The Prime Minister's Political Creed
The Duke, before he went to Matching, twice reminded Phineas Finn
that he was expected there in a day or two. "The Duchess says that
your wife is coming to-morrow," the Duke said on the day of his
departure. But Phineas could not go then. His services to his country
were required among the dockyards and ships, and he postponed his
visit till the end of September. Then he started for Matching, having
the double pleasure before him of meeting his wife and his noble host
and hostess. He found a small party there, but not so small as the
Duchess had once suggested to him. "Your wife will be there, of
course, Mr. Finn. She is too good to desert me in my troubles. And
there will probably be Lady Rosina De Courcy. Lady Rosina is to the
Duke what your wife is to me. I don't suppose there will be anybody
else,--except, perhaps, Mr. Warburton." But Lady Rosina was not
there. In place of Lady Rosina there were the Duke and Duchess of St.
Bungay, with their daughters, two or three Palliser offshoots, with
their wives, and Barrington Erle. There were, too, the Bishop of the
diocese with his wife, and three or four others, coming and going, so
that the party never seemed to be too small. "We asked Mr. Rattler,"
said the Duchess in a whisper to Phineas, "but he declined, with a
string of florid compliments. When Mr. Rattler won't come to the
Prime Minister's house, you may depend that something is going to
happen. It is like pigs carrying straws in their mouths. Mr. Rattler
is my pig." Phineas only laughed and said that he did not believe
Rattler to be a better pig than any one else.
It was soon apparent to Phineas that the Duke's manner to him was
entirely altered, so much so that he was compelled to acknowledge to
himself that he had not hitherto read the Duke's character aright.
Hitherto he had never found the Duke pleasant in conversation.
Looking back he could hardly remember that he had in truth ever
conversed with the Duke. The man had seemed to shut himself up as
soon as he had uttered certain words which the circumstances of the
moment had demanded. Whether it was arrogance or shyness Phineas
had not known. His wife had said that the Duke was shy. Had he been
arrogant the effect would have been the same. He was unbending, hard,
and lucid only when he spoke on some detail of business, or on some
point of policy. But now he smiled, and though hesitating a little at
first, very soon fell into the ways of a pleasant country host. "You
shoot," said the Duke. Phineas did shoot but cared very little about
it. "But you hunt." Phineas was very fond of riding to hounds. "I am
beginning to think," said the Duke, "that I have made a mistake in
not caring for such things. When I was very young I gave them up,
because it appeared that other men devoted too much time to them. One
might as well not eat because some men are gluttons."
"Only that you would die if you did not eat."
"Bread, I suppose, would keep me alive, but still one eats meat
without being a glutton. I very often regret the want of amusements,
and particularly of those which would throw me more among my
fellow-creatures. A man is alone when reading, alone when writing,
alone when thinking. Even sitting in Parliament he is very much
alone, though there be a crowd around him. Now a man can hardly be
thoroughly useful unless he knows his fellow-men, and how is he to
know them if he shuts himself up? If I had to begin again I think I
would cultivate the amusements of the time."
Not long after this the Duke asked him whether he was going to join
the shooting men on that morning. Phineas declared that his hands
were too full of business for any amusement before lunch. "Then,"
said the Duke, "will you walk with me in the afternoon? There is
nothing I really like so much as a walk. There are some very pretty
points where the river skirts the park. And I will show you the spot
on which Sir Guy de Palliser performed the feat for which the king
gave him this property. It was a grand time when a man could get
half-a-dozen parishes because he tickled the king's fancy."
"But suppose he didn't tickle the king's fancy?"
"Ah, then indeed, it might go otherwise with him. But I am glad to
say that Sir Guy was an accomplished courtier."
