MR. PLIMSOLL AND MR. MORLEY. T WO specially representative politicians, Mr.
Samuel Morley and Mr. Plimsoll, have announced recently to their constituents their intention of retiring from Parliament. They have acceded to a request to postpone their final deter- mination. But if they consent to seek once more the suffrages of their constituents, they will do so more or less under pro- test. Mr. Samuel Morley's more active energies have been spent in business, and we should add, also in the very hard work of charity. Yet though he has never pretended to statesmanship or eloquence, he will be missed from Parliament.
Wealthy and benevolent, a Dissenter staunch and moderate, he is a politician whose vote is equivalent to many another man's speech. His expressed reasons for retirement are that, at sixty-nine, he is growing to feel an old man, and that Parlia- mentary life now requires physical as well as intellectual power. If the former had been the only ground alleged there would have been nothing to say. A man on the verge of seventy has earned a right to rest. The second ground is not quite so apparent ; and it is shared by Mr. Morley with Mr. Plimsoll. Mr. Plimsoll the other day at Derby explained somewhat more elaborately his motives for wishing to resign his seat. He, like Mr. Morley, says he is no longer young, and late hours begin to tell upon him. The Merchant Shipping Act was his mission in Parlia- ment, and he has accomplished it. He desires to travel. The reasons are so good for retirement from the House of Commons, that we are only afraid other Members as useful as Mr. Plimsoll and Mr. Morley should see the force of them, and refuse the country their services. There is a favourite saying, which has obtained very undue acceptance, that the House of Commons is the best Club in London. If it be true, the palaces in Pall Mall and St. James's Street must be whited sepulchres. The most extravagantly high of entrance-fees, exorbitant subscriptions ; bad dinners, if any, often none ; an obligation to listen, it may be till three o'clock in the morning, to other persons' eloquence, with liberty very seldom to try one's own ; a bench in a Cave of ./Eolus, with hot draughts tempered by cold draughts ; half of the Members sworn foes of the other half, or at all events, obliged to wear that air before the world ; and a fair probability for any Member of being ejected in from one to seven years by the friends who voted him in, are only some among the pleasant conditions of this vaunted society. It might be thought that in these circumstances the contingency of ejectment should be classed among the advantages rather than the disadvantages. But a peculiarity of a seat at Westminster is that, numerous as are the drawbacks, its possession, even for a single Session, takes the flavour out of other pursuits. Very many Members might have refused to take up that condition of life, could they have foreseen how shadowy and impalpable is the grandeur, but once adopted, it is the hardest of all vocations to resign.
A man the instant he is sent to Westminster becomes a composite being, half his own and half his constituents' ; separated from his seat, he is in the condition of a limpet taken from its sea-weed-covered rock. Minds devoted to letters, like Mr. Kinglake's or Lord Macaulay's, may welcome a restoration to liberty. But for the most part, no existence is more truncated than that of an unseated Member of Parlia- ment. Hundreds of tendrils, flimsy and slight each one, fasten him not so much to politics as to the public profession of a politician. It is a slavery to which the limbs become so used that they cannot move easily without the fetters. All Members of Parliament are liable to be so affected, though the burden sits lightly on some and heavily on others. On Mr. Morley and Mr. Plimsoll, by their own confession, it is heavy, and they are types of conscientious Members generally. Mr. Plimsoll, above all, has achieved a great legislative task, and is entitled to take his ease. Unseaworthy ships are no longer always putting out from English ports, and the Board of Trade is not perpetually plotting with shipowners to endanger the lives of sailors. Yet Mr. Plimsoll feels his nerves con- tinually strained by the possibility that some call may be made upon them. What applies to him applies much more to Members who have not made their mark. Now and then a Member actually breaks down and dies, never having per- formed anything, whatever his promise His Parliamentary work is assigned as the cause, yet it is difficult to state pre- cisely what he has done. The long hours of night sittings are supposed to account for it all. It would have been much the same did the House sit by day, instead of by gaslight. A Member may have been scarcely known to speak, or if he has spoken, to have said more than might be heard at any law- debating society. Nevertheless, he is said to have been killed by Parliament,—and the statement is true. Many men may sit through a protracted Session as comfortably as in their club smoking-room. Others may have their brains fretted away by the constant waiting and expectation for an opportunity which may never come. A racer would, we suppose, suffer more from an hour of straining at the bit in the effort to break away than from the race itself. Comfortable County Members, whose minds are made up never to take any part in a debate except at the division, may pass a long life in the House. So, it would be thought, might the orators and statesmen who leaped into greatness at once. They have not to wait for the occasion ; they can create it whenever they please. The Palmerstons refresh