Election 'eighty
ROBERT BLAKE
This is the first attempt to apply to a past general election the psephological techniques pioneered for modern elections by Mr R. B. McCallum in 1945, followed by Mr Herbert Nicholas in 1950 and by Mr David Butler ever since. No doubt these modern studies have their critics, but one has only to think where we should be without them in order to appre- ciate their value. There was, unfortunately, no Nuffield College in the nineteenth century to encourage contemporary psephological re- search. This means that some of the material which would form the evidence of a modern study has vanished for ever. Anyone who was old enough to vote in the election of 1880 would be at least 109 if living today and would, one fears, be a somewhat unreliable witness. Opinion polls of the dead cannot be taken— anyway, not by any /method yet discovered by historians; and so one important source of evi- dence is missing.
Yet Mr Trevor Lloyd's excellent books shows how much can be done in spite of these gaps. Obviously he cannot give us all the information which one would get in a Nuffield survey of a modern general election, but it is remarkable how much he does give us. It is to be hoped that his undoubted success will encourage other his- torians to investigate ()theu general elections of the past. There is no greater gap in political history, no field where unsubstantiated generali-
sations have for longer held sway in the absence of hard fact and careful research.
The general election of 1880 gives Mr Lloyd a chance to test a thesis about voting. It is to the effect that the great majority of the elec- torate is selfish, cautious and defensive. What stirs it is fear of something disagreeable, and high on the list of disagreeable things is the loss of economic prosperity. The fear that this may happen if the opposition gets in; alternatively the fact that it is happening under the Govern- ment and seems likely to go on happening if the Government remains in power—these are what influence the masses. On the other hand, though influenced by these considerations, the masses are fundamentally apathetic and apoliti- cal. The problem is to get them to vote. Here one needs the enthusiasm of the party workers, the people who are prepared to canvass the streets, stick wrappers, deliver election addresses and do all the other boring things which are required of them. They are not swayed so much by material considerations. They need a 'cause,' a moral issue, something of the spirit of a crusade, whether negatively against a policy they consider to be wicked, or positively in favour of one they believe to be good—or both. Foreign and imperial issues can often stir the party workers, though seldom the masses. -
This theory obviously does not explain all elections even in relatively modern times, nor does Mr Lloyd make such a claim. But it does fit certain elections, and 1880 is one of them. Disraeli believed that he had been beaten by 'hard times,' a combination of industrial depres- sion, poor harvests, and the adverse effects of cheap food imports upon agricultural pros- perity. Gladstone believed that he had won be- cause he had exposed the moral obliquity of a Conservative foreign policy which was in a very special sense Disraeli's own—the policy which placed the supposed British interest in the pre- servation of Turkey above the fearful evil of the Bulgarian atrocities. On Mr Lloyd's show- ing both were right. The masses turned out to vote Liberal—the poll was much higher in 1880 than in 1874—because they feared for their prosperity, but the enthusiasts who stirred them to turn out at all were influenced by their de- testation of 'Beaconsfieldism'—an immoral and predatory foreign policy.
It would be a gross over-simplification to suggest that this is all there is to Mr Lloyd's book. On the contrary, he analyses with much acumen the party organisations, the speeches, the territorial variations, the many backward eddies and cross currents of one of the most fascinating elections during the last hundred years. This is the first of a new series—Oxford Historical Monographs—and it makes an ad- mirable beginning, upon which both author and editors deserve the highest praise.
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