ICED RHETORIC AND SPICED RHETORIC.
ANY one who has compared carefully the style and manner of Lord Derby's speech on Tuesday to the Unionists of Kent, with Mr. F. Harrison's letters of Monday and Wednesday in the Daily News, will see admirable and, we may almost say, perfect examples of two very opposite and, in their different ways, very effective styles of rhetoric, —the iced rhetoric and the spiced rhetoric. No doubt they are effective for very different classes of readers, and for very different purposes. If Positivism means, as we are often told that it does, the creed which keeps close to proved fact, and. which excludes as far as possible all un- proved assumption, Lord Derby's rhetoric would represent the rhetoric of the Positivist, the rhetoric which inspires confidence by the studiously moderate and low-pitched tone of its hostile criticism, while Mr. Frederic Harri- son's would represent the rhetoric of the inflamed partisan who snatches at every assumption discrediting to his opponents which it is open to him as an honest man to believe on the faintest shadow of evidence, and clothes it in the most violent and vituperative words which a very considerable command of language places at his disposal. To our minds, Lord Derby is much the more persuasive orator of the two,—not because we happen to agree with him, for we should say just the same of the mere style of Mr. Parnell, excepting, of course, when he lapses into such rare vulgarities as dropping the usual prefix of "Mr." in speaking of his antagonist, Mr. Balfour, and calling him a " mushroom " without the smallest significance or drift, simply because he does not like him. But so far as Mr. Parnell's usual style of oratory goes,— and we are speaking, of course, of the persuasiveness of certain forms of speech,—we should be far more easily persuaded by the carefully refrigerated statements which either Lord Derby or Mr. Parnell continually makes, than we should be by the roaring vituperation of Mr. Harrison, who appears to make up by the gratuitous assumptions which aggressive passions force upon him, for the self-denials which he practises in the region of religious belief. Mr. Harrison's rhetoric is the most highly spiced rhetoric of which we have recently had any specimen, unless we go to the speeches of Mr. O'Brien, or Mr. Conybeare, or Mr. Labouchere. And the spicing is not, to our minds, persuasive at all. It is exciting to those who are already persuaded, but the farthest that can be conceived from per- suasiveness to those whose minds are not made up, but are looking for the grounds on which they should be made up. Whether there are many political minds in that very desirable condition, is a fair subject for question. But granting their existence, they would be repelled, not to say revolted, by Mr. Frederic Harrison's vast assumptions and high-piled vituperation. We would as soon drink the heavily spiced wines which seemed to find favour with our ancestors, as read Mr. Harrison's invective in the hope of gaining light on the political controversies of the day. Take this, for example :—" It is the business of to-day to make all England see that her Majesty's Ministers are at the bottom of it all, the centre of it, the authors and instigators of it all. No man of sense and honesty will believe that the Government ever intended to leave one of the greatest State trials in our history, a trial on which their existence depended, to the control of a private gentleman.' No one believes, when a private gentleman went into a State trial, the costs of which are counted by hundreds of thousands, that he did it for the pleasure of backing his own opinion, without any guarantee, promise, or understanding of a quid pro quo. No one believes that when a Ministry suffered their Attorney- General to pledge himself to the proof of the most dreadful accusation ever launched against any modern statesman, he did so without anxious deliberation and full authority of the Cabinet. No one believes that Resident Magistrates are independent of the Castle, or that they ever pass a sentence which the Castle disapproves. No one believes that the Prison Board are the inexorable Mr. Jorkins ' of State, utterly impervious to Mr. Balfour's remonstrances. No one believes that the so-called new law of the land' is anything but the mere weapon of an unscrupulous faction, which we will break and wrest out of their hands the instant they dare to appeal to the judgment of the nation." The ginger, the cloves, the nutmeg, could hardly be thrown in with a heavier hand than they are in that passage. As Mr. Harrison is well aware, men to whom he would never dream of denying sense and honesty in any transaction of private life, men whose word he would not doubt for a moment if they told him one day that the Times' case had broken down or another day that it had been powerfully supported in Court, exist in hundreds and thousands, and do believe precisely what he says that no such man does believe. And there is this very strong reason why they should believe it, that the Government steadily refused month after month to have anything to do with such a State trial, that they offered to let the incriminated Irish Members prosecute the Times for libel, choosing their own counsel, and paying the expenses of the prosecution, and that they were positively baited into granting some sort of tribunal by the persistency and acri- mony with which they were attacked for not granting a Coin- mittee of the House. And now, because they have granted a Commission which stands far above any charge of par- tiality, and which has brought out clearly the rottenness of the Times' case on one important though non-essential point,—the very result which the Government declared that must be attained if the incriminated Members were innocent, from submitting the case to the investigation of high-minded Judges,—we are assured that the whole affair has been a vile plot, on the trustworthy intuition of Mr. Frederic Harri- son. We can only say that a worse-managed plot for proving guilt by the agency of men who have laid down all the rules and observed all the precautions by which innocence has been demonstrated, was never yet devised. If this has been the result of proving Mr. Parnell's innocence of the forged letters, what would have been the course taken by Mr. Harri- son and his friends if the opposite result had been elicited ?
