Contemporary Thought on Nineteenth Century Conservatism

1850-1874

Angus Hawkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367636517
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000387230
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

The Conservative party remains the longest-established major political party in modern British history. This collection makes available 19th century documents illuminating aspects of Conservatism through a critical period in the party's history, from 1830 to 1874. It throws light on Conservative ideas, changing policies, party organisation and popular partisan support, showing how Conservatism evolved and responded to domestic and global change. It explores how certain clusters of ideas and beliefs comprised a Conservative view of political action and purposes, often reinforcing the importance of historic institutions such as the Anglican Church, the monarchy and the constitution. It also looks at the ways in which a broadening electorate required the marshalling of Conservative supporters through greater party organisation, and how the Conservative party became the embodiment and expression of durable popular political sentiment. The collection examines how the Conservative party became a body seeking to deliver progress combined with stability.

The documents brought together in this collection give direct voice to how Conservatives of the period perceived and extolled their aspirations, aims, and the values of Conservatism. Introductory essays highlight the main themes and nature of Conservatism in a dynamic age of change and how the Conservative axiom, in an imperfect world of successful adaptation, being essential to effective preservation informed and defined the Conservative party, the views of its leaders, the beliefs of its supporters, and the political outlook they espoused. This fourth volume continues exploring the period 1850-1874.

Part 4
CONSERVATISM AND REFORM, 1852–1868

3
JOHN WILSON CROKER, ‘THE REFORM BILL’

The Quarterly Review, March 1854, 558–605

ART. VIII.—

1. The Constitution of the United States compared with our own. By H. S. Tremenheere. London. 1854.
2. The English in America. By (Mr. Justice Halyburton) the Author of ‘Sam Slick,’ &c. 2 vols. London. 1851.
3. Parliamentary Reform: a Letter to Richard Freedom, Esq., on the Re-distribution, Extension, and Purification of the Elective Franchise. By a Revising Barrister (Sir J. Eardley Wilmot, Bart.) 2nd Edition. London. 1853.
4. Minorities and Majorities, their relative Rights: a Letter to Lord John Russell, M.P., on Parliamentary Reform. London. 1853.
5. Electoral Facts from 1832 to 1853, impartially stated; constituting a complete Political Gazetteer. By C. R. Dod, Esq. London. 1853.

WE are told that most of the members of the House of Commons who heard Lord John Russell’s speech on the introduction of his present Reform Bill—as well as the majority of persons out of doors—appear to consider and treat the proposition as a sham. This may account for the cold dissatisfaction with which it was received by those with whom the very name of a New Reform Bill promised to be so popular, and the surprising indifference with which it has been regarded by the Conservative party both in the House and in the country. It seemed to be viewed in no more serious light than as an experiment addressed ad captandum to the Radicals on one side, and in terrorem to the Conservatives on the other, which the Ministers thought it prudent to have in hand, though with very vague intentions as to employing it. These surmises were very much confirmed by the remarkable shilli-shalliness of the Ministerial press as to its opportunity. One day it was questioned whether it was wise to begin a foreign war and a domestic revolution simultaneously, but the conclusion arrived at was that the attack on the Russians at Cronstadt or Sebastopol need be no impediment to an assault on the freemen of our towns or the freeholders of our counties. A few days after the opposite opinion prevailed, and we were advised that the Government had on their hands so much to do, that they could not pursue with sufficient vigour their schemes to undo. Then came some meetings of the friends of Reform, who thought the new scheme not worth a trial; and others—the most favourable—would only accept it as a small instalment, little better than nothing: and at the late moment that we write these lines we still are in doubt what course the Ministers mean to take.

We on our part believe that the motive and the object were more simple as well as more serious. Our conjecture is that Lord John Russell has long seen that his original Reform Bill had failed—that it had neither pacified the Democracy, nor, what he had still more relied on, secured the official domination of the Whigs, and that stronger measures, though in the same direction, would be necessary to secure these points. He has also a little personal monomania—that he alone has a right to be the reformer of the age, and that if any further reform is called for, his hands must prepare and his single voice propound it. In the last years of his own ministry, he found his followers unmanageable, and in the agony of its final months of feeble and feverish existence, he saw that both power and popularity were slipping away from him, and that he had no resource but in a new Reform Bill, of which he would be of course the leader, and eventually the chief beneficiary. The embarrassment of his government—in spite of his attempted Reform Bill in 1852—drove him to resign—not unwillingly—for he probably calculated that it was only reculer pour mieux sauter. He foresaw that he would be in a condition either to storm the Cabinet in a new tempest of reform, or make it the subject of a compromise with some new combination of men, in which he, whatever else might happen, should still be the grand Missionary of the measure. This has happened, and we have little doubt that he was so far consistent in his negotiation with his new colleagues, that a new Reform Bill was his sine quâ non, and became the fundamental basis of the Coalition.

