INTELLECT AND PARTY.
THERE is evidently a. very real, while amusingly self- conscious, anxiety in a large section of the friends of the party which has just come into power, to make out that it is not inferior in intellectual ability or distinction to the party which has just gone out. They seem to think, and perhaps not without reason, that there is a general impression abroad to the contrary which needs to be corrected. The Pall Mall Gazette has been analysing and marshalling and parading over and over again the intel- lectual "record," the literary and academic achievements of the members of the new Government, down to the most unimportant of Junior Lords. The Daily News, whose temper, for some reason, does not seem as much improved by success as might have been expected—perhaps because its enemies have not fallen far enough—exults over its fallen foes, and will not allow them any merit whatever, least of all the merit of intelligence: " Mr. Gladstone," it told its readers the other day, " has fought against mighty odds, but he had this advantage. The real in- tellect of the country was always on his side, and in the long run intellect must win." This, of course, is not at all Mr. Gladstone's account of the matter. " The great bulk of the educated classes," he told his constituents at Midlothian (we are, of course, condensing his exact words), " are against us. But take courage and com- fort; the educated classes have almost always been in the wrong. The Universities have not returned a single Home-rule Member, but the Universities have always been benightedly Tory, and the sooner they are disfranchised the better for the country." We must not take either the Daily News or Mr. Gladstone too literally. The Daily News is so obviously what the Americans call " bluffing," that we can only suspect it is not satisfied with the cards it holds in its hand after the new deal. The party which numbers among its adherents men like Lord Tennyson, Lord Kelvin, the Duke of Argyll, Lord Selborne, Sir Gabriel Stokes, or Professor Jebb, to name no others, need hardly heed the statement that the real intellect of the country is against it. On the other hand, if Mr. Glad- stone spoke his real mind, he should be what he is least of all men, a profound pessimist, and a disbeliever in a cardinal article of the old faith of his party, and in some of the largest results which it has been the effect of his life to bring about. It is true that Mr. Gladstone, who was once a Tory and is now a Radical on the verge of Socialism, has never been a Whig—though for a time he acted with the Whigs—and has not perhaps quite the Whig belief either in intellect or education ; nor, indeed, has he himself been prominently identified with the education policy of the last quarter of a century, least of all with Free Education. But it cannot be supposed that he really thinks this policy a mistake, or that the cultivation of reason is the cultivation of error, and the only effect of education to produce political aberration. The truth is, he was fighting very wild at Midlothian, wilder this time than he has ever fought before, and his language was a petulant fling at his old friends who had not followed him, a fling which contrasts as unfavourably in temper with the laughing philosophy of Lord Beaconsfield—who gave a vote to intellect, though it should be for that moment against him, when he gave a Member to the University of London, in order, as he said, to provide a seat for Lord Sherbrooke, then Mr. Lowe—as it does in wisdom with the famous dictum of Lord Sherbrooke him- self, that it was our duty, in view of democracy, to educate our masters. For this dictum—recalled as it has been, and emphasised by the death of Lord Sherbrooke in the very middle of the most democratic Election we have seen, and commented on by the phenomena of that Election—may well raise for us what is the real question. Is intellect in the nature of things inclined to the one party or the other ? Is it really the tendency of education to produce, not perhaps so much definite political Conservatism, as a generally Conservative frame of mind ? If the history of the past could assure us of this, we should have a most potent factor to reckon with, one the importance of which we have hardly yet realised. Does the actual experiment of " educating our masters " at all warrant this theory ? It has been tried for just the time which has elapsed since it was uttered. And certainly, on the face of things, a good deal of change has come about. Two-and-twenty years ago, intellect and anxiety for education were cer- tainly supposed to belong in vast preponderance to the Liberals. The Tories were proverbially the "stupid party," and they hardly themselves seemed to care to repudiate the description, except, perhaps, by the mild protest that there was a great deal of " dormant talent " on their side. The description is never heard now. In 1870, all, or almost all, the clever young men at the Universities were supposed to be on the Liberal side. Now they are probably at least equally divided, and the majority are certainly Unionist. In 1870, the Conservative working man was supposed to be a contradiction in terms ; practically, he was considered not to exist, except as a figment of his master's brain, or an amiable lusus natures. Now, even his enemies must admit that he exists in his thousands, and apparently as naturally as the Radical working man. And it is especially in the boroughs, where education is keenest and best organised, that he is to be found in the largest thousands. For it cannot be denied that Mr. Gladstone, if his appeal from knowledge to ignorance was only rhetorical, certainly had peculiarly the " suffrage of the plow" and the support of the illiterate voter. We do not speak of Ireland, where illiteracy is partly artificial, but of constituencies like the Stowmarket Division, where recent statistics show the illiterate vote to have been higher than anywhere else in England. If we could suppose that, as education spreads, this process will go on, and the counties will by-and-by follow the boroughs, we should have a much