THE SHATTERING OF THE RADICAL CABINET. T HE account given in
last Monday's Pall Mall of the shattering of the Radical party's Cabinet so soon as it had ceased to be held together by the responsibilities of office is evidently authentic, and reminds one almost of the sudden collapse of a carefully embalmed corpse when after long ages of cohesion it suddenly turns to dust on exposure to the air. We are told that the ex-Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery, had always been bitterly opposed to Sir William Harcourt's Death-duties but had been overruled by his Cabinet, just as Sir William Harcourt had been bitterly opposed to the Uganda railway but had been overruled by the Cabinet, whose opinion went with Lord Rosebery. and that each of these leaders had in turn submitted to the opinion of the majority. But the nominal coherence left by this severe strain on the rela- tions of the leaders only just survived to the eve of Lord Salisbury's first full Session of Parliament, and then gave way altogether in the most singular and sensational fashion. Lord Rosebery, it appears, had found it possible to condole with Sir William Harcourt on his rejection at Derby,—condolences with rivals in their troubles have always something sweet in them ;—and Sir William Harcourt, after West Monmouthshire had more or less softened the memory of that great disaster, had found language in which to acknowledge his leader's not very grateful sympathy. But there the matter had rested till it was necessary to summon a council for the con- sideration of the Queen's Speech of the present year. Then when both of the Radical leaders wrote to Lord Spencer to arrange for the loan of his London house for the con- sideration of the Queen's Speech proposed by their opponents' Government, the Radical cohesion suddenly gave way. Lord Rosebery could endure the moral in- dignity of subordination to his lieutenant no longer, and said to Lord Spencer that the leader of the party would in future hold no political relations with the leader of the party in the House of Commons. And of this letter he sent a copy to Sir William Harcourt, so that there might be no misunderstanding on the subject. Such an act speaks volumes as to what Lord Rosebery had endured during the precarious life of the previous Cabinet. Indeed he must have suffered tortures hardly equalled by those of the Spartan boy who allowed the fox under his cloak to eat away his liver rather than express the misery he was en- during. To have seen Sir William Harcourt reap the only glory which the Radical Ministry had achieved in the carry- ing of the new Death-duties, to which Lord Rosebery him- self was bitterly opposed, must have been, indeed, a barely tolerable mortification. And we can well imagine how Sir William Harcourt would have rubbed the salt into that open sore at all the Cabinet meetings of the last Radical Session. It speaks volumes for the nominal leader's stoicism that he did endure this suffering at all, and we suspect that he would never have endured it had it not been obvious that his resignation would leave Sir William Harcourt in full command of the situation, since no other ,Prime Minister would have been possible after his , successful Budget. But for the sensational failure of the. Local Veto Bill, and the soothing defeat of Sir William Harcourt at Derby, we can well imagine that the tension of these unhappy relations between the Roi faineant and the Mayor of the Palace would never have lasted even as long as they did. When the moment came for more meetings of the ex-Cabinet, and more defeats of the nominal leader by his lieutenant in the House of Commons, the crisis was reached. Lord Rosebery could bear the humiliation no longer, and we only wonder that the catastrophe was kept a secret for another eight or nine months till Lord Rosebery found an excuse in Mr. Gladstone's speech at Liverpool on the Armenian question for throwing up the cards and formally resigning the pretence of a leadership which he had never really possessed.
