LORD BRABOURNE.
IT is quite clear that Lord Brabourne has made up his mind never to forgive Mr. Gladstone for having made him only a Peer, when he thought himself entitled to be a Cabinet Minister. Not that Lord Brabourne objects to his peerage. He evidently enjoys it. But what puzzles and annoys him is, that Mr. Gladstone should have shelved him with a peerage. The prize, indeed, was too tempting to be rejected. It would
probably never be offered again ; and meanwhile the Govern- ment was formed, and Mr. Knatchbull-Hugessen was not in it. What was to be done ? Nobody would suspect him of having refused office, and for an aspirant to Cabinet office to find himself suddenly reduced to the rank of a mere private in the Liberal Army was an intolerable idea. Where was he to sit?
Not on any of the benches occupied by the regular supporters of the Government ; for how could he support a Liberal Government which had failed to appreciate his qualities and claims ? On the other hand, how could an Old Whig sit among Radicals below the gangway ? It was a painful dilemma, for a respectable gentleman who industriously prac- tised the rile of a Leader of Opposition in the last Parliament, whenever the Liberal Chiefs happened to be away ; and Mr. Knatchbull-Hugessen solved the problem by becoming Lord Brabourne. The Peers have now accordingly among them a man with a grievance and rumour has it that Lord Bra- bourne has already achieved in that august assembly the reputation of leading, facile princeps, the first of the "two mighty tribes of bores and bored" into which, according to Byron, "Society is now" divided. Last Friday evening Lord Brabourne declared in the House of Lords that "if, in the early part of 1880, he could have been endowed with the spirit of prophecy he certainly should not have been there to address their Lordships to-night." Fancy the shudder which niust have passed through the assembled Peers, as they learnt for the first time that Lord Brabourne's voice would never have been heard among them but for the providential accident of his not being " endowed with the spirit of pro- phecy 1" "For great as was the honour of a seat in their Lordships' House," continued Lord Brabourne,—and, as report avers, amid much half-suppressed laughter from the Peer*— " it was not an honour which he should have ventured to accept, if he could have foreseen that he should feel abso- lutely bound, within so short a time, to oppose the policy of the Minister" who transformed Mr. Knatchbull-Hugessen into Lord Brabourne. It is a pity Lord Brabourne did not explain why he felt "absolutely bound" to take so unusual a course, for an unusual course it certainly is. The Land Act is by no means the only question upon which Lord Brabourne has vehemently attacked "the policy of the Minister" from whom he received the peerage which en- ables him to fling his irresponsible accusations against the party to which he professes to belong. He has been in a state of chronic opposition to Mr. Gladstone almost from the day on which he passed through "the ivory gates" of the House of Lords. The necessity must have been great indeed which could have forced an honourable man to violate so ostenta- tiously all the time-honoured traditions of political life. And we search in vain for any adequate explanation in Lord Bra- bourne's long speech. Let us glance at the ostensible grounds of his quarrel with Mr. Gladstone's Government.
Lord Braboume, forgetting that he was himself a subordi- nate member of the Liberal Government of 1870, stigmatises the Land Act of that year as revolutionary ; and he taunts Mr. Gladstone with having declared that the Act of 1870 would settle, once for all, the Land Question in Ireland. 'Yet it was not Mr. Gladstone who reopened the question. It was reopened by Lord Beaconsfield, when he appointed a Royal Commission to inquire into the Land system of the United Kingdom, including Ireland. But Lord Brabourne apparently has no objection to revolutionary legislation on the subject of land, however frequent, provided only that it does not come from Mr. Gladstone. It is hardly accurate to describe the Land Acts of 1870 and 1881 as "a revolution in the system of land laws every ten or twelve years." Lord Brabourne has no reason whatever to suppose that any. Liberal politician contemplates any revolutionary change in the land laws of Ireland "every ten years." On the other hand, his political experience ought to have taught him that there is no such thing as finality in politics. In systems pf land laws, as in everything else, the "fundamental axiom of 'a mama political faith" is to correct existing laws whenever iiihey are found to violate, justice and to be detri-
mental to the State. But what has Lord Brabourne to say of the scheme of the Conservative party proposed, not "ten or twelve years," but only one year, after Mr. Gladstone's second Land Act ? That scheme—we mean the recommendations of Lord Donoughmore's Committee, which Lord Salisbury has publicly adopted—is incomparably the most revolutionary proposal with respect to land that has ever been made in this country by any responsible politician. It is a proposal to transfer the whole land of Ireland from its present owners to their tenants, on the following terms :—
" That the advances of the State for the purpose of facilitating purchase should be at the rate of 43 per cent., and that the repay- ment should be by annual instalments of three and a half per cent., spreading over sixty-six years ; or of 44 per cent., spreading over forty-six years, whichever term may be selected for the operation."
