TOPICS OF THE DAY.
TORY TIMIDITY.
ARE not the Conservatives, as a body, just now a little foolishly nervous ? We understand the angry annoy- ance of the county Members, who see that if the Franchise Bill passes, the compacts among the gentry hitherto customary will in future elections be useless, and who fear they may have to fight hard for seats hitherto secured with little trouble ; but what are the body of the party so alarmed about ? They seem to think that if the new Reform Bills pass, and household suffrage becomes universal, and the seats for small boroughs are transferred to larger constituencies, their party may be extinguished, or at least reduced to infinitesimal proportions. Why ? There is no reason whatever in nature why a body of 10,000 men should be Liberal, while a body of 1,000 would be Conservative ; and a good deal of reason for imagin- ing that the tendency of an enlarged franchise might be the other way. The mass of mankind are not inclined to change, but are afraid of change ; and in most countries a wide suffrage, and especially a wide rural suffrage, is decidedly conservative. The Bills themselves, when passed, will take a heavy load off the Conservatives' backs, relieving them once for all from the charge of distrusting the people, while their opponents will have lost one of their most stimulating rallying cries. Both parties will have accepted the widest suffrage as yet possible, and the party which has always been favourable to extension will have lost that great attracting force. Moreover, the new voters will be men unusually subject to "influences" such as Conservatives usually prefer, the immense majority of them,
whether agricultural labourers or "urban" workmen, living by weekly wages, and being in an endless variety of ways dependent upon employers, who are for the most part Con- servative. Why should they all turn Liberal, or vote in a body on either side, or revolt against those whom Tories de- scribe as their natural chiefs ? Above all, why should they all be unreceptive of Tory ideas, and arguments, and pro- mises, so unreceptive as to leave no hope in Conservative minds of their ultimate adhesion ? The new voters have nothing to get from the Liberals that the Conservatives cannot give them, and nothing to fear from the Tories against which Liberals would protect them. The history of recent politics does not show that large constituencies are necessarily Liberal in a party sense. On the contrary, the most distinctly Tory Parliament of the last half-century was elected by household suffrage in the boroughs ; and the Conservatives profess to believe, quite honestly, as we think, that Lancashire and London, with their huge masses, are more nearly on their side than any other divisions of the country. On the other hand, the restricted suffrage in Scotland is ardently, even furiously, Liberal. Liberals do not carry all the big boroughs, and the borough of Preston, in which household suffrage is of the longest standing, has always been, and remains, distinctly Tory. The Conservatives cannot believe, in the face of such evidence, that their views have no penetrating power among the masses ; and if they have, what are they all, or all except Lord Randolph Churchill, so frightened about ? They say, because certain "interests" will be unrepresented ; but what evidence have they for their fear ? Certainly not that of experience, for the Householders elect representatives devoted to the "interests" just as readily as the Ten-pounders. We all see how the Railways can fight in the Commons, how employers can resist, how even single interests like the ship- owners can make hostile legislation impracticable. The "landed interest" is a great interest, and will make itself felt after the change, just as it did before, and this even if we define the phrase to mean the landed-proprietor interest. The squires have great means, wide distribution, and heaps of dependents, and they will make themselves felt, we may be sure. The landed interest never ruled the Ten-pounders, as was shown in the battle of Free-trade, and may, when the Ten-pounders have passed away from the counties, be at least as strong as ever.
