BRITISH CONSERVATISM AND THE PRIMROSE LEAGUE ... - ideals

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CHAPTER EIGHT
Epilogue
We [the aristocracy] have had an excellent innings, I
don't deny that for a moment: an excellent innings; and
the turn of the people will come some day. I see that
quite as clearly as you do. But not yet, not yet. You
will educate some of the working class; that is all you
can hope to do for them. And when you have educated
them we shall buy them; or, if we don't, the Liberals
will, and that will be just the same for you.
Lady Dorothy Nevill writing in the early
1880's to the leader of the marxist
Social Democratic Federation, H.M. Hyndman,
as recorded in her autobiography, My Own
Times (1912)
[Recipe for the conversion of the common man from
"perdition" to "salvation."] Not by words and dreams;
but by thirtyeight [sic] shillings a week, a sound
house in a handsome street, and a permanent job. In
three weeks he will have a fancy waistcoat; in three
months a tall hat and a chapel sitting; before the end
of the year he will shake hands with a duchess at a
Primrose League meeting, and join the Conservative
Party.
George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara (1905)
I
The years between 1900 and 1914 were marked by an ever valiant
effort on the part of the Central Office to bolster the numbers of
Habitations, members, and field of operations while, all the while,
losing ground to a host of new extra-parliamentary organizations which
made inroads into the sphere of "independent" political activity
previously dominated by the Primrose League.
The death of Queen
Victoria in January of 1901, marked with a sense of finality the end of
an era and the inauguration of a new age, one which melded older