MR. GOSCHEN'S CANDIDATURE.
IT was impossible that Mr. Goschen should say anything new in his address to the electors of the Exchange Division of Liverpool. The object of the Home-rule Party is the same as it was at the General Election. They wish to give Ireland a separate Legislature, with an Executive responsible to it. The object of the Unionist Party is the same as it was at the General Election. They wish to have a single Parlia- ment, and a single Executive responsible to it for all the Three Kingdoms. The only change that has come over the situation is that the " Plan of Campaign " has made it additionally clear what manner of men they are to whom we are asked to make over the government of Ireland. The victory won in the summer needs to be maintained and made more complete, and it is for each individual Unionist to determine how lie can best help on this great process. Mr. Goschen, acting on the advice of Lord Hartington, has decided to help it by entering the Government ; and he now appeals both to Con- servatives and Liberal Unionists to give him their active support.
So far as these two sections of opinion are concerned, there is no fear that the electors of the Exchange Division of Liverpool will fall short of their duty. Mr. Goschen has the double claim of having been a Liberal all his life, and of having now entered a Conservative Government. In the former character, he ought to be sure of the support of all Liberals who have not been led astray by the new doctrines ; in the latter, he can rely on the influence of party discipline. But in every constituency there are some voters who are but little open to political considerations. No doubt this per-tentage is smaller than it has ever been. Numbers of men who ordinarily take no part in an election went to the poll in the summer with as much zeal as if they had been Caucus committeemen. But even now this per-centage exists. There are always men to be found in whom political diffidence is exceedingly strong. They do not feel that they have the necessary data for forming an opinion of their own, and they are not inclined by habit or temperament to adopt without examination those of others. Scarcely any question in practical politics has only one side to it, and where so many Englishmen have suddenly become ardent believers in Home-rule for Ireland, there will certainly be some whose judgments will be too equally balanced to allow of their action being influenced by either of the opposing cases. It is to such as these, if they exist in the Exchange Division of Liverpool, that this paper is addressed. We will concede, for argument's sake, that there is as much to be said in rearm of Home-rule as there is to be said against it • and censer quently, that if the contest lay between two wholly unknown men, there would be no reason for voting at all. As it is, however, we think we can show very good reason for voting for Mr. Goschen. One of the two candidates must be returned, and as, from the point of view of Home-rule, the elector is supposed to be entirely indifferent which is returned, it is permissible for him to vote for the candidate whom he prefers on other grounds. If his vote should turn the scale, he will be better represented as regards the things he genuinely cares about, and no worse represented as regards the thing about which he is genuinely indifferent.
It can hardly need proof that, apart. from Home-rule, Mr. Goschen is of all men the beat fitted to be the representative of a great commercial constituency. It is not merely that he knows a great deal about business ; there are men, no doubt; in Liverpool who know quite as much as he. But in Mr. Goschen this mass of knowledge is informed by a vivid business imagination. His intellect delights to play over business
subjects. They have the same interest for him that scientific facts have for the man of science, or historical facts have for the historian. He loves to arrange them, to examine them, to determine what they prove, and what kind of action they call for. Now, this business imagination is an exceedingly rare characteristic. To possess it, it is not enough for a man to be both imaginative and a good man of business. He may be both, and yet the business side of him and the imaginative side of him may be kept quite separate. The imaginative side may be occupied with history, as it was in Grote, or with atone implements, plants, and animals, as it is in Sir John Lubbock ; while the business side may simply deal with the affairs of the concern in which he is a partner as they present themselves for daily treatment. In Mr. Goschen, on the contrary, the two are intimately associated. His love of business has survived his retirement from the practical conduct of it. It excites him, it absorbs him, it draws out all his faculties. Moreover, besides being rare, this characteristic is especially valuable in a legislator. Many Acts of Parliament have been failures because those who framed them had none of it. The effect of the laws they were making has not been vividly present to them. They have not placed themselves in the shoes of those for whose benefit they are assumed to be enacted, and pictured to themselves what their position will be after, as compared with before legislation. They have not appreciated the great natural and economical forces of which they were essaying to guide the course, and, as might have been expected, these forces have refused to move along the commonplace lines laid down for them. It is especially im- portant that a higher faculty should now be brought to bear upon business legislation, because the near future is likely enough to make heavy calls on it. We need not hold with Mr. Cotter Morison, in the remarkable book he has just published, that "before the century is at an end we shall know what a general or commercial catastrophe really means, when the famishing unemployed will not be counted by thousands, but by millions ; when a page of the Times will suffice for the business advertisements of London ; and when the richest will be glad to live on the little capital they have left, never thinking of interest." But without going this length, or admitting that after many false alarms despair has at last proved itself to be the only temper in which we can reasonably contemplate the future, we may grant that the demands likely to be made on the energy and foresight of our commercial men are more exacting than they have ever been, that the rivalry of other nations is yearly becoming keener, and that the economical problems that await solution have grown alike in importance and in difficulty. The humdrum legislator is not the man to whom we can look for help under such circumstances as these. We need some one who can take a comprehensive view of the facts for which he has to make provision, and can bring before his own mind, and before the minds of others, some conception of the effect which the laws he proposes will produce. In this quality, Mr. Goschen stands above all his contempo- raries, except Mr. Gladstone. Of late years, indeed, he stands even above Mr. Gladstone, because his business imagination is not, as Mr. Gladstone's is, kept in strict subordination to his political and Parliamentary imagination. The economical results of legislation are not hidden from him by a coming division. If, then, there be any voters in the Exchange Division of Liverpool to whom the strife between Unionists and Home- rulers seems unintelligible, they must surely desire to be repre- sented by a man who, quite apart from politics, has such re- markable claims upon a great business constituency. Though they may care nothing about the main course of the battle, they have still something to gain by taking part in it, and something to lose by holding aloof from it ; and this con- sideration ought to be enough to bring every man of them to the poll, and to ensure his voting for Mr. Goschen.
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