TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE DUKE OF RICHMOND.
THE difficult as to the Tory leadership in the Lords has been settled by the choice of the Duke of Richmond, —an event which, as it has been followed by the removal of Lord Salisbury and Lord Carnarvon from the benches of inde- pendent Opposition' to those where the true followers of the Opposition chiefs usually sit, is supposed to indicate a virtual consolidation of the Tory party in the Lords. If it were necessarily true that solid leaders infect their followers with solidarity,' the choice of the Duke of Richmond would be as brilliant as our Tory contemporaries strive,—with much effort,—to believe it. And to a very limited extent, no doubt, this is true ; and to that extent the Duke, who is as solid a Briton as ever sat in Parliament, may very likely succeed in recementing the recent breaches. He is a man of business, clear-headed in business matters, beyond all doubt ; a temperate man, too, who is not liable to be carried away by rhetorical fervour, of which he hardly guesses the meaning ; a man of sense (in the narrower significance of the word) who judges well from the experience of yesterday to the -policy of to-day, but hardly well from the experience of last year to the policy of next year ; a loyal and safe party-man, more- over, who is not at all likely to be tempted into breaking with his colleague in the other House, and who is likely to be most strenuous,—if he is given time to apprehend the emer- gency,—about securing a certain amount of concession from all the various sides of his party, so as to enable it to act with something like unanimity. He has more knowledge and more judgment than the Earl of Malmesbury : he is worth a very high multiple of the Duke of Marl- borough. If the post of leader of the Tory Lords were the sort of thing for a good plain politician, with no gifts and graces, except high rank, no humour, no power of oratory, no capacity for exposition, no ease of manners no grasp of mind, there could not be a better Tory leader than the Duke of Richmond. He is a perfectly regular ducal solid, with an excellent head for small matters and a capacity for not apprehending large ones till the time is past,—which makes him, no doubt, an excellent representative of the Tory Peers. But whether a perfect representative of Tory Peers can really manage for any long time to lead them, is a very doubtful matter indeed, for which we should be sorry to answer with any positiveness.
The Standard is happily convinced that "the whole political career of the noble Duke shows that he is emi- nently qualified for the leadership of the Conservative party, under the peculiar circumstances in which the party is placed. He unites in himself the chief, the essential qualifi- cations of a party leader,—experience, business aptitude, tact, readiness, the courtesy which facilitates so much the conduct of Parliamentary business, the good-will and confidence from supporters which give a party leader his strength,"—and so forth. Well, as regards the experience, the business aptitude, and the good-humour, the Standard is no doubt right. But then, though the Duke has plenty of experience, he has shown a very slender power of profiting by it ; though he has plenty of business aptitude, he has shown no political sagacity ; though he has an ample store of good-humour, it is apt to render him well satisfied with untenable positions. As for "tact and readiness," he has about as much for Parliamentarypurposes as a hull without either sails or steam has tacking power. The Duke is heavy in thought, heavier in speech, heaviest of all in ac- tion. The "political career" of the Duke is one of solid mis- conception, tempered as he grew older by some practical caution. As Lord March, in the House of Commons he supported Sir Robert Peel till Sir Robert Peel's good genius gave him a leaning to Free Trade, when Lord March, then M.P. for West Sussex, was the first to express his horror and astonishment. "He could not forbear saying,"—this was in January, 1846, on the proposal to repeal the Corn Laws,—" that never, in the whole course of his existence, had he been so much horrified, distressed, or astonished as he had been that night in listening to the propositions which had emanated from the right honourable baronet at the head of Her Majesty's Government." The policy then initiated should encounter, he said, "his most strenuous, violent, and unceasing opposition," and except that Lord March had not quite devil enough in him, nor, indeed, quite talking impulse enough, to be as " violent " as he fully intended to be when horror, distress, and astonishment loosed, almost for the first time, his tongue in the House of Commons, he kept his word. Yet there has always been a certain sort of solidity of conception about the Duke of Richmond's errors. Even in his speech against the repeal of the Corn Laws he was coherent in error, which is not commonly a Tory virtue. He believed that the great bulk of opinion both in the country and in towns was favourable to Protection. Not only so, but he urgently demanded that protection for native agriculture and protection for native manufactures should stand or fall together,—only unfortunately he demanded that they should stand together, and not fall together, whereas they adopted the latter alternative. The interests of agriculture and manu- factures were "inseparably united ;" what was injurious to the one was injurious to the other ;—which was very good sc. far as it went, had not Lord March made the little mistake of putting bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. He also seemed to hold that English agriculture and manufactures both needed protection because both of them were "still in their infancy,"—in 1846,—which in one sense perhaps they were but certainly a very aged infancy, from which they would never have emerged under the guardianship of Protection. This intellectual stability and coherence in error has been one of the most encouraging features about the Duke of Richmond. For the very same solid confidence in an obsolete position which the Duke betrayed at the beginning of his career, when he boldly declared in 1846 that the whole com- munity, town and country alike, were in general favourable to Protection, he betrayed again in 1868 with reference to the Irish Church measure of Mr. Gladstone. "The operation of the Bill" [the Suspensory Bill], he said on that occasion in the House of Lords, "extends only to August 1 in next year (i.e.,. 1869) ; "but is there a man in the country who will pretend to say that there is any possibility of a scheme for the disestablishment- and disendowment of the Irish Church, and for the appropria- tion of the funds which will accrue if such a measure be carried, passing in the meantime through this or the other House?" Clearly the Duke is one of those philosophers who do not believe in the possibility of motion. He did not believe in it in 1846. The experience of twenty-two years had not taught him to believe in it in 1868. How should a solid ducal intelligence, in the stable equilibrium of absolute content with the British institutions which had maintained him where he was, realize, without an utterly unducal imagi- nation, the existence of an accelerating force acting on those comparatively free particles of matter of which, for the most part, the mass of the country is made up ? While Mr. Disraeli, after admitting in deference to his party that opinion is at rest, no doubt says to himself, like Galileo in like circum- stances, "All the same, it moves," the Duke of Richmond, even after his own party has begun to see that the avalanche is moving, murmurs credulously to himself, "All the same, it is at rest." He is the kind of politician who, like Dr. Johnson, would have proved the reality of matter by master- fully knocking his stick upon the floor. A single point of positive experience is more to such a mind than a whole world of speculative reasoning, or even of half-distinct observation.
