SIR HENRY CAMPBELL-BANNERMAN AT CAMBRIDGE.
SO far as can be judged from the report, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's speech at Cambridge last Saturday was a highly successful one ; very few sentences were spoken without either provoking "laughter" or " laughter and cheers " or " prolonged cheering" or cries of " Shame ! " directed, of course, not to the speaker but to his imaginary opponents. And when any orator succeeds in thus amusing, interesting, and exciting his audience, no one can deny that for the moment at least the speech has answered its purpose. One of the chief objects of a party meeting is, we suppose, to strengthen the agreeable opinion in the minds of those who constitute it, not only that they are in the right, but also that they are on the way to con- vince the English people that they are in the right. That was evidently the object of Sir Henry Campbell-Banner- man's speech, and the effect produced on the audience shows that it had exactly the kind of influence he intended it to have. It operated like political champagne. It made his hearers more cheerful, it exhilarated them, and therefore it exhilarated the speaker. But whether it was a good speech for any other purpose than that of giving his hearers a better conceit of themselves, we more than doubt. Some people are not unwilling to misunder- stand their antagonists, so long as misunderstanding them makes them feel more comfortable in their own minds, or, as the late Lord Westbury used to say, in " what they are pleased to call their minds." Our own impression is that our minds are given us to understand the universe with,—including even our antagonists, not to misunderstand them. And we hold that if a man can succeed in turning his mind into a con- trivance for giving him a mistaken and distorted view of his opponents, even though it makes him more comfortable, --as it well may,—he has used it to precisely the worst purpose of which it admits. That seems to us the purpose to which Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman turned his mind this day week. He did all he could to distort the views of his audience, to make them see their opponents as you see faces in a concave or convex mirror, caricatured by hideous and ludicrous exaggerations of one feature, and by all but obliterations of another, and so to persuade them of what they were only too ready to believe, that in so construing their antagonists' views they were looking at a true picture. By the measure of the temporary success of the speech, you may gauge almost accurately its true misleadingness. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman began by dwelling on the Gladstoniau successes at Frome and the Wick Burghs. He must have known that they were wholly unimportant, that in both constituencies the chances are that if the Glad. stonians themselves had won the seats at the General Elec- tion, they would have lost them again at the by-election. In both constituencies the previous majorities were very trifling,—in the Wick Burghs only 24,—and both are notoriously constituencies which habituallyvibrate from one party to the other. Yet the orator quoted them as showing that, " from Dan to Beersheba," from John o' Groat's down to the south of England, the country is changing its mind already. We cannot believe that Sir Henry Camp- bell-Bannerman was so credulous as to think anything of the sort, and the best that we can say of his triumphant demonstration is that he probably never dreamed of his audience being taken in by it. He used it only as theo- logians use " pious opinions," not as propositions to believe, but as opinions to give a pleasant flavour,—that is, a misleading bias,—to your thoughts. But then Sir Henry went on to more serious misrepre- sentations of his opponents. He contrasted the Glad- stonian Imperialism with the Unionist Imperialism, very much to the disadvantage of the latter. Both parties are Imperialists, he declared, amidst " prolonged cheering," but the Gladstonians are Imperialists who wish to strengthen and extend the Empire "without vulgarity," " without swagger," " without any offence to, or inter- ference with, their neighbours." The Unionists, on the contrary, wish not so much to extend the Empire as to extend the influence of " the upper classes," of " society," of "the rich," over the Empire ; to snub the House of Commons and the taxpayer, and to lodge as much power as possible in the House of Lords as distinguished from the House of Commons. At a time when the majority for the Government in the House of Commons is about one hundred and forty-six, that is certainly a very curiously misleading remark. So far as the restriction of the power of the Commons is the policy of the present Government, to whom is it due ? Why, of course, to the direct votes of the people themselves. If the Lords are, for the present, popular, it is the people who have made them so. It is not the Lords but the Commons who have given an effectual condemna- tion of the insane policy of the late Government in endeavouring to throw everything into the power of the Commons. It is the Commons who say, and the people who strenuously support the Commons in saying, that if the Commons arrogate the whole power of the United Kingdom to themselves, and try to paralyse the second House of the Legislature, the people of this kingdom will suffer, and will suffer a great deal more than the "upper classes " or " society " or the " rich." If the late Govern. ment had had