4 JUNE 1864, Page 4

TOPICS OF THE DAY.

MR. GLADSTONE'S PAMPHLET.

GLADSTONE'S affix to his speech on the suffrage which he calls a preface, will not do him any good It is badly written, dubious in meaning, and apologetic in tone without really containing a word which can be fairly construed into apology. Those who attacked him attacked him on two grounds,—the Tories because they said he had ex- pressed a moral conviction in favour of universal suffrage, the thinking Liberals because he had not guarded his just principle from democratic misconception. He answers the Tories fairly enough. The expression objected to must, he says, be taken with its context; that context excluded all morally unfit, and all whose admission would or might be attended with political danger; and he now explains this last reserve as including any danger "through the disturbance of the equilibrium of the constituent body, or through virtual monopoly of power by a single class." That is all the Tories can say with any appearance of fairness. They have never ventured to say, and we do them the justice to admit they probably do not think, that exclusion is for its own sake a positive good, or even a harmless element in an otherwise good constitution. All they ask is that no change shall be made which will impair the " equilibrium " which as they conceive exists, or throw all power into the hands of a class which they said Mr. Baines's Bill would do. If neither conse- quence is to follow, then of course they are simply con- tent, and only ask why for the sake of inappreciable changes revise what needs no revision? But the objection raised by educated Liberals is not this at all, though it may read like it, and to them Mr. Gladstone's answer is most unsatisfactory. They say the equilibrium which all sane politicians desire does not exist, the middle class whenever excited possessing a clear monopoly both of legislative and executive power. From a mixture of laziness, flunkeyism, and real confidence, it yields habitually to a corrective force, that of the aristocracy, but it pos- sesses the ultimate power, and on some questions, such as the relations of labour and capital, compulsory education, sectarian disputes, and a few points of foreign policy, it exercises it un- hesitatingly, without the faintest reference either to the upper ten thousand or the working million. This monopoly, which has always been an anomaly, and may at any time become an in- jurious anomaly, these Liberals desire to remove by admitting the workmen to their fair share of power. Mr. Baines's Bill, on behalf of which Mr. Gladstone paired, did not give them more than their share ; but its principle went much further, and they asked how Mr. Gladstone proposed to keep the train from slipping upon the incline he was helping to construct ? There is no answer in his preface to that query, only a limi- tation which is a Conservative and not a Liberal one, and a plea that his speech "was not a deliberate and studied an- nouncement," which is in appearance a plea ad miserieordiam, a demand that no importance shall be attached to words which have gone all over England stirring up the fears of the few and the hopes of the millions, making all politics more real and all politicians more earnest, defining new party lines, and wiping out feuds which for years have impelled men who think alike into actually hostile camps. It is in form an apology for uttering words which gave to every workman in England a new hope, a revived belief that after all the public men who govern England might be as honest, as truthful, and as aware of the relation between word and act as any other Englishmen.

If we believed this "apology " to be Mr. Gladstone's real meaning, this preface to be, as the Times said, a full and clear retractation, we should despair of Mr. Gladstone as a leader for any party whatever. Apart altogether from the drift of his speech, great party leaders are not permitted to make great oratorical blunders. We cannot have Premiers telling the peasantry in " announcements " not "studied or deliberate" that they are to divide the land, or expressing offhand a belief that the Peers ought to govern the country, or pro- mising a million or two of votes to the unenfranchised, in order to lend new point to a discursive debate. Blun- ders are crimes in politics, and if Mr. Gladstone had made any such blunder, had really offered to modify the constitution radically "as a course of argument drawn forth by opponents," there would be an end of his follow- ing among educated Liberals. Constitutional government tempered by oratorical "points" is not their ideal at all. But we do not believe that he intended to make any such appeal, to recede in any degree from the firm and visible conviction, contained in the original speech more fully than in the speech plus preface. The apologetic form of the preface is, we believe, adopted for a very different end,—is not an explanation to political opponents, but an assurance to political friends that the Chancellor of the Exchequer was not intriguing. The talk all over town on the day which followed the speech was • that Mr. Gladstone "intended to run his own horse ;" that in the combinations which must follow Lord Palmerston's retirement from toil he designed to be a leader with the• nation behind him instead of a personal following. Mr. Glad- stone, who though ambitious is not an intriguer—if he were he would have the "following" which is his greatest want— therefore assures the doubters that his speech was not "deli- berate and studied," meaning not that he failed to express his own political ideas, but that he had not planned by express- ing them to jockey more timid rivals. He rejects the idea that his speech was a personal manifesto, and re-affirms that it was a political speech, saying more or less success- fully that which he wanted to say. This is, so far as we can comprehend an intellect which like the Tor Stone is im- moveable but always rocking, is very nearly the same idea as that of most educated Liberals, namely, to introduce into the constitution as many workmen as will secure that class their share of power, as much, in fact, as they can have without impairing the proportionate shares of the remaining classes and so stripping the nation of its right to rule itself in order to enable one class to impose its rule instead. The plan for accomplishing this end, which floats as it were through the speech, and is not re- pudiated in the pamphlet, is one for including the whole population in the constitution while still leaving the nation intact,—the exact end the Liberals who are not Democrats have for years put before them as their constitutional ideal.

While, however, we entirely exonerate Mr. Gladstone from the charge of retrogression, we repeat that this preface will do him no good. Apart altogether from the truth that those who aspire to be leaders of men should never do their thinking aloud, the preface has in it a tone of hesitation which Mr. Gladstone's admirers did not expect to find. There is one sentence in it which smacks as strongly of political falsehood as the conduct of the Whigs in this matter throughout the whole of this Parliament,—Mr. Gladstone, whose first point in the speech is that promises have not been kept, now affirming that "the discussion is little likely to become practical ex- cept for another generation." That is just what Lord Palmerston says, and Mr. Disraeli says, and every false friend of reform would say if he only dared, and if that is what Mr. Gladstone means he had better have held his tongue. We trust that he does not mean it, that he really sees his way to introduce as well as support a plan of reform which shall fulfil his ideal, find be for the benefit of us who pay taxes, and suffer, and strive, and not only for that of our children, who may do none of those things. But it is vexations when all through England educated Liberals are in want of a leader who can represent them, as well as some of their ideas, to find that leader not only giving forth an uncertain sound, but actually stuffing sand in his trumpet lest its note should perchance be too clear. This intellectual see-sawing, this determination to define, and hopeful trust in hypothesis, is not Mr. Gladstone's merit, but his greatest disqualifica- tion. Men hoped he was getting rid of it, learning to express strong convictions in overt act, to construct his build- ing as well as explain the theory of architecture ; but the old habit is powerful still, and the intellect which could best lead England is deliberately bound by its owner in a net of fine distinctions. An honest Cardinal advising reform in Rome would have written just such a preface, and of course plain Englishmen—who, and not refined Englishmen, make up the political army—can only admiringly stare. They can admire a thesis, but they only follow an audible word of command.