MR. GLADSTONE ON THE LEISURED CLASS.
CHARTISM "is pretty much played out," as the Americans say, and we doubt if Mr. Peter Taylor will receive much response to his speech of Tuesday,—a good speech, be- cause individual and bold, but otherwise an anachronism. There will be a great fight in England one day over universal suffrage, for that scheme of government, with all its defects, is based on a large idea, that man as man has rights apart alike from his social position and his capacities ; but that fight will not come yet. The married-man suffrage suits the respect- able British mind a great deal better, and that is what house- hold suffrage would mean if extended over the whole country. Mr. Taylor did not touch on the greatest " point " of the Charter, and of the three proposals he advocated, one will, we believe, carry itself ; the second will perish under discussion ; and the third is a surplusage. Equal electoral districts are quite inevitable the moment the agri- culturists ask for votes, and with Mr. Gladstone, we suspect the change has much to be said for it. The public does not care about either annual or biennial Parliaments, and will care less when it sees that their first effect would be to revolutionize our Parliamentary system by making penal dissolu- tion on any special question impossible, and so destroying the great ligament of party. And payment of Members by the Exchequer, besides tending to diminish the popularity of the Commons—a terrible evil, for every other power is growing weak—is entirely needless. Nothing prohibits a constituency from paying its Member if it likes. It can even, we believe, by law vote him a sum of money, and at all events could as easily subscribe to pay him a salary as to pay his expenses. Candidates are very often in fear of the expenses of an election, but no candidate is ever stopped by any difficulty which a small salary would remove. The defeat of the motion was of course inevitable, and the real interest of the debate seems to us to centre in an opinion expressed by Mr. Gladstone, which embodied in a few well-sounding words a political theory well worth a little examination. The Premier says that England possesses an unique "leisured class," a class which, having leisure, is ready, indeed eager, to serve the country for nothing, and it would be silly to throw away so "fortunate an advantage." It is clear from that expression, and indeed from the whole of this portion of his speech, that Mr. Gladstone thinks the leisured class, on the whole, the best fitted for Parliament ; that government through this form of aristocracy—an aris- tocracy very wide, very flexible, and very closely linked with the people, but still an aristocracy—is acceptable to him, that he at heart agrees with the majority of Englishmen, who, as he says, "prefer such men" for Parliament. Taking the telling phrase " a leisured class " in its widest sense, we believe he is justified in saying that this is the present atti- tude of the English mind ; but we are somewhat sur- prised to find that Mr. Gladstone accepts that attitude as good. That he is in instincts no democrat we have often remarked, but we should have thought the circumstances of his life, the dissociation he must often have perceived between his own ideas, motives, and objects and those of this very leisured class ; the contrast between his singleness and their complexity, between his earnestness and their con- siderate indifferentism, between his high morale and their slightly Sadducee toleration, must by this time have biassed his mind the other way. The fact that it has not is a remark- able one, and the more so because the householders, from a very different point of view, have arrived at so very similar a conclusion. We are not so sure it is the right one, or even, if it lasts any long time, a very safe one. There are, no doubt, some advantages in the system, advantages which the example of America, and in another way of France, force very strongly on the public attention, but they are counterbalanced by disadvantages, certainly not less than equivalent. The leisured class, to begin with, has leisure, which is almost as essential to the study of politics as of any other science or art, and wanting nothing that the mass of men want, is tempted to find in that great strife a special and an abiding source of interest and excitement. Then it is apt to possess, particu- larly if the leisure has been hereditary, a certain detachment of mind, a way of looking at things which is not that of the classes still immersed in affairs, and which is on occasion highly convenient to the statesman. It is a travelled class, too, and knows that a great many of the arrangements which to the mass of the people seem to have been settled by nature —as Sir Rainald Knightley thought, or seemed to think, parish boundaries were—are really the result of history or accident. The class, too, as a rule, knows a great deal of business of various kinds, without having purchased its know- ledge by that attention to minute details which is of all habits of mind possibly the one most fatal to statesmanship. It is free, too—freer perhaps than any other class—from small selfishness. This may seem an odd remark when we re- member the Land Laws, the Game Laws, the laws about rental, and above all, the Cattle-Plague legislation ; but it is, nevertheless, true of the whole House, as anyone may per- ceive who compares the English and American Protectionists, or the behaviour of the Commons about direct taxation with the behaviour of the French Chamber. The latter would descend into the streets to resist an income-tax which the former deliberately put on its own shoulders and that of its constituents. Above all, the leisured class, though not free from a wish to be " conciliated " by the Patronage Secretary, is as a body entirely free from pecuniary corruption, and those who know most of foreign legislatures will form the highest estimate of that virtue. In America, in France, and we greatly fear in Italy, corruption very often rages like a disease, though in each country the mode of corrupting is a different one. In America the grants are made in hard cash by the great "interests ;" in France, the Treasury is almost the sole pay- master ; in Italy, the usual solatium is said to be early speculative information. In England, the only form of cor- ruption even alleged, except in individual and infrequent cases, is that of the "gilded saloons," and we suspect that is considerably exaggerated, at all events in extent. Every country has its own vices, and the Englishman who will buy a borough—that is, suborn a judge to perjure himself while giving his verdict, for that is what bribery involves—will regard an offer of a bribe for the use of the power he has bought as an unpardonable insult. It is not a very high point of righteousness to reach, but still freedom from pecuniary temptation is in politics almost an inestimable virtue.
