TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE PREMIER'S BLAST.
if B. DISRAELI is greater in "furbishing up" very old political furniture than any politician of his generation. We have never seen our very feeble old friend the 'No-Popery' cry furbished and gilded up into anything so like freshness as in the glorious bit of writing beginning "But amidst the dis- cordant activity of many factions, there moves the supreme purpose of one power," and ending with "devoted people." One reads it with a sort of shiver of admiration for the dexterous political upholstery it contains, yet, on the whole, events are unfavourable to the emotions which the Prime Minister labours with so much skill to revive. After reading for about the fifth time Mr. Disraeli's gorgeous remarks on the self-flatteries of the philosopher, and the ambitious hopes of the sectarian concerning the downfall of the State Church, and recognizing with ever new admiration the profound scorn implied in the great statesman's announcement, "These are transient efforts ; vain and passing aspirations ; the ultimate triumph, were our Church to fall, would be to that Power, &c., we happened to turn to the last and newest manifesto of "that Power," namely, its message to the Protestants, reproaching them for not being Catholic at the moment when a new (Ecumenical Council, big with Roman Catholic destiny, has just been summoned. And the result was by no means favourable to that emotion of terror which Mr. Disraeli desires to excite, and which he has really succeeded in exciting,—in the bosom of the Standard. "We confess that we are frightened," it wrote on Tuesday. And apparently this was even after reading the very wandering and amiable rigmarole of Pio Nono, which reminds us more of the mumbling of Bunyan's toothless old Giant Pope than of "that power with whose tradition, learning, discipline, and organization our Church alone has hitherto been able to cope," 1. e., according to the very eccentric views of history taken by Mr. Disraeli, who apparently believes that the Pope is paramount in the Russian, Norwegian, Danish, and Prussian Churches. The Pope might, indeed, have written that letter almost on purpose to enhance the diffi- culties of hesitating Protestants, in joining a Church of which the author of this letter is likely to be declared the infallible voice and mouthpiece. There is the quaver of dictatorial garrulousness, asserting, because half doubting and distrusting itself, in every line ; there is not a word either of true calm power or even of Mr. Disraeli's mock power, in the epistle. The man whom all the Church is ready, as the Dublin Review tells us, to declare the true organ of an infal- lible corporation, maunders out his anxieties like a worn-out and peevish invalid, and takes a column of print to express the drift of five words. Even Mr. Disraeli's art can scarcely furbish up such a Pope, whose only trusted and faithful servant among crowned heads has just been expelled from her king- dom for ignorance, cruelty, and lust, and each one of whose allocutions is at once more dictatorial and tremulous than the last, into an object of dread so terrible that we must call upon the State not merely to preserve its own laws inviolable, but to fortify in every country some particular form of Pro- testantism by its subsidies and its direct alliance. Has the ultimate triumph in the United States, in Canada, in Austra- lia fallen to "that power which would substitute for the authority of a sovereign the supremacy of a foreign prince ? Is Catholic Ireland itself a bit less subject to "that power," —nay, is it not certainly more so,—for the existence of this pretended buffer, which only excites Catholic irritation and makes political martyrs of true believers ? But it is idle to Urgue with a statesman, who is not expressing but masking his beliefs with words. This kind of beautiful manifesto is not meant for belief, but for use as a party token. It is the sort of thing not to think, but to say.
