“... The House will not forget what that class has done in its legislative enterprises. I do not use the term ‘middle class’ with any disrespect; no one more than myself estimates what the urban population has done for the liberty and civilisation of mankind; but I speak of the middle class as of one which avowedly aims at predominance, and therefore it is expedient to ascertain how far the fact justifies a confidence in their political capacity. It was only at the end of the last century that the middle class rose into any considerable influence, chiefly through Mr. Pitt,[60] that minister whom they are always abusing.” He proceeds to praise their abolition of the slave trade: “... A noble and sublime act, but carried with an entire ignorance of the subject, as the event has proved. How far it has aggravated the horrors of slavery, I stop not now to inquire.... The middle class emancipated the negroes, but they never proposed a Ten Hour Bill.... The interests of the working classes of England were not much considered in that arrangement. Having tried their hand at Colonial reform, ... they next turned their hands to Parliamentary reform, and carried the Reform Bill. But observe, in that operation they destroyed, under the pretence of its corrupt exercise, the old industrial franchise, and they never constructed a new one.... So that whether we look to their Colonial, or their Parliamentary reform, they entirely neglected the industrial classes. Having failed in Colonial as well as Parliamentary reform, ... they next tried Commercial reform, and introduced free imports under the specious name of free trade. How were the interests of the working classes considered in this third movement? More than they were in their Colonial or their Parliamentary reform? On the contrary, while the interests of capital were unblushingly advocated, the displaced labour of the country was offered neither consolation nor compensation, but was told that it must submit to be absorbed in the mass. In their Colonial, Parliamentary, and Commercial reforms there is no evidence of any sympathy with the working classes; and every one of the measures so forced upon the country has at the same time proved disastrous. Their Colonial reform ruined the colonies, and increased slavery. Their Parliamentary reform, according to their own account, was a delusion which has filled the people with disappointment and disgust. If their Commercial reform have not proved ruinous, then the picture ... presented to us of the condition of England every day for the last four or five months must be a gross misrepresentation. In this state of affairs, as a remedy for half a century of failure, we are under their auspices to take refuge in financial reform,[61] which I predict will prove their fourth failure, and one in which the interests of the working classes will be as little considered and accomplished.”
The third passage concerns the symptoms of a need and the moment for change. Leaders, he argues, should educate and prepare the people, and not allow mere agitators to manufacture grievances, but rather prick the educated and well-born to remember the duties by virtue of which alone they hold their position.
“... A new profession has been discovered which will supply the place of obsolete ones. It is a profession which requires many votaries.
“‘Grammaticus, rhetor, geometres, pictor, aliptes,
Augur, schœnobates, medicus, magus.’
The business of this profession is to discover or invent great questions. But the remarkable circumstance is this—that the present movement has not in the slightest degree originated in any class of the people.... The moral I draw from all this—from observing this system of organised agitation—this playing and paltering with popular passions for the aggrandisement of one too ambitious class—the moral I draw is this: why are the people of England forced to find leaders among these persons? The proper leaders of the people are the gentlemen of England. If they are not the leaders of the people, I do not see why there should be gentlemen. Yes, it is because the gentlemen of England have been negligent of their duties, and unmindful of their station, that the system of professional agitation, so ruinous to the best interests of the country, has arisen in England. It was not always so. My honourable friends around me call themselves the country party. Why, that was the name once in England of a party who were the foremost to vindicate popular rights—who were the natural leaders of the people, and the champions of everything national and popular.... When Sir William Wyndham was the leader of the country party, do you think he would have allowed any chairman or deputy-chairman, any lecturer or pamphleteer, to deprive him of his hold on the heart of the people of this country? No, never! Do you think that when the question of suffrage was brought before the House, he would have allowed any class who had boldly avowed their determination to obtain predominance to take up and settle that question?...”
Nor let him be misconstrued in his views of the ancestral temperament of the Whigs. Nothing is more remarkable in the chronicle of combinations than the fact that for more than a century a party, the most exclusive in its operation, was considered the least. The recent publications of the Portland and Harley Papers establish beyond a doubt that while the “New Whigs” of Queen Anne were in large measure a commercial syndicate that “made a corner” in power, the old Whigs of George III. were an aristocratic oligarchy that subverted rule, both popular and personal, and monopolised government.
“How an oligarchy,” says Disraeli, in the preface to Lothair, “had been substituted for a kingdom, and a narrow-minded and bigoted fanaticism flourished in the name of religious liberty, were problems long to me insoluble, but which early interested me. But what most attracted my musing, even as a boy, was the elements of our political parties, and the strange mystification by which that which was national in its constitution had become odious, and that which was exclusive was presented as popular. What has mainly led to this confusion of public thought, and this uneasiness of society, is our habitual carelessness in not distinguishing between the excellence of a principle and its injurious or obsolete application. The feudal system may have worn out, but its main principle, that the tenure of property should be the fulfilment of duty, is the essence of good government. The divine right of kings may have been a plea for feeble tyrants, but the divine right of government is the keystone of human progress, and without it government sinks into police and a nation is degraded into a mob.” And he continues with reference to the Toryism of a later period: “... Those who in theory were the national party, and who sheltered themselves under the institutions of the country against the oligarchy, had, both by a misconception and a neglect of their duties, become, and justly become, odious; while the oligarchy ... had, by the patronage of certain general principles which they only meagrely applied, assumed, and to a certain degree acquired, the character of a popular party. But no party was national; one was exclusive and odious, and the other liberal and cosmopolitan.”
His history—I speak as a student of the reigns of Queen Anne and the Georges—will bear scrutiny. Indeed, he carries the descent of Whiggism some steps further, and traces its pedigree back to the Roundhead Independents,[62] and even the favourites of Henry VIII., enriched by the spoil of the plundered abbeys. But he never denied, or wished to gainsay, the special and signal qualities of the Whigs’ conspicuous service. They had reconciled religious liberty to the consecration of the State, and had constantly proved themselves a “national” party[63]—that solecism in words but truth in ideas. This he repeatedly acknowledges. Neither did he ever spare the soulless, cramped, hollow, and shrivelled Toryism of the period preceding Bolingbroke’s and Wyndham’s struggle to recall it to its origins; or again of the period after Pitt’s generous concessions were overwhelmed by the Jacobin deluge, and neutralised by the impersonalities of Addington and Perceval; by the Phariseeism of Liverpool’s puzzle-headedness; by the pigheadedness of Eldon and Wetherell. Nor did he ever deny that pseudo-Toryism had often nursed the very vices of the Whig oligarchy.[64] What he did contend, from first to last, was that any party which by its elements makes for national growth and union, and favours the free play of custom in institutions, is “national;” while any party encouraging class warfare, class preponderance, and cosmopolitan theories repugnant to the genius of those institutions, will be “anti-national;” that the democratic possibilities of our constitution must be spread, as opportunities arise to enlarge the “estate of the Commons;” yet that this must never mean the enthronement of either Oligarchy or Democracy in place of our mixed government; further, that in all such expansion influence is more important than interest; that theorisers must never blind us to the distinction between the “Rights of Man” and the duties of English citizens, between private and public equality, between the “Sovereignty of the People” and a national government; that over-government is a fatal evil, but that individual leadership is a priceless privilege.
* * * * *
The Reform Act raised the whole question of Representation. Is its aim monotony or variety? If it is necessarily elective, must it not logically end in becoming a plebiscite? Will a vote open to all be prized by any? And is suffrage any panacea for suffering?