worship should, at least in England, be always on the side of liberty
and equality and human progress. Indeed, if inclined to discuss such a
question at all, I should rather be disposed to put it the other way and
ask how it happens that men so enlightened and liberal in education and
principles should yield a moment's obedience to the ghostly shadow of
Roman Catholic superstition, which Auguste Comte, in the decaying years
of his noble intellect, conjured up to form a new religion. But I am
quite content to let the question go unanswered--and should be willing,
indeed, to leave it unasked. I wish just now to do nothing more than to
direct the attention of American readers to the fact that a new set or
sect has arisen to influence English politics, and that their influence
and its origin are different from anything which, judging by the history
of previous generations, one might naturally have been led to expect.
"Culture" in England has, of late years, almost invariably ranked itself
on the side of privilege. The Oxford undergraduate shouts himself hoarse
in cheering for Disraeli and groaning for Bright. Oxford rejects
Gladstone the moment he becomes a Liberal. The vigorous Radicalism of
Thorold Rogers costs him his chair as professor of political economy,
although no man in England is a more perfect master of some of the more
important branches of that science. The journals which are started for
the sake of being read by men of "culture" are sure to throw their
influence, nine times out of ten, into the cause of privilege and class
ascendency. The "Saturday Review" does this deliberately; the "Pall Mall
Gazette" does it instinctively. Suddenly there comes out from the bosom
of the universities themselves a band of keen, acute, fearless
gladiators, who throw themselves into the van of every great movement
which works for democracy, equality and freedom. They invade the press
and the platform; they write in this journal and in that; they are
always writing, always printing; they are ready for any assailant,
however big, they are willing to work with any ally, however small; they
shrink from no logical consequence or practical inconvenience of any
argument or opinion; they take the working man by the hand and talk to
him and tell him all they know--and it is something worth studying, the
fact that their scholarship and his no-scholarship so often come to the
same conclusion. They will work with anybody, because they go farther
than almost anybody; and they will allow anybody the full swing of his
own crotchet, even though he be not so willing to give them scope enough
for theirs. Thus they are commonly associated with Goldwin Smith, who
has a perfect horror of French Democracy and French Imperialism, and who
sees in Mirabeau only a "Voltairean debauchee;" with Tom Hughes, who is
a sturdy member of the Church of England, and does not, I fancy, care
three straws about the policy of ideas; with Bright, whose somewhat
Puritanical mind draws back with a kind of dread from anything that
savors of free-thinking; with Auberon Herbert, the mild young
aristocrat, converted from Toryism by pure sentimentalism and
philanthropy; with Connolly, the eloquent Irish plasterer, whose
vigorous stump oratory aroused the warm admiration of Louis Blanc. It
would be impossible that such a knot of men, so gifted and so fearless,
so independent and so unresting, so keen of pen, and so unsparing of
logic, should be without a clear and marked influence on the politics of
England. It is quite a curious phenomenon that such a group of men
should be found in close and constant co-operation with the English
artisan, his trades' union organizations, and his political cause.
Frederick Harrison represented the working men in the Parliamentary
commission lately held to inquire into the whole operation of the
trades' unions. Professor Beesly writes continually in the "Beehive,"
the newspaper which is the organ of George Potter and the trades'
societies. I cannot see how the cause of Democracy can fail to derive
strength and help from this sort of alliance, and I therefore welcome
the influence upon English politics of the little group of Positivist
penmen, believing that it will have a deeper reach than most people now
imagine, and that where it operates effectively at all, it will be for
good.
ENGLISH TORYISM AND ITS LEADERS.
Sir John Mandeville tells a story of a man who set out on a voyage of
discovery, and sailing on and on in a westerly direction, at last
touched a land where he was surprised to find a climate the same as his
own; animals like those he had left behind; men and women not only
having the same dress and complexion, but actually speaking the same
language as the people of his own country. He was so struck with this
unexpected and wonderful discovery, that he took to his ship again
without delay, and sailed back eastward to impart to his own people the
news that in a far-off, strange, western sea he had found a race
identical with themselves. The truth was that the simple voyager had
gone round the world, reached his own country without recognizing it,
and then went round the world again to get home.