How this would work, is thus explained :—
" Taking the case of a tenant paying a rent of 450, and agreeing with his landlord for a sale at twenty years' purchase, the tenant would make to the State an annual payment of 485, being 23 10s. per cent., or 440, being 44 per cent. on 41,000. He would also be liable for 45, the additional taxation falling on him as owner. His annual liability would, therefore, be 440, or 445 (as the case might be), or a reduction of 410 or 420 per cent, on his present rent, with the advantage of any possible increment."
But if it be good policy to transfer the land of Ireland to the tenants, by the simple process of State advances equivalent to a reduction of £10 or £20 per cent. of their present rents for a period of forty-six or sixty-six years, "as the case might be," we should like to know how the application of this policy is to be restricted to the case of Ireland ? Why should not the farmers of England and Scotland demand to be made owners, on similar terms, of the land they till ? Both in his Land Legislation of 1870 and i881 Mr. Gladstone strove to correct the Land Laws of Ireland only in so far as they differed in substantial justice from the Land Laws of England and Scot- land. But the legislation now proposed by the Tory Party is just as applicable to England and Scotland as it is to Ireland, and may yet lead to momentous results on this side of St. George's Channel. Thirty years ago, Lord Macaulay expressed his anxiety about Tory legislation, in the following prophetic language :—
"What precisely I am to expect of them I do not know ; whether the most violent opposition to every change, or the most insanely violent change. If I look to their conduct, I find the gravest reasons for apprehending that they may, at one time, resist the most lust demands, and at another time, from the merest caprice, propose the wildest innovations. On the whole, what I do expect is that they will offer a pertinacious, vehement, provoking opposition to safe and reasonable change; and that then, in some moment of fear or caprice, they will bring in and fling on the table, in a fit of desperation or levity, some plan which will loosen the very foundations of Society."
How truly this prediction was fulfilled in the case of Parlia- mentary Reform nobody has acknowledged with such vehe- ment resentment as Lord Salisbury, and now he seems in a fair way himself to eclipse his late chief in the art of violent opposition to salutary change, to be followed by some revolu- tionary mancouvre far beyond the dreams of the wildest Radicalism. He opposes the Arrears Bill, as it left the House of Commons, partly on economic grounds, and partly on the ground of its interfering too much between landlord and tenant ; and, meanwhile, he has himself been stumping the country with a scheme for expropriating Irish landlords, on terms which would make the taxpayers of this country re- sponsible for some £200,000,000.
But Lord Brabourne is blind to all this. He is careful to strain out the Liberal gnat, but has no objection to swallow the Tory camel. Whatever Mr. Gladstone does is revolu- tionary, and violates some "fundamental axiom" in the political creed of Lord Brabourne. Without an acre of land in Ireland, he has ohosen the part of the Aunt Sally of Irish politics, in whose gaping mouth the Irish landlords deposit all the rubbish which they wish to see flung at Mr. Gladstone from the elevated position of a bench in the House of Lords. Lord Brabourne's personal attacks on the Irish Sub-Commis- sioners, on information supplied by anonymous accusers, was as outrageous as it was proved by Lord Carlingford to be unjust. A single specimen will suffice. One of the Sub-Commissioners vilified by Lord Brabourne was a Mr. Davidson. But Mr. Davidson, according to Lord Carlingforcl, "had been a practi- cal farmer, a magistrate for County Down, and a coroner for the county, and had been strongly recommended by all parties in the district,—by Lord Arthur Hill, Mr. Mulholland, and gentlemen of that class." The truth is, Lord Brabourne has mistaken his vocation. He is a charming writer of stories for the nursery, but Nature does not seem to have intended him for the career of a statesman.
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