They indeed supported him in the press.The Morning Chronicle,which expressed their views,declared him to be the most virtuous minister,that is (in true Utilitarian phrase),the most desirous of national welfare who had ever lived.The praise of Radicals would be not altogether welcome.Canning,in supporting his friend,maintained that sound commercial policy belonged no more to the Whigs than to the Tories.Huskisson and he were faithful disciples of Pitt,whose treaty with France in 1786,assailed by Fox and the Whigs,had been the first practical application of the Wealth of Nations.
Neither party,perhaps,could claim a special connection with good or bad political economy.And certainly neither was prepared to incur political martyrdom in zeal for scientific truth.A question was beginning to come to the front which would make party lines dependent upon economic theories,and Huskisson's view of this was characteristic.
The speech from which I have quoted begins with an indignant retort upon a member who had applied to him Burke's phrase about a perfect-bred metaphysician exceeding the devil in malignity and contempt for mankind.Huskisson frequently protested even against the milder epithet of theorist.He asserted most emphatically that he appealed to 'experience'and not to 'theory,'a slippery distinction which finds a good exposure in Bentham's Book of Fallacies .17The doctrine,however,was a convenient one for Huskisson.He could appeal to experience to show that commercial restrictions had injured the woollen trade,and their absence benefited the cotton trade,18and when he was not being taunted with theories,he would state with perfect clearness the general free trade argument.19But he had to keep an eye to the uncomfortable tricks which theories sometimes play.He argued emphatically in 182520that analogy between manufactures and agriculture is 'illogical.'He does not wish to depress the price of corn,but to keep it at such a level that our manufactures may not be hampered by dear food.
Here he was forced by stress of politics to differ from his economical friends.The country gentleman did not wish to pay duties on his silk or his brandy,but he had a direct and obvious interest in keeping up the price of corn.Huskisson had himself supported the Corn Bill of 1815,but it was becoming more and more obvious that a revision would be necessary.
In 1828he declared that he 'lamented from the bottom of his soul the mass of evil and misery and destruction of capital which that law in the course of twelve years had produced.'21Ricardo,meanwhile,and the economists had from the first applied to agriculture the principles which Huskisson applied to manufactures.22Huskisson's melancholy death has left us unable to say whether upon this matter he would have been as convertible as Peel.In any case the general principle of free trade was as fully adopted by Huskisson and Canning as by the Utilitarians themselves.The Utilitarians could again claim to be both the inspirers of the first principles,and the most consistent in carrying out the deductions.
They,it is true,were not generally biassed by having any interest in rents.They were to be the allies or teachers of the manufacturing class which began to be decidedly opposed to the squires and the old order.
In one very important economic question,the Utilitarians not only approved a change of the law,but were the main agents in bringing it about.Francis Place was the wire-puller,to whose energy was due the abolition of the Conspiracy Laws in 1824.Joseph Hume in the House of Commons,and M'Culloch,then editor of the Scotsman,had the most conspicuous part in the agitation,but Place worked the machinery of agitation.The bill passed in 1824was modified by an act of 1825;but the modification,owing to Place's efforts,was not serious,and the act,as we are told on good authority,'effected a real emancipation,'and for the first time established the right of 'collective bargaining.'23The remarkable thing is that this act,carried on the principles of 'Radical individualism'and by the efforts of Radical individualists,was thus a first step towards the application to practice of socialist doctrine.Place thought that the result of the act would be not the encouragement,but the decline,of trades-unions.The unions had been due to the necessity of combining against oppressive laws,and would cease when those laws were abolished.24This marks a very significant stage in the development of economic opinion.
IV.CHURCH REFORM
The movement which at this period was most conspicuous politically was that which resulted in Roman Catholic emancipation,and here,too,the Utilitarians might be anticipating a complete triumph of their principles.The existing disqualifications,indeed,were upheld by little but the purely obstructive sentiment.When the duke of York swore that 'so help him God!'he would oppose the change to the last,he summed up the whole 'argument'against it,Canning and Huskisson here represented the policy not only of Pitt,but of Castlereagh.
The Whigs,indeed,might claim to be the natural representatives of toleration.
The church of England was thoroughly subjugated by the state,and neither Whig nor Tory wished for a fundamental change.But the most obvious differentia of Whiggism was a dislike to the ecclesiastical spirit.The Whig noble was generally more or less of a freethinker;and upon such topics Holland House differed little from Queen's Square Place,or differed only in a rather stricter reticence.Both Whig and Tory might accept Warburton's doctrine of an 'alliance'between church and state.The Tory inferred that the church should be supported.His preion for meeting discontent was 'more yeomanry'and a handsome sum for church-building.The Whig thought that the church got a sufficient return in being allowed to keep its revenues.