TOPICS OF THE DAY.
SIR JAMES GRAFT A M.
THE characters of our leading statesmen are in every sense public property, and it is for the advantage not only of the nation, but also of great statesmen themselves, that they should be so regarded. Men who know that their every action and the whole tenour of their existence are likely to be scanned by the eager eyes of a great multitude, for warn- ing or example, will live lives partially at least determined by the solemn sense of national hope and observation. And if it is to be so, it becomes a national duty to speak out can- didly the true impression which our statesmen leave upon us as one by one they vanish from the conflict or seek the quiet retirement that suits declining .powers, while their names pass into history and become the watchwords of new tradi- tions. A statesman of this class was Sir James Graham, on whom the tomb has only just closed. Commencing his po- litical career under Lard William Bentinck, in Sicily, when Murat was ruling in Naples, he has lived to see every great European crisis of the present century, and to influence many of them. It may be of little significance to him now what the English press say or forbear to say of his merits and demerits, but it is much for those who remain to remember that the career of every English statesman belongs, as a whole, to the people whom he helps to rule, and will one day be regarded in its entireness, and not in the light of frag- mentary and momentary interests. Reviewing Sir James Graham's character in this impartial light, we shall find in it certainly much that deserves our respect and gratitude, and much also which, as we may hope, will warn the present generation of the moral perils which beset on every side the politicians of our own day. There are politicians who may be said to live by faith, politicians who live by prejudice, and others again who live by sight. Of the former class are all who cling as closely either to fixed principles or even to the higher instincts of their own character in times of alarm, surprise, and unpopu- larity, as they do in times of triumph and prosperity. Such were Burke, Buxton, Wilberforce, and Romilly ; such also, in great measure, Pitt, Canning, and Huskisson, and the Libe- rals of the hopeless war-era, Lord Grey and Lord John Russell. And it is impossible in any way to divide off the po- liticians who live by a faith which supports them in the deepest shadow of eclipsed popularity, from those who live by a cer- tain deep-rooted prejudice or instinct of their own nature, often equally tenacious and powerful, though less noble be- cause more egoistic. These last have often as defined a political character of their own as the higher class, though it is deter- mined less by adhesion to a cause, and more by the elective affinities of temperament and tradition. Such were, and are, most of the well-defined Tories of the older type, as, for example, the Duke of Wellington ; and such too, in great measure, is Lord Palmerston—a statesman whose political faith numbers very few and insignificant articles, but whose vaguer sympathies are deeply rooted and usually generous, while his two or three political traditions concerning Egypt, Syria, and France, for example, are fixed ideas— what metaphysicians would term " pure forms of thought,' —fundamental necessities of his understanding—without which he cannot conceive of the existence of the political world at all.
Again,—it is difficult to draw the line—but again, we can distinguish from these a third class of politicians, in whom !Itch prepossessions as these exist, but in a much more flex- ible, fluid, and indefinite form, in a form ready to yield to the impulse of any strong pressure from without. Such are the class whom we have called politicians living by sight, whose policy is moulded less by what is above or within them, less by faith, tradition, or sympathy, than by the forces they see around them, less by conviction, sentiment, and prejudice than by inspection of the position. They feel the pulse of the times, and direct their individual movements by the set of its cur- rents. Nor are they usually politicians who are much in- finenced by the force of popular sympathy. Sir Robert Peel, who was the most distinguished and high-principled,Sir James Graham, who was the most typical politician of this class, were both of them men less than ordinarily sensitive to the approbation of the crowd. It was the marked peculiarity, indeed, of the statesman who has just left us, that while no man went through so many decisive changes in deference to the changing tide of public thought, he appeared, and was, haughtily indifferent to the force of popular disapprobation. Indeed, Sir James Graham scarcely seemed to know what sympathy with the people meant. He was both at the be- ginning and end of his career, a Radical of very advanced views ; but we cannot remember a single speech in which he evinced what we may call any impulse of sympathy with the struggling classes whose enfranchisement he advocated.
