MR. CHAMBERLAIN AND LORD ROSEBERY.
WHEN one compares Mr. Chamberlain's speech on Tuesday to the Liberal Unionists of Birmingham, with the attack of Lord Rosebery to which it was a reply, and the rejoinder of Lord Rosebery at Sutton on Thursday, it is easy to understand the reason why the former has gained such an influence at Birmingham, that he, and he alone, has been able to keep a great and thoroughly Radical city impervious to the spell of Mr. Gladstone's fascination. Lord Rosebery is a very clever and witty orator, though we regret to notice that he is becoming what he has never hitherto been, decidedly bitter. There is no one, except Mr. Gladstone, who has a greater influence over the mind of the Scotch people than Lord Rosebery. He has the Attic vivacity of a very keen intellect, with a fair share of the popu- lar genius for broad effects. His taunt that those who predict and excuse the Ulster disposition to kindle the anti- Papal passions of the British people are doing the evil work of Lord George Gordon over again, was one of the most daring and also one of the most telling hits in the Glad- stonian oratory of this last campaign,—and the only one to which Mr. Chamberlain either forgot or, for some better reason, thought it undesirable to reply. And the sting with which he enforced the taunt,—that the difference between the Duke of Argyll who had tried to set the prairie on fire, and Lord George Gordon who in the last century succeeded in setting it on fire, was simply this, that Lord George had followers, while the Duke of Argyll has none,—was just the kind of irritating and rankling sting over the delivery of which a great audience gloats. We rather wonder that Mr. Chamberlain did not reply to that sarcasm, that there was another and a greater difference between the Duke of Argyll and Lord George Gordon ,—namely, that Lord George egged on his mob to a direct attack on the London Papists, while the Duke of Argyll did his best to anticipate and prevent a stroke of policy which might even now render the Belfast No-Popery riots of 1893 more dangerous than the London No-Popery riots of 1780. But in spite of this skilful democratic (should we not more truly call it dema- gogic ?) unfairness of Lord Rosebery's, there is no com- parison possible between Mr. Chamberlain's Birmingham speech and that which provoked it and that which followed it, in point of force, frankness, and popular effect. Mr. Chamberlain took his audience into his confidence, made them feel that he took them into his confidence, till they must have realised with a cogency that nothing could surpass, all the reasons that had justified the steady sup- port given by a hearty Radical to a nominally Conservative Government. He began by noticing Lord Rosebery's own hesitation and vacillation when the Home-rule crisis was sprung upon him, his tepid support of Mr. Gladstone, and the very significant preference which he evinced for treating the subject of Colonial Federation rather than the subject of the relaxation of the Irish Union,—though why he termed this a desire "to visit the Colonies" we do not know. It was the one error by the exposure of which Lord Rosebery scored something in his rejoinder at Sutton. But Mr. Chamberlain exposed most effectively Lord Rosebery's unfair use of the prejudices against the name of Conservative, when all the policy which the Liberal Unionists had actually supported, had been, not Tory, but so Liberal that it had achieved year after year what Mr. Gladstone had again and again expressed his eager wish to do, but somehow had never succeeded in doing. He asked which was worse, to be tied to the coat-tails of such a very much misnamed" Tory " Administration as that which established County Councils, passed the Allotments Act, the Small Holdings Bill, and Free Education ; or to be tied to the "nether garments" of Mr. William O'Brien, and to be committed to the palliation, if not the approval, of an Irish policy of violence and fraud like boycotting and the "Plan of Campaign." He dealt with the special reproaches brought by Lord Rosebery against the Liberal Unionists, that they had not supported "One man, one vote," and had not voted for the use of compulsion in the Small Holdings Bill. As to" One man, one vote," he said that all Radicals would support it if it were coupled with the removal of much greater anomalies of precisely the same kind as the so-called plural vote,—for example, the monstrous anomaly of allowing an elector of Kilkenny, Galway, or Newry, to exercise six times the electoral power of a Birmingham artisan. But if we were to meddle again with a franchise law of which Mr. Gladstone had himself deliberately declined to remove the remaining anomalies six years ago, it would be unworthy to meddle with it only to remove a little blot of which the Gladstonians complain, without touching at all the much more conspicu- ous and more offensive blot of which the Unionists complain. As to the principle of compulsion in the Small Holdings Bill, it was simply a question between getting nine-tenths of a loaf, or getting no bread at all. The Conservatives offered what was in any case a very great instalment of justice, and what