The Three Ingredients of Good Government

“Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.” – Burke, Reflections

“Were I to define the British constitution, therefore, I should say, it is a limited monarchy, or a mixture of the three forms of government commonly known in the schools, reserving as much of the monarchical splendor, the aristocratical independency, and the democratical freedom, as are necessary that each of these powers may have a control, both in legislation and execution, over the other two, for the preservation of the subject’s liberty.” – John Adams, “Lord Clarendon to William Pym”

Though it may truly be said that government – both self-government and that government which applies to states – is a gift of God, nonetheless the variety of governments we see across history demonstrate that the specific permutations of government are “contrivances of human wisdom”, as Burke says. Based on natural law, contingent factors, and – I would say – the revealed Law of God, mankind contrives governments to “provide for human wants”. The term “wants” is not to be understood as synonymous with “appetites” – as if governments existed to give subjects or citizens stuff. That is certainly the ordinary activity of most modern governments, but that is a proof of degradation, not a useful form of definition.

In 1765, future Founding Father John Adams identified three components in the British Constitution. He avowedly believed the British Constitution was the best in the world at that time, and was defending his conception of it against those who sought to tyrannise the Colonies. These three components reflected the forms of governments delineated by Aristotle, and each had a particular value associated with it: monarchy (splendour), aristocracy (independence), and democracy (freedom). The three work together to preserve the true “rights”, drawn from Natural Law and established by prescription, to which every member of a society is entitled. Burke summarises these rights thus in his Reflections:

[L]aw itself is only beneficence acting by a rule. Men have a right to live by that rule; they have a right to justice…. They have a right to the fruits of their industry; and to the means of making their industry fruitful. They have a right to the acquisitions of their parents; to the nourishment and improvement of their offspring; to instruction in life, and to consolation in death. Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself; and he has a right to a fair portion of all which society, with all its combinations of skill and force, can do in his favour.

The manner in which each form of government acting on its own may oppress these are clear to those who have read history. Monarchy alone may be arbitrary, brutal, self-deluded; aristocracy alone is prone to plutocratic and oligarchic excesses, the tendency to factional baronial warfare, the maintenance of an oppressive class structure, and the counting of the small people as no people but rather as kine; whilst democracy alone is prone to anarchy and rapacity, robbing the rich to buy votes, before descending into the historically inevitable contestation of the streets and the coming of some charismatic Caesar or Buonaparte to win the people over and re-enslave them, to resounding popular applause.

When balanced, however, these three ingredients of good government – splendour, independence, and freedom – work together to preserve a tolerably ordered and free society. They counterweight each other; they provide, within the constitution, curatives of those abuses that inevitably arise from time to time in any society.

Monarchy provides splendour in four ways: by its apparent permanence in the form of lifetime terms of office, it spans many lifetimes and personifies the nation as an apparently eternal thing; by its pomp and circumstance, it gives pleasure to the morally healthy subject, and displays the strength of the nation to the world; its paramountcy places other components of the constitution in relief, and allows them to be freely criticised; and its strange manner of gaining (ordinarily by primogeniture) removes it from common ambition and places it in an almost mystical category. (The best American parallel here is the Constitution as viewed by its devoutest advocates.)

Aristocracy provides independence in one chief manner, with a variety of side effects. Let us first define aristocracy in Adams’ terms. It is not necessarily a matter of inherited landed nobility, though that is a historically vindicated form; nor is it the strict meaning of the Greek original, “rule by the best”, though it connects; rather, “aristocracy” here means that interconnected-yet-distinct network of subsidiary centres of power where men and women of private means influence affairs.

A wealthy landowner to whom many owe informal allegiance can make his own decisions about a number of matters, and must be listened to by other decision-makers; a Countess of Huntingdon may cultivate a circle of reform-minded preachers; those old Cardinals of Renaissance Rome could patronise a variety of artists set in competition, thereby providing alternative visions of beauty for the wise to consider.

In essence, the independence of the aristocracy in financial and property terms, and the fact they are a multiple body rather than a singular man (or Parliament), will always restrain any overhaughtiness of the King or mad rapacity of the People, and the aristocrats themselves will only rarely, in a balanced constitution, unite to dominate others, instead lending strength to different causes according to their own conviction. They will only unite when an unbearable attack on their liberty threatens – as the Barons did in the face of King John, or the German Princes and Bishops did when in reaction to the Munster Rebellion.

Democracy provides freedom not by any appeal to equalitarianism – “I’m as good as you!” – but by providing a regular, law-enshrined, and peaceful means of removing bad governments. Popper puts it that the question we ought to ask when constructing constitutions is not “who should rule?” but “how do we get rid of bad rulers?”; this is the basis of his powerful defence of First-Past-The-Post electoral law against Proportional Representation. Bad government always tends to oppress freedom, whether by removing rights or by encouraging license. In a system with only a monarchy, there is no removing bad government except by natural accident; in a system of monarch and aristocracy, armed rebellion is the chief means of vindicating rights; but in a properly mixed system, the electors may go every three or five or seven years to the polls and declare if the government truly is intolerable. If it is intolerable – it leaves, packing its suitcases and heading off to retirement whilst some other group get their chance.

Now, can we see these features thriving in the British Constitution?

We can easily see the splendour of monarchy in the Britain of 2020, faded as it might be. There is a world-admired Queen, born and trained to service, dignified in her bearing, a grandmother to her subjects. There are still fine ceremonies – not just the high pomp of royal weddings, but also the austere splendour of the monarchy in the midst of this plague. I write this just as the 99-year-old Prince Consort, that ancient and unbeaten warhorse, has finally retired from his last colonelcy, handing it over to his daughter-in-law; following immediately upon that, the Queen knighted another old warhorse, the centurion and Captain (Bvt Colonel) Tom Moore.

