SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT, BY MR. J. J. HOLDEN.
MR. HOLDEN has given the contest at Southport a kind of interest which is independent alike of the merits of the candidates and the result of the voting. It is a very great triumph to make the literature of a by- election amusing to wearied politicians living in London, under a heat-wave, in the last week of August. But it is nothing less than this that Mr. Holden has done. His letter to Sir George Pilkington is a wonderful example of innocent faith in the Radical party, resting apparently on no better foundation than his own dislike of the Unionist party. It is this that makes it so attractive. Mr. Holden is very far from being a novice in politics. In years, at all events, he has long attained his majority. But in point of convictions he is as childlike as the day he left off petticoats. His wishes are still the measure of his beliefs. When he has discovered what it is that he wants, he feels no doubt that it is what is going to happen. "Liberal Unionists," he tells his correspondent, "are sup- posed to be Liberals on all subjects except Home-rule for Ireland." Consequently, Home-rule for Ireland being well out of the way—" Home-rule all round" has either no terrors for Mr. Holden or it has not yet come under his notice— it is the business of Liberal Unionists to promote Liberal legislation. Any hopes they may have cherished of getting this from the present Govern- ment have long since proved vain. Liberal measures can only be had from Liberal men. In Sir Herbert Naylor-Leyland the Liberal Unionists of Southport have a Liberal man, and if by returning him they strengthen Sir William Harcourt's hands, they may fairly look to get the legislation they wish for in the next Parliament. In this Parliament, of course, improvements are hopeless. Liberal Unionists must continue to chafe under the Tory tyranny to which the passing needs of the Home-rule controversy forced them for the time to submit. But in the next Parliament, with Home-rule for Ireland finally laid on the shelf, and Sir William Harcourt once more on the Treasury Bench, all will go right. The seven lean years of Tory rule will be at an end, and Liberal Unionists will once more bask in the light and warmth of the legis- lation they love.
When we turn to the details of the picture which Mr. Holden paints in such glowing colours the interest of his letter increases. Every fresh sentence in it is a fresh surprise. That he is "dissatisfied with the legislation of the present Government " we can well understand. We should describe Mr. Holden's political creed as a mosaic forveod from the views of Lord Wemyss and Sir Ellis Ashmead- Bartlett with just dash of Mr. Labouchere, and, as may be supposed, he has little chance of getting legislation of the kind he wishes so long as Lord Salisbury is in office Naturally, therefore, his eye turns to Sir William Harcourt. He has none of the follies affected by Mr. Morley or Mr. Asquith. He is just a plain honest Liberal, with no weakness either for Ireland or Socialism The comparison between Sir William Harcourt as be appears to Mr. Holden and Sir William Harcourt as he appears to the rest of the world—himself included—ie full of interest. First of all, Mr. Holden looks to hie idol to lighten the fiscal burdens of the middle classes, Ignorant observers have regarded Sir William Harcourt as the prophet of democratic finance. They have asse ciated his return to power with the reduction of indirect taxation and the long-delayed emancipation of the break. fast-table. Mr. Holden knows better. He is anxious to turn out the present Government because they have had no mercy on the payer of Income-tax. It is he who "has a right to expect a reduction when there is a surplus is the Revenue " ; and as it is to Sir William Harcourt!' Death-duties that all the recent surpluses are due, it is plain that he is marked out by destiny to make a righteous distribution of what he has given. "Harcourt and twopence off the Income-tax" is the obvious Radical cry of the future.
But this is only a part of the work that lies before the Liberal leader. Mr. Holden confesses that "since the passing of the Workmen's Compensation Act" he "has been entirely out of sympathy with the Conservative party." By that measure they have "needlessly harassed employers of labour." Now it is part of the A B C of politics that if the Conservatives do one thing, the Liberals may be trusted to do just the opposite. If the Conservatives harass employers, the Liberals will leave them alone. If the Conservatives make them pay compensation for acci- dents to their workmen, the Liberals will transfer the liability to the rates or to the Consolidated Fund. This, at least, is Mr. Holden's simple creed, and he is equally sanguine as to what a Liberal Government will do in the matter of factory legislation. The cotton trade of Lancashire is now threatened by a Bill to prevent young persons under the age of fifteen being employed in factories. At the first blush this might seem a Radical measure, but Mr. Holden knows better. It is really all of a piece with the latest Conservative legislation. 'Look at Gorst,' we can imagine him saying, with his fads about keeping children longer at school. He is just the man to want to keep children out of the mills till they are fifteen, and yet he is allowed to remain in the Govern- ment. Sir William Harcourt will stand no nonsense of this sort. He knows the real meaning of "Train up a child in the way he should go," and I can trust him not to be a party to keeping a child out of the way he should go because he is not yet fifteen.' It was to be expected that a politician who thinks that a Liberal victory wil give a death-blow to Workmen's Compensation Acts, and to attempts to postpone the age at which children are allowed to go to work, should also regard Sir William Hat court as the destined exponent of a spirited foreign policy. Trade, says Mr. Holden, "which means the very existence of this country," is not only "harassed at home," but "not sufficiently fostered abroad." Good markets have been closed to us in Madagascar, Sista and Turkey, and it is Lord Salisbury's want of resolution that is the cause. There was a, time, probably, when Mr Holden looked to Mr. Chamberlain to keep markets °per for him, but now that he has proved no better than hu colleagues those who once believed in him have been drives to look to Sir W. Harcourt as the one man whom thet can trust in the matter of foreign policy. What a grand chapter, or series of chapters, he would have added to OUT annals had he been Minister for the last three years Their very headings are like the sound of a trumpet,– The Siamese War, The Tunis War, The Madagascat War, The War with France and Russia. We should be sorry to say anything to dash Mr. Holden's satisfa tion, but we think that he must have forgotten two thing This spirited foreign policy would have greatly delayed th reduction of the Income-tax, and, apart from this, er question whether Mr. Holden has not invested his ne leader with a more bellicose temperament than reallY belongs to him. Is the Liberal ideal, as Sir W. Hat ret is assumed to understand it, so completely a matter "Cannon to right of them, cannon to left of them " ? this picture of Sir William, with a bale of cotton one hand and a revolver in the other, quite true to ;ure and history ? We admit that the result of the ithport election goes to show that a good many Liberal ionists besides Mr. Holden have recognised the accuracy the portrait. But we find it hard to accept it for our- res, or to see in Sir William Harcourt the ultimate ,cessor to Lord Palmerston.
Mere is one element, however, in this incident which es us real satisfaction. The hopes which Mr. Holden ; built on the return of the Liberals to office, with Sir ,lliam Harcourt at their head, seem to us wildly possible. But the fact that he entertains them has a nificance of its own. It indicates a reversion—partial, nay be, at present, but likely to grow as time goes on o the old way of regarding political parties. That y was simply to see in one the complement of the ler, to look to the party out of office to give what the rty in office had refused. It is not a high conception of rty politics, but in practice it is not an unwholesome t. It implies that those whom it influences no longer iociate the Liberal party with revolutionary social loges, that they see no very material difference tween one party and the other, that they are ite willing to give each a trial according as the Ley takes them. We are sorry that Mr. Holden's Lmple should have been so largely followed last ednesday, but we see in the facility with which the ;version of certain Liberal Unionists has been accom- shed a guarantee against heroic legislation when the )erals are next in power. They will have been placed office by men who want nothing very startling, and o, if they get something more startling than they want, be quite ready to give the Conservatives another turn.
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