until the “Marney” of Sybil expired “in the full faith of dukeism and babbling of strawberry leaves.”

“From that period till 1830,” to resume my citations from his earliest pamphlets, “the tactics of the Whigs consisted in gently and gradually extricating themselves from their false position as the disciples of Jacobinism, and assuming their ancient post as the hereditary guardians of an hereditary monarchy.” To ease the transition, they invented Liberalism, a bridge to regain the lost mainland, and recross on tiptoe the chasm over which they had sprung with so much precipitation. “A dozen years of ‘Liberal principles’ broke up the national party of England—cemented by half a century of prosperity and glory, compared with which all the annals of the realm are dim and lack-lustre. Yet so weak intrinsically was the oligarchical faction, that their chief, despairing to obtain a monopoly of power for his party, elaborately announced himself as the champion of his patrician order, and attempted to coalesce with the Liberalised leader of the Tories. Had that negotiation not led to the result which was originally intended by those interested, the Riots of Paris would not have occasioned the Reform of London. It is a great delusion to believe that revolutions are ever effected by a nation. It is a faction, and generally a small one, that overthrows a dynasty or remodels a constitution. A small party, strong by long exile from power, and desperate of success except by desperate means, invariably has recourse to a coup d’état.... The rights and liberties of a nation can only be preserved by institutions.... Life is short, man is imaginative, our passions high.... Let us suppose our ancient monarchy abolished, our independent hierarchy reduced to a stipendiary sect, the gentlemen of England deprived of their magisterial functions, and metropolitan prefects and sub-prefects established in the counties and principal towns commanding a vigorous and vigilant police, and backed by an army under the immediate order of a single House of Parliament.... But where then will be the liberties of England? Who will dare disobey London?... When these merry times arrive—the times of extraordinary tribunals and extraordinary taxes ... the phrase ‘Anti-Reformer’ will serve as well as that of ‘Malignant,’ and be as valid a plea as the former title for harassing and plundering those who venture to wince under the crowning mercies of centralisation.... I would address myself to the English Radicals. I do not mean those fine gentlemen or those vulgar adventurers who, in this age of quackery, may sail into Parliament by hoisting for the nonce the false colours of the movement; but I mean that honest and considerable party ... who have a definite object which they distinctly avow.... Not merely that which is just, but that which is also practicable, should be the aim of a sagacious politician. Let the Radicals well consider whether in attempting to achieve their avowed object they are not, in fact, only assisting the secret views of a party whose scheme is infinitely more adverse to their own than the existing system, whose genius I believe they entirely misapprehend.” And after commenting on the “preponderance of a small class” under the new arrangement, the dangerous tendency towards centralisation and the perils of the reformed municipal corporations, he thus concludes: “If there be a slight probability of ever establishing in this country a more democratic government than the English Constitution, it will be as well, I conceive, for those who love their rights, to maintain that constitution, and if the more recent measures of the Whigs, however plausible their first aspect, have in fact been a departure from the democratic character of that constitution, it will be as well for the English nation to oppose ... the spirit of Whiggism.”

No student of the Croker Papers can deny that some of the leading Whigs did in the period immediately succeeding the Reform Bill plot for a Republican purpose. No historian will deny that the Reform Bill, by the exclusion of “Labour” from the franchise, and its deprival at the same time of the ancient rights which industry had possessed, left open a rankling sore. In this tract of 1836 Disraeli exposes the machination and probes the wound. Even thus early he feared the predominance of a plutocracy, “the supreme triumph of cash” at an era when, in Carlyle’s phrase also, “Cash Payment” is fast becoming “the universal sole nexus of man to man;” while he determined, if ever he had the power, to redress the balance by including the labouring classes. In 1848 he had spoken in Parliament on these questions to the same effect as he had spoken on the hustings in 1833, even favouring, as he had then advocated, triennial parliaments, except that under the later circumstances it might be an unnecessary change; and denouncing, as he had then denounced, “universal suffrage,” and on the same grounds. In this remarkable speech he forecasted that signal settlement which nearly twenty years later he was to secure. I shall shortly connect many utterances of his, ranging over more than thirty years; but there are three passages from this declaration, made at a time before the re-modelling of the reforms of 1832 had been agreed upon as an open problem, which I ask leave to excerpt as a prelude, for they strike the very keynotes of his domestic policy. Disraeli pointed out that the Radical Hume was taking property as the basis of suffrage fully as much as the Whigs had done in 1832, and that the same bourgeois predominance would ensue.

“... Now, sir, for one I think property is sufficiently represented in this House. I am prepared to support the system of 1832 until I see that the circumstances and necessities of the country require a change; but I am convinced that when that change comes, it will be one that will have more regard for other sentiments, qualities, and conditions than the mere possession of property as a qualification for the exercise of the political franchise.” And he then definitely protested against being ranked among those who accepted finality in that “wherein there has been, throughout the history of this ancient country, frequent and continuous change—the construction of this estate of the realm. I oppose this new scheme because it does not appear to be adapted in any way to satisfy the wants of the age, or to be conceived in the spirit of the times.” He opposed it also because this Radical motion, like the great Whig measure, really implied the undue ascendancy of the middle classes—

