Bagehot

by James Grant

  Politically, the candidate risked little with such provoking speech: Kidderminster was a Liberal riding, and Lowe was sure to win. The trouble started after the results came in. Among the unemployed, unbribed, and thirsty people in and around Kidderminster, there were those who wanted to kill him, and thousands of hostile men and women were happy to lend moral support to these assailants (“Kill the bastard; kill the pink-eye”). Retiring on foot from the ceremony that closed the balloting, Lowe and his party, locking arms behind a small police escort, passed through a hailstorm of rocks and bricks. Men fell under the barrage, including the brave Constable Jukes, who later died of his wounds. Except for the courage of the headmaster of a local grammar school, who dragged the wounded candidate into the safety of his house, Lowe might have died, too. As it was, the Liberal victor suffered a broken skull. Blood streamed down his alabaster face.

  LOWE HAD MADE A memorable anticipatory contribution to the reform dialogue in 1865. The franchise was already open to tens of thousands of voteless working men, he insisted. It was theirs for the taking. According to government figures, the average Englishman consumed 240 quarts of beer a year, representing an outlay of £4.34 Any who wanted to meet the customary £10 standard had only to stop drinking. Many would rather have boarded a boat for Australia.

  In 1866, on the second night of debate on the reform measure, Lowe speculated on what it might mean if the working class did, indeed, gain electoral control. He was now the member for Calne, having decided not to face his homicidal constituents in Kidderminster again. “Look at what that implies,” he warned the House on March 13:

  I shall speak very frankly on this subject, for having lost my character by saying that the working man could get the franchise for himself, which has been proved to be true, and for saying which he and his friends will not hate me one bit the less, I shall say exactly what I think. Let any Gentleman consider—I have had such unhappy experiences, and many of us have—let any Gentleman consider the constituencies he has had the honor to be concerned with. If you want venality,—if you want ignorance, if you want drunkenness, and facility for being intimidated; or if, on the other hand, you want impulsive, unreflecting and violent people, where do you look for them in the constituencies? Do you go to the top or to the bottom?

  Gladstone said that Lowe wrote on rock with a steel pen, and certainly, those words of his had staying power. They would be quoted against the man who spoke them for years to come. If the bill were to pass, Lowe went on, it would be

  in mere deference to numbers at the expense of property and intelligence, in deference to a love of symmetry and equality—at least that is the name under which the democratic passion of envy generally disguises itself, and which will only be satisfied by symmetry and equality—I feel convinced that when you have given all the right hon. Gentleman [Gladstone] asks you will still leave plenty of inequalities, enough to stir up this passion anew. The grievance being theoretical and not practical will survive as long as practice does not conform to theory; and practice will never conform to theory until you have got to universal suffrage and equal election districts.

  A government with everyone having a voice in it, said the author of the 1856 limited liability law, was like a joint-stock company “in which everyone is a director.”

  Bagehot, writing in the Economist, judged that some electoral reform was overdue, and he applauded the proposed reduction in the qualification for the borough, or urban, franchise. The big landowners wielded too much power, and this was a way to redistribute the surplus. But like Lowe, who had charged the working classes with “venality,” Bagehot warned that the most certain effect of the bill would be to increase the already shocking level of electoral bribery. “All over England,” he predicted, “this Bill will enfranchise a very large number of persons who will consider their votes, and whose wives will consider their votes, as so much saleable property.” You didn’t need a parliamentary commission to know that; everyone knew it.35

  “IT IS REALLY CURIOUS how things drop into your hands when you want them,” Bright remarked drily as he answered Lowe on the floor of the House. What had so conveniently surfaced on Bright’s desk was an 1859 newspaper article that quoted Lowe, then Palmerston’s vice president of the Committee of Council on Education, on the necessity of a new, moderate reform bill. Well, Bright demanded, what was the bill now in front of the House except that very measure? Bright urged the naysayers to recall the French Revolution and the less tumultuous European disturbances of 1848. Accidents do happen, he said, particularly when unwise statesmen carelessly put in place the conditions to cause them.

  “I ask hon. Gentlemen,” Bright went on,

  whether it is not better to accept a measure so moderate, and if you like, as may be said by many in the country, so inadequate, but still to some extent, so good? Is it not better to accept this measure, and show your confidence in the people, than to take the advice of the right hon. Member for Calne—the most revolutionary advice that was ever given in this House—and shut your doors against five millions of people, and tell them that unless they can scramble over this £10 barrier none of them shall ever find a direct representation in this House?

  Mill, speaking a month later, on April 13, 1866, also took aim at Lowe, while generously conceding the good that his opponent had done for English schoolchildren. The former minister for education had contended that the reform bill would deliver no practical benefit, but he could not really know that any more than the statesmen of 1832 could have known what, in the train of their enlightened legislation, would come of the abolition of the Corn Laws, the abolition of the Navigation Laws, and the granting of “free trade to all foreigners without reciprocity.” Yet much good had blessedly come to pass.

