TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE GOVERNMENT PLAN.
MR. DISRATILT has once more missed his mark. It was not his fault, though everybody is abusing him for it, for he was called upon to do the one thing to which he has always been incompetent. He was not asked to improvise a Constitution or suggest a coup d'e'tat, or even to propose a plan for Representative Government. He might have done any one of those things, and done them brilliantly, but he was asked to interpret the inner mind of the British people on the distribution of political power, to give form and expression to the half latent, half conscious longings of the nation whose representatives he is supposed to guide. He could not do it, for he did not understand what those longings were. He was in the position of a clever philologist in a telegraph office, able by sheer brain power to make marvellous guesses, to seize single words, to jump at meanings by computing the pro- babilities arising from the recurrence of certain clicks, but utterly unable to make out a connected message. A stupid clerk who knows the code makes it out twice as well. To under- stand a people one must sympathize with it, and Mr. Disraeli does not sympathize with Englishmen, or with any section among Englishmen,—viith the aristocracy whom he leads, or the Squires whom he drives, or the Whigs whom he maddens, or the Radicals whom he would madden, but for their instinct that he is not, and never can be, one of their natural foes. It is certainly most annoying to see so splendid an opportunity so utterly thrown away. The House is becoming actually eager to get this Reform question out of the road. Any tangible proposal, any quiet but effective compromise, such as Sir Robert Peel would have proposed, would have been gladly welcomed by an immense majority of the members, and probably endorsed by the nation, while anything at once original and effective would have made Mr. Disraeli for the first time the true favourite of his party. Even a startling suggestion, such as to get rid of the difficulty of redistribution by raising the number of the Com- mons to some fixed proportion to the population, say one to every 40,000 persons, would have been a relief, but instead of anything effective, or novel, or even tangible, there was a heavy pompous speech, revealing nothing except that Govern- ment would like to make rating the basis of the franchise, and suggesting nothing except that the House should accept the initiative, which belonged to the speaker. The single original idea in the Resolutions, that the plurality principle would facilitate broad reductions in the borough qualification, was never so much as hinted at, while of the Resolutions as a whole Mr. Disraeli gave no idea. He did not even produce them, but talked on and on about the necessity for freeing the county register of all urban electors, with an obvious idea that this would reassure such of his followers as the resolu- tions themselves might startle. The occasion was one which might have roused a far inferior orator, yet with four Princes of the Blood scarcely able to avoid an audible expression of their views, with Peers crowding to Eaten till they sat in each other's laps, with members thronging the floor and the gangways and the doors, with a great public meeting waiting breathless for his words, and a nation in an expectancy almost visible to the eye, the brilliant rhetorician was for the first time in his life decidedly prosy. He had not even an epigram, and when he ended, his audience felt that for once he had been too long. The House broke up sulky and doubtful, and neither doubts nor sulks were removed by the sight of the Resolutions. They are more like the extraordinary proposals sometimes laid before Convocation, than the resolves usually suggested to a secular assembly. What on earth, for example, is the use of Mr. Disraeli, and Earl Grosvenor, and Mr. Gladstone voting that the number of electors for counties and boroughs in England and Wales ought to be increased They can all three vote it, and when they have voted it, Tories, and Adul- lamites, and Liberals are as far apart as before. Why not propose at once to resolve that the Christian religion is the religion of Great Britain, or that all mankind are brethren I Who doubts except Mr. Lowe that " while it is desirable that a more distinct representation should be given to the labour- ing class, it is contrary to the Constitution of this realm to give to any one class or interest a predominating power over the rest of the community V" Everybody is saying that, but the problem of extending the franchise without making the most numerous class absolute is as far from solution as before. Given ten white peas and a hundred black peas of the same size in a well shaken sieve, how is white to be made the predominant colour ? That is the point, and the most felicitous accord as to the duty of making it predominant will not advance us one step. The white will be invisible, unless. we can make the white peas prominent. Mr. Disraeli admits that, and the one vital resolution in the thirteen is that sanc- tioning plurality of votes, to which we have devoted a separate article, but even that is put in the vaguest way. Nobody objects openly to better provision against bribery, everybody is• slightly sick of the expenses at county elections, and nobody is very anxious to resist or claim the right of voting by letter. What is there to vote about in these Resolutions except the propositions that Reform is desirable, that nominee boroughs. shall not be disfranchised, that rich men shall have many votes, and that Reform shall be delayed till certain officials. have refixed the boundaries of our great towns It is quite impossible to do anything with misty proposi- tions of this sort, made by a Cabinet which says it will not go out on defeat, and a Minister who has the courage to affirm. that up to 1859 Reform was not a party question ; and the Liberals have only two alternatives. They must either reject these Resolutions altogether, turn these men out, and dissolve, in the hope of a Parliament which, with a new constituency in full sight, dare not refuse their proposals, or make Mr. Disraeli substitute new resolutions suggested by themselves. On the whole, we incline to believe the latter will prove the wiser plan. The Liberals do not want, if they can avoid it, to take office just yet. They no not want to give Lord Russell„ with his old-world ideas, the absolute control of this great question. They do not want to abandon without a struggle the last hope of carrying Reform with the consent of all moderate men, as a measure forced on by a party instead of by the nation. Above all, they do not want to subject them.- selves to the cost, and harass, and suspense of two elec- tions within a twelvemonth, to come up from the hustings choked with pledges, in order to go back to them again. Ii it be possible to avoid this, if the Tories will make as well as. ask concessions, if the Adullamites can be kept to their text, that they want Reform, but not Mr. Gladstone's Bill, if, above, all, it can be done without dangerous delay, it will be better to lick the Resolutions into some practicable shape, that is, in. plain English, to supersede them. It is very hard that an Opposi- tion Cabinet with a majority should be asked by a ruling Cabinet with a minority to be so kind as to lend them a Bill, but there- is an alternative harder than that, and that is to see Reform carried over the heads of the educated by a direct pkbiscitum. The " look of things," to use a serviceable colloquialism, is: not pleasant at all. Here is wheat at 72 shillings, beer rising- sharply for want of barley, work slack in all the great centres of industry, the Government raising in a slack time the bitterest of all social questions, that between Capital and Labour, a. bankers' panic not over, and half at least of the working popu- lation crying out for manhood suffrage. Suppose the other half joins ! It is not a bit more unlikely than it seemed in 1865 that the urban half should become savagely anxious for enfranchisement. How many loaves at tenpence will eight shillings a week buy If the agricultural labourers move, they will move for themselves, and then the problem will be either beyond hope, or soluble only on conditions which will revolutionize English society. God keep us all from the legislation of hunger, and it is that which we are risking, if the House cannot be convinced of the truth that it must receive the town populations within the Constitution, an& that if it will only accept that datum at once it can provide any " checks " it pleases. Next year it may not have the power. Grant that the Resolutions are rubbish, still to pul- verize and recement them will take less time than collecting new bricklayers to make new bricks, and it is time which is all in all. We suppose, from all the indications abroad, that our leaders' drift is the other way, and if it is, there is nothing for it except a dissolution. When the new House comes to- gether, which cannot be till autumn, we may be in presence of an opinion exacerbated till the moderate and the sensible will be pronounced traitors to the cause. We also may not be, and in that most fortunate and most unlikely of events the single gain will be the loss of one .more year,—one more year gone from a generation which has but thirty of active life,
Previous page
