Tories (British politics)

“ In politics, we were harmonious—we were Tories to a man, and defied the Radicals of all classes, ranks, and conditions. We deplored the ruin of our country, and breathed a sigh over the depression of the agricultural interest. ”

“ The dislike, be it greater or less in fact, appears to me to rest upon two main foundations.
In the first place, the Englishman is a born Conservative, or, to use the old phrase, a Tory. Toryism is of two kinds,—political and social. The majority of the nation is certainly not, at the present day, Tory in political preferences, though there is still a large leaven of that feeling also. But very many persons who are political Liberals are social Tories: they venerate the aristocracy ”

“ I am out of politics, of course, but I would go far and do much to destroy the Unionists. To them and them alone is due coercion and all the train of evils and the denial of obvious and safe improvements in England and Scotland. I have no feeling against the Tories; there must be such people in every old-established and aristocratic country, and they at least are honest and act steadily on principle. ”

“ In order, however, that men may be able to think, speak, and do as they deem right, it is necessary that the people shall rule, and that the majority, when it has made up its mind, shall have the power to carry out its decree. Even the Tories of these days will not dispute this principle, and, therefore, Liberals cannot claim it as at this moment their own; and yet, broadly speaking, the root idea of the Tory party is the aristocratic theory that the few ought to govern the many, while that [Pg 44] of the Liberal party is the democratic, that the many ought to govern the few. ”

“ The great body of the Tories, on the other hand, are thirsting for office: they are, or pretend to be, greatly alarmed at the Radical tendencies of the Government, but they are well aware that in the actual state of the House of Commons they have the power of keeping the Government in check and of defeating every Radical scheme while in opposition, but that it would be dangerous to attempt to turn them out and take their places. ”

“ A system originally sound and good could well become corrupt and bad under a changed condition of affairs, and if Tories were pledged to resist any sort of change, bad or good—well, they at once placed themselves in a false position, and made their own extinction only a matter of time. He maintained that the true Tory aimed always for the best and soundest policy, the policy that would make England respected abroad and prosperous at home. ”

“ Were the Tory party led by genuine Tories it would have been extinct long ago. It lives and looks upon the earth, it has its triumphs and its gains, its present and its future, only because by very virtue of its own dulness it has allowed itself to be led by men whom it ought to detest, whom it sometimes does distrust, but who have the wit to sell principle in the dearest market, and buy reputation in the cheapest. ”

“ The Tory party has always, of late years, had to call in the aid of brilliant outsiders, political renegades, refugees from broken-down agitations, disappointed and cynical deserters from the Liberal camp, or mere adventurers, to fight their battles for them. It used to be quite a curious sight, some three or four years ago, when the Tories were, as they are now again, in opposition, to look down from the gallery of the House of Commons and see the men who did gladiatorial duty for the party. ”

“ The Tory finds the good of the individual in the strength of the State. The Liberal finds the strength of the State in the good of the individual. Where the one seeks to maintain and use, the other seeks to ease, to alter, and to readjust, binding himself to no particular scheme of political or economic construction, but ready to apply to each case of individual hardship, as it arises, such devices as he can invent.
Practical Toryism, the theory as it has been expressed in actual politics, has been until recent years the Toryism of a governing class. But no class has a monopoly of it. ”

“ It must be owned, however, that what is now going to happen is another exemplification of what I have long seen to be an established fact in politics—viz. that the Tories only can carry Liberal measures. The Whigs work, prepare, but cannot accomplish them; the Tories directly or indirectly thwart, discourage, and oppose them till public opinion compels them to submit, and then they are obliged to take them up, and to do that which they can do, but the Whigs cannot do. ”

“ The gravity with which such remedial measures as this were proposed shows how utterly the Tories had failed to understand their business. It is always the habit of a Tory to suppose that popular discontent is a matter of preaching. It is always preached up, and it can always be preached down. The people ask for bread, and the Tories offer them a dogma. The Government of 1819 was no wiser than its predecessors, and it applied itself with great diligence to convert the people by words from a disposition which arose directly out of a combination of low wages and high prices. ”

“ The Whigs then expect to gain by the new elections and to obtain an accession of strength to their Government. They think the popularity of a new reign, and the partial neutrality of the Tory principle, will be of material advantage to their cause. The Tories, though they maintain that they shall not lose at the elections, evidently feel that they take the field under a great disadvantage, and do not deny that the King’s death has been a heavy blow to them as a party. ”

“ The Tories are dangerous innovators. Our political progress has consisted in setting aside "the leading subtleties which grew up from the thirteenth century to the seventeenth," and reverting "to the plain common sense of the eleventh or tenth, and of times far earlier." ”

“ The Tory damns the Whig, for maintaining a resistance, which he himself never fails to practice; and the Whig reproaches the Tory with slavish principles, yet calls him rebel if he do not practice them. The truth is, all men dread the power of oppression out of their own hands, and almost all men wish it irresistible when it is there.
We change sides every day, yet keep the same names for ever. I have known a man a staunch Whig for a year together, yet thought and called a Tory by all the Whigs, and by the Tories themselves. ”

“ Even if this be allowed—and, carried to its logical extent, it would justify every piece of “political legerdemain” (the phrase applied by Lord Salisbury himself to Mr. Disraeli’s Reform Bill) the Tory party has ever perpetrated, or may ever attempt—Liberals need not shrink from the test. For the Tories, as they have ever done, are now shrinkingly and fearsomely following in the paths the Liberals years ago laid down, with just sufficient deviation to prove that the old Adam of reaction is not dead. ”

