THE " RADICALS " AND THE GOVERNMENT.
IN speaking at the Eleusis Club, at Chelsea, on Monday, Mr. Labouchere responded to the toast of "Our Radical representatives," and his speech was certainly ominous of trouble to the Government,—from a consider- able proportion of which, however, we trust that Mr. Balfour will be able to shield them. Mr. Labouchere is evidently not content with the present House of Commons, and still less content with the Gladstonian Administration. He thinks that the genuine Radicals were not very much in earnest at the General Election. They were afraid of bring- ing a Government into power which would not be heartily Radical ; and he appears to hold that the event has been partly the consequence of that misgiving, while, in part at least, it was the consequence of the tepid Liberalism which gave rise to the misgiving. Mr. Labouchere is for war to the knife with the House of Lords. He is very contemptuous over Mr. Gladstone's proposal to ignore the probable rejection of the Irish Home-rule Bill by the House of Lords, as a perfectly inadequate mode of pro- ceeding. He is for Mr. Frederic Harrison's policy, the creation of an indefinite number of Peers, a number sufficient first to pass Home-rule, and then to abolish the House of Lords. In short, Mr. Labouchere is for a policy of "thorough," and the great thing he insists on is the democratising of the House of Commons. Evidently Mr. Labouchere does not think it sufficient that the suffrage should be wide enough to test the real feeling of the people. It must apparently be so manipulated as to be hostile to the rich and prosperous. "They might depend upon it that so long as they had a rich man" [we quote from the Daily News' report] "in the House of Commons, they would never have poor man's legislation." We can hardly think that Mr. Labouchere gave utterance to that sentence. He cannot have intended to say that so long as he himself is returned to the House, the poor will never get what he calls "poor man's legislation." He is surely not intending to retire in order that the poor may do without him what they could not do with him. And it would take more than his retirement, we may assume, to ensure the passage of this poor man's legislation. What Mr. Labouchere seems to want is, not so much to democratise the House of Commons as to dictate the kind of House of Commons which the people should choose, and the kind of measures which they ought to pass when they had chosen it. He will not be content with the people's spontaneous taste, unless that taste corresponds with his own. Rich man though he be, he wishes to impose his type of democracy on the House of Commons, and to set it to work on the class of measures he would choose for it. He can- not go quite so far as to say that he agrees with Mr. Tom Mann's policy, but he does go so far as to say that unless the people elect poor men like Mr. Tom Mann to fill the House of Commons, the people will not be truly demo- cratic. It is not the liking of the people for a Parliament and a policy which, in Mr. Labouchere's eyes, makes it democratic ; it is his own a priori notions of democracy which define what is and is not democratic, and if these notions are not to the taste of the people, so much the worse for the people. If, for instance, the people, instead of wishing to fill the House of Lords with new peers, who would first pass Home-rule and then abolish themselves, should heartily approve of the determination of the House of Lords to refer Mr. Gladstone's Bill, so soon as its hitherto utterly uncertain characteristics shall be clearly defined, to the arbitration of the constituencies, he would regard that as a proof that the people themselves are not a democracy, and that they want teaching what sort of desires they are bound to entertain. In a word, Mr. L ibouchere's notion evidently is this : "If the people agree with me, they are a democracy ; if not, not."
All this gives us a fair conception of what Mr. Labou- chere means by democracy. It is not the will of the people, but the will of a Jacobin clique endorsed by a mob of yielding and obedient followers. But we remark on the character of Mr. Labouchere's democracy, only to show how desirable it is that the Unionist Party should protect Mr. Gladstone from the tyranny of such demo- crats as these, if Mr. Gladstone and his more moderate colleagues are willing to be so protected. For Mr. Labouchere's ideal democracy is not what democracy means to the Unionists. To us democracy only means that the State covers as wide a popular basis as possible, in order that there may be no danger of repeated appeals from the will of a limited class, to the will of another larger and jealous class which had hitherto been shut out from even the shadow of political power. We want the insti- tutions of the State to be dear to the whole people, and not to a mere privileged section of the people. But so long as we can secure this, we are very far indeed from wishing that the people should always be eager to reverse everything that its earlier history has gained for it. On the contrary, we see how great are the advantages of that people which has a historic mind,—which prefers to stand on the ancient ways so long as those ancient ways are not selfish and exclusive ways,—which loves the spirit of the traditions handed down by its forefathers, so long as there is any- thing noble in these traditions, anything large and generous in the character of the traditional patriotism. This is surely the meaning of the promise that a people whose children honour their parents shall live long in the land. It is to those whose spirit is traditional, who see all the good there is in what their fathers have done, and are not eager from the first to turn everything upside down, to whom a secure hold upon their land is given by the wisdom of Providence. Nor is there anything so shallow as the doc- trine that a democracy ought to reject and spurn what an aristocracy or middle-class has achieved. On the con- trary, there ought to be much in the past of every sagacious nation's history which the spirit of an improving, and generous, and docile people would be anxious to preserve. A truly historic democracy will always cherish a fervent patriotism ; and a fervent patriotism means continuous traditions, though continuous traditions which show a steadily widening and progressively aspiring spirit. To per- suade the English people, as Mr. Labouchere would persuade them, that everything which our forefathers have done was done in pure selfishness, and that a democracy must neces- sarily break abruptly with history, is really to persuade them that they have not been under any training for their political function in the world, that they are raw and un- disciplined recruits who are pretty sure to fail in a trial for which they have not been educated and prepared. Did we not believe, on the contrary, that history points out the path that we should pursue, we should not be Unionists. By the very fact that we are Unionists, we are bound to search for and lay to heart the lessons of our historical traditions.
