disraeli and the natural aristocracy

Disraeli and the Natural AristocracyAuthor(s): Albert TuckerSource: The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science / Revue canadienned'Economique et de Science politique, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Feb., 1962), pp. 1-15Published by: Wiley on behalf of Canadian Economics AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/139260 .

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Economics and Political Science Volume XXVIII FEBRUARY, 1962 Number 1

DISRAELI AND THE NATURAL ARISTOCRACY

ALBERT TUCKER University of Western Ontario

EIGHTY years after his death, judgments of Disraeli tend to focus on two opposing impressions. One of them derives from the portrait which he created of himself in his own lifetime. Striving as he did to exaggerate his personality in social and public life, he inevitably left the impression of being too much the opportunist ever to be sincere. The word "charlatan" was attached to him before he was out of his twenties, and he never completely outgrew it. When he was in his forties even a maverick like Lord Brougham felt free to point him out on the street as "the greatest blackguard in England."' What annoyed so many of his contemporaries was not simply that Disraeli was a Jew or an upstart, but that he did not accept the moral patterns of English politics. He seemed always too ready to make alignments beyond the fixed boundaries of party, and to use even his conservatism as a means towards personal power and fame. Dislike of him on this ground existed in various quarters from earnest statesmen like Bright, GJadstone, and Shaftesbury on the one hand, to Tory aristocrats like Derby and Salisbury on the other.2 By the end of his life there had developed also the criticism that his political career had been essentially a failure. Walter Bagehot, for example, wrote in 1876 that Disraeli possessed an inaccurate mind with little capacity for the real business of parliament.3 J. A. Froude in 1891 was even more negative when he said that Disraeli's real triumph was of short duration, since "no public man in England ever rose so high and acquired power so great, so little of whose work has survived him."4

The other impression is far more favourable and is derived from a conservative point of view. It begins with the sensitive understanding of T. E. Kebbel, who knew Disraeli in his later years.5 But the greatest sympathy with Disraeli has been expressed in the twentieth century on the argument that he was the first man to build the Tory party into a truly national party, capable of expressing a modern political creed. This idea was given its im-

lLord Broughton, Recollections of a Long Life (London, 1909), VI, 168. 2John Bright, Diaries, ed. A. J. Walling (London, 1930), 128-30; P. WV. Wilson, ed.,

The Grcville Diairy (London, 1927), II, 404, 410; G. W. E. Russell, Prime Ministers and Some Others (London, 1919), 40.

3R. 1-H. Hutton, ed., Biographical Studies (London, 1881), 364-8. 4Earl of Beaconsfield (London, 1891), 260. 5Lord Beaconsfield and Other Tory Memories (New York, 1907), 65-6.

1

Vol. XXVIII, no. 1, Feb., 1962



2 Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science

primatur in the official biography by Monypenny and Buckle.6 Though a sprawling and indiscriminate work in many respects, it had considerable influence, drawing attention both to Disraeli's contribution in holding the Tory party together and to the large extent of his writing, whether in the form of novel, speech, or correspondence. Taken hand in hand with the ascendancy of the Conservative party in this century, the biography has revived Disraeli's importance and made him a virtual prophet for Conservative politicians and Tory historians. Stanley Baldwin once said in the 1920's: "My party lhave no political bible. Possibly you might find our ideals best expressed in one of Disraeli's novels."7 R. A. Butler has been more specific, writing in 1954 that behind Disraeli's mocking spirit lies "the very philosophy of conservatism itself," for he saw the nation as more than "a mere mass of bipeds, . . . as a work of art and a work of time."8 Similarly, the estimate of G. M. Young dwelled on Disraeli as "a genuine Tory" in his reverence for the social order, his dislike of the bourgeois element in the state, his insistence on actualities and tradition as the basic stuff out of which tomorrow must be made.9

The two views may go together. The unscrupulous political charlatan may have expressed the most lasting principles of nineteenth-century conservatism. But then the principles are suspect, or else the ambition was more responsible than he was willing to reveal. For the moment the question may be left open. What is needed is a brief path through Disraeli's career to establish a coherent relation between his ideas and his politics. The means to that end adopted in this paper is to select and to examine the most political of all his writing, and to compare the ideas there expressed with the action of the Conservative leader in the crisis of the second Reform Bill of 1867.

The essence of Disraeli's conservative ideas may be found in four works: his Vindication of the English Constitution, published in 1835; his essay, The Spirit of Whiggism, written in 1836; and his two novels, Coningsby and Sybil, both of which were published between 1845 and 1847.10

The Vindication was a derivative work, owing much to Bolingbroke, but it possessed also a contemporary spirit not unlike that to be found in Coleridge's Constitution of Church and State. Both writers were concerned with the numerical influence of the raw industrial cities pressing against an ancient constitution. Each assumed that the possession of land implied a responsibility and sagacity which were the surest protectors of moral and spiritual liberties. Disraeli, it is true, did not write in terms of the "idea" of

6The Life of Disraeli. The first edition was published in six volumes (London, 1910-20). A new and revised edition appeared in two volumes (New York, 1929). Page references are to this second edition.

