Peel and Disraeli Show How Conservatives Reform Without Wrecking

There are two ways to lose a house. You can refuse to repair the roof until the ceiling falls in, or you can burn the place down to get a better view. Both arrive at the same result. The honest conservative has always been the man who stands between those two fools, holding a hammer.

British Conservatives learned to hold the hammer in the nineteenth century, and the story of how they did it is a story with a lesson for every movement that wants to last. It features two very different men: Sir Robert Peel, the stiff, brilliant, honest son of a cotton manufacturer who changed his mind when the evidence changed, and Benjamin Disraeli, the flamboyant novelist who dished him for it and then spent two decades doing a version of the same thing. Their careers include a party split, a famine and a "leap in the dark." Let me tell it in order.

The principle first

A word about the principle, since the history illustrates it.

Edmund Burke, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), wrote a sentence that has been quoted by conservatives ever since: "A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation." That is the principle in one line. A nation that cannot adjust is not conserving anything; it is waiting for a collapse. Burke said elsewhere that the spirit of reform should be accompanied by a disposition to preserve. The two instincts, he argued, are halves of a single statesmanship. For more of his thought, see Burke's Doctrine of Prescription Says Old Institutions Deserve a Hearing and Seven Myths About Edmund Burke That His Fans and Critics Both Repeat.

The test of the principle is what happens when the reformers are knocking at the door. Do you hold the line until the door is broken down, or do you answer the knock? Peel and Disraeli are the two best case studies in how a conservative should decide.

1832: the Reform Act and the fear of collapse

In 1830 the British House of Commons was a museum. Great cities such as Manchester and Birmingham had no members of their own, while tiny "rotten boroughs," some with hardly any voters, sent members to Westminster, often at the pleasure of a local landowner. Meanwhile the country was being transformed by factories, railways and a growing middle class. The mismatch between the old representation and the new nation was an invitation to revolution, and with the memory of France in 1789 and again in 1830 across the Channel, everyone knew it.

The Whig government of Earl Grey introduced a reform bill, and after a ferocious struggle, including a Lords veto, riots in several cities and a political crisis in May 1832, the Reform Act became law that June. It abolished many rotten boroughs, gave seats to the new industrial towns and extended the vote to more property-holders, though it still left the great majority of men, and all women, without it.

Peel and the Tories opposed it, and many were certain it meant the end of everything. It did not. That is a lesson in itself: the catastrophes conservatives predict from reform are sometimes simply wrong, and the old order proved more resilient than its defenders thought. The question for the Tories was what to do next.

1834: the Tamworth Manifesto

The answer came from Peel in December 1834, in a letter to his constituents at Tamworth that became known as the Tamworth Manifesto. Peel was by then leading a short-lived minority government, and the Tories were demoralized and suspected of wanting to turn back the clock. Peel did the opposite. He told the country that he accepted the Reform Act as a "final and irrevocable settlement" of a great constitutional question. He would not try to repeal it. Instead, he promised to look carefully at the institutions of Church and State, to correct proved abuses and to remedy real grievances, while refusing to throw away what was good in the existing order.

The document is often called the founding charter of modern British conservatism, and it deserves the title. Its significance is not in any detailed program but in its posture. It says: we do not defend every old thing merely because it is old, and we do not accept every new thing merely because it is new. We will judge each on its merits, we will keep what works, and we will repair what does not. That is the posture of a party that intends to govern, not a party that intends to mourn.

Notice the contrast with the alternatives. The ultra-Tory said: reform was a mistake, so undo it. The radical said: reform was a start, so keep going until nothing is left. Peel took a third course, which is the hardest: accept the settlement, steady the ship and reform what needs reforming from inside.

Peel in office, and the things he did

Peel's record in office bears out the posture. In 1829, as Home Secretary under the Duke of Wellington, he had created the Metropolitan Police, the first modern professional police force in London, replacing a patchwork of watchmen with something that could preserve order without an army. The same year, to avoid a possible civil war in Ireland, he helped steer through Catholic emancipation, a reform he had long opposed, because he judged that refusing it had become more dangerous than granting it. Both decisions show the same habit: when the facts changed, he changed his policy and not his principles.

As Prime Minister from 1841 to 1846 he reformed the nation's finances, restored the income tax in 1842 as a temporary measure to balance the budget, passed the Bank Charter Act of 1844, which put the issue of banknotes on a firmer footing, and lowered or abolished many duties on imports. He was a conservative in the Burkean sense: devoted to sound money, stable government and the rule of law, and willing to change the details to preserve them.

1846: the repeal of the Corn Laws and the split

Then came the test that broke his party.

The Corn Laws, which dated in their most famous form to 1815, imposed duties on imported grain to protect British landowners from foreign competition. They kept the price of bread high, which helped the landed interest that dominated the Conservative Party and hurt the urban poor. The Anti-Corn Law League, led by Richard Cobden and John Bright, had campaigned against them for years. Then, in 1845, the potato blight struck Ireland, and a famine of terrible proportions began. Peel concluded that the country could not hold on to a policy that made food dearer when people were starving.

In June 1846 he carried the repeal of the Corn Laws through Parliament, with the support of the Whig opposition and against the opposition of most of his own party. The Conservatives split. The Protectionists, who included most of the party's back benches and who were led in the Commons by Lord George Bentinck and a rising orator named Benjamin Disraeli, accused Peel of betraying the interests that had elected him. On the same night the repeal bill passed its last stage in the Lords, the Commons defeated his Irish coercion bill, and he resigned. The Peelites, the loyal remnant, wandered in the political wilderness for years, and some, such as William Gladstone, eventually found a home in the Liberal Party.

