The Tories in England

I

WHEN Hengest, the Great Horse, Chief of the Angles, found the quarrels of his old men too much for him, he laid down his club in the centre of the clearing and commanded them to fight it out among themselves — adding, with a humor characteristic of his tribe, that the weapon might come in handy to finish off the weaker side. Thus the mace became the symbol of our Parliament and the King learned to trust in the dominant faction, and throughout the greater part of our history, when one party was defeated, the King, by the advice of the other, took off its head. This salutary custom cut a sharp line across the principle of continuity, so much so that in the Middle Ages it is difficult to trace the lines of our politics. Only when our politicians, alarmed by their high death rate, entered into a gentlemen’s agreement not to impeach one another, and to pension where they used to decapitate, do we come to distinct and continuous traces of organized parties embracing, not merely one, but succeeding generations.

When we inquire into the principles which governed these parties, we find reason to doubt the lofty claims made by their respective historians, who have an easy habit of tracing everything to two big noises, one the Constitution and the other the Church. Such lofty explanations of the politics of the past will hardly convince the student of the politics of the present. For human nature under all its variety is a constant factor: the political animal makes a great show of fighting over an ideal — his true motive is generally something more material. Man may pretend to himself that even his hatreds are divine and that his animosities are founded in altruism; but if we look to the roots of his nature we find interest perpetually asserting itself under these plausible disguises. The flower of sentiment grows on the root of necessity; man organizes to protect or advance himself in the struggle for existence.

Here, I suggest, lies the origin of the party system.

Even in those misty and violent Middle Ages we seem to trace parties clustering round certain great interests of the nation. England was at one time a wool-exporting country, — Friedrich List describes mediæval England as the wool farm of the German Hansa,— and there grew up a popular party that aimed at keeping that wool for English looms, opposed by a foreign party that had an interest in the weaving industry of Flanders and the carrying trade of the Hanseatic cities. We see the patriot, Simon de Montfort, like George Washington, clothing his followers in homespun to symbolize the cause of weaving native cloth out of native wool, and our oldest political ballad tells the secret of his overthrow by foreign intervention: —

In the Wars of the Roses these native weaving, mercantile, and shipping interests supported the House of York against the House of Lancaster, which was committed to the export of wool, and its foreign bankers, the Hansa. Warwick the Kingmaker, like Simon de Montfort, led the national against the alien cause. To that end he set Edward IV upon the throne; but that monarch cynically betrayed the interests by which he had risen. The Wars of the Roses were indeed a popular revolt against an alien domination; we find the same cause arising again to a brief triumph in the reign of Edward VI, suppressed in blood by Mary and Fhilip of Spain, and returning to complete and glorious victory with Queen Elizabeth.

Thus even before the rise of party government we see dimly certain great lines of conflict in English history and the existence of a party devoted to such interests as English weaving and shipping, or — shall we say ? — to the national economic cause. Here, if I am right, was the germ of the Whig Party, the party of the merchant adventurers and manufacturers, the party of high protection, the party that made war either to open markets or to defeat commercial and industrial rivals. This party supported the Reformation because the Pope, the Emperor, and the King of Spain between them had closed the ports of the Old and the New World to English trade; it supported Cromwell because Charles I drew heavily on its capital and depended on our commercial rivals, the Dutch; it brought in William III because James II was thought subservient to our industrial rivals, the French. It was an active, aggressive party that dragged its country into many commercial and colonial wars on sea and land — its aim being to make England a great economic power. It had its chief strength in London and in the seaports and industrial towns. Such in essence were the Whigs.

Upon the other side was a party founded on the great quiet landward interest of agriculture, a party that would have been content to sell its wool to the foreign buyer if he offered a better price, a party that had no quarrel with French silks and clarets, a party that disliked foreign wars, for which it had to pay without receiving any direct benefit, a party rooted in English soil and devoted to old traditions, to the Crown and to the settled hierarchy of its social organization. It was this party that was faithful to the Stuarts, fought Cromwell, and would have opposed Dutch William but for the fatal obstinacy of James; it was this party that reasserted itself under Bolingbroke, fell because of that leader’s subservience to France, and remained long in the shades of opposition through its fidelity to the cause of the Stuarts and its dislike of the House of Hanover.

