TOPICS OF THE DAY.
MB. DISRAFT.PS SURRENDER.
"IX HERE are you going, Jack I" asked the farmer, as the
thief's head appeared coming through the garden fence. "Back again," said Jack, as he retreated empty-handed, to receive, let us hope, the applause of his friends for his strategical adroitness and his quickness in repartee. At least, if the rogues of the alehouse refused to admire Jack's feat, thinking success some test of capacity, they were of a different temper from the Tory journalists who see, or affect to see, in their leader's retreat of Friday week proof positive alike of Jack's genius for foray and of the farmer's unscrupulous- ness in maintaining his legal rights. They protest in one and the same breath that Mr. Gladstone was factious in opposing Lord Sandon's Bill for reversing the national policy in respect to Endowed Schools, and Mr. Disraeli right in giving up the Bill exposed to that opposition—that is, they maintain that the castle was impregnable, and that therefore its surrender by its commandant on a manufactured pretext was the very per- fection of strategical finesse. They are welcome to their opinion, if they hold it, and if it comforts them ; but to us, we confess, Mr. Disraeli's surrender, and especially the method of the sur- render, only complete a series of blunders Which we could scarcely believe an experienced leader capable of making, blunders so curious as to suggest that the Premier, who "understands the House of Commons so well," understands it best when it is full of Liberals. Blunder the first was allowing the Bill to be introduced at all. It is very easy to say that Mr. Disraeli did not perceive its importance, or that his hand was forced, but neither of those excuses can be received as more than verbal apologies ; for if the first is true, Mr. Disraeli does not on vital questions attend to his own work—and if the second is true, he sacrificed the prospects of his own party to the desire of teaching some of his colleagues, by a severe practical lesson, that he knew what was and was not practicable very much better than they. Either he mistook a political shell for a Parliamentary foot-ball, in which case his special reputation for insight into the temper of the House of Com- mons cannot escape without damage ; or he gave up the veto, which is the most valuable attribute of the Premiership ; or he deliberately risked a great danger for his party, to establish his own intellectual superiority among his own closest colleagues. He himself stated at first that he knew the danger, and delighted in it, for the reorganisation of the Liberal party made it far more easy for him to conduct the business of the House with decorum and success ; but on Friday night he abandoned that ground, and pleaded entire ignorance. He did not know what the Bill meant. He had considered the disputed clauses for hours, and had come to the conclusion that what with their inherent obscurity, and the new method 9f drafting, he could not understand their effect, and consequently he withdrew them. In other words, Mr. Disraeli, the most acute and discerning politician of our time, allows a Bill to be brought in which he does not understand, defends it through nights of debate, solemnly pronounces it a "good Bill," taunts the House of Commons with having entirely misconceived its drift, and then, when he has held Cabinet Coun- cil after Cabinet Council, admits that he knows nothing about it, that he has had to rely upon others, that he cannot make out the clauses which have roused all the boroughs in England, and that if only he may dismiss the Commissioners who worked the old Bill too well, he will still follow the policy which those Commissioners were appointed to carry out. He had defended a revolution, to be sure, but that was a draughts- man's blunder ; he had sanctioned a coup d'e'tat, but it wis only a printer's error. Did anybody ever hear words so inept from the lips of a man so able Is there a competent person in the whole country, on either side, who will do the Premier's intellect such absurd injustice as to accept them as any- thing but mere excuses for retreat, framed so hurriedly, and possibly under such irritation, that their author did not perceive that they made his retreat a little ridiculous. 'I give up my fortress, because, you see, the laws of war are so badly drawn.' Nay, it is worse even than that, foT Mr. Disraeli really says that he gives it up for that reason, and for this other,—that his adversary's best artillerists have tt last been taken off by his own sharpshooters. As the Commis- sioners are dismissed, therefore let the law they administered stand. No wonder that Mr. Gladstone summed up the trans. action in a speech which for reasoning scorn—the scorn of s politician, and not of a satirist—has seldom been surpassed.
had been accused of factiousness in resisting the Bill, and his accuser had declared his own Bill to be unintelligible. He had been accused of unreasoning hostility to a few clauses, and his enemy had,-with its own hand, cut them away, as too obscure or too absurd to be worth discussion, in an Assembly in which he possessed all the while, as he boasted on the previous Tuesday, a well-assured majority.
