TOPICS OF THE DAY.
CONSERVATIVE DISCONTENT.
THE "little rift" begins to appear in the Conservative "lute." The party of content does not appear in some of its public utterances to be absolutely contented. Its disci- pline has always been marvellous, as compared with that of its adversaries—people who think being apt to differ in thought —but discipline, in England at all events, is sometimes com- patible with growing discontent. This discontent has been expressed this week in two or three ways, and may turn out, if the present lull in our internal politics continues, formidable enough to deserve and demand examination. A Liberal with a grievance may become libellous about his leaders without his vote being much affected, but a Conservative who turns critical is very apt, being an inarticulate sort of being, to give effect to his remonstrances by sulkily sitting still. Mr. Gorst, for example, is a representative man, and from his influence in the Conser- vative Association of far greater weight with his party than the outside world quite recognises, and he obviously is not in that mood of contented submissiveness which is the ideal, in the eyes of a Whip, of a sound Conservative vote. On the contrary, he thinks Ministers want stirring up very much,—so much, that it is no longer "the duty of the Conservative party to agree with every opinion which the Government expresses, to accept every measure they propose, or to support them, as he had been asked to do, whether right or wrong." Such "a course would be fatal to the interests of the country, the welfare of the party, and the continuance of the Ministers themselves in office." Mr. Gorst is all for the right of private judgment, which is a Liberal, not to say a Radical, state of mind; and desires the party to express itself "openly and honestly," or indeed, as he subsequently puts it, "roughly," so as to stimulate an indolent Minister to action. How he is to act we are not exactly told. The Government ought, indeed, to carry out Mr. Plimsoll's views, and reform the Marine De- partment of the Board of Trade—upon which Mr. Gorst bestows some very hard words—and grant superannuation pensions in dockyards and spend more money there, and do other things acceptable to a constituency like Chatham; but something much wider, more general, is also evidently required. Ministers as a body are doing or neglecting to do something which disturbs Mr. Gorst very much, for he says they are all, especially the Treasury, in need of pressure from without. All are too much in the hands of the permanent officials, who, owing to the long enjoyment of power by Radicals, are now all Radicals, and alien in sentiment and policy from the party seated at the elections. These men are so powerful, from their abilities and knowledge, that they overcome new Ministers, who cannot act independently unless impelled by "a loud and clear" utterance of the public 'voice and of the House of Commons. So bad is the influence of these officials, that the Ministry have not only mismanaged the Merchant Shipping Bill, and when their Bill was recast inside the House failed to carry out its provisions, but they have stultified themselves about the legal charges for prosecu- tions, and have even, horror of horrors, "offended great numbers of their supporters among the County Members." If this is not incipient mutiny, what. is? What can the stoutest Radical say of the Ministry worse than Mr. Gorst implies or says,—that it administers badly, that it needs pressure from without to do anything properly, and that it is too feeble to override the pressure of the permanent Civil Service? With the accu- racy of the charges brought we have just at present no con- cern. The root of evil in the Administration may, for what we know, be the overmastering tenacity of men whom other politicians describe as the most useful and pliable servants of the Crown, incapable of embarrassing the work of the State by their political preferences or antipathies ; but without dis- cussing that, we may at least assert that Mr. Gorst's is not the language of content. If the Member for Chatham, and those who cheer him, are faithful Conservatives, what are the Ministers who, in their judgment, want all manner of pressure, and "loud and clear" warnings, and pokings-up generally, to induce them not to be the humble mouthpieces of their Radical clerks?
