TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE CABINET AND THE SESSION.
THE Times has poured a mighty broadside into the Minis- terial ironclad just as she passed in safety out of the line of fire. On the last day of the Session, when nothing
said outside can influence the votes of Parliament, the Times published an indictment against Mr. Gladstone filling six mortal columns, and purporting to be a Review of the Session.
For a document so ponderous, so little likely to be read, and so sure to be forgotten before Parliament reassembles, it is marvellously well done, a hatred amounting to loathing for the man who dared to propose a Ballot Bill as a Cabinet measure lending vigour to the writer's sentences, edging his sneers, and giving point to his incessant insinuations that Mr. Gladstone, perhaps the most haughtily disinterested man alive, cares nothing for England, or her institutions, or her fame, in com- parison with his own possession of power. After a Session harassing and laborious beyond all precedent, a Session during which he has opened the Universities to the nation without
distinction of sect, has settled the laws of Trades' Unions,—
the most dangerous and embarrassing of our social difficulties ; has repurchased for the nation the right to control its Army,— a transfer resisted by the whole body of the plutocracy ; has so altered the position of the Ballot question that by the close of next Session secret voting must become law ; has laid the foundation of a Supreme Court of Appeal, and has created a Department of Local Government, the weary man who has accomplished all this turns to enjoy his hardly-won and momentary leisure, only to be told by the first journal in the world that he is a self-seeking politician who at heart believes that the masses of Englishmen are, and ought to be, devoid of patriotic feeling. Well, the attack is not much worse than any one of the hundreds made by the Times upon Lord Palmerston while only Foreign -Secretary, and will fail just as they did in altering the public estimate of a Minister who, like most of the great rulers of men, is better loved by the people who see him from afar than by the Court which stands around to see him dress and eat. It was not the opinion of Paris, or even of his own Ministers, which enabled Henry IV. to found a dynasty in France ; but the belief of the people that the King, heretic as he was, cared first of all for them. We need not go again over ground occupied last week, but a British Government does not consist of one man, and we wish to do a morsel of the justice everybody begins to refuse to Mr. Gladstone's Cabinet. We doubt very much, in spite of the loud roar of depreciation we hear around us on every side, whether the Liberal Ministers have, on the whole, lost much ground with the country, whether some of them have not gained. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is the only one, we think, who has unmistakably lost popularity. He has dis- played an inability to understand his countrymen, to appreciate their prejudices or respect their convictions, which in a man so able is amazing, and must be due to a growing habit of defer- ence for his own intellectual conclusions. Whatever the merits of the succession-duty—and we are inclined to,believe that it contains a solvent for one at least of our financial problems, the injustice of our indiscriminate income-tax—it was most rash to ask the people all on a sudden to give up what is with them almost a creed, namely, the preferential right of children to their fathers' property. An equal suc- cession duty levied on all successors alike implicitly denies that right, or rather asserts the superior right of the community, and was sure, in the first instance, and at a moment when thorough discussion was impossible, to be rejected. The match-tax produced, as we think unjustly, an explosion of derision, and did as much to make Mr. Lowe unpopular with the electors, as his succession-duty, his attack on the exemp- tion from the duty on horses employed by farmers, and his assumption that all unexpected expenditure should be paid for out of income-tax, did with the propertied classes, with the economists, and with the politicians who, like ourselves, dread the corruption of a democracy more than its violence. Mr. Lowe's reputation as a " safe " financier disappeared with his budget, and as an administrator he has this year done nothing, though his new appointment as Master of the Mint might have enabled him to do much,—to introduce the coins necessary to a future decimalization, the " silver penny," or tenth of a florin, and the "dime," or tenth of the silver penny. He has declined to give us the gold dollar or quarter-sovereign, for which all but the poor are so anxious, and has taken no visible steps to lighten the scarcity of small silver, of which
trade is beginning to complain. As administrator, Mr. Lowe cannot compare with Mr. Monsell, who is introducing improve- ments of the most practical and yet daring kind, altering the, unit of postal weight, for example, in favour of the public. The post-card, the reduction of newspaper postage, and the substitution of the ounce for the half ounce as the base of the penny post, are felt as direct benefits by every man in the kingdom who can road and write. We suppose Mr. Bruce, too, has declined somewhat, but any fall with the Home Secretary must be a very short one. Nobody ever expected him to be strong, and if he was beaten both by the publicans and the political roughs, nobody had much hope that he could be victorious. The public originally under-estimated Mr. Bruce, denying him credit, for instance, for a faculty he really possesses, that of assimilating new ideas, and his failures con- sequently, mortifying as they may be to politicians, do not greatly lower his reputation. The withdrawal of his Bills, however, was not his fault, his Licensing Bill was a broad and thoughtful though dangerous measure, and his little Suspend- ing Bill, which irritates nobody, may prove a foundation for much social, legislation in the future.
