SIR WILFRID LAWSON AS FANATIC.
SIR WILFRID LAWSON has more than once called him- self a' fanatic,' though his .admirers chiefly insist upon his merits as a maker of political jests. Indeed, these have now attained so considerable a reputation that the Liverpool Argus is publishing a series of elegant extracts from his " gay wisdom," the first number of which has just appeared in a pamphlet form, containing ninety-four passages from his speeches, most of them more or less of the nature of banter, and almost all of them full of fanatical belief in the Per- missive Bill. The selection will tend rather more, we suspect, to raise Sir Wilfrid's reputation for' gay fanaticism' than his reputation for ' gay wisdom.' Now and then, undoubtedly, he is wise ; almost always he is shrewd ; but the characteristic which strikes one most powerfully in running through these passages from his speeches is his half-grotesque and half- fanatical propensity to harp upon the physical conditions of the evil he has to deal with, as if they were the most important of all, indeed the only conditions of any importance. Of course, that is of the very essence of his Permissive Bill ; but then one sees quite clearly that instead of feeling it to be the weakness of his Bill, and the point that most needs apology and defence, he regards it as the strong point of his Bill. Thus he says quite calmly in one place that since even an hereditary drunkard cannot get drunk without drink, " it is the drink, and not the fact of a man being an hereditary drunkard that does it." He.might just as well say that as an hereditary thief cannot get into people's houses without burglar's tools, it is the centre- bit and the false keys, and not the fact of his being a thief by nature and training, that does it. No one can read Sir Wilfrid's arguments on the liquor question without being struck with the fact that his enthusiasm for getting rid of the physical opportunity of drunkenness, is very much due to his hopelessness of getting rid of any of the moral conditions which make the drunkard ; and that so far as ho is a fanatic, he is a fanatic, as it were, through his scepticism,—through his sense of the grotesque and hopeless character of the effort to get at any deeper or more radical cure. Listen to his depreciation of education as a remedy :—" I doubt if primary education is likely to give self-control, for it seems to me as if some of the School Boards required a little self-control. Let your educa- tion be as good as it may, it must take years before children grow up. When we get to that period,—when we get all educated not to drink,—we shall not want a Permissive Bill, and I don't even know whether we shall want a House of Commons. But until that time comes, we ought to remove temptation." Evidently, Sir Wilfrid thinks, the Millennium will come as soon as the eradication of drunkenness through any moral causes ; but if you could only get rid of the drink itself, then you might physically extirpate drunkenness. So, again, he is quite tender to the drunkards, and very severe upon a Birmingham constable who had called them " poor brutes." " He (Sir Wilfrid) did not like to call his fellow-creatures brutes. He was not going to excul- pate them for getting drunk. It was sin, it was wrong, a man ought not to do it ; but while he blamed. he also pitied them ; and it was not the poor drunkard he wished to have a fresh law to punish, but it was the man who made him drunk he wished to get hold of." We should have supposed that it was the poor drunkard who made himself drunk. Certainly, it could not be done without his consent. But Sir Wilfrid sees no real help in the matter except the physical expedient of putting intoxicating liquids out of the way; and BO he husbands his wrath for the man who supplies them, not for the man who demands them. So, again, he maintains that prosperity and high wages only increase the evil, so long as drink is to be had. " High wages have not been a blessing but a curse to the homes of the working-men. Why ? Because those high wages have gone, when earned, into the pockets of the pub- licans,—men whom the Government has licensed to collect them from the working-men. I only read yesterday of some gentleman who employed hundreds and hundreds of working-men—in Wales, I think it was—and who said ! Ah, if I marked all the sovereigns I pay every Saturday night, I know I could collect a third part of them next week from the public-houses 1' That seems to me a very melancholy way in which the people of this country expend their earnings„ and I am confident you will never have any change in the right direction, until that state of things is radically altered." And to alter it, Sir Wilfrid thinks the only way is to attempt to reach, not the character of the people, but the urgency of their "temptations." Ile quotes the story of the Irishman who first made it his excuse for drinking that he had a wife with whom he lived unhappily, and afterwards, that that wife was dead, and that " he never could bear prosperity,"— arguing from it that adversity and prosperity alike will only be new excuses, for drinking till you make drinking physically difficult or impossible, by more or less abolishing the sale of drink. Indeed, Sir Wilfrid calls drunken men the "articles manufactured and turned out by publicans,"—so utter a fatalist is he in relation to any possibility or chance of dimin- ishing the inclination to drink without diminishing the oppor- tunity for buying drink.
Reading all these utterances of Sir Wilfrid Lawson's, we certainly get much less idea of his gaiety than of his fana- ticism, though we quite admit that the extreme grotesqueness which Sir Wilfrid evidently sees in the notion of any moral remedy, is partly at the root of that fanaticism. He even makes fun of the temperance movements which are not move- ments for total abstinence, and represents them as only effec- tive for their purpose in the same way in which the drunkard was effective, who accompanied his teetotal brother in order to act as the " awful example." But evidently teetotalism itself means very little to him, without a measure to extinguish the opportunity for breaking the pledge. The very first joke in this series of Sir Wilfrid's gay oracles is at the expense of a tee- totaller who was taken up for being drunk and disorderly,'—and naturally so, for if teetotalism could, in his estimation, stand and spread without the Permissive Bill, he would devote his energies to the Teetotal movement, and not to his favourite political aid to teetotalism. But what surprises one in a man of Sir Wilfrid Lawson's shrewdness and knowledge of the world is that he should not see how hopeless the task •is of cutting off people who have a will to drink from the way of drinking. Yet that is just what does not seem to him half so hopeless as cutting them off from the will to drink. To establish a permanent physical obstruction between intemperate men's will and their way, seems to him easy com- pared with the moral miracle of making intemperate men temperate, or even helping children, who are neither as yet, to grow up in temperate habits. It is, however, somewhat remarkable that the kind of humour visible in all 'Sir Wilfrid Lawson's speeches should exist in one who, on a single point at all events, is, as he himself confesses, a fanatic. The explanation seems to be that Sir Wilfrid Lawson's fanaticism is not the fanaticism of a single idea run mad, but rather of the reaction against a great many ideas which have lost their hold on him, so that to this simple philanthropy, as he thinks it, which promises great moral results through a physical means, ho clings as to the last great pro- mise of help and regeneration to mankind. Sir Wilfrid is a jester at most things. He is not a great believer in patriotism. Patriotism seems, we imagine, to him a sort of selfishness. He laughs at the Army, thinks its autumn manoauvres by far its most serious occupation, and asserts that our most formidable invader is likely to he the Colorado beetle. He laughs at the Navy, and the difficulty of keeping the great ships afloat. He even makes light of education. He is not much impressed with our Colonial Empire, and from time to time ridicules the effort to keep it together,—describing, for instance, the results of the Ashantee war as summed up in a treaty and an old umbrella, of which the old umbrella is the more valuable of the two. There is hardly a public movement of any kind in which be has much hope. To his imagination, all the improving agencies at work appear in very ambiguous shapes, and excite more hie amusement than his respect. His mind dwarfs the significance of great moral ideas. But he can grasp firmly the enormous evil of drunkenness, and to him there seems a hope, not in- deed of making men unwilling to drink, but of rendering them unable, to do so by shutting up the public-houses. And to that last distant promise of moral regeneration for mankind he clings with the tenacity of a fanatic who has almost ceased to expect anything from causes more spiritual and subtle. This, at least, is how we explain the curious conjunction in Sir Wilfrid Lawson's jokes of the light humour of the jester and the one-idead prepossession of the fanatic.
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