all this represented a great advance. But Lecky was not so easy to convince. Like Burke, he never valued abstractions. That a thing worked, worked well, and gave every evidence of continuing to do so, was more important to him than speculative dreams. What had worked best for Britain, so far as he was concerned, was the electoral system that prevailed from the Reform Bill of 1832 until the Reform Bill of 1867. In 1832, the middle class had been enfranchised. The change had, at the time, split the country asunder, but it had worked. This was because, in Lecky's view, it had admitted to power a class of men solid, trustworthy, educated, and hard-working. Their merits, not their abstract “rights,” qualified them for the franchise. It was different with the millions granted the vote in 1867 and 1884. Sheer numbers was what mainly seemed to commend them as voters.
But what were mere numbers against intelligence, experience, and wisdom? “In every field of human enterprise,” argued Lecky, “in all the competitions of life, by the inexorable law of Nature, superiority lies with the few, and not with the many, and success can only be attained by placing the guiding and controlling power mainly in their hands.”1
In speaking of such matters, Lecky refused to mince words. “As far as the most ignorant class have opinions of their own, they will be of the vaguest and most childlike nature.”2 “One of the great divisions of politics in our day,” he predicted, “is coming to be whether, at the last resort, the world should be governed by its ignorance or by its intelligence.”3 It is a measure of how much ideological water has flowed under the bridge since 1896, that a noted author, soon to become a member of Parliament, should write so frankly without giving public scandal. In the late 20th century, he would be picketed by college freshmen, pilloried by congressmen and TV talk show hosts, without anyone's stopping to inquire whether intelligence might, on the whole, be socially more useful than ignorance.
What Lecky feared was that his country's government would pass out of the hands of gentlemen and “into the hands of professional politicians”—like those to be found in the United States. (Lecky admired the American Constitution and the American Senate and compared Alexander Hamilton favorably to Burke; yet he winced to see democracy so far advanced in the Republic.) Already in Britain, since democracy had taken root, there was more bribe-taking, more apostasy, more flouting of principle.
Lecky was concerned, accordingly, that gentlemen should continue to govern. He was concerned especially for the future of the House of Lords, which fast was coming to be regarded as a feudal relic, occupying “a secondary position in the Constitution.” “Man for man,” he wrote, “it is quite possible that (the Lords) represents more ability and knowledge than the House of Commons, and its members are certainly able to discuss public affairs in a more single-minded and disinterested spirit.”4 The peers' “superiority of knowledge” was “very marked.” They were more than ornamental; they contributed, along with the Throne, to the kingdom's “greatness and cohesion.”
Do such notions sound snobbish and insufferable to 20th century ears? They sounded snobbish, in truth, to many a 19th century ear. Yet Lecky, a man of the middle class, was no snob. He reasoned that if liberty was to be maintained against the central state, someone other than the politicians, who were watering and nurturing the state, must do the job.
The state was in fact putting out roots in every direction, and not by happenstance either. A new kind of radicalism had arisen during the 1870s and 1880s. The older sort, the sort in which Englishmen like Lecky rejoiced, had asserted the rights of the individual against the state; the newer radicalism, whose voice was Joseph Chamberlain of Birmingham, insisted that to the contrary, individual freedom could only be guaranteed by the collective state. This was because individuals were being ground down by the weight of the capitalistic structure. Only the majesty of the state could rescue them.
Numerous rescue missions were launched in the 1870s and ′80s. In 1871 and 1872, local government boards were created and given vast powers over public health and the poor—traditional concerns of the parish and squirearchy. By an act of 1888, justices of the peace, who were mostly squires bred in a tradition of public service, were denuded of their broad powers and replaced by 62 county councils. Education was made compulsory in 1876 and in 1891 was made free at the elementary level. The economist, Stanley Jeavons, in words that would have confounded Cobden and Bright, asserted that “the State is justified in passing any law, or even in doing any simple act, which in its ulterior consequences adds to the sum of human happiness”—with happiness, presumably, to be defined by the lawmakers themselves.
Even firmer in that conviction stood the Fabian Society, organized in 1884 by a coterie of middle-class intellectuals bent on converting the country, however slowly, to outright socialism. “The economic side of the democratic ideal,” said one of the Fabians, Sidney Webb, “is in fact Socialism, itself.”
Lecky, though the philosophical obverse of Webb, could not have agreed with him more. “No fact,” he wrote, “is more incontestable and conspicuous than the love of democracy for authoritative regulation.”5 The increase of state power would mean “a multiplication of restrictions imposed upon the various forms of human action.” It would mean more bureaucracy. It would mean something the 20th century can understand even better than these—constantly mounting taxes to finance the state. For Lecky, the tax question was “in the highest degree a question of liberty.” The country was nearing a time when one class could impose the taxes and another class pay them. In that unhappy event, taxation would no longer serve the common good. It would be used “to break down the power, influence, and wealth of particular classes; to form a new social type; to obtain the means of class bribery.”6 Lecky, the historian, had shown that his eyes were as good for looking forward as for looking backward. For so it all came to pass in Britian, once the Labor Party finally acquired dominion.
The likelihood of actual socialist sway over his country, Lecky stoutly refused to admit. Socialism was an abstract, Teutonic program; the English were too sensible to have much truck with it, even if it was probable that Marxists might “in some degree and in more than one direction, modify the actions both of the State and of local bodies.”7
It happened that the socialists came to power after all, but that they lacked the doctrinaire convictions necessary to build a thoroughly socialist nation. Though they increased taxes and nationalized key industries, they declined to drive the private sector entirely out of business. This was fortunate, for as Lecky had pointed out, “The desire of each man to improve his circumstances, to reap the full reward of superior talent, or energy, or thrift, is the very mainspring of the production of the world. Take these motives away; persuade men that by superior work they will obtain no superior reward; cut off all the hopes that stimulate, among ordinary men, ambition, enterprise, invention, and self-sacrifice, and the whole level of production will rapidly and inevitably sink.”8
Lecky understood not just the practical arguments against socialism but likewise the theoretical ones. Capital was not robbery, as Marx alleged; nor was it the working man's enemy. Rather, it was “that portion of wealth which is diverted from wasteful and unprofitable expenditure to those productive forms which give him permanent employment.”9 Capital and labor were “indissolubly united in the creation of wealth,” each one indispensable to the other.
All the eloquence and learning that Lecky mustered was shouted into the teeth of a gale. The England of his heart—industrious, rational, above all free and unfettered—was passing away even as he wrote.
The 1890s, as one scholar has written, was “the decade of a thousand ‘movements’.” The people then living “were convinced that they were not only passing from one social system to another but from one morality to another, from one culture to another, and from one religion to a dozen or more!”10 Liberty had been the supreme economic, political, and social value of the mid-Victorians. Nor had it been repudiated entirely by the late-Victorians. The term had simply come to mean something different
