The kids aren't alright
And other great things I found this week
Mystery ‘Australian academic’
A number of readers have alerted me to an encouraging development which is that someone seems to have been whispering sweet nothings into Rory Stewart’s ear. At 15 minutes in in this podcast.
And at 28.30 below.
The only thing no-one can work out is …
Who is this “Australian academic” Rory keeps mentioning!
Speaking of which, YouTube caught me by somehow getting me to click on the video below, and, though I should have been working, I watched it right through. Quite an involving interview.
Branko on Xi’s social democratic goals
Interesting piece from Branko, even though I was surprised by his assumption that high levels of inequality and strong growth are somehow closely associated with one another. Obviously complete equality can be antithetical to growth and efficiency, but high levels of inequality generate their own inefficiencies and drags on productivity growth.
Ever since he eliminated China’s two-term limit in 2018, Xi Jinping’s rule has produced a proliferation of articles and studies that compare his rule with Mao’s. The comparison is true only at a very superficial level, relating to the cult of personality that surrounds Xi …
While Mao’s ideology during the Cultural Revolution was directly anti-Confucian, Xi’s is pro-Confucian. While Mao’s great economic turns — “the Great Leap Forward” and the Cultural Revolution — were motivated by ideology and disregarded stability, Xi’s policies are motivated by the opposite desire: to produce a more stable society.
This reflects evolution over the past 40 years. Following Deng’s sharp pro-market turn that placed economic growth centre stage, first after Mao’s death in 1976, and then even more decisively after the Tiananmen crackdown, China grew tremendously (at an average annual rate of more than 6% per capita between 1992 and 2012), while inequality increased (measured by the Gini index, from 36 to 47 points over the same period). The new China made many people rich, reduced poverty, changed the structure of the elite by having it much more private-sector oriented, and made the country “moderately prosperous”. …
If we look at Xi’s “Common Prosperity” programme in a realistic way, and not fantasise that it represents some vague return to Maoism, it makes perfect sense: it is the overdue readjustment of excessively pro-capitalist policies, which, while perhaps good for growth, threatened to produce social anomie. And, in taming the liberalisation of his predecessors, what Xi proposes to do is not so different from what social democratic parties of Western Europe realised after the Second World War. Letting capitalism run amok, they thought, would produce another Great Depression, and such developments would only provide grist to the mill of the increasingly powerful Communist parties and trade unions linked with them. By contrast, their social-democratic policies were remarkably successful, so much so that a version of the period’s French sobriquet of the Trentes Glorieuses is applied across much of Western Europe. Inequality went down, growth picked up, and a “normal” middle class composed of hard-working and well-educated workers and employees was created.
We do not know if Xi’s policies will be equally successful. Western European countries were democracies; China is not. West European policies did not depend on one man, or a narrow consensus; they were the product of a much wider intellectual movement that dated back to the pre-war period.
Yet while China’s future may not be as firmly seated as Xi wishes it to be, the main ideas behind his “turn to the Left” can be easily articulated: expand the role of the state and the Party, reduce the power of capitalists, and keep growth going while making sure it does not become socially destabilising. We do not need recourse to some fanciful Maoism to explain it. Rather, to borrow the metaphor of Chen Yun, one of the early Chinese Communist leaders, it is time to slightly narrow the cage within which the private sector operates. After all, if such a “readjustment” is successful, it will set China on a track for reasonable growth (of 4-5% per year) over the medium term. This will maintain some inequality, particularly when it comes to geography, and China’s capitalists will still get rich — but they will not be in political control.
Recent reports of China’s economic decline are thus much exaggerated. They reflect the unconscious absorption by Western and Chinese analysts of a Dengist emphasis on growth alone: uniquely in the case of China, growth rates below 7-8% per annum are seen as precursors of economic demise. Yet while Deng’s approach made sense in a post-Mao China traumatised by voluntarist economic policies, it cannot be, nor should it be, maintained forever. As in every country, economic growth and social stability have to be balanced. China will not grow at 10% per annum; nor will it cease to grow. It will not rule the world, nor become irrelevant. Instead, it will maintain an intermediate position — an outcome that should be welcomed by both China and the West.
Some people are special
Nazis: I hate those guys
A Camera, Not an Engine
Modern AI puts us firmly into an age of exploration of computational reality
A very heavy and interesting post by Venkatesh Rao.
Unlike GOFAI (“Good Old-Fashioned AI”), modern AI doesn’t seem like an invention at all, let alone one embodied by the behavior of a “machine.” The word we’re looking for is discovery. To the extent things like racks full of GPUs and PyTorch shuffling data around constitute a “machine” in the picture, they are like the Webb telescope; instruments of discovery rather than engines of production. “Machines” that let us peer incredibly deeply into extraordinarily large piles of data. “Large XYZ Models” are much closer to the image processing pipeline that is attached to the output of the Webb telescope than to models in the sense of CAD files.
Any magic in the output is a strong function of magic in the input, not the processing. The Webb telescope doesn’t manufacture those amazing pictures. It sees them “out there.” In infrared. All the associated image processing adds is a kind of hallucinatory false coloring to bring them into our visual range.
If it sounds like I’m setting up a “data camera” mental model for AI, it’s because I am. But as you’ll see, that makes what’s going on more interesting, not less. Unlike traditional photography, which killed a whole world of tedious photorealistic painting, but like the Webb telescope, “data photography” reveals worlds within worlds we’ve never even suspected existed, let alone been able to see, in piles of data too large for us to ever hold in our heads.
This is what the stochastic-parrot takes (and the older monkeys-at-typewriters take) entirely miss. We’re all stochastic parrots attached to monkeys on typewriters all the way down. That’s only insulting if you don’t like parrots and monkeys and imagine you possess some ineffably higher-order consciousness their kinds of minds cannot embody.
The fascinating thing is, parrots and monkeys are all you need. That’s all it seems to take to produce anything we consider intelligent behavior, and we’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of that behavior space, which is far vaster than we imagined. …
So modern AI (I’m personally deprecating the terms deep learning and machine learning1) is a discovery, and in this essay, I want to try and unpack its discovery-like qualities. I also want to try and unpack the camera-like inhuman observational capabilities of the instruments (GPUs and the simple code they run) that helped us make this discovery. …
Seeing Computational Reality
If you ignore the anthropocentric narratives and the accidental provenance in GOFAI, modern AI fits very naturally within a connected series of discoveries about computational reality, which I’ll define as existing between objective and subjective realities.
The trajectory of discovery began with Shannon and Turing (or perhaps even earlier with Leibniz) and now, 75 years later, is really gathering steam. If Leibniz’s original “stepped reckoner” was the equivalent of Galileo’s telescope, modern AI is like the James Webb Space Telescope. Each conceptual advance helped us see more deeply into computational reality.
Take these 10 things together:
Whatever the hell Leibniz was thinking about
Information theory
Computability theory (Turing)
Cellular automata
Computational complexity theory2
Fractal geometry
Asymmetric cryptography3
Modern AI mechanisms4
Programmable cryptography5
Quantum computing
Do these phenomena, and our inexorable and natural-seeming trajectory of discovery through them, really look like they’re uniquely about random lumps of biological matter that happened to evolve on one mostly harmless speck of dust? Do they look like “inventions”? Do they look like they belong in the family tree that starts with steam engines?
You will note that I’ve left GOFAI6 and even GPUs off the list, along with much of the history of physical computers from Babbage’s Difference Engine to the the iPhone. Those do seem like a bunch of inventions rather than discoveries. Closer to steam engines, airplanes, lens-grinding, word processors and spreadsheets than to physics.
The history of physical computers is a list of increasingly capable “bicycles for the mind” as Jobs put it. But my list of 10 conceptual advances above, along with their instrumental realizations (involving physical computers as well as other technologies), is more like a list of “telescopes for the soul.” Ways to peer into the computational heart of reality, via the data it presents to our senses, both natural and technologically extended.
