MR. 0 OSCHEN'S NEW POSITION.
THE advantages gained by the people from Mr. Goschen'a Conversion scheme may prove to be very great, and not the pecuniary advantages alone, though these are larger than the public quite perceives. If he succeeds, as it now seems probable that he will succeed, he will have extinguished tha
interest on fifty millions of the Debt, and of a hundred mil- lions by 1903, without reducing the power of the Treasury to pay off debt out of the surpluses. He has given the Commis- sioners of the National Debt a lift of twenty years. It is the interest, not the principal of the Debt, which weighs on the national industry, and to extinguish a sixth of the interest is to take off one-sixth from the weight of the burden. Even if the great war should come, and the markets of Europe should be flooded with new securities, the relief felt here will be great, for not only will the country be enabled to borrow more cheaply than if 3 per cent, had remained the normal rate, but it will, if prices fall, buy up its own debt every year below instead of above par. The taxpayers would think that a financier who took off a sixth of their debt without asking them for aid, had fallen direct from heaven ; and that is what Mr. Goschen in another form will, if his scheme succeeds, have actually done. This, however, is not the greatest, perhaps it is the smallest, of the benefits we shall derive from Mr. Goschen's success.
The country is hungering, as Mr. Matthew Arnold recently said, for a little success, to see some large and beneficial proposal actually carried through, to feel, as French journalists put it, that the Government governs. It is weary of the power- lessness of Parliament, of the timidity of the Executive, of the preposterous distance which separates deliberation from act. The work of politics has begun to resemble a law- suit in our grandfathers' days, when the suitor's son, if fortunate, obtained a decision after a life and a half had been passed in sickening expectation. The conversion of the Debt is just the measure to reinvigorate the popular hope for energy. It affects everybody in some way or other, everybody under- stands it, and to everybody it seems even bigger than it is. For half-a-century the Debt has been, in the popular imagina- tion, the largest thing in polities, the great burden on the State, the first reason why taxation must be heavy, and the State punctiliously economical. The causes why the burden has grown lighter, and the Debt has, in fact, become a manageable quantity, are not perceptible to ordinary people. They forget, because it is silent, the immense growth of the estate on which the mortgage was laid. To them, the amount of the Debt is still almost unthinkable, is like the distance of a fixed star measured in miles ; and to have dealt with it easily, and through Parliamentary forms, to have reduced its aggregate pressure perceptibly, yet in doing it to have improved the public credit, will be felt, as it deserves to be, as a great feat. The Government which has done it will be considered a strong Government, will, in fact, for a curious reason, receive even more credit than would have been given to a Liberal one for the self-same act. Liberalism has been for many years identified in finance With Mr. Gladstone ; and Mr. Gladstone is considered to be in that department so superior to all other men, so like a magician, so able to dismiss a tax with "Hey, presto !" and to say to the "Reduced," "Depart, and be no more seen I" that his great performances have been hardly credited to the Government at all. This one will be, and in every debating club and association in the country it will be admitted, grudgingly or eagerly, that "Conversion," at all events, was a very big thing very well done.
