MR. LEATHAM ON THE LIBERAL PROSPECTS.
MR. LEATHAM has the gift of perpetual youth. As he himself remarks, he is, "though by no means an aged politician," still already a politician of some considerable Par- hamentary experience, and yet that Parliamentary experience has had absolutely no effect in sobering the giddy blood which feeds his hopes. He is still as much as ever liable to be mis- led by the clever phrases and epigrammatic antitheses of his own rhetoric, and is just as capable of believing that smart words will change the constitution of the universe, as when he wrote " Charmione " and made his first speech to a Yorkshire audience. This day week he made a brilliant speech in Hud- dersfield on the presumed Conservative reaction, of which he said he could discover no trace. What he did see was the Liberal party being taken to pieces like a Dutch clock, in order to be put together again, and go all the better for its repairs. The Liberal party was "nearly as well used to going to pieces as a Dutch clock, and like a Dutch clock, it kept bad time unless it was taken to pieces pretty frequently. It was being taken to pieces at this moment, and that was why it did not go.' "The party was now being taken to pieces, not in order that it might be put by on the shelf, but that it might become more effective, or as the Tories would say, more destructive,—in order that it might record on a dial which never looked backwards hour after hour of defeat and disorder and dismay for the -Tories." We can hardly believe that the Dutch clock is really resolved into its elements, when we see Mr. Leatham, like that bird of spring which so often adorns it, popping out of it so punctually to sing the quarters and the half-hours, always in the old familiar strain, and banging the little door of his secret shrine after him with rhetorical emphasis as he retreats back again into the penetralia of the works. But if Mr. Leatham be right in thinking that the clock has stopped and that the machinery is really taken to pieces, \re fear he is wrong in supposing that it has been intentionally done for the purpose of repair. We should have sup- posed that the parliamentary party might easily get out of order, owing to defective winding-up on the part of the constituencies,—and such, no doubt, was more or less the phenomenon of the Cave-period of 1866-68. But where, as would seem to have been the case recently, the failure is not with the parliamentary Liberalism, but with the Liberalism of the constituencies, where appeals to the recently enfranchised householders of the boroughs only result in Conservative triumphs, it seems to be playing with words to deny a Con- servative reaction. That such a reaction really took place in 1839-41, Mr. Leatham is the only politician we ever heard of to deny, if he really does mean to deny it. And such a reaction, as far as we can see, is really occurring now. Were it otherwise, though the Government might be defeated, it would not be directly by the favour shown to Tory candidates, but through the hesitation of the Liberals bet ween Liberal candidates of different shades ; and that, we submit, is not, so far as we can judge of it, the political phenomenon observable in recent elections. Such elections as those for the North- West Riding, East Staffordshire, Renfrewshire, Greenwich, Gloucester, Bath, Dover, and a good many others, were not decided by the eager divisions in the Liberal camp, but by the apathy of Liberals and the relatively strong union of Conservatives. And if diminished Liberal zeal and increased Conservative zeal does not mean a swing of the pendulum from the side of reform to the side of 'let well alone,' we are disposed to think that no conceivable indication of that change which Mr. Leatham would not explain away, is to be found. We shall not be charged with any desire to recognise, against evidence, a political phenomenon which we consider to be decidedly discreditable to the good feeling and good sense of the electorate. But, as Mr. Leatham himself says, it is foolish to shut your eyes to facts, however disagree- able; and these facts seem to us, in spite of Mr. Leatham's opposite dictum, to stare us in the face. It is under the Ballot, and by the verdict of household suffrage, that Liberals are at present steadily losing ground, and the Conservatives as steadily gaining it.
It is, however, quite open to Mr. Leatham to assert that, whatever the facts may be, the cause of the Liberal apathy is the reluctance of the Liberal leaders to hoist the standard which a certain party below the gangway are desirous to raise, —especially the standard of Disestablishment and Disendow- ment of the English Church. "It is the followers," he says, "who lead in England, and the leaders who follow ; and the moment the followers begin to push to the front, there is a startling activity among the leaders in the rear,"—which is very epigrammatic but not quite exact, at all events as to Mr. Gladstone's dealing with the Irish Church ; for never was a great reform more gently and inaudibly demanded by the Radical party,—we can attest it, for the Spectator was not backward in the matter, and met with hardly any support— till Mr. Gladstone suddenly raised it to the rank of an urgent question of the day. But grant that the followers lead, where the followers have, as they had on the Suffrage question and also on the Ballot, the masses behind them,—whence does Mr. Leatham infer that they have the masses behind them on the Church Establishment question ? If they have, it must go ; for a national endowment which is grudged by the nation and appropriated against its will, is an anomaly and a mistake. But what evidence is there of such a condition of things? Hitherto all the evidence has been the other way. Mr. Miall musters some eighty or ninety followers, and his little band seems likely to dwindle at the next General Election even more notably than the Liberal party itself. The Non- conformists rallied their whole strength in the North-West Riding and in East Staffordshire ; and in both elections they were -not only beaten, but beaten in the way that shows an unpopular cause. Has Mr. Leatham never heard of the phenomenon of Democratic Conservatism? Do the School- Board elections show any leaning to Secularism? Do the municipal elections show any hostility to the Church ? The Members below the gangway have led the party only where they represented a very strong feeling out of doors. It was the Members -below the gangway who bitterly opposed all inter- ference with the hours and conditions of labour in relation to the Factory Acts, and were they not utterly defeated and dis- owned by the people Did they not resist the Chinese war in 1857, with no result but to disappear in a great measure from the next Parliament ? The followers lead when they command the popular voice, and not otherwise. How is Mr. Leatham going to show us that Disestablishment of the Eng- lish Church is a popular cry, till he can point to some great election won upon that cry ?
