TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE POLICY OF 1.tit GO V.ERNMENT.
THE opening of Parliament has not for many years excited the in- terest which awaits the renewal of the session next week. It is
felt to be the inauguration of a new political fora; a strong line of
demarcation separates it from the past, and the nation looks for- ward with hope and curiosity, not unmixed with anxiety for its
own prospects, but animated with a firm trust in the capacity and good intentions of the chief actors in the coming scenes, and with the consciousness that a fresh development is at hand both for its own political life and for the characters and careers of its principal statesmen. A grand clearance has been effected during the past year ; there is no longer a party fighting a lost and hope- less battle under a watchword in which the majority of them had long ceased to believe ; the business of practical progress will no longer be impeded by the obstinate refusal of the mourners for Pro- tection to leave off " waking " the corpse ; public morality will no longer be offended by the complicity of a large and influential di- vision of the politicians and the country in a policy of pretence, unreality, and consequent evasion and shuffling. The public were fairly bored with the hundredth night of that famous old English drama ; they look to the rising of the curtain for an entirely new piece with a grateful sense of relief, an unwonted emotion of ex- pectant curiosity and unaffected interest. Real business is the attraction of the new play-bill—quite as much as the unexampled combination of talent secured for the performance of the parts. The success of the play will depend solely on the extent to which it satisfies this just expectation of the public,.
But the essential condition which will alone enable the Ministry to satisfy the public on this point, to do justice to their own talent, and to take fall advantage of the favourable concurrence of events which has induced or rather compelled them to com- bine, is a determination on their parts to act up to the im- plted spirit of the combination, and to give to the people snci guarantees as will be satisfactory that this is their determi- nation, and that they comprehend the necessities of 'their position. The country expects and is anxious for assurance that the fusion is genuine, and likely to be permanent. It wishes to 'be convinced that the statesmen who have avowedly given up obsolete party dis- tinctions, sacrificed personal pretensions, and mutually overstepped the limits of familiar party boundaries, have done so with the full consciousness of what they were doing, with a clear sense of the consequences involved in such a step, and a manly resolution not to be turned aside from a deliberately chosen course by any such obstacles as were to be foreseen and weighed beforehand. Upon the genuineness and permanence of the harmony between the mem- bers of the present Government the hopes of the country are staked. What the country generally understands by that har- mony is surely, not that one party has been converted to the opinions of the other, or that, as a compromise between conflicting opinions, a purely neutral policy, is to be followed both in legisla- tion and that important branch of administration which consists in the disposal of the patronage of the Crown ; but rather, as we have urged before, that the positive ideas of every section of the Government are to have coordinate activity, and that, both in legislation and appointments, completeness, variety, and the satis- faction of great interests moral and material, may be the aim of the Government, rather than a narrow and negative consistency, which would betray a suspension of hostilities and not bear witness to hearty union, and is only to be obtained by the evasion of great questions and the exclusion of decided characters. This we believe to be the wish of those who have thoroughly studied the present crisis ; and it needs to be enforced the more that some journals pro- fessing to support the Government would by their onesided admo-
nitions, ' though in opposite senses, do their utmost to lead it into a path certainly destructive of its hopes of permanence. Now, permanence is what the nation has set its heart upon. A wise and firm Government can only exist on condition of permanence ; only from a Government persuaded of its own tenure of office can we expect that deliberation and energy, that complete devotion to its work, which is the best security that its work will be well done. We repeat, that the permanence of the Government de- pends on the cordiality, the sincerity, and abnegation of the desire to obtain exclusive prominence for the ideas of one section, with which the combination has been formed, and shall con- tinue to be maintained. On this depends its capacity for good measures, its consciousness of strength, its heartiness of work, the enthusiasm it can excite and sustain, the support it can command, and, not least, the confidence with which it can appeal to the coun- try, should; the present Mouse of Commons prove impracticable. An early and positive guarantee on this point must be a lead- ing object of the Ministerial policy, as in itself inclusive of and essential to all other and subordinate guarantees. Not only is such a •course most fitting to the circumstances un- der which the Ministry was formed, and best calculated to arouse that confidence through the nation upon which, much more than on its numerical support in Parliament, the Ministry must feel itself to be based, but it will be the most effective shield against the probable policy of the Opposition. The antecedents of the Ministry are exactly such as to render a personal and retrospective opposi- tion easy and effective. The members of it have hitherto generally been opposed to each other, have uttered strong phrases against each other's policy and opinions, and they are now sitting together on the Treasury-benches. What more easy than to expose this undoubted fact, and to overlook the course of events, which has taught them that their proper place was side by side, that their prin- ciples are more in harmony than their training, their connexions, and their formulas had induced them to suppose, that they were only looking at different sides of the same shield, and that above all the country needs their united services ? Now, a frank avowal of all this—an avowal that they have not forgotten all this, but have well weighed the comparative importance of abiding by their
antecedents, and of learning new lessons from new circumstances, and are prepared to follow out their recent act of coalition into all its legitimate consequences, and to interpret it into the fullest
abandonment of previous misunderstandings and alienations—is all that is needed to disarm such opposition, to take the sting out of all the taunts that even Mr. Disraeli could fashion with such cosi-
osa felicitas out of the raw material of Hansard. And he, should he
still be leader spite of Rigby, is too good a tactician not to be the first to see that such opposition, such appeal to old reminiscences, would recoil upon himself and his partisans in the face of a frank avowal of the altered relations, and a firm determination not to allow the dead past to encumber the living present. And not only would it turn the edge of taunts, or silence them altogether, but it would enable Ministers with the noblest grace to resist factions motions framed expressly to provoke the known differences of opinion existing between them, and to force them either to vote against their recorded opinions or against their colleagues. As arms of defence against a mode of attack probable alike from their own position and the characters of their opponents, candour and sincerity are no less efficient than as positive means of esta- blishing confidence in the nation at large.