RIP Charlie Munger: billionaire from a Norman Rockwell painting
Charlie died at the age of 99 in the last few days. A remarkable man as you can tell from listening. I find him a bit hard to listen to, compared with his buddy and fellow billionaire from a Norman Rockwell painting Warren Buffett. But this interview with Irish entrepreneur and fellow billionaire (I presume) John Collison is excellent. Amongst other things, Munger doesn’t hold back on what sleazebags the Sacklers are to profit from mass death, and why extractive businesses aren’t good businesses.
Nice message to get having posted to a Y-combinator forum thread
Jon Haidt on how the kids aren’t alright
Back when I was focused on anxiety and depression as the dependent variables, the story of technology (as the independent variable) seemed to be a story that was mostly about girls. But once I read an early draft of Richard Reeves’s book Of Boys and Men, I realized that I had been focused on the wrong dependent variables. For boys and young men, the key change has been the retreat from the real world since the 1970s, when they began investing less effort in school, employment, dating, marriage, and parenting.
Figure 2 illustrates one aspect of this gradual withdrawal. It plots the percentage of American high school seniors who agree with the statement “People like me don’t have much of a chance at a successful life.” As you can see, very few girls agreed with that statement back in the 1970s, and as girls and women made progress relative to boys in school and employment, the line stayed low. It wasn’t until girls’ social lives moved onto smartphones and Instagram in the early 2010s that they reported feeling much more pessimistic about their lives and themselves (across many survey items).
The male crisis didn’t begin on the day that boys traded in their flip phones for smartphones packed with social media apps. Boys started to become more pessimistic around four decades ago, although the trend has accelerated in the years since everyone got a smartphone.
In Of Boys and Men, Richard describes many of the structural factors that caused boys’ gradual disengagement from the real world, such as an economy shifting away from manufacturing (in which male strength is a huge asset) and toward the service sector (where women have some advantages). What I and my colleagues have added to this analysis is the role of digital and entertainment technologies in pulling and keeping boys away from the real world. …
The virtual world was magical for many boys. In addition to letting them interact with new gadgets, it also enabled them to do—safely—the sorts of things they find extremely exciting but not available in real life: for example, jumping out of planes and parachuting into a jungle war zone where they meet up with a few friends to battle other groups of friends to the (virtual) death.
Just as video games became more finely tuned to boys’ greater propensity for coalitional competition, the real world, and especially school, got more frustrating for many boys: Shorter recess, bans on rough and tumble play, and ever more emphasis on sitting still and listening.
A canine conflict of loyalties
The mirage of a two-state solution
Gideon Rachman’s depressing column.
At some point, the fighting will stop. The day afterwards, the world will face a series of urgent questions. Who will rebuild the territory, who will govern it, how will it be supplied? …
The US Congress seems to be turning against all forms of foreign assistance. People talk airily about the Saudis and other Gulf Arabs footing the bill. But will they really do that — without any clear political structures to fund in Gaza? So there may be no way of dealing with the immediate disaster in Gaza without an agreement, at least on paper, on a long-term political solution. The Saudis, like the Americans and the EU, have long advocated a two-state solution — in the context of the normalisation of relations between Israel and the Arab world. But, these days, even the supporters of a two-state solution often sound embarrassed to utter the phrase. Understandably. This idea has been pushed repeatedly for more than 30 years — but consistently failed to take root. …
The conditions for a two-state deal are, in most respects, far worse than they were in 1991 … The bleak truth is that some of the worst suspicions both sides have about each other are true. Hamas has said repeatedly they would like to destroy Israel and massacre more Israelis. There are far-right extremists in key positions in the Israeli government, who openly dream of driving the Palestinians out of the occupied West Bank and Gaza …
Netanyahu — like his sometime friend, Russian president Vladimir Putin (the two men had a long conversation this week) — may be hoping that new opportunities will open up, if and when Donald Trump returns to the White House. But there is a snag in that strategy. Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, are ardent supporters of Israel. However they also place great store in their relationship with the Saudis. In 2017, Trump’s first trip as president was to Riyadh.
What does a Monet have in common with the Brisbane Lions
They were both at the cutting edge of commercialism busting up an old monopolistic order
Julian Barnes reviews Jackie Wullschläger’s new biography of the impressionist we all love to love: Claude Monet.
This exchange is recorded in Hughes’s trenchant essay about the New York art scene. … The high-priest critic Clement Greenberg ‘didn’t believe in buying art, but he liked receiving it,’ from artists and art dealers whom his words had assisted or would assist. But ‘by far the most corrupt art-world figure I knew in New York ... was Henry Geldzahler.’ When the director of the Met, Thomas Hoving, wanted to put on an Andrew Wyeth show, Geldzahler was against it – Wyeth’s figurative paintings were the very opposite of the art he believed in and succoured. But when it became clear the show would go ahead, Geldzahler ‘wrote privately to Wyeth himself, offering to curate the show in return for a nice Wyeth watercolour that Henry would personally select. Much to the flinty Wyeth’s credit, this overture was rebuffed.’ …
When and where did it all start? Probably in Paris; more unexpectedly, when the Impressionists came along. For centuries, the Salon had ruled over taste, over what was and wasn’t art, and therefore over most artists’ incomes. There had been the famous Salon des Refusés in 1863, but that experiment in imperial permissiveness was not to be repeated. So the Impressionists, following Courbet’s example, put on their own exhibitions, the first in 1874. They made little money but received a good deal of publicity. Gradually, the stranglehold of the Salon was loosened. … Critical mass had arrived: that nexus of artist, dealer, critic and curator, plus shock value and a rising market. Monet, as leader of the Impressionists and the group’s highest earner, was at the heart of this new world. At one point he had three or four different dealers, and delighted in playing them off one against the other. There is no direct evidence of graft in Jackie Wullschläger’s new book, but all the conditions for Hughes’s ‘ethical slide area’ were now in place. …
[Monet’s art] is cheerful. Truthful, deeply truthful, the result of long looking, but a cheerful truth. … Pissarro summed up Monet’s first set of serial paintings, Haystacks, with the words: ‘These canvases breathe contentment.’ Not complacency – there is not a grain of this sentiment anywhere in Wullschläger’s account – but the contentment of getting it right after a long struggle. Almost his last written words were a shaky scribble in the autograph album of Paul Valéry’s daughter, Agathe: ‘All I can say is that painting is terribly difficult.’ …
Monet was always more than just an eye. He was a painter of heart and brain, feeling and memory. Late in life, when working on his Water Lilies, he told his friend Gustave Geffroy: ‘They’re beyond the strength of an old man, but I want to succeed in rendering what I feel.’ He was the only Impressionist who made the full journey from realistic social subjects (which was as far as Zola was able to go with him) to looser-brushed landscapes with purple shadows, to gradually increasing explosions of colour, to the sudden originality of series painting with its cumulative effects, to the shimmering, evanescent, vertiginously beautiful near-expressionism of the Water Lilies. This was an art that pushed against its own limits, so that many (including Monet himself) reached for comparisons with poetry and music – specifically, Mallarmé and Debussy. Monet increasingly exemplified Mallarmé’s famous poetic dictum ‘to paint not the thing itself, but the effect that it produces’. …
In 1900, Renoir accepted the Légion d’honneur. He knew that Monet disdained such baubles, and wrote him a fretful letter hoping that a strip of silk wouldn’t impair their friendship. A few days later he regretted it and wrote again: ‘I realised today and even before that I’d written you a stupid letter ... I wonder what it matters to you whether I’m decorated or not ... You must know me better than I know myself, since I very probably know you better than yourself.’ This last remark is deeply wise, pertinent not just to their Impressionist friendship, but also to the writing of biography, and beyond that, to the rest of us.
Fantastic!!
