SIR HENRY JAMES AT BURY.
THE Attorney-General's speech at Bury has more of genuine oratory in it than any speech which we have read since Mr. Gladstone made even Tories ashamed of them.elves for having added a seventeenth night to the sixteen on which, during the present Session, they had already debated Egypt. Its oratory is of the kind which we now seldom have,—keen, fine, reticent, with more of significance than at first meets the ear. It would have been impossible to make the folly of the Lords, in determining in private conclave to reject the Fran- chise Bill before they even knew in what shape it would come before them, more painfully evident to the public at large, than Sir Henry James made it in his most artistic and yet quite unlaboured speech. What, he asked, could be more unconstitutional than to give out to the world that it is of no use to labour upon or improve a measure submitted to the House of Commons, because, as one of the Conservatives in- formed the House, it is already "as dead as a door-nail," its doom having been pronouned on grounds absolutely unconnected with its provisions. What is the effect of such a doom ? Why. of course, that those who desire to strengthen the House of Lords no longer desire to improve the Bill, even from their own point of view, because they know that improving the Bill from their own point of view means rendering it more difficult for the Lords to deal with it as that foregone conclusion requires. On the contrary, the Conservatives in the House of Commons who aim at what is called sheltering the Lords, are likely to do all they can to justify the foregone conclusion of the Peers, by making it such a Bill that the Lords will be pardoned, if not even praised, for rejecting it. "The best way to justify the House of Lords in throwing out the Bill is to make it a bad and unworkable Bill ;" and that is precisely what the belief in the absolute determination of the Lords to reject it, tends to make it. If the Conservatives can but succeed in making the Bill absurd, they will make it absurd,—just as a father who knows that he must have some justification for his daughter's rejection of a suitor, is not always sorry to find an inde- pendent excuse for quarrelling with him, apart from his daughter's inclination. The Conservative Peers who met on May 10th to adopt their foregone conclusion did the most unconstitutional thing they could do, because they made their friends in the House of Commons anxious that the measure they were discussing should be made as bad as possible, in order that it might justify and fortify the resolve of the Tory Peers. Accordingly, they will try, no doubt, to make it ridiculous, by engrafting on it Mr. Woodall's amend- ment, or any other irrelevant proposal which would be likely to lessen the displeasure of the people against the noble wreckers who had determined on its destruction.
We may assume, however, that the Government will be too wary to meet the hopes of these secret foes of the Bill, and that it will be sent up to the House of Lords in very much the same shape in which it was introduced into the House of Commons. If so, in what position will the Peers place them- selves by rejecting the Bill! Sir Henry James has given an
admirable estimate of the situation, as compared with the very different situation of 1832. "Do the Peers," he asks, "quite realise the forces against them ? History is no safe guide for them now. Many changes have happened since the last great contest. As the strength of the Lords was in 1832, so is it now. The same hereditary Peerages exist. The holders have added one generation to their lineage. How far that has given them strength I do not pretend to say. The Irish and Scotch Peers, representing no principle save that of co-opta- tion, sitting by no right of hereditary succession, selected by somebody in somebody's drawing-room, are just as they were then. Twenty-one Bishops may again record their votes in opposition to the enfranchisement of the people ; but such forces have not grown, and are not likely to grow. They have no reserves. There are no intrenched lines for them to fall back upon except those which have been constructed by the good-will of the English people. But now let us review the opposing force. What was it in 1832 What is it now ? The population of Great Britain, not including Ireland, was then 16,600,000; it is now 30,500,000. The electorate is difficult to compare, for there was no register in those pre-Reform days. National education was unknown ; the Press was comparatively powerless, the legislation of 1867 was nnthought of ; political intelligence was inactive, and organisation ineffective. But most men now have entered the active service of political life, and the forces the Lords will have to contend with are many, and determined, and strong. But I believe their sense of certain success will make them moderate. I do not anticipate any whirlwinds or hurricanes of passion ; I do not think any coronets or mitres will be blown off ; but I do think that there will be humiliation to these Tory Lords, which will weaken the hold their order justly have upon the people now. If no calamitous effects follow, at any rate they incur the peril of a party disaster. What issue to determine by a general election could be more agreeable to the views of an extreme politician than the question whether the House of Lords or the representatives of the people are to prevail ? The condition of things at Khartoum presents many features of interest ; but the voice of 2,000,000 of Englishmen asking to be enrolled to take a share in selecting those who have to govern them, will speak more loudly than those who are either for dangerous war or for the total abandonment of Egypt." We cannot conceive how a Tory friend of the House of Peers can look at the prospect sketched by Sir Henry James in that fine passage without panic,—panic lest, if the Tories were to succeed for a moment, by the aid of the unenfranchised counties, a gust of passion, which might really blow off coronets and mitres, should succeed ; and lest, if they fail,—as they almost certainly will fail,—their failure should add another and more conspicuous blot to the blotted history of the House of Lords.
Sir Henry James put the true issue before the electors when he said that the matter for them to decide was not whether errors had or had not been made by the Government in their Egyptian policy, or any other part of their policy, but whether the policy which places the great duties and interests of the people at home in the front of the battle, and honestly endea- vours to adapt the foreign and colonial policy of the country to the duties and the wants of the millions of our people at home, is or is not to be preferred to the policy which tries to defeat a Reform Bill by violent attacks on supposed or real mistakes abroad, one the very essence of which is to divert the mind of the people from its most useful tasks at home, by exaggerating the danger of foreign crises and the im- portance of military prestige. We are, and always have been, amongst those who think the Egyptian policy of the Government at present inadequate, and rendered inade- quate by too sanguine a dream of what Egypt might effect for herself. But that is a mistake on the right side, on the side of endeavouring to enable others to do for them- selves what we should certainly wish to do for ourselves ; it is a mistake in judgment, not in aim. The Conservatives who are trying to defeat the Reform Bill by operations affecting the banks of the Nile, are making a mistake, not of judgment, but of principle. They are subordinating our true policy in Egypt to their own selfish party interests, and trying to postpone the dethronement of the landlords in the counties by hastening the assumption by England of the Egyptian Administration. That seems to us a sin against principle of the worst kind; and we are sure that it is not one which the electorate of Great Britain will easily pardon. They wish to see the United Kingdom governed in the interest of the inhabitants of the United Kingdom. The Tories, following implicitly the lead of Lord Beaconsfield, wish to move the centre of gravity of our Empire eastwards, and to make English policy depend more and more every day on their craving to extead our power in Asia and in Africa, whether at the expense, or to the profit, of our people at home.
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