We regret to see so clever a speaker as Mr. Leatham echoing Mr. Chamberlain's clap-trappy programme of a Free Church, a Free School, Free Labour, and Free Land. It is rather like the schoolboy's Christmas holiday programme,—a coach-box, a Christmas-box, a boxing match, and a box of tools. A Free Church means, as far as experience seems to go, a Church whose people are free to say exactly what they will and what they will not be taught, but whose teachers are the very reverse of free to teach,—somewhat like a school whose masters should be appointed and removed by a jury of boys. A Free School is a school for which the parents pay nothing, except as ratepayers, if ratepayers they be. Free Labour means, we suppose, labour not shackled by unjust restrictions; and Free Lankland as pnrchaseable as any chattel. Is it worthy of any serious orator to pun three times with a word which carries so much meaning, and use it only once in
its proper sense ? Labour is, we hope, if not quite free, yet very near free in this country, and we shall be the first to support Mr. Leathern in his wish to remove such restrictions as still trammel it. No paper has fought more earnestly for the simplification of the law of transfer of land than our own ; but important as this is, easily saleable and purchaseable land is simply miscalled "free" land; and the reform referred to, more- over, is one of secondary, though very real importance. As for gratuitous schooling, whether desirable or not, it really means an extension of the poor law to the subject of education,—the legal dependence of one class of parents on the ratepayers for the edu- cation of their children. It is a gross abuse of the word "free" to call that an extension of freedom. If it be desirable at all, it is desirable on the ground that it is a justifiable invasion of the freedom of the more independent classes, for the sake of the poor. And free Churches are certainly Churches of which the taught are free and the teachers are bound ;—a modification of the term which deserves special definition and study.
But our main objection to Mr. Leatham's speech is that its whole tone is one of juvenile levity in relation to politicians who do not agree in his views, and whom he evidently does not hope to convince, but rather to overbalance their judgment by considerations of mere party expediency into an external adhesion to views which they can never bond fide adopt,—and this on the deepest questions of politics. He seems to treat the conversion of men who are in their hearts opposed to a measure, but who yield to it from a kind of fatalism,—because they believe it is the manifest destiny of the party,—as a thing to chuckle over and enjoy. For ourselves, we do not think it a pleasant spec- tacle to see Leaders reluctantly dragged in the rear of their own followers ; and to our minds it is one of Mr. Gladstone's greatest distinctions that, except, perhaps, in relation to the Ballot, he has always been moved by the weight of obviously personal conviction, and that, too, before he was compelled to move by the exigencies of party or in deference to the swing of Liberal opinion. The kind of glorying in the ascendancy of party necessities over private convictions in which Mr. Leatham indulges, seems to us pardonable in a young politician, but not good taste in one who has had the experi- ence of Mr. Leathern. We are perfectly well aware that Mr. Leatham himself would regard the success of the Disestablish- ment movement as a triumph of the loftiest principle of justice, but it is also clear that he expects to see it, and would not be sorry to see it, obtaining the votes of those who would be converted solely by the pressure of party exigencies, and not by any change of moral convictions. For our own parts, there is nothing we believe to be more fatal to the true influence and weight of Parliamentary opinion with the nation, than this kind of political regeneration by "squadrons and platoons "in the sudden panic of a dissolving party. If Disestablishment is to win the day, let it at least be for some reason more creditable than because the Liberal party would go to pieces without it. And let not even those who, like Mr. Leatham, would doubtless prefer conscientiously to see the Liberal party go to pieces than to abate anything of their demand in this respect, exult in spirit over the unworthy anticipation that the leaders they have learned to respect may be persuaded to yield discreditably to the petty exigencies of party, on questions on which they ought to be converted heart and soul, or not at all. Mr. Leatham does himself and his friends great injustice when he speaks in a tone which implies that opinions may rightly be adopted and abandoned for the sake of party strategy,—that instead of party existing for the sake of convictions, convictions may exist for the sake of party. To our minds, the existing Liberal party might be exchanged for another based on views such as those of Mr. Leathern, without any discredit or moral danger to the nation ; but if its elements are to remain un- changed, it could not be metamorphosed by the mere fear of disaster and defeat into such a party as Mr. Leathern wishes, without the greatest discredit and moral danger to the nation. We confess we do not like,—we heartily disapprove, —this flippant and jubilant tone in relation to the prospect of hastily-shuffled convictions and rapidly converted ministers. We believe that Disestablishment would be an impolitic act of the most momentous magnitude ; but we should not fear half as much even from Disestablishment, as from the rapid growth in parliamentary circles of a disposition to chuckle over the levity of political faith and the fickle purposes of badgered statesmen.
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