Nor was this Lowe’s only defect. Powerful in attack, he was feeble in defence. Terrible as a critic, he had, as his official career showed, little constructive talent, little tact in shaping or recommending his measures. Unsteady or inconstant in purpose, he was at one moment headstrong, at another timid or vacillating. These faults, scarcely noticed when he was in Opposition, sensibly reduced his value as a minister and as a Cabinet colleague.
In private Lowe was good company, bright, alert, and not unkindly. He certainly did not, as was alleged of another famous contemporary, 303 Lord Westbury, positively enjoy the giving of pain. But he had a most unchristian scorn for the slow and the dull and the unenlightened, and never restrained his scorching wit merely for the sake of sparing those who came in his way. If the distinction be permissible, he was not cruel but he was merciless, that is to say, unrestrained by compassion. Instances are not wanting of men who have maintained great influence in spite of their rough tongues and the enmities which rough tongues provoke. But such men have usually also possessed some of the arts of popularity, and have been able to retain the adherence of their party at large, even when they had alienated many who came into personal contact with them. This was not Lowe’s case. He did not conceal his contempt for the multitude, and had not the tact needed for humouring it, any more than for managing the House of Commons. The very force and keenness of his intellect kept him aloof from other people and prevented him from understanding their sentiments. He saw things so clearly that he could not tolerate mental confusion, and was apt to reach conclusions so fast that he missed perceiving some of the things which are gradually borne in upon slower minds. There are also instances of strong men who, though they do not revile their opponents, incur hatred because their strength and activity make them feared. Hostility concentrates itself on the 304 opponents deemed most formidable, and a political leader who is spared while his fellows are attacked cannot safely assume that this immunity is a tribute to his virtues. Incessant abuse fell to the lot of Mr. Bright, who was not often, and of Mr. Gladstone, who was hardly ever, personally bitter in invective. But in compensation Mr. Bright and Mr. Gladstone received enthusiastic loyalty from their followers. For Lowe there was no such compensation. Even his own side did not love him. There was also a certain harshness, perhaps a certain narrowness, about his views. Even in those days of rigid economics, he took an exceptionally rigid view of all economic problems, refusing to make allowance for any motives except those of bare self-interest. Though he did not belong by education or by social ties to the Utilitarian group, and gave an ungracious reception to J. S. Mill’s first speeches in the House of Commons, he was a far more stringent and consistent exponent of the harder kind of Benthamism than was Mill himself. He professed, and doubtless to some extent felt, a contempt for appeals to historical or literary sentiment, and relished nothing more than deriding his own classical training as belonging to an effete and absurd scheme of education. He left his mark on our elementary school system by establishing the system of payment by results, but nearly every change made in that system 305 since his day has tended to destroy the alterations he made and to bring back the older condition of things, though no doubt in an amended form. His ideas of University reform were crude and barren, limited, indeed, to the substitution of what the Germans call “bread studies” for mental cultivation, and to the extension of the plan of competitive examinations for honours and money prizes, a plan which more and more displeases the most enlightened University teachers, and is felt to have done more harm than good to Oxford and Cambridge, where it has had the fullest play. He had also, and could give good reasons for his opinion, a hearty dislike to endowments of all kinds; and once, when asked by a Royal Commission to suggest a mode of improving their application, answered in his trenchant way, “Get rid of them. Throw them into the sea.”
It would not be fair to blame Lowe for the results which followed his vigorous action against the extension of the suffrage in 1866, for no one could then have predicted that in the following year the Tories, beguiled by Mr. Disraeli, would reverse their former attitude and carry a suffrage bill far wider than that which they had rejected a year before. But the sequel of the successful resistance of 1866 may stand as a warning to those who think that the course of thoroughgoing opposition to a measure they dislike is, because 306 it seems courageous, likely to be the right and wise course for patriotic men. Had the moderate bill of 1866 been suffered to pass, the question of further extending the suffrage might possibly have slept for another thirty years, for there was no very general or urgent cry for it among the working people, and England would have continued to be ruled in the main by voters belonging to the middle class and the upper section of the working class. The consequence of the heated contest of 1866 was not only to bring about a larger immediate change in 1867, but to create an interest in the question which soon prompted the demand for the extension of household suffrage to the counties, and completed in 1884-85 the process by which England has become virtually a democracy, though a plutocratic democracy, still affected by the habits and notions of oligarchic days. Thus Robert Lowe, as much as Disraeli and Gladstone, may in a sense be called an author of the tremendous change which has passed upon the British Constitution since 1866, and the extent of which was not for a long while realised. Lowe himself never recanted his views, but never repeated his declaration of them, feeling that he had incurred unpopularity enough, and probably feeling also that the case was hopeless.
