TOPICS OF THE DAY.
MR. GLADSTONE'S RESIGNATION.
"NOW is the stately column broke" without an external blow. We suppose there is no help for it, for every man, however necessary to his fellow-men, must be the ulti- mate judge of his own conduct, but Mr. Gladstone's Letter of Resignation is nothing less than a calamity. His decision has been made final just at the moment when the party, and to a large extent the country, had made up its mind to renew cordially and thoroughly its old allegiance, and to follow him as Englishmen follow a leader who is fighting up the hill in the face of overpowering foes. The appreciation of Mr. Gladstone is probably stronger with his party now than it has ever been. Time has shown those who honestly dissented from him, such as the Nonconformists, that they have nothing to expect either from the policy, or the squeeze- ableness, or the good-nature of his adversaries, and they were openly rearranging themselves to fight under his banner. Time has also worn away the bitterness of those who were discontented with him on personal grounds, many of whom failed to obtain seats in the new Parliament, and time has rivetted the faith of the Old Whigs in the wisdom of their originally unwilling choice. Above all, time has shown the Liberals throughout the country that for Mr. Gladstone no equal substitute is obtainable. The party has many able leaders, but some objection of some sort can be raised to each ; and there is this objection to them all, that no one of them is or could be an effective leader in the presence of the dis- approving Member for Greenwich. The part which Sir Robert Peel played successfully for some years is not open to Mr. Gladstone. There is not a competent follower behind him who does not know that he must either lead, or travel abroad, or, by occasional interventions, dwarf any other leader into powerlessness, and who was not therefore ready to accept him, if not with his whole heart—and that is the case with nine out of ten—at least with his whole brain. If Mr. Gladstone had only said that he would lead, there would have been one mighty cheer, and a party as thoroughly disciplined as Liberals can ever hope to be. It would have taken but one Session of real hardship, of daily watchfulness and contest and intellectual victory, to make the party again strong, and give them that distant sight of power which impels political leaders to their highest projects and most strenuous efforts to achieve them. And now the prospect is overcast, the party thrown into anarchy,—for after all, its chiefs were Mr. Gladstone's Ministers, and after his resignation cease to form an organism,—and the rulers of the future are left without the guidance of the man on whose genius they could most con- fidently rely. Still young, as years are counted in English politics, in the fullest vigour of health, with his brain teeming with capacities, with an army of followers ready at his beck, Mr. Gladstone retires from the service of the country which owes to him more than to any man now living, and at least as much as to any Premier in her constitutional record. It is a stupendous misfortune, and none the less so because Mr. Gladstone leaves no certain successor behind him, has indicated no one publicly on whom his mantle ought to fall. The Recess may now be counted by days, and the party will, to all ap- pearance, commence its Parliamentary duty as a mere con- gregation of atoms, without a chief, a programme, or even a rallying-cry. It will scarcely know at first how to manage daily work. The arrangement of last Session disappears with Mr. Gladstone, and even had he remained, could not have been protracted through another. It had become intolerable. Utterly anomalous as it was in theory, there was a hope that it would work well, but it was found to work much as a similar arrangement would work in an army or a fleet, —that is, it did not work at all. The party was reduced to the position of the majority in the French Assembly,—that is, it could show its strength only when so provoked by some unexpected move that anger supplied the place of organisation. There are in the French majority too many leaders, too many fractions, and too many sources of dis- cord for effective action, and so there were last year in the Liberal party. The common work of Opposition, work with- out which a Parliamentary party is a mere collection of voters, could not occasionally get itself done, and measures of the very worst, though not of the most striking kind, were allowed to pass without "whips," and without adequate criticism. It is vain to say that opposition was useless and criticism waste of valuable time. The moment Mr. Gladstone led, and the Liberals attended to what was doing, and the Whips were able to work with a clear knowledge of the general object, the Ministry were compelled to pause, to reconsider their proposal', and finally to withdraw all its most objectionable clauses. A Bill fur handing over 'rational educational endowments to the Church, proposed as a vigorous assertion of Tory feeling, was in a few days reduced to a proposal for telling Lord. Lyttelton by Act of Parliament that he had made himself unpopular with Trustees. The party found, as a well-led party always does, that it had allies in the Opposition, and would, had the division been taken, have whittled, the