Freddie Deboer on megalomania (and Taylor Swift)
Cruel but fair. And I wondered the same about Beyonce. Machiavelli used to say that it wasn’t il popolo you had to worry about but the i grandi. Il popolo didn’t want trouble. They wanted to live their life on as fair terms as they could get, but left unprovoked they’d live as let live. I Grandi — the people of some wealth and power on the other hand? They were insatiable! I began this paragraph thinking that capitalism was a system that propagates insatiability, but history suggests that the great and powerful have always made trouble, building their empires, nicking each other’s stuff. But capitalism democratises it. Anyone from anywhere can aspire to insatiability. And just being great at what you do — say like Judy Davis is a great actor — and being happy with that. Well that’s your private affair. And you rapidly become invisible. To be replaced by some insatiable.
I think it’s fair to say that Taylor Swift and her team ran a full-court press in 2023. You had the brief but massive success of her concert film, the continued release of the “Taylor’s version” series of re-recordings of her old material, absolutely constant media visibility, and of course the relentless publicizing of her relationship with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. The latter is a good example of choosing to expand your media footprint. There are some conspiracy theories that suggest that the relationship is all a sham; Kelce, at 34 years old, is clearly looking to set up a career as a media personality after football, and the endless shots of Swift in a luxury box at NFL games have taken her inescapability to a new high. I have no opinion about and no interest in those theories. I do want to stress, though, that had she wanted it, that relationship could have been much quieter. She certainly has the juice to say to the NFL “I want to sit in privacy in the back of a luxury box with no cameras on me, and plus let my team in the back of the stadium with no publicity.” She chose to do the opposite and make this romance as public as possible. That’s generally been her MO in 2023 - whenever she’s had the opportunity to go bigger, get richer, get more famous, harvest more attention, she’s pursued that opportunity with gusto.
Hey, look! Yet another august academic institution is giving a course on Taylor Swift! That’s fun! Isn’t this fun? Aren’t we all having fun?
I am not a fan of Taylor Swift’s music. I don’t know why a 42-year-old metalhead would ever be expected to like Taylor Swift’s music, but I also know that we live in a culture of rabidly-enforced hegemonic poptimism, under threat of character assassination, and that I have technically just committed a hate crime in 37 states and the District of Columbia. I’m sorry! But that’s not really relevant to my interests today. It’s also the case that I think this stuff has reached a level of absolute madness, that the sense that no matter how obsessed we are with this woman, it’s never enough, is genuinely creepy and reflects a deeply diseased society. I’m genuinely frightened by her fanbase; they are as vindictive and remorseless a social force as I can remember in online life. Personally, I think people are fixated on Swift in this way because they’re lonely and directionless and lack any source of transcendent meaning, and have tried to invest celebrity with the hopes that once accrued to God or country or the party, and I further think that this is bound to result in inevitable disillusionment and sadness. (People living in tents for five months to get tickets to a concert aren’t a cute human interest story, it’s gross and scary and sad.) I don’t know how anyone looks at all of this and says “ah yes, this is all perfectly healthy for everyone and will surely end well.” But that’s also not what we’re here to talk about today.
I’m interested in a different issue: why does Swift harbor such a palpable feeling that she needs even more success? 15 years after “You Belong With Me” was released, she’s grinding more than ever, clawing for more and more presence in the national popular consciousness. Her vast professional apparatus has worked relentlessly to make sure that she stays in said popular consciousness. And my question is… why? For what? What does she want, that she does not already have? What need could she fill that hasn’t already been filled? She has more of everything than almost any human being who has ever lived. Why does she need more than more?
Australia Post taxes the bush to feed corporate earnings
Declaration of Interest. Lateral Economics has been helping TGE make the case for requiring Australia Post to act competitively (rather than restrictively) and give other logistics companies access to rural post offices — many of which are not even owned by Australia Post but rather are contractors to them. The Australia Post monopoly on letters is designed to enable them to use margins in the city to cross-subsidise the bush. But what they’re doing is using their natural monopoly over the ‘last mile’ in rural Australia to swell revenue to their city operations. If you want to send a parcel from Melbourne to someone in Broken Hill, you can’t pay TGE to get it to Broken Hill who would then pay the local post office to deliver it. Australia Post insists on your doing it all through them. You pay them, post it in Melbourne. They then sub-contract TGE to get it to Broken Hill (putting their own margin on it) and pay the local post office to deliver it. Who wins? Australia Post’s city operations. Who loses? The bush.
Kevin Munger and Vilém Flusser explain the great weirding
I tend to put the ‘heavier’ stuff towards the end of my newsletter. Anyway, I have a weakness for philosophers whose native language is not English explaining all the things about that world that can’t otherwise be explained — with some existentialism and phenomenology thrown in. I let this one wash over me. Seems plausible enough.
Hannah Arendt on hope
Hannah goes the full German philosopher in the book she published from her PhD — Rahel Varnhagen about the Jewish born woman who ran one of the most successful salons in Europe during the Napoleonic wars of the late 18th and early 19th century. Her being born a Jew was a matter she ruminated on her entire life and Arendt’s study of her inspired Arendt’s dramatising the choice a Jew has between being a parvenue and a pariah. Varnhagen was the former, and though Arendt wrote that she was her “closest friend, though she ha[d] been dead for some hundred years” Hannah chose the latter course, so she thought. The book is written from Varnhagen’s 6,000 odd letters and this passage is Arndt’s rumination on the period leading up to her marriage. She is contemplating her impending marriage. The quotes are from Varnhagen’s diaries and letters.
Note this is just a snippet that intrigued me for the thought it suggests on hope and on the reality distorting aspects of hope. And James Burnham might write “wish fulfillment.” It’s the opium of us all. And free association leads me to add that it’s seen our own age descend into little more than vacuous rhetoric in all manner of areas from politics and government to organisational statements of intent.
Rahel had become a specific person; but she had not acquired any specific qualities. Her reality manifested itself only in what she had suffered in what was now past. There was an inexorability about the past which no future, no hope, no possibilities, no matter how deeply longed for, could outweigh. Rahel had dared “to yield to chance”; chance was mightier than she, its reality stronger than any “calculable” fulfillment of natural, necessary hope. What had happened to her was irrevocable, had happened to her “for ever.” Passion’s insistence upon absoluteness causes her capacity for novelty to perish, its organ to atrophy. Where hope does not wait expectantly, it is difficult for anything unexpected to occur. Her future would now be prolongation of the past; if the future were some day “going to appear as the present,” all it could do would be to “repeat the past.” This was “the truest unhappiness,” for she had arrived at a point when she could no longer “wish to be happy by force.”
Only complete happiness and complete unhappiness permit life to be seen as a whole, because in both hope is canceled out. “Anyone who was ever really unhappy can never again be happy; anyone who was ever completely happy ought not to be able to be unhappy again. Otherwise he would lack a clear consciousness in being so. That is why we find a cruelty in unhappiness; and that is why it is such a great good fortune to be happy.” Life, then, was really done, had nothing more to say. Hopeless despair understands itself; no false expectations cause it to waver. In hopeless despair—and this is the sole profit to be gained from it—the whole course of life is laid bare before one; in despair we speak “as we speak upon our deathbeds”— namely, the truth.
Because everything was over, because life no longer seemed to have any future, the suffering which had made Rahel a specific person did not go on existing in its specific and particular form; she was persuaded she had experienced life, life in general, as it was. She would not revert back to her former personality, which had been a nothingness. Life had trodden roughshod over her desires. It had treated her as if human pretensions did not exist at all. It had equipped her with no gifts and developed no talents.
Snapshot of our labour market
One of Australia finest labour market economists Jeff Borland, puts out a weekly newsletter. And he’s just published a snapshot on past research on the Australian labour market. As he writes:
So much of that research still has lessons for us today, or is important for understanding how we got to where we are now in studying labour markets, yet doesn’t seem to be widely known. I’m starting in this Snapshot with articles published between the mid-1970s and mid-1990s.
