MR. BAGEHOT'S LATEST PREDICTION.
MORE than a merely literary interest attaches to the un- finished paper which Mr. Bagehot's representatives have this month published in the Fortnightly Review. Mr. Bagehot's reputation as a clear-sighted, cool-judging politician has been growing ever since his decease, as before his decease it grew in all countries of the Continent, where his great book on the British Constitution was accepted at once as a kind of political revelation. Though upon many points so unsympathetic with English Liberals that he failed to induce them to send him to the House of Commons, where he would have been invaluable, 2Ir. Bagehot had a profound comprehension of the English people, understood alike their weaknesses and their strength ; and though sometimes perplexed by gusts of emotion which he did not share, rarely failed to predict aright the general course of their action. His belief, therefore, expressed on paper, though not published, in 1874, that the country stood on the threshold of a long Conservative regime, deserves, even under the much-changed circumstances of our day, attentive consideration. He maintained that there was a cause for such a change inde- pendent of momentary politics, and one which would operate even if any special Conservative Ministry were replaced for a time by moderate Liberals. This cause we may call, for brevity's sake, the change of generation. " We imagine a fic- titious entity called a nation ; we habitually think and speak of it as if it always remained the same ; but in truth, after a few years, it is no longer the same. The men who compose it are different. The generations change ; the son is not like his father ; the grandson is still less like his grandfather. They do not feel the same feelings, or think the same thoughts, or lead the same life. If a man of fifty will take any house which he has always known, and which has twice changed owners in course of nature, he will get a notion of the inten- sity of the change. ' Nothing about the place,' he will be almost inclined to say, is the same now as it was when he was a boy,'—it is not so much a question of this or that particular thing, but the look is different, the spirit different, the tout ensemble is different." The generation' which had been alarmed and shocked to the heart by the excesses of the French Revolution, and which, therefore, gave power to the Tories for forty years, had, by 1830 became exhausted, and had been succeeded by a genera- tion full of hope, and eager for innovation. That generation reigned with infrequent and short breaks, from 1832 to 1872— again, forty years—and then in its turn was found to be ex- hausted, and in 1873 gave place to a generation tired of change, desirous of rest, and full of the content with its institutions which is the natural attitude of mind in great and, on the whole, well-governed communities. This content could, of course, be expressed by Whigs, or the Left Centre—as Mr. Bagehot called them—but he thought it would not be, partly because that party, though the wisest in the State, has no cry to raise, but chiefly because neither of the great active forces which rule nations, the force which demands the continuance of what exists, and the force which desires great innovations, were fairly ranged behind it. The Government would be entrusted, therefore, to Conservatives ; and their rule would be long, be- cause the " revolutionary or innovating force " which could alone upset them had no demand to advance sufficiently desired by the people, to induce them to insist that Liberals should for the sake of that reform take up the reins. Mr. Bagehot intended to show that neither Parliamentary Reform, nor Tenure Reform, nor Church Re- form would give the necessary leverage, and did show that it would not be supplied by a demand for financial economy. He held that the English people, though always favourable to retrenchment in the abstract, cared at present nothing about it,—were, in fact, both able and willing to spend much more. An " Englishman is individually the most expensive animal in the world," and he does not sincerely object, except at times, to increased national expenditure. Mr. Bagehot therefore saw no cause which should create the " mighty innovating force " which would turn back the stream of tendency of this genera- tion towards Conservatism.
But Mr. Bagehot, while thus expressing his belief, made the long regime of Conservatism depend upon two conditions, and omitted one great factor from his calculations. He assumed that the Conservatism which was to rule for so long a period was to be essentially a Government of moderate men,—of men who could and would make all needful improvements, and in making them, drag with them the zealots of the party. And he held that the head of the Government would not and could not be Mr. Disraeli:— " Mr. Disraeli, so far from being a pre-eminent man of business, scarcely pretends to be a man of business at all. He had no training in it. His youth was passed in light literature. Till (in 1852) he was made Chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the House of Commons, he had never filled any office whatever ; probably, had never transacted any business whatever. Nor has he done much since. When in office, he has, till now, been always leader of the House of Commons without a majority. His whole mind has been occupied in clever strategy ; he has been trying to make five men do the work of six ; he has been devising clever policies which will divide his enemies, and little epigrams which will sting. Such work exactly suited the nature of his mind ;—the movements of no leador were ever so deli- cate; the sarcasms of no speaker were ever more fine and well placed. But in all other matters ho was simply a tolerated deficiency. If you pointed out the monstrous inconsistency of his serious assertions, his friends said, 4It is Dizzy, you know ; that is his way.' If you showed some astounding inaccuracy, they said, 'Yes, Dizzy goes like that.' If you asked as to any of the wonderful stories of his official negligence, they said,' Ah, Dizzy does not care for these things.' But the world has gone on, and we have come to a time when his party may be ruined
because Dizzy does not (probably can't) do those things It is too late for Mr. Disraeli to change his habits. He was not trained as a man of business, he has never lived as one, and he cannot now become one. He is wholly unable to give to his Cabinet the administrative impulse and the administrative guidance which their want of experience makes so necessary, and which their peculiar task requires. An oak,' according to the saying, should not be transplanted at fifty,' and a novelist who is near to seventy—who hates detail, and who knows no detail—cannot guide his younger colleagues in a now world of thorny business, much of which is alien to their prejudices, much of which was made by their adversaries, but to which they must shape their ways and adapt their policy. So long as Mr. Disraeli remains at the head of the Conservative Government, its career will bo one of many stumbles, though its great majority may keep it from falling."