But we shall be asked,—Why press this failure, if failure it was, so closely home to the Premier? Everybody knows that the Bill was not his Bill, that he understood its meaning well.
enough, that he thought it unwise, but that he was tired of resisting the more fanatically Churchy section of his own Cabinet. It was necessary to give them something to gnaw, and so he gave them the law on Endowed Schools. If they succeeded in killing it, well and good, for the clergy would all applaud ; if they did not succeed, well and good too, for it would be easy to educate them in future. That is, no doubt, so far as can be known to anyone not in the secrets of the Cabinet, the true account of the matter, and it is on that account that the fiasco must be pressed home to Mr.: Disraeli himself. It is about him, and him only, that the country is liable to make a mistake. Nobody in either party doubts for a moment that Lord Salisbury is a Tory "dyed in the wool"; that when he speaks or acts, he means to advance a genuinely Tory policy; that if he were head of the Ministry, or the chief of twelve Lord Salisburys, reaction would set in with a force utterly unknown in English politics since the House of Hanover ascended the Throne. He is recognised. and understood so clearly, that whenever he will apply his great powers to practical work in any special department, the country feels a sort of gratitude, as to a man who is putting himself a little aside, suppressing himself, as it were, in order to help on the great and somewhat cumbrous machine„ Imperial Government. Nobody doubts either that Mr. Hardy, while Member for the University of Oxford, is, partly from conviction, and partly from those necessities of position whiclx always if in accor& with convictions tend to deepen them, on all clerical politics Lord Salisbury over again, or at all events so like him, that the difference in action fades away into nothing. But the country has always thought that in Mr. Disraeli, when Premier, it had just the correctiye neces- sary to keep these Ministers within the limits of Englisk policy, to prevent mere reaction, to compel the Cabinet to act as if it were composed, not of deeply-convinced Tories—Tories of the De Broglie school—but of men of the world with Tory pro- clivities,—a disposition, that is, to be Tories, but out of their very Toryism to accept all that is. This very Ministry, it was thought, and indeed said over and over again, by ourselves among the rest, would be Liberal-Conservative,—more, to. speak plainly, like a Government of Old Whigs, than a. Government prepared to rouse Old Whigs, like for instance Lord 0-. Cavendish, into flat rebellion. It was expected to dislike Liberal measures, and carry them out very gently, not to say gingerly, indeed, but it was not expected to undo them. That confidence, which rested mainly on Mr.. Disraeli, which was increased by the popular belief in his cleverness, in his appreciation of facts, in his reluctance to run his head against brick walls, in his very unscrupulousness— unscrupulousness as of the artist, not of the wicked man— has received in this Bill of Lord Sandon's a very rude shock indeed. If Mr. Disraeli did not understand what he was doing, then average men cannot trust his capacity any more. If he did understand and did not resist, then he is ready to let his Ministry, which is accepted only because it is moderate and safe, become immoderate, and therefore dangerous at times and on points—points which cannot be foreseen, and times which cannot be anticipated, and which therefore are just as alarming as if they covered the whole ground. And finally, if he did understand and resisted, then he has not that full control of his Cabinet which he was expected to have, and confidence in him, though not destroyed, is necessarily pro tants diminished in the country. In the existing state of the public mind, Mr. Disraeli is of more import- ance to his party — and, in fact, to the government of the country apart from party—than he ever was yet ; but it is only so • long as he is what the country believes him to be, a moderating influence on the side of sense, discretion, compromise, as against fanaticism of any description. It is because he has not shown his influence in this case until it was nearly too late, that his action on the Bill, as apart from his colleagues' action, has been so pre-eminently interesting. The Mr. Disraeli whom the country knows, is a strategist who wins, not a strategist who loses who prohibits mad rushes
instead of allowing them, who gets rash followers out of scrapes instead of making their scrapes too evident, who, above all, keeps them from menacing until he is resolved they shall bite. The Mr. Disraeli who accepts a Bill which would have cost him every borough seat without seeing its importance, who sits quietly while Lord Sandon gives to that Bill its most dangerous and provocative interpretation, and who finally withdraws it, alleging his _own dullness of comprehension, is a very different person, and the party will feel the results of that change in every election. Mr. Disraeli did not prevent a grand and official effort to renew the exclusion of all Dissenters from the equal enjoyment of all Educational endowments, until he saw that the effort could not succeed. There is an end of that kindness on both sides for Mr. Disraeli which has so materially helped to seat the Conservatives in power.
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