But the sheer age of those mentioned, and the necessary silence about some other members of the family, are a warning sign – the blood is finally running thin; not in terms of crass genetics, but in terms of that elusive term breeding. We may be confident of honest service from the Prince of Wales and Duke of Cambridge, but we have no guarantees beyond that.

Additionally, the constitutional sidelining of the monarchy has led to a weakening of its splendour. I hasten to say that its constitutional limitation has been of vital importance in preserving both it and its benefits for the nation. France took 169 years to resolve the problem posed by the first crippling of its monarchical element, brought on by charges of arbitrariness (whether fair or not). But a purely nominal monarchy cannot serve the nation as the nation needs; most particularly, if its paramountcy becomes a technical but not a real one, then the subordinate elements of government will increasingly take its place in the public imagination, as we have seen in this country. The awful tensions of the modern Presidential style of government – a figure who must be loved or hated in connection to each and every deed, who is revered by one faction and loathed by another – are fruiting in full in our country, centred around the occupant of Number 10 Downing Street (whoever it may be at any given time). We would be far better served by a more officially “political” Crown.

What of the aristocratic element of our constitution? Well, there are still landed aristocrats, and some still serve in the military, but between their continual effacement in the constitution, by the revenue, and in popular media, they are no real factor except as a subset of one of the three pseudo-aristocracies that now fill this role.

Our last landed aristocrats now – with honourable exceptions – are merely a minor element of the great international plutocracy which forms a transnational aristocracy. I do not resent corporate billionaires their money; I have more sympathy than may seem fitting for their desire not to sink their fortune into the public revenue like a stallion into a swamp; but I loathe their selfishness, their mock cosmopolitanism, their banality. As most have no ties to particular countries for their revenue – as they do not chiefly gain from rents, or from the productive sale of their own goods, or even the management of a particular chain of factories – they position themselves above the fray; but in this case, he who is not for me is against me. Indeed, the sheer scale of the wealth of these corporations, greater individually than the gross product of some small countries, renders them rivals to every constitution for power, rather than constituent parts of those constitutions.

The second pseudo-aristocracy in this country is in the bodies which we like to call “independent”. Indeed, this seems a promising source of aristocracy, if aristocracy is to provide us independence. But these bodies – our independent civil service, our independent public broadcaster, our independent judiciary – are not independent in the way aristocracy ought to be. I do not mean here to comment on whether these bodies are truly “independent” in views; I am merely comparing them to the aristocracy Adams and Burke would have recognised. The Marquess of Suchington and Cardinal della Pozzo are independent by reference to their private security, whilst the bureaucrat is independent (Deus vult) in reference to their opinions and judgement. The aristocrat gains independence by physical means, the bureaucrat by educative ones. The bureaucrat, then, is strong enough only to obstruct, not oppose; they have a natural interest in the maintenance and power of the very machinery they operate, and cannot make an individual stand against it, by reason of self-interest as well as of weakness. They may be diligent and honest and effective, but they cannot provide an aristocracy.

The third pseudo-aristocracy is in the devolved governments. These may appear as an aristocracy because the devolved governments provide alternative centres of power to Westminster, and thereby might provide a counterweight. However, this is an entirely illusory prospect. First, the devolved governments are nests of factional hatred and the haughtiness of small stakes; they have no love for the whole body of the people or the constitution, and that in Scotland actively seeks to destroy the order by which it exists. Second, the devolved governments are truly bureaucratic bodies, and so fall under the disqualification articulated in the last paragraph. Thirdly, as these are merely regional bodies, they cannot have meaningful views on matters of national import, because they do not have any right to oversight upon the whole. Their interest is sectional and geographic, and so they cannot provide a healthy counterweight to national government; the best they can purpose is disorderly rebelliousness.

The prospect of building a meaningful aristocracy in this country is even more remote than that of restoring monarchical splendour. Though the wheel of fortune turns dramatically, those turns are not predictable; and there is no predictable tendency to restoring hereditary landed titles or creating an ecclesiastical Curia in this country.

Finally, what of democratic freedom? The democratic element is certainly in the ascendant here, though often in cancerous ways. There are two loud but contradictory demands made by the most ardent tribunes of the people – on the one hand, more “democracy” in the form of more majoritarianism, more referendums, more “fair” representation, and so forth; on the other hand, an obsessive focus on alleged minority rights, which would be well and good if these were real rights rather than vain imaginations. One can see in this latter, of course, a nascent aristocratic movement, but one entirely unfitted either by intellect or morality or stable wealth. The only temporal comfort one draws in the face of their enormities is that they will soon enough be disgraced and forgotten except as a warning from history. At any rate, the two demands represent the two factions of our Revolution – the “more democracy” Girondins and the “more rights” Montagnards.

Democracy alone cannot preserve real freedom, because it collapses upon itself with comparative speed in its race for greater freedoms. It becomes so free from its body that the blood drains and the organs fall to the floor. Our present democracy increasingly threatens our freedom – by its assaults on good old institutions, by its obsession with demographic mathematics rather than judgement, by the ever-louder demands for more rapacious revenue policies – and, unrestrained, will surely lead to the tyranny Plato and Aristotle warned us about so long ago.

Any patriot desiring the salvation of our fine old Parliamentary democracy and its protection of our freedoms must desire the infusion of splendour and independence into it. Without all three ingredients, we shall soon enough have none.