The National Argument

THE IMPERIAL TO THE NATIONAL AGE

Denn eben wo Begriffe fehlen, da stellt ein Wort zur rechten Zeit sich ein. [At the point where conceptions are lacking, a word comes to the rescue.]

— THE DEVILISH MEPHISTO TO A STUDENT IN GOETHE'S FAUST (1808) CITED IN SÁNDOR RONYI'S APPROPRIATE PROGRAM FOR THE LEGAL AND PRACTICAL SOLUTION OF THE HUNGARIAN QUESTION (1865)

A Word-Making Age

"At the point where conceptions are lacking, a word comes to the rescue." This is a line from Goethe's Faust, which appeared in the first decade of the nineteenth century. The devil Mephisto is explaining to a student — in his devilish way — the opportunities afforded by sophistry and the uses of knowledge for personal gain. Words could possess a magical automatism (sich einstellen), the passage implies, offering an escape from failing concepts and perceptions. A word can substitute for understanding reality, or, more importantly, it can create a new reality ("with words a system can be built," the passage continues). Mephisto possessed the nineteenth century. This argument follows the word-makers.

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Britain was the birthplace of the age of questions. A prehistory reveals both the centrality of Britain to the emergence and spread of questions, and the particularly British parliamentary stamp they initially bore. Many of the first "x questions" — the American, Catholic (later Irish), Carnatic, Oude, East India, and South American questions — touched upon the form and character of the British Empire and its relationship to the colonies. Later, with the treaty negotiations following the Napoleonic Wars, questions spread far and wide, and found their way into most corners of the globe. They would eventually acquire a different aspect in each language they entered, and each language nurtured its own unique spread of them. Examples from various national-linguistic contexts — German, Russian, Polish, Turkish, and American, to name a few — and a longer case study on the age of questions in Hungary reveal how distinct national contexts gave the same questions a very different character, or the way the same question was defined in comparison with or against the forms it took in other contexts.

An Imperial Prehistory of the Age

"The eighteenth century saw the evolution of the Parliamentary question," wrote the British historian P. D. G. Thomas. These were questions posed by parliamentarians to ministers on matters of policy that came to form the basis of debates around legislative decisions. By the end of the American Revolutionary War, they were an "established custom," Thomas observed. As these questions tended to center on perceived failures, shortcomings, or excess expenditures generated by government policy, it was likely this practice that contributed most directly to the emergence of the shorthand "the x question."

Among the oldest of the "x questions" was the American question. It was a peculiar outlier; in its original form, it had already faded away before the age of questions truly began but later experienced several reincarnations. An early reference to the American question appeared in Thomas Pownall's The Administration of the Colonies from 1764. Pownall, a former governer of one of the Thirteen Colonies, argued that "the Colonies, although without the limits of the realm, are yet in fact, of the realm ... and therefore ought ... to be united to the realm, in a full and absolute communication and communion of all rights, franchises and liberties, which any other part of the realm hath, or doth enjoy, or ought to have and to enjoy." "The precise ground on which this dangerous question ought to be settled," wrote Pownall, was:

how far they are to be governed by the vigour of external principles; by the supreme superintending power of the mother country: How far, by the vigour of the internal principles of their own peculiar body politic: And what ought to be the mode of administration, by which they are to be governed in their legislative, executive, judicial and commercial departments; in the conduct of their money, and revenues; in their power of making peace or war.

Up until 1793, the American question surfaced mainly in parliamentary debates, albeit with a marked capriciousness of nomenclature, sometimes even within a single source. In 1774, Edmund Burke made mention of "American questions" in a speech before parliament; in reference to a speech before the House of Lords from 1776 by Lord Temple, the editor(s) of a gentleman's magazine recounted Temple's remarks on "the grand American Question," "the question of sovereignty over America," and "debates on American questions."

On the eve of the American Revolution, the American question was most frequently mentioned in parliamentary debates as the issue of how to address the intensifying calls of the Colonies for representation. On February 24, 1775, the British nobleman and military officer John Griffin Griffin charged many of his fellow parliamentarians with having "uniformly shrunk ... from the great American question; they have wished to defer to the latest hour possible, all discussions of this critical topic," and determined to offer his own views "[h]owever grating to the ears of some individuals the subject may be." The tone of urgency (that deliberation and action were overdue) and necessary irritation were to become hallmarks of nineteenth-century questions.

