ABSTRACT
Socially and politically, the late Victorians never escaped from the shadow of the Second Reform Act. The affair of the Hyde Park Railings and Disraeli’s subsequent ‘leap in the dark’ shook the morale of all who were not radicals almost as much as did the uncertain fortunes of wheat and coal and textiles. For the rest of the century they drifted rather despondently along in the direction to which the act had pointed them, allowing themselves to be dragged towards Democracy, and what they were pleased to call ‘Socialism’, in the hope that if they did not struggle too much they might somehow manage to keep afloat. In a sense it was fortunate for them that Gladstone, though he talked so often about the virtues of ‘the masses’, diverted everybody’s political attention in the 1880s to the Irish question and in doing so left Liberalism without a head and Radicalism without a home, while at the same time
bequeathing the Conservative Unionist alliance the valuable electoral assets of patriotism and Imperialism. It was also fortunate for the men of property that Salisbury, though opposed on principle to the Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884, was by nature non-belligerent and, whether in foreign or domestic politics, usually in favour of doing whatever was least spectacular. He accepted that the stirring dogs of democracy were unlikely ever to lie down again; he was sure that, in the end, no good would come of this; but he was always as careful as possible not to excite them. When it became evident that under his premiership the Empire was becoming larger and larger, he waved no flags himself because he so greatly detested vulgarity and because his deep private Christian convictions were of a sort that made him the only Victorian minister after the irreligious Melbourne who believed that nothing whatever that one did in the political sphere would ever transform a sinful world into a virtuous one. He regularly dodged the limelight because he knew it would reveal a countenance as firmly fixed on the past as Prince Metternich’s. Thus, Salisbury quietly accumulated a fund of popular goodwill which was all the greater because he seemed so majestically aloof from all the stridencies of the era over which he presided.
