TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE IMPERIAL OBSTACLE.
EVERYBODY joins in expressing dissatisfaction at a Ministry that cannot enforce its own purpose : that is an old story, but the con- sciousness of the extreme practical inconvenience attending the duration of such a Ministry is a newer feeling, only just attaining to its full strength.
It is not merely a question whether or not there shall be two or three Jews in Parliament : that is a matter which concerns justice to a particular class but does not actively concern the nation. Still, even in this matter a practical inconvenience is inflicted on that meritorious class of citizens by the existence of the present Ministry in office ; and such practical consequence will be seen more distinctly if we imagine the alternative cases. If we had a Minister at the head of affairs really bent upon carrying a bill for the removal of the last of the Jewish disabilities, unquestionably such a man, possessing the resources of office, would have been able to bend the Parliament to his will, and the thing would have been done. We are without the advantage of possessing such a Minister. On the other hand, if we had in office a Ministry avowing hostility to removing the last disability of the Jews, that op- pugnancy, amongst others, would be a valid reason for appealing to the judgment of the nation at large ; and then, at no great dis- tance of time, we should be able to put a Ministry into office for the purpose of carrying the Jew Bill. The actual state of things offers neither of those advantages. We have in office a set of men who are not bent on carrying the measure ; and yet, inasmuch as they profess that they mean to carry it, they disarm the larger portion of those who might force the measure in by the help of a new Ministry. Meanwhile, no one knows whether the policy of the country really is to let the Jews into Parliament or not ; and the gentlemen of that race are not only kept on the tenterhooks of suspense, but are put to a great waste of expenditure, which would be spared if they found in the Government frankness either of co- operation or resistance.
The same kind of practical inconvenience attends still more im- portant classes of measures. Sanitary Reform, for example, is adopted by the Government to smother it. The Sanitary Reform Association possessed some kind of life and influence ; it made way with proselytes, it obtained adherents in high places; there was decided progress—until it was as it were, adopted by Government, and turned into a Board of 'Leith. At the present moment we have a Government professing sanitary reform, and preventing it. They will not permit the officialized reformers to do what is needed; and yet, if the earnest reformers outside threaten to take strenuous measures, as besieged barbarians have held up the wo- men and children of the besiegers, so do Ministers expose the brother reformers in duresse to the shafts of the assailants. Mean- while, all sorts of private interests are damaged. Improvements in drainage and building that might spontaneously have been car- ried out are arrested till people shall know what is to be done. Improvements in water-supply, property in water companies, ul- tenor extensions to fit the ever-extending town, are locked up, and in some cases subjected to deterioration. The loss to property, the inconvenience to shareholders and public, are direct results of the existence of such a Ministry in office.
It is the same, scarcely to a minor extent, with Law Reform. The public is hardly aware of the progress which opinion has made, withia the last few years, in the minds of eminent lawyers ; so that a great instalment of amended law is ready for execution. The Ministry adopt it, and they do pass just enough to -warrant the name. But they put at the head of the law, first a man actually opposed to law reform, and then a man who sympathises too deeply with the inferior devices of the law—witness his speech in the de- bate on the Cape Constitution—to be very anxious for reform ; and in neither case can the step-parents of Law Reform muster suficient heartiness or courage to insist on fulfilling their own intent. The consequence is, that many a. suitor in the Courts of Chancery or Common Law is still subjected to delays, expenses, and losses, which he might have been spared under another Ministry. Those expenses and losses are Ms fine for having a professing but not acting Ministry in office. Parliamentary Reform is in a similar predicament. If it is desirable to have reform at all, we must incur sonic evil by its procrastination ; and when the present Ministers adopt Parlia- mentary Reform, we all anticipate the sequel : it is either a talk, to get up some credit, or if there is to be anything substantial in it, it will encounter objection ; and as the Ministerial party professes to measure its will inversely by the resistance which it encounters, the objectors actually hold a veto. Many reforms might be com- manded, and have been proposed, by Mr. Locke King, Mr. Dun- combe, Mr. Henry Berkeley, and others ; but they have all been negatived, to make way for the great Ministerial reform of "next session." At this time, therefore all that we have with certainty realized by having the present therefore, in office is a negation of every plan of reform in Parliament. If any substantial improvement in taxation is to be expected, or the completion of free trade, or any alleviation for the agricultural "distress," which the Queen's Speech thinks it needful to deplore and Sir Charles Wood to recognize in. his offering of seed-duties—if one of these things is to be desired, and is in itself practicable, the real obstacle to it is-the existence of a promising, lion-performing Ministry, It is the same not only with reform hut with peace in the Colo- nies, possibly with the integrity of the Colonial Empire. The Colonies cannot learn of the present Ministers what they mean to do. They will neither dictate to the Colonies nor perform what the colonists want, but are ever trimming between tyranny and concession. It is evident from the debates in Parliament, that both the Cape colony and the Australias would obtain a settlement of the questions which agitate them, if there were any other Minis- try in office rather than this one which professes to have a special vocation to the settlement of Colonial questions, but has opened more and settled fewer than almost any Ministry that ever existed.
That a Ministry should retain office when it cannot carry for- ward its own policy, is a serious infraction of our constitutional theory and practice : professedly the constitution works by sending into office that Ministry which can put its own policy into practice because such policy has the concurrence of the i'arliamentary majority; and the remaining in office when that qualification has ceased is an offence against constitutional rule, not only because it subjects the country to the negative part of a policy which is not that of the national majority, but because it keeps out the party that ought to be in office. Such is the theoretical conclusion; but we have become used to the reproach of seeing the Russell Ministry in office after its qualification has expired. We have not yet got used to the practical inconveniences—the political perils, the vex- ations, the losses, and the actual expenses—resulting from that continuance : on the contrary, those inconveniences form an ac- cumulating stock of the raw material of indignation ; and so Lord John dismisses his Queen's Parliament, for their country trip, to employ the recess in reckoning up the cui bono of a Liberal Minis- try.
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