TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE " QUARTERLY " ON THE COMMONS.
CAN a popular body ever be consistent, can it ever carry out a policy which requires years for its perfect de- velopment ? These are the questions asked in the Quarterly by the extremely able writer of the article on " The Political Lessons of the War "—said to be a Tory leader of the first rank—and he answers them both, as we understand him, in the negative. If he is right, there must some day or other come an end to government through a popular As- sembly, and as that day will probably be the last day also of free institutions, and as at least three-fourths of the Reviewer's descriptions are true, it is at all events worth while to examine patiently and impartially what he has to say for himself. His data are correctly stated. It is true that up to 1832 the United Kingdom was governed, as a rule, with certain intermittent exceptions, by a limited number of landholding families. They were not in many cases aristocrats in the Heralds' sense of that word ; but they had all the power and most of the characteristics of a true political aristocracy, pride, persistency, and that kind of hard- ness which is the attribute of men with a strong sense of their individuality and their rights. It is also true that from 1832 to 1867 the Kingdom was governed by an artificial aristocracy, a middle-class electorate, which may or may not have been consciously designed by Earl Grey—we doubt that as a historical fact—but which certainly had all the bad and many of the good qualities of an aristocracy. It neglected the Departments, but it took the taxes from the shoulders of the people to lay them on its own. And it is also true that the Kingdom is now governed by the great body of the people, that they are as yet scarcely aware of their power, but that they will in the end insist that Govern- ment shall go the way they approve, and not any other. Nor will any grave politician deny either that the House of Com- mons is at last the true head of the Executive, that it controls every department, that Ministers will and must shape their policy so as to please the judgment of their actual master, the House, which is so much the more potent because it is exempt—as a rule, though there are some marked excep- tions to this law—from the dread of popular resistance ; or that at this particular moment the House is a vacillating lord. We, who are Radicals "dyed in the wool," who firmly believe it better that a nation once fit for liberty should perish fighting for its liberties than that it should resign its freedom, accept with a single reserve this description of our existing condition :—" The peculiarity, therefore, of the English Consti- tution, as it at present works, is that the ruling power has no rights at all. Its official existence is as much at the mercy of its master, the House of Commons, as that of the vizier of an Eastern sultan. The ruling power in France, as has been already said, is held by a tenure not exceeding that of an ordinary farm lease. But the ruling power in England has not even the six months' notice accorded to the poorest tenant- at-will. It is not even entitled to the month's warning of a livery servant. It can be, and has been, dismissed unexpectedly upon the spot. It may be said that this is the fate of all ministers, whether they serve despot, president, or House of Commons. The English Prime Minister is not more liable to dismissal than the Minister of Prussia or the Secretary of State in America. But the cases are not parallel. These ministers are not the ruling power. There is always above them a supreme authority—no matter by what title he holds, whether by election or by inheritance—who does not depend for his official existence upon the nightly caprices of a popular assembly."
We have underlined a single sentence, the sentence we reserve from our assent, but does not that sentence contain the very gist of the whole matter? Is the House of Com- mons the final ruling power ? Is there not in England a ruler who cannot be dismissed, whose tenure is to all human appearance quite immutable, who is as absolute as any Sultan, more absolute, indeed, because this ruler alone among rulers of earth is not liable to have his head chopped off, or to be poiniarded, or to die of measles ? We believe that the Quarterly reviewer would be the last man in England to deny that the Electorate is such a ruler, to question that if the married males of Great Britain really resolve upon a particular course of action—" policy," " attitude," "line of progress," call it what you will—that line of action must be adopted as obediently as if it had been dictated by a Caliph with a divine
right to take fourteen lives a day. He himself acknowledges this in set terms whenever matters interesting to the masses are in question, indeed he dislikes the absoluteness of the ruler; terming the obedience of the Ministry to the people in such cases• obsequiousness, and we want to know why he considers that this electorate must be vacillating in its policy. Because, he will reply, vacillation is a natural characteristic of the masses of mankind. We deny it. The natural characteristic of the masses of mankind, and especially of Anglo-Saxon man- kind, is a stupidly tenacious adherence to certain fixed ideas, to which they will and do stick with a pertinacity such as no King or President ever did or will show, simply because no personage has the endurance of a nation. Just let the Reviewer try to attack one of the rooted ideas of the British mind, say this one, that if in danger of criminal punishment he ought to be tried by