'THE GOVERNMENT AS IT HAS BEEN.
TT is an expedient time, we think, to remind our readers of what this Government, considered as a Govern- ment and not as an instrument for passing a single Bill of third-rate importance, really has been. It has governed . -with a great, deal of success. We ventured, when it first -came into power, to predict that it would not be a Tory Government—that is, a Government concerned to protect privilege—but would be influenced through and through, in its innermost temper and ideas, both by its new con- stituency and by its alliance with the Unionist party : and it has fully realised that prediction. It has, in the first place, been thoroughly faithful to Unionist principles. It has not given way upon any point, but has set itself steadily to its double task of restoring the ascendency of 'law in Ireland by civil process and without courts-martial, and of carrying through a revolution in tenure unaccom- panied, and therefore not spoiled, by projects of confiscation. There may have been some errors of detail in administration, .caused mainly, we believe, by the chronic irritation produced in a force like the Irish Constabulary by the hostility of the furious section of the people ; but no Irishman denies that life and property are now safe in the island, the strongest Parnellite only alleging that the improvement is due to .the hopes excited by the " sympathy " of the English Liberal Party. As to the tenure, the Government 'has risked popular displeasure to carry out a radical reform, and its success may be measured by the energy with which the Home-rulers resist the passing of the Land-Purchase Bill, and the ardour with which the Parnellites denounce the Ashbourne Act as at once a, bribe to the farmer and a " means of escape " for the detested landlord. When the bitterness of the struggle Sias died away, the historian will allow that during a most difficult interval between two widely different con- -ditions of society, in years which were years of birth and therefore of sickness, the Unionist Ministry main- tained the Pax Britannica in Ireland very well. So also they have legislated very well. We are not concerned just now with smaller measures, which succeed or fail generally according to the degree of judgment displayed by an individual Minister ; but the Unionist Cabinet have carried through at least one social change of the first order. They have " disestablished the country gentlemen " by the County Councils Act so successfully, that local .power has passed to the people ; yet there has not been a symptom of social war, or even of that silent bitterness `between classes which elsewhere follows every great change. The County Councils are working so well that, except in London, their proceedings are hardly noticed, and opinion is quietly maturing itself in favour of still larger trans- -fers to them of local authority and work. The Councils, an fact, which are the creation of the Unionist Govern- ment, are the recognised heirs of every local body which it may from time to time be found by Parliament expedient ./to supersede. These are visible successes, and they have been outdone Thy some which the electors can scarcely be said to see. They do not see, for example, the immense difficulty of so revising the Education Code as to modify " Payment by Results," and to content the Department itself, yet excite no Parliamentary irritation upon the most contentious and complicated of all subjects ; but this has been accom- plished. It is admitted by Admirals who are discontented that the great wants of the Navy have been supplied by Lord George Hamilton and Mr. Goschen ; that the lacunee in our maritime ,strength have been filled up ; and that when the automatic scheme accepted by Parliament has been fully carried through, the British Fleet will be equal to the fleet of any two Powers, and will find itself in possession of the only safe array of coaling-stations possessed by any maritime Power in the world. The country has, in fact, been made as strong at sea—which means all over the planet—as it can be made, without wasting the resources of the people in an effort to meet contingencies which may never arise, and which it is not in human power accurately to foresee. If the whole world combines to crush us, we may be beaten ; but short of that unprecedented calamity, the English and Italian Fleets would render a good account of almost any con- ceivable combination of navies. The Army is not so strong—is not, perhaps, our new responsibilities being considered, so strong as it should be by ten thousand men —but it is, by the admission of Lord Wolseley in a public speech, stronger than it ever was before, and besides performing all its usual work, which includes, be it re- membered, for one trifle, the permanent defence of the North-West Frontier of India against a first-class Power, it has for four years so garrisoned Egypt that the Soudanese Arabs have not been able even to enter it—one attempt having been repelled with ease—and that the Delta itself has remained as tranquil and orderly as Suffolk. Just think, we would ask any readers who may be doubtful, of the sort of bulletin that Napoleon, the first soldier of his age, would have made of that. The improve- ment in both Army and Navy has, of course, involved expenditure ; but so well have the finances been ad- ministered by Mr. Goschen, that besides incessant reductions in the bulk of the Debt, he has been enabled to reduce its interest for this generation by £1,800,000 a year, and for the next by £3,600,000 a year, thus enabling the people in any emergency to borrow £100,000,000 without any addi- tion to their ancient burdens. So high, in fact, does British credit now stand, that if the Government were involved in a really great war—a war, for instance, with France—it could at once raise £200,000,000, the amount of the French Indemnity, without difficulty at 3 per cent., a source of power which is not in any way a substitute either for courage or military skill, but which would supply to both the material force without which victories in war- time cannot be achieved.