Was Peel right? I'd argue he was right on the policy and costly in the politics. The repeal was sound economics and sound ethics: a tax on bread was a tax on the poor, in a famine year. But Peel had also done what a leader of a party must not do carelessly: he had changed course without bringing his own supporters along. He had been elected on protection and repealed it. That is the hazard of a reformer, and it is a lesson for every conservative leader about the cost of leaving your own camp behind. Disraeli's vicious attacks on Peel in the Commons in these years, sometimes calling him a man who had "caught the Whigs bathing and walked away with their clothes," are among the great pieces of political invective, and they were not entirely unfair.

1867: the "leap in the dark"

Now the second act, and the irony of it. The man who had destroyed Peel for changing his mind spent the next two decades learning to change his own.

By the 1860s the question of extending the vote to more working men was again unavoidable. The Liberals tried a modest bill in 1866 and it failed, in part because some of their own members rebelled. In 1867, the Conservatives were in government as a minority under the Earl of Derby, with Disraeli as Chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the Commons. Disraeli saw a chance. If the Conservatives passed a reform bill themselves, they could claim the credit, keep the initiative and shape the result.

The bill that became the Reform Act of 1867 went much further than anyone had expected at the outset. By accepting a series of amendments during the debate, and by giving the vote to householders in the boroughs, it roughly doubled the electorate and brought in a large share of the urban working class. Derby himself called it "a leap in the dark," and some of his own party, including the Marquess of Salisbury, then Lord Cranborne, resigned in protest. Disraeli carried it through by sheer parliamentary skill, outmaneuvering Gladstone at nearly every stage.

The leap turned out to be a safe one, and the party that took it became a party of government. Disraeli went on to become Prime Minister, first briefly in 1868 and then for six years from 1874. In a speech at the Crystal Palace in 1872 he laid out a conservative program that joined the defense of the Crown, the Church and the constitution with a concern for the condition of the people. His second ministry delivered on the promise with measures on public health, housing for the working class and the legal status of trade unions. The lesson was that a conservatism that cares only for the comfort of the established can be thrown out; a conservatism that serves the whole people can last.

What the critics say

Now the other side, and it is worth hearing.

The conservative purist says that Peel and Disraeli were, in fact, betrayers: that every "reform" they passed was a step on a road that led away from the old constitution, and that a real conservative would have dug in. Peel gave up protection; Disraeli gave up the franchise. At each step the line moved, and the radicals took the credit. If conservatism simply accepts what is inevitable, say the critics, what is it conserving?

The reply is that the purist's approach was tested. The ultra-Tories who tried to stop the clock lost, repeatedly, and the institutions they were trying to protect were put in greater danger by their refusal to adjust. The monarchy, the House of Lords, the established Church and the rule of law all survived the nineteenth century, while across Europe in 1848 many old regimes were shaken or toppled. The British order bent and did not break.

The better answer is the one Burke supplies. Conservation is not the same as immobility. The test is whether a reform preserves the essential structure while repairing the part that was failing. Peel's repeal kept the constitution and fed the poor. Disraeli's franchise extension brought new citizens into the established order, where they would have a stake in it. Those are not betrayals. They are repairs.

The American connection

Americans should recognize this argument, because the Founders made a version of it. The Constitution's Article V provides a lawful path for change: amendment by two-thirds of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the states. The Founders knew that a constitution with no means of change would eventually be broken by those it refused to hear. Madison, in Federalist No. 43, defended the amendment power on exactly this ground, that it guards equally against "that extreme facility, which would render the Constitution too mutable," and "that extreme difficulty, which might perpetuate its discovered faults." Change should be possible and hard. The same spirit shapes Chesterton Called Tradition the Democracy of the Dead, and He Was Right, with its insistence that tradition gets a vote, though not a veto, and Oakeshott Said Being Conservative Is a Temperament Before It Is a Program.

What the lesson asks of conservatives

Three practical rules emerge from the careers of these two men.

1. Accept the settled question. Peel did not spend his career trying to undo 1832. A movement that spends all its energy fighting yesterday's loss will never govern tomorrow. (This is a point about settled legislative questions, not about principles: a conservative does not surrender a principle because it lost an election.)
2. Reform before the revolutionaries do. Change that comes from people who love the institution is slower, cheaper and kinder than change that comes from those who hate it.
3. Bring your own side along. Peel's cost was his party. A reform that cannot be explained to your own supporters is not ready.

The lesson of Peel and Disraeli is not that conservatives should surrender. It is that the best defense of a house is to keep the roof sound.

The case in brief

1. Burke's principle holds that a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation, and Britain's nineteenth-century Conservatives put it into practice.
2. After the Reform Act of 1832, Peel's Tamworth Manifesto of 1834 accepted the settlement and promised to correct proved abuses while keeping what worked.
3. The repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 was right on the merits in a famine year but split his party, a warning about leaving your own supporters behind.
4. Disraeli's Reform Act of 1867, the "leap in the dark," roughly doubled the electorate, kept the Conservatives in the game and led to a party that served the whole people.
5. Article V of the American Constitution reflects the same wisdom: change should be possible and hard.

What you can do: read Article V on our Constitution page, then identify one rule in your own town or state that has outlived its purpose and write to your representative proposing a specific repair.