THE GHOST OF REFORM.
TO thinking men who feel, like ourselves, a hearty sympa- thy with the political claims of the working classes, no- thing can seem much more dreary than the Reform Conference which has just taken place in London. The working classes want either new lenders or a new infusion of principles, or both. Their present leaders have not apparently the dimmest notion of the true reason why the late movement was so deplorable a failure. And they go on talking the same statistical plati- tudes in the same cheerless manner, like politicians breathing under a half-exhausted political receiver and wondering why the words come so faint and lifeless. The only marvel is that with such an absolute dearth of elasticity of any kind the Con- ference should. have got itself up at all. We suppose that in fact its members wanted to see the Exhibition, and thought a political mission to London would be a good excuse. The Whittington Club has seldom cherished in its bosom a more cheerless form of " advanced " thought. At the Conference the only man who seemed in spirits about his particular form of error was the advocate of woman's suffrage, and that, as it was looking up in the world, and seemed to answer to certain living tendencies of the present day, he—with a true instinct as to the temper of the meeting—offered to sacrifice to the general feeling in favour of the desolate conventional formula. In the evening the Reform Conference took tea with itself under the name of its alter ego the Ballot Society, when that particular species of placid but disheartening " resolutions " ensued which generally mark the colloquy of an unsuccessful being with himself,—which the Pope, for instance, must sometimes offer for the acceptance of Pio Nono, and which Pio Nono accepts unanimously, but without exhilaration. What is the reason of this exceeding dreariness ? Why do the men of any weight who attend sit silent and blank, and the men of no weight din the old formulas into our ears ? It cannot be, and we see no reason to believe, that all politi- cal vigour has vanished from the working classes of the country, that they really attach no interest to the rise of a Parliamentary party which shall represent them heart and soul. The truth is, that they are working against a paralyz- mg conviction that the last Reform Bill deserved nothing but defeat, and that what they ask now deserves it just as much,— that they have never really gone to the bottom of the ques- tion at issue between themselves and the middle classes,— and that till they do so they can never throw that hearty enthusiasm into their cause which could alone ensure its triumph. Why does not some sincere friend of the working classes put clearly.to these attenuated politicians such ques- tions as these : "Either your political principles and wishes are now fairly represented in Parliament, or they are not. Of course you do not think that they are, or you would never agitate for the mere right of registering your names for persons who would in any case have represented your wishes. But if you hold and strenuously maintain that your principles and wishes are not so represented, then you in fact admit what some of your doctrinaire friends frequently deny, that your principles and wishes do mate- rially differ in colour and drift from those of the present middle class electors. But if this be the case,—and no doubt it is so,—how can you with any show of fairness or candour propose a remedy which would simply have the effect of drowning the voice of the political middle class in the political working class ? You complain of a great wrong which we admit. And your remedy for it is to inflict exactly the same wrong on the more educated classes above you. You groan over the present unjust monopoly, and you propose to transfer that monopoly to yourselves. What good can it be to the middle classes to possess the mere right of voting in a perpetual minority, if, whenever their principles and wishes differ from yours, they are to be absolutely and completely swamped ? Yet this is what you claim as a matter of abstract right, forgetting that the very grounds on which you urge that right admit the right of every consider- able body of well-defined political thought in the country to be represented as well as yours." Had any of the working class leaders dared to press this honestly and strongly upon the recent Conference, we are quite sure the proceedings would have been of a very dif- ferent character from what they were. Instead of frigid talk of "compromise" with the middle classes, concealing a real belief (which no one would admit) that there is a practical injustice in the numerical majority system when it goes so far as to throw the whole political power of large towns into the hands of a single and rather sharply defined class, there would have been an animated discussion on a great question of political principle and justice. The working classes of our towns have, in truth, passed the age at which the people's charter represented truly their sense of justice. Once it did so ; once the class of ideas it embodied were political truths to them, while now they are half falsehoods—falsehoods, indeed, that they cannot quite see through, but which are too false to take any hold upon them. They are beginning to see that a society and a nation are not realities susceptible of numerical measurement ; that the different classes constitute a real unity which is infinitely stronger than the strength of any one section of society taken apart, even though it be by far the biggest. These truths are haunting them, and naturally paralyze their enthusiasm for a political scheme of which it is the only principle to count heads, and of which the effect would be to rid the Legislature, as it has already done in America, of all the various lights and shadows of political life and thought a° essential to the true representa- tion of the national mind. This is the true reason why Reform has lost all its vitality, and walks the earth the mere ghost of its former self, blighting the career of its chosen avenger, Earl Russell, with a task too hard for him, and feebly entreating the world in general to ballot for its restoration to life.
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