The walk was taken, and the pretty bends of the river were seen; but
they were looked at without much earnestness, and Sir Guy's great
deed was not again mentioned. The conversation went away to other
matters. Of course it was not long before the Prime Minister was
deep in discussing the probabilities of the next Session. It was
soon apparent to Phineas that the Duke was no longer desirous of
resigning, though he spoke very freely of the probable necessity
there might be for him to do so. At the present moment he was in his
best humour. His feet were on his own property. He could see the
prosperity around him. The spot was the one which he loved best in
all the world. He liked his present companion, who was one to whom he
was entitled to speak with freedom. But there was still present to
him the sense of some injury from which he could not free himself. Of
course he did not know that he had been haughty to Sir Orlando, to
Sir Timothy, and others. But he did know that he had intended to be
true, and he thought that they had been treacherous. Twelve months
ago there had been a goal before him which he might attain, a
winning-post which was still within his reach. There was in store for
him the tranquillity of retirement which he would enjoy as soon as a
sense of duty would permit him to seize it. But now the prospect of
that happiness had gradually vanished from him. That retirement was
no longer a winning-post for him. The poison of place and power and
dignity had got into his blood. As he looked forward he feared rather
than sighed for retirement. "You think it will go against us," he
said.
Phineas did think so. There was hardly a man high up in the party
who did not think so. When one branch of a Coalition has gradually
dropped off, the other branch will hardly flourish long. And then the
tints of a political Coalition are so neutral and unalluring that men
will only endure them when they feel that no more pronounced colours
are within their reach. "After all," said Phineas, "the innings has
not been a bad one. It has been of service to the country, and has
lasted longer than most men expected."
"If it has been of service to the country, that is everything. It
should at least be everything. With the statesman to whom it is not
everything there must be something wrong." The Duke, as he said this,
was preaching to himself. He was telling himself that, though he saw
the better way, he was allowing himself to walk on in that which was
worse. For it was not only Phineas who could see the change,--or the
old Duke, or the Duchess. It was apparent to the man himself, though
he could not prevent it. "I sometimes think," he said, "that we whom
chance has led to be meddlers in the game of politics sometimes give
ourselves hardly time enough to think what we are about."
"A man may have to work so hard," said Phineas, "that he has no time
for thinking."
"Or more probably, may be so eager in party conflict that he will
hardly keep his mind cool enough for thought. It seems to me that
many men,--men whom you and I know,--embrace the profession of
politics not only without political convictions, but without seeing
that it is proper that they should entertain them. Chance brings a
young man under the guidance of this or that elder man. He has come
of a Whig family, as was my case,--or from some old Tory stock; and
loyalty keeps him true to the interests which have first pushed him
forward into the world. There is no conviction there."
"Convictions grow."
"Yes;--the conviction that it is the man's duty to be a staunch
Liberal, but not the reason why. Or a man sees his opening on this
side or on that,--as is the case with the lawyers. Or he has a body
of men at his back ready to support him on this side or on that, as
we see with commercial men. Or perhaps he has some vague idea that
aristocracy is pleasant, and he becomes a Conservative,--or that
democracy is prospering, and he becomes a Liberal. You are a Liberal,
Mr. Finn."
"Certainly, Duke."
"Why?"
"Well;--after what you have said I will not boast of myself.
Experience, however, seems to show me that Liberalism is demanded by
the country."
"So, perhaps, at certain epochs, may the Devil and all his works; but
you will hardly say that you will carry the Devil's colours because
the country may like the Devil. It is not sufficient, I think, to say
that Liberalism is demanded. You should first know what Liberalism
means, and then assure yourself that the thing itself is good. I dare
say you have done so; but I see some who never make the inquiry."
"I will not claim to be better than my neighbours,--I mean my real
neighbours."
"I understand; I understand," said the Duke laughing. "You prefer
some good Samaritan on the opposition benches to Sir Timothy and the
Pharisees. It is hard to come wounded out of the fight, and then to
see him who should be your friend not only walking by on the other
side, but flinging a stone at you as he goes. But I did not mean just
now to allude to the details of recent misfortunes, though there is
no one to whom I could do so more openly than to you. I was trying
yesterday to explain to myself why I have, all my life, sat on what
is called the Liberal side of the House to which I have belonged."
