Karl Marx 
The Elections—Tories and Whigs 

New-York Daily Tribune. 
Nr.3540, 21. August 1852 

The Elections—Tories and Whigs. 

Correspondence of The N. Y. Tribune. 

London, Friday, Aug. 6, 1852. 
The results of the General-Election for the British Parliament are now 
known. This result I shall analyze more fully in my next letter. 

What were the parties which during this electioneering agitation opposed 
or supported each other? 

Tories, Whigs, Liberal Conservatives (Peelites,) Free Traders par ex- 
cellence, (the men of the Manchester School, Parliamentary and Financial 
Reformers,) and lastly, the Chartists. 

Whigs, Free Traders and Peelites coalesced to oppose the Tories. It was 
between this coalition on one side, and the Tories on the other, that the real 
electoral battle was fought. Opposed to Whigs, Peelites, Free Traders and 
Tories, and thus opposed to entire official England, were the Chartists. 

The political parties of Great Britain are sufficiently known in the United 
States. It will be sufficient to bring to mind, in a few strokes of the pen, the 
distinctive characteristics of each of them. 

Up to 1846 the Tories passed as the guardians of the traditions of Old 
England. They were suspected of admiring in the British Constitution the 
eighth wonder of the world; to be laudatores temporis acti, enthusiasts for 
the throne, the High Church, the privileges and liberties of the British subject. 
The fatal year, 1846, with its repeal of the Corn Laws, and the shout of 
distress which this repeal forced from the Tories,, proved that they were 
enthusiasts for nothing but the rent of land, and at the same time disclosed 
the secret of their attachment to the political and religious institutions of Old 
England. These institutions are the very best institutions, with the help of 
which the large landed property—the landed interest—has hitherto ruled 
England, and even now seeks to maintain its rule. The year 1846 brought to 

The Elections—Tories and Whigs 

light in its nakedness the substantial class interest which forms the real base 
of the Tory party. The year 1846 tore down the traditionally venerable lion's 
hide, under which Tory class interest had hitherto hidden itself. The year 
1846 transformed the Tories into Protectionists. Tory was the sacred name, 

5 Protectionist is the profane one ; Tory was the political battle-cry, Protection- 

ist is the economical shout of distress; Tory seemed an idea, a principle; 
Protectionist is an interest. Protectionists of what? Of their own revenues, 
of the rent of their own land. Then the Tories, in the end, are Bourgeois as 
much as the remainder, for where is the Bourgeois who is not a protectionist 
of his own purse? They are distinguished from the other Bourgeois, in the 
same way as the rent of land is distinguished from commercial and industrial 
profit. Rent of land is conservative, profit is progressive; rent of land is 
national, profit is cosmopolitical; rent of land believes in the State Church, 
profit is a dissenter by birth. The repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 merely 
recognized an already accomplished fact, a change long since enacted in the 
elements of British civil society, viz., the subordination of the landed interest 
under the moneyed interest, of property under commerce, of agriculture 
under manufacturing industry, of the country under the city. Could this fact 
be doubted since the country population stands, in England, to the towns' 
population in the proportion of one to three? The substantial foundation of 
the power of the Tories was the rent of land. The rent of land is regulated 
by the price of food. The price of food, then, was artificially maintained at 
a high rate by the Corn Laws . The repeal of the Corn Laws brought down 
the price of food, which in its turn brought down the rent of land, and with 
sinking rent broke down the real strength upon which the political power of 
the Tories reposed. 

What, then, are they trying to do now? To maintain a political power, the 
social foundation of which has ceased to exist. And how can this be attained? 
By nothing short of a Counter-Revolution, that is to say, by a reaction of 
the State against Society. They strive to retain forcibly institutions and a 
political power which are condemned from the very moment at which the 
rural population found itself outnumbered three times by the population of 
the towns. And such an attempt must necessarily end with their destruction; 
it must accelerate and make more acute the social development of England; 
it must bring on a crisis. 

The Tories recruit their army from the farmers, who have either not yet 
lost the habit of following their landlords as their natural superiors, or who 
are economically dependent upon them, or who do not yet see that the 
interest of the farmer and the interest of the landlord are no more identical 
than the respective interests of the borrower and of the usurer. They are 
followed and supported by the Colonial Interest, the Shipping Interest, the 

Karl Marx 

State Church Party, in short, by all those elements which consider it neces- 
sary to safeguard their interests against the necessary results of modern 
manufacturing industry, and against the social revolution prepared by it. 

Opposed to the Tories, as their hereditary enemies, stand the Whigs, a 
party with whom the American Whigs have nothing in common but the 
name. 

The British Whig, in the natural history of politics, forms a species which, 
like all those of the amphibious class, exists very easily, but is difficult to 
describe. Shall we call them, with their opponents, Tories out of office? or, 
as continental writers love it, take them for the representatives of certain 
popular principles? In the latter case we should get embarrassed in the same 
difficulty as the historian of the Whigs, Mr. Cooke, who, with great naiveté, 
confesses in his "History of Parties" that it is indeed, a certain number of 
"liberal, moral and enlightened principles" which constitutes the Whig party, 
but that it was greatly to be regretted that during the more than a century 
and a half that the Whigs have existed, they have been, whenin office, always 
prevented from carrying out these principles. So that in reality, according 
to the confession of their own historian, the Whigs represent something quite 
different from their professed "liberal and enlightened principles." Thus they 
are in the same position as the drunkard brought up before the Lord Mayor, 
who declared that he represented the Temperance principle but from some 
accident or other, always got drunk on Sundays. 

