TOPICS OF THE DAY.
WEST YORKSHIRE.
THE Fitzwilliam assault on the West Riding has been a " fiasco " —a total and disgraceful failure. It reduces mere family dicta- tion ad absurdum, and it will probably be the last instance of any such flagrant attempt. Young Mr. Fitzwilliam was introduced to the electors without one claim on their notice as a candidate. He had evidently been tutored and drilled for the nonce, and re- peated a few commonplace generalities, in favour of free trade, and against " organic changes" ; but when he was pushed by questions into details, or to other questions about which he had not been primed, he was unable to answer, and whispered re- ferences to a supporter only made his tutelage the more painfully obvious. He pleaded his " youth and inexperience" with an earnestness and anxiety that stultified his offer to sit in the Im- perial Legislature; and he avowed that it would be "exceedingly difficult for him to tread in the footsteps" of goodnatured Lord Morpeth—" a man of such extraordinary talent.'
Even Mr. Fitzwilliam's immediate connexions can hardly fail to perceive the damaging effect of such an exhibition. Earl Fitz- william has been, a second time, exposed in the attempt to palm off a half-taught boy upon the largest constituency in the king- dom; and this time it was a boy so little " up " in the commonest questions of the day, that he could not even pass the rough and ready examination of the hustings. The withdrawal of the can- didate scarcely does away with the effect of this repeated attempt : the anti-popular purpose has not been corrected by time ; "the great family " has not improved, but is only weakened. But supposing that the preliminary difficulties had been surmounted, and that Mr. Fitzwilliam had succeeded in forcing his way to the House of Commons, it is quite clear that his success could have done no good to any party, but the reverse. It would have done no good to himself, to be sent into the great law-factory before he had completed his education. It would have done no good to Earl Fitzwilliam, to have a second son thrust prematurely, perhaps altogether unfitly, into so prominent a position. It could have done no good to Mr. Fitzwilliam's " order ": if persons of family suppose that it is their privilege to use the House of Commons as a finishing academy for their sons, or that they may continue to send in sons and dependents to execute their behests in a manner so open, they should learn that they are only keeping up the feeling, identical in nature though fainter in degree, which caused the first outbreak in France against the privi- leged classes. And when scions of high family are placed in com- petition with so many men of talent—we say nothing of genius— as are now to be found in the House of Commons, they brave comparisons which had better be avoided ; for the most hazard- ous feeling of all that threaten the existence of our hereditary aristocracy is one of personal contempt. Such a recruit as Mr. Fitzwilliam could be of no possible use to the Whig party. We need not say a word as to the good that the electors or the county could derive from his presence in Parliament. Constituency, party, order, and family, are only injured by such presence. Exposure on the hustings is bad enough ; the exposure in Par- liament is more protracted, more fertile in ridicule and in a just bitterness.
The electors also should derive a profitable lesson from the event. At the outset, they consented to assume a very unworthy position ; humbly asking the young gentleman to forbear his de- mand on their suffrages. Why this extraordinary delicacy in re- buffing a very improper piece of boyish forwardness ? If Master Garbutt had proposed to succeed his papa as Mayor of Leeds, the Town-Council would not have sent a deputation to the young gentleman to request his retreat from the civic chair : why then deal in such finikin tenderness with a still grosser act of pre- sumption? What were the Liberal leaders afraid of ?—They were afraid of " dividing the party." But how? Surely not by any fault of theirs in repelling the youth who did not know his place ? What the fear means is, that certain Whigs would have voted for Mr. Fitzwilliam, not with reference to the qualifications demanded in a senator, but solely with referenee to his birth as an hereditary Whig. Any "splitting of the Liberal party," therefore, would have been brought about by the obstinate and perverse adherence of the Whigs to the practice of family membership,—a practice always tyrannical, absurd since feu- dality has been swept away, and doubly preposterous in the promoters of the Reform Hill. From the first, they should have been left to the responsibility of such a course. The habit of yielding to the routine in these matters is the thing that perpetuates the tyranny of the " great families " over constituencies that might be really independent if they only willed to be so. Another source of weakness, indeed, is the meanness prevalent among the middle class, who will sacrifice "mere politics" to oblige a customer ; another is the want of positive opinions among the same class. But the leading opponents of Mr. Fitz- william have found by the event that they were stronger than they thought, and that firmness in itself is strength. To esta- blish the position they have gained, it behoves them to cultivate the extension of positive opinions, to set the example of a gene- rous independence, and, above all, without scruple or compunc- tion, without care for the "division of party," to let the Whigs, or any other party that will, pursue unheeded its own course of separate interests ; for that is the way in which faction will ex- hibit its selfishness, its isolation, and its decay.
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