He starts with Bob Gregory.
Bob Gregory (1991), ‘Jobs and gender: A lego approach to the Australian labour market’ , Economic Record, 67, Supplement, 20-40. The only place to start a review of research on the Australian labour market in the 1980s and 1990s is with Bob Gregory. This article asks the question: ‘Why, despite strong employment growth during the 1980s, did unemployment remain high at the end of the decade?’ The answer, it turns out, is straightforward, yet at the same time a major departure from how dynamics in the Australian labour market had been thought to operate.
New job creation in the 1980s attracted extra workers, not by pulling people out of unemployment, but by bringing extra workers into the labour force. A slightly more detailed account is that: (i) During the 1980s, job growth was biased towards part-time jobs in industries where females accounted for a large share of employment; and (ii) Females taking up those jobs came primarily from outside the labour force, rather than from unemployment.
The article presents us with several lessons for studying labour markets: • The importance of looking beneath the aggregate numbers. In this case, that means dividing the labour market between males and females, and employment between full-time and part-time. Of course, it’s not just a matter of looking at disaggregated measures. It’s also about choosing a level of disaggregation that gets to the essence of the question being considered, and at the same time is as simple as possible.
• The need to understand unemployment, not just in terms of workers shifting between employment and unemployment, but also taking into account movement into and out of the labour force.
• Every episode needs to be seen anew. Applying the unemployment/ employment relationship from the 1930s predicts a much larger decrease in the rate of unemployment in the 1980s than actually occurred.
Understanding the 1980s required recognising that this was a new episode, where movements to and from the labour force had become a much more important aspect of cyclical adjustment than in the 1930s.
My list of other essential reading of articles by Bob Gregory includes: • Cross-country analysis (with Anne Daly and V. Ho) of the gender pay gap, using the 1969/72 Equal pay case decisions in Australia as a ‘natural experiment’, with the objective to identify the impact of discrimination and the scope for policy to affect wage outcomes (for example, Gregory et al., 1989).
• Analysis of the determinants of wage growth in Australia, proceeding from the breakdown of the Phillips curve in the 1970s and 1980s, to present an insider-outsider theory of wage setting and alternative empirical approaches to testing the impact of demand on wage growth (Gregory, 1986).
• Work (with Boyd Hunter) on the differential impact of the macroeconomy on labour market outcomes between neighbourhoods (Census Collector Districts) in Australia from 1976 to 1991 (Gregory and Hunter, 1995; and see also Hunter, 1995).
Man from other planet goes into politics
The alien in question is John Stuart Mill. Thanks to Henry Oliver for putting me into him. I read his autobiography about forty years ago and was struck that he had a nervous breakdown when he realised the number of tunes you could get out of a finite number of notes was finite. This suggested he was extremely sensitive, and a little unhinged. Turns out his first big nervous breakdown was for more ‘rational’ reasons. He realised that, even if he could realise all that he’d been brought up to regard as worthwhile, he’d still feel empty. And so he fell into a pit of despair. The original first world problem I guess, but there you go. He’d had a hothouse upbringing and it was finally taking its toll.
Be that as it may, his description of his venture into the Parliament just goes to show how much water has run under the bridge since back then. Early signs are good. But the reductive laws of politics eventually assert themselves. From his autobiography.
In this summary of my outward life I have now arrived at the period at which my tranquil and retired existence as a writer of books was to be exchanged for the less congenial occupation of a member of the House of Commons. The proposal made to me, early in 1865, by some electors of Westminster, did not present the idea to me for the first time. It was not even the first offer I had received, for, more than ten years previous, in consequence of my opinions on the Irish Land Question, Mr. Lucas and Mr. Duffy, in the name of the popular party in Ireland, offered to bring me into Parliament for an Irish county, which they could easily have done: but the incompatibility of a seat in Parliament with the office I then held in the India House, precluded even consideration of the proposal. After I had quitted the India House, several of my friends would gladly have seen me a member of Parliament; but there seemed no probability that the idea would ever take any practical shape. I was convinced that no numerous or influential portion of any electoral body, really wished to be represented by a person of my opinions; and that one who possessed no local connection or popularity, and who did not choose to stand as the mere organ of a party had small chance of being elected anywhere unless through the expenditure of money. Now it was, and is, my fixed conviction, that a candidate ought not to incur one farthing of expense for undertaking a public duty. Such of the lawful expenses of an election as have no special reference to any particular candidate, ought to be borne as a public charge, either by the State or by the locality. What has to be done by the supporters of each candidate in order to bring his claims properly before the constituency, should be done by unpaid agency or by voluntary subscription. If members of the electoral body, or others, are willing to subscribe money of their own for the purpose of bringing, by lawful means, into Parliament some one who they think would be useful there, no one is entitled to object: but that the expense, or any part of it, should fall on the candidate, is fundamentally wrong; because it amounts in reality to buying his seat. Even on the most favourable supposition as to the mode in which the money is expended, there is a legitimate suspicion that any one who gives money for leave to undertake a public trust, has other than public ends to promote by it; and (a consideration of the greatest importance) the cost of elections, when borne by the candidates, deprives the nation of the services, as members of Parliament, of all who cannot or will not afford to incur a heavy expense. I do not say that, so long as there is scarcely a chance for an independent candidate to come into Parliament without complying with this vicious practice, it must always be morally wrong in him to spend money, provided that no part of it is either directly or indirectly employed in corruption. But, to justify it, he ought to be very certain that he can be of more use to his country as a member of Parliament than in any other mode which is open to him; and this assurance, in my own case, I did not feel. It was by no means clear to me that I could do more to advance the public objects which had a claim on my exertions, from the benches of the House of Commons, than from the simple position of a writer. I felt, therefore, that I ought not to seek election to Parliament, much less to expend any money in procuring it.
But the conditions of the question were considerably altered when a body of electors sought me out, and spontaneously offered to bring me forward as their candidate. If it should appear, on explanation, that they persisted in this wish, knowing my opinions, and accepting the only conditions on which I could conscientiously serve, it was questionable whether this was not one of those calls upon a member of the community by his fellow-citizens, which he was scarcely justified in rejecting. I therefore put their disposition to the proof by one of the frankest explanations ever tendered, I should think, to an electoral body by a candidate. I wrote, in reply to the offer, a letter for publication, saying that I had no personal wish to be a member of Parliament, that I thought a candidate ought neither to canvass nor to incur any expense, and that I could not consent to do either. I said further, that if elected, I could not undertake to give any of my time and labour to their local interests. With respect to general politics, I told them without reserve, what I thought on a number of important subjects on which they had asked my opinion: and one of these being the suffrage, I made known to them, among other things, my conviction (as I was bound to do, since I intended, if elected, to act on it), that women were entitled to representation in Parliament on the same terms with men. It was the first time, doubtless, that such a doctrine had ever been mentioned to English electors; and the fact that I was elected after proposing it, gave the start to the movement which has since become so vigorous, in favour of women's suffrage. Nothing, at the time, appeared more unlikely than that a candidate (if candidate I could be called) whose professions and conduct set so completely at defiance all ordinary notions of electioneering, should nevertheless be elected. A well-known literary man(, who was also a man of society,) was heard to say that the Almighty himself would have no chance of being elected on such a programme. I strictly adhered to it, neither spending money nor canvassing, nor did I take any personal part in the election, until about a week preceding the day of nomination, when I attended a few public meetings to state my principles and give to any questions which the electors might exercise their just right of putting to me for their own guidance; answers as plain and unreserved as my address. On one subject only, my religious opinions, I announced from the beginning that I would answer no questions; a determination which appeared to be completely approved by those who attended the meetings. My frankness on all other subjects on which I was interrogated, evidently did me far more good than my answers, whatever they might be, did harm. Among the proofs I received of this, one is too remarkable not to be recorded. In the pamphlet, Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform, I had said, rather bluntly, that the working classes, though differing from those of some other countries, in being ashamed of lying, are yet generally liars. This passage some opponent got printed in a placard, which was handed to me at a meeting, chiefly composed of the working classes, and I was asked whether I had written and published it. I at once answered "I did." Scarcely were these two words out of my mouth, when vehement applause resounded through the whole meeting. It was evident that the working people were so accustomed to expect equivocation and evasion from those who sought their suffrages, that when they found, instead of that, a direct avowal of what was likely to be disagreeable to them, instead of being affronted, they concluded at once that this was a person whom they could trust. A more striking instance never came under my notice of what, I believe, is the experience of those who best know the working classes, that the most essential of all recommendations to their favour is that of complete straightforwardness; its presence outweighs in their minds very strong objections, while no amount of other qualities will make amends for its apparent absence. The first working man who spoke after the incident I have mentioned (it was Mr. Odger) said, that the working classes had no desire not to be told of their faults; they wanted friends, not flatterers, and felt under obligation to any one who told them anything in themselves which he sincerely believed to require amendment. And to this the meeting heartily responded.
