PRINCIPLE AND PREJUDICE

Mr. J. A. Froude once told me that he did not in the least mind the accusation which was brought against him (certainly not without reason) of being prejudiced. "A good stiff prejudice," he said, "is a very useful thing. It is like a rusty weathercock. It will yield to a strong and long-continued blast of conviction, but it does not veer round and round in compliance with every shifting current of opinion."

What Mr. Froude expressed other people felt, though perhaps they would not have cared to avow it so honestly.

One of the most notable changes which I have seen is the decay of prejudice. In old days people felt strongly and spoke strongly, and acted as they spoke. In every controversy they were absolutely certain that they were right and that the other side was wrong, and they did not mince their words when they expressed their opinions.

The first Lord Leicester of the present creation (1775-1844) told my father (1807-1894) that, when he was a boy, his grandfather had taken him on his knee and said, "Now, my dear Tom, whatever else you do in life, mind you never trust a Tory;" and Lord Leicester added, "I never have, and, by George, I never will." On the other hand, when Dr. Longley, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, did homage on his appointment to the see of Ripon, King William IV. said, "Bishop of Ripon, I charge you, as you shall answer before Almighty God, that you never by word or deed give encouragement to those d—— d Whigs, who would upset the Church of England."

John Keble, the gentle saint of the Tractarian movement, when he saw the Whigs preparing to attack the property of the Church, proclaimed that the time had come when "scoundrels should be called scoundrels." And the Tractarians had no monopoly of vigorous invective, for, when their famous "Tract XC." incurred the censure of an Evangelical dean, he urbanely remarked that "he would be sorry to trust the author of that tract with his purse."

Macaulay, on the morning after a vital division, in which the Whigs had saved their places by seventy-nine votes, wrote triumphantly to his sister—

"So hang the dirty Tories, and let them starve and pine,
And hurrah! for the majority of glorious seventy-nine."

The same cordial partisan wrote of a political opponent that he was "a bad, a very bad, man; a disgrace to politics and to literature;" and, of an acquaintance who had offended him socially, "his powers gone; his spite immortal—a dead nettle."

The great and good Lord Shaftesbury, repudiating the theology of "Ecce Homo," pronounced it "the most pestilential book ever vomited from the jaws of Hell;" and, dividing his political favours with admirable impartiality, he denounced "the brazen faces, low insults, and accursed effrontery" of the Radicals; declared that Mr. Gladstone's "public life had long been an effort to retain his principles and yet not lose his position;" and dismissed Lord Beaconsfield as "a leper, without principle, without feeling, without regard to anything, human or divine, beyond his personal ambition." In the same spirit of hearty prejudice, Bishop Wilberforce deplored the political exigencies which had driven his friend Gladstone into "the foul arms of the Whigs." In the opposite camp was ranged a lady, well remembered in the inner circles of Whiggery, who never would enter a four-wheeled cab until she had elicited from the driver that he was not a Puseyite and was a Whig.

"Mamma," asked a little girl of Whig parentage, who from her cradle had heard nothing but denunciation of her father's political opponents, "are Tories born wicked, or do they grow wicked afterwards?" And her mother judiciously replied, "My dear, they are born wicked and grow worse."

But alas! they are "gone down to Hades, even many stalwart sons of heroes,"—with King William at their head, and Lord Shaftesbury and Lord Leicester, and Keble and Macaulay and Froude in his wake—men who knew what they believed, and, knowing it, were not ashamed to avow it, and saw little to praise or like in the adherents of a contrary opinion.

They are gone, and we are left—an unprejudiced, but an invertebrate and a flaccid, generation. No one seems to believe anything very firmly. No one has the slightest notion of putting himself to any inconvenience for his belief. No one dreams of disliking or distrusting a political or religious opponent, or of treating difference of opinion as a line of social cleavage.

