TOPICS OF THE DAY.
SIR STAFFORD NORTHCOTE'S LEADERSHIP. THE choice of Sir Stafford Northcote as leader of the House of Commons, after Mr. Disraeli went to the Upper House, was all but inevitable. There was but one other man in the House of Commons who could even compete with him,—Mr. Hardy,—and Mr. Hardy, though much the better party orator of the two, is so com- pletely wanting in the judicial mind and the calm self- restraint so needful in a leader, that it would have been a very serious blunder to choose him while Sir Stafford Northcote was available. It is not possible to get a perfect leader. Mr. Disraeli himself had great defects as a leader, though he had great excellencies. And it is better at any time to have a leader who rides with a loose rein, and does not attempt to put too much pressure on the House, than a leader who would have made the Opposition, and not only the Opposition, but the Laodicean Conservatives, feel themselves trampled upon and oppressed, as Mr. Hardy, if he had been made leader of the House, would have done. Mr. Hardy never had adequate elasticity of political feeling for such a position. There is a woodenness even in his enthusiasm which renders him to some extent incapable of being penetrated by the thoughts and ideas of others. But that, at least, is not Sir Stafford Northcote's defect. For one long Session and half of another very critical Session, the House has been under his lead, and no single Member of it would, we think, ascribe to him too heavy a hand in the control of its procedure. But many, we think, would regard his leadership as deficient in firmness and decision. And notwithstanding the sincere respect we entertain for Sir Stafford Northcote, we confess that with this opinion we agree. Last Session, on more than one occasion, we had to point out this want of decision. When Mr. Read proposed his County Organisation Bill, and the Government, after sending out a Whip against him, in a wavering and half-hearted way, accepted the principle of his measure, it was obvious that the leadership of the House was in very uncertain hands. It was the same when Mr. Yorke proposed the Royal Commission to inquire into the management of the Stock Exchange. The speeches with which the Government met that proposal were speeches of decided disapprobation, but they accepted it none the less, in spite of those speeches. Again, Sir Stafford North- cote resisted strenuously in principle the proposed Committee to inquire into Lord Dundonald's grievance, but in spite of resisting it strenuously in principle, he granted it in fact, and that without a division. All this was grievously wanting in decision. And the same fault appears to us to have been exhibited in a very marked degree, though in a different class of cases, this Session. Within the last week, on three occasions at least, there has been evidence of a vacillating mind, a mind not equal to the emergency, and disposed to take a middle course where a middle course had little or no meaning. The first and most important case was in reference to the disorderly proceedings in the Lobby during the sitting of Friday week. When such men as Mr. Gladstone, the Marquis of Hartington, and Mr. Whitbread vote in favour of any measure, and are hooted in the Lobby for so doing, it be- comes the leader of the House to use his full authority for the purpose of rebuking and discouraging with some peremptori- ness the Members guilty of such discourtesy. There was no middle course possible in such a case as this, consistently with the dignity of the House and the House's leader. Yet no account of the proceedings that we can see or hear of, repre- sents Sir Stafford Northcote as rebuking in any way the in- decent violence of his followers, though he does seem to have regretted that he had voted for the secret session himself. While himself always courteous to his opponents, he appears to be too much afraid of inspiring discontent in the minds of his supporters, to permit of his using the curb and bit effectively. Perhaps he is too conscious of not wielding a very vigorous whip and spur, to be quite willing to use the bridle as vigorously as he should, when his supporters go far beyond him, and indeed beyond discretion and reason, in their zeal. To treat men who were against a secret sitting—which everybody, in- cluding Sir Stafford Northcote himself, now admits to have been a grievous mistake— as if they had approved of Mr. O'Donnell's course, was at once so silly, as well as so ill-bred, that we greatly fear that a leader of the House may lose influence and weight who did not venture to condemn it as he ought. Sir Stafford Northcote must not fear to chastise his own followers when they break away from all rules of decency and propriety, if he wishes for their sincere respect. The second instance of a tendency to vacillation, and to the drawing of distinctions without a difference, was his conduct on Monday night in reference to the increased Dog-tax. First, Mr. Chaplin proposed that no single pack of hounds should pay more than £30 for dog-tax, and that any master of hounds should, indeed, be at liberty to commute the tax on his pack for a payment of £30. This Sir Stafford Northcote very properly resisted, and resisted on the right ground,—the ground of justice. He thought fox- hunting, he said, a national sport. Still, you must not tax a man who prefers one national sport less than you tax a man who prefers another, else you will be incurring the charge of dealing unjustly with different persons. The position thus taken was quite unassailable. But when a few minutes later Sir Stafford Northcote himself brought in a clause exempting the whelps of hounds from taxation till they reached the age of a year, though all other puppies are to be taxed from the age of six months, he exposed himself to the very condemnation which he had just passed on Mr. Chaplin's proposal. bro. more distinctly unjust exemption could be conceived. It is no doubt true, as it is stated, that till the whelps