LORD SALISBURY ON THE CHANGE IN POLITICS.
THE greater part of Lord Salisbury's speech last week, at Hackney, was too violent and too weak to interest the English public for eight days together. But he made one remark which was interesting and partially true, though much truer, as it seems to us, in relation to his own party than it was in relation to the Liberal party, to which exclusively it was applied. He said :—"Few phenomena of recent times are more remarkable than the strong Conservative movement which has manifested itself in the constituencies which com- pose this metropolis. I can remember the time when the idea that the City of London would return Conservatives by a majority which would enable them to command the whole four seats, that the City of Westminster would return two Conser- vative Members, and that Surrey would be entirely occupied by Conservative Members,—when such an idea would have been held to be absolutely chimerical. It is not, there- fore, wholly out of our hope, not wholly beyond realisation, that, with good organisation, the borough of Hackney may yield to the same influence, and in sympathy with the same motives. What are those motives? Is it a mere question of conviction—that men have simply changed their minds ? Not wholly so. I attribute the phenomenon mainly to another cause. It is not that the men who come to us have changed their minds, but that the Liberal party has changed its principles. It is a very common incident in the commercial life of the City in which we are now stand- ing, that an old firm, whose name carries respect upon every Exchange, falls into new hands, who involve themselves in speculation far apart from the traditions of sound business with which the name of that firm was previously connected. That happens not unfrequently in the City, and when it happens, the result is that the customers, though they are somewhat slow to find out that the change has taken place, leave the firm. Much the same is taking place with respect to the Liberal party. Nothing but the name connects the party led by Lord Palmerston with the party led by Mr. Gladstone. With respect to the questions which are mainly prominent in the present day, the Liberals of old time were, at all events, care- ful and respectful of individual property, but the Radical writers who are the motive-power of the present Liberal party lose no opportunity of treating individual property with con- tempt. Well, I think that that discovery will make its way. People will find out more and more that the Liberal party which they admired is not the Liberal party which exists at the present time, that the principles which in their view they may have followed are not the prin- ciples upheld by the Radical party at the present day." Now, to a certain extent, that is true. There is no doubt that questions have been raised since Mr. Gladstone took power in 1869, some of which were raised indeed under Old Whig Administrations, but none of which were, or could then have
been, dealt with on large principles, as they have been dealt with in more recent times. Lord John Russell raised two of them,—that of the Establishment of the Church of the Minority in Ireland, under the shape of the Appropriation Clause, and that of Education, when he proposed the first Privy Council grants to national and voluntary schools ; and Sir Robert Peel made a courageous effort to give a national extension to the scheme for the education of the people ; but Lord John Russell was defeated on the Irish Church, and the very little that was done for popular education was purely tentative, till the extension of the suffrage to the householders of the boroughs gave the Government power to deal with popular questions on genuinely popular principles. There- fore, though it is by no means true that " nothing but the name " connects the Liberal party under Mr. Gladstone with the Liberal party under Lord John Russell and Lord Mel- bourne,—Lord Palmerston was always known and admitted to be a mean between Whig and Conservative, — it is perfectly true that the great extension which the Con- servatives themselves gave to the constituencies of this country in 1867 has operated, and necessarily operated, to widen the base of Liberalism, and to make it something different from the mere Whiggism of the ten years which followed the great Reform Act. That is true, we say, and Lord Salisbury has his own leader primarily to thank for it. But it is also true that the change which that leader introduced, altered the base of the Conservative party far more than it widened the base of the Liberal party. Mr. Disraeli always declared that he aimed at popularising Con- servatism. We have recently had much experience of what that process of popularising Conservatism meant., and no one has worked so hard at it as Lord Salisbury. It means, we are told, appealing to the national imagination of Englishmen, kind- ling them with great historic ideas, taking up in the nineteenth century the foreign policy conceived by the Cecils in the six- teenth century, teaching the English people to dream of shifting the centre of gravity of the Empire to the East, flourishing our Indian regiments in the face of Europe, evolving an Empress out of a Queen, and finally, concealing from Parliament the plot for the invasion of Afghanistan. All this has come of giving to Conservatism the popular extension required by the extension of the constituencies. And in all this change of base Lord Salisbury has been, if not the mainspring, at least the most powerful instrument. If there is nothing but the name to connect the Liberalism of Lord Palmerston with the Liberalism of Mr. Gladstone, is there even so much as the name to connect the Conservatism of Sir Robert Peel and the late Lord Derby with the popular Toryism of Lord Beacons- field and Lord Salisbury ? We now habitually hear the old name " Conservative " suppressed, and the new one of " Tory," which best describes the new party, substi- tuted for it. When we speak of Sir Stafford North- cote, perhaps we may still speak of his Conservatism, for we feel that in exchanging it for Toryism, he is carried whither he would not. But when we speak of Lord Beacons- field and Lord Salisbury, the mind involuntarily chooses the word " Tory." Conservatism not only fails to describe their policy, but positively misdescribes it, suggests a totally mis- leading class of ideas.