The Tories were disabled, not only by their adherence to a fallen cause, but by the nature of things. Whereas the Whigs, depending on industry and commerce, were concentrated mainly in the great towns and the eastern counties, the Tories, depending on agriculture, were widespread and found it more difficult to combine. Adam Smith, a pensioner of the Duke of Buccleuch and a stout adherent of the landed interest, puts the case of the Tories as follows in his Wealth of Nations:

The country gentlemen and farmers dispersed in different parts of the country cannot so easily combine as merchants and manufacturers, who, being collected into towns, and accustomed to that corporation spirit which prevails in them, naturally endeavor to obtain against all their countrymen the same exclusive privilege which they generally possess against the inhabitants of their respective towns.

I do not assert that the Tories were all landowners or the Whigs all merchants. But there was, roughly speaking, this economic division between the two parties; and, that being so, the Whigs were the active element in the State, the Tories the passive. And although these circumstances made the Tories comparatively weak in organization, they were strong in popularity. The Whigs exploited the common people as free labor; the Tories protected them as feudal dependents. ‘Long,’ says Lecky, in his Democracy and Liberty, ‘after the sceptre of feudal power had passed from the landed gentry to the middle classes, the old belief or prejudice or superstition, that the administration of government ought to be chiefly entrusted to gentlemen, prevailed, and in spite of all democratic agitations it is certainly very far from extinct.’

And the same judicious historian writes further: —

It was also a fundamental principle of the old system that the chief political power should be with the owners of the land. The doctrine that the men to whom the land belonged were the men who had to govern it was held, not only by a great body of English Tories, but also by Benjamin Franklin and by a large section of the American Colonists. It was urged that the freeholders had a fixed, permanent, inalienable interest in the country, widely different from the migratory and often transitory interests of trade and commerce, that their fortunes were much more indissolubly blended with the fortunes of the State; that they represented in the highest degree that healthy continuity of habit and policy which is most essential to the welfare of nations.

I have said that the Whigs generally made the wars which the Tories paid for, the backbone of our fiscal system in those times being a tax on land. The Whigs involved us in wars with France and Spain; the Tories, in their attempts to meet the bill, sought to place some of the liability on the Thirteen Colonies.

I may be forgiven if I refuse to enter the long-vexed controversy over the stamp duty and the reform of the American customs. But this at least I may say, that Chatham, the greatest of the Whigs, who used such fiery language about these trifling impositions, himself supported a far more tyrannical attitude toward the Colonies when he declared that he would not allow so much as a horseshoe nail to be made in America. And I am glad to see that the modern American historian begins to do justice to the Tory case, and to admit that the smugglers of Boston, like your modern bootleggers, were not quite such idealists as from their pretensions we are led to suppose.

The Whig quarrel with France really ended with the Eden Treaty, which marked the fall of the French industrial system. The Whigs were indifferent or even friendly to the great Revolution caused by that fall; but the Tories rallied to the defense of the social order and found their inspired leader in the younger Pitt. The Continental system of Napoleon forced the mercantile interest of England to renew its old quarrel with France, and Great Britain united under its Tory leadership. All Englishmen came to see that their best hope of safety lay in unity; and the extension of this sound principle brought Ireland into the Union. Thus England found union, strength, and victory under a Tory administration.

But again there was the bill to be met; and to Manchester the problem seemed simple. All our enemies, commercial and industrial, had been not merely defeated but annihilated. The only problem that remained was overhead costs, in which the chief element was the price of corn. Sir Robert Peel, although he happened to be a Tory, was also a cotton magnate and was the instrument of that great surrender from which we date a new regrouping of British politics.