  To persuade the mighty to relinquish some of their power, Mill went on, do not tell them that they have been abusing it—“which, if it were true, they could not be expected to be aware of”—but instead remind them “of what they are aware of—their own fallibility.” He continued, “we all of us know that we hold many erroneous opinions, but we do not know which of our opinions these are, for if we did they would not be our opinions. Therefore, reflecting men take precautions beforehand against their own errors.”

  The precaution that the members should take was to admit a new class of expert into their midst. As it was, merchants, lawyers, bankers, farmers, and landowners occupied the benches of the House, and they did not hold back from espousing the claims of their respective occupations and classes. Wanted were authorities on apprenticeships, wages, hours of work, child labor, occupational health and safety. “Is there, I wonder,” asked Mill, “a single Member of this House who thoroughly knows the working men’s view of trades unions, or of strikes, and could bring it before the House in a manner satisfactory to working men?” No one was asking that the working class be given the keys to the kingdom, Mill went on, but rather, “What is asked is a sufficient representation to ensure that their opinions are fairly placed before the House, and are met by real arguments, addressed to their own reason, by people who can enter into their way of looking at the subjects in which they are concerned.”

  The final and eighth night of debate, on Friday, April 27, was a contest of physical endurance almost as much as political strength and oratorical skill: by the time Disraeli got to his feet, to raucous cheers, it was after 10 p.m. The Tory leader denied that the Conservatives were afraid of the working classes. The real question was whether the government’s bill would improve the English Constitution—and it would do no such thing, but rather lead to the importation of American-style democracy, a good thing for America, a fatal thing for England. Disraeli taunted Gladstone for his opposition to the Reform Act of 1832—though it was an opposition, as Gladstone would presently remind him, that he had voiced as a student in an Oxford Union debate in 183136—and warned against a debasement of the character of the House should the working classes gain a disproportionate representation in it.

  “You may
talk of the rudeness of Monarchical Government,” said Disraeli, quoting Sir George Cornewall Lewis, James Wilson’s old friend, “but I defy you to point out anything in Monarchy so irrational as counting votes, instead of weighing them, as making a decision depend not on the knowledge, ability, experience, or fitness of the judges, but upon their number.”

  Gladstone had looked “careworn and pale” when he arrived at the House in an open carriage, in the opinion of a Times reporter. When he rose to follow Disraeli and close the debate, it was 1 a.m. The bill was in trouble, and the chancellor spoke to save it as well as the government that had brought it forward. He praised Lowe’s extraordinary eloquence—a pity that the member from Calne had squandered his gifts on the wrong cause. Now addressing the chief Adullamite, Gladstone continued,

  Will my right hon. Friend permit me to apply to him the story which is told of the mother of the regent Duke of Orleans, Elizabeth the Princess Palatine of Bavaria. She said of her son, what I will venture to apply to my right. hon. Friend. Her story was, that at his birth the fairies were invited to attend. Each came, and each brought the infant the gift of a talent. But in sending the invitations one fairy had unhappily been forgotten. She came unasked, and said for her revenge, “Yes, he shall have all the talents except one, that of knowing how and for what end to apply them.”37

  Lowe had asserted that the House knew nothing about the kinds of people it was asked to enfranchise. Gladstone retorted that a single word of description would suffice. “Lancashire” was that word, the city being synonymous with the suffering of the English textile operatives during America’s Civil War. “They knew,” said Gladstone of the pro-Union working men, “that the source of their distress lay in the war, yet they never uttered or entertained the wish that any effort should be made to put an end to it, as they held it to be a war of justice, and for freedom”—a handsome tribute from a man who had bought Confederate cotton bonds.

  “Sir,” Gladstone went on, as the hands of the clock approached 3 a.m., “the hour has arrived when this protracted debate must come to an end [Cheers].” Reform had been the stumbling block of the House in the thirty-four years since the Act of 1832. Four previous attempts to broaden the franchise and redefine constituencies had gone down in failure, nor was this one assured of success. And if it did fail, said Gladstone, quoting the prime minister, Lord Russell, so would the government. Gladstone conceded the possibility. Addressing Disraeli and his Tory opposition, he concluded,

  You may drive us from our seats. You may bury the Bill that we have introduced, but we will write upon its gravestone for an epitaph this line, with certain confidence in its fulfillment—“Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor.”38 You cannot fight against the future. Time is on our side. The great social forces which move onwards in their might and majesty, and which the tumult of our debates does not for a moment impede or disturb—those great social forces are against you; they are marshalled on our side; and the banner which we now carry in this fight, though perhaps at some point it may droop over our sinking heads, yet it soon again will float in the eye of heaven, and it will be borne by the firm hands of the united people of the three kingdoms, perhaps not to an easy, but to a certain and to a not distant victory.39

  When, two hours after he rose, Gladstone slumped back into his seat to immense cheering, he looked as if he were ready to faint. Presently, the Speaker announced the division: “Ayes to the right, noes to the left.” The results were as Gladstone had feared: the government prevailed by a mere five votes, fifty-five shy of the estimated potential Liberal majority in the House.40 It was a virtual defeat—and an absolute victory for Lowe, who, his face as ruddy as Gladstone’s was pallid, “took off his hat, waved it in wide and triumphant circles over the heads of the very men who had just gone into the lobby against him.”41

