CONSERVATISM IN BRITAIN
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medicine-to give pleasure to those who like that sort of thing, not
to do good to anyone. The overriding political aim of the Church
in England is to keep as much 'optional' as possible: and this of
course is quite inconsistent with any large imaginative reconstruction
of society.
Of the Aristocratic Society we hear if anything even less: which
must be particularly irritating to the American Tory. (Rather as
if
poor Strether had discovered, when he finally solved the mystery,
that what Madame de Vionnet had been engaged in all the while
was elaborate negotiations for emigrating to the New World.) Once
again, the reason for this silence is not the obvious one: namely,
that aristocratic life has been so recently and so painfully extinguished
in Britain that the whole subject is a sore one. On the contrary:
though aristocratic life has like other forms of privilege suffered con–
siderably from the redistributive measures of recent years, what is
really interesting and remarkable is the extent to which it has sur–
vived. Members of great families and owners of large houses pay
heavy taxes, suffer from the high cost of living, find servants diffi–
cult to get, and live in the shadow not only of death but of death
duties: on the other hand, given any practical ability, they make
large untaxed capital gains, lend well-paid prestige to company
boards, open their houses to an enthusiastic public, exploit the numer–
ous loopholes in the fiscal system and in the normal course of events
die with their money safely in their children's hands. Scattered across
England there survives a form of life that combines, effectively and
without detriment to either element, the privileges of the eighteenth
century and the comforts of the twentieth. That this is so is entirely
the work of the upper classes themselves, plus their legal and finan–
cial advisers, and the whole success of this delicate operation can
be directly ascribed to one simple technique: silence. In 1911 during
the stormy debate that immediately preceded the passing of the
Parliament Act, Lord Selborne, a man of extreme views, declared
to the delight of his more intransigent fellow peers that their Lord–
ships would not "perish in the dark": forty years later, the sons of
those who applauded his words are delighted to live in the dark. For
only thus can they (by their standards) live at all.
Here then we have the major case, if never presented more than
unconsciously, against any statement of true Toryism. For its effect