II

The growth of a great poor industrial population encouraged the rise of the Liberal Party, which voiced the demand of the towns to rule the country and of the ‘have nots’ to take from the ’haves.’ The Tories, representing a dwindling cause, became the party of defense, — of ‘Conservatism,’as the nineteenth century called it, — and, their case being thought desperate, they employed an extremely astute advocate.

I cannot conscientiously rank myself among the more fervent admirers of Benjamin Disraeli. It seems to me that in the course of his amazing career he contrived to surrender, with skill and adroitness, one position after another until the very foundations of the Tory Party were completely undermined. There is evidence that the more perspicacious of his colleagues felt more or less acutely this uneasy sense of mistrust. The fourth Earl of Carnarvon, who served both with and under Disraeli, and the great Lord Salisbury, an even more distinguished colleague, exchanged views which have recently been published. Thus, for example (in the year 1877): —

On the night of Salisbury’s return to London he dined alone with me, and he then detailed to me the whole history of his negotiations at Constantinople. . . . He appeared, in talking over with me all that had passed, to have but one feeling — viz., a rooted belief in Disraeli’s untrustworthiness, and a dread of the policy which he thought D. intended to pursue.

This is no isolated passage — it is characteristic of the attitude of those great Tory magnates toward this brilliant outsider whom they mistrusted even while they employed. In such circumstances it is not surprising that the Tories never attempted to reëstablish the economic foundations of their cause, but were content to fall back from position to position as expediency seemed to dictate. It was reserved for a Liberal recruit to their ranks to make this great attempt. Joseph Chamberlain’s scheme of Tariff Reform might have succeeded in reëstablishing the Tory Party on a national basis, but counsels of timidity prevailed. The Conservatives recoiled in confusion before arguments drawn from their old armory of the Wealth of Nations, and Chamberlain’s political design — to unite the country interest and the manufacturers, as Bismarck had united them in Germany, by means of a fiscal tariff— was defeated. The Tories fell into disunion; the Liberals returned to power under the banner of Free Trade and remained in office until the Teutonic trumpet at the gate awakened us out of our dreams.

The Liberals were ill equipped to conduct a war which they had helped by their blindness and timidity to precipitate. A succession of failures and blunders brought them to such disrepute that the Tories, if they had been resolutely led, might have claimed and obtained control of the government. The nation expected nothing less; but the Unionist leaders had been rendered meek by long adversity and had a possibly justifiable diffidence in their own abilities. They consented to a subordinate place in a coalition and, when Mr. Asquith fell, continued to work with unswerving servility under Mr. Lloyd George.

How far they were led away from their principles and traditions by that fatal allegiance would be a doleful computation to make. Mr. Lloyd George, by genius and upbringing, belonged to the school of Radicalism in politics. He was born with and cherished a hatred of everything that the Tories love — the social order, the landed system, and that greater nationalism which includes the whole United Kingdom as one organism for administration and defense. Especially was he opposed to the old faith of Englishmen in a caste of gentlemen traditionally entrusted with the conduct of the government, which, as we have seen from Lecky, has sturdily survived all the assaults of Democracy. Mr. Lloyd George had an itch to disturb, to challenge, to shake up, to pull down, which was unassuaged even by the dreadful crisis of war. Being persuasive, able, and masterful, he led the Conservative side of the Coalition into a series of adventures alien to its nature. The franchise was extended so that property was utterly submerged; the Union with Ireland was surrendered to violence; new Departments of State were created which swelled extravagance and promoted Socialism; and an attempt was made to nationalize the coal mines. Successive surrenders were negotiated with the tradeunions; a fatal system of doles was established, and the cost of administration increased beyond all limits of prudence and economy. When at last the rank-and-file revolt of the Carlton Club put an end to the Coalition, Mr. Lloyd George confessed that he had abused the blind trust of his Tory colleagues. ‘They did not like it, and they got to like it less,’he said in a speech at Leeds, October 21, 1922. ‘I am not complaining. They stood it very long.’

