The House of Commons, however, as I have before said, is essentially a body of trustees, and it is by their performance of their public duty that its members must be chiefly judged. Is it too much to say that, in the opinion of the great body of educated men, there has been in this respect a marked decline? I am anxious on this subject to avoid all exaggeration. It is not yet true of England, as it is of America, that the best men in intellect and character avoid public life, though there are ominous signs that this may before long be the case. Parliament still contains a large body of such men, and there have been several conspicuous modern instances showing how much the weight of character still tells in public life. Probably a large proportion of my readers will be of opinion that the year 1886 witnessed the worst act of modern English politics; but it at least brought with it the consoling spectacle of a large body of public men, several of them of the highest political eminence, deliberately and without any possible selfish motive breaking old ties and sacrificing political ambition rather than take part in a disgraceful scene. But, on the whole, can any one doubt that apostasies have been more shameless, class bribes more habitual, and the tone of the House of Commons less high, than in the last generation; that principles are more lightly held and direct party interests more habitually followed; that measures of great and far-reaching importance are more recklessly launched for mere electioneering purposes; that men to whom, in private conversation, not one educated man out of a hundred would ascribe any real sincerity or weight of conviction are playing a more leading part in English public life? I have elsewhere dwelt on the profound and indelible impression made in the last century by the coalition between Fox and North. These two able, honourable, and in most respects patriotic, politicians, had been fiercely divided on the question of the American War, and Fox had used the strongest language against his opponent, denouncing him as the enemy of British freedom, and describing him as worthy of death upon the scaffold. The American War ceased; the controversies it produced were closed, and then Fox made an alliance with North for the purpose of keeping out of office a statesman whom they disliked and distrusted. Nothing in the English parliamentary history of the eighteenth century more profoundly shocked the public mind and conscience than this transaction, and Fox, at least, never recovered the discredit which the coalition left upon his character. Yet, after all, both of these statesmen were men undoubtedly devoted to the interests of the great empire they ruled, and after the termination of the American War there was no capital subject of present difference between them.
Compare this transaction with the alliance which gave the Liberal leaders eighty-five Home Rule votes in 1886, and placed them in a close bond of union with the very men whom they had so lately denounced and imprisoned for treason to the Empire, and for most deliberately inciting to dishonesty and crime. Those who will judge public men by their acts, and not by their professions, can have little difficulty in pointing the moral.
Few persons will question that this transaction would have been impossible in the Parliaments before the Reform Bill of 1867. In the days of middle-class ascendency every politician found it necessary to place himself in general harmony with average educated opinion. A very slight shifting of that opinion, especially in the smaller boroughs, could be decisive. There was always an ultimate court of appeal, which could be relied on to judge promptly, with shrewdness and patriotism, and some real knowledge of the facts of the case. Mere rhetoric and claptrap; brilliant talent, unallied with judgment; coalitions to carry some measure which the country condemned by uniting it with a number of bribes offered to many different classes; policies in which great national interests were sacrificed to personal ambition or to party tricks; the dexterity which multiplies, evades, or confuses issues, had seldom even a temporary success. The judgment of average educated men on the whole prevailed; and although that judgment may not be very quick or far-seeing, or open to new ideas, it rarely failed to arrive at a just estimate of a practical issue.
But the changes that introduced into the constituencies a much larger proportion of ignorance, indifference, or credulity soon altered the conditions of politics. The element of uncertainty was greatly increased. Politicians learned to think less of convincing the reason of the country than of combining heterogeneous and independent groups, or touching some strong chord of widespread class interest or prejudice. The sense of shame to a remarkable degree diminished. It would once have been intolerable to an English public man to believe that, in spite of all differences of opinion, he was not followed through life and to the grave by the respect of the great body of his educated fellow countrymen. This sentiment has greatly faded. Men have now become very indifferent to what they would nickname the opinion of the classes or the clubs, provided they can succeed, by the methods I have described, in winning a majority and obtaining power and office. The party game is played more keenly and more recklessly, and traditional feelings as well as traditional customs have greatly lost their force.
This tendency is increased by the extreme rush and hurry of modern life, which naturally produces some levity of character. A constant succession of new impressions and ideas takes away from societies, as from individuals, the power of feeling anything deeply and persistently. Disgrace never seems indelible when it is so soon forgotten, and the strong, steady currents of national sentiment and tendency, on which the greatness of empires depends, become impossible. Continuity of policy is more difficult, and, with a jaded political palate, the appetite for experiment and sensation becomes more powerful.
In the whole field of politics, personal and class interests seem to have grown stronger; and the latter are often not even those of a very large class. The objects of an ordinary trade strike have begun to blend powerfully with national politics. In the dockyard towns, it has long been said that questions of wages, salaries, or employment dominate over all others. There have been instances in which the political votes of the police force, of the Post-office officials, of the Civil Service clerks, have been avowedly marshalled for the purpose of obtaining particular class advantages.52 In county councils and other small elective bodies, it is probable that these motives will, in England as in America, be easily and efficaciously employed. When the votes of a body of men in a nearly balanced contest may be purchased with public money, or at least lost if public money is withheld, a higher standard of public virtue than is now general is required to resist a mode of bribery which is at once cheap, easy, and not illegal. A powerful trade union may capture a small elected body, and a weak government resting on a fluctuating and a disintegrated majority is strongly tempted to conciliate every detached group of voters.
The reader must judge for himself whether this picture is untrue or over-charged; if he believes it to be true, he will hardly question its gravity. The evil I have described is much aggravated by the very inadequate sense of the criminality of political misdeeds that prevails widely in contemporary thought. In the case of those acts of open violence and treason which are commonly described as political crimes, this may be largely traced to the time when power was in the hands of a very few, when religious liberty, and personal liberty, and liberty of expression were all unknown, and when much of the highest and purest heroism was displayed in resisting intolerable oppression. Much of the poetic glamour which was thrown over the revolutionists of those days still remains, though in nearly all countries the circumstances have wholly changed. Under the popular governments of modern times revolution is nearly always a crime, and usually a crime of the first magnitude. No one, as I have elsewhere said, ‘Who has any adequate sense of the enormous mass of suffering which the authors of a rebellion let loose upon their country will speak lightly of this crime, or of the importance of penalties