THE PLACE OF THE DOCTRINAIRE IN POLITICAL LIFE. T HAT there
is a place for the doctrinaire in our political life we do not doubt for a moment. We want a man who can throw dry light on the problems of the hour, who can divest the issues of party heat and party prejudice, who can go down to the foundations and show us exactly where we stand, who can know "causes of things," and who,whether we agree with the treatment he recommends or not, can at least give us a skilled and clear diagnosis. We want to know the exact state of the body politic, even though we differ as much as ever about the remedies. Such diagnosis the doctrinaire is supposed to give us, and in giving it to us he would confer a great public benefit. But, alas !
such a doctrinaire is very far to seek. Mr. Morley would dearly like to play the part, and is in some ways well fitted for it. Unfortunately, however, his attempt to do the -doctrinaire's duty always ends in failure. He means to approach the subject of politics in the best doctrinaire spirit. We see him begin quite in the proper tone and temper of the consulting physician who is asked to pro- nounce an opinion merely on the nature of the disease. The moment, however, Mr. Morley gets to close quarters with his subject, the moment, that is, that the patient's shirt is off and the stethoscope is applied, Mr. Morley is whirled away in a hurricane of medical partisanship. The man who we hoped was going to be content with diagnosis plunges into all the issues of treatment past and future. We find him jump at once from the scientific question of the patient's condition to a passionate condemnation of the follies and errors of the previous treatment, and to a burning desire to impose a new and better system for the future. The calm con- sultant has departed, has entirely vanished. In other words, directly Mr. Morley gets interested the true political Englishman emerges, and he cannot help going at the problems of the moment tooth and nail. We are bound to say that though we very greatly regret the loss af the doctrinaire's dry light, we cannot suppress a certain feeling of sympathy. This determination to throw off the philosopher's garb of frigid calm and to take a hand in the struggle is so human and so English that we can- not refrain from liking Mr. Morley all the better for his failure to play tho part for which Nature would seem to have cast him.
Mr. Morley's last speech, that at Manchester on Wednesday, is a good example of his unsuccess- ful efforts to play the doctrinaire, and to act a part which was played to perfection by Mr. Walter Bagehot. He no doubt most sincerely desired to give us nothing but dry light. Instead, except in one short and sensible passage about efficiency and economy and their interdependence—a point on which our readers will remember we have again and again insisted—Mr. Morley's whole speech was instinct with the passion of his own feel- ings, views, and prepossessions. We do not say this to prejudice Mr. Morley, for we hold that passion alone can move the world, and that a man whose political views are not stirred by passion will do little or nothing in political life.—It is this absence of the true political passion which ruins all Lord Rosebery's •efforts. — Mr. Morley, like the majority of those whom for want of a better word we cannot well help calling Pro-Boers, is essentially a patriotic man. Though we think him ill-judged and mistaken, we have never doubted for a moment that he is intensely anxious for the welfare of the Motherland, and would make any and every personal sacrifice to further her interests as he understands them. That his understanding of them is hopelessly at fault is no derogation from his patriotism any more than it was from that of the Copperheads who stormed at Lincoln fOr peace in the last year of the war. There are some men, ana very good men, who always lose their heads in a carriage accident, and think it helpful to abuse the driver and to anathematise the wickedness of the carriage-builder, and even of the road surveyor. But granted Mr. Morley's patriotism of intention, nothing could have been more absoliitely opposed to that true attitude of the doctrinaire which he apparently believed he was assuming than Mr. Morley's treatment of the war. In the passages dealing with the situation the feminine note, always latent and often very audible in Mr. Morley's public utterances,came out very strongly. He spoke about war and its horrors, not with that magnificent, almost superhuman, humanity of temper which Lincoln never failed to use in regard to the horrors of war. Instead there was a shrill, wailing cry as of a physical pain engendered by the thought of the blood- shed and the misery. One heard behind the well-turned literary expressions the woman's most natural and most human impatience. It is too dreadful. I can't bear it. Why can't they stop fighting? What shall I do? Oh, why are they allowed to kill each other like this ! ' When we point out this tone in Mr. Morley's utterance we can assure our readers it is without the slightest sense of that scorn or contempt withwhich some persons may be inclined to regard it. That he should be thus moved does not, in our view, detract in the least from his high and noble character as a public man, or from our belief in his own personal steadfast- ness. Were he personally called upon to bear a great weight of responsibility he would, we have no doubt, bear it as all experience shows the most tender-hearted and sensitive of women bear such responsibilities. Women of that temper are often not less but more heroic in moments of personal stress and danger than those whose feelings are less easily stirred. But this must not blind us to the fact that the judgment is apt to be warped and distorted by such sensi- tiveness and tenderness of nature. We may feel a certain respect, even veneration, for those who are so deeply touched by mortal suffering, but to use such men as guides in moments of crisis and peril is most un- wise. To show that we are not exaggerating, let us quote only one of the shrill, wailing passages from the Manchester speech. After speaking of the Peace meet- ing in St. James's Hall in 1899, Mr. Mofley went on : —" I think I need not describe to you the hideous shadow that has fallen o'er our hearts since that meeting.
