TORY DEMOCRACY
‘The Tory party in this country is the national party; it is the
really democratic party of England. It supports the institutions of
the country, because they have been established for the common
good, and because they secure the equality of civil rights without
which, whatever may be its name, no government can be free, and
based upon which principle every government, however it may be
styled, is, in fact, a democracy.’
B. DISRAELI: _A Vindication of the English Constitution_.
[Sidenote: 1882-1885]
The conditions of British politics during the Parliament of 1880,
whether in the House of Commons or abroad in the country, were
peculiar--perhaps unprecedented. Mr. Gladstone’s Administration,
outwardly so powerful alike in the capacity of its members and the
number and fidelity of its supporters, was divided by zig-zag, oblique,
inconsistent yet fundamental dissensions. Nor were these disturbances
the temporary or accidental effect of particular men or measures. There
were important measures. There were earnest, ambitious men. But
something more lay behind the unrest and uncertainties of the day. Not
merely the decay of a Government or the natural over-ripeness of a party
produced the agitations of 1885 and 1886. It was the end of an epoch.
The long dominion of the middle classes, which had begun in 1832, had
come to its close and with it the almost equal reign of Liberalism. The
great victories had been won. All sorts of lumbering tyrannies had been
toppled over. Authority was everywhere broken. Slaves were free.
Conscience was free. Trade was free. But hunger and squalor and cold
were also free; and the people demanded something more than liberty. The
old watchwords still rang true; but they were not enough. And how to
fill the void was the riddle that split the Liberal party. It happened,
moreover, that at this very time, already so critical, a Liberal
Government had been forced to deal with all kinds of affairs for the
efficient conduct of which their formulas furnished no clue. They were
compelled to intervene by force of arms in Egypt, to repress popular
movements, to banish popular leaders, to hang revolutionaries, to devise
ingenious instruments of Coercion, to mutilate Parliamentary procedure
and to curtail the freedom of debate. And thus, while half the Cabinet
were ransacking the past for weapons of Executive authority, others were
groping dimly towards a vague Utopia.
All this confusion was still worse confounded by the imminence of a
further extension of the franchise. The ‘ten-pounder’ and the
‘householder’ had been stages of growth. The evolution was now to be
completed, or practically completed. The government of a world-wide
Empire was, for the first time in human experience, to be thrown
unreservedly to the millions. And no man could predict the results of
that experiment. There seemed to be no reason to assume that any large
body of working-class electors would ever vote Tory. Who could possibly
have foreseen that whether from conscious choice between men and parties
or from the unsuspected operation of irresistible forces till then
latent, the millions would peacefully hand back their powers to
political organisations and so to established authority; that
enfranchised multitudes would constitute themselves the buttresses of
privilege and property; that a free press would by its freedom sap the
influence of debate and through its prosperity become the implement of
wealth; that members and constituencies would become less independent,
not more independent; that Ministers would become more powerful, not
less powerful; that the march would be ordered backward along the beaten
track, not forward in some new direction; and that after a period of
convulsion and flux, twenty years of Tory Government would set in? Who
would have listened to such paradox with patience?
The differences of mood and aim which racked the Ministerial party were
reflected, only less vividly, in the Tory ranks. A Conservative
Opposition smarting under what they regarded as most undeserved defeat
and hampered by leaders to whose defects no one could be blind, had been
forced constantly to support their antagonists upon the main issues of
their policy. They found the Liberal Government engaged in assertions of
authority, at home and abroad, with which all their deepest instincts
inclined them to sympathise. The enforcement of the sternest forms of
Coercion in Ireland, the suspension and suppression of disorderly
members at Westminster, the launching of great warlike enterprises
across the sea, were all public objects which upon the highest patriotic
grounds commanded Tory assent. Upon the other hand they hated with the
fiercest animosity of faction the Ministers who directed these affairs.
They knew that a crisis was approaching. They feared--not without
reason--the formidable union of Gladstone and democracy. They believed
that he was ruining the country and was prepared to dishonour the
Empire. Yet they found themselves repeatedly compelled to vote with him;
and even when opportunities of legitimate attack were offered, no one of
their champions seemed able to strike the blow.
The hesitancy and incompetence which marked the conduct of the
Conservative Opposition--although to some extent due to very lofty
motives of public duty--filled with exasperation the militant Tories in
the country. Members of Parliament, confronted week after week by
definite issues on which votes had to be recorded, found themselves
drawn inch by inch into supporting whole spheres of Governmental action.
Their friends outside took a more general view. They saw what they took
to be a succession of feeble surrenders before Mr. Gladstone’s prestige.
They saw their representatives, bewitched by his authority and
eloquence, in the same Lobby with their arch-enemy. They saw the
Liberal Government staggering ponderously forward, in spite of
disunion, difficulty, and peril, through a succession of mismanaged
warlike undertakings to a series of pernicious domestic reforms. And no
man apparently to stand in their path! And then, all of a sudden, a man
arose alone, or almost alone, to do battle on their behalf. They watched
him struggling day after day against overwhelming odds, overthrown a
score of times, deserted and even tripped up by those who should have
sustained him; yet always returning with inexhaustible activity to the
attack and gaining from month to month substantial and undoubted
successes.
The Conservative party outside Parliament had as little real liking for
much that Lord Randolph Churchill said about Ireland and Egypt as their
leaders and representatives in the House. They could not find any
sympathy for the followers of Mr. Parnell. They did not enjoy being told
that British troops had been used in Egypt to collect the bondholders’
debts, or the description of such thrilling episodes as the bombardment
of a city by an ironclad fleet, a cavalry charge by moonlight, or the
storming of an entrenched position as ‘tawdry military glories.’ They
could not join whole-heartedly in eulogies of a Pasha whom British
justice had condemned to life-long exile, or in attacks upon the
morality and humanity of a Khedive whom British bayonets had replaced
upon his throne. All this, even while they cheered, seemed to them
unpatriotic. But they could not overlook the commotion which Lord
Randolph Churchill’s denunciations wrought in the Gladstonian ranks, or
the embarrassments in which they involved the Radical supporters of the
Ministry. They loved their country much, but they hated Gladstone more;
and they consoled themselves with the belief (which did Lord Randolph
Churchill less justice than he deserved) that he did not really mean all
he said; that it was only his way of beating the Grand Old Man; and
that, after all, he was Jingo and True Blue at heart.
