TOPICS OF THE DAY.
IS THE LIBERAL UNIONIST PARTY AN ABORTION?
MR. GLADSTONE rarely uses words so ill-considered as those which he employed at Hastings to express his disgust for the Liberal Unionist Party. The difficulty, he said, that stands in the way of the Tory Party, if they were disposed, as they might be disposed, to adopt the policy of Home-rule, does not lie in the Tory conscience, which does not care much about it, nor does it lie, he believes, in the Tory intellect. " it is in the existence of that unhappy, unfortunate, ill-starred abortion of a party, which is called the party of the Liberal Unionists." Did a great orator ever choose more fatally inapplicable words to express his chagrin with a party than these ? Why, in the very sentence in which he passed these derogatory epithets upon the Liberal Unionists, he confessed the total inapplicability of the invective which he condescended to use. He told us that the Liberal Unionists constitute a fatal difficulty in the way of any Conservative stampede to join the Home-rule cause. Well, that was one of the main objects of the formation of the Liberal Unionist Party. And Mr. Gladstone admits its complete success. Does he, then, look upon an abortion as an organisation which fulfils its natural end, and attains the sort of life to which the processes which formed it were properly subsidiary ? If he does, he has quite lost that happy command of speech by which his oratory is usually distinguished. Of course, he has not lost that command more than momentarily. He has, however, momentarily allowed himself to be blinded by passion into the serious mistake of thinking that because a party that was created expressly to resist his policy, succeeds in resisting it, it is a complete organic wreck and failure. We can understand meaner orators thinking that any stone is good enough to cast at an enemy, but we cannot understand Mr. Gladstone thinking so. He knows what the force of words is. And he cannot possibly have persuaded himself that an organi- sation which has been almost exceptionally and magnifi- cently successful in doing exactly that which it was created to do,—neither more nor less,—is an abortion, simply because it has for the present frustrated the purpose which he himself had most at heart. The French might and did apply a great many terms of effective disparagement to the German Army of William of Prussia, but they at least never thought of calling it an abortion. That is a term of disparagement which they would feel to be absurdly inapplicable. Now we maintain that it is not less in- applicable for any orator speaking at the present time of the Liberal Unionist Party, to describe it as an abortion. It has not only answered the purpose for which it was called into existence, but answered it hitherto so completely and fully, that it excites Mr. Gladstone's utmost spleen to contemplate its success. If it were really an abortion, it would not figure in his speeches half as much as it does. He would pass it by with a smile of scorn. And, in point of fact, there was never, in the whole history of our Parliamentary life, a more successful party. It was formed for two great objects, and it has succeeded beyond its utmost hopes in both. The one was to prevent the concession of Home-rule to Ireland by either the Tory or the Gladstonian Party ; and the second was to spur on the Tories to a policy more popular and progressive than any which they would otherwise have been disposed to adopt. It never cherished the ambition of becoming one of the great living forces of the nation. That was not in its re at all. It aspired only to the task of putting a serious obstacle in Mr. Gladstone's way as regards his cherished scheme of granting Home-rule to Ireland, and of making the Tory Government which alone could rule during Mr. Gladstone's stay in Opposi- tion, tolerable and even satisfactory to the people of Great Britain, by urging it on to wise and prudent reforms conceived in a spirit of hearty sympathy with the people. We do not know in which of its two main purposes it has been the more completely successful. By Mr. Glad- stone's own admission, it has interposed an insurmountable obstacle in the way of any Tory surrender to Home-rule. And by all the many and critical divisions in Which it has maintained the great Parliamentary majority against the attacks of Mr, Gladstone and his lieutenants, it has cer- tainly shut him out from any hope of passing Home-rule during the duration of this Parliament : and what more does the party contemplate ? Of course it may turn out that it has not leavened the constituencies with as much respect and affection for the existing Union with Ireland, as might well be desired ; that it has not exerted as much influence in damping the Home-rule aspirations of Scotland and Wales as its leaders intended. All that is, at present, matter of speculation. But so far as Parliamentary results go, the Liberal Unionists have been as completely successful in stemming the progress of Mr. Gladstone's views as the most enthusiastic of their statesmen could have hoped. Nor has the party been less successful,—perhaps it has been even more conspicuously successful,—in leavening the Tory policy with Liberal leaven. It made the Irish Crimes Bill of 1887 a moderate and workable measure at the same time that it made it a most efficient measure for the sup- pression of boycotting and other kinds of illegal conspiracy. It made the Irish Land Bill of 1887 a Liberal and popular measure which has done more than any of its adversaries choose to admit, to lessen discontent and relieve distress in Ireland. It made the Local Government Bill of 1888 a large and statesmanlike measure with which even Mr. Gladstone was compelled to express a carefully limited satisfaction. It has lent the Government both the wish and the power to make the various measures for the relief of Irish distress and the encouragement of Irish industry, wise and popular measures which neither section of the Irish Party venture to oppose. And it has strengthened the Government in the preparation of the large and states- manlike Irish Land measure of the present Session, as well as in the preparation of the measure for placing the tithes law on its true basis, and depriving it of the sting of apparent injustice. We do not know how it could have done more. We are quite sure that no one who carefully considered the difficulties of the alliance at the time the alliance was first formed, ever hoped that it would do so. much. The way in which the natural jealousies of the two parties have been smoothed away, without once introducing anything like weakness or hesitation into the policy of the Government, seems to us at least something like a miracle of prudent and disinterested party diplomacy. And no doubt it is the conspicuous disinterestedness of the Liberal Unionist Party which has won for it this won- derful success. The statesmen of that party have gained nothing for themselves, and have steadily refused to hamper their independence by accepting office, excepting in the case of Mr. Goschen, who, with a much larger avowed sympathy with certain principles of the Conservative Party, than any other of his former colleagues, was. urgently needed to fill up the gap caused by the resig- nation of Lord Randolph Churchill, and who did fill up that gap with distinguished credit to himself and much honour to the Government. For the rest, the Liberal Unionists have gained nothing in the world except what they sought, the success of the Unionist policy. And that they have achieved so completely, that Mr. Gladstone's term of contumely is likely to be long remembered as the one term which could not well have been more flagrantly misapplied. If he had called the Liberal Unionist Party, according to the precedent set by O'Connell in his exchange of vituperative epithets with a fishwife, "a rectangular parallelopiped," he would not have found a more irrelevant term of opprobrium.
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