majority away to nothing. This is the result of leader- ship, and leadership will next Session be still more neededd. Unless all rumours, signs, and symptoms are alike false, the Tory Government propose to attend chiefly to the only class of subjects upon which their supporters within the House are at variance with their supporters out of it,—that is to say, they intend to bring forward measures for the amelioration of tenure and the regulation of local tqxation, which County Members will not like because they prefer things as they are, and county electors will not like because the suggestions do not go half far enough. That will be the very opportunity of the Liberals, if only they can be led, and led by a Committee whose head can act at the right moment, without too much hesitation, and without seeing his colleagues jump up to propose an alternative scheme ; but if they are not led, the chance is certain to be lost, to the permanent injury of the Liberals, who will be again condemned by the farmers as disregardful of their interests, and to the temporary injury of the country. There is no need, however, to give illustrations. The plain fact of the matter is that loyalty to anarchy is impossible, that no party can be devoted te• space, that there must be an organisation, and that in England: an organisation requires a head constantly present, though it be only in the imagination of the people. There must be somebody who can give an order in an emergency, with full technical right to give it, so that those who obey it at all events will have discipline to plead ; and last year, night after night, sometimes under the moat irritating circumstances, there was no such leader. The arrangement made was worse conceived than that which nearly ruined Marlborough—the transference of the command on alternate days from him to another general—and in fact, amounted to this,—that whenever Mr. Gladstone was present nobody else had any general authority, and when he was not present nobody had any general authority at all.
This state of affairs must be ended, and it must be ended by Mr. Gladstone. We do not presume to tell him, as so many of his party will, that he has acted wrongly, that his duty is to die in harness, that no possible consideration ought to be of such moment to him as the good government of Great Britain. He has done too much for Englishmen, and received too little at their hands, for that argument to lie in their mouths. Every man must be judge of his own conscience, and there is not in England a conscience less likely to be strained than Mr. Gladstone's. If he desires full leisure to think out questions: before which English party politics are very trivial, he is his own arbiter of his own duty to himself and to mankind ; but none the less does he owe one more service to his countrymen, one effort to organise that essential datum of the national political life,—Her Majesty's Opposition. He ought, as we read our recent constitutional history, to call his party together, to state once more and viva' voce his decision, to hear their mournful representations, and if his will remains unmoved, to take counsel with them boldly and frankly on their choice of a working Chief. It is not for him to dictate, though his voice may outweigh that of most there present, but it is for him to advise and for them f accept, and to make known to the con- stituencies the reasons for their choice. Let the burden of leadership fall where it may, it will be a heavy one, but it will be intolerable if the selection is not accepted by Liberal Members and ratified by the party at large. There must be an end of indiscipline, and Mr. Gladstone's retirement, if prompt measures are not taken, will end in a confusion like that which is apt to reign in a defeated party in Spain. Every man will fight for his own hand, and the most unscrupulous will come to the top. And painful as it is to say it, there is another word remaining to be said. This last duty done, and we maintain that it is a moral duty of the most im- perative kind, Mr. Gladstone must bethink himself whether, until the new leadership is compacted, he can conscientiously in- tervene even occasionally in debate. It seems so hard to write, but the plain truth lies there, that Mr. Gladstone in the House
so dwarfs every other Liberal, the sound of his voice so terri- fies every other orator, the words of his counsel so outweigh the advice of any other Ulysses, that leadership may be an impossibility or a humiliation. There is not a possible leader who, if he knew that Mr. Gladstone were com- ing after him, would not lose half his powers in the depressing consciousness that he was sure to be out- shone, that he might possibly be rebuked, and that he might be criticised into inanition. With Mr. Gladstone in the House, no ecclesiastical policy is possible to the front Liberal Bench, and no financial policy can be pressed with a certainty of acceptance. With Napoleon in the ranks, no Marshal can command, and it is from very admiration, from an enthusiasm of belief in his powers, that we repeat the advice of those who wish him no good, and pray him, if he will be Kingmaker instead of King, not to let his shadow take all brightness out of the new-made crown and all authority out of a scarcely welded sceptre.
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