THE USE OF MR. LOWTHER.
MR. LOWTHER is a very useful man to the Tory Party, —and to the Liberal. To the former, he is an admir- able electioneering lecturer, who can say precisely the things electioneering agents are paid to say, but with a force and in a way no agent paid for his services can attempt to rival. There is never, and never can be, such a rush in the stream of an agent's rubbish as there is in Mr. Lowther's,—a rush to carry the foolish off their feet. The moment an election is toward anywhere in the North, or, indeed, any party gathering at which the Tory chiefs do not care to appear, Mr. James Lowther enters on the scene, and makes a speech of a kind which, if it gladdens his enemies—and he makes a good many, say 10,000 a week, not counting Irishmen—undoubtedly inspirits his friends. There seems to be so much dash and " go " in his oratory ; it has in it so much of the political publican, that coming, as it does, from an aristocrat with a certain air of conviction about him, it has for men to whom publican eloquence is delightful a never-ending charm. Englishmen like hard hitting, when it is on their
own side, and an orator who sits down amid a chorus of "Didn't he give 'em it well I" is an orator who in a sense and in a way succeeds. Artistic swearing is a gift, like another; and in a crowd, to which swearing seems "to set aff conversation mightily," it always elicits a rapture of applause. It is a pity Mr. Lowther should be reported, for his speech, when read by people who can think, loses half its attraction, which lies in a certain suitability to its audience, and the bold blundering of its total drift becomes too palpable ; but when only spoken, it is as effective as the big drum in military music. The drum is neither melodious, nor harmonious, nor expressive of meaning, but it accentuates the impression we call" effect." Mr. James Lowther has not a trace in him of political mind. He has never offered a suggestion which was of the slightest help to statesmen, or cast light upon any obscure problem, or even felicitously described any course of policy. His notion of commerce is that you should never buy what you want of anybody who will not buy of you, for if you do, you lose, and put your money to waste. His notion of diplomacy is that you should take all you want, and if other nations do not approve, should scold at them or fight them till they do. His notion of remedying distress is to tax imported bread, because then farmers could pay high rents ; and then the landlords,
being rich, would buy all that the taxed artisans make; and hisIrish.notion of governing Ireland is to send away the Irish. He told his hearers at Stockton, on Tuesday, that, " at the risk of considerable misrepresentations, he had never hesitated to affirm that a well-considered and careful, statesmanlike scheme of emigration would be the true remedy for many of the evils of Ireland." Mr. Lowther is probably quite sincere, and does not even know that his panacea has been at work for forty years, without his result ; .that the population of Ireland has sunk three millions since 1842, and is de- dining every year, entirely through the operation of emigra- tion ; and that, nevertheless, the Irish difficulty seems only to grow more chronic. With a mind, Mr. Lowther would be almost formidable,—would rank, say, with Lord Cranbrook; and in spite of his incapacity for thinking, or perhaps in con- sequence of it, he is, in certain places and before certain audiences, a most effective speaker. He has in'splendid measure the courage of his credulities. He has the art of repeating, in sentences sometimes racy, though seldom humourous, and never witty, all the floating charges which partisans half believe and half invent, and are delighted to hear sent back to them in an authoritative way. Mr. Lowther, like Mr. Glad- stone, gives back in a flood what comes to him in vapour, the difference being mainly in the quality of the water, which, when the object is rush, does not greatly matter. All the wild credulities, all the half-felt malignities, all the floating hatreds of an excited crowd, all the angry humours which it mistakes for convictions, reach Mr. Lowther's mind, are received, believed, and thrown back as formal charges. He has the strength which comes from unconsciousness of the absurd. If he hears angry people say that Mr. Forster has been intrigued out of the Cabinet, he immediately thinks that quite probable, and makes a formal charge with as much readiness, and probably as much conviction, as if he had been present when his imaginary intrigue was being prepared. Mr. Chamberlain is a Radical, consequently, he is potentially bad; consequently, if anybody says he intrigued, that may be, must be, nay, is, the interpretation of the facts. The Govern- ment is bad, the Parnellites are bad ; consequently, any agree- ment between them may have, must have, nay, has, an " infamous " basis. The belief once generated in Mr. Lowther's mind, no amount of denial has the least effect on him. Like a gardener who is told that the barometer is against his view of the weather, he thinks the statement one of those in which the foolish cultivated men believe ; while " he, being a plain man, knows different." Many Tories have a way of accounting for their defeat in 1879 by attri- buting to Mr. Gladstone a sort of daimonic power of enchant- ing and deceiving the people of England. The result was due, in their hazy thoughts, not to any long-maturing appre- ciation of the meaning of a Tory regime, not to the six years' experience of Conservative government, but to the speeches in Midlothian and Mr. Gladstone's marvellous power of mislead- ing common folk. Mr. Lowther is much