TOPICS OF TIIE DAY.
THE NEW LEADER.
BY the unanimous choice of the party Mr. Bonar Law has become the Unionist leader in the House of Commons. If he fulfils the expectations of his friends, it will not be long before he also succeeds to the position of leader of the party as a whole, and therefore the future Unionist Prime Minister. Though we might have pre- ferred a different filling of the vacancy caused by Mr. Balfour's retirement, not a word will fall from us in opposition to or depreciation of Mr. Bonar Law. As leader of our party in the great struggle that is coming over Home Rule, he will have as loyal support from us as from any member of the Tariff Reform League, and we call upon all Unionist Free Traders to join with us in accord- ing him their help. The tremendous issues involved in the attempt to dissolve the legislative union with Ireland and to follow that dissolution by a ruinous scheme of pseudo- Federalism throughout the United Kingdom dwarf every other consideration. Impenitent Free Traders as we are, we say deliberately that we would far rather see a bad fiscal system established in this country than that the whole fabric of the Constitution and of the Empire should be destroyed by the break-up of the United Kingdom. Tariff Reform would no doubt prove a source of great economic waste and of financial inefficiency, but Home Rule means ruin. Besides, a system of indirect taxation, however bad, is always subject to repeal by a new Budget. Home Rule, established first in Ireland and then in Scotland and Wales, could only be got rid of by a convulsion of which the outcome can hardly be other than civil war, or at any rate a convulsion which might very well leave this country at the mercy of her rivals abroad. The Empire rests in the last resort upon the strength and prestige of the Mother Country. But that strength and prestige will never be maintained if, instead of a United Kingdom, we have a welter of jarring and hostile nationalities. Therefore, at what we verily believe to be a crisis in the nation's fate greater than any which has confronted us in the last hundred years, unity of aim and purpose amongst Unionists is absolutely essential.
If, therefore, we thought Mr. Bonar Law a bad leader, and distrusted him as a politician and a man, we should still, since the choice has fallen on him and since any party leader is better than party anarchy, do our very best to afford him support. Happily, however, this is not a position which we or any other moderate or Free Trade Unionist need take up. Mr. Bonar Law is not the kind of leader who will have to be supported with anxious trepidation, with doubt, perplexity, and foreboding. He is a man, however much one may differ from some of his opinions, whom no honest man and no lover of his country need be ashamed of following. To begin with, he is a man of high personal character, and that counts for a great deal in public life. He has not risen by political trickery or chicane, and he will not maintain his position by any such arts. He has no political past which he need blush to remem- ber. Whatever record leaps to light he need not fear disgrace. This is of good omen. It is also of good omen that as a man he represents one of the soundest portions of the community—the upper middle class—the social stratum from which of necessity the greater part of the Unionist Party is recruited. He is an upright business man who has taken to politics, but not too late in life. A son of the manse apprenticed to the industrial world, by birth and breeding his roots go deep into the national life. The fact that he is native born of one of the great free nations of the Empire adds to the interest of his appoint- ment. We cannot admit for a moment that because a man is British-born he therefore is not capable of the widest and fullest sympathy with the Dominions, but never- theless we admit that sentiment is touched and interest excited by a leader from the overseas Empire. Finally, Mr. Bonar Law comes of an Ulster stock, and that at this moment should stand him in good stead. A man whose father was born in Ulster and whose nearest relations still live there is not likely to misunderstand the Irish question in the way in which English statesmen sometimes misunderstand it, even when their intentions are of the best. There is yet another ground for congratulation, though it is one upon which, for obvious reasons, we do not wish to dwell at any great length. The crisis of last summer created by the problem, should the Unionist majority in the House of Lords force a creation of peers or let the Par- liament Bill pass, and so prevent the creation ? may be fairly described as a test question—one which tried the temper of men's statesmanship and showed whether they did or did not possess political judgment. Mr. Bonar Law early proved that he did possess such judgment. In spite of the very great temptations by which he was surrounded to take the wrong side, or at any rate to conceal his views, he had the courage and good sense to speak out and to make it clear that he would have nothing to do with the false policy of ruining the Constitution in the endeavour to preserve it, of burning down the whole house in order to prevent a portion of it from being temporarily rendered uninhabitable.
