The enthusiasm of progress—Carlyle and Disraeli—Protection and Free Trade—Sir Robert Peel the Protectionist Champion—High Church movement at Oxford—The Church as a Conservative power—Effect of the Reform Bill—Disraeli’s personal views—Impossible to realise—Election of 1841—Sir Robert Peel’s Ministry—Drifts towards Free Trade—Peel’s neglect of Disraeli—Tariff of 1842—Young England—Symptoms of revolts—First skirmish with Peel—Remarkable speech on Ireland.

The discovery of the steam engine had revolutionised the relations of mankind, and during the decline of the Melbourne Ministry was revolutionising the imagination of the English nation. The railroads were annihilating distances between town and town. Roads were opening across the ocean, bringing the remotest sea-coasts in the world within sure and easy reach. Possibilities of an expansion of commerce practically boundless inflated hopes and stimulated energies. In past generations England had colonised half the new world; she had become sovereign of the sea; she had preserved the liberties of Europe, and had made her name feared and honoured in every part of the globe; but this was nothing compared to the prospect, which was now unfolding itself, of becoming the world’s great workshop. She had invented steam; she had coal and iron in a combination and quantity which no other nation could rival; she had a population ingenious and vigorous, and capable, if employment could be found for them, of indefinite multiplication. The enthusiasm of progress seized the popular imagination. No word was tolerated which implied a doubt, and the prophets of evil, like Carlyle, were listened to with pity and amusement. The stars in their courses were fighting for the Free Traders. The gold-discoveries stimulated the circulation in the national veins, and prosperity advanced with leaps and bounds.

The tide has slackened now; other nations have rejected our example, have nursed their own industries, and supply their own wants. The volume of English trade continues to roll on, but the profits diminish. The crowds who throng our towns refuse to submit to a lowering of wages, and perplex economists and politicians with uneasy visions: we are thus better able to consider with fairness the objections of a few far-seeing statesmen forty and fifty years ago.

As far as the thoughts of an ambitious youth who had taken Pistol’s ‘The world’s mine oyster’ as the motto of his first book, and perhaps as the rule of his life—of a gaudy coxcomb who astonished drawing-rooms with his satin waistcoats, and was the chosen friend of Count D’Orsay—as far as the thoughts of such a person as this could have any affinity with those of the stern ascetic who, in the midst of accumulating splendour, was denouncing woe and desolation, so far, at the outset of his Parliamentary life, the opinions of Benjamin Disraeli, if we take ‘Sybil’ for their exponent, were the opinions of the author of ‘Past and Present.’ Carlyle thought of him as a fantastic ape. The interval between them was so vast that the comparison provokes a smile. Disraeli was to fight against the Repeal of the Corn Laws: Carlyle said that of all strange demands, the strangest was that the trade of owning land should be asking for higher wages; and yet the Hebrew conjuror, though at a humble distance, and not without an eye open to his own advancement, was nearer to him all along than Carlyle imagined. Disraeli did not believe any more than he that the greatness of a nation depended on the abundance of its possessions. He did not believe in a progress which meant the abolition of the traditionary habits of the people, the destruction of village industries, and the accumulation of the population into enormous cities, where their character and their physical qualities would be changed and would probably degenerate. The only progress which he could acknowledge was moral progress, and he considered that all legislation which proposed any other object to itself would produce, in the end, the effects which the prophets of his own race had uniformly and truly foretold.

