The Earl of Beaconsfield

by James Anthony Froude

With the light which is thrown by ‘Sybil’ on the workings of Disraeli’s mind, it is easy to understand the feelings with which he regarded the words and actions of Sir Robert Peel. He had seen, or supposed himself to have seen, a poisonous fungus eating into the heart of English life. In town and country, among the factory operatives, and on the estates of the rich and the noble, there was one rapid process of degeneracy. The peasantry were serfs, without the redeeming features of serfdom; the town artisans were becoming little better than brutes. In the cities, family and the softer influences of home were ceasing to exist. Children were being dragged up in misery or were left to die, and life was turned into a flaring workshop in which the higher purposes of humanity were obliterated or forgotten. The cause was everywhere the same. The gospel of political economy had been substituted for the gospel of Christ. The new law was to make money; the new aim of all classes, high and low alike, was to better their condition, as it was called, and make the most of their opportunities. Each must look out for himself: one man was not another’s keeper; labour was an article of trade, which the employer was to buy as cheap as he could get it, and the workman was to sell for the most that he could get. There their duties to each other ended, and the results were the scenes which he had witnessed in Marley and Mowbray. The further trade was extended under the uncontrolled conditions demanded by the ‘Manchester school,’ the more these scenes would multiply.

SIR ROBERT PEEL

With the powerful Protectionist majority returned by the elections of 1841, Peel, in Disraeli’s opinion, had an opportunity of bringing these demoralising tendencies under the authority of reason and conscience. The Corn Laws were but one feature of the problem. The real question was whether England was to remain as she had been, the nursing mother of a noble breed of men, or whether the physical and moral qualities of a magnificent race were to be sacrificed to a rage for vulgar wealth. Disraeli had not flattered his party. In Trafford and in the elder Millbank, he had drawn manufacturers who were splendidly alive to their duties. The ennobled landowners he had left to be represented by such men as Lord Marley. He was a Radical of the Radicals, a Radical who went to the root of the mischief. Like Carlyle, he was telling his country that unless they brought authority to deal with it, the England which we were so proud of would speedily forfeit her place among the nations of the world. It is likely enough that Peel would have failed if he had tried. His own followers were thinking more of their rents than of the moral condition of the people. But at any rate he was not trying, and evidently had no thought of trying. He took the course which promised most immediate success. To restore authority required an aristocracy who could be trusted to use it, and there was none such ready to hand. Wages must be left to the market where he found them. All that he could do to help the people was to cheapen the food which was bought with them, to lay taxation on the shoulders best able to bear it, and by education and such other means as he could provide to enable the industrious and the thoughtful to raise themselves, since neither legislation nor administration could raise them. Cheap food and popular education was his highest ideal. Peel could see what was immediately before him clearer than any man. His practical sagacity forbade him to look farther or deeper.

But the difficulty of his position lay in his having been brought into power as a Protectionist. The constituencies had given him his majority in reply to his own Protectionist declarations. If Free Trade was to be made the law of the land was Peel to repeat the part which he had played in Catholic emancipation? All reasonable Conservatives knew that the corn laws must be modified; but the change, if inevitable, need not be precipitate. Peel’s great defect, Disraeli said in his ‘Life of Lord George Bentinck,’ was that he wanted imagination, and in wanting that he wanted prescience. No one was more sagacious when dealing with the circumstances before him. His judgment was faultless, provided that he had not to deal with the future. But insight into consequences is the test of a true statesman, and because Peel had it not Catholic emancipation, Parliamentary Reform, and the abrogation of the commercial system were carried in haste or in passion, and without conditions or mitigatory arrangements. On Canning’s death the Tories might have had the game in their hands. A moderate reconstruction of the House of Commons, the transfer of the franchises of a few corrupt boroughs to the great manufacturing towns, would have satisfied the country. Peel let the moment pass, and the Birmingham Union and the Manchester Economic School naturally followed. His policy was to resist till resistance was ineffectual, and then to grant wholesale concessions as a premium to political agitation. The same scene was being enacted over again. Sir Robert had rejected Lord John Russell’s eight-shilling duty. It appeared now, from the course in which he was drifting, that the duty would be swept away altogether.