We confess ourselves astonished at his success on this point. We had fancied that there were parties to these negotiations whom nothing could have induced to pass under the Caudine Forks of reform; but it may have been thus brought about. Lord John Russell, no doubt, felt that in accepting, first, secondary office, and, subsequently, the leadership of the House without office, with and under his oldest political antagonists, he was making a great sacrifice and entitled to an adequate consideration. That consideration probably was that he should mark his own importance and the total acquiescence of his new colleagues, by having his great object recognised and sanctioned by the solemnity of being announced in the Speech from the THRONE—an honour with which he had not ventured to invest his own measure of 1852.

This we suspect to be something very near the secret history of the new Reform Bill, and convinces us that it is no sham—at least on the part of Lord John Russell, but that, on the contrary, it is a measure on which he has staked his political existence, and that any hesitation or reluctance as to its progress can only have arisen from those of his colleagues, who, though they may have acquiesced in his general views, may have discovered that it is pregnant with more difficulties and dangers of various kinds than they had at first imagined—as little acceptable to the people as it is discordant with their own former principles; and that the safest and perhaps the only possible course now left to them would be to abandon it.

This can only be a mere conjecture on our part—but neither the secret reluctance of Lord John’s colleagues, if it exists, nor the postponement nor even modification of the measure itself, would make any essential and ultimate difference in the state of the case, or alleviate the alarm with which we view this revival of the whole Reform question—not as the inflammation or fever of a season—it has lost all those transient symptoms—not as a question of this session or the next—but as a cancerous disease now inoculated into the vitals of our Constitution. Whether the Ministers had originally more or less intention of forcing on the Bill, or more or less hope of carrying it, can have little importance compared with the more permanent influence which such a proposition solemnly made by a Cabinet that professes to be conservative as well as liberal, with the sanction of the Crown, must ultimately have, sooner or later, on what still remains of the old English Constitution.

We wish on so serious a subject to exaggerate nothing; and we will therefore not say that this is the last nor even the penultimate blow which that Constitution, mutilated as it is, may be able to bear. We do not mean to represent the operation of the Ministerial measure as inevitably sudden, though we believe it to be inevitably certain. We are well aware of the vitality that must exist in a government so old—so tried—so rooted—so successful—so honoured as ours has been. We know that in such a case forms will long survive spirit—that life will still linger under a mortal wound—that the hectic blush of decay may look like a transient bloom of health—that, after a spendthrift has been ruined, he may continue for a time deceiving himself and those who have dealings with him on a hollow and factitious credit—and that, in short, a Constitution, by the illusion of departed strength, by the prestige of its ancient vigour, and by the force of a post mortem and galvanised action, may be like the hero of romance—

‘Andava combattando—ed era morto!’

This has been exemplified by the state of the country, which for the last twenty years has been sliding down the inclined plane of democracy with little other visible check or jolt than—a most unprecedented and remarkable circumstance to be sure—our having had within that period no less than fifteen changes of Ministers; and we think that, even as things stand, no one can reasonably expect more stability for the future; while, on the other hand, we shall show in the course of this paper that if this new Bill is to pass, some of the main causes of that very precarious stability will be utterly destroyed. In short, we have taken a slow poison; and though in the interval we may seem to talk as wisely and as calmly as Plato tells us that Socrates did on the mortuary couch, the event is equally certain, and the awful power stands at the bedside to administer fresh doses, if what we have already taken should be found insufficient.

Let us recapitulate some of the main facts of the case. The Reform Bill of 1832 was made, as its promoters admitted, extravagantly large, in order that party fanaticism should have no excuse for attempting to extend it. Lord John Russell called it a revolution, and so great a one that he was determined, he said, not to risk another; and he had so deeply pledged himself to this principle as to entitle him from his own partisans to the discourteous title of ‘Finality John’—a designation which, however, we should cite as even more honourable than the title he derives from his birth, if he had really merited it by political wisdom and personal consistency. Lord John Russell, we say, in spite of these antecedents—but under the new impressions created by the failure of his own administration, which we have before noticed—produced in 1852, in the character of First Minister of the Crown, a new Reform Bill, or, to use his own term, attempted a new Revolution. Three changes or modifications of the Government have since taken place, all notoriously produced by the weakness of the governing power and the growth of the democratic one in the House of Commons; and yet He, who had been himself driven by the caprices of that unmanageable body from the station of Prime Minister into Opposition, and from Opposition to the Foreign Office, and, finally, to leave the Foreign Office for no office at all, but that of leading old enemies against old friends—and all this within two years—He, we say, Finality John, now proposes another and worse revolution, of which the obvious and indeed the almost avowed result must be to render any administration still more precarious, and the democracy still more unmanageable.

We are, therefore, not surprised that an impression should have prevailed that a course so inconsistent, and so absurd, was never expected nor intended to succeed; but we are satisfied, as we have just stated, that this impression was erroneous, and that the measure was proposed in the most sincere of all tempers—party zeal and individual amour-propre! How else could it have received the solemn sanction of a recommendation from the Throne—which, on such an occasion, is not a proposition, but a pledge—a confession on the part of the Sovereign that her power, which is hardly sufficient to keep a ministry together for twelve months, is too great, and that the already irresistible force of her electoral subjects requires a large addition.