themselves with a doze, sure when they wake up to find the House at the point, so far as they are concerned, at which they left it. Yet even a life of states- manship and oratorical fame scarcely gives coolness and perfect ease, unless accompanied by a peculiarly even balance of temperament. A leader, like Mr. Gladstone himself, whose rising "makes a House," confesses to suffering from "the great exhaustion often consequent on protracted expectation and attention before speaking." If an ex-Prime Minister feel the strain, much more must ordinary politicians. The average Member knows that if he nod but for a minute, he may find himself, on stirring, all alone, while his intended audience has gone away to dine. Mr. Plimsoll refers to the completion of his crusade against the Shipowners as a reason for quitting Parliament. After such a success as he has compassed, the- mind may not be subject to the tension which Members on their promotion feel. But we do not know if the substitute be more tolerable. The victory leaves a vacuum which requires to be filled. Sir Wilfrid Lawson would not take his ease in his seat for Carlisle, if the Permissive Bill were suddenly passed over his head; nor Mr. Newdegate, were he permitted to inspect every Catholic nunnery in the kingdom. The effect of the triumph of an annual motion is to leave its author in the attitude of boys pulling at a rope which the other side has let go. Mr. Plimsoll's mission may be ended, as he says ; but we suspect that though he may himself be hardly conscious of the fact, he is anxious to be free from Westminster not so much be- cause he has done his special work, as that he cannot easily acquiesce in the view that he has no special work to do. Retire- ment from Parliament would have been a material guarantee to himself that no obligation lay upon him to discover a new object, in the place of that which the Merchant Shipping Act has stolen away from him. He feels sure, as every one giving up business does, that a holiday for the rest of his life would be delightful. It is a common fallacy of hope, partaken in by all, from Mr. Gladstone, who had vowed himself to Homer and the Vatican, to the grocer who buys a villa in Brixton. Mr. Plimsoll has tried it, and thinks he knows. Several months in 1877 he occupied with a foreign tour, "'with much enjoy- ment and advantage to himself." The Session was in full career, and the Home-rulers were sitting up with the House to early breakfast. The Member for Derby read of the aimless noise and trouble, in his Galignani. Doubtless he meditated how pleasant would be mountains, and lakes, and the talk of tables d'h tite, if there were no Honse of Commons in the background. But to be wandering in June among great works of art or greater works of nature as Member for Derby, and due at Westminster, except for leave given by constituents, is the charm of the combination. It pains us to attempt to dissipate the illusion of a hard-worked man. Mr. Plimsoll has been multiplying in imagination the worth of the residue of life by the nights he has for ten years abandoned to the Speaker, and which henceforth he hoped would belong to memory and imagination. Were he to persist in retiring from the House, he might find, we fear, that the gratification of "the strong inclination he has had from his youth upwards to travel" is more in the promise than in the fruition.
Conscientiousness is too often accompanied by self-conscious- ness. Mr. Plimsoll is conscientious, and he is also self-conscious. Not conscientiousness alone, nor self-consciousness alone, but the two together, are as accountable as an imagined taste for foreign travel for his request to be relieved from his seat in Parliament. He confesses with shame that for the last two years he has been, as he calls it, "shirking work." On many an occasion on which he would previously have remained to the end of the sitting, he has said to himself, "There will be nothing special to-night," and at ten o'clock he has gone home. He does not tell us that anything special did happen when he was ingloriously in bed, or that the country or his constituents—sailors, or electors of Derby—suffered loss by his absence. Yet he is too conscientious to rest easy under the thought that his absence may have been detri- mental to the public interest, and too self-conscious not to suppose that a likely result. It would be dangerous doctrine to preach that a Member of the House of Commons is free to absent himself, except during debates in which he takes an individual interest. But Members, like Mr. Plimsoll, who have set their mark on legislation, and representative business men, like Mr. Morley, in whom large and important interests con- fide, are entitled to claim something more of liberty than the Members who are sent distinctly not to speak, but to vote. The art of husbanding resources is essential in every depart-. ment of human industry, and most essential in politicians. It is an art easier to acquire young than old. Mr. Morley, at sixty-nine, may fairly perhaps plead age. Mr. Plimsoll, how- ever, is only now fifty-four, and ten years or more of Parlia- mentary life may teach him the art of economising himself, though he has not yet learnt it. We should be sorry to lose Mr. Morley from the House. We are especially glad to know that, at the request of his constituents, the question of Mr. Plimsoll's retirement is left in abeyance till next General Election. Another three or four months of wandering abroad may, perhaps, by that time have taught him that foreign travel is more desirable as a form of holiday than as a vocation.
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