SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT'S HA_RING-lTE.
SIR WILT,TAM HARCOURT'S speech at Derby is a miserable proof of the rapid degeneration which our political life is undergoing. One would have thought that the man who is most likely to be the successor to Mr. Glad- stone in the leadership of the House of Commons, when the Gladstonians next return to power, who probably, in- deed, aspires to the Premiership, and might very well be entrusted by the Queen with the formation of a Govern- ment in an event which he himself believes to be very near at hand, and to have been brought almost within reach by the events of the last week,—would know how to com- mand his passions, and to respect the decencies of political life. And no one would be more capable than Sir William Harcourt of achieving either self-command or the precise note of conventional decorum which would be most befitting the occasion, if he thought it likely to advance his political position to achieve either the one or the other. Evidently he does not think so. He thinks the moment come for venting the rage which the extreme members of the Radical Party feel against the Times and the Government, in the most unmeasured terms. He probably thinks that the days when political decorum was a matter of primary im- portance, are gone Jay, and that what popular leaders now need is the presence of mind to express the passions of the most violent part of the public with as much calculated bitterness as may make up for some deficiency in the ardour of those passions in themselves. We have read the earlier part of Sir W. Harcourt's speech at Derby with dismay, not so much for the light it throws on the political character of Sir William Harcourt, in which we have long ceased to take much interest, but because we regard him as a very acute interpreter of the state of at least a con- siderable section of public opinion, and understand that he interprets it as sanctioning virulence of political feeling, vulgarity of expression, perfect indifference to equitable and careful judgment, and positive liking for coarse vitupera- tion. Twenty years ago, such a speech as Sir William Har- court's on such an occasion as this would have extinguished absolutely his chance of ever becoming either Prime Minister or the Leader of the House of Commons. At that time, every one would have said that for a man in his position to assume,—as, if we rightly understand remark- ably plain English, he does assume repeatedly,—that the Times had been party to a base and deliberate fraud for the purpose of blasting an innocent man's character, and that the Government had been sharers in the plot, was simply an indecency, and. a very gross indecency, which would render such a man utterly unfit either to lead the House of Commons or to represent the country. "I do not think," said Sir William Harcourt of Mr. Balfour, "that a responsible Minister ever stood before the House of Commons or the country in the same humiliating and contemptible position. Their curses are coming home to roost. No wonder they are out of heart. They thought they were going to crush Mr. Parnell with their forgeries and their infamies, but Mr. Parnell is going to crush them ; and they will fulfil the saying of old, They dug a pit for others, and they are fallen into the pit." Of course, it is open to a good deal of doubt who the " their " and "they" refer to. This is the slovenly sort of vituperation which does not care to define who it is that is being reviled, so long as it is clear that revilings of a sufficiently coarse nature are being levelled at a con- siderable number of persons. But the sentence has even less significance than it has sweetness and light unless Mr. Balfour and his colleagues are the objects of the revilings, which, again, can hardly be very intelligible, unless they include the Times and its managers as the authors of the "forgeries and infamies." Then, further on, Sir William Harcourt says :—" It has been openly avowed that these notorious letters were procured, purchased, and finally published on the morning of the second reading of the Crimes Act, and in order to carry coercion. It was part of a deliberate plan to ruin the Irish cause and the Irish representatives." Greater wickedness can hardly be imagined than is charged on the Times in that last sentence, and it is the kind of wickedness which no sober mind would dream of imputing to its managers, who, blunder as they might, have certainly not been guilty of anything of the sort. Again, further on, Sir William Harcourt says :—" Long before this business, these articles on ` Parnellism and Crime' began, I think it was in this hall that I ventured to describe it as unmitigated rubbish. I did not know at that time that it was also undiluted villainy." There again, what the antecedent to the pronoun " it " may be, of which it is stated that it was unmitigated rubbish, and is now shown to be undiluted villainy, we have not any clear idea. Sir William is too anxious to have his Bing, and too well aware that his audience will not care very much at whom he is flinging dirt, so long as they see that there is plenty of it, to be at all particular as to his noun when he has got plenty of coarse adjectives for his pronoun ; but it can hardly be doubted that he intends to accuse the Times of undiluted villainy. We could, for our parts, just as easily believe Sir William Warcourt a severe and impartial judge as even-handed as Sir James Hannen, as believe the managers of the Times, whom everybody knows, and knows to be honourable men, guilty of "undiluted villainy" And that, we imagine, will be the universal judgment of sober-minded men, whatever culpable carelessness they may think it right to impute to the Times' managers. In all probability, Sir William Harcourt himself has some inner doubt,—or more than doubt,—as to the justice of his imputations. But the worst feature in the speech as a sign of public opinion, is that he evidently thinks it quite unnecessary to be either con- siderate or even decorous ; that he regards these qualities as quite out of date in political controversy ; that he hurls the most violent language about, just as a non-elector used to hurl about rotten eggs, with very little care whether it hits one man or another, and no care at all whether the annoyance and the pollution which are caused, have or have not been deserved by those who suffer from them.
This degeneration of political morals and manners is a very serious and disturbing symptom of the politics of the day, and none the less so if it be true, as we think it is, that speeches like Sir William Harcourt's do not please any very large portion of the constituencies. We are quite sure that the larger number of voters are quiet and decent people, who have no delight in violent or unjust accusa- tions, and who are not influenced by them. But it is also true, we fear, that they do not seriously resent such accusations, and will never care to punish those who avail themselves of such modes of warfare. They hardly realise how much the whole atmosphere of politics is injured by this sort of virulence, how it drives the best men out of the political field, perverts the judgment of the men who do not dislike it, and removes all the issues of political life into a region of vulgar and hap-hazard strife, where the survival of the toughest is the rule, and not the survival of either the fittest, the wisest, or the best. Where brickbats are flying about, the thickest skulls get the least injury ; and. we suppose that we are coming to the time when political issues will be determined by those who are least dis- interested, and who feel the least disgust for loud abuse and vulgar ni,e/ess. For such a period Sir William Harcourt appears to be carefully qualifying himself. Perhaps he may be the first Premier who will be the idol of the roughs.
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