But the personal warfare within the House will be simply ha- rassing, and will rather be the play than the serious business of the Derbyite party. Symptoms unmistakeable have already been furnished that they are prepared and eager to raise the piratical banner under which selfish interests and savage passions have so often fought shoulder to shoulder. 44 The Church in danger— Protestants to the rescue!" will be the death's head and bloody bones under which disappointed ambition, personal spite, restless fanaticism, and simple intolerance, will attempt to rally the country electors ; whose gullibility to a cry, and whose wilful blindness to the real objects of their leaders, have been satisfactorily tested by a six-years fascination under the magical letters that made up the word Protection." We have too recent experience of what the religious sensibility of this country is, to undervalue the effect of such a cry skilfully raised ; and Lord Derby and -Mr. Disraeli are not the persons to scruple to raise the cry, if they think it will reinstate them, and to laugh at it all the time as heartily as any of us. We must be prepared to have it raised. It will not matter that Mr. Denison will raise it in one sense, meaning that Lord John Russell will not allow perverse fanatics to have the monopoly of Church dignities and emoluments, and that Mr. Stowell will mean by it that Roman Catholics and Jews are not subject to civil disabilities and penal laws : 'the sound will be the same, and the last elections prove how cleverly certain politicians can adapt the interpretation of a party cry to the constituencies they are addressing. The sound, we say, will be the same ' • and the effect will be produced, unless it be met by a distinct and un- mistakeable declaration on the part of Ministers of what their Church policy is intended to be. A candid statement of the -views of the Government as to its own relations with the' Established Church and the religions sects, illustrated by a programme of practical measures, and of the principles on which it intends to distribute its Church patronage, would be the most effective means of meeting this infamous but too telling weapon of party warfare ; the more telling that it has a less selfish sound than the old cry of "High rents for us and short-commons for the peo- ple," though in real purport and practical issue the two cries not only have but are meant to have the same ef- fect. On this ground, no less than the two before men- tioned, perfect candour and openness, resting on a complete appreciation of the position and of the logical consequences of the formal act of coalition, are at once the best means of •con- ciliating support and of disarming opposition. They could offend none who are not irreconcileably hostile, while they would dissi- pate that vagueness which magnifies objects of apprehension, or creates them out of what is innocuous or even beneficial : and it would be found far more difficult for opponents to deal with a de- finite statement resting on acknowledged political facts, than to in- sinuate doubts and to create alarms out of the material supplied by the supposed private religious opinions or previous politico- ecclesiastical tendencies of the members of the Government.
The suggestions we have thrown out seem to us essential start- ing-points for a course of wise practical measures, on which of course the Ministry must ultimately rest. The talent of the Min- istry, its capacity for public business, its oratorical and Parlia- mentary ability, the oharacters of its individual members, cannot be doubted. Neither can it be doubted that the crisis wants all these qualities in a Government. The only doubt upon which its opponents can stake a chance of success, or even of united opposi- tion, is that the Ministers may net have counted the cost of their coalition; that they may have yielded to the mingled influences of generosity, ambition, and patriotism, and have entered on a path without deliberately weighing the difficulty of walking in it. The differences of its members on ecclesiastical and theological ques- tions, and the importance-of these questions in our politics, twilit& the main sustenance of 'thin doubt. Assurance on this point— assurance that the Ministers understand their own position, the consequences of their own act, and see clearly the immediate future at least, would be abundant assurance to justify the nation in an-
,- ticipating a course of useful legislation, and to reconcile them to leaving the order and detail of such legislation to a Government which had given pledges of unanimity and mutual good un- derstanding. All parties would, we are convinced, soon learn to look with favour upon a Government formed upon a broad basis, which implied in its very construction a recognition of opinions and interests which have hitherto found themselves in hostile array. The advantage of a Government which could conciliate the respect and command the cordial support of that vast majority among us which values the liberty and the order we at present enjoy, and would seek ever to be adding to it and developing it without running the risk of sacrificing it to chimeras and theories, who can overrate ? It has been the sad fortune in our modern history, that no Government has been more than the Government of a party, though Sir Robert Peel rose above the position in which he originally found himself, and the course of the war caused. the nation to rally round Mr. Pitt. Might we not hope that a Government really enjoying the confidence of the nation— because it represents the variety of opinion with the unity of aim characteristic of a great nation—would, knowing that its strength lay solely in that confidence, and knowing that a nation's confi- dence is only to be maintained by doing the work of the nation, by 'guiding its aspirations, by shapinc, its convictions, and by watching over its interests, come partially to realize that hitherto Utopian dream, the government of the wisest based upon the free choice of the governed P—A few weeks will decide whether this is still to be a dream, as far from earthly accomplishment as ever. Meanwhile, hope and sympathy are the feelings with which we await next Thursday, and the practical issues that will then be opened.
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