If Mr. Gorst's speech stood alone, it might be set down as the utterance of an individual addressing a very ex- ceptional constituency, but the Times gives the honours of its largest type to a complaint which is more general still. The "Active Conservative" who on Saturday stormed out at the Conservative Ministers is also, like Mr. Gorst, greatly exercised by the treatment of Dockyard Members, "who are daily- more and more compromised with their constituents by the disregard of their representations superciliously and persistently advertised by the First Lord of the Admiralty," but he has a more general charge to prefer. Her Majesty's Ministry
is too County-Memberish. It is not a family party, as most Whig Ministries were said to be, and not bourgeois, as in the belief of men who worship titles, but do not under- stand rank, Mr. Gladstone's Ministry was, but it is a County-Member clique. "The Conservative phalanx in the House of Commons" numbers 351 Members, and of these 191 represent counties, 153 boroughs, and 7 Universities. Of the 7 University Members, 3 are, or were, in high employ ; out of 191 County Members, 21 are within the inner circle ; while out of the 153 Borough Members, only 3—Lord Sandon„ Lord Henry Lennox, and Mr. W. H. Smith—occupy posts of importance, and two of these belong strictly to the County_ Member class while only 10 have any places at all. There is- no Borough Member proper in the Cabinet, and only one in a considerable position, and the "Active Conservative" is so wrath that he leaves that one out of his calculation, and lumps Mr. Smith with the ten Borough Members who have posts of some kind. The consequence of this favouritism is, he intimates, that the feelings of Borough Members are consistently "ignored, over- looked, and even cynically defied," by the "chief rulers" of the party. This is discontent with a vengeance. Here is Mr. Gorst declaring that the "chief rulers" have stultified themselves in order to discontent County Members, and "An Active Conserva- tive "asserting that Borough Members are systematically and even cynically overlooked and defied. Upon their united testimony, therefore, the chief rulers please nobody except the seven Members for Universities, and as Mr. Beresford Hope is one of them, the totality even of their satisfaction with the Administration must be at the utmost a measurable quantity. Add to these. complaints the assertion recently publicly made, that Mr. Disraeli has alienated the whole Civil Service by four careless or jobbing appointments—one of them a promotion of his own brother upon which no Liberal has made a remark—and the reasonable belief that his legal followers in the House will not be delighted by the calmness with which he has snubbed them all to appoint Mr. Gifford Solicitor-General over the- heads of all Tory lawyers in the House, and we have a mass of discontent which, if it only exists as described, will within no long time make itself felt in politics. But does it exist ? We think it does, though not quite in the strong form in which Mr. Gorst and the letter-writers have chosen, for their argument's sake, to put it. It is rather that the elements of discontent are gathering, than that dis- content itself has yet got to any head. But it is clear that two causes are beginning to work within the Conservative party which may, as time goes on, produce very harassing and even destructive effects upon its discipline. One is that the borough Conservatives are recognising that they have nothing like the place in the country to which their numbers entitle them, and the other, that Conservatives are losing their placid self-confidence in themselves as administrators. The first —"— source of danger is as yet scarcely developed enough for dis- cussion, but it may become the most important of all. Hitherto. Conservative opinion has been country-gentleman opinion. Coun- try gentlemen have led the party ; country gentlemen have- formed the party ; and country gentlemen have naturally used the party. To this hour, the Tory chiefs scarcely understand that if they are in accord with the Squires, they may not be in accord with the whole of their own following, and look on a borough Tory as a sort of person whom it is creditable to a borough to send up, but who is not entitled to think himself an entity. He is an entity, however, and a separate one. One- half at least of their party in the Commons are either borough Tories—that is, men whose instincts differ from those of country Tories on many serious points—or they are country gentlemen whose constituents compel them to express the borough-Tory view of affairs. The difference between the two sets a men is at least as great as that between Whig and Liberal, and if it is not recognised, and the whole party is treated as if it were all of one grain and colour, the chiefs will yet have a rough reminder that in England cliquism is only tolerated when it succeeds. They are in the old position of the Whigs, bound to reconcile followers of similar opinions but dissimilar instincts, and like the Whigs, they will have to face mutinies before they get things even temporarily straight. The other cause of danger is much more pressing. Partly from tradition, partly from the fact that Sir R. Peel was a Cower- vative, and partly from long-continued boasting, the Conserva- tives have imbibed a child-like confidence in their own power of administration. They think that their party once in power is sure to administer well, even if individual heads of depart- ments should prove weak. Mr. Ward Hunt "will do" just as well as Sir Charles Wood. They are now being startled out of this foolish faith, and open their mouths to stare like children in presence of something strange. A Queen's ship go down with Tories in power ! A great privilege like the extra-territoriality of a man-of- war given up with Conservatives in command ! Meanness rampant in small things with a Tory majority of fifty ! Their faith in the universe is shaken. They cannot understand it at all, and they do not like it, and like all Englishmen in that mood, they look round to see if they cannot find a scapegoat somewhere, and till he is found, fret them- selves and their chiefs as contumaciously and perversely as if they were only Liberals. Events may restore their dis- cipline and their placidity, but after another blunder or two we shall not be surprised to find Mr. Gorst announcing that, in his opinion, the first duty of the party is a thorough weeding of its chiefs, and an "active Conservative "demon- strating that it is needful in the choice of new ones to pass over country gentlemen. And then we hope, but do not expect, that the Conservative party will feel as if it knew itself again.
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