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IN the twenty years between
1860 and 1880, all
true Britons, whatever their rank and callings, were
as far asunder as are the North and South Poles
from Keir Hardie Socialism and twentieth -century
gospel of universal revolution in theology preached
from the erstwhile orthodox pulpit of the City
Temple, which has been endorsed, I feel sure, to
the amazement and disgust of the majority of
English operatives, by the Labour Conference held
at Hull in January, 1908. The Liberation Society,
indeed, in its blind hostility to the Church of
England, baited its disestablishment policy by the
suggestion that after life-interests had been exhausted
and liberal grants of buildings and funds had, as in
Ireland, been made to the dispossessed Episcopalians,
there would ultimately be a heap of capital available
for secular and popular purposes. This policy was
accepted by the Welsh Labourists in its barefaced
form, and they destined the plunder for education and
the payment of salaries, as in the United States, to
members of Parliament. It was a policy which had,
in the plurality of election contests in England, to
be carefully masked, because the full avowal of it
would alienate Liberal Churchmen and scare away
the candidates for whom the sturdiest Nonconformists had a very decided preference.
Faddists, theorists, and
enthusiasts were held in
check in the worsted district by the commonsense of
an industrious, practical people intolerant of shams
and wild dreams. Plutocrat and democrat of the
native breed were at bottom both Conservative, and
thoroughly agreed about the sacredness of private
property, and the justice of giving full compensation
and something over for land or heritages required
for public or railway company purposes. However
ready the plutocrat on a Liberal platform might be
to promise going on with perpetual tinkering of the
Constitution, he would, of course, be the last man to
concur in projects which would rob him of his
possessions or diminish the value of his securities
and investments. His ambition was almost invariably from the beginning of
his career to become owner of a landed estate, and many of his class
attained that position, and left estates and baronetcies to their sons. Feudalism did not die, but
transmigrated to the newly-enriched. Shopkeepers,
small traders, and artisans sought to acquire a real
property stake in their country before they took to
invest in bank or railway shares, or in Consols or
other stock. The thrifty workman had no peace of
mind until he became owner of his house.
Trade-unionism had two sides,
a fighting with
capital side, and a benefit society or mutual assurance side to provide
against want of work, or sickness, or old age. There were strikes and lock-
outs in the worsted district between single firms and their operatives ; but
I did not see anything like a general strike or lock-out. In the conflicts
which did take place employers were, in my opinion, oftener in the wrong
than the employed, who reluctantly spent union funds on a strike when driven
to extremity by the greed and injustice of employers.
Our operatives felt that while the strike was their
best weapon of defence and offence, it was well to
keep it as much as possible hanged up in terrorism,
because the use of it was costly to the union funds,
which were wanted for benefit society purposes.
Our unions had then a local character and a spirit
of independence in politics and trade affairs which
agreed with the sturdy character of the people that
formed them. The officials of these local unions
were not glib-tongued agitators, but intelligent
business men who kept accounts straight, and as
soon as opportunity came used their connection
advantages to start in some line of business as
employers. Every good member of a trade union
wished to develop into an employer or, at least, to
have an independent career and a stake in the
country.
While employers and employed,
rich man and
poor man, were ambitious to acquire real property,
and held the same views regarding the rights of
property, I rather think the instructive and
genuinely patriotic conservatism of the masses was
stronger than that of the wealthier and better
educated classes, whether they called themselves
Liberals or Conservatives. Our working people did
not realise how conservative they were in their
principles, habits, practices, and ambitions. They
had been taught by Liberal politicians to dislike the
Tories. The word "Tory" was one to be hissed at.
But for all that, they retained hereditary respect for
the "quality," and never forgot that it was Sir
Robert Peel who gave them the free imports, which
they called free trade, and that their out-and-out
Tory neighbour, Mr Ferrand, advocated with all the
strength of his vigorous nature the passing of the
Factory Bill, which Mr Bright and Mr Cobden
opposed on economic grounds. Because of the boon
of cheap and plenty food they were always willing
to give cheers for Cobden and Bright, but not at all
disposed to follow their lead on all questions.
