The Foreboding Conservatism of Stephen

• Date: 01 December 1952
• Author: Russell Kirk
• Published date: 01 December 1952
• DOI: 10.1177/106591295200500401
• Subject Matter: Articles

THE FOREBODING CONSERVATISM OF STEPHEN
RUSSELL KIRK
Michigan State College
The old ways of living, many of which were just as bad in their time as any of our
devices can be in ours, are breaking down all over Europe, and are floating this way
and that like haycocks in a flood. Nor do I see why any wise man should expend
much thought or trouble on trying to save their wrecks. The waters are out and
no human force can turn them back, but I do not see why as we go with the stream
we need sing Hallelujah to the river god.
SIR JAMES FITZJAMES STEPHEN,
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity
ONVERSING
WITH
Sir Henry Maine in 1882, Lord Acton objected
c
to Maine’s defense of primogeniture, in a recent lecture: this, said
Acton, was legitimacy, giving a Tory tinge to the entire paper. &dquo;You
seem to use Tory as a term of reproach,&dquo; Maine replied. Acton was taken
aback. A friend of his, nominally a Liberal, tolerant of Toryism? &dquo;I was
much struck by this answer -
much struck to find a philosopher, entirely
outside party politics, who does not think Toryism a reproach.&dquo; 1 Three
years later, Maine would write a book intensely conservative: Popular
Government. He had begun his adult life by despising Disraeli; he ended
it in a deep pessimism, alarmed at the blind tendency of society, which
was stumbling along a path of retrogression. Like Herbert Spencer, like
J. K. Stephen, like a dozen other leading Victorians whose allegiance
originally had been liberal or radical, Maine changed his political affiliation
but not his views. It was liberalism, and the times, that changed: relin-
quishing its old devotion to personal freedom, liberalism took up the
cause of the material welfare of the masses. Once that occurred, men
of sober learning, aristocratic libertarians in temperament, began going over
to the party which Disraeli’s kaleidoscopic imagination had kept alive,
and before long, surprise at finding a philosopher who respected Toryism
was impossible even for Acton.
1
Letters of Lord Acton to Mary Gladstone, ed. Herbert Paul (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1904),
p. 119.
563

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564
Acton himself, after the Reform Act of 1885, could not ignore
the collectivistic inclination of liberalism; but he excused it - at least
the &dquo;academic socialism&dquo; of Continental thinkers, which, he conceded,
Gladstone might come to represent in England - as somehow the ir-
resistible intellectual drift of the time.
I quite agree with Chamberlain, that there is latent Socialism in the Gladstonian
philosophy. What makes me uncomfortable is his inattention to the change which is
going on in these things.... But it is not the popular movement, but the travelling of
the minds of men who sit in the seat of Adam Smith that is really serious and worthy
of all attention.’
Though this is loyalty to Gladstone, is it loyalty to Acton’s own principle
of liberty? Or to the principle of progress?
Maine, even more keenly aware of the earnest flirtation which
scientists and political economists were conducting with collectivism, saw
in this affair infidelity to both freedom and progress; for progress is
measured in terms of freedom. If the movement of society from status to
contract is the index of progress, then socialism is disastrous reaction. Ten
years before this exchange between Acton and Maine, another liberal
of the old stamp, James Fitzjames Stephen, had perceived the direction
of the social current, and that knowledge converted him into a conserva-
tive. His book, Luberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873), was the most penetrat-
ing defense of conservative values written in Victorian times -
and, after
Burke and perhaps Coleridge, the most important work of English con-
servative thought.
After 1867, conservative elements in ~British society found themselves
steadily reinforced by recruits from the old Liberal and Whig and Utilitar-
ian camps. Alarmed at the trend of Gladstonian liberalism, at the
increasing powers of the state, at the aggressiveness of the labour move-
ment, and at the flattery paid to the vast new electorate, the middle
classes (so long the driving force behind liberalism) began to transfer
their allegiance to the Tories. As early as the fifties, Bagehot perceived,
and unmistakably by the middle seventies, true conservative and liberal
interests were approaching identity; and small difference remained between
a &dquo;conservative Liberal&dquo; and a &dquo;liberal Conservative.&dquo; Both had the duty
of setting bounds to the expansion of a voracious democracy and a
ponderous state. The Tories, who since the beginning of the century had
been sturdy opponents of the utilitarians’ social atomism and equally
resolute defenders of the state as a moral agency, now found that the
balance had swung the other way: the constitution of English society
was threatened by a secular collectivism, as a political movement the
instrument of the poor who were now enfranchised. Herbert Spencer,
2

Ibid., p. 212.

