"DUKE'S SON, COOK'S SON"

Evening Post, Volume CVII, Issue 48, 28 February 1929, Page 10

"DUKE'S SON, COOK'S SON"

By the election of an ex-coalminer to the chairmanship of the Conscrva-

tive political machine, it is once more demonstrated that the British Con-

servative Party is not obsessed by tho circumstances surrounding tho accident of birth. Hereditary rights received — in the House of Lords legislation passed by a strong Liberalism in the best days of: Campbell-Bannerman, Asquith, and Lloyd George—a blow from which politically .they have never recovered; and, since then, the dernocratisation of the Conservative Party has been-progressive. But generations beforo that the party was-open to the leadership of brains irrespective of birth. One has only to recall names like that of Disraeli in the last century, and to remember that the Salisbury Government that came in later — and which was so heavily staffed with the old brigade as to be. called the Hotel Cecil—received most of its motive power from plain Joseph Chamberlain. Within the present generation F. E. Smith has risen politically from nothing to the Earldom of Birkenhead, and the Conservative Party is prepared to be a ladder equally for Duke's son and cook's son ■ if he possesses the goods. Perhaps, if there is any advantage of birth, it might even be in favour of low birth, since there is nothing more de-Toryising in tho public mind than a high place in the party for the aristocraey-of-brains sprung from a plebeian source. Class-conscious-ness is the weapon of communism. A class unconscious attitude in the political field is Conservatism's best answer.