THE NEW CLAIM OF BIRTH.
SOME of our " progressive " friends will think hard things SOME
us if we say that the claim of birth is rather in- creasing than diminishing as a force in politics ; but we feel much inclined to say it, and that not as a paradoxical proposi- tion, but as a simple truth. The regard for rank may be dying away, though we doubt it, and believe that if their opinions are the same, an eldest son will be chosen by a Radical caucus in preference to John Smith ; and with the regard for rank the regard for historic pedigree may be fading too. Pedigree in that sense has, however, never been much of a charm to the English people, for though Shakespeare makes Jack Cade proclaim himself a Mortimer, the English have since his time forgotten their traditions, know no history, and defer to new rank more than they will to:antiquity of family. Any Lord is, in their eyes, the social superior of any "Mr.," a blunder the Scotch and Irish have never made. Mr. More, of More Hall, may benefit at the polls by the old legend; but a Tollemache who stood outside his own county would not get a vote because his stock was almost as old as England. Lord Sudeley's son would be helped in a contest by his father's title ; but the evidence that he was the nearest representative of Rollo would not bring him ten supporters, even though Mr. Freeman endorsed the state- ment. His strongest working committeeman would ask who Rollo was, and not know when he was told. The influence of that kind of claim may even be decreasing ; but there is another claim of birth the value of which is not decreasing at all. It is an immense help, an increasing help, in seeking the suffrages of a great constituency, and especially if the constituency is an entire nation, to be the son or grandson of a man whom the electors remember with favour or delight. It is not that they attribute to the descendant the virtues or the powers of the ancestor, still less that they are grateful for anything that ancestor has done ; but they know the candidate's name. So large and so ignorant are modern constituencies, that all candidates seem to them almost the same ; that they are bewildered by their own difficulty in identifying any one in particular, except by his party colours ; and that anything which removes the difficulty removes the most formidable of all obstacles to success. " Who is he ?" is as fatal a query with a democracy as with the most exclusive caste. To make a candidate known even to a single electoral district costs weeks of weary speechifying, reams of print, and the use of an army of can- vassers ; and if the constituency is a nation, it is often next to impossible. It costs a million, they say, to run an unknown candidate for the American Presidency, and half the money is spent merely in the effort to give him individuality in the popular brain. A good nickname is an excellent help, and so is anything singular in his career, such as Lincoln's rail-splitting, or Garfield's inability to read till he was thirteen ; but the best of all is sonship or grandsonship to a popular hero. Americans who should know tell us that it will be difficult to resist Mr. Robert Lincoln, now Minister in London; as the next candidate for the Presidency, if he is nominated; and that to suppress his name in the Convention will be the next thing to an impossibility. He is the son of Abraham Lincoln, and consequently, to all farmers in the West, to all the soldiers of the Civil War, and to all Negroes in the South, he is a most distinct• and acceptable figure. We do not know, or pretend to know, if that is true; but we do know that the same thing is true of democratic France, and that the main cause of the selection of M. Carnot for the Presidency was that he was the grandchild of the man who, according to the revolutionary legend, " organised victory." It is possible that the peasants thought he would therefore defeat the Germans; but it is more certain that they knew his name, as they would have hardly known that of anybody else after months of advertising and speeches. " The grandson of the great Carnot " suggested, even to the lowest electors, an accept- able individuality, and therefore, though they knew and could know nothing whatever about him, his election by the Assembly, an Assembly neither popular nor trusted, was received with a chorus of national applause. He was a dark horse with a grand name, and be is therefore President of the French Republic, and will live in history. Mr. Herbert Gladstone, in our own time, owed more to his name than to his own rather dangerous gift of impromptu speech-making ; and Mr. Albert Bright only a few weeks ago practically defeated both parties in Birmingham because be was his father's son. He is an excellent politician, we do not doubt ; but except for his name, he would never, under the circumstances of the hour, have been sent up. for Birmingham. There was not a Liberal in England on Monday who did not feel a thrill of annoyance when he read that Earl Russell had been fined in a police-court, though it was only for overdriving a steam-launch on the Thames ; and if Mr. Disraeli stands for Bucks at the next election, or the next after that, we will guarantee his majority, though he will be chosen not as his father's son, bat only as his uncle's nephew. He has, however, the name, and is the repre- sentative of his family, and he will, we predict, not only be elected-1,000 Primrose Dames, let us hope, dragging his carriage home—but will be helped in the House of Commons by the distinct wish of both parties that he should have an honest chance. As nothing can possibly be by that time known of him, he will owe those immense advantages, for which hundreds of candidates have cried in vain, solely to his birth. The "hereditary principle" will not have seated him, but the influence from which the " hereditary principle" originally sprang, greatly intensified by a difficulty peculiar to democracy, will. And be it observed that this honour will not be paid to descent by heralds, or by the Crown, or by equals, but by the mass of the voters, who, instead of raising the bravest, or wisest, or most successful on the shield, will raise the man whose name will be most pleasantly familiar in their ears.