Now, we do not say this from the very idle desire to meet taunt with taunt. We say it partly because we believe that this wider basis of the suffrage really explains and partly ex- cuses the broader and coarser tone of political partisanship which has marked recent politics,—of which tone Lord Salisbury him- self gives us by far the best example, especially in the speech in which he accuses the Liberals of desiring to prolong Irish turbulence and agitation, in order that their new land Bill may not " fall very flat,"—and partly because it is really of importance for all parties to recollect that they must not only adopt a sound policy, but a policy which, to the great majority of very inexperienced politicians, shall seem sound. It was, no doubt, because the showy policy of Lord Beaconsfield did seem sound to the greater number of the electors of the City and of Westminster, and of the villa-residents of Surrey, that so remarkable a Tory victory was there obtained. It was because Mr. Gladstone's policy seemed sound to the great majority of the great Northern constituencies, and to most of the boroughs of the South, that Mr. Gladstone got so notable a victory in the United Kingdom. And it was because both Liberals and Tories felt that to be understood at all, they must make their words very distinct, very emphatic, and of a kind to appeal to the least educated of political judgments, that both parties discrimi-
nated their policy so sharply, and expressed it in such plain and pungent words. It is of no use to give books written in recondite words, on recondite subjects, to children who have
only just learned to read. It is of no use drawing fine distinctions, and marking delicate shades of political meaning, to constituencies who have only just learned the alphabet of politics. The result of Mr. Disraeli's latest Reform Act has been, and must have been, a certain suppression of the finer shades of political difference, a certain stronger and harder de- lineation of all political thought, and a certain accent of otherwise regrettable and rather novel intensity in the character of the mutual party strictures. That is the natural result of getting a larger democratic basis for your representative institutions. And though it is a great set-off against the advantages of that demo- cratic basis, it is a necessary set-off. We cannot combine the ad- vantages of low pressure with the advantages of high pressure. We cannot secure both the ascendancy of what may be called low-pressure statesmen and the ascendancy of high-pressure statesmen. If we are to command the confidence of vast crowds, we must have some means of getting at them adapted to the political imagination of large crowds. Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Salisbury have seen this perfectly, and have adopted what may be called the gaudy style of political art, in order to attain their end. Mr. Gladstone has seen this, and has couched his appeal in tones which startle and rouse the con- science, and has in that way attained still more perfectly the same end. And it will be a condition of future success in politics, that in some way or other, not necessarily that either of Lord Beaconsfield or Mr. Gladstone, but yet in some way of their own, the successful statesmen of the future shall catch the ear of the multitude, as it is not often given to ordinary politicians to catch it.
There is, as is here admitted, a certain loss as well as gain in the result. It is a loss that such statesmen as the late Sir Robert Peel or the late Sir George Cornewall Lewis, are hardly likely in future ever to come to the top of our great Parties. We shall always find the more brilliant and audible man taking preced- ence for the future of the merely sagacious and sober man.
But then we must not forget the gain, in reckoning the loss. The gain is this, that when a great thing has to be done—even in the face of mighty stumbling-blocks and prejudices, whether due to class-feeling or historical complications,—it can be done. The Education Act of 1870, which is already doing such mighty work, could never have been carried at all without a great popular force behind the Legislature. And this is equally true of a great foreign policy. We do not think Lord Beaconsfield's foreign policy a great one, but a very small one, though there were some strokes of genius in it. But un- doubtedly Lord Beaconsfield would never have ventured to do even what he did, if he had not felt persuaded,—falsely per- suaded, as it proved,—that he had behind him a mighty popular force, to which he could safely appeal. And it is the same now in relation to Ireland. There is no hope of a suc- cessful Irish policy without vast courage. And the courage which such a policy will require would be impossible to any Government which rested on a really restricted suffrage. Lord Salisbury is quite right. We are paying a price, and perhaps a considerable price, for the new forces at work in politics. Still, no one, we think, who knows what there is to be done, or how difficult some of the tasks are, would hesitate to say that, though the price we give for these new forces is a great one, it is not a costly one, not one the sacrifice involved in which is comparable to the advantages thereby obtained.
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