We believe the true explanation of the Conservative fear, so far as it is reasonable, is that recently given by Mr. James Lowther in his cynically outspoken way, and is the belief that if numbers are to rule, the wealthy will have no chance. Well, that would be a great change, we admit, and it may be worth while in the lull before the meeting of Par- liament to inquire upon what grounds that impression rests. They seem to us very slight. The Householders, so far as we see, like the Ten-pounders, distinctly prefer rich men as their representatives, and send up local magnates, often with no claim except their success in fortune-making, by the score. So far from their feeling the American jealousy of the rich, or the Italian preference for the poor, described by the Marquis Nobili-Vitelleschi, they are apt to believe that men without means are adventurers, and to demand in
candidates, first of all, pecuniary independence. They distrust poor men, and are far from being attracted by find- ing a candidate in circumstances like their own. So far from Mr. Chamberlain's income injuring his popularity, he would not have half the hold over Birmingham if he had only five hundred a year. Mr. Broadhurst complains that even- handicraftsmen are reluctant to vote for the poor, and every election agent knows well that the charge of "moderate means" is a disqualification which it takes some length of public service to remove. The Liberals might have carried Mr. Fawcett for Liverpool perhaps as easily as Mr. Smith ; but had Mr. Smith been a poor man, they could not have cal-lied him at all. What reason is there to believe that this feeling will be absent among rural voters, that their pronounced preference for the man who spends largely is hypocritical, or that, other things being equal, they will not prefer the man with visible possessions or recognised station to any other candidate ? He can make himself just as popular in a county division as in a great town, and is on the whole rather more visible to the .people, if only because he resides among them so much longer. The wealthy landlord does not retreat from the place which is the source of his wealth, and the wealthy citizen does. So far from the electors feeling any jealousy of wealth, they hardly press for action against primogeniture and settlement, and have not sent up one single Member with instructions to discuss the liberty of bequest. We cannot recall one single Bill levelled at the rich by Members elected by the Householders, —for the Anti-Leasehold Bill was not intended to make any one poorer—and certainly no such Bill has passed. The wildest constituencies refused to endorse Mr. Labouchere's proposals. Indeed, on the subject on which a community like ours would first display this feeling, the distribution of patronage, the. tendency has been the other way ; and the Householders have enlarged and strengthened the system of selection by examination, which gives a legal monopoly of place to, the men who can pay the high cost of rapid and successful education. No man has a chance of so much as a clerk- ship in the Civil Service who cannot spend £300 in preparing for the contest. All Englishmen are in the main alike, and there is no reason whatever to believe that rural voters will be more hostile to the rich or less under their influence than the voters in great towns, who everywhere regard the posses- sion of wealth as an attractive quality. There is not the- slightest need, even from his own point of view, for Mr. Lowther's suggestion that the rich should have more votes than the poor. A sentiment ineradicable from the national mind gives the rich more advantage in political influence than any invidious privilege could confer, and will continue to give it even when rural householders become the equals of house- holders who dwell in towns. Unless the national wealth should decline, the House of Commons a century hence will still be a wealthy body.
We know of nothing more curious or less explicable than this Tory timidity. As a rule, we find our Conservative acquaintance sincere men, not to say bigoted men, heartily convinced that they are right, and by no means sure that the majority are not of their opinion. They are, indeed, apt to say, and honestly to believe, that if the Conservatives only got fair-play—if Mr. Gladstone's transcendent influence, for example, were away—and if they had a capable leader in the Commons, the English people would yet pronounce in their
favour. They are eager for a Dissolution, and never tired of saying the election of 1880 was in great measure an untoward accident. Lancashire, says Sir R. Cross, will yet reverse that vote, and declare, as in 1874, for the Tories, and most Conservatives believe him. And yet when they are asked to place all England in the position of Lancashire, they shrink back and mutter about the necessity of guarantees, and the chances of their party under a re'gime of numbers being altogether extinguished. They want to be "protected," either by some large representation of minorities which they will never obtain—unless, indeed, they propose equal electoral districts and single seats—or by some fanciful Redistribution scheme intended to segregate the agricultural labourers, and which might work in an unexpected way, giving us, for the first time in England, an agrarian instead of an agricultural party. We wish the Liberals to win, and to 'win largely ; but we honestly believe the Conservative appre- hensions to be almost without foundation, a result of political nervousness, not a display of political sense. The country gentlemen will have to surrender some prejudices, and to work hard at election time ; but the "English tone" runs through all classes, and the Conservative Party will no more be killed by the Bill of 1884 than the aristocracy was killed by that of 1832. We only wish it were not certain that within the next dozen years the United Kingdom would have become for one Parliament Conservative, or that for the whole twelve years Liberal measures would pass without exhausting discussion and resistance. No franchise can alter the temper of a nation, or break the stream of its history.
Previous page
