l'ith CABINET AND THE MAJORITY.
THE arrival of the Easter Recess makes it possible to take stock, in a very preliminary fashion, of the prospects of the Liberal Government. The surprises of the General Election are already distant, and we are in a position to estimate, with the help of a few weeks' experience, the working character of the new House of Commons. There is the majority, and there is the Cabinet which that majority has placed in office. What are the relations between the two now, and what are they likely to become hereafter? How far is the majority homogeneous ; and. if it is homogeneous now, how far does it promise to remain so ? Questions similar to these must have been much in the minds of politicians in 1833. Then, as now, a new order of things had come into being. In one respect, indeed, the change effected by the elections was greater than in 1906. Not only was the House of Commons new, the constituencies were new also. The Reform Act had created a new electorate, and redistributed as well as enlarged. it. And yet the change in the composition of the House was less marked in 1833 than in 1906. Fewer well-known faces were absent from it; there were fewer gaps on the Opposition Front Bench. The force of Parliamentary tradition was stronger; there was less indisposition to follow the recognised. party leaders. The difference between the two Parliaments is most marked, of course, in the Opposition. In 1833 the Conserva- tives had a leader of commanding genius and. great authority, and as a consequence of this they had a united party. The Unionist Opposition would find the first eight years of the Reformed Parliament an invaluable subject for meditation during their present holiday. It is not in the power of any party, indeed, to create a Peel ; but they might, if they were wise, do something to repro- duce the conditions which enabled Peel to convert defeat into victory. When Peel announced that he would con- sider the Reform question as "finally and irrevocably disposed of," he made it possible for his followers to share and profit by his determination to "look forward to the future alone.' If Mr. Balfour would signalise his return to the House after his illness by a similar declaration in regard to Free-trade, lie would. be buying ultimate unity at the cost of present disruption. The question which split the Unionist Government and the party in two in the last Parliament is not of the order that can be left open,— except in the sense in which a sore is left open. *Until its intentions in regard to that question are known and pro- claimed, the Opposition must remain what it is, a thing of patchwork policy and divided leadership.
In comparison with the Opposition, the unity of the Ministerialists looks amazing. Observers are not agreed upon the cause of the recent miracle ; but there is no doubt that it has been worked. And even the difference of opinion as to the cause does not go very far. The Election turned. only upon three things : Free-trade, Chinese labour, and the Education Act,—so much is universally admitted. The point upon which the political doctors differ is only as to the relative weight of the last two of the three causes. The Ministerialists may be trusted to give a solid vote against dear bread, against yellow labour, and against the maintenance of two kinds of elementary schools. But Governments cannot well limit their activity to subjects upon which their supporters are all of one mind ; least of all can they do so in such a Parliament as the present. Even in 1833 Ministers soon found. them- selves at issue with what Sir Spencer Walpole calls "the mixed band of Radicals, Reformers, and. Repealers, who regarded the Reform Bill as only the means to an end, and were zealous to embark at once on the new enterprises which they fancied themselves in a position to undertake." So far, it may be said, the House of Commons to-day is a replica of the House of Commons seventy-three years ago. There is the same tempestuous energy, the same desire to be doing something, the same discontent with the apparent apathy of Ministers. But to say this and no more would. be to overlook an important distinction. In 1833 the object of the majority was simply destructive. The chief obstacle in their path was the number of abuses to which they wanted to put an immediate end. *Upon the fact that these things were abuses, and. needed to be abolished some day, there were hardly two opinions. In 1906, on the other hand, the business of the majority is constructive. Each section wishes to leave its mark on the statute-book, not merely by clearing it of rubbish, but by fillirg it with creative measures. Obviously, agreement as to what shall be pulled down is much more easily attained than agreement as to what shall be set up in its place. Liberals, Radicals, Socialists, Labour men may be equally anxious to get rid of what is now on the ground, and yet be absolutely at issue as to the form and purpose of the new building. That is what will probably happen in the present case. In the questions which await, the Government later on—the land, taxation, theLicensing Laws—there will be abundance of enthusiasm, but it will be enthusiasm directed to vary- ing, and possibly conflicting, ends.
This consideration tends to add to the uncertainty which rests upon the later work of the new Parliament. It is .Zurther increased by the long absence of the Liberal Party from power, and the effect which this absence has had upon the composition of the Cabinet. Some of the most important offices are filled by men who are little more than names to the rank-and-file of the party. As regards domestic legislation, and even the business of their own offices, they have still to make their reputation. For the present, therefore, we are living in appearance, or at any rate in the opinion of a. large portion of the House of Commons, under a one-man Ministry. A large section of the majority know Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, but among the older men they know hardly any one else. If the extremists have any decided opinion about their leaders, it is that, had they known how immense the majority was going to be, they would have insisted on the predominant element in it being much more largely represented in the Cabinet. As things have turned out, the interests of statesmanship and good government have benefited by Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's decision to take office • before the Election. If he had refused to do this, and had still obtained his present majority, the War Office and the India Office, and possibly the Foreign Office and the Exchequer, might have been differently filled. It is conceivable that a growing Parliamentary experience may somewhat modify this temper, and though each member of the majority may still be convinced of his own capacity to fill any post that may fall vacant, he has probably grown more sceptical as to the ability of his colleagues to do so. If so, the disposition to provoke a Ministerial crisis may become less active as the Session goes on. The uncertainty of the result in divisions where the Cabinet is known to be of one way of thinking, and the rank-and-file are suspected of being of another, tends in the same direction. The minority which supported Major Seely the other day would probably have been a great deal larger if the victory of the Government had been assured beforehand. When some three hundred men are hesitating between the wish to vote for a particular Resolution and the wish to keep the Government in office, the calculation of numbers becomes a very uncertain science.
The moral of all this is that Ministers should be careful to avoid the appearance of not knowing their own mind, or of being willing to yield to pressure which does not square with their own convictions. We do not expect them to show heroic fortitude in defending their projects against their own side. Majorities look for a fair return for the trouble they have taken to put a Government in office, and a Minister who was only anxious to make this return as small as possible would, perhaps not unnaturally, be con- sidered to have but slight claims to Cabinet office. But the character which the Government have earned for the moment of intending to leave everything to the judgment of the House—which, after all, is only a fine way of saying that the officers think it easier to obey their soldiers than to exact obedience from them—is not unlikely to lead by a roundabout road to the very disaster which Ministers are anxious to avert. A Government which is known to be always open to pressure will certainly be driven in the end to show that it can make a stand somewhere, and under the influence of this necessity it is extremely likely to make that stand in the wrong place. Unionists as we are, we should be exceedingly sorry to see a Government which we• regard as at present the sole trustee for Free-trade bringing this fate upon itself. Ministers have gone dangerously near it twice in this Session, and we sin- cerely hope that they will try no more experiments in the same direction.
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