- TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE DEBATERS OF THE COMMONS.
LORD BEACONSFIELD'S accession to the ranks of his party in the Lords will hardly prove much of a compensation for the loss to his party in the Commons. For in the latter place he was a tower of defence to a beleaguered city, while in the former he will only add a single brilliant lance to a company num- bering many almost as effective as his own. Indeed, after Lord Beaconsfield has once expended the little capital of picturesque and epigrammatic epithets upon his opponents in the Lords, which must now have been accumulating for some time, it may be questioned whether he will add very materially to the moral effect of Lord Salisbury's keen and dangerous onset, Lord Derby's rather oppressive common-sense, and Lord Carnarvon's chivalrous and persuasive eloquence. It is a peculiarity of Lord Beaconsfield's that while his originality and brilliance shelter the inglorious crowd on behalf of whom he fights, and divert to his own person the various political marksmen who are in want of an aim, he nevertheless embarrasses able col- leagues at least as much as he encourages humble followers, and opens so wide a field for attack on the inconsistencies and incompatibilities of the opposite lines of defence attempted, that he puts at least one new weapon into his antagonist's hand for every one which he dashes to the ground. But in the Commons his place will be left unto him desolate,—the more so, that debates of a more collective and less departmental character than have been usual lately, are now to be expected. For some years past, as we have observed with regret, neither the members of the Government nor the members of the Oppo- sition have appeared to make common cause with each other on the greater occasions of debate. Each subject has been left in charge, as it were, of one or two chiefs, while the other leaders have held off as carefully from any dealings with it, as though they were afraid of being charged with poaching on a neighbour's preserve. This has been a very bad education for the rising members of both parties, but if we may trust the signs of the times, the coming Session will bring a change for the better in this respect. With a great subject before the country,— and one in which the nation is deeply interested,—there will be more general engagements, more field-days, more broadsides, more grapplings and boardings of the hand-to-hand kind which used to distinguish the debates of twenty or thirty years ago.
And if this should happen, then will Mr. Disraeli's loss be deeply felt in the Commons. The leaders, indeed, are not unfairly matched. The Marquis of Hartington,—who first impressed his own comrades with a sense of the stuff that was in him by yawn- ing at the dullness of his own speech, and justifying himself for doing so on the strictly logical ground that 'it was so dull,'— is not a leader who will ever excite enthusiasm. Good-sense is his forte, and poco-curanteism is his failing. But he has far too much good-sense to do things by halves, and when he makes his point, he makes it decisively, and does not halt between two opinions. Sir Stafford Northcote, who as leader of the Government in the Lower House will have to reply to Lord Hartington's criticisms, is a speaker of more fluency,— indeed, too much fluency,—more humour, and more geniality than his antagonist ; but he has not the same hard-headed distinctness of purpose, or the same incapacity to present dis- solving views of policy as if they were all pictures of the same phase of facts. Sir Stafford Northcote can make a very affective Budget speech. His reply to Mr. Gladstone's attack on his Budget last year was both popular and pointed, but it is clear that he has not either those personal resources for extempore retort, or that audacity enabling him to deal superficially with a subject of which it is impossible for him to know much, which made Mr. Disraeli so successful a leader of a party whose rank and file often had almost as much knowledge, but never half as much daring as himself. Again, Mr. Gathorne Hardy is a very fair second in command to Sir Stafford Northcote. He has more eloquence, more fire of the conventional squib- and-rocket kind, more perfect sympathy with the rural Tory, more appreciation for the wooden side of the British character, and more power to feel indignation against his opponents, than Sir Stafford Northcote ; but what is he to compare with his opponent,—if Mr. Gladstone is to be Lord Hartington's second in the chief debates of the Session,—but a child against one of the first debaters of the century? And when we have counted Sir Stafford Northcote and his first lieutenant, the Minister of War, we seem to have exhausted all the avail-
able oratorical strength of the Cabinet in the House of Commons, unless Sir Michael Beach even more than fulfills the expectations which his friends cherish on his behalf. Lord John Manners is but a pleasing and vener- able shadow of other days, with a weak voice and an outworn political creed. Mr. Cross is an exceedingly sensible Minister, who has not much time nor much liking for foreign politics, and whose role in debate is rather guarded and sagacious exposition, than either attack or defence. Mr. Ward Hunt may be said to be rather a negative than a positive quantity, when we are estimating the strength of the Government in a general engagement. And against whom is this muster of ineffective debaters to be pitted Against Mr. Forster, whose singular power of reaching the sympathies of earnest men on both sides of the House, whether Liberals or Conservatives who care more for increasing the happiness or diminishing the sufferings of multitudes than they care for the benefit of their own party, has again and again been put to the proof, and always displays itself, both in the kind of questions which most deeply interest him, and in the indifference to esprit de corps with which he takes them up ; against