TOPICS OF THE DAY.

LORD DERBY.

COULD we but really know it, it would be curious to com- pare Lord Derby's estimate of himself with the estimate of him formed by the Lord Provost of Edinburgh. It would,

we fancy, be in more than one important particular not only different, but contradictory. The Lord Provost complimented Lord Derby on the fact that the "spirit and mantle " of his father had " so amply descended from sire to son ;" and further, on possessing " not perhaps the burning eloquence of your father,"—there, we think, the Lord Provost was right,— " but what otherwise was specially characteristic of him, and what in the present day, in my estimation, is more urgently needed, namely, calm and studied wisdom, and broad common- sense, coupled with a power of language eminently fitted to bring home sound ideas to the understanding and conviction of those to whom they are addressed." Further, in reviewing Lord Derby's personal career, the Lord Provost went out of his way specially to compliment him on the " consummate tact and firmness with which the delicate [Luxembourg] affair was ad- justed to general satisfaction, although for a while appearing impossible of peaceful solution." If we could have heard Lord Derby's inner reflections on these various compliments, they would not have implied, we suspect, very warm commendations of the Provost's sagacity. The late Lord Derby had a genius for taking up lost causes. The present Lord Derby dislikes no waste of strength so much. The late Lord Derby was a spirited statesman, who rather approved of one-sided enthusiasms. The present Lord Derby, as he told the Glasgow students six years ago, and has told the Edinburgh students now, prefers even " cultivated apathy," or to use his more modern phrase, " a wise but not un- kindly scepticism," to anything like earnestness of the one- idead sort. The late Lord Derby was, as the Lord Provost justly remarked, a man of fiery eloquence. The present Lord Derby prefers to treat fiery thoughts, like fire itself, as " good servants, but bad masters," and we may admit at once that he quite succeeds in keeping the ardour of his ideas well under control. Then, again, if there were a tender point in Lord Derby's career which the Lord Provost was unkind to touch, it was that "delicate Luaeinhourg affair," of his mode of

dealing with which Lord Derby was certainly very far from proud at the time, and has probably been becoming more and more ashamed ever since. Moreover, that stroke of policy certainly did not result in peace, though it delayed the war. And it set the worst political precedent of modern times,—that of accepting in words a Treaty the signataries

of which at once disavowed the true meaning,—a prece- dent which is never referred to in Europe except in depreca- tion, or even ridicule. Again, though no one can doubt that the Lord Provost was right in attributing to the present Lord

Derby a singular lucidity in expounding common-sense notions, and of bringing them home to the understanding of English-

men, we should by no means have attributed this power to

his father, who was much more competent to lead a rash attack, or a forlorn hope in the defence of a losing cause, than to bring

home sober and judicious convictions,—convictions all of them in- digenous to what Lord Derby himself once called the "temperate zone " of life —to the judgments of average Englishmen. In short, we can hardly conceive statesmen at more completely opposite poles of the political world than the late and the present Lord Derby, except, indeed, in this,—that both of them have been in a high degree manageable in the hands of a skilful mani- pulator like Mr. Disraeli, who has known how to carry them with him as he shifted his position. He made both the late Earl and the present, after coming into office to save the country from the advance of democracy, first (in 1859) accept the principle of an identical borough and county franchise, and then (in 1867) accept household suffrage for the boroughs. He even persuaded the present Lord Derby, then Lord Stanley, to play into his hands, by leading him to assure the disaffected Conservatives that nothing would induce the Conservative Government to accept mere household suffrage, pure and simple, and yet Lord Stanley was himself one of the foremost to accept that solution. The only feature in which the statesmanship of the father and son really resemble each other, is this singular

amenability to be influenced by a shrewd man who understands

and understood their characters. For the rest, you might almost as well say that political dash and a timid political considerateness are different names for the same quality, as explain the present Lord Derby's character as the outcome of qualities he has inherited from his father. Blind earnestness' was a quality of which his father was not by any means devoid. It is the subject of the present Lord' Derby's most characteristic warnings. There is nothing more dangerous, he told the Edinburgh students last week, than "the union of strong convictions with very narrow intelli- gence." " Many a man has died for a phrase which he did not understand, and many a man, having got hold of what may possibly be a truth has regarded it ever after as the truth."

Lord Derby himself distrusts every policy which does not look hum-drum. He acts habitually on the theory that if you ever do a big thing, you should make the least of it in the world,

and let it pass, if you can, for a small thing. Indeed, he is so- habitual a 'minimiser,' that if he gets hold of a large policy—

as in the Suez-Canal case—he pares it down till it seems a small policy ; and if he is conscious that he does not in- tend much,—as in the Luxembourg case,—he will confess to all the world that he meant nothing, and loudly avow that it is a very undesirable thing to do what seems to mean some thing, and yet not mean anything by it. He once suggested that " war with limited liability " ought to be possible,—mean-- ing, we suppose, that it ought to be possible for a State to say, We will spend so much money and use up such and such a, number of regiments or ships in this war, but we will not go• beyond this.' That has always seemed to us very characteristic of Lord Derby's sobriety of mind, and of his weakness as a politician. He would often like to sink a given amount of. political capital in a policy, but he would like to be off his- bargain when that capital was used up. He forgets that that is just what is impossible, under any sort of popular govern- ment. If you do not identify yourself wholly with your cause, it will be very apt to renounce you, and make light of your support. You cannot measure how much sacrifice you will make to this cause or that, and give it up when the sacrifice has been made fruitlessly, even if you wish to do so.. Lord Derby's support is generally given as if he did wish this- He tells you very plainly that the political ends he advocates, show a balance of advantage, but that the balance is not very great, and that you might easily squander too much energy in securing it. Consequently, his support, though it commands a certain amount of respectful adhesion from the thinking men, is not a great political power. It is the sup-

port of a political Laodicean, who thinks it the first of duties. to be neither hot nor cold, and indeed he is so temperate that if he acted alone, he would never get up the steam necessary to ensure locomotion.

