Part 8 (1/2)

CHAPTER VIII

THE BEGINNING OF THE GLADSTONE PERIOD

The Palmerston era was now at an end, and that of Gladstone was beginning.

The first had been a period of domestic indifference and external agitation. Energy at home and restraint abroad were the marks of the first Liberal Ministry. The dominating force in practical politics was a man who derived his principles from a mixture of sound stocks. A temperate foreign policy, a rigorous economy in expenditure, and a dislike of commercial interference and restriction he had inherited from Sir Robert Peel.

Beginning his career as a strong Churchman, he had gradually acquired the old Whig liberality in religious matters. ”I think it,” he wrote in 1865, ”a most formidable responsibility in these times to doubt any man's character on account of his opinions. The limit of possible variation between character and opinion, ay, between character and belief, is widening, and will widen.”[280] To belief in popular government he seems to have approached of his own nature, and he shared with Bright the honours of leaders.h.i.+p in the new agitation for Reform. His party was compounded in much the same way of the different schools, old Whig doctrines of freedom of opinion, Palmerston's enthusiasm for nationalities, and the Manchester School's dislike of foreign affairs and preference for domestic interests combining in a general theory of individual and national liberty, which for the first time approached complete Liberalism. In two directions {231} the policy of the new school of thought showed a distinct advance upon any of its predecessors. Its conception of freedom was less pedantic than that of Benthamites or Manchester men, and it was not afraid to imitate the methods of State interference which Tory philanthropy alone had previously ventured to employ. This new spirit combined with the regard for nationalities to produce an entirely novel policy in Ireland, where peculiar diseases were at last met with peculiar remedies.

The policy of economic reconstruction, which was first seriously undertaken by the Liberal Ministry of 1868, was undertaken largely in response to pressure from a new section of society. The Reform Act of 1832 had enfranchised the 10 householder. The Representation of the People Act of 1867 enfranchised every town-dweller who paid rates. The first gave power to the middle cla.s.s. The second gave power to the working cla.s.s. The artisans, whose political agitation had died out in the Chartist movement of 1848, had devoted their energies since that date to the development of their industrial organizations. In 1863 Holyoake started an ”a.s.sociation for the Promotion of Co-operation,” and in 1869 the Co-operative Societies had a total capital of 2,000,000, and an annual trade of 8,000,000. A similar growth had taken place in the case of Trade Unions. Between 1855 and 1865 the numbers of Trade Unionists seem to have been more than doubled, and Unions which in 1870 contained 142,000 members, had 266,000 in 1875.[281] This form of organization was even more directly political than co-operation in the manufacture or supply of goods. It was frequently brought into conflict with legal theories about conspiracy, restraint of trade, intimidation, and breach of contract; and the necessity of amending the existing law was apparent.

This growth of organizations had produced a great increase of intelligence and influence among the better sort of working men. In thus managing affairs on a large scale, they had developed a capacity for political control which was very different from the vaguer discontent of an earlier generation. They were now {232} organized and disciplined, and their demand for enfranchis.e.m.e.nt could no longer be ignored or despised. The American Civil War had aroused their interest in politics, and the fort.i.tude with which some of them had borne the sufferings of the time had done much to disarm opposition. Bright's agitation at last found a response, and in 1866 the Whig Government introduced a Reform Bill. The Ministry, deprived of Palmerston, collapsed before the Bill could be carried, and by a cynical sacrifice of the very Tory principles which had defeated the Whig Bill, the Tory Ministry of Lord Derby and Disraeli pa.s.sed the Bill of 1867 into law.

With the Tory leader himself supporting the Bill, the voice of Toryism was not loudly raised against it. Lord Robert Cecil, who soon afterwards became Lord Salisbury, was the most bitter of the independent men behind Disraeli, and he was rivalled, if not surpa.s.sed, by the Radical Robert Lowe. Party discipline kept most of the Tories quiet, and there was no general opposition on the other side. Disraeli cared little for his own Bill, except as a means of ”dis.h.i.+ng the Whigs,” and Gladstone and Bright were the real champions of the measure, in and out of Parliament. ”The working men,”

said the latter, ”in thinking over this question, feel they are distrusted, that they are marked as inferiors, that they are a sort of pariahs.”[282]

The former roused the contempt of Lord Cranborne by describing the workmen as ”our own flesh and blood.” The issue, in short, was simply that of all disputes about the franchise. Was the governing cla.s.s for the time being to admit that the other was capable of managing its own affairs, or was it to declare that there was some essential difference between them which made its own ascendancy necessary? Disraeli was not, in these matters, a Tory, and with Liberal support he carried his Bill. It was a job, without any genuine enthusiasm to inspire it, but it had its Liberal effect. The artisans obtained fuller control over their own lives, and the Liberal Government which they set up in 1868 expressed for the first time the wishes of their cla.s.s in legislation.