The Tories were again free, at least in appearance. They easily commanded a majority in the country, and could shape their policy according to their own principles and traditions. The war and the Coalition had been fatal to their Liberal opponents, and the Socialists, active and aggressive as they were, could not hope to command a majority in the House of Commons. They were, then, in seeming, once more masters of their own destiny; but in reality they were still unhappily entangled in the net of the Coalition. Mr. Baldwin himself had been a member of that Government; Mr. Austen Chamberlain and Lord Birkenhead, two of its principal ministers, had been complacent agents in the Irish surrender. They had committed themselves to a whole line of policy that stultified their principles and fettered their liberties. Mr. Baldwin made a desperate attempt to return to Joseph Chamberlain’s programme of fiscal protection and Imperial Preference. His appeal to the country was, if not ill judged, at least ill prepared. It failed. The Liberals, unable to take office themselves, put in the Socialists, who fell ignominiously to a flirtation with the Bolsheviki, and the Conservatives again came into office.

They came into office, but not exactly into power. They had inhibited themselves by certain pledges against their own policy, and in particular they had promised that they would refrain from any general measure of fiscal protection. Thus they had prevented themselves from carrying out the only great measure which could give relief to the industries and agriculture of the country. What they had gained at the polls by their sacrifice of principle it would be difficult to estimate. My own view is that they gained very little, for the Free Traders, faced by the dilemma of voting for the Socialists or for the Tories, would probably have chosen the latter and swallowed protection in order to avoid confiscation. Be that as it may, it is certain that what they gained in numbers they lost in liberty of action and in the enthusiasm of their workers. No political party can afford, for whatever gain, to cut off its main line of advance. It is fair to add that they maintained the right to apply the Safeguarding of Industries Act, a measure designed by the Coalition to secure protection in small doses.

There is no doubt that the nation expected the Conservative Government to take measures both against the abuses of trade-unionism and against the spread of Bolshevism. Here was a crusade which would have aroused fierce opposition, but would have inspired to enthusiasm all that is true, sound, and manly in the British people. But a spirit of diffidence, a wavering timidity, an inordinate love of compromise, still overshadow the counsels of the Tory Party. In the recent clash over the coal mines, when the Government found itself faced by a Council of Action of the great tradeunions, a surrender was made which timidity may explain but can hardly justify. As I write, the subversive forces are still gathered ominously. Their next assault may either be met or be bought off for a little. There is in these dark forces, overtly and covertly arrayed against the British Government, a power that in the long run will have to be faced and fought. Whether these successive surrenders are the best preliminary for conflict I must leave to the judgment of the event.

III

I have tried to trace in brief summary the course of the Tory Party and to suggest also some of its leading characteristics. If I have failed to make clear what it stands for I may plead, with Pirandello, that human nature is an evasive and elusive compound, of which the leading constant is inconstancy. The Whigs, at one time the exponents of Imperialism and high protection, declined into Liberalism, degenerated into Radicalism, and are now, in their contemptible remains, being kicked aside from the path of Socialism . The Tories began as a country party; they developed into a national party; and the disappearance of the Whigs offered them a reversion of Whig principles which they have been slow to accept and quick to surrender.

It is easier to say what the Tories might be than what they are. Their traditions are rooted deep in British soil; they have by no means got rid of that aristocratic principle in which Englishmen continue to believe; they accept Democracy with a difference and a reservation. The British Empire was made by a ruling race, if not by a ruling caste. To press the principle of Democracy too far would confront us with the prospect of the British nation itself in a minority in an empire chiefly populated by races of other colors, and that is a fate to which no self-respecting Englishman could ever bring himself to submit.

