CRITICAL OPINIONS
‘I made my maiden speech last night,’ he tells his sister, ‘rising very late after O’Connell, but at the request of my partyand with the full sanction of Sir Robert Peel. I state at once that mydébutwas a failure—not by my breaking down or incompetency on my part, but from the physical power of my adversaries. It was like my firstdébutat Aylesbury, and perhaps in that sense may be auspicious of ultimate triumph in the same scene. I fought through all with undaunted pluck and unruffled temper, made occasionally good isolated hits when there was silence, and finished with spirit when I found a formal display was ineffectual. My party backed me well, and no one with more zeal and kindness than Peel, cheering me repeatedly, which is not his custom. The uproar was all organised by the Rads and the Repealers. In the lobby, at the division, Chandos, who was not near me in speaking, came up and congratulated me. I replied I thought there was no cause for congratulation, and muttered “Failure.” “No such thing,” said Chandos; “you are quite wrong. I have just seen Peel, and I said to him, ‘Now tell me exactly what you think of Disraeli.’ Peel replied, ‘Some of my party were disappointed and talk of failure; I say just the reverse. He did all that he could under the circumstances; I say anything but failure: he must make his way.’” The Attorney-General (Campbell), to whom I never spoke in my life, came up to me in the lobby and spoke to me with great cordiality. He said, “Now, Mr. Disraeli, could you just tell me how you finished one sentence in your speech? We are anxious to know. ‘In one hand the keys of St. Peter and in the other ——’” “In the other the cap of Liberty, Sir John.” He smiled and said, “A good picture.” I replied, “But your friends would not allow me to finish my picture.” “I assure you,” he said, “there was the liveliest desire to hear you from us. It was a party at the bar, over whom we have no control; but you havenothing to be afraid of.” Now I have told you all.—Yours, D., in very good spirits.’
Disraeli’s collapse was the next day’s delight at the clubs. Shiel, though an Irish leader, declined to join in it. ‘I have heard what you say,’ he answered to the wits who appealed to him, ‘and what is more, I heard this same speech of Mr. Disraeli; and I tell you this: If ever the spirit of oratory was in a man it is that man. Nothing can prevent him from being one of the first speakers of the House of Commons.’
The speech, however, might have been a failure, Shiel admitted, if Disraeli had been allowed to go on. The manner was unusual; the House of Commons had not grown accustomed to it. ‘Get rid of your genius for a session,’ he said to Disraeli himself. ‘Speak often, for you must not show yourself cowed, but speak shortly. Be very quiet; try to be dull; only argue and reason imperfectly. Astonish them by speaking on subjects of detail; quote figures, dates, and calculations. In a short time the House will sigh for the wit and eloquence they know are in you. They will encourage you to pour them forth, and thus you will have the ear of the House and be a favourite.’
Disraeli’s sense was stronger than his vanity. His whole fate was at stake, and he knew it. He took Shiel’s advice. A week after he had been howled down he spoke again on the Copyright Bill, a subject which he perfectly understood. Again when he rose he was observed with curious attention. It was thought that he would allude to his first misadventure; he made not the least reference to it. His voice, naturally impressive, was in good condition. What he said was exactly to the purpose. His conclusion, if simple, was excellent.
‘I am glad to hear from her Majesty’s Government that the interests of literature have at length engaged their attention. It has been the boast of the Whig party, and a boast not without foundation, that in many brilliant periods of our literary annals they have been the patrons of letters. As for myself, I trust that the age of literary patronage has passed; and it will be honourable to the present Government if under its auspices it is succeeded by that of literary protection.’
The House was willing to be pleased. Lord John Russell cheered the allusion to his Liberal predecessors. The Radicals approved of the independence which he claimed for the future of his own profession. Peel loudly applauded, and never after had Disraeli to complain that he was not listened to with respect. The cabal which would have silenced him had, in fact, made his reputation. His colleague and his Maidstone constituents were delighted. In the remainder of the session he was frequently on his feet, but only to say a few sensible sentences and never putting himself forward on great occasions.
Notwithstanding all that has been said and continues to be said about the outset of his Parliamentary career, he had made solid progress in the estimation of the House and, far more to the purpose, his quick apprehension had learnt the temper and disposition of the House itself.
ENGLAND, PAST AND PRESENT
Before proceeding further a brief sketch must be given of the state of public affairs when Disraeli’s political life commenced. The British Islands were covered with the shells of institutions which no longer answered the purpose for which they were intended. The privileges remained. The duties attaching to them were either unperformed or, from change of circumstances, incapable ofperformance. Down to the Reformation of the sixteenth century the beliefs and habits of the English nation were formed by the Catholic Church. Men and women of all ranks were brought up on the hypothesis that their business in this world was not to grow rich, but to do their duties in the state of life to which they had been called. Their time on earth was short. In the eternity which lay beyond their condition would wholly depend on the way in which it had been spent. On this principle society was constructed, and the conduct, public and private, of the great body of the people was governed by the supposition that the principle was literally true.
