THE STUMP. T HE Pall Hall has expressed ably enough more
than once its disgust for the necessity, which it evidently more than half doubts,—of popularizing, or, as it seems to think, vulgarizing the greater political issues of the day by the pro- cess commonly known as Stump Oratory. On Monday it renewed its expression of disgust by way of comment on Mr. Gladstone's electioneering tour in Lancashire, and concluded bY pretty plainly condemning the practice, in him and such as he, altogether, and exhorting him to follow more closely Mr. Mill's example of vouchsafing no special explana- tion of his views to his constituents, but rather making them feel that if he became their representative a favour is conferred by him on them, and not by them on him. Well, that, of course, is very true, and if Mr. Gladstone's tour were a mere mode of soliciting support for himself in Lancashire, the argu- ment of the Pall Mall might be perfectly sound. But it would be just as correct to assume when you go out to dine with a friend that you go Solely for the food he has promised you, and for nothing else, as to take for granted that a politician's relations with his constituents —and in Mr. Gladstone's case, of course, the whole Liberal party, and in some sense, the whole nation, are virtually his constituents,—are exhausted, when they have got a clear con- ception of his principles and he has got a clear conception of their wants. If that were all that took place between repre- sentatives and the represented, there is no nation in Europe where the representative system would stand at all. If the people are to be the sources of political power, the people must be profoundly interested in political issues, or they will simply be the worst sources of power you could possibly obtain. Political discussion, of a vivid and minute kind, must stir them up to the very depths, or no system could be more full of danger or a more fertile source of corruption. Parliamentary institutions are not simply valueless in a country where the people are languid or ill-informed in politics, they are a mask for all possible malpractices,—as we know too well ourselves in those boroughs where the electors are not politicians, and those counties where the electors, although politicians, care so much more about their self-interest as tenant farmers than their duties as citizens that they do not care to combine in their own self-defence. The one con- dition of a sincere and courageous popular decision on any questionis the. excitement of a deep interest, amounting to something like enthusiasm, in the public mind upon that ques- tion ; and so far from regarding Mr. Gladstone's speeches on financial economy, on the history of Reform, or on the Irish. Church, as superfluous condescensions to that vulgar popular taste which likes to regard the candidate as a sort of petitioner for favour, they seem to us the most typical speci- mens we could possibly have of those political influences by which alone any people can hope to make a popular and democratic system pure, strong, and efficient. If the politi- cians did not diffuse their minuter knowledge of the business and science of politics among the electors, and refresh their own- apprehensions of the popular consequences of proposed legisla- tion by periodically attempting to exhibit the great interests at- stake so as to tell upon the people who are ultimately affected by it, and if the process which we describe under these dry, ab- stract terms, were not one of really vivid and eager interest on both sides, the whole theory of representation would soon be- come worse than a farce. If every member of Parliament could effectually do for his own locality what Mr. Gladstone does for the whole nation in such election tours as this, we do not doubt that corruption and intimidation,—which are only possible where electors are uninterested or half-interested in the public- questions to be decided,—would vanish at once ; nay, more, that we should have a Parliament with a sense of force behind it such as no Parliament in English history has ever had except in the most exciting of revolutionary crises. Mr._ Gladstone in popularizing for the whole nation the questions. at issue between the opposing parties, and in strengthening,. moreover, the personal tie between the whole Liberal party and himself, is contributing more to the deliberate decision of the matters at issue on rational and conscientious grounds, than any number of precautions like the ballot, or the disfranchising of bribees, or the disqualification of bribers for a seat in Parliament, could possibly effect. Those who contend for a. popular system and then deprecate the only agencies by which a popular system can be worked in good earnest, seem to us to fight against themselves.
Well, but,' the able writer in the Pall Mall might say, if it must be grudgingly admitted that this diffusive rain of popular oratory is essential in order to water and fructify a popular political system, still you must at least admit that the process is very degrading to the individual intellect, and turns statesmen into rhetorical machines with a political ideal of duty below instead of above them.' Or, to put the case in the writer's own vigorous language :- "There are men who know quite as well as their neighbours what- hard work means, and who fully appreciate the advantages of various forms of it mental and bodily, who would rather slave for a week from early morning to late night over the dreariest papers or the dullest blue- books, or wrangle over points of law in a pestilential court-house from nine in the morning till seven in the evening, or, which is far worse, pass the same time in debating clause by clause and phrase by phrase the terms of a report to be made by a commission, than submit to the drudgery of the stump. To see before you night after night the same- or a very similar set of uninteresting faces, to have to find for each suc- cessive set a slightly different version of the very same common-places, to exchange the same sort of compliments with the same kind of chair- man, and to feel throughout that the whole proceeding is more or less- humbug from first to last, that you are talking for talking's sake, and trying rather to flatter and conciliate your audience into giving you their political support than really to inform their minds upon subjects as to which they neither do nor possibly can over take more than a passing and rather casual interest, are to some people, to more, we sus- pect, than is usually believed, operations so disgusting as practically to debar them from entering upon political life."
