TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE PLIMSOLL INCIDENT.
IT is only too clear that Mr. Plimsoll has brooded over the dangers to which our Seamen are needlessly exposed, till the prospect of another long delay in applying any remedy to the mischief, has been a little too much for his overstrained brain. The speech which he made on Thursday night, and the protest which he handed in against the discharge of the order for the resumption of the Committee on the Merchant Shipping Bill, were the outburst of morbid excitement, though of a kind of excitement the origin of which is very creditable to Mr. Plimsoll. It is, no doubt, more or less true that the Government has sacrificed a Bill on which many lives depend, for the sake of a Bill of purely political value and of very little social concern to the nation. But it is unfortunately not the first time that this disproportionate weight has been assigned to political over more human considerations in Parliament, and it will not be the last. Parliament responds to a generally diffused popular feeling quickly enough ; but the artificially created issues of Parliamentary battles will be always apt to take precedence even over life-and-death questions affecting only a special class in the community, and for precisely the same reason for which, under oligarchical and aristocratic governments, the interests of the masses of the people themselves have often remained undiscovered and unregarded for generations, and even centuries. Things which affect the English Government and so interest the English people will generally take precedence of much more vital matters which touch only a small section of the people. Nor is there any greater paradox in that than in the fact that a public holiday which interests everybody, is very apt to push out of view the interest attaching even to a very fatal but purely local epidemic. The risks and hopes of party government are the risks of all politicians. The risks of farmers, or agricultural labourers, or shipowners, or sailors, interest but a few politicians. Mr. Plimsoll, if he had kept his head cool, would have known that though it would produce a very wholesome effect to expose the selfishness of a party Government which thinks more of its majority than of the lives and deaths of a great and most useful class, it would be of no use in the world to speak of such selfishness as if it were an unheard-of crime never before committed by man, or left without the vengeance of God. On such a principle as that, the whole generation which passed away between the rise of the cotton industry and the passing of the Factory Acts, was a generation liable to such denunciations as Mr. Plimsoll poured out on Thursday over the Government and Parliament which postponed the Mer- chant Shipping Act. Probably there has not ever been a measure passed for the protection of poor men's lives that has not been jostled repeatedly out of the way by measures of purely party concern, but none the less, for that reason, of keener Parliamentary interest. All men know, and always will know, that matters of life and death to themselves are not near as interesting to other people as the most trivial concerns of those other people. And you cannot place a great representative body at the head of a nation, without immediately making the smallest matters which affect its constitution and government, of greater interest to most of its Members, than the happi- ness and lives of even considerable classes of their fellow- subjects.
Mr. Plimsoll, therefore, proved that he had lost his head in the feverish intensity of his very noble sympathy with the Seamen. And Parliament did very wisely in showing some- thing of sympathy for the outburst of despair and indignation by which his failure of self-command was accompanied. But not the less should we regret to see, as we think it possible we may see, the constituencies taking anything like a heroic view of Mr. Plimsoll's passionate sympathy with the seamen, and showing any inclination to justify such outbursts of philanthropic frenzy in future. We have the most genuine respect for Mr. Plimsoll, for the true self-devotion he has given to his work, and ascribe his break-down simply to ill-health and overstrained nerves ; but there is nothing we should dread more than any disposi- tion on the part of the constituencies to take up the cry he has raised in the same tone, and to begin denouncing the sin of Parliamentary selfishness and Administrative indifference to the wrongs of the people, in the key which Mr. Plimsoll's in- disposition led him to indulge in. There is always a certain danger of hysteria in popular oonstituences, and Mr. Plimsoll
has more than once elicited responses to his appeals which have impressed us with that danger. Indeed the danger is never so great as when a really disinterested man like Mr. Plimsoll loses his self-command on behalf of a cause for which he has made great sacrifices. Popular bodies are apt to admire the evidence of uncontrolled sympathy with the people almost the more for the want of control. And it is barely possible that if Mr. Plimsoll were to retain his health sufficiently to persevere in the violence for which there was so much excuse on Thursday night, and to make a merit of it with the masses, there might be a kind of response to it which would have a very mischievous effect on political life. We cannot say that we greatly fear this result in this particular case. Though the whole of Mr. Plimsoll's agitation has been carried °win a too emotional key, it is tolerably certain, we think, that when he recovers his tone of mind, he will regret the scene of Thursday, and express his regret with befitting earnestness. But we do fear anything which is at all likely to make hysteric waves of enthusiasm popu- lar amongst the constituencies. Such hysteric impulses would. furnish a very bad complement indeed to the self-interest and corruption which appear to be inseparable from democratie forms of government. Disinterested passion is no balance for- interested calculation. Passionate popular feeling needs the contra of more calmness and sagacity and in a sense, even of more hard- ness than are exhibited by interested politicians, if it is to purify politics, and not rather to emasculate them. That no one will be. hard on Mr. Plimsoll's error we are quite sure. But that the con- stituencies may not possibly take too admiring a view of it we are. not sure. There is something so attractive to the heart in the- spectacle of a man consumed, as Mr. Plimsoll evidently is, by- passionate sympathy with a disinterested cause, that popular bodies are apt to forget that such absorbing feeling is, after all, a disease which paralyses the practical powers, and not a. state of mind to be imitated, or even admired.
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