Had Robert Lowe died in 1868, when he became a Cabinet Minister, his death would have been a political event of the first magnitude; but when he died in 1892 (in his eighty-second year) hardly anybody under forty years of age knew who Lord Sherbrooke was, and the new generation wondered why their seniors should feel any interest in the disappearance of a superannuated peer whose name had long since ceased to be heard in either the literary or the political world. It requires an effort to believe that he was at one time held the equal in oratory and the superior in intellect of Mr. Bright and Mr. Gladstone. There are few instances in our annals of men who have been equally famous and whose fame has been bounded by so short a span out of a long life.

No one who knew Lowe ever doubted his abilities. He made a brilliant reputation, first at Winchester (where, as his autobiography tells us, 294 he was miserable) and then at Oxford, where he was the contemporary and fully the peer of Roundell Palmer (afterwards Lord Chancellor Selborne) and of Archibald Tait (afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury). He was much sought after and wonderfully effective as a private tutor or “coach” in classical subjects, being not only an excellent scholar but extremely clear and stimulating as a teacher. He retained his love of literature all through life, and made himself, inter alia permulta, a good Icelandic scholar and a fair Sanskrit scholar. For mathematics he had no turn at all. Active sports, he tells us, he enjoyed, characteristically adding, “they open to dulness also its road to fame.” When he left the University, where anecdotes of his caustic wit were long current, he tried his fortune at the Bar, but with such scant success that he presently emigrated to New South Wales, soon rose to prominence and unpopularity there, returned in ten years with a tolerable fortune and a detestation of democracy, became a leading-article writer on the Times, entered Parliament, but was little heard of till Lord Palmerston gave him (in 1859) the place of Vice-President of the Committee of Council on Education. His function in that office was to administer the grants made from the national treasury to elementary schools, and as he found the methods of inspection rather lax, and noted a tendency to superficiality and a neglect of backward 295 children, he introduced new rules for the distribution of the grant (the so-called “Revised Code”) which provoked violent opposition. The motive was good, but the rules were too mechanical and rigid and often worked harshly; so he was presently driven from office by an attack led by Lord Robert Cecil (now Lord Salisbury).

Though Lowe became known by this struggle, his conspicuous fame dates from 1865, when he appeared as the trenchant critic of a measure for extending the parliamentary franchise in boroughs, introduced by a private member. Next year his powers shone forth in their full lustre. The Liberal Ministry of Lord Russell, led in the House of Commons by Mr. Gladstone, had brought in a Franchise Extension Bill (applying to boroughs only) which excited the dislike of the more conservative or more timid among their supporters. This dislike might not have gone beyond many mutterings and a few desertions but for the vehemence with which Lowe opposed the measure. He fought against it in a series of speeches which produced a greater impression in the House of Commons, and roused stronger feelings of admiration and hostility in the country, than any political addresses had done since 1832. The new luminary rose so suddenly to the zenith, and cast so unexpected a light that everybody was dazzled; and though many dissented, and some attacked him bitterly, 296 few ventured to meet him in argument on the ground he had selected. The effect of these speeches of 1866 can hardly be understood by any one who reads them to-day unless he knows how commonplace and “practical,” that is to say, averse to general reasonings and historical illustrations, the character of parliamentary debating was becoming even in Lowe’s time. It is still more practical and still less ornate in our own day.

The House of Commons then contained, and has indeed usually contained (though some Houses are much better than others), many capable lawyers, capable men of business, capable country gentlemen; many men able to express themselves with clearness, fluency, and that sort of temperate good sense which Englishmen especially value. Few, however, were able to produce finished rhetoric; still fewer had a range of thought and knowledge extending much beyond the ordinary education of a gentleman and the ordinary ideas of a politician; and the assembly was one so intolerant of rhetoric, and so much inclined to treat, as unpractical, facts and arguments drawn from recondite sources, that even those who possessed out-of-the-way learning were disposed, and rightly so, to use it sparingly. In Robert Lowe, however, a remarkable rhetorical and dialectical power was combined with a command of branches of historical, literary, and economic 297 knowledge so unfamiliar to the average member as to have for him all the charm of novelty. The rhetoric was sometimes too elaborate. The political philosophy was not always sound. But the rhetoric was so polished that none could fail to enjoy it; and the political philosophy was put in so terse, bright, and pointed a form that it made the ordinary country gentleman fancy himself a philosopher while he listened to it in the House or repeated it to his friends at the club. The speeches, which, though directed against a particular measure, constituted an indictment of democratic government in general, had the advantages of expressing what many felt but few had ventured to say, and of being delivered from one side of the House and cheered by the other side. No position gives a debater in the House of Commons such a vantage ground for securing attention. Its rarity makes it remarkable. If the speaker who attacks his own party is supposed to do so from personal motives, the personal element gives piquancy. If he may be credited with conscientious conviction, his shafts strike with added weight, for how strong must conviction be when it turns a man against his former friends. Accordingly, nothing so much annoys a party and gratifies its antagonists as when one of its own recalcitrant members attacks it in flank. When one looks back now at the contents of these speeches—there 298 were only five or six of them—and finds one’s self surprised at their success, this favouring circumstance and the whole temper of the so-called “upper classes” need to be remembered. The bulk of the wealthier commercial class and a large section of the landed class had theretofore belonged to the Liberal party. Most of them, however, were then already beginning to pass through what was called Whiggism into habits of thought that were practically Tory. They did not know how far they had gone till Lowe’s speeches told them, and they welcomed his ideas as justifying their own tendencies.

