SIR W. V. HARCOURT AT OXFORD.
ABOUT a year ago, Sir William Harcourt assured us that "ambition was the noblest of all passions," and described it, funnily enough, as the desire to be something "higher and better" than you are. Well, as Sir William Harcourt says, a good deal has happened since then, but the noblest of all pas- sions seems to be running, with him, a prosperous course. He
was then only Mr. Gladstone's Solicitor-General ; now he care- fully poses himself in the character for which the Marquis of Bath, we think, recommended him,—as Mr. Gladstone's rival. And very skilfully he does it too. He makes a distinct bid for the support, first, of the moderate Liberals,—next, of the great Whig Houses,—then of the Protestant party,—finally, of the Roman Catholics, all without the slightest inconsistency; and besides all this he significantly throws out two tubs to the two unwieldy Behemoths of the working-classes,—the artisan class, which somehow does not yet get itself politically orga- nised, and the agricultural labourers' class, which is still outside the pale of the Constitution; furthermore, he gives one substan- tial promise to the tenant-farmers' class, which has so recently given the best proof of the extraordinary strength it can exert in the counties whenever it chooses to exert it. That is pretty well for a single speech in addition to two heavy back-handers at Mr. Gladstone, and seems to show that "the noblest of all passions " has a fair chance of being glorified in the career of Sir William Harcourt.
Perhaps the only weakness of his position is that, as he him-
self admits, there is nothing to speak of to distinguish his principles from those of the Government now in power. There is, as the old philosophers used to call it, a " want of sufficient reason " why Sir William Harcourt should be trying for the lead in either party rather than in the other. He heartily approves of Mr. Disraeli's line in relation to the Public Worship Regulation Act, and disapproves of Mr. Gladstone's. He heartily approves of Mr. Disraeli for not making too much sail,—or carrying too much " top-hamper," as he graphically puts it, with a nice feeling for a British audience's appreciation of nautical slang,—and declares that it was the last Cabinet's love for that kind of thing, which wrecked it when the squall came down. He is as severe on " advanced opinions " of all kinds as Mr.
Disraeli himself could be. " This country," he says, with a careful imitation of Mr. Disraeli's favourite kind of epigram, " has a wholesome dread of parties of sensation, and of the politics of surprise ;" and it was impossible " to sustain the healthy tone of an over-excited system by blazing rhetoric and sensational pamphleteering." Mr. Disraeli himself could not have delivered a more direct blow at Mr. Gladstone, and the sneer was couched, moreover, in the Conservative, not in the Liberal tone. The reiterated and very clever attack on the men of advanced opinions was all conceived in the same tone of Conservative animosity rather than of Liberal reserve :— " I have really no objection to persons who compliment them- selves on what they are pleased to-call advanced opinions, nor do I dispute the superiority they claim over the rest of the human race, but then they should reflect that the advantage on which they pride themselves depends on the fact that there is an- inferior order of beings who are not quite abreast of them. If we were all as wise as they are, they would not be the very superior persons we admit them to be ; and if there was no one below, these gentlemen of advanced opinions would not have so much to boast of, for they would not be more advanced than their neighbours. They should, therefore, extend a little toleration to those benighted creatures who act as the foil to
their super-eminent merit. I don't dispute that political Uhlans are admirable skirmishers, but they don't win pitched battles, and I should recommend them not to deride and insult the mass of the army on whom they are inevitably driven in as soon as they meet the enemy, or to discard those reserves and supports upon whom, in the long-run, depends the fortune of a campaign. No people and no party is wise
which seeks to break altogether with its past. It is an error which the French nation committed at the end of the last century, and which it has never recovered." That would have been even better received by the supporters of Mr. Hall at Oxford than by the supporters of Sir William Harcourt. Indeed the only points on which he expressed a wish for something like immediate reform were points on which the Conservatives are ready to say quite as much, or more, than Sir William Har- court. He wishes to free the laws regulating the relations of the employers to the labourers from all inequalities, which also the Conservatives are most eager to do. He wishes to give the tenant-farmers more security for the capital they may choose to embark in farming, and this Mr. Clare Reed has given his constituents in Norfolk to understand