TOPICS OF THE DAY.
DR. PANKHUIIST.
IT may prove that the managers of the Liberal party in Manchester, in refusing to fight the seat, have done a greater injury to the cause than we suspected. It is more than possible, it is quite probable, that Dr. Pankhurst may be returned as the third Liberal Member. Several Liberals of position, including Mr. Hugh Mason, have announced their intention of supporting him. They think his distinctive ideas will not signify in a Parliament like the present, they believe that, whatever he says, he will vote steadily for the Govern- ment, and they are irritated with the triumphant and taunting tone of the local Tories, whose nominee, Mr. Houldsworth, has most injudiciously called them cowards. A great body of the Liberal rank and file think any candidate better than none, if only he rill keep the Tory out, and are completely con- ciliated by the promise to abide at the General Election by a test ballot ; while the Parnellite Irish, who for a time hung back, have finally agreed to vote for Dr. Pankhurst. He is ready to vote for the local Government of Ireland " upon the Federal principle," and the difference between that and Home-rule is to them, as also to us, imperceptible. Finally, Dr. Pankhurst has the support of that large body, growing larger, we fear, every day, who do not study politics at all, and who ask only to be made certain that the candidate, whatever his views or his unwisdom, cares heartily for the masses of the people, which we have no reason to doubt Dr. Pankhurst does. If the body of the Liberals, the more extreme Radicals, and the bulk of the Irish finally declare for Dr. Pankhurst, he will have a heavy vote, and possibly a heavier one than Mr. Houldsworth, whose heavy dullness and passionate advocacy of the House of Lords
will scarcely please even his own side.
This result, though it will secure two additional votes for Mr. Gladstone, is, in our judgment, a most disastrous one for the Liberal party. Against Dr. Pankhurst himself we have not a word to say. Difficult as it is for sane men to believe that he can honestly hold all his opinions, there is every reason to suppose that he does hold them, and that he is fighting for the seat as a fanatic, and not as an adventurer. If be gives a pledge, he will keep it, if he can ; and we do not expect to see him voting on every possible occasion in the Tory ranks. But he is, of all recent candidates, the one who is most distinctively a crotchetteer. His ideas are his ideas, not those of any section of the Liberal party. The most deter- mined Radicals are not unanimous for universal suffrage, and are distinctly hostile to the swamping of all male votes in that of the large majority of women. They are opposed to all those projects either for confiscation or for the foolish expenditure of public money which are concealed under the phrase, "Nationalisation of the land." They desire rather to reform than to abolish the House of Lords. They are divided—probably about equally—about the disendowment of the Church, though more than half may be in favour of Disestablishment. They are almost to a man against Home-rule for Ireland. They do not believe that the United Kingdom can be well and wisely governed for £50,000,000 a year, and they utterly reject the notions that the Debt shall be decried, the Army abolished, the Navy attenuated, Church property confiscated, and the expense of administration reduced to its lowest point, simply to save money. Upon all these points Dr. Pankhurst is emphatically and, we may add, honourably distinct and precise. It is impossible to read his speech of Saturday, in Chorlton Town Hall, without seeing that be believes that if the government of England were committed to men of his opinions, £35,000,000 a year could be saved; or, we may add, without suspecting that in his secret heart he holds the taxa- tion of the people to pay the interest of the National Debt to be a colossal injustice. His words, as reported in the Man- chester Examiner, not a hostile paper, though its conductors understand politics too well to support him heartily, are as
follows :—
" The national expenditure had recently been £85,000,000, and it was not hard to see how they could bring that down to 250,000,000. Such a saving would work a wonderful, sweet, transforming effect upon their lives and upon their destinies. He had £35,000,000. How should he deal with it P (" Divide IL") That was just what he was going to do. The interest on the National Debt stood at 229,000,000. That charge was created by a policy hostile to the men of labour, in exclusive defence of bad pretensions and wrong and unjust privileges. It was chiefly and above all in defence of landlords. Up to 1832 the House of Lords and the House of' Commons were the private property of landlords. Suppose a lord' with a big estate that was falling to ruin. That nobleman, a member of an assembly having great power of influencing the money grant,. would very naturally feel inclined, when all this money was going about, to get some, if possible, for his property. Since this £29,000,000 per annum was a charge due to the defence of a bad. system of landholding, let us so arrange the land that it should be better and more wisely held, and out of the money savings of an improved land system let us pay this yearly charge. The change would do far more than that. First of all, there was land that never went out of the ownership of the State—common land ; then there was corporate property and Church property. (A. voice : " Private property.") How could it be considered private property P As to Church lands, the only question was how far down towards the present ought they to come in interfering with the givers' views about how the State should use the property which he had given to. the State. The old endowments ought to be dealt with without regard to the way in which they were now used ; the modern• endowments ought to be dealt with with reference to their present user, having regard to their being national property. The lands he had spoken of would far more than pay the yearly charge of the National Debt. Then there was the Army, representing an annual expenditure of about £16,000,000. He believed that the country would have alit it needed, if it kept up a small body of trained troops to train others,. and the balk of the soldiers were volunteers. In this way an• enormous saving would be effected. Then there was the expenditure upon the Navy, about 210,000,000 a year, and, though he would not reduce this so much as he would reduce the other items, he thought that it was capable of a great diminution in the public interest. In this way, he would bring down the expenditure of the country to. £50,000,000 a year."
