PROFESSOR FAWCETT'S INDICTMENT.
WE should sincerely regret to see the prophecy fulfilled which the junior Member for Brighton told his consti- tuents on Monday that kind friends had so freely communi- cated to him, to the effect that he had not 'the ghost of a chance" of ever representing Brighton again. Widely as we often differ from him, and truly as we regret the dicta- torial jar in his habitual tone of treating almost all shades of Liberalism that differ from his own, but most of all those which are represented by the Government under all the neces- sary difficulties and restrictions of official responsibility, we should be exceedingly sorry to see his place vacant in a House where his high spirit, his carefully-reasoned independence of view, his complete absence of respect for persons, and his resolute opposition to the unreasonable side of democracy no less than to oligarchy, have earned for him a well-deserved in- fluence and a characteristic position. The man who balances his not very reasonable vote against the dowry of the Princess Louise by an eloquent protest against the attempt to tax a class for the benefit of the whole nation,—who, while he demands extension of household suffrage to the counties, and a redistri- bution of seats in proportion to population, earnestly vindicates the rights of minorities drowned in the nation by their too even distribution through it, to win some sort of real representation for themselves by combination and co-operation,—who is not afraid to say that he values individual liberty so highly that rather than admit the right of two-thirds of the ratepayers of any parish to deprive the other third of their glass of beer, he would infinitely rather never enter the House of Commons again,—deserves to be heard attentively by all who love justice and fair play. We value highly Mr. Fawcett's influence in the House of Commons,—an influence which, however crotchetty and acrid, is always used on the side of high principle ; and we cannot show our value for it better than by indicating carefully what we regard as the grave faults of his speech,—its unpractical political standards, and its excessive acerbity of tone,—faults which we cannot better convey in a general way than by saying that he speaks like a man who bitterly resents the sin committed by a government of the nine- teenth century in that it is not what he might perhaps less unreasonably expect from some government of the twen- tieth century,—that if he had lived in the days of Wyclif, he would have upbraided it severely for not being the age of Luther, —that he would have been offended with Sir Robert Walpole for not reforming Parliament in the sense of Lord Grey's great measure,—that he would have severely reprimanded Mr. Addington for not imposing compulsory education, and Lord Liverpool for failing to apply competitive examinations to the reform of the Civil Service. Perhaps, however, Mr. Fawcett will point out to us that in his speech at Brighton the other day, he really did acknowledge deliberately the principle that there is a time for everything, and that there are some things, which he thinks good, for which this is not the time. We heartily acknowledge and congratulate him on the admis- sion. He would not conceal, he said, the opinion he held, that" for many reasons it is unwise to raise the question of Republicanism at the present time." That is wise. But would not this admission that there are laws of development in politics, that some proposals which might be ripe for discussion a few years or a generation or generations hence would be unripe now, go a great way towards reforming the assumptions of his own speech, especially in relation to his strictures on the Government,—since any government is simply self-condemned if it attempt to carry with it a representative assembly in a proposal for which neither the people nor their
representatives are prepared Let us consider his speech a little in relation to this particular point. He begins his strictures by the sarcastic remark that as the Government is never tired of taking credit for its two great Irish measures,—theDisestablishmentandDisendowment of the Protestant Church in Ireland, and the Tenant-Right Act, it might recollect that a principle which is good for Ireland can- not be bad for Scotland and England, and that though the emergency requiring the changes may not be so great in either of these countries as it was in Ireland, the principle holds as true in the former cases as in the other. Mr. Fawcett might precisely as well say that because it was right to give complete parliamentary self-government to the Australian and Canadian colonies, it was necessarily wrong to break up the untimely and inappropriate parliamentary government of Jamaica, or that because a very peculiar marriage law is supposed to work well in Scotland, it should be introduced at once into England and Ireland. We are not discussing the questions themselves, only a particular argument for them, and we ask Mr. Fawcett seriously if a Government would have been in its senses which had proposed to extend the disestablishment and disendowment principle at the present time to England, or to have spon- taneously offered Great Britain a tenant-right measure like that of Ireland, without any audible demand from the tenant-farmers of this island for such a law ? Mr. Fawcett knows perfectly well that in such matters a Government is bound not to anticipate a public opinion that as yet never has been, and perhaps never may be formed, and that it is the merest carping to turn these great and beneficent Irish reforms into reproaches against the Ministry for shrinking from an extension of their idea to countries where, as far as can be at present ascertained, these measures would be rejected with angry surprise.