During the years which had passed since the new Parliament had met, the
working-class supporters of the Conservative party, particularly in the
great towns, had come to look with especial favour upon Lord Randolph
Churchill. To these were added a considerable defection from those who
had hitherto counted themselves Liberals. He touched the imagination of
the English people; and he appealed especially to their youth. ‘The
young men of England,’ he exclaimed, ‘are joining the Tory party in
great numbers. The youth of England is on our side.’ He was, indeed,
soon forced to defend himself from the assumption ‘that any expression
of opinion from a person who has no claim to the monumental age of 101,
is a breach of decorum, almost an act of indecency, and an indication of
incurable vice.’ ‘Youth,’ he said (Edinburgh, December 20, 1883), ‘is no
doubt a great calamity, and it appears to excite all the worst passions
of human nature among those who no longer possess it. But we may, I
think, chase away such depressing reflections by remembering that youth
is a calamity which grows less bitter and less poignant as the years go
by, and that by the sheer and simple process of living and survival we
must, each in our turn, approach the summit of the wave.’
By the end of 1882 he was already unquestionably the most popular
speaker in the Conservative party. In 1884 and 1885 he equalled, if he
did not surpass, Mr. Gladstone himself in the interest and enthusiasm
which his personality aroused. Wherever he went he was received by
tremendous throngs and with extraordinary demonstrations of goodwill. In
times when good Conservatives despaired of the fortunes of their party
under a democratic franchise and even, making a virtue of necessity,
regarded it as almost immoral to court a working-class vote, and when
the chiefs of Toryism looked upon the resisting powers of small shop and
lodging-house keepers, of suburban villadom, and of the genial and
seductive publican as almost the only remaining bulwarks of the
Constitution, Lord Randolph Churchill boldly enlisted the British nation
in defence of Church and State. At a time when Liberal orators and
statesmen, ‘careering about the country,’ as Lord Randolph described
them, ‘calling themselves “the people of England,”’ were looking forward
to an election which should relegate the Conservative party to the limbo
of obsolete ideas, they were disconcerted by the spectacle, repeatedly
presented, of multitudes of working men hanging upon the words of a
young aristocrat; and Radicals, bidding higher and higher to catch the
popular fancy, heard with disgust the loudest acclamations of the crowd
accorded to Lord Randolph Churchill as he denounced ‘the Moloch of
Midlothian’[13] or ‘the pinchbeck Robespierre’[14] for war and tyranny
beyond the sea, profusion and misgovernment at home.
Abuse was retorted on his head in vain. ‘“Yahoo Churchill,”’ ‘Little
Randy,’ ‘Cheeky Randy,’ ‘the music-hall cad,’ ‘the Champagne Charley of
politics,’ were designations which measured at once his popularity and
the rising fury of his foes. His fierce moustache and ‘note of
interrogation’ head lent themselves to caricature. He was drawn as a
pigmy, a pug dog, a gnat, a wasp, a ribald and vicious monkey, so
habitually, that nearly everyone, who had not seen him in the flesh,
believed that his physical proportions were far below the common
standards of humanity; but the contrast between his reputed stature and
the majestic outlines of Mr. Gladstone and Sir William Harcourt only
enhanced his fighting qualities in the public eye. ‘Give it ’em hot,
Randy,’ cried the crowds in the streets and at the meetings, till he
himself was forced to complain that he was expected to salute his
opponents with every species of vituperation. But, to tell the truth, he
responded to the public demand with inexhaustible generosity. He spared
no one. Neither persons nor principles escaped an all-embracing
ridicule. The most venerated leaders of the Liberal party, famous in the
great days of its rise, fared no better at his hands than the crudest
and most violent of the New Radicals. One by one Mr. Bright, Mr.
Gladstone, Lord Hartington, Lord Granville, Sir Charles Dilke, Mr.
Chamberlain, Mr. Bradlaugh, and Mr. Schnadhorst were summoned before
that irreverent tribunal and exhibited to popular censure and derision.
His speeches were effective far beyond the circles of his hearers. As
early as the spring of 1881 the _Morning Post_ began to report him
_verbatim_. Mr. Chenery, always a firm believer in his genius, followed
this example almost immediately. Instead of that paragraph of mutilated
misrepresentation with which so many eminent Ministers and ex-Ministers
have to remain dissatisfied, column after column of the _Times_ was
filled with the oratory of an unproved stripling of thirty-two. The
remonstrances which jealousy suggested did not discourage Mr. Chenery;
for, indeed, Lord Randolph’s speeches were the best of ‘copy.’ His
wonderful memory enabled him to make the most elaborate preparations.
His earlier speeches were almost all written out beforehand and learned
by heart. He had the knack of being able to foresee the occasion and he
wrote not an essay or an argument, but just the kind of harangue that
would fit the mood of his audience. His style was essentially
rhetorical, and much more spontaneous than his peculiar methods of
preparation would imply. He seems to have written with scarcely a single
correction and without hesitation of any kind, as fast as he could set
pen to paper. Indeed, I fancy that he wrote his speeches chiefly for an
exercise of memory and to fix them clearly in his mind and did not by
any means make them up with a pen in his hand. Once written, they could
be repeated almost without notes and quite without alteration. But in
this laborious process they gained a logical sequence which, while it
did not in the least detract from the delivery, added vastly to their
virtues in reproduction.
Above all, they were entirely fresh and original. Wit, abuse, epigrams,
imagery, argument--all were ‘Randolphian.’ No one could guess beforehand
what he was going to say nor how he would say it. No one else said the
same kind of things, or said them in the same kind of way. He possessed
the strange quality, unconsciously exerted and not by any means to be
simulated, of compelling attention, and of getting himself talked about.
