DEMOCRACY AND REPRESENTATION
I wish to head this chapter by a most striking passage hitherto
unquoted. It occurs in the fourth of Disraeli’s Letters to the Whigs,
published in the first numbers of _The Press_--an organ founded by him
in 1853 for the exposition of his views.[50] It unites the brilliance
of his youth to the ripeness of his prime. It is a wonderful forecast
of the future, and it embodies his ideas at a time when the “Coalition”
alliance of Peelites, Whigs, and Manchester Radicals--one of “suspended
opinions”--was entering on the career which closed so disastrously. In
1833, the “aristocratic” principle had been crippled. The problem now
was how to bring the new democracy into line with an old monarchy--
“... I see before me a numerous and powerful party, animated by chiefs
whose opinions in favour of all that can advance the cause of pure
democracy have been openly proclaimed. Amongst that party no doubt
there are some more moderate than others, some who march blindfold
towards the goal which those of bolder vision see clear through the
mists of faction. But all unite in the march of the caravan towards
the heart of the desert; and if there be those who then discover that
the fountain which allures them on is but the mirage, it will be too
late to return, and it will be destruction to pause.... If England
is to retain that empire which she owes to no natural resources, but
to the various influences of a most complicated and artificial, but
most admirable and effective social system, _she must gather into one
united phalanx all who hold the doctrine that England, to be safe,
must be great_. To continue free, _she must rest upon the intermediate
institutions that fence round monarchy, as the symbol of executive
force, from that suffrage of unalloyed democracy_ which represents the
invading agencies of legislative change. Our system of policy must be
opposed to all those who by rules of arithmetic would reduce the empire
on which the sun never sets to the isle of the Anglo-Saxon, and leave
our shores without defence against a yet craftier Norman. Our measures
of reform must be so framed as to gain all the purposes of good
government, yet to admit under the name of reform no agency that tends
by its own inevitable laws to the explosion of the machinery whose
operations you pretend it will economise and quicken.
“By what plausible arguments were the dwellers in the Piræus admitted
to vote in the Athenian assembly?... Hence from that moment arose the
dictator and the demagogue, ... the flatterer and the tyrant of mobs;
hence, the rapid fluctuations, the greedy enterprises, the dominion
of the have-nots, the ruin of the fleet, the loss of the colonies,
the thirty tyrants, the vain restoration of a hollow freedom ...
licence--corruption--servitude--dissolution. Give the popular assembly
of Great Britain up to the _controlling_ influence of the _lowest_
voters in large towns, and you have brought again a Piræus to destroy
your Athens.”
We shall see ere the close how he foiled the schemes for representing
the refuse of opinion.
* * * * *
A great statesman is a man inspired by great ideas; and, since all
history is the visible and particular development of unseen and
universal ideas, it must happen that a great statesman versed in
experience and intuition forecasts and foreknows. For the prophet is
the inverted historian or philosopher: he descries the currents ahead
which the other analyses in retrospect. “To be wise before the event,”
urged Disraeli more than once, “is statesmanship of the highest order.”
Throughout the preceding century two broad aspects of politics, that
is to say of applied national energy, present themselves in England.
They were and remain divergent, but they are and remain mutually
instructive and indispensable.
The one regards our kingdom as an elastic society, the outcome of
native habits expressing national temperament; as a soil of distinctive
character and capacity, to which new plants, if destined to flourish,
must be acclimatised, but on to which, or against which, they must
never be forced.
The other--the “philosophic” school--regards the soil as a mere medium
to be exhaustively manured by chemical processes for the introduction
of growths of every origin, as a sort of “subtropical garden.” It
perceives an idea suitable to other communities or other conjunctures,
and immediately hastens to transplant it. In like manner it perceives
an institution suitable to the race and temper of England, but
unsuitable to some alien race and temper. It is at once for forcible
adoption. It prefers the rigid logic of abstract notions to the
flexibilities of human nature. Its attitude is mechanical instead of
being sympathetic.
The one is in its essence national; the other, if we reflect,
international. The aim of the one is the evolution of individuality
embodied in a nation; that of the other, the ultimate effacement of
nations, and their replacement by cosmopolitanism.
These are the logical issues of each system. With the former Burke
identified himself, when he recoiled from following his party into
the anti-national abstractions of the French Revolution. With the
latter Mr. Gladstone identified himself, when he broke loose from the
national idea, and advocated the “right” of every small community
to “govern” itself. The one depends on popular privileges and class
responsibilities evenly distributed--the outcome of national treaty
and compromise, the tact born of struggle, not of upheaval. The other
hinges on inherent “rights,” which are infinite, ubiquitous, abstract,
and indefinite.