Had I been defeated in the election, I should still have had no reason to regret the contact it had brought me into with large bodies of my countrymen; which not only gave me much new experience, but enabled me to scatter my political opinions rather widely, and, by making me known in many quarters where I had never before been heard of, increased the number of my readers, and the presumable influence of my writings. These latter effects were of course produced in a still greater degree, when, as much to my surprise as to that of any one, I was returned to Parliament by a majority of some hundreds over my Conservative competitor.
I was a member of the House during the three sessions of the Parliament which passed the Reform Bill; during which time Parliament was necessarily my main occupation, except during the recess. I was a tolerably frequent speaker, sometimes of prepared speeches, sometimes extemporaneously. But my choice of occasions was not such as I should have made if my leading object had been Parliamentary influence. When I had gained the ear of the House, which I did by a successful speech on Mr. Gladstone's Reform Bill, the idea I proceeded on was that when anything was likely to be as well done, or sufficiently well done, by other people, there was no necessity for me to meddle with it. As I, therefore, in general reserved myself for work which no others were likely to do, a great proportion of my appearances were on points on which the bulk of the Liberal party, even the advanced portion of it, either were of a different opinion from mine, or were comparatively indifferent. Several of my speeches, especially one against the motion for the abolition of capital punishment, and another in favour of resuming the right of seizing enemies' goods in neutral vessels, were opposed to what then was, and probably still is, regarded as the advanced liberal opinion. My advocacy of women's suffrage and of Personal Representation, were at the time looked upon by many as whims of my own; but the great progress since made by those opinions, and especially the response made from almost all parts of the kingdom to the demand for women's suffrage, fully justified the timeliness of those movements, and have made what was undertaken as a moral and social duty, a personal success. Another duty which was particularly incumbent on me as one of the Metropolitan Members, was the attempt to obtain a Municipal Government for the Metropolis: but on that subject the indifference of the House of Commons was such that I found hardly any help or support within its walls. On this subject, however, I was the organ of an active and intelligent body of persons outside, with whom, and not with me, the scheme originated, and who carried on all the agitation on the subject and drew up the Bills. My part was to bring in Bills already prepared, and to sustain the discussion of them during the short time they were allowed to remain before the House; after having taken an active part in the work of a Committee presided over by Mr. Ayrton, which sat through the greater part of the Session of 1866, to take evidence on the subject. The very different position in which the question now stands (1870) may justly be attributed to the preparation which went on during those years, and which produced but little visible effect at the time; but all questions on which there are strong private interests on one side, and only the public good on the other, have a similar period of incubation to go through.
The same idea, that the use of my being in Parliament was to do work which others were not able or not willing to do, made me think it my duty to come to the front in defence of advanced Liberalism on occasions when the obloquy to be encountered was such as most of the advanced Liberals in the House, preferred not to incur. My first vote in the House was in support of an amendment in favour of Ireland, moved by an Irish member, and for which only five English and Scotch votes were given, including my own: the other four were Mr. Bright, Mr. McLaren, Mr. T.B. Potter, and Mr. Hadfield. And the second speech I delivered[9] was on the bill to prolong the suspension of the Habeas Corpus in Ireland. In denouncing, on this occasion, the English mode of governing Ireland, I did no more than the general opinion of England now admits to have been just; but the anger against Fenianism was then in all its freshness; any attack on what Fenians attacked was looked upon as an apology for them; and I was so unfavourably received by the House, that more than one of my friends advised me (and my own judgment agreed with the advice) to wait, before speaking again, for the favourable opportunity that would be given by the first great debate on the Reform Bill. During this silence, many flattered themselves that I had turned out a failure, and that they should not be troubled with me any more. Perhaps their uncomplimentary comments may, by the force of reaction, have helped to make my speech on the Reform Bill the success it was. My position in the House was further improved by a speech in which I insisted on the duty of paying off the National Debt before our coal supplies are exhausted, and by an ironical reply to some of the Tory leaders who had quoted against me certain passages of my writings, and called me to account for others, especially for one in my Considerations on Representative Government, which said that the Conservative party was, by the law of its composition, the stupidest party. They gained nothing by drawing attention to the passage, which up to that time had not excited any notice, but the sobriquet of "the stupid party" stuck to them for a considerable time afterwards. Having now no longer any apprehension of not being listened to, I confined myself, as I have since thought too much, to occasions on which my services seemed specially needed, and abstained more than enough from speaking on the great party questions. With the exception of Irish questions, and those which concerned the working classes, a single speech on Mr. Disraeli's Reform Bill was nearly all that I contributed to the great decisive debates of the last two of my three sessions.
I have, however, much satisfaction in looking back to the part I took on the two classes of subjects just mentioned. With regard to the working classes, the chief topic of my speech on Mr. Gladstone's Reform Bill was the assertion of their claims to the suffrage. A little later, after the resignation of Lord Russell's Ministry and the succession of a Tory Government, came the attempt of the working classes to hold a meeting in Hyde Park, their exclusion by the police, and the breaking down of the park railing by the crowd. Though Mr. Beales and the leaders of the working men had retired under protest before this took place, a scuffle ensued in which many innocent persons were maltreated by the police, and the exasperation of the working men was extreme. They showed a determination to make another attempt at a meeting in the Park, to which many of them would probably have come armed; the Government made military preparations to resist the attempt, and something very serious seemed impending. At this crisis I really believe that I was the means of preventing much mischief. I had in my place in Parliament taken the side of the working men, and strongly censured the conduct of the Government. I was invited, with several other Radical members, to a conference with the leading members of the Council of the Reform League; and the task fell chiefly upon myself, of persuading them to give up the Hyde Park project, and hold their meeting elsewhere. It was not Mr. Beales and Colonel Dickson who needed persuading; on the contrary, it was evident that these gentlemen had already exerted their influence in the same direction, thus far without success. It was the working men who held out, and so bent were they on their original scheme, that I was obliged to have recourse to les grands moyens. I told them that a proceeding which would certainly produce a collision with the military, could only be justifiable on two conditions: if the position of affairs had become such that a revolution was desirable, and if they thought themselves able to accomplish one. To this argument, after considerable discussion, they at last yielded: and I was able to inform Mr. Walpole that their intention was given up. I shall never forget the depth of his relief or the warmth of his expressions of gratitude. After the working men had conceded so much to me, I felt bound to comply with their request that I would attend and speak at their meeting at the Agricultural Hall; the only meeting called by the Reform League which I ever attended. I had always declined being a member of the League, on the avowed ground that I did not agree in its programme of manhood suffrage and the ballot: from the ballot I dissented entirely; and I could not consent to hoist the flag of manhood suffrage, even on the assurance that the exclusion of women was not intended to be implied; since if one goes beyond what can be immediately carried, and professes to take one's stand on a principle, one should go the whole length of the principle. I have entered thus particularly into this matter because my conduct on this occasion gave great displeasure to the Tory and Tory-Liberal press, who have charged me ever since with having shown myself, in the trials of public life, intemperate and passionate. I do not know what they expected from me; but they had reason to be thankful to me if they knew from what I had, in all probability preserved them. And I do not believe it could have been done, at that particular juncture, by any one else. No other person, I believe, had at that moment the necessary influence for restraining the working classes, except Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Bright, neither of whom was available: Mr. Gladstone, for obvious reasons; Mr. Bright because he was out of town.
