BY the middle of the Nineteenth Century it had become apparent to a small number of people that the Money power was the most evil which had ever exerted oppression upon men and women. Among that small number was Benjamin Disraeli.
Disraeli earned fame by attacking Sir Robert Peel, and so, in effect, advancing the old Tory doctrine of the God-system against the doctrine of gain of the New Conservatism. With wisdom and justice he directed his early strictures against the condition of the workers, their wives and children throughout the land.
"When I hear," he told an audience in Shrewsbury, "a political economist or an anti-Corn-Law Leaguer, or some conceited Liberal reviewer, come forward and tell us, as a grand discovery of modern science, that 'Property has its duties as well as its rights,' my answer is that that is but a feeble plagiarism of the very principle of that Feudal System which you are always reviling. Let me next tell these gentlemen, who are so fond of telling us that property has its duties as well as its rights, that labour also has its rights as well as its duties; and when I see masses of property raised in this country which do not recognize that principle . . . when I hear of all this misery and all this suffering; when I know that evidence exists in our Parliament of a state of demoralization in the once happy population of this land which is not equalled in the most barbarous countries—cannot help suspecting that this has arisen because property has been permitted to be created and held without the performance of duties."
The same note was heard a few years later (August 1844).
"There is no subject," Disraeli told his constituents, "in which I have taken a deeper interest than the condition of the working classes. . . . I had long been aware that there was something rotten in the core of our social system. I had seen that, while immense fortunes were accumulating, while wealth was increasing to a superabundance, and while Great Britain was cited throughout Europe as the most prosperous nation in the world, the working classes, the creators of wealth, were steeped in the most abject poverty and gradually sinking into the deepest degradation."
Disraeli had a shrewd idea of the nature of that "something rotten." He had founded a party called "Young England" and thus declared its mission :
"We want in the first place to impress upon society that there is such a thing as duty. We don't do that in any spirit of conceit or arrogance; we don't pretend that we are better than others, but we are anxious to do our duty and, if so, we think we have a right to call on others, whether rich or poor, to do theirs. If that principle of duty had not been lost sight of for the last fifty years you would never have heard of the classes into which England is divided. . . .
"We see but little hope for this country so long as that spirit of faction is fostered and encouraged. We call it a spirit of faction, for the principles on which the parties who nominally divide this country were originally formed have worn out and ceased to exist; and an association of men, however powerful, without political principles is not a party but a faction. Of such a state of society the inevitable result is that public passions are excited for private ends. . . ."
Disraeli, in other words, recognized the evils which subservience to the international system of Money had effected. He declared that the curse of money began with King William III, who had "introduced into England the system of Dutch finance":
"The principle (of Dutch finance) was to mortgage industry in order to protect property (money); abstractedly nothing can be conceived more unjust; its practice in England has been equally injurious. It has made debt a national habit; it has made credit the ruling power, not the exceptional auxiliary, of all transactions; it has introduced a loose, inexact, haphazard and dishonest spirit in the conduct of both public and private life; a spirit dazzling and yet dastardly; reckless of consequences and yet shrinking from responsibility. And in the end it has so overstimulated the energies of the population to maintain the material engagements of the State and of Society at large, that the moral condition of the people has been entirely lost sight of."
Never has the Money power been described with a more excellent justice, nor its responsibility for the destruction of the nations more clearly set forth. And Disraeli saw the remedy as clearly as Louis XIV, as Turgot, as Louis XVI, as George III, and as Napoleon had seen it :
"The tendency of advanced civilization is, in truth, to pure Monarchy. Monarchy is, indeed, a Government which requires a high degree of civilization for its full development. It needs the support of free laws and manners and of a widely diffused intelligence. . . . In an enlightened age the Monarch on the throne, free from the vulgar prejudices and the corrupt interests of the subject, becomes again divine.
"Toryism still lives in the thought and sentiment and consecrated memory of the English nation. It has its origin in great principles and in noble instincts; it sympathises with the lowly; it looks up to the Most High. . . . It is not dead, but sleepeth; and in an age of political materialism, of confused purposes and perplexed intelligence, that aspires only to wealth because it has faith in no other accomplishment, as men rifle cargoes on the verge of shipwreck, Toryism will yet rise from the tomb over which Bolingbroke shed his last tear, to bring back strength to the Crown, liberty to the subject, and to announce that power has only one duty; to secure the social welfare of the people."
Disraeli appeared, then, as the champion of the God-system, which "Dutch finance" had destroyed throughout Europe, and, consequently, as the enemy of the City of London. In this respect he was joined to his Sovereign and her husband, both of whom beheld with horror and shame the destruction of the English people by the Money power, and agreed with the leader of the Young England party that this destruction was not primarily attributable to the leaders of industry.
"I beg to be understood," Disraeli had told his constituents, "that I do not join in the absurd cry against the manufacturing interest of the country. I respect the talents, the industry, the indomitable energy of that powerful class, and I acknowledge them as the primary source of our wealth and greatness; and although I am not blind to the fact that great distress, and perhaps tyranny, exists in the system . . . I fear, nay I am sure, that the condition of the agricultural labourers cannot be cited to the confusion of the manufacturing capitalists."
Nevertheless Disraeli was firmly convinced that agriculture is "the soul" (in Napoleonic phrase), and that therefore the "landed interest," which is neither more nor less than the leadership of agriculture, is essential to the national well-being. Disraeli saw in a restored and awakened "landed interest" the spearhead of the attack which it was now the purpose of his life to launch against "Dutch finance." He perceived, too, that a prosperity which depended chiefly upon the accident that England had possessed steam engines before other people was not likely to be of long duration. It was scarcely conceivable that the working people of England would be willing, for ever, to see their wives, while pregnant, compelled to toil in coal pits or to stand by—the men whose fathers had broken the Old Guard at Waterloo—while brutal overseers lashed the tender flesh of their children. Men would ask, one day, on whose behalf and for whose benefit were these abominations. They would learn, at last, that their employers, in spite of their wealth, were slaves like themselves, compelled to pursue courses hateful to most of their consciences and, in any case, harmful to all their pockets. In that day master and man, whether on the land or in the factory, would recognize their common enemy, that dreadful parasite which was consuming the blood of them both.
For this great Jew was under no illusions about the "services" which "Dutch finance" was supposed to be rendering to industry. He began to see this power as something great and sinister and terrible; without scruple and without mercy; ready, for its own interest, to hurl nation against nation, class against class, man against man. He gained knowledge about the sums spent by Money in subsidizing the economists and writers favourable to its claims and in maintaining a propagandist Press, and he soon reached the conclusion that Liberalism was but a pawn of the Money power. This was Queen Victoria's view also, and explains the deep and ineradicable dislike she felt for Mr. Gladstone.