Most of this in great measure he foresaw, and in all this has been amply justified. What he did not anticipate was the enormous stature which these developments have now reached. Multitudes of telling instances might be given from those remarkable speeches, the pith and point of which were always how this change would affect the labouring classes. I will single out two alone, and both from that great speech of 1846 on Mr. Miles’s amendment, which, in the light of the present, reads like a continuous prophecy. Speaking of the displacement of labour in connection with the then sparse distribution of the precious metals, which he pointed out six years later must again modify the situation owing to the recent and immense discoveries of gold, he said: “... Every year and in every market English labour will receive less in return of foreign articles. But gold and silver are foreign articles; and in every year and in every market English labour will have less command of gold and silver....” “... Supposing you import five millions more from Russia than you ever did before, how will you make your payments, if they take no more additional goods from you than they do now?... I know it will be replied they manage these things by means of bills and so on. But that will not improve the case. Suppose ... you buy Russian bills on Brazil and New York to the amount of those five millions, and you thus complete your transaction. But you have already supplied the Americans and the Brazilians with as much of your goods as you cared to take, and if you want to sell more to them, you must do so at a great sacrifice....”
Once more, as regards foreign competition. He forecasted that of America; and in demolishing the argument that Prussia’s protective Zollverein was being “shaken;” he instanced Mecklenburg, induced by English remonstrances to abstain from joining, but now complaining that: “... After all the sacrifices we have made, if the Zollverein are to have free importation to England, we have no advantage whatever, and the best thing we can now do is to join and ... advance the cause of native industry.”
Disraeli resolved that if the repeal became law, the burdens which had been thrown on the land, because of the privileges which were its ancient trust, should in fairness be mitigated; that it should compete as freely as other manufacturers, for he never ceased to object to a distinction, as manufacturers, between the farmer, the miller, and the mill-owner.
“... I know,” he urged in a speech full of dignity and wisdom, “that we have been told that ... we shall derive from this great struggle not merely the repeal of the Corn Laws, but the transfer of power from one class to another, to one distinguished for its intelligence and wealth—the manufacturers of England. My conscience assures me that I have not been slow in doing justice to the intelligence of that class; certain I am that I am not one of those who envy them their wide and deserved prosperity; but I must confess my deep mortification that in an age of political regeneration, when all social evils are ascribed to the operation of class interests, it should be suggested that we are to be rescued from the alleged power of one class, only to sink under the avowed dominion of another;” and he concluded with the hope that if the monarchy of England, “mitigated by the acknowledged authority of the estates of the realm,” was to prove “a worn-out dream,” if England was to sink “under the thraldom of capital, ... of those who while they boast of their intelligence are prouder of their wealth,” if a new force must be summoned to maintain “the immemorial monarchy of England,” that “novel power” might be found in “the invigorating energies of an educated and enfranchised people.”
All this has happened. A thraldom to the middle class came into being, and was tempered by Disraeli’s own franchise bill, and by an education act sufficient, though not conceived in the decentralised form which Disraeli desired, but never won the opportunity of effecting. And out of this thraldom is springing that other of plutocracy—one which exercises great political power without assuming great political duties; one in the interest of which, it seems to me, some of the new fiscal changes now being mooted are designed.
These wholesale changes I cannot but feel that Disraeli would have withstood. Many features in Mr. Chamberlain’s plan would have enlisted his sympathy, but in their entirety he would have thought them hazardous. Some protection for the grazier he might have upheld; he always laid stress on the importance of home markets. A moderate duty on corn, in partial, though most inadequate, aid of agriculture, he might have favoured as a necessary lever for colonial reciprocity; especially as it would be spread over the untaxed colonial, the foreign dutiable imports. It would scarcely much affect the price of bread, and the very Peelites forewent the fallacy of the dear loaf; although, as in 1852, he would show that even a four shilling duty on imported corn could never restore the land to its former footing. “We ought,” he would again argue, “to go to the country on principle, and not upon details. We say we think there should be measures brought forward” (as since have been brought forward) “to put the cultivators of the soil in a position to allow them to compete with foreign industry.” What, however, he then urged with all his force was that the fiscal revolution had confessedly caused vexatious taxes. “Sir,” he said in 1852, “I do now and ever shall look on the changes which took place in 1846, both as regards the repeal of the Corn Laws and the alteration of the Sugar Duties, as totally unauthorised. I opposed them ... from an apprehension of the great suffering which must be incurred by such a change. That suffering in a great degree, though it may be limited to particular classes, has in some instances been even severer than we anticipated. But I deny that at any time after those laws were passed, either I, or the bulk of those with whom I have the honour to act, have ever maintained a recurrence to the same laws that regulated those industries previously to 1846.” He then showed the difference between Lord Derby’s proposed “fixed duty” and the old state of affairs; while he continued: “... When we come to this question of fixed duty, ... I must say now what I said before in this House, that I will not pin my political career on any policy which is not after all a principle, but a measure. Our wish is, that the interests which we believe were unjustly treated in 1846,[84] should receive the justice which they deserve, with as little injury to those who may have benefited more than they were entitled to, as it is possible for human wisdom to devise. Sir, I call that reconciling the interests of the consumer and the producer, when you do not permit the consumer to flourish by placing unjust taxes upon the producer; while at the same time you resort to no tax which gives to the producer; an unjust and artificial price for his production....”
