TOPICS OF THE DAY.
WIIAT THE PRACTICAL ISSUE WITH THE ENGLISH PEOPLE WILL BE.
1T is very curious to observe that with one accord the papers which write in the interest of the Government pooh-pooh the notion of harping on the past any longer. The Times is quite angry with Mr. Gladstone for saying anything at all about the history of the Administration. All that, it declares, has been said so often ; Mr. Gladstone is certainly wrong ; but even if he were not wrong, it is injudicious of him to talk of the past ; he should have better sense, and talk now of the future. It is perfectly true, so the Times says, that the country may not be quite as well satisfied with the Government now as it was when the Government came in ; but that has very little to do with its foreign policy, or its policy at all. It is the fate of all Governments to weary the country. If this Government is growing less popular, it would have grown less popular, what- ever its policy had been. Anyhow, the past is past, and is a little wearisome. Why not say something fresh? That would be both better for Mr. Gladstone, and better, too, for journalists who have to criticise Mr. Gladstone. The Standard writes much in the same tone, complains of the damnable iteration of the same charges to a weary country, and almost apologises for having anything to say to them. And the Telegraph, except in a good-humoured, majestic note, has nothing to say to them,—drops the subject altogether for Science and the British Association, for Sir Julius Caesar Master of the Rolls in James I.'s and Charles I.'s time, for our worthy guests from Java, Prince Gondosi- woyo and Radhen Mas Soenaryo. So complete an identity in the Conservative counsels is partly, no doubt, due to the journal- istic apathy engendered by much writing on the same subjects, but is partly also the result of a very sagacious instinct that the less said about the past, the better for the future. We remarked last week that the Government themselves were toning down their references to the past, and doing all they could to suggest, without explicitly saying, that they are going to live a sober life for the future, to attend to business, to pass London Water Bills, amend the system of municipal loans, embark largely in agricultural statistics, and get a tardy reputation for frugality. That at least is the impression left by all but the Prime Minister, but whether he has or has not any coup in store for us, who can say ? To reckon without Lord Beaconsfield, is indeed to reckon without your host.. At the same time, it is obvious that in the absence of a new stroke of genius, the Conservative cue is to cease from the line of glorification, and to bustle about with an air of homely and vigorous simplicity which may obliterate the Jingoism of the past from the practical mind of the present. And this is precisely what Mr. Glad- stone, and those who really wish to bring home to the nation their political responsibility for the conduct of the Govern- ment., wish to avoid. Hence, of course, that monotonous harp- ing on the old strings which the Conservatives, in their new desire to treat their own achievments as ancient history, find so offensive and so impertinent. Both parties, doubtless, from their point of view, are right. Mr. Gladstone is certainly most wise, when he tries to clinch the matter by this fine appeal to the moral responsibility of the nation :—" But remember this, if the country again returns a Parliament like the present, if the country renews the title of the Administra- tion, do not you presume, and do not affect, to lay the blame upon Lord Beaconsfield, or upon Sir Stafford Northcote, or upon Lord Salisbury, or upon any of those people. Those people have given you ample means of judgment, of knowing what they are. You can judge them now by their words, and you can judge them by their acts ; and if those words and those acts are such as elicit your approval, take the respon- sibility,—do not, like cowards, shrink from it. Those acts will become your acts, those words your words ; that trampling upon law, your trampling upon law ; that disregard of treaties, your disregard of treaties ; that insatiate expenditure, your in- satiate expenditure. All this you will have taken upon your- selves, you must stand by it, and you alone must bear the consequences."
