TOPICS OF THE DAY.
MR. LABOUCHERE'S MANIFESTO IN SCOTLAND.
THE Unionist newspapers, the Times more especially, make a mistake in not reporting Mr. Labouchere more carefully. They cannot, we fancy, quite get over the notion that he is not a serious politician ; but they may find him very serious indeed. He intends that his party, the New Radicals, should master the commonwealth. If Mr. Gladstone carries the elections, the Member for Northamp- ton will be a member of his first Cabinet, and he has hopes that he will be the most influential figure there. His idea, visible in all his recent speeches, and, to do him justice, expressed before his following appointed a Whip of their own, is that Radicalism has never been fairly worked in this country as an electioneering cry, the country, he says, being always more Radical than Parliament, and Parlia- ment more Radical than the Ministry; that the mass of Englishmen and Scotchmen are Radicals or Tories ; and that, since the descent to household suffrage, it is the Radicals to whom Liberals must defer. This is especially the case since the Home-rule Question drove the men of wealth, culture, or traditional opinions— the whole Whig party, in fact, plus the experienced Radicals—out of the Liberal party ; and it is, there- fore, to the Radicalism of the lower voters that Mr. Labouchere is appealing. He does not care particularly if he disgusts the better Liberals, who offend his antinomian instincts nearly as much as Tories, because he hopes so to use the weight of the mass vote below-stairs that the Gladstonians must accept Radical candidates, or risk a defeat which might make them all elderly men before they regain power. The Radical candidates being accepted, however reluctantly, he will be pretty well master of the situation, and will compel the Opposition leaders, who, as he quite understands, will be unwilling enough, to admit a large minority, or even a majority, of Radical Ministers into the Cabinet. We are not drawing this idea from our own con- sciousness in any way, or accusing Mr. Labouchere of overweening self-esteem. It is what any Extremist leader in any country would do,—M. Clemenceau, for example, just as well as Mr. Labouchere ; and the latter avowed it himself in his speech at Edinburgh. By far the most important sentence of that speech, as we shall all find if the mysterious verdict of the multitude destroys the Unionist Ministry, is the following : " If there is a Radical majority returned to Parliament, they must insist upon a Radical Ministry," —that is, in practice, a Ministry in which men who look to himself for guidance will be the real depositaries of power, Mr. Gladstone, Lord Rosebery, and that group forming in it a sort of Court, to be treated with as deep an external respect as Mr. Labouchere can bring himself to pay to anything, but " advised," as Kings are advised, to do things they detest. Mr. Gladstone will be allowed to propose his own Home-rule Bill, and retire ; and then power will pass, perhaps formally as well as really, to the extreme Left wing. It is a bold programme, much more dangerous than it suits conventional Liberals to admit, and Mr. Labouchere works hard to realise it, stumping even Scotland, where the people have no sympathy for him personally, and where a Gladstonian victory is already secured, in order to wake up fully the lower section of the electors. He does not want hard-headed Scotchmen in Parliament, however Radical, but people of the Mr. Keay type, revolutionaries in Liberal clothes. His first object of attack is always Mr. Chamberlain, for whom his pleasantest nickname is Judas, not because he specially hates Mr. Chamberlain—though, being an aristocrat as well as a Red, he probably dislikes him —but because the Member for West Birmingham has a hold upon the lower democracy. It is a rival Mr. Labouchere fears, not a traitor he detests. He is never hard upon Tories, because he thinks they have no place in the popular imagination—an error curious in one who knows English history, the Tories remaining always, in the unchanging British mind, the alternative party—and he is positively civil to Lord Hartington, whose chance he thinks is over ; but Mr. Chamberlain and Liberal Unionists he fears, lest they draw part of his boats away, The Member for West Birmingham must be destroyed, or the old Radicals, those who believe that "the People" }mss duties as well as rights, may rally round his banner. He rails at him, therefore, at every opportunity, using, as every man of his type since 0414.4, filwaTs has used, not the weapon of Wettriln which belongs to his culture and his temperament, but the vulgar abuse which he thinks will be intelligible to his mob. Mr. Chamberlain's qualities, good and bad, are forgotten in view of Mr. Chamberlain's orchids, and his loyalty to Lord Hartington is described as that of a tin kettle tied to a dog's tail. The first thing, in fact, to be taught to the democracy is that " Codlin's the friend, not Short ;" and then, and only then, the direct offers are made. The Ministry, as we have said, is to be made Radical. The Irish Members are to be kept in West- minster. [Note, as a most singular fact indicating the existence somewhere in Mr. Labouchere of the pride in England which he usually disavows, that he never swallows this particular pledge without an audible and visible intel- lectual choke.] Parliaments are to last only three years, which would mean, in practice, an Election every second year, it being too dangerous to allow a Parliament to run out. Double voting is to be abolished. The Churches are to be disendowed as well as disestablished, their funds, we may imagine, going to secular uses,---that is, practically, to education or municipal purposes. " We are disendowers as well as disestablishers," said Mr. Labouchere, though, in another part of his speech, he admitted that he would let the Irish Parliament endow or establish anything it liked. The poor are to be housed, the Licensing Laws are to be dealt with, and, above all and before all, "we will make such a change in the Land Laws that landlords will hardly recognise the country after we put our hands to it." Mr. Labouchere said nothing about the House of Lords ; but as he could hardly carry out that pro- gramme while the House existed, its total abolition—and, we should imagine, the abolition of any Second Chamber with power to compel the people to suspend judgment— may be taken as included.
