4 AUGUST 1894, Page 4

TOPICS OF THE DAY

SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT'S TRIUMPH.

SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT evidently approves of that dangerous Roman custom of celebrating victory by a grand display of the victims over whom the victory has been gained. He deserved congratulation for the sobriety with which he moulded his democratic Budget to the demands made upon him to lighten its pressure on those from whom he chiefly hopes to draw his fresh resources. But as there is a certain doubt as to the fulfil- ment of his hopes, a doubt arising chiefly from the very narrow limits of the class to which he looks chiefly for his new contributions,—Sir John Lubbock thinks that the higher Death-duties will depend on a class numbering about five hundred annually,—his speech on Wednesday would certainly have been in better taste if he had dwelt chiefly on the duty of applying his new financial principle with the utmost moderation, and had not laid himself open to the charge that he was dragging his chief victims in the wake of his triumphal car. But though Sir William Harcourt showed sobriety enough in his concessions to the complaints made of the practical hardships which his principle would involve, it is not in him to show the more English, and we should have thought the more easy, sobriety of abstaining from glorifying himself by an arrogant display of the captives of his bow and spear. He is far more moderate in deeds than he is in words. He could not resist exalting himself, though he had re- frained in the HOUE0 of Commons from insisting on the most threatening features of his finance. He gave way on many points of practice, both to the Colonies and to the class of large landowners by whom the pressure of his new proposals was most likely to be painfully felt. But when he came to celebrate his triumph, he showed no disposition at all to depreciate the magnitude of his victory. He trampled on the rich Dukes whom he was dragging behind the wheels of his chariot with a gusto almost insolent. He said nothing of that of which it would.have become him to have said most,—the immense danger of pushing his new principle of graduation too far, and the extreme folly of so applying the principle of the equalisation of the taxes on realty and personalty as to transform nominal equality into a mere reversal of the injustice against which he had contended. He was not wise enough to warn his successors, as he ought to have done, that the whole fruitfulness and success of the new democratic finance depends on the rigid moderation with which it may be applied. If it is so applied as really to appropriate, as revenue for the State, private capital which would otherwise have been accumu- lated, it will injure the poor a. great deal more seriously than it will injure the rich. But warnings of this kind are not, unfortunately, in Sir William Harcourt's way. He can show plenty of Whig wisdom in practice. But he loves to magnify the glory of his victory in his display before the world. His action is prudent compared with his words. He cannot help flourishing his victorious sword over the head of his captives, and, what is worse, setting apparently to his colleagues an example of ruth- less harshness to the rich, which in reality he has been far too Wise to set. He forgets that as the democracy pursues its way, new leaders will arise who will make the most of his vainglorious words, and the least of the prudence of his deeds. That a statesman who is fond of dwelling on the Plantagenet blood which runs in his veins, should yield to the vanity which is the besetting sin of dema- gogues is deplorable. Some of the Angevin monarchs no doubt delighted in this kind of vainglory, but it was not the frailty of the greatest of them. And Sir William Harcourt would not only have enhanced his own dignity, but done what he could to keep his successors in the straight path, if, instead of flourishing his sword with such ostentatious arrogance, he had urged his successors to keep it in the scabbard, and to be at least as modest in words as he had been in deeds. Instead of that he not only harped on his position of " commander-in-chief " with a pertinacity that will not improve his relations with the Prime Minister, but did his best to humiliate the Dukes over whom he had obtained a victory.

And in this respect his speech was not only vainglorious, but absurdly and almost blatantly unjust. He tried to' make out that the split upon the question of Home-rule was chiefly due to landowners' apprehension for their class under a thin political disguise. The Duke of Argyll, he said truly enough, had left Mr. Gladstone on account of his Irish land measures before the question of Home-rule was even raised. And he tried to show that it was the same motive which had really animated Lord Hartington when, on the breaking out of the Home-rule question, he seized the opportunity of following his Grace of Argyll. Nothing could be more unjust, or indeed more childish, than this imputation. The Duke of Argyll him- self broke with Mr. Gladstone not as a landowner, but as a political economist whose mind was much more repelled by the attempt of the State to fix a fair rent without the help of free competition, than by any fears for the position of his class ; and no one who observed how enormously difficult and atrociously haphazard that fixing of fair rents actually proved, can blame him for his dread of that heroic-measure. But Lord Hartington was conspicuously loyal to Mr. Gladstone during the whole of the period. between 1881 and 1886, and only left him when Mr. Bright left him, when Mr. Chamberlain left him, when even Sir George Trevelyan left him, though the latter had not the tenacity or the nerve to persevere in the attitude he took up. Was Mr. Bright's motive nothing but the prejudice of frightened landlord in disguise ? Was Mr. Chamberlain's motive nothing but the prejudice of a frightened landlord in disguise ? Was Sir George Trevelyan's revolt explicable in that absurdly paradoxical fashion ? Nay, for the matter of that, what was the motive which induced Sir William Harcourt himself, before he knew Mr. Gladstone's real drift, to invent that unhappy phrase about "stewing in Parnellite juice," which has since clung to him in spite of his abject surrender to the Parnellite policy ? Was he too, [actuated by the landowner's selfish panic when he coined the phrase which has divided him like a great gulf from the Irish party, even though they have been com- pelled to ally themselves with him, and in their own interest to follow his lead P No aspersion on the part plaied. by the great leader of the Liberal Unionists could possibly have been more monstrous and more childish than this attempt to identify the motive of Lord Hartington's action in 1886, with the motive of the Duke of Devonshire's resistance to the democratic Budget of 1894. We do ' not hesitate to say that such a charge as that is conspicuously silly, and that is not a fault which we should ever venture to attribute to Sir William Harcourt without the most irresistible proof. But vanity does sometimes make even the cleverest and the wittiest man silly. Sir William Harcourt was pleased at the notion of tracing the revolt against Mr. Gladstone to the same motive against which he himself has fought his pitched battle eight years later, and he felt a certain pride in thinking that it had fallen to him to triumph over the enemy who had kept his great chief at bay so long. We can account in no other way for the amazing and preposterous charge which he brings against the Liberal Unionist party in the person of the Duke of Devonshire. Nothing has become Sir William Harcourt leas than his triumphal oration. It was not eloquent, it was hardly witty, and it was wholly wanting, not only in magnanimity, but in discernment. On his steering of the Budget he deserved congratulations. For the petty vanity of his triumphal oration he deserves little but commiseration.