When, some time later, the Tory Government brought in a bill to prevent public meetings in the Parks, I not only spoke strongly in opposition to it, but formed one of a number of advanced Liberals, who, aided by the very late period of the session, succeeded in defeating the Bill by what is called talking it out. It has not since been renewed.
On Irish affairs also I felt bound to take a decided part. I was one of the foremost in the deputation of Members of Parliament who prevailed on Lord Derby to spare the life of the condemned Fenian insurgent, General Burke. The Church question was so vigorously handled by the leaders of the party, in the session of 1868, as to require no more from me than an emphatic adhesion: but the land question was by no means in so advanced a position; the superstitions of landlordism had up to that time been little challenged, especially in Parliament, and the backward state of the question, so far as concerned the Parliamentary mind, was evidenced by the extremely mild measure brought in by Lord Russell's government in 1866, which nevertheless could not be carried. On that bill I delivered one of my most careful speeches, in which I attempted to lay down some of the principles of the subject, in a manner calculated less to stimulate friends, than to conciliate and convince opponents. The engrossing subject of Parliamentary Reform prevented either this bill, or one of a similar character brought in by Lord Derby's Government, from being carried through. They never got beyond the second reading. Meanwhile the signs of Irish disaffection had become much more decided; the demand for complete separation between the two countries had assumed a menacing aspect, and there were few who did not feel that if there was still any chance of reconciling Ireland to the British connection, it could only be by the adoption of much more thorough reforms in the territorial and social relations of the country, than had yet been contemplated. The time seemed to me to have come when it would be useful to speak out my whole mind; and the result was my pamphlet England and Ireland, which was written in the winter of 1867, and published shortly before the commencement of the session of 1868. The leading features of the pamphlet were, on the one hand, an argument to show the undesirableness, for Ireland as well as England, of separation between the countries, and on the other, a proposal for settling the land question by giving to the existing tenants a permanent tenure, at a fixed rent, to be assessed after due inquiry by the State.
The pamphlet was not popular, except in Ireland, as I did not expect it to be. But, if no measure short of that which I proposed would do full justice to Ireland, or afford a prospect of conciliating the mass of the Irish people, the duty of proposing it was imperative; while if, on the other hand, there was any intermediate course which had a claim to a trial, I well knew that to propose something which would be called extreme, was the true way not to impede but to facilitate a more moderate experiment. It is most improbable that a measure conceding so much to the tenantry as Mr. Gladstone's Irish Land Bill, would have been proposed by a Government, or could have been carried through Parliament, unless the British public had been led to perceive that a case might be made, and perhaps a party formed, for a measure considerably stronger. It is the character of the British people, or at least of the higher and middle classes who pass muster for the British people, that to induce them to approve of any change, it is necessary that they should look upon it as a middle course: they think every proposal extreme and violent unless they hear of some other proposal going still farther, upon which their antipathy to extreme views may discharge itself. So it proved in the present instance; my proposal was condemned, but any scheme for Irish Land reform short of mine, came to be thought moderate by comparison. I may observe that the attacks made on my plan usually gave a very incorrect idea of its nature. It was usually discussed as a proposal that the State should buy up the land and become the universal landlord; though in fact it only offered to each individual landlord this as an alternative, if he liked better to sell his estate than to retain it on the new conditions; and I fully anticipated that most landlords would continue to prefer the position of landowners to that of Government annuitants, and would retain their existing relation to their tenants, often on more indulgent terms than the full rents on which the compensation to be given them by Government would have been based. This and many other explanations I gave in a speech on Ireland, in the debate on Mr. Maguire's Resolution, early in the session of 1868. A corrected report of this speech, together with my speech on Mr. Fortescue's Bill, has been published (not by me, but with my permission) in Ireland.
Another public duty, of a most serious kind, it was my lot to have to perform, both in and out of Parliament, during these years. A disturbance in Jamaica, provoked in the first instance by injustice, and exaggerated by rage and panic into a premeditated rebellion, had been the motive or excuse for taking hundreds of innocent lives by military violence, or by sentence of what were called courts-martial, continuing for weeks after the brief disturbance had been put down; with many added atrocities of destruction of property logging women as well as men, and a general display of the brutal recklessness which usually prevails when fire and sword are let loose. The perpetrators of those deeds were defended and applauded in England by the same kind of people who had so long upheld negro slavery: and it seemed at first as if the British nation was about to incur the disgrace of letting pass without even a protest, excesses of authority as revolting as any of those for which, when perpetrated by the instruments of other governments, Englishmen can hardly find terms sufficient to express their abhorrence. After a short time, however, an indignant feeling was roused: a voluntary Association formed itself under the name of the Jamaica Committee, to take such deliberation and action as the case might admit of, and adhesions poured in from all parts of the country. I was abroad at the time, but I sent in my name to the Committee as soon as I heard of it, and took an active part in the proceedings from the time of my return. There was much more at stake than only justice to the negroes, imperative as was that consideration. The question was, whether the British dependencies, and eventually, perhaps, Great Britain itself, were to be under the government of law, or of military licence; whether the lives and persons of British subjects are at the mercy of any two or three officers however raw and inexperienced or reckless and brutal, whom a panic-stricken Governor, or other functionary, may assume the right to constitute into a so-called court-martial. This question could only be decided by an appeal to the tribunals; and such an appeal the Committee determined to make. Their determination led to a change in the chairmanship of the Committee, as the chairman, Mr. Charles Buxton, thought it not unjust indeed, but inexpedient, to prosecute Governor Eyre and his principal subordinates in a criminal court: but a numerously attended general meeting of the Association having decided this point against him, Mr. Buxton withdrew from the Committee, though continuing to work in the cause, and I was, quite unexpectedly on my own part, proposed and elected chairman. It became, in consequence, my duty to represent the Committee in the House of Commons, sometimes by putting questions to the Government, sometimes as the recipient of questions, more or less provocative, addressed by individual members to myself; but especially as speaker in the important debate originated in the session of 1866, by Mr. Buxton: and the speech I then delivered is that which I should probably select as the best of my speeches in Parliament.[10] For more than two years we carried on the combat, trying every avenue legally open to us, to the Courts of Criminal Justice. A bench of magistrates in one of the most Tory counties in England dismissed our case: we were more successful before the magistrates at Bow Street; which gave an opportunity to the Lord Chief Justice of the Queen's Bench, Sir Alexander Cockburn, for delivering his celebrated charge, which settled the law of the question in favour of liberty, as far as it is in the power of a judge's charge to settle it. There, however, our success ended, for the Old Bailey Grand jury by throwing out our bill prevented the case from coming to trial. It was clear that to bring English functionaries to the bar of a criminal court for abuses of power committed against negroes and mulattoes was not a popular proceeding with the English middle classes. We had, however, redeemed, so far as lay in us, the character of our country, by showing that there was at any rate a body of persons determined to use all the means which the law afforded to obtain justice for the injured. We had elicited from the highest criminal judge in the nation an authoritative declaration that the law was what we maintained it to be; and we had given an emphatic warning to those who might be tempted to similar guilt hereafter, that, though they might escape the actual sentence of a criminal tribunal, they were not safe against being put to some trouble and expense in order to avoid it. Colonial governors and other persons in authority, will have a considerable motive to stop short of such extremities in future.
