TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE PROCLAMATION.
SIR HENRY JAMES is doing a real service to the country by the motion of which he has given notice for next Thursday, though we may assume as certain that it cannot be carried. That the Proclamation does not attempt to carry out the pledge given by the Ministry to localise the new title of Empress in India is so obvious, that Lord Cairns had nothing to answer to Lord Selborne on Tuesday, except that in the House of Lords the Colonies had not been specially referred to, and that the chief anxiety had seemed to be lest the title should be needlessly used at home. The discussions in the House of Lords, however, were avowedly supplementary to the dis- cussions in the House of Commons. It is quite certain that Lord Cairns's engagements in the House of Lords would not have satisfied the Opposition, had they not been taken in close connection with the Prime Minister's undertakings in the House of Commons, undertakings so often explicitly referred to as governing the whole purport and interpretation of Lord Cairns's own declara- tions. Mr. Disraeli's explicit promise that " the assump- tion of the title of ' Empress' was to be limited to India, and to be a local title," was distinctly recited in the House of Lords by Lord Cairns himself, the only qualification made in either place being that whenever it was needful to use the full titles of the Crown for formal purposes, as in dealings with foreign States, or in express relation to the Indian Empire, there should be no bar to the addition of the new words. Now, no one can pretend for a moment that, for the purposes of our colonies and possessions outside the Indian Empire, there is more occasion for the new title than there is for its use in Great Britain or Ireland. If the Viceroy of Ireland is to be appointed by the Queen, as such, and not by the Empress of India, what conceivable reason can there be for appointing the Viceroy of the Canadian Dominion or the Governor of the Cape Colony in any other name ? Is it localising the new title in India to direct, as the Proclamation directs, that " henceforth, so far as conveniently may be, on all occasions and in all instruments wherein our style and titles are used " [with the exception of those operating only in the United Kingdom] "the follow- ing addition shall be made to our style and titles at present appertaining to the Imperial Crown of the United Kingdom and its dependencies, that is to say . . . 'Empress of India ?" What more express instructions not to localise the title in India could possibly be given ? Nay, even the Ministers themselves admit it. " The Royal Proclamation," said the Attorney-General on Tuesday night, "in my opinion only requires the use of the additional title in instruments having operation in colonies or out of the United Kingdom, in cases where it is necessary to make use of the full and complete titles of her Majesty. Where it is not strictly necessary to employ the full and complete titles of her Majesty, it may be omitted ; but in respect of all instruments, it will be for the -authority issuing them to decide whether the addition of ' Em- press' can be conveniently dispensed with." Sir John Holker could not have given a more positive opinion that the Govern- ment have not only not localised the new title in India by the .Proclamation, but have given directions inconsistent with its localisation. As regards instruments operating outside the United Kingdom, he says it will not be always necessary to use the new title ; it is required by the Proclamation that it shall be used whenever it is usual to enumerate the full style and titles of the Sovereign, but in other bases, wherever abbreviations are proper, then it may be dispensed with at the discretion of the authority issu- ing the instrument. The new title is enjoined, then, ..lor colonial use in many instances ; it may, of course, be legitimately used always ; but it may be dispensed with -when, and only when, it is usual to suppress others of the Sovereign's titles as well as this one. Will any person, with the smallest regard for honesty or eommon-sense, deny that this is a flagrant breach of the engagement to localise, as far as possible, the new title in India I If the House of Commons were not given an opportunity of expressing its opinion on this cynical violation of the obligation so solemnly, and apparently so spontaneously, taken by the Prime Minister, the chief function of that Assembly, as the great Court of Inquiry in which Ministerial derelictions are tried, would be at an end. Indeed, the Colonies were only mentioned in the recent debates in the hope, cordially shared by both sides of the House, of bringing them closer to the United Kingdom, by including them by name with the United Kingdom under the British Crown ; but the effect of the- Proclamation actually issued is to separate them further from the United Kingdom ; to make the title, which is as far as possible to be sup". pressed here, valid and even necessary there ; to imperialise the Colonies first, whence it may be reasonably conjectured that the imperial virus will gradually spread back to the mother-country. If the Proclamation had honestly carried out the engage- ments of the Prime Minister, and if the Proclamation had also legal power to bind the nation (of which we are by no means sure), the new title would have done no harm. We have never objected to it on any ground except the difficulty,—we may well say, in the presence of the very wide-spread disposition of British Philistines to feed their minds on grand titles as if they were meat and drink, the impossibility,—of attaching the title to the only ground on which it is in any sense even tolerably appropriate. How that difficulty could in any case be surmounted when all the com- missions of officers in the Army and Navy must necessarily- be made out in the name of the Empress as well as of the Queen, we do not know. But as it is, the Proclamation makes not the feeblest attempt to localise the title, though it does make a feeble one to keep it out of these Islands. Now, it appears to us that it is precisely in the Colonies that the traditional feeling concerning the English Crown is likely to be less keen than at home, and that it is there that the " breach with history " would give less positive offence than, at present at least, it would in England. If, therefore, we needed to guard specially the comparative simplicity and dignity of the old title in one part rather than another of the Queen's dominions, it would have been in those new and loosely-connected terri- tories where a change in the style of Government is more easily made than at home. Certainly, too, it is in the Colonies that the temptation, if temptation there be, to a re- publican form of government is likely sooner or later to be presented with the greatest force, if only from the near neighbourhood to some of them of a very great Re- public ; and therefore it is most of all in the Colonies that one would have guarded carefully the old historic title and associations, and from them that we should have. been chiefly anxious to exclude all the Brummagem grandeur of Imperial designations. Not that we suppose there would be any greater fascination for our Colonies than for England in such designations, but rather that titles would there, even more than here, stimulate the latent Republican feeling which is- never wanting where the forms of authority are gravely carica- tured, and its prestige seriously impaired. There is a certain simplicity in the lives of young and chiefly agricultural com- munities, which, though it does not render Republicanism con- genial to them,—rather, perhaps, the contrary, since it is hr simple and monotonous states of society that the incident of rank excites the pleasantest interest,—yet does make any- thing like unreal and coxcombical assumptions of status un- usually absurd. While the old hietoric tie with the English Crown remains, no doubt our colonies are proud of it, and prefer• its not very exacting sway to the rough-and-ready rule of a; farmers" Republic. But make that historic tie look ridi- culous in any way, and the contagion of Republicanism,— which seems so well fitted to a plain society in which there is no aristocracy and little literary culture,—would revive. Certainly, by spreading the new title over the whole area of the Empire, the British Islands alone excepted, the Government have done what in them lay to vulgarise the one link by which these great possessions are held together, and to open a new gulf between them and the United Kingdom. Sir Henry James will not succeed in getting our Conservative House of Commons to censure the Ministry, but he will at least be able to make the majority ashamed of what they are doing, and to express the universal regret with which our Colonies will hear that the title which is to be ignored in England is absolutely imposed by the Proclamation upon them.
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