History takes note of the exception of the foolish or tyrannical king, the oppressive baron, the profligate Churchman, the occasional expressions of popular discontent. Irregularities in human life are like the river cataracts and waterfalls which attract the landscape painter. The historian dwells upon them because they are dramatically interesting, but the broad features of those ages must be looked for in the commonplace character of everyday existence, which attracts little notice and can be traced only in the effects which it has produced. It was thus that the soil of this island was cleared and fenced and divided into fields as by a pencil. It was then that in every parish there arose a church, on which piety lavished every ornament which skill could command, and then and thus was formed the English nation, which was to exercise so vast an influence on the fortunes of mankind. They were proud of their liberty. A race never lived more sternly resolute to keep the soil of their sea-girt island untrodden by the foot of the invader. Liberty in the modern sense, liberty where the rights of man take the place of the duties of a man—such a libertythey neither sought nor desired. As in an army, each man had had his own position under a graduated scale of authority, and the work was hardest where the rank was highest. The baron was maintained in his castle on the produce of the estate. But the baron had the hardest knocks in the field of battle. In dangerous times he was happy if he escaped the scaffold. He maintained his state in the outward splendour which belonged to his station, but in private he lived as frugally as his tenants, sleeping on a hard bed, eating hard, plain food, with luxury unheard of and undreamt of. The rule was loyalty—loyalty of the lord to the king, loyalty of lord to peasant and of peasant to lord. So deeply rooted was the mutual feeling that for long generations after the relation had lost its meaning, and one of the parties had forgotten that it ever had a meaning, reverence and respect to the owner of the land lingered on and is hardly extinct to-day.
In the towns the trades were organised under the guilds. The price of food, the rate of wages from household servant to field labourer and artisan, were ordered by statute on principles of equity. For each trade there was a council, and false measure and bad quality of goods were sharply looked to. The miller could not adulterate his flour. The price of wheat varied with the harvest, but the speculator who bought up grain to sell again at famine price found himself in the hands of the constable. For the children of the poor there was an education under the apprentice system, to which the most finished school-board training was as copper to gold. Boys and girls alike were all taught some useful occupation by which they could afterwards honestly maintain themselves. If there were hardships they were not confined to a single class, but were borne equally by thegreat and the humble. A nation in a healthy state is an organism like the human body. If the finger says to the hand, ‘I have no need of thee; I will go my way, touch what pleases me, and let alone what I do not care to meddle with,’ the owner of the hand will be in a bad way. A commonwealth, or common weal, demands that each kind shall do the work which belongs to him or her. When he or she, when individuals generally begin to think and act for themselves, to seek their rights and their enjoyments, and forget their duties, the work of dissolution has already set in.
PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE
The fear of God made England, and no great nation was ever made by any other fear. When the Catholic Church broke down it survived under Protestant forms, till Protestantism too dwindled into opinion and ceased to be a rule of life. We still read our Bibles and went to church; we were zealous for the purity of our faith, and established our societies to propagate it; but the faith itself became consistent with the active sense that pleasure was pleasant and wealth was power, and while our faith would make things right in the next world we might ourselves make something out of the present. From the Restoration downwards the owners of land began to surround themselves with luxuries, and the employers of labour to buy it at the cheapest rate. Selfishness became first a practice and then developed boldly into a theory. Life was a race in which the strongest had a right to win. Every man was to be set free and do the best which he could for himself. The Institutions remained. Dukes and earls and minor dignitaries still wore their coronets and owned the soil. Bishops were the spiritual lords of their dioceses, and the rector represented the Church in his parish. The commercial companies survived in outward magnificence. But inaiming at wealth they all alike forfeited their power. Competition became the sole rule of trade; a new philosophy was invented to gild the change; artisans and labourers were taught to believe that they would gain as largely as the capitalists. They had been bondsmen; they were now free, and all would benefit alike. Yet somehowalldid not benefit alike. The houses of the upper classes grew into palaces, and the owners of them lived apart as a separate caste; but the village labourer did not find his lot more easy because he belonged to nobody. As population increased his wages sank to the lowest point at which he could keep his family alive. The ‘hands’ in the towns fared no better. If wages rose the cost of living rose along with them. The compulsory apprentice system was dropped, and the children were dragged up in squalor upon the streets. Discontent broke out in ugly forms: ricks were burnt in the country, and in the northern cities there was riot and disorder. They were told that they must keep the peace and help themselves. Their labour was an article which they had to sell, and the value of it was fixed by the relations between supply and demand. Man could not alter the laws of nature, which political economy had finally discovered. Political economy has since been banished to the exterior planets; but fifty years ago to doubt was heresy, to deny was a crime to be censured in all the newspapers. Carlyle might talk scornfully of the ‘Disraeli science.’ Disraeli might heap ridicule on Mr. Flummery Flum. But Mr. Flummery Flum was a prophet in his day and led the believers into strange places. The race for wealth went on at railroad speed. Vast fortunes were accumulated as the world’s markets opened wider. The working classes ought to have shared the profits, and they were diligently instructed that they had gained as much as their employers. But their practical condition remained unaltered, and they looked with strange eyes upon the progress in which, for one cause or another, they did not find that they participated. The remedy of the economists was to heat the furnace still hotter, to abolish every lingering remnant of restraint, and stifle complaint by admitting the working men to political power. The enlightened among the rich were not afraid, for they were entrenched, as they believed, behind their law of nature. In its contracts with labour capital must always have the advantage; for capital could wait and hungry stomachs could not wait. In the meantime let the Corn Laws go. Let all taxes on articles of consumption go. Trade would then expand indefinitely, and all would be well. ‘The wealth of the nation,’ the Free-Traders of Manchester said, depends on its commerce. The commerce of England is shackled by a network of duties. The consumer pays dear for the necessaries of life, which he might buy cheap but for artificial interference. The raw materials of our industry are burdened with restrictions. But for these we might multiply our mills, expand our connections, provide work and food for the millions who are now hungry. With your Corn Laws you are starving multitudes to maintain the rents of a few thousand Elysians, who neither toil nor spin, who might be blotted off the surface of the soil to-morrow and none would miss them; who consume the labours of the poor on a splendour of living unheard of since the Roman Empire, and extort the means of this extravagance by an arbitrary law. You say you must have a revenue to maintain your fleets and armies, and that it cannot be raised except by customs duties. Your fleets and armies are not needed. Take away your commercial fetters, allow the nations of the earth a free exchange of commodities with us, and you need not fear that they will quarrel with us: wars will be heard of no more, and the complaints of the poor that they are famished to supply the luxuries of the rich will no longer cry to Heaven.
The Free-Traders might have been over-sanguine, but on the Corn Laws it was hard to answer them. The duties attaching to the ownership of land had fallen to shadows. The defence of the country had passed to the army. Internal peace was maintained by the police. Unless they volunteered to serve as magistrates the landlords had but to receive their rents and do as they pleased with their own. An aristocracy whose achievements, as recorded in newspapers, were the slaughter of unheard of multitudes of pheasants, an aristocracy to one of whose distinguished members a granite column was recently erected on a spot where he had slain fifty brace of grouse in half an hour, were scarcely in a position to demand that the poor man’s loaf should be reduced in size, for fear their incomes should suffer diminution. Carlyle said that he had never heard an argument for the Corn Laws which might not make angels weep. If the fear of suffering in their pockets had been the only motive which influenced the landed interest in its opposition to free trade, there would have been nothing to be said for it; but if that had been all, Corn Laws in such a country as England could never have existed at all. Protection for native industry had been established for centuries. It had prevailed and still prevails in spite of the arguments of free-traders all the world over, and under all forms of government. The principle of it has been and is that no country is in a sound or safe condition which cannot feed its own population independent of the foreigner. Peace could not becounted on with an empire so extended as ours. Occasions of quarrel might arise which no prudence could avert. The world had seen many a commercial commonwealth rise to temporary splendour, but all had gone the same road, and a country which depended on its imports for daily bread would be living at the mercy of its rivals. Christianity had failed to extinguish war. It was not likely that commerce would succeed better, and the accidents of a single campaign, the successful blockade of our ports even for a month or a fortnight, might degrade us into a shameful submission. British agriculture was the creation of protection. Under the duties which kept out foreign corn waste lands had been reclaimed, capital had been invested in the soil, and with such success and energy that double the wheat was raised per acre in England as was produced in any country in the world. The farmer prospered, the labourer at least existed, and the country population was maintained. Take protection away and wheat would cease to be grown. The plough would rust in the shed; the peasantry of the villages would dwindle away. They would drift into the towns in festering masses, living precariously from day to day, ever pressing on the means of employment with decaying physique and growing discontent. Cobden said the cost of carriage would partially protect the farmer. His own industry must do the rest. The ocean steamers have made short work of the cost of carriage; the soil could yield no more than it was bearing already. Cobden’s more daring followers said that if the country districts returned to waste and forest the nation itself would be no poorer. In the defence of protection and in the denunciation of it there was alike a base element. The landlords were alarmed for their private interests. The manufacturer did expect thatif the loaf was cheaper labour would be cheaper, for by orthodox doctrine labour adjusted itself to the cost of living. But to statesmen, whose business it was to look beyond the day that was passing over them, there was reason to pause before rushing into a course from which there could be no return, and which in another century might prove to have been a wild experiment. The price of food might be gradually reduced without immediate revolution, and the opportunity might be used to attach the colonies more closely to the mother country. The colonies and India, with the encouragement of an advantage in the home market, could supply corn without limit, and their connection with us would be cemented by interest; while if they were placed on the same level as foreigners they would perhaps take us at our word and become foreigners. The traders insisted that if we opened our ports all the world would follow our example. But prophecies did not always prove correct, and, if the world did not follow our example, to fight prohibitive duties with free imports might prove a losing bargain.