Now, to apply these general principles to Mr. Labou- chere's special doctrines. In his speech, he menaces the Government which his own party has chosen on many points. In the first place, he would sweep away the House of Lords on the very ground that it wishes to secure to the democracy an opportunity of fully considering and revising Mr. Gladstone's plans for the dissolution of the Union, after they shall have been for the first time fully com- municated to the people of the United Kingdom. Of course, we Unionists are bound not to help Mr. Labouchere in that ; but the danger is that we may, to some extent, help him by the character and scornfulness of our opposition. The duty of the Lords is, in the present case, a strictly demo- cratic duty ; and it is as a democratic duty, and not as a plea for the privileges of a class, that we ought to fight the battle, if we are to have any chance of taking the more moderate Gladstonians, whether in Parliament or in the country, with us. We are bound to insist that, whether or not the House of Peers is a permanent and valuable part of the political institutions of the country, still, at the very time when it is doing a distinct service to the demo- cracy,—the very same service which the United States and France and Switzerland and every other democracy have secured by purely democratic provisions,—it is wholly inopportune to fall foul of the House of Lords and sweep it away. We ought to keep attention sedu- lously fixed on this point. Here is a strictly democratic provision, which, as it happens, the least democratic of the elements of our Constitution in the present case is called upon to safeguard. Is it common sense, is it true historic feeling, to use that opportunity for demanding its reform or abolition ? It seems to us most important that in the fight which is approaching, we should cut Mr. Labouchere's ground from under his feet. Let us not join in indiscriminate, and, as we think, more or less undeserved, eulogies on the House of Lords. Let us rather urge the modest and. indisputable plea, that whatever the short- comings of the Lords in former times, they are now in- sisting on a popular safeguard, for which every democratic constitution in the world carefully provides,—let us insist that a great constitutional revolution shall not be sprung suddenly on an unprepared. people,—and that this is not, at all events, even a decently chosen occasion for an attack upon the House of Lords. If we take this ground, we shall have many moderate Gladstonians with us both in the House of Commons and in the country.
In the next place, Mr. Labouchere threatens the Govern- ment with a hostile vote on the African question. He represents the maintenance of the British power in Uganda as if it were for the mere selfish interest of a lot of greedy aristocrats, and. as if the democracy would gain by Englishmen shutting themselves up in the narrowest limits to which the Empire can be contracted, and throwing over the question of the slave-trade and of Colonial expan- sion, as if they not only did not involve, but were positively inconsistent with, the interests of the people at large. We must help the Government to refute that view, and show that it is for the popular interest, nay, for the interest of humanity at large, that we should refuse to give up our sphere of influence in Uganda. With the Scotch Liberals so heartily on our side, we do not think that Mr. Labouchere will have much success on that question. Finally, Mr. Labouchere indicates clearly enough his wish to exclude the Irish Members from all interference in British legislation, by way of set-off against giving them the complete control of their own island. Now, Unionists are resolutely opposed to giving them the control of their own island, so that we must guard. against anything like enter- ing into an alliance with Mr. Labouchere on the one minute point on which we happen to agree with him, not only be- cause we wholly differ from his principle, but because the only effect of uniting with him would be to give a triumph to what may be called the federal Home-rulers, who wish virtually to restore the Heptarchy in order to make room for Irish nationalism. Now, much as Unionists are opposed. to Irish nationalism, they are still more bitterly opposed to restoring the Heptarchy. Let us, therefore, beware, above everything, of joining Mr. Labouchere even on the one small point on which we do happen to agree with him,—namely, that the Irish Members are not to meddle in English affairs, as well as to settle their own affairs in their own way. We are quite willing that they should have their share in settling the affairs of Great Britain, so long as we keep our influence over the affairs of Ireland. And we cannot, therefore, join him even in urging his reason- able determination that Irish representatives shall not in- terfere in both. Let Unionists have nothing at all to do with any plot of Mr. Labouchere's against Mr. Gladstone's Government, any more than with any plot of his to spur it on to more mischief.
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