“... In the protracted discussions to which this celebrated measure gave rise, nothing is more remarkable than the perplexities into which the speakers on both sides are thrown when they touch upon the nature of the representative principle. On the one hand, it was maintained that under the old system the people were virtually represented, while, on the other, it was triumphantly urged that, if the principle was conceded, the people should not be virtually, but actually represented. But who are the people? And where are you to draw a line? And why should there be any? It was urged that a contribution to the taxes was the constitutional qualification for the suffrage.” Here is repeated what he had urged in the ’thirties, and was to reiterate in the ’fifties, that indirect taxation is as much taxation as direct; that “the beggar who chews his quid as he sweeps a crossing is contributing to the imposts; ... he is one of the people, and he yields his quota to the public burthens.” The logical inference of such a qualification must be to convert the suffrage from being a privilege into being a right. Manhood suffrage, in common with all privilege unearned, is usually prized by none, and even disregarded by most.
“Amid these conflicting statements,” he continues, “it is singular that no member of either House should have recurred to the original character of these popular assemblies which have always prevailed among the northern nations.... When the crowned northman consulted on the welfare of his kingdom, he assembled the estates of his realm. Now, an estate is a class of the nation invested with political rights. Then appeared the estate of the clergy, of the barons, of other classes. In the Scandinavian kingdoms to this day the estate of the peasants sends its representatives to the Diet. In England, under the Normans, the Church and the Baronage were convoked together with the estate of the Community, a term which then probably described the inferior holders of land whose tenure was not immediate of the Crown. The Third Estate was so numerous that convenience suggested its appearance by representation, while the others, more limited, appeared, and still appear, personally. The Third Estate was reconstructed as circumstances developed themselves. It was a reform of Parliament when the towns were summoned. In treating the House of the Third Estate as the House of the People, and not as the House of a privileged class, the Ministry and Parliament of 1831 virtually conceded the principle of universal suffrage. In this point of view, the ten-pound franchise was an arbitrary, irrational, impolitic qualification. It had indeed the merit of simplicity, and so had the constitution of Abbé Sièyes. But its immediate and inevitable result was Chartism.
“But if the Ministry and Parliament of 1831 had announced that the time had arrived when the Third Estate should be enlarged and reconstructed, they would have occupied an intelligible position; and if, instead of simplicity of elements in its reconstruction, they had sought, on the contrary, varying and various materials which would have neutralised the painful predominance of any particular interest in the new scheme, and prevented those banded jealousies which have been its consequence, the nation would have found itself in a secure position. Another class, not less numerous than the existing one, and invested with privileges not less important, would have been added to the public estates of the realm, and the bewildering phrase, ‘the People,’ would have remained what it really is, a term of natural philosophy, and not of political science.”
* * * * *
The quality, then, of excellence, instead of the majorities of multitude, the variety of every approved influence, and not the undue weight of any overwhelming interest—these formed for him the true bases of representation. He was ever for levelling up instead of down; and, as we shall see, he was directly opposed to Mr. Hume’s fallacy (still rampant) that by our traditions representation depends only on taxation.
These ideas animated him throughout, and he achieved them in 1867, not, though it has been insinuated, by filching the proposals of his predecessors, but on the opposed principles which he continued to advocate from the ’thirties to the ’sixties. In 1835, two years before he entered Parliament, he expressed the same convictions in his Spirit of Whiggism. He showed that the two Houses were the “House of the Nation,” not the “House of the People,” but that both alike represent the “Nation.” He proceeded to prove by powerful illustration that, under whatever assumed form, political power will follow the distribution of property. He emphasised the “passion for industry” as an instrument of wealth as an English characteristic hostile to any future revolution in the distribution of property. He proved that in England revolution is ever a struggle for privilege, in Europe one against it; and he concluded, therefore, that “... If a new class rises in the State, it becomes uneasy to take its place in the natural aristocracy of the land.... The Whigs in the present day have risen on the power of the manufacturing interest. To secure themselves in their posts, the Whigs have given the new interest an undue preponderance. But the new interest has obtained its object and is content.... The manufacturer begins to lack in movement. Under Walpole the Whigs played the same game with the commercial interest. A century has passed, and the commercial interests are all as devoted to the Constitution as the manufacturers soon will be.... The consequence of our wealth is an aristocratic constitution, founded on an equality of civil rights. And who can deny that an aristocratic constitution resting on such a basis, where the legislative and even the executive office may be obtained by every subject of the realm, is in fact a noble democracy?”
