TOPICS OF THE DAY.
1Ith CORONATION OF THE HOUSEHOLDER.
TilEEnglish Revolution marches fast. Monday night is fixed for the third reading of the Reform Bill, and though Mr. Gladstone will doubtless utter a magnificent speech against its many imperfections, and Mr. Lowe will once more pour forth an eloquent tirade against Democracy, and Lord Cranborne will describe the change about to pass over the Constitution in weighty and mournful sentences, and General Peel will give vent to the disgust which old Conservatives feel at the trickiness of their leader, there is no chance but that the Bill will pass. The true Liberals have striven hard to admit the many into the Constitution without disfranchising the few, to infuse democratic vigour into the nerves of the Stale while excluding democratic vulgarity of object. and idea, to repre- sent the people without ceasing to represent the nation,—and they have failed, and they know that they have failed. Partly through their own fault, partly through the recklessness of their adversaries, they are in a position which compels them to accept the evil with the good, or to reject the good, and in re- jecting it sacrifice all present power, it may even be all future power, of tempering the evil. They must accept the Bill as it stands or cease to govern England ; the Lords will not ven- ture to act,—cannot, perhaps, on such a question, be expected to act, for their chance is the union of the million with the millionaires,—and to all human appearance, before August closes, the " aristocratic republic with monarchical institutions " will be a democratic republic tempered by a monarchical tradition. The ultimate sovereignty of the middle class will be exchanged for the ultimate sovereignty of handi- craftsmen, and England will commence for the second time within living memory a new political career. Unless prece- dents are worthless and reason utterly at fault, we shall within ten years have a new House of Commons, that is, a new sovereign power, with a new tone and novel impulses, driving with fresh and indefinitely increased momentum towards objects at present scarcely seen as through a haze at sea. All the new things may be bad or good ; we only con- tend that they must at least be new ; that with the third reading of Mr. Disraeli's Bill the old political world in which this generation has lived and breathed and fought and suc- ceeded will silently pass away. There will be, so to speak, a new heaven and a new earth ; a new, and it may be, brighter ideal, towards which politicians may lift themselves in aspira- tion ; a new, and we greatly fear, a coarser series of facts and passions, and gravitating tendencies, restraining them from flight. The pettiness of the means must not blind us to the magnitude of the result achieved. It is but Mr. Disraeli who has been the lever, but the thing moved is the British world. When Parliament reassembles the non-electors of to-day, the classes whose voice has been but as the roar of the surf, which all men hear and no man cares to analyze, will be the acknowledged sovereigns of a fourth of the human race. If they cry for Barabbas, Barabbas must not only go free, but ascend the judgment-seat. In the presence of changes so vast, with consequences so permanent, we cannot wonder that even to- day, so few hours before the end, politicians should doubt whether the end is really at hand, whether it will not be arrested by eloquence, or delayed by fear, or stopped by some great political cataclysm ; but the feeling is but a physical emotion, the chill which precedes the explosion, and the ex- plosion will arrive nevertheless. The Bill must pass.
We have never been able either to applaud or to denounce its inevitable results, as some of our contemporaries have done, for we do not believe that any politician knows, or— and this is the marvel of the situation—thinks he knows, what those results will be. The single thing certain is, that a new and gigantic force has this year been born into the political world, and the result of that birth will depend absolutely upon the use to which that force may be applied. Hence- forward the nation has an irresistible instrument, a weapon which may be employed alike to pulverize or to construct, to demolish or to found, to clear away rains or to erect the fairer edifices which should supersede them. The one good tiling we shall undoubtedly get out of the Revolution is political strength. If that is employed, as it is very likely to be employed, merely to pulverize, to brush away obstacles, social, moral, or traditional, from before the capitalist and the artisan, the result will be almost unmixed evil, for we shall in a genera- tion be in a worse position than that of New York—the masses dominant, but not possessed of landed property, able to do all things, but, from their want of relation to the future, with no in- terest in doing the better instead of the worse. If, on the other hand, it is used, as it may be used if the true artisans take power, to found and regulate, if the irresistible Householder commands order and compels education, coerces the nation.