But though it is of the first importance not only to the Liberal cause at present, but to the cause of popular responsibility for popular Governments in all times, that the people should be taught to pass serious judgment on the past Parliament, and the Administration responsible for guiding that Parliament, at every general election, we must remember that the ideal procedure is one thing, and the actual procedure another. It is more or less, no doubt, possible to evade this sort of popular judg- ment. It is more or less possible to distract the popular mind till the past, even the past of a very short time ago, seems distant and insignificant, till the consideration which decides a great proportion of the votes becomes something comparatively accidental,—something dependent on the humour of the moment,—on the last illusory hope held out to the nation, or on the weather, the harvest, the price of meat and bread. For the work of passing serious judgment on a Government and a Parliament, a great many nations are little qualified ; and the English nation, however well qualified they have been at times, are held by many to be losing some of their qualifica- tions for it,—to be growing more flighty and more fickle. Anyhow, it is quite certain that an attempt to divert the attention of the public from the history of the past, and to fix it on some imaginary point in the future, sometimes succeeds. On the whole, of course the next Election will turn on whether the people like or do not like the thought of another Tory Government like the present. But other matters besides the story of their past work, will go to determine the people in making up their mind on this. Some will think, like the man at Sheffield who cried out on Monday that they would all be starved if the present Government remained in another winter, that it is a question of bread-and-butter. Others will decide it,—from very opposite points of view,—as a question whether the cultivated soil of England is to fall back into heath and moorland, or not. Others will treat it as a question of taxation, and others, again, as one of personal or literary pre- ference. It is quite impossible to say how many may be the practical points of view, or how far removed from any strict prin- ciple of responsibility for the past, on which the votes of hun- dreds of thousands at the next election will turn. A bad harvest and another severe winter might produce a good deal more effect than all the foreign and colonial policy of the Govern- ment put together. But there is no denying this,—that the chance-influences of the times are more likely to be unfavour- able to the prospects of the Government than favourable, and that if, therefore, the Conservatives are neither proud of their past nor able to catch popularity by a skilful stroke for the future, the prospect of waiting for the chapter of accidents is not cheerful. Nor is it always safe for a Government that believes itself to be unpopular, to try a redeeming coup. Probably the one great blunder committed by Mr. Gladstone was the appeal to the constituencies in 1874 to return him to power, under promise to abolish the Income-tax. The constituencies turned a deaf ear to Mr. Gladstone. Being unprepared to do justice to his really great and laborious legislative reforms, they were not going to be turned away from their displeasure by the offer of a tempting bribe. And Lord Beaconsfield, with his usual acuteness, will have made note of this, and will pro- bably refrain from making a bid to the constituencies to which he thinks the constituencies at all likely to respond with a snub. He will have recognised that when the English have once taken offence, justly or unjustly, it does not answer to conciliate them, though it might perhaps answer to take the proud attitude of persisting in and justifying the ground of offence.
On what, then, will the temper of the country, in con- templating the next election, principally turn ? We have seen that the leaders are discouraging the tone of exulta- tion about the past which has hitherto been the Tory cue. It does not seem at all probable that the chapter of accidents will turn up any new reason for popular satisfac- tion with the powers that be ; and the finance at least of next year—if the Government should wait for the finance of next year—must be decidedly forbidding. Does Lord Bea- consfield reckon on going to the constituencies with that sort of personal authority with which Lord Palmerston went. to the constituencies, not on a policy at all, but on the mere strength of a single great name ? We believe that when the name is really such as to fasein ate, no cry of mere political drift is so likely to succeed with the English people as a cry of this kind. It was Lord Palmerston's name, and that alone, which carried the elections of 1857, 1859 and 1865, and it was Mr. Gladstone's
name which carried the election of 18G9. It was not, we think, Mr. Disraeli's name which carried the election of 1874, but rather a certain recoil from the tension of the Gladstone Ad- ministration. Still, it might be that Lord Beaconsfield's name would now have at least a better chance—though that is not saying much,—of carrying an election than any specific
policy, either past or future. There are certainly more Englishmen who, in a sense, are half-jocularly proud of him they call Dizzy," than there are who are proud of
the Treaty of Berlin, or of the acquisition of Cyprus. There are not a few whi would talk of Lord Beaconsfield's policy with a certain amount of shoulder-shrugging, who would yet vote all the same for prolonging his term of power, so long as he cares to hold it. They admire him for having made his own career ; they admire him for holding his own, by whatever flashy means, in difficult times ; they claim for him, perhaps half-contemptuously, but still with a sort of sympathy, that he has attained a certain measure of success, that he has escaped out of his most difficult situations with adroit- ness, that he has known when the flashy policy was exhausted, and a serious drawing-in must begin. Without a great man on the opposite side,—with Mr. Gladstone a private Member, Lord Granville taking things so quietly, and Lord Hartington still little known—we are by no means sure that the next general election may not really turn on the disposition of the people to express personal confidence in Lord Beaconsfield.
But we do not think that such confidence would be ex- pressed. A year or two ago it might have been ; but, as the Duke of Argyle said, we think the Prime Minister has now begun to be found out. The avowed collapse of the Anglo-Turkish Convention, the evidence that it was, indeed, a sham from beginning to end, the political burlesque of Cyprus, the break-down of Lord Beaconsfield's great point of all, the 'urkish garrisoning of the Balkans, have diffused a notion that clever as Lord Beaconsfield is, he is like the monster balloon at Paris, liable to collapse suddenly. And though, like the balloon, in the recent crisis lie collapsed only after getting down to terra firma, and not while lie was up in the diplomatic sky of Berlin, yet there is no confidence that on a future occasion this would happen so again. And then, though a Minister lucky in escape from difficulties ; though lucky in
. not getting us into war with Russia, when he went so near ; though lucky in getting us so soon out of the Afghan war ; and lucky in the prospect of escape from the South-African war, Lord Beaconsfield has certainly not been a Minister of a eommanding type. He has made a number of small, but showy, ventures, and has come off with moderate loss. But no one can say he has made a great position for himself or his country. On the whole, we think that though ' confidence in Lord Beaconsfield' is about the best cry on which the elections, when they come, can be made by Conservatives to turn, we believe that if they are made to turn upon this cry, the reply of the country will be that though it hesitated on the subject for some time, its mature and deliberate condition of mind includes no sort of confidence in Lord Beaconsfield.
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