THE VALUE OF WEALTH IN POLITICS. MONG the younger Peers
who will probably push to the front, as the older men drop off, is the Earl of Rosebery. A Radical, though not of a very Red colour, active to feverish- ness, and a very fair speaker—indeed one of the clearest and most amusing speakers in the Upper House, though yet not one of the weightiest—ambitious and enterprising, he is pretty sure, if he will only work, of rising to high office when the next long spell of Liberal administration begins. He is just the man to be tried in the Duchy of Lancaster, and be, as Lord Dufferin said. he was, the maid-of-all-work of a Ministry ; and then, if he suc- ceeds with his broom and duster, to glide naturally into one of the positions which confer direct power. We could conceive him most effective in defensive debate, particularly if he had gat a case iu which sense was on his side, and logical argument on the other. But he will not rise one bit the quicker because his friends are just now puffing him very much, or because he has bought a newspaper, or because he has married into the richest,. family in the world. Politicians in England rise to Cabinet rank only in one of four ways, and striking out a new one has hitherto. proved an almost impossible task. Either they have greatly served the State, or they are good Parliamentary debaters, or they have acquired a representative position in some important fraction of a party, or they have inspired some of the few persons who really bear rule with the idea that they will be useful. Puffs—and the biography of the Earl of Rosebery in the Dublin University Magazine of this month is, if not quite, very nearly a puff —do no good whatever to any politician, and more especially to a Peer who has not to convince a constituency that there is some reason other than his promises for electing him. A Peer in the least likely to be selected for office is sure to be known enough, and if he is not, the public confidence in those who make the selection is very nearly illimitable. What does the public know of Mr. F. Stanley ? As to the purchase of a paper, if Lord Rosebery has bought one, as the magazine says, it is a blunder. The ownership of a paper distinctly hurts an English politician. if he edits it, he is regarded as a journalist, and not as a politician, a critic, and not a leader ; and if he does not, every idea in his journal is more or less attributed to his in- spiration. He makes a hundred enemies for one friend, and half his work in Parliament is spoiled because it is contrasted or compared with the thoughts in his paper, and he is consequently suspected of insincerity. There always will and ought to be a difference, not indeed in kind, but in degree, between the thoughts which a man puts forward when he is responsible for an administration or a party, and those he wishes to make felt when he is responsible for himself alone. You can make your views prevail in Parlia, meat or in the Press, but not in both without confusion. Even Mr. Walter, who is proprietor rather of an institution than a paper, could not remain proprietor and be Premier too,—to run the risk of a printers' error setting Europe on fire, or half the boroughs telegraphing to know if " that article " indicated a change in the Free-trade policy of the Ministry. The single exception to the rule of failure in this line, Mr. James Wilson, owned a paper so restricted in object that it did not matter if every serious opinion in it was attributed to himself, as, indeed, it often was, with complete justice. We greatly doubt if " organs " do not injure politicians, and are quite certain that newspaper property does.
As to wealth, the question is a little more complex', but we rather doubt whether very great wealth does help
a man in England much towards political power. The country does not care about it at all, and Society much less than is imagined. There is said to be a great difference in this respect between England and the Continent, the in- fluence of a millionaire being there far greater, more direct, and above all, more recognised. Some wealth, no doubt, is nearly essential to independence, and in the case of a new man, to the removal of that imputation of being an adventurer which is so dangerous in English political life. One or two very prominent men of our day have suffered gravely through want of visible and unearned income, and in office it is not always possible or con- venient to live quietly,—to go down to the House with an umbrella, and dine on a mutton chop ; and English official salaries, though sufficient for a man who hardly changes his establishment because he is Secretary of State, do not suffice to make a poor man rich.
Lord John Russell, however, openly told a House of Commons Committee that his brother had to pay his debts ; and Mr. Cobden
might have been a Cabinet Minister, and still have lived in lodg- ings. Still, some wealth is almost necessary for any man who thinks of being Premier in a country where men contemn poverty, but very great wealth, or any wealth above fifteen thousand a year, is of scarcely any assistance at all. Money enables its possessor to make his entertainments larger, more frequent, or more costly ; but that kind of thing will not bring power, or help to keep it, one whit more than the performance of the same duty by some other member of the party. Why should it ? The men whose voice gives power do not care where they are entertained, and are slightly bored by the corvee of attending entertainments which, when given in the Chief's house, are apt to have a compulsory character about them. They want to be led, and to be guided, and to be got out of scrapes, not to be entertained. We should doubt very greatly if Sir Robert Peel's chronic ungeniality ever lost him a division, or if Lord Melbourne's fine gaiety ever got him one, and utterly disbelieve that Lord Palmerston's dictator- ship was even strengthened by the hospitalities of Cambridge House. The nation never went there. As for the direct power of money, it is nil. No wealth would purchase a dozen votes, while the employment of wealth for any such purpose would be danger- ous in the extreme,—too dangerous, in fact, to be attempted. Something of the kind is popularly supposed, probably without reason, to have been tried by Parliamentary Agents during the Railway mania ; but times have changed, and if they had not, a party leader wants votes given outside a Committee-room. There is, we suppose, lingering somewhere in the country, a certain admira-
tion for magnificence, and especially magnificence which has been long sustained ; and a man who has great wealth as well as great
rank may retain a great political position all the more easily for them, but they will not win or help to win the position of them- selves. The Duke of Westminster will never be Premier merely because he is Duke of Westminster.
It is a remarkable fact that only one man of the very first class of fortune has, in our day, been a Premier, the office having fallen generally to men who, in England at all events, and by comparison, must be accounted men of moderate means. Sir Robert Peel was probably far the richest of them all, save this one, and he was not supposed, as was shown once by an incident in the Commons, to be as rich as his will proved him to be, and came in no way up to the vulgar English ideal of the magnifico. Earl Grey and Lord Spencer were wealthy men, but not remark- able for wealth ; and Lord John Russell, Mr. Gladstone, and Mr. Disraeli were all not only comparatively poor, but believed by the populace to be much poorer than they were. Earl Derby had indeed a vast property, though in his earlier lift not so productive a one as it afterwards became, but if he had received no more than his grandfather did, the public, which believed in him as the Rupert of Debate, and not as millionaire, would not have cared one straw. We suspect that immense means in themselves rather disqualify men for high office. The millionaires find so many interests in their lives, the pleasant things come to them so easily—though a million a year is no protection against toothache—that they get impatient of the worry, the labour, and the stinging publicity, as of living under a burning-glass, inseparable under our system from great political power. They fall into easy ways and self- willed ways, and neither tend to fit a man for the acquisition or retention of power in a country which is not only free, but governed by deliberation. Above all, we suspect great means release the will too much, take away too much of its power of keeping down, as with a spring, the latent caprices of the mind. Capricious- ness, the desire to gratify volition at the instant of its develop- ment, is the special " folly " of millionaires, and we suspect is not entirely absent from any one of them. The temptation is like that of absolute power, which invariably, though slowly, weakens the brain of its possessor, generating the most disturbing of all thoughts,—that lie is not as the rest of mankind. Now nothing interferes like caprice with the slow, resolute climbing, the con- stant devotion to one subjcct, the perpetual mental attention necessary to the acquisition, and still more to the retention, of power in England, where the statesman has to please a thousand masters, and make five millions of people think him wise. Those qualities have belonged to the rich, but they are born of poverty, and are hardly consistent with the character produced by wealth so great that the larger part of it can never cease to be a sort of Genie, all-powerful, and to be summoned at will. Aladdin might have been Grand Vizier in Bagdad, but would hardly have risen in England to a Principal Secretaryship of State.
Previous page
