MR. GEE WAKING UP.
IT is something, after all, to live in an age of progress. In the old conservative days, it took a generation to work out a change which is now effected in a fortnight. Can it be only that time since we wrote about the feudal ideas of Mr. Gee, the amiable editor of the Baner, and predicted that his son might perhaps come abreast of the Tudors ? Why, Mr. Gee himself has reached at a bound the epoch of the Long Parliament, and will probably be a sound Constitutional Monarchy man before Michaelmas. The article which he published last Saturday—it is translated in Tuesday's es—belongs to a different order of political ideas from the one which suggested our former remarks. When Mr. Gee first took these high questions in hand, the Queen, as he thought, governed as well as reigned. It was by her direct orders that the frugal tenant who had hoped to save his pocket by a lavish display of his conscience, was forced to pay in cattle what he would not pay in money. It was -because she was the " head " of the Church of England that an alien Establishment was allowed, to harry and torture Welsh Nonconformists. It was useless to set up any plea of irresponsibility. Mr. Gee swept all such trumpery aside with a stroke of his pen. Talk not to me,' he seemed to say, of Ministers and majorities. I am not Minister ; I am not in a majority ; consequently, for me they have no existence. It is the Queen alone who rules this suffering and enslaved land, and all I have, save the nobler and immortal part of me—the concentrated essence of Gee—I hold at her mercy.' That, of course, was not a condition of things which Mr. Gee could be expected or even asked to put up with, and his first article was a call to every free- born Welshman to bring a tyrant Sovereign to her senses. Now his tone is altogether changed. A fortnight's study of English history, even in a Welsh manual, has con- vinced him that we have already left this particular theory of kingship far behind. The necessities of news- paper production have for the moment arrested Mr. Gee's historical education at a point which, though it is far in advance of that, from which he started, is still more than two centuries behind. The Queen is no longer an originating force ; she has become the mouthpiece of her Ministers. But, according to Mr. Gee, these Ministers are not imposed upon the Sovereign by the majority of the House of Commons. They have taken possession of the Queen by force or stratagem, and they hold her a prisoner for their own evil purposes. The Royal visit is neither more nor less than a Tory intrigue. It may look innocent, but Mr. Gee's "distrust of the Tories and their deep plots" is absolute, and nothing that they do can take him in. Their object is "no less than to obtain what influence her Majesty possesses to lead our ancient nation back to those weak and worthless principles that dominated the country in past years." To the outward eye, the Queen comes to Wales to renew her acquaintance with a pic- turesque and interesting portion of her dominions. But to the inward eye—the inward eye, be it remembered, of Mr. Gee, and what a wealth of penetrative faculty this thought suggests !—the real significance of the visit is plain. Every step the Queen takes is prompted by an Ulterior Object—no ordinary capitals can adequately ex- press the weight of sinister meaning this -Ulterior Object evidently has for Mr. Gee—and this object is what he has described, the leading back of an ancient nation to weak and worthless principles.
The progress of Mr. Gee's education is shown in the part he assigns to the Queen in this nefarious design. A fortnight ago, he would have described it as a Royal plot. It would. have been devised by the Queen in person, and carried out by the willing agents with whom she had sur- rounded herself. Now, Mr. Gee's tone is very different. "We do not say that the Queen has anything to do with the plan. We believe that she has not." Mr. Gee is still separated by a vast interval from constitutional ideas. He evidently thinks that if the Queen knew of the plan and had the power to resist it, it would be her duty to do so. Her excuse is that she is not a free agent. She is a prisoner acting under duress. She may, of course, be a willing prisoner ; but Mr. Gee, impersonating as he does the Charity that thinketh no evil, prefers not to believe this. He gives her the benefit of the doubt, and assumes that, though she is now carried about by the Tories, she would, if she could, break loose from her gilded chains, and. be a Nonconformist Radical Welshwoman. This is quite the tone in which Charles I. was spoken of in the early days of the Long Parliament, or Louis XVI. in the first fervours of the French Revolution. The King was in bad hands. Left to himself, he would listen to the wishes of his people, and see that no wrong was done to them. But evil advisers kept the truth from him, and used his name for their own base ends. So it is with the Queen now. She is in bad hands. The evil adviser is at her side in the person of Mr. Raikes :- -"Rim Him there they found,
Squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve, Assaying by his devilish art to reach The organs of her fancy, and with them forge Illusions as he list."
Thus, Mr. Gee is no longer in open rebellion. That was his position a fortnight back; but last Saturday he posed as a true friend of his Sovereign, anxious only for her enlightenment and emancipation. He knows as by instinct her real mind. She does not love the Tories who surround her. She would gladly banish this retinue of Bishops and Lord-Lieutenants, and abandoning idle state, find the true home of her soul in the heart of Nonconformist Welds,— perhaps in the bosom of the Gee family. It is only superior force that detains her where she is, and for superior force Mr. Gee can make every allowance. Has he not too often seen the Nonconformist cow lowing vain regrets in the glebe of an alien priest ?
Seriously, it is strange that a man who has at least had the traininab of journalism and business, should be to all appearance totally unable to take in that the Queen is not the prisoner of her Ministers for the time being, but their willing coadjutor. With what eloquence would Mr. Gee enlarge on the constitutional position of the Sovereign, if Mr. Labouchere or Mr. Ellis were Prime Minister ! With what indignation he would denounce the Tories, if they so much as hinted that the Queen did not like her Ministers, and was only anxious to shake off their yoke ! He would have no difficulty then in seeing that, as the Queen can only a,ct through her Ministers, the act of a Tory Minister is as much hers as the ant of a Liberal Minister. Mr. Gee talks, no doubt, abundantly about the power of the people and the rights of the people; and if asked, he would no doubt admit in words that "the people" meant: the majority of the people. But in his heart he thinks quite differently. The majority has only a right to be obeyed when it happens to be of the same mind with himself. If it is a Radical and Nonconformist majority, this condition is satisfied, and then no one is more ready to yield the obedience claimed than Mr. Gee. But when the tables are turned, it becomes at once a case of "Gee contra mundum." Majorities are nothing, the will of the people is nothing ; there are only two things in the universe,—Mr. Gee, and the Tories plotting against him. But against this solitary but suffi- cient force, what can the Tories do ? They can but "throw a feather against a gale." We thank Mr. Gee for the word. It is he himself who has told us that he is only wind.
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