Tory

“ Do you wish, then, that the gods had made me political?
Touch. I do, truly; for they swear to me thou art true Tory, parson-and-squire-ridden Tory. Now, if thou wert political, I might have some hope thou didst feign—to them!
Aud. Would you not have me Tory?
Touch. No, truly, unless thou wert fortune-favoured; for Toryism coupled to poverty is to have folly a sauce to misery.
Jaq. (aside) . A shrewd fool!
Aud. Well, I am not rich; and therefore I pray the gods to make me Liberal. ”

“ Though, therefore, we admit that a modern Tory bears some resemblance to a Whig of Queen Anne’s reign, we can by no means admit that a Tory of Anne’s reign resembled a modern Whig. Have the modern Whigs passed laws for the purpose of closing the entrance of the House of Commons against the new interests created by trade? Do the modern Whigs hold the doctrine of divine right? Have the modern Whigs laboured to exclude all Dissenters from office and power? The modern Whigs are, indeed, at the present moment, like the Tories of 1712, desirous of peace, and of close union with France. ”

“ To the Tory, if he believes in it at all, it is a piece of efficient political machinery. "What use can the State make of this man?" asks the Tory. "What use can this man make of himself?" asks the Liberal. The Tory theory is expressed in terms of duties, the Liberal in terms of rights. The disposing mind is at the back of the one, the encouraging mind at the back of the other. ”

“ I am glad I have convinced thee at last that thou art a Tory. Your friend's definition of Whig and Tory must be just, for aught I know, as far as the latter are concerned; but respecting the former, I think him mistaken. There is no TRUE Whig who wishes all power in the hands of his own party. The division of it which the lawyers call tripartite is exactly what he desires; and he would have neither king, lords, nor commons unequally trusted, or in the smallest degree predominant. Such a Whig am I, and such Whigs are the true friends of the constitution.
Adieu! my dear ”

“ The Tory reverses the dogma, and even when he pursues the good of individuals, he pursues it rather in order to make them better soldiers or workers, that is to say, better servants of the State, than to make them better in themselves. Democratic government to the Liberal is an essential condition of the free growth of the individual soul. To the Tory, if he believes in it at all, it is a piece of efficient political machinery. ”

“ Strait is the gate and narrow is the way that leadeth to Reform, but broad is the way that leadeth to Corruption, and multitudes there are that walk therein. The Tory is sure to be in the thickest of them. His principle is to follow the leader; and this is the infallible rule to have numbers and success on your side, to be on the side of success and numbers. Power is the rock of his salvation; priestcraft is the second article of his implicit creed. He does not trouble himself to inquire which is the best form of government—but he knows that the reigning monarch is "the best of kings." ”

“ Some who will not venture to assert, that the real difference between Whig and Tory, was lost at the Revolution, seem inclined to think that the difference is now abolished, and that affairs are so far returned to their natural state, that there are at present no other parties amongst us but Court and Country; that is, men who, by interest or principle, are attached either to Monarchy or to Liberty. It must indeed be confessed, that the Tory party seem of late to have decayed much in their numbers, still more in their zeal, and I may venture to say, still more in their credit and authority. ”

“ The word Tory, as here applied, must not be confounded with the term of party distinction now in general use in the political world. It simply means a thief on a grand scale, something more than "a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles," or petty-larceny rascal. We have classical authority for this:—Tory: "An advocate for absolute monarchy; also, an Irish vagabond, robber, or rapparee."—Grose's Dictionary. ”

“ If people are frightened at the Tories, we'll turn round and frighten them. You know what a Tory is—one who wants to drive the workingman as he'd drive cattle. That's what a Tory is; and a Whig is no better, if he's like Garstin. A Whig wants to knock the Tory down and get the whip, that's all. But Transome's neither Whig nor Tory; he's the workingman's friend, the collier's friend, the friend of the honest navvy. And if he gets into Parliament, let me tell you it will be better for you. ”

“ To the Tory, the Empire seems to be something in itself; he is impressed with its size, its wealth, its population; the mere existence of such a huge fabric, efficiently maintained, under the national flag, satisfies him. The Liberal is more concerned with what the Empire represents, with its maintenance of individual liberty, with its development of the subject peoples which it contains, with its encouragement to exploitation, with its implied antagonism to foreign peoples, with its increase of the cost of armaments, and with its effect upon the temper of domestic government. ”

“ The Capital should suffer from Tory sway no more;
By the Nine Points he swore it, and named a trysting day,
And bade his messengers ride forth east and west, and south and north,
To summon his array.
East and west, and south and north the messengers ride fast;
From Kennington to Poplar they've heard the trumpet's blast.
Shame on the false Caucusian who loiters in his Club
When triple-chin'd HARCURTIUS prepares the foe to drub!
Too long the Capital hath borne the stubborn Tory yoke,
Too long the Liberals have failed to strike a swashing stroke. ”

“ On the contrary, it cuts both ways; but while the Whig says ‘The Tory is a knave, because he is a Tory,’ this is as much as to say, ‘I cannot be a knave, because I am a Whig;’ and by exaggerating the profligacy of his opponent, he imagines he is laying the sure foundation, and raising the lofty superstructure of his own praises. ”

