TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE COMING SESSION.
WE trust that the Liberal leaders will adhere firmly to their resolve to raise the question of "fiscal reform" by an amendment on the Address. They have shown great weakness, and a certain failure in their idea of public duty, in not raising it effectively before. Our Parliament has a function other than legislation,—namely, the educa- tion of the people in politics, and upon this fiscal question it has hitherto shirked its performance. The consequence is that there have been deluges of talk outside, very seldom illuminating talk, but there has been no real debate. It is only in Parliament that speeches are answered at once and on the spot, and only in Parliament, therefore, that speakers hesitate to make statements which, being directly contrary to the facts, can be instantly contradicted. Even if they are not more scrupulous, as counsel grow more scrupulous in Court, they dread the immediate intellectual defeat, and fear the ridicule which, if humour had not so nearly disappeared from the House of Commons, would instantly follow an outrageous "cram." It is, no doubt, most unfortunate that the cause of Free-trade is not at this moment vivified by the utterances of any orator of the first rank ; but still, there are a hundred Members at least who thoroughly understand the facts, and the slow filtration of their clear, though perhaps not eloquent, statements will gradually mould opinion in the House as well as outside. Ordinary debates are not, perhaps, so much read as those who engage in them take pleasure in believing ; but the speeches on great occasions are carefully studied, and being made under a sense of responsibility too often wanting on the platform, they weigh permanently with the nation as speeches in the market-place for a moment weigh with the crowd. That responsibility is becoming of great political importance. It -is high time that Members should be compelled to decide to which side of the great issue they belong, and to express the decision so that their constituents can under- stand. We have never known a case in which so many men doubted their own conclusions, and so many more had, as was said in the lobby before the Recess, nailed their colours to the fence. The pretty little tricks of Tadpole and Taper are out of place now that a great question has divided all society and all politicians, and pulverised those groupings of statesmen through which our Constitution is usually worked. And it is time, also, that those grave doubts which have been created by the hesitations—we cannot believe them to be finessings—of the Premier should be finally removed. In a great Parlia- mentary debate Mr. Balfour must state whether he is at heart a follower of Mr. Chamberlain or not, and must define what he means when he pleads for "liberty of retaliation" as an alternative policy. The vote does not so much matter, for the only vote which will be executive is that of the whole nation at the polls. The intellectual fog needs clearing off, and the only breeze strong enough to clear it—for the fog is very dense—is the breeze of aroused conviction which so often follows on a grand debate.
We are no foes, be it understood, to the kind of process by which Mr. Chamberlain has endeavoured to convert the country. It was within his right, if he liked, to travel about, call public meetings, and accept their cheers as evidence of the approval of the nation. We do not believe, indeed, that the cheers at public meetings summoned to listen to an orator whose line is a foregone conclusion are always evidence that the country is definitely with him. The majority of those who throng to those meetings are always the voters who wish to hear arguments leading up to their preconceived conclusion. Nor do we believe that the pleased excitement of audiences, which reveals itself in what newspapers call "enthusiasm," always lasts after the night has brought reflection, and the morning the chilly doubt with which at that time of day men habitually re- gard their prospects. Mr. Gladstone might have addressed every city or every village in England on Home-rule, and have been listened to with enthusiasm, and still his Home- rule project would, when brought forward as the test question of an Election, have been rejected. Sir Robert Peel said—did he not ?—that Free-trade was carried by the unadorned eloquence of Richard Cobden; but we cannot but think that it was carried by irritation at a taxation which fettered every action of the trader, and the national horror at a price for bread which made every poor household wan. Still, market-place speeches have their uses. They wake up a section of the people to consider, and they enable the statesmen to form some idea of what it is that tells with the Demos who is lord,—an idea which is not always deceptive, though if Mr. Chamberlain had gone to Norwich on the day before the election there, he would have been received with rapturous applause, and have come away next evening a flabbergasted man. They improve in our politicians that habit of popular speaking which is so essential to the education of a democracy, and which in Parliament all but the few who, like Mr. Bright, are popular orators by the gift of God—a gift as incom- municable as the poetic faculty—are apt to lose from an inner fear of not talking like cultivated and thoughtful gentlemen. Such speeches teach those among the multi- tude who are the recognised or unrecognised accoucheurs of decisions to consider, though the decision will not always be so fully in accord with the orator's thought as he expects. And we are not unwilling to admit that there must be granted to the peripatetic publishers of politics a certain license of argument, perhaps even of statement, which should never be granted to the Minister in Parliament. The eye sees only what it has the capacity of seeing, and the mind of the uncultivated unwittingly discounts much. The right accorded to counsel may be accorded also to the politician who is disputing the most visible of facts. But in making these concessions we do but exalt the necessity for that close Parliamentary debating which we trust the reporters of the next Session will have the opportunity to record. In a democratic Constitution like our own the debater is the best corrective of the demagogue.
The lack of the highest kind of orator, the speaker who can at once persuade and illuminate, which is now so marked in Europe, is a little hard to explain. Count von Billow speaks well, but he leaves on those who read him an impression of guile, or shall we say of a man who, having resolved upon a decided course, in- vents on the spur of the moment the arguments which he thinks will tell ? There is bite in his words, but the bite is derived, not from the collocation of the words themselves, but from the strong action they occasionally forecast, and which, therefore, is watched for always. M. Combes talks well, but he talks like a schoolmaster who cannot thinkthat amonghis audience there may be his intellectual equals. His eloquence tends, like that of Mr. Chamberlain, to be the eloquence of assertion. Those who know say that Serior Canalejas alarms opponents with the marvellous persuasiveness of his oratory, but no sufficient body of it has reached this country to allow of trustworthy judgment. Scores of Americans speak well, but if we except President Roosevelt and Mr. Hay, the majority are thinking so much more of the immediate audience than of the nation that the quality of weight which is a constituent of effective public oratory is usually lacking. Mr. Chamberlain when speaking out- side Parliament is too much like a popular preacher, and inside sometimes too like a theologian who assumes the data which his adversaries contest. bOccasionally, however, as we have always admitted, he is great. Mr. Balfour is too much given to confuse philosophy and politics, and to those arts of clever rather than persuasive speech by which men defend a difficult position. The level of public speaking in Europe is perhaps still a high one, but there are no lofty eminences. This can hardly be a consequence of democracy, for it is in democracies or in Law Courts, which are for the moment democracies, that the most splendid orators have revealed their powers ; and we cannot but hope that in the fierce struggle which is now opening, a struggle which will break up parties and dissolve friend- ships, new men will be thrown up who will carry to the body of the people that illumination of which they still stand so grievously in need. We retain this hope even for the debates of next Session, though Parliament knows it is dying, and too many will speak, not to express their thoughts, but to diminish thew own feara of forfeiting their seats.
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