TOPICS OF 11:114 DAY • TRIUMPHANT GLADSTONTANS.
SIR WTT,TJAM HARCO1TRT is always magnificent. He always outshines those who have gone before him in the same field. And now in his political estimates of the situation, he not only outdoes them in the grand sweeps of his rhetoric, but his vaulting ambition leaps far beyond the point which either Mr. Schnadhorst or any other sanguine political calculator had reached in his most liberal excursion of political fancy. To say that he counts his chickens before they are hatched, is an absurdly weak description of his attitude. He counts his chickens before the eggs are laid from which he expects to hatch them, almost before the hen is in existence to which he trusts to lay them. At least, if Sir William Harcourt seriously thinks, as he professes to think, that the delay of the Government's proposals for settling the Irish Land question and the Tithe question, is the close of the pitched battle between the Unionists and the Home-rulers,—which is about as reasonable as to maintain that the successful postponement of two of the minor athletic contests between Oxford and Cambridge is equivalent to the defeat in the boat-race of the University which had objected to the postponement,—Sir William Harcourt must be the most light-headed of political dreamers. The Government have been worsted in the arrangement of the business of the Session. They have been compelled to withdraw the Licensing Bill, because the teetotalers were too many for them, and too fanatical. They have lost a good deal of time, and their proposals on important subjects which do not touch the question of the Union at all, must stand over till the winter. That is all, and there is not a trace of any change in the opinion either of the Parliamentary majority or the country at large, on the great issue itself. Yet Sir William Harcourt asserts that the pitched battle is over; that the Government have been smitten hip and thigh% that they are beaten out of the field ; and that it only remains to take prisoners the demoralised and exhausted forces which are flying in rout and terror from the Gladstonian pursuit. It is hardly possible to imagine a caricature of the situation more monstrous and more ridiculous. Mr. Schnadhorst would never have made himself responsible for such a reading of the omens. Indeed, the assurance with which these Miinchiiusen auguries are given out, seems to us to show much more eagerness to snatch at straws than a really confident party would actually feel. What are the actual political omens of the moment ? We feel no doubt that they are ambiguous. They do not point decisively either way. They are just what they would be if the constituencies cared very little for the Irish Question, and felt that chronic desire to show dissatisfaction with the party in power which all Governments, Tory and Liberal alike, appear to excite. There was a very strong reaction against Mr. Gladstone's first Government, the Government of 1868 to 1874, the Government which Mr. Disraeli, writing to " My dear Grey de Wilton," accused of " blundering and plundering " till the country was sick of it. Again, the Government of Lord Beaconsfield excited a very strong feeling of reaction in the country, and Mr. Gladstone found no difficulty, when he reappeared from his retirement in 1878, in driving it from office. But the Government which succeeded it fared no better. Probably no Government has had to face more signal signs of distrust than the Government of Mr. Glad- stone which went out of office in 1885 without a fight. But for their success in passing a great Reform Bill with the aid of the opposite party, it would have been pretty certain that the General Election would have placed them in a small minority. We are quite willing to admit that there are symptoms of the same kind, though of nothing like the same extent, now. So far as we can form a dispassionate judgment on the facts, we should say that though the country is fax from disinclined to a fresh swing of the pendulum, no Government of the last twenty-two years has excited so little reaction as the one now in power. There is a reaction against it, but a rather feeble reaction. All the signs appear to indicate that Mr. Gladstone has recovered a certain portion of his old popularity, but nothing like the whole of it ; that the country is wavering ; that it is disposed to give " the Grand Old Man " another chance, but is very uneasy in its mind as to the mode in which he will use that chance, and not at all clear that his leading proposal is either intelligible or right. As is usual in the fourth Session of a Parliament, the Government has offended a good many friends, and has not made many new allies. It has set the Temperance party against it, and it has of course more or less cooled down the enthusiasm of its supporters,—which is the inevitable fate of every Government. But it has made far fewer big blunders, far fewer mistakes which constituencies are unable to forget, than either of Mr. Gladstone's Administrations, or that of Lord Beaconsfield. Its Foreign and Colonial policy has been, on the whole, remarkably successful. And even the results of its Irish policy have scored a brilliant success as compared with the results of the Irish policy of either of Mr. Gladstone's Administrations. In his case, the very policy for which he claimed most merit had been, to vulgar eyes, the most portentous failure. The Irish, instead of having been conciliated and subdued to hearty co-opera- tion and gratitude, had filled the world with their execra- tions of his tyranny and injustice. Mr. Balfour's Irish policy never even pretended to be of a kind that would make Ireland overflow with gratitude. Yet he has really established an order far more solid and effectual than Mr. Gladstone,—no doubt (tartly by the help of the policy which Mr. Gladstone succeeded in initiating,—and if he too is execrated, he is execrated in language which is not so. coarse and violent as that used against his prede- cessors; moreover, he can boast that the gifts which the Irish repudiate so vehemently with their mouths, they quietly stretch out their hands to receive. As for the by-elections, they all go to show the same sort of indeterminate result,—a certain reaction against the Government of a rather undecided kind, with here and there a considerable exception, but nothing approaching to the violent recoil which preceded Mr. Gladstone's defeat in 1874, Lord Beaconsfield's defeat in 1880, and which marked the first four years of Mr. Gladstone's Govern- ment between 1880 and 1885. If, then, during next Session the Government achieve any considerable success ; if, as we fully expect, they carry their Irish Land Bill, and carry it in a manner to show that even the Parnellites dare not resist it; if they settle the- Tithe dispute, and carry Free Education,—we should fully expect that a dissolution would be more likely to confirm them in power than to turn the scales against them. And even if it turned the scales against them, it would give Mr. Gladstone no majority by which he could. hope to revolutionise the Constitution in the fashion proposed.
This is, we think, the moderate and unimpassioned view of the situation. We quite admit that the democracy, hitherto at least, has not shown itself able to grasp the full significance of the issue. It does not like Home-rule, but it has no adequate fear of it, no clear insight into its dangers and its many and great un- certainties,—uncertainties which may turn out to involve almost unimaginable disasters. If it takes Home-rule at all, it will take it reluctantly on Mr. Gladstone's authority. It is more likely, we think, to reject it hesitatingly, and without the peremptoriness and decision which we desire to see. But as for the contention of the triumphant Gladstonians that the battle is over and their cause won, we have no language to describe it that would not seem discourteous to opponents to whom we desire always to be respectful. Such language is mere arrogant and sanguine folly.
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