Before the Reform Bill of 1832, Disraeli wrote, musing on Athens, and contrasting the strong simplicity of Greek literature with the imitative splendour of Rome, “... A mighty era, prepared by the blunders of long centuries, is at hand. Ardently I hope that the necessary change in human existence may be effected by the voice of philosophy alone; but I tremble and am silent. There is no bigotry so terrible as the bigotry of a country that flatters itself that it is philosophical.” In introducing the great Act of 1867, he observed: “... The political rights of the working classes which existed before the Act of 1832, and which not only existed, but were acknowledged, were on that occasion disregarded and even abolished, and during the whole period that has since elapsed in consequence of the great vigour that has been given to the Government of this country, and of the multiplicity of subjects commanding interest that have engaged and engrossed attention, no great inconvenience has been experienced from that cause. Still, during all that time there has been a feeling, sometimes a very painful feeling, that questions have arisen which have been treated in this House without that entire national sympathy which is desirable.”
The Reform Bill and its sequels transferred the immemorial franchise of toilers to the middle classes, who were to be further aggrandised by the repeal of the Corn Laws.[65] They raised the revolutionary bitterness of Toil in England and Religion in Ireland, both of which they provoked to physical force. The Act proved rather a measure for the House of Commons than for the Commons themselves. It was the makeshift and stop-gap of oligarchy in distress. Its immediate effects were to wipe out that parliamentary opposition on which the health of party government depends,[66] to encroach on the independent influence of the House of Lords, to end, it is true unintentionally, the “Venetian Constitution” of those who enfeebled their cause in 1837 by resolving to continue as oligarchs when the weapon of oligarchy had vanished; while none the less it left the monarch a doge, and the multitude a cipher; a crown still “robbed of its prerogatives, a Church controlled by a commission, and an aristocracy that does not lead.” Such were the joint results of the two large and once great parties that had lost principles in their search after organisation, the one by thwarting, the other by tricking the popular voice. It sharpened the warfare between rich and poor, afterwards aggravated by the acceptance of the principle of unrestricted competition; it precipitated a plutocracy, it helped to set class against class, and it became a prop of that calculating materialism which exalted “utility.” On the other hand, its indirect benefits were many. “It set men a-thinking” (I quote from Sybil); “it enlarged the horizon of political experience; it led the public mind to ponder somewhat on the circumstances of our national history; to pry into the beginnings of some social anomalies which, they found, were not so ancient as they had been led to believe, and which had their origin in causes very different from what they had been educated to credit; and insensibly it created and prepared a popular intelligence to which one can appeal, no longer hopelessly, in an attempt to dispel the mysteries with which for nearly three centuries it has been the labour of party writers to involve a national history, and without the dispersion of which no political position can be understood and no social evil remedied.” This latter was an especial province of Disraeli. Carlyle also, as a social regenerator appealing to higher sanctions than the “useful,” was able to address the newly awakened “popular intelligence.”
Here again Disraeli is in curious accord with Carlyle, the difference between them being that Disraeli, a doer as well as a seer, discerned in the traditional “orders” or “estates” of the realm real curatives of a sick body politic. Both protested against a state based on statistics and a progress that was arithmetical. Both were quick to discriminate, under the surface of parties, between the influences which made for cementing and those which made for dissolving the nation. Both saw in the conservatism and liberalism of the ’thirties, on the one side a pretence of protecting the forms they enfeebled, on the other a pretext and a sop for the universal suffrage which their professions logically implied. Disraeli perceived that such a French democracy was alien to England, and meant eventually some sort of unenlightened despotism, and the aggravation of a government by favouritism and through interference. He therefore resolved to reinspire the three “estates”—and if possible the Crown—with reality; and thus, in extending franchise, to extend it as the privilege of an order, earned by thrift, education, and intelligence, while he sought to found it on a basis so stable that leadership might never sink into being the sport of a fluid and fickle ignorance. Like Carlyle, he rejoiced that “opinion is now supreme, and opinion speaks in print; the representation of the Press is far more complete than the representation of Parliament;” he hailed the spread of knowledge among the mass so early as in the Revolutionary Epick. But, unlike Carlyle, he did not deem this increasing power fatal to parliamentary institutions; indeed, he regarded Parliament as a body privileged to lead and leaven “opinion,” and one that should never abandon its proper functions of initiative. Both Parliament and the Press in his eyes were vents for that free discussion inseparable from political health, but the one ought to form a school for statesmen, the other an arena for critics. And Disraeli also held and enforced that parties should never be particularist, but should rest on some national principle instead of on incoherent prejudices. Parties should represent broad attitudes towards working institutions. Only thus can they escape debasement into sets on the one hand, and shams on the other. If parties are split up into intriguing factions, they are solvents; if they become merely the masks of disregarded principles, they grow lifeless and hypocritical. They are at once “humbug and humdrum.”
