TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE NOBLER LIBER A T,TSM.
AN anonymous pamphlet has been sent us, written by a member of the Reform Club, and printed by Mayo, Dean Street, Fetter Lane, though without any publisher's name, which we should earnestly desire, if with any show of reason we could do so, to regard as a sign of the times. It is by a Home-ruler, so far as regards Ireland at least, for he states that he honours his great leader for his Irish policy, which he believes to be both just and right, though he declares his conviction that Mr. Gladstone's appeal to the masses against the classes was as fatal an appeal as was ever uttered by an English statesman. " I had rather," he says, " have heard of his death than that words so hateful and so utterly hurtful to English constitutional government and to English life, should have been uttered by him." The writer holds that the theory of reducing representatives to something like delegates of the majority, is to the last degree injurious to English political morality, and asserts that " the excellence of government in a democratic, as in any other form of State, is exactly commensurate with the degree of completeness with which it is, in its conception and action, handed over to the Wise amongst us ; that is to say, to the best men, the real aristocracy, not of birth, or wealth, or chance, but of capacity, of honour, of love, whether they be drawn from the Peer's palace or the peasant's cottage." Though a member of the Liberal Party, he declares that he disapproves of " half the measures scheduled in the miscalled Liberal programme," amongst which are to be especially reckoned. the secularisation of Church property ; the enthusiasm for widening still further the extension of the franchise before the millions of electors whom we already have, have gained any political experience, much less any political wisdom.; the rash proposal to interfere by statute with the liberty of working men to determine at their own discretion the length of their own working day ; and most of all, the habit of requiring party candidates to commit themselves to all the articles of a long-winded party programme before they can be accepted as the candidates of the party. The secularisation of Church property he regards as a deliberate throwing away of the highest political ideals ; the haste to adopt abstract principles of popular right, like " One man, one vote," before the existing electorates have learned their duty, he treats as complicating fearfully the main problem of politics, to select the wisest and justest rulers,—since such reform measures imply, first, a great extension of the number of raw politicians who do not know what to aim at, and next, a lowering of the capacity of the average elector to select wise and independent repre- sentatives. The legislative interference with hours of labour he considers to be of a tendency to weaken the sense of individual responsibility, and to paralyse men's practical judgment ; and the caucus system he holds to be a tyranny which takes all the freedom and elasticity out of political life. His main desire is to set the Parliamentary representative free from the dictation of the electors as regards all but the general principles of his political career, and to teach the democracy that it is their duty to find the best men, but then to leave it to them to discover the best policy for themselves. We could, indeed, heartily accept in this journal every principle he lays down except the duty of giving in to the Irish in relation to their demand to be set free from the restraints of the rest of the United Kingdom ; but even on this great subject, he so qualifies his doctrine as to leave a common ground on which it might be discussed fairly between us, for he insists that no section of a nation shall ignore the good of the whole in contending for the aggrandisement of a part ; and he bitterly reproaches the Gladstonian leaders for palliating and excusing Irish outrages, when by their frank and hearty condemnation of them, they might, he thinks, have practically put an end to that disgraceful method of waging political war. This is the attitude by which Mr. Lacaita distinguished himself a few years ago, when he resigned his seat for Dundee because his constituents would not bear him out in repudiating Mr. Gladstone's apologies for the boycotters and campaigners of the Home- rule Party. If Liberals of the type of Mr. Rolleston in Ireland, of Mr. Lacaita in Scotland, and of this anonymous writer of the Reform Club in England, had but abounded during the last few years, instead of having been fewer than it would take the fingers of one hand to check off, we should not now be so hopelessly estranged from the Gladstonian Party that it would. seem as if even Liberal Unionists wei e cut off from them by an impassable gulf of principle, instead of by a single important divergency in political judgmen". But, unfortunately, as we have already intimated, we fear that we cannot regard the appearance of this pamphlet as a sign of the times. The very wonder with which the tone of this " appeal " on " British Politics " fills us, alone betrays its utterly exceptional character. It is like thunder in a clear sky, like mutiny among the Janissaries, like one of Livy's prodigies, bos imam est. During the last six years, six years of the most momentous split which has ever divided the Liberal Party, the number of those who, adhering to the policy of Home-rule for Ireland, have yet ventured to repudiate publicly any single item of the great leader's complicated programme, might be counted without passing into two figures. The only competition has seemed to be, not in the direction of greater freedom, but in the direction of greater enthusiasm for constraint. Mr. Gladstone himself has agreed to make Home-rule in Ireland far more trenchant than in 1886 he had proposed, both as regards the power of the Irish Legis- lature over the Land question, and as regards its power over the police ; while all serious reference to safeguards against the tyranny of the majority in Ulster has dropped out of sight. Sir George Trevelyan has begged to have the suffrage screw turned a great deal tighter, and the Disestablishment screw pressed as far as it will go. The offer to leaseholders to set them free by statute from their contracts with their landlords, and not only to set them free, but to compel the landlords to give up the advantages which they had secured under those contracts, has been renewed until it promises to be one of the great features in the policy of the next Gladstonian Government. On all sides we have heard of demands for enlarging and pres- sing more dictatorially the number of selfish inducements by which the Home-rule policy is to be backed up and made more attractive to hesitating Liberals ; while protests such as Mr. Rolleston's, or Mr. Lacaita's dealings with his constituents at Dundee, or the pamphlet we are considering, have been so rare, that they fill the political world with as much astonishment as an earthquake, or the reawakening of an extinct volcano. 'Yet it would be im- possible to overestimate the good effect of a little more independence of thought amongst the Gladstonians, who are now furnished with a most effective tail for propa- gating the revolutionary doctrines of the party, but are utterly deprived of any moderating element tending to retard. and repress this morbid activity. If there were a respectable right wing to the party, the position of political affairs would be far more encouraging. Then we might reasonably hope that even if Mr. Gladstone won the General Election, we should be able, with the help of his right wing, to insist on checks so effective, that Irish Home-rule would. become nothing more than a temporary experiment, tried under the most elaborate precautions, and made terminable at any moment when clear evidence had been obtained that it was leading to oppression on the one hand, or to political confusion and chaos on the other. The danger of the present situation is, that all the irreconcilables are to be bribed. to insist on a revolutionary policy in Ireland by promises that if they do, they shall have their own pet revolution afterwards, whether it be the secularisation of all Church property, or the confiscation of ground-rents, or the disintegration of the United Kingdom, or a sanction for terrorism so long as it is the terrorism of the poor over the rich, and not the terrorism of the rich over the poor. It is this tendency of Home-rule to bring a number of other subsidiary revolu- tions in its train, which is to us its most alarming feature. It seems to threaten a sort of universal political chaos, in which anything like independence of political judgment is to be not only submerged, but threatened with penal con- sequences. We cannot express adequately our anxiety to see a real revival of such manly political independence as appears in the pamphlet called " British Politics ; an Appeal."
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