BRITISH CONSERVATISM AND THE PRIMROSE LEAGUE ... - ideals

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bodies were created in 1885, the Ladies Council
(LGC) and the Scottish
Grand Council
(SGC) both of which supplemented the administrative
functions of the Central Office.
With the vast change in the size and scale of operations, the
Central
Office began to assume the rudimentary features common to any
large bureaucratic entity.3
Under these circumstances, it was hardly
surprising that the Primrose League shed its personal allegiance to
Lord Randolph Churchill in favor of the more general endorsement of the
issues advocated by Salisbury and the Conservative party.
As the
League expanded, an increasing number of employees were hired in order
to enforce rules and regulations.
By 1888 the Central Office had
acquired a "rationalistic" character typical
of large-scale
organizations, exhibiting a preoccupation with perpetuating its own
expansion as an end in itself, rather than merely a means to promote
the interests of the Conservative party.
Despite innovations achieved in the operations of the London
headquarters, the Primrose League, as a whole, never obtained the
thorough mechanization characteristic of a sophisticated bureaucracy.
Instead, it straddled the older, declining forms of patronage that
still held some measure of support, particularly in rural communities,
with the newly emerging and increasingly nondeferential relations
coming to characterize partisan politics.
In seeking to maintain
3 Both Max Weber and Robert Michels have provided interesting
studies illuminating some of the characteristic features common to
bureaucracies. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology translated and
edited by H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1946), pp. 196-98, 228. Robert Michels, Political Parties (New
York: The Free Press, 1962), pp. 333-34, 338-41.