LORD SALISBURY ON THE POLITICAL BIAS OF PROPERTY.
AT St. James's Hall on Wednesday, Lord Salisbury was very condescending to the middle and lower classes. It was they, he said, not the millionaires, not the great nobles, on whom you must rely for supporting the Constitu- tion,—because it was they, and not the millionaires and not the great nobles, who had most to lose by any revolution which disturbed the solid basis of proprietary right. Men like Lord Hartington, he declared, can never be relied on to support the Constitution from self-interest. In the prodigality of their generosity, they can afford to throw away what would seem a great stake in the country, and yet have eo much left as is enough to gratify every desire they are at all likely to form. It is the same, of course, with Lord Salisbury Emself. If he is faithful to the principles of the Constitution, it is by a sort of happy accident that he is so, for he, too, could afford to lose a great deal, and yet never leave a serious want ungratified. It is not, therefore, he teaches us to think, on himself or on his order, but on the industrial classes, including in that term all who earn their own living, that the Conservative creed is enjoinea by the great guarantee of self-interest. Those who, if they lost any- thing material by the unsettling of proprietary rights, would lose what they would keenly and constantly miss, are the persons to whom you must look to maintain proprietary rights with a -severity commensurate with their interest in them. The splendid noble cannot be trusted; he may choose to stake much on his ambition or his whim, because, even after staking and losing much, he will find himself still in all essentials where he was before. But villadom and trade and manual labour will not venture what they dare not lose, and it concerns villadom and trade and manual labour, therefore, as it does not concern the richer classes, to take care that the rights of property are not tampered with, and that vested interests are properly revered. And no doubt, there are certain political phenomena which seem to confirm Lord Salisbury's theory. There is, indeed, very little to show that trade and manual labour discern the paramount duty of Conservatism as Lord Salisbury has expounded it, but then villadom does. From suburban villas by scores of thousands flock the steady Conservative voters, who in Middlesex, East and West Surrey, and the three divisions of Kent, as well as in the vicinity of all the great provincial towns, support what Lord Salisbury calls the Con- stitution, and what Lord Beaconsfield preferred to speak of as the majesty of the Empire. But is it really the imperious power of PrOperty which makes these good people in their semi-detached villas into Conservatives and Jingoes ? Would the mere feeling of panic at any.menace to proprietary right have had the least power to inspire what was called the Jingo feeling,—a feeling which undoubtedly did a great deal more to rally voters to the late Government than the proprietary feeling ever did ? Was not Lord Beaconsfield a great deal nearer the mark when he relied on what he called the power of the imagination to rally the country party, than Lord Salisbury when he relies on the iron gripe of self-interest? HOW is it that the Dissenting tradesman and the artisan do not find the gripe of this same self-interest making Conservatives of them, just as much as the suburban-villa residents ? Why do the Baptist greengrocer and the Methodist miner vote for the Liberal candidate, while the managing clerk at the Bank and the small stockbroker vote for the Tory ? Does not the screw of self-interest press as close on the worldly interests of the former, as it does on the worldly interests of the latter ? Why does the imagination of the one class take a scornful attitude towards the poor, and the imagination of the other class take a scornful attitude .towards the colonial and diplomatic ambi- tions of the showy politician ? Surely Lord Salisbury must see that, whatever weight his appeal to the pocket of the middle and lower-class ought to have, it has very little to do
with the actual creed of these people, and that the lightest grain of sympathy with special grievances and special ideas easily turns the scale against what he regards as the promptings of self-interest ? It is clear enough, we suppose, that the dis- like of privilege felt by the Dissenter when he contemplates the dignities of the Church Establishment, has far more to do with his Radicalism thau any wish at all to lighten the burden of his own Church on his own pocket, a burden of which he is pro- bably very proud ; and that in like manner the jealousy of any sacrilegious interference with what he regards as divine claims has much more to do with the Conservatism of the Con- servative Churchman than any dread of the-claims of a Dis- established clergy on his purse. Lord Beaconsfield was at least right in saying that passion and imagination play a far greater part in politics than mere self-interest ; and we cannot imagine that Lord Salisbury's proprietary Conservatism will recommend itself at all warmly to the minds of even the suburban villa-residents themselves. They would all, we suspect, more easily turn Liberal under any stirring appeal to their imagination—such as the anti-slavery agitation caused —than consent to found their Conservatism consciously on their distrust of the honesty of the masses of the English people.
Nothing is, to our notion, more curious than the fascination which the idea of Property seems to have for Lord Salisbury. In reality, there is no English party in existence that wishes to play fast and loose with property. There is a party, and a very flourishing party, which holds that a great deal of injus- tice has been done between class and class by the laws govern- ing the distribution of property as we now have them. But the very root of the creed of this party is a belief in the possi-
bility of finding a juster law of distribution,—a belief wholly inconsistent with the notion that the distribution of it should be decided by a scramble or by the will of the impecunious,
and not by the wish to give to the labourer more precisely
what he has earned, and what at present some one else receives. Lord Salisbury's strange notion that nothing which unsettles a
proprietary arrangement sanctioned by custom, can by any pos- sibility rest on the respect for property, but must proceed from a contempt for proprietary right, will find, we believe, extremely little hearty support even amongst the Conservatives and Jingoes to whom he appeals. They know perfectly well that those Radi- cals who are in any degree formidable, assail not the sacredness of property, but the unsacredness of an unfair property law, and wish to make the law of property sounders not weaker
than before. And this they understand so well that a
political campaign hardly ever turns on the mere question of confiscation, but on the alleged justice of giving more of the
yield of a particular kind of property to one of the classes in- terested, and less of it to another of those classes. Lord Salisbury's imagination must surely be very feeble, if he - imagines that by a trumpet-call of self-interest he can awaken an enthusiasm a which has not been awakened by more dis- interested and more imaginative war-cries.
it seems to us something of a riddle how a nobleman of considerable powers of invective, and not a little literary
subtlety, who has followed his late leader in experimenting pretty freely on the imaginative sentiment of Englishmen, should yet cherish a political creed carefully pivoted on this notion that proprietary rights are at the source of all political questions, and that proprietary rights are unchanged and unchangeable. May it be that the cynicism of Lord Salisbury accounts at once for his power of scorn, and for his curious theory ? No doubt, predominant scorn, by throwing suspicions on every new claim on the sympathies, would tend to make a man a Tory ; while, by its tendency to ascribe low motives to men, it would also make him think it easiest to keep Tories to their faith by appealing blankly to their self-interest. That is the only way in which we can account for the curious tenacity with which Lord Salisbury broaches low theories of Toryism, even while he lavishes on Tories the whole store of his rather dry political affections.
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