TOPICS OF THE DAY.
MR. DISRAELI THIS WEEK.
MR. DISRAELI has not been succeeding this week. There is an indefinable impression abroad that his power of management is declining, whether from ill-health, or aversion to business, or, as the Times hints, from a touch of the arro- gance which comes to the victorious,—and certainly this week his management has been at fault. He has sustained, to be- gin with, his first considerable Parliamentary defeat. He did not perceive that Mr. M'Lagan's Bill for remodelling the Game Laws in Scotland would interest the farmers' friends, he took no part in it, he sent out no debaters, his lieutenants neglected the usual precautions, so that the Ministerial benches were nearly empty, and after the Government had avowed that it resisted the Bill mainly to preserve the free- dom of contract, the Ministry were defeated by 172 to 150. The Bill itself does not matter a straw. It is not a good one, it will not content Scotland, and it will be mutilated beyond recognition in the Peers ; but it matters a good deal to a Tory Government to be defeated in a large House, on a country-gentleman question of the most crucial kind. • Then on Monday Mr. Cartwright asked whether the Government intended to appoint a Commissioner as Director of a National Bank in Egypt, which would facili- tate advances of money to the Khedive, and Mr. Disraeli replied that it did not, but " had there been a proposal that a Commissioner should be appointed to receive certain branches of revenue, and apply them to the redemption of Debt, that would have been a proposal which might have received our consideration." That was a most extraordinary statement, first, because, as the Pall Mall Gazette has already pointed out, the plan which Mr. Disraeli rejected contained the very proposition he appears to refuse ; and secondly, because the Khedive, who wants money. and does not care about terms, was certain to jump at the promise im- plied in the Premier's hasty suggestion. This he has done, and Mr. Disraeli has now either to confess that he spoke hastily, or to agree to a proposal to aid in forming an International Commission for the management of Egyptian finances, to which Parliament will never consent. This country would rather stand aloof from Egypt altogether than share its government with Italy and France. Mr. Disraeli may retort that he was not thinking of an international Com- mission at all, but of a British Commissioner to act as the French Commissioner acts in Tunis ; but if so, he made a statement on an important financial point which was misunder- stood by the House, by the public, and by the Khedive. There may be, of course, a secret history which will make his answer to Mr. Cartwright intelligible, but it looks very much as if the Premier were leaving Egyptian affairs, in which the country is urgently interested, very much to other hands, were not posting himself up to current events, and were content to make the first answer that occurred to him. Then, later on in the evening, when Mr. Gladstone brought up the question of M. de Lesseps' peremptory dismissal of Sir Daniel Lange, the Premier's observations were most unsatisfactory. Sir Daniel Lange had, in a series of letters marked " private and confidential," pressed on the British Government through Lord Granville the wisdom and the possibility of buying up the Suez Canal. On Lord Granville's resignation, these letters were retained in a pigeon-hole, marked with his name, as private communications. Nevertheless the Cabinet decided to publish them, as Mr. Disraeli says, in accordance with the regular routine of the Foreign Office. Moreover, as he states, that Office had received the "sanction " of Lord Granville to the publication. Now, it is true that the words "private and confidential" may be misused, till they act as an unjustifi- able fetter on the person to whom letters are addressed. No man can have a right, to put an extreme case, to warn the Home Secretary in a private and confidential letter that he means to blow up the House of Commons, and then expect that Mr. Cross shall keep his communication under the seal of confession. Nor had the late Czar Nicholas a right to propose a partition of Turkey, and expect that the Power which rejected his offer should deny that he had ever made it. But it is the accepted doctrine that information laid before a Government for its benefit by a private individual, and marked " private and confidential," should, except in cases of absolute necessity, be so treated, and one reason why the British Government is often so ill informed is the dread all Continental statesmen entertain of our Parliamentary publicity. Mr. Disraeli's answer tends directly to deepen that dread, and to close the access of Government to information which may often be of the highest importance. There was no imperative reason for publishing Sir Daniel Lange's letters, which excited no interest, except in his own Board, and no excuse for not asking his consent to their publi- cation. The real motive for printing them was a spiteful one, to show the country that the Gladstone Government neglected an opportunity of buying the whole Cant cheap, and the motive will deepen the distrust in which foreigners will for the future hold the British Foreign Office, where excision cannot be expected if either national or party interests. can be served by publicity. We will not press the minor point that Lord Granville never gave the sanction he is re- ported to have given, for we can understand that Lord Tenterden, the permanent Under-Secretary, thought that, as Lord Granville had read the letters, and marked one for excision, he assented to the propriety of publishing the remainder. But the responsibility of the publication rests exclusively with the Ministry, which has, therefore, pub- lished letters intended to benefit it, and marked " con- fidential," with no result except the dismissal of its well- intentioned informant,—who, we may remark, though moved by patriotic considerations, obviously thought the purchase would benefit the Company he served, though not the nationality to which most of its shareholders belonged. And finally, look at Mr. Disraeli's management of this