nth OLD AND THE NEW LIBERALISM.
Nip are not surprised at the anxiety of some defenders of the Budget to show that Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Bright were the objects in their day of quite as violent language as Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Churchill are now. It would be very convenient for them to be able to prove that the strong things said of Mr. Lloyd George are merely part of the stock-in-trade of Unionist writers,—something which every Liberal has to put up with in his turn. But in their eagerness to make good their point they forget some very real distinctions between the two cases. No doubt Governments and Oppositions have always been given to abusing one another, and. are likely to go on doing so as long as the Parliamentary system lasts. Mr. Gladstone came in for his full share of this discipline while he lived., and was not backward. in returning it in kind. But what was attacked in his case was his policy. What is attacked in Mr. Lloyd. George's case is not the policy so much as the principles which, if we are to take his speeches for gospel, underlie that policy. The Spectator, for example, did not mince matters when attacking Mr. Gladstone's Home-rule Bills. But what it denounced. was not the principle of Home-rule, but its application to the United Kingdom. The choice between unity and federation must be governed by the circumstances of the particular country in which it has to be made. Federation is an excellent system for the United States,—probably the only system on which that vast territory could be governed.. No matter how mischievous a Home-rule Bill for Great Britain and Ireland might be, the objections to it were strictly local. The policy was bad for us, but we never said that it was bad for all countries. What was wrong was not the principle, but its application. The fault of some of the provisions of the present Budget lies deeper, and. the fault of Mr. Lloyd George's exposition of those provisions lies deeper still. Thus, to take a single instance, one purpose of the Finance Bill is to levy taxes which will become increasingly productive as years go on. The advantage claimed for this plan is that the State will be in possession of funds adequate to the fresh expenditure which will continually be demanded of it. We can imagine nothing that would have given Mr. Gladstone greater uneasiness than such a prospect as this. With him taxation was only a necessary evil,—a burden which he was compelled to impose on the taxpayer for a particular year, but which he hoped to be able to lighten in future years. Mr. Lloyd George is quite above any such weakness as this. In his eyes the purpose • of taxation is moral, not financial. It would be more truly described as a fine levied on the classes who happen to possess a certain kind of property, property which in his opinion has ordinarily had a vicious origin, so that the owner may be thankful that the State, with perhaps foolish, but still only temporary, compassion, has refrained from confiscating the whole at once. In presence of this policy the motive for economy disappears. If Mr. Lloyd George were perfectly candid, he would probably confess that economy has ceased to be a virtue in the management of public finance Taxation is no longer the diversion of so much money as is required for the necessary purposes of the Government. It has become the transfer of money from owners, who at the best are incompetent and at the worst selfish, to an omnipotent and. omniscient State, which is in the end to take over all property into its own wiser and stronger hands, and. distribute it among its citizens according to their deserts. Of course this is - not Mr. Lloyd George's avowed object; it is not, very possibly, even the object which he has in view. But it is —which is much more important—the object to which his speeches at Limehouse and Newcastle point, and. the object which, if his policy is to escape immediate and humiliating failure, must be given a continually larger place in his mind. For, whatever may be the consequences of adopting the whole Socialist programme, its partial adoption can do nothing but mischief. The consistent preacher of the new religion will tell you frankly that the success of his pro- jects hangs upon the assumption that all the evil in man is the result of his environment. Make this what it ought to be, and we shall one and all be kindly, diligent, thinking only of public interests, and. willing to accept cheerfully whatever temporary share of the public property the State may from time to time think well to lend us. But the accomplishment of this comprehensive change will never be brought about by merely coquetting with Socialism, and though this may be all that the Chancellor of the Exchequer contemplates at present, he will be forced, if he secures • the opportunity, to convert his flirtation into a serious attachment. Where is there any trace in the older Liberalism of the heedless acceptance of premisses which necessarily lead to so tremendous a conclusion ? - It may be objected. to this distinction that the Liberal legislation of the past has sometimes been Socialistic, that the Poor Law has always carried this mark, that Mr. Gladstone's Irish Land. Acts presented the State in the same aspect of an earthly Providence. But there is all the difference in the world between setting up a new principle as the universal guide of life, and makin special and, so far as intention goes, solitary exceptions. The Poor Law demands a particular qualification which every one who is to benefit by it must possess. Before a man can get a farthing from the State he must show that he is destitute. The Land Acts of 1870 and 1881 altered the whole relation between landlord and tenant in Ireland. But here again we come upon the same distinction. Mr. Gladstone did not step in between landlord and tenant until he had satisfied himself that this relation, as it was understood in Ireland, was radically faulty, and led to directly mischievous results. He never dreamed of extending the principle of his Irish legislation to England. His own account of the matter was that in the Ireland he had to govern he found a law of landlord and tenant which made government impossible. His policy may have been thoroughly mistaken,—we think it was. But the mistake was not an error of principle, it was a misreading of the situation to which he applied the principle. There is nothing answering to this in the Budget. It is not the misuse of the land by its present possessors that excites Mr. Lloyd George's indignation, it is the fact that they possess it. Yet we are told evening by evening that there is no essential distinction between the Liberalism of to-day and the Liberalism of a generation ago. "I have given instructions," Mr. Gladstone wrote to his eldest son, "to convert your life interest under the Hawarden settle- ment into a fee simple. Reflection and experience have brought me to favour the latter method of holding landed property as on the whole the best." The moral and social responsibilities which belong to the position, he goes on, "are full of interest and rich in pleasure, but they demand (in the absence of special cause) residence on the spot and. a good share of time, and especially a free and ungrudging discharge of them. Nowhere in the world is the position of the landed proprietor so high as in this country, and this in great part for the reason that nowhere else is the possession of landed property so closely associated with definite duty." Compare this with Mr. Lloyd George's challenge to this very class. "Who made ten thousand. people owners of the soil, and the rest of us trespassers in the land of our birth ? " There is no question here of the use to which the soil is put, no allegation of duties left undone and responsibilities ignored. The Chancellor of the Exchequer sees but one crime where land is concerned,— the fact that it is in private ownership. In his anxiety to make the most of this crying scandal he even omits a. cipher or two from his figures. Socialism may be the true road out of our difficulties, but if it be not, Mr. Lloyd. George's denunciation of a particular class of property owners can have no purpose except the stirring up of strife for strife's sake.
A third feature in which Mr. Lloyd. George may claim to be original is more impatient of definition. To some of us, however, it is his worst fault. It is bad to take wrong principles for granted because you wish to apply them in particular cases. It is bad to make a comparatively small class in the community an object of general detestation. It is bad to encourage poor men to think that it is the duty of the well-to-do to support them by giving them work on their own terms. But there is something worse still in the style and language in which these errors are communicated to vast audiences. Wrong principles may be set right, misstatements of fact may be corrected, but the public which has learned to admire nothing except abuse of every one who presumes to differ from the orator is made perms- gently unfit for the political duties which will more and more fall to its share. The statesmen of the last genera- tion did not spare their foes. From the speeches of Mr. Gladstone or Mr. Bright, of Mr. Disraeli or Lord Salisbury, you may draw abundant examples of rhetorical invective. But placed by the side of the Chancellor of the Exchequer's efforts in the same direction there is a difference which is unmistakable. The one is oratory; the other is calculated denunciation. If the tables were turned, and Mr. Lloyd George were the victim of the same type of eloquence, the change which he is doing his beet to bring over English public men and English public life would be equally lamentable.
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