{233}

It is necessary at this point to refer to two forces which were acting upon the political machine. The first, Socialism, was a diffused influence, operating among the working cla.s.ses. The other, the teaching of John Stuart Mill, was a definite intellectual impulse, which worked directly upon the minds of men of education. Socialism has never been accepted as a creed by the majority of British working men, and its hard, logical reasoning will probably always prove as alien to them as Philosophic Radicalism was to the middle cla.s.s. It had been expressed for a short time in the co-operative experiment of Robert Owen, and it came into prominence at the time of the French Revolution of 1830. But its direct proclamation that the system of private capital meant the abuse of wage-earners, and that it was only where the whole people owned and controlled the means of production, distribution, and exchange that the poorer section could get economic security, was never popular. The Chartist movement had a purely political programme of annual Parliaments, payment of members, the ballot, and other const.i.tutional reforms. Practical Socialism, the direct interference of the State in order to improve economic conditions, was concentrated after the Reform Act of 1832 in the Tory philanthropists. Lord Shaftesbury hated Socialism as a creed. But in opposing a Secular Education Bill of 1850 he used the very arguments by which Socialists justified their demand for the nationalization of capital: ”The honourable and learned member seemed to think that crime was to be traced in almost all instances to want of education; no doubt that was in many cases a source of crime, but it was not the only, nor the chief source. Want of employment was the source of a vast proportion of crime. The condition in which the people lived, the influences to which they were subjected, the sunken and immoral state of a vast number of parents, rendered it next to impossible to produce any permanent improvement in many brought into our schools; and so long as you should leave the condition of your great towns, in all their sanitary, social, and domestic arrangements, such as at present, a large proportion of your efforts would be vain, {234} and the education you could give nearly fruitless.”[283] This was not Socialism. But it was the recognition of the fact that the individual would have no chance of honest growth unless society co-operated to improve the conditions in which he lived.

The general att.i.tude of legislators towards the spirit of Socialism was very different. The Tories were largely moved to oppose it by its alliance with free thought. In 1833 the Bishop of Exeter formally moved that the Government should take steps to suppress it. The Bishop of London said that ”The Government, as a Christian Government, were called upon in the exercise of their parental functions to interpose a s.h.i.+eld between these pernicious doctrines and the minds of those who were more than the rest of society liable to the dominion of pa.s.sion.”[284] Wellington gravely referred to the ”atrocious character” of the Socialist a.s.sociations, which decoyed the people away from church by inviting them to Sunday dances. The Whig Ministry then declined to interfere with the propagation of any opinions, however obnoxious. But their intellectual hostility was as marked as that of Wellington himself. In 1852, after the French Revolution of 1848, with its disastrous attempt to provide work for all at the expense of the State, had brought the new doctrines again into prominence, Macaulay declined with great vigour to have anything to do with ”Fourierism, or St.

Simonianism, or Socialism, or any of those other 'isms,' for which the plain English word is 'robbery.'”[285] Whigs and Tories, whatever their opinions about free thought, were at least united in their determination to brook no interference with private property.

The real English Socialism was of a more practical kind than the doctrinaire Socialism of Continental thinkers like La.s.salle and Marx. The chief spokesman was Thomas Carlyle, who was a philosopher rather than a politician, and rather created a {235} new spirit in men than contrived for them any practical expedients. He never concealed his contempt for the ordinary politician, and had more in common with a Tory like Shaftesbury than with Whigs, Radicals, or political workmen.

