TOPICS OF THE DAY.
PARLIAMENTARY ANARCHY AND MR. GLADSTONE. IT is the peculiar misfortune of the later history of England that the majority and the intellect of Parliament stand in most un- sympathizing relations with each other. Political chiefs have lately looked to numbers and influences as the sole sources of strength. And the thinkers and orators of the House have either been left, or, from the over-cultivation of peculiar forms of thought, have wilfully thrust themselves into positions, where their intellectual brilliancy becomes a mockery of the real needs of public life, and a snare to those who unwarily trust them. Perhaps there is no more difficult problem in the whole range of moral or speculative inquiry than to adjust aright the relations between free thought and senatorial or official duty : between the action of the statesman, moulded and tempered as it should be by the thousand and one iron facts which current history is perpetually disclosing, and the speculation -which belongs to the unfettered soul and, the fixed conscience. There are men to whom this problem appears to be absolutely insoluble. And indeed to mere thinkers it is so. For it can only be ade- quately dealt with by the practical strong will of the men born to exercise rule and govern their kind. To those with whom the speculative faculties are over-developed, practical public life will always be a scene in whelk the judgment and conscience appear forced to oscillate between impossible ideals of right, and un- fathomable abysses of baseness. Such men are the Hamlets of politics. They feel a peculiar vocation to redress wrong, and set the world right. But their hands are paralyzed by their morbid brains. Their thoughts take the form of a communing with spectres, their practical methods partake of the unsteady scene- shifting of the stage : and in all their efforts there is passionate incoherence, trouble, mortification, and failure. Mr. Gladstone is the most signal example, which the present time affords, of the man of speculation and scholarship misplaced and lost in the labyrinth of practical politics. He is one of the most interesting persons on the political stage. But if it is im- possible to observe his course without interest, it is equally diffi- cult not to feel anxiety lest a career in which the highest intel- lectual power appears so little governed by the instinct of practi- cal wisdom, should eventuate in a catastrophe. In the full vigour and zenith of his splendid faculties he finds himself the chief orator and the weakest man in the House of Commons ; and his accusing conscience readily- appropriates to himself the chance phrase of "rhetorician of the hour," which has fallen from the lips of the Tory leader, of whom it seems doubtful whether he is, as of old, the mortal foe' or merely the party rival. It is the re- ductio ad absurdum of Mr. Gladstone's besetting infirmities that men ask one another whether he is now the friend or the enemy of Mr. Disraeli. Five years since, Mr. Gladstone became the master-spirit of a coalition Government, whose leaders rushed into a precipitate alliance because the common sentiment of hatred to that gentleman, of whom Mr. Gladstone had constituted him- self the Parliamentary executioner in a speech never to be for- gotten, overpowered their sense of mutual repulsion. But time has passed, and now a newer and stronger hatred impels Mr. Gladstone in the direction of Mr. Disraeli and his party. The sensitive conscience and the unpractical intellect, have brought so great a man to the lamentable result, that his action appears to many to represent the net balance of his antipathies alone.
i It s not too much to say that the presence in Parliament of a man at once endowed with such greatness and such weakness, at this very peculiar stage of party transition and reconstruction, is a misfortune to the state. It is the characteristic of the time that Parliament is literally resolving itself into its elements under the just discontent of the majority with its chiefs. Prescriptive rights of leadership as represented by old names and houses, are becoming obsolete. The men who have hitherto been foremost in this party of progress, were selected for that preeminence less from intrinsic intellectual powers, than from the just and instinctive gratitude of the nation for the representatives of great families, who were faithful to the cause of reform, when to be so was almost to for- feit their own position with the aristocracy and the crown. They were liberals in spite of being aristocrats. And it will never be
the worse for generous- England that the Liberal party has clung to them for those "immortal services " in spite of much mortification and disgust. But that era is passing away : and its representatives are well nigh, in the most literal sense, functi offi- ens. Just at this moment, when Parliament and country are slip- ping from their old moorings, when the leadership of prescription is passing away, Mr. Gladstone's splendid incapacity unhappily comes to make men sceptical and distrustful of the very power of talent. For they see it in him unsurpassed alike in brilliancy and in unfruitfulness. And they feel that at this time, when practical guidance would be the greatest of blessings, Mr. Glad- stone's proceedings, both past and present, constitute one of the worst sources of perplexity and confusion.
