THE TEMPER OF PARLIAMENT.
THE Session of 1868 runs some risk of being called in future the Session of Short Temper. The days on which there has been no pertness and no truculence in the House of Com- mons, the pertness and the truculence have broken out in the House of Lords. This has been the session wherein Mr. Bright has told Mr. Disraeli that he is pompous and ser- vile, and in which Mr. Disraeli has retorted that Mr. Bright was no gentleman ; in which Mr. Disraeli has charged his opponents with making the name of England one of " sus- picion and distrust in every Court in Europe," and they have replied that the imputation was made "after dinner," i. e., in a condition of mind not wholly responsible ; in which Mr. Grant Duff has pointed out that the one Frenchman who thought Mr. Disraeli a demi-god immediately went mad, and Mr. Dis- meli hinted in reply that Mr. Grant Duff would do better not to make " an exhibition " of himself ; in which Lord Russell has taunted the new Government with openly avowing that it professes one thing and means another, and Mr. Disraeli rejoined that the Lords were forgetting their good manners ; in which Colonel Stuart Knox has made a violent and blundering charge against Mr. Gladstone, and Mr. Gladstone has made an inaccurate onslaught on Mr. Rearden, and the -Prime Minister has been rebuked night after night by his own supporters for not resigning, and the Queen has been dragged into the scuffle by the Prime Minister and the presiding genius " of the Government. The latest scenes of this Donnybrook Session have been those in which Lord Malmes- bury has twice inveighed against the Whig Lords for leaving the House, and the Whig Lords have inveighed against Lord Malmesbury for breaking faith ; in which Lord Cairns and Lord Derby have, as if by consent, brought up bitter and ungrounded accusations against Lord Carnarvon,—Lord Derby .replying when positively corrected that he must have been deaf if they were not true, and Lord Cairns replying that though his charges were in some slight degree untrue, they needed no apology. In a single word, the Session has been one in which honourable members and noble lords have been so " cross,"— there is no other word for it,—that even guerilla chiefs have had to mediate, Mr. Bernal Osborne having volunteered for the soft and soothing office on one occasion, and the Marquis of Salisbury having twice experienced the sweet rewards of that 'beatitude wherein peacemakers are blessed.
How shall we account for this remarkable moral condition of both Houses? The Times feebly ascribes it to the hot weather ; but the hot weather had not begun in March, and the vituperation had ; besides, we cannot see that private tempers are perceptibly impaired. Somebody has suggested that it is only the bad temper well known to appertain to invalids dur- ing convalescence, the Reform process constituting the convales- cence. But even as a metaphor this would not be applicable to the House of Lords, which is not under repairs, unless, indeed, it be convalescent in the sense in which bedridden persons who are sinking into their last rest are sometimes, by a figure of tender sympathy, termed convalescents. The truth we suspect to be that this ingrained " crossness " in both Houses this session is due to a total loss of self-respect. Nothing makes a man so disposed to be wrathful about trifles as the feeling that he has forfeited his own good opinion. Every one has heard that old story out of Tom Moore's life about the man who, after losing a great sum in gambling, found another tying his shoe on the top of the stairs outside, and with the remark, "Damn you, you're always tying your shoe 1" kicked him down to the bottom. Well, it seems to us that all this wrath, both in the Commons and Lords, is due to this same disposition in both Houses. The provocation, in this case as in the other, is only, perhaps, that some politician is performing an office as ordinary as tying his shoe ; but the mind of both Houses being already overcharged with a discon- tent and disgust which are eagerly pressing for an outlet, such operations are made the excuse for an outburst of latent heat .such as has disfigured almost every debate in the Session. What the ground of this want of self-respect has been is obvious enough. Government by a minority is in itself a ,process which tends to destroy self-respect, for government by minority can never mean anything but government by the .sacrifice of your own party's convictions to meet the convic- tions of your opponents, and no mode of buying support is more injurious to self-respect than this. And this, we need not say, applies even more to the House of Lords than to the House of Commons; for in the Lords the majority have to sacri- fice their convictions in order to meet the views of the majority of the Lower House, and it was in the very uncomfortable process of accomplishing this the other day that the noble Lords on both sides lost temper,—the Liberal minority being determined to make the majority feel the yoke of the Lower House on their necks, and the Conservative majority fretting and fuming under the humiliation. But Government by a minority is not the sole, perhaps not even the principal, cause of that accumulation of moral electricity in both Houses of Parliament which has resulted in so many thunderstorms. This Session has been marked by the accession of Mr. Disraeli to power as Prime Minister, and no one can pretend to doubt that this event, though it was the natural and proper sequel of the Conservative strategy of the last two years, which was purely Mr. Disraeli's personal strategy, has produced a very marked nervous tension in both parties in both Houses,—the sort of nervous tension which people always feel when they do that for which they are sure to be blamed,—for which, indeed, they are more or less sure to blame themselves. The Conservatives have deeply felt the distrust which everybody expresses of Mr. Disraeli ; deeply felt the suspicion to which all his colleagues were exposed by following his lead ; deeply felt the credence given by the country to the charge that he had been playing a double part both on Reform and on the Irish Church, deeply felt the charlatanerie of his clever mani- festoes, most deeply of all felt the absolute indispensableness of their leader and their own impotence without him. On the other hand, the Liberals have been still more bitter at the yoke they have voluntarily fastened upon their own necks in putting the minority into office, and have reared, kicked, plunged, in the hope of getting rid of it, but only to find anew on each attempt that in entrusting Mr. Disraeli with the work of Reform, and even insisting that it should be completely done, they have given him an excuse for delay, nay, a power of insist- ing on delay, which is more fretting than they could have con- ceived. There is the leader of the House of Commons and the real head of the English State doing political comedy night after night, with a face hardly serious, and not a little con- tempt in it for those whom he takes so little pains to deceive, practising openly all the " dodges " of his own political novels, dating party letters " Maundy Thursday " to please High Churchmen ; speaking of the " awful dispensation " which has made it the first duty of the new constituences to decide whether they shall " sustain or subvert " the ancient Constitution of the country, to please dry Church-and-State men; and even threatening confederacies between the Roman Catholics and the Ritualists, which were said to be likely " dan- gerously to touch the tenure of the Throne," to please Low Churchmen. This is not a condition of things pleasant to honest, steady-going politicians of any school ; but when these honest, steady-going Liberals feel that they ought to have, and in any ordinary times would have, the power to shake off the political charlatan who is making the House and country ridiculous, it is natural that they should shake themselves with something of that vehement and irritated vibration with which a dog attempts to shake a flea out of its ear. The Conservatives, who, as Mr. Hardy says, " long " for some end to their period of humiliating ascendancy, and the Liberals, who are bitterly ashamed of themselves that they ever sup- plied the opportunity for their own still more humiliating humiliation, are alike in a state of almost hypochondriac irri- tability, and yet alike helpless to do anything effectual. Hence they snap and bully and chafe with the most feverish pertinacity, and only teach the country by their conduct in doing so, how false a step they have made by putting the country under the government of a minority, and that minority under the control of a charlatan.
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