A BUTTERFLY PREMIER.
IT is sometimes said,—Carlyle said it often, and with bitter raillery,—that the English Parliament had reduced government to a matter of words, to a babble- ment, to an institution of mere rhetorical artifice. We do not believe it. And nothing could better illustrate the shallowness of that taunt than the complete failure of Lord Rosebery's Government to carry through even a three years' reign by the help of that "little member" which" boasteth great things,"—the tongue. It would be difficult to imagine a Government which had greater masters of the tongue, and the tongue merely, than the last. In the head of the Government we had a most skilful speaker, who had all the arts of mere speaking entirely under his command. In the Lower House, Sir William Harcourt was an accomplished wit and a past master of logical fence. Yet their combined skill in plausible speaking gave the United Kingdom a regular surfeit of accomplished talk. Some one will say that Mr. Gladstone was a greater orator than either of these, and that he kept England spell-bound by his masterful rhetoric. Yes ; but he was masterful. And masterfulness is not a feat of the tongue, but a feat of the character, of the will. Mr. Gladstone was a great orator, but the secret of his oratory was not mere speech, but speech dominated by a lofty, though often much too impulsive and abrupt, purpose. Lord Rosebery had no will. His speech was, indeed, the beginning and end of his influence. No one ever surpassed him as a graceful after-dinner speaker. His ease, his playfulness, his happy irony, his urbanity, his delicately turned phrases, were the envy of all his followers. But compare him with the most successful of recent Prime Ministers, and we shall find that what he lacked was not power of speech, but power of character. Take his successor, Lord Salisbury, who has often been reproached with being a mere literary man, a mere Saturday Reviewer. No doubt helwas one of the greatest of Saturday Reviewers of the old and great days. But what does that imply ? Certainly not mere skill in the use of words, but skill in the use of words resulting from laborious study and a coherent purpose. We should not say that Lord Salisbury is like Mr. Gladstone, a very strong man overridden by a too hasty and spasmodic judgment. He has too often shown that he can vacillate in purpose, that he can play with new ideas, without knowing how far they are going to carry him, as he did with Home-rule in 1885. But though he can vacillate, at least a backbone of laboriously accumulated knowledge and specific bias has always controlled his judgment. He is no amateur Premier. He is a real devotee to his duties, and has never in any respect shirked the discipline of hard labour, while the desire to control the spirit of restlessness by which the progressive party is dominated, has always pervaded and given coherence to his purpose. Lord Beaconsfield was much more of a mere amateur than Lord Salisbury ; but then Lord Beaconsfield, if far less laborious, was always pervaded by a very masculine ambition,—an ambition even greater, though much more indolent, than Lord Palmerston's. As a rule, English Prime Ministers, from the great Reform Bill downwards, have been men of great and predominant purpose. Mr. Gladstone was a giant worker. Lord Palmerston was a very hard worker. Sir Robert Peel was a great worker. Even Lord Melbourne would work very hard when he felt that it was his duty to guide his Sovereign and his Cabinet. Lord John Russell was a harder worker than Lord Mel- bourne. And as Macaulay told us, "those who listened with delight till the morning sun shone on the tapestries of the House of Lords, to the noble and animated eloquence of Charles, Earl Grey, could form some estimate of the powers of a race of men amongst whom he was not the foremost."
Lord Rosebery has not been, and perhaps with his fragile health could not have been, one of the great race of Ministerial toilers. He was the favourite of the modern socialistic party, because he showed himself so open to new ideas, and especially to those new ideas which fascinated the democracy. He did not see that it was necessary to have a deep conviction to make ideas really potent. From the first he has trifled with ideas. He trifled with the idea of Home-rule, with the idea of Disestablish- ment, with the idea of "a second Chamber," indeed with all the chief ideas of the Independent Labour party. He began to build towers without counting the cost. He made war with ideas, without calculating whether with ten thousand followers he could sustain the onset of him who came against him with twenty thousand fol- lowers, and never sent his embassage in time to propose conditions of peace. He was an amateur from the first, a society Premier, whose flights were always fasci- nating and always shortlived. He was always ready to take back his most effective suggestions, to change, and change even hurriedly, his most tempting baits. His ideas glittered in the sun, and then they disappeared and were exchanged. for others which also glittered and were withdrawn. His tact was often happy, but what is the use of tact without purpose, without resolve behind it ? He was a butterfly Premier, ephemeral in his essence, resplendent one moment, vanished the next. We shall hardly meet with him again in that great position. Even his ardent friends, the Social Democrats, are hardly in charity with him now. They see that he is a fair-weather Premier. He has strangely disappointed Mr. Gladstone's. hasty and singularly unfortunate prediction, that he would "go far." None of our Premiers have ever shown such significant signs of transitoriness, of utter deficiency in "staying" power. He has been a great master of words. But great masters of words only, will never be masters of the English people. Even in his own special region, even in foreign policy, he has not been workmanlike. He has impressed the French with his levity, with his feebleness of purpose. He has trifled even with the new diplomatic questions in the East. He vacillated in Africa. He dealt feebly with France, both as regards Egypt and Siam. He has left the United Kingdom with more adver- saries and fewer and infirmer friends than he found it. France is more unfriendly, Russia is more closely allied with France, Germany and Austria are more decidedly neutral, and Italy alone is more anxious to stand well with England.
But on domestic questions Lord Rosebery's Govern- ment has been far less successful. The organ of the most powerful section of the Irish party, the Healyites, posi- tively exults in the collapse of the Government's Home- rule policy, and declares that the liberty they have regained to return to the old demand for Repeal of the Union, puts the Irish party in a far better position for obtaining its own ends. No one knows what the Irish policy of the Gladstonians will now be. No one knows how far the Radicals will stick to Disestablishment and Disendowment ; and every one knows that they have lost ground by their essays in that direction instead of gaining it, because they have neither been outspoken nor magnanimous. The House of Lords has become, for the first time during the last sixty-three years, a positively popular body. And even the Temperance party have suffered by their superfluity of moral intemperance. Jack of all revolutions and master of none, will be Lord Rose- bery's repute as a Prime Minister. It is a pity that a man who can think and speak so brightly on any political brief, should have gained so great a reputation for political trifling. As he justly said in reply to the Duke of Argyll, he is no Catiline. Never was there a states- man with less of the Catiline in him, for never was there a statesman of less audacity or nerve. He has been the iridescent flutterer of a sterile epoch, and has done more, we think, to render the House of Lords unpopular with the Radical party than any of his Tory opponents. A political butterfly, a fragile pageant of bright colour and fair form, is not the kind of Premier whom a hardworking, much-enduring nation really admires.
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