ABSTRACT
W.H.Lecky Democracy and Liberty (1898) The Conservative political tradition has always had a problem with democracy. Disliking it, as the threat posed by numbers to property, liberty and civilization, Conservatives have tried both resistance and domestication. It is all there in the history of late Victorian Conservatism, as political enfranchisement combined with a nascent socialism to frighten the life out of the defenders of the old order. A string of theorists and politicians-from Maine to Mallock, Salisbury to Lecky-worried away at the shape of things to come. A democratic collectivism seemed to be the order of the day, and Conservatives did not like it.
