GETTING UP THE STEAM.
THE Conservatives are getting up the steam for the work of the autumn, and Mr. James Lowther's shrill speech at Maryport on Wednesday may be regarded as a kind of pre- mobitory whistle, intended to inform the world that the dead season is drawing to a close, and that the party machine is about to start again. It would be unfair to Mr. Lowther to speak of him as exactly a representative man. He has been fifteen years in Parliament, and Lord Beaconsfield made him a Minister ; but neither age nor office has had the slightest effect upon the reckless candour with which, from the time when he invented Obstruction down to his latest appearances as the avowed champion of Protection, he has proclaimed his own opinions and defied the party managers. What the mass of his political associates only think, Mr. Lowther says openly ; what they whisper in the safe seclusion of their clubs and caucuses, he publishes upon the house- tops. Every one, however, will acknowledge that there is not to be found in the ranks of his party a better partisan, and when Liberals wish to know the worst that is said or believed of them by their opponents, it is to Mr. Lowther's speeches that they turn instinctively. From this point of view, his latest effort must be pronounced full and instruc- tive. His Maryport oration is a long and unbroken catena of damnatory epithets. The hostility and disaffection of the Irish were, he asserts, never so marked. At no period had the business of Parliament been in such a discreditable state as it was last Session. Millions bad been voted away without discussion in a thin House in the month of August, and on a Sunday morning. Mr. Lowther himself had vainly pro- tested against this unexampled sacrilege, but it was carried through, "amid disorderly interruptions, initiated and encouraged by the Treasury Bench, and participated in by the Prime Minister himself." (This picture of Mr. Gladstone hounding on his followers to an unconstitutional use of the Sabbath is in Mr. Lowther's best manner, and is sure to be imitated freely by inferior artists.) The new Rules and the Grand Committees were an "egregious failure." "It was being acknowledged by everybody, except the Prime Minister, that the system of devolution was as rank and signal a failure as the rest of the policy of the Government." He was not prepared to say that there was "any great harm" in the Agricultural Holdings Bill, but what faith could the farmers have in a Ministry which had by means of "discredit- able quibbles" evaded the law against the importation of diseased foreign cattle? Abroad, the Government had aban- doned the "traditional policy" of England, which was to main- tain a cordial alliance with the "old Conservative Powers" of Central Europe. In Colonial matters they were still more at sea, and the restoration of Cetewayo (described in the Lowther dialect as the "sending back of the dusky warrior to the scene of his former iniquities ") had been " fraught with disastrous consequences to our empire." Mr. Lowther's comprehensive survey at last brought him to the field of domestic politics, but we need not follow him further. His speech was pitched in the same key from first to last, the moral of the whole being that it is the one duty of Conservatives to strain every nerve to compass the speedy downfall of a Government whose follies and failures are unredeemed by even the faintest trace of patriotism or statesmanship.
Mr. Lowther's invective, barren and wearisome as it is, is worth noticing, for two reasons. In the first place, it shows how extremely difficult the abler Conservatives find the task of justifying and explaining the intense bitterness which they and their followers feel for Mr. Gladstone and his Government. No one who reads Mr. Lowther's speech can doubt either the genuineness of his aversion for the Cabinet whose enormities he denounces, or the strength of his desire to convince both himself and his hearers that things are really as bad as he makes them out to be. He is so angry, that a measured and reasoned attack would afford him no satisfaction, and, in order to sustain his passion at its proper level, he is obliged to take refuge in indiscriminate and transparently hollow abuse. No one, for instance, knows better than Mr. Lowther that last Session produced a more than average crop of useful legislation. An admission to that effect would not be at all inconsistent with his character as a stout and unbending partisan. But it would be inconsistent with the accepted Tory maxim that nothing succeeds, even by accident, under the evil auspices of the present Government, and Mr. Lowther therefore boldly declares, and doubtless tries to believe, that the business of Parliament was "never in such a discreditable state." Many Conservatives, again, bore witness in the House of Commons to the excellent results which attended the reference of the Bankruptcy Bill to a Grand Committee. It was Mr. Lowther, if we remember right, who once declared these Committees to be a copy of the Birming- ham Caucus, and predicted that they would double the time spent in the consideration of a Bill. Be that as it may, he is not content to express his own dissatisfaction with the new forms of Procedure, but must needs assert, in direct contradic- tion to the testimony of Members on his own side, that the system of devolution is acknowledged by everybody to be as "rank a failure as the rest of the policy of the Ministry?' The same falsetto tone pervades the whole of Mr. Lowther's speech. Everything must be wrong, under the worst pos- sible of Governments. To admit that in a single instance it had shown wisdom or courage, or even been smiled upon by fortune, would be to allow a fatal exception to the general principle to which, by the central law of its being, all its history must conform. If the facts fail to shape themselves as the theory requires, they are quietly ignored, or audaciously perverted. In all this, Mr. Lowther only gives exaggerated expression, as is his wont, to the prevailing temper of his party. They are angry beyond measure with the Government, more angry than ever since fortune, which was so long adverse to it, began to set decisively in its favour ; and finding the country unsympathetic and contented, they try at once to justify and to stimulate their passion by artificial denunciations of imaginary crimes.
Mr. Lowther's speech is worth attention in another way, as illustrating the lines upon which the Tory leaders seem deter- mined to carry on their campaign. It will be observed that he offers the country nothing as the reward of the struggle to which he invites it, except relief from the present Govern- ment. The Tories, who either never read, or have very quickly forgotten the Midlothian speeches, are convinced almost to a man that Lord Beaconsfield was talked out of office by eloquent abuse. The same simple belief in the effi- cacy of Mr. Gladstone's methods, independently of Mr. Glad. stone himself, which sustains Sir Stafford Northcote every autumn in his weary pilgrimage from platform to platform, leads Mr. Lowther and the lesser orators of the party to give themselves up entirely to invective. They forget how large a part of Mr. Gladstone's speeches was purely constructive, and how many of the measures that have been or will be passed by the present Parliament were inscribed on the programme which he persuaded the country to adopt. They forget, too, that the nation condemned the legislative impotence of Lord Beacons- field's Administration, no less heartily than its pernicious activity abroad. It would, of course, be idle to expect the Conservatives, whose opportunity will come, if ever, in some fit of popular exhaustion like that of 1874, to throw away their best chance, by promising large changes in the Con- stitution and the Law. But, unless we are mistaken, they will find it no less difficult to attract the sympathy of the people by mere negations than to destroy their confidence in Mr. Gladstone's Government by insincere and hysterical abuse.
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