Every word he spoke was studied with interest and apprehension. Each
step he took was greeted with a gathering chorus of astonished cries. As
Tacitus said of Mucianus: ‘Omnium quae dixerat, feceratque, arte quadam
ostentator’ (‘He had the showman’s knack of drawing public attention to
everything he said or did’). Before the end of 1882 a speech from Lord
Randolph Churchill had become an event to the newspaper reader. The
worthy, pious, and substantial citizen, hurriedly turning over the pages
of his _Times_ or still more respectable _Morning Post_, and folding it
to his convenience, crouched himself in his most comfortable chair and
ate it up line by line with snorts of indignation or gurglings of mirth.
‘Look what he says about Gladstone. I wonder the _Times_ prints such
things. How lowering to the dignity of public life! I can’t think why
they pay so much attention to this young man. Randolph Churchill,
indeed--preposterous! Give me the paper back, my dear.’
Speeches are--next to leading articles--the most impermanent of
impermanent things. But the character and conceptions of that political
movement to the stimulation of which Lord Randolph Churchill devoted his
life, and by which he was now to be so swiftly carried forward, cannot
be better explained than in his own words; and, moreover, the reader is
entitled to have some opportunities of judging for himself. The winter
at Blenheim, with its diversions of the Harriers and the Woodstock
Railway, seems to have refreshed Lord Randolph’s mind and added to his
stores of fancy. He emerged from his retirement to plunge into a
vehement political campaign. On three successive days in December he
delivered at Edinburgh what he called a ‘trilogy’ of speeches. The first
was upon Egypt. Here are its keynotes:--
The Court of Chancery repudiates loans made by money-lenders to
infants even though they may have actually received and spent the
money. Far more ought this country, acting as a great Court of
Equity, to protect the Egyptians in any efforts they may make to
free themselves from this frightful burden [of debt] which is
strangling the life out of them--these Egyptians whom Sir Evelyn
Wood so eloquently calls the infants of centuries: this burden for
the contraction of which they are absolutely innocent, forced upon
them by the great money-lenders of the Stock Exchanges of London
and Paris. The other day the poor Egyptians were very near
effecting a successful revolution; they were very near throwing off
their suffocating bonds; but, unfortunately for Mr. Gladstone, the
Prime Minister of Great Britain--Mr. Gladstone, the leader, the
idol, the demi-god of the Liberal party--Mr. Gladstone, the member
for Midlothian, came upon them with his armies and his fleets,
destroyed their towns, devastated their country, slaughtered their
thousands, and flung back these struggling wretches into the morass
of oppression, back into the toils of their taskmasters. The
revolution of Arabi was the movement of a nation; like all
revolutions, it had its good side and its bad; you must never, for
purposes of practical politics, criticise too minutely the origin,
the authors, or the course of revolutions. Would you undo, if you
could, the Revolution of 1688, which drove the Stuarts from the
throne, because of the intrigues of the nobles and of the clergy?
Would you undo the French Revolution because of the Reign of
Terror? Would you undo the Revolution of Naples because Garibaldi
might not be altogether a man of your mind? You know you would not;
you know that those revolutions were justified by atrocious
Governments.
* * * * *
I advocate, in the first place, the expulsion ‘bag and baggage’ of
the Khedive Tewfik, with all ‘his Turks and his Circassians, his
Zaptiehs and his Mudirs, his Bimbashis and Yuzbashis, his Kaimakams
and his Pashas’[15]--no great number of them in all; two or three
ships would hold the lot. I advocate the recall of the exiles from
Ceylon, the resuscitation of the national party, the formation of a
genuine popular Government, at the head of which shall be placed a
Prince--either native or European, as you will--who shall be indeed
and in truth constitutional, enlightened, and just. I advocate a
great re-arrangement and reduction of the Egyptian national debt
and a clean sweep of the debts of the victimised, the bankrupt, and
the ruined fellaheen. I advocate the placing of Egypt under the
guarantee and guardianship of united Europe, so that no one single
Power shall be able to exercise there superior influence to
another, so that collective authority shall restrain individual
ambition. In a word, I advocate--I plead for--the real emancipation
of an historic land and the true freedom of an ancient race.
* * * * *
You will be told that Egypt is the high-road to India, and that
Britain must hold it at all costs. This is a terrible and a
widespread delusion. Similar delusions have before now led astray
the foreign policy of this country. At one time it was ‘the balance
of power’: that has passed away. At another time it was ‘the
integrity of the Ottoman Empire’: that has tumbled into an
abandoned and forgotten grave; and now we have ‘the high-road to
India’ will-o’-the-wisp, which in time will vanish too. Egypt is
not the high-road to India. The Suez Canal is a commercial route to
India, and a good route, too, in time of peace; but it never was,
and never could be, a military route for Great Britain in time of
war. In time of war there are no well-marked high-roads to and fro
across the British Empire. The path of Britain is upon the ocean,
her ways lie upon the deep, and you should avoid as your greatest
danger any reliance on transcontinental communication, where, at
any time, you may have to encounter gigantic military hosts.
(Edinburgh, December 18, 1883.)
The second speech dealt with the question of the extension of the
franchise, and must be considered in its place. The third foreshadowed
the advent of the Home Rule struggle:--
[Sidenote: 1884 ÆT. 35]
Develop, if you like, in any way you may, the material resources of
Ireland. Advance public money on the easiest terms for railways,
tramways, canals, roads, labourers’ dwellings, fisheries, and
objects of that kind. We owe the Irish a great deal for our bad
government of them in the past; and if we are not stingy, there are
few injuries, however deep, which money will not cure. But do not,
if you value your life as an Empire, swallow one morsel more of
heroic legislation. By giving a continuous support to the Tory
party, let the Irish know that, though they cry day and night,
though they vex you with much wickedness and harass you with much
disorder, though they incessantly divert your attention from your
own affairs, though they cause you all manner of trial and trouble,
there is one thing you will detect at once, in whatever form or
guise it may be presented to you, there is one thing you will never
listen to, there is one thing you will never yield--and that is
their demand for an Irish Parliament, and that to their yells for
the repeal of the Union you answer an unchanging, an unchangeable,
and a unanimous ‘No.’ (Edinburgh, December 20, 1883.)