It is the very gravest calamity for the Conservative party that it should be led by a man who neither does nor can give the weight of conviction to his manifestos of policy and his cries to arms. There are those who think that with the Liberal party it should be otherwise. There are those,—'*e cannot in the least agree with them, but they are not a few,---who wish that the Liberals were led by a man more of Mr. Disraeli's type, who, instead of Mr. Gladstone's grave and earnest faith, could show some of that reckless destructiveness, that mockery of traditional usage, that elan of the true guerilla warrior, which Mr. Disraeli disguises with difficulty under the solemn mask of a political schoolmaster. Liberalism is apprehende& by some,—the most unmanagable and mischievous of their party, it is true,—as a mere disorganizing power, whose- function it is to assail continually the venerable fictions. of the world ; and at the same time, most institutions embodying any real idea are, in the eyes of such men,. mere venerable fictions. Now we cannot wonder that such as these should fret under the lead of a man of such posi- tive character as Mr. Gladstone. But while there is a certain_ superficial plausibility in misrepresenting the party of move- ment as a party of reckless and destructive instincts, which needs a leader of like character, there is nothing but incon- sistency, both superficial and profound, in having for the leader of Conservatives, for the official protector of our "ancient institutions," for the solemn champion of all that is venerable, for the wise and cautious statesman who distrusts change, one who cannot say a word in his appropriate part without over- acting it, and inspiring, not sympathy and respect, but a cer- tain puzzlement among the credulous and amusement every- where else. There are one or two sentences in Mr. Disraeli's. manifesto which, if they had been in the proper context, sur- rounded with the proper atmosphere of weighty Peelite warn- ing, would have had a considerable effect,—for example, the remark that to take away revenue from the Irish Church is. dangerous because "confiscation is contagious, and when once a community has been seduced into plunder, its predatory acts. have seldon been single." Even that is a little too strongly worded ; but it might pass as the grave peroration of a country gentleman, or even a man weighty in the world of commerce, moved into eloquence and almost epigram, by the bare shadow of confiscation. But coming, as it does, between the sentences which declare that the connection of religion with the State instils "some sense of responsibility into Governments much more absolute than Mr. Disraeli:s,— that the Archbishop of Canterbury, in short, is the main safe- guard for Mr. Disraeli's responsible use of power,—and the stiff grander sentences about "the supreme purpose of one power". (poor old Pio Nono), this high-toned appeal to the Englishman's sense of the sacredness of property, scarcely reads natural. lb has a hollow and artificial sound, which instead of strengthen- ing the faith of others in the righteousness of the Irish Church's proprietary pretensions, has a tendency to shake it, just as when we hear our own views echoed in empty and pompous accents from the other side of a railway carriage,. we immediately begin to feel qualms as to the genuineness of their foundations. The whole context of Mr. Disraeli's stilted address destroys the moral force of even such few passages as the late Sir Robert Peel might have written. It has nothing of the ring of the country party's dread of innova- tion, and profound faith in the old watch-cries, about it. It is no':, pompous in the safe Conservative way,—not pompous with the pomp of prestige or antiquity, and the scorn for new things,—but gaudy with literary paint. It is not staid with the sense of official responsibility, sedate with the con- fidence of power, but grandiloquent with the rhetorical flourishes of a candidate for popular favour. It has not even, the dignity of that conscious intellectual ability to which Mr. Disraeli has no need to lay claim, for its writer still avowedly clings to the persuasion that he rests under the protecting shadow of Lord Derby's name and favour. In short, it is an ad- dress that shows none of the reassuring qualities of Conservative statesmanship,—neither the solidity and strength of Sir Robert Peel, nor the aristocratic pride of Lord Derby, nor the prudent and canny sobriety of Lord Aberdeen. There must be something as humiliating to the Conservative party in reading such an as this,—humble as a begging letter in its opening, pedantic as a Queen's speech in its recitative, and stilted as Tancred's revelation on Mount Sinai in its peroration,—as it would be to the Royal Society to take the great Wizard of the North for their president, and listen to him while he addressed them on the scientific wonders of natural magic. Mr. Disraeli, with all his didactic tours-de-force, will not be able to excite real panic about Rome, and, without that, his letter to his con- stituents will be a dead letter. "The supreme purpose of that one great Power" which he finds it convenient to magnify so preposterously, has indeed sunk beneath its lowest historic level, when, in spite of all the advantages of theatrical dress and circumstance with which so clever a political manager as Mr. Disraeli knows how to put it on the stage, it fails to excite a single thrill of terror or even interest, except from the official claque who attend on purpose to counterfeit emotion and elicit sympathy.
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