70n England (London, 1926), 205. 8Tradition and Change: Nine Oxford Lectures (London: Conservative Political Centre,

1954), 10. 9In H. W. J. Edwards, ed., The Radical Tory: Disraeli's Political Writings and Speeches

(London, 1937), 8. l'Both essays are to be found in Benjamin Disraeli, Whigs and Whiggism, ed. W.

Hlutcheon (New York, 1914). Page references are to this volume.



Disraeli and the Natural Aristocracy 3

the state, but certainly he agreed with its definition as the inclusion of all men in a religious and social unity based on the good life of its citizens. In England, this principle of unity and of ethical purpose was not a nostalgic abstraction, but was manifest in the continuing influence of age-old institutions which were still able to resist the demands of uprooted numerical majorities. There is a parallel also between Disraeli and the early Burke, for Disraeli wrote that national character and political institutions are woven into one whole, that you cannot change one without altering the other. Nations, said Disraeli, "have characters as well as individuals." And again: "respect for precedent, clinging to prescription, reverence for antiquity . . have their origin in a profound knowledge of human nature."1'

But there were real differences. Disraeli's work was both more polemical and more historical than that of Coleridge. It was also less profound and less passionate than that of Burke. One searches in vain for the same feeling, the same immersion in the subject. The reason for this difference is not to be found simply in dismissing Disraeli as too superficial. A more fruitful explanation may be drawn from Karl Mannheim's essay, "Conservative Thought. "12 In his terms, conservatism as "reflection" only came into being when dominant European groups recognized the need to articulate their own defensive ideology in order to counter the attacks raised by eighteenth-century rationalism. In any given country of Europe in the early nineteenth century, the character of its conservative ideology was determined partly by the position of the traditional ruling groups, and partly by the nature of the liberal offensive or "utopia." If we examine these two impulses of conservative thought in England, then Mannheim's statement may well be brought back to Disraeli. The attack or criticism made by the English utilitarians, the philosophic radicals, and the laissez-faire liberals retained only part of eighteenth-century rationalism. It contained little or nothing of the state of nature, of the social contract, of popular sovereignty or the Rights of Man-those aspects so dominant in European ideas of natural law.'3 The English radicals, however, adopted the method by which natural law might be applied-its rationalism as applied to specific problems, its mechanistic outlook on the social body, its static or non-historical thinking, its belief that all historical and social units are subject to universal laws. The legalistic, reforming character of this liberal thought was bound to have an effect on the answer given to it by English conservatism.

Nor did English conservative thought ever develop the systematic philosophy or bureaucratic defence adopted by German conservative ideology. It sought more consistently to come to terms with immediate grievances. This quality, which was essentially one of application and compromise, was made possible by the second impulse, which came from the flexible and adjustable nature of English ruling groups, even of those based on land. The latter had come to identify themselves with a working parliamentary government. They preferred

"Life of Disraeli, I, 311-12. '21n his Essays on Sociology and Social P-roblems, ed. Paul Keeskemeti (New York,

1953). l3IbidM, 117.



4 Canadian Journal of Econamics and Political Science

the House of Commons to remain aristocratic, but they would accept as final the decisions arrived at on the floor of that House and approved by the Lords. For this reason, English conservatism was always more inductive and empirical in its historical interpretation than that of Germany, or than that of French writers like de Maistre.

The pragmatic quality of this conservative mind may have been especially apparent to Disraeli, who did not have to face, as the later Burke had done, the threat of a foreign foe and an alien doctrine. Disraeli's enemies were the Whig oligarchy and the utilitarians-both of them English and anything but revolutionary. If we add to this the fact that he was by nature and temperament a man for whom the art of writing, in whatever form, provided a direction for his ambition, his public action, then we have some explanation for the polemical character of his political thought. "Poetry," he once said, "is the safety-valve of my passions, but I wish to act what I write." He wrote, therefore, towards an interpretation of English history that would justify the position of the Conservative party, beginning with a refutation of the idea that the House of Commons had ever represented "the people." They were no more than the delegates, he said, of an estate; and the formation of that estate could be traced as far back as the Plantagenets. In the fourteenth century, and for long after, the Commons possessed no power of legislation; their function was purely "remedial." The knights of the counties came to West- minster only to impart knowledge and to present to the king the state of his realm and the grievances of his subjects.14 By the fifteenth century, the Com- mons had become a fundamental part of the feudal constitution. The virtue of that constitution lay in the balance which it sustained between the two estates and the monarchy. Whenever the evolution of this balance had been upset, only tragedy and violence had resulted. Thus the wars of the fifteenth century led to a Tudor despotism, and to this distortion Charles I was the tragic heir. In the struggles of the seventeenth century the extremists turned the Commons from one estate of the realm into the real power of the country. From the very nature of the Commons, the attempt could not succeed; and so, said Disraeli, "the Nation, the insulted and exhausted Nation, sought refuge from the Government of 'the People' in the arms of a military despot."'5

