THE CAUCUS IN SOUTHWARK.
iT is high time that the chiefs of the Liberal party should come to some definite conclusion about this Caucus system, and to some sort of agreement with those who are organising it in the great boroughs. If they do not, they may find at the next election that there is a dangerous fissure in the party organisation, and one which may seriously imperil the success of the best candidates. It is quite evident that a numerous class of Liberals are pleased with the new scheme, with the new power it seems to give them over public affairs, and with its anti-" exclusive" tendency, and will not give it up without an embittered struggle. If they are simply defied or thrust aside, they will run their own men or abstain from voting, and the result will be in many places as disastrous as, but for the moderation of the artisans, the dispute about labour candidates might have been in 1868. It is neces- sary to forget for a moment the side - point raised at Bradford—whether a sitting Member should not, if he has been faithful to the party, be exempt from a pledge to abide by the decision of the Caucus—to keep down as well as one can the disgust naturally excited by the in- tolerable vulgarity of the proceedings in some places, a vul- garity which is, after all, mainly accidental, and to decide dispassionately whether the preliminary organisation of the voters for the purpose of selecting a candidate is or is not avoidable. Should, or should not, the informal Committee which at present, in almost all places, selects the candidate, be replaced by a formal one, elected more or less regularly by the voters, and called a Caucus, or any more intelligible name which may happen to approve itself to the public ear ? We will confess, to begin with, that we instinctively dislike the whole thing. A large, popular Committee, however organised, is sure, in this country, to be a vulgar committee, sure to imitate the only familiar model, the method of electing Nonconformist preachers, and sure to deter the best Liberals from taking a persistent and anxious part in its deliberations. It will not contain the best electors, and it may affront the best candidates. The causes which tend to exclude refined men from vestries, to the great loss of the community, will tend to exclude them from Caucuses, or as we should call them, congresses,"—that word, which correctly describes the representatives of many wards, not being applied in England, as it is in America, to a different purpose— and the power of nomination may tend to pass to persons less qualified than those who now possess it. The Congress will not understand candidates as existing Committees do ; will, like all popular bodies, overrate fluent speech ; and will be tickled by promises which the present Committees would know were either injudicious, or certain to be broken. The danger, in fact, that the Congresses will vulgarise the House of Commons, in both the meanings of that term, is very great, and will seriously affect not only all Whigs, but many. sincere Liberals, who cannot believe that sincerity of conviction and earnestness of purpose can be complete substitutes for poli- tical knowledge or administrative power. They will fear the rise of a new couche sociale, differentiated from the old one not by the defects of the tradesman or the artisan, which might perhaps be usefully represented, but by those of the demagogue, which are pure evil, and ought not to be repre- sented at all. We confess we sympathise with this fear, and understand, if we do not wholly approve, the difficulty which men like the old Whigs and the cultivated Radicals must feel in being even just towards the new organisations. We agree with them that proceedings like those at Southwark are enough to disgust educated men with politics, and that both._ Mr. Watkin Williams and Mr. Thorold Rogers, in con- senting to deliver trial-speeches, lowered the personal dig- nity of all candidates in the kingdom. They, in fact, offered themselves, not as they were, which they might have done inoffensively, but as they thought the Caucus would like them to be, one of them making that distinction apparent even in his language. There is no particular ob- jection to the statement, considered as a statement, that the Government had "blacked the boots of Russia and picked the pocket of Turkey," for it is in essence true, and was said in very different words by Mr. Gladstone and Lord Granville ; but Professor Thorold Rogers is a cultivated man, who does not talk like that except to a Caucus, and the lowering in the standard of style is but a forewarning of the coming lowering in the standard of ideas.