In whatever way Peel had acted it is not likely that the state of England at present would have differed materially from what it is. The forces which were producing either the decay or the renovation of the Constitution, whichever it proves to be, were too powerful for the wisest statesman either to arrest or materially direct. Plato thought that had he been born a generation sooner he might have saved Greece. The Olympian gods themselves could not have saved Greece. But when untoward events arrive they are always visited on the immediate actors in them, and Disraeli visited on Peel the ruin of his own party and the disappointment of his own hopes. Perhaps, as he was but half an Englishman, his personal interest in the question at issue was not extreme. It is possible that he had resented Peel’s neglect of him. At any rate he saw his opportunity and used it to make his name famous. Hitherto he had been known in the House of Commons as a brilliant and amusing speaker, but of such independent ways that even the Conservatives gave him but a limited confidence. So little had he spared his own friends in vote, speech, or writing that he may be acquitted of having dreamt of becoming their immediate leader. But Peel had laid himself open. The Premier’s policy, supported as it was by his political pupils and the Liberal Opposition, Disraeli knew to be practically irresistible. He was therefore spared the necessity of moderating his own language. At least he could avenge his party and punish what he could not prevent. It was his pride when he made an attack to single out the most dangerous antagonist. Sir Robert Peel was the most commanding member of the House of Commons, and the most powerful oratorical athlete.

PEEL AND DISRAELI

Disraeli’s speeches during Peel’s Ministry and the effects which they produced can be touched but superficially in a narrative so brief as this, but they formed the turning-point of his public life. His assaults when he began were treated with petulant contempt, but his fierce counter-hits soon roused attention to them. The Liberals were entertained to see the Conservative chief dared and smitten by one of his own followers. The country members felt an indignant satisfaction at the deserved chastisement of their betrayer. The cheers in Parliament were echoed outside the walls and rang to the farthest corner of the Continent. With malicious skill Disraeli touched one after the other the weak points of a character essentially great but superficially vulnerable. Like Laertes he anointed his point, but the venom lay in the truth of what he said, and the suffering which he inflicted was the more poignant because administered by a hand which Peel had unfortunately despised. Disraeli was displaying for the first time the peculiar epigrammatic keenness which afterwards so much distinguished him, and the skill with which he could drive his arrows through the joints in the harness. Any subject gave him an opening. Peel supposed that he had rebuked and silenced him by quoting in a dignified tone Canning’s lines upon ‘A Candid Friend.’ The allusion was dangerous, for Peel’s conduct to Canning had not been above reproach. Disraeli took an occasion when the general policy of the Ministry was under discussion to deliver himself in his clear, cold, impassive manner of a few sentences which hit exactly the temper of the House. Peel was generally accused of having stolen the Liberal policy. The right honourable gentleman, he said, had caught the Whigs bathing and had walked away with their clothes. He had tamed the shrew of Liberalism by her own tactics. He was the ‘political Petruchio who had outbid them all.’ Then came the sting. Peel had a full memory, and was rather proud of the readiness with which he could introduce quotations. Disraeli first touched his vanity by complimenting him on the success with which he used such weapons, ‘partly because he seldom quoted a passage which had not previously received the meed of Parliamentary approbation, partly because his quotations were so happy.... We all admire Canning,’ he said; ‘we all, or at least most of us, deplore his untimely end. We sympathised with him in his fierce struggle with supreme prejudice and sublime mediocrity, with inveterate foes and with candid friends. Mr. Canning! and quoted by the right honourable gentleman. The theme, the poet, the speaker!—what a felicitous combination!’

The shaft which Peel had lightly launched was returned into his own breast and quivered there. The House of Commons, bored with dulness, delights in an unusual stroke of artistic skill. The sarcasm was received with cheers the worse to bear because while the Radicals laughed loud Peel’s own side did not repress an approving murmur. He was like the bull in the Spanish arena when the chulos plant their darts upon his shoulders. ‘He hoped,’ he said, ‘that the honourable member, having discharged the accumulated virus of the last week, now felt more at his ease;’ but the barb had gone to the quick, and Peel, however proudly he controlled himself, was the most sensitive of men.

The tormentor left him no rest. A few days later came Mr. Miles’s motion for the application of surplus revenue to the relief of agriculture. Peel, when in opposition, had argued for the justice of this proposal. In office he found objections to it; and Disraeli told his friends that they must not be impatient with Sir Robert Peel. ‘There is no doubt,’ he said, ‘a difference in the right honourable gentleman’s demeanour as leader of the Opposition and as Minister of the Crown. But that is the old story. You must not contrast too strongly the hours of courtship with the years of possession. I remember the right honourable gentleman’s Protection speeches. They were the best speeches I ever heard. But we know in all these cases when the beloved object has ceased to charm it is vain to appeal to the feelings.’

Sidney Herbert had spoken of the agricultural members as whining to Parliament at every recurrence of temporary distress. Disraeli again struck at Peel, dealing Sidney Herbert an insolent cut by the way.