Bagehot

by James Grant

  The Church of England and the landed interest formed the beating heart of what Disraeli called the “territorial constitution,” and it was the happy alliance of church and state that nurtured the historically rare coexistence of liberty and order. “[I]n the age in which we live,” said Disraeli, “the duties of Government each year become more social than political. I am at a loss to know how these duties can be fulfilled if the State be not in intimate relation with an order of men set apart, who, by their piety, their learning and their social devotion, not only guide and control, but soften and assuage the asperities of conflicting creeds. [Cheers].”

  Disraeli was no deeper a theologian than he was a constitutional theorist, and when he talked about God—playing his “religious trombone,” as the Tory chronicler Arthur Baumann called it—even some of his admirers covered their ears. However, Disraeli’s social and literary gifts were of a different order. His speech and bearing had a magical effect on many who heard him in parliamentary action, and Baumann was among the affectionate observers who sat in the House of Lords when Disraeli rose to speak on the Treaty of Berlin, by which the Great Powers put their stamp on the recently concluded Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78. “He divided his speech into two parts,” Baumann recalled,

  the first dealing with Europe, the second treating of the Eastern possessions of the Sultan. After dismissing the absurd pretentions of Greece with a counsel of patience, he stopped and put his hand into the inner breast-pocket of his frock coat. He pulled out a tiny silver flask, deliberately unscrewed the top, took a pull at its contents, as deliberately replaced it, and turning to a grave and silent House said, “And now, my lords, I will ask you to accompany me into Asia.” A well-bred ripple ran along the scarlet benches.11

  On May 20, 1867, John Stuart Mill made what he came to regard as “the only really important public service I performed in the capacity of a member of Parliament”: he proposed substituting “person” for “man” in Disraeli’s suffrage bill, the nascent 1867 Reform Act. Hoots of male derision met the suggestion that women, of all creatures, should be given the vote. “It is thought, perhaps,” said Mill, “that those who are principally charged with the moral education of the future generations of men, cannot be fit to form an opinion about the moral and educational interests of a people; and that those whose chief daily business is the judicious laying-out of money, so as to produce the greatest results with the smallest means, cannot possibly give any lessons to the right. hon. Gentlemen on the other side of the house, or on this, who contrive to produce such singularly small results with such vast means.”

  Disraeli, who, as chancellor, had everything to do with the production of those singularly small results, chose not to enter the debate, nor did he vote on the motion, which failed 196–73. According to Robert Blake, “Disraeli was by no means unfriendly to the idea, anyway in principle. Indeed, few people would have gained more than he by votes for women. But he did not regard the proposal as practical politics.”12

  It was at about this time that Emily Davies, the suffragist and educational reformer, was recruiting distinguished men and women to support her work to found a women’s college of Oxbridge caliber. Tennyson, Browning, Ruskin, several members of Parliament, and the economist William Newmarch were among the 175 who consented to sign the memorial or to serve on an organizing committee. The editor of the Economist, too, was asked to participate. Bagehot replied as follows:

  I assure you I am not an enemy of women, I am very favorable to their employment as laborers or in other menial capacity. I have, however, doubts as to the likelihood of their succeeding in business as capitalists. I am sure the nerves of most women would break down under the anxiety, and that most of them are utterly destitute of the disciplined reticence, necessary to every sort of cooperation. Two thousand years hence you may have changed it all, but the present women will only flirt with men, and quarrel with each other.13

  Possibly, Bagehot was being facetious (though, if so, where was the fun?), or blowing off steam in response to some unknown provocation, though it can’t be denied that he had a misogynistic side. A tone of overbearing masculine superiority hung heavily over even an 1874 article throwing the Economist’s weight behind the decision to allow women to enroll in degree-granting course work at the University of London.**14

  What was Bagehot’s true position on the Woman Question? The connective tissue between his private communication to Emily Davies—who would go on to found Girton College, later absorbed into Cambridge University—and his 1874 article was a scorn for those he considered lesser beings. Neither Disraeli nor Mill was given to sneering at the weak or the ignorant. Bagehot sneered habitually.

