MR. GLADSTONE AND THE PLATFORM.
MR. GLADSTONE'S short but animated panegyric in the Nineteenth Century for April, on the Platform, to which he is especially grateful for the services which it has rendered to Home-rule between 1886 and 1892, is intended to show that it deserves the Homeric epithet of man-glorifying. And it would be folly to deny that it does, for in our day a great deal more glory is achieved on the platform, than in the battle to which Homer applied the same great epithet. But though the Platform certainly does glorify, and glorify a larger number of men and in a much higher degree than any other modern institution, it is very questionable whether the glory it actually confers is fully deserved. Mr. Gladstone attributes to the Platform all the progress which his cause has made between 1886 and 1892, which, if it be true, would certainly not do much in our eyes to recommend the Platform to our approbation. But is it true ? Is not that progress mainly owing to the Caucus, and in a very secondary degree indeed to the Plat- form? No doubt the Platform has provided the Liberals who drew back in 1886 and are returning to their allegiance to Mr. Gladstone in 1892, with the excuses which they needed for not deserting their party. But it was the Caucus which really pulled at their heart-strings, while the Platform only found them plausible reasons for doing what they wished. We should have supposed that the Platform has been quite as active on behalf of the Unionists as it has been on behalf of the Gladstonians. But the difference was this, that the larger party which melted away till it became a minority in 1886, never really lost very many adherents to the other side. They stood aloof for a time, but they did not actively resist. Gradually party ties, which are the next thing among English politicians to domestic ties, reasserted themselves, and what was needed was not conversion, but in four cases out of five, plausible pretexts for abandoning the attitude of displeased neutrality and returning to their old friends. The Platform, no doubt, supplied them with those pretexts ; but we gravely doubt whether it often effected any real change of mind or heart. So far as reasoning could do anything, the Unionists have done a great deal more than the Gladstonians, who are compelled to hold their hand and respect their leader's secret, and to ignore all the objections which can only be dealt with by disclosing that secret, if there be one to dis- close. It cannot be even plausibly maintained that where five-sixths of the arguments against Home-rule are necessarily and completely ignored on the Platform, the Platform has had much to do with turning back the hearts of the disobedient to Mr. Gladstone's cause. It is in the main the old habits and associations of party life, not the efforts of Platform oratory, which have stifled the scruples of so many Liberal Unionists, and made the recent by-elections approximate so often to the elections of 1885.
We should feel much more of Mr. Gladstone's admira- tion for the Platform, if it ever was or ever could be a place, like the House of Commons, for real discussion, and not for mere advocacy. But as a rule, and with very rare exceptions, this is just what it never is or can be. The platform is the organ of party. No party will take the trouble to organise a first-rate discussion which may result in its own humiliation. It is true that a sprinkling of members of the opposite party usually attend the meetings of their foes ; but they do so rather for the fun of the fray and the joy of contradiction, than in order really to listen to what may be said against them. Nine-tenths of the adherents of one party never hear the objections to their creed except in the version given of those objections by speakers who set them up as ninepins in order that they may knock them down again. Gladstonians do not fre- quently go to Unionist meetings to hear what they dislike to hear, nor do Unionists go to Gladstonian meetings for a similar purpose. The politicians of each school listen to their own leaders, and to their own leaders only ; and by that means they are educated in their own prepossessions, and not forced to face frankly the difficulties of their case: In the old days, when the debates in Parliament were really reported in the papers read by the constituencies, and the opinions of the electors were greatly influenced by these debates, there was a much greater openness of conviction, a much greater disposition to vote for the best policy, even though it were the policy of an opponent, and to vote against a bad policy, even though it were the policy of a partisan, than there is now. The " man- glorifying " assembly was then an assembly for real discussion,—for a kind of "battle,"—as it was in Homer's time, not an assembly convened for the pur- pose of propagating a special view. The Platform is no doubt a useful agency for those who will go and listen honestly to the case of their opponents as well as to the case of their allies. But it is hardly to be called beneficial to those who only desire to be confirmed in the views they already hold, and who carefully avoid hearing anything by which their views may be shaken. And even for those few politicians who really attend the meetings of their opponents as well as their own meetings, the Platform is a very second-rate school to a good debate in Parliament, where it is not so - easy for the speaker to avoid all the weak points of his owncase, and to single out all the strong ones, as it is in an assembly of friends who only desire to have their - confidence in the superiority of their own views effectually strengthened.
When Mr. Gladstone assures us that the Platform' cannot continue for any length of time to be as important a factor in political measures as it has been since 1887, and promises us an interval of comparative rest in which the Press shall regain its relative importance, and the Plat- form pass to some extent into the shade, he seems to us to forecast a very unlikely turn in the political tastes of the day. It is not, as he thinks, the overwhelming importance of the Irish Question, of which, indeed, the English people are pretty well weary, that has given this impetus to the Platform, but the wish of constituents who hold strong party views, and who do not find either time or oppor- tunity or inclination to read Parliamentary debates, to see a little of the distinguished speakers on their own side, and to be confirmed in the notion that their own side is the- right side. Mr. Gladstone thinks that when Home-rule for Ireland is carried there will be a lull. We do not expect Home-rule for Ireland to be carried in our time. But if it were, the last consequence that we should expect, would be a lull. That event would usher in a new crisis, in all proba- bility a series of crises, and certainly not a lull. But even apart from a revolutionary measure like Home-rule for Ire- land, we can see no prospect of any lasting or considerable abatement of the causes which have made of the Platform so great a political institution in our own day. We believe these causes to be the natural consequences of committing political power to the masses of the people, as it was com- mitted by the measures of 1867 and 1885, and we should be surprised to see any material change in the methods of the political drilling of our constituencies, at least until education has wrought such a change in them that they themselves wish for less stimulus to party heat, and freer access to impartial judgments.
In the meantime, we hold that Mr. Gladstone's esti- mate of the beneficence of the work done by the Plat- form is far too favourable. That work itself is the work of a political hot-bed. or forcing-house. It brings political opinion to premature fruitage, and diminishes its hardiness and stamina. We should like to see it much less actively forced and. much more deeply rooted. And we believe that it would be less actively forced and more deeply rooted, if the Platform were superseded by influences less one-sided, less adapted for intensifying the spirit of party, and better adapted for that impartial discussion which gained for the assembly of old days the great Homeric epithet "man-glorifying," in its older and higher signifi- cance,—the sense in which it really denoted a " battle " of heroic combatants, though a battle not in the physical but in the intellectual and moral field.
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