TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE MAHDI OF BIRMINGHAM.
SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT has evidently given Lord Randolph Churchill a moment of keen delight by naming him the Mahdi of Birmingham. To make himself a successful false prophet is probably Lord Randolph's highest ideal of political achievement, and he sees in Sir William Harcourt's recognition of him an omen of happy augury. He much prefers, he says, Sir William Harcourt's nickname to that of Sir Stafford Northcote, who called him the "bonnet" of the Government. But he parades Sir Stafford Northcote's wrath so ostentatiously, that it seems impossible he can be entirely
displeased at its manifestation. The truth is, that he values at a perfectly inestimable price everything which goes to swell his importance in the eyes of the mul- titude, and probably Sir Stafford Northcote's indignation has even more effect in that way than Sir William Harcourt's scoffs. To be a thorn in the flesh to his own leader, is a greater distinction than to be recognised as looming formid- able in the eyes of her Majesty's Government. The fact that whether Lord Randolph be described as Mahdi, or whether he be described as a "bonnet," both parties alike recognise in him something delusive and false, does not annoy him in the least. He has no objection to be thought something delusive and false, so long as he is thought about a good deal, and found extremely inconvenient. He is like Puck, in his love of mis- chief and confusion :—
"Then will two at once woo one, That must needs be sport alone ; And those things do best please me, That befall preposterously."
The Tory Party and Radical Birmingham are, we suppose, the two who at once woo one, in whom Lord Randolph finds his sport. And certainly, if Birmingham should elect him, he will be "best pleased' not only by obtaining his seat in Parliament, but by obtaining it in so preposterous a fashion as the conquest of Birmingham would imply.
What we have said will show our readers why it is not very easy for us to estimate Lord Randolph Churchill's Birmingham speeches with much seriousness. A man who has been described as the political Puck, as the Mahdi of Birmingham, and as the " bonnet " to decoy the Tory Party into losing its advantages to the Liberal Government, and who has never seemed to resent,—rather, indeed, to feel proud of,—all these titles to fame, is not a man of whom it is possi- ble to think seriously at all. And yet Lord Randolph's second speech at Birmingham, the speech of Wednes- day, might have some title to be considered seriously, if it were not flanked by so many tricksy and insolent out- bursts that no one, who will take Lord Randolph as a whole, can attach any importance to a single deviation into something like coherence and purpose. But the speech of Wednesday had, no doubt, a gleam of significance in it. It did sketch out such a conception of Tory democracy, that if the speaker had even kept for a single session true to what he there in- dicated, he might represent a force in the country, though certainly not at present a force which any substantial party embodies. It was a speech founded, of course, on Mr. Dis- raeli's general idea of Tory democracy, a speech insisting on the Constitution as it is, and inviting the adherence of the masses to the Constitution as it is,—a speech which made much of the Crown, much of the House of Lords' much of the Church, and much of the people ; and which depreciated the importance of all those trivial checks on Democracy, and set-offs against popular power, of which Tories like to dream. Lord Randolph boldly accepted the idea of popular government,—Caucuses and all,—and proposed to bring it into perfect harmony with aristocratic institutions. We do not think much of this programme, even if it stood alone. If Lord Randolph Churchill would go up and down the country, prophesying to the Squirearchy and the Peerage, instead of to the people of Birmingham, he might indeed make something of his plan. But as it is, there are two portentous obstacles in his way,—one, that he will never get the Conservatives in the House of Commons to agree with him ; the next, that he will never get the Peers, whether Whigs or Con- servatives, to agree with him, and so cannot procure himself a majority in either House of Parliament. Even Mr. Disraeli
failed in this policy. He did indeed manage to cheat the Tory party into passing Household Suffrage with the aid of the Radicals, but when he got his majority in 1874 he
never could manage to do anything with it in the way of a popular home policy. He found a popular policy as regarded even the tenant-farmers far too un- palatable to his friends to carry. He found a popular policy as regarded the agricultural labourers far too un- palatable among his supporters even to broach. And he found what he intended as a popular policy in the Church most dis- tasteful to the Clergy, on whom he had relied for support. He was compelled to dash into foreign policy to find the, elements of popularity at all, and he discovered that even there he could not convert the Democracy to any belief in his. genius or his justice.
But Lord Randolph Churchill is in a far worse position than Mr. Disraeli. He has weighted himself with all sorts of blunder- ing projects for which Mr. Disraeli was far too shrewd. He has committed himself to the denunciation of Free-trade, and how he is to combine the denunciation of Free-trade with any sort of democratic policy in England, it would puzzle a much cleverer man than Lord Randolph Churchill to find out. He has com- mitted himself, too, to the perfectly mad policy of paying the whole cost of national education out of the national taxes,. while leaving to voluntary bodies and local bodies the undis- turbed management of the schools for which the taxpayer is to find ways and means. He has committed himself,. again, to the maddest of all the various views of the Egyptian problem which have been put forward by any section of the nation. His is a sort of combination of the- policy of Lord Salisbury, the policy of Sir Wilfred Lawson,. the policy of Mr. Labouchere, and the policy of Mr. Chaplin. Indeed, the mythical Centaur is a natural possibility com- pared with the monster policy of Lord Randolph Churchill's imagination. He must either confess that he has been playing off an elaborate and poor joke on the people of England for the last three years, or attempt to convert Conservatives behind him to revolutionary measures which make their hair stand on end, and the democracy before him to the deliberate destruction of their own prosperity. If he were a prophet at all—even a false prophet believing in himself—he might deem this possible. Fanaticism has odd dreams, and sometimes converts other people to a, strange faith in its odd dreams. But the Mahdi of Birmingham is only a Brummagem Mahdi. He is not a fanatic, only a political Cheap-Jack, who can amuse the people with his lively promises of impossible feats. He has no knowledge of the political history even of his own boyhood, and has, we think, no belief in anything but his own audacity. We do not suppose him to be a " bonnet " set to lure Tories into Liberal snares. But we do. suppose him to be a shallow and tricksy politician, who, if he has at all what he is pleased to call convictions, has such an inconsistent and grotesque medley of them, that they remind you more of the world "behind the looking-glass" than of the world before it. He is a Brummagem Mahdi, and a plusquam. Brummagem Puck. If Birmingham,—fascinated by the diableries of Woodstock,—such diableries as almost remind us of Sir Walter Scott's famous novel,—should choose this counterfeit Puck to represent her in the House of Commons, it will indeed mark a serious crisis in the development of English. representative institutions.
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