TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE SHUFFLE IN THE MINISTRY. LORD GRANVILLE has not been shifted to the Poor Law Board and Mr. Goschen to the Foreign Office. We state this at once, to dissipate any feeling of natural alarm that may spring up in the public mind lest the principle, or whatever it is to be called, which is at the bottom of the recent shuffle in the Ministry, should be pushed to extremes. The announcement which has been gravely made this week of the Ministerial changes looked so very like the beginning of a Christmas game of " Puss in the Corner," that one felt some perturbation as to where the very seasonable hilarity of the Cabinet was likely to end. Or say it looks as if they had determined to conclude the amusements with the pastime of what children call cross questions and contrary answers. "I was asked," Mr. Gladstone seems to say, " what would be the best measure for strengthening the War Office, and the answer was, To send a good Irish Secretary to the Board of Trade." Further, " I was asked how best I could increase the confidence of the Radicals in the Government, and the answer was, By sending my Postmaster-General to Ireland." Seriously, what could promise worse for Mr. Gladstone's Ministry than this idle shuffling of the cards at a moment when all England was anxious to see the Ministry doubly strengthened, first, by the better selection of men for the administrative offices where there is most need of energy ; and next, by the improvement of its representative character, seriously weakened, as it has been, by the loss of Mr. Bright ? Mr. Gladstone's actual resolve is an official declaration that in neither of these respects is there any room for improvement, nay, that the strength of the Ministry is so overflowing, that there may almost be said to be room for visible deterioration without the smallest risk of failure. As far as we can see, the object of the change is to show the country that the Ministry is strong enough for a tour de force, in other words, for a misappropriation of strength, without appearing inadequate to its duties. Mr. Chichester Fortescue made an admirable Colonial Under- Secretary, and a most sagacious and generally courageous, though in this last Fenian amnesty a politically chicken- hearted, Irish Minister. Lord Hartington was a respectable War Minister in 1866, and has been an energetic Postmaster- General since December, 1868. And if you find for each of them a class of duties as remote as may be from those which they have hitherto performed, by transferring Lord Hartington to Ireland, and Mr. Chichester Fortescue to the Board of Trade, you will put your Cabinet to much the same sort of test as you would a dramatic company, by assigning to the jeune premier to act the part of the heavy father, and to the walking gentleman to play the principal lover. Moreover, if after that reconstruction of your playbill, the public are still satisfied with the performance, you may fairly say that the company is equal to anything, and that no shuffling can injure it ; but whether it is good policy at a time of great anxiety to shuffle your cards at random, in order to show com- plete self-confidence, is clearly a matter of which two views are likely to be taken. Nobody, as far as we know, was discontented with the management of the Board of Trade. Though Mr. Bright had been laid aside for a year, Mr. Lefevre discharged its duties very creditably, and there had been no demonstration of popular passion in relation to the department. Nobody as far as we know had been otherwise than full of admiration for the Irish Adminis- tration, except in regard to the fall between the two stools of amnesty and rigour. Yet,—though hardly, we suppose, on this very account,—these are precisely the two departments selected for manipulation, while those as to which everybody was really anxious are ostentatiously left alone. Mr. Glad- stone seems to say, ' The constituents of the Cabinet are too perfect already to borrow from outside ; the only conceivable change is an internal change of the molecular atoms of the Cabinet, and even that will probably seem to the uninitiated --.."•eye a change for the worse. Let the public lay to heart, then, what„t,? merits of that Cabinet must be, the only feasible variation on which, Te—em—s--to a deterioration.' We can only say that this rather vain-earkw praciteal boast of unimprovability may cut two ways. A type may be un- improvable either because it is perfectly adapted for a par- ticular class of functions, or because it is hopelessly unfit for them. You could hardly improve the type of mastiff either as a house dog or for coursing,—for the former purpose because it is so good, for the latter because it is so bad, And so it may be with regard to Mr. Gladstone's Government. It was barely improvable for the purposes of reforming the Govern- ment of Ireland and educating England, because it was so. good ; it may be that it is hardly improvable for the purpose of strengthening the English Army and conducting her foreign relations with becoming sell-respect, because it is so- much the reverse. At all events, it is a step hardly likely to- strengthen the Government with the English people, to pro- claim to the world that the only change which the resignation of Mr. Bright seems to render desirable, is a funny little• shuffle of offices, which leaves the Cabinet what it was before,. but with an appearance of less efficiency.
What we seriously fear most for Mr. Gladstone's Govern- ment is this narrowness of view. There are governments, as there are men, who do not seem to be aware of their own- limitations and defects, who do not seem to realize where their peculiar powers stop. This only happens to men of very considerable but limited powers of mind, men capable of great achievements, and usually men who have verified that, capacity by actually achieving great things. And so it is, too,. with governments, and especially with governments which. have earned great gratitude from the country, and which command a great majority within the House. Their imagina- tion runs on their successes, and does not easily get out of the rut in which it has so long and so triumphantly worked. Lord Palmerston and his Government showed this borne character in 1858, and fell in consequence, and great was the fall thereof. Mr. Gladstone has earned a far better right to the confidence and gratitude of the country than ever Lord. Palmerston had, and we doubt if he is at all liable to those spasms of self-confidence and overbearingness which led to the Parliamentary catastrophe of the Conspiracy Bill. But, on the other hand, he is perhaps even less able to gauge the deficiencies of his Cabinet on sides on which his own political intellect is not usually active. His thoughts run so eagerly on the resources and prospects of peace, that he is unable even to persuade himself to face seriously the alternative of war. We doubt if he can look upon war as anything more than a bare residual possibility of the imagination, which it is, of course, proper to admit and provide for, but to admit and provide for only in the languid way in which one provides against the chance of a fire in one's house, or of dying by a railway collision in the train in which one habitually travels. He can probably hardly even conceive of the efficiency of the Army ever involving the solvency of the Bank of England, to say nothing of a great deal more besides. He never probably even admitted into his imagination that it might become a positive duty for England to interfere on the Continent on behalf of a great nation whose very existence might be threatened. And consequently he looks at the state of mind of a great part of the English people who do perceive the by no means remote possibility of these events, as a sorb of pitiable illusion, which the meeting of the responsible repre- sentatives of the people must dispel, and rather marks his contempt for the craving to see a stronger Ministry of War and a higher spirit in Foreign affairs, than concedes anything to it or tries to satisfy it.
Here we have a sick First Lord of the Admiralty, a Minister at War who is more elated by his alliterative success in repudiating the two p's, "panic and parsi- mony,” than by any progress towards efficiency of which he can boast ; and a prime Minister who has always been known as a passionate devotee of peace ;—and, when the people of England express a wish for more signs of strength, readiness, and determination, the reply is equivalent to a flab refusal to strengthen the Cabinet in this direction. Does not this look like an idle fire in Mr. Gladstone,—like not only a peace ministry at any price, but a peace ministry so resolved on peace that it will not even encourage the belief that if forced into war, it could prosecute war with energy and suc- cess ? Lord Hartington's translation to the Irish Secretaryship, and Mr. Chichester Fortescue's grotesque removal to the Board of Trade, as the answer to the demand for a stronger War administration and a Cabinet of more liberal sympathies in Foreign Affairs, may prove to be an historical event mark- ing the first decadence of one of the greatest administrations which ever presided over English affairs.
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