TOPICS OF THE DAY.
MR. HENLEY.
WE trust that Mr. Henley is not yet at the end of his term of service in the House of Commons, and we should regret it the more if we thought that his mischievous speech on the Union Chargeability Bill was to be his last formal farewell to the country. He has been a Tory haunted with glimpses of broader and manlier thought,—a country gentle- man to whom it has been given to have some little sympathy with great towns,—a quarter-session squire who could partly understand the thoughts of thinking Liberals, hard-headed manufacturers, and ambitious operatives,—the salt of the country party, without which it would have lost much of its savour with the nation, and have become good for little but to be cast out and trodden under foot of men. It was Mr. Henley and Mr. Walpole whose influence with the Conservative party prevented them from committing them- selves to the folly of a final uniformity in the suffrage, to admitting a divine idea' in the 101. minimum which should give a limit to county and borough suffrages alike. The member for Oxfordshire has repeatedly shown him- self the advanced guard of the English squirearchy, and it would be sad to have him make his last effort in defence of a cause to which only the more bigoted and more selfish of his party cleave,—to have him print his strong character for the last time on the public mind in that aspect of mere class- prejudice which he has done much to diminish and something to remove. We do not know why we should indulge such fears, but that, having already retired from the Oxfordshire quarter sessions, he gave on Monday night in his own off- hand way, and with his old, hearty, indomitable pluck, an impression that he was conscious of declining physical strength. In fact he did what, as if by instinct, strong men often seem to do towards the end of their public careers, pronounced with something of epigrammatic force his own epitaph as a public man. In reply to the charge of pulling down cottages made against the landlords of England in the recent report of Dr. Hunter and Mr. Simon on the con- dition of the agricultural poor, laid before the House by Mr. Villiers, and impugned by the Conservatives as a gross ex-parte statement if not positively dishonest, Mr. Henley said,— " Old as I am, and half worn out, if I could do nothing else when such charges are made, I would lie upon my back and halloo 'Fudge ! ' as loud as I could." Mr. Henley knew perfectly well the literary value of what he was saying as a monument to his own labours and merits. It was really as effective, if not quite so elaborate, a tribute to his own career as the late Sir Robert Peel's memorable speech about the labourer's bread no longer embittered by injustice' which was to vindicate his memory and preserve his name. We do not mean that Mr. Henley's services to the country have literally consisted of lying physically on his back in the House of Commons and crying Fudge !' But that is the attitude in which political, though not pictorial, Art might most happily glorify Mr. Henley. If he has done anything well—and he has done much well—in the House of Commons, it has been the expansion and development of that apparently rather cynical monosyllable. Sometimes, as on Thursday night, he has roared it out—with pieces just!ficatives we admit —to the opposite party, the reformers. Sometimes, with more title to the permanent gratitude of the nation, he has dressed it up in a less austere, direct, and chastising form for the benefit of his friends. But in one ;hape or other his public counsels have chiefly consisted in dashing aside with a strong, shrewd, humorous sort of squirearchical understanding the pleas which he thought hollow, or fine-drawn, or want- ing in "a bottom of good sense," as Dr. Johnson said of some lady to her tittering friends, either on the Liberal side of the House or his own. When the friends of greater intellectual liberty for the clergy have urged their case for a revision of the subscriptions Mr. Henley has put aside, not perhaps rudely, but abruptly, the finer sense and delicate insight of some of the younger men of his own party (like Mr. Butler Johnstone), and expounded the question as if it lay merely between discouraging absurdly- unpractical and unmeaning scruples in honest Churchmen, and encouraging real Jesuitism in dishonest Churchmen. He solved the question with a 'fudge' to the genuine scruples it was intended to allay, and another 'fudge' to the pretext of genuine scruples put forward by those who, as he held, meant to mask therewith wide and radical doubts utterly inconsistent with the essence of our Church. The same sort of strong, somewhat coarse, limited, good sense Mr. Henley has applied to all the questions with which he has dealt, sometimes taking his stand on narrow, sometimes on iider ground—as on the question of the franchise—bat always endeavouring first to get rid of the unreal and fanciful disguises with which accomplished advocates cover their case, and to approach the - heart of the matter as he conceived it. Nor is there, even when he is utterly in the wrong, as on Monday night, any proper cynicism in Mr. Henley. If he speaks with a sort of rough impa- tience of "a girl coming into your parish and having an illegitimate child, for which, because the kid was dropped in your parish, you had to be accountable,"—it is not super- ciliousness, but only a remark in the same familiar style as that other one that in healthy neighbourhoods, if people marry young "they have a smartish number of children,"—in short it is the squire's frank, offhand manner. Mr. Henley is in- capable of real cynicism, though he never cares to graduate his thoughts or language nicely, for that is a practice which,. when he notes it in others, always inclines him to say in his. heart " Fudge !"
