The British Political Tradition

198 UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY Lost-undiminished hy eighteen years of scholarly patience and academic fortitude-will induce them to consider the superiority of Milton 's poem in the terms appropriate to poetry. But he will also induce them to meditate on the long tradition and the immediate historical process without whose failures and partial successes even Milton's genius would not have been able to raise an argument to a height above the Aonian mount while it pursued "things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme." THE BRITISH POLITICAL TRADITION' A. BRADY Whatever the names of movements and parties during the past century, there have been two principal strands in the British political tradition: the conservative, emphasizing a sane continuity in society and the state, and the progressive, emphasizing prompt change in order to achieve a more rational and humane order. Rarely are the two traditions sharply differentiated. There are conservative elements in Britain's liberalism, and liberal elements in its conservatism. Macaulay on one occasion told the House of Commons: "I am at once a Liberal and a Conservative politician." Most politicians, like Macaulay, stage their battles in the intervening territory between the two political poles, and all more or less adopt a characteristic British empirical attitude. Religious ideas and sentiments have abundantly fed both traditions, and with diminishing power continue to feed them. Adherents of the Dissenting sects and the Established Church are present in both camps, either contending for reform or retarding it. Confusing interactions of attitude arc sometimes discerned in the same individual. With evangelical zeal Lord Shaftesbury sought factory laws to protect women and children against a harsh industrial exploitation, but at the same time he was prompt to oppose state education because, as he remarked, "a scheme for local rates to maintain the education of the people is a death warrant to the teaching of the evangelical religion." Matthew Arnold commented on the fact that many Nonconformists distrusted the state because of its former restrictions on their own religious freedom, and their distrust hampered the development in England of a healthy collectivism. On the other hand some zealots for the Liberal and Labour causes came from the Nonconformist ranks. Keir Hardie, founder of the Independent Labour *A . J. Mundella. 1825- 1897: T he Libe,.al Background to the Labour Movement. By W. H. G. AR),IYTAGE. London: Ernest Benn Limited. 1951. Pp. xii, 386. 30s. British Working Class Movements: Select Documents 1789- 1875. By G. D. H. COLE and A. W. FILSON. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd. [Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada LimitedJ, 1951. Pp. xxii, 629. $8.50. REVIEWS 199 party, was a lay preacher, who, with others like himself, brought the fervour of the Nonconformist chapel to the political platform. The two British political traditions have also been profoundly shaped by transformations in the social structure and their influence on the attitudes of the social classes. In nineteenth-century England the most significant social fact was the maintenance of a bridge between the middle classes and the workers. To it were partly due the triumphs of liberalism in the late nineteenth century as well as those of Labour in the twentieth. The sharp collision of classes, issuing in a social revolution like that predicted by Marx and Engels, was prevented by the stability of the bridge. Here we are not concerned to examine the forces involved in this circumstance, but merely to note how two different volumes under review throw light on them. In A.]. Mundella, 1825-1897, Mr. W. H. G. Armytage illustrates not merely what he calls "the Liberal background to the Labour movement " but no less significantly the Labour background to the Liberal party during the last thirty years of the nineteenth century. Mundella was a self-made man who achieved success as a hosiery manufacturer. In early youth he experienced the uncertain employment and meagre earnings of the lace-makers, shared some of the aggressive enthusiasms current among the Chartists, sought later as a successful manufacturer to harmonize relations between workers and employers by the device of arbitration, and devoted the last twenty-nine years of his life to parliamentary and ministerial activity in the interests of Gladstone's...