ques- tion of the new title to be taken by the Queen. Mr. Disraeli at first absolutely refused to state, on Mr. Forster's demand, what title he should advise her Majesty to take. He next,. when Mr. Samuelson, notoriously with Lord Harlington's approval, pressed the same question, flung back a "No" in Lord Palmerston's style, by repeating the very words of the interrogatory, with a refusal prefixed. Finding, however, between Tuesday and Thursday that the House would not bear this method of compelling it to act in the dark, he stated that the title would be "Empress of India," the whole formula. running, " Victoria, by the grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Queen, Defender of the Faith, and Empress of India." That acknowledgment took the point out of Mr. Samuelson's motion, which Lord Harlington accordingly begged him to withdraw, and which was defeated by a great majority, but the speech supporting it in no way reconciled opponents to the title. Mr. Disraeli affirmed indeed that the Princes of India wished for such an addition to the Royal style, but gave no evidence of his assertion ; and as regards the United King- dom, to which alone Parliament is responsible, though it may be responsible for India also, he offered but the feeblest argu- ments. They were chiefly intended to show that the change meant nothing. The title had no superiority in it, the Czarina Catharine, when she adopted it, having expressly disclaimed any claim to be more than equal to other Sovereigns, and the Queen after her new title had been voted would be just the same as before. But if that is the case, how does it become the head of the Tory party to propose such a change ? We thought that the most rooted sentiment of that party was that change for the sake of change, and especially change in anything very ancient, very illustrious, and very popular, was in itself objectionable. Mr. Disraeli may reply, and justly, that he never was a Tory, that he only finds brains for the Tories, because they put him at their head; but he may rely on it that though he is conservative of nothing, the English people is conservative of many things ; that they dislike the bedizenment of their Chief Magistrate with pretentious and artificial dignities, and that they regard the new " splendour " which he says the title " will add even to her throne" as a splendour of the most histrionic and vulgar kind. They do not wish, as we have so often said, for a throne of cotton - velvet, but still less do they wish for one on which rich draperies are spoiled by tinsel spangles intended to throw back lime- light. They feel precisely what we should have expected the Tories to feel, and what Mr. Gladstone does feel, and ex- pressed with such splendour of grave rhetoric in his unanswerable speech,—a speech which Mr. Disraeli will do well to remember has still to circulate in the country :- " I cannot help saying that I feel with the right honourable gentleman the greatness, and the unsullied greatness, of the title borne by the Queen of England. I use the language of moderation, when I say that it is a title unequalled for its dignity and weight, unequalled for the glory of its historic associations, unequalled for the promise which it offers to the future, among the titles of the Sovereigns of Europe, among all the States and nations of the earth. Sir, I have a jealousy of touching that title, and I am not to be told that this is a small matter. There is nothing small in a matter, in my judgment, which touches the honour and dignity of the Crown of England. They are far-reaching ; they extend not only over the life of that Sovereign, who we hope will be long preserved to the nation ; they reach far beyond that. You should not take a step in advance now which hereafter you may possibly have to regret or retract. You should consider the whole of these questions which touch the Sovereign—such are the lessons I have learnt from my political instructors, and such are the lessons I try to hand down—you should consider all that touches the Crown as matters of the highest delicacy, of the highest importance, and part, the most sacred portion, of the same power which we are called upon to administer on behalf of the Empire. This magnificent and noble title of the 'Queen of England,'—am I wrong in saying that it is unequalled as to every substantial attribute ? The title of 6 King of France ' might have placed itself in competi- tion with it. That title of King of France' has been en- tirely swept away What I feel about this Imperial title is that, with the greatest possible respect for Emperors now subsisting, and not at all questioning that the per- fect legitimacy of the titles they bear is justified by the circumstances in which they stand, I am not very wil- ling to have the title of ' Queen of England,' without very strong reasons, brought into any sort of competition with theirs."
There was nothing whatever in the speech of the Premier equal to the magnitude of the change which he advised in the Royal title, a change which he says is nothing, yet declares to be so great that it will add splendour even to that lonely and historic dignity which now attaches to the Sovereign of these Isles. He removed no difficulties, unless indeed he removed one by saying that " Her Royal Imperial Majesty " would be a clumsy periphrasis ; he never touched upon the difficulty of translation, and though his lieutenant, Sir Stafford North- cote, did, he blundered, for the translation he gave was not " Padishah," but " Shah-i-Shah-i-Hind," — King of the Kings of India ; and besides being a mere copy of the Persian formula—only fancy Queen Victoria wanting to be " Shahess "- it confers on men like our old Highland chiefs the rank of King. The speech has removed no prejudice and soothed away no ani- mosity, it will lead to no victory except one that is worse than a defeat, and it will stamp into the British mind the conviction that Mr. Disraeli, with all his genius and all his adroitness, has in his mental web a thread of that true vulgarity which cannot distinguish between the histrionic and the symbolic, between the grandiose and the grand.
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