From here, Disraeli takes his history into the eighteenth century, and his mentor is very obviously Bolingbroke, whose influence runs all through "The Spirit of Whiggism." This was a more brief and more interesting essay than the "Vindication." Its purpose was to insist that all the apparently democratic intentions of the Whigs were only a veil to cover their pursuit of factional power. Through the eighteenth century they had so effectively come to control the royal councils, the estate of the Commons, the judicial and ecclesiastical appointments, that England was fast approaching the state of a Venetian republic. It was the monarch in the person of George III, who had reinstated the constitution on its popular foundations, and the French Revolution which had rallied the sympathy and patriotism of the Nation behind the Crown as its symbol of unity. Then, in 1830, taking advantage of the restless mood stirred

14Disraeli, "Vindication," 152. l5bid., 181.



Di&raeli and the Natural Aristocracy 5

up by conditions at home and events on the continent, the Whigs became the dominant group in the Commons for the first time in sixty years. If they were to restore their old power, however, they must have allies, and so they schemed for the enfranchisement of the "sectarians," a group too small and prosperous to be a democratic threat, yet more than willing to become dependent on the Whig magnates. Now, having secured the House of Commons by "swamping," the Whigs were bent on destroying tlhe power of the House of Lords and the influence of the Tory gentry in the municipalities.'6

In all of this, Disraeli was clearly writing for the Tory party and for his own election. Yet it was not a perverted or deceitful interpretation. He was the partisan of a cause which had valid historical roots, and those roots gave depth to his perception that English society in the 1830's, despite all its industrial, commercial, and urban changes, was still dominated by a landed aristocracy. This continuity of the social structure is the most obvious explanation for the similarity between the views of Disraeli and those of his pre- decessors. The apologia for the continuing power of that aristocracy lay in its political and constitutional connection with the Crown, but more important was its still very real influence over rural society. The rents from many of its landed estates together with mining royalties and invested profits went in turn to support noble houses in English cities where standards of taste and power were set that could seldom be achieved but were always desirable. In such a society, said Disraeli, that kind of leadership is best which had been acquired through long experience and which had been handed on from generation to generation until it had become an instinct in the governing class.

The disposition of property in England throws the government of the country into the hands of its natural aristocracy. I do not believe that any scheme of the suffrage, or any method of election, could divert that power iilto other quarters. It is the necessary consequence of our present social state. I believe, the wider the popular suffrage, the more powerful would be the natural aristocracy.'7

He used the word "natural" deliberately hiere, as he did in many of his works; and it may well be taken as an illustration of what Mannheim has claimed is inherent in the historical conservative theory-that it is not enough for the political leader "to possess merely the correct knowledge and the mastery of certain laws and norms. In addition . . . he must possess that inborn instinct, sharpened through long experience, which leads him to the right answer."'18

To build further on Disraeli's observations, we might compare them with those of another scholar who has studied the aristocracy in cultural and sociological terms. Werner Jaeger, in his magnificent Paedeia, has said that for the Greek poet, Pindar, "education cannot act unless there is inborn Areta for it to act upon. . . We must acknowledge the gulf which Pindar points out between natural nobility born in its possessor and the knowledge and powers which have been merely acquired by learning, for the difference between these things is natural and right."'9 If the same remark be applied

OIbid., 330-6. '7bid., 346.

18Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, trans. L. Wirth and E. Shils (New York, 1936), 121.

19Trans. Gilbert Highet (New York, 1939-44), I, 217-19.




to Disraeli's description of "Young England," or to his biography of Lord George Bentinck, hardly a word need be changed. Furthermore, his characters were taken from an aristocracy which, at least in a social sense, held a peculiar influence over the middle class. This must be generally true of flexible ard open societies, like the Greek and the English, which are subject to the forces of commercial and industrial change. Professor Jaeger has concluded that "the presuppositions of aristocratic civilization are fixed residence in one place, ownership of land, and respect for tradition. These are the factors which allow a set form of life to be transmitted unaltered from one generation to another." If the transmission of the hereditary principle leads to the creation of a class that is too privileged, "it is counterbalanced by the new supplies of strength which pour in from the lower classes."20 But as leaders, these lower elements, in their turn, will adopt the criteria and the ideals of the aristocracy. Disraeli in the thirties and the forties observed this same hierarchical mobility in English society. Comparing violence in England and Europe, he said: "There is this difference between the revolutions of England and the revolutions of the Continent-the European revolution is a struggle against privilege; an English revolution is a struggle for it. If a new class rises in the State, it becomes uneasy to take its place in the natural aristocracy of the land."2' Even without revolution, the middle class, which has raised itself to eminence by reason, thrift, efficiency, and hard work, sees something always above it more worthy of attainment than the acquisition of mere wealth. "The industrious ten-pounder," said Disraeli,

who has struggled into the privileged order of the Commons, proud of having obtained the first step of aristocracy, will be the last man to assist in destroying the other gradations of the scale which he or his posterity may -yet ascend; the new member of a manufacturing district has his eye already upon a neighbouring park, avails himself of his political position to become a county magistrate, meditates upon a baronetcy, and dreams of a coroneted descendant.22

There is some exaggeration here. Disraeli was only partly right, because he ignored the independence and pride of nonconformist religious separatism. It was true, nevertheless, that trade, industry, and education, together with the established church, composed a ladder which made social ascent a more general characteristic of the middle classes. Disraeli's focus, in everything that he wrote and did, was on the top of that ladder. It is obvious to an extreme degree in his novels, and it can be traced in his later political action. We are not interested here in any detailed discussion of the novels, but a few dominant impressions may be gathered from the two most important of them-Coningsby and Sybil.

