TOPICS OF THE DAY.
SMOLLETT AND MR. GLADSTONE.
THE scene on Friday week in the House of Commons when Mr. Smollett fired his blazing broadsides of jocular political insolence into Mr. Gladstone, and Mr. Gladstone replied with proud hauteur, with keen sarcasms, with indig- nant resentment, with anxious historical precedents, and yet with the clear evidence in all he said that he did not think either the House or the country would entirely appreciate his reply and appraise Mr. Smollett's criticisms at the exact rate which he himself assigned to them, was almost as much of a parable of life, as of a particular aspect of a particular political crisis. Mr. Smollett did but speak with the tongue and give expression to the natural mind of vulgar political suspicion, judging by the ordinary standards of worldly common-sense and cunning what the motive of Mr. Gladstone's course had been. Mr. Gladstone, on his side, was profoundly conscious how false this estimate was, and how utterly it distorted his own concep-
tion of his own motives. But the more he strove to make this evident to the House of Commons, the more painfully conscious he became of the subtlety of some of the shades of difference by which the policy he had chosen could alone be discriminated from the policy painted on the coarse canvas of Mr. Smollett's historical picture. It was a parable of the world, easy in its own political morality, and consequently disposed to put a vulgar construction on the dubious acts of others, holding up the distorting mirror of its own selfish theory of life, to a refined and lofty mind, accus- tomed within itself so to blend its highest and its poorest motives, and to transform the latter with the fine flavour of the former, that the coarse and broad interpretation suddenly given to its purposes by the world at large at once provokes indignation and causes painful enlightenment. Let the most refined man look at his own expression in the bowl of a spoon, see his smile broaden- ing into an unmeaning grin, his eyes starting out of their sockets, his whole countenance widened into a "foolish face of praise," and it will be surprising if he is not a little shocked at the elements of folly in him which the false mirror seems so happy in singling out and exaggerating. What a false mirror will thus do for the finest expression, Mr. Smollett did for Mr. Gladstone,—suggested the most nnpleasing distortions of his real errors, suppressed all that was lofty in his motives, and made him appear a crafty and blundering "trickster," instead of what he always was, an am- bitious and strenuous, but thoroughly lofty-minded statesman, by no means incapable of mistaking a tenacious love of success for pure political disinterestedness, but quite incapable of using as a bid for power what he even suspected to be a policy which he would have condemned had it been brought forward by his opponents. However, the world is pretty sure to divine the commonest elements in a public man, and will often ignore altogether his best elements. And Mr. Smollett, on Friday week, was no bad epitome of the vulgar world,—that is, of the constituencies in their most earthly mood, not the mood in which they make a political idol of a conscientious statesman, and attribute to him all the great quali- ties they love to believe in in their dreams, but the mood in which they scent the attempt to overreach them in a bargain, and glory in their own minute acquaintance with the holes and earths whereto that sort of cunning leads its owner to betake himself. The view Mr. Smollett briefly developed yesterday week was that Mr. Gladstone had planned a great political surprise, for the sake of gaining the advantage which a sudden dissolution must give a party in a great majority ; that he prorogued Parliament in November till the fifth of February, then to meet for the despatch of business, not without an idea of dissolving it before that day should arrive ; that, later, "circulars were sent out from the Treasury advising the friends of Ministers to attend at the opening of the Parliament which was never to meet ;" that Mr. Gladstone, only two or three days before the dissolu- tion, rose from his sick-bed to meet a deputation introduced by the semi-republican Member for Newcastle, and to take counsel with them how further to tinker the Constitution in a session of Parliament that was never to be convened ; and that by these devices "all suspicion was allayed," and "the pious fraud was consummated." And to this vulgar reading of Mr. Gladstone's conduct, Mr. Smollett added the amiable criticism that Mr. Gladstone, who had long been professing and still professed to need rest and retirement, suddenly discovered when making the appeal to the people that he did not need rest at all, but wanted to be confirmed in power for five or six years more, and tried to bribe the constituencies by enormous promises of relief from taxation to fulfil his hopes.