But any prohibitive tax on foreign manufactures—that is another matter, one which would protect certain trades at the expense of the community, and aggravate the very evils which Free Trade introduced. Such a system must press all the harder on that class of consumers whose pay would remain unaffected by its results, and who would, in fact, be subsidising our colonies out of their emptied pockets. The sentiment of the colonies he would have prized beyond measure, but other means for riveting it might be found; and in the undeveloped condition of many among them, would not a Canadian favouritism sow a harvest of jealousies? Moreover, the colonial population as a whole is still far too scanty for the replacement of our markets abroad; and further, the two main channels of cheap capital and British prosperity—our carrying trade and London’s commercial position as the clearing-house of the world—might be revolutionised by changes, to which no limit could be fixed. And again, the remission of Income Tax ought in justice to accompany such a system, for that tax was revived by Peel expressly because the revenue had to be reimbursed for its losses on adopting the measures for free imports. With respect to “dumping,”[85] its conditions contain its cure. England, no longer the main workshop of the world, cannot perhaps be so generous as heretofore, but she can still afford to be generous. As for the promise of higher wages through protective duties, wages are more likely to rise through the resumption of gold imports from South Africa; while the joint result of retaliatory tariffs and such imports would be doubly to enhance the price of commodities for the mass. On the other hand, the vision of a self-supporting empire he would honour, and equally the sincere and commanding zeal of its prophet. But he would surely argue that the times were far from ripe, and that small and gradual beginnings might lay firmer foundations than a colossal combination of incompatibles. Again, he would, as the writer fancies, deplore a loud and unsolicited appeal to the passions of a multitude and the greed of a class easily thus led into a lordship of mob despotism. At the same time, he would certainly recognise, as Mr. Chamberlain alone has fully recognised, the crying need for a better distribution of employment.
Disraeli over and over again affirmed that since the nation had endorsed this vital change, its reversal was impracticable unless the considered national demand for it became overwhelming. It was one of his cardinal ideas that without such deliberate demand no great change of national policy should be risked in any department. In 1852, he and Lord Derby appealed to the country on a modified issue of this question—that of a fixed duty. The country’s answer Disraeli considered as final, even in that regard; nor, so far as he was able, would he ever permit these momentous issues to be reopened by any party or section. He remained devoted to the reciprocity principle. He believed that “give and take” is the foundation of trade which is barter. But, though he descried rocks ahead in the future, he recognised that the consumer had benefited by the free opening of our ports, that so far as material wealth was concerned, England had become the emporium and the banker of the world. On the other hand, this very prosperity had aggravated the misery of a class and had raised those problems which are still engaging anxious attention. Utilitarianism, the “cheapest market” theory, had triumphed in the establishment of unrestricted competition, but the upshot of that competition was an increasing strain and disorganisation of native labour. With these evils he left the quickened spirit of “Young England” to cope; while he himself strove to meet them by the remission of the now unjust burdens laid on the land, his industrial franchise bill, and his cherished policy of sanitas sanitatum. He had, at any rate, largely influenced the opinion of his generation in bringing home to men’s minds and consciences the equality of the rights of Labour with those of property, and the adequacy of constitutional forms to enforce them; nor did he ever cease to press them in his writings and speeches. But as a statesman he had always to choose between evils; and of these a forced disturbance of a nationally adopted system, which by hasty expedients might tend to disorder and to dispersal, he ever considered the graver. To experiment he always opposed experience.
Speaking only two years before his death, he said—
“So far as I understand ... reciprocity is barter. I have always understood that barter was the first evidence of civilisation[86]—that it was exactly the state of human exchange that separated civilisation from savagery.... My noble friend (Lord Bateman) read some extracts, ... and he honoured me by reading an extract from the speech I then made in the other House of Parliament. That was a speech in favour of reciprocity—a speech which defined what was then thought to be reciprocity, and indicated the means by which reciprocity could be obtained. I do not want to enter into the discussion whether the principle was right or wrong, but it was acknowledged in public life, favoured and pursued by many statesmen who conceived that by the negotiation of a treaty of commerce, by reciprocal exchange and the lowering of duties, the products of the two negotiating countries would find a freer access and consumption in the two countries than they formerly possessed. But when my noble friend taunts me with a quotation of some rusty phrase of mine forty years ago, I must remind him that we had elements then on which treaties of reciprocity could be negotiated. At that time, although the great changes of Sir Robert Peel had taken place, there were one hundred and sixty-eight articles in the tariff which were materials by which you could have negotiated, if that was a wise and desirable policy, commercial treaties of reciprocity. What is the number you now have in the tariff? Twenty-two. Those who talk of negotiating treaties of reciprocity—have they the materials?... You have lost the opportunity.... The policy which was long ago abandoned, you cannot now resume. You have at this moment a great number of commercial treaties ... nearly forty, with some of the most considerable countries in the world ... in which ‘the most-favoured-nation’ clause is included. Well, suppose you are for a system of reciprocity as my noble friend proposes. He enters into negotiations with a state; he says: ‘You complain of our high duties on some particular articles. We have not many, we have a few left; we shall make some great sacrifice to induce you to enter into a treaty for an exchange of products.’ But the moment you contemplate agreeing with the state, ... every other of the forty states with ‘the most-favoured-nation’ clause claims exactly the same privilege. The fact is, practically speaking, reciprocity, whatever its merits, is dead.... The opportunity, like the means, has been relinquished; and if this is the only mode in which we are to extricate ourselves from the great distress which prevails, our situation is hopeless. I should be very sorry to say, whatever the condition of the country, its condition is hopeless....”