A month later he spoke at Blackpool. Perhaps this speech affords the
best example of his rhetorical methods. Certainly it filled Tory
Lancashire with merriment and satisfaction:--
Mr. Chamberlain a short time ago attempted to hold Lord Salisbury
up to the execration of the people as one who enjoyed great riches
for which he had neither toiled nor spun and he savagely denounced
Lord Salisbury and all his class. As a matter of fact, Lord
Salisbury from his earliest days has toiled and spun in the service
of the State and for the advancement of his countrymen in learning,
in wealth, and in prosperity; but no Radical ever yet allowed
himself to be embarrassed by a question of fact. Just look,
however, at what Mr. Chamberlain himself does. He goes to Newcastle
and is entertained at a banquet there, and procures for the
president of the feast a live earl, no less a person than the Earl
of Durham. Now Lord Durham is a young gentleman who has just come
of age, who is in the possession of immense hereditary estates,
who is well known on Newmarket heath and prominent among the gilded
youth who throng the corridors of the Gaiety Theatre, but who has
studied politics about as much as Barnum’s new white elephant, and
upon whose ingenuous mind even the idea of rendering service to the
State has not yet commenced to dawn. If by any means it could be
legitimate, and I hold that it is illegitimate, to stigmatise any
individual as enjoying great riches for which he has neither toiled
nor spun, such a case would be the case of the Earl of Durham; and
yet it is under the patronage of the Earl of Durham and basking in
the smiles of the Earl of Durham, bandying vulgar compliments with
the Earl of Durham, that this stern patriot, this rigid moralist,
this unbending censor the Right Hon. Joseph Chamberlain, flaunts
his Radical and levelling doctrines before the astounded democrats
of Newcastle.
After Mr. Chamberlain, Mr. Gladstone:--
‘Vanity of vanities,’ says the preacher, ‘all is vanity.’ ‘Humbug
of humbugs,’ says the Radical, ‘all is humbug.’ Gentlemen, we live
in an age of advertisement, the age of Holloway’s pills, of
Colman’s mustard, and of Horniman’s pure tea; and the policy of
lavish advertisement has been so successful in commerce that the
Liberal party, with its usual enterprise, has adapted it to
politics. The Prime Minister is the greatest living master of the
art of personal political advertisement. Holloway, Colman, and
Horniman are nothing compared with him. Every act of his, whether
it be for the purposes of health, or of recreation, or of religious
devotion, is spread before the eyes of every man, woman, and child
in the United Kingdom on large and glaring placards. For the
purposes of an autumn holiday a large transatlantic steamer is
specially engaged, the Poet-Laureate adorns the suite and receives
a peerage as his reward, and the incidents of the voyage are
luncheon with the Emperor of Russia and tea with the Queen of
Denmark. For the purposes of recreation he has selected the felling
of trees; and we may usefully remark that his amusements, like his
politics, are essentially destructive. Every afternoon the whole
world is invited to assist at the crashing fall of some beech or
elm or oak. The forest laments, in order that Mr. Gladstone may
perspire, and full accounts of these proceedings are forwarded by
special correspondents to every daily paper every recurring
morning. For the purposes of religious devotion the advertisements
grow larger. The parish church at Hawarden is insufficient to
contain the thronging multitudes of fly-catchers who flock to hear
Mr. Gladstone read the lessons for the day, and the humble
parishioners are banished to hospitable Nonconformist tabernacles
in order that mankind may be present at the Prime Minister’s
rendering of Isaiah, or Jeremiah, or the Book of Job....
He proceeded to describe Mr. Gladstone’s method of receiving a
deputation at Hawarden Castle:--
It has always appeared to me somewhat incongruous and inappropriate
that the great chief of the Radical party should reside in a
castle. But to proceed. One would have thought that the deputation
would have been received in the house, in the study, in the
drawing-room, or even in the dining-room. Not at all. That would
have been out of harmony with the advertisement ‘boom.’ Another
scene had been arranged. The working men were guided through the
ornamental grounds, into the wide-spreading park, strewn with the
wreckage and the ruins of the Prime Minister’s sport. All around
them, we may suppose, lay the rotting trunks of once umbrageous
trees: all around them, tossed by the winds, were boughs and bark
and withered shoots. They come suddenly on the Prime Minister and
Master Herbert, in scanty attire and profuse perspiration, engaged
in the destruction of a gigantic oak, just giving its last dying
groan. They are permitted to gaze and to worship and adore and,
having conducted themselves with exemplary propriety, are each of
them presented with a few chips as a memorial of that memorable
scene.
Is not this, I thought to myself as I read the narrative, a perfect
type and emblem of Mr. Gladstone’s government of the Empire? The
working classes of this country in 1880 sought Mr. Gladstone. He
told them that he would give them and all other subjects of the
Queen much legislation, great prosperity, and universal peace; and
he has given them nothing but chips. Chips to the faithful allies
in Afghanistan, chips to the trusting native races of South Africa,
chips to the Egyptian fellah, chips to the British farmer, chips to
the manufacturer and the artisan, chips to the agricultural
labourer, chips to the House of Commons itself. To all who leaned
upon Mr. Gladstone, who trusted in him, and who hoped for something
from him--chips, nothing but chips--hard, dry, unnourishing,
indigestible chips....
Gradually the tone changed as the speaker passed from ridicule to
serious attack:--
The other startling advertisement I wish to allude to was as
follows: ‘Hawarden Castle.--The Prime Minister attended divine
service this morning. He was guarded as usual’ ‘Guarded as usual!’
‘As usual!’ Gracious Heavens! what a commentary on Liberal
government in those two words, ‘as usual’! Do you know that from
the days when first what is called a Prime Minister was invented to
the present, there has been no Prime Minister about whom such a
statement could be made? Many Prime Ministers have come and gone,
good, bad, and indifferent; but the best and the worst have never
been guarded by aught else save the English people. And has it come
to this? Are the times so terrible, are bad passions so rife and
unrestrained, after four years of Liberal rule, that the apostle of
freedom, the benefactor of his country, the man for whom no
flattery is too fulsome, no homage too servile, cannot attend
divine service in his parish church without being ‘guarded as
usual’? Surely a world of serious reflection is opened up; surely
the art of government must have sunk to a very low ebb when the
first servant of the Crown has to be watched night and day by
alguazils armed to the teeth. I hope and pray that they will guard
him well, for it would be an indelible stain on our name and our
fame if a man who has spent fifty years of his life in the service
of the State, were to be the victim of an infamous assassin. But I
ask myself, are we to blame humanity for this state of things? Is
our civilisation all in vain? Is Christianity but a phantom and a
fiction? Is human nature the awful and incurable cause? Surely not.
