TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE NEW FOURTH PARTY. THE more extreme English Radicals, dissatisfied with the tactics of Mr. Gladstone, who never can forget that the Queen's Government must be carried on, have taken a step which may prove a serious one. They have organised themselves into a separate group, comprising some fifty Members, with whips and tellers of their own, and, under the leadership of Mr. Labouchere, will adopt a separate mode of action. They will, they say, do " nothing that may lead to conflict with the front Opposition Bench," but they wish for a more definite position in the House, to advance certain measures not, perhaps, cordially favoured by the Liberal chiefs, and, above all, to secure " set de- bates" on various votes in Supply. They will, they assert, in this way gradually familiarise the country with Radical views, and exercise an influence upon the general policy of the Opposition which at present they do not possess. This is their avowed programme, but it is fair to assume that they also contemplate persistent and scientific obstruction,— obstruction, that is, carried on not by votes of censure which always result in defeat, but by the abuse of the right of putting questions, by amendments in Committee of Supply intended only to facilitate talk, and by set debates on every proposal which can be framed likely to catch the popular ear. At least, that is what all men will conceive to be meant by Sir W. Harcourt's extraordinary admission on Tuesday that he wanted to " cross-examine " the Govern- ment, not to strengthen it by votes of censure ; by Mr. Labouchere's statements on the same night that his friends " intended to maintain a guerilla war," that " he would not give a single day to the Government, because never a day passed without their doing something evil," that " he would not afford them the opportunity of getting a single sixpence ;" and by the number of amendments in Supply, twenty of them by one Member alone, already placed upon the paper. Men who observe these things will perceive what they really mean, and recognise that the idea of the Extreme Left in forming a new group is to make govern. ment through. Parliament impossible, unless it is left in Liberal, and, indeed, Radical hands. The will of the majority, which is for constitutional purposes the will of the people, is to be rendered powerless by a small minority using the power of infinite delay which the forms of Parliament, arranged at a time when to paralyse Parlia- ment would have been accounted treason, place in their hands. The object of the new Fourth Party is to arrest the machine.
We are not greatly alarmed even for the progress of public business by this new movement. Mr. Labouchere will find that even should many Liberals and all Parnellites be favourable to his plan, he will experience considerable difficulties in carrying it out. Englishmen are not Irishmen, and his followers are hardly capable of the Hibernian feat of talking at will for an hour or two without saying anything. Few of them can sprinkle their sauce with epigrams, as Mr. Labouchere can, nor have they his French facility of committing every oratorical crime except that of being dull. Their con- stituents are slow-witted, and might think them fools or bores for uttering torrents of twaddle, and doubt the expediency of re-electing persons who made them so ex- ceedingly ridiculous. They will all have opinions, too, of their own, which is an inconvenience Mr. Parnell had not to encounter ; and the Member for Northampton does not appoint them, does not even help in appointing them, to their seats. An extreme English Radical is generally what is called an impracticable person ; and though he may be a diamond, still, as the Arabs say, we build walls not with diamonds, but with bricks. Fifty Professor Stuarts would mean fifty parties, each warring on its own line. Moreover, the majority has the Closure in its hands, and may, if it pleases, find stronger weapons still—Closure, for instance, as in France, without the Speaker's intervention, or the suspension of the Standing Orders—and the House, aghast at the infinite boredom with which it is menaced by the new party, will see those powers energetically employed with a sense of pleasurable relief. Indispensable measures will be passed in spite of obstruction ; and for all others the Government can wait patiently, leaving the country to digest their proposals at leisure, and to see clearly who it is that is stopping them, and why. The electors may be trusted to inflict the necessary chastisement. It is not the business of the country which is threatened by the new move, but the Gladstonian Party. Their leaders have now to drive three horses tandem, instead of a pair abreast. It is very easy to say that the new Fourth Party will never do any- thing to bring itself into conflict with the front Opposi- tion Bench ; but it is, we presume, to be a live thing, and every live thing likes now and again to manifest its separate life. There never was a new party yet which did not begin to hate the party from which it had seceded in contempt, and the Radicals are not the people to put up with their friends merely for public convenience. They will always be egging them on to extreme courses, and Mr. Gladstone will speedily find himself reduced to one of two alternatives. He will either have to follow his own tail, or he will have to get rid of it, and so appear on important divisions to have lost much of his strength. Mr. Labouchere no doubt thinks the former will be the- result, and that, to repeat the old joke, the tail will wag- the dog ; but Mr. Gladstone has not given up all his old friends in order to go his own way, to be coerced into quiescence by one of his old enemies. He has only to raise his voice in serious anger, and any recalcitrant Radical will lose his seat, an ultimate power the force of which we may judge from the Parnellite example. The front Opposition Bench, while Mr. Gladstone sits there, will retain its control, and Mr. Gladstone will do as he pleases at an immensely increased expenditure of his energy, his calmness, and his remaining faculty of management. His party will continue, and will continue his, but will be weakened by a formal division which may on any given night become a real one.
But we shall be asked, may it not be that the new Fourth Party is formed with a deeper design than this ? May it not be that it is intended to utilise the passionate party feeling of the Extremists, or their partisan unscrupulous- ness, yet liberate the great body of the Liberals from the odium of their tactics ? May it not be intended that the Fourth Party shall paralyse Parliament, while the front Opposition Bench, blandly smiling their constitutional distaste for such proceedings, shall use them as proof that without Home-rule Parliamentary government cannot be carried on ? We do not see how that scheme is possible without Mr. Gladstone's consent, which could never be obtained. He has only to rise and suggest that the vote had better be taken, and the adroitly wicked device collapses, useless. His own followers would, of course, agree, and for the Dissentient Radicals to resist him would only endanger their seats. They are elected by Gladstonians as well as Radicals, and Gladstonians do not approve even difference with their chief. Such a scheme without his consent would be found abortive in a month, and would only bring on its promoters the reputation of being unsafe men, never to be trusted, even when the Commander-in-Chief himself had issued final orders. On the other hand, supposing Mr. Gladstone to have assented to the plot—(and we beg his pardon for the supposition, though put forward only to exhaust the argument)—the whole Liberal Party would have to bear the odium, the intense odium, not only of obstruction, but of all the wild schemes which a Radical Party un- steadied by Liberal influence is certain to propose. The new Fourth Party, with its fantasies and its fanaticisms, would be seen to be nothing but a wing of the Oppo- sition, and it is by the acts and speeches of its wings that a great party is judged by the electors. In France at this moment, voters like the Parisians condemn the Opportunists from dread of M. Ferry and his like ; while voters who are peasants condemn them from dread of M. Clemenceau and his ultras. Liberals in England not fifty years ago were scoffed at by Radicals as Old Whigs and detested by Tories as Revolutionaries, in both cases because of the language of the few fanatics on each flank If the Liberals and the new Fourth Party pull together steadily, the effect will soon be felt,—first in the House, where independent Members of their side will abstain from voting, and next in the elections, where men who would grant Home-rule without a wince will vote against it because they believe their property endangered by Radical propositions. As a matter ofjudgment, we conceive that the Liberals will only be weakened within the House owing to the increased cliffioulty of compelling their soldiers to keep step ; but if this difficulty is avoided, and step is kept, the new party will make their position more precarious in the country. In no case can the formation of a new and enrage group benefit the Gladstonians, while it must greatly increase the confusion, the delays, and ultimately the discredit, of Parliamentary government.
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