If the voyage were made in our time, and the explorer were a British
Tory who had left England in the opening of the year 1867, and after
unconsciously sailing round the world had fallen in with British Tories
again in the autumn of the same year, one could easily excuse his
failing to recognize his own people. For in the interval of time from
February to August, British Toryism underwent the most sudden and
complete transformation known outside the sphere of Ovid's
Metamorphoses. If any of my American readers will try to imagine a whole
political party, great in numbers, greater still in wealth, station and
influence, suddenly performing just such a turn-round as the "New York
Herald" accomplished at a certain early crisis of the late civil war, he
will have some idea of the marvellous and unprecedented feat which was
executed by the English Tories, when, renouncing all their time-honored
traditions, watchwords and principles, they changed a limited and
oligarchical franchise into household suffrage. It is singular, indeed,
that such a thing should have been done. It is more singular still that
it should have been done, as it most assuredly was done, in order that
one man should be kept in power. It is even more singular yet that it
should have been done by a party of men individually high principled,
honorable, unselfish, incapable of any deliberate meanness--and of whom
many if not most actually disliked and distrusted the man in whose
interest and by whose influence the surrender of principle was made.
Perhaps when I have said a little about the leadership of the English
Tories, the phenomenon will appear less wonderful or at least more
intelligible. It was not a mere epigram which Mr. Mill uttered when he
described the Tories as the stupid party. An average Tory really is a
stupid man. He is a gentleman in all the ordinary acceptation of the
word. He has been to Oxford or Cambridge; he has received a decent
classical education; he has travelled along the beaten tracks--made what
would have been called in Mary Wortley Montague's day "the grand tour;"
he has birth and high breeding; he is a good fellow, with manly,
honorable ways, and that genial consideration for the feelings of others
which is the fundamental condition, the vital element of gentlemanly
breeding. But he is, with all this, stupid. His mind is narrow, dull,
inflexible; he cannot connect cause with effect, or see that a change is
coming, or why it should come; with him _post hoc_ always means _propter
hoc_; he cannot account for Goodwin Sands otherwise than because of
Tenterden steeple. You cannot help liking him, and sometimes laughing at
him. It may seem paradoxical, but I at least am unable to get out of my
mind the conviction that there is a solid basis of stupidity in the mind
of the great Conservative Chief, Lord Derby. Let me explain what I mean.
The Earl of Derby is in one sense a highly accomplished man. He is a
good classical scholar, and can make a speech in Latin. He has produced
some very spirited translations from Horace; and I like his version of
the Iliad better on the whole than any other I know. He is a splendid
debater--Macaulay said very truly that with Lord Derby the science of
debate was an instinct. He will roll out resonant, rotund, verbose
sentences by the hour, by the yard; he is great at making hits and
points; he has immense power of reply and repartee--of a certain easy
and obvious kind; his voice is fine, his manner is noble, his invective
is powerful. But he has no ideas. The light he throws out is a polarized
light. He adds nothing new to the political thought of the age. I have
heard many of his finest speeches; and I can remember that they were
then very telling, in a Parliamentary point of view; but I cannot
remember anything he said. He is always interpreting into eloquent and
effective words the commonplace Philistine notions, the hereditary
conventionalities of his party--and nothing more. His mind is not open
to new impressions, and he is not able to appreciate the cause, the
purpose or the tendency of change. This I hold to be the essential
characteristic of stupidity; and this is an attribute of Lord Derby,
with all his Greek, his Latin, his impetuous rhetoric, his debating
skill and his audacious blunders, which sometimes almost deceive one
into thinking him a man of genius. Now the Earl of Derby is the greatest
Tory living; and if I have fairly described the highest type of Tory,
one can easily form some conception of what the average Tory must be.
Every one likes Lord Derby, and I fully believe it to be the fact that
those who know him best like him best. I cannot imagine Lord Derby doing
a mean thing; I cannot imagine him haughty to a poor man, or
patronizingly offensive to a timid visitor of humble birth. Look at Lord
Derby through the wrong end of the intellectual telescope and you have
the average British Tory. The Tory's knowledge is confined to classics
and field sports--when he knows anything. Even Lord Derby has been
guilty of the most flagrant mistakes in geography and modern history.