“ Parliament and the Tory.
“Every one is acquainted with Moore’s beautiful poem of Paradise and the Peri, in which the fallen spirit is represented as seeking on earth for a boon to regain the heaven she has lost. The story assimilates closely to a late affair, in which a certain military Tory (the Duke of Wellington) , having lost the heaven of place (to him far more desirable than any place in heaven) devised all kinds of tricks to regain his former position. ”

“ He loved the Tory people and used to plan many times to go back and visit them. Tory has a sort of fascination about it, it looks so remote and unreal, "like an opal jewel in a pale blue sea," he described it once in a letter. ”

“ At the time of our Revolution it is a historical fact that about one third of our population was Tory in its mental attitude. Many of the Tories, quite possibly most of them, were actuated by a sincere and deep conviction that it was better for every one that human beings should be subjects. That conviction had been the basis of nearly all science of government for centuries. ”

“ As certainly as the despot remains a despot, whether his motives are good or bad, so certainly does the Tory remain a Tory, whether he has egoistic or altruistic motives for using state-power to restrict individual liberty, beyond the degree required for maintaining the liberties of other individuals. ”

“ The French Revolution made an end of that old distinction in which the Tory was known as the upholder of Crown-prerogative and the Whig as the supporter of a constitutional oligarchy of great families. It created that new political antagonism in which, whether under the names of Whig and Tory, or of Liberal and Conservative, two great parties have contended, one for a series of beneficial changes, the other for the preservation of the existing order. The convulsions of France and the dread of revolutionary agitation in England transformed both Pitt and the Whigs by whom he was opposed. ”

“ There was one Tory poster that represented the interior of a public house; in front of the bar, with a quart pot in his hand, a clay pipe in his mouth, and a load of tools on his back, stood a degraded-looking brute who represented the Tory ideal of what an Englishman should be; the letterpress on the poster said it was a man! This is the ideal of manhood that they hold up to the majority of their fellow countrymen, but privately—amongst themselves—the Tory aristocrats regard such “men” with far less respect than they do the lower animals. ”

“ The Liberal conception of the State makes the development of the individual an end in itself. The Tory conception makes it a means of public advantage, of obtaining workers for national industries and soldiers for national armies, and it is accompanied by proposals for conscription, protection, and the maintenance of popular education at a low level, which are redolent of restriction and subordination. ”

“ During that Revolution, human beings in America, in conformity with their respective beliefs in the Tory or the American concept of the relation of human being to government, had been divided into what history knows as the Tories and the Americans. Many of the human beings, assembled in those conventions of ten or twelve years later, had been sincere Tories in the days of the Revolution. ”

“ On every account it was a good thing that the old Tory rule was broken up, but chiefly for this that when the thing was done by strong compulsion of fact, of necessity men were beginning to look for the principle of the change, and thereby to obtain some insight into the views of the parties that had governed, or would or might govern, the country. ”

“ A Tory is one who is governed by sense and habit alone. He considers not what is possible, but what is real; he gives might the preference over right. He cries Long Life to the conqueror, and is ever strong upon the stronger side—the side of corruption and prerogative. ”

“ For, on collation of such clauses with their causes, I find, and therefore take (under correction always) the rabid Tory to be—a temperate lover of order, whom his mother has taught to "fear God," his father to "honour the king," and his pastor to "meddle not with them who are given to change." A rabid Tory, in matters of national expenditure, remembers to have heard an old unexploded proverb, "There is that scattereth, and yet increaseth, and there is that withholdeth what is due, but it tendeth to poverty;" ”

“ Now, I don’t mean to say but that at the back of this ancient name of Tory there lies a great mass of genuine Conservative feeling, held by people who, if they had their own way, would play some rather fantastic tricks, I fancy ”

“ To call a man a Whig was to compare him with the Presbyterian rebels of the west of Scotland. To call a man a Tory was to compare him with the Papist outlaws of Ireland. In fact, at this time the Whigs were maintainers of parliamentary power over the crown and of toleration for Dissenters, the Tories maintainers of the hereditary indefeasible rights of the wearer of the crown and of the refusal of toleration to Dissenters. ”

“ The effects of these changes soon became palpable. The political atmosphere was altogether different; and an entirely new set of influences was governing the policy of statesmen. The change affected the Tory as much as the Whig. However strongly he might believe that he was carrying on the old methods, he was affected by the new ideas which had been almost unconsciously incorporated in his creed. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 ”

“ Every good Tory knows that his Party alone is to thank for the glorious certainties that Britannia rules the waves, that an Englishman's house is his castle, and that journeymen tailors earn fourpence an hour more than they were paid in the thirteenth century. ”

“ The pure Tory is of course as rare as the pure Liberal, and neither of the two groups, which are at any particular time described as Liberal and Tory, corresponds exactly with the habit of mind associated with its name. ”

“ It evidently includes the great body of the piety, Christian enterprise, and [Pg 123] sterling virtue of the nation. It is, in time of party excitement, alike hated and denounced by the ultra Tory, the crabbed Whig, and the Radical leveller. Such was our impression of the true character of what, by the periodical press in England, is termed a moderate Tory. From his theories we in some respects dissent; but his integrity, his honesty, his consistency, his genuine liberality, and religious beneficence, claim respect and imitation. ”