MR. MORLEY'S AVOWALS.
MR. MORLEY'S speech at Newcastle on Wednesday has done the Unionist cause more good than any speech which the Unionist leaders could have uttered. First, he has definitely identified the Gladstonians not only with the Irish Home-rulers of the present day,—that was done before,—but with the duty of raising again that stained and tattered standard, even after it has been once more defeated and captured in the next political battle at the polls. He himself certainly can never again lift his head as a statesman if he accepts the popular verdict of the English people against this hapless and hopeless proposal and consents to drop it from the policy of the Liberal party of the future. And nothing can be more unfortunate for the would- be leader of a great democracy than to avow as he does that, let the people say what they will as to their rooted aversion to this break-up of the nation,—this sub- division which has already demonstrated that it cannot stop where Mr. Gladstone proposed to stop, but must go on to " Home-rule all round," whatever that may mean,— the so-called Liberals must turn a deaf ear to the people, and insist on converting them to their own view, as if the policy of Union were a moral stain to which it would be a degradation for any true man to give ground. That is Mr. Morley's first and most fatal declaration. But the second, though not so thoroughgoing, is perhaps almost as immediately injurious, namely, that he and his colleagues are committed, for the present at least,—here he does not venture to commit himself to all time,—to a policy of philanthropic tyranny on the question of temperance, and will identify the Liberal party with the Veto Bill, quite the most unjust and unreasonable of the enthusiasms of the present day for reforming inebriates by enabling the will of the majority to ride roughshod over the moral discretion of the minority in matters purely and distinctly moral.
These two admissions seem to us the most signal of the triumphs of unreason over the one statesman of the Glad- stonian party of whom it was once justly supposed that while he set limits to the tyranny of numbers in matters on which the individual ought to consult his own reason and conscience alone, and not the mere pleasure of his fellow-citizens, he yet accepted the verdict of the majority on purely constitutional matters. In rela- tion to the hours of labour, Mr. Morley was the last of the Gladstonians to take a firm stand and refuse to bind minorities by the decision of majorities. He was understood to distinguish between matters political and matters moral, and to stand up for the right of the nation to dictate the solution of questions of the former class, while denying its right to dictate the solution of questions of the latter class. But now he appears to have almost reversed the character of the decision at which he had arrived. If ever there were a matter in which, to plain men's minds at least, the nation has a right to decide, it is the question of the organisation of the nation itself. Yet that is just the matter on which Mr. Morley refuses absolutely, as we understand him, to take any final orders from the people, and binds himself to the lost cause, even if it be a lost cause, as peremptorily as if the limits of the Union were a moral question, and it were as base to submit to the will of the majority, as it would be to conform to the popular judgment on a question of moral purity or religious conviction. He has seen, or ought to have seen, the rapid progress made towards the policy of the Heptarchy since Irish Home-rule was first raised. He knows that many of his own colleagues are now the avowed advocates of a tetrarchy at least, and have fallen victims to the logic of disintegration. Yet, though he himself has never as yet adopted that political polytheism, as it may almost be called, he not only ignores its dangers, but announces that, come what may, he holds the Glad- stonian party bound to nail the Irish colours to the mast, however loud the nation's voice may be in deprecation of that step. He commits himself to the duty of fighting on against the will of the people for any period to which the lives of existing statesmen may extend, as if the declared will of the people had no right at all to influence the judgment of those who dissent from it, even on a matter so distinctly within the limits of the democratic principle as this. That is surely a very startling position to take up. If the whole may not decide for itself into what parts it will, and will not, allow itself to be split for the purposes of common action, it is not easy to conceive that a national whole means anything at all. The principle of national life loses all force and meaning, if it may not dictate to the parts for what purposes they may, and for what purposes they may not, go free and decide according to their own good will and pleasure. Yet if a great democracy is told that, whatever it decides, the minority in favour of disintegration will take no notice of the national decision, but will continue to propagate its doctrine as if it were a spiritual gospel that could not, and would not, accept any modification from the dictation of the majority, that surely amounts to a declaration against the very principle of democracy in the very field in which, if in any field at all, democracy ought to wield a legitimate authority. We cannot imagine a declaration more fatal to the Gladstonians than this of Mr. Morley's, that they have tied this heavy weight so firmly round their necks, that, whether the nation likes it or not, they at least must sink or swim with this impracticable doctrine weighing them down.
But Mr. Morley's second avowal, coming from his lips, seems to us even stranger. If there be a matter in which it is to our minds certain that the moral liberty of the individual should override the political policy of the nation, it is the question of personal conduct as to matters of eating and drinking. Yet this is the very matter on which Mr. Morley claims to dictate to the people at large, what shall be justice and what shall be injustice, how the nation shalt interfere with the rights of the individual, and how it shall not interfere. The Local Option Bill is treated by the Gladstonians as if it were a Bill to reform the morals of the people, yet it is a Bill which begins and ends with the assumption that morality consists in treating a large class arbitrarily and unjustly for the sake of the few weak persons who are sup- posed to be unable to pass a public-house without yielding to the temptation to go in and buy drink. If it passes, it will arbitrarily ruin a good number of persons who have been licensed by the State to pursue a particular business in a particular locality, and who have pursued that business quietly and respectably. And it will do this without offer- ing compensation of any kind, unless a three years' notice can be so regarded,—which, we venture to say, it cannot. If anything were ever doing evil that good might come of it, this Bill seems to us the most perfect illustration of the principle. We hold most strongly that to withdraw a license for the sale of liquor from people who abuse the rights it gives, is not only right but a duty. But to with- draw it without compensation in a number of instances, necessarily chosen more or less at hap-hazard, because for reasons depending on local convenience, from people who have never abused it, seems to us the proceeding of philanthropic tyrants, who are rapidly becoming the most dangerous tyrants of our country and age. We regard the Local Option Bill as a, thoroughly unjust Bill, proposed in the supposed interests of weak and intemperate men without any real chance of doing them good. Mr. Morley's enthusiastic support of it is one of the most singular and startling of the phenomena of our time. He may try to discredit Mr. Chamberlain as occupying " the box-seat on the brewer's van," if he pleases. He seems to us to have taken the box-seat on the car of a philanthropic Jugger- naut who is bent on driving over scores and hundreds of honest and innocent tradesmen, solely because they supply useful wares which are liable to abuse, and are actually abused, by men and women too weak to resist the most superficial of temptations. We never expected to find Mr. Morley proposing to defy democracy where democracy is really exerting its most legitimate preroga- tive, and to bow down before democracy when it proposes to override the most obvious principles of justice in the in- terest of a doctrinaire, despotic, and decadent philanthropy.
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