their way, and had concentrated all power in the narrow majority of a single elective House, it would have been the masses of the people who would have suffered by it, who would have had to curb a dis- loyal Ireland without having the means to curb it, and who would have had to suffer by the impulse given to a Cantonal division of Great Britain and a great centrifugal rending asunder of the institutions of the State. As for the imputation that the Unionists wish to extend the influence of the upper classes and the rich over the Empire to the exclusion of the influence of the people at large, does the policy of the Unionist Government look like it ? When Mr. Chamberlain pro- poses to " develop " the resources of our great Colonies and dependencies, is it in the interest of the upper classes or of the labourers who find their sphere at home so narrow and restricted, that he proposes it? When, against the wish of the old Tories and of a good many of the middle classes, the Unionists of four years ago established Free Education,—to Sir Henry Howorth's dismay,—was that carried by the votes of the rich and of the upper classes, or by the votes of the millions ? Nothing can be more idle, indeed in our opinion more conspicuously false, than the assertion that the Unionist party are resting their policy on the favour of the upper classes and not on the favour of the great majority of the people. Why should the masses give so great a majority to Lord Salisbury, if Lord Salisbury's Government is a Government of the few who look down upon the many ? In Ireland no less than in England it is the policy of the Government to improve the condition of the great masses of the people, and the Irish people recognise this as plainly as the English people, for they clamour for the Irish Land Bill which the present Government has introduced. Nothing can be more absurd, more contrary to all the facts of the case, than to represent the Unionists as friends of a narrow oligarchy who established a class Government over the heads of the very people who have raised them to power. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman knows as well as anybody that when he talks of "the half-dozen men who act as if they were the autocrats of the Empire," he has just the same right to say so as, we should have had to say that Mr. Gladstone, Lord Rosebery, Sir William Harcourt, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Mr. Asquith, and Mr. Bryce were the half-dozen men who between 1892 and 1895 acted as if they were the autocrats of the Empire, and so acted, moreover, with a very much smaller majority at their back.
It is a curious superstition which dominates the Glad- stonians that they, and they alone, are the popular party, even when the majority of the people are against them. We wonder how it is that this illusion exerts so great a sway over them. From Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's speech it appears that he thinks it is all the doing of the " Primrose dames,"—that they obfuscate the senses of the poor, and exercise a sort of illegitimate magic over the working man. For that matter we do not see how the " Primrose dames " differ from the millionaire Lords who thundered against th e Upper House after their victories on the turf. But in both cases alike it is the millions who give either Primrose dames or millionaire Lords their in- fluence, or want of influence, over them. You cannot appeal to the masses and then complain because the masses have a certain amount of sympathy with the classes, if they happen to think that the classes have formed a right judgment with which it is very good sense for themselves to concur. But that is the permanent grievance of the Gladstonian party. They have a per- manent delusion that the masses are bound to follow the leaders who declare war on the classes, whether they think it to their own interest or not. That is a delusion which we venture to say is a very foolish one. In an inverted form, some even of the Tories share it. They are eager to take advantage of the popular vote, but when the popular vote strikes at Toryism, as it did when the Free Education Bill was passed, they com- plain of it as if it was their leaders who had betrayed them, instead of their followers. Thus Sir Henry Howorth complains this week of his leaders as having abandoned the principles of Toryism in accepting the Free Education Bill at Mr. Chamberlain's instance. It was not at Mr. Chamberlain's instance, it was at the instance of the great majority of the people who wished for Mr. Chamberlain's measure. Neither party can have the advantages of a popular vote without accepting its disadvantages also. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman is quite bitter against the popular vote for sustaining the House of Lords ; Sir Henry Howorth is quite bitter against it for sustaining Free Education ; and each of them tries to fancy that it is not the people who are in fault, but either the Primrose dames who have misled the people, or the Liberal Unionists who have misled the Tory chiefs. All this is folly. Those who appeal to the people must abide by the people's decision, and not try to cheat them- selves by a sort of political thimble-rigging. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman got great cheers and laughter from his Cambridge audience, but if any true Unionist had been there he would have cheered and laughed too, but in a sense exactly opposite to that of the Gladstonian audience.
Previous page