There is, however, little risk of war, or risk from one quarter alone. So quietly has Lord Salisbury managed the Foreign Office, and so little has his management irri- tated the Opposition, that up to the beginning of the negotiations with Germany about Africa, it has hardly attracted the attention of the public. There has not been throughout his administration one sincerely hostile attack made in Parliament upon his foreign policy. He has, all the same, been steering through very difficult seas. He has had to face the determined hostility of France to the occu- pation of Egypt, a hostility in which Russia for practical purposes may be said to concur, and he has faced it without bluster, without rousing the nations by public discussion, and without surrender on any one point except those in which success would have involved a breach of treaty. We had, for example, no legal right to bid France defiance as to the conversion of the Debt. The Powers which authorised us to enter the Valley in 1882 are, as M. Ribot confesses almost in so many words, still of opinion that British occupation is beneficial, and must for the present be continued. That the quarrel exists we fully acknow- ledge, and also that it cannot end until we can find France compensation; but it has never been allowed to come to an outbreak, or to interfere with that strong control of the general administration of Egypt the success of which, it is too often forgotten, ought to be carried to the credit of the Foreign Office, which selects, or approves and supports, the whole of the agency employed. Administration of that kind is not the usual function of a Foreign Office, and like much of the organisation of our power on the East Coast of Africa, is, in fact, new work thrown on a department which has, or ought to have, no experience in the direct business of governing. Then, words can hardly describe the delicacy of the position which Lord Salisbury has occupied towards the "League of Peace" and its two enemies, a position out of which the Government has secured incidentally a most important advantage. Lord Salisbury could not pledge England to join France and Russia, because the demands of the latter would, in the event of victory, be wholly opposed to English interests, nor could he join Germany and Austria in a war which might make of France a secular enemy, or be pushed to a result—the destruction of France—which Englishmen, irritated as they often are by that fretful Power, could never bring themselves to approve. He was compelled, therefore, to maintain neutrality ; but, sympathising with the League so long as it maintained peace, he could and did render it an important advantage by protecting Italy. There is, we imagine, no treaty with Italy, and there never has been public discussion as to any " under- standings ;" but it is perfectly evident that England and Italy have become close friends, that Italy looks upon Great Britain as a powerful ally, and tht Great Britain regards with "benevolent favour" the rather rash efforts of the House of Savoy to include Abyssinia in its dominions. The effect of this arrangement is, that England, instead of being isolated in the Mediterranean, commands in time of danger two fleets ; that she has a steady vote on her side at Constan- tinople, and in all Egyptian affairs; and that she might, in an hour of emergency in Africa, rely upon aid from the nearest of all the great armies of the Continent. That is an immense advantage to have secured out of such a situa- tion as the present, and one which may be permanent ; for even if a European disarmament should one day be arranged, Italy, if she fixes herself in Africa, would constantly stand in need of British good-will. Finally, Lord Salisbury, though pressed by difficulties of the most acute character, one being that he is not dealing at Berlin with ordinary statesmen, but direct with an Emperor who has an iron will, has succeeded in arranging a compromise which binds England and Germany together in Africa, which leaves us free to expand from the Equator to the North as far as we please, and which vests in us, by a title no one has the power to dispute, a dominion in South Central Africa which would hold and feed the- whole population of Great Britain. We stand to-day in Europe almost arbiters of the situation—quite arbiters, if the people wished to have it so—we occupy Egypt subject to a European warrant already secured ; we have stretched Cape Colony from the Cape, far over the Zambesi, nearly to the Equator ; and we occupy in East Africa, such a position that the Queen is the true Sovereign of Zanzibar and its dependencies, and may stretch her sceptre northwards till, at all events, she touches the territory pro- tected by the Italians,—that is, by warm allies. We may not approve all these results, we are doubtful of one of them ourselves—a possible premature implication in Soudanese affairs—but if they are not great results, words have in politics lost their meaning. This Government so far has, in fact, been one of the most successful Govern- ments of modern times, and if the people only understood its action as the cultivated do, it could take the constitu- tional plebiscite with an absolute assurance that the answer to spring from the urns would be an emphatic " Yes." Unfortunately, such knowledge does not belong to the masses of any people, and we are not sure, amidst the perplexity and overwork of our present constitutional system, whether the Government have not a little neglected the great art of advertising themselves. They have done great things almost too quietly, and it is quite possible that they may pay heavily for a reticence which used to be con- sidered the first sign of strength, but which has become, we hope only for the hour, almost inconsistent with modern manners.
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