And yet the Duke of Richmond, like many other men of strong sense in the narrow meaning of that term, when he has a leader who is quicker-sighted than himself, is apt to have even more confidence in his habitual trust of his leader, than in his habitual disbelief in change. In 1846 he was "horrified, distressed, and astonished" at the course of Sir Robert Peel, but then Sir Robert Peel was hardly reputed a great squire, and he was dealing with corn, which Lord March thought the province of great squires. He virtually regarded the late Lord Derby, then as afterwards, as his leader, and Lord Derby was horrified, distressed, and astonished too. Since then the Duke has more than once shown the mastiff-like fidelity of strong characters not themselves of the first intellectual order, to a leader. When the satellites of the Cabinet were taunted by Lord Carnarvon in 1867 with their responsibility for a Reform Bill which was really due to only two or three of them, the Duke growled his dissent just like a faithful mastiff who sees his master threatened. "I consider myself," he said, "as bound to every part of the measure as if I had been the sole author of it ;" and again, "I am quite ready to admit, and do so frankly, that I place the greatest confidence in the judgment of my noble friend at the head of the Government, and that if on any great question I find myself differing very materially from him, I should be inclined to doubt whether I was correct, or whether the opinions of my noble friend ought not rather to prevail." That is the sort of shaggy fidelity dear to a master's heart. No doubt, when Lord Cairns succeeded to the Earl of Derby he did not find in the Duke the same implicit confidence. The Duke cautiously declined to encourage a serious rupture with the House of Commons by voting against the second reading of the Irish Church Bill. Just as his father resigned rather than support Lord Grey in the threat of swamping the House of Lords at the time of the great Reform Bill, the son regarded an open defiance of the one House by the other as a sort of overture to chaos and the end of all things, from which his soul shrank, and certainly would not consent to encounter at the instigation of a mere success- ful lawyer like Lord Cairns. But though it is evident that the Duke of Richmond will hardly follow Mr. Disraeli, as he might have followed the late Lord Derby, to the verge of destruction, he showed on one occasion at least a very touch- ing loyalty to his leader's intellectual word of command. When, in the Irish Church contest, Mr. Disraeli suggested to his party that very eccentric watchword at which the whole nation laughed heartily, "The Catholic Church in Ireland, already an Established Church, established by the Pope," and asked his followers to point out that if the Protestant Church were disestablished by the English Crown, it would be com- peting as a voluntary Church against an established Catholic Church, the Duke of Richmond with quite pathetic docility took up the cry. "If you destroy this Establishment," he said, following humbly in the steps of his leader, "you will by no means have destroyed all establishments. You will be left with one great Establishment, which owes its allegiance not to the Queen of England, but to the Pope of Rome, against the aggressions of whom this country has successfully and manfully striven for the last three hundred years." Clearly the new leader is not without intellectual docility. Whether that is precisely the best quality of a leader is not so certain.
As a debater, no one would pretend that the Duke of Rich- mond has the slightest pretensions to the post he has accepted. He is slow, unready, difficult of speech. His notion of retort is clumsy, conventional, dismal. He does not often attempt it, and when he does their Lordships smile as the man smiled in 1Esop's fable when a certain creature, not fitted for it by nature, took upon him to gambol like a lap-dog, under the impression that such manoeuvres were winning without refer- once to the qualifications of the performer. When the Duke wanted to quiz the Liberals for leaving the Irish Church ques- tion so long untouched while they were themselves in office, he had recourse to the time-honoured quotation of every session for the last fifty years or so,—
" As bees on flowers alighting cease their hum, So settling upon dace Whigs are dumb,"
—which he accompanied by the unfortunate suggestion that the quotation might prove prophetic as well as descriptive of the past Whig character, and that no more might be heard of the Irish Church Bill after the accession of the Liberals to office. When he wanted to defend Lord Derby against Lord Russell for passing a Reform Bill founded on household suffrage, he had nothing happier to suggest by way of scoff than this immemorial taunt against Lord Russell :—" I cannot say that I ever had the honour of visiting Pembroke Lodge, but I can almost fancy that were I to do so, I should see this inscription over the door, Russell, sole patentee and inventor of Reform. None genuine unless signed by me. Imitators beware! Very hippopotamian playfulness indeed! The Duke should leave that sort of thing to Mr. Disraeli. On the whole, we should augur that his success will depend on his power to keep Lord Salisbury and Lord Carnarvon at his side without alienating Mr. Disraeli. The less he tries to be original, the better.
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