In themselves, as pieces either of rhetoric or of “civil wisdom,” the speeches are not first-rate. No one would dream of comparing them to Burke’s, in originality, or in richness of diction, or in weight of thought. But for the moment they were far more appreciated than Burke’s were by the House of his time, which thought of dining while he thought of convincing. Robert Lowe was for some months the idol of a large part of the educated class, and indeed of that part chiefly which plumed itself upon its culture. I recollect to have been in those days at a breakfast party given by an eminent politician and nominal supporter of the Liberal Ministry, and to have heard Mr. G. S. Venables, the leader of the Saturday Review set, an able and copious writer who was a sort of literary and political 299 oracle among his friends, deliver, amid general applause, including that of the host, the opinion that Lowe was an intellectual giant compared to Mr. Gladstone, and that the reputation of the latter had been extinguished for ever.

This period of glory, which was enhanced by the fall of Lord Russell and Mr. Gladstone from power in June 1866—the defeat came on a minor point, but was largely due to Lowe’s speeches—lasted till Lowe, who had now become a force to be counted with, obtained office as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Liberal Ministry which Mr. Gladstone formed in the end of 1868. From that moment his position declined. He lost popularity and influence both with the country and in the House of Commons. His speeches were always able, but they did not seem to tell when delivered from the ministerial bench. His financial proposals, though ingenious, were thought too ingenious, and showed a deficient perception of the tendencies of the English mind. No section likes being taxed, but Lowe’s budgets met with a more than usually angry opposition. His economies and retrenchments, so far from bringing him the credit he deserved, exposed him to the charge of cheese-paring parsimony, and did much to render the Ministry unpopular. Before that ministry fell in 1874, Lowe, who had in 1873 exchanged the Exchequer for the Home Office, had almost ceased to be a personage 300 in politics. He did nothing to retrieve his fame during the six years of Opposition that followed, seldom spoke, took little part in the denunciation of Lord Beaconsfield’s Eastern and Afghan policy, which went on from 1876 till 1880, and once at least gave slight signs of declining mental power. So in 1880 he was relegated to the House of Lords, because the new Liberal Government of that year could not make room for him. Very soon thereafter his memory began to fail, and for the last ten years of his life he had been practically forgotten, though sometimes seen, a pathetic figure, at evening parties. There is hardly a parallel in our parliamentary annals to so complete an eclipse of so brilliant a luminary.

This rapid obscuration of a reputation which was genuine, for Lowe’s powers had been amply proved, was due to no accident, and was apparent long before mental decay set in. The causes lay in himself. One cause was purely physical. He was excessively short-sighted, so much so that when he was writing a letter, his nose was apt to rub out the words his pen had traced; and this defect shut him out from all that knowledge of individual men and of audiences which is to be obtained by watching their faces. Mr. Gladstone, who never seemed to resent Lowe’s attacks, and greatly admired his gifts—it was not so clear that Lowe reciprocated the admiration—used to relate that on one occasion when a foreign potentate 301 met the Minister in St. James’s Park and put out his hand in friendly greeting, Lowe repelled his advances, and when the King said, “But, Mr. Lowe, you know me quite well,” he answered, “Yes, indeed, I know you far too well, and I don’t want to have anything more to do with you.” He had mistaken the monarch for a prominent politician with whom he had had a sharp encounter on a deputation a few days before! For social purposes Lowe might almost as well have been blind; yet he did not receive that kind of indulgence which is extended to the blind. In the interesting fragment of autobiography which he left, he attributes his unpopularity entirely to this cause, declaring that he was really of a kindly nature, liking his fellow-men just as well as most of them like one another.[42] But in truth his own character had something to answer for. Without being ill-natured, he was deemed a hard-natured man, who did not appear to consider the feelings of others. He had indeed a love of mischief, and gleefully tells in his autobiography how, when travelling in his youth through the Scottish Highlands, he drove the too self-conscious Wordsworth wild by his incessant praise of Walter Scott.[43] 302 He had not in political life more than his fair share of personal enmities. One of them was Disraeli’s. They were not unequally matched. Lowe was intellectually in some respects stronger, but he wanted Disraeli’s skill in managing men and assemblies. Disraeli resented Lowe’s sarcasms, and on one occasion, when the latter had made an indiscreet speech, went out of his way to inflict on him a personal humiliation.