But we have other evidence of the seriousness of this proposition earlier, and in these times more authoritative, than the speech from the Throne. We have lately heard much of the divulgation of Cabinet secrets, but nothing we think more curious than as to this new Reform Bill, which contains, besides the old obvious and hackneyed encroachments on the Constitution, with which the former one had rendered us but too familiar, some provisions of so novel and, as they seem to us, so absurd a nature as would have astonished the world if it had not been prepared for them by certain publications, which, if not originally suggested by the resolutions of the Cabinet, must inevitably have been borrowed and adopted by it. We must leave the common sense and intelligence of mankind the choice of the alternative whether the Cabinet prompted those publications, or whether it drew its inspiration of public policy and public duties from such sources. However that may be, the fact is certain that an article in the ‘Edinburgh Review’ of two years ago and another in that for last October, and the pamphlet by a ‘Revising Barrister,’ since avowed in a second edition by Sir Eardley Wilmot, first opened to the wondering eyes of the public the very minute and accurate details of some of the most extravagant innovations which we have since found in the Ministerial Reform Bill—election by minorities—saving banks’ franchise—members for the Inns of Court and London University—placemen not vacating—nay, the names of places to be disfranchised, and the very scale and lines that were to govern disfranchisement were all distinctly suggested. We do not mention this as a complaint that Ministers should pay attention to the suggestions of their supporters in private or in the press—nothing more natural; we are only surprised to find that our colleagues, gentlemen of the pen, have become the advisers of Cabinet measures and the harbingers of the embryo intentions of the Crown. Sir Eardley Wilmot is, as far as we know, a respectable gentleman, though we should regret to find verified a rumour that has reached us that his Ministerial pamphlet has been rewarded with a County Judge-ship. We have heard that the author of the article in the ‘Edinburgh Review’ is also personally as respectable as he is as an essayist; but somehow we do not think it was quite seemly to put these gentlemen forward as the first heralds and organs of the determination of her Majesty the Queen some months before it was communicated to Parliament. But even upon that anomaly we lay little stress, and we notice it only as an additional proof that this Reform Bill is a serious and premeditated design. Its absurd details should not induce us to divert our alarm from its formidable object. It is like what we sometimes read of in the Italian carnivals, where the foulest murder is perpetrated under the masquerade of a jack-pudding.

That ultimate object is to carry out through our whole representative system the numerical principle—the power of mere NUMBERS, and especially of AGGREGATE NUMBERS—in short, physical force. This was for the first time in the legislative history of Governments attempted in the original Reform Bill, but rather covertly and with some appearance of bashfulness, as if the naked proposition was too indecent to be exhibited. In the present Bill it is more shamelessly avowed, and the slight adjuncts which are hung round it to divert the eye remind us of the female figure in the Great Exhibition, of which the nudity was rather marked than tempered by the adventitious addition of a bracelet round the wrist and a fetter round the ankle. Of no more value for either decency or substantial importance are the pretences of the educational franchises, the protection of minorities, the votes for taxes, and other similar delusions, which are to be attached to the wrists and ankles of the colossus of Universal Suffrage, of which, and of nothing else, this Bill is really the model and the mould.

This scarcely veiled principle of Representation by numbers is, in our view, the whole Bill, and it is to it that we think it our duty to endeavour to direct the attention of the country by a closer analysis of that principle than we have before had either the opportunity or the necessity of attempting; and we cannot but hope, that late as it may seem, we may still make some impression on the public mind by a more practical elucidation of the case than we have yet seen.

The verbal import of the word ‘Representation’ has been, in our opinion, very mischievously confounded with its real, and, in this country, constitutional essence. Undoubtedly the abstract principle of representation assumes numbers as the fundamental basis of political as they are of physical power, and if a Constitution were a mere arithmetical question, any thousand men would have a claim to ten times the political weight of any hundred; and the logical result of that unlimited principle would be Universal Suffrage. But the danger of such an extension, and its incompatibility with the safety of individual persons, the security of private property, or the steady administration of civil government, are so axiomatically obvious, that no country, not even the most democratic republics, have ever ventured on a practical adoption of the unrestricted principle.

If any one should at first sight, and it could only be at first sight, object that the recent, experiment in France, and the longer one in the United States of America, are exceptions to this statement, we reply that these are, in fact, no exceptions, but on the contrary pregnant instances of the justice of our opinion. The French republic of 1848 attempted a Government on the basis of universal suffrage; but it and all its provisions were summarily swept away within two years by a military usurpation, which Universal Suffrage was also pro hac vice called in to cover with its delusive authority, and to constitute an absolute despotism, in which neither universal nor indeed any suffrage but the sic jubeo of one man is of the slightest weight or importance. France has now for a second time accomplished that sagacious prophecy of Burke’s, that her attempts at a republic would end ‘in the most comple...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Part 3 Conservatism and the Church, 1852–1874
• Part 4 Conservatism and Reform, 1852–1868
• Part 5 Conservatism in the Country, 1866–1874