Of the former, from first to last, Disraeli, like Canning before him,
was a fearless exponent. “Change,” he said in his famous Edinburgh
speech of 1867, “is inevitable, but the point is whether that change
shall be caused only in deference to the manners, the customs, the
laws, the traditions of the people, or whether it shall be carried
in deference to abstract principles and arbitrary and general
doctrines.... The national system, although it may occasionally
represent the prejudices of a nation, never injures the national
character, while the philosophic system, though it may occasionally
improve ... the condition of the country, precipitates progress, may
occasion revolution and destroy states....” His attitude to the repeal
of the Corn Laws depended, as I shall prove in another chapter, on this
dominant idea. It is in close connection with that idea of personality
which I have already characterised, for nationality is itself the
ideal personality which combines races in communion. It is also in
close connection with that mode of government which seeks salvation
from society and not from the State; and it is bound up with all the
characteristics that distinguish a “nation” from a “people.” Disraeli’s
achievement was to adjust the spirit of England to the spirit of the
age.
Our two parties are, after all, only the strategical forces in the
big campaign of ideas. Without great generals they constantly tend to
forget the issues which nominally enlist them.
At the period when Disraeli first stood on the hustings, “Reform” had
been forced on the Whigs by the “Radicals,” just as “Repeal” was to be
forced some twelve years later on the Conservatives by the Cobdenites.
To be a “Radical” committed one to neither of the legitimate camps.
The Whigs had entered on their kingdom after long years of hopeless
exclusion. They were bent on engrossing office, and none detested the
new-fangled doctrines more than Lord Grey. Disraeli’s purpose from the
very first was to widen and popularise Toryism, but never to maintain
the exclusive system of the Whigs in power by the popular machinery to
which they so often resorted. In a purged and quickened Conservatism
lurked irresistible possibilities, true benefit to the nation and
empire at large, and a golden occasion for himself.
I think that if the oil could have blent with the vinegar, if Peel
could ever have coalesced with Lord John Russell, Disraeli would
have had less chance in politics, and must have been thrown back on
literature.
His consistency stands out prominent in review. It is one of ideas.
It is only by dint of long retrospect over a whole career that we can
decide in the case of any statesman whether he has controlled his
phases, or drifted with them.
From the first Disraeli compassed his reconciliation of new ideas
with ancient institutions on definite principles, at once national
and constructive, as opposed to destructive and international
theories. He desired it through engraftment, not uprootal; through
the defence and development of a constitution which is, in fact, the
British _character_ expressed by the modulations of the national
voice, and not by the shouts of mechanical majorities. He wished in
every case to preserve its efficiency by strengthening its tone and
enlarging its vents; while, in the process, he displayed an insight
into the instincts of classes which the conversance of genius with
ideas can alone empower. Of modern, of cosmopolitan “Liberalism,” he
said, as late as 1872, that its drift and spirit were “to attack the
institutions of the country under the name of reform, and to make war
on the manners and customs of the people of this country under the
pretext of progress.”
What then were the “new ideas” and the “old institutions”?
That form of government which is most national will be best, because
the least liable to sudden and social revolutions; and that form will
be most national which is most genuinely representative; while true
representation is one of power distributed, not centred. It follows
that any Government that does not mirror the nation will break down.
This was the real meaning of the French Revolution.
“... ‘You will observe one curious trait,’ said Sidonia to Coningsby,
‘in the history of this country--the depository of power is always
unpopular. As we see that the Barons, the Church, and the King have in
turn devoured each other, and that the Parliament, the last devourer,
remains, it is impossible to resist the impression that this body also
is doomed to be destroyed.’--‘Where then would you look for hope?’--‘In
what is more powerful than laws and institutions, and without which
the best laws and the most skilful institutions may be a dead letter
and the very means of tyranny, in the national character. It is not
in the increased feebleness of its institutions that I see the peril
of England; it is in the decline of its character as a community....
You may have a corrupt Government and a pure community; you may
have a corrupt community and a pure Administration. Which would you
elect?’--‘Neither,’ said Coningsby, ‘I wish to see a people full of
faith, and a Government full of duty.’”
Are the modern ideas of untempered democracy--Carlyle’s “despair of
finding any heroes to govern you”--compatible with real representation,
as contrasted with the mechanism of elective systems or the shams of
paper constitutions? Can these ideas ever prove expressive of true
nationality--the _character_ of a united people--as opposed to the
conflicting instincts of unreconciled races, or the factious claims of
divergent groups? Is not the mechanical subordination to the “State”
of Socialism hostile to an individual “nationality”? How, in the
ferment of modern progress, can the new wine be prevented from bursting
the old bottles? How can government and free action, independence
and inter-dependence, be allied in living reality? How can opinion
be organised into allegiance to leadership? How can traditions be
rendered less formal? How can discipline and development, authority
and elasticity, combine? How can the machinery of national custom be
brought into real accord with popular aspirations, and the mainstay of
character with the modern speed of movement? “Certainly,” as Carlyle
insisted, “it is the hugest question ever heretofore propounded to
mankind.”
In the proem to the _Revolutionary Epick_, Disraeli says that the
French Revolution marks the greatest political crisis since the Siege
of Troy. The paroxysm of that Revolution produced two hollow fictions,
the “Rights of Man” and “the Sovereignty of the People.”
