TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE NEW GOVERNMENT.
`\IITHAT is a patriotic Englishman to say about the V HAT Government—and at such a moment as the present ? We are entering upon the tremendous task of reconstituting Europe. We have before us the gigantic task of founding a League of Nations which shall substitute Peace through right and justice for the dread arbitrament of war. Finally, we have got to remake our polity at home and teach the People as a whole, men and women, what full citizenship means —its duties and obligations as well as its rights and privileges. At such a moment it is essential that the British Government, which must take a leading part in all these things, should be strong with the strength which can only come from a united community behind them. Clearly we must all want our Government to enter the councils of the world with the very maximum of prestige, using. that rather ambiguous word in its better and not its inferior sense. Now if ever our Government should enjoy the maximum of confidence. But such confidence, as we may be sure, cannot possibly accrue to them unless there is a general feeling that the Government represent the whole Nation, and have the sanction and consent of all those who are best amongst us. But how can our Government have prestige of this kind, and speak both to friends and enemies with the emphasis with which we desire they should speak, if they have been criticized here and declared to be unworthy of the Nation for which they act in the Council of the Nations ? How can we be said to weaken them in the bee of Europe and America, and imperil the carrying out of the tremendous tusks in front of them, by pointing out in public how and where they fail to maintain the standard and the character which the British Government ought to maintain In view of these considerations, the first impulse of every Englishman when he scans the names and offices in the Reconstructed Government is to say nothing. Not merely the sense of shame at many of the new appoint- ments, but the fear that he may weaken his country in her fated hour, seems to hid him keep silence. But though this desire not to criticize but to acquiesce is moat natural, nay, instinctive, there must be a limit to its indulgence. If not, we may fall into an even greater error, an error which is fatal to the good conduct of all human affairs—that of inspiring our agents with the belief that they have been given an unlimited moral credit; that nothing they can do will be adjudged wrong, that they arc like some monarch who is allowed to press the claim of Pia dirinuni to its uttermost extreme, and that accordingly they may consider themselves as free from accountability for their acts. There is no man in the world, let alone the ordinary Party politician, who is not demoralized by the belief that he possesses a talisman which frees him from responsibility, and that he is above criticism. But it is not enough to say that no body of ruling men, even in such exceptional circumstances as those of to-day, must be told that they may regard themselves as above criticism, lest criticism should weaken them. There are certain cases in which the good citizen may find it his duty, though a duty per- formed with the utmost reluctance, to say what he thinks of the man at the wheel.
It is with deep regret that we find it necessary to say that the Government as now reconstituted are not worthy of the duties which they have to perform. The group or ring of ruling men in the Government, the influence which will count in the Administration, is not what it should be or what it might be. No one knowing anything of the inside of our political life who read the list of Ministers in last Saturday's newspapers can have failed to see again and again that a large number of the men given office, or allowed to retain it, were put there, not because they were the best men, but because places, and good places, had to be found for this or that friend or supporter of the Prime Minister, or, worse still, friend or supporter of his chief supporters. It is a case not of finding the best man for the job, but of finding a job which will satisfy a powerful or insistent political partisan. Again and again as one reads the list and asks the question, Why is this man here and why is he given this great office ? " the answer that has to be made is a bewildered " Who can tell ? " The only alternative tc such political agnosticism is some conjecture so humiliating to the nation and to the distributor of public offices as to make its entertainment at this critical moment appear an outrage. We did not expect an ideal Ministry to be formed by Mr. Lloyd George. There is too much of levity, rashness, and inability to see the political life of the nation steadily and see it whole in Mr. Lloyd George to make any such expectation possible. But we did hope that for once his spirit might be touched to fine issues. and that at any rate the sinister influences upon which he has had too often to rely in his dash for power would be put aside, and that some, if not all, of the tares originally planted in the Administration would be rooted out. Our hopes, however, were not long-lived. Alas ! it is not the tares that have suffered in the reconstruction, but the wheat. There were Press warnings indeed before the list was published that an old journalistic hand could not fad to recognize. It was noticeable that the Northcliffe Press, which ' manages " Mr. Lloyd George with a mixture of threats and cajolery, obloquy and peevish adulation, had begun to express the fear that the balance of power in the new Ministry would be placed in the hands of " the Tories," and " the Old Gang," and so forth. Mr. Lloyd George, it was added, would be judged according to whether he brought in new blood or left the aforesaid Tories to ruin his Administration, and so and so on.
This talk about Tories and government by the Carlton Club is of course pure humbug. It is senseless to describe the chief Unionist leaders as Tories, meaning thereby men who have refused to accept and respect our democratic Constitution, men who are believers in privilege, and who want to exploit the rights of Capital and of the Plutocracy. Any one with experience of public affairs could see that this talk of Toryism, when coming from the Daily Mail and the rest of the Northcliffe Press, was mere cant, and dangerous cant at that. It was only necessary to apply these generalizations to the facts, and to note what they meant in terms of persona. They meant in practice that under the cry of " Toryism " we ought to be deprived of the benefit of the good sense, high character, and patriotism of men like Mr. Austen Chamberlain and Mr. Walter Long— and no doubt also Mr. Balfour—as well as of men like Lord Finlay, in order to give greater scope to such high-souled democrats and idealists as Mr. Winston Churchill, Sir F. E. Smith (the new Lord Chancellor), Sir Alfred Mond, and Lord Reading. Though technically not a member of the Administration, the last-named has been given a great post in National Reconstruction, and is semi-officially recognized as the Prime Minister's chief source of political inspiration. If these are the men who are to be substituted for such " Tories " as Lord Finlay, Lord Robert Cecil, and Lord Cave, we can only express our belief that the beat, most thoroughgoing, and most open-minded leaders of Democracy in the country would infinitely prefer the so-called Tories.
Those who take only a superficial view of the situation may perhaps argue that after all the Northcliffe Press did not get its way ; that its pet aversions, Mr. Austen Chamber- lain and Mr. Walter Long, were not got rid of because tho Daily Mail had chosen to label them Tories " ; and that Mr. Lloyd George did not yield in this instance to newspaper clamour. We are of course devoutly thankful that men of such moderation and such high character and ability as Mr. Austen Chamberlain and Mr. Walter Long are to remain in the Government, and to support men of such tried probity and political experience as Mr. Balfour, Lord Curzon, and Lord Milner. But Ministries, like human institutions and human creatures, must he gauged by what Pope called "the ruling passion," or, as we should say in this case, by the predominant influence. Who can doubt that the men who wield the predominant influence in the new Administration are unworthy to do so at such a time as this ? To see them saying the final word in the ruling of the Nation would be a hard thing to tolerate in ordinary circumstances. It is intoler- able now.
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