Disraeli’s belief, political and religious—Sympathy with the people—Defends the Chartists—The people, the middle classes, and the aristocracy—Chartist riots—Smart passage at arms in the House of Commons—Marriage—Mrs. Wyndham Lewis—Disraeli as a husband.
CREED, POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS
Into this Maelstrom Disraeli was plunged when he entered Parliament. He had his own views. He knew the condition of the poor both in England and Ireland. He had declared that no Government should have his support which did not introduce some large measure to improve that condition. He had chosen the Conservative side because he had no belief in the promises of the political economists, or in the blessed results to follow from cutting the strings and leaving everyone to find his level. He held to the old conception of the commonwealth that all orders must work faithfully together; that trade was to be extended not by cheapness and free markets, but by good workmanship and superior merit; and that the object which statesmen ought to set before themselves was the maintenance of the character of the people, not the piling up in enormous heaps of what wealth had now come to mean. The people themselves were groping, in their trades unions, after an organisation which would revive in other forms the functions of the Guilds; and the exact science of political economy wouldcease to be a science at all, whenever motives superior to personal interest began to be acted upon. Science was knowledge of facts; the facts most important to be known were the facts of human nature and human responsibilities; and the interpretation of those facts which had been revealed to his own race, Disraeli actually believed to be deeper and truer than any modern speculations. Though calling himself a Christian, he was a Jew in his heart. He regarded Christianity as only Judaism developed, and, if not completely true, yet as immeasurably nearer to truth than the mushroom philosophies of the present age. He had studied Carlyle, and in some of his writings had imitated him. Carlyle did not thank him for this. Carlyle detested Jews, and looked on Disraeli as an adventurer fishing for fortune in Parliamentary waters. His novels he despised. His chains and velvets and affected airs he looked on as the tawdry love of vulgar ornament characteristic of Houndsditch. Nevertheless, Disraeli had taken his teaching to heart, and in his own way meant to act upon it. He regarded the aristocracy, like Carlyle also, in spite of the double barrels, as the least corrupted part of the community; and to them, in alliance with the people, he looked for a return of the English nation to the lines of true progress. The Church was moving at Oxford. A wave of political Conservatism was sweeping over the country. He thought that in both these movements he saw signs of a genuine reaction, and Peel, he still believed, would give effect to his hopes.
DISRAELI AND PEEL
These were his theoretic convictions, while outwardly he amused himself in the high circles which his Parliamentary notoriety had opened to him. His letters are full of dukes and princes and beautiful women, and balls and dinners.He ventured liberties, even in the presence of the great Premier, and escaped unpunished. In the spring of 1839 he notes a dinner in Whitehall Gardens. ‘I came late,’ he says, ‘having mistaken the hour. I found some twenty-five gentlemen grubbing in solemn silence. I threw a shot over the table and set them going, and in time they became noisy. Peel, I think, was pleased that I broke the awful stillness, as he talked to me a good deal, though we were far removed.’ But though he enjoyed these honours and magnificences perhaps more than he need have done, he kept an independence of his own. It was supposed that he was looking for office, and that Peel’s neglect of him in 1841 was the cause of his subsequent revolt. Peel did make some advances to him through a third person, and said afterwards in the House that Disraeli had been ready to serve under him; but if office was really his object, never did any man take a worse way of recommending himself. In the summer of the same year (1839) the monster Chartist petition was brought down to the House of Commons in the name of the working people of England, and the general disposition was to treat it as an absurdity and an insult. Disraeli, when his turn came to speak, was not ashamed to say that, though he disapproved of the Charter, he sympathised with the Chartists. They were right, he thought, in desiring a fairer share in the profits of their labour, and that fairer share they were unlikely to obtain from the commercial constituences whom the Reform Bill had enfranchised. Great duties could alone confer great station, and the new class which had been invested with political station had not been bound up with the mass of the people by the exercise of corresponding obligations. Those who possessed power without discharging its conditions and duties, werenaturally anxious to put themselves to the least possible expense and trouble. Having gained their own object, they wished to keep it without appeal to their pockets, or cost of their time. The true friends of the people ought to be the aristocracy, and in very significant words he added that ‘the English nation would concede any degree of political power to a class making simultaneous advances in the exercise of great social duties.’