Before illustrating the train of Disraeli’s ideas, let me touch on
these two doctrines.
_The Rights of Man._ What is the real meaning of a dogma which
annihilates the duties of citizens in declaring the licence of their
“rights;” in affirming personal claims as distinguished from popular
or legal privileges; in destroying the community by exalting the person?
It was based on Rousseau’s figment of a “Return to Nature.”
All “Returns to Nature” are, if we reflect, a harking back to chaos,
a denial of the whole self-developing social state which God has
ordained for man. They are the protests of instinct against order, of
“the People” against “the Nation,” of isolation against fusion, of
“naturalism” against “spiritualism.” One way or the other, they signify
relapses into brute force and animal conflict.
Rousseau’s “Return” was a _sentimental_ one, for sentimentality
often attends materialism. The best side of Rousseau was that he
did undoubtedly leaven the irreverence of his generation with some
feeling for God. But Rousseau invented a past on which he founded his
hopefulness of sensibility--an inverted optimism. He cried aloud in
hysterics, “Man is born free; everywhere he is in chains.” To what
freedom was man born? The freedom of confusion. The order that he
evolves is the parent of his true freedom--the freedom to work and
serve, and to receive justice. The real “Rights of Man” are the rights
to justice that order creates. And if that order belies its name,
and injustice, disorder, masquerade as divine government, why then
Fifth-Monarchy men, French Revolutions, ruining cataclysm, witness
to the heavenly destinies, and order is born once more. Rousseau’s
sobs resembled those of the hero of French melodrama, who under stage
moonshine and stage misfortune, always ejaculates, “Ma mère!” His mere
emotion worked on nerves of sterner fibre and facts of harder quality.
Since Disraeli’s death, Nietzsche has propounded a physical “Return to
Nature,” which, however, excludes the humanitarian side of the French
“Equality.” He has sighed for a gigantic brood of antediluvian anarchs.
He has tried to make anarchy heroic. But a monster is not even a man,
still less a hero.
All such systems must fail, because, as Disraeli has finely said, “Man
is born to adore and to obey.” They contradict the spiritual facts
of our structure. For the true Right of Man is to lead wisely and be
led loyally in public affairs; neither to steal nor be stolen from
in private. These are what Carlyle terms his “correctly articulated
_mights_.” Leadership, loyalty, and social honesty belong to no “state
of nature” of which record or even guess is possible. And Disraeli
agreed with Carlyle when the latter wrote, after the former had in
effect said the same: “... ‘Supply and demand’ we will honour also; and
yet how many ‘demands’ are there, entirely indispensable, which have to
go elsewhere than to the shops!”
But Nietzsche’s theories are luckily untranslatable into action, and
inconsistent with any form of the “state.” Rousseau’s theories, on
the other hand, are the more dangerous because they are feasible. The
“Rights of Man” is a doctrine absolutely at issue with the “Rights of
Nations.” The abstract notion of universal “rights” is also at variance
with the pressing impulses of physical “wants.” Low wages and long
hours are not redressed by the apparatus of ballot-boxes or the cant
of independence. Physical needs due to economical causes, which can be
modified only by the earnest statesmanship of leaders rising to their
responsibilities, are not to be dismissed by the vague generalities of
“moral force.” This aspect is powerfully emphasised in _Sybil_.
“... Add to all these causes of suffering and discontent among the
workmen the apprehension of still greater evils, and the tyranny of
the ’butties,’ or middlemen, and it will with little difficulty be
felt that the public mind of this district was well prepared for the
excitement of the political agitator, especially if he were discreet
enough rather to descant on their physical sufferings and personal
injuries, than to attempt the propagation of abstract political
principles with which it was impossible for them to sympathise.... It
generally happens, however, that where a mere physical impulse urges
the people to insurrection, though it is often an influence of slow
growth and movement, the effects are more violent and sometimes more
obstinate than when they move under the blended authority of moral and
physical necessity, and mix up together the rights and the wants of
man.”
The pendant to the “rights” is the “_equality_” of man. Here, again,
nothing is more self-evident than man’s natural inequality. The whole
development of societies, which we call civilisation, is for the very
purpose of redressing or relieving these inequalities of occasion,
of equipment. By nature man, like the brute, starts without equality
and without rights. By his “mights” he has created these ideas, and
acquired something of their substance by his superior faculties, by
the spiritual energy which differentiates him. His “rights” spring
from the “law” which he has propagated. The political equality which
he has founded more than compensates him for the personal inequality
of his beginnings. The “personal equation,” indeed, would imply
the reversal both of his nature and of his craftsmanship; of all
conditions, moreover, compatible with variety of character and freedom
of action. It means, in fact, a denial of the existence of that natural
aristocracy which we find in every class and every order, and which
decides that everywhere the game of “follow my leader” must be played.
