TOPICS OF THE DAY.
LORD HARTINGTON AND MR. GLADSTONE.
THAT possession with the subject of Ireland which Mr. Gladstone has recently betrayed, and which comes out even in his most thoughtful utterances on the most far-off subjects, begins to irritate the Unionist speakers. A good many among them do not believe he is possessed, set down his obiter dicta to foxiness, and declare that his single object just at present is to catch votes. He is ready,' they say, to give up the Church in Wales rather than lose Welsh Nonconformists, to permit a Channel Tunnel in order to win the South-Eastern Railway, to oppose the higher education of Catholics that he may secure Evan- gelical support, to condone any fad however wild, or any doctrine however immoral, if only he may be certain of the allegiance of its devotees.' Even those who know Mr. Gladstone better, and are aware that deep in his intel- lectual character lies the perfervidum ingenium, that he can be as much carried away, especially by a moral emotion, as if he had never ruled an Empire, betray signs of irritation, of doubt whether they have not hitherto done the Home-rule leader, as Lord Hartington now styles him, too much justice. Mr. Chamberlain, in his powerful speech of Tuesday at Newcastle—a speech which is like a chain cable made of old metal, every link worn to rustiness, but the whole unbreakable—talks with a novel asperity of Mr. Gladstone's refusal to reveal his policy as an instance of that " stealthy suppression which Gladstonians mistake for statesmanlike reserve." Mr. Chamberlain is a hard hitter, but that is more bitter than usual, as is also his fierce declaration to some critics among his audience that " when you talk of traitors and renegades, you had best look for them amongst those who have abandoned their principles, who have sur- rendered their position without firing a shot and without even a council of war, and surrendered it to the enemies of their country." Mr. Courtney, too, who, in spite of the strength of his convictions, tries always to under- stand his opponents, in the solid speech which he delivered at Looe on Friday week, and which has hardly been noticed in London, declared about Mr. Gladstone's speech on the dock strikes, that " the only thing that seriously came out of the business was the reflection that wherever Mr. Gladstone turned, and whatever subject he devoted his attention to, he was quite certain in the midst to discover the problem of Home-rule cropping up again, much as a well-known person in a well-known fiction found that King Charles I. would come into his memory at every odd corner and every odd sentence." Even Lord Harting- ton, at Aberdeen, was more inclined than he has ever yet been to depreciate his old leader, and while giving him ample credit for his grand services to the State, denied that he was in any way an infallible tactician. " I am bound to say that as a tactical leader of the Liberal Party, of that party which he himself described to be the great instrument of progress, his success has been less con- spicuous. Three times within my recollection, three times within your-recollection, Mr. Gladstone has led the Liberal Party to either disaster or defeat. In 1866, when virtually he was leader of the Liberal Party, it was broken up and defeated through internal dissensions. In 1874 it was disastrously defeated at the polls. In 1886 it was most disastrously defeated all through the adoption, by the act almost alone of its leader, of an ill-considered and ill-advised Irish policy. Nay, it not only rent the party in two, but it absolutely shattered it beyond all human probability or possibility of reconstruction." That is true, but it is bitter ; and were there not new causes of irritation, a new doubt whether Mr. Glad- stone has any longer any object except the one which he thinks so paramount and so great, the sentences, we think, would not have been uttered. Certainly Lord Hartington would not have refused to Mr. Gladstone the title of the Liberal leader, or said that he had become absorbed in the party of Home-rule. " It is with the Home-rule leader of the day, not with the leader of the Liberal Party, we have to deal, and we have a right and we are bound to ask, as my noble friend the chairman has asked to-night, whom is he leading, and to what end and object is he leading the party of which be is still the leader ?" Nor would he, we think, have uttered this, which rises nearly into shrillness, and is, If true, a tremendous indictment:—" It appears to me that Mr. Gladstone [in denouncing the moral authority of the Union] is going not very far from direct incitement to some ardent minds- to what everybody admits would be the greatest calamity that could befall our country, the outbreak of actual in- surrection, and that he is approaching very closely to the limits, if he is not overstepping the limits, which ought to guide the conduct of a loyal subject of the Queen." We regret this new outburst of bitterness, though we thoroughly understand its cause, and deem it only natural. It is intellectually sickening to politicians to see Ireland treated as the pivot of the world, and all human affairs as important only in the degree to which, by any wresting of their true meaning, they may be made to bear upon the question of Home-rule. They are accustomed to that sort of thing in teetotallers, anti-vaccinationists, Socialists, Anglo-Israelites, and Professor Stuart; but in statesmen it rouses in them a kind of intellectual indignation. They are bored as well as annoyed, and feel as a Bishop feels when a chaplain, cl propos of a discussion on lawn-tennis, quotes a text. A bored man is always a man likely to say sharp things. We question, however, whether this intellectual