“ In the debates which followed these resolutions both parties put forth their whole strength. There was a motive for this on either side. The Whigs knew, that if their adversaries triumphed, such restrictions would be laid on the power and patronage of the regent, as would render it impossible for them to carry on the administration, and would render all the business of government unprofitable and uncertain; while, on the other hand, the Tories knew that by their success they should secure the favour of the king more firmly than ever, if he should be able to resume his functions. ”

“ He gibed at the Tories; but the Tories forgave him because he was half a Tory at heart,--he utterly distrusted popular instincts and was afraid of popular ignorance. He was rarely warm for the actual measures of the Liberals; but the Liberals knew that he intensely despised the pig-headed obstructiveness of the typical Tory, and had no kinship with the blind worshipers of the status quo. ”

“ Another favouring influence not understood outside England was to be found in the character of the party he led. In his day the Tories, being the party of the property-holders, and having not to advance but to stand still, not to propose changes but to resist them, having bonds of interest as well as of sentiment to draw them close together, possessed a cohesion, a loyalty to their chiefs, a tenacious corporate spirit, far exceeding what was to be found among their adversaries, who were usually divided into a moderate or Whig and an advanced or Radical section. ”

“ There is a natural tendency to reaction in English popular opinion, and a tendency to murmur against whichever party may be in power. This tendency must soon have told in favour of the Tories, with little effort on their own part ”

“ Liberalism appears to me to have gained a much stronger and wider influence than it had before I went away; liberal opinions have certainly spread, and I suppose will spread indefinitely. Toryism, on the other hand, seems as steadfast in its old strongholds as ever; the Tories, I see, are quite as wedded as formerly to their political faith, but at the same time more afraid of all that is not themselves, more on the defensive, more socially exclusive ”

“ The present struggle is not between the people and the Tories, it is one against both Whig and Tory—it is between you, the Parliament, and the people; for you do not represent the nation, you have made yourselves a class against the nation. Some of you may be the nominees of dukes, earls, marquises, and barons for boroughs in which the voters are political serfs, and to such of you I declare that you are a dishonour to our country, a disgrace to our House of Commons. ”

“ We have to take into account, too, that even dust is not raised without a cause; and so in public we sit, Radicals all, in solemn inquiry into things, with plenty of Westminster stage thunder, while behind the scenes we get in good old Tory heavy work, not necessarily [Pg 260] because we are Tories, but because Toryism serves a useful purpose just at present. Once or twice lately I have disobeyed my doctor, and stayed at the office for tea, so closely in touch have I had to keep with various Committees and Conferences ”

“ But the Toryism of men who only know they had a grandfather by inference, not by positive testimony; who inherited nothing but their bare limbs; who began their career as tradesmen or mechanics,—mechanics in divinity or law as well as in trade,—and get their bread by any of the useful and honourable callings of life—that such men, getting rich, or lifting their heads out of the obscurity they were once in, should become Tories, in a land, too, where institutions are founded on the idea of freedom and equity and natural justice—that is another thing. ”

“ The Tory foresaw an easier mode of gaining money for the government he abhorred, with a firmer hold on the people for the monarch he despised, and his antagonism bore all the energy of political partisanship. ”

“ No sooner were the people in control of the government than they divided into hostile parties: the liberal Whigs, who were determined to safeguard popular liberty, and the conservative Tories, with tender memories of kingcraft, who would leave as much authority as possible in the royal hands. On the extreme of Toryism was a third party of zealots, called the Jacobites, who aimed to bring the Stuarts back to the throne, and who for fifty years filled Britain with plots and rebellion. The literature of the age was at times dominated by the interests of these contending factions. ”

“ Is not England, with spinning-jenny PEEL at the head of its affairs, in this precise predicament? England may live; but inactive, torpid; unfitted for all healthful exertion,—deprived of its grandest functions—paralyzed in its noblest strength. We have a Tory Cabinet, but where is the brain of statesmanship?
Now, however, there are no Tories. Oh, no! Sir ROBERT PEEL is a Conservative—LYNDHURST is a Conservative—all are Conservative. Toryism has sloughed its old skin, and rejoices in a new coat of many colours ”

“ We say this would be but fair, because the Tories, with as little reason, have a thousand times demanded, "What good has the Reform Bill done?"—knowing, full well, that no benefit could possibly result from that measure until a Parliament, chosen under the new system, had been elected, and that, even then, the results could only be slowly developed. But the effects of the dominance of Toryism, in our city, come more rapidly. ”

“ The Tories showed no inclination to trust men whom they considered as their betrayers, and they resisted them as statesmen who had abused their power, and coalesced with their political antagonists, to force upon the country a measure contrary to its opinions, interests, and institutions. They resisted them, also, as politicians who, to effect their purpose had abandoned their tenets, betrayed and surprised their own confiding adherents, and introduced as a principle into the conduct of government, that everything was to be granted which was demanded by clamorous agitation. ”

“ As the war drew to its close and it became plain to every one that the cause of the patriots must triumph, the feeling between the two parties of Americans became less bitter; and the Tories, in many cases, saw that it would be wise for them to accept the situation, and become loyal citizens of the United States of America, as before they had been loyal subjects of Great Britain. ”

“ But the leaders of this "people's party," men like the Clintons of the State of New York, were sometimes as aristocratic in their social life as the leaders of the Federalists. During the Revolutionary War the only parties were those who aimed at national independence, and the Royalists, or Tories, who did not wish to sever their connection with the mother-country; but these Tories had no political influence when the government was established under Washington. ”