“... The House will not forget what that class has done in its legislative enterprises. I do not use the term ‘middle class’ with any disrespect; no one more than myself estimates what the urban population has done for the liberty and civilisation of mankind; but I speak of the middle class as of one which avowedly aims at predominance, and therefore it is expedient to ascertain how far the fact justifies a confidence in their political capacity. It was only at the end of the last century that the middle class rose into any considerable influence, chiefly through Mr. Pitt,60 that minister whom they are always abusing.” He proceeds to praise their abolition of the slave trade: “... A noble and sublime act, but carried with an entire ignorance of the subject, as the event has proved. How far it has aggravated the horrors of slavery, I stop not now to inquire.... The middle class emancipated the negroes, but they never proposed a Ten Hour Bill.... The interests of the working classes of England were not much considered in that arrangement. Having tried their hand at Colonial reform, ... they next turned their hands to Parliamentary reform, and carried the Reform Bill. But observe, in that operation they destroyed, under the pretence of its corrupt exercise, the old industrial franchise, and they never constructed a new one.... So that whether we look to their Colonial, or their Parliamentary reform, they entirely neglected the industrial classes. Having failed in Colonial as well as Parliamentary reform, ... they next tried Commercial reform, and introduced free imports under the specious name of free trade. How were the interests of the working classes considered in this third movement? More than they were in their Colonial or their Parliamentary reform? On the contrary, while the interests of capital were unblushingly advocated, the displaced labour of the country was offered neither consolation nor compensation, but was told that it must submit to be absorbed in the mass. In their Colonial, Parliamentary, and Commercial reforms there is no evidence of any sympathy with the working classes; and every one of the measures so forced upon the country has at the same time proved disastrous. Their Colonial reform ruined the colonies, and increased slavery. Their Parliamentary reform, according to their own account, was a delusion which has filled the people with disappointment and disgust. If their Commercial reform have not proved ruinous, then the picture ... presented to us of the condition of England every day for the last four or five months must be a gross misrepresentation. In this state of affairs, as a remedy for half a century of failure, we are under their auspices to take refuge in financial reform,61 which I predict will prove their fourth failure, and one in which the interests of the working classes will be as little considered and accomplished.”

The third passage concerns the symptoms of a need and the moment for change. Leaders, he argues, should educate and prepare the people, and not allow mere agitators to manufacture grievances, but rather prick the educated and well-born to remember the duties by virtue of which alone they hold their position.

“... A new profession has been discovered which will supply the place of obsolete ones. It is a profession which requires many votaries.

The business of this profession is to discover or invent great questions. But the remarkable circumstance is this—that the present movement has not in the slightest degree originated in any class of the people.... The moral I draw from all this—from observing this system of organised agitation—this playing and paltering with popular passions for the aggrandisement of one too ambitious class—the moral I draw is this: why are the people of England forced to find leaders among these persons? The proper leaders of the people are the gentlemen of England. If they are not the leaders of the people, I do not see why there should be gentlemen. Yes, it is because the gentlemen of England have been negligent of their duties, and unmindful of their station, that the system of professional agitation, so ruinous to the best interests of the country, has arisen in England. It was not always so. My honourable friends around me call themselves the country party. Why, that was the name once in England of a party who were the foremost to vindicate popular rights—who were the natural leaders of the people, and the champions of everything national and popular.... When Sir William Wyndham was the leader of the country party, do you think he would have allowed any chairman or deputy-chairman, any lecturer or pamphleteer, to deprive him of his hold on the heart of the people of this country? No, never! Do you think that when the question of suffrage was brought before the House, he would have allowed any class who had boldly avowed their determination to obtain predominance to take up and settle that question?...”

Nor let him be misconstrued in his views of the ancestral temperament of the Whigs. Nothing is more remarkable in the chronicle of combinations than the fact that for more than a century a party, the most exclusive in its operation, was considered the least. The recent publications of the Portland and Harley Papers establish beyond a doubt that while the “New Whigs” of Queen Anne were in large measure a commercial syndicate that “made a corner” in power, the old Whigs of George III. were an aristocratic oligarchy that subverted rule, both popular and personal, and monopolised government.

“How an oligarchy,” says Disraeli, in the preface to Lothair, “had been substituted for a kingdom, and a narrow-minded and bigoted fanaticism flourished in the name of religious liberty, were problems long to me insoluble, but which early interested me. But what most attracted my musing, even as a boy, was the elements of our political parties, and the strange mystification by which that which was national in its constitution had become odious, and that which was exclusive was presented as popular. What has mainly led to this confusion of public thought, and this uneasiness of society, is our habitual carelessness in not distinguishing between the excellence of a principle and its injurious or obsolete application. The feudal system may have worn out, but its main principle, that the tenure of property should be the fulfilment of duty, is the essence of good government. The divine right of kings may have been a plea for feeble tyrants, but the divine right of government is the keystone of human progress, and without it government sinks into police and a nation is degraded into a mob.” And he continues with reference to the Toryism of a later period: “... Those who in theory were the national party, and who sheltered themselves under the institutions of the country against the oligarchy, had, both by a misconception and a neglect of their duties, become, and justly become, odious; while the oligarchy ... had, by the patronage of certain general principles which they only meagrely applied, assumed, and to a certain degree acquired, the character of a popular party. But no party was national; one was exclusive and odious, and the other liberal and cosmopolitan.”