It is more natural to blame the policy of the statesmen who, to
possess themselves of power, to overthrow a hated rival, set class
against class and race against race; who use their eloquence for no
nobler purpose than to lash into frenzy the needy and the
discontented; who for party purposes are ready to deride morality
and paralyse law; who, to gain a few votes either in Parliament or
in a borough, ally themselves equally with the atheist or with the
rebel, and who lightly arouse and lightly spring from one delirium
of the multitude to another in order to maintain themselves at a
giddy and a perilous height. (Blackpool, January 24, 1884.)
[Sidenote: 1884 Æt. 35]
A few days later it became known that Lord Randolph Churchill had
accepted the invitation of the Birmingham Conservatives to contest that
city with Colonel Burnaby at the General Election against Mr. Bright and
Mr. Chamberlain. This unfurling of the Tory flag in the very heart and
centre of militant and organised Radicalism and against the most famous
and the most active of Radical leaders aroused the keenest interest
among Conservative working men all over the country. The Tories of
Birmingham had long been powerless under the rule of their opponents.
For years they had scarcely been allowed to hold a political meeting.
Almost every avenue of civic life and even of municipal employment was
closed against them. Now the fighting leader of Tory Democracy was
coming to their deliverance. It is impossible to describe the enthusiasm
which his bold challenge excited, or the encouragement which it spread
through the mass of the Conservative party. The newspapers were filled
with cartoons of ‘Jack the Giant-killer’ or of a diminutive David going
forth to battle with a vast screw-bearing Goliath. The mention of his
name, or any reference to the contest on which he had entered, drew
forth the loudest cheers at every Tory meeting. Letters of gratitude,
resolutions of confidence and support, poured in upon him from all parts
of the country.
Before actually descending upon Birmingham he sounded a trumpet-call of
defiance from Woodstock. He attacked Mr. Bright and Mr. Chamberlain with
an impartial and unmeasured ferocity:--
The battle which Mr. Bright has rashly challenged shall be fought
_sans trève ni merci_. The savage animosity which Mr. Bright has
breathed into his speeches, has raised a corresponding spirit among
his opponents. The robe of righteousness with which he and his
confederates have clothed their squalid and corrupted forms shall
be torn asunder; naked and ashamed shall they be beheld by all the
intelligent public, and all shall be disclosed which can be,
whether it be the impostor, and the so-called ‘people’s tribune,’
or the grinding monopolies of Mr. Chamberlain, or the dark and evil
deeds of Mr. Schnadhorst.
A positive fury was excited in Radical Birmingham by these and similar
words. The political predominance of the Liberal party had been
overwhelming and absolutely unbroken in the whole history of the city
since the Reform Bill had enfranchised it. All kinds of criticism had
been suppressed in all kinds of ways and those who had attempted to
voice the opinion of the minority, had found it best to do so with a
prudent politeness. Here was insult in profusion, gross, elaborate, and
designed. ‘The mode of warfare,’ observed Lord Randolph, ‘of the Radical
party resembles that adopted by savage tribes who endeavour to terrify
their opponents by horrid yells and resounding exclamations. I observe
that the reports of the speeches of Mr. Bright and Mr. Chamberlain on
Tuesday were interspersed with “loud and prolonged groans,” “groans,”
“hisses,” “renewed hisses,” and “roars of laughter” and such like. These
resources will no doubt frighten any person of weak nerves and are
calculated to make old women and children run away. But the Tory party
in Birmingham, many thousands strong, will preserve its composure and
the candidate whom they have put forward, will not be intimidated one
little bit.’
Upon April 15 Lord Randolph Churchill opened his campaign in Birmingham
in two speeches delivered on successive nights. He was a man of many
styles. The arguments which he submitted to the electors were the
sincere expression of his deepest convictions; they were in perfect
harmony with the whole of his political life and work, but they were
strange arguments for a Tory to employ:--
I am not here to deny the services which the Radical party have
rendered to English civilisation. I believe that the present
generation is considerably indebted to the struggles which were
carried on five-and-twenty and thirty years ago by those who were
then designated the Philosophical Radicals. They enlarged the
boundaries of freedom, they removed religious and civil
disabilities, they brought the Constitution into the home and the
cottage of the artisan, and they taught the people that there were
in the political life of monarchies and nations higher and nobler
aims than the perpetual waging of wars or constant striving after
territorial aggrandisement. The student of English history, fairly
recognising these lofty results, will not be concerned to discover
or disclose the faults and the follies--and, indeed, I may say the
absurdities--which the Philosophical Radicals mingled with their
creed. Here in Birmingham, amongst your fathers and forefathers,
those men found their home, their mainstay, and their trusting
friends. But parties, like Empires and like all human combinations,
wax and wane. The law of perpetual change, which is the motive
principle of the Radical, exercises its fatal effect upon the
Radical himself....
What was the great motto which expressed all their principles,
which enabled the Radical party of old days to guide and control
the course of events, to make and unmake Ministers and Governments,
to win and retain the confidence of mighty cities such as yours?
‘Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform!’--in other words,
Non-intervention, Rigid Economy, and genuine Progressive
Legislation. And so long as they adhered to those great rocks with
the tenacity of limpets, so long was their good name secure--so
long was their wisdom undoubted; and year by year they could appear
before you with clean hands and clear consciences to ask from you a
renewal of your confidence. Chancellors of the Exchequer,
Secretaries to the Treasury and of public departments, groaned
under the tyrannical economy of Mr. Hume, but were uncommonly
careful to give him as little handle as possible for what they
arrogantly called his cheese-paring mania. The genius and influence
of Mr. Cobden exercised a diminishing effect upon the estimates of
the War and Navy Ministers; and Mr. Bright and Mr. Milner Gibson
either averted or effectually censured unjust and unnecessary war.
