In Defense of the Indefensible
I was about ten years old in the mid-1970s when I toured Fort Henry in Kingston, Ontario, and first learned about what I regarded as the crazy British practice of purchased officer commissions. Some years later, I felt like the smartest kid in the room when I recounted this nonsense in a high-school English-class discussion of Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade.
I didn’t encounter a rational explanation for purchased commissions until 2007, while reading Harry Jaffa’s A New Birth of Freedom:
This seemingly irrational practice (which lasted until after the Crimean War) served to assure the country that the officer class would be drawn from the propertied class and would not consist of adventurers who might expect their fortunes from the booty of the conquests of their commander. (The British experience explains why the president of the United States, as commander in chief, must be a civilian and why all appointments to the higher ranks of the armed services must be consented by the Senate. Consent is the American equivalent of purchase.)
And it wasn’t until recently that I first read the following, taken from F.W. Maitland’s Justice and Police (1885):
It is not asserted that the justices [landed gentry], in administering the affairs of the county, have been corrupt or extravagant. Notoriously the fact is otherwise. For the last half-century we have been trying many experiments in local government: we have had municipal corporations, poor-law boards, boards of health, school boards, all constituted on different principles. The result of these experiments is simply this: that of all known forms of local government, government by justices of the peace is the purest and the cheapest. More than this can be said; it is the form which requires least control on the part of the central Government; this is no slight merit in these days when all are complaining of over-centralization. The average justice of the peace is a far more capable man than the average alderman, or the average guardian of the poor; consequently he requires much less official supervision. As a governor he is doomed; but there has been no accusation. He is cheap, he is pure, he is capable, but he is doomed; he is to be sacrificed to a theory, on the altar of the spirit of the age.
I’ve come to the conclusion, once again, that when I hear about some old, indefensible, pre-WWI way of life that strikes me and just about everyone else as patently stupid and wrong on the face of it, the best course is to presume that everyone is uninformed. It’s taken me a long time to come to that.
J. Douglas Johnson is the executive editor of Touchstone and the executive director of the Fellowship of St. James.
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