His history—I speak as a student of the reigns of Queen Anne and the Georges—will bear scrutiny. Indeed, he carries the descent of Whiggism some steps further, and traces its pedigree back to the Roundhead Independents,62 and even the favourites of Henry VIII., enriched by the spoil of the plundered abbeys. But he never denied, or wished to gainsay, the special and signal qualities of the Whigs’ conspicuous service. They had reconciled religious liberty to the consecration of the State, and had constantly proved themselves a “national” party63—that solecism in words but truth in ideas. This he repeatedly acknowledges. Neither did he ever spare the soulless, cramped, hollow, and shrivelled Toryism of the period preceding Bolingbroke’s and Wyndham’s struggle to recall it to its origins; or again of the period after Pitt’s generous concessions were overwhelmed by the Jacobin deluge, and neutralised by the impersonalities of Addington and Perceval; by the Phariseeism of Liverpool’s puzzle-headedness; by the pigheadedness of Eldon and Wetherell. Nor did he ever deny that pseudo-Toryism had often nursed the very vices of the Whig oligarchy.64 What he did contend, from first to last, was that any party which by its elements makes for national growth and union, and favours the free play of custom in institutions, is “national;” while any party encouraging class warfare, class preponderance, and cosmopolitan theories repugnant to the genius of those institutions, will be “anti-national;” that the democratic possibilities of our constitution must be spread, as opportunities arise to enlarge the “estate of the Commons;” yet that this must never mean the enthronement of either Oligarchy or Democracy in place of our mixed government; further, that in all such expansion influence is more important than interest; that theorisers must never blind us to the distinction between the “Rights of Man” and the duties of English citizens, between private and public equality, between the “Sovereignty of the People” and a national government; that over-government is a fatal evil, but that individual leadership is a priceless privilege.

The Reform Act raised the whole question of Representation. Is its aim monotony or variety? If it is necessarily elective, must it not logically end in becoming a plebiscite? Will a vote open to all be prized by any? And is suffrage any panacea for suffering?

Before the Reform Bill of 1832, Disraeli wrote, musing on Athens, and contrasting the strong simplicity of Greek literature with the imitative splendour of Rome, “... A mighty era, prepared by the blunders of long centuries, is at hand. Ardently I hope that the necessary change in human existence may be effected by the voice of philosophy alone; but I tremble and am silent. There is no bigotry so terrible as the bigotry of a country that flatters itself that it is philosophical.” In introducing the great Act of 1867, he observed: “... The political rights of the working classes which existed before the Act of 1832, and which not only existed, but were acknowledged, were on that occasion disregarded and even abolished, and during the whole period that has since elapsed in consequence of the great vigour that has been given to the Government of this country, and of the multiplicity of subjects commanding interest that have engaged and engrossed attention, no great inconvenience has been experienced from that cause. Still, during all that time there has been a feeling, sometimes a very painful feeling, that questions have arisen which have been treated in this House without that entire national sympathy which is desirable.”

The Reform Bill and its sequels transferred the immemorial franchise of toilers to the middle classes, who were to be further aggrandised by the repeal of the Corn Laws.65 They raised the revolutionary bitterness of Toil in England and Religion in Ireland, both of which they provoked to physical force. The Act proved rather a measure for the House of Commons than for the Commons themselves. It was the makeshift and stop-gap of oligarchy in distress. Its immediate effects were to wipe out that parliamentary opposition on which the health of party government depends,66 to encroach on the independent influence of the House of Lords, to end, it is true unintentionally, the “Venetian Constitution” of those who enfeebled their cause in 1837 by resolving to continue as oligarchs when the weapon of oligarchy had vanished; while none the less it left the monarch a doge, and the multitude a cipher; a crown still “robbed of its prerogatives, a Church controlled by a commission, and an aristocracy that does not lead.” Such were the joint results of the two large and once great parties that had lost principles in their search after organisation, the one by thwarting, the other by tricking the popular voice. It sharpened the warfare between rich and poor, afterwards aggravated by the acceptance of the principle of unrestricted competition; it precipitated a plutocracy, it helped to set class against class, and it became a prop of that calculating materialism which exalted “utility.” On the other hand, its indirect benefits were many. “It set men a-thinking” (I quote from Sybil); “it enlarged the horizon of political experience; it led the public mind to ponder somewhat on the circumstances of our national history; to pry into the beginnings of some social anomalies which, they found, were not so ancient as they had been led to believe, and which had their origin in causes very different from what they had been educated to credit; and insensibly it created and prepared a popular intelligence to which one can appeal, no longer hopelessly, in an attempt to dispel the mysteries with which for nearly three centuries it has been the labour of party writers to involve a national history, and without the dispersion of which no political position can be understood and no social evil remedied.” This latter was an especial province of Disraeli. Carlyle also, as a social regenerator appealing to higher sanctions than the “useful,” was able to address the newly awakened “popular intelligence.”

