‘The Tory party in this country is the national party; it is the really democratic party of England. It supports the institutions of the country, because they have been established for the common good, and because they secure the equality of civil rights without which, whatever may be its name, no government can be free, and based upon which principle every government, however it may be styled, is, in fact, a democracy.’
B. Disraeli: A Vindication of the English Constitution.
1882-1885
THE conditions of British politics during the Parliament of 1880, whether in the House of Commons or abroad in the country, were peculiar—perhaps unprecedented. Mr. Gladstone’s Administration, outwardly so powerful alike in the capacity of its members and the number and fidelity of its supporters, was divided by zig-zag, oblique, inconsistent yet fundamental dissensions. Nor were these disturbances the temporary or accidental effect of particular men or measures. There were important measures. There were earnest, ambitious men. But something more lay behind the unrest and uncertainties of the day. Not merely the decay of a Government or the natural over-ripeness of a party produced the agitations of 1885 and 1886. It was the end of an epoch. The long dominion of the middle classes, which had begun in 1832, had come to its close and with it the almost equal reign of Liberalism. The great victories had been won. All sorts of lumbering tyrannies had been toppled over. Authority was everywhere broken. Slaves were free. Conscience was free. Trade was free. But hunger and squalor and cold were also free; and the people demanded something more than liberty. The old watchwords still rang true; but they were not enough. And how to fill the void was the riddle that split the Liberal party. It happened, moreover, that at this very time, already so critical, a Liberal Government had been forced to deal with all kinds of affairs for the efficient conduct of which their formulas furnished no clue. They were compelled to intervene by force of arms in Egypt, to repress popular movements, to banish popular leaders, to hang revolutionaries, to devise ingenious instruments of Coercion, to mutilate Parliamentary procedure and to curtail the freedom of debate. And thus, while half the Cabinet were ransacking the past for weapons of Executive authority, others were groping dimly towards a vague Utopia.
All this confusion was still worse confounded by the imminence of a further extension of the franchise. The ‘ten-pounder’ and the ‘householder’ had been stages of growth. The evolution was now to be completed, or practically completed. The government of a world-wide Empire was, for the first time in human experience, to be thrown unreservedly to the millions. And no man could predict the results of that experiment. There seemed to be no reason to assume that any large body of working-class electors would ever vote Tory. Who could possibly have foreseen that whether from conscious choice between men and parties or from the unsuspected operation of irresistible forces till then latent, the millions would peacefully hand back their powers to political organisations and so to established authority; that enfranchised multitudes would constitute themselves the buttresses of privilege and property; that a free press would by its freedom sap the influence of debate and through its prosperity become the implement of wealth; that members and constituencies would become less independent, not more independent; that Ministers would become more powerful, not less powerful; that the march would be ordered backward along the beaten track, not forward in some new direction; and that after a period of convulsion and flux, twenty years of Tory Government would set in? Who would have listened to such paradox with patience?
The differences of mood and aim which racked the Ministerial party were reflected, only less vividly, in the Tory ranks. A Conservative Opposition smarting under what they regarded as most undeserved defeat and hampered by leaders to whose defects no one could be blind, had been forced constantly to support their antagonists upon the main issues of their policy. They found the Liberal Government engaged in assertions of authority, at home and abroad, with which all their deepest instincts inclined them to sympathise. The enforcement of the sternest forms of Coercion in Ireland, the suspension and suppression of disorderly members at Westminster, the launching of great warlike enterprises across the sea, were all public objects which upon the highest patriotic grounds commanded Tory assent. Upon the other hand they hated with the fiercest animosity of faction the Ministers who directed these affairs. They knew that a crisis was approaching. They feared—not without reason—the formidable union of Gladstone and democracy. They believed that he was ruining the country and was prepared to dishonour the Empire. Yet they found themselves repeatedly compelled to vote with him; and even when opportunities of legitimate attack were offered, no one of their champions seemed able to strike the blow.
