“... It may be said you have established a democratic government in England, because you have established household suffrage, and you have gone much further than the measures which you previously opposed.... Now, I am not at all prepared to admit that household suffrage with the constitutional conditions upon which we have established it—namely, residence and rating—has established a democratic government. But it is unnecessary to enter into that consideration, because we have not established household suffrage in England. There are, I think I may say, probably four million houses in England. Under our ancient laws, and under the Act of Lord Grey, about one million of those householders possessed the franchise. Under the Act of 1867, something more than half a million will be added to that million. Well, then, I want to know if there are four million householders, and one and a half million in round numbers possess the suffrage, how can ‘household suffrage’ be said to be established in England?”

Thus the proper balance of power, which the bill of 1832 impaired by the exclusion of labour and the enfeeblement of aristocracy, was restored. The people were at last reconciled to their leaders. It had been by accident that the Whigs found themselves arbiters of the national fate in 1832, and it may be conceded that, according to their lights, they honestly did their best. To Lord Grey and his colleagues Disraeli was always just and respectful. But the breach then made demanded the amends which Disraeli had meditated for years. By cancelling qualifications arbitrary and irrational, by conferring political power only in conjunction with social and political responsibility, by regarding society more than the state, and influence than interest, by persistent courage and purpose, this great project succeeded and has endured. The day may come in the process of generations when, as Disraeli has imagined elsewhere, industry may cease to repose upon industrialism alone, and representation may also cease to seem the sole machinery of politics; when enlightenment and public opinion may form a real national conscience; and when leadership may prove itself independent of artificial forms. But till that day arrives, it will be madness in England to give each citizen, irrespective of any qualification but existence, a voice in the Legislature, or entrust them with the sway of an empire. His avowed aim and his accomplished triumph were “to restore those rights which were lost in 1832 to the labouring class of the country,” and to “bring back again that fair partition of political power which the old Constitution of the country recognised.” A year after its enactment, in his great Irish speech he spoke of it as “a most beneficent and noble Act,” and he added that he looked “with no apprehension whatever to the appeal that will be made to the people under the provisions of the Act. I believe you will have a Parliament full of patriotic and national sentiment, whose decisions will add spirit to the community and strength to the State.” “Time,” which was “Contarini Fleming’s” record in the book of “Adam Besso,” has proved the fulness of his foresight and the skill of the adjustment.

The mistrust of this great measure at the time, even by men of intelligence, may be justified by the objection that in the distant future Labour may resume its war against authority in its coming conflict with Capital; and that a rigid conservatism of defiance is preferable to an adaptive conservatism of development. But whenever that hour strikes, it will be seen that Disraeli’s statesmanship has prevented the revolution which a conservatism of defiance must have prepared and entailed. Disraeli will have helped to preserve the English immunity from the violences which mark such upheavals elsewhere. He sought with all his might to quicken Capital into duty, and to hearten Labour by conferring privilege, not as a sop, but as a reward, while, by alleviating misery through creative enactments, he has conservatised Labour and kept it in touch with the national scheme.

It may not, perhaps, have been wholly realised how harmonious Disraeli’s utterances respecting the progressive principles of representation in England have been. That is my excuse for treating the subject with insistence, though by no means with completeness. To have done so would risk the exhaustion of the reader as well as of the subject. Disraeli prevented the raid of alien and disruptive democracy from making England a home. Out of the common he extracted the choice. He revived the democracy long inherent in the English Constitution; he naturalised the democratic idea on the soil of tradition and order; and thereby he cemented the solidarity of the State and the welfare of the nation. He proved that “progress” is not synonymous with push, and that in going forward it is wise also to look back, lest the goal should be a precipice. Still, long as this disquisition has necessarily been, I may hope that it is not dull, since, in Mrs. Malaprop’s aphorism, “I don’t think there is a superstitious article in it.”

CHAPTER III
LABOUR—“YOUNG ENGLAND”—“FREE TRADE”

In Vivian Grey, Disraeli mocks at the attitude of the early political economists towards Labour in the person of “Mr. Toad,” who defined it as “that exertion of mind or body which is not the involuntary effect of the influence of natural sensations.” In the second of his long series of election addresses, he promised to “withhold his support from every ministry which will not originate some great measure to ameliorate the condition of the lower orders, ... to liberate our shackled industry....” The subject is closely allied to much already surveyed. Here, however, I shall for the most part leave politics alone, and confine myself mainly to the social aspects of the question, for from this standpoint he himself approached it. On Mr. Villiers’ resolutions in 1852, he distinctly stated that he and his friends had opposed the repeal of the Corn Laws on the main ground that it would “prove injurious to the interests of Labour;” on the subsidiary ground that it would injure “considerable interests in the country.” He had, two years before, urged that it “was a question of labour, or it was nothing.” Even in the Revolutionary Epick, fifteen years earlier, he had sung, “The many labour, and the few enjoy.”

The extracts given in the preceding chapter from Disraeli’s speech on Mr. Hume’s motion in 1848, illustrate the central ideas which he enforced with singular pertinacity in all his published works and public utterances.

They are mainly these.