DISAPPEARANCE OF THE COMMERCIAL RADICALS.
MHE "Seven Wise Men" who voted last week against
furnishing the Government with means for 20,000 addi- tional land forces, and on whose behalf Mr. Jacob Bright has "liberated his conscience" this week, in a speech of which the drift was that England will always be quite right in fight- ing to defend herself, but never can be right in fighting to defend anybody else, may be regarded as curious relics of a departed idea,—more interesting to political palmontologists than to actual politicians. During the Free-Trade enthu- siasm, when a large commerce was for a time regarded with a sort of superstitious reverence, almost as a second-best religion, and men who despatched cargoes of hardware to the East were disposed to think of them- selves, like Mr. Pecksniff when he had wound up his diges- tive apparatus and set it going, as benefactors to their race,' the eloquent speeches of Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright threw an imaginative halo round economical operations which for a time succeeded in elevating the dictates of enlight- ened self-interest into a sort of gospel for mankind. But those times have now long gone by. The Radicalism of sympathy has succeeded to the Radicalism of self-interest. The "extreme left," represented by such men as Professor Fawcett and Mr. Peter Taylor, no longer preaches the duty of standing utterly alone, and disavowing all active relations with European affairs. Mr. Jacob Bright, who is a clever man, though in this respect a mere political fossil, tries to put the duty of absolute isolation on the compassion we owe to our one million of paupers, and to the two or three millions who are only just above pauperdom. But this would prove that England ought not to defend herself against a foreign foe, as well as that she should never defend any other State. If liberty be a higher thing than the material welfare of any section of the people, it is impossible not to admit that the highest uses of liberty, the strict fulfilment of the spirit of the national engage- ments, the defence of the freedom of the weak against the aggression of the strong, the legitimate maintenance of our national influence and dignity in Europe, are also of higher moment than the material welfare of any section of the people. No great nation was ever yet made on the principle that you must fill the stomachs of all, before you can afford to have a national conscience for any. Yet this is the hopeless sort of intellectual position Mr. Jacob Bright took up in the short speech in which he declared that he liberated his conscience "before going down to his constituencli,"—a phrase which looked, by the way, very much as if the constituency were, on this head at least, the keeper of his conscience. A nation which should act in the spirit of Mr. Jacob Bright's speech, deliberately live alone in shabby retirement and avoid all social expenses till it had gained wealth enough to afford them, would, we may be pretty certain, never become a nation at all. The welding power which makes a nation depends more on the great historic enterprises in which the life of a people is embarked, and with which it is identified, than on any internal economy, however beneficent ; and an England utterly detached from Europe would soon become, in all pro- bability, a rope of sand,—an England disjointed and full of heterogeneous unannealed fragments in herself. The theory of insulation which the seven wise men appear still to main- tain is hardly any longer even a matter for discussion. When the Radicals of Mr. Mill's school take up the radicalism of sympathy, and even the hardest-headed of the old laissez-faire party only venture to preach practical caution and not theoretical selfishness, there is no great chance for the gospel of non-intervention on the old ground of economical and commercial philanthropy.
It is a matter for satisfaction—this final extinction of the pretentious school which has so long taught that England's only foreign policy should be to have none but absolute
neutrality, whatever happens. It is something to be rid of the foolish and vexatious battle-cry, and to be allowed to discuss our particular obligations in particular cases, and not with reference to an empty abstract principle which the greatest of living English orators never even succeeded in rendering plausible. Moreover, the effect is certain to be, not to dimin- ish the safeguards against rash and childish intervention, but on the contrary, to diminish the danger of such intervention arising from mere dislike and contempt of a narrow and osten- tatiously commercial party. Anyone who remembers the Crimean war will remember how powerfully Mr. Cobden played into the hands of the war party, through the repulsion which the Manchester school, as it was falsely called at that time, excited. Everybody who had any doubt of the duty of de- fending Turkey and resisting Russia was supposed at once to be an adherent of that school, and consequently the statesman- like discussion of the question, the discussion of the extent and binding character of our engagements, of the consequences to Europe of intervention and non-intervention, was all clouded and confused by the tendency to suppose that everyone who took a side unfavourable to the war was really advocating a disguised form of the abstract policy of pure selfishness. We do not mean to say that the result would have been different from what it was, had the so-called Manchester school never existed. But we do mean that the suspicions and disgusts which that school excited threw a powerful party on to the war side which would otherwise have hesitated long, and perhaps have ultimately suspended its judgment. The dwindling of this party to the Seven wise men, tells in favour of a far more keen and searching scrutiny of our foreign engagements than we were likely to have while every man who contributed to such a scrutiny was in danger of being classed with the supporters of the pseudo-Manchester school.
There is another reason for satisfaction at the virtual dissolution of this conceited and mischievous little school of non-interventionists, and that is, that like all schools conscious of excessively unmanageable principles, it has been constantly in the habit of clouding the positions it advocates by thoroughly irrelevant and unreal considerations. Thus Mr. Rylands, only the other night, ostentatiously advanced it as a good reason for not protecting or offering to protect Belgium, that France and Prussia while fighting against each other are much less to be feared than France and Prussia when at peace, and therefore able to combine and dictate to the rest of Europe. Would any politician, except in an agony of anxiety to divert attention from his real reasons, seriously advance such nonsense as that ? We have the best evidence that the passion for increased territory is so powerfully at work that it is causing a war of the first magni- tude, and we are to infer from that that it is for that very reason quite unlikely to cause a second war of less apparent magnitude ; and so we are to fall back into apathy. Does a shepherd, hear- ing that his neighbour's fold is attacked by the wolves, calmly infer that there is so much the less fear of his own fold being attacked, and go to sleep on the strength of it ? Mr. Rylands, when he talks in this way, raises the same kind of deep distrust which the Manchester school was always wont to raise, when it passed from the courageous defence of its prin- ciple to the congenial task of throwing dust in the eyes of those who could not accept its principle. Schools of politics with a radically untenable and unpopular principle are always em- barking in unreal subsidiary defences of their positions which do even more to confuse and mystify political discussion than false principles themselves. Few as are the victories which pure intelligence achieves amidst the nalle of heterogeneous con- stituencies, we think the country is to be congratulated on having finally lost sight of the pseudo-Manchester school,—a school characterized by a principle which is the destruction both of ethics and politics, and disposed to help out the difficulties of that principle by a great store of the most irrelevant and mis- leading arguments. Mr. Jacob Bright must have felt the other day as if he were lecturing on the contents of some political barrow of olden times which he had just disinterred for the benefit of the House of Commons. He should cover it up again as quickly as he may. The Seven Wise Men would find complete silence on their principle their wisest conduct for the future. Let the pseudo-Manchester school sleep peacefully in the grave it has so well deserved.
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