Mr Bright, because of his
ancestral creed, concurred in the sending of a foolish Quaker embassy
to Czar Nicholas, which made the Crimean war
inevitable, by convincing the haughty autocrat of
All the Russias that peace at any price would be
the British policy, whatever might be that of
France. He was sure of Austria's neutrality, and
of the fetch and carry conduct of Prussia. Mr
Cobden bitterly opposed British participation in the
Crimean war, because he was plunged and lost in a
wild Utopian dream of his own, little expecting the
collision of armies and the war of tariffs which were
fated to come. He believed that in a few years the
doctrine of free trade in all its fulness would be
accepted by all nations, and that as a consequence
of that acceptance the world at last would enjoy a
Golden Age for evermore. This visionary hope
made the Manchester school of political economists
careless about retaining the colonies as integral
parts of the British Empire. Mr Bright, in a speech
glorifying the United States, assumed that it would
absorb the Dominion of Canada, and possess all from
the North Pole to the Gulf of Mexico, and, I think,
the Isthmus of Darien. He lived long enough to
see the big wars on the Continent, as well as the
Civil War in the United States, with the demoralisation which followed thereon. He saw the war of
tariffs, and like the good patriot he ever was when
freed from Utopianism, he set his face like flint
against Mr Gladstone's mad proposal to give the
Irish a measure of Home Rule, which they could
soon and easily use for the disintegration of the
United Kingdom, which would leave Great Britain
open to attacks from Irish separatists and foreign
enemies in alliance with them.
It was clear, from the way in
which working
men, who called themselves Radicals, and were so
on reform and free trade matters, spoke of Lord
Palmerston, both before and after his death, that
they always had had unbounded trust in his conduct
of foreign affairs, and that they had no confidence
at all on that matter in the men whose names they
cheered at public meetings, and for whose candidates
they demonstrated noisily at election times, before
household suffrage and the ballot put the electoral
supremacy at their disposal. In regard to the
colonies and dependencies which formed the outer
and greater Britain, our working people were proud
of them, and wished strongly that they should ever
remain in unity of allegiance and citizenship with
the Mother Country. They had close ties with these
outer parts of the Empire, through sons, daughters,
and friends, who went there and found themselves
happier and more at home under the old flag than
they could be ever under the Stars and Stripes of
the United States, however many the openings and
however high the wages that were to be had in that
go-ahead country of boundless extent and resources,
where, until after the Civil War, carpet-baggers,
and swindlers, and syndicates, and combines had not
vitiated pristine republican virtues and perverted
constitution and institutions into instruments for
running "machines" to benefit birds and beasts of
prey by the defrauding of honest citizens, to the
endless vexation of true patriots down to President
"Roosevelt, the strongest of them all. Our working
men went merrily into the Volunteer movement,
regardless of the cold water thrown upon it by the
peace-at-any- price dreamers of vain dreams.
When I first went to
Bradford, I found the town
represented in the House of Commons by Mr
Wickham, a Conservative, and by Mr Titus Salt, a
Liberal, who had too great a stake in the country to
be really much of a Radical. Mr Salt, who found
attendance at Westminster incompatible with the
close superintendence of his big mill at Saltaire,
soon resigned his seat, and was afterwards made a
baronet. On his resignation, Mr William Edward
Forster, manufacturer, in partnership with Mr Fison, was elected in his
place. Mr Forster, who had in him the make of a broad-minded and truly
patriotic statesman, was a representative of whom any constituency might well be proud, altogether apart from
party considerations. It is as the man who had the
fashioning and the piloting through Parliament of
the first Education Bills for England and Scotland
that his memory will be preserved in history. The
Bills were drawn upon right lines, but Mr Forster
had not the least idea of the huge cost to which
they would lead under School Board and Education
Department management, nor the least conception
of how the new system in England and Wales
would be abused to the purposes of sectarian attacks
upon the Church of England schools. At the head
of the Education Department, Mr Forster was the
right man in the right place. He was, in Mr
Gladstone's 1881 Administration, sadly misplaced
when sent to Ireland as Chief Secretary. He soon
sickened of Ireland, but got out of it without being
assassinated.
