A S I write, Mr. Gladstone's speech in Midlothian seems to
me to have removed one of the greatest dangers to which the Liberal Patty was exposed. I believe that the effect of his speech will be to prevent a great many moderate Liberals from voting, in a violent Church panic, against their party ; and so far as that speech goes, it certainly tells in favour of a strong Liberal majority, and against that aspect of the situation which I am going to put forward.
None the less, the situation hardly seems one in which Liberals can count on a very magnificent majority over the united parties of the Tories and the Parnellites. The governing considerations in the matter appear to be these :— In the boroughs the franchise has not been changed. Now, in 1880 there were 297 borough Members in England and Wales, of whom only 80 were Tories. In other words, we had a majority in the boroughs of England and Wales of 217. Of the 80 Tories returned for boroughs, a very considerable number were returned for rather large boroughs,—boroughs like the Metropolitan boroughs, or Liverpool, or Wigan, or Sheffield, and this was very much more so in 1874 than in 1880. Undoubtedly the Liberal majority, though considerable, was not nearly as large in the boroughs of the greatest wealth and popula- tion, as it was in the boroughs of comparatively moderate wealth and population. Nothing was more marked than the tendency of the very large English boroughs to approximate in their political type to those suburban districts which returned so unbroken a Tory majority in the last Parliament. Now, instead of having 297 borough Members in England and Wales, we shall have 237 borough Members,—at least so called, for I quite admit that many of the county districts will approximate very closely to the type of boroughs,—and all of these will be of the type in which the Tories gained at the last two Elections the greater number of those triumphs on which the Tory Democrats most relied when they urged the policy of redistributing electoral power in a democratic sense. London itself—in the larger sense —will have about half a hundred more Members than it had in the last Parliament, and a very considerable minority of that large number will certainly be won by the Tories,—a much more considerable minority than would have been won if the places of the fifty new Metropolitan constituencies had been filled by the moderate-sized boroughs which have been disfranchised to make room for them. The Liberals ought to be well con- tented if they win on the borough seats a clear majority of 25. If they succeed as well as they succeeded in the Metropolitan seats in 1880, they would have a rather larger majority—namely, 37; but in the towns, at all events, I rather look to 1874 than to 1880 as the basis for calculation.
Of course, this large diminution of Liberal power in the boroughs will be redressed—and, we may hope, more than redressed—by the great change to be expected in the county constituencies so called,—I say "so called," because it is certain that a very great many of them are really nothing but boroughs with a margin of county round them. A correspondent of the Times calculates that the rural county constituencies will be very much fewer than the urban county constituencies, and I believe that he is right. In the last Parliament, the Tories won, in England and Wales, 120 county seats out of 187, or had a majority over the Liberals of 53. Of the new county constituencies there are 253; and the really critical question, of course, for the electors is how far the new victories of the Liberals in the rural constituencies will much more than counter- balance their losses elsewhere. Now, as I have already said, a majority of these new county constituencies are very much more like the new towns than like the old counties. We may probably expect a clear majority even in this class, but we can hardly expect so large a majority as we shall get in the boroughs themselves. In the next place, even of the new county divisions which are genuinely rural in their character, there will be not a few in which the old territorial influence will still prevail. It is
quite true that in those counties where the Dissenting sects are very powerful, there is likely to be a considerable revolution towards Radical views. Hence a very con- siderable number of county divisions,—notably in the East of England, and also probably in the South- West of England,—will be carried by the Radicals as a result of bestowing the franchise on the agricultural labourer. We must remember, however, that just as the artisans, when they were enfranchised, soon showed themselves to be divided in opinion, if not pile in the same proportions as the shopkeepers, still in proportions not very widely
different, so we may expect that the agricultural labourers, when they are enfranchised, are sure to present, in a greater or less degree, the same political phenomenon. Some of them are sure to emulate the politics of the small farmer, to deride the visionary hopes of the Radicals amongst them, and to show a strong disposition to take a line of their own, and this the line of the class above them, rather than of the majority of their own fellow-labourers. Englishmen will be Englishmen, to what- ever class they belong ; and if there is one feature rather than another that marks the Englishman, it is the tendency of a majority of each class to exert a repelling force on a minority, and to drive them off into the opposite pole of thought. If the greater number of agricultural labourers are likely to be Radical, as I think they are, there will be in every county a smaller number who will think of themselves as farmers in embryo, whose thoughts and sympa- thies will go with the actual farmers and not with their fellow-labourers. Add to these the number who will cer- tainly fear everything if they vote against the wishes of their employer, and I think it may be safely predicted that in a considerable number of the new county districts, though not in a majority of them, a Tory Member will be returned. In Wales, for instance, we are almost cer- tain to lose two or three seats. In England, too, villadom will still be extremely strong in all suburban districts ; and, on the whole, I think we may be well content if in the counties we get more than a majority of 23. If this be added to the majority assumed in the towns, we should have in England and Wales alone a majority of 50; while in Scotland, if we lose three or four seats through the disappointment of the Free-Church Party, we can hardly count on a greater majority than 58. That would give us a majority of 108 in Great Britain ; but in Ireland, whenever Mr. Parnell and the Irish Tories were both against us, it would be very questionable whether we might not have to face a net majority of at least 85, so that we should have a working majority of only 23; and we shall not do badly, I think, if we can safely secure that number in all the critical divisions in which the Irish Home-rulers use their utmost strength to overthrow the Liberal Government, and get the full support of the Conservatives.
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