The same post brought the Prime Minister a most appealing letter signed, “Mary Anne Disraeli,” addressed “Dear Sir Robert Peel,” and marked “Confidential.” She begins: “I beg you not to be angry with me for my intrusion, but I am overwhelmed with anxiety. My husband’s political career is for ever crushed if you do not appreciate him. Mr. Disraeli’s exertions are not unknown to you; but there is much he has done that you cannot be aware of, though they have no other aim but to do you honour, no wish for recompense, but your approbation.” Her husband had made Peel’s opponents his personal enemies, she goes on; he had stood four expensive elections since 1834. “Literature,” she concludes, “he has abandoned for politics. Do not destroy all his hopes, and make him feel his life has been a mistake.”
Peel’s reply was cold and formal. He disliked Disraeli, regarding him as a political adventurer, and disliked him personally. “My dear sir,” he addresses him, and, fastening on the statement that Disraeli had joined the Tory Party at the instigation of a member of Peel’s former Cabinet, he declares that no one had ever got from him the slightest authority to make such a communication. Then Peel gives a remarkable account of the difficulties which beset him in constituting the new Government:
But, quite independently of this consideration, I should have been very happy, had it been in my power, to avail myself of your offer of service; and your letter is one of the many I receive which too forcibly impress upon me how painful and invidious is the duty which I have been compelled to undertake. I am only supported in it by the consciousness that my desire has been to do justice.
I trust, also, that when candidates for parliamentary office calmly reflect on my position, and the appointments I have made—when they review the names of those previously connected with me in public life whom I have been absolutely compelled to exclude, the claims founded on acceptance in 1834 with the almost hopeless prospects of that day, the claims, too, founded on new Party combinations—I trust they will then understand how perfectly insufficient are the means at my disposal to meet the wishes that are conveyed to me by men whose co-operation I should be proud to have and whose qualifications and pretensions for office I do not contest.
Disraeli, writing from Grosvenor Gate, September 8, 1841, hastens to explain that he never intended to even suggest, much less to say, that a promise of official promotion had ever been made to him at any time by any member of Peel’s Cabinet. “Parliamentary office,” he says, “should be the recognition of Party services and parliamentary ability, and as such only was it to me an object of ambition.” He ends with a dignified touch of pathos: “If such a pledge had been given me by yourself, and not redeemed, I should have taken refuge in silence. Not to be appreciated may be mortification; to be baulked of a promised reward is only a vulgar accident of life, to be borne without a murmur.”
Five years passed, and in the debate on the third reading of the Bill for the repeal of the Corn Duties, Disraeli, from the back Ministerial benches, made a scathing attack upon Peel and what he called his betrayal of the Tory Party in bringing in such a Bill to establish Free Trade. The Prime Minister, in reply, disclosed to the country the curious incidents of 1841. “It is still more surprising,” said he, “that if such were the hon. gentleman’s views of my character he should have been ready, as I think he was, to unite his fortunes with mine in office, thereby implying the strongest proof which a public man can give of confidence in the honour and integrity of a Minister of the Crown.” Disraeli rose at once to make a personal explanation. He denied that his opposition to the Free Trade policy of the Prime Minister was inspired by his disappointment of office. He was not an applicant for office in 1841. “I never shall—it is totally foreign to my nature—make an application for any place,” he cried. “Whatever occurred in 1841 between the right hon. gentleman and myself,” said he, “was entirely attributable to the intervention of another gentleman, whom I supposed to be in the confidence of the right hon. baronet, and I daresay it may have arisen from a misconception.” The correspondence which I have quoted was not published until long afterwards. The abrupt ending of the incident in the House of Commons is strange in the light thrown upon it by the correspondence. According to the report in Hansard, Peel made no reply to Disraeli. Peel held the correspondence in his hands, and resisted the temptation to read it and crush Disraeli, because he was advised by one of his colleagues that the disclosure of a private application for office would be contrary to the high and honourable traditions of statesmanship.