In old days, King Leopold of Belgium told Bishop Wilberforce that "the only position for a Church was to say, 'Believe this or you are damned.'" To-day nothing in religion is regarded as unquestionably true. When the late Archbishop Benson first became acquainted with society in London, he asked, in shocked amazement, "What do these people believe?"—and no very satisfactory answer was forthcoming. If society has any religious beliefs (and this is more than questionable), it holds them with the loosest grasp, and is on the easiest terms of intercourse with every other belief and unbelief. The most fashionable teachers of religion have one eye nervously fixed on the ever-shifting currents of negation, talk plausibly about putting the Faith in its proper relation with modern thought, and toil panting in the wake of science; only to find each fresh theory exploded just at the moment when they have managed to apprehend it.

We used to be taught in our nurseries that, when "Old Daddy Longlegs wouldn't say his prayers," it was our duty to "Take him by the left leg and throw him downstairs;" and the student of folklore will be pleased to observe in this ditty the immemorial inclination of mankind to punish people who will not square their religion with ours. The spirit of religious persecution dies hard, but the decay of prejudice has sapped its strength. It does not thrive in the atmosphere of modern indifferentism, and admirable ladies who believe that Ritualists ride donkeys on Palm Sunday and sacrifice lambs on Good Friday find it difficult to revive the cry of "No Popery" with any practical effect.

The decay of prejudice in the sphere of politics is even more remarkable than in that of religion. In old days, political agreement was a strong and a constraining bond. When people saw a clear right and wrong in politics, they governed their private as well as their public life accordingly. People who held the same political beliefs lived and died together. In society and hospitality, in work and recreation, in journalism and literature—even in such seemingly indifferent matters as art and the drama—they were closely and permanently associated.

Eton was supposed to cherish a romantic affection for the Stuarts, and therefore to be a fit training place for sucking Tories; Harrow had always been Hanoverian, and therefore attracted little Whigs to its Hill. Oxford, with its Caroline theology and Jacobite tradition, was the Tory university; Cambridge was the nursing-mother of Whigs, until Edinburgh, under the influence of Jeffrey and Brougham, tore her babes from her breast. In society you must choose between the Duchess of Devonshire and the Duchess of Gordon, or, in a later generation, between Lady Holland and Lady Jersey. In clubland the width of St. James's Street marked a dividing line of abysmal depth; and to this day "Grillon's" remains the memorial of an attempt, then unique, to bring politicians of opposite sides together in social intercourse. On the one side stood Scott—where Burke had stood before him—the Guardian Angel of Monarchy and Aristocracy: on the other were Shelley and Byron, and (till they turned their coats) the emancipated singers of Freedom and Humanity. The two political parties had even their favourite actors, and the Tories swore by Kemble while the Whigs roared for Kean.

Then, as now, the Tories were a wealthy, powerful, and highly-organized confederacy. The Whigs were notoriously a family party. From John, Lord Gower, who died in 1754, and was the great-great-great-grandfather of the present Duke of Sutherland, descend all the Gowers, Levesons, Howards, Cavendishes, Grosvenors, Harcourts, and Russells who walk on the face of the earth. It is a goodly company. Well might Thackeray exclaim, "I'm not a Whig; but oh, how I should like to be one!"

Lord Beaconsfield described in "Coningsby" how the Radical manufacturer, sending his boy to Eton, charged him to form no intimacies with his father's hereditary foes. This may have been a flight of fancy; but certainly, when a lad was going to Oxford or Cambridge, his parents and family friends would warn him against entering into friendships with the other side. The University Clubs which he joined and the votes which he gave at the Union were watched with anxious care. He was early initiated into the political society to which his father belonged. Extraneous intimacies were regarded with the most suspicious anxiety. Mothers did all they knew to make their darlings acquainted with daughters of families whose political faith was pure, and I have myself learned, by not remote tradition, the indignant horror which pervaded a great Whig family when the heir-presumptive to its honours married the daughter of a Tory Lord Chamberlain. "That girl will ruin the politics of the family and undo the work of two hundred years" was the prophecy; and I have seen it fulfilled.