The aristocracy had lost their power because their duties had been neglected. They might have wealth or they might have power; but not both together. It was not too late to reconsider the alternative. The Chartists, finding themselves scoffed out of the House of Commons, took to violence. There were riots in Birmingham, and a Chartist convention sat in London threatening revolution. Lord John Russell appealed for an increase of the police. Disraeli was one of a minority of five who dared to say that it was unnecessary, and that other measures ought to be tried. When the leaders were seized, he supported his friend, Tom Duncombe, in a protest against the harshness of their treatment. The Chancellor of the Exchequer rebuked him. Fox Maule, a junior member of the Government, charged him with being ‘an advocate of riot and disorder.’ In later times Disraeli never struck at small game. When he meant fight, he went for the leading stag of the herd. On this occasion he briefly touched his two slight antagonists. ‘Under-Secretaries,’ he said, ‘were sometimes vulgar and ill-bred. From a Chancellor of the Exchequer to an Under-Secretary of State was a descent from the sublime to the ridiculous, though the sublime was on this occasion rather ridiculous, and the ridiculous rather trashy!’
It is scarcely conceivable that if Disraeli was thenaspiring to harness under Sir Robert, he would have committed himself with such reckless audacity; and his action was the more creditable to him as the profession which he had chosen brought him no emoluments. His financial embarrassments were thickening round him so seriously, that without office it might soon become impossible to continue his Parliamentary career. Like Bassanio,
When he had lost one shaft,He shot his fellow of the self-same flightThe self-same way with more advised watchTo find the other forth, and by adventuring bothHe oft found both.
When he had lost one shaft,He shot his fellow of the self-same flightThe self-same way with more advised watchTo find the other forth, and by adventuring bothHe oft found both.
When he had lost one shaft,He shot his fellow of the self-same flightThe self-same way with more advised watchTo find the other forth, and by adventuring bothHe oft found both.
When he had lost one shaft,
He shot his fellow of the self-same flight
The self-same way with more advised watch
To find the other forth, and by adventuring both
He oft found both.
But one shaft had disappeared after another till he had reached the last in his quiver. He had not been personally extravagant. He had moved in the high circles to which he had been admitted rather as an assured spectator than as an imitator of their costly habits. But his resources were limited to the profits of his writings, and to such sums as he could raise on his own credit. His position was critical in the extreme, and Disraeli’s star might then have set like a planet which becomes visible at twilight on the western horizon, and shows out in its splendour only to set into the sea. The temptation to sell oneself under such circumstances would have been too much for common Parliamentary virtue. But Disraeli was a colt who was not to be driven in a team by a master. Lord Melbourne had asked him once what he wished for. He had answered coolly that he wished to be Prime Minister. The insanity of presumption was in fact the insanity of second sight; but ‘vaulting ambition’ would have ‘fallen on the other side’ if a divinity had not come to his assistance.
MARRIAGE
The heroes of his political novels are usually made to owetheir first success to wealthy marriages. Coningsby, Egremont, Endymion, though they deserve their good fortune, yet receive it from a woman’s hand. Mr. Wyndham Lewis, who had brought Disraeli into Parliament, died unexpectedly the year after. His widow, the clever rattling flirt, as he had described her on first acquaintance, after a year’s mourning, became Disraeli’s wife. She was childless. She was left the sole possessor of a house at Grosvenor Gate, and a life income of several thousands a year. She was not beautiful. Disraeli was thirty-five, and she was approaching fifty. But she was a heroine if ever woman deserved the name. She devoted herself to Disraeli with a completeness which left no room in her mind for any other thought. As to him, he had said that he would never marry for love. But if love, in the common sense of the word, did not exist between these two, there was an affection which stood the trials of thirty years, and deepened only as they both declined into age. She was his helpmate, his confidante, his adviser; from the first he felt the extent of his obligations to her, but the sense of obligation, if at first felt as a duty, became a bond of friendship perpetually renewed. The hours spent with his wife in retirement were the happiest that he knew. In defeat or victory he hurried home from the House of Commons to share his vexation or his triumph with his companion, who never believed that he could fail. The moment in his whole life which perhaps gave him greatest delight was that at which he was able to decorate her with a peerage. To her he dedicated ‘Sybil.’