May we, if we can do so without offence, venture to take this opportunity of making one or two suggestions for Mr. Bonar Law's consideration in that conduct and manage- ment of the Unionist Party which will be now his duty as leader ? In the first place, we would urge him, with all the power at our command, to remember that the Unionist Party is also the party of conservatism and moderation, the party specially pledged to preserve the existing social order. The Unionist Party will never be strong and healthy if its leaders are making vain attempts to outbid the Radicals in matters of social reform. Nothing is more certain than that while the country is in a Socialistic mood and bent on tryiug Socialistic experiments under some alias or other it will entrust the carrying-out of them to the Liberal, not to the Unionist Party. They are the patentees of the social cure- all, and it is to them that the public will go when they are determined to try a course of quack medicine. It is useless to offer an imitation panacea when " the old firm " is in the market with a nostrum already well advertised. It is sure to hold the field while the hot fit for political patent medicines is on. It is when the medicine has proved a failure, and the public is for the time disillusioned, that the chance of the Unionists will come. This being so, the business of the Unionists is not to get into a position which will justify a great many people in saying that they are really as bad as their rivals and that a moderate man who hates Socialism has, after all, no excuse for changing his party. Remember that it is by the conver- sion, and only by the conversion, of a large number of the electors that the Unionists can win. The two parties com- mand with an absolute regularity about equal numbers of the electorate. Between them stands a body of changing opinion which gives victory. The intermediate or, as Lord Goschen called him, balancing elector, having once voted Liberal, dislikes making a change ; for consistency is the foible of the politician, high and low. When, then, he is disgusted with his old friends, and is impelled by many considerations to desert them, it is essential not to give him the feeling that it may be out of the Liberal Socialistic frying-pan into the Tory Socialistic fire. To vary our metaphor, what we want to impress upon him is that there is a sensible, long-headed, able medical practitioner stand- ing by to whom he can fly when he has got tired of quackery, as he certainly will get tired of it. Much quicker and much more effectual will be this flight if he is not haunted by the thought that one set of quacks is as bad as another. That thought makes him a sulky abstainer, not a convinced convert and a fighting recruit.
Another and a more specific point we desire to place before Mr. Bonar Law. We most sincerely trust that he will not abandon the policy of the Referendum adopted officially at the last General Election by the Unionist Party. Unquestionably the proposal to establish a veto over legislation which may have been obtained by a system of Parliamentary log-rolling is rapidly gaining popularity with the electorate. If they could once feel assured that the Unionists were sincere in this matter we are certain that a great many independent men in the country would rally to them on this proposal alone. But it is not enough to advocate a Poll of the People in the abstract. We are convinced that if we want to win the next General Election Mr. Bonar Law must advocate the policy, adopted by Mr. Balfour for the party, and endorsed, if we remember rightly, by Mr. Bonar Law in person, of declaring that Tariff Reform must be submitted to the popular vote after it has been passed in Parliament, but before it comes into operation.
We ask Mr. Boner Law and our readers to believe that in making this demand we are not attempting to strike an insidious blow at Tariff Reform. We advocate the Refer- endum pledge on entirely different grounds. They are that only through such a pledge can a very large body of voters be set free to do what they at heart want to do, namely, to vote for Unionist candidates at the General Election. Tariff Reformers may perhaps ask us : " Why cannot the ordinary electors do what the Spectator itself is prepared to do, and has done, namely, support Tariff Reformers, even though no such pledge for final con- sideration by the electors is given ? " Our answer— and it is one which in a sense we give with regret— is that the bulk of Unionist Free Traders and of non-party men throughout the country generally do not realize the dangers of the situation as we realize them, and are therefore not prepared to vote for food taxers as advocates of an infinitely smaller evil than the disintegration of the Union. We are convinced that there are hundreds of votes in every constituency which can only be made sure of by means of a pledge that Tariff Reform shall go to a Poll of the People. That pledge once given, a large body of electors will, as we have said above, feel free to vote Unionist. They will not feel free under any other conditions. Unless they can be assured that their vote is not irrevocable in the matter of Tariff Reform, and that they will have an opportunity of voting against food taxes if they think them oppressive, such electors will never be got to the poll in Lancashire, and indeed in a very great part of the country. " Union or no Union, Socialism or no Socialism, I am not going to risk my food being made dearer by taxation." The man who says that—and there are tens of thousands who do—can only be reached by the promise that he will have an opportunity of voting against the food taxes if, when the whole case is put before him, he believes that they mean starvation for him and his family. To put the matter once more in the plainest terms. It is not in order to stab Tariff Reform in the back, but solely in order to set men free to vote for the maintenance of the Union. that we urge Mr. Boner Law to reassert Mr. Balfour's pledge that taxes on corn, meat, and dairy produce shall not be imposed without a reference to the electorate.