And this rough impression of his that all the half-lights of life are in some way unreal and pretentious, misleads him sometimes into such gross injustice as he was guilty of on Monday night in desiring to lie on his back and cry 'fudge' to the attacks made upon his order on behalf of the agricultural labourers, merely because in two- or three cases in which he had been able to verify the facts. urged to prove the demolition of cottages, he had discovered,. or thought he had discovered, exaggeration and misstatement. in the critics. In truth what he endeavoured to show was no refutation of what his antagonists had proved. He endeavoured to show that the house accommodation for agricultural labourers had not diminished but increased since 1831, while his antagonists only offered proof that it had diminished in an increasing population since 1851. The amplest evidence given, too, from members of his own class really corroborated this assertion, but there was something in the nature of the report and the way Mr. Villiers had brought it forward which made the old man very unjustly suspect its bona' fide character and fancy an ambuscade. Perhaps the irritation he felt with the President of the Poor-Law Board rather aggravated this suspicion. A man who habitually meets the weaker and more superficial arguments of his opponents with an impa- tient fudge' always internally resents a similar habit in his foe. Mr. Villiers is an aristocratic Radical of the cynical kind. He rather likes to show up the selfishness of the terri- torial class, and to pronounce this offenling monosyllable, or some equivalent for it, when they take to themselves credit for any strength of benevolent or kindly feeling to the labourers. Mr. Henley's amour propre and territorial prejudices are pro- foundly offended at these Pharisaic attacks (as he thinks them) on the selfishness of his own order by men who pretend to care, without really caring, for the agricultural labourer. And his amendment on Thursday night doing away suddenly with the right of removal altogether was perhaps honestly meant, but yet meant also as a retort, or, as he said, to "test their sincerity." Mr. Villiers in his deep distrust of the ruling class is equally offended at the disclaimers of territorial greedi- ness and professions of interest in the well-being of the rural labourers with which they reply. Mr. Henley believes that the soi-disant philanthropic innovators on the Poor Law are cooking their facts ; Mr.Villiers believes that the angryterritorial minority are hypocritical in repudiating that wish to put off their poor- rates on others on which obviously they so often act ; and thus. they stimulate in each other the impatient contempt which Mr. Henley's characteristic monosyllable so well expresses. Strong Conservative sense of Mr. Henley's kind cannot but be partly founded on a stratum of class-prejudice. It is of the essence of his kind of good sense to feel the 'fudge' rise more rapidly to the surface of his mind when an institu- tion familiar and welcome to him is attacked rather than when it is defended. There is to him reality in all that custom sanctions, and he suspects the hollowness and unreality rather in those who endeavour to make him relin- quish his hold on these heir-looms of thought. Still he haa shown himself too strong not to see clearly enough occa- sionally the flimsiness and unreality in the pretexts of his own party, and even through his savage speech against the critics of the English landowners there runs a thread of candid confession that they have left undone much that they ought to have done' even if they have not done much that they ought not to have done. He denies very eagerly that with selfish and greedy purpose they have re- cently demolished cottages, and so deliberately sacrificed the poor labourer's interest to their own. But he lamas that they have failed to build, to extend the accommodation with their extending wants, to sacrifice their own interest in the first instance to that of the poor labourer. Even this is much in advance of some of his allies. And we believe the farther step proposed by him on Thursday night, though Mr. Villiers was quite right in rejecting it as certain to overweight the measure and defeat it altogether, may have been honestly offered as a sort of conscience-money to the poor people who have been rattled about "like peas in a fire-shovel" so long. For Mr. Henley is in essence a sincere man, not tender in his thoughts of the poor, but just to them, — as just, that is, as the genius of the squirarchy will allow. 3Ie is disposed to think a large proportion of the minor miseries of the labourer are natural, and that Providence itself echoes the 'fudge' with which he meets the compassion lavished on them. But he feels there is a point of misery beyond which that monosyllable is not justified, and for everything over the margin he evidently takes home a modified self-reproach. He has the prejudices of his order within broad definite limits; pass those limits, and he throws them overboard. He will ridicule the critics of his order till a certain point is passed by his friends, and then he gets up and admonishes the latter that they are going too far, and gives real help to his foes. Let us hope that in spite of being almost worn out,' he may yet once more im- piees the just side of his own mind on the House of Commons with regard to this matter, and with better effect than he could do on Thursday night, when the amends offered to the poor certainly looked—even if as we hope, it was not—very like a treacherous present to his antagonists. For after all he is a positive and not a negative Conservative. When he pitches into what he thinks nonsense, it is from a sort of blind loyalty to something to which he is attached—if that be only a Parish —and therefore when he gives unpleasant counsel to his own friends he always commands their respect no less than that of his foes. We should be sorry if we could see no more of the shading of political truth and falsehood than Mr. Henley ; but for all that he has a realism of nature which many a man might envy, and he will be generally missed by both Tories and Liberals whenever he retires from political life.
Previous page
