TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE LIBERAL POLICY. THE discord among the Liberal leaders which became apparent last week, when Mr. Forster, Mr. Childers, and Mr. Stansfeld voted for Mr. Trevelyan's motion for Household Suffrage in the Counties, while Lord Hartington and Mr. Goschen walked out of the House, and Mr. Lowe voted against it, has naturally brought down upon the chiefs of the party a good deal of benevolent advice. They have been told how short-sighted they were in not calculating beforehand the whole orbit of the Reform movement, for a generation at least to come ; and the one among them who spoke has been especially lectured for taking so narrow and short-sighted a view of the question as to make it a mere affair of con- temporary politics, instead of rivetting his gaze on the future, and showing to what changes in our electoral system the pre- sent miscarriages of representative institutions point. Again, those who did not speak, but who showed their tacit or avowed hostility to Mr. Trevelyan's measure, are censured implicitly for not supplying their comrades' deficiency. Now we cannot concur in the justice of these reproaches, but we heartily welcome any discussion which will bring the Liberal party to consider more carefully the lines of its future policy. As for the par- ticular division of last week, we hold that Mr. Forster was amply justified in urging that an immediate and great danger, the danger of a growing feeling of alienation from the Consti- tution on the part of a very numerous, and now for the first time active-minded and vigilant class, justified and even de- manded an immediate remedy. Nor was it for him, in plead- ing this necessity, to alarm the many weak vessels in the House of Commons, by explaining that to grant the appropriate temporary remedy would virtually compel the House of Commons at some future day to enter on a long and difficult revision of our electoral system, the result of which would be not only the granting of an equal number of representatives to equal areas of population, but the adoption of some principle, like personal repre- sentation, or the cumulative vote, within given units of area, in order to enable persons of like views to combine to return a satisfactory representative of their special political creed. Such a programme, deliberately enunciated by the leaders of a party which had just been ejected from power, would have been regarded as a mere factious sum- mons to agitation, and one neither in good taste nor of good omen. Mr. Disraeli might be excused for using such a plea as this against change, but if those who had advocated change had used the same plea, they would have been told that they were ambitious meddlers, who could never see them- selves deprived of power without proposing so to strain the Constitution as, in their opinion, to lead to their own restoration to power. And we think the charge would have been exceedingly plausible. It is not true that what we must always look to in our statesmen's professions of policy, is the evidence of far-sight. On the contrary, nothing is less statesmanlike than that inconveniently ostentatious wisdom of far-sight which can- not see the immediate, urgent, and necessary step before one's eyes, without dwelling on the difficulty of the step which lies out of view. English statesmen are, to a large extent, captains on whom the rank and file rely for their immediate confidence and courage. And if such captains, instead of giving lucid orders for the moment, and telling their troops enough of their minds to enable them to fight hopefully, were to dwell on all the distant dangers of the campaign, they would find that their followers had little heart for the struggle of the day. It may be quite true that the representative grievances of the labourers would not be adequately removed by the extension of household suffrage to the counties, any more than the representative grievances of the operatives have been adequately removed by household suffrage in the towns. But the question is not of an adequate distant remedy, but of a partial immediate remedy. No one can deny that in the towns the operatives have gained vastly by house- hold suffrage, not only in power, but in the consciousness of obtaining political justice, though they have so seldom cared to return representatives of their own class. So, too, the agricultural labourers would gain vastly, both in power and in content with the Constitution, by an extension of the suffrage which might yet fall very short of the result on which they are calculating. To depreciate the advantages of such step On the ground that it lacks theoretical complete- ness, is like depreciating the advantage of an addition of new rooms to a house which really wants to be new-built on a different plan. Nevertheless, the people who have the use of the new rooms will not be ungrateful.
But to pass from the particular censure passed upon our Liberal leaders to the general discussion of the Liberal policy of the future, we observe, first, that true Liberalism. consists in covering more and more completely by constitu- tional means the whole area of popular feeling, without putting any needless impediment in the way of the organisa- i tion of the higher forms of intelligence. Mr. Disraeli has. identified Toryism with the rule of 'the residuum.' The Liberal party ought to make it apparent that while they desire to consult the interests of all, the residuum not excepted, they have no wish or intention of merging the intelligent voters in the residuum,' as the Tories would. like to do. Yet a good many of the Liberal party,. Mr. Bright, unfortunately, at their head, have rather made themselves conspicuous by levelling every opprobrious epithet, that it is possible to conceive, from " new-fangled " (dead- liest of English terms of abuse) down to "monstrous," at every proposal for facilitating the organisation of intelli- gent conviction,—such, for instance, as cumulative voting in the School Boards, and the three-cornered constituencies in the counties and larger boroughs. And other Liberals who have not made this mistake have made the mistake into which Lord Hartington and Mr. Goschen, and still more, Mr. Lowe, fell, last week, of trying to preserve the influence due to intelligence by simply discouraging or opposing the enfranchisement of those whose intelligence cannot be relied upon. Both blunders are serious and are essentially illiberal, though no doubt the latter of them has a Whig flavour. It is not a Liberal policy to let any part whatever of the population feel that its interests are looked down upon as vulgar and outside the pale of the Consti- tution. It is not a Liberal policy to oppose, out of mere prejudice as "innovations," any device which may so. improve the representative machinery of the Constitu- tion as to break up the huge, uniform, monotonous, inert force of a democracy into the individual cells and specific organs of strongly-marked political conviction. It seems to us that Mr. Forster, in the eager sympathy he has shown, first, for the masses of the cities, and now for the masses of the agricultural labourers, has been careful to avoid the first blunder; and in the honest trial which he has secured for the cumulative vote under the Education Act, has avoided the second. He has neither fallen into the Whig blunder of letting the dim common populations' think he regards them with contempt and aversion as residuum ;' nor into the common- place radical blunder of regarding the very coarse device of election by a sheer majority for all purposes whatever, as a sort of divine oracle, which it would be impiety to replace by any more delicate and elastic method. He has shown his desire to include all, without showing his wish to suppress each. In his case, at least, it is absurdly unjust to assume that because he wishes to give the agricultural labourers votes at once, without waiting for a further modification of the electoral system, he is blind to the danger of obtaining a representative system which finds no mouthpiece for the various voices of the community, but only one for the loudest voice in it.
