LORD LINDSAY ON TORYISM.
-WHAT is Toryism—this system of thought which is supposed to have manifested itself so strongly in the English county elections, and to have so vigorous a hold upon the consciences of the newly-enfranchised twelve-pounders? Is it mere dislike of the disestablishment of the Irish Church ? If so, it will be a very temporary phenomenon, for the fiercest of Toriss does not venture to deny that on religious questions cities and counties have equal rights, equal powers, and equal information, and the citizens have condemned the Establish- ment by a heavy majority. Is it mere aversion to change ? Then it has manifested itself most strangely in support of a Minister who has done more than any man living to change the basis of government in the United Kingdom. Is it a prejudice based on a belief that Liberals are, on the whole, hostile to the agricultural interest ? Then why is it not felt in the agricultural counties of Scotland, while it is so strong among the suburban dwellers of the metropolitan counties, that we verily believe if the Conservatives had fought South Essex as they fought West Kent they would have carried two more seats ? Or roryism, in brief, resistance to Democracy ? Then how ca.r...,..-e-be so devotedly loyal to a man who, in accepting household suffrage, made the franchise more demo- cratic than most Liberals desire? Is there, in fact, any single word or phrase which describes the emotion, or conviction, or system of ideas which has just been shown to be dominant in the English counties ? Lord Lindsay, heir to the Earldom of Crawford and Balcarras, and to endless possessions under the earth of Lancashire, scholar, author, and, we believe, poet, affirms that there is. In a badly written but moderate and courteous pamphlet issued this week he declares that Toryism and patriotism are identical, and endeavours to prove his ease by a syllogism, which he evidently thinks unanswerable, and which will, we suspect, have much effect with a certain class of readers,—an argument so remarkable, that after a vain attempt to condense its perfection, we have been compelled to give it in his own words :— " A nation of the highest typo, like that of Britain, passes through three distinct periods—of growth, of maturity, and of decline. The period of growth is marked by the struggle of the People, aristocracy and commons acting in union, for Liberty against the power of the Crown,—during this period the patriot is the Liberal. The period of Maturity is witnessed by the development of two great political parties, springing from and representing the higher intellect of the race ; repre- sented by the national Aristocracy, territorial and commercial ; known by tho varying names of Tory and Whig, Conservative and Liberal ; contending under the rival banners of Order and Liberty ; each of nearly equal weight and power, and alternately prevailing, the result of the successive struggles being development (at once) and consolidation of the political constitution of the country—so long, that is to say, as neither of the two parties (for this is the criterion) permanently pre- vails over and depresses the other. The period of Decline commences from the moment when one of these two great parties begins to obtain a permanent ascendancy in the counsels of the nation ; and it is always the Whig or Liberal party that ultimately does so, supported and pushed forward by the increasing influence of the masses of the people, gradually sharing (as they have a right to share) in the intellectual life diffused by education from the central focus of the national intelli- gence. The result of this undue exaltation of Liberty and depression of Order is that the ship of the State becomes as it were lopsided ; the free play of political life is checked; the vigour that springs from opposition, from the independent and sharp contention of champions equally powerful, equally honoured by the people, in the arena of public life gradually departs ; selflshneas, tyranny, political scepticism, the loss of the sense of national Obligation to the laws of God, indifference to public honour, contempt for political enemies, and general moral cowardice take the place of the corresponding virtues of heroic self- sacrifice, respect for the rights of others, faith, the grateful conscious- ness of responsibility, jealousy for national credit, chivalrous esteem for our opponents, and indifference to mord popular applause which characterized the earlier life of the community ; and, while private virtue languishes, and Liberty, no longer protected by Order, vanishes from the scene, Constitutional Government in its highest form, as exhibited, for example, by the old Constitution of England—monar- chical, aristocratical, and democratical in consummate harmony, each element in its place, neither of them predominant—ultimately expires, —to be replaced by Democracy pure and simple, the rule of the mob, short and disastrous in its culmination, born in licence, flowering in anarchy, and to be cut down by Despotism."
