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monarch and the multitude. As the power of the Crown has diminished, the privileges of the people have disappeared, till at length the sceptre has become a pageant, and the subject has degenerated again into a serf. . .

'That we may live to see England once more possess a free monarchy, and a privileged and prosperous people, is my prayer; that these great consequences can only be brought about by the energy and devotion of our youth, is my persuasion. . . . The claims of the future are represented by suffering millions, and the youth of a nation are the trustees of posterity.'

CHAPTER IX

The New Gospel-Effect on English character-The Manchester School-Tendencies of Sir Robert Peel-The Corn Laws-Peel brought into office as a Protectionist-Disraeli and Peel-Protracted duel--Effect of Disraeli's speeches - Final declaration of Peel against the Corn Laws-Corn Laws repealed-Lord George Bentinck-Irish Coercion Bill-The Canning episode-Defeat and fall of Peel-Disraeli succeeds to the Leadership of the Conservative Party.

WITH the light which is thrown by 'Sybil' on the workings of Disraeli's mind, it is easy to understand the feelings with which he regarded the words and actions of Sir Robert Peel. He had seen, or supposed himself to have seen, a poisonous fungus eating into the heart of English life. In town and country, among the factory operatives, and on the estates of the rich and the noble, there was one rapid process of degeneracy. The peasantry were serfs, without the redeeming features of serfdom; the town artisans were becoming little better than brutes. In the cities, family and the softer influences of home were ceasing to exist. Children were being dragged up in misery or were left to die, and life was turned into a flaring workshop in which the higher purposes of humanity were obliterated or forgotten. The cause was everywhere the same. The gospel of political economy had been substituted for the gospel of Christ. The new law was to make money; the new aim of all

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classes, high and low alike, was to better their condition, as it was called, and make the most of their opportunities. Each must look out for himself: one man was not another's keeper; labour was an article of trade, which the employer was to buy as cheap as he could get it, and the workman was to sell for the most that he could get. There their duties to each other ended, and the results were the scenes which he had witnessed in Marley and Mowbray. The further trade was extended under the uncontrolled conditions demanded by the 'Manchester school,' the more these scenes would multiply.

The Corn Laws The real question

With the powerful Protectionist majority returned by the elections of 1841, Peel, in Disraeli's opinion, had an opportunity of bringing these demoralising tendencies under the authority of reason and conscience. were but one feature of the problem. was whether England was to remain as she had been, the nursing mother of a noble breed of men, or whether the physical and moral qualities of a magnificent race were to be sacrificed to a rage for vulgar wealth. Disraeli had not flattered his party. In Trafford and in the elder Millbank, he had drawn manufacturers who were splendidly alive to their duties. The ennobled landowners he had left to be represented by such men as Lord Marley. He was a Radical of the Radicals, a Radical who went to the root of the mischief. Like Carlyle, he was telling his country that unless they brought authority to deal with it, the England which we were so proud of would speedily forfeit her place among the nations of the world. It is likely enough that Peel would have failed if he had tried. His own followers were thinking more of their rents than of the moral condition of the people. But at any rate he was not trying, and

evidently had no thought of trying. He took the course which promised most immediate success. To restore authority required an aristocracy who could be trusted to use it, and there was none such ready to hand. Wages must be left to the market where he found them. All that he could do to help the people was to cheapen the food which was bought with them, to lay taxation on the shoulders best able to bear it, and by education and such other means as he could provide to enable the industrious and the thoughtful to raise themselves, since neither legislation nor administration could raise them. Cheap food and popular education was his highest ideal. Peel could see what was immediately before him clearer than any man. His practical sagacity forbade him to look farther or deeper.

But the difficulty of his position lay in his having been brought into power as a Protectionist. The constituencies had given him his majority in reply to his own Protectionist declarations. If Free Trade was to be made the law of the land was Peel to repeat the part which he had played in Catholic emancipation? All reasonable Conservatives knew that the corn laws must be modified; but the change, if inevitable, need not be precipitate. Peel's great defect, Disraeli said in his Life of Lord George Bentinck,' was that he wanted imagination, and in wanting that he wanted prescience. No one was more sagacious when dealing with the circumstances before him. His judgment was fault

less, provided that he had not to deal with the future. But insight into consequences is the test of a true statesman, and because Peel had it not Catholic emancipation, Parliamentary Reform, and the abrogation of the commercial system were carried in haste or in passion, and without conditions or mitigatory arrangements. On Canning's

death the Tories might have had the game in their hands. A moderate reconstruction of the House of Commons, the transfer of the franchises of a few corrupt boroughs to the great manufacturing towns, would have satisfied the country. Peel let the moment pass, and the Birmingham Union and the Manchester Economic School naturally followed. His policy was to resist till resistance was ineffectual, and then to grant wholesale concessions as a premium to political agitation. The same scene was being enacted over again. Sir Robert had rejected Lord John Russell's eightshilling duty. It appeared now, from the course in which he was drifting, that the duty would be swept away altogether.

In whatever way Peel had acted it is not likely that the state of England at present would have differed materially from what it is. The forces which were producing either the decay or the renovation of the Constitution, whichever it proves to be, were too powerful for the wisest statesman either to arrest or materially direct. Plato thought that had he been born a generation sooner he might have saved Greece. The Olympian gods themselves could not have saved Greece. But when untoward events arrive they are always visited on the immediate actors in them, and Disraeli visited on Peel the ruin of his own party and the disappointment of his own hopes. Perhaps, as he was but half an Englishman, his personal interest in the question at issue was not extreme. It is possible that he had resented Peel's neglect of him. At any rate he saw his opportunity and used it to make his name famous. Hitherto he had been known in the House of Commons as a brilliant and amusing speaker, but of such independent ways that even the Conservatives gave him but a limited confidence.

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