Scientization, or the use of scientific metaphors to render a question (and its solution) comparable to mathematical problems, likewise appeared early. In a footnote to one of his sermons from 1769 published in an anthology more than two decades later, Richard Watson, Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, noted,

A little before the time when this Sermon was preached the Colonies had begun to resist the Mother-Country; and I well remember, that I, even then, when the American Question was scarcely understood by any person, thought the resistance of the Colonies so reasonable, that I hesitated in calling them — disobedient. I soon after examined the question to the bottom, and saw, as clearly as I ever saw a proposition in Euclid, — that Taxation without Representation, real or virtual, was robbery and oppression.

By the time of Watson's footnote, most who mentioned the American question — including Watson himself — had concluded either implicitly or explicitly that the American question was "at an end" or "no more." The Revolutionary War and American independence had "solved" it in the eyes of many earlier querists. Yet with its origins in Parliament and partial reach in the press, the American question was a true ancestor of the "x question" mania in the early nineteenth century.

In the last decade of the eighteenth century, the Catholic question made its appearance around the issue of Catholic emancipation then raised in Parliament. In the young United States, a couple of publications on the Mississippi question appeared in 1803. A later wave of questions discussed in Britain included the Carnatic, Oude, (East) India, corn, and bullion questions. The Carnatic and Oude questions emerged in the first decade of the nineteenth century around the British East India Company's intensifying and controversial involvement in two regions of India (Karnatak and Oudh). Both questions were subjects of intense parliamentary inquiry and discussion, as well as pamphleteering intended to influence public opinion and thereby also the outcome of parliamentary debates.

In 1810, W. Huskisson, who was a member of the Bullion Committee, published a long pamphlet under the title The Question concerning the Depreciation of our Currency stated and examined. Although the phrase "bullion question" did not appear in the text, Huskisson did use the "question" formulation, not least of all to justify putting his views into print, "when the many evil consequences of an erroneous, or even an unsettled state of the publick mind upon a question of such vast importance are considered; I trust that I shall be justified in submitting, what was originally prepared for an indulgent and limited circle only, to the examination and judgement of a more extended and impartial tribunal."

Huskisson's reference to a "more extended and impartial tribunal" is symptomatic of how querists would conceive of public opinion as judge or jury in the arbitration of questions. Whereas the preliminary arbiter and forum for discussion of questions had been Parliament, in Britain, at least, the voting public was being called to enter the fray. Pamphlets, newspaper reports on parliamentary proceedings, discussions around expansion of the voting franchise, and the grassroots activities of political parties and debating clubs all contributed to making the fray an expansive one.

In response to Huskisson's pamphlet, the Scottish politician and protostatistician Sir John Sinclair wrote that he had meant to defer propagating his own views on these "important subjects, until the question came to be discussed in Parliament, where the solidity of the arguments to be adduced on either side must ultimately be determined." But he now believed a more timely intervention was warranted:

It seems to me ... incumbent upon those, whose attention has been directed to such inquiries, to lay before the public, a clear and explicit declaration of their sentiments on the subjects of coin and paper currency, and that with as little delay as possible, on two grounds, recognized by Mr. Huskisson; 1. The importance of the question; and, 2. The necessity of having it thoroughly considered, previously to its discussion in Parliament On the decision of that question depend, not only the interests and the comforts of every class of society, but the very safety and existence of this great Empire.

Sinclair emphasized the magnitude and significance of the question as one demanding serious and urgent public attention; to ignore it would be a catastrophe for society and state alike. It was, he insisted, a matter affecting "every class of society." Adding to the sense of urgency was the rhetoric of ubiquity and threat of harm should no redress be sought and found.

In 1811, the report of the Bullion Committee was discussed in the British House of Commons by Lord Viscount Castlereagh and George Canning, among others, whose speeches were published as pamphlets and later reviewed in the periodical press. While none of the speeches addressed the "bullion question" as such, like Huskisson before them, the "question" formulation, a parliamentary commonplace ("the present question"), was in evidence. "The object of the right honourable gentleman is to settle the publick mind on a question on which there is great division of opinion," declared Canning. "[O]ne cannot well imagine anything more fatally injurious to the prosperity of a state," said Castlereagh, "whose power in war, and whose advancement in peace so intimately rests upon its public credit, than having a question, such as this, hung up in suspense, to be debated from year to year, to the encouragement of the enemy, and to the dismay of our own people, and of those nations in the world who look up to us for protection." The tenor of urgency to solve the question with alacrity or else became another common attribute of the way questions were discussed — within a broadly antagonistic genre that used the public sphere to poke and prod legislative bodies.