Under the old organisation of England, the different orders of men were bound together under reciprocal obligations of duty. The economists and their political followers held that duty had nothing to do with it. Food, wages, and all else had their market value, which could be interfered with only to the general injury. The employer was to hire his labourers or his hands at the lowest rate at which they could be induced to work. If he ceased to need them, or if they would not work on terms which would remunerate him, he was at liberty to turn them off. The labourers, in return, might make the best of their own opportunity, and sell their services to the best advantage which competition allowed. The capitalists found the arrangement satisfactory to them. The people found it less satisfactory, and they replied by Chartism and rick-burnings. The economists said that the causes of discontent were the Corn Laws and the other taxes on food. Farmers and landowners exclaimed that if the Corn Laws were repealed, the land must go out of cultivation. The Chartists were not satisfied with the remedy, because they believed that, with cheap food, wages would fall, and they would be no better off than they were. It was then slack water in the political tides. Public feeling was at a stand, uncertain which way to turn. The Reform Bill of 1832 had left to property the preponderance of political power, and everyone who had anything to lose began to be alarmed for himself. The Conservative reaction became more and more evident. The faith of the country was in Sir Robert Peel. He had been opposed to the Reform Bill, but when it was passed he had accepted it as the law of the land, and had reconstituted his party out of the confidence of the new constituencies. He had been a declared Protectionist. He had defended the Corn Laws, and had spoken and voted for them. He had resisted the proposal by the Whigs of a fixed eight-shilling duty, and had accepted and gloried in the position of being the leader of the gentlemen of England. But he had refused to initiate any policy of his own. He was known to be cautious, prudent, and a master of finance. He was no believer in novel theories or enthusiastic visions, but he had shown by his conduct on the Catholic question that he could consider and allow for the practical necessities of things. He was, however, above all things an avowed Conservative, and as a Conservative the country looked to him to steer the ship through the cataracts.

Another phenomenon had started up carrying a Conservative colour. Puseyism had appeared at Oxford, and was rapidly spreading. The Church of England, long paralysed by Erastianism and worldliness, was awaking out of its sleep, and claiming to speak again as the Divinely-appointed ruler of English souls. Political economy had undertaken to manage things on the hypothesis that men had no souls, or that their souls, if they possessed such entities, had nothing to do with their commercial relations to one another. The Church of England, as long as it remained silent or sleeping, had seemed to acquiesce in the new revelation, but it was beginning to claim a voice again in the practical affairs of the world, and the response, loud and strong, indicated that there still remained among us a power of latent conviction which might revive the force of noble and disinterested motive. A Church of England renovated and alive again might, some thought, become an influence of incalculable consequence. Carlyle’s keen, clear eyes refused to be deceived. ‘Galvanic Puseyism,’ he called it, and ‘dancings of the sheeted dead.’ A politician like Disraeli looking out into the phenomena in which he was to play his part, and thinking more of what was going on among the people than of the immediate condition of Parliamentary parties, conceived that he saw in the new movement, not only an effort of Conservative energy, but an indication of a genuine recoil from moral and spiritual anarchy towards the Hebrew principle in which he really believed. Two forces he saw still surviving in England which had been overlooked, or supposed to be dead—respect for the Church, and the voluntary loyalty (which, though waning, might equally be recovered) of the people towards the aristocracy. Perhaps he overrated both because he had been himself born and bred outside their influence, and thus looked at them without the insight which he gained afterwards on more intimate acquaintance. To some extent, however, they were realities, and were legitimate subjects of calculation. Extracts from his writings will show how his mind was working. He had been studying the action of the Reform Bill of 1832. No one pretended, he said, that it had improved the character of Parliament itself.

‘But had it exercised a beneficial influence in the country? Had it elevated the tone of the public mind? Had it cultivated the popular sensibilities to noble and ennobling ends? Had it proposed to the people of England a higher test of national respect and confidence?... If a spirit of rapacious covetousness, desecrating all the humanities of life, has been the besetting sin of England for the last century and a half, since the passing of the Reform Act the altar of Mammon has blazed with a triple worship. To acquire, to accumulate, to plunder each other by virtue of philosophic phrases—to propose a Utopia to consist only of Wealth and Toil—this has been the business of enfranchised England for the last twelve years, until we are startled from our voracious strife by the wail of intolerable serfage.’[6]

Again: ‘Born in a library, and trained from early childhood by learned men who did not share the passions and the prejudices of our political and social life, I had imbibed on some subjects conclusions different from those which generally prevail, and especially with reference to the history of our own country. How an oligarchy had been substituted for a kingdom, and a narrow-minded and bigoted fanaticism flourished in the name of religious liberty, were problems long to me insoluble, but which early interested me. But what most attracted my musing, even as a boy, were the elements of our political parties, and the strange mystification by which that which was national in our Constitution had become odious, and that which was exclusive was presented as popular.

