SHOOTING NIAGARA . ' 193

were not the same. The latter wanted to restrict the functions of
government and leave the ring clear for the individual with

talent and industry. The workers on the other hand, though the
educated and therefore' better-to-do minority among them

tended to absorb liberal middle-class sympathies, needed
state protection against the economic excesses of the in-
dividual. As soon as they realised the power which the vote
had given them, they began to demand it. They leant not towards
the classic liberalism of laissez-faire but towards that social
reform whicjj Disraeli had preached since his Young England
days and which Shaftesbury and the factory reformers had
fought for against the utilitarians.

Gladstone's programme of civic emancipation, Irish Church.
disestablishment and administrative reform therefore made
little appeal-to the working-class electorate. After a few years
of Liberal rule the country became surfeited with organic
.change. The sun of "the People's William" waned: that of
" Dizzy,9* the inspired Jew boy who had " climbed to the top of
the greasy pole,5' rose flamboyant. In 1874 for the first time in
33 years the Conservatives obtained a majority.

The date marks the dividing line between the utilitarian legis-
lation of the middle half of the nineteenth century and the
collectivist or socialist legislation which has since taken its
place. The change was in some degree due to Disraeli, who at
the age of seventy was able to apply an instalment of the social
policy which he. had advocated in his thirties. It was far more
due to the crying needs of the working classes and to the
preponderating influence in legislation which the extension' of
the franchise had given them. With every expansion 'of .the'
industrial population that preponderance- increased.

During the quarter.of a century that followed the collapse of
the Chartists the working-class movement had silently gathered
^ -momentum. In every town where skilled workers were assembled,
the Trade Unions made their appearance. The quiet years of'
widening trade and employment helped their growth, giving
them cohesion, tradition and financial reserves to meet the
stormier years ahead. Local consolidation was usually followed
by amalgamation on a national scale. The first great national *
Union, the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, was founded in
1851 with the fusion of over a hundred local trade'societies. In
the next fifteen years its membership of 12,000 more than doubled.