The Radical party of those days, he went on, was few in number, with no representatives in the Government and no Caucus in the country. ‘It was their great principles,’ exclaimed the speaker, ‘which gave them power, and which they asserted with obstinacy, irrespective of party, on all occasions, small or great.’ And now—with half a dozen Radicals in the Ministry and nearly a hundred members in the House—What had been the course of events? In 1880 a war in Afghanistan protracted for a whole year under a Liberal Government; in 1881 the revolt of the Boers, ‘with which every Radical in England was bound to sympathise,’ met by force of arms, disgracefully and unsuccessfully applied; in 1882 ‘the struggle for Egyptian freedom undertaken by Arabi Pasha, suppressed by Liberals, great towns destroyed, bloody battles fought; and estimates swollen nine millions beyond those of Lord Beaconsfield’s Administration.’
And what would be the policy of the Conservative party if power were placed in their hands?
I have no right, a humble member of the rank and file of the Tory party, to declare to a great meeting like this what will be their policy. I do not know what will be the policy of the Tory party. I am not the least bit in the confidence of the leaders, and I must admit that I do not enjoy the high honour of their friendship. Only the other night one of them accused me in the House of Commons of being in secret and fraudulent alliance with the Prime Minister for the destruction of the Tory party. I have not been able to gather from their speeches or their acts what would be the policy they would adopt if the responsibility of government was placed upon them. They have preserved a prudent, perhaps an over-prudent, reticence. But though I cannot tell you what their policy will be, I think I can tell you what their policy ought to be—and in general terms what I will try and make it to be—if ever I should represent this powerful constituency. It shall be a policy of honesty and courage. It shall be a policy which will grapple with difficulties and deal with them, and not avoid them or postpone them. It shall be a popular policy, and not a class policy. It shall be a policy of activity for the national welfare, combined with a zeal for Imperial security.
The Tory democratic movement in the English boroughs was powerfully aided by and largely interwoven with the spread of Fair Trade doctrines. In Lancashire especially the persuasive arguments of Mr. Farrer Ecroyd had gained a wide acceptance, and twenty years have not effaced the effects of his exertions. Lord Randolph Churchill, eager to attack the Liberal Government, began in 1881 by urging the Fair Trade cause with characteristic vigour and happy irresponsibility. As his influence and knowledge increased, his assurance upon fiscal matters diminished; and at Blackpool in 1884 he would not commit himself beyond an ‘inquiry into the present condition of British industry and as to how it is affected by our present methods of raising revenue for the service of the State.’ But certainly no one could have painted in more vivid colours the shocking and melancholy condition of British trade. The words have been often quoted:—
What is the state of things in the world of British industry? We are suffering from a depression of trade extending as far back as 1874, ten years of trade depression, and the most hopeful either among our capitalists or our artisans can discover no signs of a revival. Your iron industry is dead, dead as mutton; your coal industries, which depend greatly on the iron industries, are languishing. Your silk industry is dead, assassinated by the foreigner. Your woollen industry is in articulo mortis, gasping, struggling. Your cotton industry is seriously sick. The shipbuilding industry, which held out longest of all, is come to a standstill. Turn your eyes where you will, survey any branch of British industry you like, you will find signs of mortal disease. The self-satisfied Radical philosophers will tell you it is nothing; they point to the great volume of British trade. Yes, the volume of British trade is still large, but it is a volume which is no longer profitable; it is working and struggling. So do the muscles and nerves of the body of a man who has been hanged twitch and work violently for a short time after the operation. But death is there all the same, life has utterly departed, and suddenly comes the rigor mortis. Well, but with this state of British industry what do you find going on? You find foreign iron, foreign wool, foreign silk and cotton pouring into the country, flooding you, drowning you, sinking you, swamping you; your labour market is congested, wages have sunk below the level of life, the misery in our large towns is too frightful to contemplate, and emigration or starvation is the remedy which the Radicals offer you with the most undisturbed complacency. But what produced this state of things? Free imports? I am not sure; I should like an inquiry; but I suspect free imports of the murder of our industries much in the same way as if I found a man standing over a corpse and plunging his knife into it I should suspect that man of homicide, and I should recommend a coroner’s inquest and a trial by jury. (Blackpool, January 24, 1884.)
In any case, even, if free imports were a wise policy, he would not allow Mr. Bright and the Liberal party the credit of the discovery:—
Mr. Bright advised his audience at Birmingham to read over again the speeches of Mr. Charles Villiers on Free Trade made fifty years ago. I advise them to do nothing of the kind, because if they do they will lose every shred of veneration and respect which they still may feel for the name of Mr. Bright. They will find that the great battle of Free Trade, of which Mr. Bright has never been tired of boasting loud and long, was fought by Mr. Charles Villiers long before Mr. Bright made his appearance in public; that Mr. Charles Villiers bore the burden and heat of that protracted and lengthened contest; and when Mr. Villiers had won the day Mr. Bright and his dear friend Mr. Cobden stepped in and tried to rob him of all his glory. All those who read Mr. Charles Villiers’s speeches will find that Mr. Bright and his dear friend Mr. Cobden were nothing more nor less than two plundering cuckoos, who shamefully ejected Mr. Charles Villiers from the nest which he had constructed, and who reared therein their own chattering and silly brood. (Woodstock, January 31, 1884.)
After all this the Fair Traders were not unnaturally inclined to complain when in 1887—three years afterwards—Lord Randolph Churchill having acquired a responsible position, having studied the report of the Commission on Trade appointed largely at his insistence in 1885, having reflected upon the voting of the counties in the General Election, and surveyed the problems of finance from the Treasury chambers, poured buckets of cold water on their cherished schemes and declined to make any exertions in their support.
But the central proposition of the Tory Democratic idea was that the Conservative party was willing and thoroughly competent to deal with the needs of democracy and the multiplying problems of modern life; and that the British Constitution, so far from being incompatible with the social progress of the great mass of the people, was in itself a flexible instrument by which that progress might be guided and secured.
The Whigs are a class with the prejudices and the vices of a class; the Radicals are a sect with the tyranny and the fanaticism of a sect.... The Whigs tell you that the institutions of this kingdom, as illustrated by the balance of Queen, Lords and Commons, and the Established Church, are but conveniences and useful commodities, which may be safely altered, modified, or even abolished, so long as the alteration, modification, or abolition is left to the Whigs to carry out. The Radicals tell you that these institutions are hideous, poisonous, and degrading, and that the divine Caucus is the only machine which can turn out, as if it was a patent medicine, the happiness of humanity. But the Tories, who are of the people, know and exclaim that these institutions, which are not so much the work of the genius of man, but rather the inspired offspring of Time, are the tried guarantees of individual liberty, popular government, and Christian morality; that they are the only institutions which possess the virtue of stability, of stability even through all ages; that the harmonious fusion of classes and interests which they represent corresponds with and satisfies the highest aspirations either of peoples or of men; that by them has our Empire been founded and extended in the past; and that by them alone can it prosper or be maintained in the future. Such is the Tory party and such are its principles, by which it can give to England the government she requires—democratic, aristocratic, Parliamentary, monarchical, uniting in an indissoluble embrace religious liberty and social order. And this party—this Tory party of to-day—exists by the favour of no caucus, nor for the selfish interests of any class. Its motto is—‘Of the people, for the people, by the people’; unity and freedom are the beacons which shed their light around its future path and amid all political conflict this shall be its only aim—to increase and to secure within imperishable walls the historic happiness of English homes. (Blackpool, January 24, 1884.)