TOPICS OF THE DAY.

THE TRAGIC PREDICAMENT OF THE UNIONIST PARTY.

IHAVE dealt elsewhere with Mr. Begbie's spirited and -I- attractive attempt to put heart of grace into the Unionist Party. I am afraid his easy optimism has led me into over-plainness of speech ; but the situation is, in truth, far too perilous for the ironic douche, however well deserved its application. It is the strange sense of unreality, of want of hard definite purpose, and of that bold earnestness which knows no doubts and knows no fears, which alarms me as a plain citizen who asks for guidance, and is apt to get only polite lectures on the dignity of inanition. I would fain be up and doing, and I get nothing but an eternal " Better not " from a large section of party leaders to which I should like to belong—a party which, as far as I can see, neither knows its own mind nor my mind nor, as I sometimes think in my worst moments of depression, anybody's mind. The trouble with . the Unionist leaders is, I suspect, that they have not any sense of relative values. Though they use the verbiage of a timid modernism, they do not in the least realize that the times have changed, and that we are all changed with them. A great poet some seventy years ago exactly and most sympathetically described the plight of the Unionist Party, and " the hopeless tangle of our age " ;— " Down came the storm ! In ruin fell The outworn world we knew.

It pass'd, that elemental swell ! Again appear'd the blue.

The sun shone in the new-wasli'd sky— And what from heaven saw we ? Blocks of the past, like icebergs high, Float in a rolling sea.

Upon them ply the race of man All they before endeavour'd ; They come and go, they work and plan, And know not they are sever'd.

Poor fragments of a broken world Whereon we pitch our tent !

Why were ye, too, to death not hurl'd When your world's day was spent ?

The past, its mask of union on, Had ceased to live and thrive. The past, its mask of union gone, Say, is it more alive ?

The millions suffer still, and grieve ; And what can helpers heal With old-world cures men half believe For woes they wholly feel ?

And yet they have such need of joy ! And joy whose grounds are true ! And joy that should all hearts employ As when the past was new !

But now the past is out of date, The future not yet born— And who can be alone elate, While the world lies forlorn ? "

But it is useless to deplore, even in words so moving and so full of insight. We want to get on, not to stop the caravan while we tell our Guides, in words however richly deserved, what we think of them.

We will ask our Chiefs to consider what is asked of them by their followers, instead as now of putting their main energies either into abusing their opponents, crea- tures as distracted as they are, or else trying to patch up internal quarrels.

" Magnates of the Carlton, when will you realize that almost all the young men of the Unionist Party, and a very large number of the older, want a dynamic, and not a static party, a party that is working for a moving as opposed to a stationary community ? We want you to give those who ask for bread, not the cold stone of the status quo, but the warm food of action and development. We are riot, and we believe at heart that you are not, content with the world as it is, and we do not want anyone else to. be., We want them to feel the divine discontent out of which come life's creative forces. But in the struggle for betterment we -do not want the people to take the wrong road, but the right. road. We want to show them the better way. We are not content to live on a category of negatives. It is emasculating food. But it is not enough merely to do lip service to the principle that we ought to provide alternatives to Socialism and Revolution, which will relieve without weakening. That is, of course, agreed to by everyone. Yet you seem not to know how to save yourselves. You know that the Will of the People is with you. Yet you will not fit the safety-valve of the Refer- endum to the National Engine. You prefer to bewail the inherent fickleness of Democracy. You knoW that the thunder-stroke of Revolution comes in a moment, and that the best way of guarding against that peril is the lightning conductor of small ownership, especially in the case of the land. Yet you do nothing to put the land of this country in the hands of a body of owner-occupiers. You look with a tepid smile on the proposals for Universal All-in Insurance, and the abolition of the Poor Law ; but you will not take the stage with that vital principle and leave the details to the Actuaries. Instead, you let your rivals appropriate and wear what might have been your clothes while you are hesitating as to whether this or that point in the cut is becoming. You might demand that the credit of the nation should be used to reduce Unemployment and to endow us with good houses, good roads, and cheap power, and smokeless skies ; but. ' instead, you twitter in the corner about the dangers of big schemes, and wonder whether a safer plan would not be to go in for artificially dear money. Can you wonder that those who want real safety and real stability, though in ordered progress and coupled with resistance to all Revolutionary schemes, Communistic or reactionary, feel, as the present writer is coming to feel, that it is better to stand aside from party politics altogether than to endorse action and policy so futile and so inept ? "

I will work with the utmost enthusiasm to resist Socialism and Revolution by forwarding such proposals as those for : (1) The Referendum, (2) a new land system based on owner-occupiers, and (3) a financial system bold as well as conservative ; but I do not propose to spend the most fateful years in our history in perpetual " hover- ing." In this determination I am confident that I do not stand alone. What the Spectator is saying to-day the largest section of the Unionist Party has been thinking for many months, and will say so to-morrow. As proof of what I say, let me call my readers' special attention to a letter on the state of the party which appears in to-day's Spectator. It is written by a young Conser- vative—a member of an old and greatly respected Conservative family—and a would-be candidate. He is no isolated grumbler, but the representative of a large body of opinion.

I shall be called a " crank," an " impossible theorist," and the like, by the men in possession of the Unionist Party ; but, for all that, what -I have said represents. the better opinion. I am confident, also, that Mr. Baldwin is at heart entirely with-my plea for action, movement and vitality in politics. I may not like all the points in his policy, but I infinitely prefer an earnest policy, even when wrong, to fatty degeneration. If the leaders are wise they will, before it is too late, reckon, not with me, but with those whose views I reflect.

J. ST. LOE STRACITEY.,