The Whigs were ”the grand dilettanti” or ”lukewarm, withered mongrels.” The Radicals were ”ballot-boxing on the graves of heroic ancestors.” The ma.s.s of the people were ”the rotten mult.i.tudinous canaille,” and manhood suffrage was as reasonable as ”horsehood and doghood suffrage.” The world could only be saved by the hero, and the best thing mankind could do was to entrust itself to the unfettered genius of its great men. All this, and much more wild abuse sprang from Carlyle's violent indignation against individualism. He had no respect either for the aristocratic neglect of the Whigs or for the philosophical basis of the school of _laissez faire_. For the conception of society as a collection of competing individuals, protected in their compet.i.tion by the State, he endeavoured to subst.i.tute a conception of society as a ma.s.s of mutually dependent individuals, united by ”organic filaments,” the weaker aided and protected by the State against the compet.i.tion of the stronger, and the whole rising and falling, advancing and retreating together. ”Call that yet a society,” he exclaimed, ”where there is no longer any social idea extant; not so much as the idea of a Common Home, but only of a common overcrowded Lodging House? Where each isolated, regardless of his neighbour, turned against his neighbour, clutches what he can get, and cries 'Mine,' and calls it Peace, because in the cut-purse and cut-throat scramble no steel knives but only a far cunninger sort can be employed.”[286] This is not scientific Socialism, with its logical formulae, the evolution of economic structures, the ultimate nationalization of all the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the rest. But it is a pa.s.sionate appeal, in the very spirit of Socialism, to the sense of brotherhood, to the feeling that every man has as much right as every other not to be left behind in the race of industrial {236} compet.i.tion, and that the State, the organization of Society for common purposes, should not be confined merely to negative functions, but should be made the active and positive instrument of the improvement of human life.

Carlyle presented a curious contrast of the aristocrat and the democrat.

His feeling was all for the people. But it was to be carried into practical effect by despotic or oligarchic methods. No man ever saw more clearly the miseries of poverty, or felt more acutely the degradation of worth by external circ.u.mstances. ”Through every living soul the glory of a present G.o.d still beams.” But he was convinced that misery could not be entrusted with the instruments of its own relief. The two habits of mind, the sympathetic and the disposing, were in him united. His contempt for political democracy was bound up with his zeal for social democracy, his recognition of the equal worth of all with his determination not to give them equal power. The generation in which he wrote based all its hopes upon politics. Political reform was everything. Once enfranchised, the population would be able to protect itself against aggression, and its distress would come automatically to an end. Carlyle saw, what the Whigs, the Radicals, and the Manchester men could not or would not see, that this negative operation of the vote, this power of defence against interference by others, was of little use for his immediate purpose, the economic reconstruction of society, and he declared in his haste that it was of no use. Political reform did not go deep enough, and Carlyle drove violently into the camp of opposition. There was no hope except in the hero, the man of extraordinary understanding and strength, who could both detect the causes of human suffering and compel society to abate them.

It was this emotional appeal of Carlyle which made him such a powerful force among thoughtful men and women, and especially among those whom experience had made acquainted with the worst effects of the industrial revolution. His hero-wors.h.i.+p gave no little encouragement to the more brutal sort of Toryism, and there are still many English people who believe {237} that the history of a nation is only the biography of its great men.

But his insistence upon the direct responsibility of the social organization for the happiness of every one within it was in the line of a reaction against crude individualism, which by 1850 was strongly marked outside Tory philanthropy. Mrs. Gaskell's _Mary Barton_, a novel which dealt sympathetically with industrial unrest, was published in 1848.

Harriet Martineau, identified with Whiggery and the Manchester School, wrote in 1849 of the state of the wage-earners: ”A social idea or system which compels such a state of things as this must be, in so far, worn out.

In ours, it is clear that some renovation is wanted, and must be found.”[287] In 1850 the Christian Socialist movement in the Church of England produced the _Tracts on Christian Socialism_ and Charles Kingsley's novel _Alton Locke_. d.i.c.kens published his _Hard Times_ in 1854, and constantly attacked the system of _laissez faire_ in the columns of _Household Words_. Ruskin, with less political instinct, pleaded as pa.s.sionately for beauty in common life as for ethical principles in art, and, like his master Carlyle, clothed his economic sermons in a style which put the cold reasoning of individualism to shame. Even Disraeli, who combined unusual moral levity with an unusual capacity for discovering the set of social currents, gave utterance to similar opinions in _Sybil_ and other novels. By the time that the working men were enfranchised in 1867, the Parliamentary work of Lord Shaftesbury was being accompanied by a general movement in society. Negative Liberalism, the removal of restrictions upon the individual, had obviously produced little direct good among the poorer people. It was time that humane and generous impulses in the direction of positive a.s.sistance had their way. The difference between the new Liberalism and the old was the difference between emanc.i.p.ation and toleration, between leaving alone and setting free.