No wonder that Mr. Gladstone resented Mr. Smollett's imputations, in the truth of which no one who has really-
studied Mr. Gladstone's political character could even for a. moment have concurred. But the worst of the matter was not the coarseness, which refuted itself, but the difficulty of making clear to the public the curiously complex sort of motive by which Mr. Gladstone really had been led to re course decidedly eccentric, and as it turned out, unwelcome because unintelligible to the country at large. The trutk certainly was that in November Mr. Gladstone no more con- templated dissolving Parliament than he contemplated repeal- ing the Union. No doubt he did contemplate as early as August a great financial proposal, and no doubt he believed that if he could dissolve upon it in case he was embarrassed by Parliament in carrying it through, he should have a very favourable chance of renewing the strength and restoring the. discipline of the Liberal party. No one who knows Mr. Glad- stone would ever have supposed for a moment that he prepared stealthily a great surprise for the country, in order to gain a small party advantage. But in all probability, as he- meditated his financial scheme, and contemplated the possi- bility of disclosing it to a hostile and worrying Parliament, whose bad reception of it might have taken from it all its gloss and brilliance, he became conscious of a greater and greater distaste for submitting it to the last Parliament, especially as every fresh election seemed to give new heart to. his opponents, till at last, when the financial results of three- quarters of the year were in his bands, and be saw the clear practicability of his scheme, it suddenly occurred to him that what might conquer the country after being submitted to the. hostile criticism of a disorganised and unfavourable Par- liament, might much more conquer the country if made the ground of a direct appeal ; for which course, too, there was, the further argument, which he urged forcibly on Friday week, that it would gain time instead of wasting it, since a dissolution. in the spring would certainly waste more time than a dissolution- at a moment when nearly fourteen days of the vacation had still to run. Such were, we suspect, Mr. Gladstone's real motives for a dissolution which no doubt was almost as sudden- a change of purpose to himself as it seemed to the world at large. No doubt, indeed, when he received the Newcastle- deputation he must have known his own mind, but there- could have been nothing but folly in anticipating the proper and formal mode of giving his purpose to the world, even if the policy resolved on had then received the Queen's assent and the assent of his colleagues, as it probably had not. But Mr.. Gladstone needed a more complete justification than such rea- sons as we have given for a dissolution not merely so abrupt, but- so unusual in its form, since it in fact laid a provisional budget be- fore the country, instead of merely stating general principles and measures, and reserving for Parliament, unfettered by previous. pledges, the full right to judge of the relation between the re- sources of the country and the remissions of taxation proposed.. And we suspect that he found it extremely bard to assign such a justification. He appears to have thought, indeed, that he had a precedent in Sir Robert Peel's address to the electors of Tamworth on the dissolution of 1834, but we have read that address very carefully since he referred to it, and find nothing in it of the character he gives it. There is not, indeed, a single financial proposal submitted to the country in it, and it seems to us, therefore, completely to fail as a precedent for Mr. Gladstone's recent procedure. It is true, no doubt, that in 1852 Mr. Disraeli did briefly promise the farmers to attempt to relieve them of some of the taxes which were burdens on agri- culture, but that was rather a matter of policy,—the Free-trade. policy reversed,—than a proposal to abolish an approved tax, on the strictly financial ground that it could be spared without injury to the public service, a matter of which surely Parlia- ment, and not the constituencies, is the only fit judge. Indeed,. it seems to us that the false step of laying a Budget before the country, and asking the constituencies to send up a Parliament to vote it, instead of laying it before Parliament, and then, if necessary, appealing to the country on the question of confi- dence or no confidence in the Administration, has not been put in any better light by Mr. Gladstone's reply to Mr. Smollett. It is objectionable partly because Parliament alone can judge of and discuss matters of this kind, matters of which consti- tuencies, only too eager usually to be rid of taxation, though they did not show themselves so this time, are very bad judges. And it is still more objectionable when the pro- posal is simply to relieve the country of a burden for which no equivalent is to be proposed, because in that case the effect must be to encourage a vicious kind of Dutch auction be- tween opposite parties,-a competition as to which of them will ask for the least amount of taxation. And, indeed, this result was actually produced to some degree in the recent appeal to the constituencies, since Mr. Disraeli, at least till after the borough elections were over, spoke of the Income- tax as if the Tories were just as anxious to get rid of it as the Liberals. We hold, then, that the objection of principle to Mr. Gladstone's course in this case is hardly removable, and certainly was not diminished by either of his prece- dents. The truth no doubt was, that while utterly incapable of a "trick," Mr. Gladstone was far more influenced than he himself knew by his aversion to meet again a Parliament in which he had been exposed to so many mortifications last year, and also a little perhaps by his natural wish to use the brilliant character of the financial prospects he was able to hold out, in a direct appeal to the country, before his pro- gramme had been spoiled by a sulky Parliamentary reception. Mr. Smollett's view of the case was, we believe, vulgar and erroneous. But it ought to show Mr. Gladstone how the vulgar opinion of the world is sure to misjudge dubious acts ; how inevitably it detects and exaggerates the least disinterested elements in them into gross selfishness or cowardice ; how sure it is to find evil motives where there were none in the attendant circumstances ; how utterly incapable it is of under- standing a complex state of mind ; and how important, there- fore, plainness and simplicity of purpose are to a statesman who would guide a great people. Mr. Smollett cannot have done much harm of any kind to Mr. Gladstone by his coarse invec- tive; he may have done him a real service, if he teaches him how the commoner class of minds misread a policy of which the true aim is at least not obvious, and not quite justifiable, while another aim, which to some men would be the natural one to assume, though unworthy of its author, is perfectly level to a somewhat ignoble popular imagination.
Previous page