As a matter of curiosity I kept some specimens of the abusive letters, almost all of them anonymous, which I received while these proceedings were going on. They are evidence of the sympathy felt with the brutalities in Jamaica by the brutal part of the population at home. They graduated from coarse jokes, verbal and pictorial, up to threats of assassination.
Among other matters of importance in which I took an active part, but which excited little interest in the public, two deserve particular mention. I joined with several other independent Liberals in defeating an Extradition Bill introduced at the very end of the session of 1866, and by which, though surrender avowedly for political offences was not authorized, political refugees, if charged by a foreign Government with acts which are necessarily incident to all attempts at insurrection, would have been surrendered to be dealt with by the criminal courts of the Government against which they had rebelled: thus making the British Government an accomplice in the vengeance of foreign despotisms. The defeat of this proposal led to the appointment of a Select Committee (in which I was included), to examine and report on the whole subject of Extradition Treaties; and the result was, that in the Extradition Act which passed through Parliament after I had ceased to be a member, opportunity is given to any one whose extradition is demanded, of being heard before an English court of justice to prove that the offence with which he is charged, is really political. The cause of European freedom has thus been saved from a serious misfortune, and our own country from a great iniquity. The other subject to be mentioned is the fight kept up by a body of advanced Liberals in the session of 1868, on the Bribery Bill of Mr. Disraeli's Government, in which I took a very active part. I had taken counsel with several of those who had applied their minds most carefully to the details of the subject—Mr. W.D. Christie, Serjeant Pulling, Mr. Chadwick—as well as bestowed much thought of my own, for the purpose of framing such amendments and additional clauses as might make the Bill really effective against the numerous modes of corruption, direct and indirect, which might otherwise, as there was much reason to fear, be increased instead of diminished by the Reform Act. We also aimed at engrafting on the Bill, measures for diminishing the mischievous burden of what are called the legitimate expenses of elections. Among our many amendments, was that of Mr. Fawcett for making the returning officer's expenses a charge on the rates, instead of on the candidates; another was the prohibition of paid canvassers, and the limitation of paid agents to one for each candidate; a third was the extension of the precautions and penalties against bribery to municipal elections, which are well known to be not only a preparatory school for bribery at parliamentary elections, but an habitual cover for it. The Conservative Government, however, when once they had carried the leading provision of their Bill (for which I voted and spoke), the transfer of the jurisdiction in elections from the House of Commons to the Judges, made a determined resistance to all other improvements; and after one of our most important proposals, that of Mr. Fawcett, had actually obtained a majority, they summoned the strength of their party and threw out the clause in a subsequent stage. The Liberal party in the House was greatly dishonoured by the conduct of many of its members in giving no help whatever to this attempt to secure the necessary conditions of an honest representation of the people. With their large majority in the House they could have carried all the amendments, or better ones if they had better to propose. But it was late in the session; members were eager to set about their preparations for the impending General Election: and while some (such as Sir Robert Anstruther) honourably remained at their post, though rival candidates were already canvassing their constituency, a much greater number placed their electioneering interests before their public duty. Many Liberals also looked with indifference on legislation against bribery, thinking that it merely diverted public interest from the Ballot, which they considered—very mistakenly as I expect it will turn out—to be a sufficient, and the only, remedy. From these causes our fight, though kept up with great vigour for several nights, was wholly unsuccessful, and the practices which we sought to render more difficult, prevailed more widely than ever in the first General Election held under the new electoral law.
In the general debates on Mr. Disraeli's Reform Bill, my participation was limited to the one speech already mentioned; but I made the Bill an occasion for bringing the two great improvements which remain to be made in Representative Government, formally before the House and the nation. One of them was Personal, or, as it is called with equal propriety, Proportional Representation. I brought this under the consideration of the House, by an expository and argumentative speech on Mr. Hare's plan; and subsequently I was active in support of the very imperfect substitute for that plan, which, in a small number of constituencies, Parliament was induced to adopt. This poor makeshift had scarcely any recommendation, except that it was a partial recognition of the evil which it did so little to remedy. As such, however, it was attacked by the same fallacies, and required to be defended on the same principles, as a really good measure; and its adoption in a few Parliamentary elections, as well as the subsequent introduction of what is called the Cumulative Vote in the elections for the London School Board, have had the good effect of converting the equal claim of all electors to a proportional share in the representation, from a subject of merely speculative discussion, into a question of practical politics, much sooner than would otherwise have been the case.
This assertion of my opinions on Personal Representation cannot be credited with any considerable or visible amount of practical result. It was otherwise with the other motion which I made in the form of an amendment to the Reform Bill, and which was by far the most important, perhaps the only really important, public service I performed in the capacity of a Member of Parliament: a motion to strike out the words which were understood to limit the electoral franchise to males, and thereby to admit to the suffrage all women who, as householders or otherwise, possessed the qualification required of male electors. For women not to make their claim to the suffrage, at the time when the elective franchise was being largely extended, would have been to abjure the claim altogether; and a movement on the subject was begun in 1866, when I presented a petition for the suffrage, signed by a considerable number of distinguished women. But it was as yet uncertain whether the proposal would obtain more than a few stray votes in the House: and when, after a debate in which the speaker's on the contrary side were conspicuous by their feebleness, the votes recorded in favour of the motion amounted to 73—made up by pairs and tellers to above 80—the surprise was general, and the encouragement great: the greater, too, because one of those who voted for the motion was Mr. Bright, a fact which could only be attributed to the impression made on him by the debate, as he had previously made no secret of his nonconcurrence in the proposal. (The time appeared to my daughter, Miss Helen Taylor, to have come for forming a Society for the extension of the suffrage to women. The existence of the Society is due to my daughter's initiative; its constitution was planned entirely by her, and she was the soul of the movement during its first years, though delicate health and superabundant occupation made her decline to be a member of the Executive Committee. Many distinguished members of parliament, professors, and others, and some of the most eminent women of whom the country can boast, became members of the Society, a large proportion either directly or indirectly through my daughter's influence, she having written the greater number, and all the best, of the letters by which adhesions was obtained, even when those letters bore my signature. In two remarkable instances, those of Miss Nightingale and Miss Mary Carpenter, the reluctance those ladies had at first felt to come forward, (for it was not on their past difference of opinion) was overcome by appeals written by my daughter though signed by me. Associations for the same object were formed in various local centres, Manchester, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Bristol, and Glasgow; and others which have done much valuable work for the cause. All the Societies take the title of branches of the National Society for Women's Suffrage; but each has its own governing body, and acts in complete independence of the others.)
I believe I have mentioned all that is worth remembering of my proceedings in the House. But their enumeration, even if complete, would give but an inadequate idea of my occupations during that period, and especially of the time taken up by correspondence. For many years before my election to Parliament, I had been continually receiving letters from strangers, mostly addressed to me as a writer on philosophy, and either propounding difficulties or communicating thoughts on subjects connected with logic or political economy. In common, I suppose, with all who are known as political economists, I was a recipient of all the shallow theories and absurd proposals by which people are perpetually endeavouring to show the way to universal wealth and happiness by some artful reorganization of the currency. When there were signs of sufficient intelligence in the writers to make it worth while attempting to put them right, I took the trouble to point out their errors, until the growth of my correspondence made it necessary to dismiss such persons with very brief answers. Many, however, of the communications I received were more worthy of attention than these, and in some, oversights of detail were pointed out in my writings, which I was thus enabled to correct. Correspondence of this sort naturally multiplied with the multiplication of the subjects on which I wrote, especially those of a metaphysical character. But when I became a member of Parliament. I began to receive letters on private grievances and on every imaginable subject that related to any kind of public affairs, however remote from my knowledge or pursuits. It was not my constituents in Westminster who laid this burthen on me: they kept with remarkable fidelity to the understanding on which I had consented to serve. I received, indeed, now and then an application from some ingenuous youth to procure for him a small government appointment; but these were few, and how simple and ignorant the writers were, was shown by the fact that the applications came in about equally whichever party was in power. My invariable answer was, that it was contrary to the principles on which I was elected to ask favours of any Government. But, on the whole, hardly any part of the country gave me less trouble than my own constituents. The general mass of correspondence, however, swelled into an oppressive burthen.