into discipline, and makes law as absolute as in armies, the. result may be almost unmixed good, for we shall occupy the position France would hold if all her people were educated, an& the irresistible central authority were but herself under another name. That a democracy will rule England is certain, certain also that it will rule it strongly, but whether it will be of the. American type, seeking ever to reduce sedlety into a heap of dust, or of the better French type, seeking ever, though it has. hitherto failed, to cast the grains into some newer and higher,. because definite form, remains still to be decided. All that is certain is, that it will have force for either ; may, on the one hand, exclude the thinkers from power in favour of the mil- lionaires, and so vulgarize all political life ; abolish the aris- tocracy, without establishing any ideal to correct the inherent meanness of bourgeois standards ; insist on a colourless social equality, and declare that the only needful sceptre is the con- stable's baton ; or it may, on the other hand, find in a new-- born reverence for the State the refining influence it once- found in regard for an aristocracy ; may bring the power of the community to aid the weakness of the individual ;- may organize the nation till the whole body sympathizes in- the lightest suffering of its smallest member. If the result of the measure be what some men fear—to supply leverage for one dead heave of the masses upwards to the light, to give hope, and careers, and the enjoyment of life to the crushed-down common. millions who have toiled on through so many ages, only to ac- cumulate at last a right to poor relief—the disfranchisement of culture will, though still bad in itself in our eyes, have an ample compensation. That upheaval is but half the work which wise men seek in urging political progress, for they seek to give men wisdom as well as comfort, but it is the half without which the other half is impossible or useless. But will the new electorate do this, will it begin the battle with pauperism, and ignorance, and preventible disease, and social anarchy ? will it put down ignorance with an armed hand, and strike at disease as it would strike an invader ? All that is certain is that it can do it, as it can also, by returning only millionaires, by proclaiming laissez-faire as its fixed principle, and by reducing the authority of the State to a formula, like the authority of the Throne, widen and deepen the existing de- moralization and anarchy. Will it, to use a small but concrete and intelligible illustration, insist that there shall be no Poor Law, and so restore the habit of thrift; or that there shall be a wise Poor Law, and so make Christianity effective ; or that there shall be just such a Poor Law as is compatible with the- least possible demand on the electors' pockets ? The new elec- torate can secure either, but there is no ground for deciding,. no guarantee for believing which of the three it will secure. All that is certain is, that the Bill will develop the necessary force.
It is the coexistence of doubt as to the character of the new Sovereign with certainty as to his power which makes hie installation next Monday so unspeakably important an event. When we elected our new ruler in 1832 we knew whom we were electing, knew almost precisely his politics, his habitudes, his dominant virtues and foibles. He turned out to be much- milder in temper and much more honest in taxation than anybody anticipated, but, with this exception, the tenpounder has almost exactly fulfilled Lord John Russell's hopes and the more sensible Tories' fears,—has been very liberal, very much opposed to organization, very much inclined to weaken the authority of the State, and very much given to a sort of bourgeois complacency and indisposition to construct. But the Sovereign who is to ascend in 1868 we do not know. The artisan is familiar to us, and the artisans' assistant, but the Householder What is he ? Even his politics are unknown, much more his wishes, most of all, his temper. If the sir ablest politicians in England were gathered round a table and compelled to speak their true thought of him, we should have just twelve different opinions, each man having two, ranging from a belief that the Householder would be e socialist fanatic- to a belief that he would be an easy-going money-seeking, liquor-loving, immovable Conservative. But on one point there world be no dispute. Charles H. or William HI., Stuart, or Tudor, or Guelph, whatever his character, impulses, or aims, the Householder whom on Monday his superiors enthrone is: thenceforward absolute monarch of the richest, the most extended, and the most varied dominion upon earth.
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