5
Gladstone agreed with Peel that it was not advisable to put a man into the Cabinet without a previous official training. It was also Gladstone’s custom, once he had invited a man to office, to hold on to him to the last possible moment. “The next most serious thing to admitting a man into the Cabinet,” said he, mentioning one of the principles which guided him in the making of a Government, “is to leave a man out who has once been in.” Still, there were occasions when he was compelled to pass over an old comrade-in-arms on the ground of age. He was himself seventy-one years of age when, in 1880, he was called upon to form his second Government. To one old member of his former Administration he wrote: “I do not feel able to ask you to resume the toils of office.” He admitted that he himself was “the oldest man of his political generation,” and that, therefore, he should be a solecism in the Government which he was engaged in constructing. “I have been brought,” he added, “by the seeming force of exceptional circumstances to undertake a task requiring less of years and more of vigour than my accumulating store of the one and waning residue of the other.” Here we have the answer to the question of age and office. The exclusion of a veteran politician from office is not a matter of the number of years he has counted. Is he an extinct political volcano as well as an old man? May he safely be set aside? On the answer which the Prime Minister gives to these questions in his own mind depends the fate of the office-seeker of advanced years. Gladstone was eighty-four in 1893, but he was still inevitable as Prime Minister. If the strong young man of achievement, and still greater promise, cannot be ignored, neither can the old man, who, having built up a commanding reputation, takes care that it is duly and fittingly recognized.
It is a singular thing that, among the twelve hundred men or so who constitute the two Houses of Parliament, there has never been any reluctance to take office. Probably the only instance of a public man who had a positive repugnance of office was Lord Althorp, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons in the Grey and Melbourne Administrations from November 1830 to December 1834. Office destroyed all his happiness, he declared, and so affected his mind that he had to remove his pistols from his bedroom lest he should be tempted to shoot himself. He remained in office because he felt that one in his rank and position—born, as it were, to the purple, a member of one of the great territorial families, who boast of long lines of ancestors in the public service—could no more set aside the responsibility of office than the earldom and broad acres of which he was also the heir. The one consolation he derived from the death of his brother, Earl Spencer, was that his own accession to the House of Lords compelled him to lay down the burden of Chancellor of the Exchequer. Sir George Cornewall Lewis seems to have been animated by somewhat the same uncommonly high sense of duty. When Palmerston, in the forming of his Administration in 1855, offered him the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer which Gladstone had vacated, he says he entertained the strongest disinclination to accept the office. “I felt, however,” he writes, “that in the peculiar position of the Government”—they were in difficulties over the Crimean War—“refusal was scarcely honourable, and would be attributable to cowardice, and I therefore, most reluctantly, made up my mind to accept it.”
But these cases of objection to office on the part of public men, however wealthy or however old, are exceedingly rare. The hunt for posts when a new Government is being formed after a dissolution is eager and untiring. The old men, who will not admit that their weight of years unfits them for the cares of office, haunt the political clubs and Downing Street, so as to keep themselves conspicuous in the eyes of the new Prime Minister. But they cannot all get “jobs,” to use a word commonly employed while a Government is being made. Some of them must be sacrificed; there are so many able and pushful young men to be provided for. The same cry is heard in politics as in other walks of life: “Why should these old fellows lag superfluous on the stage?” But “the old gang”—as they are called by the young—will not retire from public life voluntarily and gracefully. It is not alone that they instinctively revolt against the assumption that their capacity for work is at an end, but they also dislike change of habits and pursuits, and, above all, they desire for a little longer to play a leading part on the prominent stage of Parliament. Public life, therefore, retires from them. It is only the few who have made a great reputation and acquired a great authority that cannot lightly be set aside. For most politicians, no matter how fine their services in the past, a time comes when they are designated “old fogeys,” and, while still anxious to be once more Ministers of the Crown, they experience the humiliation, as they look upon it, of being shunted for ever. It is idle to talk of acquiescing patiently in the inevitable. Political history affords many a sad instance of such a fate being regarded as one of the sorest of the injustices of life.