S IR STAFFORD NORTHCOTE has gone to the South to recover
from the physical depression which is, perhaps, more or less the result of moral depression. Lord Salisbury has gone to the North to attack the sources of that moral depres- sion itself in their most formidable stronghold. He has a mission for converting the Scotch, and thinks that his address of Thursday will help the Conservative reaction which he anticipates in that land of hardy Liberalism. We suspect he will find out his mistake. It is not much to have found twelve hundred Conservatives to listen to a great Tory orator in such a city as Edinburgh. Could he have found twelve thou- sand to cheer him tothe echo,as Mr. Gladstone would easily have found to cheer him ? Lord Salisbury would have had to sweep something like half-a-dozen great Scotch counties to find them. And if the demonstration in itself is not indicative of any great prosperity for the Conservative cause in Scotland, we need not fear that the Marquis of Salisbury's speech will do much to galvanise the dying cause into renewed vitality. It is a clever speech enough in a party sense ; but then the party sense of the speech is so obviously shallow, and suggests so very powerfully the proper party answer to it. Thus, take the Egyptian part of it. Lord Salisbury's indictment against the Government is twofold,—(1), that we ought to have humoured the Sultan by allowing him to break his engage- ments with Montenegro, and allowing Europe to break her engagements with Greece, and he holds that by thus humouring him as he (Lord Salisbury), if he had stayed in office, would have humoured him, we should have found it easy to secure the Sultan's influence on the right side in Egypt ; and (2), that by refusing to fight for our " military credit "—which Lord Salisbury prefers to substitute for our "prestige "—in the Transvaal, we did our best to inspire the enemies of England in Egypt with the confidence that we should not fight for it there. Well, the answer to that is so easy. Lord Salisbury thinks that by showing the white feather in our immediate transactions with the Sultan, by throwing over the causes to which we had pledged ourselves at Berlin, we should have gained such influence with him as to secure his aid in a matter in which he believed it to be as much as his sovereignty was worth to side with us ; and yet he also thinks that by refusing to fight in a certain complicated South African quarrel, of which neither Turkey nor Egypt in the least understood the rights and the wrongs, we lost autho- rity. in Egypt. All we can say is that he answers himself. We risked much, to show the Sultan that we would tolerate no bad faith in matters which the Sultan perfectly understood. How that could have tended to make him think it safe to quarrel with us on another matter, which he also perfectly understood, we fail to see. As a matter of fact, it had just the opposite effect. The Sultan would have given his scimetar to support Arabi openly, and the reason he did not do so was, in all pro- bability, because he was so much afraid of Mr. Gladstone's Government. He knew by our threat of seizing Smyrna that our Government, when committed to a just cause, did not scruple to use force with some effect. And, so far as we know, nothing else would have prevented him from joining openly the cause to which he notoriously gave all the secret support he could. To suppose that by a cowardly policy on the Montenegrin and Greek questions we could have persuaded the Sultan to risk collision with the fanatical Mahommedan party, is childish in the highest degree. He would have despised us for throwing over Montenegro and Greece, and the more he had despised us, the less he would have feared us. Again, to treat the policy of the Government in surrendering the Transvaal as weighing seriously with either'the Sultan or the Egyptian rebels, in relation to the mutineers of Alexandria, is per- haps even more childish than to suppose that we could have induced the Sultan to act against his fanatical allies by showing him how desperately we were afraid of offending his suscepti-
bilities even in the interest of a solemn contract. Why, Lord Salisbury himself, with all his regard for military credit, did not overawe either Cetewayo or Shere Ali, though he made as fair a bid towards bullying the latter into submissiveness, as ever was made by an unscrupulous devotee of " military credit." Did not Lord Lytton tell Shere AIi that he was the earthen pot betwixt two iron pots, and would assuredly be broken by the iron pots if he did not ally himself with one of them ? And was not the result this, that the earthern pot crept behind the wrong iron pot, instead of the right ? What can Lord' Salisbury mean, then, by ascribing the necessity for military operations in Alexandria to the surrender of the Transvaal ? Does he seriously think that had he been in power, and had he been in full military occupation of the Transvaal, he could have coaxed the Sultan or frightened Arabi into complete submission to his will ? If he does, he is still more of a madcap in statecraft than even his short administration of the Foreign Office would suggest.