We need not say that neither of these conditions has been realised. The Conservative Government has proposed no im- provements at all, and indeed no legislation of any import- ance ; while it has, upon the only subjects on which concession was urgently desired by large classes—subjects like the Burials Bill—shown no disposition to give way. And Mr. Disraeli transferred to the Peers, bestarred, beribboned, and bespattered with adulation, is master of the Government, controls its policy, and is, in the eye of the public, the man who furnishes it with brains. Mr. Bagehot, well as he knew England, never contemplated this difficulty in the Conservative path, any more than he calculated that the subject of Mr. Disraeli's action and of national interest would be foreign policy. It never occurred to him that the Tories would obtain power instead of the Conservatives, or that Lord Beaconsfield would be per- mitted to substitute for humdrum but effective administrative reforms, a policy of "mystery and menace, of brag and blus- ter," as a Scotch Provost recently described it, which would be utterly at variance with that instinctive Conservatism of the new generation upon which he based his prediction. No man in Eng- land would have stood so aghast as Mr. Bagehot at the Anglo- Turkish Convention, which is opposed to every idea he ever tried to express, or have resisted so strenuously the determina- tion to pass beyond our North-West frontier in Asia. Had he contemplated those aberrations, he would, we believe, at once have declared that his first datum had fallen through ; that the new policy introduced as much innovation in foreign affairs as the old one had introduced into domestic legislation ; and that the new generation, being influenced by content and the desire for rest, would speedily be alienated, if not from Conservatism itself, from Conservatism as momentarily manifesting itself. He would not, we imagine, have expected any permanent change in the direction of the cyclical movement, holding, as he did, that it arose from causes nearly independent of politics ; but he would have expected an interruption such as once or twice broke the long stretch of Liberal administration. He would have looked for, and probably fought for, not a Liberal Government, but such a transformation of the Conservative one as should bring it into accord with the enduring tendency of the generation which now governs affairs. The Moderate Conser- vatives, as he puts it, "have always a game at their disposal, if they are wise enough to perceive it. All that they concede, the attacking force will accept, and whatever they choose to concede, the rest of the defending force must allow. In two ways the Conservatives in happy States are likely to have a preponderance of power,—first, because that happiness is an indication that in the main the existing institutions are suit- able, and that very much organic change is not wanted ; and secondly, because Conservatives, if they only knew it, have the greatest advantage in making the changes which have to be made."
We believe Mr. Bagehot was, in the main, right, though we suspect he underrated the new rapidity with which, in so immense an electoral body as we now have, each generation will come to the front, but we must add one word to make the picture complete. The few far-sighted Tories will, in the main, agree with him, but they will add a brief but important rider. They will say that the new generation, besides being tired of innovation, is discontented with a certain want of distinction and grandeur in the position of Great Britain among the nations of the world ; that Lord Beaconsfield has perceived this feeling, and has appealed to it, and while he gratifies this desire, all other offences may be condoned. Mr. Bagehot, they will say, did not anticipate the rise of the " Imperial spirit," and close reasoner as he was, the omission of so important a datum impairs the value, if not of his general argument, at least of his statement of necessary conditions. That is true, so far as it goes ; and had the Government really elevated the position of England among the nations, had it even been able to declare itself, as so many Jingoes wish, the Protector of Islam throughout the world, instead of striking down the only free Mussulman people left outside Arabia, the interruption in the cyclical movement might have been long postponed. The Englishman is not only " an expensive animal," but an animal sensitive about his visible rank in the world, liking always to feel that criticism on him is dictated by envy, and not contempt. But the new generation and the new electors, though moved by this desire to an unexpected degree, have not lost their national char- acter, which survives cycles as well as passing Administrations. They are at heart realists, men of a certain brutal common-sense and reverence for facts, and the Beaconsfield foreign policy, with its public bluster and secret agreements, and daring ad- ventures against petty Princes, will not content them long. They will consent to the " interruption " which will rid them of costly displays of fireworks, and allow them to resume the tenour of their way, even though that way should be for a long cycle, as Mr. Bagehot predicted, a leisurely walk to see that everything in the great farm keeps straight.
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