LORD BANDON'S WEEK OF PENANCE.
LORD BANDON, as everybody knows, is an excellent young man. Everybody who assails the measure with which Parliament has this week been so deeply embroiled,—and all such assailants usually begin by expressing their astonish- ment at Lord Sandon's tremendous artillery-fire in first opening the trenches against the Dissenters,—gives him a testimonial to character, before speaking to him like a father. And Lord Bandon has proved that he is a good young man, by his speech of M■inday night, when he wrapped himself, without any false shame, in a white sheet, directly after Mr. Fawcett and Lord George Cavendish had moved their amendment on the proposal to go into Committee, and proceeded to confess that he had acted injudiciously in railing at the Endowed Schools Commissioners, and had meant no harm by his very belli- cose attitude towards the Dissenters. Probably he was only fired by Mr. Disraeli's epigrammatic eulogy on the late Lord Derby, for combining " the passion of politics with the ten- derness of domestic life," and had hoped to be able to unite with his reputation for being an excellent, conscientious, and even judicious young man, some of the more hazardous glory of " the Rupert of Debate." That was ambitions, and ambition is honourable ; but discretion is shown in selecting the ground for a florid display of 4 the passion of politics,' and we cannot say that Lord Bandon chose his ground well. Earnest young men seldom do. They think it sufficient to have a feeling at the bottom of their hearts. No mistake in politics could be greater. Wary politicians like the late Lord Derby know pre- cisely when it is tolerably safe to be rash and to pour forth the passion of politics' in a manner not unwelcome to Parlia- ment and the nation. Lord Bandon never thought of asking himself whether or not it was safe to be impulsive, and as a matter of fact, it was not safe. He had a Bill to introduce to Parliament drawn apparently with the express intention of not making its drift clear to the Legislature. As we remarked when we first criticised it a fortnight ago, nothing could be more involved or difficult to interpret than the drift and effect of the most important clause. If Lord Bandon had introduced the Bill not only without a flourish of trumpets, but in a speech of the mininnsing order, he would not have had to recant his own big words this week ; and Mr. Disraeli would have had a very much easier task in trying to make out that all the questions raised were not questions of principle, but questions for Committee, which it would be quite easy to accommodate to the views of all parties, and, again, in giving up, as he now seems likely to give up, the main point after all. But after Lord Sandon's bugle had rung out so very defiant a strain both to the Commissioners themselves and the policy of the Commissioners, this minimising line was clearly untenable, and Lord Bandon had not only to retreat from his Balaklav a charge, with the mortifying duty of declaring that he never meant it and was very sorry, but even so, Mr. Disraeli found the scrape a very serious one, for it was quite obvious that even if Lord Bandon himself did not mean it, somebody else did ; Lord Bandon must have been a wind in- strument in the hands of some more mighty master than him- self,—say, for example, Lord Salisbury ; and thus the Bill, instead of being allowed to slip through as a small measure carelessly drawn, so as to seem more than it really was, became a big mea- sure hastily contracted, under the frigid displeasure of Parlia- ment, into proportions ludicrously unlike those which it had been designed to take. It is certain that Lord Bandon must have been sitting upon thorns for the whole of this last week, though he went through his penance like a man on Monday night. Every speech almost must have added to his pangs. Lord George Cavendish,—who has not been too anxi- ous to defend the late Government,—came forward to express his surprise and disgust at this reactionary step. Mr. Fawcett showed that only last year one of the greatest of the Denominational schools in the United King- dom, Trinity College, Dublin, had been converted, not only with the acquiescence, but with the eager support, of the Conservatives, into a national and undenominational school, and this too with far more excuse for retaining its sectarian religious character than could be found for many of the endowed schools now to be given back to the Church of England. Mr. Forster, again, made the very important remark, that under the provisions of the new Bill, the grouping or amalgamation of schools of a different character, so as to supplement each others' deficiencies, would be impossible, since the governing bodies of the differ- ent schools so amalgamated or grouped would be constituted on different principles and governed by different religious tra- ditions. Then Mr. Shaw-Lefevre pointed out that the present Government, during five months of office, had accepted forty- two scheme& from the Commissioners without a single cen- sure, though they were preparing all the time this coup de theiltre which declares the Commission dead by virtue of its own inherent sins and deficiencies. Even the Chancellor of the Exchequer in his turn disowned, for his own part, all Lord Sandon's impeachment of the Endowed Schools Commisaioners, and apologised for their dismissal on a ground more difficult of
justification than ever,—at least, consistently with the ' tone of Mr. Disraeli,—namely, that as they were to have a new policy, it was quite essential, even out of common delicacy for the feelings of the Commissioners themselves, to have new men. Mr. Lowe thereupon remarked that the Cimmerian darkness around the Bill was getting deeper than ever, since this declaration that the policy was to be so completely revo- lutionised that the same men could not possibly carry it out, implied a total subversion of principles. Mr. Sullivan having elicited from the Prime Minister that the wishes of the pious founder of an endowment were not to be respected if he chanced to live before the Reformation, Lord E. Fitzmaurice showed up the extraordinary tactics of the Government, in sheltering themselves behind an opinion hastily extracted (on Saturday last) from the Charity Commissioners, to the effect that they would be very glad to absorb and assimilate into their own organisation the powers of the Endowed Schools Commission. Sir J. Kennaway and Colonel Barttelot (both Conservatives) repudiated earnestly some of the most con- spicuous intentions of the Bill, while throwing a very untenable doubt on the question whether or not those intentions were to be found in it. Sir T. Acland commented on the very unusual character of the blame thrown by the Government on their own permanent officers, without any substantiation of that blame ; Mr. Goschen pointed out the alarming character of the prospect, if every scheme to be prepared under the new Com- mission was to be criticised and debated in detail by the House, in consequence of the distrust created by this revolutionary policy and Bill ; Mr. Gladstone, in one of the most cogent speeches he ever made, exposed the strange and disastrous
