MR. ROEBUCK'S POLITICAL SIGNIFICANCE.
AT makes Mr. Roebuck an interesting political study
is this,—that he, and he almost alone, seems to show us what average Englishmen of more than average abilities and acquirements would be like, if an enormous vanity, a vanity almost of the gascona.ding type, were added to their constitu- tional self-esteem. There is in Mr. Roebuck just enough of variation on that national type on the basis of which he is clearly constituted, to make him an instructive phenomenon. He has often boasted that he was typically English. In 1865 he told his constituents at Sheffield that he was the man known "as thoroughly representing the people of England and Wales," and though, when so stated, that was one of his illusions,—since nothing represents Englishmen less than gasconade,—there has always been enough truth in that impression of his to lend to his most flighty outbursts far more interest than we should ordinarily attach to rhodo- montade of that class. Early in his political life he carried a motion against both Whigs and Tories for an inquiry into the compromises by which so much electoral corruption was scriened from public notice. During the Russian war, again, it was his motion which gave expression to the indignation of the people at the administrative fiasco in the Crimea. He has almost always spoken the language of the English middle- class, and apoken it with vigour. Only, his vanity has often induced him while they were deeply pondering their course, though not disguising their tendency, to outrun them in can- dour, in audacity, in narrowness. The greatest mistake, per- haps, which he ever made was in the violent part he took on behalf of the Confederate States of America, when he told Englishmen that it was for England's advantage that the United States should be broken up into many parts, and that what was for England's advantage must be for the advantage of the world. His boastful anticipation of England's sweeping in ten days every enemy's ship from the sea, if England and France would but declare war with the North, and his tawdry tirades against the corrupt Yankees, were, how- ever, only the extravagant forms given by an eager and rest- less vanity to feelings and hopes widely enough spread at that time among the class from whom Mr. Roebuck derived his inspiration. Yet only Mr. Roebuck could have carried that unauthentic message from Louis Napoleon to the English House of Commons in 1863 by which, fantastically enough, he hoped to persuade that proud body—whose independence and shrewdness he has many a day magnified with sufficient force—to throw itself into a quarrel with which it had determined to },lave nothing to do. It took a man of his inordinate egotism to be -blind to the absurdity of the position he professed to occupy, as the confidant of Imperial resolves which must have been com- municated through the English Ambassador in Paris, if seriously intended at all. And so, too' Mr. Roebuck allowed his personal egotism to mislead him utterly as to the spirit of the -English people, when he took up the cause of Austria against Italy, just because he had been well received at Vienna, and had entered into various financial speculations there. These .are the aberrations which illustrate the disturbing force of vanity on Mr. Roebuck's career. It is this which has so often transformed his sturdy English feeling into mere boastfulness and bounce ; which has made him defend jobs which were convenient, like the Galway Steam-packet contract, and yet bitterly attack those who cut out cankers as mischievous from the body politic as the Irish Protestant Establishment; and which at presentmakes him speak as if, now that the reforms he
first advocated are carried, every Liberal is bound to keep with him that political Sabbath in which he contemplates his works, and, finding them very good, blesses them somewhat ostentatiously, and rests from his labours. It is this, too, which makes him boast so loudly to the people of Sheffield that it was he who brought down the Prince of Wales there, and which induces him to tell them that when he proposed to the Prince to undertake the (probably very unwelcome) task of inspecting the National Schools in Sheffield, and when he assured his Royal Highness that if he did so he would do much more good than by looking over the Sheffield manufactories, the Prince replied in these re- markable words,—" I believe you, Mr. Roebuck; but you see how lam situated." An heir to the Throne,who consented to be brought down to Sheffield, as Mr. Roebuck so emphatically remarked, by Mr. Roebuck, and who cordially replied to Mr. Roebuck's observation on the good results which would attend visiting the schools, with an I believe you, Mr. Roebuck," is clearly a national institution which Mr. Roebuck is bound to support ; and accordingly, in spite of his youthful Re- publicanism, Mr. Roebuck lends the Prince of Wales and his family the full weight of his authority, just as he lends also to the House of Commons, to which he has been returned by Sheffield, the full weight of his authority, declaring it the best representative Assembly the world has ever seen, and as he further lends the country which has returned him to that House the full weight of his authority, describing it as the country with whose happiness is indissolubly bound up the happiness of the world. Just now indeed the English House of Commons seems to be a sort of idol of Mr. Roebuck's, for he is not only an influential member of it, but it has turned out the Minister whom he detested and accused of every political sin which unbridled ambition can produce and has substituted a Minister who pro- poses to rest after achieving all the reforms advocated by Mr. Roebuck. A few years ago, the House of Commons was not quite so favourite a theme of Mr. Roebuck's eulogy. That was the time when he was,—in some sadness and hesitation of spirit, no doubt, but still steadily, though