What is wanted is a real aristocracy which “claims great privileges for
great purposes.” What is always dangerous is the monopoly of action
by an aristocracy that shirks its duties, that plays at government,
that is dilettante in leadership or sybarite in life; or that, as
in the three decades preceding the French Revolution, revenges its
exclusion from influence by multiplying sinecures. It is such a class,
as contrasted with individuals--wherever found--of genuine capacities,
that so often evoked Disraeli’s irony, and has lately been satirised
by Mr. Barrie in a whimsy accentuating the natural inequality of man.
Speaking through the lips of “Egremont,” in that fine passage where he
cheers “Sybil”--the noble daughter of the people, disappointed by the
Charter and the Chartists--with a vista of the future, Disraeli says:
“The mind of England is the mind ever of the rising race. Trust me it
is with the People.... Predominant opinions are generally the opinions
of the generation that is vanishing.... It will be a product hostile to
the oligarchical system. The future principle of English politics will
not be a levelling principle; not a principle adverse to privileges,
but favourable to their extension. _It will seek to ensure equality,
not by levelling the few, but by elevating the many._” And again, the
great manufacturer, “Millbank,” in _Coningsby_, is made to remark
(after giving distinction as the basis of aristocracy), “that ‘natural
aristocracy’ ought to be found ... among those men whom a nation
recognises as the most eminent for virtue, talents, and property, and,
if you please, birth and standing in the land. They guide opinion, and
therefore they govern. I am no leveller. I look upon an artificial
equality as equally pernicious with a factitious aristocracy; both
depressing and checking the enterprise of a nation. I like man to be
free--really free; free in his industry as well as his body....” As
Carlyle puts it: “... I say you did not make the land of England;
and by the possession of it you are bound to furnish guidance and
government to England....”--“A high class without duties to do is like
a tree planted on precipices.”[51]
It should not be forgotten, and I shall afterwards illustrate, that
in these and many other respects Carlyle’s teaching chimes with
Disraeli’s. “... That speciosities which are not realities can no
longer be.... What is an aristocracy? A corporation of the best, of the
bravest.... Whatsoever aristocracy does not even attempt to be that,
but only to wear the clothes of that, is not safe; neither is the land
it rules in safe.... We must find a real aristocracy....” And so with
priesthood.
In “Angela Pisani”--a dazzling dream-picture of three generations
in France--by Disraeli’s early intimate, Lord Strangford, occurs a
striking outburst against natural equality, that solecism in ideas,
that remainder biscuit of the French Revolution.
“... Go and preach equality to the deep seas, ... that the oyster is
equal to the whale or the starfish to the shark; you will succeed there
sooner than you will be able to alter the relative grades of the five
races of humanity. It is a _law_ which man must unmake himself, ere
he can change, that the Caucasian will aspire as the highest, and the
negro will grovel as the basest.” Disraeli’s attitude was the same in
_Contarini Fleming_:--
“... The law that regulates man must be founded on a knowledge of his
nature, or that law leads him to ruin. What is the nature of man? In
every clime and every creed we shall find a new definition.... What
then? Is the German a different animal from the Italian? Let me inquire
in turn whether you conceive the negro of the Gold Coast to be the same
being as the Esquimaux who tracks his way over the Polar snows? The
most successful legislators are those who have consulted the genius
of the people.... One thing is quite certain, that the system we have
pursued to attain a knowledge of man has entirely failed....”
Although “Equality” ignores alike the instinct and the clue of “race,”
it asserts in practice the pandemonium of race-warfare; because in
imagining that man is born equipped, it ignores his great acquirement
of “nationality,” which blends the reconcilables of “race” into
one ideal whole--a league of common traditions, language, habits,
institutions, duties, and privileges--of “solidarity”--without the bond
of blood or the necessity for bloodshed. Nationality thus brings the
specific qualities of races into the common stock. Disraeli has often
harped on the theme that a “nation” is no “aggregate of atoms,” but a
corporate individuality; and indeed the force of individuality lies
at the root of all his conceptions. But in truth the whole fiction of
“natural equality” springs from a sort of native envy. As Goethe sings--
“Men stick at reaching what is great,
Yet only grudge an equal state.
To deem your equals all you know--
No envy worse the world can show.”
Crises, according to him in 1833, were determined by causes far other
than these figments of “natural” laws--
“... When I examine the state of European society with the
unimpassioned spirit which the philosopher can alone command, I
perceive that it is in a state of transition--one from feudal to
federal principles. This I conceive to be the sole and secret cause of
all the convulsions that have occurred and are to occur.”[52]
All this has proved, and is proving true. The civil and legal
“equality” of united nationality and of unifying empire is replacing
the material “equality” of classes or of individuals.