It is to this programme, aided by certain views as to foreign policy, which may be summed up as " non- intervention, except to spite Germany," and not to the question of Home-rule, that Mr. Labouchere looks for victory at the next Election, a victory which is to be of a twofold character, a victory by Liberalism plus Radicalism over the Unionists, and a victory of Radicalism over Liberalism. The dog is to swallow the bone, and then the tail is to wag the dog, or rather, for Mr. Labouchere by no means contemplates so purposeless an operation as wagging, the tail is to guide the dog like a sort of sentient rudder,— a little picture which we humbly place at Mr. Sambourne's disposal. We shall see, when the time arrives, if the plan greatly attracts the English electors, who are, after all, the English people, who have such a history and such posses. sions, and have usually kept their heads. We confess that, looking on at the scene as mere historians, we doubt it a good deal. It is open, we fancy, to Fouquier Tinville's retort when taunted with the loss of his daily batch of victims for the guillotine. " Is your bread cheaper, canaille," said the great Delator, "because they are absent ?" There is a want of bread among the bribes. Abuse of Mr. Chamberlain is not by itself equivalent to bread,— first, because it was he who originally offered " three acres and a cow ;" and secondly, because it is a characteristic of English and American electors that mere political abuse does not influence their minds at all. You might as well abuse your cabman in order to convince the crowd that he should not have his fare. To hurt an opponent in England, you must accuse him of being a Catholic, or of having no money. Indeed, it is not easy to see that there is anything at all in the programme for rough people to eat. The promise of more frequent elections has never attracted anybody yet except a few doctrinaires, and though it was inserted in the Charter, it was, of all the six points, the one the people cared for least. The prospect of paying for what clerical help he wants by no means attracts the countryman ; and though a promise of Disestablishment strengthens the zeal of Nonconformists, it rouses the other side to a zeal at least as great as theirs. As to the housing of the poor, we wish it were a popular cry ; but it only attracts the philanthropists, the poor understanding quite well that to improve a slum you must first sweep it away, and not at all liking that pre- liminary process. Lord Compton a few days ago stopped the Holborn improvement scheme in ten minutes by merely raising that cry. There remains the question of the land, and this no doubt will exercise, as all recent elections show, considerable influence. The country-folk naturally, and WI we think properly, would like cheap allotments within reach of their dwellings ; and the townsfolk are eager for them, not to work on—nothing would persuade them to dig—but because they hope that if allotments were granted, country-folk would not swarm to the towns to the reduction of wages. Read Mr. Burns's speech of Tuesday against the grant of a London contract to a Liverpool firm, and see how bitterly selfish townspeople are getting. The promise of allotments is a promise which tells ; but then, the Unionists can go in that direction just as far as Mr. Labouchere can without disregarding the laws of common honesty. He may be, probably is, prepared to go far beyond those laws ; but if he is, he will awaken a kind of resistance of which we suspect he does not understand the strength. He is breaking his own leader's sword, which is his sympathy with English moral sense. We do not believe that the English people, who for centuries have respected the wealth accumulated in their midst, will knowingly vote for any scheme of plunder, any more than they will vote for the repudiation of the Debt, and this for two reasons. The immense majority of them reverence certain rough rules of goodness, which bind them as strongly as other races are bound by the rules of religion, and each one of them all hopes, as an ideal happiness, to be possessed of property for himself. Mr. Labouchere will find, we suspect, that he offers too little to overcome the resistance alike of conscience and of habit, and that he has only roused the deep suspicion of all, Liberals as well as Tories, who have anything to lose. That is, however, no reason why Unionists should not watch his steps, and recognise that there are two forces at work to secure the elections,—the Gladstonians, who seek Home-rule for Ireland, and the guidance of affairs for themselves ; and the Jacobins, who seek Home-rule for Ireland, and the control of the Kingdom by men pledged to revolutionary changes involving a redistribution, great or small, of existing property-rights. If the Unionists wish to be safe, they must assail the latter as well as the former ; for the latter address a crowd which does not understand Home- rule, but does understand that it has not itself the material comfort it desires.
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