Nor was this Lowe’s only defect. Powerful in attack, he was feeble in defence. Terrible as a critic, he had, as his official career showed, little constructive talent, little tact in shaping or recommending his measures. Unsteady or inconstant in purpose, he was at one moment headstrong, at another timid or vacillating. These faults, scarcely noticed when he was in Opposition, sensibly reduced his value as a minister and as a Cabinet colleague.

In private Lowe was good company, bright, alert, and not unkindly. He certainly did not, as was alleged of another famous contemporary, 303 Lord Westbury, positively enjoy the giving of pain. But he had a most unchristian scorn for the slow and the dull and the unenlightened, and never restrained his scorching wit merely for the sake of sparing those who came in his way. If the distinction be permissible, he was not cruel but he was merciless, that is to say, unrestrained by compassion. Instances are not wanting of men who have maintained great influence in spite of their rough tongues and the enmities which rough tongues provoke. But such men have usually also possessed some of the arts of popularity, and have been able to retain the adherence of their party at large, even when they had alienated many who came into personal contact with them. This was not Lowe’s case. He did not conceal his contempt for the multitude, and had not the tact needed for humouring it, any more than for managing the House of Commons. The very force and keenness of his intellect kept him aloof from other people and prevented him from understanding their sentiments. He saw things so clearly that he could not tolerate mental confusion, and was apt to reach conclusions so fast that he missed perceiving some of the things which are gradually borne in upon slower minds. There are also instances of strong men who, though they do not revile their opponents, incur hatred because their strength and activity make them feared. Hostility concentrates itself on the 304 opponents deemed most formidable, and a political leader who is spared while his fellows are attacked cannot safely assume that this immunity is a tribute to his virtues. Incessant abuse fell to the lot of Mr. Bright, who was not often, and of Mr. Gladstone, who was hardly ever, personally bitter in invective. But in compensation Mr. Bright and Mr. Gladstone received enthusiastic loyalty from their followers. For Lowe there was no such compensation. Even his own side did not love him. There was also a certain harshness, perhaps a certain narrowness, about his views. Even in those days of rigid economics, he took an exceptionally rigid view of all economic problems, refusing to make allowance for any motives except those of bare self-interest. Though he did not belong by education or by social ties to the Utilitarian group, and gave an ungracious reception to J. S. Mill’s first speeches in the House of Commons, he was a far more stringent and consistent exponent of the harder kind of Benthamism than was Mill himself. He professed, and doubtless to some extent felt, a contempt for appeals to historical or literary sentiment, and relished nothing more than deriding his own classical training as belonging to an effete and absurd scheme of education. He left his mark on our elementary school system by establishing the system of payment by results, but nearly every change made in that system 305 since his day has tended to destroy the alterations he made and to bring back the older condition of things, though no doubt in an amended form. His ideas of University reform were crude and barren, limited, indeed, to the substitution of what the Germans call “bread studies” for mental cultivation, and to the extension of the plan of competitive examinations for honours and money prizes, a plan which more and more displeases the most enlightened University teachers, and is felt to have done more harm than good to Oxford and Cambridge, where it has had the fullest play. He had also, and could give good reasons for his opinion, a hearty dislike to endowments of all kinds; and once, when asked by a Royal Commission to suggest a mode of improving their application, answered in his trenchant way, “Get rid of them. Throw them into the sea.”

