THE REAL CONSERVATIVE PARTY.
THE real Conservatives are not those who affect the name. Lord John Manners is as great an innovator as Mr. Roebuck, only he would innovate backwards. In truth, few who can read or write are pure Conservatives : the first propensity that develops itself in the thinking man is that of seeking to shape everything about him after his own fancies. All the old ladies of Exeter Hall are rank partisans of a movement in some direction or other. To find the genuine unsophisticated Conservative, you must cut deeper into the mass of society—to a stratum which has not yet been reached by the pile-drivers of National or even of Sunday schools. There is something in the old doctrine of the Standard that the Democracy of England (taking Democracy in the sense it is now most frequently used in) is Conservative. The Demo- cracy—or, to speak more accurately, the rabble—is Conservative: turbulent it maybe, but nothing excites its turbulence so certainly as any attempt to change its old habits. The mob is not stirred, as the intelligent artisans are, by appeals to some future unimaginable perfectibility, but by assertions that its old familiar habits and privileges are to be broken in upon. It wrecked Priestley's house, and it hates Peel for conceding to the Papists. It knows no change even in externals. Hogarth's Election, with " Punch candidate for Guzzledown," might pass for a picture of the Cambridge " Navvies " in procession, carrying for a standard a live lubber smoking with a huge can of beer on his knees. Hogarth's Nav- vies are Conservative too : their banners bear " No Jews "—for even then there were some who sought to remove the Jewish dis- abilities ; and " Give us our eleven days"—that is, no reform, not even in the calendar. This Conservative party is undoubtedly the "oldest" interest in England : its members are the unso- phisticated descendants of the earliest barbarians who occupied the country. It is in the moral world what Milton's " Anarch old" was in the physical—the Chaos, on the face of whose stagnant waters the Dove of intellect has not yet begun to brood. Their venerable customs date from before the Hep- tarchy, for the Saxons had learned to wash their faces ; their principles are more venerable than the Conquest, for the Normans had felt the innovating hand of civilization. Unchanged, un- changeable, this broad basis of British society alone can with strict justice be called Conservative. It is a proud thought for the new Solicitor-General that he returns to Parliament as its representative : the distinction is worthy of him who wept for Tawell.
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