BRITISH CONSERVATISM AND THE PRIMROSE LEAGUE ... - ideals

material ran round the various balconies. From the
proscenium depended the motto, "Imperium et Libertas,"
and at the center of the stage, just before the
footlights, stood a marble bust of Lord Beaconsfield
and a terra-cotta bust of Lord Salisbury. The armorial
banners of many habitations, hung all around the
theatre, completed the decorations.23
III
The League's inventiveness, however, was not confined to an
idealization of Lord Beaconsfield.
Its greatest achievement was the
creation of a conservative subculture from which the party could draw.
In achieving this end, it helped to reformulate deferential relations
in an age increasingly at odds with hierarchical patterns of social
relations.
In recent years the use of the term "deference" has come under
a great deal of criticism.
The expression was devised by Bagehot in
the mid-nineteenth century to refer to the "theatrical show of
society," the love of the masses for atavistic displays of pageantry.
This attraction, he argued, served to cement social class relations.24
23
Ibid., 20 April 1888, p. 10.
24 Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1966), pp. 248-51; The work was published originally
as part of a series appearing in The Fortnightly Review between 1865
and 1867. The above edition is based on The Collected Works of Walter
Bagehot edited by his sister-in-law, Mrs. Russell Barrington, and
published by Longmans in 1915. Two fairly recent assessments of
Bagehot's concept of deference include David Spring's, "Walter Bagehot
and Deference," American Historical Review vol. 81, no. 3 (June, 1976),
pp. 524-31 and Samuel Beer's "Tradition and Nationality: A Classic
Revisited," American Political Science Review, vol. 68, no. 3
(September, 1974), pp. 1292-95.