  IN THE POLITICAL NEGOTIATIONS for reform, Disraeli consented to the granting of a new parliamentary constituency for the University of London. As Oxford and Cambridge had their seat, so, now, would Bagehot’s alma mater.

  And as UCL gained, so did Robert Lowe lose; Calne, the pocket borough he represented in Parliament—the trousers of that pocket belonging to Lord Landsdowne—was being reformed out of existence. Where else might the nation’s foremost opponent of the enfranchisement of the working classes turn for electoral support? Not to those first-time working-class voters, nor still to the Liberal Party leadership, who would not soon forget Lowe’s signal contribution to the defeat of the Russell–Gladstone ministry in 1866 and the reciprocal rise of the Derby–Disraeli government in 1867. There was one flicker of hope, however. Lowe’s work in the cause of public health had won him the gratitude of the medical profession, including the many physician–alumni of UCL. And though Lowe was an Oxford man, he had served UCL as a member of its senate and in the House of Commons, which had blocked a plan that would have split the honor of a new parliamentary seat between UCL and Durham. Thanks to Lowe, UCL alone gained its parliamentary voice.

  Richard Holt Hutton, still a close friend of Bagehot’s, was not alone in thinking that UCL should send one of its own to Parliament, rather than go crawling to Oxford or Cambridge for political talent. Bagehot was of the same view. Hutton and he likewise agreed that the editor of the Economist should be that favorite son.

  Hutton, taking charge of his friend’s campaign, presented Bagehot to the electors first as a distinguished man of letters, second as the author of The English Constitution, third as a banker and economist, and only fourth as the editor of the Economist. As to character and convictions, Hutton noted Bagehot’s “cordial adhesion to those principles of religious liberty of which our University may fairly be considered the embodiment, and his personal attachment to the Liberal cause.”15

  Bagehot attracted strong early support: the banker and politician George Goschen, the economist Stanley Jevons, and the author and jurist Fitzjames Stephen signed on for him. The very conservative Lord Stanley said that, naturally, he would prefer a good Tory, but Bagehot would otherwise nicely do.

  John Lubbock, a thirty-four-year-old London private banker, naturalist, mathematician, and intellectual ally of his Kent neighbor, Charles Darwin, also signaled his support—until deciding to stand himself.†† Edwin Chadwick, sixty-eight years old, revered fighter for public health, was another contender for the UCL seat. All, like Lowe, were Liberals.

  Bagehot, as he addressed the UCL electors late in June 1867 in the form of a letter to Hutton, said he would waste no breath decrying the Tories’ “leap in the dark,” as Derby famously styled their great reform. “The sudden extension of the franchise is one of those ‘facts of the first magnitude’ which are never long resisted.” In the wake of the first reform, in 1832, the call went forth to mobilize the new electors; “Register! Register! Register!” the victorious progressives cried. Now, said Bagehot, the cry must be, “Educate! Educate! Educate!” To this end, the government would have to “intervene far more widely than is as yet thought ere the problem of wide education in a mixed society is solved.”

  Some would oppose this breach of the tenets of limited government, Bagehot went on, perhaps recal
ling his own libertarian convictions. They should not:

  The English State is but another name for the English people, and to be afraid of it, is to be alarmed at ourselves. From countless causes the age of great cities requires a strong government. The due extension of the functions of the State is superintending the health and in lessening the vice and misery of our large towns must receive speedy attention from a Parliament in which most of the inhabitants of those towns are for the first time directly represented.16

  The would-be member for UCL would, if elected, work to sweep away the remaining pocket boroughs, stewpots of electoral corruption. The status of the established Irish Protestant Church, the English flower long ago transplanted into Catholic soil but never taking root, was another hotly contested issue of the day; Bagehot pledged to disestablish it.

