TOPICS OF THE DAY.
EASTER MONDAY.
SOME of our Unionist friends are a little unfair about the scene of Easter Monday, and the meetings which are to be called all over the country against the Crimes Bill. They say the Liberal leaders are appealing to the people against Parliament, or trying to force a dissolution by inciting the populace to condemn the Bill. Surely that is nothing new. We must all have helped to do it in our time ; nor can we see any reason for repentance in the recollection. To appeal to the electors against their representatives whenever the two are out of touch, to prepare for a dissolution by mass meetings, by articles, by speeches sometimes a little inflated,—to raise, in fact, an agitation outside Parliament in opposition to the majority inside, is a regular part of the modern English system of instructing the people, and breaking down their otherwise invincible apathy. The practice began when the House of Commons did not represent the people, and it will retain popularity, in theory at all events, until Parliaments are elected in the first week of every year, an innovation we by no means recommend. Mass meetings may seem to reflective men rather ridiculous as means of deliberation, the multitude called together being quite too great for the range of the human voice, and the resolutions rather of the " cut-and- dry " order ; but, order being granted, they do little harm, and they do this much good,—they warn the Government of the day that, great as their majority may be, large minorities are dissatisfied with their action, and that even if all the wisdom is on their side, the number of the unreflective is always large. There are sections in every population whose voice is apt to be inarticulate, yet ought to be heard ; and a mass meeting, though an exceedingly clumsy way of making it audible, is useful till a better can be devised, a task, as we try to show elsewhere, of exceeding difficulty. It seems to us a little feeble to accept democracy and then object to appeals to it ; and at the worst, calling a mass meeting is only a rude method of instituting such an appeal. Of course, in a city like London, inhabited as it is by whole tribes of criminals, half-criminifle, roughs, and believers in wild ideas, a vast meeting con- tains some elements of danger ; but the multitude of the respectables is endless, physical force apart from the soldiery is altogether on the side of order—if only because three days of disorder would reduce London to hunger—and the danger is rather a reason for a strong police and a sufficient garrison than for interference with one method of displaying the citizens' vitality. If the Liberal leaders like to feel supported by large crowds, gathered to assent to pre- arranged resolutions, they may exhibit feebleness in that liking ; but they are entirely within their right.
Our dread is not of public meetings, but of statesmen paying over-much attention to them. The true danger of this country does not consist in the people, which, we may rely on it, in spite of appearances, retains substantially its historic national character, but in a special kind of timidity, constantly manifested by its chosen rulers. They are all, or nearly all, weak in the knees. They cannot understand that they are expected to be decided men, that the democracy prefers oaks to willows. A great many of them are aristocrats—the mass still distinctly preferring men of birth—and aristocrats are often possessed with a notion of the unreasoning wilfulness of " the people," which is nothing but a huge concourse of ordinary . persons wanting sensible guidance, and quite ready to be led by competent persons who will stick to their opinions. There is an instance of this familiar to everybody, yet which nobody . seems to regard. Mr. Gladstone is at once the most popular and the most inflexible of men. The Tories are never tired of talking of him as a demagogue ; but how often does Mr. Gladstone ever give way, and which of the two, the populace or he, struck out the new line about Home-rule ? He went his way, right over all the precedents, and right against all the wishes of his party ; and after one brief pause of dismay, three-fourths of them followed him. Many of the remaining leaders are really officials accustomed to watch " opinion " as an erratic outside force essentially hostile to wise government, and to tremble before it, lest it should sway their ultimate master, the House of Commons. Neither class have yet fully learned the great lesson that when the suffrage is vast, their first business is to ignore small manifestations of opinion ; to let the journals talk, and respect only the arguments imbedded in the chatter; to hearken civilly, but without response, to deputations ; to note and weigh, but not fear " resolutions ;" and to
remember that the tree ultimate sovereign is the silent mass which votes, and which is now directly represented within the House of Commons. They are to attend to the House of Commons, not for the old Tory reason that it is wiser than the people, but for the Liberal reason that it truly represents them. A crowd of a hundred thousand in Hyde Park is a great crowd ; but with household suffrage, it is only important to stateemea so far as it is a voting crowd, and its voice is only weighty so far as it may indicate future aotion at the ballot. Assuming —and it is a preposterous assumption—that there were fifty thousand voters in Hyde Park on Easter Monday, drawn there by a wish to protest against the Crimes Bill, and to what does that " grand fact" amount? To this only, that 10 per cent. of the electors of London are sufficiently dissatisfied with the Government to waste part of a non-earning day in assenting to resolutions in which that dissatisfaction is expressed. That is a reason for caution, and reflection, and painstaking ; but it. is not in the least a reason for giving way. It might have been fifty years ago, or even twenty-one years, for the
might have signified that the mass of the com- munity were in opposition ; but we know now for a certainty what that mass thinks, for it votes, and its votes are for the Government. The people, by a majority of 18 per cent., accept the Closure and the Crimes Bill. That change, which doubles or trebles both the moral and the physical force of the House of Commons, is not yet fully appreciated, the change having coincided in time with the rise of obstruction, and therefore with the temporary paralysis• of the House ; but it is the central fact of our new democracy. The people do utter their will through their representatives ; and unless those representatives are influenced by the meetings, the meetings ought to have, and by degrees will have, no influence at all. If, for instance, in the present case the majority of Members adhere steadily to the Government, that is the people adhering, and the Crimea Bill should go through if a hundred crowds re- solve that it is to them anathema. They are only a fraction of a minority, and the majority is to rule. That, at all events, ought to be the determination of the leaders, who should -recollect that if representative government is true, it is giving them a complete and a final justification for their policy. Any argument to the contrary derived from meetings, news- paper articles, or individual speeches is, under the new suffrage, worth just nothing.
We shall he told, of course, that, under our Septennial Act, a Parliament may outlive its mandate, and get more or leas out of touch with its electors ; and that, no doubt, is true, more especially when a new and great question has soddenly arisen. This Parliament, however, is not a year old ; it is still discussing the subject on which it was sent up to vote, and it exhibits no trace of any pressure from the electors who sent it up. If the meetings indicated real change, we should see their effect in the wavering of Members ; but they do not waver. Lengthily as discussion drags on, the majorities for the Bill are as great as ever, and the language of those who debate grows on both sides more decided. The meaning of that must be that the people have not changed, that the meetings express nothing which the votes of the minority did not express before, and that the duty of the Government, there- fore, if it would truly represent as well as govern, is to go forward with quiet resolution, guided first of all by its own judgment—which, be it recollected, makes votes outside—and secondly, by the decisions of the House of Commons, in which, and in which only, those of the people are embodied. Formerly, we admit, it was not so ; but now, when every man with a house- hold votes, the House of Commons is alone important, and meetings do not matter. We wish, of course, that the Govern- ment should be guided by still higher considerations, that it should set aside all fears for its own fate or that of its party, and that while it exists it should maintain the law ; but still, its Members may be strengthened by remembering that the evidence of the House is now solid evidence, and that on that evidence the people are with the Bill. It is not in opposition to, but in furtherance of the popular decision, that it is pushed forward, the meetings only showing that, like every other important measure, it has numerous opponents. The nation, however, elects the House, and the nation is for the Bill.
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