“Natural” equality means “physical” equality, which was the true gist
of the many cries of the French Revolution. But its hurricane swept
away classes and privilege alone; the “equality” it created, that is
to say, was social and civil. Of civil “equality” Disraeli was always
the spokesman; for in England, civil equality means abolition of
monopolies. Privilege, as the ennobling boon of merit, stands open to
all, and the limits of the political orders or social classes to which
it is attached, are corrected by the wide freedom of public opinion
and discussion. “I hold that civil equality,” said Disraeli at Glasgow
in 1873, “the equality of all subjects before the law, and a law which
recognises the personal rights of all subjects, is the only foundation
of a perfect commonwealth.” His most striking utterances in _The Press_
from 1853 to 1859, and this Glasgow address, are perhaps his most
notable commentaries on this theme.
These are no mere subtleties. “Physical equality” has exercised a
very practical bearing on the doctrines of the Manchester School and
their relations to Sir Robert Peel’s double reform, above all to
those interests of Labour which both affected. I shall show this in
my next chapter.[53] Suffice it now to say that Disraeli descried
that in adopting the “Right to physical happiness” doctrine of
Manchester, at the very moment when he unshackled commerce and undid
the Corn Laws, Peel had adopted a principle which logically demands an
“unlimited employment of labour”--a thing inconsistent at once with his
restriction of Labour by removing the restraints on competition, and,
as Disraeli thought, with the very existence of states and of nations.
Peel thus became unconsciously _cosmopolitan_, at the very juncture
when he settled commerce and unsettled labour--
“The leading principle of this new school,” explained Disraeli,
treating of “equality” in 1873, “is that there is no happiness which
is not material, and that every living being has a right to share in
that physical welfare. The first obstacle to their purpose is found in
the rights of private property. Therefore these must be abolished. But
the social system must be established on some principle, and therefore
for the rights of property they would _substitute_ the rights of
Labour. Now these cannot fully be enjoyed, _if there be any limit to
employment. The great limit to employment, to the rights of Labour, and
to the physical and material equality of man is found in the division
of the world into states and nations._ Thus, as civil equality would
abolish privilege, social equality would destroy classes, so material
and physical equality strikes at the principle of patriotism, and is
prepared to abrogate countries.”
It was just this perception that enabled Disraeli nearly thirty years
earlier to predict--as we shall see--so much that has come and is
coming to pass.
The third cry of the French Revolution was _Human Brotherhood_. The
Christian ideal of inter-nationality, which, it is to be hoped, may
ultimately be realised through the Brotherhood of Nations, is the
Brotherhood of Man under the Fatherhood of God. But the fraternity
of revolution eliminated both the Brotherhood of Nations and the
Fatherhood of God. The result was a murderous anarchy--a Brotherhood of
Cain.
Such disorders compelled their own cure in their own country. Although
they flooded Europe with opinions at war with beliefs, and upheld a
cosmopolitan model, they brought the French a deliverer who declined
into a despot. Personality avenged herself. And the eventual remedy for
Napoleonism has in its turn been found in a Republic which, discarding
the sovereignty of man, has also discarded the sovereignty of God.
The effects of such a government are best perceived in two recent
and remarkable books, M. Demolin’s “À quoi tient la Supériorité des
Anglo-Saxons,” and M. Cerfberr’s “Essai sur le Mouvement Social et
Intellectuel en France depuis 1789.” The perpetual preponderance of the
bourgeoisie has raised a bureaucracy. The Charter of the Revolution
has culminated in middle-class officialism. The over-centralisation of
government by a few groups, who do not represent the varied elements
of a great nation, has caused a dearth of individual initiative,
a lack of personal self-reliance and social free-play, a tendency
towards the withering dictatorship of state-socialism, which underlies
the unfitness of France for colonisation, and which both these acute
thinkers depict and deplore; while the late Professor Mommsen,
commenting on Cæsar’s union of Democracy with Empire, employs the same
arguments.
That state which best represents national character enjoys the freest
play of institutions, favours the finest shape of spirit, public
and private, will wield the most formative influence among nations,
expand the most easily, and propagate itself by expansion. And the
state which best embodies the national will, is where the legislature
is in keenest touch with the executive, where institutions are
organic, where representation is popular, and where centralisation
is foreign to the national genius. This has, unfortunately, never
been realised in France. She was centralised to an amazing degree
long before her memorable outburst; and De Tocqueville has well shown
that her attempts to unite judicial with legislative functions were
the surest signs of her lack of “solidarity.” Her great upheaval was
predicted by Bolingbroke more than forty years before it occurred,
just because he discerned that her ancient constitution ignored a
popular representation. De Tocqueville himself, too, only proves that
the aristocratic centralisation of old France has been replaced by the
collectivist centralisation of its new democracy. Both in spirit are
the same. Centralisation, whatever its forms, precludes the fair and
free distribution of activities. It hoards and absorbs the national
character. These are its original sins. But Disraeli has also pointed
out that, for many reasons, France remains the sole ancient country
that can afford to begin again.
So much for the “Rights of Man.” One word still on “the Sovereignty of
the People.”
“A people,” said Disraeli, as early as 1836, in his _Spirit of
Whiggism_, “is a species; a civilised community is a nation. Now a
nation is a work of art and a work of time. A nation is gradually
created by a variety of influences.... These influences create the
nation--these form the national mind.... If you destroy the political
institutions which these influences have called into force, and which
are the machinery by which they constantly act, you destroy the nation.
