TOPICS OF THE DAY.
LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL AND MR. CHAMBERLAIN. THE reports of the debate and division of Thursday night will be read by the graver men of all parties with that sense of anxiety and regret which is beginning to be the predominant feeling in relation to the proceedings of both Houses of Parlia- ment. In the first place, crowded as the House was and eager for the fray, the subject of debate did not excuse the waste of time devoted to it. Lord Randolph Churchill had no serious case, and knew he had no serious case. We are not saying that Mr. Chamberlain had not been somewhat rash in some of his speeches. We are not assuming for a moment that his account of the origin of the Birmingham riot is convincing, or the last word that can be said. Obviously there will be a whole labyrinth of confused charges and counter-charges to disentangle at Birmingham, which Birmingham is quite competent to disentangle, without wasting the time of the House of Commons. It is, no doubt, idle, as Sir Hardinge Giffard said, to attach any very great weight to the sworn oaths of reputed roughs incriminating themselves. A great deal of that part of Mr. Chamberlain's case will probably turn out to be weak enough, though we have no doubt that the testimony of the respectable Liberals who were maltreated and knocked down for wearing the Gladstone badge is perfectly trustworthy. Doubtless, similar evidence will be produced on the other side by respectable Conservatives. When a riot of this kind is got up, there is almost always fault on both sides ; and we should be astounded to hear that in Birmingham the fault lay exclusively on either side. But fortu- nately that is not the question. The only question justifying a debate in the House of Commons at all was the personal relation of Mr. Chamberlain to the violence of the Liberals. Now, Lord Randolph Churchill, though he had made at Birmingham the most damaging and explicit accusations against Mr. Chamberlain of personal complicity in that violence, —nay, of more than complicity, of being the author of it,— did not venture to repeat one word of that accusation in the House of Commons, and set up a purely constructive and inferential case, which Mr. Chamberlain had not the smallest difficulty in tearing to tatters. No reasonable Member of the House of Commons,—whether Conservative or Liberal, —after hearing Mr. Chamberlain's speech, can have felt the smallest doubt that Mr. Chamberlain had nothing in the world to do with the disturbance, that he had never anticipated it, that he had no reason to anticipate it, and that whoever was responsible for it, he was as little responsible for it as Sir Stafford Northcote him- self. Now, that was really the only accusation which could have justified for a moment the waste of time in the House of Commons. We do not say that Mr. Chamberlain's speeches have always been as prudent as they ought to have been, or that they contained the earnest condemnations of violence which it would have been very desirable that they should have contained. We do not affirm that at all. But is this the first time that a junior Member of the Cabinet has acted with a certain impatience and want of caution which his chiefs might have reason to regret ? Of course, everybody knows that it is not ; and that though it may be fair enough for the Tory Members to reflect incidentally on Mr. Chamberlain's rashness, there was nothing at all in his conduct to justify the waste of a whole debate in times like these, on a minute criticism of his speeches. The first and most serious subject of regret, then, is that this time was thus wasted ; and especially does it seem to us a subject of regret that Sir Stafford Northcote, with his usual docility when the ex- tremists of his party teach him what he should do, sustained Lord Randolph in the course he had taken.
But that is not the only subject of regret which the report of the evening's debate suggests to Liberals. We think it ex- tremely discreditable to the Liberal Party that so many of them stayed away from the division after hearing the debate. We are no personal partisans of Mr. Chamberlain. It has often been our fate to differ from him, and to criticise, more or less unfavourably, the spirit of his speeches. But all the more, we hold that he ought to be supported, and supported strenuously, by the Liberals at large when an unfair attack, such as that of Thursday night, is made upon him, and when he succeeds in disposing triumphantly of the charges brought forward. The House was crowded on both sides. Lord Randolph Churchill made the most he could of the thinnest materials ever got together by a man in his position for the preferring of a grave charge. That the soberer Conservatives, were a little-ashamed of his speech, the comparatively small vote of 178—which included some eight Pamellites,—in spite• of the strong whip issued, sufficiently shows. The Liberals, whether Whigs or Radicals, ought to have rallied in their full strength to the support of Mr. Chamberlain, and it is obvious that many of them abandoned him. We regard this as very discreditable in a case where a spiteful attack had been made on him, and no serious fault of any kind had been brought home to him. The Moderates may think, as we have often thought, that Mr. Chamberlain is a little reckless. That is- no reason for not supporting him when he is charged not with recklessness, but with actions wholly alien to his nature and to his career. How can the Moderates expect to win concessions from the Radicals, when they abandon the Radicals to the wrath of the enemy at the first note of danger ?
Another subject of regret is the relation of the debate to the Irish party. Lord Randolph Churchill's speech was one long bid for the support of Mr. Parnell and his friends. The bid was not, on the whole, very successful. It attracted a few Parnellite votes and one Parnellite speech ; but on the whole the Parnellites appear to have been under no guidance, and to have voted or stayed away as they listed. None the less, we have the very disagreeable phenomenon of extreme Tories. bidding for the support of the disloyal party in Ireland, and bidding for it with a will. And none the less, too, we have the evidence how little of true statesmanship there is in the guidance of that party. Mr. Parnell had a great opportunity. If he had been wise, he would have mocked at Lord Randolph Churchill's bid, but availed himself of Lord Randolph Churchill's arguments so far as they affected Ireland. He would have said that for himself he saw no pretext for condemning Mr. Chamberlain, that Mr. Chamberlain had but exercised the liberty of speaking frankly and without violence on the politics of the day ; but that it was too true that for Irishmen to do the same is regarded as a crime, and that while it remains a crime, Irishmen could never admit the justice of the British Administration in Ireland. That would have made a great impression in the House ; whereas the plea of Mr. MacCarthy, junior, for his vote against Mr. Chamberlain, that English politicians ought not to be permitted to do what Irish politicians cannot do without risking imprisonment and shame, is a plea not of statesmanship, but of sullen spite. If he thinks Mr. Hanington's imprisonment a disgrace to Ireland, he must think Mr. Chamberlain's liberty of speech a credit to England. The retort, " What we mayn't do with impunity, you shan't do with impunity," is the whine of political envy, not the reproach of political indignation. Lord Randolph Churchill's unrebuked bid for the Parnellite vote, and the complete failure on the part of the Irish Ex- tremists to avail themselves of the opportunity opened to them, are alike discreditable to the Tories and to the Irish Nationalists.
On the whole, the debate will not increase the reputation of any one except Mr. Chamberlain. He came out of it a dis- tinctly stronger man than he went into it. The Government came out of it blameless, for they gave a loyal support to their colleague—whom, indeed, it would have been impossible for them to abandon, and whom they certainly never dreamt of abandoning. Lord Randolph Churchill came out of it just what he went in, a politician who makes charges which he cannot• substantiate,—for which he cannot even offer a tittle of evidence,—but which he never retracts, preferring rather to cover them by other charges, which, again, he can- not substantiate, but for which he can collect, with a good deal of effort and manipulation, a plausible case,—plausible at least to the eyes of partisan passion. The Conservative leader came out of it as he generally does,—a little the weaker for attempting to sustain a colleague of whose strategy he could not possibly have approved. A considerable number of Moderate Liberals came out of it all the weaker for having deserted a colleague whom they ought to have supported strenuously under so unjust an attack. And the House of .Commons came out of it none the stronger for having shown once more that it cannot protect itself against the gross waste of time which these acrimonious personal debates invariably cause, and which, nevertheless, are evidently listened to with more interest• than debates on the most momentous issues of political life.
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