It was an age of emancipation, and Peel liberated commerce. In so doing he disjointed Labour. His two great reforms—that of the Tariff and that of the Corn Laws—designed as inter-remedial, were certainly calculated to disturb and dislocate Labour, the one by unloosing the full forces of straining competition; the other by revolutionising the centres of industry, by transferring population from the country to the city, by impairing the landed interests, both high and low, by shifting the distribution of toil. At the very moment before his relaxation of the Corn Laws, Peel, conscious that he would disorganise Labour,[75] had been unconsciously converted to the “right to physical happiness” system of Manchester—the dryest embodiment of the theory of the French “physical” equalitarians, on which I touched in my last chapter. His economics of “cheapness,” the results of which he feared in relation to the distribution of employment, thus became associated with a principle that, as I have shown, demands “unlimited employment of labour.” He freed Commerce, but he unsettled Labour, already rebelling against the harsh workings of the new Poor Laws. Disraeli asked himself if reduced tariffs would augment purchasing power, if dethroned land would be succeeded by any novel power for alleviating the Labour thus unhinged. And, further, he asked whether the middle class of 1846 would not reap the benefit without bearing the burden, just as it had done in the Reform of 1832. What would be the effect of discontent on the institutions of the country? The two great problems during the whole decade of 1830–40, when there had occurred a real renaissance, an awakening, had been Democracy and the Church. Was Democracy to be detached from the order and orders of the State? was it to be an anti-national solvent? And was the Church to realise its mission as a society of believers instead of being perverted into a library of assent? So far Chartism and Apostasy had been the answers. Were Sir Robert Peel’s arithmetical measures, excellent as they were in theory, any practical power for regeneration? Chartism’s inner causes had been both the want of employment and the despair of the employed. In 1840, he proclaimed, to his leader’s dismay, his deep sympathy, not with Chartism, “but with the Chartists,” preyed on by ambitious leaders, and victimised by official indifference. Throughout he regarded the whole “condition of England” question from its moral and social standpoints—to which economics should be subordinate—as touching Labour at one end and Leadership at the other.
The claims of Labour, he says, are paramount as those of property. Property and Labour should be allies, and not foes; nay, Labour is itself the property of the poor, out of which the property of the rich is accumulated. The gentlemen of England should form the advanced guard of Labour; and, moreover, the master-workmen themselves compose “a powerful aristocracy.” So long as property was allied both to land and manufacture, a feeling of public spirit and public duty in the main characterised the large employers. But a financial oligarchy was bound to arise, and has arisen, linked by no visible ties to the workers, and generous more by gifts of “ransom” than by personal participation; a system of commerce, too, without leaders, which now works in groups and merely on “cheapest market” principles, has sprung into being. And, moreover, the vast multiplication of machines tended all along, and tends more and more with the huge increase of intercommunication, to exalt mechanism into life and to degrade the labourer into a machine, himself devoid alike of powers and of duties. Over and over again Disraeli championed, not only the employment of the people, but variety in their employments. He is never wearied of scathing any system which might enhance the grinding monotony of mechanical toil. And all this, while the clamour for material enjoyment rises higher hour by hour; and the labourer is driven, in his hard quest after squalid enjoyments, more into the dark corners of organisations for coercing a State expected to pauperise him, than to philanthropists eager to raise his condition by preaching over his head, before the roof that covers it is decent.
To combat the latter evils—among others—Disraeli started the “Young England Movement,” and afterwards protested that the old system of trade reciprocity, with tariffs as levers, had proved a better guarantee for social happiness than the retail wealth system of “free imports.” At the same time, as I shall notice, after the repeal of the Corn Laws had cheapened commodities, he was decidedly of opinion that to go back would be too violent an upheaval, unless sanctioned by the deliberate voice of an instructed nation under absolutely new conditions. To forestall the dangers of financial and commercial plutocracy,[76] he planned and supported the many alleviative measures with which his name and Lord Shaftesbury’s are connected, in the teeth, be it remembered, of the Radical and Utilitarian opposition; while he proclaimed in the ’seventies, as he had before proclaimed in the ’fifties, his programme of Sanitas sanitatum—Health before Wealth. He foresaw, too, the overcrowding of huge cities through the waste of the soil, with all its attendant miseries; even so early as 1846 he had urged that “nothing is so expensive as a vicious population;” and he felt, also, that if life without toil is “a sorry sort of lot,” toil without life is an infinitely worse one. Above all, he looked in this matter, as throughout, far more to the regeneration of society than to State interference, so easily evaded and so devitalising. And he lamented the colossal enlargement of the towns, which isolates while it excites.