The story of the last Government shows to demon- stration not only that Lord Rosebery never actually held the power which ought to belong to the leader of a party, but that he never could have held it except to the disad- vantage, and we might almost say the ruin, of that party. For he is evidently wanting in the very first qualification of a leader, a clear discernment of the immediate object on which the party should concentrate its efforts. We do not take much account of superficial inconsistency. It is per.. fectly legitimate and even necessary for a statesman, though he has formerly announced his sympathy with some one reform at one crisis, to turn the cold shoulder to that reform when it comes up at a, time when it will take the wind out of the sails of some other policy far more im- peratively required by the exigencies of the moment. Lord Rosebery has attacked Mr. Chamberlain, for instance, for his indifference to radical reforms on which he had once laid great stress. But Mr. Chamberlain has the best possible reason, the reason which should be regarded as adequate by any practical statesman, for his present indiffer- ence to those reforms. In the first place, they could only be carried by a party which, if it could carry such changes as those, would certainly precede them by other and still more important changes which Mr. Chamberlain would regard as utterly disastrous. And in the second place, he is now an influential member of a Government which has carried, can carry, and is likely to carry in a modified form many of the changes for the sake of which mainly he desired the radical reforms that he is now accused of neglecting and ignoring. If that be inconsistency, which we do not think it is, it is at least a kind of inconsistency inseparable from political good sense and usefulness. But Lord Rosebery has shown an inconsistency of a very different and much more fatal kind, which has betrayed how utterly unsuited his unquestionable abilities are to qualify him for the leader- ship of a great party in the State. He accepted the leadership on the resignation of a great leader who bad initiated a Home-rule policy for Ireland, and who bad bound the Irish Nationalist party to him by nailing that policy to the mast, a policy to which Lord Rosebery himself had pledged his support. The first thing that Lord Rosebery did was to make an admission which drove the whole of that Irish party into something like alienation by declar- ing that till England, "the predominant partner," was con- verted to that policy it could not be carried,—a bold stroke which, if it had been boldly adhered to, might have been sound, and even in the long run absolutely prudent, in spite of the temporary alienation of the Irish party, though of course it should have been followed up by a very earnest endeavour to achieve the conversion of the "predominant partner" to the policy of Irish Home-rule. But Lord Rosebery neither stuck to his point, nor followed it up by any organised effort to convert the predominant partner. On finding the effect produced on his Irish followers by what he had said, he immediately began ex- plaining it away, so that he succeeded in both shaking the confidence of the Irish Home-rulers in his seriousness, and of the English Home-rulers in his judgment. Then again he began his attack on the House of Lords by declaring him- self the firm advocate of a Second Chamber, and proceeded to give in his adhesion to a declaration in favour of pass- ing any measure over the heads of the House of Lords which had been carried a second time through the House of Commons after a single rejection by the House of Lords, —a policy which conceded to the Second Chamber on which he had insisted so much, nothing more than a privilege of slightly postponing the legislative omnipotence of the House of Commons. No one can imagine a more impotent species of Second Chamber than that to which Lord Rose- bery was thus pledged to give his support. He had, indeed, shown conclusively that he either desired the appearance of a Second Chamber without the reality, or had sacrificed his own preferences as a statesman to the Radical im- patience of some of his followers. And it is just the same with his Armenian policy. Lord Rosebery's speech of last March to the Eighty Club is not republished in the volume of his speeches which he has just issued ; but that speech, which virtually supported separate action on the part of England, was as inconsistent with the great and eloquent speech in which he resigned the leadership of the Liberal party as one speech could well be with another of the same statesman's, and another delivered only a few month's later.
The truth is that Lord Rosebery never fixed his mind as a leader on a policy which he was deter- mined to support with all his heart. He always wavered between two opinions, and said one thing in favour of one opinion and another thing in favour of the other. A more disastrous habit for a leader it is impossible to imagine. He succeeded admirably in makiug both sides distrust him. The Home-rulers had no more confidence in him than the Unionists. Radical Republicans who desired the abolition of the House of Peers trusted him no more than Conservatives who desired its retention. Canon MacColl, who hoped to see the Armenians helped by the seizure of Smyrna or the with- drawing of our Ambassador from Constantinople, has no more faith in him than Sir Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, who desired to see the Sultan heartily sustained. Lord Rosebery never fixed his eyes on a great practical object to be accomplished, or turned all his energy to flag successful achievement of that object. He frittered away his power in a purely literary discus- sion of the issues before him, and so frittered away his influence as well as his power. No wonder he had to resign his leadership. Indeed, he would have done better to resign it even much earlier than he did. No doubt Sir William Harcourt made his position almost intolerable to him long before he resigned. But though Sir William Harcourt did not prove a wise leader when he gave himself away with the Local Veto Bill, be was at least far more of a leader than his nominal Chief. He did' one thing at a time, and did that one thing, whether it were bad or good, with his whole strength. With Lord Rosebery at their head the Radical party naturally enough: broke up into fragments of all magnitudes,—Republican, Humanitarian, Irish, Scotch, Welsh, and Educational. Under him there was no real hand on the helm at all.
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