Indeed it is almost impossible to discover from the conduct and speeches of Mr. Gladstone what are his actual views and, purposes for the future. One thing alone appears to be made manifest be- yond dispute, that it is not his hand which is destined to reor- ganize, not his will to direct, not his wisdom to guide the strong party of progress out of which the materials for the government of this country will have to be chosen. For sharing in that task he is rapidly 0 disqualifying himself. It is distressing in the ex-
treme to see one who, by the nobility of his nature and his own career, is called to a high place in the ranks of those who sin- cerely represent all that is growth and vitality in the body poli- tic, giving a sort of countenance to that base policy of simulated liberalism which has been adopted by the Government of Lord Derby. Can it be possible that Mr. Gladstone's great intellect has become the prey of that shallow sophism which is Mr. Dis- raeli's peculiar and unenviable property, and which seeks to re- present the Tory party as the real party of liberal and progressive reform ? There is much in Mr. Gladstone's later course to sug- gest some suds confusion of ideas. His political sympathies seem to hover in hopeless inconsistency4 between the lawful love for righteous national action, for good government, for freedom, for commercial and social reform, and an adulterous hankering after a strong unassailable executive in the old obstructive Tory sense. He protests against unfair dealing with the popular voice in the Danubian Principalities. But when the House of Commons rises to demand more honour for a Havelock, he rebukes it with the miserable doctrine that the Executive should be left free, and even uncriticized, in the distribution of honours. He desires un- corrupt administration and efficiency in departments, yet he lends the sanction of his vote to the opposition to Mr. Monsell's motion on competitive appointments to Artillery and Engineers. In the case of the Principalities, he enters an eloquent and in- dignant protest against the supereession of Parliement by diplo- macy. But on Mr. Wise's motion, which directly points in a practically effective manner to the reversal of this unnatural order of things, and to the assertion of a rightful influence over the course of foreign affairs for the House, Mr. Gladstone has neither speech nor vote. Every stage of his career, if closely scrutinized, would exhibit the traces of this unhappy incoherence, which is making him a mere Bedouin of the House : a noble being, full of spirit and power, but untameable for the ordinary developments of civil life.
It is not surprising that such a position of isolation, little dis- tinguishable, as it must be, either to his own tender conscience, or the general common sense of men, from one of egotisin, should tell heavily upon the intellectual calm and the conseience of a man who, after all, is sincerely desirous of the right. For it is with men as with nations. There is an uneasiness in isolation which renders it scarcely possible to maintain that attitude long. But both for men and nations alike there is no misfortune greater than that of allowing temporary disgusts to be the motive for alliance with those who are, in the most radical sense, at variance with all that is best and truest in them. Mr. Gladstone's leaning to the Tories is not unlike England's late leaning to Austria. The absence of all fundamental sympathy must needs cause mischief in both cases. For Mr. Gladstone is far too great a man to find his political or personal peace in the company of Lord .Derby and Mr. Disraeli ; but that he should make it ap- pear possible by his attitude that he might think of doing so, is an almost decisive proof that he is not great enough to be the pilot of Parliament through the rocks and shal- lows of its present navigation, into the fair open sea of legisla- tion and government which it is destined ere long to reach, unless it go utterly to pieces. The time for his decision will not he long now. Those who have utterly failed to be guides and helps to Parliament now, at this moment of reconstitution, will scarcely re- cover the ground they might have occupied. It will be 1.0 proud reflection to Mr. Gladstone hereafter should it turn out that, if he had given to the great pressing necessities and duties of the Eng- lishman and the statesman, that anxious, deliberative, sympa- thizing, scrutiny which he has applied to the old heroic days of Grecian story, there were words he might have spoken, and deeds he might have done for England, compared with which the highest achievements of scholarship are but trifles, lie has told the world, at the close of the noble book he has lately published, that the study of Homer invigorates for action and duty. Let him prove it by tempering his over-scholastic subtlety with same- thing of that Homeric strength of simplicity which has hitherto been so strikingly wanting to his nature and his work.
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