TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE NEW APPOINTMENTS.
EARL RUSSELL has begun the task of reconstruction well. The extrusion of Sir Robert Peel, the promotion of Mr. Chichester Fortescue, and the admission of Mr. Goschen into the Ministry are all of them changes which the country will accept with cordial pleasure. The appointment of Sir Robert Peel to the Irish Secretariat was from the first a mistake, and his four years' tenure of power has not reconciled Irish Catho- lics to a man whom they regard, from his share in the Bonder- bund war, as almost a personal foe. He was, we believe, not to blame in the advice he gave General Dufour, his object being by a swift termination of the affair to arrest the imminent interference of dangerous neighbours, but the Catho- lic Church has remembered his action against him, and he started in Ireland with a fund of popular dislike which his administration has only served to increase. Rightly or wrongly, he was hated and suspected, accused of Orange lean- ings, of religious bitternesses, of insolent manners, of light- headedness, and of administrative ignorance so great that his superiors were on two great occasions compelled to over- rule him. Many of these charges were unfair, and all were exaggerated in tone, but the first necessity of a consti- tutional statesman is that he shall not be personally ob- noxious to the people over whom he rules. Sir Robert Peel was obnoxious to all but Orangemen, and was not trusted by them, and his resignation removes a distinct and permanent source of danger to the Government. His sucvsor, Mr. Chichester Fortescue, has been welcomed by all classes in Ireland with acclamations, tempered only by regret that he has not been provided also with a seat in the Cabinet. That body is already too full, but with a Fenian movement to explain and Irish education to be revised, Ireland requires a representation within the sanctum which she has not obtained. There is no Constitutional necessity for admitting either the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster or the Postmaster-General into the Cabinet, while the Irish Secretaryship has been repeatedly held by statesmen with a seat there. An able and thought- ful man, popular as a landlord and elected by the Catho- lics of his county, trained to administration by an eleven years' occupancy of office, and an effective speaker, Mr. Fortescue is of all the second-class Ministers the one best fitted to manage Ireland in any time of difficulty. All parties are ready to trust him, and in Ireland the one want, without which ability is valueless and energy thrown away, is confidence between the governors and the governed. In Mr. Goschen, again, the Government gains a most valuable ally, one who will be still more effective if the strictness of official discipline is a little relaxed in his favour. Trained from boy- hood alike to business and to scholarship, a winner of Oxford honours and a loanmonger, a City man but personally familiar with half the world, he is, like Mr. Gladstone himself, a link between the thought of the country and its work. Competent to his department before he has entered it, able, for example, not only to understand the necessary points of this Austrian treaty, but to make Austrians understand them also, he brings to the general support of the Government no mean debating power. On the few occasions on which he has yet had his opportunity he has delivered speeches to which his friends listened with a sense of real instruction, and his opponents with an alarmed convic- tion that their foothold was crumbling away. We shall regret his appointment only if he is silenced, as too many of the young men are, for his silence will be a gain to the wretched party which, knowing that the higher an English- man's education the more willing he is to support the English Church, still pleads the " interests of the Church " as an excuse for closing the doors of the national Universities.
All these changes are good, but there must be more than these. The defence of the Government in the Commons can- not be safely left to Mr. Gladstone, Sir George Grey, and subordinates with padlocks on their lips, nor will the liberals who mean Liberalism be content without that distinct recog- nition which is implied by admission into the Cabinet itself. There is work to be done outside, but power centres only there. Mr. Goschen's appointment is of itself a proof, were any required, that the Government intend to introduce a Reform Bill, but the Liberal creed is not summed up in the extension of the franchise. That is necessary to complete the representation, and lend to the House of Commons a force which the middle class appears at times to have lost, but
"reform " is at the best but an improvement in machinery. We need also an improvement in outturn,—and therefore men who can add some originality to the old designs, some depth to the colouring, some purpose to the shading of the pattern. We want men who are not content merely to govern, as it is called, who do not think that the way to suppress discontent is to increase the repressive force, who do not believe that all has been done for Ireland which can be done, who are not afraid of ecclesiastical freedom, who do not tremble because another halfpenny on the income-tax is spent upon education, who, above all, can support Mr. Gladstone in the great task which, if he is ever to rank with the greatest of English Ministers he must undertake, the gradual extinction of pauperism within the United Kingdom. He has struck two heavy blows at it—t already, but the work in Great Britain is scarcely begun, and in Ireland not yet imagined. Suppose that to-morrow the Cabinet had to face any question whatever on the relation between capital and labour, or a genuine demand from Ireland for a new tenure, or a resolute petition for universal educa- tion—and any one of these events may follow a wide Reform Bill—who is there in the Cabinet except Mr. Gladstone who could be trusted even to think out of the old Whig groove, to represent the popular voice without represent- ing also the popular ignorance of principles I Mr. Glad- stone could, as we have said, but Mr. Gladstone is on one great subject at variance with the bulk of his countrymen, and at all events he must not be left alone. It is said that the etiquette which usually prevents the immediate advisers of the Crown from offering a seat in the Cabinet to any one who has not held office is too valuable to be swept away, and we cordially agree with the principle. Nothing could be more injurious to the public service than a habit of appointing as heads of departments men without departmental experience, for the practice not only makes the permanent bureaucracy too• powerful—a great and increasing danger—but tempts strong men to retain their sterile position as critics until they are eligible to the higher offices. But the etiquette has never- theless been frequently set aside, and the position of in- dependent liberals is for the moment exceptionaL The old Whigs want to take advantage of their own wrong. They have for many years past systematically kept the rising men down, have refused office to any but connec- tions of the great families, and now they taunt the middle class with their want of experienced representatives. They claim a monopoly of opportunities for action, and then abuse those whom they have excluded for their want of official aptitude. So old that men of fifty seem to them promising youngsters, so exclusive that they reckon any one not an hereditary landholder a plebeian, so narrow that a promotion outside their circle strikes them as a small coup d' Rat, they still affect to regret that the rising generation is wanting in the training required for official life. They confine the holy of holies to the Levites, and then murmur because the children of Judah are so unworthy to enter in. There has been too much of this of late years, and if the true Liberals are wise they will give the Cabinet no alternative but to concede the guarantees they have a right to demand. This journal cannot be fairly accused of assailing the just influence of the aristocratic sec- tion of the Liberal party, but a monopoly of power can no more be safely allowed to peers, peerlings, and peers' sons-in-law, than to artisans. Englishmen do not want to be governed by rank alone, any more than by-rmmbers alone, and it is time that the voting million were represented as well as the Upper Ten Thousand, and by some one besides the man of genius whom the Whig families cannot keep out and show no hearty readiness to adopt. The admission of Mr. Goschen is a sign that Earl Russell intends well, and if he will but carry out his intention, cement a hearty alliance between the traditionary supporters of progress and the men who want progress now, his Government may yet be as strong as that of the deceased dictator. If not, if he will excite no popular hope, and attract no popular sympathy, and ask no popular help, well, radicals can support administrative reform, and he will run the risk of a continuance of the interregnum for the full time during which he might otherwise direct the policy of his country. Seven years have been lost already, and any turning aside,, any feebleness of purpose, any coquetting with the party to which Mr. Lowe, Mr. Horsman, and Lord Elcho belong, may cost the Liberals and the country seven years more. At their close we may have, under unfavourable circumstances and with reduced strength, to face the one opinion which is wornks„ than exclusiveness, and to be a Russell may be not a claim"— but a disqualification for office.
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