The nation, in a state of anarchy and dissolution, then becomes a
people; and after experiencing all the consequent misery, like a
company of bees spoiled of their queen and rifled of their hive, they
set to again and establish themselves into a society....”
“The People” is a phrase of physiology, not of politics. It is an
abstruse name for a multitude; it ignores temperament and will.
Stripped of its high sound, its “Sovereignty” means government by
miscellany, the censorship of the census. Its political bearings are
as purely arithmetical as are the corresponding ethical bearings
of the Utilitarian creed; for they both disregard the many-sided
nature of man. Although derived from the speculations of some late
seventeenth-century republicans in England, the French application of
the theory--Burke’s “Wisdom told by the Head”--was entirely new. It
was not republicanism, the government by qualified members of ordered
classes: it was a despotism by the crowd as crowd. Such a “Democracy”
has never been the permanent scheme of government in any nation,
although “Liberal opinion” has relied too often on its simplicity.
“One man, one vote,” quantity instead of quality is in truth no
principle at all; and this attempt to confuse the Book of Wisdom with
the Book of Numbers is a feat reserved for modern periods alone. All
earlier systems of democracy were more or less discriminate, for no
indiscriminate state can cohere, and both freedom and order are based
on discrimination. The Attic Democracy demanded a degraded class of
unleisured, unemancipated slaves. The American Republic, which has
freed serfs and abolished leisure, possesses a peculiar stability,
which will outwear its occasional corruption because it exists through
a landed democracy--one impossible in overcrowded Europe--as we shall
find Disraeli emphasising in my American chapter.
In a word, the logical outcome of the “Sovereignty of the People”
is the tyranny of plebiscite. But a “plebiscite” dispenses with the
very principle of representation, for where all decide equally, why
should any be represented? Political power exercisable by _all_ can
only arise when all are sufficiently qualified. But it is always the
_some_, never the _all_, who are competent. Even in their proper sphere
of merely personal choice, how false and fatal most plebiscites have
proved!--“Not this man, but Barabbas.”
_Vox populi_ is only _vox Dei_ through the gradual institutions that
nations create; not through the wayward moods and momentary clamours of
“the people.” The whole problem is how at once to range and to raise
public opinion--the popular conscience; how to preserve moral, without
retarding material, progress; how to inspire “progress” itself with the
conviction that it consists in following the highest leadership; how,
again, to ensure such leadership by the constant association of duty
with privilege, and responsibility with power; how to recruit it by
every means that the spread of enlightenment can furnish.
“On man alone the fate of man is placed,”
sang Disraeli, in the _Revolutionary Epick_; and of “opinion”--
“Physical strength and moral were united,
And I, the pledge of their true love was born.”
But for this purpose the national imagination must be reckoned with.
“... When that faculty is astir in a nation,” he has insisted, “it will
sacrifice even physical comfort to follow its impulses.” The struggle
will always continue for national unity, but it takes generations to
perceive that colonial federation, for example, is as requisite a
means to this idea as native institutions representing real elements.
“... A political institution is a machine; the motive power is the
national character,” says “Sidonia;” “Society in this country is
perplexed, almost paralysed. How are the elements of the nation to be
again blended together? In what spirit is that reorganisation to take
place?...”
And again, so late as 1870, in the preface to _Lothair_, summarising
his works, Disraeli observes: “... National institutions were the
ramparts of the multitude against large estates exercising political
power derived from a limited class. The Church was in theory--and
once it had been in practice--the spiritual and intellectual trainer
of the people. The privileges of the multitude and the prerogatives
of the sovereign had grown up together, and together they had waned.
Under the plea of Liberalism, all the institutions which were the
bulwarks of the multitude had been sapped and weakened, and nothing
had been substituted for them. The people were without education, and,
relatively to the advance of science and the comfort of the superior
classes, their condition had deteriorated, and their physical quality
as a race was threatened....”
On the other hand, the incongruity of modern political machinery was
never far from Disraeli’s thoughts. “... Whatever may have been the
faults of the ancient governments,” he muses in _Contarini Fleming_,
“they were in closer relation to the times, the countries, and to the
governed, than ours. The ancients invented their governments according
to their wants. The moderns have adopted foreign policies, and then
modelled their conduct upon this borrowed regulation. This circumstance
has occasioned our manners and our customs to be so confused and absurd
and unphilosophical.... He who profoundly meditates upon the situation
of modern Europe, will also discover how productive of misery has been
the senseless adoption of Oriental customs by Northern peoples....” And
Disraeli also distinguished between the direct democracy of multitude
and that of “popular” institutions.