Next, it is clear that if the Liberal party is to be organised afresh, its new lines of advance cannot refer exclusively, even if chiefly, to the subject of electoral reform. Everything tends to show that the reasonable and unreasonable hopes. which the masses of the people form of the results of popular legislation, are coming more and more into discussion, in proportion as the great majority of the people are admitted to a direct share in political rights. We are approaching the condition of things in the United States, where the distinction between parties has long corresponded far less to our differ- ence between Liberal and Tory, than to the difference between well-taught Liberals and demagogic Democrats. Our own Tory party, under Mr. Disraeli's guidance, and with its confi- dence in 'the residuum,' will be likely to fall more and more into the habit of allying itself with ignorant prejudices to ob- struct wise reforms,—a line of action of which the end is too. likely to be such a democratic party as recently supported slavery and apologised for corruption in the United States,—while the Liberals will br in danger of falling more and more into that tone of fastidious contempt for the vulgar prejudices of the masses, of which the end is too apt to be gradually attenuated popular sympathies and a cynical attitude towards popular needs. Now with such a prospect before us, it seems to us that our Liberal leaders will have to be very careful to steer between the two great rocks of cultivated superciliousness and worship of the popular will. And at present, no doubt, their immediate danger is in the former direction. Liberals are heard to say, that after the big "dose of ignorance" swallowed in 1867, we want a little breathing-space before we take another; that we need to recover a little from the poison we have imbibed from the ignorance of the towns, before we receive into the body politic the fresh instalment of poison which may be contributed by the ignorance of the counties. That, no doubt, was in a great measure the feeling which took Mr. Lowe into the Conservative lobby, and induced Lord Hartington and Mr. Goschen to leave the House on Wednesday week. But what Liberals ought to feel more keenly than they do is, that the ignorance of the elector is not half so powerful a factor in the determination of the political future as his wants, and that with a great extension of the area of the suffrage, we are always sure to get a great extension of the interest felt in a number of subjects which were never before attended to in the Legislature, only because they were never before pressed on the minds of the representatives. Such, we take it, un- questionably has been the character of the new interest felt in popular education, in new developments of the various depart- ments of sanitary legislation, and such would be at once the interest in emigration questions, land questions, Justice of the Peace questions, and Church questions, if the agricultural labourers, who are chiefly affected by these questions, were admitted to the franchise. Liberals must be greatly on their guard against that feeling of disgust for the residuum' which Mr. Disraeli's successful manipulation of it is likely to provoke, and we are glad to think that they have at least one representative man whose largeness of popular sympathy will always protect him against the danger of a cynical fastidiousness. We hold that true Liberal policy will aim more and more at infusing wisdom into popular move- ments, and popular sympathy into intellectual movements ; at helping the people to filter out the erroneous and coarser elements from such popular institutions as the Trades' Unions, for instance, without losing the advantages which such in- stitutions can really secure ; and at so reforming the Schools, the Churches, and the Petty and Quarter Sessions, as to secure for these great institutions the genuine confidence of the people, which, at present at least, they can hardly be said to have got. We shall be much disappointed, for example, if there be not before long a Liberal movement set on foot for BO far popu- larising the Church as to make the influence of the laity felt in the conduct of the service and the general administration of the moral duties of the parish,—in place of attempting, as Archbishop Tait's unfortunate Public Worship Regulation Bill attempts, to check scandals by lodging more power in those very quaint organs of popular feeling, the Bishops. Certainly what Liberalism must aim at is to reconcile governmental force and enlightenment with broad popular sympathies ;—never to give way to mere democratic clamour, but never to harden its heart against a mass of unrepresented popular need. "This people, who knoweth not the law, are cursed," is too apt to be the language of the intellectual Liberals towards a "residuum." And there was never more danger that this temper might
encroach on the still more fundamental popular feeling of the party, than there is now, when the obstructives have suddenly developed the capacity which there is in a true democracy for anathematising wise counsel, and sustaining unmeaning prejudice.
Previous page