‘What has mainly led to this confusion is our carelessness in not distinguishing between the excellence of a principle and its injurious or obsolete application. The feudal system may have worn out; but its main principle—that the tenure of property should be the fulfilment of duty—is the essence of good government. The divine right of kings may have been a plea for feeble tyrants; but the divine right of government is the key of human progress, and without it governments sink into a police, and a nation is degraded into a mob.... National institutions were the ramparts of a multitude against large estates, exercising political power, derived from a limited class. The Church was in theory, and once it had been in practice, the spiritual and intellectual trainer of the people. The privileges of the multitude and the prerogative of the sovereign had grown up together, and together they had waned. Under the plea of Liberalism, all the institutions which were the bulwark of the multitude had been sapped and weakened, and nothing had been substituted for them. The people were without education, and relatively to the advance of science and the comfort of the superior classes, their condition had deteriorated and their physical quality as a race was threatened.

‘To change back the oligarchy into a generous aristocracy round a real throne; to infuse life and vigour into the Church as the trainer of the nation by the revival of Convocation, then dumb, on a wise basis; to establish a commercial code on the principles successfully negotiated by Lord Bolingbroke at Utrecht, and which, though baffled at the time by a Whig Parliament, were subsequently and triumphantly vindicated by his pupil and political heir, Mr. Pitt; to govern Ireland according to the policy of Charles I., and not of Oliver Cromwell; to emancipate the political constituency of 1832 from its sectarian bondage and contracted sympathies; to elevate the physical as well as the moral condition of the people by establishing that labour required regulation as much as property—and all this rather by the use of ancient forms and the restoration of the past, than by political revolutions founded on abstract ideas—appeared to be the course which the circumstances of the country required, and which, practically speaking, could only, with all their faults and backslidings, be undertaken and accomplished by a reconstructed Tory party.

‘When I attempted to enter public life, I expressed these views, long meditated, to my countrymen.... I incurred the accustomed penalty of being looked on as a visionary.... Ten years afterwards, affairs had changed. I had been some time in Parliament, and had friends who had entered public life with myself, who listened always with interest, and sometimes with sympathy.... The writer, and those who acted with him, looked then upon the Anglican Church as a main machinery by which these results might be realised. There were few great things left in England, and the Church was one. Nor do I doubt that if a quarter of a century ago there had arisen a Churchman equal to the occasion, the position of ecclesiastical affairs in this country would have been very different from that which they now occupy. But these great matters fell into the hands of monks and schoolmen. The secession of Dr. Newman dealt a blow to the Church under which it still reels. That extraordinary event has been “apologised” for, but it has never been explained. The tradition of the Anglican Church was powerful. Resting on the Church of Jerusalem modified by the Divine school of Galilee, it would have found that rock of truth which Providence, by the instrumentality of the Semitic race, had promised to St. Peter. Instead of that, the seceders sought refuge in mediÆval superstitions; which are generally only the embodiments of Pagan ceremonies and creeds.’[7]

Writing after the experience of thirty years of Parliamentary life, Disraeli thus described the impressions and the hopes with which he commenced his public career. He was disappointed by causes which he partly indicates, and by the nature of things which he then imperfectly realised. But, carefully considered, they explain the whole of his action down to the time when he found his expectation incapable of realisation. His Church views were somewhat hazy, though he was right enough about the Pagan ceremonies.

After their marriage, the Disraelis spent two months on the Continent. They went to Baden, Munich, Frankfort, Ratisbon, Nuremburg, seeing galleries and other curiosities. In November they returned to England, to the house in Grosvenor Gate which was thenceforward their London home, and Disraeli took his place on an equal footing as an established member of the great world. He was introduced to the Duke of Wellington, who had hitherto known him only by reputation. He received Peel’s congratulations on his marriage with admitted pride and pleasure, and began to give dinners on his own account to leading members of his party. The impecunious adventurer had acquired the social standing without which the most brilliant gifts are regarded with a certain suspicion.

