BRITISH CONSERVATISM AND THE PRIMROSE LEAGUE ... - ideals

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Their victory in 1868 brought greater organizational
initiatives.
Birmingham.
Ward Committees were set up by the Radicals throughout
Each was entitled to elect members to the Central
Representative Committee.
The number of individuals associated with
this body rose from four hundred to two thousand between 1868 and 1886,
an increase roughly equivalent to the growth achieved by the town's
population.
Policy was determined by a General Committee composed of
only one hundred men, who, in effect, dictated programs and candidates
to be chosen by the rank and file supporters.
The methods employed by Birmingham Radicals were seen by
Conservative critics as dictatorial and indicative of the corrupt
practices utilized in a mass democracy and demonstrated most
graphically by the Tammany General Committee in New York. They
therefore evoked the American term, "the caucus," a derogatory
inference, to describe Chamberlain's organization.
Despite the
accusations, Birmingham practices were conceived and remained
distinctly British in character. 1
1 The literature on the Liberal caucus is fairly extensive,
although no modern comprehensive study has been undertaken on the
subject. With the establishment of the NLF in 1877, Chamberlain sought
to publicize its democratic, reformist goals in the Fortnighly Review.
"A New Political Organization," Fortnightly Review vol. 22 (July-
December, 1877), pp. 126-34; "The Caucus," Fortnightly Review, vol. 24
(July-December, 1878), pp. 721-41. Francis H. Herrick, "The Origins of
the National Liberal Federation," Journal of Modern History, vol. 27,
no. 2 (July, 1945), makes a spirited defense of the NLF, strongly
sympathetic to Chamberlain's point of view and in noted opposition to
Ostrogorski's portrayal of the Birmingham methods of organization as
the embodiment of oligarchical democracy. "The Introduction of the
Caucus into England," Political Science Quarterly, vol. 8 (1893), pp.
287-316 and Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties, vol.
1, pp. 161-78.
One of the relatively recent articles, P.C. Griffiths', "The
Caucus and the Liberal Party in 1886," History vol. 61, no. 202 (June,
1976), pp. 183-97 provides an overview of the past literature on the