TOPICS OF THE DULY.
MR. COWEN.
IN the eloquent and effective speech which Mr. Cowen delivered at Newcastle-on-Tyne this day week, he re- proached Englishmen with their " pedantry," remarking that it is the note of pedantry to be controlled by phrases, rather than by the realities which the phrases denote. His illustration of English pedantry was not, however, very fortunate. He ad- duced Englishmen's dislike to " Home-rule " in Ireland as an instance of being afraid of the name, not the thing ; asserting that since the Isle of Man has Home-rule under another name, and the Channel Islands have Home-rule under another name, and since so many of our Colonies have Home-rule under another name, we cannot be afraid of the thing " Home-rule," though we are so terribly afraid of the name. We should say that Mr. Cowen's illustrations upset his own case. Every Englishman knows that " the House of Keys " is home-rule for the Isle of Man, and he is not afraid of it. Every English- man knows that we do not legislate for the Channel Islands in Parliament, and no one is afraid of leaving them to provide for their own needs. Every Englishman knows that the Par- liament of the Dominion and the Parliament of Victoria do for Canada and for that part of Australia, just what our Parliament does for us, and that the consequences are beneficial, not injurious. There is no kind of excuse for saying that we disguise from ourselves what we dislike in such cases, by giving it a misleading name. On the contrary, the proper inference from the facts named obviously is that there is something either in the smallness of the islands and the petty scale of their re- sources, or in the great distance of the Colonies from Eng- land, which renders Home-rule in the cases referred to inno- cuous, though it would not be innocuous in a substantial por- tion of so small a kingdom as our own. If we permit it—not only without the least attempt to hide the thing under a false name, but in the case of our Colonies at least, with the most emphatic assertion of the real significance of the freedom we confer—it seems obvious enough that it is not the name of Irish Home-rule that we dread, but the reality. And so, as Mr. Cowen should know very well, it certainly is. It is he who is misled by the apparent innocence of the name. It is he who does not see that to give up Imperial control of so large a part of the focus of our Empire, might be both to strengthen and to arm a powerful enemy at the very heart of that Empire. " Home-rule " is a mild phrase enough. But it is Mr. Cowen, not England, who is beguiled by the phrase. Home-role for Ireland means antagonism between England and Ireland in finance, in commerce, in education, in general policy, and in foreign policy, and this in a next-door neighbour who, if she were organised for that purpose, would be always strong enough to embarrass and paralyse us. Surely the man who sees nothing dangerous in this, because he hides it under the mild phrase, " Home-rule," is much more obviously controlled by phrases than the English people, who see great danger in such a course ?
And evidently Mr. Cowen's imagination is one as powerfully moved and as frequently controlled by phrases, as that of any Member of the House of Commons. His eloquent speech in the House, delivered in 1876, against conferring on the Queen the title of "Empress of India," was a speech founded on the assumption that phrases have a vast influence in determining policy, and was a most impressive speech from that point of view. Indeed, no man with an imagination will deny that phrases are often very potent in politics, just as no man with a really strong imagination will hesitate to grapple boldly with misleading phrases, rather than let them triumph over him. Mr. Cowen argued in the famous speech of 1876 that the greater of two names applied to the same thing had a knack of swallowing the smaller ; that Charles V. is always spoken of in history as "the Emperor," though in Spain he was only King ; that the Duke of Argyll is not even known in this country as Baron Sundridge, though he sits in the House of Lords under that title ; and that Englishmen who should be told that in India they were under an Empress, while in England they were under a Queen, would soon come to merge the Queen in the Empress, and probably to merge the consti- tutional Queen in a very unconstitutional Empress. That is a serious danger, no doubt, which it was a duty to point out ; it was a danger to which Lord Lytton fell a victim ; but to Mr. Cowen it probably represented a danger even more serious than it. really was,—for it is certain that his imagination, which is lively, is far more effectually swayed by phrases than that of the average and stolid Englishman. The very name of Russia, for instance, startles him into a sort of semi-supersti- tious recoil. " As the sea saps the shore," says Mr. Cowen, in this last speech, "so Russia undermines the surrounding terri- tory, till it trembles under her control." And he is so persuaded. of this, that he will not even recognise the progress of Bulgaria. and Eastern Roumelia, which have gained their compara- tive freedom through Russian intervention, but prophesies gloomily that their independence must disappear, either before Russia, or before the power of Austria with Germany behind her, if the mighty conflict with Russia which he predicts should end in her defeat. The name " Home-rule," which so dominates and beguiles his imagination in one context, loses all its charm.
for him when it comes to be confronted with the more potent name of Russia, and Mr. Cowen has nothing to hope for the States of the Balkans but a ruin even more complete than that inflicted on them by the Turk. So, too, when he comes to dis- cuss the methods of Parliamentary procedure, the phrase " clo- ture " has a more malignant sorcery in it, to his imagination, than even the phrase " Empress " as applied to the ruler of India. He cannot see that the power of closure is nothing in the world but the power which every well-organised public meeting exerts with the utmost coolness and advantage to itself, and he recoils from it as a bird recoils from the glittering eye of the snake. For a protestor against the superstitious belief in phrases, Mr. Cowen certainly shows a strangely keen and sensitive respect for phrases ; indeed we doubt whether any man in the House of Commons is more beguiled by phrases than Mr. Cowen.