The Radical party of those days, he went on, was few in number, with no
representatives in the Government and no Caucus in the country. ‘It was
their great principles,’ exclaimed the speaker, ‘which gave them power,
and which they asserted with obstinacy, irrespective of party, on all
occasions, small or great.’ And now--with half a dozen Radicals in the
Ministry and nearly a hundred members in the House--What had been the
course of events? In 1880 a war in Afghanistan protracted for a whole
year under a Liberal Government; in 1881 the revolt of the Boers, ‘with
which every Radical in England was bound to sympathise,’ met by force of
arms, disgracefully and unsuccessfully applied; in 1882 ‘the struggle
for Egyptian freedom undertaken by Arabi Pasha, suppressed by Liberals,
great towns destroyed, bloody battles fought; and estimates swollen nine
millions beyond those of Lord Beaconsfield’s Administration.’
And what would be the policy of the Conservative party if power were
placed in their hands?
I have no right, a humble member of the rank and file of the Tory
party, to declare to a great meeting like this what will be their
policy. I do not know what will be the policy of the Tory party. I
am not the least bit in the confidence of the leaders, and I must
admit that I do not enjoy the high honour of their friendship. Only
the other night one of them accused me in the House of Commons of
being in secret and fraudulent alliance with the Prime Minister for
the destruction of the Tory party. I have not been able to gather
from their speeches or their acts what would be the policy they
would adopt if the responsibility of government was placed upon
them. They have preserved a prudent, perhaps an over-prudent,
reticence. But though I cannot tell you what their policy will be,
I think I can tell you what their policy ought to be--and in
general terms what I will try and make it to be--if ever I should
represent this powerful constituency. It shall be a policy of
honesty and courage. It shall be a policy which will grapple with
difficulties and deal with them, and not avoid them or postpone
them. It shall be a popular policy, and not a class policy. It
shall be a policy of activity for the national welfare, combined
with a zeal for Imperial security.
The Tory democratic movement in the English boroughs was powerfully
aided by and largely interwoven with the spread of Fair Trade doctrines.
In Lancashire especially the persuasive arguments of Mr. Farrer Ecroyd
had gained a wide acceptance, and twenty years have not effaced the
effects of his exertions. Lord Randolph Churchill, eager to attack the
Liberal Government, began in 1881 by urging the Fair Trade cause with
characteristic vigour and happy irresponsibility. As his influence and
knowledge increased, his assurance upon fiscal matters diminished; and
at Blackpool in 1884 he would not commit himself beyond an ‘inquiry into
the present condition of British industry and as to how it is affected
by our present methods of raising revenue for the service of the State.’
But certainly no one could have painted in more vivid colours the
shocking and melancholy condition of British trade. The words have been
often quoted:--
What is the state of things in the world of British industry? We
are suffering from a depression of trade extending as far back as
1874, ten years of trade depression, and the most hopeful either
among our capitalists or our artisans can discover no signs of a
revival. Your iron industry is dead, dead as mutton; your coal
industries, which depend greatly on the iron industries, are
languishing. Your silk industry is dead, assassinated by the
foreigner. Your woollen industry is _in articulo mortis_, gasping,
struggling. Your cotton industry is seriously sick. The
shipbuilding industry, which held out longest of all, is come to a
standstill. Turn your eyes where you will, survey any branch of
British industry you like, you will find signs of mortal disease.
The self-satisfied Radical philosophers will tell you it is
nothing; they point to the great volume of British trade. Yes, the
volume of British trade is still large, but it is a volume which is
no longer profitable; it is working and struggling. So do the
muscles and nerves of the body of a man who has been hanged twitch
and work violently for a short time after the operation. But death
is there all the same, life has utterly departed, and suddenly
comes the _rigor mortis_. Well, but with this state of British
industry what do you find going on? You find foreign iron, foreign
wool, foreign silk and cotton pouring into the country, flooding
you, drowning you, sinking you, swamping you; your labour market is
congested, wages have sunk below the level of life, the misery in
our large towns is too frightful to contemplate, and emigration or
starvation is the remedy which the Radicals offer you with the most
undisturbed complacency. But what produced this state of things?
Free imports? I am not sure; I should like an inquiry; but I
suspect free imports of the murder of our industries much in the
same way as if I found a man standing over a corpse and plunging
his knife into it I should suspect that man of homicide, and I
should recommend a coroner’s inquest and a trial by jury.
(Blackpool, January 24, 1884.)
In any case, even, if free imports were a wise policy, he would not
allow Mr. Bright and the Liberal party the credit of the discovery:--
Mr. Bright advised his audience at Birmingham to read over again
the speeches of Mr. Charles Villiers on Free Trade made fifty years
ago. I advise them to do nothing of the kind, because if they do
they will lose every shred of veneration and respect which they
still may feel for the name of Mr. Bright. They will find that the
great battle of Free Trade, of which Mr. Bright has never been
tired of boasting loud and long, was fought by Mr. Charles Villiers
long before Mr. Bright made his appearance in public; that Mr.
Charles Villiers bore the burden and heat of that protracted and
lengthened contest; and when Mr. Villiers had won the day Mr.
Bright and his dear friend Mr. Cobden stepped in and tried to rob
him of all his glory. All those who read Mr. Charles Villiers’s
speeches will find that Mr. Bright and his dear friend Mr. Cobden
were nothing more nor less than two plundering cuckoos, who
shamefully ejected Mr. Charles Villiers from the nest which he had
constructed, and who reared therein their own chattering and silly
brood. (Woodstock, January 31, 1884.)
After all this the Fair Traders were not unnaturally inclined to
complain when in 1887--three years afterwards--Lord Randolph Churchill
having acquired a responsible position, having studied the report of the
Commission on Trade appointed largely at his insistence in 1885, having
reflected upon the voting of the counties in the General Election, and
surveyed the problems of finance from the Treasury chambers, poured
buckets of cold water on their cherished schemes and declined to make
any exertions in their support.
