Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [9]
So sincere and certain was his conviction of that “superior fitness” that in 1867 when the Tory Government espoused the Second Reform Bill, which doubled the electorate and enfranchised workingmen in the towns, Salisbury at thirty-seven flung away Cabinet office within a year of first achieving it rather than be party to what he considered a betrayal and surrender of Conservative principles. His party’s reversal, engineered by Disraeli in a neat enterprise both to “dish the Whigs” and to meet political realities, was regarded with abhorrence by Lord Cranborne (as Lord Robert Cecil had then become, his elder brother having died in 1865). Though it might ruin his career he resigned as Secretary for India and in a bitter and serious speech spoke out in the House against the policy of the party’s leaders, Lord Derby and Mr. Disraeli. He begged the members not to do for political advantage what would ultimately destroy them as a class. “The wealth, the intelligence, the energy of the community, all that has given you that power which makes you so proud of your nation and which makes the deliberations of this House so important, will be numerically absolutely overmatched.” Issues would arise in which the interests of employers and employed would clash and could only be decided by political force, “and in that conflict of political force you are pitting an overwhelming number of employed against a hopeless minority of employers.” The outcome would “reduce to political insignificance and extinction the classes which have hitherto contributed so much to the greatness and prosperity of their country.”
A year later, on his father’s death, he entered the House of Lords as third Marquess of Salisbury. In 1895, after the passage of nearly thirty years, his principles had not shifted an inch. With no belief in change as improvement, nor faith in the future over the present, he dedicated himself with “grim acidity” to preserving the existing order. Believing that “rank, without the power of which it was originally the symbol, was a sham,” he was determined, while he lived and governed England, to resist further attack on the power of that class of which rank was still the visible symbol. Watchful of approaching enemies, he stood against the coming age. The pressures of democracy encircled, but had not yet closed in around, the figure whom Lord Curzon described as “that strange, powerful, inscrutable, brilliant, obstructive deadweight at the top.”
The average member of the ruling class, undisturbed by Lord Salisbury’s too-thoughtful, too-prescient mind, did not worry deeply about the future; the present was so delightful. The Age of Privilege, though assailed at many points and already cracking at some, still seemed, in the closing years of the Nineteenth Century and of Victoria’s reign, a permanent condition. To the privileged, life appeared “secure and comfortable.… Peace brooded over the land.” Undoubtedly Sir William Harcourt’s budget of 1894, enacted by the Liberals during the premiership of Lord Rosebery, Mr. Gladstone’s rather inappropriate successor, sent a tremor through many. It introduced death duties—and what was worse, introduced them on a graduated principle from 1 per cent on estates of £500 to 8 per cent on estates of over a million pounds. And it increased the income tax by a penny to eightpence in the pound. Although to soften the blow and equalize the burden it imposed a tax on beer and spirits so that the working class, who paid no income tax, would contribute