High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  The bill spent all of July and part of August 1871 in committee. On 24 July the Cabinet, who could see it running out of time, wondered whether to postpone or truncate it, or to suggest an autumn session to complete it. At the third reading on 8 August Disraeli blamed it for holding up other vital legislation, an act of hypocrisy extreme even by his standards. The bill had its third reading unopposed – a vote would have exposed Disraeli’s problems with his own party – and went to the Lords, where Shaftesbury tried to derail it. He said he would not argue against the principle of the measure, but against trying to discuss it properly when the House was about to go into recess and, indeed, when many peers had already left London for the Riviera or were on their way to the grouse moor – it was 10 August. The bill was thrown out by a two-to-one majority. The lesson for Gladstone was that if he wanted the measure to stand a chance, it had to reach the Lords well before August to be debated properly. The next bill to introduce the ballot was considered in the Commons two days after the state opening in February 1872.

  Shaftesbury had written to Gladstone on 7 December 1871 to say that ‘as to the Ballot itself, I regard it with the deepest alarm – my feelings on it are as strong as yours were.’102 He said it was ‘the duty of the Lords – a patriotic duty, I maintain – to throw back, for further deliberation, any Bill that they deem to be dangerous or simply hurtful to the real interests of the country.’ Shaftesbury’s party was still divided on the issue, which made things easier for Gladstone – though that was not how Disraeli saw it. He personally decided to remain silent as the measure went through, and not to expose the reactionary views of much of his party and provide an excuse for Gladstone to seek a dissolution, go to the country, and quite probably win an election that would end Disraeli’s career.

  By 1872 the demand for the ballot had become so strong that any attempt by Parliament to ignore it would have had serious consequences. John Bright, in particular, was arguing that many of the newly enfranchised would be afraid to vote in a way disapproved of by their landlord or employer. Forster again took the bill through the Commons. It took the same form as the previous year. The Lords debated it on 10 June. Shaftesbury, the friend of the oppressed, rubbished the notion that men were being intimidated. ‘There may’, he said, ‘be a case of intimidation here and there, but the cases are so few they are not worth recording, to the extent, I mean, of founding on them a new legislative action. Is it not a fact—will any man gainsay it—that the people are too enlightened, the employers are too prudent, and public opinion is too strong for the continued exercise of such an abuse? All testimony is against it.’103 Shaftesbury’s naivety was almost charming, as when he accurately predicted the emergence of the Labour party and modern canvassing if the ballot was introduced: ‘If the Ballot should be established agitators would go round to every house in the country and persuade the people to vote for special candidates, by saying that if they got into Parliament not only that the taxes and rates should be reduced—that argument is legitimate enough—but hinting also, that by a little legislative arrangement there might be a better and a fairer distribution of all kinds of property.’104

  He also feared the ballot would hasten the end of the monarchy. In such remarks we come close to the real reason why so many old Tories loathed the idea. He concluded on an appropriately hysterical note: ‘In the present aspect of affairs I am prepared for the overthrow of many of our institutions. I am prepared to see the dissolution of the Church of England, torn as it is by internal dissension; I am prepared to see a vital attack made upon the House of Lords, hateful on account of its hereditary privileges; and I am prepared to tremble for the Monarchy itself, stripped as it is of its true supporters; but I am not prepared for an immoral people; I am not prepared to see the people exercising their highest rights and privileges in secret, refusing to come to the light “because their deeds are evil”.’105 Despite several other blood-curdling speeches from the Tory benches, the government got its second reading.

  At the committee stage Salisbury complained the bill had only got so far as it had because of the government’s handsome majority in the Commons. He was acutely sensitive to the amount of ground that Conservatives had given to Liberalism since 1868 – and, indeed, since 1867 – and was determined not to shift on points of principle until the last ditch. In 1870, when the Tories were in a stand-off on the Irish Land Bill, he had told Carnarvon ‘that if we make any substantial retreat from the very moderate position that we have taken up, our future position in the Constitution will be purely decorative.’106 On the Ballot Bill, he told Carnarvon: ‘If we listen to the Liberals we should accept all important Bills which had passed the House of Commons by a large majority. But that in effect would be to efface the House of Lords.’107

  Many Conservatives in the Commons disagreed with him. Disraeli’s secret weapon – or so he thought – in keeping his party together during this difficult passage was making the ballot optional. The Commons ridiculed this, much to Disraeli’s chagrin. It was, however, something taken seriously by the Lords. Liberals argued that where secrecy was optional the usual suspects would intimidate voters into waiving their right to it. Salisbury claimed that even if there were total secrecy voters could still be intimidated into not voting at all, if it were feared they would otherwise vote the wrong way. His view swayed the tribunal: the Lords amended the bill to allow optional secrecy.