We buy these advantages, however, which we admit to be very great, at a price so high, that thinking men never lose the doubt whether they are not too dear. We buy them, in the first place, at the price of submitting to what is virtually the government of a limited class, an "aristocracy"—to misuse a good word — which, though nominally open, is really accessible by roads so narrow and so long that they can be trodden by few, and not by the young at all. The consequence is a constantly recurring want of ability, the demand for which is greater than a class so confined in numbers can adequately supply. The number has been enlarged of late by a slight relaxation of the monopoly, so that Mr. Gladstone has a Government of able men ; but in making it he had so to gut the party of its brains, that debates are perceptibly duller ; while his rivals can scarcely find men at all, and could not form a Commons Cabinet which the country would understand. This drawback to the close system, this want of capacity in the reservoir of brains, is very serious, so serious that it might on occasion, during a cycle of intellectual sterility such as the aristocracy of birth seems to be passing through—ability, curiously enough, show- ing mainly in eldest sons—outweigh every other advantage. Then the brains we do get are much diminished in value by the inability of their possessors to employ them. The mental power might of itself be amply sufficient, but it has to be exercised under the fatal condition of agreement with the minds of constituents with which it has no rapport. Half the power is destroyed by an inevitable insincerity. There are entire ranges of topics upon which the "leisured class" displays no power, because the condition of power is sincerity, and sincerity would involve dismissal. Mr. Winter- botham makes a speech, and everybody feels that, narrow or otherwise, it is strong. A dozen men could make stronger, but then their views, being out of harmony with those of their masters, while Mr. Winterbotham's are in harmony, they can- not open their lips. A House of Commons with fixed tenure would settle the religious difficulty in five hours ; but the leisured class, on this as on a hundred other points, is under a necessity of partial hypocrisy, and is therefore weak, as a class of men heartily sharing the feelings of the people would not be. But above and beyond all the evils of the close system is the insouciance which is the necessary quality of the old, the wealthy, and the content,—of five-sixths, that is, of the leisured class. They pity hunger, but it is simply impossible for them to realize it. They see grievances, but they do not feel them. They see remedies, but they do not get savagely determined to have them tried. Things are so comfortable for them, it is so pleasant to believe that all is right, they perceive their own superiority so very clearly, that they gradu- ally come to believe that the "order of society" is a natural product of the divine laws, and grow contemptuous of " fanatic " efforts to improve it. They think the civilization which has produced them is a success—and so far so it is— and do not see that they are nearly all it has produced; that the mass of this very great people has gained very little, either in morality, or -dignity, or even comfort, from civilization ; that the "unique class" at one end is balanced, some people would think over-balanced, by the million of "paupers" at the other ; that the spectacle of leisured men working for the country for nothing may be grand, but that the spectacle of some hundreds of men egging on two women who, stripped to the waist, were fighting like any other prize-fighters--a trivial incident of that noble holiday, the Boat-Race—is not so grand. Want of the power to realize where the failure of our system is, to feel the weight of the incumbent mass of ignorance, suffering, and brutishness, is the necessary result, the inevitable consequence of the monopoly of power by the leisured class, which Englishmen, as Mr. Gladstone justly says, so much approve. We do not think Mr. Taylor's is the true remedy. We do not know that any remedy is to be found, except in the gradual change of public opinion as to the men who can serve the public best ; but we desire to see a change, and while admitting the truth of his fact and the force of his arguments, we regret to see the Premier use his vast authority with the constituencies to retard it.
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