The same marked absence of liberal feeling was perceptible in his foreign policy. Though he began his political career under Lord William Bentinck, in Sicily, there was no poli- tician whose voice was aeldomer heard on behalf of any op- pressed European nation. During the last year or two of his life, when Italian politics were uppermost in the mind of the House, Sir James Graham's interest was concentrated on home policy and financial economy. His speech in the great Palmerstonian debate of 1850 was the expression of his whole mind on foreign policy—a profound dislike of all the expense and risk of mterfeerence beyond the limits of the strictest necessity. He had anything, then, but an instinct of attraction towards the popular view, and yet he observed it anxiously and deferred to it rashly, and, as it turned out, some- times blindly. The truth is, that Sir James Graham was natu- rally administrative ; and he looked at the popular view nei- ther with attraction nor repulsion, but simply as a business element in the possibilities of the situation,—speculating on its force much as men of business speculate on a rising or a falling market. He began life as a Radical, because he saw the people gaining in power. He continued his career as a Conservative, because he thought he saw a clear turn of the tide in favour of the country and Protestant party. He ended it as a Radical, again, because, in 1859 at least, he thought democracy inevitable. What he might have thought in 1862 we do not know. The speech with which he startled his friends on Mr. Disraeli's Reform Bill will long be re- membered as a rash and mistaken reading of the shadows which coming events were, as he supposed, casting before them. " I speak only for myself," he said, " but I say, if you do lower the franchise in cities and boroughs, lower it effec- tually, and do it upon some principle known to the constitu- tion of the country, upon which a stand may be made against ulterior change. The ancient borough franchise rests upon rating and residence, and I am decidedly of opinion that the municipal franchise as originally settled, dependinep on a re- sidence of three years and the payment of rates for two years and a half, was a good franchise, until a most important but very ill-advised change took place with regard to rating." This proposal was the most distinctly democratic made by any statesman of official standing, and accompanied as it was by a strong affirmation that the ballot, though personally disapproved by himself, was rapidly gaining a firm footing in the favour of the country, it was generally understood to be an acceptance by Sir James Graham of the political pro- gramme of Mr. Bright. And such, no doubt, it was ; and yet no statesman of either party ever evinced less trace of political sympathy with the classes of whom he thus became the spokesman. He thought he saw the change written in the national destiny, and he accepted it, as he accepted the reaction to Conservatism five-and-twenty years previously. He was a rational Liberal, without any sort of enthusiasm for freedom, as he had been a rational Conservative without any reverence for the past. But Sir James Graham was honest and able as an admi- nistrator. He was eminently a thorough workman, and he had, with all his frank and hearty manner, none of that good- natured weakness for conciliating individual feelings which spoils many a clear-headed Minister. His calculated changes in political life were not, as we have said, due to the fascina- tion exercised over him by the nation's impulses, but to a bu- siness estimate of the demands of the situation. In admini- stration, therefore, he was hampered by no temptation of the kind. He saved courageously at the Admiralty, and he braved many a cry at the Home Office. He was never perhaps more respectable than when haughtily refusing to account for his discretionary use of the Postmaster's legal powers (which had been used even more freely by most of his predecessors) ; or when defending the Conservative scheme of education ; ar reprimanding the Scotch Free Kirk. It is probable enough that the snubbing side of a Minister's duties was not painful to Sir James Graham. He could never resist the charm of suc- cessfully demolishing a friend's untenable case. The Scotch Free Kirk ministers found this to their cost, and Dr. Chalmers experienced it with peculiar force. In 1839 he was in raptures with Sir James. " We fell to on our Church question. Sir James's views," he says, "had given me more comfort than any I had met incoming to London. . . . Came away greatly relieved and comforted ; for Sir Robert's extreme caution and coldness operate as a damper on a man's spirits, whereas Sir James is a fine, hearty, honest, outspeaking Englishman, of great good feeling and practical sense withal." This was dur- ing the Whig Government. The Conservatives were scarcely installed in power when Dr. Chalmers's view of that states- man changed, and Sir James Graham became the Free Kirk party's most formidable antagonist. When, in 1847, after the schism, Dr. Chalmers was examined before a committee of the House of Commons with respect to the possibilities of healing the breach, Sir James, though he had promised, as the Doctor says, " in the face of old friendly recollections," to leave him alone, put him through a most severe and lengthy cross-examination. He could not, in fact, resist the tempta- tion of exposing the weakness of Chalmers's case. " He shook hands with me," said the unfortunate witness, after this severe discipline, "with smiles and blandness of expression that made him as unlike a worricow as possible," but yet he could not deny himself the intellectual satisfaction of a triumph. We cite this instance simply as an illustration of the cause of Sir James Graham's personal unpopularity, and of the advantage it gave him in official business. He could not help being thorough, even at the expense of a friend. On the whole, we may say of Sir James Graham, that he was a firm, frugal, and honest administrator, but that as a statesman he belonged to a type which we do not wish to see on the increase. Love and reverence for something noble, whether it be past tradition or national liberty, should be at the basis of every great statesman's character. A more respectable Theramenes, had Sir James Graham lived in an- cient Athens, he would, like him, have twice endeavoured to overturn the oligarchy which he had helped to instal, not from any intrusive hatred to its mode of proeedure, but from a conviction that the signs of the times betokened its ruin. The statesman should study, but also help to form, these signs of the times," which are now so often the objects of abject but unloving idolatry. We admired Sir James Graham more when he was stemming the tide of momentary popular hatred, than when be was rashly or shrewdly fore- stalling the events of the immediate morrow.
Previous page