Nothing is less truly “popular” than “the people” as a “democracy,”
for the despotism of many is as odious as the arbitrary will of one,
and even more fatal than the government by groups of the few. This
is the distinction on which he expatiated in a famous speech of 1847
at Aylesbury, where he contrasted “popular principles” with “Liberal
opinions”--
“As it is not the interest of the rich and the powerful to pursue
popular principles of government, the wisdom of great men and the
experience of ages have taken care that these principles should be
cherished and perpetuated in the form of institutions. Thus the majesty
that guards the multitude is embodied in a throne; the faith that
consoles them hovers round the altar of a national Church; the spirit
of discussion, which is the root of public liberty, flourishes in the
atmosphere of a free Parliament.”
These, in the rough, are some of Disraeli’s ideas as to the new
democracy. From the first, as we shall see, he compassed the renewal
of the English democratic idea--that of democracy as an _element_--in
opposition alike to the State tutelage of the French, and to that
form of democracy which means the undue power of one _class_ in the
nation. His Reform Bill of 1867 was the accomplishment of his earliest
hopes, and the realisation of principles distinct from the spasms of
doctrinaire “Liberalism.”
He regarded our Constitution--the quintessence of the English character
immanent in English institutions--as a real though limited monarchy,
tempered by a democracy which is in effect neither more nor less than
_a natural aristocracy_.
“Aristocracy,” as a universal principle and not the badge of a
particular class, is the committal of political privilege far more
to representative influence than to powerful interests. A “natural”
aristocracy must comprehend and absorb the superiors of every class in
all their varieties.
“The Monarchy of the Tories,” Disraeli exclaimed in his youth,[54]
“is more democratic than the Republic of the Whigs.” “The House of
Commons,” he exclaimed many years later, “is a more aristocratic
body than the House of Lords.” In each House, through all its
pronouncements, he recognised that the democratic element is
aristocratic, the aristocratic element democratic. That the
representative assembly of the Commons, which is elected, should
include all that is best from each class which by its qualities has
earned the boon of the franchise; that the representative assembly,
which is not elected, should include more and more not only those whose
aggrandisement stands for the interests of property, but those too
whose intellect and attainments entitle them to distinction. Nor, of
course, can the fact be ignored that through hereditary honours the
Estate of the Commons, which constantly reinforces the Estate of the
Peers, is, in its turn, as constantly refreshed from the Estate of
the Peers. And from first to last, in theory, as well as in action, he
upheld the land as the deepest foundation of England’s greatness of
character. I could quote passage after passage, both from books and
speeches, and regarding subjects the most various, in which he presses
home the substantial importance of a territorial constitution, and the
fact that the landed interest is in truth not only a safeguard for
freedom in peace and vigour in war, but also an industrial interest of
the highest order; and doubly so, because by sentiment, by tradition,
by its contribution to local government, to stability, to the social
scale of duties conditioning the tenure of property, to physique, its
influence is essential and exceptional. I shall content myself with
a citation from a speech of 1860, and it may be remembered that the
acute De Tocqueville singles out the self-seclusion of the official
bourgeoisie from the land as a chief contributory to the French
Revolution--
“... I look round upon Europe at the present moment, and I see no
country of any importance in which political liberty can be said to
exist. I attribute the creation and maintenance of our liberties to
the influence of the land, and to our tenure of land. In England
there are large properties round which men can rally, _and that in my
mind forms the only security in an old European country against that
centralised form of government which has prevailed, and must prevail,
in every European country where there is no such counterpoise_. It is
our tenure of land to which we are indebted for our public liberties,
because it is the tenure of land which makes local government a fact in
England, and which allows the great body of Englishmen to be ruled by
traditionary influence and by habit, instead of being governed, as in
other countries, by mere police.”
Disraeli was always staunch to the land. After the Corn Law repeal,
he strove pertinaciously till he succeeded in removing those especial
burdens which unfairly hampered their free competition, and which were
originally the price of peculiar privileges then removed. But though
he always desired a preponderance of the various landed interests, he
never wished for their predominance. And to the last he refused to
allow any spurious cry for especial measures on their behalf to be
raised when a temporary depression due to the seasons arose, which
he always distinguished from permanent causes connected with social
revolutions.[55]
To develop our ancient institutions was his lifelong specific. From
his earliest pronouncements, those in the _Letter to Lord Lyndhurst_,
those in _What is he?_ and in _Gallomania_, those in the _Spirit
of Whiggism_, those in his first election speeches, extending over
a period of five years before he was returned, in his three first
political novels, to his latest orations on Conservatism as a
“national” cause, he laid the greatest stress on the function and
origin of the three co-ordinate Estates of the Realm--“popular classes
established into political orders”[56]--which under monarchy form our
Constitution. And, while to the end he praised that mighty force of
public opinion which has in the person of the Press almost divested
Parliament of its ancestral office as “the grand inquest” of national
grievances, he still held the “organisation of opinion” to remain
the essence of the party system; while he increasingly desired the
presence in Parliament of elements at once various and choice,[57] and
the absence from its councils of any preponderant sects or sections.