Mr. Lowe, who, if one of the most imprudent and most useful to the enemy, is also one of the most witty and telling of the speakers of the day ; against Mr. Bright, whose passionate feeling on the leading question of the hour has rekindled all the old fire of his great oratorical genius ; against Mr. Goschen, whose immense intellectual tenacity and logical clearness of view are only partially neutralised by his political caution ; against Mr. Stansfeld, whose silver speech is, on this subject at least, as vigorous as it is mellifluous. Granting only,—a considerable assump- tion, we admit,—that the Liberal leaders know their own mind. and that the mind they know is not, like the mind of their opponents, one which stops short on the very verge of a significant policy,—what elements we have here for producing a great effect on the opinion of England ! Mr. Bright to move the higher imaginative passions which great wrongs stir in a people whom Lord Beaconsfield himself calls the most enthu- siastic among nations; Mr. Forster to give expression to the grave sentiment of conscientious and statesmanlike responsibility ; Mr. Lowe, to drive home the utilitarian lesson to be drawn from our blunders and our boasts ; Lord Hartington to register the low-tide mark of hard aristocratic common-sense ; and Mr. Glad- stone to mould the whole history and argument of the question at issue into a great and comprehensive statement of the moral claims upon the British nation, and the resources we have at our disposal to meet those claims. And there will be no Mr. Disraeli, to hurl those taunts at Quixotism or those scoffs at innocent credulity, which always tell so well in the House of Commons. There is only Sir Stafford Northcote, with his treaty to quote and his balance-sheet to threaten us with ; and Mr. Gathonie Hardy, with a traitor feeling at his heart, a feeling partly in- spired by a constituency which, on this point at least, is more Liberal than Conservative, and partly, perhaps, by his own genuine sympathy with the victims of Turkish misrule.
Nor, if we go below the ranks of the Cabinet and ex-Cabinet, is the case any better for the Conservatives. True, we must then count for the Government Mr. Bourke, the Under- Secretary for Foreign Affairs, who, with all his good sense and good judgment, cannot make the House of Commons listen to him with any attention, even on the foreign policy which is his special subject ; the Attorney-General, Sir John Holker, whose grating ability is chiefly shown in turning obsolete law to good account for the purposes of contemporary Toryism ; Lord Sandon, whose amiable and thoughtful earnestness has so often subserved the purposes of a party less advanced than him- self ; Lord George Hamilton, whose vivacity of speech promises, perhaps, more debating success than any other of the younger Tories has as yet taught us to look forward to ; and Mr. Stanhope, whose ability is as yet rather a general belief than an ascertained fact ; and perhaps a few others among the non-official Conservatives, who, like Mr. Butler-Johnstone, have studied in the school of Sir Henry Elliot, and who will be therefore quite as well inclined to attack the Government for its lukewarmness on one side, as to defend it for not showing enthusiasm on the other. But how shall we estimate the sum of this debating power, when we com- pare it with that on the Liberal side,—where Sir William Harcourt has already displayed so much capacity to move the House of Commons that he ranks in the first class of debaters ; where Sir Henry James has earned the repute not merely of a skilful lawyer, but of a popular politician, who knows at least as much of the secret of political influence as of forensic success ; where Mr. G. 0. Trevelyan, with no little share
of his uncle's, Lord Macaulay's, popular eloquence, displays a very much keener sympathy with the attitudes of popular feel- ing; where Mr. Fawcett combines with the intrepidity due to solitary study so much of the passion of national sympathy ; where Mr. Shaw-Lefevre, with great knowledge and political precision, shows so lucid a grasp of popular principle, and where Mr. Courtney is about to commence a career from which those who know him best and have watched him most closely, expect the most of distinction and of usefulness. All those whom we have named on the Liberal side are united cordially in a sincere desire to reverse the Eastern policy of the last twenty years, though we do not as yet know how far they would go together for the purpose of reversing that policy. Yet here, in any case, is a formidable phalanx of debaters, partly of proved, partly of merely probable prowess ; and against them there is the poorest array of de- baters seated on the Tory benches who have been seen on either side for many a year back. In debating the Eastern Question,—at all events while Lord Beaconsfield continues to direct the policy of the Government,—the Tory party in the House of Commons will assuredly miss painfully the personal services of Mr. Disraeli. Were it not for such political wind- falls as the adhesion of Mr. Roebuck, the half-heartedness of Sir Charles Dilke, the hostile neutrality of Mr. Grant Duff, and a few similar contingencies, are likely to bring, the Tories would have to face compacter ranks of united and eager speakers than they have had to face since Sir Robert Peel gave up the Corn Laws. And the oratorical materials with which they have to face them are at their lowest ebb. We doubt if the Government will be able to muster more than three speakers of any rank on behalf of their Eastern policy against three times the number of the same rank on the opposite side. And though a solid vote can be given just as well in silence as when it is justi- fied by first-rate speech, there is a certain discouragement in the consciousness of being intellectually outmatched, which tells sooner or later in breaking up the solidity of the silent ranks.
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