People are never tired of alluding to a famous blunder of his about
Tambov in Russia. It is also told of him that he once spoke in
Parliament of Demerara as an island; and when one of his colleagues
afterward remonstrated with him on the mistake, he asked with
ingenuousness and _naivete_ "How on earth was I to know that Demerara
was not an island?" He once, at a public meeting, spoke of himself very
frankly as having been born "in the pre-scientific period"--the period
but too recently closed, when English Universities and high class
schools troubled themselves only about Greek and Latin, and thought it
beneath their dignity to show much interest in such vulgar, practical
studies as chemistry and natural history, to say nothing of that
ungentlemanly and ungenerous study, the science of political economy.
The average British Tory is a Lord Derby without eloquence, brains,
official habits and political experience.
How, then, do the Tories exist as a party? How do they continue to
believe themselves to be Tories, and speak of themselves as Tories, when
they have surrendered all, or nearly all, the great principles which are
the creed and faith, and business of Toryism? Because they have, in our
times, never had Tories for leaders. A man is not a Tory merely because
he fights the Tory battles, any more than a captain of the Irish Brigade
was a Frenchman because he fought for King Louis, or Hobart Pasha is a
Turk because he commands the Ottoman navy. The Tory party has always,
of late years, had to call in the aid of brilliant outsiders, political
renegades, refugees from broken-down agitations, disappointed and
cynical deserters from the Liberal camp, or mere adventurers, to fight
their battles for them. It used to be quite a curious sight, some three
or four years ago, when the Tories were, as they are now again, in
opposition, to look down from the gallery of the House of Commons and
see the men who did gladiatorial duty for the party. Along the back
benches, above and below the "gangway," were stretched out huge at
length the stalwart, handsome, manly country gentlemen, the bone and
sinew of the Tory party--the only real Tories to be found in the House.
But _they_ did not bear the brunt of debate. They could cheer
splendidly, and vote in platoons; but you don't suppose they were just
the sort of men to confront Gladstone, and reply to Bright? Not they;
and they knew it. There sat Disraeli, the brilliant renegade from
Radicalism, who was ready to think for them and talk for them: and who
were his lieutenants? Cairns, the successful, adroit, eloquent lawyer, a
North of Ireland man, with about as much of the genuine British Tory in
him as there is in Disraeli himself; Seymour Fitzgerald, the clever,
pushing Irishman, also a lawyer; Whiteside, the voluble, eloquent,
rather boisterous advocate, also a lawyer, and also an Irishman; smart,
saucy Pope Hennessy, a young Irish adventurer, who had taken up with
Toryism and ultramontanism as the best way of making a career, and who
would, at the slightest hint from his chief, have risen, utterly
ignorant of the subject under debate, and challenged Gladstone's finance
or Roundel Palmer's law. These men, and such men--these and no
others--did the debating and the fighting for the great Tory party of
England at a most critical period of that party's existence. Needless to
say that the party who were compelled by their own poverty of idea,
their own stupidity, to have these men for their representatives, were
stupid enough to be led anywhere and into anything by the force of a
little dexterity and daring on the part of the one man into whose hands
they had confided their destinies.
In speaking, therefore, of the leaders of Toryism, I must distinctly say
that I am not speaking of Tories. The rank and file are Tories; the
general and officers belong to another race. Mr. Disraeli is so well
known on this side of the Atlantic that I need not occupy much time or
space in describing him. He is the most brilliant specimen of the
adventurer or political soldier of fortune known to English public life
in our days. I do not suppose anybody believes Mr. Disraeli's Toryism to
be a genuine faith. This is not merely because he has changed his
opinions so completely since the time when he came out as a Radical,
under the patronage of O'Connell, and wrote to William Johnson Fox, the
Democratic orator, a famous letter, in which he, Disraeli, boasted that
"his forte was revolution." Men have changed their views as completely,
and even as suddenly, and yet obtained credit for sincerity and
integrity. It is not even because, in all of Mr. Disraeli's novels, a
prime and favorite personage is a daring political adventurer, who
carries all before him by the audacity of his genius and his
unscrupulousness; it is not even that Mr. Disraeli, in private life,
frequently speaks of success in politics as the one grand object worth
striving for or living for. "What do you and I come to this House of
Commons night after night for?" said Mr. Disraeli once to a great
Englishman, and when the latter failed to reply very quickly, he
answered his own question by saying, "You know we come here for fame."