Now contrast with this heavily loaded and very exciting, but extremely unpersuasive rhetoric of Mr. Harrison's, Lord Derby's style in dealing with his opponents :— "I cannot conceive anything more indicative of a mind perverted by faction or hatred than these lamenta- tions over the not very severe sentences passed on those who disturb the public peace, and the utter absence of even a formal expression of sympathy or regret for the murder of a police officer in the execution of his duty. But though I mention these things in passing, I deny that they have any real bearing on the issue before us. Magistrates are not infallible, and if in any case a sentence is thought too severe, let the matter be calmly and reasonably dis- cussed. The chief obstacle in the way of such discussion is the attitude of the Nationalists themselves. If there be any prejudice against them, it is a prejudice which they have themselves created. A real grievance, if there be one, is likely enough to pass unredressed, if it is taken up by men who have been for months deafening us with complaints which, one after another, have turned out to be unreal. But, I repeat, if it were proved—I do not know that it has been—that on any particular occasion the Irish Magistrates have been wrong, what then ? Is that to be seriously alleged as a reason for changing the relations of the two countries ? And I say the same of this question which has been filling the newspapers for the last few days,—Mr. Parnell and the letters. What does that business prove ? It chiefly proves this, to my mind,—that Home-rulers, both Irish and English, are delighted to find something to talk about that enables them to get away from the subject of Home-rule. It proves also that one Irish Nationalist is quite capable of trying to take away the character of another by means of forgery, and that he has found some English people to believe him. Why the discovery of that fact should be reckoned a great triumph for Ireland is not clear." We do not say that there is not an assumption there which the Home-rulers could dispute ; probably many of them have expressed cordial regret "for the murder of a police officer in the execution of his duty," though ninny have omitted to express it ; but with that slight exception, there is hardly a word in the passage which even Mr. F. Harrison himself,—unless he were writing an inflammatory letter to the Daily News,—could traverse. It is clear, calm, serious argument, pitched in a decidedly lower key than that of the least impassioned of Lord Derby's party,— just as Mr. Parnell's speeches also generally are,—and little as we admire Mr. Parnell's actions as an Irish leader, we have always greatly admired the frigid reticence of his usual deliverances. No doubt the object of a great deal of rhetoric,—of Mr. F. Harrison's, certainly, of late,—is not to convince, but to stimulate into passion those who are already convinced. Whether that be a legitimate object at all, is, we think, very doubtful ; but certainly for the higher purpose of convincing, the studied under- statement of a case, the sedate apprehension of your antagonist's position, the ready concession of any possible weakness on your own side, and the careful avoidance of the habit of covering your opponents with gratuitous insults,—are almost essentials of effective controversy. Lord Derby's rhetoric is the rhetoric to convince a waverer ; Mr. Frederic Harrison's is the rhetoric to in- toxicate a partisan. But we should hardly have supposed that the ethics of Positivism would have approved the latter kind of rhetoric at all. Perhaps it does not ; but Mr. F. Harrison's personal genius for it may have over- powered the moral distaste which M. Comte's ethical system would inculcate.
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