The Tories are left, by the decease of the Whigs and the Liberals, the residuary legatees of many causes not originally their own. They are, for example, the only organized party available for the defense of private enterprise, of industry, and of commerce — in short, of all that the Socialists attack as ‘Capitalism.’ The defense of property might seem to bind a party to a minority; and yet all decent people — in fact the majority, if the case were put to them — would see that property is their cause also, since it is their livelihood, and that all who draw wages and find employment are the partners and beneficiaries of Capitalism. The principle of private property, in fact, is nothing less than the principle of civilization, in defense of which we should be able to rally all the well affected, whether rich or poor. How strongly these sentiments are held by the British people is evident from the results of the last General Elections, when, as a result of an appeal to these instincts of possession and good order, the Conservatives were returned by a great majority over both Socialists and Liberals.

Then, the Tories also represent the national spirit. Although they have bowed in the House of the League of Nations, they remain nationalists rather than internationalists: they are not, among other things, prepared to sacrifice either British sovereignty or the British Navy and the British Army on the altar of Geneva. They stand, too, for certain British traditions of social order and good government; they are deeply rooted in the history and sentiments of the country, and for that reason have a far stronger hold than they suspect on the heart of the nation. Their strength lies in their immobility rather than in their ability. They take unkindly to ideas and are generally stolidly unconscious of the causes for which they are supposed to stand and of the enemies who are working against them. If I did not know their character i should despair of their intelligence; but as I know them to be compounded of a very strong and durable NormanAnglo-Saxon clay I do not by any means despair of the country of which, under an inscrutable Providence, they remain the sole political defense.

If we look a little more closely at its present position we find that the Conservative Party has an imposing appearance of strength. It was returned but a short time ago at the head of the polls, with a great majority over any combination of Socialists and Liberals. The latter are both a waning and a divided force; their two leaders, Lord Oxford and Asquith and Mr. Lloyd George, not merely dislike each other on personal grounds, but hold conflicting views on fundamental questions. Mr. Lloyd George has indeed attempted to get his party to espouse the nationalization of the land, obviously a first step to coalition with the Socialists, and has so far succeeded ill in that attempt. The Socialists themselves are strong in the poor and industrial population, but are still far below any prospect of an independent majority and are harassed by the flank attacks of the Communists.

In appearance, then, and in numbers the Conservatives have things all their own way. If they are threatened it is less by the parties opposed to them than by the difficulties with which they are faced. Some of these difficulties, it must be confessed, are of their own making. They did not dare to put their trust either in Conservative men or in Conservative principles, and made Mr. Winston Churchill Chancellor of the Exchequer with an expensive programme of ‘social reform,’ including a state system of pensions for widows. Such schemes cannot outbid the proposals of the Socialists, and increase the complications of an already overstrained finance. The Socialists have used their power in local government and in the trade-unions to add enormously to that strain. The coal subsidy alone, conceded by the Government to avoid a great strike, has already cost the Exchequer a sum well over twenty millions sterling, to which it may be necessary to add ten times that sum, the cost of the coal lockout and the general strike itself. If the Conservatives had followed in their own traditions and saved money instead of increasing expenditure, they would, I believe, have gained rather than lost in the matter of popularity. That fickle element is apt to be lost when it is sought, and gained when it is despised.

However that may be, this bout of extravagance has been pulled up sharply by financial necessities, and the Government is now faced by the dilemma of reducing expenditure or increasing taxation. It is faced also by the lowering storm of industrial menace which it should have had the courage to face earlier in the fray. And lastly it has to confront an industrial depression which shows no sign of improving. Our trade balance at the end of 1925 disclosed a deficit of close on four hundred millions sterling of exports under imports. These are fundamentals so serious that they cannot but affect the life of any administration.

The Tories, then, are faced by adversities, partly of their own making, partly at the heavy hand of Destiny. Their great majority is not sufficient help, although it gives them the assurance that the majority of their countrymen, of all classes, are behind them. They will have to summon what lies in them of virtue and courage to meet the struggle that lies before them. In that struggle, as I have pointed out, far more is at stake than an alternative of Government: dark forces gathering behind the Opposition challenge not merely the administration but all order and every accepted idea. We are living in times when the fundamentals are challenged, and all men of good will should unite to defend them. Are you, even in America, so secure that the struggle leaves you unconcerned?