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Updated: May 31, 2025
Huskisson began the series of economic reforms which were brought to their full development by Peel and Gladstone. The collection of his speeches incidentally brings out very clearly his relation to the Utilitarians. In this he reviews his policy, going over the most important financial measures of the preceding period.
Nothing is more amusing or instructive than to observe the manner in which people who think themselves wiser than all the rest of the world fall into snares which the simple good sense of their neighbours detects and avoids. It is one of the principle tenets of the Utilitarians that sentiment and eloquence serve only to impede the pursuit of truth.
The spirits of the old painters, living still on their canvass, earn from year to year the bread of an indigent and oppressed people. This ought to silence those utilitarians at home, who oppose the cultivation of the fine arts, on the ground of their being useless luxuries. Let them look to Italy, where a picture by Raphael or Correggio is a rich legacy for a whole city.
The fact is, that almost all the governments that have ever existed in the civilised world have been, in part at least, monarchical and aristocratical. The first government constituted on principles approaching to those which the Utilitarians hold was, we think, that of the United States.
If virtue and morality, right and wrong, are to continue to mean anything like that which, except by Utilitarians, has always been considered to be their only meaning, it is not simply not wrong, it is not simply right, it is among the highest achievements of virtue and morality to sacrifice your own in order to secure another's happiness, and the disinterestedness, and therefore the virtue, is surely the greater, rather than less, if you sacrifice more happiness of your own than you secure to another.
It is useless to argue with biographers; they, at all events, are neither utilitarians nor opportunists, but idealists pure and simple.
"And the other young men, those lounging guardsmen and great lazy dandies sprawling over sofas and billiard-tables, and stealing off to smoke pipes in each other's bedrooms, caring for nothing, reverencing nothing, not even an old gentleman who has known their fathers and their betters, not even a pretty woman what a difference there is between these men, who poison the very turnips and stubble-fields with their tobacco, and the gentlemen of our time!" thinks the Major; "the breed is gone there's no use for 'em; they're replaced by a parcel of damned cotton spinners and utilitarians, and young sprigs of parsons with their hair combed down their barks.
Politics were beginning to enter upon a new phase. The period was marked by the 'Six Acts' and the 'Peterloo massacre. The Radical leaders who upheld the cause in those dark days were not altogether to the taste of the Utilitarians. They were supported by Cobbett, the greatest journalist of the time, and various more obscure writers. The Utilitarians held them in considerable contempt.
Place himself took an important part at the final crisis, especially by his circulation in the week of agony of the famous placard, 'Go for Gold. But the Utilitarians were now lost in the crowd. The demand for reform had spread through all classes.
Like them, he was on his guard against 'sentimentalism' and 'vague generalities, and thought that a hasty benevolence was apt to aggravate the evils which it attacked. The Utilitarians naturally translated all aspirations into logical dogmas; but some people who despised them as hard-hearted really took much less pains to give effect to their own benevolent impulses.
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