character of the resolve of the Government that the policy of 1869 and 1873 concerning Endowed Schools was to
be reversed because it was carried by a virtually unanimous Parliament, while the policy of the abolition of University tests was to be respected because that had been gained at the cost of a serious battle and a party victory ; and then Mr. Disraeli summed up the debate by declaring, with anxious emphasis and with manifold repetitions, that everything was open for reconsideration in Committee, except, we suppose, the transfer of the duties to the Charity Commission. Again, much of the same matter, and a good deal more of a like drift, was brought
up in the stormy discussion in Committee on Wednesday and Thursday, when Mr. Forster distinctly stated that it was no secret that Lord Salisbury's influence had prevented the Endowed Schools Commission from being continued in the Expiring Laws Continuance Act,—whence it is easy to identify -the source of Lord Sandon's unaccustomed burst of political 'IA-passion." And late on Thursday came direct appeals from influential Conservatives to retrace the false step which Lord 'Hendon had so ostentatiously made. Surely the whole week must have constituted such a penance for the worthy Vice- President of the Council as that meritorious person will remember to the last day of his political life. There was not one telling speech in his defence ; not a single one which did not either admit much that was damning to the Bill, or aggra- vate, by panegyrising, its violent reactionary character. Lord Bandon, in fact, has lent himself to a crusade of the Salisbury character, and will come out of the campaign in a very rueful condition indeed.
If we push aside the smaller issues, and ask what principles, if any, have been advocated by the opposite armies in this fight, we should say that the Tories have been fighting for Church interests and the Liberals for national interests ; but that both parties alike have given up the principle of strict adherence to the Founder's will, except so far as adhesion to the Founder's will is necessary to encourage the accumulation of new educational revenues. And this is, we think, the only hopeful feature of the debate. It is a good thing to find the Conservative party as willing, for adequate reasons, to ignore an ancient Founder's will, as the Liberals themselves. There has been no pretence, for instance, of keeping for the small number of remaining Roman Catholics all the foundations of the old Roman Catholic times. There has been no pretence of keeping, even for the particular sectarian school of thought in the Church to which the Founder may have belonged, the foundations' which originated in the Reformed Church of England. The fight has been solely on this issue, — Is there sufficient justification for devoting to really national purposes the educational endowments founded by Churchmen after the Reformation, and before Dissent was an acknowledged power in the State, or is it fair that the Ohnrch should assert the right to regard such endowments as her own ? The argument on the Liberal side has been that national policy requires us to give the largest reasonable inter- pretation to the scope of an educational endowment apparently intended to be administered by Churchmen, whenever it happens that the Church to which they belonged has since given off a number of sects which fairly represent elements in her previ- ous intellectual life. If there was no intention to exclude any school of thought then, there is no sufficient reason to suppose that it would be excluded by the same Founder now. And even if it would, there is no reason why the State should not interpret a doubtful testamentary purpose in a sense larger than that which the testator would himself have preferred. After all, to allow testators to influence the destiny of the property they leave behind them at all, is not a practice demanded by pure justice ; it is permitted from motives of general expediency, rather than on the ground of justice. Now this has been virtually admitted by both parties, only some Conservatives hold that expediency tells for the Church, and not for the nation. Neither party has said, and we hope neither party will say, ' Let us penetrate as closely as we can to the actual conceptions of the testator, and enact them.' On the contrary, both parties have said plainly enough,' Let us enact the testator's reasonable wishes, or those of them which still remain reasonable, as nearly as we can
if we we do not do that, we shall have no such testamentary dis- positions in our own generation ; but let us not scruple to en- large them, wherever they seem to interfere with the wider educa- tional purpose the Founder had in view.' The Liberal party, however, have maintained that to limit in any way the enjoy- ment of the endowments to a single sect, without clear proof that the dogmatic purpose was one of the -testator's chief objects, is not an expedient course. The Tories, on the other hand, have maintained that to limit these endowments in certain respects to Church management is in itself expedient, and is in accordance with the natural presumption, even without any demonstrative evidence of what the testator's drift was.
Of course we hold that the Liberals are right. But the odd feature of the case is that the Tories also held this last year, and that many of the independent Tories hold so still, and that whatever change in their views has taken place, is due to the ac- quisition of power. This is the really formidable feature of Lord Bandon's Bill. It means that a compromise to which the weaker party voluntarily and even willingly agrees, is not to be held
sacred when the great battalions' come over to its side. No announcement can possibly be more serious. It will be a fatal blow to political good faith, and such co-operation as hitherto -there has always been between the Government and the Opposition, between the majority and the minority, when this becomes evident. And we seriously fear that Lord Sandon's Bill, unless the precedent made by it meets—as we are happy to say we hope it does meet—with the country's gravest and most signal displeasure, will constitute a very marked turning-point in the history of party Government,—the point at which it passes its highest efficiency, and begins its descent into a region of chance, passion, and unscrupulous manoeuvre.
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