Here again Disraeli is in curious accord with Carlyle, the difference between them being that Disraeli, a doer as well as a seer, discerned in the traditional “orders” or “estates” of the realm real curatives of a sick body politic. Both protested against a state based on statistics and a progress that was arithmetical. Both were quick to discriminate, under the surface of parties, between the influences which made for cementing and those which made for dissolving the nation. Both saw in the conservatism and liberalism of the ’thirties, on the one side a pretence of protecting the forms they enfeebled, on the other a pretext and a sop for the universal suffrage which their professions logically implied. Disraeli perceived that such a French democracy was alien to England, and meant eventually some sort of unenlightened despotism, and the aggravation of a government by favouritism and through interference. He therefore resolved to reinspire the three “estates”—and if possible the Crown—with reality; and thus, in extending franchise, to extend it as the privilege of an order, earned by thrift, education, and intelligence, while he sought to found it on a basis so stable that leadership might never sink into being the sport of a fluid and fickle ignorance. Like Carlyle, he rejoiced that “opinion is now supreme, and opinion speaks in print; the representation of the Press is far more complete than the representation of Parliament;” he hailed the spread of knowledge among the mass so early as in the Revolutionary Epick. But, unlike Carlyle, he did not deem this increasing power fatal to parliamentary institutions; indeed, he regarded Parliament as a body privileged to lead and leaven “opinion,” and one that should never abandon its proper functions of initiative. Both Parliament and the Press in his eyes were vents for that free discussion inseparable from political health, but the one ought to form a school for statesmen, the other an arena for critics. And Disraeli also held and enforced that parties should never be particularist, but should rest on some national principle instead of on incoherent prejudices. Parties should represent broad attitudes towards working institutions. Only thus can they escape debasement into sets on the one hand, and shams on the other. If parties are split up into intriguing factions, they are solvents; if they become merely the masks of disregarded principles, they grow lifeless and hypocritical. They are at once “humbug and humdrum.”

In his fine speech of February, 1850, on Agricultural Distress (a distress greatly due to the unrestricted competition of English land with foreign acres,67 and only to be met by what he then proposed and long afterwards carried—the relief of its peculiar burdens), Disraeli dwelt on the sad fact that the labourers of the land made no appeal to Parliament. “Why, what is that,” he urged, “but a want of confidence in the institutions of the country?” Cobden, who definitely and avowedly sought the predominance of one portion alone, of middle-class individual interest, gave an ironical cheer. Carlyle had already published his philippic against Parliament. But Disraeli—and with justice—continued—

“... The honourable gentleman cheers as if I sanctioned such doctrines: I have never sanctioned the expression of such feelings; I never used language elsewhere which I have not been ready to repeat in this House. I never said one thing in one place, and another in another. I have confidence in the justice and wisdom of the House of Commons, although I sit with the minority; I have expressed that confidence in other places.... I have expressed the conviction that I earnestly entertain, that this House, instead of being an assembly with a deaf ear and a callous heart to the sufferings of the agricultural body, would, on the contrary, be found to be an assembly prompt to express sympathy, prompt to repair, if it might be, even the injury, necessary in the main as they might think it, which they had entailed on the agricultural classes of the country.... I have that confidence in the good sense of the English people that ... they will deem we are only doing our duty, we are only consulting their interests in taking every opportunity to alleviate their burdens, in trying to devise remedies for their burdens; and, if we cannot accomplish immediately any great financial result, at least achieving this great political purpose—that we may teach them not to despair of the institutions of their country.”

This purpose he had sought to accomplish two years before, when, in 1848, he proved by a speech which, it is said, won him the eventual leadership of his party, that the breakdown which Carlyle was at that time preparing to denounce, was due to an incapable ministry, and not to an effete Parliament. He always held Parliament to be neither a municipal vestry nor a chamber of commerce, but a national temple of embodied opinion; nor can the wisdom of his view in those dark and despondent times be better tested than by comparing, in the light of what has since occurred, than by contrasting Carlyle’s fulminations in this regard with Disraeli’s discernment.

“... There is a phenomenon,” says Carlyle, in his “Chartism,” “which one might call Paralytic Radicalism in these days, which gauges with statistic measuring-reed, sounds with Philosophic Politico-Economic plummet, the deep, dark sea of trouble, and, having taught us rightly what an infinite sea of trouble it is, sums up with the practical inference and use of consolation, That nothing whatever in it can be done by man, who has simply to sit still and look wistfully to ‘Time and General Laws;’ and thereupon, without so much as recommending suicide, coldly takes its leave of us....”

Disraeli, on the other hand—

“... ‘In this country,’ said ‘Sidonia,’ ‘since the peace, there has been an attempt to advocate a reconstruction of society on a purely rational basis. The principle of Utility has been powerfully developed. I speak not with lightness of the labours of the disciples of that school. I bow to intellect in every form; and we should be grateful to any school of philosophers, even if we disagree with them.... There has been an attempt to reconstruct society on a basis of material motives and calculations. It has failed. It must ultimately have failed under any circumstances; its failure in an ancient and densely peopled kingdom was inevitable. How limited is human reason, the profoundest inquirers are most conscious. We are not indebted to the reason of man for any of the great achievements which are the landmarks of human action and human progress. It was not Reason that besieged Troy; it was not Reason that sent forth the Saracen from the desert to conquer the world, that inspired the crusades, that instituted the monastic order; it was not Reason that produced the Jesuits; above all, it was not Reason that created the French Revolution....”

I may compare with this the light episode of the travelling Utilitarian in the much earlier Young Duke—

“... ‘I think it is not very difficult to demonstrate the use of an aristocracy,’68 mildly observed the Duke.