The hesitancy and incompetence which marked the conduct of the Conservative Opposition—although to some extent due to very lofty motives of public duty—filled with exasperation the militant Tories in the country. Members of Parliament, confronted week after week by definite issues on which votes had to be recorded, found themselves drawn inch by inch into supporting whole spheres of Governmental action. Their friends outside took a more general view. They saw what they took to be a succession of feeble surrenders before Mr. Gladstone’s prestige. They saw their representatives, bewitched by his authority and eloquence, in the same Lobby with their arch-enemy. They saw the Liberal Government staggering ponderously forward, in spite of disunion, difficulty, and peril, through a succession of mismanaged warlike undertakings to a series of pernicious domestic reforms. And no man apparently to stand in their path! And then, all of a sudden, a man arose alone, or almost alone, to do battle on their behalf. They watched him struggling day after day against overwhelming odds, overthrown a score of times, deserted and even tripped up by those who should have sustained him; yet always returning with inexhaustible activity to the attack and gaining from month to month substantial and undoubted successes.
The Conservative party outside Parliament had as little real liking for much that Lord Randolph Churchill said about Ireland and Egypt as their leaders and representatives in the House. They could not find any sympathy for the followers of Mr. Parnell. They did not enjoy being told that British troops had been used in Egypt to collect the bondholders’ debts, or the description of such thrilling episodes as the bombardment of a city by an ironclad fleet, a cavalry charge by moonlight, or the storming of an entrenched position as ‘tawdry military glories.’ They could not join whole-heartedly in eulogies of a Pasha whom British justice had condemned to life-long exile, or in attacks upon the morality and humanity of a Khedive whom British bayonets had replaced upon his throne. All this, even while they cheered, seemed to them unpatriotic. But they could not overlook the commotion which Lord Randolph Churchill’s denunciations wrought in the Gladstonian ranks, or the embarrassments in which they involved the Radical supporters of the Ministry. They loved their country much, but they hated Gladstone more; and they consoled themselves with the belief (which did Lord Randolph Churchill less justice than he deserved) that he did not really mean all he said; that it was only his way of beating the Grand Old Man; and that, after all, he was Jingo and True Blue at heart.
During the years which had passed since the new Parliament had met, the working-class supporters of the Conservative party, particularly in the great towns, had come to look with especial favour upon Lord Randolph Churchill. To these were added a considerable defection from those who had hitherto counted themselves Liberals. He touched the imagination of the English people; and he appealed especially to their youth. ‘The young men of England,’ he exclaimed, ‘are joining the Tory party in great numbers. The youth of England is on our side.’ He was, indeed, soon forced to defend himself from the assumption ‘that any expression of opinion from a person who has no claim to the monumental age of 101, is a breach of decorum, almost an act of indecency, and an indication of incurable vice.’ ‘Youth,’ he said (Edinburgh, December 20, 1883), ‘is no doubt a great calamity, and it appears to excite all the worst passions of human nature among those who no longer possess it. But we may, I think, chase away such depressing reflections by remembering that youth is a calamity which grows less bitter and less poignant as the years go by, and that by the sheer and simple process of living and survival we must, each in our turn, approach the summit of the wave.’
By the end of 1882 he was already unquestionably the most popular speaker in the Conservative party. In 1884 and 1885 he equalled, if he did not surpass, Mr. Gladstone himself in the interest and enthusiasm which his personality aroused. Wherever he went he was received by tremendous throngs and with extraordinary demonstrations of goodwill. In times when good Conservatives despaired of the fortunes of their party under a democratic franchise and even, making a virtue of necessity, regarded it as almost immoral to court a working-class vote, and when the chiefs of Toryism looked upon the resisting powers of small shop and lodging-house keepers, of suburban villadom, and of the genial and seductive publican as almost the only remaining bulwarks of the Constitution, Lord Randolph Churchill boldly enlisted the British nation in defence of Church and State. At a time when Liberal orators and statesmen, ‘careering about the country,’ as Lord Randolph described them, ‘calling themselves "the people of England,"’ were looking forward to an election which should relegate the Conservative party to the limbo of obsolete ideas, they were disconcerted by the spectacle, repeatedly presented, of multitudes of working men hanging upon the words of a young aristocrat; and Radicals, bidding higher and higher to catch the popular fancy, heard with disgust the loudest acclamations of the crowd accorded to Lord Randolph Churchill as he denounced ‘the Moloch of Midlothian’[13] or ‘the pinchbeck Robespierre’[14] for war and tyranny beyond the sea, profusion and misgovernment at home.