Liberal versus Liberal: 1874. A Surrebuttal

Extract

Let us return to the undying fascination of Bradford and Sheffield. Like Wright before him, Temmel misses the point of my using the Bradford and Sheffield examples. Many schoolteachers often take the line that if the slowest children in their classes understand something the rest can be taken to have mastered it. In a somewhat similar way, I argued that if the Liberal party could be shown to be vastly more catholic than Vincent's definition allowed for in two large places where the structure of society was least favourable to a Right and Centre, then his overall contentions would have been brought most seriously into question. 1874 was a fair date to choose and comprehensive Liberalism was easily to be observed. Examination of the two boroughs showed that British Liberalism was much more broadly-faceted than Vincentian theory allowed; that ‘Whiggery’ was not just a family word, divorced in several respects from a doctrinal context; and that the Centre and the Radicals were in fact varied. If the Centre and Radicals flourished in those places, a fortiori they would elsewhere. The ‘slowest’ so to speak had obliged with data and so the Vincent case fell to the ground. Such an approach makes some intellectual demands upon the reader, not only logical but imaginative and factual. Nevertheless, it should not have proved too much for any able person in any serious profession.