In the first place, they are both still the most widely read of Disraeli's novels, and this not because they are complex or significant literature, but because they are original illustrations of certain political and social currents which Disraeli interpreted from a clear and well-defined point of view. That view confined his characters so that they emerge as types, often as caricatures,

20Ibid., I, 2, 19. 21"The Spirit of Whiggism," 347. 22Ibid., 349.




meant to represent different aspects of political activity. This is especially true in Coningsby, which was written purely as a political novel; but even when we come to Bishop Hatton or Devilsdust in Sybil, and Disraeli reveals their social origins, they do not seem vital in themselves; they are drawn too extremely, because they were meant fundamentally to illustrate the degrada- tion to which an irresponsible industrialism had led. By contrast, his heroes and heroines are all too noble, too intelligent, and disinterested. Edith and Coningsby, Sybil and Egremont-they are all ideal representatives of aristocratic responsibility. Whatever development takes place in each is only the growing awareness, from youthful inexperience, of this position of trust and leadership. Though Edith Millbank came from the industrial middle class, it was from that wealthy and respectable section of solid entrepreneurs which could produce a Peel and a Gladstone, each of whom began his career on the extreme right. And like both of these leaders, Oswald Millbank was sent to Oxford to be made into the mould of a gentleman. Even the contact between the three Millbanks and Coningsby is that of the worshippers before the hero, for he is the model of the aristocratic ideal, combining intelligence, sincerity, and public zeal with unusual courage and manly vigour.

Again, these virtues are instinctive; they are not acquired, but are part of his breeding and his historic background. It is a matter of course that his superiority is recognized almost at once by all who come into touch with him. The same deference is extended to his grandfather, Monmouth, but Monmouth is the prototype of the eighteenth-century Whig who is not in touch with the complex social currents of an industrial and increasingly bourgeois society. His energy is directed upon himself, his family, and his class. The only character in the book to approach Coningsby is Sidonia, but Sidonia is all knowledge, all insight and intellect, without the sympathy or the attachment to his own society that is so much a part of the promise of Coningsby. Birth and heredity also explain the high virtues of mind and heart that draw supporters about Sybil and her father.

An aristocracy rooted in the land, however, with its concomitant local and national institutions, could not have given to Disraeli a certain trust in the future, had it not been for the character of the English people, and especially of the workers. "Ancient lineage!" says the elder Millbank in Coningsby. "I never heard of a peer with an ancient lineage. The real old families of the country are to be found among the peasantry." That was why, in Sybil, Disraeli insisted that class divisions must be mitigated by a broader trust in the virtues of the workers of England. The clearest illustration of this trust is to be seen in his drawing of Warner and Walter Gerard in Sybil. The former is a hand- loom weaver suffering from the results of the factory system, out of work, living with his family in one room, forced to see his children go without food, and burdened with the overwhelming conviction that the rulers of society consider him of less importance than the beasts of the field. Gerard is a more idealized version, a man of independence and courage, whose descent from a truly landed family has endowed him with feelings and abilities that place him on a pedestal above the slaves of wages and of long, wearisome hours spent as the human arms of a machine. Again, these qualities are inherited,




they are instinctive; he -is a natural leader because of his descent from a noble family. But equally important as an illustration of Disraeli's political ideas was his stress in both men on their caution, their honesty, their fundamental conservatism, in spite of their deep-felt grievances. Even in that moment of depression and widespread unemployment, when Gerard is involved in the leadership of a mass meeting which threatens to lead to violence, he is quickly recovered by Sybil, is suitably and lightly punished, and becomes henceforth a counter to any suggestion of precipitate activity on the part of the workers. It is he alone who saves the Trafford factory from being sacked by the "Hell- cats"-those depraved and undisciplined workers who exist beyond the con- fines of any social order. Their march for the Charter reads like an example taken from the "Terror" of the French Revolution, which Disraeli may have had in mind. He could hardly have intended these dregs from the industrial ghettos to be included in the suffrage, but he meant full sympathy to be felt for the Warners and the Gerards. Disraeli never doubted their loyalty to a ruling class, with the Crown at its head, if only the line between poverty and riches were less sharp.