‘I,’ he says, ‘would inscribe this work to one whose noble spirit and gentle nature ever prompt her to sympathise with the suffering; to one whose sweet voice has often encouraged, and whose taste and judgment have everguided its pages, the most severe of critics, but a “perfect wife.”’ The experience of his own married life he describes in ‘Coningsby’ as the solitary personal gift which nature had not bestowed upon a special favourite of fortune. ‘The lot most precious to man, and which a beneficent Providence has made not the least common—to find in another heart a perfect and profound sympathy, to unite his existence with one who could share all his joys, soften all his sorrows, aid him in all his projects, respond to all his fancies, counsel him in his cares and support him in his perils, make life charming by her charms, interesting by her intelligence, and sweet by the vigilant variety of her tenderness—to find your life blessed by such an influence, and to feel that your influence can bless such a life; the lot the most divine of divine gifts, so perfect that power and even fame can never rival its delights—all this nature had denied to Sidonia.’ It had not been denied to Disraeli himself.
The carriage incident is well known. On an anxious House of Commons night, Mrs. Disraeli drove down with her husband to Palace Yard. Her finger had been caught and crushed in the carriage-door. She did not let him know what had happened, for fear of disturbing him, and was not released from her torture till he had left her. That is perfectly authentic, and there are other stories like it. A husband capable of inspiring and maintaining such an attachment most certainly never ceased to deserve it. Savagely as he was afterwards attacked, his most indignant enemy never ventured to touch his name with scandal. A party of young men once ventured a foolish jest or two at Mrs. Disraeli’s age and appearance, and rallied him on the motives of his marriage. ‘Gentlemen,’ said Disraeli, as he rose and left the room, ‘do none of you know what gratitudemeans?’ This was the only known instance in which he ever spoke with genuine anger.
‘Gratitude,’ indeed, if deeply felt, was as deeply deserved. His marriage made him what he became. Though never himself a rich man, or endeavouring to make himself such, he was thenceforward superior to fortune. His difficulties were gradually disposed of. He had no longer election agents’ bills to worry him, or debts to usurers running up in compound ratio. More important to him, he was free to take his own line in politics, relieved from the temptation of seeking office.
The enthusiasm of progress—Carlyle and Disraeli—Protection and Free Trade—Sir Robert Peel the Protectionist Champion—High Church movement at Oxford—The Church as a Conservative power—Effect of the Reform Bill—Disraeli’s personal views—Impossible to realise—Election of 1841—Sir Robert Peel’s Ministry—Drifts towards Free Trade—Peel’s neglect of Disraeli—Tariff of 1842—Young England—Symptoms of revolts—First skirmish with Peel—Remarkable speech on Ireland.
ENGLISH PROGRESS
The discovery of the steam engine had revolutionised the relations of mankind, and during the decline of the Melbourne Ministry was revolutionising the imagination of the English nation. The railroads were annihilating distances between town and town. Roads were opening across the ocean, bringing the remotest sea-coasts in the world within sure and easy reach. Possibilities of an expansion of commerce practically boundless inflated hopes and stimulated energies. In past generations England had colonised half the new world; she had become sovereign of the sea; she had preserved the liberties of Europe, and had made her name feared and honoured in every part of the globe; but this was nothing compared to the prospect, which was now unfolding itself, of becoming the world’s great workshop. She had invented steam; she had coal and iron in a combination and quantity which no other nation could rival; she had a population ingenious and vigorous, and capable,if employment could be found for them, of indefinite multiplication. The enthusiasm of progress seized the popular imagination. No word was tolerated which implied a doubt, and the prophets of evil, like Carlyle, were listened to with pity and amusement. The stars in their courses were fighting for the Free Traders. The gold-discoveries stimulated the circulation in the national veins, and prosperity advanced with leaps and bounds.
The tide has slackened now; other nations have rejected our example, have nursed their own industries, and supply their own wants. The volume of English trade continues to roll on, but the profits diminish. The crowds who throng our towns refuse to submit to a lowering of wages, and perplex economists and politicians with uneasy visions: we are thus better able to consider with fairness the objections of a few far-seeing statesmen forty and fifty years ago.