Like Burke, he believed that Parliament should be under every changing
phase of national development “the express image of the feelings of
the nation;” like Bolingbroke, he deemed that it should be also the
collective assemblage of its wisdom. He regarded these “estates” as the
embodiment of great national interests organised on the principle of
distinct duties conditioning privilege; and he desired that, however
modified, they should never be altered so as to impair the great
national institutions as whose buttresses they were built to serve.
Looking back historically, he discerned that some hundred and twenty
years before the birth of English Liberalism, a country and “Old
England” party, perplexed by dynastic and economic problems, confronted
too by the semi-scientific rationalism of a new age, had been first
schooled into comprehensive, generous, and “national” aspirations by
a great but lost leader, and had then been baffled by a set of great
families. Most of these began by professing Republican principles,
and all of them were branded in the literature of Queen Anne as the
“Venetian oligarchy.” These families aimed steadily for more than
a century at engrossing the whole power of the State. Their bias
from 1700 to Sunderland’s peerage bill in 1718, and from 1718 to the
Reform Bill of 1831 remained Republican. But so long as a king was
content to be a puppet dancing on their wires, and the nation to be
cowed into lethargy, they could dispense with theoretical forms,
mainly upheld as a ladder towards oligarchical power. From time to
time they assumed popular causes, but somehow they never succeeded
in themselves being popular, because their chief object as a party
organisation was “the establishment of an oligarchical government
by virtue of a Republican cry;”[58] because, as Disraeli has again
shown, English revolutions have always been in favour of privilege
traditionally distributed, while foreign revolutions have been against
all privilege whatever; because the “New Whigs” of Queen Anne and the
first two Georges sought a _tabula rasa_--a plain map, as opposed
to the picture with perspective of English institutions. They were
theoretically for “liberty and property”--the “_New_ Whig” catchword
of Queen Anne’s reign that replaced the old one of “Liberty” alone, in
which both Whigs and Tories joined at the revolution--but their bias
was always more for property than for liberty. They sought to amass
money and power through the amassing classes. They never studied the
varied interests of the whole nation. Walpole usurped their place, but
retained their influence, and by his virtue George I. reigned rather
than ruled over the towns instead of over the country. At first these
oligarchs kicked against the growing management of a sole minister,
but the shrewd steadiness of a superior will overmastered them, and
Newcastle remained on Walpole’s side--the insignificant representative
of their tamed confederacy. Trade ceased to follow the land, but
tended more and more to acquire it by purchase, until a fresh moneyed
oligarchy, which acquired fresh titles, was formed. The great Chatham
broke it for a time; and afterwards George III. obstinately mutinied
against its shackles. The French overthrow transformed the Whig cry of
Republicanism to the Whig cry of Jacobinism. “... Between the advent of
Mr. Pitt and the resurrection of Lord Grey, ... ever on the watch for a
cry to carry them into power, they mistook the yell of Jacobinism for
the chorus of an emancipated people, and fancied, in order to take the
throne by storm, that nothing was wanting but to hoist the tricolour
and to cover their haughty brows with a red cap. This fatal blunder
clipped the wings of Whiggism; nor is it possible to conceive a party
that had effected so many revolutions and governed a great country for
so long a period more broken, sunk, and shattered, more desolate and
disheartened, than these same Whigs at the Peace of Paris.” But all
proved fruitless, until at last the vast body of the nation--the real
“people”--reasserted themselves, and, by emphasising Parliamentary
reform, compelled oligarchs, mistrustful of them at heart,[59] to “do
something.” What they “did” was to aggrandise the middle classes, on
whom they had always relied; and a new revolution was the consequence.
Throughout more than a century and a half, despite noble and national
intervals, they constantly betrayed themselves as a “faction who headed
a revolution with which they did not sympathise, in order to possess
themselves of a power which they cannot wield.” In 1718 they “sought
to govern the country by swamping the House of Commons.” In 1836 they
were for “swamping” the House of Lords. Their drift was continued
against the national institutions, the conjoined independence and
inter-dependence of which thwarted their inveteracy. Their plan in the
end became avowedly cosmopolitan; and when that occurred it became
doubly dangerous, for to “centralisation”--monopoly of power--was added
the no-principle of “_laissez-faire_,” the abandonment of leadership to
chaos.
The great national struggle against Napoleon practically obliterated
party distinctions in England, although there was still a remnant
of those who are, in Burke’s words: “... the most pernicious of all
factions, one in the interest and under the direction of foreign
powers.” A lull ensued. Both Toryism and Whiggism withered; the first
from sheer inanition of those popular principles which Canning in
vain sought to rekindle; the second from the sheer impossibility of
withstanding the name of Wellington and the memories of Waterloo.
Toryism turned against freedom and Liberalism against order. Public
spirit waned with the decay of party opposition. The great warriors
dwindled into petty place-men until
“Where are the Grenvilles? Turned as usual. Where
My friends the Whigs? Exactly where they were;”
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.
“‘Grammaticus, rhetor, geometres, pictor, aliptes,
Augur, schœnobates, medicus, magus.’
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._”