TRUE AND FALSE RETRENCHMENT.
WE do not believe that Mr. Ayrton has any intention of abolishing the flowers in Victoria or any other London park. He would not be a Minister a week after he had done
it. After all, we Londoners, though it suits some politicians to despise us so much, make up one-tenth of the nation and pay one-fifth of the taxes, and comparatively powerless as the metropolis is under the antiquated scheme of distributing electoral districts, it is strong enough to prevent a contempti- ble attack on the feeling and the comforts of every inhabitant within it. We do not suppose that Mr. Ayrton wants to lose his seat for the Tower Hamlets, and we are quite sure that Mr. Gladstone does not want to see on the Sunday following the order a mad stampede of the irritated East-End over every flower in Kensington Gardens and Regent's Park, and every other place unprotected by armed men,—and that would be the first consequence of any such decree. Nor, apart from political consequences, which we honestly believe would be serious in the extreme—the Park flowers being one of the very few things of the kind which come close to the real heart of Londoners—do we believe that the House of Commons will willingly destroy the one surpassing beauty of which our capital can boast. Its Members, at all events, know Kensing- ton Gardens, and if they will just for once trouble themselves on any Sunday in July to walk through the gardens in Regent's Park we will guarantee a vote for their protection. Who manages, or plants, or digs those gardens we do not know ; but we do know that in Europe there is nothing in the least approaching to them in beauty, that if they were on the Continent they would be the centre of pil- grimage, and that even in unsentimental England the roughs who wantonly injured them would go to hospital before they went before the magistrate. We tell Mr. Gladstone gravely and seriously that firing into St. Paul's would be a safer feat than allowing Mr. Ayrton to abolish or seriously to interfere with the Park flowers. Of course, the wrong people may be paying for them, they very often are in England, but the right people are quite ready to pay, and they most decidedly will not have them touched. London is most disgracefully treated by the country. She pays scores of thousands a year for watching, lighting, and protecting Imperial institutions,
and businesses which pour wealth not into her own lap, but
that of every city in the kingdom, and then cannot get a national grant of twopence ; but still if Great Britain grudges the flowers which all its citizens at some time or other may enjoy, London is willing to pay for their maintenance and ex- tension. Her single decision, a decision which, as we firmly believe will be expressed in the most unhesitating way, is that the flowers shall be let alone.
We do not believe that Mr. Ayrton contemplates any silliness of the kind, but the universal credence given to the report does bring into strong relief the one weak place in the present Government. It is a Government of economists in both senses of the word, and it is very much disposed to make economy an idol, to think first of retrenchment and
afterwards of things more important,—such, for instance, as efficiency, progress, and the impression Government pa
Government may make upon the nation. " Manchester men," if there are any left, will smile at us, but we confess, as con- structive Radicals, we view without pleasure the rise of an impression that Government is a disagreeable thing, an organ-
ization of high utility and great unpleasantness, an institu- tion wholly without " heart," and indifferent to literature, art,
beauty, and every pursuit which has only innocent pleasant- ness to plead. We want the people to feel that Government is something more than a necessary evil ; that it is the leader of the nation, the expression of its concentrated will in all things, even if the thing be only the improvement of a Lon- doner's idea of natural beauty. A British Government does not need to conceal tyranny under an increase of popular facilities for enjoyment, but there is surely no reason why, because it is a free Government, it should reject the means of pleasant intercourse with the people, the opportunities of presenting itself in the friendly and genial aspect on which Cmsarism relies. Nor do we believe that even Manchester
men will condemn us when we say that for a Government like ours to maintain at vast cost the ceremonial of the Throne,—
ceremonial with which we have no quarrel whatever, holding that while the throne exists, ceremonial in due measure is essential to its usefulness,—but refuse the smallest bit of plea- sant showiness demanded by the people, to support Windsor and sell Epping Forest, to keep up a Herald's Office and trample out the poor folks' flowers, is intolerably base and mean. If the gardeners are of no use, neither are the Beef-eaters ; if the grant for the flowers is waste, so is the grant for any picturesque adjunct to regality. We do not attack either ; we have not a trace of a wish for a throne in cotton velvet, but then we would allow to the people some trifle of that not undignified waste on the pursuit of colour, on the maintenance of pageantry, on the addition to life of a little useless but enlivening gorgeousness which we allow to the Crown. Ten years' cost of the flower-gardens would be spent on a coronation without a murmur, and very properly spent, for the monarchy to be useful must be realized ; but then the cost of the gardens is also and for the same reason fitting. It helps the people to realize to themselves that popular sway is not necessarily mean, mechanical, dull,—that it can comprehend ideals as well as any other Sovereign. That is not apparent when orders are issued to suppress offices like that of Editor of the Records. No king would do an act like that, nor if it were submitted to a plebiscitum would it, if the people understood the question, receive a solitary vote. We do not know what the reasons against the particular office may be, but we do know that the Record Office is disgracefully underpaid, that gentlemen of the highest cultivation are worked hard for three pounds a week ; that a sinecure, if it does exist, would but enable the State to recognize work of the highest value performed for pay so small that the rate fixed almost involves a fraud. Saving of this kind tends only to lower the ideal of Government, either to reduce it to a soulless mechanical operation, or to make of it that necessary evil which American Democrats already declare it to be. The reduction of Government- to the parish constable is a conceivable view, but it is not the view upon which English Radicals are advancing, which Mr. Gladstone has upheld, or which a country with a Poor-Law can possibly endure.
