Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/23

 of the franchise, popular education, Irish land tenure, non-conformist rating, with something called the Eastern question, were the main staple of party politics. The Franco-German War of 1870 was happily kept out of English politics, and though the disestablishment of the English Church and even a spasm of Republicanism under the leadership of Dilke and Bradlaugh began to agitate a handful of “radicals” in most English towns, they did not disturb the main body of respectable Liberals. In my earliest recollection, the two Liberal members for the town were Bass and Beale, both men of means and high social standing. The first breach in high respectability was an intrusion of the semi-radical Samuel Plimsoll, felt by my father and other sober Liberals to be a somewhat dangerous innovation. But the real point of significance is that, though born and bred in an atmosphere of active Liberalism (our livelihood drawn from the conduct of a “liberal” newspaper), I had no idea, as a boy, that politics had anything to do with industry or standards of living. Nor was this merely a failure to understand a really intricate relation. At that time the two-party system was engaged half-consciously in keeping out of politics all deep and drastic issues of “the condition of the people.” Throughout his long career of public service Gladstone kept Liberalism upon issues of franchise, education, public economy, and foreign policy, hardly touching any of the graver economic issues, except when they impinged upon his Irish