HISTORICAL CONSERVATISM AND CATHOLIC DISABILITIES.
MR. RADCLIFFE COOKE, the clever Conservative who represents West Newington, and who wrote the amusing pamphlet on "Four Years in Parliament with Hard Labour," sent to Tuesday's Times a curious letter in favour of maintaining the few remaining Catholic dis. abilities, not exactly for practical use, but rather as enforcing, as the Thirty-nine Articles have it, " a godly and wholesome doctrine and necessary for these times." Mr. Cooke is perfectly convinced of the loyalty of the Queen's Catholic subjects. He thinks it very possible that " once in a generation or so " these disabilities might prevent a Catholic nobleman, otherwise the best who could be selected for the Viceroyalty of Ireland, from being made Viceroy, or a distinguished Catholic lawyer, the best who could be selected for the office of our Lord Chancellor, from being made Lord Chancellor. But he holds it to be better that such disabilities should be retained, and such services lost to the nation, than that this great historical landmark of the resistance once made to " priestly rule and foreign supremacy " should be removed. Mr. Radcliffe Cooke, in other words, takes up a highly historical position. He thinks it important to keep in evidence the traces of our historical develop- ment. Probably he would not get rid of the " vermicular appendage " in the human body, even if he could. It is of no use to us now, but it represents the historical connection of the human body with its non-human antecedents. Or, to take another illustration, Mr. Radcliffe Cooke would highly approve of the Conservatism of the prairie-dogs at the Zoological Gardens, which took care to place a sentry on duty in the paddock assigned to them, though he was seldom or never required to utter his warning whistle. This sentry, who had nothing to guard against, at least preserved amongst the prairie-dogs the living tradition of the wild life that they led when they did need sentries in their native land ; and that is just what Mr. Radcliffe Cooke wishes English Constitutionalists to do. " It is better," he says, " that some of our fellow-subjects, loyal and good citizens though we believe them to be, should be under this imputation, than that we should take down signals fixed and flying at the very apex of the State, where every one can see them as reminders of what in past generations the citizens of the State have done to free themselves from priestly rule and foreign supremacy ; and fixed them further as visible and unmistakable indications of what the citizens of the State would do in the future, if ever their liberties and their consciences were threatened from the same quarter again." That looks to us as if Mr. Radcliffe Cooke wishes the state of the Constitution and the law as we have it now, to include a sort of Constitutional Museum full of reminders of our past fears and dangers and mistakes. Would he plead for all the old gallows which Mr. Gladstone tells us were not so many years ago liberally distributed over the English counties, and all the old stocks in which two or three generations ago the vagrants of the community used to be made fast ? That • seems to us carrying the Conservative instinct even further than the prairie-dogs carry it. A sentry to remind them of dangers which are past is no great harm. Forsan et luec olim meminisse juvabit. But why we should be con- stantly reminded of all the violent and unpleasant penalties which we used to inflict on our fellow-citizens, though the excuse for those penalties is quite passed away, we cannot clearly apprehend. It seems to us that even very good Conservatives hardly grasp how Conservative is the policy of extinguishing grievances and wiping out the remembrance of them, so soon as the motive which induced our forefathers to inflict these grievances has vanished. Would it have been a Conservative measure to have kept up the old Tests against Dissenters for the benefit of some small sect of no particular consequence,—such as the Sandemanians, for example,—just that we might always have a reminder before our eyes of what England had been prepared to inflict on resolute Dissenters in the old bad days,—or to continue to punish a very rare crime, such as that of striking a Judge in Court, with the cutting-off of the hand, only in order to preserve for constitutional antiquarians a visible relic of the old severe laws ? That is not the kind of practice which seems to us at all Conservative in the true sense. In the true sense it is Conservative to extinguish as quickly as possible all the relics of old passions and injustices with which modern England has no longer any practical concern. The sooner the Conservative Party can convince themselves of the strong ground on which they will stand, if they pursue this course, the sooner they will find the ranks of Conservative working men swelling before their eyes. Now, what is the real guarantee which makes the retention of these high- flying signals of past severities to Roman Catholics, of which Mr. Radcliffe Cooke is so enamoured, so extremely foolish and obsolete ? It appears to us to be this,—that no Government of the present day could stand fora week which allowed a policy to be pursued which the great mass of the nation resents. Mr. Radcliffe Cooke thinks that the jeers with which the Gladstonians received the declaration of the Protestantism of the nation, implied some slur upon Protestantism. Why, two months or so ago, Mr. Gladstone himself was appealing most anxiously to the Protestant prejudices of the nation when he attacked the Govern- ment for altering the marriage law in Malta to please the Vatican ; and the Gladstonians, so far as we could see, supported him warmly, instead of jeering at that appeal to Protestantism. The jeers, if jeers they were, that Mr. Radcliffe Cooke observed, were directed, not to Protestan- tism, but to the notion that any artificial bulwark for our Protestantism is now required. Suppose we had both a Roman Catholic Lord Chancellor and a Roman Catholic Viceroy, and that by hook or by crook they had per- suaded the Sovereign to accept some sort of policy, whether at home or abroad, which the Protestant feeling of the nation repudiated and resented. Does Mr. Radcliffe Cooke suppose for a. moment that their colleagues in the Cabinet would not say at once : ' This will never do ; if you pursue a, policy which will offend both the Govern- ment and the Opposition Benches in the House of Com- mons, a vote will be carried against us that will not only enforce our resignation, but prevent our return to office for a generation to come' ? It seems to us thoroughly childish for a Conservative Party relying on the masses of the people, to ask for any other guarantee against propa- gandist Catholicism, or Jesuitism, or any,other " ism, The Roman Catholic Viceroy would be as safe as any Protestant Viceroy, or, if he were not, the Prime Minister would soon receive letters from half his colleagues tendering their resig- nations, The Roman Catholic Chancellor would be just as safe as any other Chancellor, or else the law officers of the Crown would soon let the Prime Minister know that it was as much as their seats in Parliament were worth to act under him. Of course the policy of a Pro- testant nation with a •democratic Constitution will be, and must be, such as to satisfy that Protestant nation. And to guard vestiges of a condition of things when it was not so, and when the trumpery security of Catholic disabilities was needed, or supposed to be needed, is a pure antiquarian caprice, and, what is worse, an antiquarian caprice that alienates one of the most loyally Conservative of the elements of which this great nation is composed.
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