TOPICS OF THE DAY.
MR. CHILDERS.
MR. CHILDERS is, perhaps, the most efficient and skilful of our administrative statesmen,—those statesmen we mean, who concern themselves less in trying to mould and modify the political character of the people, than in trying so to shape their institutions as to give to that character the most efficient and adequate expression. These are quite a distinct class, and you may often find them in the greatest perfection, on the one hand, under a virtual but intellectual despotism, like either of the French empires, or, on the other hand, under a democracy which has learnt to think of demo- cracy as final, and has, therefore, bidden adieu to the sort of passions which beset the intermediate period when democracy is rowing hard against the stream of precedent and privilege. Mr. Childers was educated as a statesman in the early years of the Colonial Parliament of Victoria. The chief assumptions of democracy were the very data from which his political mind had to start, and from the first he seems to have set himself the task rather of finding the best institutions for the people, of so adjusting and moulding its instruments as to make the best of the popular life from its own point of view, than of changing or elevating that point of view, or even help- ing to make it good as against any other point of view. Im- mediately on reaching Australia he was appointed Inspector of Schools to the Colony of Victoria, and at once commenced that practice of treating all schools, whether secular or de- nominational, with perfect equality which anticipated the legislation of much later years. It was he who introduced
the Telegraph system into Australia,—the first indeed of the kind in any British country,—in spite of much ridicule and opposition. He, too, suggested the simple tariff of those years, and the gold-export duty which was invaluable to Victoria during the gold discoveries. And what he was in Australia he has been at home. In speaking of his new Army Organisation Scheme the other day, Mr. Childers thus described his aims :—" We shall reduce the cost of the Army. We shall greatly reduce desertion, which has already been greatly reduced within the last ten years, and thus we shall introduce a more satisfactory state of feeling with respect to the general popularity of the Army. That is
the spirit in which, I think, this subject ought to be ap- proached,—to improve the feeling of the public towards the Army, to improve the comfort of the soldier, to improve his prospects, and thus get rid of the taunt we sometimes hear from those on the Continent, who rely on Conscription for their Army." That is admirably expressive of Mr. Childers' chief aims and powers as a statesman. No statesman concerns himself less with educating the public, whether by denouncing some of its favourite ideas, or by extolling others ; what Mr. Childers loves is to take in clearly what the people have made up their minds to do, or not to do,—to allow or to forbid, —and then so to adapt the institutions which are in need of change to those conditions, that under those conditions they shall still retain their highest possible efficiency. He does not fret at the conditions, and try to change them. He sets steadily to work to make the best of what needs moulding so as to fit the new ideas, without either complaining that the ideas are so obstinate, or, indeed, questioning their right to be so. Mr. Childers has the calm, flexible intellect of the man who cares. even more for order in the State than he cares for any particular type of order, and who establishes, therefore, the sort of order which best suits the time, place, and moral circum- stances, without waiting till he has made the moral circumstances other than they are. No man has so much of the forbearing temper, the elastic judgment, and the quiet equanimity which are needful for taking the measure of the public mind, and then determining what can be done for efficiency, so as not to give rise to any rude jostling against the popular assump- tions ; nay, so as not even to raise the question whether there be anything dubious or false in those assumptions. The better statesmen of a democracy—for instance, the better American statesmen—are sometimes singularly free from anything like democratic passion ; but it is rather because they have learnt to defer completely to democratic axioms as final, because they regard it as their particular work to shape these into the most reasonable practical forms, than because they feel any profound delight in the democratic doctrines they accept. It is their function to introduce order where there was confusion ; to trace new and clear outlines, where the old outlines were all blurred ; to make matters intelligible on popular principles, which were unintelligible while they were accommodated half to obsolete aristocratic traditions, and half to the modern prin- ciples of democratic policy. Mr. Childers is one of these. He is a Liberal by conviction, but an administrator by taste and genius. His Liberal creed traces for him the ground-plan of his politics,. but that is all. It is when he comes to build upon that ground- plan, to raise the house, and pierce the windows, and contrive the staircases of popular institutions, that the real power of the man comes out. Then you begin to see that whatever the ground-plan had been, he might well have taken delight, per- haps almost the same amount of delight, in adapting the structure to the space and to the popular needs. It is his chief impulse to disentangle entanglements, to elicit all the sober reason in popular causes, to rationalise national resolves, to. mitigate constitutional resistance, to diffuse a certain intelli- gent sobriety of feeling, in the place of passion and pre- judice. Mr. Childers is, of course, in conviction a democrat ; but you feel that his democracy is, like his accommodation of himself to the climate in which he lives, rather a matter of practical wisdom than of eager choice. ' These things being, so,' he seems to say, ' how can we make the best of them,— give them sobriety of temper and lucidity of purpose ?' And everything he does is an attempt to make the inevitable democracy of his country intelligent, rather than to make the intelligence of his country democratic.