No doubt, this is not unnatural in an orator of so much fire as Mr. Cowen. Very few Members of the House of Com- mons are happier in the manner and the mode of their oratory than the Member for Newcastle with that northern burr of his, of which he makes so effective a use, and which he can drop so completely when he will. Such a man is naturally a great inventor of phrases, which, perhaps, accounts for the impression they produce on the fond imagination which in- vented them. In his skilful phrase-mongering he resembles the late Lord Beaconsfield. The " semi-Mongol Czardom " is his epithet for the Power he most dreads. " It may be next year, or ten years hence, but as sure as death, as steady as time, the hoar approaches when the lowering tempest will burst, and the semi-Mongol Czardom be driven to make its last throw for its long-coveted prize. The stake is a heavy one ; the struggle will be supreme ; the avenging angel will blot from his record the inarticulate wrongs of cen- turies with something less tender than a tear." That is a.
passage quite after Mr. Disraeli's own heart, but spoken with more of fanatic conviction than ever Mr. Disraeli could have dis- played. Mr. Cowen's ears are charmed by his own sweet music. He is himself misled by the phrases which he has been happy enough to invent. Mr. Disraeli hardly was ; he used them as glittering coin to fascinate other men's imagination, but hardly as having really fascinated his own. Mr. Cowen's plea for the House of Lords, as against a real revising Chamber like the Senate of the United States,—the plea that we might set nil something much more formidable than the House of Lords : " We have now got an anachronism, we might get a master,"—is an antithesis closely resembling those of Mr. Disraeli ; but it means more in Mr. Cowen's mouth than it would have meant in Mr. Disraeli's. Mr. Cowen is as much exalted as Scott's Last Minstrel by the power of his own excellent harping. He at least convinces himself by his speeches,—which Mr. Disraeli probably never did. Mr. Cowen is often spoken of as a false Liberal, and cer- tainly his political veerings and shiftings have been numerous and perplexing. He came into Parliament as a strong supporter of the policy of non-intervention ; but he soon became, and has more or less continued, the apologist of the Afghan War and of the pro-Turkish diplomacy of Lord Beaconsfield. That, however, is fairly accounted for by his dread of Russia, a Power to which he has never seriously applied his doctrine of non-intervention. Even his marked sympathy with the Irish Obstructionists, with the Tory Obstructionists, with almost all the Obstructionists of the Liberal Government, and his dislike and depreciation of Liberal legislation generally, especially of any legislation which seems to him in any sense "grand- motherly," appears to us to arise not in the least from treachery, but from genuine sympathy with laisser-faire in all matters except the evil sorcery wrought by the Russian Spectre. For our own part, we believe that Mr. Cowen has really a much deeper regard than he has ever avowed for the policy of laisser-faire, on condition, of course, that you do not apply that maxim to the evil principle, " the semi-Mongol Csardom." So far as a sensitive and ardent rhetorician can be consistent, Mr. Cowen is fairly consistent in his dislike of strengthening Governments, and his wish to see the individual protected against the aggressiveness of either a philanthropic or a selfish Government. If he favours the Tories more than the Liberals—as he certainly does—it is because the Tories are very apt to oppose most of the philan- thropic legislation of the Liberals, and because the Tories are traditionally opposed to the influence of Russia. He never supports the Tories in a policy of coercion ; and he would not, we think, support the Tories in a policy of benevolent despotism. He sympathises with Mr. Herbert Spencer's dread of the growing prerogatives of democratic Governments, and as those prerogatives are apt to grow much faster in Liberal hands than in Tory hands, he appears to make much more danger- ous war against the Liberals than he makes against the Tories. But if ever a " Tory democracy " initiated a strong home policy in Great Britain, we imagine that Mr. Cowen's geniality towards the Tories would vanish. 'He distrusts all Government, and Russia chiefly as representing the incarnate principle of absolute Government. His latent sympathy with Turkey is sympathy not with its baseness and predatoriness and corruption, but with its loose rein, its imbecile adminis- tration, its helpless diplomacy, its tendency to anarchy. A decent, or rather not indecent, slovenliness and indolence in the governing power, would probably best represent Mr. Cowen's political ideal. On the whole, we should describe Mr. Cowen as a politician of fervid fancy, hardly rising to strong imagination, whose sympathies have early been excited by the victims of strong Government, and who has never had a sufficiently sound judgment to keep these sympathies within due bounds. A measure of his political judgment may be gathered from his description of Sir Edward Watkin as " one of the most far- seeing men I have met in my journey through life ;" and with- out a political judgment, powers of speech and of fancy so great as Mr. Cowen's are edged tools, with which the politician oftener wounds his own fingers than the hands of his oppo- nents. He is a politician of fervour, and even of passion. He can speak with some of the old dash and dignity, and we believe him to be sincere. But he is not a safe guide. He is betrayed by the Will-of-the,Wisp lights of his own fancy into political bogs and marshes, where no Government dare fellow him without bringing on itself a speedy and certain ruin.
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