False Economy - Alan Beattie [130]
Part of the reason, perhaps, that democratic reform in Britain has always tended to be piecemeal is that there have been few failures or disasters of sufficient magnitude to force rapid transformation. The loss of the American colonies was enough to put Hastings, and by extension the culture of the East India Company, on trial, but not to force immediate radical change. Burke and his fellow reformers also wanted stricter limitations on the ability of the royal household to hand out posts and sinecures to its favorites, which they said corrupted political life. But Burke argued for gradual, organic reform, tweaking existing institutions rather than destroying them in favor of new ones. He recoiled in horror from the cataclysmic change that took place across the Channel in 1789, where a true sense of crisis brought revolution, and the old forms of institutionalized corruption came to a crashing end.
In the era before general modern taxation—income tax in Britain was not introduced until 1798, and then to fund the wars against Napoleon—the state had to find creative ways to fund itself. Selling offices was one of the most obvious. They brought both social prestige and monopolies of certain services or functions, such as the grain-milling we encountered in the chapter on cities. James I of England, who had difficulty increasing taxation with an uncooperative Parliament, created an entirely new category of hereditary "baronets" to raise money. Meanwhile officers in the British army bought their positions, thus helping to finance military campaigns.
France had a similar system. But the disillusion set in earlier, particularly with the practice of selling military commissions to the nobility and then relying on the resulting officer class to recruit what were more or less private regiments. The feeble performance of the French army on the battlefields of the Seven Years' War in the middle of the eighteenth century, notably against the more professional Prussian armies, suggested that privately run regiments had been tested in the toughest possible marketplace and found wanting. The French Revolution itself, in 1789, was in a sense a wider crisis of the French nobility, which had failed to restrain the monarchy sufficiently to deliver better government. Once the king had been overthrown, the sale of public offices was immediately abolished and replaced, at least in theory, with a system of state officials and army officers chosen on merit.
In Britain, exactly as the gradualist Burke would have predicted, change happened more slowly. As individual institutions showed they were not just corrupt but incompetent, they were reformed. A separate Irish Parliament in Dublin, if anything more venal than the Westminster equivalent, was abolished only in 1801 after a rebellion in 1798 showed it had manifestly failed in its task of keeping Ireland subservient. Britain's system of purchasing military commissions ensured that the army continued to be officered largely by the aristocracy. But it survived a while longer thanks to British military successes in the wars of the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, culminating in the Duke of Wellington's victory over Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815 (very greatly helped, it must be said, by the Prussian professionals). Why change a winning team, even if the star players bought their places in the squad?
The gentlemanly/amateurish system lasted until the shambles of the Crimean War in the mid—nineteenth century, in which the British commanders' military and organizational incompetence were on spectacular display—most notoriously in the disastrous charge of the Light Brigade in the Battle of Balaclava, the result of a misunderstood order. Wellington is credited (perhaps wrongly) with the remark that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, one of the schools most favored by Britain's aristocratic elite. A century later, George Orwell, himself an old Etonian and one of the most brilliant