(At this time, and thenceforth, a great proportion of all my letters (including many which found their way into the newspapers) were not written by me but by my daughter; at first merely from her willingness to help in disposing of a mass of letters greater than I could get through without assistance, but afterwards because I thought the letters she wrote superior to mine, and more so in proportion to the difficulty and importance of the occasion. Even those which I wrote myself were generally much improved by her, as is also the case with all the more recent of my prepared speeches, of which, and of some of my published writings, not a few passages, and those the most successful, were hers.)
While I remained in Parliament my work as an author was unavoidably limited to the recess. During that time I wrote (besides the pamphlet on Ireland, already mentioned), the Essay on Plato, published in the Edinburgh Review, and reprinted in the third volume of Dissertations and Discussions; and the address which, conformably to custom, I delivered to the University of St. Andrew's, whose students had done me the honour of electing me to the office of Rector. In this Discourse I gave expression to many thoughts and opinions which had been accumulating in me through life, respecting the various studies which belong to a liberal education, their uses and influences, and the mode in which they should be pursued to render their influences most beneficial. The position taken up, vindicating the high educational value alike of the old classic and the new scientific studies, on even stronger grounds than are urged by most of their advocates, and insisting that it is only the stupid inefficiency of the usual teaching which makes those studies be regarded as competitors instead of allies, was, I think, calculated, not only to aid and stimulate the improvement which has happily commenced in the national institutions for higher education, but to diffuse juster ideas than we often find, even in highly educated men, on the conditions of the highest mental cultivation.
During this period also I commenced (and completed soon after I had left Parliament) the performance of a duty to philosophy and to the memory of my father, by preparing and publishing an edition of the Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, with notes bringing up the doctrines of that admirable book to the latest improvements in science and in speculation. This was a joint undertaking: the psychological notes being furnished in about equal proportions by Mr. Bain and myself, while Mr. Grote supplied some valuable contributions on points in the history of philosophy incidentally raised, and Dr. Andrew Findlater supplied the deficiencies in the book which had been occasioned by the imperfect philological knowledge of the time when it was written. Having been originally published at a time when the current of metaphysical speculation ran in a quite opposite direction to the psychology of Experience and Association, the Analysis had not obtained the amount of immediate success which it deserved, though it had made a deep impression on many individual minds, and had largely contributed, through those minds, to create that more favourable atmosphere for the Association Psychology of which we now have the benefit. Admirably adapted for a class book of the Experience Metaphysics, it only required to be enriched, and in some cases corrected, by the results of more recent labours in the same school of thought, to stand, as it now does, in company with Mr. Bain's treatises, at the head of the systematic works on Analytic psychology.
In the autumn of 1868 the Parliament which passed the Reform Act was dissolved, and at the new election for Westminster I was thrown out; not to my surprise, nor, I believe, to that of my principal supporters, though in the few days preceding the election they had become more sanguine than before. That I should not have been elected at all would not have required any explanation; what excites curiosity is that I should have been elected the first time, or, having been elected then, should have been defeated afterwards. But the efforts made to defeat me were far greater on the second occasion than on the first. For one thing, the Tory Government was now struggling for existence, and success in any contest was of more importance to them. Then, too, all persons of Tory feelings were far more embittered against me individually than on the previous occasion; many who had at first been either favourable or indifferent, were vehemently opposed to my re-election. As I had shown in my political writings that I was aware of the weak points in democratic opinions, some Conservatives, it seems, had not been without hopes of finding me an opponent of democracy: as I was able to see the Conservative side of the question, they presumed that, like them, I could not see any other side. Yet if they had really read my writings, they would have known that after giving full weight to all that appeared to me well grounded in the arguments against democracy, I unhesitatingly decided in its favour, while recommending that it should be accompanied by such institutions as were consistent with its principle and calculated to ward off its inconveniences: one of the chief of these remedies being Proportional Representation, on which scarcely any of the Conservatives gave me any support. Some Tory expectations appear to have been founded on the approbation I had expressed of plural voting, under certain conditions: and it has been surmised that the suggestion of this sort made in one of the resolutions which Mr. Disraeli introduced into the House preparatory to his Reform Bill (a suggestion which meeting with no favour, he did not press), may have been occasioned by what I had written on the point: but if so, it was forgotten that I had made it an express condition that the privilege of a plurality of votes should be annexed to education, not to property, and even so, had approved of it only on the supposition of universal suffrage. How utterly inadmissible such plural voting would be under the suffrage given by the present Reform Act, is proved, to any who could otherwise doubt it, by the very small weight which the working classes are found to possess in elections, even under the law which gives no more votes to any one elector than to any other.
While I thus was far more obnoxious to the Tory interest, and to many Conservative Liberals than I had formerly been, the course I pursued in Parliament had by no means been such as to make Liberals generally at all enthusiastic in my support. It has already been mentioned, how large a proportion of my prominent appearances had been on questions on which I differed from most of the Liberal party, or about which they cared little, and how few occasions there had been on which the line I took was such as could lead them to attach any great value to me as an organ of their opinions. I had moreover done things which had excited, in many minds, a personal prejudice against me. Many were offended by what they called the persecution of Mr. Eyre: and still greater offence was taken at my sending a subscription to the election expenses of Mr. Bradlaugh. Having refused to be at any expense for my own election, and having had all its expenses defrayed by others, I felt under a peculiar obligation to subscribe in my turn where funds were deficient for candidates whose election was desirable. I accordingly sent subscriptions to nearly all the working class candidates, and among others to Mr. Bradlaugh. He had the support of the working classes; having heard him speak, I knew him to be a man of ability and he had proved that he was the reverse of a demagogue, by placing himself in strong opposition to the prevailing opinion of the democratic party on two such important subjects as Malthusianism and Personal Representation. Men of this sort, who, while sharing the democratic feelings of the working classes, judged political questions for themselves, and had courage to assert their individual convictions against popular opposition, were needed, as it seemed to me, in Parliament, and I did not think that Mr. Bradlaugh's anti-religious opinions (even though he had been intemperate in the expression of them) ought to exclude him. In subscribing, however, to his election, I did what would have been highly imprudent if I had been at liberty to consider only the interests of my own re-election; and, as might be expected, the utmost possible use, both fair and unfair, was made of this act of mine to stir up the electors of Westminster against me. To these various causes, combined with an unscrupulous use of the usual pecuniary and other influences on the side of my Tory competitor, while none were used on my side, it is to be ascribed that I failed at my second election after having succeeded at the first. No sooner was the result of the election known than I received three or four invitations to become a candidate for other constituencies, chiefly counties; but even if success could have been expected, and this without expense, I was not disposed to deny myself the relief of returning to private life. I had no cause to feel humiliated at my rejection by the electors; and if I had, the feeling would have been far outweighed by the numerous expressions of regret which I received from all sorts of persons and places, and in a most marked degree from those members of the liberal party in Parliament, with whom I had been accustomed to act.
Since that time little has occurred which there is need to commemorate in this place. I returned to my old pursuits and to the enjoyment of a country life in the south of Europe, alternating twice a year with a residence of some weeks or months in the neighbourhood of London. I have written various articles in periodicals (chiefly in my friend Mr. Morley's Fortnightly Review), have made a small number of speeches on public occasions, especially at the meetings of the Women's Suffrage Society, have published the Subjection of Women, written some years before, with some additions (by my daughter and myself,) and have commenced the preparation of matter for future books, of which it will be time to speak more particularly if I live to finish them. Here, therefore, for the present, this memoir may close.