THE DECAY OF LEADERSHIP.
OUR readers have probably heard quite enough about the dissensions in the Liberal party. If nothing more were at stake than the credit of a political party the question might well be let alone. But there is more at stake. The character and efficiency of the House of Commons have suffered almost as severely as the character and efficiency of the Liberal Opposition. Party govern- ment is like a clock with two weights. Both are wanted to keep the machinery in going order. As things stand, the House of Commons is a half-paralysed organism. It moves, when the Government supplies the force, in the direction in which it is propelled, but it furnishes next to no useful criticism of Ministerial policy, and as likely as not has to be closured when it takes any such work in hand. Putting aside all speculation as to causes, there can be no doubt as to the fact. There are times when we are tempted to say that for any useful purpose the House of Commons serves at this moment its Members might as well be in their own homes, and Government measures be introduced in the Lords and knocked into shape there in Committee. This, of course, is a very general statement, and, as such, it has its exceptions. Now and again a question has brought some feature in the conduct of the war in South Africa under the notice of the Government, and some useful change has been effected. But in most of these cases newspaper criticism would have been quite as effective, since nothing more was needed than to get Ministerial attention drawn to the circumstance. That is a useful service for the question-maker to render, but it does not exhaust, it hardly even constitutes, the function of a Parliamentary Opposition. The weakness of that Opposition is seen in the plague of questions, and in the fact that the Closure sometimes comes when, though there has been too much talk, there has been too little argument. Members ask questions not to obtain information, but to annoy Ministers or magnify themselves. A wise leader of Opposition would allow some room for both motives, but he would make his displeasure visible whenever the time of the House was wasted, as it has been this Session, and the exercise of an invaluable right endangered. As regards obstruction, again, a certain amount of it is part of the proper business of an Opposition. But it is no part of that business so to repeat arguments which have been already used as to provoke the Closure before other argu- ments not yet used can be brought forward. Yet this was precisely what happened when Education Bill No. 2 was in Committee. A leaderless Opposition, revelling in the absence of the Chairman of Committees, spent a whole night in repeating second-reading speeches, and thereby threw away the opportunity of defending really pertinent amendments. No leader, wielding the powers that rightly belong to the position, would have allowed such childish strategy as this. He would have known that at this period of the Session, and in the special circumstances of the Bill, the Closure could never be far off, and he would have em- ployed the interval in finding fresh objections instead of allowing hour after hour to be spent in the repetition of stale ones.
We have two excellent witnesses to the curious paralysis which has overtaken the House of Commons. The Prime Minister, speaking the other day of the difficulty of keep- ing the Unionist vote in chance divisions at anything like its normal strength, compared Parliamentary attendance now with what it was in Mr. Gladstone's time. There were the same temptations to be absent then that there are now. Dinners were equally good, society was equally pleasant. But the consciousness that every man who got safe away from the Whips helped to expose the Government to the sleepless vigilance of an adversary who knew every point of Parliamentary strategy kept the Ministerialists, if not in their seats, at least somewhere not far off. No effort on the part of the Leader of the House can make up for the want of opponents like this. The other witness is Mr. Balfour himself. Speaking to the Unionists of East Anglia yesterday week, he pointed out that Parliamentary institutions bear their best fruit under a two-party system, and that this system now exists only in name and appearance. But if the reality has for the time disappeared, the vitality and use of the House of Commons cannot but have been greatly lessened. The House of Commons does not exist merely to pass Government measures or vote the money that Government wants. It exists to keep the Government, to whichever party it belongs, under the 'wholesome influence of a constant and watchful supervision. The best Government that ever was cannot safely be left without this check. It is huraa,n, and it needs it as a protection against the faults which are the common heritage of human beings. It has to keep in order a party some of whose members have interests and motives in which political considerations of the higher kind play but a very small part, and it finds in the activity of the Opposition the most effectual help to the exercise of this necessary control. When there is no such activity, or none that can be called continuous and coherent, the "alterna- tive Cabinet" to which Mr. Balfour rightly attaches so much importance, whether from the point of view of the party or of the nation, is for the time out of the question.
The secret, we might almost say the only secret, of securing that activity of opposition which is so essential to the proper working of the Parliamentary machine is leadership. In its absence a political party is necessarily little better than a crowd without purpose and without organisation. There is no need to insist on this. It has been made evident by the whole recent history of the Liberal party. But though the disease is known, the cause has almost escaped notice. From Lord Rosebery down to the meanest camp-follower there has been the same conviction that the leader must be elected. He is to sit in his tent, or rather in the tent-door, casting his eyes everywhere for the first indication of the approaching multitude which is to say to him, "Be our commander." Nor are his the only eyes that are looking out for the indispensable crowd. The rank-and-file have come round to the same view of their proper function, and when their sense of the need of a 'leader is keenest they are only the more active in pressing their fellows to join with them in organising caucuses and deputations the object of which is to inform the selected politician that it is upon him that the choice of the party has fallen. We seem a. to a time when the appointment of a party leader will .e determined by the production of written testimonials, and any premature effort on his part to show in practide that he has the necessary qualifications will be thought indelicate. He must be proclaimed leader before his acts will have any validity, and the proclamation must be the unsolicited work of men who till that moment have in no sense been his followers.
In Newman's " Apologia " there is a passage which states with wonderful accuracy the temper and the funetion of real leadership. "It was at Rome," he says, "that we began the 'Lyra Apostolica.' The motto shows the feeling of both Fronde and myself at the time. We borrowed from M. Bunsen a Homer,' and Froude chose the words in which Achilles, on returning to the battle, says, You shall know the difference now that I am back again." Not "You shall know the difference if by a properly constituted deputation—itself the outcome of a representative party meeting—you solicit my return," but "You shall know the difference now that I am back again." The business of a leader is to lead. The test of capacity for leadership is leading. A leader may indeed deliberately lay aside his function. He may have satisfied himself that the men he once led are not worth leading any longer, that the possible victory has become too remote or too valueless to make it worth his while to go on fighting, that in the changed conditions of the time he is no longer the man for the post! But if he still looks forward to leading his party he will not wait to be chosen by them, _because he will blow that the only choice that is likely to be effective or lasting will be the instinctive man is front of them, and powerless when any one choice of men who feel strong in the fight when this or that in else is there. That is leadership, and the politician who wishes to be a leader should remember that his first business is to "make full proof of his ministry," to take his stand in Parliament as alert, as watchful, as confident, as full of resource as though he had an army at his back. He need not fear the want of followers. They will come to him fast enough when they see and feel that here there is the man for whom they have unconsciously been waiting. They may be many or few, but they will be obedient and devoted,—and all the more obedient and devoted if they are few, because they will know that -in being so lies their one chance of success. That, as it seems to us, is the solitary moral of all the recent controversies. Where is the man who asks no questions and counts no cost, but who simply says within himself, "They shall know the difference now that I am back again " ? There, wherever he is, is the leader of the Opposition.
Previous page