desired' source of con- fidence for those who fear the too rapid transference of power from the old hands of the few to the new hands of the many, and some consolation for some of those who • voted for Free Education with needless apprehension and misgiving. The experiment, however, has perhaps been . confused by other considerations. There is a well-known tendency of newly-enfranchised classes to vote at first for change and experiment, and the counties may still be feeling this tendency in some measure. Illiteracy, too, may still go with poverty and a consequent feeling of dis- content, and the vote may be influenced by these. It may be admitted, also, as has often been contended, that the possession and exercise of the vote is in itself an edu- cation. Still, on the whole, we cannot but believe that the general showing of the last Election has been that ignorance has been on the Gladstonian side, and so far we agree with Mr. Gladstone ; though we do not, of course, agree with him that ignorance is in the right. But pro- bably a bare quarter of a century and some six elections are not enough to enable us to pronounce by induction, and we ought to look rather to the philosophy than to the history of the question. Is it in the nature of things likely that education will produce a Conservative tendency? There are some things which undoubtedly, speaking generally, conduce to this attitude. The first of these is age. Age generally tends to Conservatism. It is this which makes Mr. Gladstone's exceptional career seem, in its last and most exceptional phase, so unnatural as to be almost uncanny. But why does age produce this effect ? It is not merely or so much because it produces weakness or inactivity, as because of the experience, and especially the disillusionment, which it brings. If education can in any way anticipate experience and disillusionment—and within limits it certainly can, or it would lose half its point— then it should have some of this effect. Wealth, again, notoriously and naturally usually brings Conservatism. But, to a certain extent, education both goes with and depends on wealth, and it is also, in the truest sense, a form of wealth. For it is not merely the acquirement of money, but any kind of acquirement which has this effect. To have acquired a special skill after a long investment of time and money has this effect as much as to have acquired money itself. The professional classes tend to be Con- servative for this reason, amongst others. Lawyers and clerics are supposed to be prevailingly Conservative, but doctors, who might be expected to have no political bias, are, perhaps, more Conservative than either. The more that with the development of civilisation the demand for laboriously-acquired skill, and, so far, for education spreads, the more may this frame of mind be expected to spread too, more particularly if special education be accom- panied by general. Above all, to have " arrived," to have achieved distinction by acquisition of such skill, is to feel the influence in an enhanced form.
Education, further, tends to produce a sense of the com- plexity of human affairs. In action, it produces caution. Indeed, it is often decried on that very ground. The cynical opponent of culture—the brutal practical man in Thucydides—long ago remarked that reasoning only pro- duces hesitation, whereas ignorance is the mother of con- fidence. No doubt this caution may be excessive. It is the excess of it, together with a certain remoteness from affairs and the strong current of life, which produces the so-called academic temper, the fault of which is its critical coldness, or rather tepidity, its unwillingness to engage or to act. But if the domination of education is benumbing, the revolt against its rule is still more dangerous. It is this that produces those—at first sight—startling exceptions, when men of specially conspicuous education and attain- ment and intellectual gift seem only anxious to divest them- selves of their advantages. It is this that produces the extremism for its own sake of men like Sir George Tre- velyan ; still more that impatient and feverish impulse to " go it blind " to which he and so many of Mr. Gladstone's supporters seem to have yielded, from which Mr. Gladstone himself, with all his culture and experience, has fora long time past never been altogether free, and which, in this last crisis, he has apparently elevated into a chief maxim of poli- tical wisdom and tactics. We think it would be a misfortune if one party in the State did contain all the real intellect in the country, and if party warfare thus became in fact what party exaggeration represents it as being, a struggle between light and darkness. We do not, therefore, wish to fix the old title—now going begging—of the " stupid party" upon the Home-rulers. We readily admit the considerable amount of talent in the ranks of the new Government, though it must be remembered that many of its Members are either quite new men, or men who have come pre- cociously to the front in the absence of able and tried seniors. And we would rather see among them not a little of the spirit of self-laudation and intellectual con- ceit, than anything of the spirit which animated the famous saying of the revolutionary leader to Lavoisier : That the Republic has no need of chemists." But if going it blind" is to be the guiding principle of the Glad- stonian Party, they will find themselves, whatever their natural ability, driven more and more to appeal to the uneducated, and to become the party of ignorance. For the truth is, that education in itself produces neither partisan Conservatives nor partisan Liberals, but tends to make both more moderate, inasmuch as it makes them the creatures of reason rather than impulse. If it teaches anything, it teaches men to see and shun "the falsehood of extremes ; " and it is precisely because Unionism is something more than Conservatism or Liberalism, that it unites moderate men of both parties, and that it has—and as Unionists reckon must have—in an increasing degree an attraction for educated minds.
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