The man to whom he spoke declared, in all truthfulness, that he did not
follow a political career for the sake of fame. But Disraeli was quite
incredulous, and probably could not, by any earnestness and apparent
sincerity of asseveration, be got to believe that there lives a being
who could sacrifice time, and money, and intellect, and eloquence merely
for the sake of serving the public. Yet it is not alone this cynical
avowal of selfishness which makes people so profoundly sceptical as to
Mr. Disraeli's Toryism. It is the fact that he always escapes into
Liberalism whenever he has an opportunity; that he lives by hawking
Toryism, not by imbibing it himself; that he is ready to sell it, or
betray it, or drag it in the dirt whenever he can safely serve himself
by doing so; that he can become the most ardent of Freetraders, the most
uncompromising champion of a Popular Suffrage to-day, when it is for his
interest, after having fought fiercely against both yesterday, when to
fight against them was for his interest. Mr. Disraeli is decidedly a man
without scruple. Those who have read his "Vivian Grey" will remember
with what zest and unction he describes his hero bewildering a company
and dumbfoundering a scientific authority by extemporizing an imaginary
quotation from a book which he holds in his hand, and from which he
pretends to read the passage he is reciting. It is not long since Mr.
Disraeli himself publicly ventured on a bold little experiment of a
somewhat similar kind. The story is curious, and worth hearing; and it
is certain that it cannot be contradicted.
Three or four years ago, a bitter factious attack was made in the House
of Commons upon Mr. Stansfeld, then holding office in the Liberal
government, because of his open and avowed friendship for, and intimacy
with Mazzini. This was at a time when the French government were
endeavoring to connect Mazzini with a plot to assassinate the Emperor
Napoleon. Mr. Disraeli was very stern in his condemnation of Mr.
Stansfeld for his friendship with one who, twenty odd years before, had
encouraged a young enthusiast (as the enthusiast said) in a design to
kill Charles Albert, King of Sardinia. Mr. Bright, in a moderate and
kindly speech, deprecated the idea of making unpardonable crimes out of
the hotheaded follies of enthusiastic men in their young days; and he
added that he believed there would be found in a certain poem, written
by Disraeli himself some twenty-five or thirty years before, and called
"A Revolutionary Epick," some lines of eloquent apostrophe in praise of
tyrannicide. Up sprang Mr. Disraeli, indignant and excited, and
vehemently denied that any such sentiment, any such line, could be found
in the poem. Mr. Bright at once accepted the assurance; said he had
never seen the poem himself, but only heard that there was such a
passage in it; apologized for the mistake--and there most people thought
the matter would have ended. In truth, the volume which Mr. Disraeli had
published a generation before, with the grandiloquent title, "A
Revolutionary Epick" (not "epic," in the common way, but dignified,
old-fashioned "epick"), was a piece of youthful, bombastic folly long
out of print, and almost wholly forgotten. But Disraeli chose to attach
great importance to the charge he supposed to be made against him; and
he declared that he felt himself bound to refute it utterly by more than
a mere denial. Accordingly, in a few weeks, there came out a new edition
of the Epick, with a dedication to Lord Stanley, and a preface
explaining that, as the first edition was out of print, and as a charge
founded on a passage in it had been made against the author, said author
felt bound to issue this new edition, that all the world might see how
unfounded was the accusation. Sure enough, the publication did seem to
dispose of the charge effectually. There was only one passage which in
any way bore on the subject of tyrannicide, and that certainly did not
express approval. What could be more satisfactory? Unluckily, however,
the gentleman on whose hint Mr. Bright spoke, happened to possess one
copy of the original edition. He compared this, to make assurance
doubly sure, with the copy at the British Museum, the only other copy
accessible to him, and he found that the passage which contained the
praise of tyrannicide had been partly altered, partly suppressed, in the
