How Should a Liberal Be?July/August 2019 179
for and occasionally maltreated by their
Confederate owners.” After President
Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipa-
tion Proclamation, Bagehot accused him
o encouraging a slave uprising. “To arm
savages against your antagonist is to
make war like savages, and to descend to
the level o savages,” he wrote.
Contemptuous o slaves, Bagehot
was also heartily misogynistic. Address-
ing the question o the economic role o
women, he declared himsel “very
favorable to their employment as labor-
ers or in other menial capacity.” But he
doubted that the female temperament
was capable o taking on responsibility.
“I am sure the nerves o most women
would break down under the anxiety,” he
asserted. In a prelude to his biography,
Grant quotes the British historian G. M.
Young, who saw in Bagehot “the most
precious element in Victorian civilization,
its robust and masculine sanity.” The
second adjective was perhaps more Ãtting
than the Ãrst.
Yet there is a lesson in Bagehot’s
failings. For him, gradualism was a virtue:
the iniquities o the status quo had to
be balanced against the risks o rapid
change, which might outstrip the
human capacity for adaptation. In the
cases o slavery and women, Bagehot
got that balance very wrong. It was true
that white Northerners in the United
States abused free black laborers, but it
certainly did not follow that slavery
was more desirable; and one wonders
what Bagehot’s contemporary Florence
Nightingale, the pioneering British
nurse known for her bravery during the
Crimean War, would have had to say
about the allegedly frail nerves o
women. But in other instances, Bagehot
balanced continuity and change in ahe deÃned the political center, Bagehot
rejected the mystical traditionalism o
conservatives and the leveling demo-
cratic ideals o revolutionaries. For the
modern reader, living at a time when
classical liberal values are in retreat, it is
instructive to contemplate a giant who
embodied them.
LIBERAL REALISM
Although Bagehot has much to teach his
political heirs, his liberalism was often
selective—a reminder that even the
greatest liberals are not always right and
not always liberal.
Bagehot believed in progress and
change but did not fancy too much o
them. As a young man in Paris in the early
1850s, he witnessed Louis-Napoléon,
the French president and a nephew o
Napoleon I, disband Parliament and take
the title o “emperor.” Bagehot defended
the crackdown and the attendant execu-
tions, regarding them as a necessary
response to the red specter and claiming
that they commanded support among
the “inferior people.” As Grant summa-
rizes Bagehot’s perspective, “The
overexcitable French were incapable o
governing themselves in a parliamentary
system; their national character did not
allow it.” Democracy be damned. France
needed a tyrant.
Nearly a dozen years later, at the
onset o the American Civil War, Bage-
hot’s liberal values had apparently not
deepened. He sided with the Confeder-
ates, partly because the Union’s taris on
British manufacturers irked him. Claim-
ing to abhor slavery, he nonetheless
wondered i there were “any grounds for
assuming that, as a body, the negroes
would prefer being their own masters
with Northern treatment to being cared