At the general election in 1841, Sir Robert Peel was borne into power, with a majority returned on Protectionist principles, larger than the most sanguine enthusiast had dared to hope for, Disraeli himself being returned for Shrewsbury—his connection with Maidstone having been probably broken by his late colleague’s death. When the new Parliament settled to work, Peel took the reins, and settled the finances by an income-tax—then called a temporary expedient, but in fact a necessary condition of the policy which at once he proceeded to follow. Duties were reduced in all directions, but there was no word of commercial treaties. Free Trade principles were visibly to be adopted, so far as the state of parties would allow, and the indications grew daily stronger that no such policy as Disraeli desired had come near the Premier’s mind. The middle classes had confidence in Peel. It seemed that Peel had confidence in them, and Disraeli had none at all. Still, Peel was his political chief, and Disraeli continued to serve him, and to serve effectively and zealously. More and more he displayed his peculiar powers. When he chose he was the hardest hitter in the House of Commons; and as he never struck in malice, and selected always an antlered stag for an adversary, the House was amused at his audacity. Palmerston on some occasion regretted that the honourable member had been made an exception to the rule that political adherents ought to be rewarded by appointments. He trusted that before the end of the Session the Government would overlook the slight want of industry for the sake of the talent. Disraeli ‘thanked the noble viscount for his courteous aspirations for his political promotion. The noble viscount was a master of the subject. If the noble viscount would only impart to him the secret by which he had himself contrived to retain office during so many successive administrations, the present debate would not be without a result.’ Such a passage at arms may have been the more entertaining because Disraeli was supposed to have resented the neglect of his claims when Peel was forming his Administration. It is probable that Peel had studied the superficial aspects of his character, had underrated his ability, had discerned that he might not be sufficiently docile, or had suspected and resented his advocacy of the Chartists. Disraeli may have thought that the offer ought to have been made to him, but it is evident that on other grounds the differences between them would tend to widen. The Tariff of 1842 was the first note of alarm to the Conservative party—Disraeli defended it, but not with an entire heart. ‘Peel,’ he said in a letter to his sister,[8] ‘seems to have pleased no party, but I suppose the necessity of things will force his measure through: affairs may yet simmer up into foam and bubble, and there may be a row.’ The Conservatives had been trusted by the country with an opportunity of trying their principles which, if allowed to pass, might never be renewed. Their leader was not yet openly betraying them, but everyone but himself began to perceive that the Conservatism of the Government was only to be Liberalism in disguise.

Disraeli individually had the satisfaction of feeling that he was becoming a person of consequence. He ran across to Paris, and dined privately with Louis Philippe. In London he was presented to the King of Hanover, ‘the second king who has shaken hands with me in six months.’ Public affairs he found ‘uncertain and unsatisfactory,’ Peel ‘frigid and feeble,’ and ‘general grumbling.’ He continued to speak, and speak often and successfully; but the mutual distrust between him and his chief was growing.

Peel among his magnificent qualities had not the art of conciliating the rank-and-file of his supporters. He regarded them too much as his own creatures, entitled to no consideration. Disraeli, taking the whole field of politics for his province, met with rebuke after rebuke. He had seen by this time that for his own theories there was no hope of countenance from the present chief. He had formed a small party among the younger Tory members—men of rank and talent, with a high-bred enthusiasm which had been kindled by the Church revival. A party including Lord John Manners, George Smyth, Henry Hope, and Baillie Cochrane was not to be despised; and thus reinforced and encouraged, he ventured to take a line of his own.

Among the articles of faith was the belief that Ireland ought to be treated on the principles of Charles I., and not on the principles of Cromwell. O’Connell in 1843 was setting Ireland in a flame again, and Peel, better acquainted with Ireland than Disraeli, and hopeless of other remedy, had introduced one of the periodic Coercion Bills. The Young Englanders, as he and his friends were now called, had Catholic sympathies, and they imagined that religion was at the bottom of these perpetual disturbances. Coercion answered only for the moment. A more conciliatory attitude towards the ancient creed might touch the secret of the disease. Disraeli perhaps wished to show that he bore no malice against O’Connell or against his tail. He thought that he could persuade the Irish that they had more to hope for from Cavalier Tories than from Roundhead Whigs. Of Irish history he knew as little as the rest of the House of Commons. He had heard, perhaps, of the Glamorgan Articles and Charles I.’s negotiations with the Kilkenny Parliament. Peel, when in opposition, had talked about conciliation. In office he had nothing to propose but force. Disraeli, when the Bill came before the House, gave the first sign of revolt; he said that it was one of those measures which to introduce was degrading, and to oppose disgraceful. He would neither vote for it nor against it; but as Peel had departed from the policy which he had led his party to hope that he meant to pursue before he came into power, he (Disraeli), speaking for himself and his friends, declared that they were now free from the bonds of party on this subject of Ireland, for the right hon. gentleman himself had broken them. They had now a right to fall back on their own opinions.