Our last point is to ask Mr. Bonar Law to give his special attention to the Ulster problem, and to that side of it which we have kept before the readers of the Spectator. We would urge him, in the interests of the Protestant and loyalist minority throughout Ireland, to do his best as leader of the Opposition to insist that 'if the House of Commons must pass a Home Rule Bill they shall, at any rate, provide it with a safety valve. The safety valve we desire is a clause declaring that any county of Ireland which likes to demand a poll as to whether it shall or shall not be subject to a Dublin Par- liament shall be allowed to take such a poll. In the event of the county deciding against being placed under the Dublin Parliament it would not be forced under the Dublin Parliament, but would remain a county of the United Kingdom, and pass administratively under the Home Oifice and Local Government Board. No Unionist would, of course, ask Mr. Bonar Law to suggest that as in any way an acceptable compromise or as a proposal which would turn a bad Bill into a good Bill. All he need say in demanding it in his place in Parliament is that at any rate it will provide a safety valve and secure us against civil war.
If this claim is insisted upon with vigour and ability, as it will be if the Ulstermen are not deflected from their main object, we believe that they cannot fail to destroy the Home Rule Bill. Action of the kind we demand, which has been strongly endorsed by the Ulster Liberal Unionist Association, and by a section of the Ulster Unionist Press, will bring home to the minds of English and Scotch voters the realities of the situation in a way which nothing else will. It will teach them that not only are there two Irelands, but that what they are proposing to do, if the Ulster claim is not admitted, will on their own showing be a gross act of injustice and tyranny. The basis of the Home Rule argument is that localities ought to be allowed to choose the form of domestic government which they prefer. But if Ireland, why not the counties of North-East Ulster ? The only way to meet this argument is to suppose that there is something sacred in a unit of a particular size. But obviously this is absurd. If it is argued that what is wanted to justify the bestowal of self-government is a population differing in religion, racial qualifications, and industrial development from the community from which it seeks to separate itself, then the counties of North-East Ulster, with a Protestant loyalist majority, fulfil these conditions better than Ireland as a whole fulfils them.
Another reason why it is of supreme importance that Ulster should demand that, if Home Rule is granted. her counties shall have the right of declaring that they will remain outside the Home Rule Bill and become counties of England—a perfectly workable scheme—is that unless that claim is made, and made quite seriously, and rejected, Ulster will - not, in the opinion of many Englishmen and Scotsmen, acquire the moral right of resistance. There are thousands of people in England who will declare that the counties of Ulster ought not to be forced. out of the Union against their will, and who will object to such force being used. If, however, Ulster misses the opportunity of insiting on being left out of the Bill she may be met with the argument, " You have protested too late."
If Ulster is driven to resistance to a Dublin Parliament we want her to be able to resist with a. case that no one can challenge. We want her to be able to say : " We warned you that we would not be placed under a Dublin Parliament, and we suggested an alternative, though it was one which in a sense we detested. You rejected that plea, and now the guilt and bloodshed will be upon your heads and not upon ours." Mr. Bonar Law can do immense ser- vice to the cause of the Union and aid the minorities in the South if he insists upon a Local Option safety valve being inserted in the Home Rule Bill.
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