might turn out to be full justice, if the measure worked out as the Government hoped it would work out. Where was the sense or propriety of attempting to force an amendment which would have wrecked the Bill, with no result except that of deferring the boon desired for an indefinite period ? Mr. Gladstone had himself set the example, in his 1885 Reform Bill, of deliberately refusing to ask for too much, in order that he might carry what he could carry with tolerable ease, and without exciting those bitter- nesses which sometimes more than neutralise the beneficial effect of a popular measure. Why are the Liberal Unionists to be condemned for following his prudent example, and trying the effect of a very large concession to their wishes without stickling for the whole ? As to Ulster, Mr. Cham- berlain showed that the cause which the Liberal Unionists had taken up was the cause, not of the Orangemen quci Orangemen, but of genuine Liberals, Liberals who had heartily supported Mr. Gladstone in the Disestablishment of the Irish Church, and who had only reluctantly forsaken him when he abandoned the principle of the Union to which he had always previously adhered, and desired to substitute for the government of a United Parliament, the government of an Irish Parliament in which the Ulster Protestants would be altogether outnumbered and lost. If the Noncon- formists of England would ridicule the notion of putting themselves under the yoke of Archbishop Walsh or Arch- bishop Croke, why should the Nonconformists of Ireland be expected to accept that yoke quite meekly ? When Lord Rosebery had proved that the late John Bright, the late W. E. Forster, and the late Henry Fawcett were all reactionary Tories, it would be time enough for those who had followed strictly in their footsteps to confess them- selves Tories, only because they had united themselves with those who once were Tories, but who now adopt a thoroughly Liberal policy, for the purpose of warding off the greatest blow which could possibly fall on the British Constitution and the Irish people.
Now, all this is not rhetoric ; it is genuine statesmanship. The Liberal Unionists who listened to Mr. Chamberlain must have felt to the bottom of their hearts that he was telling them what had really convinced him, and could not but have convinced a candid Radical with his view of the Union, that he was taking the course that was best adapted to secure what he held to be both the safety of the United Kingdom and also the progress of Liberal policy in the United Kingdom. It was not a skilful apology for an eccentric course, but a convincing proof that, far from being an eccentric course, it was the only course which a hearty Liberal Unionist could conscientiously take. To all this solid argument Lord Rosebery, in his very acid speech at Sutton on Thursday, hardly attempted to reply, and what attempt he did make was, in fact, a re- cantation of his own statement that the modern Tories are as Tory as ever. He more than half admitted that the Unionist Government has passed a series of great popular measures, but he says that what has enabled them to pass these mea- sures is the great alteration of the suffrage carried by Mr. Gladstone in 1885. (Why, by-the-way, does Lord Rosebery insist on calling that Act the Act of 1884? In 1884 it did not pass. In 1885 it did.) No doubt that is perfectly true But that is precisely the justification of the Liberal Unionists for forming so close an affiance with the Conservatives in 1886. They knew that after the change of suffrage the Tories could no longer be, or even profess to be, Tories of the same type as those of the previous decade. And experience has proved that they were right. But if Lord Rosebery admits that, he cannot with common fairness hold it up as a gross inconsistency, if not a great crime, of the Liberal Unionists, that they formed an alliance with a party so transformed. Lord Rosebery cannot ascribe all the credit of the transformation to Mr. Gladstone's Act, and yet stick to his previous assertion that the Tories were not transformed at all, but as unpopular in their policy as ever. Lord Rosebery cannot both have his cake and eat it too. Not even his vivacity is equal to such a feat as that. Mr. Chamberlain's Birming- ham speech, instead of being, like Lord Rosebery's speech and rejoinder, a clever mosaic of special pleas and taunts, was the frank disclosure of a Radical statesman's mind on the crisis,—and that, too, in a fashion that showed how true he was to his Radicalism, as well as to his earnest convic- tion that the breaking-up of the Union with Ireland would be the beginning of innumerable woes. To our mind, a more convincing specimen of Liberal logic has never been given to the world. And we can well under- stand how a speaker who can reason in that way keeps his constituents free from all the enchantments even of Mr. Gladstone's personal magnetism, which is saying a great deal more than that he can render them impervious to the lively innuendoes of Lord Rosebery. Birmingham will continue to be the stronghold of Liberal Unionism as long as Mr. Chamberlain lives and speaks.
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