In his fine speech of February, 1850, on Agricultural Distress (a distress greatly due to the unrestricted competition of English land with foreign acres,[67] and only to be met by what he then proposed and long afterwards carried—the relief of its peculiar burdens), Disraeli dwelt on the sad fact that the labourers of the land made no appeal to Parliament. “Why, what is that,” he urged, “but a want of confidence in the institutions of the country?” Cobden, who definitely and avowedly sought the predominance of one portion alone, of middle-class individual interest, gave an ironical cheer. Carlyle had already published his philippic against Parliament. But Disraeli—and with justice—continued—
“... The honourable gentleman cheers as if I sanctioned such doctrines: I have never sanctioned the expression of such feelings; I never used language elsewhere which I have not been ready to repeat in this House. I never said one thing in one place, and another in another. I have confidence in the justice and wisdom of the House of Commons, although I sit with the minority; I have expressed that confidence in other places.... I have expressed the conviction that I earnestly entertain, that this House, instead of being an assembly with a deaf ear and a callous heart to the sufferings of the agricultural body, would, on the contrary, be found to be an assembly prompt to express sympathy, prompt to repair, if it might be, even the injury, necessary in the main as they might think it, which they had entailed on the agricultural classes of the country.... I have that confidence in the good sense of the English people that ... they will deem we are only doing our duty, we are only consulting their interests in taking every opportunity to alleviate their burdens, in trying to devise remedies for their burdens; and, if we cannot accomplish immediately any great financial result, at least achieving this great political purpose—that we may teach them not to despair of the institutions of their country.”
This purpose he had sought to accomplish two years before, when, in 1848, he proved by a speech which, it is said, won him the eventual leadership of his party, that the breakdown which Carlyle was at that time preparing to denounce, was due to an incapable ministry, and not to an effete Parliament. He always held Parliament to be neither a municipal vestry nor a chamber of commerce, but a national temple of embodied opinion; nor can the wisdom of his view in those dark and despondent times be better tested than by comparing, in the light of what has since occurred, than by contrasting Carlyle’s fulminations in this regard with Disraeli’s discernment.
“... There is a phenomenon,” says Carlyle, in his “Chartism,” “which one might call Paralytic Radicalism in these days, which gauges with statistic measuring-reed, sounds with Philosophic Politico-Economic plummet, the deep, dark sea of trouble, and, having taught us rightly what an infinite sea of trouble it is, sums up with the practical inference and use of consolation, That nothing whatever in it can be done by man, who has simply to sit still and look wistfully to ‘Time and General Laws;’ and thereupon, without so much as recommending suicide, coldly takes its leave of us....”
Disraeli, on the other hand—
“... ‘In this country,’ said ‘Sidonia,’ ‘since the peace, there has been an attempt to advocate a reconstruction of society on a purely rational basis. The principle of Utility has been powerfully developed. I speak not with lightness of the labours of the disciples of that school. I bow to intellect in every form; and we should be grateful to any school of philosophers, even if we disagree with them.... There has been an attempt to reconstruct society on a basis of material motives and calculations. It has failed. It must ultimately have failed under any circumstances; its failure in an ancient and densely peopled kingdom was inevitable. How limited is human reason, the profoundest inquirers are most conscious. We are not indebted to the reason of man for any of the great achievements which are the landmarks of human action and human progress. It was not Reason that besieged Troy; it was not Reason that sent forth the Saracen from the desert to conquer the world, that inspired the crusades, that instituted the monastic order; it was not Reason that produced the Jesuits; above all, it was not Reason that created the French Revolution....”
I may compare with this the light episode of the travelling Utilitarian in the much earlier Young Duke—