that the Government intends to do immediately. And on no other subject, except it be the preparation of some more thorough-going law to replace the Public Worship Act, in case it is found to be a dead-letter, does Sir William Harcourt even hint that he would be prepared to support reform. Evidently he made a great mistake last year when the noble passion which he esteems so highly prompted him to accept Mr. Gladstone's offer of the Solicitor-Generalship, instead of waiting for Mr. Disraeli's. Of course, in the latter case he would have had to ask Oxford to re-elect him under another party profession than that which he made when he was first returned. But Mr. Hall's friends would certainly have returned Sir W. Harcourt under the new flag, and the Conservative party would have gained a second leader of Mr. Disraeli's own type to supply his place, when failing health deprives them of their " educating " leader. The single point in Sir W. Harcourt's whole speech, which he would have had in that case to omit, would have been the panegyric on the Whigs. All the rest., except one hit at Mr. Disraeli's deference to Prince Bismarck and one sneer at the restrictions of the new Licensing Act, might have been spoken word for word as it was, in case Sir W. Harcourt had been the representative of the present Administration and the professed assailant of Mr. Gladstone's.
Now, this is a dangerous game even for the subject of "the noblest of all passions" to play, though we are not disposed to deny that he is opening it skilfully. Politics is a pursuit which it requires as much loyal co-operation to follow success- fully, as any other pursuit in life. A man who at the first good chance assails his leader with all the store of wit and sarcasm at his command, even when that leader has gained the admiration and gratitude of at least two generations of political life, goes in for all or nothing. Mr. Disraeli did this early in life with Sir Robert Peel, and as the chances fell out, won his game. But we have had no example of a similar success on
the Liberal side of the House. Lord John Russell once or twice threw over his colleagues with a remarkable sang-froid, but
every such achievement resulted in a heavy loss of political weight instead of a relative gain. Towards the close of his career, Lord Palmerston passed him in the race from this very cause, and he never recovered his old ascendancy. If a rising man plays the same game, he must either play it with consummate tact, or run the risk of a much worse catastrophe. The Liberal party, it
is certain, is not in a condition to enforce any very strict
discipline. If any of the subordinates differ sincerely from their chief, there is nothing to prevent their expressing such a difference in that tone of loyal reluctance which it seems natural to look for in such a relation. But that is not the tone of Sir William Harcourt. It was evidently a delight to him to be able at the close of the last Session to take up the popular view against his chief, and steal from him the Protestant cheers with which all attacks upon the Ritual- ists, however much those attacks might miss their aim and really pierce the shields of the Broad-Church party, were greeted. And now, in this Oxford speech, he is executing, with far more dexterity, we think, and in our minds with far more reason, but with no less obvious a satisfaction in the manoeuvre, a converse movement, and trying to gain the confidence of the Roman Catholics by an attack on the policy of Mr. Gladstone's last pamphlet. For our own parts, we hold in this matter entirely with the view f/r.en by Sir William Harcourt, though we regret to see the nth, very gener- ous eagerness with which he strives to turn his chief's error to his own political account. If he had said the same things with less of sneer and innuendo than he has, we should have
felt something like delight in the exceeding ability of this part of his speech. But as it is, we confess we cannot enjoy the display of skill which so obviously contains so very large a proportion of the noblest of all passions' to the required dose of sagacious political criticism. Still it would be very unjust not to admit that, apart from the disloyal animus of this part of his speech, Sir William Harcourt has un- doubtedly put the true view in a very masculine form. "After several generations of conflict.," he truly said, " there were two great maxims established,—the first, that with respect to all creeds which sought, and received nothing from the State, no one should be better or worse treated, regarded, or spoken of, in respect of his religious opinions ; the second, that in the case of a religious establishment which received and enjoyed privileges and endowments under the guarantee of the State, those who accepted the benefit should be compelled to observe the conditions and obey the laws under which they were prescribed." That is sound beyond possibility of serious attack, and so is the application of the first principle :—" I see no necessity, certainly