But never mind their principles; we can better make out what they are in 
historical fact; what they carry out, not what they once believed, and now 
what they want other people to believe with respect to their character. 

The Whigs as well as the Tories, form a fraction of the large landed 
property of Great Britain. Nay, the oldest, richest and most arrogant portion 
of English landed property is the very nucleus of the Whig party. 

What, then, distinguishes them from the Tories? The Whigs are the aristo- 
cratic representatives of the Bourgeoisie, of the industrial and commercial 
middle class. Under the condition that the Bourgeoisie should abandon to 
them, to an oligarchy of aristocratic families, the monopoly of government 
and the exclusive possession of office, they make to the middle class, and 
assist it in conquering, all those concessions, which in the course of social 
and political development have shown themselves to have become un- 
avoidable and undelayable. Neither more nor less. And as often as such an 
unavoidable measure has been passed, they declare loudly that herewith the 
end of historical progress has been obtained; that the whole social movement 
has carried its ultimate purpose, and then they "cling to finality." They can 
support more easily than the Tories, a decrease of their rental revenues, 
because they consider themselves as the heavenborn farmers of the revenues 

The Elections—Tories and Whigs 

of the British Empire. They can renounce the monopoly of the Corn Laws, 
as long as they maintain the monopoly of government as their family 
property. Ever since the "glorious revolution" of 1688 the Whigs, with short 
intervals, caused principally by the first French revolution and the con- 
sequent reaction, have found themselves in the enjoyment of the public 
offices. Whoever recalls to his mind this period of English history, will find 
no other distinctive mark of Whigdom but the maintenance of their family 
oligarchy. The interests and principles which they represent besides, from 
time to time, do not belong to the Whigs; they are forced upon them by the 
development of the industrial and commercial class, the Bourgeoisie. After 
1688 we find them united with the Bankocracy, just then rising into im- 
portance, as we find them in 1846, united with the MUlocracy. The Whigs 
as little carried the Reform Bill of 1831, as they carried the Free Trade Bill 
of 1846. Both Reform movements, the political as well as the commercial, 
were movements of the Bourgeoisie. As soon as either of these movements 
had ripened into irresistibility; as soon as, at the same time, it had become 
the safest means of turning the Tories out of office, the Whigs stepped 
forward, took up the direction of the Government, and secured to themselves 
the governmental part of the victory. In 1831 they extended the political 
portion of reform as far as was necessary in order not to leave the middle 
class entirely dissatisfied; after 1846 they confined their free trade measu- 
res so far as was necessary, in order to save to the landed aristocracy the 
greatest possible amount of privileges. Each time they had taken the move- 
ment in hand in order to prevent its forward march, and to recover their own 
posts at the same time. 

It is clear that from the moment when the landed aristocracy is no longer 
able to maintain its position as an independent power, to fight, as an inde- 
pendent party, for the government position, in short, that from the moment 
when the Tories are definitively overthrown, British history has no longer 
any room for the Whigs. The aristocracy once destroyed, what is the use of 
an aristocratic representation of the Bourgeoisie against this aristocracy? 

It is well known that in the middle ages the German Emperors put the just 
then arising towns under Imperial Governors, "advocati, "to protect these 
towns against the surrounding nobility. As soon as growing population and 
wealth gave them sufficient strength and independence to resist, and even 
to attack the nobility, the towns also drove out the noble Governors, the 
advocati. 

The Whigs have been these advocatiof the British Middle Class, and their 
governmental monopoly must break down as soon as the landed monopoly 
of the Tories is broken down. In the same measure as the Middle Class has 
developed its independent strength, they have shrunk down from a party to 
a coterie. 

Karl Marx 

It is evident what a distastefully heterogeneous mixture the character of 
the British Whigs must turn out to be: Feudalists, who are at the same time 
Malthusians, money-mongers with feudal prejudices, aristocrats without 
point of honor, Bourgeois without industrial activity, finality-men with 
progressive phrases, progressists with fanatical Conservatism, traffickers in 
homeopathical fractions of reforms, fosterers of family-nepotism, Grand 
Masters of corruption, hypocrites of religion, Tartuffes of politics. The mass 
of the English people have a sound aesthetical common sense. They have 
an instinctive hatred against everything motley and ambiguous, against bats 
and Russellites. And then, with the Tories, the mass of the English people, 
the urban and rural proletariat, has in common the hatred against the 
"money-monger." With the Bourgeoisie it has in common the hatred against 
aristocrats. In the Whigs it hates the one and the other, aristocrats and 
Bourgeois, the landlord who oppresses, and the money-lord who exploits it. 
In the Whigs it hates the oligarchy which has ruled over England for more 
than a century, and by which the People is excluded from the direction of 
its own affairs. 

The Peelites (Liberal Conservatives) are no party; they are merely the 
souvenir of a party-man, of the late Sir Robert Peel. But Englishmen are too 
prosaical, for a souvenir to form, with them, the foundation for anything but 
elegies. And now, that the people have erected brass and marble monuments 
to the late Sir R. Peel in all parts of the country, they believe they are able 
so much the more to do without those perambulant Peel monuments, the 
Grahams, the Gladstones, the Cardwells, etc. The so-called Peelites are 
nothing but this staff of bureaucrats which Robert Peel had schooled for 
himself. And because they form a pretty complete staff, they forget for a 
moment that there is no army behind them. The Peelites, then, are old 
supporters of Sir R. Peel, who have not yet come to aconclusion as to what 
party to attach themselves to. It is evident that a similar scruple is not a 
sufficient means for them to constitute an independent power. 

Remain the Free-traders and the Chartists, the brief delineation of whose 
character will form the subject of my next. 

Karl Marx.