Arnold, Matthew, 1822-1888; Critics -- Great Britain -- Biography; Poets, English -- 19th century -- Biography
Then again, with reference to Irish land, his belief in the action of
the State displayed itself very clearly. In his opinion the remedy for
agrarian trouble in Ireland was that the State should, after rigid and
impartial enquiry, distinguish between good landlords and bad, and then
expropriate the bad ones. This, he thought, would "give the sort of
equity, the sort of moral satisfaction, which the case needed." Once
again he was in harmony with Liberal opinion, when he desired to widen
the basis of the State by extending the suffrage in turn to the Artisans
and the Labourers. In one respect at least he was in harmony rather with
Collectivist Radicalism than with orthodox Liberalism, for he did not in
the least dread the intervention of the State between employer and
employed. He desired to strengthen Parliament, the supreme organ of the
national will, by reforming the House of Lords; though he strongly
dissented from a scheme of reform just then in vogue. "One can hardly
imagine sensible men planning a Second Chamber which should not include
the Archbishop of Canterbury, or which should include the young
gentlemen who flock to the House of Lords when pigeon-shooting is in
question. But our precious Liberal Reformers are for retaining the
pigeon-shooters and for expelling the Archbishop of Canterbury."[23]
Even in the full flood of Liberal victory which followed the General
Election of 1880, he saw what was coming. "What strikes one is the
insecureness of the Liberals' hold upon office and upon public favour;
the probability of the return, perhaps even more than once, of their
adversaries to office, before that final and happy consummation is
reached--the permanent establishment of Liberalism in power." And, while
he saw what was coming, he thus divined the cause. The official and
commanding part of the Liberal Party was at the best stolidly
indifferent to Social Reform; at the worst, viciously angry with the
idea and those who propagated it. The commercialism of the great Middle
Class had covered the face of England with places like St. Helens, which
the capitalists called "great centres of national enterprise," and
Cobbett called "Hell-Holes." In these places life was lived under
conditions of squalid and hideous misery, and the inhabitants were
beginning to find out, in the words of one of their own class, that
"free political institutions do not guarantee the well-being of the
toiling class." Under these circumstances it was natural that the
toilers, having looked for redress to the Liberal Party and looked in
vain, should, when next they had the chance, try a spell of that
Democratic Toryism which at any rate held out some shadowy hope of
social betterment. Arnold's misgivings about the future of the Liberal
Party were abundantly made good by the General Election of 1885; but
enough has now been said about his contribution to the practical
politics of his time. A much larger space must be given to the influence
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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