These are no dry theories, but surely a true version of growing facts. Our Constitution is that of a natural aristocracy founded on popular privilege depending on the mutual exercise of duties. This free aristocracy distributes its power through the estates of the realm, and these orders should accord with the institutions to which they have given rise; for, as Disraeli said in 1852, they are “popular” without being absolutely “democratic.” When any one of them degenerates into undue monopoly, the whole body must suffer; and should such a catastrophe attain any permanence, one of the great institutions through which English nationality thrives would be shattered by the very order to which it corresponds. What Disraeli observes of the eventual reduction of each new ascendant interest to aristocratic influence, is beyond question. But that influence must rest on the due performance of civil and social responsibilities which empower it. Stripped of historical verbiage, the “constitution” harmonises classes through special privileges and reciprocal duties. Of the “middle-middles” he always spoke with respect, of the “lower-middles” with much sympathy, not least as victims of the income-tax;[71] but he ever doubted their governing capacity as a class; and when Sir Robert Peel’s “monarchy of the middle classes” came into swing, Disraeli feared the plutocracy which has happened, and which, when financial, is more easily freed from political responsibility. The choice offered between wealth omnipotent and mob-despotism, is a choice between Scylla and Charybdis. To obviate it, Disraeli created in 1867 an artisan franchise, accorded as a boon at length earned by character and intelligence, and based on the rating principle, which affords a pledge of permanence; at the same time, he strove to countervail the growing irresponsibility of wealth by relieving unprotected land of its burdens and unrepresented labour of its degradation. By the first, he strove to retain that sap of the soil which underlies the English character, the English health, the English order, through local government, the English freedom, and the English steadiness; for (and this was said in 1852), “... Laws which, by imposing unequal taxes, discourage that investment (i.e. capital invested in land, the return for which is rent) are, irrespective of their injustice, highly impolitic; for nothing contributes more to the enduring prosperity of a country than the natural deposit of its surplus capital in the improvement of its soil....” By the last, he tried to redress that social misery which the measures of 1846 had not removed and had even increased: the overcrowding of the towns, the displacement of labour, the subsidising of foreign agriculture to the decultivation of English land, the enthronement of Mammon and materialism—all denounced and foreseen by him with wonderful prescience. Very soon after the repeal of the Corn Laws, discerning, as Disraeli did, its drift of denationalising tendencies, its certainty of some social and physical demoralisation, as well as the possible changes in European competition which might necessitate another “commercial and social revolution,” he inveighed against the inference that “we are to be rescued from the alleged power of one class, only to fall under the avowed dominion of another;” he believed that “the monarchy of England, its sovereign power mitigated by the acknowledged authority of the estates of the realm, has its root in the hearts of the people, and is capable of securing the happiness of the nation and the power of the State.” His peroration—some of which I shall give in the next chapter—is a noble flight of hope. He discerned at once that the transformation scene of 1846 would affect society more than politics, and that the next extension of the franchise must consequently prove a social antidote as well as a social sedative.
In 1839, refuting Mr. Hume’s hobby already alluded to, he showed that the theory is nowhere inherent in our Constitution, but is a doctrinaire supplement of alien origin; that the “Commons” are a political order invested with power for the performance of duties, just as the Peers are a similar order, but needing no representation; he re-urged that the House of Commons was the representative of the “nation”—an organic whole, and not of the “people”—a vague abstraction. He had even then already pointed out that, historically, the delegates before the Restoration had perverted the national traditions by announcing, more than a century before the French Revolution, the sovereignty of the “people.” He once more stoutly denied that “taxation and representation went hand-in-hand” according to our constitution. There was representation without election, as in the case of the Church in the Lords, for the Crown appointed the bishops, not the clergy. And as regards taxation, it was indirect, as well as, unfortunately, direct. In the same year, protesting against Lord John Russell’s assumption of a “monarchy of the middle classes,” Disraeli repeated that in this country “the exercise of political power must be associated with great public duties,” just as in 1846, when justifying the burdens on land so long as protection was accorded it, he asserted that great honours demand great burdens. Again, in 1848, Disraeli, opposing Mr. Hume once more, and protesting against the finality of the reconstruction of 1832, even before Lord John Russell declared the question free for both parties in 1853 and 1856—strongly condemned the radical scheme just because it did not “... enable the labouring classes to take their place in the Constitution of the country.” “If there be any mistake,” he said, “more striking than another in the settlement of 1832, ... it is, in my opinion, that the bill of 1832 took the qualification of property in too hard and rigid a sense, as the only qualification which should exist in this country for the exercise of political rights.” In 1852, he again dinned into unappreciative ears the necessity for a genuinely industrial franchise, though he was not satisfied that Lord John Russell’s £5 franchise would so operate. In 1859 and 1867, Disraeli tried hard to confer franchises on education and thrift, but Mr. Bright sneered at them as “fancy franchises,” Mr. Gladstone scoffed at them, and in forwarding the great measure of labour suffrage by the compelled co-operation of both sides of the House, Disraeli had to surrender safeguards he never ceased to desire and to regret, for they are founded on the State recognition of individual excellence, instead of on the State manipulation of mere party mechanism.
“Is the possession of the franchise,” demanded Disraeli in 1851, “to be a privilege, the privilege of industry and public virtue, or is it to be a right—the right of every one, however degraded, however indolent, however unworthy?... I am for the system which maintains in this country a large and free Government, having confidence in the energies and faculties of man. Therefore I say, make the franchise a privilege, but let it be the privilege of the civic virtues. Honourable gentlemen opposite would degrade the franchise to the man, instead of raising the man to the franchise. If you want to have a free aristocratic country, free because aristocratic (I use the word ‘aristocratic’ in its noblest sense—I mean that aristocratic freedom which enables every man to achieve the best position in the State to which his qualities entitle him), I know not what we can do better than adhere to the mitigated monarchy of England, with power in the Crown, order in one estate of the realm, and liberty in the other. It is from that happy combination that we have produced a state of society that all other nations look upon with admiration and envy.”
In all these considerations, the social results of measures and formulæ were ever uppermost in his mind. What he had ever been resolute to secure was, as he avowed even in 1850, “the industrial franchise,” which the resettlement of 1832 had thrown to the winds.