It would not be fair to blame Lowe for the results which followed his vigorous action against the extension of the suffrage in 1866, for no one could then have predicted that in the following year the Tories, beguiled by Mr. Disraeli, would reverse their former attitude and carry a suffrage bill far wider than that which they had rejected a year before. But the sequel of the successful resistance of 1866 may stand as a warning to those who think that the course of thoroughgoing opposition to a measure they dislike is, because 306 it seems courageous, likely to be the right and wise course for patriotic men. Had the moderate bill of 1866 been suffered to pass, the question of further extending the suffrage might possibly have slept for another thirty years, for there was no very general or urgent cry for it among the working people, and England would have continued to be ruled in the main by voters belonging to the middle class and the upper section of the working class. The consequence of the heated contest of 1866 was not only to bring about a larger immediate change in 1867, but to create an interest in the question which soon prompted the demand for the extension of household suffrage to the counties, and completed in 1884-85 the process by which England has become virtually a democracy, though a plutocratic democracy, still affected by the habits and notions of oligarchic days. Thus Robert Lowe, as much as Disraeli and Gladstone, may in a sense be called an author of the tremendous change which has passed upon the British Constitution since 1866, and the extent of which was not for a long while realised. Lowe himself never recanted his views, but never repeated his declaration of them, feeling that he had incurred unpopularity enough, and probably feeling also that the case was hopeless.

People who disliked his lugubrious forecasts used to call him a Cassandra, perhaps forgetting 307 that, besides the distinctive feature of Cassandra’s prophecies that nobody believed them, there was another distinctive feature, viz. that they came true. Did Lowe’s? It is often profitable and sometimes amusing to turn back to the predictions through which eminent men relieved their perturbed souls, and see how far these superior minds were able to discern the tendencies, already at work in their time, which were beginning to gain strength, and were destined to determine the future. Whoever reads Lowe’s speeches of 1865-67 may do worse than glance at the same time at a book,[44] long since forgotten, which contains the efforts of a group of young University Liberals to refute the arguments used by him and by Lord Cairns, the strongest of his allies, in their opposition to schemes of parliamentary reform.

To compare the optimism of these young writers and Lowe’s pessimism with what has actually come to pass is a not uninstructive task. True it is that England has had only thirty-five years’ experience of the Reform Act of 1867, and only seventeen years’ experience of that even greater step towards pure democracy which was effected by the Franchise and Redistribution Acts of 1884-85. We are still far from knowing what sorts of Parliaments and policies the enlarged suffrage will end by giving. 308 But some at least of the mischiefs Lowe foretold have not arrived. He expected first of all a rapid increase in corruption and intimidation at parliamentary elections. The quality of the House of Commons would decline, because money would rule, and small boroughs would no longer open the path by which talent could enter. Members would be either millionaires or demagogues, and they would also become far more subservient to their constituents. Universal suffrage would soon arrive, because no halting-place between the £10 franchise[45] and universal suffrage could be found. Placed on a democratic basis, the House of Commons would not be able to retain its authority over the Executive. The House of Lords, the Established Church, the judicial bench (in that dignity and that independence which are essential to its usefulness), would be overthrown as England passed into “the bare and level plain of democracy where every ant-hill is a mountain and every thistle a forest tree.” These and the other features characteristic of popular government on which Lowe savagely descanted were pieced together out of Plato and Tocqueville, coupled with his own disagreeable experiences of Australian politics. None of the predicted evils can be said to have as yet become features of the polity and government of 309 England,[46] though the power of the House relatively to the Cabinet does seem to be declining. Yet some of Lowe’s incidental remarks are true, and not least true is his prediction that democracies will be found just as prone to war, just as apt to be swept away by passion, as other kinds of government have been. Few signs herald the approach of that millennium of peace and enlightenment which Cobden foretold and for which Gladstone did not cease to hope.

No one since Lowe has taken up the part of advocatus diaboli against democracy which he played in 1866.[47] Since Disraeli passed the Household Suffrage in Boroughs Bill in 1867, a nullification of Lowe’s triumph which incensed him more than ever against Disraeli, no one has ever come forward in England as the avowed enemy of changes designed to popularise our government. Parties have quarrelled over the time and the manner of extensions of the franchise, but the 310 issue of principle raised in 1866 has not been raised again. Even in 1884, when Mr. Gladstone carried his bill for assimilating the county franchise to that existing in boroughs, the Tory party did not oppose the measure in principle, but confined themselves to insisting that it should be accompanied by a scheme for the redistribution of seats. The secret, first unveiled by Disraeli, that the masses will as readily vote for the Tory party as for the Liberal, is now common property, and universal suffrage, when it comes to be offered, is as likely to be offered by the former party as by the latter. This gives a touch of historical interest to Lowe’s speeches of 1866. They are the swan-song of the old constitutionalism. The changes which came in 1867 and 1884 must have come sooner or later, for they were in the natural line of development as we see it all over the world; but they might have come much later had not Lowe’s opposition wrecked the moderate scheme of 1866. Apart from that episode Lowe’s career would now be scarcely remembered, or would be remembered by those who knew his splendid gifts as an illustration of the maxim that mere intellectual power does not stand first among the elements of character that go to the winning of a foremost place.