THE CORN LAWS AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
As far as the thoughts of an ambitious youth who had taken Pistol’s ‘The world’s mine oyster’ as the motto of his first book, and perhaps as the rule of his life—of a gaudy coxcomb who astonished drawing-rooms with his satin waistcoats, and was the chosen friend of Count D’Orsay—as far as the thoughts of such a person as this could have any affinity with those of the stern ascetic who, in the midst of accumulating splendour, was denouncing woe and desolation, so far, at the outset of his Parliamentary life, the opinions of Benjamin Disraeli, if we take ‘Sybil’ for their exponent, were the opinions of the author of ‘Past and Present.’ Carlyle thought of him as a fantastic ape. The interval between them was so vast that the comparison provokes a smile. Disraeli was to fight against the Repeal of the Corn Laws: Carlyle said that of all strange demands, thestrangest was that the trade of owning land should be asking for higher wages; and yet the Hebrew conjuror, though at a humble distance, and not without an eye open to his own advancement, was nearer to him all along than Carlyle imagined. Disraeli did not believe any more than he that the greatness of a nation depended on the abundance of its possessions. He did not believe in a progress which meant the abolition of the traditionary habits of the people, the destruction of village industries, and the accumulation of the population into enormous cities, where their character and their physical qualities would be changed and would probably degenerate. The only progress which he could acknowledge was moral progress, and he considered that all legislation which proposed any other object to itself would produce, in the end, the effects which the prophets of his own race had uniformly and truly foretold.
Under the old organisation of England, the different orders of men were bound together under reciprocal obligations of duty. The economists and their political followers held that duty had nothing to do with it. Food, wages, and all else had their market value, which could be interfered with only to the general injury. The employer was to hire his labourers or his hands at the lowest rate at which they could be induced to work. If he ceased to need them, or if they would not work on terms which would remunerate him, he was at liberty to turn them off. The labourers, in return, might make the best of their own opportunity, and sell their services to the best advantage which competition allowed. The capitalists found the arrangement satisfactory to them. The people found it less satisfactory, and they replied by Chartism and rick-burnings.The economists said that the causes of discontent were the Corn Laws and the other taxes on food. Farmers and landowners exclaimed that if the Corn Laws were repealed, the land must go out of cultivation. The Chartists were not satisfied with the remedy, because they believed that, with cheap food, wages would fall, and they would be no better off than they were. It was then slack water in the political tides. Public feeling was at a stand, uncertain which way to turn. The Reform Bill of 1832 had left to property the preponderance of political power, and everyone who had anything to lose began to be alarmed for himself. The Conservative reaction became more and more evident. The faith of the country was in Sir Robert Peel. He had been opposed to the Reform Bill, but when it was passed he had accepted it as the law of the land, and had reconstituted his party out of the confidence of the new constituencies. He had been a declared Protectionist. He had defended the Corn Laws, and had spoken and voted for them. He had resisted the proposal by the Whigs of a fixed eight-shilling duty, and had accepted and gloried in the position of being the leader of the gentlemen of England. But he had refused to initiate any policy of his own. He was known to be cautious, prudent, and a master of finance. He was no believer in novel theories or enthusiastic visions, but he had shown by his conduct on the Catholic question that he could consider and allow for the practical necessities of things. He was, however, above all things an avowed Conservative, and as a Conservative the country looked to him to steer the ship through the cataracts.
CHURCH REVIVAL
Another phenomenon had started up carrying a Conservative colour. Puseyism had appeared at Oxford, and was rapidly spreading. The Church of England, longparalysed by Erastianism and worldliness, was awaking out of its sleep, and claiming to speak again as the Divinely-appointed ruler of English souls. Political economy had undertaken to manage things on the hypothesis that men had no souls, or that their souls, if they possessed such entities, had nothing to do with their commercial relations to one another. The Church of England, as long as it remained silent or sleeping, had seemed to acquiesce in the new revelation, but it was beginning to claim a voice again in the practical affairs of the world, and the response, loud and strong, indicated that there still remained among us a power of latent conviction which might revive the force of noble and disinterested motive. A Church of England renovated and alive again might, some thought, become an influence of incalculable consequence. Carlyle’s keen, clear eyes refused to be deceived. ‘Galvanic Puseyism,’ he called it, and ‘dancings of the sheeted dead.’ A politician like Disraeli looking out into the phenomena in which he was to play his part, and thinking more of what was going on among the people than of the immediate condition of Parliamentary parties, conceived that he saw in the new movement, not only an effort of Conservative energy, but an indication of a genuine recoil from moral and spiritual anarchy towards the Hebrew principle in which he really believed. Two forces he saw still surviving in England which had been overlooked, or supposed to be dead—respect for the Church, and the voluntary loyalty (which, though waning, might equally be recovered) of the people towards the aristocracy. Perhaps he overrated both because he had been himself born and bred outside their influence, and thus looked at them without the insight which he gained afterwards on more intimate acquaintance. To some extent,however, they were realities, and were legitimate subjects of calculation. Extracts from his writings will show how his mind was working. He had been studying the action of the Reform Bill of 1832. No one pretended, he said, that it had improved the character of Parliament itself.