There can be little doubt, then, as to the clarity of his early ideas and sympathies. However derivative they were, their author can hardly be accused of ambiguity. The constitution of the Crown, Estates, and Church was, seen in its historical and not simply its romantic context. The aristocracy he could criticize as being exploitive, new, or even useless; but it had given and. would continue to give to English society whatever leadership it possessed. Within the working classes was a reserve of deference, industry, and goodwill,. which needed only greater trust and greater material well-being to make class differences less a source of grievance and division. The stability of English society, and its unique characteristic, came from the sense of place and status imposed by the social power of the aristocracy and by the attitude of per- manence expressed by the landed gentry.23

These ideas of the basic social structure in England were confirmed by his conception of race. The Saxons and the Jews were for Disraeli among the fewv superior races of the world, and their achievements made false

that pernicious doctrine of modern times-the natural equLality of man, a principle which, were it possible to act on it, would deteriorate the great races and destroy all the genius of the world. What would be the consequence on the great Anglo- Saxon republic, for example, were its citizens to secede from their sound principle of reserve, and mingle with their negro and coloured populations? In the course of time they would become so deteriorated that their states would probably be reconquered and regained by the aborigines whom they have expelled, 'and who would then be their superiors.24

The Jews were opposed to the idea of natural equality because of pride in their blood and their long tradition as a people of deep religious feeling. They represented the Semitic principle, the real origin of Christian doctrine. In addition, they possessed the faculty of acquisition, a faculty so unique that it had been able to accumulate a remarkable amount of wealth despite

23See Kebbel, Lord Beaconsfield and Other Tory Memories, 65-6; and Paul Jolhnson, "The Dark Youth of Disraeli," New Statesman, Dec. 17, 1960, 976.

24Disraeli, Life of Lord George Bentinck (Beaconsfield edition, n. d.), 126.




the restrictions of European laws. "Thus it will be seen that all the tendencies of the Jewish race are conservative. Their bias is to religion, property, and natural aristocracy: and it should be the interest of statesmen that this bias of a great race should be encouraged, and their energies and creative powers enlisted in the cause of existing society."25 These opinions were written by the mature Disraeli in 1851, when he was forty-seven. They indicate that his views of race were woven into an intricate whole with his interpretation of English history and English politics.

The question remains: was there any connection at all between these ideas and that high point in his political career-his management of the Conservative Reform Bill of 1867? Disraeli has been held almost alone responsible for this reform, which extended the suffrage to at least a million new voters. Much of his reputation really rests on the passage of that Act. Because of it, he has been called both a traitor to the Tory party and the first of the Tory Democrats. To what extent was he acting what he had written? Was his ambition so all pervasive that he ignored his earlier writing, or was there a real continuity between these two phases of his career?

II

It must be said at the outset that Disraeli's conduct in 1867 can hardly be understood apart from expediency. It was pressure and circumstance more than anything else which explain the success of the Reform Bill. Disraeli would have preferred to avoid the question altogether.26 When he became leader of the Commons in 1866, foremost in his mind was the desire to keep his minority government in office, and it was not until January of 1867, nearly six months later, that he was finally persuaded Reform would serve such an end. What influenced him was the rapid increase of extra-parliamentary agitation. During the fall of 1866 the huge meetings of the Reform organizations, reviving what was left of the Chartist movement and the Anti-Corn Law League, made it more and more apparent that no government could continue to ignore the issue of franchise extension. Pressure was also brought to bear by the Queen, who insisted that war in Europe did not permit England the luxury of quarrelling over Reform.27 Her insistence finally prevailed upon Lord Derby, the nominal leader of the Tory Government, to state that the franchise must be extended on something more broad than a narrow party basis.

How, then, was Disraeli to proceed? In his awareness of these immediate circumstances, two facts governed his actions above all else. One was the absence in his own mind of any real aversion to electoral reform. If be had avoided it for the previous six months, that was largely because the difficulties seemed serious enough to defeat his Government, as they had already defeated that of Gladstone. But if the continuation of his Tory cabinet depended on a reform bill, he felt no objections of an ethical or ideological nature. The second fact was related to the condition of political grouping in the Commons. Disraeli

25Ibid. 26Life of Disraeli, II, 188; see also Asa Briggs, Victorian People (London, 1954), 280-1;

Bright, Diaries, 305. 27Letters of Queen Victoria, 2nd series, 1862-85, ed. G. E. Buckle (London, 1925-27),

I, 371-2.




was aware as soon as he took up the possibility of a bill that most members wished to avoid a crisis which would force the Queen to dissolve parliament or to make another change of government. This was true even of the followers of Gladstone and Bright, many of whom would abandon their leaders in order to support a Conservative Bill which might stand as a final settlement. "The corruption of the House," said Bright, "is something extraordinary. Men fear a dissolution and will descend to any meanness to escape it."28

