ABSTRACT
Few of the intellectual and political elite looked forward to an age of mass politics without anxiety. Literary figures like Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle and George Eliot saw urban household suffrage as a weapon in the hands of anti-intellectual middle-class Dissenters and ignorant, brutal labourers. Members of the intelligentsia looked to education as the chief means of avoiding political barbarism. In Lowe's sardonic words: 'We must educate our masters to compel our future masters to learn their letters'. There is, therefore, a direct link between the 1867 Reform Act and the 1870 Education Act. There is little evidence for the argument that Disraeli and the Tory party embraced fundamental social reform under the impact of the 1867 Reform Act in order to persuade working men that the Conservatives had more to offer them than had the doctrinaire laissez-faire Liberals. and Whigs argued that 'caucuses' marked the introduction of corrupt, oligarchical and dictatorial American politics.