bitterness helps a speech much with a popular audience. It may in Scotland, where worship of Mr. Gladstone has become a cultus, and where, therefore, proof that he is not infallible is an essential preliminary to any assault, in order that the assailant may not be accused of blasphemy. But in England, where opinion is more divided, we some- what doubt its efficacy. The classes here need no con- vincing, and the masses are rather impressed by reiteration, are willing that their leaders should be reticent even to " stealthy suppression," and would be apt to think, if they thought about it at all, that failures in tactics were the result, as they often are, of being too much in earnest. It is not from any vain repetition, any reticence, any mistake in strategy, that the decline in Mr. Gladstone's influence over the masses will proceed, but from a very different cause. His strength as a manager of elections is becoming his weakness. No man has ever understood so thoroughly the emotional side of Englishmen, the degree in which those hard and seemingly selfish men are governed by altruism, the respect for a high moral ideal, if only it is also a kindly ideal, which exists in their minds side by side with shrewd sense and hard decision. Mr. Gladstone has never quite understood them on the hard side ; but he has understood them on the soft one, and his comprehen- sion of that is the secret of his enduring authority. We believe that even in that strange political transaction, his offer to repeal the Income-tax, he was entirely governed by a moral disgust at the habit of lying which he thought the tax developed in the well-to-do, and that nothing ever puzzled him more than the entire absence of sympathy with his feeling which he found in the electors. He forgot that they knew nothing about the returns, though he did, and that they judged his proposal on its business side alone, and on that side rejected it as unsound. He made his political fortune by his courage in describing the non-electors as of one flesh and blood with the rest of us, and he has obtained full hearing for his proposal of Home-rule by his argument, in which he himself fully believes, about the " Union of Hearts," as opposed to the " Paper-Union." His power of rousing emotion, usually good and legitimate emo- tion, has been the secret of his special authority, an authority far greater than his marvellous capacity for many branches of administration would have given him, and it will be, if he persists, the source of his decline. He does not recog- nise sufficiently that, while the judgment never wearies, the emotions wear out; that people, even when they are English, grow tired of appeals to them ; and that, when once they have sunk from overwork, they cannot be roused in their old strength again. Let the emotions once grow cold, and the other side of Englishmen comes uppermost, the side which has given them their freedom, their commerce, and their Empire ; and they will attend only to argument as hard as if they were arranging a bargain. Dwell on " Union of Hearts " a little too long, and Englishmen ask why such Union should lead to separation a mensal et thorn ; talk of the " Paper- Union " a little too much, and they recollect that every treaty of alliance is a paper union, and that the majority of human affairs are regulated on the strength of paper contracts. The wrongs done to Ireland stir the very blood; but after the tenth recital, plain men ask whether we ought now to weep for the much greater wrongs done to Negroes, or to give them the West India Islands in which they were endured as a compensa- tion. Equality with Englishmen is the right, the con- tract right as well as the moral right, of every Irishman ; but discourse about it, if too often repeated, makes the Englishman ask if equality means that the Irishman should dominate him as he is dominating the Liberal Party. The people, when strongly moved, do not at first expect argu- ment from their leaders ; but as the emotion subsides, they do, and if they do not find it, they cease to follow. The heat generated in their minds by the original fervid appeals has not burnt up the fuel yet; but it is waxing low, and constant puffs with the bellows only produce a still more rapid consumption. Let any one who doubts this watch how dead the accounts of evictions fall, how little the people care when Irish Members suffer under the Crimes Act, how doubtful they are when Irish orators promise them perpetual love if they will only accept a divorce. The spring of emotion is, in fact, exhausted, and when the General Election comes round, Mr. Gladstone will find that the strings of his most formidable bow have grown incurably slack. If the " Bitter Cry " could re-house the people in a week, it would be a matchless instrument of philanthropic power; but if the process is to take ten years, then a plan for housing them cheaply and well will have fifty times its effect. It is a very strange people, ours, often as unintelligible to itself as to others, and always liable to spasmodic bursts of emotion ; but in a lifetime, now growing long, we have never seen it make a grave mistake unless it acted at once. It may even yet vote for Home-rule, but its demand that Irish Members shall be retained in Westminster—a demand to which Mr. Gladstone this week gives his unqualified written submission—means that it intends, whatever it votes, to keep the control of Ireland in its own hands. That demand has never been altered, and is strikingly characteristic. An Englishman is the most charitable of mankind, but there is one definite and impassable limit to his charity. He never will, till he dies, give away one sixpence out of capital.
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