MR. DISRAELI AT GLASGOW.
WHEN, on one occasion, the late Emperor of the French was amongst the working-classes at Auxerre, if we remem- ber rightly, he said that he " breathed freely," explaining that it was because he felt himself at the very heart of France. We seem to recognise something of the same disposition to breathe freely on the part of the Conservative leader when he addresses his Conservative allies in North Britain. It was at the Edinburgh banquet, just six years ago, in October, 1867, that he explained so quaintly how he had educated his party, in spite of the can- didly admitted difficulties of that process :—" It is a large party, and it requires its attention to be called to questions of this kind with some pressure." At Glasgow last week he first confided to a similar dinner audience that, so far from having alienated his party by this pedagogic process, he had never sought to give up his leadership without being pressed to re- main, and having even more emphatic confidence and kindness shown him by his followers than before. And then, in addressing the working-men, he ventured to enter into what the Christian Fathers called an " apologetic " exegesis of his unfortunate Bath letter, of which most people would have supposed that, consider- ing its disastrous immediate results, and the dismay with which his party received it, the least said would have been soonest mended. Clearly Mr. Disraeli feels towards the Scotch Con- servatives much as St. Paul felt towards the Corinthians when he said, " 0 ye Corinthians, our mouth is open unto you, our heart is enlarged." Mr. Disraeli is never so confidential, never so much inclined to let us all into the dialogue of his own mind with himself, as when he addresses the Conservatives of North Britain. His mouth is open freely unto the men of Lancashire ; but his heart is not enlarged to them as it is when he finds himself North of the Tweed. He hardly ventures to divulge the delicate little seorets of party life, and to try to place his own blunderings in a more attractive light, till he is addressing the Athens and Corinth, of, the North. It is a great tribute to the intelligence of the scotch Tories, that Mr. Disraeli evidently finds his own self-relpect deeply involved in standing well with them, and that he would fain,put even his mistakes in a softened light when he comes face to face with them. He is conscious, we imagine, that Scotch Conservatives are like himself, Conservatives with a fundamental doubt at the bottom, Conservatives snatched as a brand from the burning, Conservatives in spite of their intellects, Conservativp of the wistful kind who know, like Sir Walter Scott, that the moulds of the present cannot conform to the moulds of the past, though they yearn after the past with irrepressible yearning nevertheless. Mr. Disraeli sees that in Scotland the Conservatives are few and the Liberals many ; and that the few Conservatives there are, are of the class who do not want " educating," who do not need " some pressure " to draw their attention to the necessity for great concessions to the spirit of improvement, and therefore his soul cleaves unto them ; and he loves to whisper in their ears the tree explanation of the anomalies of his own tactics, and to plead with a pathetic earnestness for a genial view of his mistakes. If he cannot paint his political acts as plausible, and his aims as sober and rational, amongst his Scotch partisans, he feels that he can do so nowhere to his own real satisfaction. If Conservatism in Scotland misinterprets him, how shall he ever be satisfied with himself ?
That is, we take it, the true account of the singularly eager and careful explanations which Mr. Disraeli has now for the second time given in Scotland of his party tactics, and of the sobered and intellectualised tone of his Toryism when he is appealing to the shrewd sagacity of the North. But if his apology for the Bath letter was really successful in Glasgow, it must rather have been because his audience was anxious for an excuse for forgiving or extenuating the error, than because he succeded in palliating it. For example, he began by substituting for his charge against the Government that it had been a "plundering " Government, the bigger, vaguer, less significant phrase, that it had sanctioned " spoliation " and " amercement," asking if the Irish Church and Land measures were not avowedly measures of "spoliation" and "amercement." But the awkward part of this justification was that it was an attack, not on the Ministry, but on the country. It was the country that returned a vast majority pledged to the policy of "spoliation " and " amercement," especially the former. Yet Mr. Disraeli is set upon vindicating the people at the ex- pense of the ruling party. He maintains that if the Govern- ment have really deserved all the honour they profess to have deserved, then their justification amounts "to a slur on the character of the people of this kingdom," since by their great desert they have earned nothing but unpopularity. Well, but Mr. Disraeli's "plundering " charge, as he himself justifies it by reference to the Irish Church and Land measures, is a very much more direct slur of the same kind. The so-called " spoliation " was sanctioned at every hustings which sent a Liberal to the House of Commons of 1868 ; and if that be identical with " plundering," then " the people of this king- dom " have the slur cast directly upon them that they more than sanctioned, that they demanded, an act of plunder. If the Bath letter was, as Mr. Disraeli now says, " severely accurate," it was an indictment of the vast majority of the people of this kingdom for approving and even instigating robbery. And if it be a slur on " the people of this kingdom" to accuse them indirectly of ingratitude and fickleness, what is it to accuse them, as Mr. Disraeli does, directly, of insisting on robbery, of returning a Parliament pledged to plunder
But conscious of his weakness in this respect, Mr. Disraeli goes on to justify the charge of ' plunder' by reference to the proposals of the Endowed Schools' Commission, " which has dealt with the ancient endowments of this country in so ruthless a manner, that Parliament has been frequently called on to interfere, and has addressed the Crown to arrest their propositions." Well, but there, again, Mr. Disraeli casts a slur on the people, so far as the House of Commons represents the people ; for it so happens that the House of Commons has never addressed the Crown to " arrest their propositions." When asked to do so, it has re- fused, and the people have supported it in refusing. The House of Lords, which is not representative, but privileged, has been the only House which has thus consented to interfere. Thus, even in this feeble attempt to support his accusation by petty supplementary evidence, Mr. Disraeli is left between the horns of the very dilemma which he had to force on the Government. Either he must acquit the Administration of deliberate "plundering," or he must " indict " the people. Perhaps it is taking a rhetorical attempt to whitewash his own imprudent and unmeaning violence too gravely, to follow him thus into detail. But as he pretends that his Bath letter was "severely accurate," one is bound to treat it seriously. And this, at least, is certain :—either the people are not worthy of the respect he so strenuously professes for them, or he was playing a foolish and violent part when he accused the Government of spoliation ; and still more so, when he substituted for the vague Parlia- mentary word " spoliation,"—which is a word capable of various nuances,—the homely word "plunder," which admits only of one interpretation.