reluctantly,—contem- plating the possibility of becoming a life-peer, and taking his political wisdom to the House of Lords. In 1872 he recanted publicly at Sheffield his youthful heresies on the subject of the House of Lords, and explained that though he regarded himself as too old for that body, "some gentlemen had been kind enough to shadow out a way in which I might obtain a seat in it." Now that he is once more a member of the popular House, his searchings of heart on the subject of his youthful indiscretions seem to have disappeared, and he can even reissue some of his old sneers at the ponderous and lazy procedure of the English Peers. No one ever had a more gener- ous disposition than Mr. Roebuck evinces, to lend importance, out of his own inexhaustible stock of it, to the public bodies and even to the nation with which he himself is most closely connected. Like Captain Boyton in his life-saving apparatus, Mr. Roebuck, in his own imagination at least, can not only float himself, but almost everything he touches. At Sheffield, on Monday, his delight with English institutions, as he had remodelled them, was so great that he found himself committed not only to English greatness and prosperity, but to the universal prevalence of English virtue in this golden harvest of the reforms which he had sown. "In this country we have safety for property, safety for person, safety for reputation." Nay, regardless, for one ecstatic moment, of our many Colonel Bakers, rich and poor, Mr. Roebuck hazarded the suggestion that England had realised Tom Moore's Irish vision of the young lady "whose maiden smile in safety lighted her round the Green Isle." "I believe you could pass from one end of the country to the other a young maiden lady without anybody to protect her," sang Mr. Roebuck ; and though the words were hardly out of his mouth before the image of Colonel Baker rose in his memory, he ignored the many other much more formidable competitors of the colonel's, and ventured to re- gard the exception as proving the rule. Certainly, never -was there a more unhappy suggestion than that Mr. Roebuck from being a "rabid Radical" has become a "tame Tory." A Tory, no doubt, he has become, if it be Tory to condemn almost every Liberal measure which the last seven years have produced. But a "tame" Tory he can never be. He buoys, as it were, the very spot where Liberalism ceased to be in his opinion good by ceasing to take counsel of Mr. Roebuck ; and as the buoy bobs up and down incessantly on the dancing waves, so Mr. Roebuck's opinions bob up and down over the fatal place where, according to him, Liberalism was wrecked, and revolutionary Gladstonian- ism took its rise; and there is certainly nothing "tame" in the accents in which we are so constantly exhorted to be proud of our country, our House of Commons, and our Member for Sheffield.
Now, the interest of this curious incarnation of political egotism is, for us, the instructive light it throws on English character. Mr. Roebuck is at heart an energetic and clever, but otherwise very common-place Englishman of the middle-class. All his ideas are essentially conventional ideas lighted up by a wonderful and brilliant vanity, and this is just the significant thing about him. He is almost exactly what all able and energetic middle-class Englishmen might be, if only they were as vain. His caprices are the sort of caprices we should most of us indulge in, if we could but be as easily satisfied that we were sure to be right. The Ilan with which Mr. Roebuck declared that it was for the in- terest of England that the United States should be pounded into fragments, and that what was for the interest of England could not but be for the interest of the world, was but the dense English sell-esteem written out incautiously in very big letters. The pride with which Mr. Roebuck boasted of having brought the heir to the throne down to Sheffield was characteristically English pride. The gratification with which he reported the Prince's momentous words, "I believe you, Mr. Roebuck," was essentially English gratification, though it was not English to avow it after that naif fashion. The positive hatred with which Mr. Gladstone's thoroughness in dealing with Irish and other questions, as, for instance, Army Purchase, inspired Mr. Roebuck, was again thoroughly appropriate to the English middle-class. No one can teach us what we should be, if only vanity made us as outspoken as Mr. Roebuck, as Mr. Roebuck can. In him is written out clearly, the narrowness, the conventionality, the selfishness, the positiveness, the dauntlessness, the pertinacity, the stiff- ness, the sagacious recklessness, of the English character,—only that his inordinate vanity makes him show his hand earlier, and draw much more attention to his mistakes, than middle- class Englishmen ordinarily do. Still, almost all that Mr. Roebuck politically has been, middle-class England is in some sense in danger of becoming, if she ever loses her wise reserve and sobriety. That is why we read Mr. Roebuck with a cer- tain perennial interest. It is like reading the story of all the possible errors of middle-class arrogance and narrow-minded- ness, not unaccompanied by the manifestation of its better qualities, including some which have made middle-class rule in England really wise and bold. Still Mr. Roebuck is a carica- ture of English middle-class politicians ; and caricatures of ourselves, though very instructive, are never wholly pleasant. We start, as we do when daylight shows us a precipice down which we might have fallen, saying to ourselves, 'With but a little more vanity, we might really have been as narrow and shortsighted and bumptious as that!' Mr. Roebuck's speeches, with all their manly qualities, are therefore not a pleasant study ; but they are unquestionably a very profitable study to middle-class Englishmen who care to know themselves.
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