THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY MEETING. T HE self- congratulations with which the
leaders of one party appear to receive the news that the leaders of the other party have summoned a meeting of their followers, are rather, we think, pathetic indications of the universal human tendency to invent grounds of hope which do not exist, than testimonies to the sagacity of party judgment. Mr. John Morley devoted quite a considerable passage of his Stepney speech on Wednesday to the evidences of demoralisation likely to be afforded by the meeting of the following day at the Carlton Club. Yet if he could have been present at the meeting at the Carlton Club, it is very doubtful whether he would have found much cause for self-congratulation. Party meetings are no doubt .meant to be opportunities for letting off a certain amount of subdued discontent with the strategy of party leaders. But it is only the subdued discontent, not the angry discontent, that they do let off. Those who are in open revolt, like Lord Randolph Churchill, for instance, at the present moment, are very apt to stay away, and the grumblings which are heard are only grumblings which cheer without inebriating those in. whose breasts they spring up. In the present case, however, the grumblings which were heard were by no Means serious. A word. or two was said as to defects in the Tithes Bill, which cannot possibly be a pleasant sub- ject of contemplation to the landlords. A word or two was said, though only, we think, by a Peer, as to the danger of giving Free Education ; but, for the most part, the meeting seems to have been as loyal and enthusiastic as if. Lord Salisbury had called it together on the very morrow of a great victory at the polls. We do not derive brilliant omens for the future from that loyalty and enthusiasm, because we know that the deepest dissatisfaction which prevails in a party never makes itself heard. at meetings of this kind, lest it should be too roughly rebuked. But, unquestionably, the party meeting of Thursday was not of the kind which Mr. John Morley had predicted and hoped for It betrayed no irritability in the minds of Members generally, and it did lead to expressions of confidence in the Government in relation to the more popular aspects of their programme, especially in relation to a question which will not come up till next Session,—Free Education,— which must have given Lord Salisbury unexpected pleasure. One thing is clear enough : that the same change which has taken place in the Liberal Party,—that they are falling more and more under the influence of their most advanced men,—is also taking place in the Conservative Party, who are more and more falling under the influence of their most progressive counsellors. We do not infer, indeed, that the Tory malcontents will not be dangerous and mischievous only because they do not speak at party meetings, or even do not attend them. But we do infer that they will have to make their discontent felt indirectly rather than directly, --by flank attacks and adroitly excused. desertions, rather than by plain declarations of distaste for a policy which they think too popular and too democratic. Lord Salisbury was urged from various quarters to mature as soon as he could his new education policy, and publish it to the world. And we. strongly suspect that if he is able to carry it next Session, the success of that policy will prove to be the signal for a dissolution. As to the Tithes Bill, which promises to be the chief business of the Session, Sir Walter Barttelot's cordial adherence to its principles was far the most important announcement of the Conservative meeting. It does not follow, of course, that so complex and difficult a. piece of legislation, which many of the Tory Party must genuinely dislike, will pass ; but it does follow that its enemies, so far as they sit on the Government side of the House, will have to practise a good deal of self-control, and to watch for convenient opportunities of putting a spoke in the wheels of Government, if they desire to d,efeat it without incurring a large share of political odium in the process. The popular side of the Govern- ment policy is not the side on which they can be safely attacked in public. And both the Tithes Bill and the policy of Free Education are expressions of advanced or popular Conservatism. Naturally, therefore, the organs of the Opposition regard the Conservative meeting of Thursday with a very forlorn air, and have had to fall back on the revolt of Lord Randolph Churchill, and what they treat as the vast significance and importance of his speech on the Special Commission, as the one event which the Conservative Party meeting had not the courage to refer to. This is, indeed, a very humiliating line of retreat after Mr. Morley's unfortunately premature peen over those flagrant evidences of Oonservative demoralisation which were to burst upon the world on Thursday, and which did not burst upon the world at all. In point of fact, the only difficulty which stood. in the way of any reference to Lord Randolph Churchill's orapade was, that to have referred to the explosion of that perfectly harmless though very pretentious bomb- shell at all, in the absence of the offender who let it-off, would have been extremely bad taste. Nobody in that meeting thought it anything but a final evi- dence of Lord Randolph Churchill's political incom- petence ; and to glory over the political incompetence of a political deserter who had struck what he thought a great blow at the Government and injured no one but himself, would have been hardly good manners. The Gladstonians themselves must know perfectly well that all that blatant nonsense about "A thing, a reptile, a monster, Pigott ! " " A ghastly, bloody, rotten fcetus, Pigott, Pigott, Pigott ! " had produced no effect at all, except to make its utterer ridiculous ; and it would have been extremely ill-bred to indicate this in an assembly which was virtually of one mind on the subject, and in which probably no single partisan of the offender was to be found. There would be more sense in gilding refined. gold, than in trying to convince Conservatives that Lord Randolph Churchill had repeated the melo- dramatic manoeuvre of 1886, with results even more disas- trous to his own reputation. In 1886, every one thought that the resignation of the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Leader of the House of Commons was a real catastrophe which might have been fatal to the Government. But when once it was discovered that it resulted in the greatest stroke of good fortune which had befallen the Government, the accession of Mr. Goschen to its ranks, and that the loss of Lord Randolph Churchill was in effect the loss of a minus quantity, it seemed pretty certain that Lord Randolph had no longer the power to excite dismay by any further display of his political caprice. And so it has proved. His lively melodrama on Tuesday week had just about as much effect as lively melodrama usually has. It amused a good many people, and it frightened nobody. The Conservative Party meeting had something better to do than to trample on a fallen politician who is no longer to be counted with as a serious force in politics. The real upshot of the party meeting was not perhaps of the highest significance. But such as it was, it showed that the Conservatives are more liberal at heart than they ever were ; that they are as loyal as ever to their leaders ; that they are as composed as ever, and as free from liability to sudden gusts of emotion ; and that they do not feel at all agitated by the theatrical declamation of the eight weeks' leader who once seemed not unlikely to make a clever chief, but who soon showed that he had not sufficient solidity of judgment to restrain him from preposterously overestimating both his own importance and the discrimi- nating power of his own feeble though alert judgment.
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