It is hardly worth while to follow Mr. Disraeli into his justification of the less serious accusation that the Government has harassed every trade and vexed every profession in the country by its tormenting proposals or administratibe methods. For it is obvious that every change which involves restriction is, to somebody or other, of a vexatious character. When Mr. Disraeli himself advocated the Ten Hours' Bill, of which he is never weary of boasting, he harassed the manufacturer ; and when he gave his qualified support to the Mines' Regulation Bill, he vexed the mine-owners. His proposed cry, Sanitas sanitatum, omnia sanitas, if worked out with anything like logic, would involve more harassment and more vexation to provincial
interests, than the present Government has caused by all its restrictions on licensed victuallers and all its reorganisation of the the Army and Navy put together. If you will not allow farmers to employ little boys until they have got a certificate of attendance at school, you harass the farmers ; if you insist on insulating cattle disease, you worry the graziers ; and if you enforce the Dog-licence, as Mr. Ward Hunt did, at the time he reduced it, against the shepherds, you aggrieve the shepherds. This part of Mr. Disraeli's charge only means either that the present Government has been strenuous where his own was preoccupied or languid, or that in particular cases, perhaps one or two at most, its policy has been mistaken. Certainly for every annoyance of this kind which Ministers have given needlessly, there are at least as many more which, if time and energy had served them, they would have done well to give, could they have counted on success. For example, the practice of partly paying the agricultural labourer in cider and other doles,—a most pernicious one,— it would have been well to abolish, had it been possible. But unquestionably this would have harassed the farmer, who is under Mr. Disraeli's special protection, far more than Mr. Lowe's hastily formed and as hastily withdrawn sug- gestion of doing away with the " exemptions " from the horse-tax.
But Mr. Disraeli's chief accusation against the Government is one founded on a most serious mis-statement. He says that the Government policy for Ireland has not only been a failure, but that it has been the direct cause of the existing difficulties of the " veiled rebellion,"—we suppose he refers to Home Rule,—which is now prevalent there. And he says this is due to the Prime Minister's doctrine that Ireland ought to be governed according to Irish ideas, of which Home Rale is the logical consequence. Mr. Gladstone never proclaimed any such doctrine, and Mr. Disraeli knows well that when charged with it, Mr. Gladstone has time after time explained what doctrine he did proclaim,—one directly at issue with it on the critical point of all. He said that in matters not directly affecting Imperial interests and principles, the true policy both for Ireland and Scotland was to consult local wishes. Can any matter be conceived which more directly affects Imperial interests than the dissolution of the legislative union, and the creation of a weak and indeed impossible federal bond instead? If it can be argued for a moment that the senior partner in a firm is not affected by the junior partner's wish to turn the partnership into a sort of alliance between, in some degree, independent firms, then, and then only, can Mr. Glad- stone's doctrine be made to yield up Mr. Disraeli's results. And as a matter of fact, Mr. Gladstone's principle has had nothing to do with the Home-Rule agitation, which is only a milder form of a movement that has been going on in a much more formid- able shape during the whole of this century. If the Home- Rule movement be " veiled rebellion," we may be extremely thankful for the veil,—which appears altogether to take the dangerous edge off rebellion. There is no legal or constitutional reason why the Irish should not agitate for Home Rule, no more than there is why the English should not advocate the abolition of the Lord-Lieutenancy and a closer administrative union with England. Both are perfectly constitutional agita- tions. Englishmen have a most important voice in both ques- tions, as they affect our interests quite as much as those of Ireland. But if 'veiled rebellion' means peaceful agitation for radical changes, there is plenty of veiled rebellion in England as well as Ireland, and plenty which no man in his senses would ever think of extinguishing by force.
With what Mr. Disraeli says of the danger of constantly doctoring the Constitution, of living with your hand on its pulse, and always suggesting some little tonic or other medicine to make it work better, we very largely agree,—only it does not apply at all, and Mr. Disraeli did not even venture to pretend that it did apply,—to the immediate extension of household suffrage to the counties. That is a measure which might be adopted without making any large draught on Parliamentary time, without any consultation among the leading political physi- cians, and without any tendency to increase the valetudinarian view which doctrinaires are so apt to take of our organic laws. It is a measure of simple justice, now that the agricultural labourers have shown that they are awake to the duty of assert- ing their place in the Constitution, and that they have interests to protect, which none who are not chosen by their votes are really qualified to protect for them. It is a good omen for the Tory party that Mr. Disraeli did not venture to depre- cate this, but that all his anxieties were reserved for any attempt to take up at present the very big and difficult ques- tion of the redistribution of seats. Let us hope that the great political schoolmaster sees his way to educating his party on this subject also ; and then all that Mr. Disraeli's speech will come to, is,—that it is the Tory policy to avoid giving offence to any powerful interest, and the Liberal policy to do justice, whether you give offence by so doing, or not.
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