“‘Pooh! nonsense, sir! I know what you are going to say, but we have got beyond all that. Have you read this, sir? This article on the aristocracy in The Screw and Lever Review?’

“‘I have not, sir.’

“‘Then I advise you to make yourself master of it, and you will talk no more of the aristocracy. A few more articles like this, and a few more noblemen like the man who has got this park, and people will open their eyes at last.’

“‘I should think,’ said his Grace, ‘that the follies of the man who has got this park have been productive of evil only to himself. In fact, sir, according to your own system, a prodigal nobleman seems to be a very desirable member of the commonwealth, and a complete leveller.’

“‘We shall get rid of them all soon, sir....’

“‘I have heard that he is very young, sir,’ remarked the widow.

“‘Ah, youth is a very trying time! Let us hope the best. He may turn out well yet, poor soul!’

“‘I hope not. Don’t talk to me of poor souls. There is a poor soul,’ said the Utilitarian, pointing to an old man breaking stones on the highway. ‘That is what I call a poor soul, not a young prodigal....’”

No one who has followed the labour movement in England, or the social-democrat organisations in Germany and France, can fail to recognise the immense part that personality, imagination, and desire of power plays in them, and how completely, in their instance, utilitarianism has broken down. Utilitarianism, of course, ignores the moral and imaginative aspects. It mistakes the moon for a cream-cheese. It ignores personal influence. Above all, it confounds happiness with prosperity. “Charcoal,” exclaims Ruskin (here in complete accord with Disraeli), “may be cheap among your roof-timbers after a fire, and bricks may be cheap in your streets after an earthquake; but fire and earthquake may not therefore be national benefits.” Even in a concern purely commercial, reserve must be weighed against dividends.

Again, as regards this very Reform Bill of 1832, and the stagnant formulæ of its pioneer, I will again invoke Carlyle—

“... An ultra-radical, not seemingly of the Benthamee species, is forced to exclaim, ‘The people are at last wearied! They say, “Why should we be ruined in our shops, thrown out of our farms, voting for these men?” Ministerial majorities decline; this Ministry has become impotent, had it even the will to do good. They have long called to us, “We are a Reform Ministry; will ye not support us?” We have supported them, borne them forward indignantly on our shoulders time after time, fall after fall, when they had been hurled out into the street, and lay prostrate, helpless, like dead luggage. It is the fact of a Reform Ministry, not the name of one, that we would support.... The public mind says at last, Why all this struggle for the name of a Reform Ministry? Let the Tories be a ministry, if they will; let, at least, some living reality be a ministry!’...”

Let me illustrate Carlyle by two further passages from Disraeli. The first concerns parties in 1837, the second concerns the withered and withering Toryism left to confront the hollow conventions of the Reform Ministry. He is arguing that “the man who enters public life at this epoch has to choose between political infidelity and a destructive creed.”

“... The principle of the exclusive constitution of England having been conceded by the Acts of 1827–28–32, ... a party has arisen in the State who demand that the principle of political liberalism shall consequently be carried to its extent, which it appears to them is impossible without getting rid of the fragments of the old constitution that remain. This is the destructive party—a party with distinct and intelligible principles. They seek a specific for the evils of our social system in the general suffrage of the population. They are resisted by another party who, having given up exclusion, would only embrace as much liberalism as is necessary for the moment; who, without any embarrassing promulgation of principles, wish to keep things as they find them as well as they can; but, as a party must have the semblance of principles, they take the names of the things that they have destroyed. Thus they are devoted to the prerogatives of the Crown, although in truth the Crown has been stripped of every one of its prerogatives; they affect a great veneration for the constitution in Church and State, although every one knows that it no longer exists; they are ready to stand or fall with the independence of the Upper House of Parliament, although in practice they are perfectly well aware that, with their sanction, the ‘Upper House’ has abdicated its initiatory functions, and now serves only as a court of review of the legislation of the House of Commons. Whenever public opinion, which this party never attempts to form, to educate, or to lead, falls into some violent perplexity, passion, or caprice, this party yields without a struggle to the impulse, and, when the storm has passed, attempts to obstruct and obviate the logical, and ultimately the inevitable results of the very measures they have themselves originated, or to which they have consented. This is the Conservative party. I care not whether men are called Whigs or Tories, Radicals or Chartists, ... but these two divisions comprehend at present the English nation.... With regard to the first school, I for one have no faith in the remedial qualities of a Government carried on by a neglected democracy, who for three centuries have received no education. What prospect does it offer us of those high principles of conduct with which we have fed our imagination and strengthened our will? I perceive none of the elements of government that should secure the happiness of a people and the greatness of a realm.... Many men in this country ... are reconciled to the contemplation of democracy, because they have accustomed themselves to believe that it is the only power by which we can sweep away those sectional privileges and interests that impede the intelligence and industry of the community, ... and yet the only way ... to terminate what, in the language of the present day, is called class legislation, is not to entrust power to classes. You would find a ‘locofoco’69 majority as much addicted to class legislation as a factitious aristocracy.... In a word, true wisdom lies in a policy that would effect its ends by the influence of opinion, and yet by the means of existing forms.”