Again; take Mr. Fawcett's bitter impatience of the Educa- tion Act for establishing what he ridicules as "permissive compulsion,"—a sort of compulsion which has resulted in leaving all the rural districts entirely free from compulsion, and establishing it only in the towns. There, again, we main- tain that he is simply complaining of a beginning for not being the end, that he is about as wise as a physician who should start by administering as his very first dose the maximum quantity of a strong drug which any patient will bear. Of course, the rural districts have as yet got no com- pulsion, and have got an amount of school accommodation exceeding the wants of those who actually attend. That was precisely what the Government wished, and wisely wished. They are beginning, like Mr. Fawcett, though in a slower way, to complain of having all that expense put upon them for inadequate results ; they are beginning slowly to grudge the towns their superior power of compelling attendance ; they are beginning to be prepared for compulsion, which two years ago would simply have caused violent resistance and angry reaction. But all this shows how much wiser the Government was than Mr. Fawcett. There is no peril greater than that of forc- ing a complete educational system on an unprepared and reluctant people. By making compulsion permissive, the Government enabled it to be used where public opinion is already prepared for it, and to be delayed where it is not,—and that was precisely what was wanted. When Mr. Fawcett asks his audience who ever heard before of such an anomaly as permissive compulsion,' we may ask him in reply whether he ever heard of the legal authority of a parent. That is precisely permissive compulsion, and it is legalized for precisely the same reason as permissive compul- sion was legalized in the Education Act,—in order to give an elastic training-power, capable of being adapted to a variety of different circumstances the importance of which could not be estimated by any central authority. If Mr. Fawcett in his impatience had committed us at one plunge to universal com- pulsion in education, he would have also committed us at one plunge to a violent popular reaction of the most dangerous kind against education. Mr. Fawcett cannot bear development. He would have voted for summer without a spring, and objected on principle to the gradations of twilight.
But one, at least, of Mr. Fawcett's bitterest attacks on the Government is not even excusable out of consideration for the impatience of his political temperament. He bitterly attacks the Government for its " onesided economy," for its "partial retrenchments," for retaining sinecures for the rich and curtly refusing money to the poor,—the last point being illustrated by its grudging policy about Epping Forest. We are with Mr. Fawcett on the latter point, but we say unhesitatingly that when he charges the Government with deliberately sustain- ing "sinecures for the rich," he is speaking in the spirit of blind prejudice. Was the suppression of the Mastership of the
Mint a sustaining of sinecures for the rich Have the
bitterly-condemned savings in judicial appointments, —the long-suppressed appointment of Judge of the Queen's Bench, for instance, by no means an economy of which we approve,— been instances of sustaining "sinecures for the rich" I Were the economies in relation to the Boards of Inland Revenue and of Customs sustainings of "sinecures for the rich"? Was the suppression of Mr. Barry's office as Architect to the Houses of Parliament an attempt to sustain "sinecures for the rich"? We are no zealots for the policy of cheesenaring for the sake of cheeseparing ; but we declare that no Government ever showed more honest purpose in the matter of economy,— whether always wise or not is quite another business,—than this ; and we assert especially that Mr. Fawcett's petulant charge that the Government has cared nothing for economy in pieces of valuable preferment, while urging harshly economy in relation to the wages of the poor, is conspicuously false.
We may add that as Mr. Fawcett is so severe on the Government for its asserted wish to invite defeat on that clause of the Ballot Bill which threw the Election Expenses on the Constituencies,—a clause on which we heartily sympa- thize with him, — he might have thrown part of the blame on his "friend," "that distinguished barrister and accomplished lawyer," Mr. Vernon Harcourt (whom Mr. Fawcett goes out of his way to compliment highly be- cause he too is making himself very disagreeable to the Govern- ment),—a gentleman who in the name of popular constituencies brought all the pressure he could to bear against this import- ant clause, and had certainly more to do with defeating it than any insincerity on the part of the Government which intro- duced it. But Mr. Fawcett makes very light of the sins of mem- bers below the gangway, though, if they were committed by the Government, he would hardly be able to denounce them in strong enough language.
We are by no means, as our readers know, mere apologists for Mr. Gladstone's Government. We hold quite as strongly as Mr. Fawcett, that in the appointment of Sir Robert Collier to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council by the help of a "colourable evasion of the law," the Government was guilty of a blunder quite criminal in its magnitude and the mis- chievousness of its precedent. We regard, with him, the dis- position of the Government to ignore the claims of the people of London to open spaces like Epping Forest as most blamable, though we refer it to that excessive and almost blind craving for economy which Mr. Fawcett only admits where it is hostile to the interests of the poor, but which the Government show quite as conspicuously in suppressing what Mr. Fawcett calls "sinecures for the rich." We blame the Government for much for which Mr. Fawcett, if it were not physically impossible for him to get a word of praise of the Government beyond his throat without all the sensations of spasmodic choking, would praise it,—for its shilly-shallying with Russia as to the Black- ,Sea question, for its want of courage in not firmly and boldly pro- testing against the principle of annexations that take no account of the wishes of the people annexed,—for its apparent (we hope it maybe onlyapparent) cowardice in not putting fully in force in relation to the higher education of Ireland the principles which Mr. Gladstone has announced as governing his Irish policy,— principles which Mr. Fawcett's own proposal in relation to the University of Dublin by no means adequately satisfies. But we are not disposed to find no good thing in the Government because we find many faults with it. And if Mr. Fawcett could only take in good part the criticism with which we will sum up our remarks on his speech, we believe it might be of really high service to a political reputation the noble inde- pendence and high spirit of which we sincerely respect. That criticism is, that a mere fault-finder who is unable to appreciate the good qualities visible in the object of his criticism, cannot possibly have the proper influence of an independent critic. Nobody will believe that Mr. Fawcett is wholly in the right, and such a Government as the present wholly in the wrong ; on the contrary, the animus of acrid prejudice which produces a speech so brimful of dislike and contempt, is sure to weigh with every impartial mind in a sense hostile to the intellectual weight and moral impartiality of the man who spoke it.
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