TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE GOVERNMENT A_ND THE LORDS.
THE Government have forfeited the confidence of the country, and they know that they have forfeited it. No other conclusion can be drawn from the way in which
the Ministry and their supporters have acted since the rejection of the Licensing Bill by the Peers.—As our readers know, we regretted that the Lords did not read the Bill a second time, but that regret does not blind us to the facts of the case.—The Liberal leaders and the Liberal newspapers tell us with the utmost emphasis that their Bill was not only good in itself, but is ardently desired by the country, and that it represents a policy
to which the Liberal Party are absolutely and whole- heartedly committed, and by which they mean to stand or fall. The Peers in rejecting the measure were flouting the will of the people. If the Liberals were iu grim earnest, and if such talk were something more than froth and rhetoric, how would they act ? Would they avoid coming to close quarters with the Peers, and letting the masters of both—the electors—decide between them ? Assuredly not. They would think nothing of punctilios, sueh as the alleged impossibility of allowing the claim of the Peers to dictate the date of dissolution. What they would do would be to dissolve Parliament at once, and to base the dissolution on a double appeal. They would ask the country to give them a mandate, not only to pass the Education Bill, but to do what the Liberal Tarty declare is the right thing to do with the Lords,— to deprive then of their power of rejecting Bills on which the Commons have made up their minds. We are, of course, personally glad that the Government have not had the courage or the strength to adopt this policy of " Thorough "; but the meaning of their refusal to adopt it is quite obvious. They would like to bite as well as to bark ; but they have come to the conclusion that if they tried to bite they would break their teeth. Therefore their only policy is to bark and run away. Yet so incurable is the belief of the Liberal leaders in words and platitudes that we find a Cabinet Minister of Mr. Birrell's ability explaining to the public that barking and biting are in reality the same things. In his speech reported in last Saturday's papers be actually told his hearers that the Government were determined to bite, and not merely to bark, and then went on to point out that what be meant by this was a policy of barking, and nothing but barking.
The truth, however disagreeable to Radical pundits and party rhetoricians, is that the House of Lords never was stronger than at the present moment, nor the country less inclined to abolish it. It is true that a very large number of people, like ourselves, deeply regret that the Lords had rot sufficient courage and independence to refuse to pass the Trade Disputes Bill in the form insisted on in the Commons, and also to refuse to establish old-age pensions except on a sound contributory basis. But even those who agree with us in this respect do not find in our criticism of the Lords, any more than do we, ground for supporting the Government policy. Because we want to see the Lords stronger and more independent we are naturally not going to consent to their being made weaker and more subservient, and the country placed at the mercy of a single Chamber dominated by the Closure and the "guillotine," a Chamber, too, which may very likely, as at present constituted, represent, not the majority, but the minority of the voters. Till it can get a better and stronger Second House, the nation will resolutely refuse to abolish or emasculate the present Assembly by taking away the very imperfect right of veto and revision which it now enjoys. We want a more, not a less, independent Upper House.
Before we leave the subject it may be worth while to ask why it is that the Government have forfeited so completely the confidence of the country. In the first place, because they have betrayed the cause of Free-trade. They were not elected on a mere party issue, certainly not on a Socialistic issue. Their huge majority was given' them by the country in a conservative frame of mind, and in order to prevent the great evil of a revolution in our fiscal policy. The Cabinet, however, had not the force or the pluck or the bo9esty to recognise this fact. The Unionist Free-traders and the independent and non-party voters gave them their majority, but the Government have consistently used that majority for the narrowest party purposes. Because the Unionist Free-traders are not represented. in the House of Commons, and cannot make their influence felt in the division lobbies, they are ignored. The Government have again and again placed themselves at the disposal of the Socialists and the Labour Party, not because they were convinced by their arguments, but because they needed their votes and dreaded their enmity. The result of this truckling to the Socialist vote, and forgetting the fact that the Parliament of 1906 was elected, not to further Socialism, but to preserve Free-trade, has been to throw the finances of the country into a condition far worse than that into which they were thrown by one of the most expensive wars of modern times. Aud in ruining the finances of the country the Government have, short of some miracle, which we fear will be one of those which do not happen, ruined Free-trade. They have got to raise some twenty to twenty-five millions by new taxation. In all human probability they will fail in the task, and will leaye it to their successors, the Tariff Reformers, to obtain the bulk of the money. But this is the very opportunity that the Tariff Reformers have always desired. So-called scientific taxation in the abstract we have never dreaded, because it was clear that, once given the opportunity of putting their proposals into practice, the advocates of Protection would soon come to blows amongst themselves. Now, unfortunately, the problem will be comparatively easy. They will not have to arrange for a scientific tariff, but merely for a tariff for revenue,—a tariff to which, in theory at least, Free-traders cannot object. That in the end the raising of the money by Custom- duties will prove a thoroughly had way, and a thoroughly extravagant and wasteful way, we do not doubt; but at any rate it will be a way, however burdensome, which the plain man will prefer to new direct taxation on a gigantic scale. The ordinary voter may be, on the whole, a Free-trader, but his Free-trade views are not strong enough to stand twenty millions of new direct taxation. Rather than face that he will get rid of the Free-trade system which has done so much for him in the past, and has so greatly increased the prosperity of the country. It is very unfortunate that this should be so, and very foolish also of the plain man to feel as he does, but we shall not alter the facts by pretending that they are otherwise. But if this happens—and we see little possibility of it not happening— the men who will have killed Free-trade, strange as it may sound, will not be the Tariff Reformers, but those who have Free-trade for ever upon their lips, though, as experience has shown, not in their hearts. The whole social reform programme of the Liberal Party is indeed a negation of the policy of free exchange. You cannot keep Free-trade in a water-tight compartment, and confine it to exports and imports. Those who deny free contract, which is the essence of free exchange, and are continually proposing schemes for making men prosperous, or giving them employment, not by the encouragement of exchanges, but by their limitation and by the interference of Govern- ment, can never be trusted to fight Protection honestly and bravely. They have sold the pass before the real attack begins. Financial profligacy, Socialiam masquerading under the name of social reform, Protection dressed in the livery of Cobdenism,—these are what have killed, and deserved to kill, the confidence of the country in the present Government.
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