TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE QUEEN'S SPEECH AND THE DEBATE.
IT is quite clear, both from the Queen's speech, and from the Prime Minister's speech which followed it, that the vile of the Tory party is, for the present, to be dignified repose,
and a certain magnanimity of attitude towards their opponents. The Queen's Speech sketches out hardly any party work,—the main legislative suggestion of the Government, the perfecting of the Judicature Act by its extension to Ireland, and in part at least, to Scotland, being just the kind of work on which no party feeling is likely to arise ; while the Bill for simplifying the transfer of land is pretty certain not to meddle with the law of entail and settlement in any sense disagreeable to the great country families and hereditary peers. On the one question which might and probably would have excited party feeling, the amendment of the laws relating to labour, Mr. Disraeli has shirked an official measure, and referred to a Royal Com- mission the responsibility of suggesting an amendment, " if it should be found necessary." This is a very mild pro- gramme, and even when taken with the promise to soften down the hardship of the laws affecting the sale of intoxi- cating liquors, it is not one which promises much angry debate. As far as we can see, the only substantial contro- versy of the Session is likely to centre round the Budget ; and no one can be sure that, even in that difficult matter, Mr. Gladstone's pupil may not manage so to steer his course as to avoid anything like formidable attack. As was observed in the debate, there is no sort of fear of a block of measures at the legislative narrows of the Session, shortened though the time has been by Mr. Gladstone's policy. The Conservatives have come in to teach us that even though "calm's not life's crown, yet calm is well." And Mr. Disraeli is inaugurating the policy of calm with a very elaborate display of magnanimity. He gave Sir W. Stirling-Maxwell a very hard rap on the knuckles for having presumed, " without consultation with any one," to twit Mr. Gladstone with his dissolution, —no doubt not quite forgetting that in thus grandly repudiating any wish to bear hardly on his defeated foe, he was also to some extent paying off an old debt to a follower not quite so disposed to accept the word of command from his leader as that leader might have wished. But that was a merely incidental advantage of Sir W. Stirling-Maxwell's indiscretion. It was evidently a deliberate policy in Mr. Disraeli to take up the part of a magnanimous statesman who, having been entrusted by the whole nation with its confidence, wishes to be the organ of the whole nation, rather than the organ of a party, and to con- ciliate Trojan and Tyrian alike by his demeanour. Certainly, Mr. Gladstone, who, of course, spoke before Mr. Disraeli, had done all that in him lay to facilitate that attitude. There was something simple as well as generous in Mr. Gladstone's admis- sion that the dissolution was his policy, carried out in the manner which he thought most beneficial to his Administra- tion, determined upon as the best means of getting full power for the inauguration of a financial policy of great importance, but successful only in eliciting that the country was weary of his Government and not in love with his proposals. Mr. Glad- stone's words on the duty of carefully watching the set of public opinion, and duly giving it the power of freely express- ing itself from time to time, ought to be studied and laid to heart by the Duc de Broglie, for whose benefit, we presume, they were in great measure intended. It was a courageous as well as a disinterested lesson for a statesman to give who had just appealed to the country and been rejected by the country as the result of that appeal, and we do not wonder that it con- firmed Mr. Disraeli in his (no doubt) independent conclusion that he ought to deal with the Opposition in a generous and respectful manner, not in that of a mere party leader. The tribute he paid to Mr. Gladstone and the splendour of the great victories to which he had led his party, was in ex- cellent taste,—on questions of public taste no one has a more ready intuition than Mr. Disraeli,—and there can be no doubt that if Mr. Disraeli can only sustain the tone he has taken up, of sincere respect for the Liberals, even when he himself most earnestly opposes their policy, he will have a far greater chance of a long reign than if he becomes the mere mouthpiece of his own followers.
The only political danger which seems to be involved in the programme both of policy and moral attitude that Mr. Disraeli has sketched out for himself, is, we think, a certain tendency to cause looseness of organisation, and even party decomposition, which may result from so very passive and polite an attitude; The enthusiasm of the party will probably suffer,—and its' cohesion must suffer if its enthusiasm suffers,—without certain occasional sharpness of combat. A Minister who is not in any degree militant, is apt to see his forces melt away under him. Of course, the Liberals may, if they please, remedy this for Mr. Disraeli, by organising repeated and vehement attacks on the Conservative position, but at present at least there does not seem much chance of this. The Liberals: are dispirited, and some of the old "planks in their plat- form " have for the present disappeared. On the only question of the day on which, as it is said, the innovators have gained strength,—women's electoral rights,—the leader of the move- ment is now a Conservative,—Mr. Forsyth, the Member for Marylebone,—and were there the least danger of the House of Lords accepting what it is held to be not unlikely that the House of Commons will pass, the result would probably be to exaggerate the apparent strength of the Conservative party
still more, and thereby to sow the seeds of still greater mis- chief. No party is well disciplined or trustworthy without the clear sense of a cause and an organisation. Conservatives without a constitutional programme of their own, and without any sharp attacks of their foe to repel, will be in great danger of falling into depression and anarchy. They are the party of resistance, and the languor of their opponents will, instead of being a benefit to them, be a very great peril. For the present, while they can live on the feat of having stopped• the triumphant car of reform in mid-career, and so averted a great number of imaginary dangers and catastrophes, they will do pretty well. But in England no party can live on the strength of past achievements. The time will come, and come before long, when the grievances which a Government always accumulates against itself, will begin to tell, and when the fear of what Mr. Gladstone would have done, had he remained in power, will lose all its vivacity and significance. Then the passive character of the Conservative programme, the absence of any rallying-point for the party such as the Liberals always, had in the reforms still promised, will begin to tell. If Mr. Disraeli does nothing, he will lose strength; and if he' attempts to regain ground by doing something new,—which, of course, a number of Conservatives would be sure to object to,—he will lose strength even more. We expect that his own vivacious imagination, his delight in the grand style, his Orientalism of mind, will then induce him to make some great bid for popularity, in which he will utterly misunderstand the English people, and fall with a fall even greater than that which his rival so courageously described on Thursday night, as marking the greatest relative change in party strength which had taken place since the time of the first Reform Act. However, it is of little use to look too minutely into the future. We only mean that in this passive mood of their own, and still more in the passive temper of their opponents just now, lies the great Tory danger. The party will crumble away much more easily under the dislikes which all administrations earn, if there is no sustained attack on them as yet from the Liberal side, than if there is. They are a party who cannot afford to be let alone, and yet cannot well inaugurate anything great without incurring the reproach of innovators. We expect that the want of spirit and unity among us Liberals will prove an even greater injury to the Government than any variety of Liberal enterprise,—however formidable,—possibly could prove.
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