Lord Lindsay omits to tell us who the patriot is in the period of Maturity, when both forces are equally powerful, equally necessary, and equally in the right. Are there no patriots when a nation is mature, or are all men patriots then ? We fancy from another paragraph in the pamphlet that Lord Lindsay thinks in such a case a landed gentleman is patriotic when he is a Tory, and a commercial person when he is a Liberal ; but he leaves the point undecided, and would possibly excuse a tailor under stress of personal convic- tions for voting on the Conservative and, for him, unnatural side. We may, however, let that slip pass, and confine our- selves to the main argument, an embodiment of the very grossest of Tory fallacies, the one which Sir A. Alison for so many years pressed so severely on a disbelieving world,— the assumption that because nations have risen, culminated, and decayed, the periods of rise, meridian, and decline coincide with three modifications in the system of government. We will not for the present dispute the poetical proposition that a nation, like an individual, must pass through a youth, a manhood, and an old age, though even that is a pure assump- tion, based, with one exception on the history of Pagan and slaveholding States, which may be proved, and we believe will be proved, by future experience to be entirely unwarranted, It is, however, in accord with some experience; but the second and more essential proposition, that youth and despotism, maturity and constitutional order, decay and democracy, are synchronous terms, is not. Rome was in her maturity, i.e., performing her highest function in the world, that of esta- blishing the idea of Law, under a pure despotism which super- seded a close and grinding oligarchy. She never was a democracy in the modern sense, except in a few stormy intervals, and never a perfect democracy at all. Athens rose, culminated, and fell as an aristocratic republic based on slavery,—was a South American state, not a Swiss canton, and died under foreign swords. Judea developed and con- secrated the monotheistic idea as a republic and almost lost it as a monarchy, and was ultimately destroyed by external force alone. Spain rose under a feudal aris- tocracy, culminated under a strong despotism, sank under a weak one, and seems likely to begin a new career as a Federal Republic. Venice reached her height under the closest and most cruel of oligarchies, which was still reigning when she fell; Florence was the home of art, the depositary of the thought of the Renaissance under what in all but form was a badly con- structed despotism, hereditary in her greatest house. The United States have risen to their astounding height of external power under a democracy, more or less limited, it is true, but still so " pure " that the people have always made their own laws ; and her decline, if it is to come, is certainly not so near that she can be quoted to children as a terrible example. All the English Colonies, the great States of the future, begin as pure democracies. Whence, then, does Lord Lindsay derive the law on which he lays such stress, that he thinks obedience to a questionable induction from it the test of an Englishman's intellect and patriotism ? Sir A. Alison used to make a great deal of the example of France, but when has France had for a generation a decently honest constitutional monarchy ? Her history from Hugh Capet is one of five centuries of feudalism, two of monarchy pure and simple, and one of desperate and hitherto unavailing efforts to establish under one form or another a free government. Which period does Lord Lindsay suggest as her meridian,—Louis Philippe's rule through a bribed consti- tuency of officials, or the few years of " constitutional" anarchy under Louis XVI., or which ? If anything is certain in prophetic history,—and we quite admit nothing is certain, —France is travelling painfully towards better days, which, when they arrive, will in all human probability be found under a Republic " one and indivisible." Or are the Swiss Cantons, perhaps the happiest places in the whole world, all slowly perishing because their constitutions are in the main thoroughly democratic ? Even in the Spanish American States it is very doubtful if Democracy has had any real connection with disorder ; if Chili, for example, is not better governed and will not last much longer as a State than the Empire of Brazil, which seems well governed only because its most numerous class is silenced with the lash. If history teaches anything, it is that nations culminate, that is, exercise the greatest influence over mankind at large, when the struggle within them has ceased, and some one principle has for the time overborne the remainder. If Toryism be only this, only a belief that history shows order, democracy, decay, to be the three descending steps in a ladder which ends in destruction, then, indeed, Toryism is in a bad way, as bad a way as any creed based upon a visibly false cosmogony, and its priests should prohibit the study of history as leading directly to infidelity and desertion.
That the function of the Tory party in every state is a great one no politician who has studied politics ever attempts to deny, but Toryism as such has no relation to the principle of authority. On the contrary, the American Tories take as their principle of action that "government is a necessary evil," which it is the first duty of politicians to reduce to a mini- mum. Toryism in its essence, apart from the accidents of the hour, is nothing but. content, with its natural sequence, dislike or dread of change, and its natural and most estimable func- tion is to moderate change, to compel the imaginative, and the resolute, and the hopeful, who, with the masses behind them, are treading towards a brighter day, to re-examine their con- victions, to think out their policy, to define and justify the objects for which they seek, to avoid those coups ditat towards which the impatience of the inexperienced naturally tend, and which are always attended with this evil, that action is taken before opinion is ripe, and the nation, alarmed or indignant, is ready to retrace its steps. This, however, is but a function of a party whose true bond is content, a belief that the world, on the whole, goes well ; that change is rash, that the evils which exist exist as hail does, through the operation of natural laws ; that a State can never be justified in political experiments. There may be times when that condition of mind may be justified by facts, just as there may be times when a man has a right to sit quietly in his chair ; but the times are few, and the present day. when Ireland is seething with rebellion, when capital and labour are almost at war, and when three-fourths of the English people are con- demned to lives of monotonous and scarcely remunerative toil, is certainly not among them. For the hour, at least, the patriot is the man who is willing and resolute to remove these evils, not the man whose single idea is to resist their removal.
Previous page