Confronted with this situation, Disraeli decided that his only course must be a broad bill that would attract in some measure the votes of all groups in the Commons. The answer was to go beyond previous renting and rating limits to a household suffrage which could then be qualified by very real safeguards. His objection to the renting or rating limits was that they were too confused in the boroughs to be used as a definition of that moral and economic fitness which alone could justify a man's possession of the franchise.29 He argued that it was more sound to extend the suffrage to the mere householder provided it were accompanied by the kind of checks which could be approved by the Tory and Whig peers, by moderate Liberals, and even by himself. On these grounds he gave instructions for a bill to be drawn up which was approved by his cabinet and presented to the House in March, 1867. It contained household suffrage qualified by two years' residence, personal payment of the poor rates, and dual votes for those who possessed evidence of property and wealth. In Ihis own mind, how important were these limits or fences? The conclusion can too readily be drawn that because he eventually surrendered them, they were of no account to him in the first place. His reputation as a Tory Democrat rests on the impression of his having devised artificial limits on the franchise, only to lead on his lethargic gentry followers to a point where he could surrender all the limits and so surprise his own party with a large increase in lower-class voters. But there is real evidence that Disraeli from the beginning did not intend it to be a democratic bill. When he introduced it into the House, for example, he insisted that the franchise must be based on a man's "regularity of life,"> and his "trustworthy conduct," and to that end two years' residence and personal payment were intended.30

Personal payment of the rates was meant to discriminate against those who compounded, or included their rates with their rents, leaving it to the landlord to remit the rate payment to the Poor Law Overseers. Exclusion of these compounders could be defended only by a specious moral argument, but there was a very real movement in the party among some of the borough members for household suffrage on this basis. It represented a growing commercial middle-class representation in the Conservative party, led at this time by Samuel Graves, member for Liverpool. Graves wrote to Disraeli when the bill was being formed: "That's the real thing. Rating is better than any money

28Diaries, 299. 29This confusion is illustrated in "Report of the Select Committee of the House of Lords

on the Elective Franchise," Parliamentary Papers, 1860, XII (c. 459), evidence of H. West, 52-7, and of Sidney Smith, 77.

3OHansard, 3rd series, CLXXXVI, March 18, 1867, 13. Disraeli's words were: "being rated to the poor, and the paying of the rates, constituted a fair assurance that the man who fulfilled those conditions was one likely to be characterized by regularity of life and general trustworthiness of conduct."'




qualification. There are 10,000 Parliamentary voters now in Liverpool who do not pay their rates-and never will."3' Disraeli replied: "I will not conceal from you that Lord Derby and myself are of your opinion." He was assured also of Whig support for the whole bill if such a limitation were included, when the Whig leader in the House of Lords, Lord Grosvenor, wrote to the Queen that the Whigs would vote with the Government if there were "some compen- satory arrangement against the possible influx of Compound Householders."32 Disraeli was himself fully aware of these Whig terms. At the very time when he was instructing Thring to draw up the bill he was also writing to the Queen that while the compound householders totalled 484,000, yet the number likely to avail themselves of the clause specifying personal payment would not come to any more than 50,000 voters.33 There might be an additional 115,000 from the boroughs, but the bulk of the new electors, perhaps 300,000, would come from the counties with the reduction of the property qualification there from ?50 to ?12. It was clear that his intention, even in that final bill presented on March 18, 1867, was still to leave unchanged the balance of representation and leadership. By subtle manoeuvring he might yet be able to do this and thereby establish the claim of his Conservative Government both to hold power and to settle the question of electoral reform.

Why, then, did he surrender all of the qualifications, finally acknowledging a bill which added nearly a million voters, and in its extent surprised even the radicals? Asa Briggs has explained it by calling Disraeli's whole performance in 1867 one of "imaginative opportunism," and he has suggested that Disraeli had been waiting nearly twenty years for such an opportunity. But that is to give hiim more integrated intentions on behalf of the working classes than was his due.34 Disraeli would have taken much less than the final Act, had it not been for the conjunction of pressures. The amendments all came from the radicals, and the bill as it finally emerged belonged more to Bright than to Disraeli. Briggs' interpretation is not substantially different from that of Buckle, who wrote: "The educating process . . . aptly described the whole course of his leadership of the party out of the narrow policies of the late forties into the broad and national programme of the 1866 administration.... He kept ever before his eyes the establishment of the Conservative party on a national and popular basis."35 Such statements surely exaggerate his purposeful direction of the Bill. Compounding was a check which Disraeli, in spite of Cranborne, had hoped would hold where the renting and rating limits had failed. Bright's final amendment, forcing every occupier to pay his rates in person, was not

3lLife of Disraeli, II, 224; Sir Edward Russell, That Reminds Me (London, 1899), 250; 0. F. Christie, Transition to Democracy (London, 1934), 20; and Briggs, Victorian People, 301-31.

32Letters of Queen Victoria, 2nd series, I, 409. 331bid., II, 407-8. 34Briggs, Victorian People, 205-6, 281, 288-91. By going back through Disraeli's speeches

on parliamentary reform, from 1851 to 1867, Professor Briggs was able to find "a remarkable continuity in his ideas on reform." But Disraeli's favourable utterances on reform must always be related to the position of the Tory party and its hope of attaining or holding office. Cf. Kebbel, Lord Beaconsfield and Other Tory Memories, 38: "Disraeli's ideas on... parliamentary reform in general can hardly be gathered either from his speeches or his books."