none that has newly arisen, for attacking the Catholics ; and if there is no necessity, then there is great mischief. When we reflect that the Catholic subjects of the Queen form probably a fifth part of her English-speaking people, and especially if we regard their distribution in Ireland and in Canada, we shall not forget the wise saying of Burke, that he did not know how to draw an indictment against a whole people. But the Catholics of the United Kingdom are far more numerous than those of whom Burke spoke. I may disapprove, as I do, of their religious system ; but I cannot impeach a community which forms so great a portion of this Empire. I cannot impeach five or six millions of men as a suspected class. What is the necessity for such a course ? If the alleged view of the sentiments and the aims of the Catholics is well founded, the whole of the legislation of a century has been a fatal mistake, and the traditional policy of the Liberal party must be stigmatised as an egregious blunder. The penal laws and the civil disabilities were founded upon the theory of inherent bad citizenship, and if these assumptions are true, the policy, cruel as it was, must be admitted to have been necessary, and therefore wise." " What is the use," added Sir William Harcourt, with unanswerable force, " of trying to convince men that they ought to be disloyal either to their Church or to their country, when they are very ready to be loyal to both, even at the cost of a syllogism I" It is impossible to put the case in a more practical form. If pre- cautions are to be taken against the logical consequences deduced by Protestants from the Catholic's Creed, we have been on the wrong tack for fifty years. If we are not to assume disloyalty till disloyalty appears, it is not our business even though the Vatican Council has increased,—as we suspect it has,—the number of the theoretic opportunities for a dis- loyalty of which we have no practical experience. We concur so completely with Sir William Harcourt, that we can only wish his protest against the Anti-Vaticanist panic had been less of a personal attack on a man much greater than himself.
The weak point of Sir William Harcourt's bid for popularity re- mains, however,—namely, the line he took last year on the Church question. It is perfectly true in our estimation,—indeed, we believe that the very phrase has been used in these columns that the Roman Church would be" the residuary legatee" of Disestablish- ment,—in other words, that the multitudes who must always lean less on reason than on outward authority, if they saw no longer any National Church to claim them, would turn to the Church with the proudest tradition and the most of external prestige among the sects,—in other words, to the Church of Rome. But it seems to us childish to maintain, as the exigencies of his position led Sir W. Harcourt to maintain last Session, and apparently leads him to maintain still, that it is even possible to enforce, in such an age as this, conditions of Uni- formity agreed upon centuries ago, when religious thought was in a wholly different condition. !And if it be so, the Act of last Session is either an inequitable sham, directed-against one party while professing to enforce the obsolete conditions of uniformity equally upon all; or it is one of the greatest blunders of our day, which must remain a dead-letter, if it is not to break up the Establishment.
Sir William Harcourt's peroration was characteristic. It consisted in a somewhat ad captandum panegyric on English- men for cherishing a " traditional distrust of priests, and an instinctive aversion to philosophers." In short, our nation walks, in his view apparently, neither by faith nor sight, but by a sagacious sort of smell in religious matters, which it does not care to justify speculatively, but which guides us in a middle course between sacerdotalism and scepticism. That is clap-trap, for Sir W. Harcourt himself, we suppose, would hardly say that it is an ' instinctive aversion to philosophers ' which has led to the universal desire • to pro- vide for expeditions like those of the Challenger,' or that which is to penetrate the Arctic Sea, or for the expensive observations of the late Transit of Venus. But no doubt he is quite right in supposing that Englishmen prefer an almost blind sagacity to imperfect and bumptious philosophy. Even so, however, the sagacity which is to take the place of know- ledge must be true sagacity, and all true sagacity has a thread of moral loyalty in it. Even the highest sagacity of leadership is a riper form of the commoner sagacity of comradeship and fidelity. Moral instincts are often exceedingly good substitutes for clear knowledge, but not if they drop their moral elements. We are inclined to doubt gravely if the noblest of all passions' is an instinct quite trustworthy enough to serve as the compass of an extremely clever man's political career, without the help of much prudence and a little reverence.
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