(6) "Aristocratic and Unaristocratic Statesmen,"
Inquirer, April 28, 1855, pp. 257-258.
Bagehot refers to Paley, Napoleon, Palmerston, and Lowe in his
identified writings; the author of this leading article does so, too. The
humour
in this article, though subdued, is reminiscent of Bagehot's. For instance,
the author says that it cannot be denied that the traditional English view that
statesmen should be gentlemen has been recently assailed:
Mr. Layard ascribes to it all our evils. Mr. Lowe denounces it as a
superstition. A warm-tempered military gentleman mentions it as a "cold
shade." Excluded politicians candidly confess that they cannot see the
reason of it. For nearly three days the Times wrote
consistently against it. Such remarkable phenomena seem to require an
explanation.
Though the irony that sharpens those last two sentences is absent from my
next example, there is a Bagehotian echo in it: the
Inquirer
writer remarks that Lord Chancellors are "authorised vulgarities," a phrase
which brings to mind Bagehot's remark that George III was "a consecrated
obstruction." And the author of this leading article concludes his defence
of Britain's current statesmen with a term (italics mine) which similarly
evokes the flavour of Bagehot's wit: "We must adhere to the
Aborigines of Downing-street; after all, they are the best that
we have."
The writer in the Inquirer argues that though it is often
said that higher education disqualifies men from practical life, we must not
forget that it can also make us more qualified:
The manual efficiency of cultivated men is often poor and small, but
their interior judgment is commonly accurate and distinguishing. . . .
Throw . . . [fine minds] into a mass of discordant difficulties and confused
perplexities, and they will choose at once the delicate and latent points on
which the decision really turns.
This seems to be similar to what Bagehot wrote three years before in his
essay on Oxford (
Prospective Review, VIII [August, 1852],
368):
. . . in the practical concerns of life, though a prolonged education
rather interferes than otherwise with a perfect and instinctive mastery of a
narrow department, though it disqualifies men for special or mechanical
labour and the petty habits of a confined routine, yet for affairs on a
considerable scale, for a general estimate of general probabilities . . . a
carefully-formed mind and a large foundation of diversified knowledge are
indisputably wonderful and all but indispensable aids.
When to the Inquirer's remarks given in the quotation
above, which puts gentlemen into the practical affairs of government, we
add its opening statement that the English "wish to be governed by
gentlemen," we can see that the writer is very close to Bagehot's
recommendation at the end of his essay on Peel (National
Review, III [July, 1856], 174), that for statesmen "you must be
content with what you can obtain—the business-gentleman."
Finally, one brief quotation can be paralleled in one of Bagehot's
essays. The writer in the Inquirer speaks of the "'great
manslaying profession' (as Carlyle called it)." In "Edward Gibbon,"
National Review, II (January, 1856), 1, Bagehot wrote of
"the 'great manslaying profession' (as Carlyle calls it) . . ."
