TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE PARTY DEMONSTRATIONS.
THE Conservatives have begun their campaign in earnest. At Leeds, at Over-Darwen (near Blackburn, in Lanca- shire), at Plymouth, at Oxford, they have been holding Easter meetings for tall invective and mutual praise. The Liberals have replied by a single party demonstration at Ipswich, addressed by Lord Kimberley, and very moderate indeed in its tone, as becomes an assembly in which a Cabinet Minister takes the lead. Neither party as yet seems to have any clear idea of the next decisive step to be taken in
political construction. The Conservatives evidently think their best cue for the present is vehement abuse of the enemy and inflated praise of old institutions. Mr. Stanhope (South- West Riding), who appeared to be the favourite at Leeds, thanked God once more for the House of Lords, without tell- ing us from which of the objectionable and dangerous measures introduced by the Liberal Government, the Assembly he was so gi ateful for had shielded the country. Indeed, he appeared to hold that such shielding was not what he required of the House of Lords ; that its real office was to sit as a model to the country, to help it in choosing a House of Commons fashioned after the same likeness, Mr. Stanhope exhorting us all,—some- what as a fond mother is often heard to pray ostentatiously in the hearing of her boys that they may but grow up as good men as their father,—to do our duty by bringing "the House of Com- mons into unison with the House of Lords." This is quite a new and interesting view of the function of the House of Lords, that it is a sort of political standard weight or measure,—only laid up in St. Stephen's instead of in the Tower—by the care- ful study of which working-men may discover the shortcomings of the House of Commons. True, Mr. Stanhope suggested a difficulty in his own very original theory when he remarked that it is blood ' which makes the House of Lords so good, for he did not tell us in any way how to supply that deficiency in the House of Commons. Perhaps he meant that the whole House of Commons ought to be chosen from amongst Stan- hopes and their like ; or perhaps only that we ought to try and test the fitness of men who have unfortunately for them no blue - blood, by their amount of agreement in opinion with the men who have blue - blood. On these points, however, he was wisely vague. His object, like that of most of the other Conservative speakers at the various meetings and banquets, seems to have been to evade by irrelevant grandiloquence Mr. Disraeli's difficulty that the Conservative party have not got a policy, and cannot get one in a hurry. The other device for evading this difficulty was of course round abuse of the present Government. Mr. Raikes, who has humour, and ought therefore to know better than to scold, described Mr. Gladstone's Irish policy as one " that had pandered to sedition," (by the Peace Preservation Act ?) " which had increased treason," (by refusing to pardon the Fenians ?) " which had sacrificed rights which it had hitherto been considered essential to protect," (the rights of riot ?) " and they had met with their reward in the recent rejection of their proposals by the Irish Members." At Over- Darwen the Conservatives were even wilder and foolisher. One of them, the chairman, -and a clergyman of the Church of England, accused Mr. Gladstone of gross jobbery for giving his son a Junior Lordship of the Treasury, on the ground that if Mr. W. H. Gladstone had to compete with a factory operative for a situation worth £50 a year he would fail,—which of course would be equally true of the Prime Minister himself, or of any other man fitted for the place ; the same silly speaker also spoke of the Prime Minister as "an unsavoury pie,"—we suppose because he disagrees with him ; and another clergyman pre- sent, evidently emulating the Pharisee in the parable, " thanked God he was not a Dissenting minister " I A third orator declared that " industries had been crushed, and vast sums of money lost under the specious guise of economy," by the present Government,—transactions which the speaker (Mr. Holker, Q.C., M.P. for Preston) appears to have been discreet enough not to describe more particularly, and we have not the slightest conjecture to what he refers. On the whole, we gather from the Conservative meetings that their promoters have not an idea of their own as to policy, that they are very confident in the power of wholesale vituperation, that they are anxious to identify the Government with the Ultramontanes, but are not very easy as to their own party's vote on the Irish University Bill ; and lastly, that they are very nervous as to the relations of landlord and tenant, and while detesting any adequate measure of reform, feel the necessity of going as far as they can to conciliate the tenant- farmer.
In the Liberal meeting at Ipswich, Lord Kimberley cau- tiously no doubt, but not, perhaps, altogether wisely, kept almost exclusively on the defensive, though he did accord his sympathy to the movement of the agricultural labourers for higher wages. He claimed a great success for the Irish policy of the Government,—a success by the victory over the whole breadth of discontent which divides Fenianism from the Home-Rule movement, he claimed national gratitude for the Education Act and for the Army Reform,—and credit for a policy of economy in this sense, that in years of great European excitement and unexampled. prices of fuel and materials, the Government had vastly increased the force at its disposal with a slight diminu- tion of expenditure ; finally, he asserted that the Administra- tion had pursued a policy of peace, while so adding to the strength of the United Kingdom that it has never before been. better prepared for war. All that is no doubt perfectly true, but we wish Lord Kimberley could have said something on some of the pending questions of the moment. Is the Govern- ment to reserve all its sympathy for the Irish tenant, or to keep some of it for the English tenant also ? Is it to over-rule the aristocratic bias of its own bigger supporters on the subject of the Army, but not on the subject of the land ? Is it to, despise the rural electors because they are apt to be blindly conservative on all matters which do not affect their own in- terests, and to support only those reforms which appeal to the• imagination of the householders of the boroughs ? We sin- cerely hope not, though another week or two will show. It is evident that the Conservatives will not be able, in spite of Mr. Disraeli's education of his party, to stomach Mr. Howard's. and Mr. Clare Read's proposal on the subject of compensation for unexhausted improvements ; at Canterbury last Saturday, Lord Fitzwalter (Conservative) could not deny himself an outbreak against the compulsory clause ; and in the Suffolk Chamber of Agriculture on Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Corrance, M.P. (Conservative), and Lord Henniker (Conservative) took the same line, though the strongest approval of the principle- they opposed was warmly expressed in the Chamber itself, Mr. Hermann Bidden very justly remarking that if the compulsory clause or something equivalent to it were not passed, " it would be made a condition of every lease that the tenant should give up the benefit of the Act." If the Liberal party abjure their old and narrow policy of ignoring the griev- ances of those who do not usually vote for them, and give a hearty support to Mr. Howard's and Mr. Clare Read's very just measures, they have the prospect of winning for themselves a new class of adherents, no doubt of slow and somewhat obstinate habits of political feeling, but on that account only the more strenuous and tenacious when once their position is taken. The tenant-farmer secure of the return of all the capital he chooses to put into the soil, would be a very different class of political critic from the tenant-farmer uncomfortably conscious that the safety of his savings depends more or less on his relations with his land- lord. Of course it is perfectly true that this applies as much to Liberal as to Conservative landlords, but the habit of in- dependence of thought will always be favourable to Liberal opinions, and it is that habit which the proposed change tends to favour,
We wish, then, that the Liberal party would not confine themselves to the defensive attitude quite so much as they do. It is very true that they have a great policy to be proud of, and every right to defend it against the scurrilous attacks. of the Tories. But they should remember St. Paul's exhortation, "Forgetting those things which are behind, to press forward to the mark of their high calling," even though the things which are behind are things to be proud of,—which in this case they are. It is not for the Liberal party to fall into the attitude of mere laudatores tenzporis (zed..
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