"Did you succeed?"
"I began life with the misfortune of a ready-made political creed.
There was a seat in the House for me when I was twenty-one. Nobody
took the trouble to ask me my opinions. It was a matter of course
that I should be a Liberal. My uncle, whom nothing could ever induce
to move in politics himself, took it for granted that I should run
straight,--as he would have said. It was a tradition of the family,
and was as inseparable from it as any of the titles which he had
inherited. The property might be sold or squandered,--but the
political creed was fixed as adamant. I don't know that I ever had
a wish to rebel, but I think that I took it at first very much as a
matter of course."
"A man seldom inquires very deeply at twenty-one."
"And if he does it is ten to one but he comes to a wrong conclusion.
But since then I have satisfied myself that chance put me into the
right course. It has been, I dare say, the same with you as with me.
We both went into office early, and the anxiety to do special duties
well probably deterred us both from thinking much of the great
question. When a man has to be on the alert to keep Ireland quiet, or
to prevent peculation in the dockyards, or to raise the revenue while
he lowers the taxes, he feels himself to be saved from the necessity
of investigating principles. In this way I sometimes think that
ministers, or they who have been ministers and who have to watch
ministers from the opposition benches, have less opportunity of
becoming real politicians than the men who sit in Parliament with
empty hands and with time at their own disposal. But when a man has
been placed by circumstances as I am now, he does begin to think."
"And yet you have not empty hands."
"They are not so full, perhaps, as you think. At any rate I cannot
content myself with a single branch of the public service as I used
to do in old days. Do not suppose that I claim to have made any grand
political invention, but I think that I have at least labelled my own
thoughts. I suppose what we all desire is to improve the condition of
the people by whom we are employed, and to advance our country, or at
any rate to save it from retrogression."
"That of course."
"So much is of course. I give credit to my opponents in Parliament
for that desire quite as readily as I do to my colleagues or to
myself. The idea that political virtue is all on one side is both
mischievous and absurd. We allow ourselves to talk in that way
because indignation, scorn, and sometimes, I fear, vituperation, are
the fuel with which the necessary heat of debate is maintained."
"There are some men who are very fond of poking the fire," said
Phineas.
"Well; I won't name any one at present," said the Duke, "but I have
seen gentlemen of your country very handy with the pokers." Phineas
laughed, knowing that he had been considered by some to have been
a little violent when defending the Duke. "But we put all that
aside when we really think, and can give the Conservative credit
for philanthropy and patriotism as readily as the Liberal. The
Conservative who has had any idea of the meaning of the name which
he carries, wishes, I suppose, to maintain the differences and the
distances which separate the highly placed from their lower brethren.
He thinks that God has divided the world as he finds it divided, and
that he may best do his duty by making the inferior man happy and
contented in his position, teaching him that the place which he holds
is his by God's ordinance."
"And it is so."
"Hardly in the sense that I mean. But that is the great Conservative
lesson. That lesson seems to me to be hardly compatible with
continual improvement in the condition of the lower man. But with
the Conservative all such improvement is to be based on the idea of
the maintenance of those distances. I as a Duke am to be kept as far
apart from the man who drives my horses as was my ancestor from the
man who drove his, or who rode after him to the wars,--and that is to
go on for ever. There is much to be said for such a scheme. Let the
lords be, all of them, men with loving hearts, and clear intellect,
and noble instincts, and it is possible that they should use their
powers so beneficently as to spread happiness over the earth. It is
one of the millenniums which the mind of man can conceive, and seems
to be that which the Conservative mind does conceive."
"But the other men who are not lords don't want that kind of
happiness."
"If such happiness were attainable it might be well to constrain
men to accept it. But the lords of this world are fallible men; and
though as units they ought to be and perhaps are better than those
others who have fewer advantages, they are much more likely as units
to go astray in opinion than the bodies of men whom they would seek
to govern. We know that power does corrupt, and that we cannot
trust kings to have loving hearts, and clear intellects, and noble
instincts. Men as they come to think about it and to look forward,
and to look back, will not believe in such a millennium as that."