‘But had it exercised a beneficial influence in the country? Had it elevated the tone of the public mind? Had it cultivated the popular sensibilities to noble and ennobling ends? Had it proposed to the people of England a higher test of national respect and confidence?... If a spirit of rapacious covetousness, desecrating all the humanities of life, has been the besetting sin of England for the last century and a half, since the passing of the Reform Act the altar of Mammon has blazed with a triple worship. To acquire, to accumulate, to plunder each other by virtue of philosophic phrases—to propose a Utopia to consist only of Wealth and Toil—this has been the business of enfranchised England for the last twelve years, until we are startled from our voracious strife by the wail of intolerable serfage.’[6]
EFFECTS OF THE REFORM BILL
Again: ‘Born in a library, and trained from early childhood by learned men who did not share the passions and the prejudices of our political and social life, I had imbibed on some subjects conclusions different from those which generally prevail, and especially with reference to the history of our own country. How an oligarchy had been substituted for a kingdom, and a narrow-minded and bigoted fanaticism flourished in the name of religious liberty, were problems long to me insoluble, but which early interested me. But what most attracted my musing, even as a boy,were the elements of our political parties, and the strange mystification by which that which was national in our Constitution had become odious, and that which was exclusive was presented as popular.
‘What has mainly led to this confusion is our carelessness in not distinguishing between the excellence of a principle and its injurious or obsolete application. The feudal system may have worn out; but its main principle—that the tenure of property should be the fulfilment of duty—is the essence of good government. The divine right of kings may have been a plea for feeble tyrants; but the divine right of government is the key of human progress, and without it governments sink into a police, and a nation is degraded into a mob.... National institutions were the ramparts of a multitude against large estates, exercising political power, derived from a limited class. The Church was in theory, and once it had been in practice, the spiritual and intellectual trainer of the people. The privileges of the multitude and the prerogative of the sovereign had grown up together, and together they had waned. Under the plea of Liberalism, all the institutions which were the bulwark of the multitude had been sapped and weakened, and nothing had been substituted for them. The people were without education, and relatively to the advance of science and the comfort of the superior classes, their condition had deteriorated and their physical quality as a race was threatened.
‘To change back the oligarchy into a generous aristocracy round a real throne; to infuse life and vigour into the Church as the trainer of the nation by the revival of Convocation, then dumb, on a wise basis; to establish a commercial code on the principles successfully negotiated by Lord Bolingbrokeat Utrecht, and which, though baffled at the time by a Whig Parliament, were subsequently and triumphantly vindicated by his pupil and political heir, Mr. Pitt; to govern Ireland according to the policy of Charles I., and not of Oliver Cromwell; to emancipate the political constituency of 1832 from its sectarian bondage and contracted sympathies; to elevate the physical as well as the moral condition of the people by establishing that labour required regulation as much as property—and all this rather by the use of ancient forms and the restoration of the past, than by political revolutions founded on abstract ideas—appeared to be the course which the circumstances of the country required, and which, practically speaking, could only, with all their faults and backslidings, be undertaken and accomplished by a reconstructed Tory party.
‘When I attempted to enter public life, I expressed these views, long meditated, to my countrymen.... I incurred the accustomed penalty of being looked on as a visionary.... Ten years afterwards, affairs had changed. I had been some time in Parliament, and had friends who had entered public life with myself, who listened always with interest, and sometimes with sympathy.... The writer, and those who acted with him, looked then upon the Anglican Church as a main machinery by which these results might be realised. There were few great things left in England, and the Church was one. Nor do I doubt that if a quarter of a century ago there had arisen a Churchman equal to the occasion, the position of ecclesiastical affairs in this country would have been very different from that which they now occupy. But these great matters fell into the hands of monks and schoolmen. The secession of Dr. Newman dealt a blow to the Church under which it still reels. That extraordinaryevent has been “apologised” for, but it has never been explained. The tradition of the Anglican Church was powerful. Resting on the Church of Jerusalem modified by the Divine school of Galilee, it would have found that rock of truth which Providence, by the instrumentality of the Semitic race, had promised to St. Peter. Instead of that, the seceders sought refuge in mediæval superstitions; which are generally only the embodiments of Pagan ceremonies and creeds.’[7]