We suppose we need not point out the absurdity of all that, or argue that a Volunteer Army, even if it could defend us- from invasion, could not protect the Empire ; or point out that the Debt was incurred with the passionate, though, we admit, informal consent of the people ; or even calculate that £3,000,000 taken from the Church, and £12,000,000 saved upon the Army,-and £5,000,000, say, taken from the Navy, do not represent £35,000,000, which, even if we throw in. corporate property and waste land, could not be made up without an attack upon the Debt, or the starvation of the Civil Administration. We may admit that the figures given are only evidences of ignorance which experience would correct, and still we may ask if Dr. Pankhurst is deserving of Radical support. Is a man with these opinions a fitting representative of the third city in the kingdom ? His friends may say that in electing him they elect a "general supporter of Mr. Glad- stone's Government," but they also elect a man whose election. the enemies of that Government can quote with reason as proof that Radicals detest, though they submit to, the pay- ment of the Debt, that they do not respect property if there is any pretext for calling it national, that they understand nothing of the real utility of Army and Navy, and that they are prepared for the maddest experiments, if only by trying them they may temporarily reduce taxation. They are, in fact, driving all Whigs, all Moderates, and all cool Democrats into that huge Party of Common-sense which never dies in England, and which, if Radicals do not show a little more judgment, may, before long, overwhelm them.
We claim to be Radicals of the most sincere type, earnestly desirous that the State should be governed not only for the people, but by the people,—that all privilege should be abolished, that all should be legally equal, all educated, and all protected and aided to the limit of possibility by the corpo- rate strength of the Commonwealth ; and we warn Radicals in deep sadness that it is here we see their most immediate and pressing danger. They are far too ready to tolerate any opinion, even one which is demonstrably nonsensical, if only they are convinced that the man who puts it forward cares for the body of the people. Nothing offends them but hard- ness. They endure and even like every kind of crotchetteer. No matter what the proposal—the abolition of the Army, which would mean the loss of all dominion outside Britain ; or Home- rule for Ireland, which means the separation of the Islands ; or the reduction of the Navy, which means the blockade of an island unable to grow its own food ; or universal female suffrage, which means female government ; or the nationalisation of the land, which means either gigantic confiscation or the purchase of the soil at the price of three National Debts and the crashing of all but peasants with new taxes—there are thousands who will, to support it, postpone all reasonable and attainable political ends. The best candidate is nothing to them, if he will not support their nostrum ; and the worst is palatable to them, if he will. They will not look beyond the idea, and will vote for a man certain to propose excessive or even irra- tional expense, if only he will resist a twopenny-halfpenny outlay—which, we may add, we dislike in principle as much
as they do—upon hereditary pensions. It is not that they are foolish. If they were, if they were merely misled by ignorance, we could trust to argument, or, at worst, to gradual enlightenment ; but the evil lies deeper than this. It is a strange and a melancholy truth that one- half of those who support crotchets do not believe them, see the folly of them, and only like their authors because they see even in those crotchets proof of a feeling which they approve. Suppose five thousand voters in Manchester—English voters, we mean—heartily on Dr. Pankhurst's side. Four thousand of them will know perfectly well that the Army cannot be abol- ished, that the Debt cannot be paid except out of taxes, that a third of the national expenditure cannot be saved by any prac- ticable economy. Two thousand at least would not abolish the Army if they could, would consider any kind of tampering with the Debt monstrous, and are desirous of civil expenditures such as would largely increase taxation ; and yet the whole five thousand will vote for Dr. Pankhurst, because they say he wants to make the people happier. The idea that bard sense, rigid arithmetic, adherence to facts, is as necessary to the good as to the bad, to philanthropists as to monopolists, to Radicals as to Tories, seems wholly absent from their minds. They want a millennium of peace and prosperity, and believe that anybody who also wants it will bring it nearer, irrespectively of his mental powers. He may talk nonsense, but he is " of the right sort." Some of them would perhaps like acres, though that is not a general wish, and will support the man who wishes to give them ten apiece, even if they know, and are conscious that they know, that the acres have no existence. That makes no difference ; he wishes well to them and to the world, and the man who says all acres are appropriated, and if they were not, are only two for each person, does not. So deeply do we feel the growth of this tendency, which is in its essence unreasoning pity for others as well as for themselves, that but for the hard sense of the majority we should seriously dread a currency craze in this country, an issue of paper money being advocated as the most plausible mode of relieving suffering, which in five years would produce a huge catastrophe. It seems to us that the first duty of reasoning Liberals, however Radical, is to fight this tendency, to admit that the great laws which impose upon mankind labour, suffering, and self-sacrifice are irreversible, and to insist that whoever leads, crotchetteers shall not. We admit that Dr. Pankhurst is honestly dreaming, and not pretending to dream ; and therefore we prefer, if we are forced to make the choice, a sensible Tory to Dr. Pankhurst.
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