"Do they believe in any millennium?"
"I think they do after a fashion, and I think that I do myself. That
is my idea of Conservatism. The doctrine of Liberalism is, of course,
the reverse. The Liberal, if he have any fixed idea at all, must, I
think, have conceived the idea of lessening distances,--of bringing
the coachman and the duke nearer together,--nearer and nearer, till a
millennium shall be reached by--"
"By equality?" asked Phineas, eagerly interrupting the Prime
Minister, and showing his dissent by the tone of his voice.
"I did not use the word, which is open to many objections. In the
first place the millennium, which I have perhaps rashly named, is
so distant that we need not even think of it as possible. Men's
intellects are at present so various that we cannot even realise the
idea of equality, and here in England we have been taught to hate the
word by the evil effects of those absurd attempts which have been
made elsewhere to proclaim it as a fact accomplished by the scratch
of a pen or by a chisel on a stone. We have been injured in that,
because a good word signifying a grand idea has been driven out of
the vocabulary of good men. Equality would be a heaven, if we could
attain it. How can we to whom so much has been given dare to think
otherwise? How can you look at the bowed back and bent legs and
abject face of that poor ploughman, who winter and summer has to drag
his rheumatic limbs to his work, while you go a-hunting or sit in
pride of place among the foremost few of your country, and say that
it all is as it ought to be? You are a Liberal because you know that
it is not all as it ought to be, and because you would still march on
to some nearer approach to equality; though the thing itself is so
great, so glorious, so godlike,--nay, so absolutely divine,--that you
have been disgusted by the very promise of it, because its perfection
is unattainable. Men have asserted a mock equality till the very idea
of equality stinks in men's nostrils."
The Duke in his enthusiasm had thrown off his hat, and was sitting
on a wooden seat which they had reached, looking up among the clouds.
His left hand was clenched, and from time to time with his right
he rubbed the thin hairs on his brow. He had begun in a low voice,
with a somewhat slipshod enunciation of his words, but had gradually
become clear, resonant, and even eloquent. Phineas knew that there
were stories told of certain bursts of words which had come from
him in former days in the House of Commons. These had occasionally
surprised men and induced them to declare that Planty Pall,--as he
was then often called,--was a dark horse. But they had been few and
far between, and Phineas had never heard them. Now he gazed at his
companion in silence, wondering whether the speaker would go on with
his speech. But the face changed on a sudden, and the Duke with an
awkward motion snatched up his hat. "I hope you ain't cold," he said.
"Not at all," said Phineas.
"I came here because of that bend of the river. I am always very
fond of that bend. We don't go over the river. That is Mr. Upjohn's
property."
"The member for the county?"
"Yes; and a very good member he is too, though he doesn't support
us;--an old-school Tory, but a great friend of my uncle, who after
all had a good deal of the Tory about him. I wonder whether he is at
home. I must remind the Duchess to ask him to dinner. You know him,
of course."
"Only by just seeing him in the House."
"You'd like him very much. When in the country he always wears
knee-breeches and gaiters, which I think a very comfortable dress."
"Troublesome, Duke; isn't it?"
"I never tried it, and I shouldn't dare now. Goodness, me; it's past
five o'clock, and we've got two miles to get home. I haven't looked
at a letter, and Warburton will think that I've thrown myself into
the river because of Sir Timothy Beeswax." Then they started to go
home at a fast pace.
"I shan't forget, Duke," said Phineas, "your definition of
Conservatives and Liberals."
"I don't think I ventured on a definition;--only a few loose ideas
which had been troubling me lately. I say, Finn!"
"Your Grace?"
"Don't you go and tell Ramsden and Drummond that I have been
preaching equality, or we shall have a pretty mess. I don't know that
it would serve me with my dear friend, the Duke."
