THE WANING OF LORD ROSEBERY.
IT is impossible to say that Lord Rosebery has had a fair chance. In spite of the great flourish of trumpets with which he was received by certain sections of the Radical party, and. the hope which his tact in the chair of the London County Council had inspired in the Socialist group, he has begun his Premiership under extraordinary disadvantages, of which it would not be easy to exaggerate the importance. In the first place he had to take his Cabinet en bloc from Mr. Gladstone, and not only so, but to leave the guidance of the House of Commons,—much the most difficult part of an ordinary Prime Minister's duty,—to another statesman, who was a disappointed as well as a very brilliant competitor for the place of Prime Minister. That has never yet been the hard lot of a new Prime Minister, so far as we can remember. When Lord Palmerston succeeded to. Lord Aberdeen during the Crimean War, he was not only leader of the House of Commons but was completely• master of the House of Commons. When Mr. 'Disraeli succeeded Lord Derby as' Conservative Premier in 1868 he only accepted the formal dignity, of Prime Minister which he had substantially held for some time back as Leader of the House of Commons. But Lord Rosebery had not only to take the Cabinet en bloc from Mr. Gladstone, bat to leave the whole substantial power in the hands Of his ablest rival, without the chance of removing or appOinting a single Minister. It is impossible to exaggerate the disadvantage of such a position as that. And it would be most unfair not to take it into account iny-estiMate- Of Lord' Rosebery's capacity for the post he now occupies. He is at a great disadvantage as a Peer who has never even sat in the House of Commons. He is at a still greater disadvantage as a Peer who has not had the choosing and sorting of his own colleagues. In both respects his difficulties have hardly any parallel in our political history. Nevertheless, we do not think it possible to doubt that Lord Rosebery, since he became Prime Minister, has both sunk in the estimation even of those who blew his trumpet most loudly on his accession to power, and has in some respects deserved to sink. There can be no question as to the difference in tone between the Daily Chronicle's enthusiasm on his first accession to power, and the rather fiat article in which the same journal excused the Man- chester speech in which Lord Rosebery scolded the Labour group for their want of loyalty. We should take no account of the temporary subsidence of that rather excessive effervescence with which his first installation as Prime Minister was received, if we did not see signs of real vacillation and inconsiderateness on matters on which it behoved him to be most tenacious and most clear of purpose from the very first moment of taking office. But we do see almost unmistakable signs both of vacillation and of confusion in his own deliverances. He began badly by saying what he found it necessary to explain away immediately. His Edinburgh speech was a very feeble and ineffectual withdrawal of his first speech in the House of Lords, and his first speech in the House of Lords was a very ill-considered variation on his' address to the Liberal party in the morning of the same day. Lord Rosebery's first duty was to make up his mind what his attitude towards the Irish party ought to be, and so soon as he had made up his mind, to show that he would stick to it, and not give way an inch. He did neither. He evidently thought that he could manage to hold out a sort of flag of truce to the Liberal Unionists without alienating his Irish allies, and even when he found that that was impossible, he did not abandon the futile attempt to make light of the Irish question, to declare that the " common-sense " of the nation would settle it without difficulty, when it was really the most highly controversial issue on which the two parties had ever been divided. When he spoke of the "predominant partner" in the -Union, and declared that England must be converted to Irish Home-rule before Home-rule could be carried, he spoke his own mind, but offended Irish Home-rulers most bitterly. That would not have mattered so much if he had stuck to it and said to the Irish, 'That is my deliberate view; you may compel me to resign if you like ; but you will not compel me to alter it. But he did nothing of the kind. He whittled down his statement till it became quite colourless, and lost all meaning. And even after that, he kept reverting to the attempt to treat the Irish question as one of very secondary importance, as one that "common-sense" would settle without sensation, as one that might be adapted to a new development of the Imperial power, a recast of the Empire in some half-federal sense. No mistake could be greater. Instead of attenuating the difficulty of the Irish question by mixing it up with the federation of the Empire, he aggravated that difficulty tenfold. If Ireland is to be as independent as the self-governing Colonies. Ireland will be more than satis- fied; but all Mr. Gladstone's " guarantees " will be scattered to the winds. If, on the contrary, all the self- governing Colonies are to be hampered by such conditions as even Mr. Gladstone wished to impose on Ireland, the Empire will soon be a mere wreck instead of a more im- posing reality than it is now. Lord Rosebery's mind was never clear on the subject, and naturally enough he vacil- lated, became ambiguous, appealed to common-sense with- out any indication of what common-sense, in his opinion, required, signalled vaguely to all parties, and gained none. Nor has that been Lord Rosebery's only uncertain sound. He has been very uncertain about the House of Lords. He has declared that while he has always hitherto been an advocate for a Second House of Legislature, he was now, for the first time, wavering on that subject, because he saw how very much delay the House of Commons, by = its Standing Orders, interposes between the inception of any policy and the carrying out of that policy. Here, then, he has held out hopes to the party which desires to "end" the House of Lords, without taking any decided line of . his own on this most grave constitutional question. His own mind seems to have drawn no distinc- tion between the delay of a tedious and dragging debate, which really is of little or no political advantage when the best speakers on both sides have once been fully heard, and the delay which secures a full reconsideration by the democracy at large of a great constitutional issue, after full debate,—a matter of the utmost possible importance. No confusion can be more serious than Lord Rosebery's con- fusion between the irritating delay of an interminable Parliamentary wrangle, and the fruitful delay which puts to the people at large a plain question as to how debate has affected their minds concerning what should be done. Yet Lord Rosebery has spoken as if the first kind of delay were any sort of equivalent for the second. Again, Lord Rosebery has given a very uncertain sound on the subject of Disestablishment. As we understand him he has no objection at all to the Establishment of any form of Christianity which is really national enough to include both the great political parties within its range. He objects to the Scotch Establishment (and we suppose to the Welsh Establishment) not on principle, but because he thinks the Established clergy are not really national clergy, but only Tory clergy,who do not exert any common religious influence over all the political parties. That is a very half- and-half sort of sympathy with a policy which, with nine- tenths of its supporters, is based on the conviction that Establishments are dangerous bribes to the worldly passions of men, and potent in stifling the consciences of Christians. Nor has he given us any idea of the test he would apply in order to determine whether a Church be national or not ; and in what sort of area, whether a province, or a county, or a parish, he would think it right to apply the test before determining on Disestablishment. Here, as elsewhere, Lord Rosebery has spoken ambiguously. We do not know what he desires, or how far he would go. Add to all this, that Lord Rosebery has taken on the whole a too frivolous tone,—in his speech at the Royal Academy, for instance, he was almost merely jocose, and hardly the Prime Minister at all,—and we think that there is sufficient reason for saying that Lord Rosebery, far from growing in public estimation, has actually fallen in public estimation since be became Prime Minister. He has had unexampled difficulties, but he has not confronted these difficulties with grave and mature resolve. He has carried his reputation as a light after- dinner speaker into politics, and has lost ground thereby. Instead of deliberately considering and clearly announcing his counsels to the nation, he has hesitated, trimmed, joked, and hinted, till even his own supporters have become lukewarm. The brightness of his rising was due chiefly to the impetuousness of his friends in the County Council, and the satisfaction felt at his administration of the Foreign Office ; but these were very inadequate grounds on which to found belief in him as a strong Prime Minister. Hitherto, at least, he has by no means justified that belief. And he must change greatly if he is ever to justify it.
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