or ‘theatrical show’ meant to distract and gratify ‘the mob’ below. This ‘disguise’ allows the ‘real rulers’ – not the House of Commons but the Cabinet, a ‘committee of the legislature’ chosen by it – to conduct the business of the nation in relative peace and quiet.
Business is the operative term. Bagehot repeatedly emphasized how much this committee resembled a ‘board of directors’ – its greatest virtue, in his eyes – with the royal family there to smooth out its one comparative shortcoming: the fact that cabinet members could be removed suddenly based on shifts in public opinion. Since most people, he said, ‘really believe that the Queen governs’, the real rulers came and went ‘without heedless people knowing it’, avoiding the unrest or uncertainty such reshuffles might otherwise provoke. The upshot was as cynical as it sounds. A vindication of the ‘plutocratic’ upper and lower houses and a strong executive shrouded in secrecy were the wonders of political science in England.60
Yet Bagehot’s classic work – revered by jurist Albert Dicey as the first to explain ‘in accordance with actual fact the true nature of the Cabinet and its real relation to the Crown and Parliament’ – must be considered in the context of the Economist.61 For over five years before the serialization of the English Constitution, Bagehot had been writing on politics, evaluating constitutional structures in terms of their tendency to help or hinder different states on their paths of capitalist development. Wilson had first encouraged Bagehot to take on this role, expanding his original banking brief at the Economist, based on his 1859 National Review essay entitled ‘Parliamentary Reform’, which showed how far they agreed on the need to limit democracy. In it, Bagehot had argued that any extension of the franchise be limited to a top layer of rate-paying artisans in the largest towns – with artisans in smaller towns, farm workers and all unskilled labourers shut out, so as not ‘to deteriorate the general character of the legislature’. This was fair, he insisted, in his recalibration of natural law, for ‘every person has a right to so much power as he can exercise without impeding any other person who would more fitly exercise such power.’62
From that point on, Bagehot used the Economist itself to denounce the democratic tendencies of reform plans put forward by both Tories and Liberals, which, he said, risked turning a sensitive deliberative body into ‘class-government’, ‘a mere reflex of the popular cry’. ‘True Liberalism’ was at odds with ‘the extreme left of the Liberal party’, he wrote in the spring of 1860, with its ‘superstitious reverence for the equality of all Englishmen as electors’ based on a ‘glaringly false assertion’, that ‘the talents and attainments of the lowest peasant and mechanic are the measure of the electoral capacity of the most educated man in the land’.63
In a review of Mill’s Considerations on Representative Government, he hailed the first section, which he called ‘an exceedingly able protest, by the only living thinker of much authority among English Liberals, against that helpless and reluctant drifting of the Liberal party into pure democracy which is so melancholy a sign of their political imbecility.’64 This rhetoric forced the Economist to defend itself against charges of being ‘impractical, doctrinaire, theoretic’ and of promoting ‘Tory views’ – a reminder that it was uncommon for Liberals to be quite so openly anti-democratic.65 In 1860 Bagehot had even sent a signed letter to the editor, wishing to express himself categorically on the proper attitude of Liberals towards any further reform. ‘The question now is, what securities against democracy we can create; none are easy; none are perfect; which is the least defective and the least difficult to attain?’66
Bagehot tinkered with his answer to this question in the Economist before folding the results into the English Constitution. Early on, he was prepared to accept a slightly wider suffrage, provided there was also ‘a double test of numbers and property, giving every householder a vote, but taking property as the index of social station, and giving higher classes, therefore, a number of votes.’67 He soon had second thoughts about this, however. In a leader from 1864 he suggested a net transfer of members from ‘stagnant’ boroughs to industrial towns, which alone would enjoy a greater degree of popular participation.68 ‘A Simple Plan of Reform’ then became the appendix to the 1867 edition of the English Constitution.69
Here Bagehot gave a detailed rationale for the schemes he had posited in the Economist.70 For the efficient secret of the constitution to be kept, two things were required: the lower classes must not know it, and the upper classes must fully understand it, not falling for pious ‘paper descriptions’ of their government as one of perfectly calibrated checks and balances. So Bagehot made clear just how wide the chasm was between rulers and ruled. With the exception of an educated and propertied elite amounting to no more than ten thousand men, most were ‘no more civilized than the majority of two thousand years ago, narrow-minded, unintelligent, incurious’ and ‘unable to comprehend the idea of a constitution’. Giving them votes would spell disaster, for that would mean ‘the rich and the wise are not to have, by explicit law, more votes than the poor and stupid’ – or, in big towns, the workers, whom he dubbed ‘the members for the public houses’ (i.e. pubs).
It is useless to pile up abstract words. Those who doubt should go into their kitchens. Let an accomplished man try what seems to him most obvious, most certain, most palpable in intellectual matters, upon the housemaid and the footman, and he will find that what he says seems unintelligible – that his audience think him mad and wild when he is speaking what is in his own sphere of thought the dullest platitude of cautious soberness. Great communities are like great mountains – they have in them the primary, secondary, and tertiary strata of human progress; the characteristics of the lower regions resemble the life of old times rather than the present life of the higher regions.71
Bagehot’s defeat in his third attempt to be elected a Liberal MP in 1866, just as he was finishing up the English Constitution, gave to it this very bitter edge, with masters advised to ‘go into their kitchens’ to confirm the witlessness of their servants. Passage of the Second Reform Act the next year – by the Tories, no less – surprised him and deepened his gloom. A change in tone is clear from the 1872 edition of the English Constitution. ‘What I fear is that both our political parties will bid for the support of the workingman.’ There was no worse misfortune ‘for a set of poor ignorant people than that two combinations of well-taught and rich men should constantly offer to defer to their decision’. Or, rather, there was one: the poor and ignorant conferring among themselves. ‘In all cases it must be remembered that a political combination of the lower classes, as such and for their own objects, is an evil of the first magnitude.’72
Yet once again it was in the Economist that Bagehot first registered his shock and disgust at the bill that Benjamin Disraeli, the Conservative leader in the Commons, crafted and pushed through both Houses in 1867. The Second Reform Act increased the number of working-class male voters in the towns and cities by extending the vote to occupiers (renters) paying at least £10 a year – in a move that altered neither the basis of the franchise in property, nor the balance of class forces in parliament. ‘We shall not be supposed to like a Reform of the present pattern. We have opposed it for years’, ran an Economist leader, comparing the debate over reform to a botched shareholders’ meeting.73 Bagehot’s constitutional theory was on the line, just a year after it was published. ‘We are not so great a political people as we thought,’ he wrote, ‘or we could not on a sudden change our deepest thoughts upon the most familiar and important of political questions.’74 ‘Why has the “Settlement” of 1832 So Easily Melted Away?’ contained a mixture of bitterness, and swipes at the British elite for misunderstanding the constitution, despite his attempts to enlighten it:
The English people have been told by the received authorities on their Constitution, that it contains, apart from the House of Commons, and in a position to resist that House, great conservative forces on which they might rely. Most
