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The country being, in the main, divided politically into three chief groups of thought—Conservative, Liberal and Labour—the machinery for the promotion of political principles and Party interests is principally supplied by three great rival organizations. These are the National Union of Conservative and Constitutional Associations, controlled by the Conservative Central Office; the National Liberal Federation, controlled by the Liberal Central Association; and the Labour Party, controlled by the National Executive. Each of these organizations is aided by several subsidiary but independent bodies, which are formed for the promotion of sectional political interests within the main movement to which they are attached.
The systems of the National Union, the Liberal Federation and the Labour Party are much alike in methods. Those of the two ancient political Parties may be taken for the purposes of illustration. In most constituencies there is a branch of each organization. These local bodies elect the council for the county or for the borough. These councils send delegates to the annual conferences of the Conservative Union, or the Liberal Federation, by which the programme of each Party is considered, revised and confirmed, and a central executive is appointed with supreme authority. The branches look after Party interests locally. The Federation, or the Union, speak for the Liberalism or Conservatism of the country as a whole.
But in reality Party organization is controlled, for the Conservatives by the Conservative Central Office, and for the Liberals by the Liberal Central Association. Both the Union and the Federation are founded upon a popular and representative basis, and their annual meetings, at least, are open to the Press. They each fulfil the double functions of educating political thought in the country, and of enabling the Party leaders in Parliament to gauge the drift of opinion within the Party on current questions of the day. But of the working of the Conservative Central Office and the Liberal Central Association little or nothing is made public—nothing, at any rate, that is really important. What is known is that each consists of a staff of officials directed by a Chief Agent, who is appointed by the parliamentary leaders of the Party. The Chief Party Whip in the House of Commons is also a leading director of the affairs of each of these central bodies. In each is vested the expenditure of the Party fund, subscribed by wealthy supporters, and popularly supposed to be immense. Each has a voice in the selection of candidates. The favour of headquarters is often the best passport to selection by the local association. Each body has an agent permanently residing in constituencies where political opinion is pretty evenly divided. “Give the men a smoking concert,” these Party agents are advised in a little book called How to Win an Election, “where they can obtain a reasonable quantity of good, pure, wholesome beer, rather than a tea opened with a touch of the religious element.” Each body also has gentlemen continually on the road—rival political travellers, as it were, bringing round to the electors the newest and most attractive samples of principles, Liberal or Conservative.
Such is the British variant of the American Caucus. It was imported from the country of its origin, in 1873, by Mr. Joseph Chamberlain—a man who has profoundly influenced Party tactics and strategy, as well as political opinion, in Great Britain—and was first set up in Birmingham under the direction of Mr. Francis Schnadhorst. The Caucus was at once attacked as a most mischievous element in public life. It was contended by old-fashioned Liberals and Tories alike that it would make impossible the free expression of the will of the constituency. The electors would become an unthinking, passive mass under the dominion of headquarters, and the destiny of the Nation—controlled as it is by the exercise of the franchise—would pass into the hands, perhaps, of unprincipled and artful demagogues. But the Caucus had come to stay. It was adopted by the Conservatives as well as by the Liberals. In fact, the idea of forming a Party organization in this country first originated with Disraeli.
In the General Election of 1868 the Conservative Government, of which Disraeli was Prime Minister, was hopelessly beaten at the polls. There was practically no organization of the Conservatives at the time, and the work of bringing it into existence was entrusted by Disraeli to a young barrister who had been in the House of Commons for a year or two—John Eldon Gorst. Gorst began by establishing the “Central Conservative Office.” He then proceeded to create a permanent system of local bodies throughout the country for the registration of voters, linked them up in the National Union, and kept at headquarters a register of approved candidates from which the local bodies could make their own selection. The dissolution of the Liberal Parliament in 1874, unexpected though it was, found the Conservatives accordingly quite prepared, and they returned from the polls victorious. The Liberals then set earnestly to work on the same lines, and, improving upon the Conservative example, produced an even more perfect electoral machine. In 1877 Schnadhorst founded the National Liberal Federation, and, becoming the chief organizer and electoral adviser of the Liberal Party, it was to his exertions that the immense Gladstonian victory of 1880 was mainly due. Schnadhorst, on his retirement in 1887, was presented with 10,000 guineas by the Liberal Party as a slight recognition of his great services to their cause.
In truth, the rise of the highly developed and powerful Central Party organization was a destined stage of political development in Great Britain as well as in the United States. An essential adjunct of a constitutional system like the British—the two fundamental principles of which are democracy and Party government—is the Party organization for the education of public opinion in its tenets, and for having its forces ready to take the field at the General Election, the outcome of which is the supremacy of one Party or the other in the House of Commons for a term of years, and, consequently, the paramount influence of one set of political principles or the other in the government of the Nation. Moreover, the effect of Party organization has, on the whole, been beneficent. It is hardly too much to say that to it is due the healthy political vitality of Great Britain. It has aroused an interest in public affairs and government, and by the propagation of ideas it has given to the democracy coherent political convictions. If public opinion were unorganized, its aimless ebbing and flowing—knowing not what it really desired—its tendency to separate into numerous factions, some of them, possibly, with wild and visionary aims, would have led in time to the instability of the Constitution. The Party system, on the other hand, has undoubtedly contributed to the strength and security of the State by bringing about the convergence of the various streams of political thought into three main channels, each with settled principles, Conservative, Liberal and Labour in tendency, and pursuing ends that are on the whole national as well as rational.