Even as regards efficiency, we are unable heartily to concur with the action of the Cabinet. Retrenchment, we admit, tends directly towards strength. Nino times out of ten a wasteful Government is a weak Government, and wo hear of orders extinguishing dockyards, or abolishing departments, or " doubling up " offices with sincere pleasure. If Chatham is not wanted, abolish Chatham, in spite of howling. If the Paymaster-General's office is surplusage, sweep it away, and more ornamental offices with it, and rely upon a vote for justification. If the Civil Service costs too much for its work, or, which is the fact, is too antiquated in theory for the needs of the hour, reorganize the Civil Service. But we confess to a great doubt as to the expediency of the raids upon clerical expenditure of which we so often hear as projected by the Government. Govern- ment clerks are no doubt, by the law of their being, very useless persons. It must be dreadfully wearying to any efficient governing man to see a hundred gentlemen drawing inadequate pay for pretending to do discontentedly work which twenty scriveners would do twice as well, and be delighted with permission to attempt. It is true also that the tendency of an over-manned department is to make work, and that every useless clerk pro- bably costs his wages twice over. But still the Govern- ment did make some sort of reckless tacit contract with the poor fellows that in consideration of over-education, and bad pay, and quasi-military obedience, they should be exempt from dismissal ; and utterly bad and wasteful as the whole system was, we cannot honestly say we should like to see the contract broken. We write with extreme reluctance, feeling that all the chivalry is with the Government, that it is doing painful and dangerous work in the interest of the taxpayers, and often with the full knowledge that the taxpayers are not grateful, but still the fidelity to engagements is a higher duty than even the care of the poor, and justice a nobler quality than charity, and we do not feel clear about the justice of economical dismissals. Greater severity in exacting work and in punishing any laxity of attendance seems to us much
more beneficial to the State, than wholesale dismissals of men who had grounds for thinking that they held freeholds sub- ject only to certain fixed conditions. That they never ought to have held freeholds is true but is nothing to the purpose if they do hold them. It is no doubt the most harassing thing in the world that a lot of men with no more political right than so many carpenters should have claims to pension which impede reform, but still they either have or have not them ; and after all, what does it amount to ? We shall not save a ship per annum out of them all, and in future we can prevent the nuisance.
Economy is surely raised into an idol when the State ser- vants are irritated, alarmed, or injured for a saving so trivial, when a claim like that of the Irish Civil Service is not granted, and when offices like the Record Office are pared down, while offices like the Heralds' Office are left in existence ; and we do not quite like all we hear of other reductions. On the whole, the man most abused for his economies, Mr. Childers, seems to us to have acted with the most direct attention to efficiency. He has a policy in concentrating dockyards, and the fleet to which he gives orders is recognized by enemies as singularly efficient for all work, and though he might be a little quicker in giving India the squadron she wants—that would save him more than any office reform will, and might help to make that terrible Transport Service a little less costly—still he is saving millions, and our Navy is as strong as ever. But are we really—we do not affirm it—with an Army unre- organized, with purchase not abolished, with Majors still in existence, with our Colonial policy unsettled, going to cut 10,000 men off the strength ? We do not say such cutting is unwise. We do not pretend to know anything about it till the discussions in Parliament have commenced, nor even then shall we put our opinion in opposition to that of experts. But we do know that no such reduction ought to be based on economic reasons ; that with an Army like ours the primary question ought to be efficiency, and not cost ; that the rooted idea of the Horse Guards is to save " the system " at the expense of real strength, and that the fixed idea of Mr. Card- well is to postpone the inevitable conflict with the pre- rogative till a more convenient season. The report looks very much as if real strength were going to be sacrificed to an economy, and the tendency to such sacrifices is, we are fain to believe, this Government's weak point. It does not fully per- ceive that the country does not want to save its pennies so much as to get pennyworths for them ; that it seeks efficiency, -dignity, progress, content, rather than remissions of taxes which are hardly felt.
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