There was a time, little more than ten years ago, when. Lord Derby, then Lord Stanley, was looked on as a kind of crypto-radical among the Conservatives. It was said that he consorted more in the lobbies of the House of Commons, with Mr. Bright than with the members of his own party. It was understood that he thought democracy something like a ' manifest destiny,' which it was idle to try to avoid, and that except, perhaps, on questions of property, the future lay

with the Liberal party. We believe that this phase of Lord-

Stanley's mind was perfectly consistent with the phase of more genuine Conservatism through which he is, now passing. Both alike rested upon that ' wise but not unkindly scepticism' which he preached to the Edin- burgh students, and on that strong desire to avoid cant,. or the habit of "using cut-and-dry phrases without attaching any definite meaning to them," and to avoid ' rant,' or the habit of " treating very little matters as if they were big ones,"' which have always honourably distinguished Lord Derby's public career. In his earlier days he was thoroughly sceptical as to the vastness of the dangers which were then supposed to attend the progress of democracy. He probably thought that in him at least it would have been ' cant' to speak, as his father often did, of the perils to be encountered from the political pre- dominance of the masses in the State. He did not very much.

believe,—he never has been a great believer,—in the functions of Government; and the same doubt as to its power to do very much good came out in his speech last week to the working-men of Edinburgh. Ten years ago he did not anticipate that the result of making Government more popular might possibly be to make it stronger, and more disposed to interfere and become even meddlesome in private life. He looked, as other men looked, to the American type of democracy, where the central power was very much distrusted. On the whole, he saw more cant and more rant at that time in Conservatism than in Liberalism ; and though, acting on his habitual principle not to be too much in earnest about anything so uncertain as political opinion, be held to the party of which his father was the leader, his influence was always exerted, so far as it was exerted at all, to damp the panicmongers among his own allies. Of late years, the situation has been very different. He has seen a strong Liberal Government bringing about rather fundamental changes under the influence of enthusiastic Liberal ideas, and he has seen a growing tendency to believe in the power of Government, when it acts as the organ of the people, to trans- form the social and moral life of society. Consequently his warnings against unreal language, and the magnifying of small matters, have been directed rather against the superstitions of Liberalism than the superstitions of Toryism. He had no faith in the vast importance of the burning questions' of the day. He smiled when he heard enthusiastic popular prophecies. He did not believe in the grand hopes of an age of peace and civilisation. He was sceptical even of popular fidelity to popular ideas. And now he is in power with a Government which is labouring to show,—not, perhaps, with- out some success,—that the people are just as willing to be led by statesman who distrust change as by statesmen who are very sanguine that they can introduce great changes which will be changes for the better. Lord Derby's weakness as a statesman is his radical timidity. With all his splendid good-sense, his lucid intellect, his wholesome habit of looking steadily at all ideas presented to him, and his tendency to distrust extreme theories of any kind, you can see that he has little or no initiative ; that he sees both sides too strongly to believe in either ; and that his Con- servatism, therefore, is due to that most profound of all sources of Conservatism, the want of any adequate motive-power to induce men to alter what is. But that is almost as dangerous a habit of mind as rashness itself, for any one who has really got to take great resolves. Perhaps, after all, rashness and timidity are more closely allied than we are apt to think, and that the difference between the late and the present Lord Derby was quite as much a difference of temperament, as any difference in their deliberate estimate of political ideas. If Mr. Disraeli were to leave on record his real criticism on the two men, probably what he would have to say would be something of this kind:— 'When I wanted to bring round the father to my views, I suggested a probable advantage to his party and to the nation from the course I proposed. I made him see, for instance, that it would "dish the Whigs." When I wanted to bring round the son, I suggested a probable accumulation of new difficulties from standing still ; I suggested, for instance, that if we did not sign a treaty in an unreal sense, we should soon have to go to war ; or that if we did not buy the Suez-Canal shares, we should have to fight our way to India. But though I found the father much more amenable to the influence of suggested hopes, and the son to that of suggested fears, I found both of them uncertain in their mind, and quite open to well- considered influence ?' The defect of Lord Derby's habit of mind certainly is this,—he habitually minimises so much the scope of large ideas, that his mode of defending his policy, when a big policy is put into his bands, is apt to be a justifi- cation of his opponents. He is so timid of great professions, that he disavows the only adequate motive for his own policy, and so plays his adversaries' game. There is great wisdom in him of the negative kind, but it is not the kind of wisdom which a great leader wants who is piloting a great Government through stormy seas, and whose duty it is not only to breast the waves, but to raise in his crew the confidence and the courage which can alone bring them safely through.