MR. GOSCHEN AT SHEFFIELD.
MR. GOSCHEN'S speech at Sheffield shows a mingling of the qualities of the large-minded statesman with the qualities of the popular orator such as we have not observed in any other speech of the last few years. It was a speech full of economical knowledge, full of political wisdom, and full of oratorical instinct ; and these are elements which are now more rarely combined than perhaps at any other period of our history. The econo- mical knowledge is the least part of the business ; but at a time when all the best economists of former years seem to be exhausting themselves in au effort to falsify their former teaching, and to undo what the great thinkers of the past have done, by finding selfish excuses in the possible tempo- rary gains of English consumers for a system so destructive of all sound commercial principle as that of sugar-bounties, it is something to get Mr. Goschen's brilliant demonstra- tion, first, that, as a matter of fact, the immediate rise in the price of sugar—a rise the term to which is already put by the lower prices asked for sugar to be delivered in the autumn—neither is nor can be due to the negotiation of a treaty which is not to come into operation for two years ; and his still more impressive illustration how much is often lost and how little gained by the temporary running down of the price of an article under a system of artificial competition ; considering that the moment the subsidised competitor has beaten his unsubsidised rival out of the field, the price is very apt to run up again to a point far higher than it would have reached if there had been no subsidising in the case. In fact, no one who has once got the least grasp of the principle of Free-trade can doubt for a moment that bounties on the growth of any sort of product in an old country like Europe, where there is no chance that the bounty will simply call into existence a natural source of supply and then cease to be needful, can be anything but purely hurtful,—a great disturber of the natural order of productive effort, and a great source of ultimate loss even to those who for a time seem to profit by it. Mr. Goschen recalls the partisan. Liberals who, like Mr. John Morley, are trying to mislead the masses with the notion that the Govern- ment are running up the price of sugar to gratify their own naturally perverted sympathies, to the true rationale and meaning of Free-trade, and shows them to be utterly in the wrong by facts and arguments of which none of them ought for a moment to have doubted the existence or the force. We have never in our time seen political prejudice triumph more marvellously over well- trained intellects and accurate knowledge, than in the conversion of a number of hereditary and fully instructed Free-traders into the passionate apologists for a de- liberately fostered and most mischievous monopoly.
But this was quite the least remarkable part of Mr. Goschen's speech, though no part of it was more con- vincing. Nothing has struck us more than the protest it contained against the modern habit of shunting the middle class out of the field of political consideration, and addressing all the political argument of the day to the so-called masses, in other words, the labouring class. Mr. Goschen is the last whom any one can charge with leaving that labouring class out of account. This speech is itself full of the evidence how anxiously he watches the bearing of every measure of the Government on the true interests of that class. But Mr. Goschen sees how utterly impossible it is to further the true interests of any class without taking into account the interests of those other classes which prosper when it prospers, and suffer when it suffers. Some of the repre- sentatives of the working men go about the country representing that the proposed expenditure on our Navy is little but a job in the interests of the ship- builders and of those who supply the shipbuilders with their materials. Mr. Goschen turns to these perfectly honest but rather short-sighted agitators, and asks what would happen, in the event of war breaking out, if the general belief abroad should be that England had not got a Navy that could efficiently protect her commerce. Why, the first result would be a rise in the price of imported food which it is not too much to estimate at 10 per cent. ; and as we import a hundred millions' worth of the food of the people yearly, that means an immediate loss of ten millions to the people who consume this food. Can anything prove more clearly that it is not in the interest of the shipbuilders and of those who supply the shipbuilders, that the Government are proposing to strengthen the Navy, but in the interest of the vast consuming class itself P Then what can be more in- structive than Mr. Goschen's piece of evidence of identity of interest between the capitalist classes and the working classes who are now so rapidly becoming capitalist classes too, derived from the protest he has recently received from the Friendly Societies against one of the stamps which he had imposed on the transfer of securities ? That stamp appeared to be a middle-class tax, and nothing else. But the working classes have now invested such large sums in securities, that they find the shoe pinch where our financiers supposed that they were only screwing a little more out of the comparatively wealthy. Of course. it is quite fair that the working classes should feel the taxes imposed on the well-to-do, directly they become well-to-do. But nothing can be more satisfactory than such evidence that the working classes are becoming well-to-do, and are .Thr feeling very keenly the absolute identity between their in- terests and the interests of the capitalists with whom they are now doubly bound up,—first, as receiving wages from themnext, as sharing in their profitable enterprises. Working men, says Mr. Goschen, now hold more than £100,000,000 in our trustee and Post Office savings-banks. What guarantee could be more satisfactory than this, that instead of attacking the middle classes and trying to despoil them, they will aid the middle classes in resisting all those wild socialist experiments from which, if they were ever tried, nothing but disaster could possibly proceed? Nothing could be more statesmanlike in the widest sense than that portion of Mr. Goschen's speech in which he endeavoured to make the middle and working classes see how visibly identical are their interests on every side,—on grounds at once economical, national, and Imperial.
But perhaps the most significant touch in Mr. Goschen's speech as regards its power of popular oratory, was the striking passage in which he contrived to kill two birds with one stone by dwelling on the magnificent evidence we have recently had that all our great ships at least are not ineffi- ciently provided with steam-power and other necessary naval appliances, and by generously giving credit at the same time to the Irish Captain and Staff Commander for the ability and energy with which they rescued the Calliope ' from her position of extreme peril in the harbour of Samoa. No one can have heard or read that passage of Mr. Goschen's speech without feeling the most lively pleasure, not merely in the evidence it gave that our national seamanship is still what it was, but in the eagerness displayed by our Unionist Chancellor of the Exchequer to vindicate for Irish officers their personal claim to honour and gratitude. The Radicals have spoken of this generous zeal in Mr. Goichen as if it were exceptional and unprecedented. They should have given some evidence for that assertion. So far as we can trust our memory, it is by no means the first time that Mr. Goschen has shown his hearty appreciation of the distinction achieved by Irish servants of the State. Indeed, we do not think that there is a single statesman who sits on the benches of either the Government or the Opposition, who is more alive to the value of Irish genius and Irish fidelity in serving the. Empire, than Mr. Goschen. But, of course, it is one thing to appreciate the strength which Ireland lends to the Union, and quite another to appreciate the efforts which she is now making to deprive the Union of these stores of strength. The former is a proper subject for Unionists to glory in ; the latter can be nothing to them but a subject of discouragement and regret. Of this, however, we are quite sure, that Mr. Goschen is far more genuinely eager to dwell on the advantages which Great Britain derives from the services of Irishmen, than he is to dwell on the advantages which Ireland derives from the services of British subjects,—though even these, in spite of Mr. Parnell's depreciation, are, we venture to think, not inconsiderable. For example, Mr. Goschen himself is certainly at the present moment conferring upon Ireland, by his financial statesmanship, services which we are quite confident that no exclusively Irish Chancellor of the Exchequer, dealing with Ireland alone, could rival, or even. so much as approach. But Mr. Goschen would no more of enlarging on those services to Ireland, than Mr., Parnell would think of recognising them as services at all, even if he knew how great they were.
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