TOPICS OF THE DAY.
DOCKYARD TRUTH AND ITS CANTERBURY ECHO.
THE course of the evidence before the Canterbury Commissioners is a retort upon the Dockyard Committee, with a moral somewhat
more forcible than that of the ordinary " tu quoque." Indirect methods of influencing political movements are not confined to the Tory party. The Canterbury Commissioners will be able to place that fact upon record ; and although we knew it before, there is a special force in the formal record at such a moment. Certain facts may be notorious but unapt for use simply because they are not formally registered. Every generation, for instance, has its notorious diversions of pedigree, which are currently celebrated in the historical conversation of the period, but which can never be applied to their true social or political moral, because they have never been noted either by the Registrar-General or the House of Lords. But the use of bringing the Canterbury irregularities of the Liberal party under the distinct cognizance of the public is, that it accomplishes the moral already roughly hewn by the Dock- yard Committee, and will strengthen the more wholesome feeling which is born of political disgust. We had felt in all its strength the conclusion that abuses like those from which the veil had been torn were "too bad," and could not be suffered to go on; • but so long as there remained a modicum of sin on the Liberal side an- confessed and uncorrected, there was a species of hypocritical re- servation in the resolve to stop the disease, which deprived it of its full vitality. The Liberal party has now made a clean breast of it, as well as the Tory party ; we are confessors as well as accusers; and when we say that such things cannot be carried forward in another political lease, sincerity is added to the force of indig- nation.
Political vices, like some social vices, lose half their charm by becoming stale. A political excess may be absurd, but when it has become commonplace it has become tedious, and the most blase of political roues is sick of it, as well as the most virtuous. When it has become not only commonplace but the object of pub- lie contempt, it is discreditable as well as tedious. There are vic- tories of which the most insatiable gallant would be ashamed, and there are stratagems in politics of which a very Don Juan of rotten boroughs would blush to be accused. They are the stratagems proclaimed, notorious, trite, used up, seen through ; they are con- trivances which imply a total failure of inventives, of audacity— devices which can be executed from first to last by one's valet. And perhaps we have arrived at so good a time as to account the corrupt bribery of political friends by place or pay amongst gie number, at least for the present, until we have found out some more novel and elegant mode of wrapping up the rouleau. Abuses, however, may be notorious and condemned for extinc- tion at a proper opportunity, and yet they may survive till the opportunity come. Such was the case with the Post-office frank- ing. Originally intended to facilitate public business by placing the machinery of the Post-office at the disposal of public servants and public men, it had been prostituted to every species of misuse. To send by frank any trifle or any bulk was a recognized licence ; to transmit under a statesman's sign-manual that audacious cadeau of confident gallantry which might bear the motto " Honi soit qui mal y pense," was a modest joke in a diversion of the public ac- commodation which had extended to the transmission of guns under signature of a Member, or hampers of game, or even a piano- forte with the direction of a letter tied round it. The considerate representative could make his electors free of the Post-office; to the noble debauchee it was the carrier's office to the most delicate department in the bureau of his gentleman's gentleman. All this was notorious and condemned, and stood for abolition; but the opportunity did not come until Rowland Hill and his sweeping • reform called for a revision of the whole Post-office system; and then franking was thrown in as a matter of course, with the con- sent even of those who had enjoyed the privilege. The privilege of using the public offices and public resources as a means of penetrating to the hearts of independent electors now stands somewhat on the same footing with the privilege of frank- ing when Rowland Hill began to discuss his improvement. We • have had improvements also in the conduct of public business. Remote as it may seem from the immediate subject in hand, the
• practical adoption of free trade has done much to improve our public morals, by placing the rationale of public affairs as to the material part on a distinct basis of common sense and utility. The doctrine of protection in regard to matters of production served as a screen for many a paradox and immoral irregularity in public matters. If it was somehow for the benefit of the state to keep out wholesome corn, and oblige the poor to buy dear bread for the benefit of -their country and the maintenance of the agri- cultural system, it might be for the benefit of public morals to use the secret service money in the purchase of votes for a Ministerial vote—even though the Member to be dragged in was like a noted Irish wit, whose habits of life prompted him to condemn his sto- mach to "digest in its waistcoat," and made it a matter of chance whether he should adorn the debate with a sparkling shower of
bon mots or scandalize it with undisguised debauchery. While plain sense was postponed to perverse paradox in substantial things, it was difficult to set straight the less tangible and mea- surable of moral questions. The adoption of free trade has knocked paradox out of the substantial part of our public polity, substi- tuting common sense ; and there is no doubt that a corresponding improvement is taking place in the moral feeling with regard to matters less tangible.
By a fortunate concurrence of events—by what Mr. Robert Owen would call a conjunction of " superior circumstances" in the life of the British state—it so happens that a recent Minis. try undertook the part of volunteer Helot in reducing Tory- ism and state intrigues ad absurdum; and in the explosion of the Disraeli devices for conducting modern state business according to the worn-out intrigues of a past period, we have had a great lesson in the science of that which is "too bad." Common sense and ob- solete nonsense have both been brought too glaringly to view for us to disregard the principles, and with free trade as an example of material common sense, we have had the Dockyard analysis of old intrigues as the example to avoid.
It is just at this juncture that the sins of the Liberal party are also disclosed by the Canterbury inquiry into the election ofLibe- ral Members by indirect means; in the furnishing of mysterious funds to defray the expenses of independent Members, with re- spected names like the Colonel Romilly, and of some association of those mysterious funds with the Secretary to the Treasury for the time being, whether he was Mr. Forbes Mackenzie or Mr. Goodenough Hayter, and in some converse between that Secre- tary to the Treasury and the archetype of Parliamentary agents, Mr. Coppock. This opportune rebuke has come to the Liberal party just at the moment when the indignation at the disclosures of the Dockyard Committee had thoroughly aroused public feeling against the whole class of abuses. We also am tainted, the Liberals must confess ; and the strength of contempt and sternness which would have sufficed to crush the same abuses in the Tory party will apply to the Liberals more than enough of resolution to eat out the tainted part from their own body.
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