One closing word on the social aims of “Young England.” I may summarise them by the phrase “Health and Home.” They compassed the relief of industry, and they implied the effort to shame the knights of industry into some chivalry towards it.
“Pitt,” wisely comments Mr. Kebbel, “ended the quarrel between the King and the aristocracy, and reconciled the Whig doctrine of monarchy with the Whig doctrine of Parliament. Peel accommodated Toryism to the new régime established by the Reform Bill, and his name will always be identified with the progress of middle-class reform. Lord Beaconsfield carried Toryism into the next stage, and made it the business of his life to close up the gap in our social system which ... had been gradually widening, and to reconcile the working classes to the Throne, the Church, and the Aristocracy.”
To those who object that beyond Foreign Policy and the last Reform Bill, Disraeli effected little that is lasting, this is the answer. He was prouder of his many social reforms than of his Berlin Treaty. He was a born conciliator. He put a new and powerful leaven into the social lump, and he inspired the generous youth of the country. What he especially sought to mitigate was irresponsible Plutocracy, with a shifting stock of vagrant and unrelated Labour bought in the cheapest market, sold in the dearest; without stability, without ties, without allegiance.
“‘I am not against Capital’ (he makes “Enoch Craggs” declaim in Endymion), ‘what I am against is Capitalists.’
“‘But if we get rid of capitalists, we shall soon get rid of capital.’
“‘No, no,’ said Enoch, with his broad accent, shaking his head and with a laughing eye. ‘Master Thornberry (the Radical) has been telling you that. He is the most inveterate capitalist of the whole lot.... Master Thornberry is against the capitalists in land; but there are other capitalists nearer home, and I know more about them. I was reading a book the other day about King Charles—Charles I., whose head they cut off—I am very liking to that time, and read a good deal about it; and there was Lord Falkland, a great gentleman of those days, and he said when Archbishop Laud was trying on some of his priestly tricks, that “If he were to have a Pope, he would rather the Pope were at Rome than Lambeth.” So I sometimes think, if we are to be ruled by capitalists, I would sooner, perhaps, be ruled by gentlemen of estate, who have been long among us, than by persons who build big mills, who come from God knows where, and, when they have worked their millions out of our flesh and bone, go God knows where....’”
The two river bills carried at Disraeli’s instigation in 1852; the twenty-nine bills for ameliorating the position of factory operatives, passed despite those Radicals who predicted ruin for the manufacturer; the Employers and Workmen Acts, the Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act, the Poor Law Amendment Act, the Commons Act, the Artisans’ Dwellings Acts, the Public Health Act, the Rating Act, the Employers’ Liability Acts, the Agricultural Holdings Act, among many others, attest the victory of “popular Toryism” over “class Liberalism,” and the protection of suffering against selfishness. “Young England,” like all Utopian propaganda, was a romantic vision, and exceeded actuality. But in essence it has been eminently practical. Classes (of which England is made) are infinitely more in communion than they were in 1840. The effort to set them by the ears and to oppose the “masses” to the “classes” has ignominiously failed. The Church of England has roused itself to the national needs beyond all comparison with those days. The appeals of Sybil, Coningsby, and Tancred, ridiculed as rodomontade and branded as a charlatan’s dodge, have been rendered into action, and stand confessed as the deeply felt and pondered schemes of a poet and a statesman. “When,” says Bolingbroke, “great coolness of judgment is united to great warmth of imagination, we see that happy combination which we call a genius.” Such has proved Disraeli, and his inmost soul is embodied in that “Young England” which he organised and encouraged in a freezing atmosphere. Over fifty years ago he exhorted youth, at the Manchester Athenæum, as “the trustees of posterity.” “The man,” he then said, “who did not look up would look down, and he who did not aspire was destined perhaps to grovel.” The youth of to-day is far more conscious of its burden than was the youth of any class in the ’forties.
