LORD SELBORNE. T HE regret expressed in the House of Lords
on Tuesday for the death of Lord Selborne had an unusually unconventional and personal ring about it, which it is only too easy to understand. It is twenty- seven years since we wrote with the most profound respect in this journal of Sir Roundell Palmer's act of renuncia- tion in separating himself from his party, and, apparently at least, cutting himself off from legitimate hopes of the greatest legal honours, and the highest prize of political ambition, by declining to support Mr. Gladstone, to whom he was bound by as close a tie of political, as he was of personal, friendship, in disestablishing and disendowing the Irish Church. Yet he was one of the most convinced and most advanced of the Conservative Liberals of that day. He supported household suffrage when most of his own col- teagues recoiled from it, and when even Mr. Bright had seemed to approve the halfway-house of an .R.,8 suffrage. At that moment of general hesitation, Sir Roundell Palmer thought the most prudent, as well as the most courageous, policy was to enfranchise, in the boroughs at least, all the householders, without any of those aominal safeguards of plural voting and the rest, with which Mr. Disraeli pretended at least to hamper ais gift. It was not, therefore, from any political timidity of disposition that Sir Roundell Palmer aban- loned his old friend and colleague, and gave up the aope of the Chancellorship, which was well within his zrasp. He declined to disestablish and disendow the frish Church from exactly the same deep sense of duty from which he declined to support the repeal of the law against marriage with a deceased wife's sister, because he ?rofoundly believed that if you began to lay bare the :oots of the instinctive pieties of life, and to undermine nstitutions, whether social or religious, for the justice and reasonableness of which you could find no adequate moral demonstration, you would pull to pieces the very- structure of society, and dissolve the mortar by which the solidity of all human arrangements is secured. We quoted .n 1868 one of his great Conservative Liberal axioms, an which so much of his political life, from his earliest years of Parliamentary candidature, was founded, that "if lemonstration, if argument that admitted of no answer in a popular assembly, were to be required for the justifica- tion and maintenance of the principles on which our moral .nstitutions are founded, there is hardly one which, if sufficient agitation were,raised in the country, might not be assailed, and with regard to which it might not be said, as it was in this case" [that of the law forbidding marriage with a deceased wife's sister], "'the argument is all Dn the Bide of the supporters of a change.'" In that axiom you see the very basis of Lord Selborne's Con- servative Liberalism. And though neither in 1868 nor now could we admit that it legitimately applies to the case of a Church endowed by a people of one faith, whose endowments had been diverted to the uses of a handful of persons of another faith, it seems to us a very adequate and powerful statement of the danger of expecting or demanding a conscious and adequate defence of the justice of all the instincts on which so many of our human institutions are founded. If the bees were to begin to ask on what principles the architecture of their cells is founded, or the ants to question why they fill their storehouses with grain at a particular season of the year, and to desist from these practices directly they find that they could not explain them, their race would soon come to an end ; and so, too, it is perfectly certain that the cohesion of human society depends on a great number of sagacious moral instincts of which we are quite unable to assign the deeper sources. When Sir Bounden Palmer,—advanced Conservative Liberal though he was, —boldly declined to meddle with the roots of our religious life, without being convinced that they were not inter- woven with many much deeper reverences and hopes and fears than we are at all able to analyse and. explain, he assigned the true justification, as we believe, of that dislike of doctrinaire theory, which has saved England from the revolutionary experiments on which the destructive energy of the Jacobins and of the followers of Rousseau and the "Social Contract" visionaries, was mainly founded. Lord Selborne was one of the heartiest of those Liberals who thought it difficult to lay the foundations of our representative institutions too deep in the sympathies of the million. But he was also one of the most cautious of those Conservatives who felt assured that you might easily miss the deepest sources of instinctive wisdom, and that you ought to be very reluctant indeed to pull to pieces institutions of ancient origin, of the full strength of whose far-reaching tendrils we have so little conscious knowledge.
But the most significant trait of Lord Selborne's life was this—that what he was personally doubtful of the wisdom of doing, no division of the responsibility with others would persuade him to do. In 1868, he rejected the moral certainty of holding the highest social and legal office in England, and of moderating (as he might easily have argued with himself) the policy of his colleagues by his personal influence, rather than incur the respon- sibility of doing what he suspected to be wrong, and of tampering with the cohesive forces on which the very existence of human society depends. If he could have foreseen in 1868 how far rationalistic analysis would go in breaking down the natural ties of family and the natural relations of the sexes, before thirty years should pass away, he would, we think, have been still more afraid of any rash meddling with the fabric of our religious institutions than he actually was. But there were scores of politicians who really shared his fears, whom the example of friends and colleagues induced to ignore and suppress those fears. Sir Roundell Palmer, however, always had the moral courage to act independently of any motive of either self- interest or friendship, when once he had convinced him- self that what his colleagues were doing was at least very questionable, and if questions ble, then, for him at least, wrong. There was no personal ambition which could outweigh for him a single clear scruple of conscience. That was the great characteristic which filled not only party friends like the Duke of Devonshire, and party opponents like Lord Herschell on the one side and Lord Salisbury on the other, with an almost passionate respect. No one would have expected Lord Rosebery, for instance,—who could not have known anything of Lord Selborne so long as twenty-seven years ago,—to have spoken with the accent of deep feeling which marked his speech of Tuesday. But, in fact, Lord Selborne's simplicity and earnestness carried the same conviction to the heart of the contemporaries of his old age which it carried to that of the contemporaries of his prime. Up to the last days of his life no one could miss the tone of supreme and unaffected dutifulness which distinguished that singularly learned, lucid, and able mind. He was not only a great equity lawyer, but a great equity thinker. Equity had entered as deeply into his character as it had into his studies, and that is rather a rare combination of qualities. Legal equity has a trick of drowning moral equity in ordinary minds.
The pathos which, more or less seemed to attend his manner in the delivery of his latest speeches was indeed, we think, mainly the result of the feeling that the convictions which he himself held most. deeply were far less deeply imprinted on the world he addressed in these latter days than they used to be. He had the air of thinking that he had lost touch with the political condition of things which he had himself done so much to introduce, for no one can deny that Sir Roundell Palmer's adherence to the democratic principle of household suffrage had more to do with reconciling cautious politicians to the proposal of household suffrage than that of the more merely political Ministers with whom he was associated. He had hardly realised adequately, we think, how much the democratic rtgime would revolutionise the world in which he lived ; and when be did begin to realise how thoroughgoing the change had been, he gave the impression of bewailing it. There was a tone of moral expostulation with the Age in all Lord Selborne's later speeches which gave them a somewhat pathetic ring. Surely there never was a really great Chancellor whose mind, full as it was of positive law, was so much fuller even of moral equity, as Lord Selborne's.
Previous page
