TOPICS OF THE DAY.
LORD SALISBURY AND MR. GLADSTONE. T.1 OR]) SALISBURY and Mr. Gladstone have both made characteristic speeches this week,—speeches so characteristic, that there is, we think, more instruc- tiveness to be got out of them by regarding them as illus- trations of the political character of the two statesmen, than by too closely considering the substance and direct political bearing of their remarks. Lord Salisbury, who spoke in the House of Lords for the purpose of crushing with his foot, as it were, Lord Stratheden and Campbell, and who was in manner curt, caustic, and contemptuous, addressed himself as directly to the point in dispute, which was the supposed interference in his own case of his duties as Foreign Minister with his duties as Prime Minister, as if he had been writing a despatch on the subject. He scorn- fully admitted that he had not been able to prevent the insubordination of the Grenadier Guards, that he had not been able to persuade the French fishermen in Canada that lobsters are not fish, and that he had not been able to go circuit amongst the Courts of Europe to bring over foreign statesmen to his own views ; but he contended that all these grave incapacities on his part would have been just as serious if he had happened to fill only one of the two offices which he held. They were, he said, ineapacities inherent in his character. Even without being encumbered with the duties of the Foreign Minister, he should have been guilty of all these serious deficiencies. The laborious duties of the Prime Minister had not diminished in any degree his persuasive- ness as to the distinction between lobsters and fish ; the duties of the Foreign Office had not diminished in any degree his power to control the insubordinate tendencies of the Grenadier Guards ; nay, had he been relieved from either office, he should not have thought of attempting a circuit amongst the foreign Courts of Europe to bring over foreign statesmen to his views. All these shortcomings, and many more to which Lord Stratheden and Campbell had alluded, were due to the natural limitation of his powers, and not to the double work which Lord Stratheden and Campbell had kindly suggested as the excuse for his faults. More- over, he had not even looked for precedents for the com- bination of the two offices. It had happened in his case to be convenient to combine them. In former days, it had not usually been convenient to combine them. No man who had to lead the House of Commons could possibly undertake the duties of Foreign Secretary too. But as he happened not to have the responsibility of leading the House of Commons, it did not occur to him that he needed a precedent for doing what he was enabled to do just by the very circumstance that he had more leisure than any Leader of the House of Commons could have. You should ask for precedents in the case of action depending on a large number of political and moral con- siderations of which it is not easy to discern the full scope ; but where the only reason for a difference of prac- tice is that an accidental change in the smaller circum- stances of the case suggests it as convenient, it is mere pedantry to ask for precedents. And there Lord Salis- bury is right. You might as well ask a precedent for not taking out your watch with your right hand when that hand happens to be full, as ask for a precedent for not taking up the work of the Foreign Minister when you happen to be also Leader of the House of Commons. But this successful and masterly little speech did miss, and probably intentionally miss, one important point, as Lord Granville, —who remarked that he had always thought there was a vein of Radicalism in Lord Salisbury,—indicated in his reply. It missed the point of the double consideration which foreign policy gets when the Foreign Minister has to discuss all the more important aspects of his policy with the Prime Minister, a double consideration which, of course, it does not get when the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister are one and the same man. We suspect that if Lord Salisbury had chosen to take up that point, which he did not, he might have said, and said truly, not what he did say, that Prime Ministers usually interfere very little indeed with the Foreign Minister (which may be quite true and yet irrelevant, if the little interference for which they are responsible embarks the Foreign Minister himself in new lines of hesitation or action) ; but that, in his own case at all events, his policy is all the better and more dis- tinctly coherent, for not being modified, and sometimes rendered vacillating, by attempting to embody inconsistent suggestions. Lord Salisbury, as we interpret him, is always in danger of being too much moved by any plausible and popular criticism on his action. He has the literary turn of mind, and not the immovable determination of purpose which has made the greater Foreign Ministers. And he has been all the more coherent in purpose, instead of less so, for not discussing so much as other Foreign Ministers have had to do, the difficulties and embarrass- ments in his way, with a chief who felt the dangers of failure more keenly than he, and the prospects of success less keenly. The speech as a whole was extremely characteristic of Lord Salisbury. It was crushing as far as it went. It omitted the one point of real weight in the criticism hostile to the combination of the two offices ; and we are by no means certain that the practical result was. not all the sounder for omitting it. Lord Salisbury would not have liked to say that Lord Beaconsfield's influence over him, when he was Lord Beaconsfield's Foreign Minister, was always considerable and always mischievous. But that, we believe, was the truth.. There are cases in which the instinct of the statesman leads him to omit the salient point in the argument, and where the conclusion is all the juster for the strength of that instinct.