This is a great source of power to the allied parties who now govern the Kingdom, and there is another yet. It is a fact which it would take a volume to explain, but which no one, we think, will deny, that the people of this country expect and demand of all Conservative Govern- ments more administrative skill than they do of their Liberal rivals. The idea, a partially false idea, but deeply rooted, is that every Government ought to do something for its money, and that, as a Conservative Government will not advance " the cause of progress," or introduce new experiments in Constitution-making, it ought, in common fairness, to improve what exists, to make all departments, and institutions, and public servants' work a little better. If it does not do that, what is it good for? A Government which reduces taxation, or secures peace, or proposes a magnificent novelty in the way of transferring power to the people, may be pardoned for losing the Transvaal, or building bad ships, or spending too much on an ineffective Army ; but a Government which pro- poses none of these things, or proposes them reluctantly, ought to succeed in work. The rooted idea of the people is that, although they may tolerate a man of genius like Lord Beaconsfield, or a great Prince like Lord Salisbury, the proper and natural outcome of Conservatism is a Sir Robert Peel, a man with wide plans for administration or finance, which nevertheless are good plans, and above all practicable. Such a man, they say, will "administer well," will "keep everything safe," will meet any difficulty with a measure as large as itself, and they pardon him all defects, such, for instance, as Sir Robert Peel's want of the sense of party honour, with a readiness which to foreigners, who always expect to see a people touched through the imagination, is simply inexplicable. This latent expectation is deeply gratified by a success like Mr. Goschen's, which indicates infinitely more than a capacity for dealing with large figures. On finance, though not always on taxation, the people take their opinion from experts ; and the experts know well that a National Debt is not converted by doing a sum on a elate. Mr. Goschen must have ascertained the opinion of multitudes of men, must have conferred with and conciliated powerful interests, must have estimated scrupulously the strength of certain sources of resistance, must, above all, have weighed to a sovereign his own means of punishing, or at least over- coming, any widespread refusal to accept his propositions. To do all that, yet keep the decision a secret almost up to the hour of execution, is good administration, and we shall find henceforward that Mr. Goschen is of this additional use to the State. If very large proposi- tions have to be made, involving, as modern propositions so often do, a mixture of statesmanship and financial adroitness, he will be listened to from the first as one whom the people trust. His plan, or the plan he sanctions, may be rejected ; but it will be rejected as a grave measure to be thoroughly considered, and set aside only for reasons of the first importance. Suppose, for instance, that Mr. Goschen should propose to revolutionise local taxation to an extent at present improbable, or to buy up Ireland on behalf of its cultivators—which will one day have to be done—those very large proposals will be received and considered with a prima-fade approval, a sense that they will probably work ; that though great, they are not dreamy ; that, at all events, they must be seriously opposed, as they never would have been but for the Conversion scheme. Men, in fact, will not be frightened, or even agitated, when Mr. Goschen sets them sums in scores of millions, for he has dealt with hundreds of millions, and dealt so successfully that Mr. Gladstone, who had every conceivable reason to oppose, at once pronounced his plan " most carefully considered." It is a grave advantage to the State to possess a man who occupies such a position, and therefore a grave advantage to the party with which he has allied himself, and which, as he is not yet Mr. Gladstone, succeeds in carrying to its own account much of the credit of his achievements.
The advantage is the more welcome because of Mr. Gosehen's somewhat exceptional place in politics. He is the Unionist par excellence. The country is just now governed by a party singularly united in its preferences and in its aversions, in its plans and in its rejections of plans, which, if it bore but one name, would be recognised as among the strongest that had ever appeared in Parliament. As, owing to certain diver- gences of ultimate tendency, it retains two names, its strength is hardly perceived, and its adversaries keep on hoping against hope that it will split asunder. Not a Bill can be brought forward upon which there is not a cackle of prophecy that this will produce disunion, and Mr. Parnell has even formulated the theory that the puzzle solvitur ambulando, that the more work is done, the greater is the likelihood of the workers parting from one another. He might as well say that Alpine guides are sure to quarrel when they see a crevasse to be passed ; but his theory has obviously weight, both in Parliament and outside. At such a moment, it is no light thing that the man who has advanced most in repute for practical ability, for doing the very things it is most difficult to do, should be the Minister who is, so to speak, the actual and concrete nexus between the two divisions of the governing party, the only Unionist who sits within the Conservative Cabinet, the one man who belongs essentially and completely to both. If he is a great administrator, then Unionism and able administration are plainly compatible, and, moreover, the alliance in no way interferes with strong and successful govern- ment. So far from the two-headed Government being weak, or vacillating, or given to ill-success, it has carried through the largest measure of our day, in the face of difficulties too great for Mr. Gladstone's Government, so easily and so smoothly that the magnitude of the achievement half escapes attention. It has, moreover, accomplished this feat through the agency of the very man who, if the alliance has a weakening effect, ought to be the weakest in the Cabinet, for he above all others displays its ruling temper, Conservatism modified and made energetic
by the influence of internal Liberal opinion. The country is not foolish when it is once informed, and it can hardly miss the lesson thus afforded it, or fail to see that it has in the two-headed Government an instrument which can do more for it than merely resist successfully the disintegration of its Home Dominion.
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