new edition specially issued by Mr. Disraeli, in order to prove to the
world that he had not written a line in the poem to imply that he
sanctioned the slaying of a tyrant. Now, this was a small and trifling
affair; but just see how significant and characteristic it was! It
surely did not make much matter whether Mr. Disraeli, in his young,
nonsensical days, had or had not indulged in a burst of enthusiasm about
the slaying of tyrants, in a poem so bombastical that no rational man
could think of it with any seriousness. But Mr. Disraeli chose to regard
his reputation as seriously assailed; and what did he do to vindicate
himself? He published a new edition, which he trumpeted as not merely
authentic, but as issued for the sole purpose of proving that he had not
praised tyrannicide, and he deliberately excised the lines which
contained the passage in question! The controversy turned on some two
lines and a half; and of these Mr. Disraeli cut out all the dangerous
words and gave the garbled version to the world as his authoritative
reply to the charge made against him! This, too, after the famous
"annexation" of one of Thiers's speeches, and the delivery of it as a
panegyric on the memory of the Duke of Wellington, and after the
appropriation of a page or two out of an essay by Macaulay, and its
introduction wholesale, as original, into one of Mr. Disraeli's novels.
The truth is that Disraeli is so reckless a gladiator that he will catch
up any weapon of defence, use any means of evasion and escape; will
fight anyhow, and win anyhow. In political affairs, at least, he has no
moral sense whatever; and the public seems to tolerate him on that
understanding. Certainly, escapades and practices which would ruin the
reputation of any other public man do not seem to bring Disraeli into
serious disrepute. The few high-toned men of his own party and the other
who hold all trickery in detestation, had made up their minds about him
long ago; and nothing could hurt him more in their esteem--the great
majority of politicians laugh at the whole thing, and take no thought.
The feeling seems to be, "We don't expect grave and severe virtue from
this man; we take him as he is. It would be ridiculous to apply a grave
moral test to anything he may say or do." In Lockhart's "Life of Walter
Scott," it is told that the great novelist went one morning very early
to call on a certain friend. The friend was in bed, and Scott, pushing
into the room familiarly, found that his friend was--not alone, as he
expected him to be. Scott was a highly moral man, and he would have
turned his back indignantly on any other of his friends whom he found
guilty of vice; but his biographer says that he took the discovery he
had made very lightly in this instance; and he afterward explained that
the delinquent was so ridiculously without depth of character it would
be absurd to find serious fault with anything he did. Perhaps it is in a
similar spirit that the British public regard Mr. Disraeli. He delivered
a memorable peroration one night last year in the House of Commons, the
utterance and the language of which were so peculiar that charity itself
could not affect to be ignorant of the stimulating cause which sent
forth such extraordinary eloquence. Yet hardly anybody seemed to regard
it as more than a good joke; and the newspapers which were most
indignant and most scandalized over Andrew Johnson's celebrated
inaugural address made no allusion whatever to Mr. Disraeli's
bewildering outburst. One reason, probably, is that Disraeli, in
private, is much liked. He is very kindly; he is a good friend; he is
sympathetic in his dealings with young politicians, and is always glad
to give a helping hand to a young man of talent. Personal ambition,
which, in Mr. Bright's eyes, is something despicable, and which Mr.
Gladstone probably regards as a sin, is, in Disraeli's acceptation,
something generous and elevating, something to be fostered and
encouraged. Therefore, young men of talent admire Disraeli, and are glad
and proud to gather round him. The men who have any brains in the Tory
ranks are usually of the adventurer class; and they form a phalanx by
the aid of which Disraeli can do great things. No matter how the honest,
dull bulk of his party may distrust him, they cannot do without him and
his phalanx; and they allow him to win his battles by the force of their
votes, and they think he is winning their battles all the time.