And the other—

“Mr. Rigby began by ascribing everything to the Reform Bill, and then referred to several of his own speeches on Schedule A. Then he told Coningsby that want of ‘religious faith’ was solely occasioned by want of churches, and want of loyalty by George IV. having shut up himself too much at the cottage in Windsor Park, entirely against the advice of Mr. Rigby. He assured Coningsby that the Church Commission was operating wonders.... The great question now was their architecture. Had George IV. lived, all would have been right. They would have been built on the model of the Buddhist pagoda. As for loyalty, if the present king went regularly to Ascot races, he had no doubt all would go right. Finally, Mr. Rigby impressed on Coningsby to read the Quarterly Review with great attention, and to make himself master of Mr. Wordy’s “History of the Late War,” in twenty volumes—a capital work which proves that Providence was on the side of the Tories.’...”

As regards the principles and conduct of the Reform Ministers themselves, years before he entered Parliament, in that brilliant series of speeches on the hustings of High Wycombe and Taunton, which preluded so many of his ideas, he denounced the incompleteness of the measure and the inadequacy of the men. In 1832 he said—

“... If, instead of filling the humble position of a private individual, I held a post near the person of my King, I should have said to my sovereign, ‘Oppose all change, or allow that change which will be full, satisfactory, and final.’ In the change produced by the professing party now in power, there are omissions of immense importance. These points they promised; these points they have not given you; and now, after all their protestations, they turn round and ask how the people can have the audacity to demand them.”70

In 1834 he denounced “the Whig system of centralisation,” and their organised attempt to “overpower” the House of Lords and to despotise the House of Commons, while of their subsequent disorganisation from within, because of the failure of concerted opposition from without, he gave that surpassing simile of Ducrow’s Circus. In 1835 he pursued the subject of constitutional opposition, and he expressed his dread, as he did in 1881, that if the Whigs remained “our masters for life, the dismemberment of the Empire” might follow. And all this in the teeth of what was then considered a system installed for fifty years, and which would have promised him a personal triumph had he appeared then to have chosen to have endorsed it.

But the views he always retained as to the first principles of representation are best heard in a passage from Coningsby.

“... In the protracted discussions to which this celebrated measure gave rise, nothing is more remarkable than the perplexities into which the speakers on both sides are thrown when they touch upon the nature of the representative principle. On the one hand, it was maintained that under the old system the people were virtually represented, while, on the other, it was triumphantly urged that, if the principle was conceded, the people should not be virtually, but actually represented. But who are the people? And where are you to draw a line? And why should there be any? It was urged that a contribution to the taxes was the constitutional qualification for the suffrage.” Here is repeated what he had urged in the ’thirties, and was to reiterate in the ’fifties, that indirect taxation is as much taxation as direct; that “the beggar who chews his quid as he sweeps a crossing is contributing to the imposts; ... he is one of the people, and he yields his quota to the public burthens.” The logical inference of such a qualification must be to convert the suffrage from being a privilege into being a right. Manhood suffrage, in common with all privilege unearned, is usually prized by none, and even disregarded by most.

“Amid these conflicting statements,” he continues, “it is singular that no member of either House should have recurred to the original character of these popular assemblies which have always prevailed among the northern nations.... When the crowned northman consulted on the welfare of his kingdom, he assembled the estates of his realm. Now, an estate is a class of the nation invested with political rights. Then appeared the estate of the clergy, of the barons, of other classes. In the Scandinavian kingdoms to this day the estate of the peasants sends its representatives to the Diet. In England, under the Normans, the Church and the Baronage were convoked together with the estate of the Community, a term which then probably described the inferior holders of land whose tenure was not immediate of the Crown. The Third Estate was so numerous that convenience suggested its appearance by representation, while the others, more limited, appeared, and still appear, personally. The Third Estate was reconstructed as circumstances developed themselves. It was a reform of Parliament when the towns were summoned. In treating the House of the Third Estate as the House of the People, and not as the House of a privileged class, the Ministry and Parliament of 1831 virtually conceded the principle of universal suffrage. In this point of view, the ten-pound franchise was an arbitrary, irrational, impolitic qualification. It had indeed the merit of simplicity, and so had the constitution of Abbé Sièyes. But its immediate and inevitable result was Chartism.

“But if the Ministry and Parliament of 1831 had announced that the time had arrived when the Third Estate should be enlarged and reconstructed, they would have occupied an intelligible position; and if, instead of simplicity of elements in its reconstruction, they had sought, on the contrary, varying and various materials which would have neutralised the painful predominance of any particular interest in the new scheme, and prevented those banded jealousies which have been its consequence, the nation would have found itself in a secure position. Another class, not less numerous than the existing one, and invested with privileges not less important, would have been added to the public estates of the realm, and the bewildering phrase, ‘the People,’ would have remained what it really is, a term of natural philosophy, and not of political science.”

The quality, then, of excellence, instead of the majorities of multitude, the variety of every approved influence, and not the undue weight of any overwhelming interest—these formed for him the true bases of representation. He was ever for levelling up instead of down; and, as we shall see, he was directly opposed to Mr. Hume’s fallacy (still rampant) that by our traditions representation depends only on taxation.