But the central proposition of the Tory Democratic idea was that the
Conservative party was willing and thoroughly competent to deal with the
needs of democracy and the multiplying problems of modern life; and that
the British Constitution, so far from being incompatible with the social
progress of the great mass of the people, was in itself a flexible
instrument by which that progress might be guided and secured.
The Whigs are a class with the prejudices and the vices of a class;
the Radicals are a sect with the tyranny and the fanaticism of a
sect.... The Whigs tell you that the institutions of this kingdom,
as illustrated by the balance of Queen, Lords and Commons, and the
Established Church, are but conveniences and useful commodities,
which may be safely altered, modified, or even abolished, so long
as the alteration, modification, or abolition is left to the Whigs
to carry out. The Radicals tell you that these institutions are
hideous, poisonous, and degrading, and that the divine Caucus is
the only machine which can turn out, as if it was a patent
medicine, the happiness of humanity. But the Tories, who are of the
people, know and exclaim that these institutions, which are not so
much the work of the genius of man, but rather the inspired
offspring of Time, are the tried guarantees of individual liberty,
popular government, and Christian morality; that they are the only
institutions which possess the virtue of stability, of stability
even through all ages; that the harmonious fusion of classes and
interests which they represent corresponds with and satisfies the
highest aspirations either of peoples or of men; that by them has
our Empire been founded and extended in the past; and that by them
alone can it prosper or be maintained in the future. Such is the
Tory party and such are its principles, by which it can give to
England the government she requires--democratic, aristocratic,
Parliamentary, monarchical, uniting in an indissoluble embrace
religious liberty and social order. And this party--this Tory party
of to-day--exists by the favour of no caucus, nor for the selfish
interests of any class. Its motto is--‘Of the people, for the
people, by the people’; unity and freedom are the beacons which
shed their light around its future path and amid all political
conflict this shall be its only aim--to increase and to secure
within imperishable walls the historic happiness of English homes.
(Blackpool, January 24, 1884.)
Again and again in these years of strife Lord Randolph Churchill
returned to this central idea:--
The foundation [of the British Constitution] is totally new, purely
modern, absolutely untried. You have changed the old foundation.
You have gone to a new foundation. Your new foundation is a great
seething and swaying mass of some five million electors, who have
it in their power, if they should so please, by the mere heave of
the shoulders, if they only act with moderate unanimity, to sweep
away entirely the three ancient institutions and put anything they
like in their place, and to alter profoundly, and perhaps for a
time altogether ruin, the interests of the three hundred million
beings who are committed to their charge. That is, I say, a state
of things unparalleled in history. And how do you think it will all
end? Are we being swept along a turbulent and irresistible torrent
which is bearing us towards some political Niagara, in which every
mortal thing we now know will be twisted and smashed beyond all
recognition? Or are we, on the other hand, gliding passively along
a quiet river of human progress that will lead us to some
undiscovered ocean of almost superhuman development? Who can
tell?... My state of mind when these great problems come across
me--which is very rarely--is one of wonder, or perhaps I should
rather say of admiration and of hope, because the alternative state
of mind would be one of terror and despair. And I am guarded from
that latter state of mind by a firm belief in the essential
goodness of life, and in the evolution, by some process or other
which I do not exactly know and cannot determine, of a higher and
nobler humanity. But, above all, my especial safeguard against such
a state of mental annihilation and mental despair is my firm belief
in the ascertained and much-tried common sense which is the
peculiarity of the English people. That is the faith which, I
think, ought to animate and protect you in your political future;
that is the faith of the Tory democracy in which I shall ever
abide. (Cambridge University Carlton, June 6, 1885.)
* * * * *
‘Trust the people’--I have long tried to make that my motto; but I
know, and will not conceal, that there are still a few in our party
who have that lesson yet to learn and who have yet to understand
that the Tory party of to-day is no longer identified with that
small and narrow class which is connected with the ownership of
land; but that its great strength can be found, and must be
developed, in our large towns as well as in our country districts.
Yes, trust the people. You, who are ambitious, and rightly
ambitious, of being the guardians of the British Constitution,
trust the people, and they will trust you--and they will follow you
and join you in the defence of that Constitution against any and
every foe. I have no fear of democracy. I do not fear minorities; I
do not care for those checks and securities which Mr. Goschen seems
to think of such importance. Modern checks and securities are not
worth a brass farthing. Give me a fair arrangement of the
constituencies, and one part of England will correct and balance
the other. (Birmingham, April 16, 1884.)
And in later years, after the battle had been won, and when the Tory
leaders had already begun to look upon their new supporters as if they
were an inalienable asset:--
I cannot but feel that we have nearly realised what was some years
ago apparently only a dream, the dream of Tory Democracy. You
remember with what scoffs and scornings and with what sneers and
ridicule the phrase ‘Tory Democracy’ was received when I first made
use of it in the House of Commons in the year 1882. Nothing was too
bad, nothing was too taunting, nothing was too absurd to apply to
the idea or to those who dared to sustain such an idea in public.
You in Birmingham were the first publicly to associate yourselves
with the policy which is contained in the phrase ‘Tory Democracy.’
What is Tory Democracy? Tory Democracy is a democracy which
supports the Tory party; but with this important qualification,
that it supports a Tory party, not from mere caprice, not from
momentary disgust or indignation with the results of Radicalism,
but a democracy which supports the Tory party because it has been
taught by experience and by knowledge to believe in the excellence
and the soundness of true Tory principles. But Tory Democracy
involves also another idea of equal importance. It involves the
idea of a Government who in all branches of their policy and in all
features of their administration are animated by lofty and by
Liberal ideas. That is Tory Democracy. (Birmingham, April 9, 1888.)
One more quotation--Lord Randolph’s defence of the Established
Church--shall close this chapter. The speech from which it is taken was
delivered in the course of his Birmingham campaign and comprised a
general vindication of the British Constitution. Let it be remembered
that in those days the demand for organic change was real and fierce.
The vast unsounded problems of Collectivism and Individualism, the
intricate and varying relations between Capital and Labour, the almost
limitless power of combined or accumulated wealth and the racial
deterioration produced by civilised poverty, were issues which might be
considered by philosophers or fought out between master and man but
which approached only remotely the Parliamentary and political arena.