People who disliked his lugubrious forecasts used to call him a Cassandra, perhaps forgetting 307 that, besides the distinctive feature of Cassandra’s prophecies that nobody believed them, there was another distinctive feature, viz. that they came true. Did Lowe’s? It is often profitable and sometimes amusing to turn back to the predictions through which eminent men relieved their perturbed souls, and see how far these superior minds were able to discern the tendencies, already at work in their time, which were beginning to gain strength, and were destined to determine the future. Whoever reads Lowe’s speeches of 1865-67 may do worse than glance at the same time at a book,[44] long since forgotten, which contains the efforts of a group of young University Liberals to refute the arguments used by him and by Lord Cairns, the strongest of his allies, in their opposition to schemes of parliamentary reform.
To compare the optimism of these young writers and Lowe’s pessimism with what has actually come to pass is a not uninstructive task. True it is that England has had only thirty-five years’ experience of the Reform Act of 1867, and only seventeen years’ experience of that even greater step towards pure democracy which was effected by the Franchise and Redistribution Acts of 1884-85. We are still far from knowing what sorts of Parliaments and policies the enlarged suffrage will end by giving. 308 But some at least of the mischiefs Lowe foretold have not arrived. He expected first of all a rapid increase in corruption and intimidation at parliamentary elections. The quality of the House of Commons would decline, because money would rule, and small boroughs would no longer open the path by which talent could enter. Members would be either millionaires or demagogues, and they would also become far more subservient to their constituents. Universal suffrage would soon arrive, because no halting-place between the £10 franchise[45] and universal suffrage could be found. Placed on a democratic basis, the House of Commons would not be able to retain its authority over the Executive. The House of Lords, the Established Church, the judicial bench (in that dignity and that independence which are essential to its usefulness), would be overthrown as England passed into “the bare and level plain of democracy where every ant-hill is a mountain and every thistle a forest tree.” These and the other features characteristic of popular government on which Lowe savagely descanted were pieced together out of Plato and Tocqueville, coupled with his own disagreeable experiences of Australian politics. None of the predicted evils can be said to have as yet become features of the polity and government of 309 England,[46] though the power of the House relatively to the Cabinet does seem to be declining. Yet some of Lowe’s incidental remarks are true, and not least true is his prediction that democracies will be found just as prone to war, just as apt to be swept away by passion, as other kinds of government have been. Few signs herald the approach of that millennium of peace and enlightenment which Cobden foretold and for which Gladstone did not cease to hope.
No one since Lowe has taken up the part of advocatus diaboli against democracy which he played in 1866.[47] Since Disraeli passed the Household Suffrage in Boroughs Bill in 1867, a nullification of Lowe’s triumph which incensed him more than ever against Disraeli, no one has ever come forward in England as the avowed enemy of changes designed to popularise our government. Parties have quarrelled over the time and the manner of extensions of the franchise, but the 310 issue of principle raised in 1866 has not been raised again. Even in 1884, when Mr. Gladstone carried his bill for assimilating the county franchise to that existing in boroughs, the Tory party did not oppose the measure in principle, but confined themselves to insisting that it should be accompanied by a scheme for the redistribution of seats. The secret, first unveiled by Disraeli, that the masses will as readily vote for the Tory party as for the Liberal, is now common property, and universal suffrage, when it comes to be offered, is as likely to be offered by the former party as by the latter. This gives a touch of historical interest to Lowe’s speeches of 1866. They are the swan-song of the old constitutionalism. The changes which came in 1867 and 1884 must have come sooner or later, for they were in the natural line of development as we see it all over the world; but they might have come much later had not Lowe’s opposition wrecked the moderate scheme of 1866. Apart from that episode Lowe’s career would now be scarcely remembered, or would be remembered by those who knew his splendid gifts as an illustration of the maxim that mere intellectual power does not stand first among the elements of character that go to the winning of a foremost place.
WILLIAM ROBERTSON SMITH
Robertson Smith,[48] the most widely learned and one of the most powerful teachers that either Cambridge or Oxford could show during the years of his residence in England, died at the age of forty-seven on the 31st of March 1894. To the English public generally his name was little known, or was remembered only in connection with the theological controversy and ecclesiastical trial of which he had been the central figure in Scotland fifteen years before. But on the Continent of Europe and by Orientalists generally he was regarded as the foremost Semitic scholar of Britain, and by those who knew him as one of the most remarkable men of his time.