35Life of Disraeli, II, 289, 297.



12 Canadian Jour-ntal of Economics and Political Science

inevitable, and when it came Disraeli felt only apprehension. He souglht the advice of his chief colleague in the cabinet, Gathorne-Hardy; but I-Hardy was not available, and so he faced the Opposition almost alone, in a House of only 145 members, and made one more concession which, he said, "would destroy the present agitation and extinguish Gladstone and Co...." But he was not happy, and he immediately wrote to Hardy that he had only voted because the Opposition had originated the move. lie seems to have been in a state of anxiety until Hardy sent his reluctant approval.36

Disraeli moved like this, from one contingency to the next, without any firm scheme. Hardy observed when he was first taken into Disraeli's official confi- dence, "that he is always looking for what will suit others, rather than wlhat is sound in itself. . . ." As the weeks went by, Hardy noted frequently in his diary after cabinet meetings: "what confusion in all our plans. . . . what will come of it all.. .. again and again I long to be out of the bother. Odious work."37 Rather than say that Disraeli forced his party in 1867, it is nearer the trutlh to conclude that he was himself forced. It was not his foresight, his working-class sympathy, but rather his indifference to detail, his detachment from hide-bound principles of Tory honour, which made the bill possible.38

III

One is driven back, then, to the criticisms of men like Walter Bagehot or of John Bright. The latter added in 1867: "Disraeli has been possessed by a devouring ambition-not to preach and act the truth, but to distinguish himself. We come here for fame, he said to me many years ago."39 For Bright, with his Quaker sense of mission, Disraeli's ambition worked itself out on a low field. Beside his observation there must be placed that of Sir John Skelton, the Scottish and Tory writer, who said of Disraeli in the same year: "what an actor the man isl-and yet the ultimate impression is of absolute sincerity and unreserve."'40 Let us add this to his detachment, to "the face like a mask." Given the pressures in 1867, he could afford to be indifferent to detail, but hie could also be sincere. For even as a politician dealing with immediate necessities, he was not throwing over his basic ideas of power and the social structure. He possessed a very qualified sympathy wvith the working man, and he could talk informally with Bright; but at heart even Bright's radicalism was conservative. Brigl-ht wanted a limit to the franchise, he said, "that would satisfy the demands of our ancient constitution." The English working class was simply not revolutionary, and Bright was only the parliamentary spokesman for a number of trade union leaders at the time, who saw hopes for improvement in education

38A. E. Gathorne-Ilardy, Lord Cranbrook: A Mlemoir (London, 1910), I, 208-10. 371bid., 202-12. 38WVlicn Disraeli made a speech at Edinburgh in the fall of 1867, after the bill had been

passed, he stressed the principle that "a man shall have a vote who has, by his residence and his contributioni to local taxation, proved that he is interested in the welfare of the community." Kebbel, Selected Speeches of the Earl of Beaconsfield (London, 1882), II, 482. But these words should be placed beside his famous speeches to the IIouse on March 18 and 26, 1867, in both of which he included personal payment as beinig equally important with residence an(d raiting.

39Diarics, 297. '0The Table-Talk of Shirley (London, 1895), 258.




anrd self-improvement among the workers. Disraeli, therefore, had little cause for apprehension.41

For.the sake of Whig and Tory consent, he would have preferred to keep the limits' on the franchise. But without them the worst was not bad at all. The Act added another million voters, making a total electorate of more than two million in a population of over thirty million. The counties remained firmly in the hands of the landed interest, by the exclusion not only of the farm- labouring class but also of the thousands of miners, iron, and textile workers who lived outside of borough boundaries. Within the borou'ghs, too, the electoral registers were still managed by the party registration associations, who exploited the qualifications for voting and made almost impossible the existence of an independent voting public. And the small boroughs were represented out of all proportion to the large. In 1873 Sir Charles Dilke could prove that one-half of the Commons was returned by 500,000 electors and the other'half by 2,000,000. The radical historian, Simon Maccoby, has found that in 1874 Liverpool and Marylebone, with a combined population of 970,000 were represented by five members, while seventy-seven members sat for seventy-seven boroughs with a total population of 720,000. The small county of Rutland, with a population of 22,000 sent as many members to parliament as South-East Lancashire with its 403,000 people.42

Disraeli could hardly have seen the Act as a threat to fundamentals, to the basic social structure. His critics, like The Times or the Quarterly Review, saw only the desire of a conglomerate mass of working men to use their new-found political -influence for a single goal-the improvement of wages and hours of work, the supply of cheaper housing, the lowering of prices, with no concern or capacity for the wider interests of the state. But Disraeli was more aware of something else. In a parliament of over 650 members, more than two hundred came from families owning 10,000 acres or more, while nearly another two hundred belonged to families holding between 2,000 and 10,000 acres.43 Some of the wealth behind this land may have lain in trade, the ownership or the titles may have been of recent origin, but such facts only enhanced the influence of rank and descent. In the very year of the Reform 'Bill, Leslie Stephen could write:

England is still an aristocratic country; not because the nobility have certain privileges, or possess influence in certain boroughs. . . . The country is aristocratic, because the whole upper and middle, and a great part of the lower, classes have still an instinctive liking for the established order of things; because innumerable social ties bind us together spontaneously, so as to give to the aristocracy a position tolerably corresponding to their political privileges.44

Disraeli's awareness of this condition is evident in a number of ways. Lady

4JSee Bright's comment to Sir Edward Russell, editor of the Liverpool Daily Post, in 1868: "We have got household suffrage. In a year or two we are pretty certain to have national education; and after that I really don't see what there is that Parliament can use- fully do for reform and progress." Russell, That Reminds Me, 78.

42Simon Maccoby, English Radicalism, 1853-86, IV (London, 1938), 97, 200; H. J. Hanham, Elections and Party Management (London, 1959), x.

43John Bateman, The Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland (London, 1879), quoted in Hanham, Elections and Party Management, xv.

44Leslie Stephen, Essays on Reform (London, 1867), 107.




John Russell, with a touch of malice, said that his imagination foresaw the susceptibility of the democracy to wealth and riches, making "it easy to put a hook in the nose of Leviathan," and to take the monster in tow by the Conservative party.45 In 1872 Disraeli himself said that the 30,000,000 non- voters of the United Kingdom must depend for protection of their rights on the aristocracy and the crown.46 It was not very different from that statement of 1836: "I believe, the wider the popular suffrage, the more powerful would be the natural aristocracy.'

When a bill was introduced to enfranchise county electors in 1874, Disraeli opposed it. He realized, he said, that the labourers of the land were sober, industrious heads of families; but the suffrage was not an abstract right. It was an affair of convention, and the bill would involve too large and sudden a redistribution of seats. In time, however, he did not see even a rural political change as any more a threat than that already accomplished in the towns.47 The vote and the ballot in the long run could not upset the ingrained habits of centuries, nourished as they were by all the social and educational influences of the countryside. Matthew Arnold said of him in 1872: "What is curious about Dizzy is his great knowledge about county families and their history; I really think not from anything servile, but because it interests him in bearing on English life, politics and society."48 Even the dangers emerging in European affairs were for Disraeli contributing to the maintenance of England's ruling class. In 1871, during the Franco-Prussian war, he wrote to Lord Derby: "I am not sorry to see the country fairly frightened about foreign affairs," and he gave two reasons. One was the benefit of being diverted from what he called "that morbid spirit of domestic change and criticism, which has ruled us too much for the last forty years." But the second was his conviction that foreign affairs would lead to greater emphasis on the naval and military establishments, the reconstruction of which "will . . . be favourable to the aristocracy, by which I mean particularly the proprietors of land."49

The combination of writing and utterance in the 1870's all come back to this one focus. His ambition for fame and power, his flair for eccentric taste, his love of beautiful surroundings, together with his Jewish birth, had all drawn him inevitably to the side of the aristocracy. The association had deepened with his rural residence, his writing, and his leadership in the Commons. Beneath each of these commitments there lay an unchanging faith in race, birth, the hero, all of which cast a mystical quality over his conviction that the stability, the uniqueness of English society rested on hierarchy, on the sense of place and status among its people. The breadth of this conception provided the foundation of his pragmatism in politics, but it also sustained his Tory attachment.

If, then, there is any answer to the question posed at the beginning of this paper, it may be said that observers in the nineteenth century exaggerated

45Lady John Russell, A Memoir (London, 1910), 210. 46Kebbel, Selected Speeches, II, 501. 47Hansard, 3rd series, CCXIV, 217, 259. 48Matthew Arnold, Letters (London, 1895), 11, 77. 49Life of Disraeli, II, 472.




the aspect of the conjurer and the manipulator in Disraeli, allowing his ambition to distort the strong vein of sincerity which was there at all times. The identity which he established in his own mind between aristocracy and race looked too much like the propaganda of self-justification to his contemporaries. They underestimated his loyalty to the notion that political power must be based on the principles of birth and property, on the gentry as natural leaders, and on all social relations as tied together in a territorial constitution. As for the praise of conservatives in the twentieth century, there is a tendency, again, to interpret his success as a far more applicable conservatism than it really was. The truth is that Disraeli held the Conservative party together through a period of party confusion in parliament. He enabled it to take office as a minority government three times in the fifties and the sixties, and in 1874 to form one of the first of the truly party ministries. But the making of the Conservative party, even the formation of the 1874 ministry, had to do with circumstances beyond Disraeli-with the death of Palmerston and the inevitable shift of his Conservative followers, with the disintegrating effect of Gladstone's leadership on the Liberals, with the dilemma of Liberalism in the twentieth century. Over these events Disraeli had little initiative or control. His temperament, his ideas, and his associations, all belonged to a period that was fading even before he died.



disraeli and the natural aristocracy

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