This being Mr. Childers temper, it is no wonder that he has made his mark rather in Office than in Opposition. There is no rancour in him, and very little passion. It is when there is something difficult to devise, rather than when there is, something objectionable to criticise, that his power comes out. Nevertheless, the perfect composure of his glance has enabled' him more than once to define exactly where the weakness of his opponents lay. When he told his constituents, in November, 1878, that the English people had just discovered that they were slumbering on the edge of the volcano of " second-rate Indian official Chauvinism," he simply stated, with an ex- actitude that was almost as considerate as it was keen,
the precise danger of the situation. And when, stilt earlier in the history of that unfortunate Government, Mr. Childers remarked on the enthusiastic Tory cheers with which Sir Richard Cross's apologies for Turkey were received, and the silent energy with which the Tories "sat and fanned themselves" whenever Sir R. Cross said any- thing less respectful to Turkey, he showed no slight trace of that placid,half-American humour which consists in the double power, first, gently to exaggerate the passionate swelling of human hearts, and then to enjoy thoroughly its own exemption from those interior convulsions. The perfectly rational temperament, which yet enters kindly, though almost playfully, into the tumultuous emotions of others, is very characteristic of the most cultivated type of mind in all great democracies, and is distinctly traceable in Mr. Childers.
It is most likely that if ever Mr. Gladstone resigns the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer without resigning office altogether, Mr. Childers would succeed him. Undoubtedly, it was Mr. Childers's duty while in Opposition to criticise the finan- cial statements of Sir Stafford Northcote, and it is certain that he performed his task with a very accurate and discriminating skill. He has the true financial mind. He does not, indeed,. make figures positively fascinating, as Mr. Gladstone does ; but he makes them tell a coherent tale, and has a great gift for docking them of all those misleading suggestions which statistics, in the hands of any but a master, are sure to convey. It was Mr. Childers, in a financial speech de- livered in 1873, who first adopted the plan of separating the yield of our taxation from the yield of those pro- ductive Departments.—like the Post Office and Telegraph Services,—which really have as little to do with taxation proper as the yield of our gas or water companies. Moreover, his eye is on the look-out for, and therefore catches the significance of, statistics, as only the eye of a very few even among the class of statesmen ever does. For instance, we remember noting, a year ago, how skilfully he refuted the statement that the Liberals in criticising Conservative finance had made no allow- ance for the bad times on which the Conservative Government fell, and the comparative good-luck of the previous Liberal Government. " Some one said that the English people were drunk under Mr. Gladstone and sober under Lord Beaconsfield, that they drank themselves out of their financial difficulties in Mr. Gladstone's time, but, now-a-days, did not spend so much on drink, so that the Exchequer became empty. I find that in the first five years of Lord Beaconsfield's Administration, sixteen and a half millions more were collected in the shape of spirit
duties than in the five years of Mr. Gladstone's that £3,800,000 more was collected on tea than in the five years of Mr. Gladstone's ; that £4,500,000 more was collected on to- bacco than in the five years of Mr. Gladstone's; that £3,500,000 more was collected on malt than in the five years of Mr. Gladstone's," so that nearly three times the whole expense of those affairs which are made the excuse for the financial diffi- culties of the Government, were collected on the Customs and Excise alone, during the five years of Lord Beaconsfield's Government, in excess of what had been received during the five years of Mr. Gladstone's. A more graphic and instructive little bit of financial criticism than this could hardly have been devised by any Parliamentary critic of our time. In Mr. Childers's hands, figures are never, as they so often are, a blinding kind of dust ; on the contrary, they are made to draw the outlines of telling and important facts.
On the whole, there is no mainly administrative statesman of our day who inspires us with the same confidence as Mr. Childers. He made a great change for the better in the administration of the Navy, and has told us very tersely what it effected. In April, 1874, after the defeat of the Liberals and the formation of the Tory Government, he said :—" If, which may God avert, we should be, at twenty-four hours' notice, entangled, without an ally, in a war with the three principal maritime Powers, even allowing an ally to them, our strength is such that we should be able to hold our own in the Channel, in our Home seas, in the Mediterranean, and in the Chinese and Colonial waters. Within six months, such is the power of developing a force afloat which this nation possesses, we should have complete command of the seas, and have ruined our opponents' commerce ; and within twelve or fifteen months, at the outside, we should have added so many powerful ships to the Navy as would prevent any enemy's ship from putting to sea without the almost cer- tainty of meeting with a superior British force." Such was the service—and his service, at least in the main,—rendered for our Navy. He is making a great change for the better—we trust quite as great a change—in the administration of the Army, and all with as little fuss and as little cause of irritation as if the changes were small, and not great. He has sketched areal reform of the Established Church, and is just the statesman who might
succeed with it. He has the curious gentleness which belongs to the more plastic statesmen educated in democratic ideas, that habit of patient dealing with political forces as if they were amongst the great objective phenomena of Nature, instead of amongst the irritating symptoms of human perversity, which seems to tranquillise the temperament and strengthen the reticence of those who administer the institutions of a great Democratic State. Mr. Childers does not form the mind of the people as Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Bright form it. But, starting from what that mind insists upon, he has as much capacity to invent for the people the most efficient political instruments, as a wide and broad intelligence, an indomitable industry, and an illimitable patience can give to a statesman of singularly unimpassioned insight.
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