Mr. Gladstone also has made a very characteristic- speech this week to a select audience in the National Liberal Club, and one which brings out the great contrast between him and Lord Salisbury. Lord Salisbury likes best an audience to whom he can speak with literary brevity and wit. Mr. Gladstone, now at least, likes best one to which he can enlarge with perfect certainty of hearty sympathy. To some extent his speech of Wednesday night was less characteristic of the Mr. Gladstone of former days than it is of the Mr. Gladstone of this day, for now he evidently prefers audiences of a well-marked type, for whom he can prepare the kind of speech which will, in his opinion, suit them best, —it may be a Presbyterian or- Congregationalist type, or it may be a Railway Service type, or it may be, as on this occasion, a Wesleyan type. It is no doubt much easier for a great orator to speak to an assembly of which he intimately understands the leading bias. And latterly Mr. Gladstone has indulged himself a good deal in this kind of oratorical luxury. The defect of that kind of audience is, however, that the orator is almost sure to over-express himself on that side of his mind which specially gratifies his. particular audience ; and certainly on this occasion Mr. Gladstone went as near making a No-Popery speech as. the Minister who so boldly opposed the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, and afterwards joined in repealing the Eccle- siastical Titles Act, could well have succeeded in going, without absolutely doing injustice to his former reputation._ His attack on the mission to Malta was, in the first place, even on his own assumption, a trivial attack ; and in the- next place, it was founded on an inaccurate understanding of the conditions of the case. No doubt it pleased the Wesleyans much, and it confirmed Mr. Gladstone in that unwise attitude of reluctance to communicate officially with the religious chief of a vast number of the Queen's subjects, for which it is impossible to offer any statesmanlike defence, and to which no great Protestant State in Europe except England shows any leaning. In this case, Mr. Gladstone was very unfortunate even in his choice of an occasion. For England was pledged by its own promise to govern Malta in conformity with the canon law found there, and the canon law cannot be altered except with the consent of the Pope, for which Mr. Gladstone, whether he himself thinks so or not, certainly encouraged the Wesleyans in- thinking that it is a great humiliation to ask. If so, it is a great humiliation to ask for the means of keeping- our promise without greatly inconveniencing Protestant, subjects of the Queen.
Mr. Gladstone was more fortunate in the choice of his second subject. No one can deny that Mr. Justice Harri- son made a very grievous blunder in talking about Lynch- law in East Galway, though the blunder was deprived of its most serious consequence by the fact that all the people in East Galway who are at all inclined to Lynch-law are inclined to it in the form which Mr. Justice Harrison was trying to put down, and not in the form to which his words, if they had had any effect, would have stimulated them. Still, an Irish Judge who says anything at all that may oe understood as an encouragement to outstep the law, is, of course, going out of his way to undermine his own authority, and Mr. Gladstone could not condemn language of that kind more strongly than we should do. That Mr. Gladstone should have combined in the same speech a blow at the Pope for the Rescript which condemned, lawfully and on moral grounds, boycotting and the "Plan of Campaign," with a blow at Mr. Justice Harrison for suggesting unlawful resistance to boycotting and the "Plan of Campaign," was not what we should have looked for from him, and hardly what it would have occurred to him to contrive for us, except in speaking to an assembly BO certain to give him enthusiastic and un- critical support as Wesleyan Home-rulers. The inference is naturally suggested that Mr. Gladstone objects to the un- lawfulness only when it is directed against the Parn.ellite Party, and not when it is used by that party for its own purposes ; but his Wesleyan friends drew no such inference. Again, his bitter attack on the Government for not finding a night to discuss a question on which there is no difference of opinion,—Mr. Justice Harrison himself agreeing with Mr. Gladstone as to the character of his own words,—is hardly like even Mr. Gladstone's own recent course of action, which has often been very moderate, though, by fits and starts, very unreasonable. Unless it is proposed to move an address to the Crown for Mr. Justice Harrison's removal, of which of course there is no suggestion, the subject is wholly unworthy of a night's debate in the House of Commons. Mr. Dillon's own language has been, times out of number, vastly more improper than Mr. Justice Harrison's ; and though of course a Judge should be much more prudent than an agitator, the Judge does admit that his language was mistaken and did not express his thought, while Mr. Dillon almost always defends his own use of language far more exciting than Mr. Justice Harrison's. Mr. Gladstone bad not even an excuse for his bitter attack on the Government for not giving up another night to a flood of reiteration of sentiment in which we are all agreed. What Mr. Gladstone's speech seems to us to show, is the unfortunateness of his increasing tendency to prefer audiences to which he can adapt himself only too skilfully, and with which he not only goes the mile he would go if he depended on his own judgment alone, but the two miles into which their bias betrays him. That is a very dangerous tendency for a statesman who is undertaking a great constitutional revolution, and who ought to be training his judgment to consider what he will have to resist, and not how much he may yield to admiring and almost worshipping friends. If Lord Salisbury is too much disposed to pass scornfully by even the one strong point in his adversary's case, Mr. Gladstone is too much disposed to foster the political weaknesses of his friends ; and it is safer for a Conservative statesman to pass by the best argument of his opponents, than for a revolutionary leader to encourage and even stimulate the most restless wishes of his allies.
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