"I will be discretion itself."
"Equality is a dream. But sometimes one likes to dream,--especially
as there is no danger that Matching will fly from me in a dream. I
doubt whether I could bear the test that has been attempted in other
countries."
"That poor ploughman would hardly get his share, Duke."
"No;--that's where it is. We can only do a little and a little to
bring it nearer to us;--so little that it won't touch Matching in our
day. Here is her ladyship and the ponies. I don't think her ladyship
would like to lose her ponies by my doctrine."
The two wives of the two men were in the pony carriage, and the
little Lady Glencora, the Duchess's eldest daughter, was sitting
between them. "Mr. Warburton has sent three messengers to demand your
presence," said the Duchess, "and, as I live by bread, I believe that
you and Mr. Finn have been amusing yourselves!"
"We have been talking politics," said the Duke.
"Of course. What other amusement was possible? But what business
have you to indulge in idle talk when Mr. Warburton wants you in the
library? There has come a box," she said, "big enough to contain
the resignations of all the traitors of the party." This was strong
language, and the Duke frowned;--but there was no one there to
hear it but Phineas Finn and his wife, and they, at least, were
trustworthy. The Duke suggested that he had better get back to the
house as soon as possible. There might be something to be done
requiring time before dinner. Mr. Warburton might, at any rate, want
to smoke a tranquil cigar after his day's work. The Duchess therefore
left the carriage, as did Mrs. Finn, and the Duke undertook to drive
the little girl back to the house. "He'll surely go against a tree,"
said the Duchess. But,--as a fact,--the Duke did take himself and the
child home in safety.
"And what do you think about it, Mr. Finn?" said her Grace. "I
suppose you and the Duke have been settling what is to be done."
"We have certainly settled nothing."
"Then you must have disagreed."
"That we as certainly have not done. We have in truth not once been
out of cloud-land."
"Ah;--then there is no hope. When once grown-up politicians get into
cloud-land it is because the realities of the world have no longer
any charm for them."
The big box did not contain the resignations of any of the
objectionable members of the Coalition. Ministers do not often resign
in September,--nor would it be expedient that they should do so. Lord
Drummond and Sir Timothy were safe, at any rate, till next February,
and might live without any show either of obedience or mutiny.
The Duke remained in comparative quiet at Matching. There was not
very much to do, except to prepare the work for the next Session.
The great work of the coming year was to be the assimilation, or
something very near to the assimilation, of the county suffrages
with those of the boroughs. The measure was one which had now been
promised by statesmen for the last two years,--promised at first with
that half promise which would mean nothing, were it not that such
promises always lead to more defined assurances. The Duke of St.
Bungay, Lord Drummond, and other Ministers had wished to stave it
off. Mr. Monk was eager for its adoption, and was of course supported
by Phineas Finn. The Prime Minister had at first been inclined to be
led by the old Duke. There was no doubt to him but that the measure
was desirable and would come, but there might well be a question
as to the time at which it should be made to come. The old Duke
knew that the measure would come,--but believing it to be wholly
undesirable, thought that he was doing good work in postponing it
from year to year. But Mr. Monk had become urgent, and the old Duke
had admitted the necessity. There must surely have been a shade of
melancholy on that old man's mind as, year after year, he assisted
in pulling down institutions which he in truth regarded as the
safeguards of the nation;--but which he knew that, as a Liberal, he
was bound to assist in destroying! It must have occurred to him, from
time to time, that it would be well for him to depart and be at peace
before everything was gone.
When he went from Matching Mr. Monk took his place, and Phineas Finn,
who had gone up to London for a while, returned; and then the three
between them, with assistance from Mr. Warburton and others, worked
out the proposed scheme of the new county franchise, with the new
divisions and the new constituencies. But it could hardly have been
hearty work, as they all of them felt that whatever might be their
first proposition they would be beat upon it in a House of Commons
which thought that this Aristides had been long enough at the
Treasury.