For the rest, the members of the Cabinet have, we conceive, if slightly, yet still decidedly risen. People admit that about Mr. Forster, who as pilot of the Ballot Bill steered his cranky vessel through the quicksands with wonderful adroitness, and while defending an utterly Radical Bill, a Bill which annoys Whigs more than Tories, extorted a chorus of compliments from his bitterest opponents. Mr. Forster, too, has done the work of the Education Office without provoking resistance except from the Lords, and has actually administered those dreadful Cattle Acts in such a way that neither the gentry nor the dealers, both of them as sensitive as poets or ownera of magazines, have ventured to bring any serious complaint. If Mr. Forster were in his proper place at the Home Office, all England would feel a sensation of pleasure and security such as it has not felt since the scarcely-noticed death of Mr.. Waddington threw that important machine out of gear, and rendered the old idea that anybody would do for the Home Office a dangerous absurdity. The minute on the grounding of the Agincourt told the public, what the Admiralty has, for some time felt, that in the "sea-sick civilian," as the Tory papers called Mr. Goschen, the Navy has found a ruler just, temperate, and strong, a man who in the interests of the Service dare add many pounds to that load of personal hatreds which this Government is doomed to carry, and do plain though stern justice without favour or fear of persons. Mr. Goschert can answer the Admirals in the House, too, without driving them quite mad, and meets Mr. Corry, his most formidable, though not his most attractive critic, on more than equal terms. He has risen decidedly, and so, though in a much less marked manner, has Mr. Cardwell. It may seem strange to say so, considering the tone of his opponents during the Session, but in spite of the muddle about the Berkshire manoeuvres, it is nevertheless true that Mr. Cardwell in August is considered less inefficient than Mr. Cardwell was in February. His• special capacity for Parliamentary work, a capacity belonging to all the Peelites, came out in the debates on the Army Bill ; he fought his opponents with temper and skill, and above all, he had a plan, and an unexpectedly large one. As explained by himself in the Commons and Lord North- brook in the Lords, it is a large and coherent scheme, one which would give us for home service nine corps d'armk of thirty thousand men each ; and if during the recess he can carry out his scheme effectively, so effectively that his corps can be inspected, many of his failures will be forgiven. He has an excellent aide in Sir Henry Storks, who is gaining ground in the House, and the department must be pronounced, on the whole, visibly stronger than it was when the Army Bill was introduced. It has survived weeks of criticism without very serious harm, and has not been attacked by anyone visibly competent to take the helm from its hands. Not one of the military critics so numerous during the Session has displayed any constructive ability or any freedom from caste prejudices, and in Parliament stature is measured con- sciously or unconsciously by comparison with opponents. Mr. Cardwell is not a strong Minister at War, but not one of the " Colonels " has displayed the capacity for being a Minister of any kind, and the Secretary at War benefits in the eyes of the public by their failures.
In the Lords the Cabinet is certainly quite as strong as it was in the beginning of the Session. Lord Granville has through- out been somewhat weak, the occasions of debate having often arisen on points on which he either differed from the policy .of his chief or chose to leave that impression. He was weak about the Army Bill, despondent about the Ballot, and too much given on smaller occasions to paying "tributes," calling Mr. Fish and Lord Ripon, for instance, " two great gentlemen," a phrase which slightly exceeds the Parliamentary limits of laudation. At the same time, the Foreign Secretary kept us out of the European struggle, and the people desired to be kept out ; he selected the most competent man in the Diplo- matic Service for the most difficult mission, thereby risking a cry both from the Service and from the Radical Press, always impatient of aristocratic ability ; and he is entitled to all the credit, as he would have been visited with all the discredit, of the Alabama negotiations. There was no genius shown in those negotiations, but there were temper, tact, and solid sense ; and though Lord Granville does not lack backbone, the country is not asking him just now to be Bismarck. His only rival on the Liberal benches, the Duke of Aygyll, has greatly increased his hold upon the country, by developing entirely fresh and, we think, unexpected power in debate. His speeches in defence of the Army Bills were by far the best made in the Peers upon the Liberal side ' • he is learning to get up his subjects like a plebeian, to throw his whole mind into them and speak out, and his department is the only one in which during the Session no visible error has been com- mitted by its chief. In the single matter which has been under controversy, the creation of the Indian Engineers' Col- lege, the Duke has deferred to the House of Commons without giving up his own scheme, has beaten the interested opposition of the profession, and has fairly launched an experiment which may and we think will help to solve the most wearisome problem of Indian statesmanship, the recon- ciliation of our duty as supreme landlord with our duty as supreme protector of millions of alien taxpayers, We must have great works in India, and we must have them cheap, and the Duke of Argyll is trying to get them by one of those short and direct cuts which so often fail, but when they succeed, succeed greatly.
On the whole, we doubt when the dust has subsided whether the Cabinet will appear to be so much weakened by the his- tory of the Session as the Times, and Punch, and the Pall Alall affect to believe, whether anything has occurred which will induce either electors or members to prefer Mr. Disraeli to Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Corry to Mr. Gosehen, Dr. Ball to Lord Hatherley, or Sir John Pakington to Mr. Cardwell, though they might prefer Mr. Hardy to Mr. Bruce. If the Liberals have accomplished little, which we deny, the Tories have done nothing, their greatest feats having been the production of a few speeches denouncing Mr. Gladstone, none of them very striking, none of them equal in mordancy to the Duke of Somerset's recent jet of vitriol, and the waste of a great many hours of valuable time. The Cabinet still remains, for all evidence the Tories can show, the Cabinet of the highest capacities engaged in Parliamentary work.
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