—one night when he returned home he found the old woman herself dead and surrounded only by corpses. The child before this had slept on the same bed of straw with a corpse: but then there were also breathing things for his companions. A night passed only with corpses seemed to him itself a kind of death. He stole out of the cellar, quitted the quarter of pestilence, and, after much wandering, lay down at the door of a factory.
—where he was taken in, not from charity, but because a brat of five was useful. Do you tell yourself that Disraeli exaggerates? Then turn to Hansard and read that before Hanway’s Act the annual death-rate among these pauper children was estimated at something between 60 and 70 per cent.: that this Act, as Howlett grimly put it, caused “a deficiency of 2,100 burials a year”: that the London parishes by custom claimed a right to dispose at will of all children of a person receiving relief, and disposed of them to the manufacturers; and that one Lancashire mill-owner agreed with a London parish to take one idiot with every twenty sound children supplied.[3]
[3] The Town Labourer, 1760–1832, by Mr. and Mrs. Hammond, p. 145. From Horner’s Speech, Hansard, June 6, 1815.
IV
Man, as Aristotle tells us, is a political animal: and among imaginative writers in the ’thirties and ’forties of the last century, Disraeli had an eminently political mind. I say, “eminently,” because in the years that followed the great struggle over the Reform Bill all men’s eyes—eyes of advocates as of opponents—were turned on this wonderful Reformed Parliament, awaiting some transformation of our society, for good or for evil. The expectancy operated on Disraeli as on the rest. He was a House of Commons man with his ambition centred on success in that House. He did not believe that this reformed House was in any way capable of producing a millennium. With his own purpose very steadily set to advance his career; with a sense of intrigue and a courage steadily sharpened by disappointment; he perceived the nostrums of the new Parliament to be nostrums no more honest than the old; as he perceived the counteracting devices of his own party to be no more than delaying devices devoid of principle. He hated the very name of “the Conservative Party” invented by Croker:
I observe, indeed, a party in the State whose rule is to consent to no change until it is clamorously called for, and then instantly to yield; but these are Concessionary, not Conservative principles. This party treats institutions as we do our pheasants, they preserve but to destroy.
But he felt, with the feeling of England, that this evil of the factory system demanded an instant redress only to be achieved by sharp legislation: and, so far he was right. Ashley and his backers could look nowhere but to Parliament for immediate cure. There happen from time to time in the history of a nation (as sensible men must admit) crises to which hasty methods must be applied, as you catch up and spoil a valuable rug to smother an outbreak of fire.
V
We know how Disraeli, in those days, saw the full problem. Here was a country, this England, divided into Two Nations, the rich and the poor. Here were the nobles who should, by all devoir, be the saviours of the State, standing by while the middle-class manufacturer held the poor in misery; standing by while the authority of the Crown diminished under steady depression by the Whigs; standing by while Churchmen fought for preferment, neglecting the oppressed, for whom—by every teaching of Christ—a true disciple is a trustee. You all know, I doubt not, the main persons and principles of the Young England party which rallied to Disraeli’s call. The men were all younger than he; mostly of Eton and Cambridge—foremost George Smythe, later Viscount Strangford, most brilliant of all, Lord John Manners, Alexander Baillie Cochrane “the fiery and generous Buckhurst” of Coningsby. All of them figure, under other names, in Coningsby, and, while that novel is remembered, will be identified in its pages; that is, long after human memory has ceased to care for the personal romance of young men once so chivalrous and admired—
The expectancy and rose of the fair state,