These ideas animated him throughout, and he achieved them in 1867, not, though it has been insinuated, by filching the proposals of his predecessors, but on the opposed principles which he continued to advocate from the ’thirties to the ’sixties. In 1835, two years before he entered Parliament, he expressed the same convictions in his Spirit of Whiggism. He showed that the two Houses were the “House of the Nation,” not the “House of the People,” but that both alike represent the “Nation.” He proceeded to prove by powerful illustration that, under whatever assumed form, political power will follow the distribution of property. He emphasised the “passion for industry” as an instrument of wealth as an English characteristic hostile to any future revolution in the distribution of property. He proved that in England revolution is ever a struggle for privilege, in Europe one against it; and he concluded, therefore, that “... If a new class rises in the State, it becomes uneasy to take its place in the natural aristocracy of the land.... The Whigs in the present day have risen on the power of the manufacturing interest. To secure themselves in their posts, the Whigs have given the new interest an undue preponderance. But the new interest has obtained its object and is content.... The manufacturer begins to lack in movement. Under Walpole the Whigs played the same game with the commercial interest. A century has passed, and the commercial interests are all as devoted to the Constitution as the manufacturers soon will be.... The consequence of our wealth is an aristocratic constitution, founded on an equality of civil rights. And who can deny that an aristocratic constitution resting on such a basis, where the legislative and even the executive office may be obtained by every subject of the realm, is in fact a noble democracy?”

These are no dry theories, but surely a true version of growing facts. Our Constitution is that of a natural aristocracy founded on popular privilege depending on the mutual exercise of duties. This free aristocracy distributes its power through the estates of the realm, and these orders should accord with the institutions to which they have given rise; for, as Disraeli said in 1852, they are “popular” without being absolutely “democratic.” When any one of them degenerates into undue monopoly, the whole body must suffer; and should such a catastrophe attain any permanence, one of the great institutions through which English nationality thrives would be shattered by the very order to which it corresponds. What Disraeli observes of the eventual reduction of each new ascendant interest to aristocratic influence, is beyond question. But that influence must rest on the due performance of civil and social responsibilities which empower it. Stripped of historical verbiage, the “constitution” harmonises classes through special privileges and reciprocal duties. Of the “middle-middles” he always spoke with respect, of the “lower-middles” with much sympathy, not least as victims of the income-tax;71 but he ever doubted their governing capacity as a class; and when Sir Robert Peel’s “monarchy of the middle classes” came into swing, Disraeli feared the plutocracy which has happened, and which, when financial, is more easily freed from political responsibility. The choice offered between wealth omnipotent and mob-despotism, is a choice between Scylla and Charybdis. To obviate it, Disraeli created in 1867 an artisan franchise, accorded as a boon at length earned by character and intelligence, and based on the rating principle, which affords a pledge of permanence; at the same time, he strove to countervail the growing irresponsibility of wealth by relieving unprotected land of its burdens and unrepresented labour of its degradation. By the first, he strove to retain that sap of the soil which underlies the English character, the English health, the English order, through local government, the English freedom, and the English steadiness; for (and this was said in 1852), “... Laws which, by imposing unequal taxes, discourage that investment (i.e. capital invested in land, the return for which is rent) are, irrespective of their injustice, highly impolitic; for nothing contributes more to the enduring prosperity of a country than the natural deposit of its surplus capital in the improvement of its soil....” By the last, he tried to redress that social misery which the measures of 1846 had not removed and had even increased: the overcrowding of the towns, the displacement of labour, the subsidising of foreign agriculture to the decultivation of English land, the enthronement of Mammon and materialism—all denounced and foreseen by him with wonderful prescience. Very soon after the repeal of the Corn Laws, discerning, as Disraeli did, its drift of denationalising tendencies, its certainty of some social and physical demoralisation, as well as the possible changes in European competition which might necessitate another “commercial and social revolution,” he inveighed against the inference that “we are to be rescued from the alleged power of one class, only to fall under the avowed dominion of another;” he believed that “the monarchy of England, its sovereign power mitigated by the acknowledged authority of the estates of the realm, has its root in the hearts of the people, and is capable of securing the happiness of the nation and the power of the State.” His peroration—some of which I shall give in the next chapter—is a noble flight of hope. He discerned at once that the transformation scene of 1846 would affect society more than politics, and that the next extension of the franchise must consequently prove a social antidote as well as a social sedative.

In 1839, refuting Mr. Hume’s hobby already alluded to, he showed that the theory is nowhere inherent in our Constitution, but is a doctrinaire supplement of alien origin; that the “Commons” are a political order invested with power for the performance of duties, just as the Peers are a similar order, but needing no representation; he re-urged that the House of Commons was the representative of the “nation”—an organic whole, and not of the “people”—a vague abstraction. He had even then already pointed out that, historically, the delegates before the Restoration had perverted the national traditions by announcing, more than a century before the French Revolution, the sovereignty of the “people.” He once more stoutly denied that “taxation and representation went hand-in-hand” according to our constitution. There was representation without election, as in the case of the Church in the Lords, for the Crown appointed the bishops, not the clergy. And as regards taxation, it was indirect, as well as, unfortunately, direct. In the same year, protesting against Lord John Russell’s assumption of a “monarchy of the middle classes,” Disraeli repeated that in this country “the exercise of political power must be associated with great public duties,” just as in 1846, when justifying the burdens on land so long as protection was accorded it, he asserted that great honours demand great burdens. Again, in 1848, Disraeli, opposing Mr. Hume once more, and protesting against the finality of the reconstruction of 1832, even before Lord John Russell declared the question free for both parties in 1853 and 1856—strongly condemned the radical scheme just because it did not “... enable the labouring classes to take their place in the Constitution of the country.” “If there be any mistake,” he said, “more striking than another in the settlement of 1832, ... it is, in my opinion, that the bill of 1832 took the qualification of property in too hard and rigid a sense, as the only qualification which should exist in this country for the exercise of political rights.” In 1852, he again dinned into unappreciative ears the necessity for a genuinely industrial franchise, though he was not satisfied that Lord John Russell’s £5 franchise would so operate. In 1859 and 1867, Disraeli tried hard to confer franchises on education and thrift, but Mr. Bright sneered at them as “fancy franchises,” Mr. Gladstone scoffed at them, and in forwarding the great measure of labour suffrage by the compelled co-operation of both sides of the House, Disraeli had to surrender safeguards he never ceased to desire and to regret, for they are founded on the State recognition of individual excellence, instead of on the State manipulation of mere party mechanism.

