SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT.
Q IR WILLIAM HARCOURT'S sun does pot sink 1.7 without a little glory. Be succeeded the most famous orator of the dge. He inherited his legacy of well-nigh impossible tasks ; and in one at least of these labours of Hercules he gained an amount of success which will not soon be forgotten. He passed a great democratic Budget, and he passed it by the help of that English moderation which it was the cue of many of his colleagues and of perhaps the greater number of his fol- lowers to depreciate and despise. No one .will say that he has left a great name for statesmanship behind him, for he inherited a host of difficulties, and indeed of impossi- bilities ; but he did not shrink from the conflict, and in spite of imperfect health and of serious difficulty with his eyesight, he did more than any one expected of him. Like a new Eolus, he ruled the many contrary winds which were tied up in his political abode, with a certain dignity and not a little skill. It is easy to see that he was deter- mined not to be governed by his unruly Irish contingent, and he was not governed by them. He did not exactly let them " stew in their own juice," as in a rash moment, before he surrendered to their policy, he had proposed to do ; but though they never felt the least loyalty to his person, he did make them feel that they could do nothing without him, and curbed their unruly temper to the last. We cannot call his reign in the House of Commons exactly heroic, for heroism was not his role. The one thing Sir William Harcourt never had was a deep moral conviction, unless indeed he managed to develop a little at the very close of his reign for one of the least romantic, and least hopeful, of all philanthropic enterprises, the abolition of public-houses. But he might almost be termed the hero as cynic, if a cynic can be a hero at all. He knew where the weak points of his opponents and of his colleagues lay, and he used the former with the utmost dexterity, and kept the latter as much in abeyance as his great wit and keen insight enabled him to do.
He began with a great disappointment and a great diffi- culty. Lord Rosebery, a man vastly his inferior in sagacity and force, was put over his head by the cry of a party which had discerned Lord Rosebery's sensitive " feelers " for new ideas and new currents of popular sympathy, with- out discerning his weakness and his shiftiness. He had a chief over him whose manoeuvres he could not control, and whose indecision he could not respect. This, no doubt, must have tried Sir William Harcourt almost beyond endurance, and that he managed to endure it at all is greatly to the credit of his strong will. He saw his nominal superior lashing his Irish supporters into anger, and then doing the very thing which was most inexpedient, running away from them when they showed that anger, and he bore it with that dumb fortitude which to a man of his tempera. ment must have been the most difficult of all achievements. To see his chief marching and countermarching at the word of command given by his own most unruly group of followers must have been wormwood to him, and it is impossible to deny him the respect due to his almost incredible fortitude. He no doubt felt through the whole Session of 1894 his own immeasurable superiority to his chief, and yet he never allowed himself to be provoked into any outburst of public disdain. In grim silence he kept his own counsel, and never allowed the House of Commons to get out of hand. That was, no doubt, rendered easier to him because he was all the time occupied in the great task which Mr. Gladstone once declared to be impossible for a single Session, and almost enough for a whole Parliament, the revision of the Probate and Succession duties, and was conscious that he could succeed in it as he did succeed ; and thereby earned himself an authority in the country which he had never before possessed. But it was all the more difficult because, in asking for new Spirit-duties he was perfectly aware that he should irritate the very group who were giving him so much trouble, and whom Lord Rosebery had uncon- sciously done his very best to make intractable. It would be quite impossible to. exaggerate the skill with which Sir William Harcourt carried his democratic Budget through a House of Commons so full of irritable followers and distrustful allies. With jealous Welshmen on the look- out for causes of offence, and resentful Irishmen also on the watch, though, fortunately for him, they were obliged to mind their " p's " and " q's " in the presence of a violent Irish minority of ostentatious patriots, Sir William Harcourt steered through the House of Commons a most difficult Budget, in defence of which he had often to sacrifice points of policy which some of his allies were most anxious that he should press, and to introduce other points of policy which other allies were most reluctant to concede. And, on the whole, he carried his object with a political moderation almost as vexatious to his wrathful allies as it was unexpected by his keen and watchful antagonists. No one of any judgment can deny that the Session of 1894 was a very great triumph for Sir William Harcourt, though it did not gain him half as much distinction as the supreme difficulty of the accom- plished task really deserved.
Nor can we deny that Sir William Harcourt showed great skill in throwing on Mr. Asquith,—a very able, though a young and perhaps not exactly highly expe- rienced colleague,—the great brunt of that toilsome duty of ploughing the sands of the sea-shore which the attempt to disestablish the Welsh Church imposed upon him. Mr. Asquith was a really convinced labourer in that unprofitable field of labour, and he had both the determination and the practical sobriety of manner which enabled him both to inspire confidence in a most jealous group of politicians and yet to set about his work with an air of capable and business-like purpose, which saved him from anything like ridicule in his Quixotic enterprise. Nothing has given us more intellectual respect for Sir William Harcourt's leader- ship than the use he made of Mr. Asquith's sincere, but by no means romantic, Radicalism during the whole of the time of his own reign in the House of Commons. Whether the prominence given to Mr. Asquith in the Administra- tion were of Mr. Gladstone's or Sir William Harcourt's origination, we cannot, of course, pretend to conjecture. But even if it were not Sir William Harcourt's astuteness which placed him at the Home Office, it was clear enough that he detected his great and, we think we may say, his happily unimaginative ability, and therefore his incal- culable value for the purpose of inspiring hope where there was no hope, in the performance of a very fagging task. There is nothing like the toil of a man who cannot realise that success is impossible, for making others toil with him to achieve what cannot be achieved, and so distracting their thoughts from the evil humour which hopeless enterprises are apt to engender. Mr. Asquith, by his admirable administrative work, by his resolution in refusing to pity deliberate crime, by his arduous industry in the initiation of enterprises doomed to failure, has done three-fourths of the work of reconciling the Welsh group and the Labour group to the policy of the late Government, and Sir William Harcourt was states- man enough to perceive that this would be so, and to use Mr. Asquith for a. function which he himself could never have discharged with half the acceptability of Mr. Asquith.
On the whole, little as we admire Sir William Harcourt's general political career,—profoundly as we dislike the facility with which he accepted a policy forced upon him by a great romantic statesman of a very different type, and recanted the confession of faith which at least represented at one time his own deepest belief,—we admit that he has done his work during the last three years, and especially during the last year and a half, with a skill, a patience, and a power of silence as well as speech, to which we cannot deny the tribute of a certain admiration. Without Sir William Harcourt, the Government of 1894-95 would have made itself ridiculous, and even the Government of 1892-94 would have hardly held together, for at his age Mr. Gladstone could not have led the House of Commons without so able a lieutenant. He has had no high ideal as a statesman. But he has discharged the duties he undertook, with a grim resolution, a keenness of vigilance, and a tacit moderation, which many states- men with much higher aims may well envy and find it impossible to imitate.
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