LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL'S TESTAMENT.
TORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL has wisely guarded his I fame as a statesman against the various risks to which -his projected journey to India might otherwise Shave exposed it, by confiding to the Pall Mall Gazette, on the eve of his departure, his view of the true development of Tory Democracy under the enlarged franchise which he has done so much to fence upon the acceptance of his leaders. This political testa- ment which was published on Thursday will doubtless be illustrated in the future by the testator himself, if he returns, as we all hope he may, in perfect health, to contest one of those great constituencies which the Reform Bills of the present Government are to establish. But if anything should happen in the meantime to divert Lord Randolph's energies from political life, the Tory leaders will no doubt anxiously consult the record of his last political advice to their party, whenever they see any signs of losing the breath of the aura popularis, and being becalmed in the high latitudes and frigid zone of Conservative traditions.
Lord Randolph's first suggestion is that the Tories ought to treat the basis of Local and Municipal Government in the same generous way in which they have been compelled to treat the basis of Parliamentary Government. In other words, they should show unlimited confidence in the people, and spare neither pains nor money to achieve the solution of popular questions in a thoroughly popular way. As an illus- tration of what he means, he mentions the subject of the proper housing of the people ; and says, in speaking of the Tories :—" We are not hampered with any blind devotion to imaginary dictates of political economy, as the Whigs are ; and we should not shrink from a large invest- ment of public money, and a large amount of State intervention, for the benefit of the masses of the people." To this frank remark the Pall Mall interviewer very naturally replied that such a policy would take money, whereupon Lord Randolph opened his heart still more freely, and answered, —" Decidedly it would ; and you must be prepared before many years are over—especially if the Pall Mall Gazelle has its way about the Navy—to see the expenditure of the country up to £100,000,000. That is a serious outlook. But we Tories have a great card in reserve in the Fair-trade movement.
No one need think of putting a tax on corn and a duty on imported manufactures just by themselves ; Fair- trade would be part of a general revision of the tariff in the interests of the revenue. What, for instance, if we greatly reduced the duty on tobacco and on tea ? That and things like that would cover a multitude of new duties. The reductions would be immensely popular with the working classes, and would, moreover, I do not doubt, bring in an increase of revenue itself." In other words, Fair-trade is to be interpreted as meaning expressly protection on things which are produced in this country, in the first place; and, in the second place, this is to be rendered palatable to the consumers at large, by reducing largely the duties on articles not produced in this country, like tobacco and tea, wherever these are freely used by the working-classes. 'Only make the luxuries of the working-classes cheap enough, and you may safely make their necessaries dear,' appears to be this great statesman's notion of true financial wisdom. You may safely tax the working-men's bread, if you give them cheap tobacco ; you may safely tax their meat, if you give them cheap tea. We only wonder he did not add that you may safely tax their clothes, if you give them cheap gin and whiskey. Lord Randolph's notion of greatly increasing the revenue by taking off duties which are not protective, and adding freely to duties which are, is one of those delightfully frank confessions of the true designs of the Fair-traders which, for- tunately for the public, dispel from time to time the mystery in whieh the designs of Mr. Ecroyd and Mr. Lowther are some- times veiled. Sir Stafford Northeote will be startled to find that one of the most influential of his followers is likely to be the first to urge him to raise the taxation to £100,000,000, in order to encourage the farmers to grow wheat where it is least profitable to grow it, manufacturers to charge high prices for what they can now sell profitably at low, and the labourers to economise in bread and meat what they spend in cigars and coffee. We have always held that Lord Randolph Churchill's ignorance and rashness are almost unlimited ; but this latest revelation of his views raises our impression of these qualities to the point of sublimity. If he really thinks that •by artificially stimulating the birth of all sorts of producing operations, carried on at a much greater cost in this country than they could be carried on elsewhere, he will increase the prosperity of the people of this country, he is quite capable of believing that by taxing knowledge he will stimu- late study, or that by taxing locomotives he will stimulate locomotion. His notion, too, that by this ruinous process of
interfering with nature, by putting an embargo on the use of her richest energies there, in order to stimulate the use of her poorest energies here, he will make the English people rich enough to build any number of destructive fleets, and to find the poor in comfortable houses at no sacrifice to themselves, he is one of those many wiseacres who are always proposing plans for getting more hay out of a field than there is grass in it, by the happy device of first subtracting a good bit from the amount actually there. Lord Randolph Churchill is very anxious to bribe the Democracy into good- humour with the Tories ; but his happy device for doing so, by making the whole nation poorer in order that there may be more to spend on the poorest class, is one of which he himself must monopolise the credit.
And not only is he going to provide funds for bribing the poor by throwing the commerce of the country into confusion, but he proposes by the same happy means to obtain a great fund for bribing the Irish also into complacency. "What about Ireland I" asked the Pall Mall's interviewer. "Is there a lesson to be learnt from Bismarck there also I"—" If a large expenditure of money by the .State on public works is Bis- marckian, yes" replied the dauntless statesman. "That would be an immediate and an enormous measure of pacification." Is that money also to come out of the British taxpayer's pocket, or is Ireland to be encouraged by heavy taxation on her imports to produce for herself what she could much more cheaply import from other countries, and to find wealth to waste on public works out of the transaction ? We suppose the latter. Lord Randolph Churchill always has the courage of his logic ; and clearly if it be a great service to meddle with all the natural laws of production in England, it must be a great service to follow suit in Ireland too. He would, doubtless, restore to Ireland, at the cost of the Irish people, certain manufactures which, without protection, are hopeless on Irish soil, and by impoverishing the peasants, give a flickering pros- perity to a few speculative capitalists ; and he would expect blessings, instead of curses, from the Irish people as his re- ward. Lord Randolph Churchill's political testament amounts then to this,—' Increase your expenditure recklessly, and apply it to bribing the poor by giving them comfortable houses at a cheap rate, and a great Army and Navy to fascinate their imaginations. Find the money for this purpose by taxing their bread, and meat, and clothes. And tempt them to tolerate this unpleasant process by giving them the sweetmeat of cheap luxuries. Also do the same in Ireland on a liberal scale. And then you will have the millions throwing up their caps for the Tory Democracy.' If this delicious programme does not do a good deal towards ending Lord Randolph Churchill's career, the English people are not so sober a people as we give them credit for. It is a policy of bribe and brag, of which the means are to be provided by a policy of waste and muddle. If that be Tory-Democracy, Tory-Democracy will go out with a fiz in sober old England.
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