  Bagehot closed his message with an appeal to restore Gladstone to power, a harmless enough rousing of the Liberal faithful. Anything but anodyne was what followed: “Mr. Disraeli . . . believes that by influence and corruption the mass of the new voters may be made to aid him. But I do not believe that a Government based on influence and corruption is possible in England.”17 To hint at Disraeli’s “deceit,” as Bagehot had done anonymously in an Economist article was one thing. To level a charge of personal corruption against him in a signed election document was something very different. Bagehot’s pen, Baumann observed, “had run away with him,” and now UCL’s Tory rump was mobilized against Bagehot even as the Liberal vote was split four ways.

  Or it would have been so split, had not contestants serially withdrawn from the race. Bagehot quit in July 1868, leaving Lowe as the only serious contender remaining on the ballot. The member for the doomed constituency of Calne had, by then, patched things up with Gladstone, who was said to be considering Lowe for a ministerial post in the next administration. Of Lowe, Bagehot wrote graciously (and truly) in his resignation message, “He has one merit, which, with me at least, weighs much. In an age when the fear to offend and the wish to be thought safe tend to cloak the thoughts of public men in a uniform coating of common-place phrases, Mr. Lowe always expresses marked thoughts in characteristic words; at every conjuncture he is at least himself, and in this age that is a rare merit.”

  Lowe won the seat in an uncontested election in November 1868. Nationally, the Liberals stormed back into power with Gladstone in the vanguard. Lowe, possessor of every talent but the one governing the wise use of all other talents, became Gladstone’s chancellor of the exchequer.

  As for Bagehot, he resolved never again to seek parliamentary office, and he was as good as his word, though his friends implored him to try. The depth of his disappointment at failing to reach the House of Commons was only revealed years later.

  Bagehot was a member of the Metaphysical Society, a kind of reconstitution of the Cambridge Apostles for brainy gentlemen at the height of their post-collegiate careers. In 1870, Bagehot read a paper to the members concerning his experience at Bridgwater. Curiously, he said, he was still overcome with the strongest sensation that he should be the member for Bridgwater, almost four years after he fell seven votes short. It made no difference that he couldn’t possibly hold the position now; as punishment for its corruption, the borough had recently been disenfranchised. If he let his mind wander back to the day he was formally nominated, “with all the people’s hands outstretched, and all their excited faces,” the “old feeling almost comes back upon me, and for a moment I believe that I shall be member for Bridgwater.”18

  * His 1839 marriage to Mary Anne Lewis, a delightful flibbertigibbet with a widow’s income of £5,000 a year (half the amount that Bagehot defined as the threshold of being rich) was a blessing in many respects. Financially, it helped only a little. Jonathan Parry, “Disraeli, Benjamin, earl of Beaconsfield (1804-1881),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  † It was published in 1845, midway through the Hungry Forties, the same year as Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844.

  ‡ In 1853, his wax likeness took its place in Madame Tussaud’s famous museum, a full seventeen years before the representation of his archrival, Gladstone.

  § An inexplicable misjudgment, the very opposite of the truth. “Bagehot was fond of paradoxes, and this is one of his most foolish,” observed Arthur Anthony Baumann, a near contemporary of Bagehot and Disraeli, in his book of reminiscences, The Last Victorians. “The education of our public schools and universities has indisputable merits, but it has the fault of turning out its pupils in a conventional mold. Disraeli had not learned to speak at ‘Pop’ [the Eton debating society] or the Union [the Oxford &/or Cambridge counterpart]; he taught himself on the hustings and rehearsed in his father’s library. It was his detachment from the vulgar prejudices of the upper and middle classes, his isolated and purely literary upbringing, that gave freshness and force to his speculations on politics.” Arthur Anthony Baumann, The Last Victorians (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1927), 46.

  ¶ The Representation of the People Act of 1867 virtually doubled the number of eligible electors to two million, out of seven million adult males in England and Wales. In urban and suburban constituencies, i.e., the boroughs, it extended the franchise to all householders as well as to any lodger paying the annual rent of £10 or more, the threshold in place since 1832. In the counties, it gave the vote to agricultural landowners. Wikipedia contributors, “Reform Act 1867,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index/php?title=Reform_Act_1867&oldid=82136628 (accessed February 8, 2018).

