Some of the People

The Passing of the Whigs, 1832-1886. By Donald Southgate. (Macmillan, 50s.)

'A WISE Tory and a wise Whig, I believe, will agree,' wrote Dr. Johnson. 'Their principles are the same, though their modes of thinking are different.' Dr. Southgate's book covers a period long after the death of the great doctor, and, Much depends on what is meant by 'wise.' Nevertheless it is by no means easy to define the difference of principle, as opposed to tactics, Which divided Whigs from Tories between the first Reform Bill and the Home Rule crisis of 1886. Both were aristocratic and believed in the ascendancy of an aristocratic landed interest and the preservation of existing institutions. Democracy was to both anathema, a term com- parable to Bolshevism in Britain thirty years ago, or Communism in modern America. Their modes of thought, however, were indeed different, and so was their view of political ex- PediencY. And there was some indefinable but Prof

; -ound difference of colour, tone and atti- tude

impossible to recapture now. No one ever conceived of a Cabinet which could comprise both Lord John Russell and Sir Robert Peel, but there were many occasions when it seemed Possible that Gladstone and Disraeli might serve in the same government. p BY the 1820s it is hard to see in the Whig n.arty much more than a traditional „aristocratic 6r°uP which happened to be out and wanted to be in.

Their original raison d'être, opposition to monarchical absolutism and preservation of

revolution settlement, together with the ,...anoverian succession, had long since vanished. N1,01. had their later policies much more relevance. 510e, economy and reform' was the threefold

„

" of Charles James Fox, the most loved and revered of Whig heroes. The first two

meant little when Britain was no longer at war, Aittcl the Tory administration of Lord Liverpool as carrying through at least as much retrench-

:Tient as ernpt._.. any Whig government would have at

r - Reform in the sense of parliamentary "ml v.n,' was indeed relevant, but, as Dr. South-

?rat! reMinds us, the Whig leaders in fact played 0. uown till the very last moment, when the 1 r.bscurantism of the Duke of Wellington and the cl.sing agitation in the country made it suddenly ear that this was the card to win the game.

for errors and Grey's skill were responsible

er the Whigs' success in 1830-32. Their own rorors and Peel's still led to a slow decline which wta.I support could no longer, thanks to the ilFs' own measures, help to arrest. In 1841 ene_, s new 'Conservatism' triumphed at the polls aseu seemed set for many years of political

rathendancy. But once again Tory error—or

the rather misfortune—came to the rescue. Only SCorn Law crisis, with the resultant Tory anrat, co . have given to Russell's semi- oischronmu istic party a new tease of life. Ironically, badrakeli, Whose destructive mockery of the Whigs vyhn ueen so brilliant, was in a sense the man Th Prolonged their political existence. diss e ensuing government, which is carefully of ,ected by Dr. Southgate, reached the apogee usinhood' and the nadir of competence. of ,?.ladstone gravely put it, Russell's selection preAlf Misters displayed 'a more close and marked aft„e.,rence for the claims of consanguinity and tici"n ,1_,Y, than is to be found among other poli- a 4..ss- Russell was for many other reasons, too, astrous Prime Minister. Luckily for the rninegds' who would otherwise have been totally in 18.55,11almerston ousted his younger colleague

He and he was a very different proposition. cks not strictly a Whig, but for nine out of the nexf ten and a half years he headed Cabinets which were sometimes purely Whig, sometimes flavoured by a few Peelites, and always very aristocratic. He disarmed Tories and Radicals alike with consummate skill. While he lived, Whiggery was safe.

Disraeli may have been unwittingly respon- sible for giving the Whigs twenty years' extension of power, but he and Derby—an ex-Whig who bore no love for his former friends—between them administered the coup de grace in the end. The Reform Act of 1867 really did what Derby half in jest hoped it would do—'dish the Whigs.' One of the many valuable sections of Dr. South- gate's book is his demonstration of how effective that 'dishing' was. The essence of Whiggery, he points out, was that it upheld what can be called 'the Conservative cause' while keeping the Liberals in check and the Conservative Party out of power. The Whigs at moments of crisis allied themselves with 'the People,' by which they meant the masses or the mob. But Disraeli's leap in the dark was an appeal, successful in the long run, to 'the Populace.' To all Whigs and many Tories it seemed a betrayal of the 'con- servative cause.' And so it was, though not of the Conservative Party, a different matter.

'If the People and the Populace were to be- come one and the same,' writes Dr. Southgate, `if the mass was to preponderate on the ruins of the representation of interests and varied com- munities, Whiggery was doomed. For it was the one element in politics so specialised that in a democratic climate it could exist only as a frail exotic.' This was indeed true, and the next twenty years constitute merely the prolonged obsequies of an extinct party.

This is very much an historian's book, packed, meaty, analytical, full of footnotes and ending in formidable appendices. The wood is not always easy to see for the trees. At the end of it one still has no answer to the question why some aristocratic grandees were Whigs and others not. But perhaps it is unanswerable. Dr. Southgate's learned, scholarly and lively study will be an invaluable storehouse of information to anyone deeply interested in nineteenth-century politics. If the treatment is sometimes slightly blurred and confused, that is no less true of the very nature of the subject treated.

ROBERT BLAKE