  The government was having none of this, and used its majority to throw the amendment out in the Commons. It also rejected one to allow the marking of ballot papers to trace who had cast them. Forster said that if the amendment stood it would make the bill ‘useless, or worse than useless’.108 Disraeli said secrecy should be used only in areas with a proven record of intimidation and corruption: he said the measure should be kept in reserve, like the Riot Act. A confrontation was thereby set up with the Lords, who threatened to hold fast in the face of the strongly expressed views of the elected House.

  Gladstone was so perturbed by this that he wrote to George Moberly, the former headmaster of Winchester and now, by Gladstone’s appointment, Bishop of Salisbury, to seek his help when the measure came back to the Lords in July 1872 ‘in preventing the very serious evil of a collision between the two Houses with the consequences it might entail.’109 He sent a similar entreaty to ‘Soapy Sam’ Wilberforce. Gladstone said it would be ‘very dangerous to mistake the general sentiments of the people on this subject’: but optional secrecy was an absurdity and had to be killed. He also urged George Glyn, the Liberal Chief Whip, to alert the press to the Lords’ determination to defeat the Commons, with a view to newspapers stirring up public feeling by ‘pointing to the extreme gravity of the consequences’.110

  Gladstone was determined not to be worsted by the Lords. The Cabinet met on 6 July and discussed options if the amendment were passed. It ruled out immediate resignation, accepting the amendment, trying again in 1873 or creating peers to vote the measure through as Gladstone wished it. It was decided that if the bill were lost there would be an autumn session and it would be reintroduced. If that failed, Gladstone would seek a dissolution in November. Glyn told him the Liberals would win the ensuing election, though probably with a much reduced majority.

  The Lords dealt with the rejection of their amendments two days later. Ripon, who led for the government, warned that if the House insisted on the optional ballot, the bill would be pointless. Peers were reminded that the idea had been thrown out in the Commons by large majorities. The Tories in the upper House were split: the Duke of Richmond insisted on the optional ballot, and the Duke of Northumberland wished he would not. An attempt was made to claim that those Tory MPs recently returned at by-elections who supported the ballot would also support the optional ballot: that was treated with derision. The amendment was not insisted upon: the Tories were reduced to squabbling about the inconvenience that would be inflicted on elementary schools when they were closed to be used as polling stations – another consequence of the measure. T
he ballot was on the statute book, and the last vestiges of Eatanswill and the pre-reform era were swept away by it.

  Both the 1867 Reform Act and the Ballot were steps towards a mature democracy that began from the high-minded impulse of those who wished to involve the lower classes in the political process, and to allow them to engage in it according to their consciences. That said, if they were conceived in idealism they were, in the end, born in pragmatism, because of the fear by the ruling class of what would happen if these civil rights continued to be denied. Disraeli’s behaviour in 1866–7 was in that respect far more unprincipled than the conduct of which he had accused Peel in 1845–6, when he had sought to save the poorest in Britain and Ireland from starvation. Once more, hypocrisy oiled the wheels of Victorian progress, but progress, nonetheless, it was.

  CHAPTER 12

  BROADENING MINDS: THE BATTLE FOR EDUCATION

  I

  ROBERT LOWE, AMONG others, had foreseen the main social consequence of the Reform Act: the urgent need to educate the people who would now have the vote. Speaking on the third reading of the Reform Bill on 15 July 1867, Lowe had said:

  I shrink from the notion of forcing education on people. It seemed more in accordance with our institutions to allow the thing to work and freely to supplement the system. That whole question has now completely changed. All the opinions I held on that subject are scattered to the winds by this measure of the Government. Sir, it appears to me that before we had entrusted the masses—the great bulk of whom are uneducated—with the whole power of this country we should have taught them a little more how to use it, and not having done so, this rash and abrupt measure having been forced upon them, the only thing we can do is as far as possible to remedy the evil by the most universal measures of education that can be devised. I believe it will be absolutely necessary that you should prevail on our future masters to learn their letters.

  He had changed his mind on centralisation, on an education rate and inspection.

  This question is no longer a religious question, it has become a political one. It is indeed the question of questions; it has become paramount to every other question that has been brought before us. From the moment that you entrust the masses with power their education becomes an absolute necessity, and our system of education, which—though not perfect, is far superior to the much-vaunted system that prevails in America or any nation on the Continent, as one system can be to another—must give way to a national system . . . You must take education up as the very first question, and you must press it on without delay for the peace of the country.1

  It should be noted, though, that when Lowe talked about a national approach to education, it was very much England and Wales that he was thinking about. Scottish education in Victorian times was a very different matter. Inspired by a post-Reformation wish to create a Godly people, Acts of Parliament in Scotland in the seventeenth century had imposed the duty upon parishes to set up schools for the education of the people, and had taxed local gentry to pay for them. Universities, similarly, offered places to those who wished to attend them, but awarded no qualifications. Carlyle, aged 15, would walk to Edinburgh from Dumfriesshire – a journey of almost 80 miles – to study at the university there, and walk back again at the end of term, living in mean lodgings and subsisting on a meagre diet. The old English universities, though more rigorous in their training, offered no such access. As for elementary schools, England was some 250 years behind Scotland.