Something still more significant was to follow. A few days later (August 1843) the Eastern question came up. Disraeli, whose friendship for the Turks was of old standing, asked a question relating to Russian interference in Servia. Peel gave an abrupt answer to end the matter. Palmerston, however, taking it up, Disraeli had a further opportunity of speaking. He complained that Turkey had been stabbed in the back by the diplomacy of Europe; that the integrity and independence of the Turkish dominions were of vital consequence, &c. But the point of his speech was in the sting with which it concluded. Winding up in the slow, deliberate manner which he made afterwards so peculiarly effective, he reminded the House of his own previous question, couched, he believed, in Parliamentary language, and made with all that respect which he felt for the right hon. gentleman. ‘To this inquiry,’ he said, ‘the right hon. gentleman replied with all that explicitness of which he was a master, and all that courtesy which he reserved only for his supporters.’

The House of Commons had much of the generous temper of an English public school. Boys like a little fellow who has the courage to stand up to a big one, and refuses to be bullied. The Whigs were amused at the mutiny of a Tory subordinate. The Tory rank-and-file had so often smarted under Peel’s contempt that the blow told, and Disraeli had increased his consequence in the House by another step. Those who judge of motive by events, and assure themselves that when the actions of a man lead up to particular effects, those effects must have been contemplated by himself from the outset of his career, see indication in these speeches of a deliberate intention on Disraeli’s part to supersede Sir Robert Peel in the leadership of the Conservative party. The vanity of such a purpose, had it been really entertained, would have been exceeded by the folly of his next movement. In the following year O’Connell’s monster meetings had become a danger to the State. Peel had again to apply to the House of Commons, with a general sense on both sides that the authority of the Crown must be supported. Disraeli, almost alone among the English members, took the same daring attitude which he had assumed on the Chartist petition. Being in reality a stranger in the country of his adoption, he was able to regard the problems with which it was engaged in the light in which they appeared to other nations. The long mismanagement of Ireland, its chronic discontent and miserable state, were regarded everywhere as the blot upon the English escutcheon, and the cause of it was the mutual jealousy and suspicion of parties at Westminster. If a remedy was ever to be found, party ties must be thrown to the winds. What, he asked, did this eternal Irish question mean? One said it was a physical question, another a spiritual question. Now it was the absence of an aristocracy, then the absence of railroads. It was the Pope one day, potatoes the next. Let the House consider Ireland as they would any other country similarly situated, in their closets. They would see a teeming population denser to the square mile than that of China, created solely by agriculture, with none of those sources of wealth which are developed by civilisation, and sustained upon the lowest conceivable diet. That dense population in extreme distress inhabited an island where there was an Established Church which was not their Church, and a territorial aristocracy the richest of whom lived in distant capitals. They had a starving population, an absentee aristocracy, and an alien Church, and, in addition, the weakest executive in the world. That was the Irish question. Well, then, what would honourable gentlemen say if they were reading of a country in that position? They would say at once ‘the remedy was revolution.’ But Ireland could not have a revolution; and why? Because Ireland was connected with another and more powerful country. Then what was the consequence? The connection with England became the cause of the present state of Ireland. If the connection with England prevented a revolution, and a revolution was the only remedy, England logically was in the odious position of being the cause of all the misery in Ireland. What, then, was the duty of an English Minister? To effect by his policy all those changes which a revolution would do by force. That was the Irish question in its integrity.... If the noble lord (Lord John Russell) or any other honourable member came forward with a comprehensive plan, which would certainly settle the question of Ireland, no matter what the sacrifice might be, he would support it, though he might afterwards feel it necessary to retire from Parliament or to place his seat at the disposal of his constituency (‘Life of Lord Beaconsfield,’ T. P. O’Connor, 6th edition p. 255, &c.).

Truer words had not been spoken in Parliament on the subject of Ireland for half a century, nor words more fatal to the immediate ambition of the speaker, if ambition he then entertained beyond a patriotic one; and many a session, and many a century perhaps, would have to pass before a party could be formed in England strong enough to carry on the government on unadulterated principles of patriotism.