---

565
his radicalism outraged by this new and more formidable peril to indi-
vidualism, published Man versus the State in 1884, becoming thereby
a kind of ally of the conservatives, now less repugnant to political indi-
vidualists than were the rising collectivistic humanitarians. &dquo;It was the
Tory party that had changed, or at any rate seemed to change,&dquo; Sir
Ernest Barker observes, &dquo;from the champion of paternalism against all
manner of dissenters to the champion of individualism against all manner
of socialists.&dquo; 3 It is not in Man versus the State, however, that one
finds the genuinely conservative ideas of late Victorian times. Three
great scholars in law and history sustained the true conservative impulse
- Stephen, Maine, and Lecky.
The strength of conservatism, Walter Bagehot says, has not emanated
chiefly from intellectual conviction. Two enduring sentiments, instead,
have nourished the attachment of most conservatives: the old cavalier
feeling of loyalty; and (what animates the &dquo;party of order&dquo; in the
Continent) the feeling of fear - &dquo;dread that their shop, their house,
this life -
not so much their physical life as their whole mode and sources
of existence - will be destroyed and cast away.&dquo; Modern British con-
servatives (Bagehot wrote in 1856) manifest an earnestness which lifts
them above the mere Toryism of enjoyment and the despicable con-
servatism of shrinking terror. But a conservatism of reflection is not yet
general in England: &dquo;In the face of questioning classes, every unthinking
Conservative endangers what he defends -
he is a vexation to the Liberal,
and a misfortune to his country.&dquo; 4 The measured and sober apologetics
which English conservative thought required still more urgently after
1867 were produced by a convert from utilitarianism &dquo;with rather an
aggressive development of conscience&dquo;; by a scientific historian of institu-
tions, recruited from among the liberals; and by a rationalist scholar,
saturated with the thought of Burke. Stephen, the first of these, was
the most redoubtable.
_
The emergence of socialism as a distinct political movement in the
seventies, a threat to the whole extant society of Britain, alarmed old-
school Manchesterians as much as it disquieted Tories. But the Labour
party not yet having come into being (though the Labour Representation
League elected two of its thirteen candidates in the general election of
1873), socialists could influence the course of Parliament only through
the process of converting men of the dominant parties to socialistic views.
As the radicals, before 1832, had penetrated the ranks of the Whigs,
3
Sir Ernest Barker, Political Thought in England from Herbert Spencer to the Present Day (New York:
Henry Holt, 1915), p. 128.
4
Walter Bagehot, "Intellectual Conservatism," The Works and Life of Walter Bagehot, ed. Mrs. Russell
Barrington (London :. Longmans, Green & Co., 1915), Vol. IX, pp. 255-58.

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566
so socialists, now, began to filter among the liberals - even among the
conservatives. This penetration is evident in the later thought of John
Stuart Mill, whom the conservative writers accurately perceived to be the
chief representative of this shifting climate of opinion: the hereditary
high-priest of utilitarianism, the leader of that restless stirring of secularism
and experiment which the philosophic radicals had managed to utilize
for their ends fifty years earlier, was moving from the extreme of
individualism toward collectivism without being conscious of inconsistency.
The &dquo;Saint of Rationalism&dquo; (Gladstone’s description of J. S. Mill) was
himself as much alienated from the life of old England as were the now-
enfranchised working classes whom, though dreaded and despised by him,
he yet helped to provide with social doctrines. &dquo;The Bible, the Church
of England, the ancient Universities and grammar-schools, the parsonage,
the country-house -
all these things which have played so large a part
in making and embodying the national tradition,&dquo; remarks Mr. R. J.
White, &dquo;were for many years outside his ken.&dquo; 5 Mill...