MR. CHAMBERLAIN'S NEW POSITION.
WE most deeply and sincerely regret the attitude which, to all appearance, Mr. Chamberlain has definitively taken up. If it does not deprive the Liberal Party of his aid,— and he promises it shall not,—it must, unless it is reconsidered, deprive the next Government of his services ; and that is a most serious loss. Far as he seems inclined to depart from true Liberal tradition, Mr. Chamberlain is on many sides of his mind a true Liberal; he is an excellent administrator, with that firmness of will which modern administrators lack ; and he is full of that pity for the poorest, the absence of which puts some otherwise Liberal statesmen out of touch with the movement of the age. Nevertheless, if he means what he says, we can see no help. He announced publicly on Thursday, in his speech at Victoria Hall, Lambeth, and in terms of measured explicitness, that unless taxation is to be rearranged so as to secure equality of sacrifice to all classes,—by which he means unless it is graduated accord- ing to wealth,—and State education is made entirely free, and local Councils are authorised to expropriate land in order to seat small yeomen and peasant-proprietors on the soil, he will not take office, but will support the Cabinet only from outside. In other words, he will place himself at the head of a group, which may be small or large, of Agrarian Radicals, who will win their seats by positive pledges not recognised by the whole party, and support the Liberal Ministry so long as it goes in their direction and no longer, thus for many practical purposes shattering the party to pieces. It is impossible for Mr. Glad- stone and the bulk of the Liberal leaders to accept dictation so absolute and so nearly new in our political annals. Many a Cabinet Minister has interposed a veto on a measure by saying that if it were proposed he must perforce resign. Many another probably has privately made the adoption of some view of his own a condition of his entrance into a Government then in course of forma- tion. But to insist publicly on three immense measures as immediately necessary of which one has been discountenanced by the head of the party, while another is still the subject of bitter debate, is practically, if not avowedly, to claim the Premiership. If such demands are conceded, Mr. Chamber- lain, and not Mr. Gladstone, is the Liberal leader-in-chief, and takes a place within the party higher even than that of Lord Randolph Churchill among the Tories, for Lord Randolph at all events did not parade his insistences in the sight of all men. It is not leadership to veto a measure, but it is leader- ship to demand with authority that the measure shall be one introducing absolutely new principles into the party scheme of legislation.
We do not believe that English Liberals as a body are prepared to agree to such demands, or that the majority of elec- tors will prefer Mr. Chamberlain's programme to Mr. Glad- stone's. Apart altogether from loyalty to the latter, they will be indisposed to go forward so fast at the bidding of a man who proclaims every day that even his own programme is nothing to the programme he himself desires to introduce. So far from thinking of himself as intrepid, he thinks of himself as weak, and stands like Clive, " astonished at his own moderation." It is impossible to judge Mr. Chamberlain's declaration of Thursday without recollecting his speech at Inverness on Friday week, and impossible to read that speech without perceiving that Mr. Chamberlain has in his mind as an effective and practical scheme the greatest of con- ceivable innovations, a radical change—call it reform, if you like—in the tenure of land, and, indeed, of all property yielding rent throughout Great Britain. He would give up free contract altogether. He calls " exorbitant rents," by which he means rents obtainable through competition, " con- fiscations." He would, therefore, have all rents settled, as in Ireland, by an external tribunal which shall decide on what is fair. He would abolish all eviction, save for non-payment of rent ; and he would grant to every tenant free sale of his tenancy. That is to say, he would convert all English tenancies into copyholds, reduce landlords to holders of. quit-rents, and thereby either reduce the selling value of land till it yielded to new purchasers a high interest, or make land the least attractive of all investments. Moreover, he would, at least in the Highlands, reclaim by legislative action all estates unfairly vested in individuals, even though the unfair- ness had been sanctioned by Acts and by innumerable decisions of recognised Courts of Justice. Now, we are not about to say that proposals like these are unjust, or inexpedient, or Socialist, or anything else ; but we say that they alter the whole tenure of property worth £1,900,000,000 sterling ; that they are as yet as foreign to the people as Proudhon's ideas ; that they have never been discussed ; and that they would utterly revolutionise society in Great Britain. All that may be no reason for rejecting them ; but it is a reason for saying that the Liberal Party, with its present ideas and present formation, cannot follow the leader who puts them forward, and who insists that the party shall at all events take what he regards as the first steps towards securing them. It is not the English way to travel out of the groove in that style, or to accept at any one's bidding vast proposals, the results of which even those who are to benefit by them have never thought out. We may be wrong in thinking that a peasant with five acres or a yeoman with fifty will wish to let one acre or ten acres by contract, and not by judicial award as to its "fair" value; but we are sure we are right in believing that he will wish that plan to be threshed out before he accepts it, and that, meanwhile, he will adhere to chiefs who only tell him what he knows to be true,—that they will enable him to sell, let, or lease at his own discretion and the purchaser's. If it turns out otherwise, and England, reversing its history, adopts an Agrarian Law, we must all yield ; but the hope of a steady march of all Liberals towards a definite end will be for years to come only a pleasant dream.
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