TOPICS OF THE DAY.
LORD HARTINGTON IN LANCASHIRE.
'LORD HARTrNGTON grows. If he would only take a little more interest in his political duties, and not be away hunting when the country and his party expect to hear from him a few weighty and significant words, he might still become one of the most considerable Parliamentary figures of this century,—a Palmerston of weightier judg- ment, and less crypto-Conservative feelings. He will never throw his whole energy into politics,—perhaps, indeed, he is one of those men whose stock of latent, potential, or lazy energy, energy unembodied, and very reluctant to embody itself in anything, will always be great. But he may, if he pleases, have all the excellences belonging to this kind of leader, which are certainly very different from the excellences of the higher kinds of earnestness. His speech at Accring- ton last Saturday is a speech much wider and abler than any we have yet had from him in addressing popular audiences. It shows the power, if we may so say, character- istic of a quick, but vigorous carelessness. The way in which he treated the subject of the sudden Dissolution illustrates this admirably. The preparations made and ostentatiously avowed by a Cabinet Minister for a real working Session ; the apparatus of a new Standing Order dealing with Obstruction which appeared to have no applicability to a fragmentary Session in which there had not been any obstruction, and if the Dissolution was to come when it did, could not be any obstruction - the introduction of a very important Water Bill for London, which, if not meant seriously, was adapted for no purpose on earth but to set in motion the wild speculation which actually occurred ; the promise of a Seats' Bill distributing the six vacant seats, one of which, it was rumoured, was destined for Accrington, in order that North-East Lancashire might be gutted of its most Liberal voters ;—all these points were touched by Lord Hartington with a somewhat scornful, but very effective touch. If they did not point to a working Session, — and he evidently thought they did not, but that the moving mind of the Government had some time ago decided on such a dissolution as this,—what did they point to, unless it was an attempt care- fully to educate the mind of the country into the precise state which Lord Beaconsfield might think most favourable for an appeal to the Constituencies ? The parade of great measures for a working Session,—a Session opened by the Prime Minister himself with a sneer at the sympathy shown by the Liberals for traitors to their Sovereign and their country,—the trailing of the coat before the Opposition in relation to Ob- struction,—the offer of what looked like a sop to the great Water Companies of the metropolis, where the Government hope to gain largely from the Opposition,—all appeared,Lord Hartington thought, to be merely preliminary notes, before the launching of a new election-cry against the Liberals, charging them with inviting help from the friends of Home-rule and of the disintegration of the Empire. And then Lord Hartington descanted with considerable power and not a little scorn on the fruits of that study of election-cries to which Lord Beaconsfield has, from his first entrance on political life, devoted himself. He never could understand, he said, why Parliament was not dissolved after Lord Beaconsfield came back from Berlin with that admirable election cry, "Peace, with honour," on his lips. But now that was getting stale, and perhaps the honour had worn rather threadbare, so it was necessary to find a new cry ; and the new one he found was suggested to him by the Sheffield and Liverpool elections, and the effective use made by the Tories of the Home-rule movement in those elections. Trip, Lord Beaconsfield had himself promoted some of the first and most active Home-rulers to places of social consideration. He had made Mr. King-Harman Lord-Lieutenant of Roscommon, just as the Liberals had made Lord Sefton' Lord-Lieutenant of Lan- cashire; but though no Liberal leader would have thought, after doing so' of calling the political convictions avowed by Lord Sefton false to his country and treasonable to his Queen, Lord Beaconsfield had no scruple in so terming the political convictions avowed by Mr. King-Harman. And then Lord Hattington went into the discussion of the relation of the Liberal party to the Home-rule agitation, with a breadth and strength of good-sense which will do much to spoil as completely the little plot devised by Lord Beaconsfield, for connecting them with Home-rule in the country, as the Liberals had spoiled, " in the innocence of their hearts," the plot for connecting them with Obstruction, by their ready concurrence in the attempt to put down Obstruction.
Lord Hartington dealt with equally good-natured contempt with Lord Beaconsfield's polysyllabic exhortation to statesmen, to promote "the consolidation of co-operation," and to resist the "policy of decomposition." He thought the way to unite the Colonies of the United Kingdom was to give them the fullest, freest, and most complete self-government, and to let them feel that the tie is purely voluntary, and may be dissolved at their own pleasure ; but that while they are proud of it, we are equally proud of it, and are willing to undergo any sacrifice in order to preserve it from being broken by any violence from outside. "Canada knows by experience that when her security was threatened, England, acting under the direction of a Liberal Government, was ready to support her with the whole force of the British power." It was not the Liberals who had promoted the decomposition of the Empire, and nothing the Liberals had ever advocated tended ' to promote that decomposition so much as the contempt with which Parliament is openly treated by Lord Beaconsfield, even in the very circular in which he appeals to the country to return a new Parliament that shall confirm his Administration in power. He there intimates that it is a matter of high policy to secure "the presence, not to say the ascendency of England in the councils of Europe," and he declares that her influence in these councils is now, if not diminished, yet " arrested " by the doubt concerning the result of the appeal to the people. It is this doubt which makes the immediate dis- solution desirable, and Lord Beaconsfield wants to see it put at rest by a triumphant vote of confidence in his Administra- tion. But though speaking of this as a matter of high policy and the first moment, Lord Beaconsfield gives not the slightest hint to the country of the issues at stake, or of the policy of the present Administration in relation to these issues, or of the consequences which he apprehends from the "arrest' of influence he deplores: In other words, he appeals to the people to express blind confidence in him on a matter of the utmost European importance, without hinting what it is, or in what direction he would wish to use the popular confidence accorded to him, if it were accorded. This is of a piece with his whole Administration. He has always kept the representa- tives of the people in the dark in relation to every important step he has taken till it was too late to modify it, much less to re- verse it. Instead of fortifying himself by the counsels of Parlia- ment, he does what he pleases, and comes to Parliament to endorse what he has done. If the people like this usage of Parliament, says Lord Hartington, the people cannot do bet- ter than express the blind confidence which Lord Beaconsfield desires. "But let them not, aften doing so, complain, if Par- liament is treated with ten times the contempt, ten times the want of confidence which have been manifested towards it by the Government during the existence of this Parliament." Indeed, Lord Hartington might have explained Lord Beacons- field's meaning in the passage in which he expresses his hope that the people will return to Westminster "a Parliament not unworthy of the power of England, and resolved to maintain it," as equivalent to a prayer that the people will return to West- minster a Parliament convinced of its own complete unworthi- ness to wield the power of England, but, nevertheless, resolved to maintain it by handing it bodily over to Lord Beaconsfield..
It was thus that Lord Hartington's first election address touched on all the salient points of the political situation,— illustrated the trickiness of the Prime Minister's policy, the thorough hollowness of his own election cries, the baselessness of the imputations so freely thrown out against the Oppo- sition, and the capital sin of this Administration, its attempt to deprive Parliament of its most important deliberative privi- leges, and to use it as a mere tool to register the Minister's own decrees. It would have been hard for any Liberal leader to have treated so large a topic with greater strength and greater cool- ness; and only one other could have treated it with greater popular effect.
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