ABSTRACT
This article refutes five of the historical charges made against Toryism – its love of arbitrary power, its corruption in the exercise of government, its connection with boroughmongering, its responsibility for the late war and the National Debt, and its opposition to the freedom of the press. In each case, Fraser’s mobilises counter-evidence and distinguishes Tories, as supporters of the British constitution, from ‘Radicals or Republicans, who in various shades and degrees, dislike, and would remodel that constitution’.
The discussion proceeds to outline a positive case for Toryism, which it sees as ‘a series of principles, not a confederacy of individuals’. These principles are defined in terms of attachment to the British constitution; ‘a conviction that there is a right and wrong in religion’; a commercial policy based upon ensuring the prosperity and comfort of the British people; and ‘a decided predilection for legitimacy, or the dominion of law, in all things, but especially in royal succession’.
The article is not uncritical of its leaders. In particular, it upbraids Wellington for the passage of Catholic Emancipation in 1829 and Peel for the deleterious operation of the return to the Gold Standard which he recommended in 1819. The real purpose of the article is an appeal to the party’s leaders to gain ‘a better understanding … of their own principles’ and a pledge to end the ‘ruinous quackery of the economists’. This was unlikely to be palatable to Wellington or Peel, both of whom resisted the reform of the currency.
