198 ENGLISH SAGA

The same government introduced an Artisans' Dwelling
Bill, empowering local authorities to demolish insanitary
dwellings and replace them by houses built expressly for
working men. The measure was not compulsory but only
permissive.1 It was no more than a tentative beginning: a
mere drop in the still rising ocean of slum. Yet its ultimate
effect was revolutionary. For it revived, in however dim a
form, the ancient ideal of the state as the guardian of the
people's homes.

Behind all this legislation lay the silent voting power of the
workers. In 1874 there were returned to the House of Commons
two men who were to be the pioneers of a mighty army. Even at
the time Alexander Macdonald and Thomas Burt, the first two
working-class M.P.'s, were something of a portent among the
landed squires and thriving manufacturers at Westminster.
Burt was Secretary of the Northumberland Miners* Association,
which, by helping to establish that the occupants of colliery
houses, though not paying rates direct, were entitled to voting
rights like the compound householders in the towns, had secured
a majority of pitmen in the constituency of Morpeth. These
representatives of the sons of toil tended at first to vote with
Disraeli's "gentlemen of England" rather than with his oppon-
ents. Macdonald told his constituents in 1879 that the Conserva-
tive party had "done more for the working classes in five years
than the Liberals in fifty."

For the old Jew, now nearing his end, for all his absorption
in duchesses and oriental splendour, believed in a tory democracy
and saw in the working man, with his native prejudices and
conservative instincts, an ally against the levelling ^utilitarian
forces he had fought all his life. He did not believe that the
simple, pleasure-loving Englishman in the craftsman's square
cap and apron wanted the drab uniformity so dear to Benthamite
pedants. In his own phrase he made it his task to " soften the
feelings of the working multitude.*12 By redressing injustices he
sought to end the fatal gulf between the "two Englands" which
more clearly than any other public man he had perceived in his

* * Permissive legislation," Disraeli explained, "is the character of a free people.
It is easy to adopt compulsory legislation when you have to deal with those who only
exist to obey, but |n a free country and especially a country like England, you must
trust to persuasion and example as the two great elements if you wish to effect any
coonderaHe changes in the manners of the people,*—JMMy>w»y and Buckle, //, 731.

* Moaypenry ana Buckle* //, 773.