That, of course, is a jaundiced account of what Mr. Glad- stone is doing by one who seems to be wholly unfit to do it himself, and who apparently thanks God that he is unfit • to do it. The characteristic value of what Mr. Gladstone does, is that what he speaks are never common-places in the sense of being spoken without the vividness and the- reality which are essential for any good result. As for any air of humbug, or insincerity, or talking for talking's sake- about the proceeding, there is infinitely less than about the ablest barrister's argument in a case of scientific legal procedure. The whole passage seems to us written by a thinker who, whatever his theoretical regard for popular institutions, has practically a profound contempt for that pro- cess of popular education which can alone render them vigorous or useful. It is of the very essence of such eager- and businesslike oratory as Mr. Gladstone's that it is fed_ by the desire to take the multitude into confidence on, the details of the various questions he discusses. Far from:' supposing his audience languid, he believes them deeply in- terested. in these questions, because he himself is so ; and by believing he makes them so. The critic began his article by
confessing that he had not read the speeches on which he was commenting ; but if he had, he could hardly have failed to be attracted and even engrossed by the vivacity of the style and eagerness and precision of the thought. To our minds this sort of speech, genuinely taking the multitude into counsel on the relative merits of rival administrations and rival ad- ministrative reforms, has much more than the merit of a barrister's address to the court or the jury on a ques- tion of law or evidence. It has all the businesslike solidity of the latter, and it has besides, and without detriment to this, all the enlarging effects of what Mr. Dis- raeli named, though he never understood it for a moment, the process of political 'education,'—and that, moreover, not addres- sed to a party, but to the people. The common forms of compli- ment which the able critic in the Pall Mall thinksso demoralizing, appear to us just as much and just as little so, as the social forms of compliment which he, like every one else, probably uses every day of his life. Moreover, we utterly deny that such speeches as these,—we do not mean merely Mr. Glad- stone's, but all which partake in any degree of the same reality
of manner and mastery of specific detail,—are uninstructive to any section of the community. We can testify that in all of them,—especially that on finance,—there have been some new and striking points to the present writer, who has certainly heard and read more than enough on the same subjects, and that not one has failed to bring home to him with a very new strength of impression, the absolute dependence of states- men on the people for giving effect to all those reforms which, though in the largest sense popular, are, in a Parlia- mentary sense, and a departmental sense, in the highest degree unwelcome, and accepted only under the pressure of an instructed popular purpose. Precisely what Mr. Cobden did for Free Trade,—when he inspired, for instance, an eager interest in the minds of thousands and tens of thousands in the true working of differential duties on foreign sugars,— that Mr. Gladstone is doing for a scientific finance and a just treatment of Ireland, when he demolishes the subtle pleas set up for extravagance and half-reform or no-reform. And why such work is less noble than technical pleadings or squabbles over a contested report we are not only unable to see, but unable to understand how any one else can so deem it. The whole conception of 'humbug' is imported into the matter by the writer's personal view of popular oratory. If it is not humbug to fight a particular clause in a report against re- luctant colleagues, why is it humbug to fight a particular view of financial economy against hostile orators ? Neither the one nor the other is humbug, if there is no insincerity or affectation about the manner of doing it. All educating pro- cesses seem humbug ' to some persons, but are the most vivid and businesslike duties in the world to men with the genius for them.
Of course, we admit that the representative system has a necessary tendency to give prominence to principles and ideas susceptible of a wide temporary acceptance, and to obscure and drive inwards, as one may say, all ideas of a kind not likely to recommend themselves to more than a few. This is one of the evils of political life. No politician likes to speak out views which he thinks may endanger his political popularity and his parliamentary power. Then, of course, it happens that, to some, political life means reticence as to their most cherished private convictions,—convictions, perhaps, whose value may be sometimes even over-estimated because they cannot be spoken out and freely tried and canvassed. The evil here we admit and deplore. But to approve a representative system and then not take advantage of it to disseminate those lessons which are susceptible of a wide popularity, seems to us to mean accepting all its disadvantages and sacrificing all its advantages. What Mr. Gladstone is now doing for England involves no atom of insincerity. The insincerity ol political life, so far as there is any, is in the habitual suppression of that part of a man's inner life which there is no chance of making popular, not in using all his efforts to popularize the truth he does conceive to be likely to move multitudes. Let politicians and states- men once neglect the latter duty, and they neglect, in our opinion, all that is valuable, nay, invaluable, in democratic institutions, and retain only what is dangerous and perhaps mischievous in them.
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