  This momentous political occasion called forth a commensurate journalistic effort, The Times sending relays of messengers from the House of Commons to Printing House Square at five-minute intervals. The final parliamentary dispatch was handed to the printers at 4:10 a.m. on Saturday, just in time to be loaded on to the waiting mail trains for national distribution.§§

  A week later, in the Economist, Bagehot appealed to “the moderate and thinking section of both parties” to come together to produce legislation to throw a suitable measure of political power to the mass of the English people. It would take good will and compromise to produce a suitable bill: “all must be ready to make sacrifices—to abandon secret hopes and cherished ideas—to submit to what is commonplace—to support what they can prove to be but second rate—to tolerate small evils that they may keep out great evils.”42 If, as Bismarck would say, “Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable—the art of the next best,” the prospective Liberal member for Bridgwater showed promising signs of a statesmanlike temper.

  * As to the statistics, a sampling: “Bank Returns and Money Market,” “Corn Returns,” “The Cotton Trade,” “American Grain and Flour Markets,” “London Markets,” “Imports and Exports.”

  † George Henry Lewes, the celebrated biographer of Goethe and a jack of all the London literary trades, was the journal’s founding editor. He and Mary Ann Evans, otherwise known as the best-selling novelist George Eliot, were husband and wife except for the legalities.

  ‡ At least, the foremost such observer among the many who wrote nonfiction; to George Eliot may go the observational laurels in the wider category of any who wrote.

  § Though as late as 1866, in his fortieth year, he could still write, “whatever is unnecessary in government is pernicious. Human life makes so much complexity necessary that an artificial addition is sure to do harm; you cannot tell where the needless bit of machinery will catch and clog the hundred needful wheels. . . .” Norman St John-Stevas, ed., The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot, vol. 5 (London: the Economist, 1974), 273.

  ¶ They were: First Lord of the Treasury, Lord Chancellor, Lord President, Lord Privy Seal, Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Colonial Secretary, War Secretary, Indian Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer, First Lord of the Admiralty, President of the Board of Trade, President of the Poor Law Board, First Commissioner of Works, Chief Secretary for Ireland. Robert Blake, Disraeli (London: Prion Books, 1998), 447.

  ** Perhaps the servants lacked the time and energy for banter. The diary of Hannah Culwick, a fourteen-year-old servant, describes the work she did in 1847 for the salary of £6 a year. There were eight children to look after, “all their boots to clean and the large nurseries on my hands and knees and a long passage and stairs, all their meals to get and our own [the other servants] . . . the water to carry up and down for their baths, and coal for the fire, put all the children to bed, and wash and dress of a morning by 8 o’clock.” Liza Picard, Victorian London: The Life of a City 1840–1870 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005), 121.

  †† “This is probably the ablest, the most amusing, and the most thoughtful, though in a certain sense the most scornful book, that has ever been written on The English Constitution,” the review led off. It was a knowing critic who remarked on Bagehot’s “alloy” of “the peculiar intellectual superciliousness of great talent.” If Richard Holt Hutton, Bagehot’s close friend and editor of the Spectator, did not write those words, he at least did not choose to take a blue pencil to them.

  ‡‡ It was testament to the stability of British prices under the gold standard that the purchasing power of £10 in 1866 was essentially unchanged from the £10 of 1832. Lowe, for one, argued that the influx of gold in the 1850s had inflated wages and rents by more than enough to infuse the electorate with satisfactory working-class representation, but the claim was controversial. It certainly did not satisfy the economist Mill. “Bracket creep,” as the inflationary escalator of taxable incomes is known to the readers of these pages, did not yet exist.

  §§ Saturday’s paper included a leading article extolling the wisdom and eloquence of Robert Lowe. Perhaps the parliamentarian–edi
torialist who had thus incurred The Times’s favor had entrusted authorship of this comment to someone who was not then seated in the House of Commons.

  CHAPTER 12

  A LOSER BY SEVEN BOUGHT VOTES

  Bridgwater was not the first constituency to recruit Walter Bagehot to stand for Parliament: Liberals in the northern manufacturing city of Manchester had asked about his availability on the eve of the general election of 1865. The incumbent Liberal MP, James Aspinall Turner, sixty-eight years old, cotton manufacturer and amateur entomologist, had decided not to seek reelection, and when no strong local successor presented himself, party leaders cast around for a suitable import. Manchester was famously hospitable to the doctrine of free trade. Would the editor of the Economist be willing to stand?

  Bagehot was certainly eager, and others were eager on his behalf. Gladstone wrote him a fulsome letter of introduction, and William Rathbone Greg, Economist contributor, and husband of the daughter of a Manchester physician, seconded Gladstone. On July 3, Bagehot presented himself at Manchester Town Hall. Four hundred people—Liberals, Conservatives, and Radicals, working men, trade unionists, textile makers—were on hand to appraise the candidates.1