It is needless to say that this respecting of persons has led all the
other parties a dance of degradation. We ruin South Africa because it
would be a slight on Lord Gladstone to save South Africa. We have a bad
army, because it would be a snub to Lord Haldane to have a good army.
And no Tory is allowed to say “Marconi” for fear Mr. George should say
“Kynoch.” But this curious personal element, with its appalling lack of
patriotism, has appeared in a new and curious form in another department
of life; the department of literature, especially periodical literature.
And the form it takes is the next example I shall give of the way in
which the capitalists are now appearing, more and more openly, as the
masters and princes of the community.
I will take a Victorian instance to mark the change; as I did in the
case of the advertisement of “Bubbles.” It was said in my childhood, by
the more apoplectic and elderly sort of Tory, that W. E. Gladstone was
only a Free Trader because he had a partnership in Gilbey’s foreign
wines. This was, no doubt, nonsense; but it had a dim symbolic, or
mainly prophetic, truth in it. It was true, to some extent even then,
and it has been increasingly true since, that the statesman was often an
ally of the salesman; and represented not only a nation of shopkeepers,
but one particular shop. But in Gladstone’s time, even if this was true,
it was never the whole truth; and no one would have endured it being the
admitted truth. The politician was not solely an eloquent and persuasive
bagman travelling for certain business men; he was bound to mix even his
corruption with some intelligible ideals and rules of policy. And the
proof of it is this: that at least it was the statesman who bulked
large in the public eye; and his financial backer was entirely in the
background. Old gentlemen might choke over their port, with the moral
certainty that the Prime Minister had shares in a wine merchant’s. But
the old gentleman would have died on the spot if the wine merchant had
really been made as important as the Prime Minister. If it had been
Sir Walter Gilbey whom Disraeli denounced, or Punch caricatured; if
Sir Walter Gilbey’s favourite collars (with the design of which I am
unacquainted) had grown as large as the wings of an archangel; if
Sir Walter Gilbey had been credited with successfully eliminating the
British Oak with his little hatchet; if, near the Temple and the
Courts of Justice, our sight was struck by a majestic statue of a
wine merchant; or if the earnest Conservative lady who threw a
gingerbread-nut at the Premier had directed it towards the wine merchant
instead, the shock to Victorian England would have been very great
indeed.