I need not describe to you how many brave men of our own country, our Colonies, our Dutch fellow-subjects have since that day gone to sleep their last long sleep. I need not describe to you how many homes, not only in England, in Great Britain, in the Colonies, in South Africa, have been stricken and made desolate. I need not tell you how South Africa itself is now in large parts of it a waste, devastated, havoc-stricken. You know that we are at this moment—we were told so in the House of Commons the other night—we are providing for some 300,000 men in arms or in attendance on men in arms. We have forage being drawn for something like 230,000 animals, and I for my part am not ashamed—you may call me a sentimental idiot—to overlook in the enormity of the sufferings and miseries and horrors of war the sufferings of dumb animals. We have got 30,000 or 40,000 prisoners of war. They are quartered about in half-a-dozen separate Dependencies and Colonies. We have spent millions of treasure and tens of millions of treasure, and are you sure that this has really advanced us to the position which we wish to occupy ? I think not." Most certainly we do not think Mr. Morley a sentimental idiot, and we view his tenderness of heart with a great deal of sympathy ; but who would take such a man as a: pilot in a, storm ? The whole attitude of mind is in- curably perverse. Apparently what makes Mr. Morley sure that the war was wrong and a crime is not its origin or our aims or the rights of the Boers, but the sufferings of the war. As well might one judge whether an opera- tion was right or wrong by the sufferings of the patient. The surgeon says : If I had not cut off the man's leg he must have died of gangrene.' The patient's friend replies 'I don't want to hear anything about that, but look at the blood and the suffering and the awful torture you have inflicted on the poor fellow ; and it is not even over yet. You are still hacking and hewing. It is appalling, and you make it worse by saying he would have died from the gangrene if you had not operated. I tell you surgery is a brutal, blood-stained crime, and I want none of your excuses. They lower you to the level of the brute.' That seems to us to represent the effect which the horrors of war have on Mr. Morley's mind.
But we must not pursue this line of thought, for we did not set out with the intention of combating Mr. Morley, but rather with the desire to express our 3regret that he is not able to fill as he would like to the part of the doctrinaire. A real doctrinaire who would keep a, clear head and a cold heart, and hit the Jingoes and the advo- cates of militarism with one hand and the sentimentalists with the other, would do an infinite deal of good in the body politic. We want the man who will "lay his ..tiger on the place, and say Thou aile,st here and here,” and will say it not as a means of triumphing over this or that man or party or section of a party, but as a scientific; fact which must be taken note of if we mean to keep the State in health and wealth long to live. We have no sympathy whatever with those who object to being told home truths and resent criticism ; but, if it is to be useful, this special kind of criticism must not be com- municated in a medium of passion and personal feeling. We want this particular food sterilised before we use it. No doubt man cannot live wholly on sterilised food, but a, little of it is often very useful. Mr. Morley, however, cannot supply it to us, and we must therefore look else- where.
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