MR. GLADSTONE ON THE MINISTERIAL RECORD.
THE Householders judge Governments broadly, and with greater consideration for special and isolated mistakes than the Ten-pounders used to show, and so judging, they will, we believe, hold Mr. Gladstone's defence of his Administration, delivered on Monday at Edinburgh, to be sufficiently satisfac- tory. Many of them will not be content with the Premier's account of his policy in Egypt, impaired as it is by vagueness, and penetrated as it is with a latent feeling that British pre. aence in the Nile Valley at all is a misfortune which, but for the errors of the previous Government, need never have occurred. They may think Mr. Gladstone blind to a splendid opportunity of doing good to the world, to Egypt, and to Great Britain, and too fearful of accept- ing responsibilities imposed on the kingdom by Providence or destiny. A few more, very few, will think he over-rates the difficulties of our task in South Africa, and treats a grqup of hard Dutch farmers, not 8,000 in number, too much as if they were a historic and independent people. The statement that we threw off the Transvaal "as a man shakes off a snake which had fastened on his hand," will shock many who think that the illustration is untrue ; and that if it were true, the duty of man is to kill snakes. But the great majority will agree, and this is all Mr. Gladstone asks them to admit, that he has in the main governed wisely and well ; that accepting power at a moment when the difficulties around seemed endless, he has faced them one by one, boldly and with success. So great is the change effected since 1880 that it needs a review, such as Mr. Gladstone gave to his enthusiastic audience, to remind us how great and how numerous those difficulties were. Abroad, we were waging a senseless war in Afghanistan, though that State had originally done nothing to attack us, which occupied 65,000 men, and involved first and last an expenditure of more than twenty millions sterling. We had come into collision in South Africa, not only with the Boers of the Transvaal and the Zulus of Zululand, but with the whole body of the Africander popu- lation of the Cape—a clear majority of the white men in South Africa,—who, as Mr. Gladstone plainly stated, were ready to rise in arms if we warred their brethren down. We were bound in Europe by the Treaty of Berlin, which com- pelled us either to enfranchise certain Greek populations, still oppressed by the Turks, or to announce to them that in spite of treaties they were to be betrayed. And, finally, we were committed in Egypt to unknown duties, the protection of a Khedive whom we, by one of the most high-handed acts ever attempted in modern history, had— together with the French—imposed upon the Egyptian people. At home we were in presence of an Ireland ripe for agrarian revolt, and prepared for an agitation which in its means, though not in its end, was one of the most criminal of the century. That agitation threatened the very existence of property in Ireland, and could not be met except by determined and long-continued military occupation—an impossibility with a Parliamentary Government—or by measures almost too radical for the temper of the English people. And for years the expenditure had kept on increasing, until the Treasury presented year by year a chronic deficit, and bills were running-up in India which it was certain the British taxpayer would sooner or later be called upon to discharge.
Every one of these difficulties, with, perhaps, a single excep- tion, has been dealt with either with success, or in such a way that success may yet be reasonably hoped for. The financial trouble, to which Mr. Gladstone characteristically and wisely gave the first place, has been cured. In spite of unexampled suffering among agriculturists, and a long-continued depression in trade, thirty-three millions of Debt have been paid off ; the deficit has been converted into a surplus; the grand windfall, the expiration of the Terminable Annuities, has been reserved to pay off future Debt; and the credit of the State has been raised, until a project to convert the Three per Cents. into Two-and-a-Half per Cents, has been accepted by the Money-market as reason- able and effective. And all this has been accomplished with- out increase of taxation, and after a long-demanded, but risky, change of the Malt-tax--one of the old " sheet-anchors " of finance—into a duty on beer. The agrarian revolt in Ireland has been stifled by a measure which, whatever its other de- fects, has at least this grand merit, that it has made the peasantry, who in Ireland are the people, feel secure, so secure that they do not think it worth while to make any personal sacrifice to become freeholders. The great criminal com- bination for terrorism has been broken up ; and while during last year there was no agrarian murder, the Law, which seemed about to perish in Ireland, .has, in all departments of life, recovered its ascendancy. Abroad, the Afghan War has been ended with full military credit ; and a native ruler, himself the most " legitimate " of all candidates, go- verns the kingdom as well and as strongly as it has ever been governed, accepts the British advice on questions so delicate as the fixing of his Northern boundary, and is no more of a Russian Agent than any Prince within our own dominions. Expenditure rn Afghanistan, except in the shape of a small subvention, has ceased, and the invading and watching force of 65,000 men has been reduced to 25,000. Above all, the barrier of the Suleiman, which, as Mr. Gladstone said, it seemed probable that we should sweep away with our own hands—the mighty wall 14,000 ft. high, which divides and protects India from Central Asia—has been restored to its position. The Greek clauses of the Treaty of Berlin have, after an effort the extent of which is scarcely yet understood, been so far carried out that the Greeks are content to wait, and there is peace in Eastern Europe ; while at the Cape, if there has not been much success, there is at least no war. True peace in that un- happy region there can never be, until the white and the dark races have accepted once for all some modus vivendi tolerable to both. In Egypt alone nothing is settled, but then also nothing is finished, and nothing has escaped the power of the British Government to settle as it pleases. That Government, more perhaps than at any recent period in its history, has regained its freedom of action and the confidence of Europe, and to-day sends 14,000 men to Egypt without a remonstrance from any capital. The trust placed by the world in the self-denying promises of the Ministry is, in fact, complete.
We have said that the Householders will be satisfied, but in truth they knew the facts before and are satisfied already. There is nothing whatever in Lowland Scotchmen to differ- entiate them from ordinary Englishmen, except a keener in- terest in politics, and greater watchfulness of public men, and they are as enthusiastic for the Premier as they were in 1880. He moves through Scotland as the people's king. In Edin- burgh there were 50,000 applications for admission to a hall which will only hold five thousand, and fourteen thousand work- men attended the third day's gathering in the Waverley Market and almost overtaxed even Mr. Gladstone's voice. At every meeting opinion has been unanimous, and the Premier's sub- sequent journey to Invercauld has been a triumphal progress, the people swarming up to the stations merely to see and cheer him. If a dissolution were ordered to-morrow, his majority in Scotland would be as great as ever, or possibly greater ; for in Scotland the feeling against the Lords is even stronger than in the South. It would be the same in the North of England, in Wales, and, as we believe, in every part of London except the City. The truth is, it is Society which is dissatisfied with Mr. Gladstone, and not the people. They care little about Egypt ; they see that he governs successfully in all internal affairs, and they recognise much more fully than Tories imagine that the failure to legislate is due exclusively to the obstruction organised by the Tory Extremists, and fostered and approved by the Tory leaders, who have not the self-control to help on domestic legislation, and make the most of their foreign ease. There has been no serious change of opinion since 1880, or rather, there has been one. The people are now convinced that they must support Mr. Gladstone, or hand over the ultimate govern- ment of the kingdom and their own future rights to a per- manent and incurable majority of Tory Peers, who will let the representatives play at law-making till they do something important, and then will send them home with contempt to their constituents.
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