MR. TREVELYAN AT BRIGHTON.
MR. TREVELYAN made at least two very important points in his speech on Monday at Brighton, on the effect of the new suffrage. The first was, that it would, so far as he could judge by his own experience, unite the country and strengthen the bond of political sympathy between all parts of it for all the more solid purposes of political life. And of this he gave a very striking illustration out of his own experience in the Border Boroughs. Every one knows that it was Mr. Trevelyan who first urged household franchise for the counties systematically upon the country, who year after year brought forward in the House of Commons a motion with that end. Well, in his speech at Brighton he told us the origin of that crusade. The very first use, he assured us, which the householders of the BorderBoroughs made of their new power, was to ei trait him, so long ago as in 1868, to consider the policy of entrusting that power to the county householders also, so that it was the eagerness of the newly- enfranchised to share their privilege with others whom they held equally entitled to it, their positive dislike to monopolise what they felt that they had no right to monopo- lise, which really originated the proposal sanctioned by the Queen and registered in the Statute-book on Saturday last. " This proposal, then," said Mr. Trevelyan, " began in unselfishness, and it has been unselfish and disinterested from first to last. The tens of thousands of working-men who marched in procession at Leeds, at Glasgow, at Bir- mingham, and in London were making a protest on be- half of others, and not of themselves. And in doing so they were only maintaining the strong tradition of our national politics that it does not become men to work only for the benefit of their own class or their own order, but they should follow after what is just and what is profit- able to the community as a whole." And Mr. Trevelyan argues frpm this, and, we believe, argues rightly, that a right, won for the county householders by the disinterested sympathy of the householders of the towns, will be exercised by the county householders in a spirit of disinterested sympathy for the householders of the towns ; that, instead of introducing fresh rivalries of class and class, we shall have taken a great step, in passing this Household Franchise Act for the whole Kingdom, towards the elimination of all those petty jealousies and sectional fears which have enabled the representatives of small constituencies so often to embarrass and even set at nought the earnest purpose of the whole people. Mr. Tre- velyan believes that that spirit of large popular sympathy with just, but relatively weaker claims than their own, in which the enthusiasm of the artisans for the agri- cultural labourers originated, and which has now expressed itself in the New Franchise Act, will mark the conse- quences of that Act ; that a Parliament chosen under that Act will discourage and resent all the trickery and obstruc- tiveness of which we have till quite recently had far too much,
—but yet, we should remember, have had comparatively little since the great demonstration of the autumn brought even our existing Parliament to its senses,—and will string-up the political nerve of the country to strong and indignant dis- approval of anything like sectional selfishness and irresponsf- bility.
And Mr. Trevelyan's second conclusion is almost as import- ant as his first. Not only does he think that the new Reform will be worked by a disinterested spirit for the benefit of all the people, and that it will strongly discourage sectional and selfish action, but he thinks it will strengthen the whole spirit of the administration, emboldening Parliament and the Ministry to do strong things which are needful for the whole nation, and to refrain from doing things that only seem strong, for the sake of gaining a reputa- tion for strength. The new Parliament, he says, will not shrink from strong things which are just ; and what is almost as important, it will not shrink from admitting that England has been wrong, where she has been wrong, only because the taking back of a false step has a false look of weakness about it, of which those who are really weak are ashamed. Certainly, nothing looks more confirmatory of this view than the popu- larity which the present Government won in the great towns by the act which all its adversaries described as its weakest act, the withdrawal from the Transvaal. Wrongly or rightly, the great town populations regarded this as an act of moral courage, and so far from wincing at the ridicule of the Jingoes, gloried in the moral nerve which could achieve it ; and what the great town populations thought in 1880 and 1881, the great country populations will, in all probability, think, and show that they think, in 1886. It takes a great Democracy to surmount false shame. The weaker Powers, the Powers of despotism and oligarchy, consult the seeming wise, where a great people has the strength to go straight to what, in its secret conscience, it holds to be really wise, though seem- ing otherwise.
We may add to Mr. Trevelyan's remarks a strong con- firmation of their general drift, derived from a consideration of the class of constituencies which have hitherto returned what we may call " detrimental& " to the House of Commons. Putting out of consideration the case of Ireland, which is ex- ceptional, and rests on ground of its own, the great disturbing centres of the House of Commons have been either class repre- sentatives or representatives of very small constituencies which had no right to be separately represented at all. Mr. Chaplin, for example, and Mr. Lowther, who have been notable disturbers of the peace, but disturbers of the peace of the more respectable kind, have professed to represent the two classes of landlords and farmers, and we may know by what they say now that they look upon their power as well-nigh at an end. The Tories who sit for great constituencies, like Lord George Hamilton, acquiesce more heartily in the new measures. Even Lord Randolph Churchill—a much more remarkable instance—ceased to be an obstructive, and became loyal to what was urged by the nation at large, the moment he ceased to think of himself as Member for Woodstock, and began to think of himself as a.. candidate for Birmingham. It is only those who still identify themselves with a class, like Mr. Lowther and Mr. Chaplin,_ who groan over the surrender of their chiefs, and lament over _ their own fallen prospects. And we take that as the sign_ that Mr. Lowther's and Mr. Chaplin's cause is doomed. They.. • know very well that the new constituencies will not hear of laws made only to benefit a class, of imposts on the food of a.. people which are to be imposed only for the extrication of land- lords from their difficulties and for the restoration to prosperity of an industry for which the country at large will have to pay. But there are many Parliamentary " detrimentals " of a much worse kind than Mr. Lowther and Mr. Chaplin, for these do at least represent a class, and a large class, though they do not represent the people. ilen like Mr. Warton, who blocks Bills just as a mischievous boy blocks-up keyholes, or Mr. Ashmead- Bartlett, who represents an individual egotism and nothing else, will wholly fail, we may hope, to find a large constituency to return them under the new re'yinte when Bridport and Eye shall have disappeared. At all events, if they do get returned again, it will be on condition of holding their tongues and amending their behaviour. With that immense transfer of power from thin to crowded populations, to which we are now,. looking, an authority will be given to the energetic men,the men_ who mean business, and who will not tolerate egotiams, vanities,_ and ignorant chatter, such as may well be trusted to stop the mouths of the mischief-makers and the bores. Nothing has been more remarkable than the steady silence and en- durance of the great representatives of the large constituencies, while the mouthpieces of petty places were prating away their impertinences to a disgusted nation. With the extinction of these petty places, and with the sense of responsibility which
large constituencies always manage somehow to impose on, their Members, we may trust that this evil will be all but
extinguished. At all events, we share to the utmost Mr.
Trevelyan's hopeful belief that the great measure which has become law, when it is supplemented, as it soon will be, by the great measure which is becoming law, will give Parliament a strength which it could not have derived from any other source, to put the babblers to silence, and to visit with effective penalties those who deliberately erect barricades against the progress of popular legislation,
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