The influence of John Stuart Mill was not so much in the direction of definite changes in society as in the direction of {238} an alteration of mental processes by which such changes became possible. Liberal thinkers like Paine and Bentham had a.s.sailed the human mind from without, clamouring about its gates with completely fas.h.i.+oned ideas, which they endeavoured to thrust into it by a sort of intellectual a.s.sault. They had no doubts of their own rightness or of the duty of others to agree with them. Mill, chiefly through his acquaintance with the evolutionary ideas of Comte, was of a more tolerant disposition, and preferred to adopt the method of getting to understand how his adversary's error had arisen, and of persuading him, as it were, to retrace his steps, and by choosing another road, arrive at a sounder conclusion. His book on Logic was an attempt to alter the prevailing system of intuitional philosophy, by which he believed that prejudices and the dictates of interest were a.s.sumed to be absolute truths, and to subst.i.tute for it a system in which every idea might be thoroughly examined and tested before it was adopted. In other words, he proposed to do with the conceptions of philosophy what Bentham proposed to do with inst.i.tutions, to accept none, except on their merits. He thus hoped to produce, not definitely new ideas, but a condition of mind to which new ideas would not be repugnant. This method of undermining his adversary's position was his method in politics as in general philosophy.

Mill was the son of a Utilitarian, and was himself a disciple of Bentham.

But he never accepted the Benthamite theory without qualification. He knew that men were actuated by other motives, good and bad, than self-interest.

He did not believe that by setting all men free to pursue their own interest the majority would achieve happiness. He did not believe that it was enough in politics to enfranchise every person of twenty-one years of age, or that a democracy might not be guilty of as abominable tyranny as a despot or an oligarchy. He held most of the Benthamite principles, as forming the best working philosophy, but he never supposed that they would not require safeguards against abuse, or would inevitably produce the desired result. Bentham said, ”This individual is actuated by this {239} motive; apply this remedy to his condition, and he will develop himself to this point.” Mill said, ”This individual seems to be actuated by various motives, of which this seems to be the most important, his history and the experience of other individuals suggests that if this remedy is applied to his condition he will tend to develop himself to this point. I will therefore make the experiment.” Bentham was always confident and dogmatic.

Mill was never more than patient and hopeful.

Mill in effect combined the qualities of the historical and the critical schools of thought. His was not the vigorous hammering method of previous Liberals, but a cold, illuminating, and suggestive examination, which gave full credit to the existing inst.i.tution, even while it displayed its defects. He asked, ”How has it grown?” as earnestly as ”How does it work?”

and he lamented the indifference of his predecessors to history. ”No one can calculate what struggles, which the cause of improvement has yet to undergo, might have been spared if the philosophers of the eighteenth century had done anything like justice to the past.”[288] Every inst.i.tution is to be studied historically, though it must be justified empirically. If it is bad in use, it must be reformed or abolished, but the change must be made along the line of past growth. What he said of the position of women he applied to every other problem. ”The least that can be demanded is, that the question should not be considered as prejudged by existing fact and existing opinion, but open to discussion on its merits, as a question of justice and expediency; the decision on this, as on any of the other social arrangements of mankind, depending on what an enlightened estimate of tendencies and consequences may show to be most advantageous to humanity in general.... Through all the progressive period of human history, the condition of women has been approaching nearer to equality with men. This does not of itself prove that the a.s.similation must go on to complete equality, but it a.s.suredly affords some presumption that such is the case.”[289] This double view, combining the Radical view of Bentham with the historical {240} view of Burke, enabled Mill to see his subject, as it were, stereoscopically and in true relation with its surroundings. He was not influenced by Darwin's theory of evolution. But his own work produced a very similar effect. It made men accustomed to the idea of continuous alteration, of future as well as past growth.