The West Riding, before it
was divided, had two
members. The last two were Sir John Ramsden,
owner of large estates in England by inheritance,
and of an Inverness-shire sporting estate by purchase, and Sir Francis Crossley, one of the three
brother - partners of the famous Halifax carpet-
manufacturing firm. Sir Francis was a newly-made
baronet, while Sir John's baronetcy dated back to
1680. On the West Riding being divided and two
seats being given to each division, Sir Francis and
Lord Frederick Cavendish, second son of the Duke
of Devonshire, were returned for our Northern
Division. I was present at the big meeting in St
George's Hall, at which -- accompanied by Sir
Francis, who was well known - Lord Frederick
made his first appearance as a candidate. The play
of "Lord Dundreary" had, a little before, been per-
formed in that hall, with Suthern as the inimitable
representative of the chief character. Now it so
happened that, in the opening sentences of his
speech, Lord Frederick, in nervous flurry, spoke so
like "Dundreary" as to cause irrepressible laughter.
He said that, on being asked to stand, he hesitated,
because he thought an older and more experienced
man would be a fitter candidate for such an important constituency. He then proceeded: "If I
was then afwaid, what must be my feelings now
when I see this magnificent woom cowded from the
floor to the v-v-wewy woof?" He, that night, in
his opening sentences, had a stammer in addition to
the slippery lisping over certain letters. The burst
of laughter put him on his mettle, and he made a
clever speech which read very well in print. I often
heard him afterwards, and wondered at the way in
which, like Demosthenes, he had conquered his
stammering, and got rid of his youthful "Dundrearyism." Sent to Ireland as Chief Secretary, in
succession to Mr Forster, he had just taken the
oath, when, crossing Phoenix Park in company with
Mr Burke, the Permanent Under-Secretary, Fenian
scoundrels beset and assassinated them. That tragic
event, which sent a shock of horror, mingled with
righteous indignation, through the whole British
Empire, took place in May, 1882.
From the passing of the first
Reform Bill to
the coming of household suffrage and the ballot
in Parliamentary elections, the two currents of
Liberalism and Conservatism balanced each other
over all England in a manner which Tories of Lord
Eldon's type deemed to be utterly impossible, since
they only trusted in feudal leadership, and had no
faith in the wisdom of newly-enriched upstarts, and
no true conception of the inherent caution and
patriotic intuition of the common people. When
Mr Disraeli cut the ground from under the feet of
Lord John Russell and the Liberals who wanted to
keep the franchise at much higher qualifications, by
boldly digging down at once to household suffrage
in the boroughs, he relied upon a spirit of Conservatism among the masses, the existence of which was
quite as much doubted by Liberals as by the most
Tory members of his own party. What happened
when power passed from the middle classes to the
masses was that the two main political currents
became full of eddies and side-whirlings which were
apt to confound the calculations of electioneering
agencies. In our district, Liberalism was usually
predominant, but it had ebbs and flows which,
superficially looked at, seemed very perplexing. For
instance, when Sir Francis Crossley died, the electors of the Northern Division gave Lord Frederick
Cavendish a Conservative colleague. That, however,
was nothing in comparison with the sweeping
changes which afterwards took place, back and for-
ward, in Parliamentary representation. All the
twenty years I was in close touch with English
politics, the masses of voters seemed to act consistently upon the principle of giving each of the two
political parties a turn about of office. By plunging
into the bog of Irish Home Rule, and by Majuba
and Convention blundering in South Africa without
which there would have been no Boer War Mr
Gladstone threw power a great deal longer into the
hands of the Unionists than on the turn-about plan
of action they would otherwise have been thought
justly entitled to. |