The earliest explicit mention I have found of the bullion question dates from 1811. Yet although the phrase appears in the title of Davies Giddy's A Plain Statement of the Bullion Question in a Letter to a Friend, it does not appear in the body of the text. The nearest approximation is on the first page, where Giddy sought to "induce a wish, and afford a clue, for examining the Question through all its details of documents, &c." That same year, no less a figure than the English scholar of political economy and demography Thomas Robert Malthus employed the phrase bullion question in a review of Giddy's pamphlet and five others. Again, however, the phrase appeared in the review title, but not in the body of the text.

Early commentary on the South American question (sometimes called the Spanish-American question) — which emerged in the 1810s around independence movements in South America during and after the Napoleonic Wars — mirrors the rhetoric put forward in discussions of the bullion question: namely, that it was a matter for "everyone." In a parliamentary intervention from 1817, an MP declared that it "must be considered not as a mere South American question, but as a European question." Querists' drive to expand the relevance of their questions did not simply reach "down" to "every class of society," but also "up" to the level of European affairs and diplomacy.

The Congress of Vienna (1814–1815), meanwhile, brought several questions to prominence simultaneously. There are early references to la question polonaise, the maritime question, the Saxon question, la question napolitaine, la question jacobine, and la question sicilienne in correspondence between participants before and during the Congress and in the documents relating to the Congress itself. The very purpose of the Congress, wrote Russia's chief negotiator Count Razumovsky to Prince Metternich in December of 1814, was "that the questions be discussed and decided by mutual agreement."

Outside the chambers of Parliament and European diplomacy, the real flood of questions into the world of pamphlets, publicists, and public opinion began in the 1820s. It can hardly be coincidental that it was during this same period, "[b]etween 1815 and the Reform Act of 1832" in Britain, that "the parliamentary question gained a new significance as a method by which public opinion, as formulated over wider and wider areas, could be expressed." An early example was the West India question, which was mentioned in the London Times with considerable frequency starting in late 1823, and often in connection with the emergent "(anti-) slave(ry) question." The publication in 1826 of a long pamphlet on The West India Question, Practically Considered was timed to precede a parliamentary decision on "what may be called the 'West India Question'" by stating that "the actual position of that Question should be accurately examined and understood in all its points and bearings" first.

Questions began therefore as items put up for discussion in representative assemblies or in the course of treaty negotiations and votes on legislation. Through debates and competitions of the national academies and debating societies, the periodical press, and pamphlets, they became items of public debate and concern. A reference from an 1825 pamphlet by T. S. Winn further clarifies the link between parliamentary debate and the form of questions. Winn mentioned the British colonial secretary Earl Bathurst's "speeches in the parliamentary debates on the Slave question" and offered an early example of question bundling: "[T]he Parliament of Great Britain took so many years to debate on the expediency of an Abolition of our Slave Trade with Africa, the Emancipation of Ireland, the Abolition of Slavery throughout our dominions, and other equally important questions of such self-evident solution."

In the discussion of the West India question, its parliamentary ancestry, the "self-evident" or natural solution, and the bundling of questions were clearly manifest. All these features would come to characterize the age of questions. Moreover, Britain's particular political and diplomatic culture had left an indelible mark on the age. To the extent we can delineate such an age, it is largely from the attributes it acquired during these moral-political challenges to the expanding hegemony of the British Empire.

International Public Sphere

The eighteenth and nineteenth century saw the emergence of the public sphere, consisting of venues beyond the purview of the state where issues of the time could be discussed and debated. Debating societies, clubs and organizations of various stripes, and the periodical press all contributed to its creation. The emergence of a public sphere was a crucial development in the history of questions, as well, but cannot alone explain their phenomenal reach and peculiar features. Any such explanation must take account not only of the exigencies of political and social interaction but also of international relations and diplomacy.

The early American, Catholic, Carnatic, bullion, and corn questions were domestic matters for Great Britain, at least for as long as the Colonies remained within the British realm. They were largely confined to parliamentary record, treaty negotiations, and pamphlets. The Congress of Vienna and its successor in Verona in 1822 changed all that. By the 1830s, the "(South) American question" (question americaine) was appearing regularly in the French Chamber of Deputees debates, in the French and Spanish press, in a history of the Hispano-American revolution, and in the correspondence of the Spanish diplomat and writer Francisco de Paula Martínez de la Rosa Berdejo Gómez y Arroyo.