And what, in a world where causes have effects and effects causes, does ‘intelligent independence’ mean?

Mr. Herman Merivale, successively Professor of Political Economy at Oxford, under-Secretary for the Colonies, and under-Secretary for India, wrote in 1861: 

’To retain or to abandon a dominion is not an issue which will ever be determined on the mere balance of profit and loss, or on the more refined but even less powerful motives supplied by abstract political philosophy.  The sense of national honour; the pride of blood, the tenacious spirit of self-defence, the sympathies of kindred communities, the instincts of a dominant race, the vague but generous desire to spread our civilisation and our religion over the world; these are impulses which the student in his closet may disregard, but the statesman dares not....’[36]

[36] Herman Merivale, Colonisation, 1861, 2nd edition.  The book is a re-issue, largely re-written, of lectures given at Oxford in 1837.  The passage quoted forms part of the 1861 additions, p. 675.

What does ‘abstract political philosophy’ here mean?  No medical writer would speak of an ‘abstract’ anatomical science in which men have no livers, nor would he add that though the student in his closet may disregard the existence of the liver the working physician dares not.

Apparently Merivale means the same thing by ‘abstract’ political philosophy that Mr. Bryce means by ‘ideal’ democracy.  Both refer to a conception of human nature constructed in all good faith by certain eighteenth-century philosophers, which is now no longer exactly believed in, but which, because nothing else has taken its place, still exercises a kind of shadowy authority in a hypothetical universe.

The fact that this or that writer speaks of a conception of human nature in which he is ceasing to believe as ‘abstract’ or ‘ideal’ may seem to be of merely academic interest.  But such half-beliefs produce immense practical effects.  Because Merivale saw that the political philosophy which his teachers studied in their closets was inadequate, and because he had nothing to substitute for it, he frankly abandoned any attempt at valid thought on so difficult a question as the relation of the white colonies to the rest of the British Empire.  He therefore decided in effect that it ought to be settled by the rule-of-thumb method of ‘cutting the painter’; and, since he was the chief official in the Colonial Office at a critical time, his decision, whether it was right or wrong, was not unimportant.

Mr. Bryce has been perhaps prevented by the presence in his mind of such a half-belief from making that constructive contribution to general political science for which he is better equipped than any other man of his time.  ‘I am myself,’ he says in the same Introduction, ’an optimist, almost a professional optimist, as indeed politics would be intolerable were not a man grimly resolved to see between the clouds all the blue sky he can.’[37] Imagine an acknowledged leader in chemical research who, finding that experiment did not bear out some traditional formula, should speak of himself as nevertheless ‘grimly resolved’ to see things from the old and comfortable point of view!