are a year old it is impossible to decide on their qualities as hounds, and whether they will do to place in the pack or not. But it is also true of a setter, or pointer, or retriever, or even of an ordinary sheep-dog, that it seldom shows its faculty till it is near a year old ; and there is no more excuse for exempting a master of foxhounds, —or rather, the subscribers for the pack, for a much greater number of packs are kept by subscription than by individual munificence,—from the cost of keeping young dogs which may not prove suitable to their purpose, than there is for exempting any other owner, whether of fancy dogs or of sporting dogs. If ever there was a tax paid out of luxuries,. the tax on packs of hounds is so paid. It is, of course, true,. as some of the speakers most irrelevantly affirmed, that plenty of farmers, and others even poorer than farmers, join in. the sport which is thus to be specially favoured by the Chan- cellor of the Exchequer. But what has that to do with the matter ? The sport is not kept up for their amusement, but for the amusement of those who pay for it, and why should they pay less in proportion than the lady pays for keeping her toy-terrier, or the boy for keeping his bull-dog ? If an. additional item in the cost of keeping packs were,—as it necessarily would be,—the item due to taxation on whelp& out of which the pack is to be recruited as the older hounds fall out, where could a better subject for taxation be found t It would be the taxation of a mere luxury, but even that is not the main point. The main point is that the special luxury of country gentlemen ought not to be favoured, when the like luxury of every other class of the com- munity finds no such favour. But then it will be said that Sir Stafford Northcote only left things as they are,—that is, acknowledged, as legal, a practice which has hitherto been fol.- lowed without its being legal. That, again, is perfectly true,. and equally irrelevant. The claim of this measure is to en- force the dog-tax thoroughly, as it has never been enforced yet. If it is to be enforced, as the Chancellor of the Exchequer states, on all sorts of poor persons whose puppies have hitherto been taken little notice of,—if "the burden of proof" that these puppies are not more than six months old is to be thrown upon them,—why, in the name of justice, are the rich owners of the subscription pack of the county, only to be compelled to show that their whelps are under twice that age ? The thing is palpably unjust, a mere bit of class legislation, and Sir Stafford Northcote in resisting Mr. Chaplin's amendment himself condemned its principle in the clearest possible language. We cannot resist the inference that he had not the moral courage to face the unpopularity which the exaction of a new impost on the favourite sport of country gentlemen would have brought him, though he had the courage to resist the proposal for a new exemption. In a word, he was neither hot nor cold. He would not go so far as to set a bad example. But he had not the courage to enforce for the first time the principle of his own measure on the most influential of his supporters.
There was the same indecision, though in less degree, in his mode of dealing on Tuesday night with Mr. O'Donnell's ques- tion of "privilege." There was, as his good-sense perceived, not the shadow of a case for admitting a breach of privilege. The Globe, in remarkably temperate language, intimated its doubt whether Mr. O'Donnell himself believed in a charge which he had not brought in a straightforward and direct manner before the House, but had put in a hypothetical and ambiguous form. Well, of course it was perfectly reasonable and legitimate for any one to doubt whether a charge so put was seriously accepted by one who elected to put it in that form. If that was a breach of privilege, all criticism is at an end. Sir Stafford Northeote said this virtually, but he said it in so cau- tious a manner that he practically left t,o Sir Henry James the duty of expressing the indignation with which the House regarded this monstrous waste of its time and absurd perversion of its rules. Sir Henry James did on that occasion the real duty of leader of the House, while Sir Stafford Northcote only faintly foreshadowed what the judgment of the House should be. That was, of course, a very venial error, and an error in the right direction,—the direction of leaning towards leniency where there is any doubt at all. But in this case there was no doubt at all. Mr. O'Donnell had really violated all just principles of action in the debate out of which the remarks of the Globe arose, and a strong leader would have expressed the feeling of the House with more force and emphasis. Sir Stafford Northcote was, as usual, a little undecided, and as usual, where he is undecided, he leant to the side of gentleness.
We say all this with no wish in the world to weaken Sir Stafford Northeote's hands,—nay, with a very strong desire to strengthen them. His faults are, as we have often said, in the right direction. No blunder could be greater than to try to rule the House of Commons with a rod of iron. Any one who did so would soon fail. In his position, a light hand is the true strength, and Sir Stafford Northeote is light-handedness itself. Still he does at present want pluck, and we hope, more from inexperience and a deep sense of the fault of any attempt at despotism, than from deficiency of spirit. Especially in cases where his own sense of moral justice must convince him that an equal hand should be brought to bear on his own supporters, and on those who are not so intimately connected with him, his indecision threatens to weaken very materially his great authority with the House ; and on such points, at least, we ven- ture to hope that he will not only tighten his loose rein, but teach the unruly party he has to lead, that he is as much their master, as an M.P.H. is master of the pack over which he rules.
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