attracted by that ex- planation of the facts, as much as peasants are by legends attri-- bating all wonderful natural objects to the Devil, he quite believes it and, in every speech he makes, describes all that happens or may happen as the natural consequence of the Premier's " reck- less rhetoric." To an audience hungering for what Mr. Lowther calls " racy things," by which he explained at Stockton that he meant broad abuse, that kind of charge is delightful. The " unthoughtlike thoughts that are the ghosts of thought " in them, take flesh and bones at once. To utter such charges is to hit hard, and to "give it 'em ;" and they think the speaker, who is only vulgarising their own thoughts, quite a hero. Of coarse, if Mr. Lowther were only a lecturer, they would only partly enjoy such utterances ; but being a Lowther, and a Privy Councillor, and one who has carried many elections, and a man—how inconceivable it now seems !—who was once set to govern Ireland, his sentences make thoughts they are half .ashamed of, yet roll under their tongues, seem quite gallant, -ands they respond with genuine cordiality. Nobody draws more cheers, or heartier cheers, from a Tory crowd than Mr. Lowther ; and though we can hardly believe that he has ever made Tories, he has certainly made Tories more enthusiastic, bolder, and perceptibly more indifferent to reason and facts, and that is for the party an excellent result. As a politician, Mr. Lowther is not to be named in the same breath as Sir Stafford Northcote ; indeed, he hardly belongs to:the order of serious politicians at all, being better described as the enfant terrible of the Tory household ; but as an elec- tion agent in the North, he is worth three of his leader, and is invaluable-to his party. There are numerous voters who are mentally roughs in the Conservative camp, and to them Sir Stafford's smooth talk is just what the Laffitte was to Punch's Lincolnshire farmers. It is very fine wine, and, of course, it is a great compliment to be offered it, but after a bottle, " they don't seem. to get no forrarder." The liquor Mr. Lowther offers is a little coarse, perhaps, to refined palates, even dis- tasteful, but nobody who imbibes it freely can affirm, that he "gets no forrarder." A very little of it, taken with abandon, makes the listener very soon intellectually drunk. Its only defect fox its purpose is that it is sometimes. a little thick. Mr. Lowther should study Cobbett, and learn how a certain simpleness of style can improve the quality, without spoiling the flavour, of the coarse invective intended for the masses. They like their assertions " strong," but they like them unconfused.
We have said that Mr. Lowther is useful to Liberals as well as Tories, and so he is, in this way : he lets Tory feelings ont of the bag. He cannot let designs out, for he does not know them, or arguments, for he does not appreciate them ; but he can let out feelings. When he has spoken about Ireland, or Mr. Gladstone, or foreign policy, or home affairs, Liberals know not indeed what Conservatives think about those things, but what they feel about them when they are not keeping themselves under any restraint. They know how the Opposi- tion, if unrestilained by its soberer judgment, would like to treat Ireland for being discontented, and to punish Mr. Gladstone for caring about the people, and to fight foreign nations for having objects which are not English, and to despise the British people for being deluded ; and that is very useful knowledge. Mr. Lowther's speeches are not, of course, fair guides to the apprehension of Conservative policy, for the Tory leaders, to do them justice, are not Mr. Lowthers, and would propose plans a little less strongly simple than his ; but they are fair guides as to what the rank and file, if the party were utterly triumphant, would like to do and to be. The Mr. Lowthers under a Tory Administration are allowed a good deal of scope, and it is well to know how they would use it, if restraint were once withdrawn. Mr. Lowther is never restrained, and, therefore, gives just the necessary hints. It is a little unfair to take them, because a party should, after all, be judged by its chiefs, and is hardly responsible for the utterances of its extremists ; but parties will always be judged so, and Mr. Lowther, therefore, unconsciously makes many Liberals, or rather makes many Liberals strong. There are Liberals with a waver in them, whom his speeches quite convince that for them Toryism is impossible ; and Liberals who are indolent, who feel as they read them that it is time to be up and doing. They can stand many things, but the prospect of being ruled on Mr. Lowther's principles and by Mr. Lowther's methods excites in them a horror which is a little extravagant—for Mr. Lowther affects much of his oratorical brutality— but which tends to keep them faithful to their party. They almost all belong to the class which has for its grand doubt about Radicalism that it is the usual creed of " the mob," and when they regard Mr. Lowther and his audiences, and read the sentences which elicit rapturous cheers, their doubt is quelled. He shows them, too conclu- sively for denial or question, that rowdyism is not confined to one political party, and that it is perfectly possible to be a mob orator, and yet a Tory of the deepest dye and the most prominent class. A good, solid Wesleyan, for instance, who is not exactly an instinctive Liberal, but who has accidentally been induced to read Mr; Lowther's speeches, might, we imag!ne, ever after be trusted to adhere to the Liberal faith. That kind of political thinking, at all events, is impossible for him.
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