TOPICS OF THE DAY.
LORD ROSEBERY AND THE PRESS CONFERENCE.
TORD ROSEBERY may always be trusted to rise to a groat Imperial occasion. He possesses to a degree not vouchsafed to other public men that inestimable art which enables a man not merely to think the right thing on the right occasion, but to say it, and to say it in words in which tact, good feeling, good humour, and good sense are equally blended. The Imperial Press Conference constitutes a great occasion, for here are gathered in the old home representatives of an institution of which the British race is peculiarly proud. The journalists of the Empire are its eyes and ears, men who perform the function of passing the news, that strange and mysterious function which, in the desert to-day as in primitive times, is almost a sacred duty. But the men who pass the news, and so lengthen our vision and hearing that we can be in touch with and understand things, places, and people that we shall never see, are also the interpreters of the news. Further, they are the exponents of the feelings of those who receive the news and those who make it. In one sense they make public opinion, yet in another it makes them, controls them, and even sweeps them away. It was one of the sinister jests of antiquity and of the Middle Ages that the image-makers were always atheists. They could not believe in the gods of their own hands. Yet the pressman who makes, or at any rate believes that he makes, public opinion is often a. genuine worshipper of the thing he believes lie has made. Next, the journalist, as Mr. Birrell reminded our guests, is essentially a critic, for there can be no interpretation without criticism. One half of his time is taken up with trying to put men and things in their proper places and their true perspective. All this makes the pro- fessional writer on public affairs, if not cynical, at any rate exceedingly fastidious. To speak to an audience of lawyers about law, or of doctors about medicine, is nothing compared with speaking to journalists about national and Imperial questions. They have been so much behind the scenes that indeed the only analogy we can suggest is speaking to scene-shifters and scene-painters on the subject of scenery. The audience, then, to which Lord Rosebery spoke, and which in national and Imperial interests it was most important that he should impress, was as difficult and as critical an audience as it is possible to imagine. Yet to have failed to move his hearers on such an occasion would have been indeed a fiasco. To have treated them to doses of rhetoric, or platitude, or graceful badinage, such as might have done well enough in the House of Commons or at a great public meeting, would have been to court disaster,—disaster in the form of polite acquiescence or genial indifference. Happily Lord Rosebery's oratorical tact did not fail him. He struck just the right note. He bit his audience exactly between wind and water. His speech, though it was light, and had the smile in it which it is etiquette for the augurs of modern days to exchange when they meet, was never too light.' It conveyed a message of cordial welcome without the slightest suspicion or Shadow of anything which might be taken by the most sensitive man as patronage, or of that tone of extreme politeness which is necessarily reserved for foreigners but never used at home. No one could have considered Lord Rosebery's speech as appropriate to an international gathering. It was the sort of thing that is only said at a family dinner when there is the fullest sympathy and com- prehension. But though Lord Rosebery was intimate, and therefore unrhetorical, his speech was charged through and through with that touch of sentiment which we all feel so deeply that we would rather not put it into words Jest a sublimated and precious spirit should evaporate and be wasted. Last, and most important of all, Lord Rosebery said the thing which every serious man felt ought to be said. He made his hearers, whether gathered from cities , so great as Melbourne, Sydney, and Montreal, or from remote districts bordering the Australian foam, from the inland woods, wastes, and waters of Canada, from beneath tropic skies, or from mountain plateaux, realise the seriousness of the moment. He focussed for them the great fact that what the Empire needs most just now is concentration upon the idea Of defence. At other times development, expansion, internal organisation, the conquest of the great forces of Nature, have been the supreme need of the Empire. Now what the crew who man that mighty vessel have to do is to stand to quarters and be ready to defend the flag under which they sail.
Theme was no note of defiance or aggression in Lord Rosebery's speech, for such a note would have been absolutely out of place. The message he gave and asked his hearers to pass on was, in fact, the message,—Prepare, Prepare, and again Prepare. We want to be ready and to make ourselves secure through that strange paradox which has again and again been presented to great kingdoms and great Empires. If they will prepare themselves adequately for defence and will maintain their position in the world, their preparations will never take effect. If they fail to prepare, that against which their preparations should have been directed must inevitably come about. The true test of men's pacific intentions must be the reality and seriousness of their attitude towards war. The world never has got, and never will get, beyond the old Latin tag that if you wish for peace you must make ready for war. The know- ledge that you have got a loaded revolver and know how to use it is the only condition under which you will be allowed to live a peaceful and useful life in that strange and lawless mining camp which we call the civilised world. If a nation or an Empire is to survive, there is no possibility of choice between adequate preparation for national defence and the Quaker attitude of refusal in any circumstances and under any provocation to strike a blow even in self-defence.
That attitude is, no doubt, magnificent in its courage in the case of the individual, but we cannot argue here to-day whether it is one which it would be possible for a nation to take up. It is enough to point out that no nation ever has had, or ever will have, the courage to adopt it. All that the advocates of a Quaker policy for a nation ever have succeeded, or ever could succeed, in achieving is the policy of half-preparation,—not of abolishing armies and navies altogether, and trusting to the innate goodness of mankind not to despoil the unarmed man, but of having an inadequate and inferior, and therefore worthless, Army and Navy. If the men who have so noble a hatred of . war would only think the matter out, they would see that what in reality they are striving after now, because it is the only thing they can possibly accomplish, is inadequate preparation for war. They cannot hope to achieve the abolition of the Army and the Navy, but merely the rendering of those instru- ments ineffective. Surely that is the maddest and most dangerous policy of all. It gives foreign Powers who have no belief in Quakerism, and who do not even believe that other people sincerely believe in it, an excuse for striking, and at the same time ,makes their victory certain.
This, we have said, is in effect Lord Rosebery's message ; but we are glad to say that he went further, and pointed out the only true basis of adequate preparation,—the acceptance by the people of this Empire of the obligation of personal and universal service. That is also the certain road to national and Imperial safety. That security must be founded upon the willingness of the men who compose the nation and the Empire to realise that "some personal duty and responsibility for national defence rests on every man and citizen." Though Lord Rosebery did not push this truth home, there can be no doubt as to his meaning. He meant that the people of this country aud of the Empire must carry into practice the principle which has always prevailed here in theory,— the principle latent in the Militia Acts, the principle which the free men of Switzerland have made their own. We must insist that the youth of the nation shall have a training in arms which will enable them, should need arise, to defend their homes and their liberties, and not imperil the heritage to which the Press Conference is a. living witness.
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