It is said every day, was said in the debate in the Commons on Friday week, that democracy has advanced beyond the hereditary principle, and has ceased to believe in the claim of birth. Has it, or has it only come to believe that no claim is valid unless sanctified with its own seal ? That is a very different principle, and seems to us very much nearer the truth. The democracy in this respect is like the Church of Rome, which holds that without her sanction the most pious cannot be a priest. The American people would not like a President imposed on them by a revelation from Heaven; but if a direct heir of George Washington had presented himself in 1888 to the Republican Convention, we suspect General Harrison's chance would have been a very small one, as, indeed, his own would have been had he not been descended from "old Tippecanoe," President in 1841. Uri would be horrified at the notion of a hereditary Landam- mann; but Uri, the most perfect democracy in the world, has for hundreds of years given a preference to a single house to take its Landammann from. To wish to make your nobles yourself is not to be convinced that all men are born equal ; and it is this wish, not disbelief in heredity, which marks the demo- cratic action of to-day. It is birth which prevails when a great constituency chooses a man because he is his father's son ; and that is a thing which such a constituency nowadays delights in doing. All it has rejected, all it delights to snub, is the claim to dispense with its own approval, as a King does, or a noble who possesses a privilege by prescription or law. `Down with heredity it shouts, and `vote for his father's son.' It is its own prerogative it is jealous of, not of an idea which, if that prerogative is respected, rather attracts it than repels. It is Kings who dislike the claim of birth, because it limits their right of choice to a few, not the democracy, which, because it is a democracy, can choose whom it will, and can therefore indulge its fancy or show its gratitude as it may deem most fitting. So far from believing it opposed to mere birth, we should not wonder if the claim became increasingly strong, the people becoming just educated enough to know what the favourite name means, and why they desire to give it a preference at the polls. It is ignorance which in England stifles tradition, and if with education tradition revives, the claim of birth will be almost beyond suppression. We shall have Brights standing for Manchester in the year 2000, and Glad- stones reverenced in Midlothian a hundred years after that. It may be true that the claim of the new kind of " birth" may not linger so long as it did in the old families ; but the only reason of that will be that it will not be protected by law, or by that monopoly of visible action which feudalism secured to its chiefs. It will have to take care of itself, but if it takes care, the popular feeling will give rank to descent as surely as ever did the Sovereigns.
We are not quite sure that there may not be another im- pelling force, what we might call the Gallon force, acting in the same direction. Suppose the masses, in their struggle for positive rules of life, caught up the heredity idea, not in the old way, through the imagination, but, as Mr. Gallon believes it and discourses upon it, as a scientific fact. They are all prepared for it by their theories about animals, and they may apply it as their ancestors did to men. That seems very improbable ; but a remark of Mr. W. Besant's, in one of his stories about the poor, recently struck us as containing a very important and quite forgotten truth. The masses may be hard to reach, but the limited though large class of Board-school teachers is not hard ; and what- ever they believe firmly, the next generation will believe a good deal. Nobody knows one-half as much about this class as. ought to be known, especially its female side, which will become in the end, as in America, by much the most in-
fluential ; but, we believe, School Inspectors who are fairly trusted—that is, in fact, are talked to by their victims—will bear us out in this. Nothing takes such a grip of the Board-school teachers as one or two of the broad con- clusions of science, one of which may be or is the -dogma—very much overstrained, we should say—of heredity. At the same time, there is nothing they are so certain of as that the children of the untaught are twice as hard to teach as the children of the well taught. Suppose—it is rather dreamy, but suppose—they should happen to believe heredity a rule of Nature, believe it as they believe that hens lay eggs, would not that belief in a generation rather strengthen the disposition to prefer the children of politicians who had been tested and had passed P And would not that new caste be possessed of a rather formidable "privilege," a definite preference in the favour of the ultimate bestowers of power?
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