CHAPTER VII

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 viewsImpossible 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 eightshilling 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 Divinelyappointed 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,