  ** “We believe that no [educated] women are so little likely to be forward and presumptuous as those who have received an education above their fellows. Instead of encouraging them to pass into conflicts for which they are not fitted, it will, we believe, tend to a very remarkable degree to put a drag on that excitable and dangerous feminine enthusiasm which is so marked a feature of our time, not because the leaders are educated, but because they are uneducated.” Norman St John-Stevas, ed., The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot, vol. 7 (London: the Economist, 1974), 414.

  †† Lubbock, who knew Bagehot as a fellow banker, wanted no intra-Liberal row. He cautioned a supporter, “I have a great personal regard for him, and think moreover that an attack on his peculiar manner would be regarded by many as going a step too far and defeat its own object.” At the time, “peculiar” signified “singular,” not necessarily strange, and Bagehot’s writing certainly made him singular. His conduct at the Manchester Town Hall, in which he challenged the working men in the audience to debate, or in Bridgwater, when he was a silent partner in vote-buying, reveal another dimension of peculiarity with Bagehot: a striking lack of self-awareness. The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot, 13:624.

  CHAPTER 14

  “IN THE FIRST RANK”

  There was nothing of the mass market about Walter Bagehot. The Fortnightly Review, which serially published The English Constitution and Physics and Politics, claimed only 2,500 subscribers at its peak circulation in 1872. A year later, the Economist achieved a grand total of 3,690 paid subscribers—and that, too, was a high-water mark. It was an elite and intimate circle in which Bagehot made his reputation.

  Writing in the Economist, he addressed the bankers and merchants in James Wilson’s no-frills, business-style prose, but he was under no such stylistic stricture with the readers of the Fortnightly. If, for them, he quoted a passage in French or Greek, that passage would likely go untranslated—the learned subscribers needed no crutch. And when he mentioned domestic servants, as he occasionally did in order to mark their intellectual or moral inferiority, he used the inclusive phrase “our servants.”

  Bagehot was a part of what the radical John Bright derisively termed “Clubland”: he belonged to the Windham*1 and to the Whiggish and aristocratic Brooks’s, both on St James’s Street. He would one day be received into the Athenaeum, the inner sanctum of the English intelligentsia.

  No aristocrat, at least not by bir
th, Bagehot nevertheless moved comfortably among the well-born, including his sponsors for Brooks’s: Charles Villiers, MP, and George Leveson-Gower, the second Earl Granville. Villiers was a hero of the Anti-Corn Law League, a campaigner for poor-law reform, and a fixture of London society—“ill-dressed but witty, informed, civilized, at times mischievous.”2 Granville, a great Whig magnate, the son of a British ambassador in Paris (where the young Granville had learned to speak French with “the accent of the ancien regime”), led the Liberal Party in the House of Lords. In 1869, the year of Bagehot’s admission to Brooks’s, Granville was Gladstone’s colonial secretary. Fellow members of the Brooks’s class of 1869 included the brewer Michael Bass, a Royal Navy captain, three MPs, and an earl.

  Bagehot was a banker before he was an editor, but he was neither a long-established London private banker nor a moneybags London joint-stock banker. Stuckey’s was, for a country bank, big and profitable, but it was still a country bank. Its London representative enjoyed no particular stature in Lombard Street.

  Still less did the descriptor “journalist” lend distinction. Then, as now, a newsman was a supplicant; such access to power as he enjoyed was that which someone chose to grant him. The gift was rarely an expression of pure friendship, and the wise journalist, if he hoped to receive additional favors, took care to give something in return. Information in exchange for publicity—publicity either given or withheld, as one’s source preferred—was and remains the basic journalistic transaction. Bagehot transacted deftly, though he was no collector of people. “It is inconceivable to me,” he remarked, “to like to see many people and even to speak to them. Every new person you know is an intellectual burden because you may see them again, and must be able to recognize and willing to converse with them.”3 It was not the attitude that typically advances a journalistic career.