  In a lecture to the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh on 1 November 1867, Lowe admitted a moral failure in having opposed education for the masses, but now advanced a utilitarian consideration: ‘It was a great evil that we did so before – it was an evil and a reproach, a moral stigma upon us. But now it is a question of self-preservation – it is a question of existence, even of the existence of our Constitution, and upon those who shall obstruct or prevent such a measure passing will rest a responsibility the heaviest that mortal man can possibly lie under.’2

  Lowe’s was one of the sharpest and most relentless minds of his generation. He had been born in 1811, like Samuel Butler the son of a Nottinghamshire parson. He was an albino with eyes that could hardly bear the light. He expected to go blind, which he did in old age. He distinguished himself academically at Winchester (where he had been bullied and miserable) and Oxford, which he left with a reputation for brilliance. He regarded Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations as of near biblical significance, and became an ardent utilitarian, heavily influenced by Benthamism. He was a radical free-trader of great personal ambition, with a knack for upsetting people: and Gladstone would make him Chancellor in his first ministry. Lowe was advised to go to the Antipodes in the 1840s, where he worked in the government of New South Wales, to see whether the light would improve his sight. The light being much stronger there, it made it worse.

  In 1859 Palmerston sent Lowe to the Privy Council Office, as vice-president with responsibility for education. Lowe was committed to reform, not least because the utilitarian in him saw, like Smith, that education was a sound investment. If a government invested in schools it would improve the life-chances of individuals, help them to be prosperous and to increase the prosperity of society, and remove burdens that would otherwise fall upon private charity and the parish. Lowe was ultra-utilitarian about the curriculum. He told a dinner of civil engineers in 1867 that study of the Classics (in which he had excelled) was merely ‘a minute analysis of the forms of expression and the modes of thought which were used by people many thousand years ago, and concerning which there was much controversy and no certainty would be arrived at.’3 Again, he took his cue from Smith, who had regarded proficiency in reading, writing and arithmetic as vital to the country. Lowe’s philosophy, expressed in an article in The Times attacking John Bright, was that ‘a man must be the architect of his own fortune and rise by his own energy. All Government can do is to remove obstacles from his path.’4 The devil would take the hindmost.

  This view was common across the parties. C. B. Adderley, Lowe’s predecessor, had told the Commons in July 1859 that ‘the education of children was naturally a parental function and was not the proper duty of the Government, which only interfered where its interposition was absolutely necessary.’5 Only the most high-minded, such as Matthew Arnold, trumpeted the value of learning for its own sake: it either had a utilitarian function, as men like Lowe would see it, or it had no function at all. Access to schools was controlled by the Anglican Church and by the dissenters, to whom the government made a grant of £20,000 a year (increased to £30,000 in 1839).6 However, also in 1839, the government voted £70,000 for the construction of new royal stables, which shows how priorities worked.

  By the mid-nineteenth century, whether or not they had had a formal education, more people were becoming literate, and therefore able to participate in rather than simply observe the development of society. That partly explained the rise of political activism from the 1830s through to the 1860s, but there had been other factors. The introduction of the penny post in 1840 had caused an exponential rise in communication. There was a substantial growth in the numbers of periodicals and books published, reflecting the expansion of the middle classes, their literacy and their leisure time. Newspapers also flourished: stamp duty was abolished in 1855, and in September of that year the Daily Telegraph was founded. Gladstone, who was Chancellor at the time, was well aware of the revenue raised by the tax: but was concerned about the perception that the government, by imposing this tax on a population growing in literacy and political awareness but still short of money, was restricting the availability of information about its own activities. He had told the Commons in April 1853 that it was not government policy to continue to ‘restrain the circulation of intelligence’.7

  Popular novelists, notably Dickens and Trollope, were serialised in periodicals: within five weeks of Dickens’s launching All the Year Round in 1859 it was selling 120,000 copies a week.8 Britain had become a nation of readers, and
the pursuit of literacy was a national ideal. Because of this, and the desire for self-improvement, the foundation of libraries became widespread in smaller as well as in larger towns. When the Free Library opened in Manchester on 2 September 1852 the event was attended by 1,000 people. Dickens, who was one, described the enterprise as ‘such a noble effort, so wisely and modestly made; so wonderfully calculated to keep one part of that awful machine, a great working town, in harmony with the other.’9 Such was the significance of the opening that as well as Dickens a number of other notables came from London for it: Thackeray, Shaftesbury, Bulwer Lytton, Sir James Stephen and Richard Monckton Milnes among them.