“Is the possession of the franchise,” demanded Disraeli in 1851, “to be a privilege, the privilege of industry and public virtue, or is it to be a right—the right of every one, however degraded, however indolent, however unworthy?... I am for the system which maintains in this country a large and free Government, having confidence in the energies and faculties of man. Therefore I say, make the franchise a privilege, but let it be the privilege of the civic virtues. Honourable gentlemen opposite would degrade the franchise to the man, instead of raising the man to the franchise. If you want to have a free aristocratic country, free because aristocratic (I use the word ‘aristocratic’ in its noblest sense—I mean that aristocratic freedom which enables every man to achieve the best position in the State to which his qualities entitle him), I know not what we can do better than adhere to the mitigated monarchy of England, with power in the Crown, order in one estate of the realm, and liberty in the other. It is from that happy combination that we have produced a state of society that all other nations look upon with admiration and envy.”

In all these considerations, the social results of measures and formulæ were ever uppermost in his mind. What he had ever been resolute to secure was, as he avowed even in 1850, “the industrial franchise,” which the resettlement of 1832 had thrown to the winds.

Again, in 1865, “... It appears to me,” urged Disraeli, “that the primary plan of our ancient constitution, so rich in various wisdom, indicates the course that we ought to pursue in this matter. It secured our popular rights by entrusting power, not to an indiscriminate multitude, but to the estate, or order, of the Commons. And a wise government should be careful that the elements of that estate should bear a close relation to the moral and material development of the country. Public opinion may not yet, perhaps, be ripe enough to legislate as to the subject, but it is sufficiently interested in the question to ponder over it with advantage; so that, when the time comes for action, we may legislate in the spirit of the English Constitution, which would absorb the best of every class, and not fall into a ‘democracy’ which is the tyranny of one class, and that one the least enlightened.”

Long before 1867, these continuous utterances culminated that typical speech of 1859, which mooted a comprehensive plan of enlarged representation of political power, yet undisturbed balance, and which would have made “a representative assembly that is a mirror of the mind as well as of the material interests of England.”

I shall quote largely from this unfamiliar speech. It illustrates how far his lifelong principles applied to a juncture before the artisans were wholly free from agitation against monarchy, and those institutions which fence it round. All Radical schemes, compassing “manhood suffrage,” all Whig schemes, merely delaying its day by seeking to reduce rental or property qualifications to an arbitrary minimum, were his aversion. Set, as he always was, against including whatever at the moment formed the dregs of ignorance, or the sediment of an unentitled populace, he already favoured that “rating” basis which Lord John Russell, always constitutional, had himself propounded in his abortive plan of 1854, and which Disraeli was to carry out in 1867 as a safeguard of stability in the boroughs. But in 1859 Lord Derby did not consider its application feasible. Disraeli had, therefore, now to forego it. Refusing to make any reductions in the franchise, or yield an inch to “detached” democracy, he now proposed to attain steadiness, to vary the vote, and to represent enlightenment contrasted with mere property by recommending the creation of the “compound householder” (“dwellers in a portion of any house rented in the aggregate at £20”)72; by a new suffrage for several small ownerships of property in the funds and savings banks; and for education, by enfranchising graduates, ministers of religion, physicians, barristers, and certain school-masters. He thus both forecasted, so far as was then practicable, household suffrage as against household democracy; and at the same time sought to represent education and ensure variety. By his attendant scheme of redistribution, he tried to prevent the counties from being “swamped” by the towns, while at the same time he jealously guarded the local independence of the boroughs. His purpose was to protect the country districts against that invasion from the cities of agrarian demagogues which, after his death, the stride forward of 1884 was to impel.73

But “finality is not the word of politics.” Progress changes possibilities. He had to wait till the pear was ripe; till the working man had been really reconciled to monarchy and its institutions; till the ground had been laid for a generous scheme of national education, and cleared by the sharply defined position of parties, which at last brought into relief the issues between democracy as a due element and as a domineering class. Nor, if he were now alive, would he fail to discern that the appeal of present imperialism to present democracy will be dangerous if made to it as a deciding class before it has acquired the governing faculty by long apprenticeship. Democracy as a leaven, democracy as the lump, are obviously distinct. The one is “popular and national,” the other despotic or cosmopolitan. Our artisans are now intensely national and patriotic; but the “submerged tenth” would soon show themselves tyrants over the community.