It was mainly on these social grounds that Disraeli resisted that system of free imports which has gone down to history as “Free Trade.” He never denied that it was calculated to enrich manufacturers and manufacturing centres; he grew to admit its benefits to the consumer, although these were by no means wholly due to its action; but he deprecated its “economic frenzy.” He held that it injured the producer[82] and played havoc both with land and distribution of labour. He thought it would eventually impair morale and physique, and sacrifice the general welfare to the material interests of a class; and, before it was nationally adopted, he considered that all ends would have been better served by the adoption of that system of reciprocal treaties[83]—on a principle called by him “at once national and cosmopolitan”—which was termed “Free Trade” in the days of Pitt, and had been inaugurated in 1713 by the abortive tariff of the great Utrecht Treaty; nor will it now be doubted that if in 1846 a comprehensive scheme of technical education had been set on foot, many of the evils engendered by over-competition would have been avoided, whatever fiscal system this country had chosen.
Writing so early as 1832 to the Wycombe electors, he even then declared: “... With regard to the Corn Laws, I will support any change, the basis of which is to relieve the consumer without injuring the farmer.” This was not the “Radical” doctrine of those days.
Disraeli has shown conclusively that in English history such a principle as absolute “protection” never existed. The original principle up to the time of Anne was to feed and supply a population then small enough so to be supported at home, and to encourage the wealth and power of trade. He has shown that Walpole, in this respect imitating the rival whom he destroyed, wisely followed this principle in its colonial applications; though he unwisely divorced productive trade from the land, and set the moneyed against the landed classes, the high finance against the country gentlemen, into whose shoes, however, it soon stepped. He has shown that when the colonial system broke down by the secession of our greatest and worst governed colony, Pitt the Second reverted to the old, the natural principle of exchange with the continent by tariff. The exigencies of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars forced an interlude; and for a time England was fed by foreign corn in free competition with her own—the very time when the loaf was dearest. But Lord Liverpool recurred to the principle; and Peel up to 1845—when his hand was confessedly forced by the appalling famine in Ireland—was in favour of the varying duties termed the sliding scale, as opposed to the fixed duties of the Whigs and the no-duties of the Radicals. That scale he eventually surrendered under the impulse of Lord John Russell’s “Edinburgh Letter,” and was suddenly converted by the Manchester School. In logic, and apart from human and national instincts, their theories were as irrefragable as those of our modern bimetallists, and of those ancient economists on whose doctrines they rested. But their lasting usefulness depended on the final achievement of a cosmopolitan confederation. Disraeli presaged with weighty reasons, scouted when they were detailed, that other nations would never fall into the scheme; he analysed the special conditions of France, Germany, and America. He also foretold, concerning corn, in common with all articles of certain and practically unlimited demand (as cotton and tea, for examples), that “the moment you have a settled market, in exact proportion to the demand, prices will fall. This is the inevitable rule.” He pressed further the grave peril, hardly yet realised, of England’s dependence on foreign supplies in time of war. But beyond all, he emphasised the social dangers—the misery for individuals and for classes. In this precipitate measure towards a material class-millennium, he discerned a large element of possible denationalisation, a displacement of labour which must unavoidably deluge the unwieldy towns, and which would to some extent relax the fibre of the nation and weaken its very means of defence, the replacement of excellence by cheapness, and of national welfare by wealth, the substitution for the landed interest which ought to preponderate though never to predominate, not, as seemed for the moment, by a high-toned class of responsible manufacturers, but eventually by an overwhelming clique of irresponsible capitalists with self-interests fluid as their portable property; the decrease of the national, the natural sway of large landowners inheriting a representative sense of accountability to tenants and dependants; a probably great fall in agriculture and its profits, prices and wages; the waste on a large scale and the depopulation of the soil itself; the special aggravation of ruinous elements in Ireland; an ultimate decay, when foreign competition should develop, of that very manufacturing interest the system was protested to advantage and intended to protect; for he divined already in the ’forties that to fight hostile tariffs with “free imports” could only benefit England while continental manufacturers were in comparative infancy.