PARTIES IN TRAVAIL.
THE most curious political feature of the time is the
evidence of the political power of names. Tories who have consented to a measure which renders Toryism in the old sense absolutely impossible, are going through throes of agony because they are asked to combine frankly with the men who are the most consistent advocates of the sobriety for which they wish. Moderate Liberals who desire nothing so much as to co-operate with reasonable Conservatives in effecting those reforms which will ensure them from revolution, are so passionate in their objection to the name of " Conservative " that they hang back from the alliance which would best secure them what they want, and risk by preference an alliance with the more vehement Radicals who will assuredly turn them to their own purposes. And now even, we find Radicals who might find evidence in every political transaction of this country that the left wing of the Liberal Party always in the end prevails over the right, objecting earnestly in their turns to fusion with the Liberals whom they will eventually succeed in turning round their finger. It was remarkable to
see on Tuesday the pangs with which the Radicals submitted at St. James's Hall to that assimilation with the less energetic elements of their party by which it is practically certain that the Radicals will gain, and the Liberals who are not Radicals will lose. Why, in the very fact that their chairman Mr. John Morley, has superseded entirely Sir John Lubbock and men of his stamp in giving the cue to the Liberal Union of the Metro- politan counties and districts, the Radicals might have discerned, if they had chosen, how ill it fares with a moderate belonging to a party of progress, when he resists the effort of the Radicals to egg him on to stronger measures. A year ago, no one knew how the Liberal Associations would go when asked to hand over Ireland to Mr. Parnell and his friends. Now we know that the Unionists are a minority, we fear a small minority, of the Liberal Party ; but none the less, the Radical betrays the most lively anguish of mind when asked to asso- ciate himself closely with the soberer Liberal whom in the end he is sure to rule. The only opposition offered to the fusion of Liberals and Radicals at St. James's Hall on Tuesday came from the Radical Party. We should have supposed that if the soberer men had shown any prescience, it would have come from the moderates. But when it comes to a question of names, the man who is asked to submit to the greatest nominal change, even if the advantage will be all on his side, is always the most restive. If the Radicals in St. James's Hall had but known what was going on at Dorchester on the same day, they might have been more content than they were to fuse themselves with the Liberals. For on that same day, at Dorchester, Lord Wolverton (better known in the House of Commons under his old name of Mr. George Glyn, Mr. Glad- stone's Whip during his first Administration) was purging the Liberal Association in Dorsetahire of all the moderates, including one of his own successors, Lord Stalbridge (formerly Lord Richard Grosvenor), and purging it in language which he himself felt to be violent, for he subsequently offered an apology for it. Yet he forced the Liberal Unionists to leave the Liberal Association only because they resist Home-rule for Ireland. Had the Radical extremists in St. James's Hall, who appeared to feel contaminated by the very name of " Liberal," known what was going on at Dorchester, they might, perhaps, have been reconciled to the hard fate of appearing for a few years a little less Radical than they are, in order to get the opportunity of making the country a great deal more so. But politicians, like other men, too often struggle blindly against the very fate they moat desire. Now certainly we find Tories so attached to their name that they are willing to sacrifice the most substantial advantages rather than acknowledge themselves Whigs ' • Whigs ready to hide their heads with shame because they have to co-operate with Conservatives ; and finally, Radicals stickling for their name with none the less passion that by sacrificing something of the appearance of extreme views, they will cer- tainly gain an immense advantage for the realisation of those views.
For our own parts, we must preach again what we have so often preached before, that politicians should accommodate their name to their policy, rather than their policy to their name. The true course now is for all moderates to unite together for a policy of sober and cautious reform against rash experiments of the effect of which it is impossible to predict the results. Even those who are Tories at heart, knowing, as they know very well, that with household suffrage every chance of true Toryism in England has dis- appeared, would do well not to stickle for a title which entirely misrepresents the policy with which they wish now to be identified, and which, by misrepresenting, gravely injures the political prospect of that policy. Whigs would be extremely foolish to start back in horror at the mere appearance of an alliance with Conservatives, and to forget that, in consenting to that alliance, Conservatives must liberalise themselves far more energetically than the Whigs will need to restrain themselves. And as for Radicals, they are quite blind to the drift of events if they ignore that, by calling themselves Liberals, they will get a great deal more influence over the country than by standing apart and calling themselves Radicals. It is a certainty that there must now be two camps, the camp of the sober politicians and the camp of the impatient politicians, and that the more liberal the name by which the sober poli- ticians call themselves, the more popular they will be, while the more moderate is the name by which the impatient politicians call themselves, the more popular they will be. Conservatives will only succeed by hearty willingness to reform abuses; ; and there- fore the more openly they profess their desire to reform those
abuses, the better they will succeed in resisting the sweeping away of what they do not think abuses, but useful national institutions. Revolutionists will only succeed by representing their policy in the light of absolutely necessary change, for the English people do not love sensation for the sake of sensation ; and therefore the more openly Reformers acknowledge that their wish is to be temperate,—and doubtless, in nine cases out of ten, it is their wish, though they mistake intemperate thoughts for temperate,—the more likely they will be to persuade the people that what amounts to a revolution is nothing but pru- dence in disguise. If there is to be any real and permanent crystallisation of English political parties, it must come in the combination of all the moderates on the basis of a policy of moderation, and of all those who wish for violent change on the position that, in the end, violent change will be found to be safer than change less drastic.
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