“... In cities,” he protests in Sybil, “that condition is aggravated. A density of population implies a severer struggle for existence, and a consequent repulsion of elements brought into too close contact. In great cities men are brought together by the desire of gain. They are not in a state of co-operation, but of isolation, as to the making of fortunes; and for all the rest, they are careless of neighbours. Christianity teaches us to love our neighbours as ourself; modern society acknowledges no neighbour.” But he descried already a rift in the gloom. “Society, still in its infancy, is beginning to feel its way.”
The late ’thirties and early ’forties, with their agitations against middle-class apathy and aristocratic neglect, witnessed to the reality of the disease which was known as the “condition-of-England question.” Many of the nobles were not noble; never had been “so many gentlemen, and so little gentleness.”[77] Exclusion from the suffrage prevented the natural representation of injuries, and compelled Labour to band itself covertly, and often under leaders embittered and embittering with personal and clashing ambitions. The Reform Act, contended Disraeli, had not reposed the government in abler hands, nor elevated the head or enlarged the heart of Parliament. “... On the contrary, one House of Parliament” (he is writing in 1845) “has been irremediably degraded into the decaying position of a mere court of registry, possessing great privileges, on condition that it never exercises them; while the other Chamber, that at the first blush and to the superficial exhibits symptoms of almost unnatural vitality, ... assumes on a more studious inspection somewhat of the character of a select vestry fulfilling municipal rather than imperial offices, and beleaguered by critical and clamorous millions who cannot comprehend why a privileged and exclusive senate is requisite to perform functions which immediately concern all....”
Undoubtedly Labour is far better situated in 1904 than it was in 1844, and undoubtedly this improvement is partly due to Disraeli’s influence and action. The ideals of “Young England” have borne fruit. Our “Toynbee Halls” and university settlements, the recognition of noblesse oblige, the trained public opinion that superior light and leading are in duty bound to lead and enlighten as well as help the poor; that the poor are their tenants; that—
“Not what we give, but what we share:
The gift without the giver is bare;”
—these and their tone are its outcome. His policies of health and humanisation, of wholesome housing before technical teaching, for first emancipating Labour from carking cares and then entrusting it with public duties, have prospered. Chartism and its allied mutinies have subsided into citizenship. The artisans of to-day are princes in comparison with what they were. The contracted sloth of the utilitarian middle class has been shaken to follow what emanated from the universities. In his Guildhall speeches of 1874 and 1875 Disraeli could point with pride to Capital at one with Labour, and to operatives in sympathy with privileges which they shared. At this moment they are catered as well as cared for; and yet their independence is far completer than when it was aggressive because it was cowed.
But none the less, the fatal overcrowding which he foresaw, the self-divestment by Mammon of direct and immediate responsibilities, has produced a fresh class of the “sweated” and rookeried masses, multiplying the unemployed and—what is worse—the unemployable in compound ratio, and still menacing the physique of the nation. The pressure of poverty is ever with us; of its wretchedness research has indeed called forth a science. As what we deemed the lowest ascends, a fresh depth of distress is always bared to our shame. The democratisation of local government through the county councils has indeed done much, and will do more, for the proletariate; but their lack, with notable exceptions, of high leadership, their tendency to municipal centralisation, their careless and inexperienced prodigality with the public purse, their bias towards pauperisation, their tendency to promote the feverish political ambitions of a class, and sometimes to confuse the cause of industry with that of its captains, remain a danger, though, I believe, a vanishing danger, to the State.
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