TOPICS OF THE DAY.
MR. GLADSTONE AND THE TWO LIBERALISMS.
MR. GLADSTONE, in his speeches at Birmingham, has very naturally devoted the greater part of his magnificent energy to the Liberal Unionists, while doing all in his power to persuade his own party that the Liberal Unionists are hardly worth taking into account at all as a separate party in the country, so rapidly are they dwindling, as he interprets the signs of the times, and so completely are they merging themselves, as he understands the matter, in the solid Tory Party. But in spite of the extreme insignificance to which, in Mr. Gladstone's opinion, the Liberal Unionists are in process of rapid reduction, his mind evidently dwells upon them with an almost morbid fascination. And no doubt he is painfully conscious of the responsibility of having initiated the policy which drove that most loyal section of his followers into revolt. He showed the same sensitive sense of personal responsibility in what he said of his own resolve to devote his unrivalled influence in the country to the cause for which he is fighting so gallantly, as long as he has the health and vigour to head the fight. Though he tells us that the country has adopted the principle of his Irish policy with so hearty and disinterested an enthusiasm that the cause is now quite independent of his own authority as a leader, he betrays an anxiety on the subject that he could hardly feel if he were not more or less aware of how much his personal authority still weighs in this matter, and how difficult it might be to find any equivalent for the passionate confidence which the Liberal electors feel in his judgment, if once he had disappeared from his place. We entirely agree with Mr. Gladstone that he does owe it to the majority of the party in which he has caused so serious a schism, to do all in his power to encourage them while his health and energy hold out, and that it would be a very serious, if it were not a fatal blow, to the success of his Irish policy, if that health and vigour did not hold out to the next General Election. But we are quite unable to agree with him that the Liberal Unionists are mere Tories, only because they have the sense and wisdom to support steadily a Government which will make no terms with the legislative and administrative decomposition of the United Kingdom, even though that support involves a little longer delay in the equalisation of the burdens on personal and real property, and,—still more shocking thought,—a postponement of "Local Option" to an indefinite future.
The truth is, that Mr. Gladstone's whole political genius fitted him to lead. a moderate Reform party, like the Peelites of old days or the Liberal Unionists of to-day, and that had not his extraordinary vivacity and eloquence as an orator,—almost unfortunately, we think,--carried him into the mid-stream of restless popular agitation, he might have done the country the very great service of at once bringing the educated classes into sympathy with the people, and bringing the people into that temperate and docile mood in which they answer gladly to the lead of statesmen of whose popular sympathies, absolute sincerity, and. equitable feeling they are as deeply convinced as they always have been of his own. Mr. Gladstone was the very man to keep the Liberal Party to its highest function, that of purging away every vestige of selfish class-privilege, while it nevertheless enforces on the great popular electorates of this country the frightful danger of interpreting and enforcing popular rights in any spirit which would involve a sudden paralysis of the national will at a critical moment, by suggesting to self-occupied sections of the people that they have but to make themselves unpleasant enough, and for a sufficiently long time, to the central Legislature, in order to ensure gaining their ends. There was a time, and that not so long ago, when Mr. Gladstone was accus- tomed to declare that he preferred relatively incomplete reforms to any abrupt and harsh ignoring of the past, when he contended, for instance, against disfranchising the free- holders as freeholders, even though they might have other votes elsewhere as occupiers, and when in great measure by his own personal influence he persuaded the House of Com- mons to accept a compromise which, though little more than three years have since passed, he spent a good part of one of his speeches at Birmingham in vehemently denouncing, proposing to abolish it in favour of the more logical principle, "One man, one vote." It is evident that, quite apart from the Irish Question, Mr. Gladstone has to a con- siderable extent changed his attitude of mind since he alienated the Liberal Unionists by his Irish policy. He now turns his back on the moderate Peelite temper of which formerly he was not a little proud ; he treats the proprietary votes for which in 1885 he apologised,— somewhat, we confess, at that time, to our own dismay, —as if they were altogether inequitable and ought not to count at all ; and he appears to be contemplating a proposal to pay salaries at least to the artisan Members of Parliament, an obvious impossibility unless he pays the Members all round, a policy to which at one time he was, we believe, strongly, and certainly very justly, opposed. Necessity is making him acquainted with strange bedfellows. He declares that he is almost always in favour of decentralisation, and appears to forget that anarchy itself is nothing but decentralisation carried to the very furthest point,—where no individual chooses to recognise the authority of any other individual,—and that he comes within what he has happily termed "measurable distance" of such a point, when he excuses Members of the Legislature for advising disobedience to the law,—and that, too, not an arbitrary and tyrannical law which has been passed without the slightest recognition of popular suffering, but the most popular agrarian law to be found in Europe, and. one of the extreme mercifulness of which he is himself in great measure the author.
But the truth is, that Mr. Gladstone since 1885 has grown impatient of that mild and patient Liberalism represented by his great master, the late Sir Robert Peel, the Liberalism which adapts the old to the new with the utmost anxiety to prevent the transition from being rude and dangerous. He has become enamoured of that new Liberalism which is always ready to call upon the people to rise in their might and strike down institutions that do not in every way answer to the people's mind, and in the meantime to regard as patriots the men of passion who defy what they cannot reform. He has fallen in love with the practice of giving Ireland a new Parliament, and at the same time running down the authority of our existing Parliament at Westminster, and that, too, even in matters so momentous that they amount to a breach with history and the sudden acceptance of mob-rule. The new Liberalism, which Mr. Gladstone is so wroth with the Liberal Unionists for rejecting, is a Liberalism of which he never showed a trace himself till within the last three years, a Liberalism that scoffs at enforcing obedience to unpopular law as if it were the most tyrannical of policies, and that drowns the authority of Parliament in the roar of the people. To such appeals as these, the Liberal Unionists may well reply that they are not in favour of surrendering without terms to an Irish Party which will not even obey its own leader when he happens to be a little more prudent than his colleagues, and which, being thus in virtual rebel- lion against its leader on the policy of the "Plan of Cam- paign," proposes to force a new Constitution upon the British Empire, on a basis which would render either civil war or separation certain within a few years, for if we did not adapt ourselves to Nationalist views of Irish independ- ence, it would be hardly likely that the Parnellites would meekly submit to a foe after they had successfully defied. their own chosen and much-belauded chief. The Liberal Unionists may well say that when they have to choose between such fatal rashness and blindness as this, and co-operating with a Conservative Party which has been completely renovated by household suffrage, and which is a great deal more Liberal than any Liberal Party that existed before 1885, they follow Mr. Gladstone's earlier and happier example in repudiating the great leap in the dark which he dictates, and in holding by counsels which can only be called Conservative at all by contrast with the bewildering rashness of his own three years' fanaticism. Counsels which are half suggested by Mr. Parnell and half by Mr. Conybeare, are hardly recognisable as the counsels of that large-minded and cultivated statesman whom we once knew as Mr. Gladstone.
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