Moreover, Lord Salisbury is as rash in his facts as he is loose in his arguments. What can a statesman. be thinking of who calmly remarks, " Only once in the history of the world, so far, at least, as this hemisphere is concerned, if I am not mistaken, has a great com- mercial city of the first class been subject to bombardment," —Alexandria being the one instance to which he refers. Is Paris in this hemisphere ? Is Antwerp ? Is Hamburg ? Is Leipzig ? Is Odessa ? Is Copenhagen ? Is Constantinople ? Is Vienna ? Is Trieste ? Is Genoa ? Is Venice ? Is Naples ?' Is Messina ? Is Palermo ? Is Lisbon ? Is Barcelona ? All these have been bombarded, and many of them in quite modern times. The truth is that a considerable number of the commercial cities of this hemisphere, and of commercial cities of the first-class, have been bombarded ; and not only commercial cities, but a great historic capital like Rome, the bombardment of which is more of an injury to civi- lisation than the bombardment of any ordinary commercial city, has shared the same fate. But then comes the most im- portant fact of all,—that Alexandria was not bombarded in July, only the forts of Alexandria, and that, so far as we can learn, absolutely no damage was done to the commercial city itself by the bombardment of its forts. Lord Salis- bury when he has to deal with facts is almost as hope- lessly inaccurate as the clergyman who began his sermon by speaking of the time when " Alexander the Great was working in the Navy yards of Amsterdam." A great politician- should not betray in this way his total ignorance of modern, history.
The second great indictment brought by Lord Salisbury against Mr. Gladstone's Government is that it has applied,, and applied mischievously and needlessly, socialistic remedies to Ireland, but has actually reduced Ireland to comparative tranquillity by the Conservative prescription of a reasonable " Prevention of Crimes " Act. The truth, however, is that, as Lord Salisbury well knows, the crime in Ireland had begun to diminish in March, before the Prevention of Crimes Act was even introduced ; that it had diminished enormously before it was passed in August ; and that the good which has re- suited from the Prevention of Crimes Act,—considerable though it be,—is not to be compared with the good which had previously resulted from the Land Act with the promise of the Arrears Act. Does Lord Salisbury sup- pose that a people like the Irish, resenting firmly as they did the Prevention of Crimes Bill, would have been quieted by anticipation, and before the penalties and powers it created were in the hands of the Irish Government ? And, again, what does he suppose that his Conservative colleagues in Ire- land thought when they voted steadily, as they did, for the principle of the Land Act and the Arrears Act ? Did they think these Acts quite superfluous for the purpose of restoring tranquillity to Ireland ? Were they Socialists at heart ? Can Lord Salisbury find an Irish statesman of any class,—even Mr. Gibson,—who would not admit at once that repressive mea- sures, without a great measure dealing with the tenure of land, would have been absolutely useless in Ireland ? Lord Salisbury seriously proposes for tranquillising Ireland a policy which we believe that no Irish statesman whose judgment is worth a moment's consideration would accept. And he affixes the adjec- tive " Socialistic " to a measure which all the most Conservative politicians in Ireland believe to be likely to deal a great blow at Socialism, an even a blow of a nature to alienate Ireland from the party of Mr. Devitt.
The more Lord Salisbury's attack on the policy of Mr. Gladstone's Government is considered by the Scotch, the more will those hardy Liberals wonder that he has ventured to bombard the capital of Liberalism with such very unserviceable armaments as these. If Sir Beauchamp Seymour had not had heavier metal than this in his attack on the forts of Alex- andria, Arabi Pasha would have laughed at him, and done even as he listed. Mr. Gladstone's influence in Midlothian is not likely to suffer much by this great display of strong oratory and weak history.
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