LORD ROSEBERY'S FIASCO.
SO far as we have any means of judging, Lord Rosebery's appeal to the country to give a long pull, a strong pull, and a pull altogether against the House of Lords, has fallen dead. He was quite explicit enough on the difficulty of making the grave constitutional change for which he desired to excite public enthusiasm. He did not conceal that it could only be carried by a weighty and impressive expression of the popular will,—such an expression of it, let us say, as Mr. Gladstone excited in 1876-77 against any further attempt to back up the Turks in terrorising and torturing the population of the Balkans, or again in 1884 in favour of including the agricultural labourer in the right to the suffrage. Enthusiasm short of that of which Mr. Gladstone then invited and received visible and tangible evidence, could do nothing to shake the House of Lords. The people, however, heard Lord Rosebery and made no sign. Not a whisper arose, not a leaf in the great forest of public opinion stirred or trembled. Nor -do we feel the least surprise. Lord Rosebery was clever enyugh ; but there was not a breath of passion in him. The note of genuine indignation and vehement resolve was quite wanting. Nobody felt that he himself was deeply moved. Nobody knew what he wanted. Nobody caught the fever of impatience. Nobody showed signs of those restless throes in which popular conviction usually forms itself. And it was pretty clear why no political germination began, for it had not begun even in Lord Rosebery himself. Nothing was more obvious than that he had not even made up his own mind. He was for a Second Chamber, he said ; 'but he had not so much as a vague idea what sort of function he wished it to fulfil, or where it was to get its authority. One thing was very clear. He did not want to have it a strong Chamber, and did not like to say that he wanted a very weak one ; nay, he did intimate that he had rather wavered between one and none, though he shrank from having none. Now, that is exactly the sort of indecision in the leader which insures apathy in the people. If he does not know what be would be at, how are they to know ? They need distinct conceptions to stir them at all, and not only distinct conceptions, but an eager desire for the prompt realisation of those conceptions. If you complain of the House of Lords for resisting the will of the people, you must wake every one feel that the people are fretting under what they have done, and Lord Rosebery did not make anybody feel that he was so fretting. And not only so, you must make every one feel that he would be happier and more politically alive if he either got rid of the House of Lords altogether, or at least got something in its place which would check the House of Commons when it was wrong, and support it -.den it was right. Neith( r of those states of mind were produced at all by Lord Ro4ebery's speech. He was afraid to say the House of Commons could never do wrong, r nd still more afraid to say that it had recently done flagrant rong. Yet almost all his hearers and readers were brimful of the conviction that it had done something both absurd and disastrous when it deliberately tried to give the Irish Members a double influence over public affairs, which no other class of Members it to possess. Well, then, what - kind of a House is t which would firmly veto that preposterous proposal for exaggerating the political in- equalities of the day by deliberately increasing the power of the most arrogant of the existing political parties, and would yet give effect to that part of the House of Commons' intentions which are not preposterous and are just ? To get a Second Chamber at once firm and weak is not an easy problem. Lord Rosebery said plainly enough that he wanted it weak, but he made no effort at all to show how he could get it weak, and yet insure its being wise and firm. His followers felt the difficulty profoundly, and the impression produced ia many of their minds evi- dently was that they had better keep the House which had at least prevented a most scandalous injustice, until they had invented one which would have certainly done the same without doing too much. Not even the Home-rulers themselves were satisfied with the proposals made by the Government in 1893. There is reason to think that many of them really counted on the House of Lords to save them from the consequences of their own monstrous blunder. And you might as well expect a man who had been saved from drowning by a life-buoy to inveigh against that useful expedient for keeping his head out of the water, as expect a politician who had been rescued from an i Irish tyranny n English affairs by the House of Lords, to suppress at once and without hesitation the very efficient political Humane Society by which he bad been delivered from that impending fate. It will take a good deal of the process called "filling up the oup " to make English politicians indifferent to the fate from which they have been rescued, and to the Assembly which effected that rescue.
This is the reason why Lord Rosebery has so con- spicuously failed in exciting public opinion against the House of Lords. One might almost as well have tried to excite public opinion against the Lacedasmonians who held the pass of Thermopyhe till the Greek preparations for resisting the Persian invasion were completed. The constituencies are sick of the Irish invasion, and look upon the only bulwark against it with a quite exceptional favour and gratitude. They are not at all unconscious of the defects of the House of Lords, but they are still more conscious of the danger from which the House of Lords, and the House of Lords alone, saved them. If it is well to be off with the old love before you are on with the new, it is also well to hold fast by the old love until you are quite sure that you can be on with a new. Now Lord Rosebery has failed to introduce us to any new love which is at all likely to discharge the function•which the House of Lords has discharged so well. If he gets what he asks for, a very weak Second Chamber, how can the people rely on this function being discharged at all ? Lord Rosebery asks for a long pull, a strong pull, and a pull altogether, and yet he holds out no hope that if he gets it, he will not remove an obstacle, and a very effective obstacle, in the way of a very, dangerous kind of caprice at the same time that he also removes an obstacle in the way of a few possibly beneficent changes for which no one is very impatient. That is not a pro- spect to awaken enthusiasm. We look for safety first and pleasure afterwards. If you ask for a weak flood-gate instead of a strong one, you will necessarily excite more fears than you can hope to remove. That is what Lord Rose- bery has done, and by doing so he has given the measure of his own political character as a statesman, and shown that he is adroit in recommending what he only half believes in himself, and is quite unable to feign any effectual zeal for. What he never felt, he naturally failed to inspire. He succeeded to admiration in showing how difficult a task he has undertaken, but he did not succeed in convincing even himself that he was wise in under- taking it. Indeed, be rather inspires the opposite con- viction, that he was not wise, that he was not even very willing to undertake it, though he had at last made up his mind to rush at it as a forlorn hope rushes on a. mighty fortress. When a man deliberately proposes to pull down a security which has at least proved effectual, and to substitute one avowedly and even ostentatiously weak, against a partisan rashness that has just been dis- played, and is still glaring in every one's eyes, he cannot hope to be very persuasive when he calls for a long pull, a. strong pull, and a pull altogether.
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