It is therefore with no feeling in favour of Caucuses that we ask the Liberal leaders to recollect the saying of a most devout Evangelical preacher, who happened also to be a gentleman, that "the task for him was not to suppress his carnal self, but his refined self," and to see whether or' not this new organisation cannot be made useful. Vul- garity is not a moral offence. It is quite clear that with the new suffrage some new organisation has become necessary ; that the confusion of which Tories have occasionally taken such advantage must be ended ; that it must be placed out of the power of a few wealthy men to send down "labour candi- dates," or "liquor candidates," or "religious candidates," or "crotchet candidates," to divide the Liberal party in every contest. It is quite clear also that if a stronger organi- sation is to be framed, and one which will prevent these trickeries, it must in some way pledge classes who are now too much left out in the self-elected Committees, and who there- fore act by themselves ; must interest them in the prelimin- aries, must make them feel themselves useful and important electors, and as it were, sharers in the nominating-power. We cannot see how this is to be avoided, and if the necessity is conceded, the necessity for a larger and more popular selecting Committee is conceded also. Large bodies of men, varying very much in opinion, have to be repre- sented; and they cannot be represented by a few gentlemen whom they did not choose, whom they hardly know, and whom they occasionally distrust, as too ready to:sacrifice everything to expediency or caste-feeling. Larger lumbers are required to allow of sufficient variety, and larger numbers directly chosen by the electors for whom they are to act, Without such a Committee, the candidates are not selected by the electors, but for the electors, and it is against that system that the electors in large constituencies, where indi- vidual action is ENT difficult, are beginning to rebel. They want a share in the nomination as well as the election, and they can have it only in this way. We may hate the system, or despise the system, but the large Electoral Committee, in- some form, is coming in large constituencies, among both parties, and in counties as well as boroughs, and the duty of the. Liberal chiefs is to study carefully whether that innova- tion cannot be reconciled with the independence and personal dignity of candidates, as well as with party interests. We do not quite despair of it. There is no necessary connection be- tween the existence of an electoral congress in a great borough like Southwark, and degrading candidates by asking them to make competitive trial-speeches, or discussing their qualifications in public, or demanding that tried representatives should sue at every vacancy for a new nomination at their hands. Why should the proceedings be public at all, or why should can- didates make to a Committee the speeches which they ought to make before public meetings ? Above all, why should not the Coranrittee act as Parliament -does, and delegate the executive work for which it is too large, and too imperfectly informed, and too popular altogether, to a Cabinet, a Council within the Committee, which could weigh the different candi- dates, and recommend the best The same reasons which induce Liberal Electors to choose a Liberal Four Hundred or Two Hundred—namely, that they themselves form too large and too 'Inorganic a mass to act directly with effect—ought to influence the Liberal Congressmen in favour of an inner Coun- cil which could, at all events, winnow the candidates, and discuss other recommendations than their powers of speech. There is nothing in the new organisation opposed to such a plan, or to any other, which, while recognising the large Com- mittees, removed from their action the defects of method which new so disgust observers, and especially those defects which might in time drive cultivated men out of politics altogether. We trust we shall not be mistaken. We cannot like the Caucus system, and feel most strongly the vulgar impress which the use 'of large Committees of selection may impart to political life. We prefer greatly that candidates should offer themselves directly to electors, and that when dissensions arise, they should either be settled by arrangement or by direct pre- linxinary ballot. But we cannot be blind to the facts of the day, to the increase of the constituencies, to the discontent of large classes with the old methods of obtaining candidates, to- the sudden formulating of that discontent through the initiative taken at Birmingham, or to the great risk that if the Committees are not adopted they may prove at the next election to be possessed of the only coherent Liberal voting-power, and after. one great :defeat by the Tories, which, in the case of contmued dissension, would be certain, may have everything their own way. We do not see how to be rid of them, any more than how to be rid of that other noxious device, the ballot, which, in relieving electors from the control of opinion,has enabled so many of them to indulge crotchets and fancies, and therefore, as practical politicians, we desire VI see the best made of' the inevitable: If the leaders say, as jour- nalists in London are saying, that it is not inevitable, we shall be delighted, as we shall also if they. can suggest a better plan for modifying the ill-effects of the change ; but upon the for- mer point we confess to have very little hope. The masses in the large constituencies mean to have their say in the choice of candidates, whether old Liberals like it or not, and they can have it only through a caucus, congress, or grand comihittee. Such a committee may fail at first to get effective power, as it did at Peterborough, and will certainly fail if it does not interest the artisansas well as the tradesmen, but we fear it will succeed at all events in compelling recognition. If it does, the party' as a whole must deal with it, and that seriously and considerately, or it will be split at the polling-booths in a way which will make a Conservative victory a foregone conclusion.
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