Following the refusal of the Peterborough Liberal Association to select George Potter, a working man's candidate, as its nominee at the 1878 by-election, George Howell wrote that

After the formation of the National Liberal Federation (NLF) in May 1877, the perceived unwillingness of local Liberal associations to accommodate the labour movement's demands for political recognition put the role of the political machine centre stage in the debate concerning labour representation.

This chapter is therefore concerned with labour's response to the rise of the Liberal party machine, which became pejoratively known as the ‘caucus’. The first part examines the impact of the NLF on labour's prospects of returning working-class men to Parliament, and analyses the labour movement's intellectual response to the caucus. Of course, the labour movement's critique of the caucus was but one part of a wider debate about the problem of organising a democracy. In the five years that followed the formation of the NLF, politicians, political commentators and the press vigorously debated whether this new kind of party organisation was a legitimate way to organise an expanded electorate in Britain. Comparisons with the United States, a democracy with an Anglo-Saxon culture that had given birth to the ‘caucus’, were therefore integral to this debate. Although historians have focused extensively on how nineteenth-century British intellectuals conceptualised American democracy, far less attention has been given to the ways in which British working-class radicals who actually travelled to America interpreted their politics. The next part of the chapter, therefore, reconsiders the travel writings of working-class radicals who journeyed to the United States and recorded their assessment of the American caucus, and examines the lessons that could be drawn from them by the labour movement.

Although an American-style party machine never arrived in England, the language of the caucus, with its references to ‘wire-pullers’, ‘dictation’ and ‘tyranny’, was certainly appropriated by politicians wishing to attack an opponent's legitimacy.