TOPICS OF THE DAY.
SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT AT PORTSMOUTH.
IR WILLIAM HARCOURT is renewing his youth. He has not made so lively a speech for years as he made at Portsmouth to the Federal Association of Liberal Unions on Wednesday, nor has he so success- fully feigned to be absolutely ignorant of any great popular party opposed to his own since the democracy has been divided into Conservative and Radical sections. It is the latter piece of acting which we admire most.
It was so simple, so unconscious, so artistic in the concealment of its art. The whole speech was delivered just as if the nation in its wrath were surging at the doors of the House of Lords,—were ready at least to march on London, were fortified by an irresistible might. And yet the whole speech was full of the sort of touches which showed to any keen political insight that Sir William Harcourt realised the exact state of the case, and, instead of having the millions behind him, was doing all in his power to conjure up the tempest which he had no talisman to raise,—to make believe that the impatience of a party was really the passion of a people. Sir William Harcourt is not exactly a political Edmund Kean, but he is a very passable political Macready. No one in the Portsmouth Drill Hall was quite aware, we suspect, of the completely artificial character of the speech, of the laboured touches by which the orator concealed his myn profound misgivings as to his power to do what he was desirous to do, and the effort that it cost him to ignore the thousands of adversaries by whom the hall might just as well have been crammed, and would have been crammed, if Lord Salisbury had been addressing a grand habitation of the Primrose League instead of himself addressing a federation of Liberal Associations. It is the greatest of all the arts of the actor so far to exclude the sense of the unreality of what he is portraying, as to prevent his own imagination from being disturbed by inconsistent itnagPs which cool his passion and dispel his dreams. And Sir William Harcourt displayed that art to perfection. But when you come to the substance of his speech, you se at once how well he had primed himself for his part. He appeared throughout to be looking down on Lord Salisbury and Mr. Chamberlain from the great height of such a confidence in national unanimity as that which carried O'Connell's Irish claim for Catholic emancipation, or Lord John Russell's demand for the Reform Bill,—the Bill, the whole Bill, and nothing but the Bill. Yet he never once allowed his audience to remember that on the previous night his colleagues and he had triumphed by only the magnificent majority of 2; that even in a normal . party division the llinisterialists had had their original majority cut down from 40 to 22; and that this had been due to the widespread conviction that the people would really prefer the policy of the House of Lords, against which he was directing all his thunder, to the policy of the House of Commons. All this Sir William Harcourt suc- cessfully concealed from the observation of his audience, and to some extent at least from his own. Had he thought t.f it too much, that air of immeasurable contempt with which be treated his opponents could not have been so admirably feigned. And even when he let out the secret that he and his colleagues are by no means ready for a Dissolution, he let it out in so artistic a fashion that it sent no shock through his audience. He professed only to be anxious to make assurance doubly sure. The dismay with which he must have heard that the Government could not muster a larger majority than 22, and that the 22 had dwindled to 2 when they attempted to check the impatience of their extremist followers, was wholly banished from his coun- tenance. He managed to assume confidence of the most convincing kind, that the big battalions were all on his side. That patience which he preached, that cue to give the Lords rope enough wherewith to hang themselves, was all, apparently, due to a kind of superfluity of precaution, which would really have been unnecessary, but for his absolute determination that this time there should be no .ebance of escape for his prey,—the hereditary House. They were to be allowed to fill up the iniquities of their fathers. They were to be encouraged to multiply freely their offences against the people. It would be well to let the House of Lords display their hostility to other portions of the Newcastle programme, in a form more emphatio than any they had adopted in allowing working men to make their own bargains with their employers, and rural labourers to choose for themselves, whether they preferred a parish meeting to a Parish Council, or a Parish Council to a parish meeting. They were to be tempted to veto, the reduction of the term of residence qualifying for a vote. They were to be invited to express their dislike to the so-called " principle " of "one man one vote." They were to be obliged to reject Welsh and Scotch Disestablish- ment. They were to be called upon to show their pre- ference for beer and brandy, to temperance and tea. LI a word, they were to be moved to sin against the democracy as often as they could sin against it in the short life of a.
Government which had such ambitious work to do, and so little force with which to do it. And then at last the Government would strike. Then the people would rise in their majesty and wrath, and sweep the Chamber away into the dust-heap of obsolete institutions. Such was Sir William Harcourt's programme.
And it is one to which Unionists can have no objec- tion. Directly it is carefully considered, it becomes obvious that this is the programme of a thoroughly dis- heartened party. The contemptuous rejection of Home- rule by the Peers is no ground for appeal to the country. The willing and even deliberately designed loss of the Employers' Liability Bill, and the Local Govern- ment Bill, both of which would have been heartily wel- come to the people even in the form in which they left the House of Lords, is no ground for an appeal to the country. It is only the Gladstoniau Party which is moved as yet, not the nation. Till the nation is moved, it is not safe to go to the constituencies again, and every effort must be made to stir the heart of the nation. Perhaps that might be done if the Lords would but reject a. Registration Bill, and a Bill abolishing the plurality of votes, and a Scotch and Welsh Disestablishment Bill, and a Local Veto Bill. Perhaps. But Sir William Harcourt is well aware that it is only a perhaps, and a very specula- tive perhaps, too. Unfortunately these various measures are by no means equally dear to all the GlacIstonians: Many of them regard the Local Veto Bill with utter disgust.
Many more tremble at an attack on the Welsh Church, and sympathise with the Scotch Presbyterians in depre- cating the disestablishment of their Church. When all these measures have been forced through the House of Commons by the use of the gag, what will be the condition of the Glad- stonian Party in the country? Will they not be at sixes and sevens, irritated, anxious, very much divided among themselves, and by no means ready for a furious and combined attack on the House of Lords ? Sir William Harcourt knows as little about it as we do. But this he does know, that the Unionist Party will not have been idle during all this agitation ; that it will not have left the various blunders and irritating negligences of the Govern- ment unnoticed ; that it will not have ceased to criticise its naval policy, its Irish policy, its evicted tenants' policy, its disintegrating policy ; and that these criticisms will have told on the constituencies before the Gladstonians can again ask for a new lease of power. To our mind, Sir William Harcourt's avowed wish to put off indefinitely the appeal to the country, which he regards as giving his adversaries plenty of rope, is significant enough of his dread of the growing popularity of the House of Lords and a growing distaste for wholesale destruction. He cannot conceal from himself that the unpopular House of Lords of 1832 would never have dreamt of passing so much of the present Government's measures as the present House of Lords have actually acceded to, though they have received no sort of thanks for these concessions ; that the people know that the House of Lords is no longer what it then was,—a mere rampart against the flowing tide of popular demands. At least half of the democracy is now on the sober side, and after a Gladstonian Govern- ment of two or three years, a good deal more than the half of it will be on that side. It is of no use any longer to try to believe that Conservatism is not popular. Sir William Harcourt has done as much as any man to make it popular, and his Portsmouth speech will add to the sum total of his involuntary services to the Constitutional Party. "Dregs from the bottom half-way up, and froth from the top half-way down," made up Sir William Harcourt's oration. And the froth was clearly better than the dregs.
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