twelve men, and see the kind of response he would get from the electorate. It would take him seven years to convince his own tenants that he was not assailing one of the laws of nature, and seven more to persuade them that his view of the matter was one which deserved more than a moment's thought. Penetrate the electorate with an idea, drive it home into the brain of that strong-willed, undying despot, and so far from. his vacillating, it will be almost impossible ever to get it out again. He will cling to his policy long after the justification for it has passed away. The reviewer says the United States have a policy because they have an independent Executive, but the Executive in America is elected by the parties, and he will hardly assert that the parties would always reject a strong cry raised by the nation. Well, did he ever hear of a serious cry raised in the United States for the abrogation of the policy of non-intervention in European quarrels ? Can he conceive of a " policy " more thoroughly carried out than that has been ? It is convenient, he will say, easy, agreeable to the nature of the electorate. Very true ; and since when have kings or aristocracies carried out policies that were inconvenient, difficult, and disagreeable to their convictions ? Did anybody ever hear of a war more persistent than that of the North against the South, or of a principle more obstinately maintained than that of State Rights, or of a Constitution regarded with such conservative reverence as that of the United States ? Or, to take an example much nearer home, can he point to any year in our history during which the body of the people, now Sovereign, has ever swerved from its clear persistent policy of retaining the freedom of the seas, has ever failed to respond to any demand for its Navy, has ever pardoned a Ministry which could be clearly proved to• have reduced our strength in that direction to a dangerous point ? Is it not absolutely true that if any Premier, Whig or Tory, said the country to be safe must double its Navy, and the people believed him, the Navy would be doubled, and any party which resisted the doubling would be ground to powder ? He points throughout the article to the necessity of improving our military system of defence, a subject upon which we most cordially agree with him ; but what prevents the electorate from imbibing that idea as firmly as they have imbibed the idea of Naval strength ? Nothing in the world. but ignorance, such as we might find in any king or aristo- cracy 'whether of the well-born or of the middle-class, such as we did find, for instance, in that very respectable King who lost us America, in that very potent aristocracy which tried to fight Napoleon with 40,000 men, and that most excellent middle-class which sent a decent corps d'armle to invade the largest of European Empires. The ignorance is lamentable, as was that of Napoleon when he declared war, but the ignorance is not the result of vacillation, is the result, on the contrary, in no small degree of a fixed idea in the British mind that the true defensive armament for a free island king- dom is a great fleet and a small army. The King needs to be informed, no doubt, like all other kings ; but that lack of in- formation is not his fault, but that of the counsellors, who have not the courage or the will to tell him the disagreeable truth. There are ten men now in Great Britain of both parties who, if they chose to come to the front, and say England must be. armed, could pass any measure they pleased, and it would take not years, but generations, to repeal it, and the Re- viewer is one of the ten. It is not the vacillation of the king, but the method of inducing him to take the neces- sary resolution, which is wrong,—the reluctance to see that the true scheme for making him persistent is not to exempt his agents from his control, or make him put the Army on the Consolidated Fund, but to inform him till he sees that such and such a system ought to be. The only diffi- culty then will be to get him to change it. How long did it -take to explode the notion of the balance of power," if, indeed, it is exploded yet ?
The real difficulty in the way of efficiency in any depart- ment is not the vacillation of the King, who is so obstinate that it takes seven years to make him change his mind, but the failure of successive governments to inform the permanent ruler of the deficiencies which exist, the hesitation to make the departmental anarchy clearly manifest, the reluctance to -appear to be asking for power, however necessary power may be, the mistaken conviction that because the old electorate ad- mired economy the nation as a body admires it too. It is not with the sovereign power that the blame rests, but with the Ministers who advise it, and who timidly decline to ask for the confidence which would be so gladly accorded and the powers the nation would, so gladly see them claim. It is not -the ruler who wants to see the Merchant Shipping Code post- poned year after year, because the House of Commons cannot -find time to deal with a Bill of eight or nine hundred clauses at once, but the Ministry which is too timid to ask power to make for objects defined in the Act any bye-laws it pleases, -which, if not rejected by the Commons within six weeks, shall have the force of Acts. The vacillation, as far as it exists, is the fault of the political leaders, and not of the ultimate ruler. The weakness is not his, but that of successive Ministries, which will not believe that the country sees its own supremacy, and will therefore trust them with power.
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