TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE DEAD-SET AGAINST MR. CHAMBERLAIN. THE converging fire on Mr. Chamberlain is a singular phenomenon of a moment of reaction. If any one man has contributed much more than could be expected from one man to check the noisy and desperate rally of the motley groups of agitators which followed the retirement of Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Chamberlain is that man. Every Radical, from Sir William Harcourt to Mr. Labouchere, felt the shiver of discouragement which the withdrawal of his great a3gis from the whole party of action threatened to their ill-disciplined and ragged ranks, and they deter- mined to make a last onset before the people had made up their minds that they would fling the Newcastle programme to the winds, and return to the tranquil and wiser pace of English reform. Mr. Gladstone, in his enthusiasm for Irish Home-rule, had opened his arms to almost any allies he could get for the achievement of his hastily though tardily formed purpose, and the ill- assorted muster of camps and camp-followers, from the Irish Nationalists on one flank to the temperance agitators on the other, were perfectly aware that, unless an effective blow were struck soon, the strange crowd of warriors would be soon dissolved. Mr. Chamberlain has borne the brunt of that attack. The Irishmen have never wearied of taunting him with the encouragement that he gave ten years ago to the attack on Dublin Castle, and the proposal to concede Provincial Councils to Ireland. The friends of Disestablishment have followed suit by re- proaching him with his "unauthorised programme" of the same year, which perhaps did more than anything else to spur on Mr. Gladstone to his great "leap in the dark." The ultra-Radicals have reminded him of the days when he spoke of extracting a ransom from Wealth, and fired his volley of satire on the House of aristocrats, " who toil not neither do they spin," while the rampant democrats have repeated again and again his sarcasms at plural voting and his demands for an improved registration. No one could have met this rally of ragged militia with more firmness and composure than Mr. Chamberlain. He has steadily kept in view the one great end, to resist the attack upon the Union, and keep these islands bound together in the bond of a single nation, and be has done more than any other single statesman to defeat this last rush of Forlorn Hopes. Yet now we have a Conservative organ, the New Review, repaying him for his loyalty to the cause, by saying that probably he does not know what loyalty means ; that he joined Mr. Gladstone's third Administration in 1886 with the deliberate intention of destroying it ; that he never made any sacrifices for the cause of Union, while his colleagues made many ; that he is a man who has always fought only for his own hand ; and that, however useful he may be as a soldier under the command of ethers, he could never be trusted as a leader himself.
This seems to us the most rank ingratitude, and we do not admire the paper the more for its flimsily excused anonymity. The writer professes that he would much rather have signed it; but that if he had, it would have committed a party, or the section of a party, more or less to its views, while he had no right to speak out his views except as an individual, though they are practically shared, he declares, by a considerable number of his friends. It seems to us that the best way to individualise an attack of this sort is to sign it, and declare that the writer speaks only for himself. If he had given his own name, and suppressed what he says of the approbation he received from those to whom he had confided his opinion, he would have been much more likely to concentrate the responsi- bility on himself, than he is now, when he covers his face with a mask and tells you into how many approving ears he has whispered what he now puts down in the pages of the New Review.
At any rate, we are convinced that no more misleading, and no more unfair, view of Mr. Chamberlain could be put foi Up to 1886, we steadily opposed him. We thought him rash and. dangerous in his attempt to win over the Irish party to some unworkable compromise between inde- pendence and the Union, and we held his "unauthorised programme" to be at once an attempt to undermine Mr. Gladstone's legitimate influence, and to press demo- cracy too far. But we never thought him insincere, and we never thought him disloyal, for Mr. Gladstone knew from the first that Mr. Chamberlain joined him for the frankly avowed purpose of bringing into his Cabinet the element of advanced Radicalism which otherwise it must have lacked. And nothing can be more monstrously absurd than to say that when Mr. Chamberlain joined Mr. Glad- stone's third Administration, he joined it only to under- mine and destroy it. He had really held for a year back a view closely allied to that which Mr. Gladstone advocated when he declared for a guarded and modified Home-rule.. Lord Hartington in 1886 went quite as far Mr. Chamber- lain, and a great deal farther than we thought safe and wise. There can be no doubt at all that Mr. Chamber- lain's line of action in 1886 was perfectly loyal. If he could have seen his way to concede something to Ireland, which would not have put it into the power of the Nationalists to snatch a great deal more, ho would have done so. Does his anonymous assailant recall the renewed attempt which Mr. Chamberlain made in 1887 to prevent the final break-up of the old Liberal party by, joining in what was called the Round-Table Conference 4 We who watched that last vain effort at a reconstructio of the party with the utmost alarm and disapproval, are bound to declare that Mr. Chamberlain did not join Mr. Gladstone's dovernment only to break it up, and did not, even after his own retirement and the General Election of 1886, despair of recasting the Irish policy of the Govern- ment in some fashion that would have admitted of the reconstruction of the party. Mr. Chamberlain to some extent shared in Sir George Trevelyan's idolatry of "the Liberal party," and we entirely believe that he never made a greater sacrifice in his life,—that no statesman of our day, indeed, has ever made a greater sacrifice,— than when he left that party definitively, and joined hands with the Conservative Liberals under the leader- ship of Lord Hartington. No change of front could. have been more distasteful to Mr. Chamberlain, and we believe that it was due to pure patriotism for the Union, which he could not see any sure mode of protecting from ruin if a separate Parliament were to be conceded to Ireland, while he held. that to be far more essential to our national existence than any kind of Radical reform. Therefore, and therefore only, he sacrificed all his eager Radicalism and. became the loyal ally of Lord Salisbury. And of this we are convinced, that a more loyal and more effectual ally Lord Salisbury could not have had.. The Tories cannot forgive him for having modified their policy, for having given a more generous Free Educa- tion Act, and a much larger Local Government Act to England, than Lord Salisbury, without Liberal Unionist allies, would have been likely to propose. But it was just there that he served. the Conservative party best. The Liberal Unionists of the Midlands have really saved the United Kingdom from the Home-rulers, and the Liberal Unionists of the Midlands would have dropped away long ago without Mr. Chamberlain's leadership. It was his Liberalising influence over the Conservatives that rendered them willing to stay by the allied standard. No more unjust or discreditable classification could have been made of Mr. Chamberlain than to denominate him a mere demagogue. He was no doubt, and. to some extent still is, a genuine Radical, but he is a Radical who puts the nation above the Radical party ; and when he sees a collision between the policy of Radicalism and the policy of saving the nation from a break up, he frankly adheres to the nation and postpones his Radicalism. Nor could any one be more rigidly and nobly loyal to that decision. We have never sympathised with his Radicalism, for we always thought him disposed to go too fast and far. But we cannot allow this ungenerous attack on his states- manship and on his personal loyalty to great national ends, without expressing,warmly and emphatically, our indignant protest,—a protest which we do not doubt for a moment that Mr. Balfour himself would be ready and even eager to endorse. The Gladstonians may reasonably attack Mr. Chamberlain, who has defeated their plans. For any section of the Unionists to do so, and to do so on the ground of Mr. Chamberlain's want of loyalty, seems to us a course as unworthy as it is ignorant. In the New Reviewer's opinion, Mr. Chamberlain is a sort of duplicate of Lord Randolph Churchill in his fitness for the part of a demagogue. We have no call to revive our differences with the dead. But we could hardly pick out any power- ful Liberal orator who seems to us farther removed from. the tvne of the irreat Tory Demorrat..
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