Disputes about forms of government still absorbed the activities of
democracy; and the hall-mark of a good Radical in the ‘eighties was
secular republicanism:--
I see in the Church of England an immense and omni-present
ramification of machinery working without cost to the people--and
daily and hourly lifting the masses of the people, rich and poor
alike, from the dead and dreary level of the lowest and most
material cares of life, up to the comfortable contemplation of
higher and serener forms of existence and of destiny. I see in the
Church of England a centre and a source and a guide of charitable
effort, mitigating by its mendicant importunity the violence of
human misery, whether mental or physical, and contributing to the
work of alleviation from its own not superfluous resources. And I
urge upon you not to throw that source of charity upon the
haphazard almsgiving of a busy and a selfish world. I view the
Church of England eagerly cooperating in the work of national
education, not only benefiting your children, but saving your
pockets; and I remember that it has been the work of the Church to
pour forth floods of knowledge, purely secular and scientific, even
from the days when knowledge was not; and I warn you against
hindering the diffusion of knowledge, inspired by religion, amongst
those who will have devolved upon them the responsibility for the
government of this wide Empire.
But I own that my chief reason for supporting the Church of England
I find in the fact that, when compared with other creeds and other
sects, it is essentially the Church of religious liberty. Whether
in one direction or another, it is continually possessed by the
ambition, not of excluding, but of including, all shades of
religious thought, all sorts and conditions of men; and, standing
out like a lighthouse over a stormy ocean, it marks the entrance to
a port where the millions and the masses of those who are wearied
at times with the woes of the world, and troubled often by the
trials of existence, may search for and may find that peace which
passeth all understanding. I cannot, and will not, allow myself to
believe that the English people, who are not only naturally
religious, but also eminently practical, will ever consent, for the
petty purpose of gratifying sectarian animosity, or for the
wretched object of pandering to infidel proclivities--will ever
consent to deprive themselves of so abundant a fountain of aid and
consolation, or acquiesce in the demolition of an institution which
elevates the life of the nation, and consecrates the acts of the
State. (Birmingham, April 16, 1884.)
‘The work of inspiring a beaten and depressed party with hope and
courage,’ wrote Mr. Jennings in 1888,[16] ‘was substantially left to one
man.’ What had become meanwhile of the acknowledged leaders of Toryism?
Where were the names which in after years were to fill the newspapers
and the Government offices? It is curious to reflect that all this time,
while Lord Randolph Churchill was straining every nerve in the service
of his party, he was the object of almost passionate jealousy and
dislike in its high places. The world of rank and fashion had long been
hostile to him. The prominent people and party officials who formed and
guided opinion at the Carlton Club, on the Front Opposition Bench, and
in the central Conservative offices, regarded him with aversion and
alarm. They could not understand him. Still less could they explain his
growing influence. He was as unwelcome and insoluble a riddle to them as
ever Disraeli had been. To them he seemed an intruder, an upstart, a
mutineer who flouted venerable leaders and mocked at constituted
authority with a mixture of aristocratic insolence and democratic
brutality. By what warrant did he pronounce in accents of command on all
the controverted questions of the day, when men grey in the service of
the State, long installed in the headship of the party, held their peace
or dealt in platitude and ambiguity? By what strange madness of the hour
had this youth who derided Radicals for abandoning their principles and
preached Liberalism from Tory platforms, gained acceptance throughout
the land? The Conservative benches were rich in staid, substantial
merchants and worthy squires. They had their blameless young men of good
family and exemplary deportment who never gave the party Whips an
anxious moment and used their talents only to discover what ‘older and
therefore wiser’ people would wish to have them say. Why was no honour
shown to them? Did not they address meetings in the provinces? Did they
not utter sentiments to which every sensible and patriotic man might
listen with unruffled contentment? And no one marked them! Was there
not enough in these evil days to bear from Mr. Gladstone and his
legions, without this turbulent uprising in their own ranks?
In truth, at this crisis in their fortunes the Conservative party were
rescued in spite of themselves. A very little and they would never have
won the new democracy. But for a narrow chance they might have slipped
down into the gulf of departed systems. The forces of wealth and rank,
of land and Church, must always have exerted vast influence in whatever
confederacy they had been locked. Alliances or fusions with Whigs and
moderate Liberals must from time to time have secured them spells of
office. But the Tory party might easily have failed to gain any support
among the masses. They might have lost their hold upon the new
foundation of power; and the cleavage in British politics must have
become a social, not a political, division--upon a line horizontal, not
oblique.
There are, without doubt, some who will be inclined to think that no
element of the heroic enters into these conflicts, and that political
triumphs are necessarily tarnished by vulgar methods. The noise and
confusion of election crowds, the cant of phrase and formula, the
burrowings of rival Caucuses, fill with weariness, and even terror,
persons of exquisite sensibility. It is easy for those who take no part
in the public duties of citizenship under a democratic dispensation to
sniff disdainfully at the methods of modern politics and to console
themselves for a lack of influence upon the course of events by the
indulgence of a fastidious refinement and a meticulous consistency. But
it is a poor part to play. Amid the dust and brawling, with rude weapons
and often unworthy champions, a real battle for real and precious
objects is swaying to and fro. Better far the clamour of popular
disputation, with all its most blatant accessories, hammering out from
month to month and year to year the laboured progress of the common
people in a work-a-day world, than the poetic tragedies and violence of
chivalric ages. The splintering of lances and clashing of swords are not
the only tests by which the natural captains and princes among men can
be known. The spirit and emotions of war do not depend upon the weapons
or conditions of the conflict. A bold heart, a true eye--clear, plain,
decided leading--count none the less, although no blood is spilled. ‘To
rally the people round the Throne,’ cried Lord Randolph Churchill, ‘to
unite the Throne with the people, a loyal Throne and a patriotic
people--that is our policy and that is our faith.’ Much of the work that
he did, was turned to purposes very different from his own. His
political doctrines were not free from error and contradiction. But he
accomplished no mean or temporary achievement in so far as he restored
the healthy balance of parties, and caused the ancient institutions of
the British realm once again to be esteemed among the masses of the
British people.