THE NEW FEELING ABOUT NUMBERS.
TT is impossible to doubt that even in the most Conservative circles,--Conservative, we mean, even as distinguished from Tory,—that dread of the masses which used to be so violent in 1832, when the middle class only was about to be enfranchised, and so genuine in 1867, when there was a certainty of obtain- ing a true popular vote in the boroughs, is rapidly passing away. The strong opposition which the Representation of the People Bill encounters is due much less to any dread of the people than to the mortification of two classes which anticipate their own deposition from power. The landlords and farmers are making a bitter fight for their county influence, it is true. They see in themselves the only classes which arc still specially repre- sented as classes, and, of course, they do not like to lose their exceptional position. But they find it a very different thing to fight for privilege, without any true panic in their hearts as to the consequences of the change proposed, from what they would find it to clamour against that ruin of the State which they would have anticipated from this measure twenty years ago, and still more confidently fifty years ago. Not even the most prominent of the Conservatives,—not even Mr. James Lowther,—regards the admission of two millions of fresh voters as likely to be ruinous now. Many of them angrily oppose it, because they thi ik, as they have thought from childhood. that " land " deserves to be represented as no other physical phenomenon whatever deserves to be represented,— there never has been any political tenderness, for instance, to- wards the much larger bulk of water,—but though they angrily oppose it, they do not in their hearts feel any of the panic which was felt vehemently at the time of the great Reform Bill, and keenly enough even at the time of Mr. Disraeli's masterly manoeuvre. You can see in every debate on the franchise that the heart is out of the Conservatives. It is not merely that Lord Randolph Churchill has abandoned them, with his faithful two, Sir Henry Drummond Wolff and Mr. Gorst ; it is not merely that some of the best Conservatives in the House, like Mr. T. Collins or Mr. Ritchie, do not seem at all averse to the admission of the new voters ; it is that there is a completely new feeling in the air on the subject. Europe no longer looks on the masses as elements of political and social ruin ; the tremor which the French Revolution caused has not only passed away, but has left behind it a positive dread of the practice of barricading Government against the people. Mr. Gladstone's assertion that the more voters you admit, the more stable your political system becomes, is no phrase of hIs own,—if it were it would have none of the characteristic force of his sayings on such subjects which are terse condensa- tions of opinions that have long been spreading,—but it is the genuine expression of a wide-spread European belief. In Russia it is still a rate and impotent belief ; but then, just for that very reason, in Russia everything seems unstable, and dynamite is as much feared, almost, as the Czar. In France, in Germany, in Italy, even in Spain, no one would even think of proposing again to stifle the feeling of the masses. If you cannot manage tolerably to satisfy the masses, all Europe west of the Vistula knows that government be- comes dangerous.
Awl as reprds English opinion, nothing can illustrate this more than the extraordinary collapse of the resistance to the inclusion of Ireland in the Representation of the People Bill. There, as every one sees, we have a real danger ahead. There, if the Crimes Act be allowed to expire, it is generally supposed that we might at any moment see a renewal of the Jacquerie of 1881 and 1882. Yet not
even the Conservatives have proposed to remedy the evil in Ireland by reducing the political rights of the people, while
many good Conservatives have heartily supported the proposal to remedy the evil by taking the Irish people into full con- fidence, and making them, as it were, direct parties to the issues raised between England and themselves. It is, of course, attempted to explain this by dilating on the demoralising neces- sity for winning the Irish vote. Lord Randolph Churchill, we are told, having no political reputation to lose, is employed by 'the real leaders to bid for the Irish vote against the Liberals ; and his mode of bidding for it is to welcome the reign of demo- cracy in Ireland. But this explanation fails, not because it does not in fact partly explain the present phase of the Conservative tactics, but simply because these tactics would be impossible if there were not a sincere feeling of Conservative relief at the prospect of knowing the worst of the Irish danger, behind their present tactics. The truth is, that the Conservatives feel just the same sort of desire to get at the true significance of the people's will which the Liberals feel. They may not see how to reconcile the Irish people's wishes with the needs of the Empire ; but they do feel that the Irish people's wishes must be frankly faced, even if they are to be thwarted, and that they can be much better thwarted after they have been brought face to face with the wishes of the people of Great Britain than they can while the wishes of neither people are adequately expressed.
The taking of the people into counsel is the one specific that has been discovered in our modern world against such catastrophes as the French Revolution; and in England our experience of that specific has been exceptionally satisfactory. We have tried it once, we have tried it twice, with, on the whole, the most gratifying results ; and now that it is pro- posed to try it a third time, there is no real dread of it, even though the new candidates for the vote will go far towards doubling the present number of the electors. Of course, it is easy to get up arguments against the proposal ; but it is not easy to get up real passion against it. Even those who are angry because they believe, and believe with justice, that it will deprive the landowners and the farmers of their political monopoly of the county influence, do not imagine that it will ruin the State. Nay, they know very well that it will give the State new stability, and stimulate year by year that sympathy between the poor and rich in the country districts, which household franchise in the boroughs has already stimulated in towns, under the far more difficult and unpromising. conditions of town life. Nothing is easier to read between the lines of the resistance offered to the Franchise Bill, than the disappearance of all genuine horror of the admission of the great mass of the people to palitical rights. Political dis- like in sufficient quantity no doubt is left—dislike founded on principle, on prejudice, and on self-interest. But genuine dread, such as once existed, of the consequences of enfranchising the people, is almost non-existent. If Lord Sherbrooke could. deliver over again in the House of Lords philippics against democracy as powerful as those which Mr. Lowe delivered in the House of Commons in 1866, they would fall almost dead even in that atmosphere of sympathy. The "Trojan horse" itself, with its hidden freight of destruction, would now bring down no cheers. Even the saying, which excited so much enthusiasm and so much dismay when Mr. Gladstone first uttered it, as to the unreasonableness of regarding with horror "our own flesh and blood," would be accepted now almost as a commonplace. The whole attitude of men's minds concerning democracy has changed in the last eighteen years, even more de- cisively than it changed in the previous thirty-four: and for a very good reason—namely, that we have drunk a deep draught of democracy, and have found it in some respects injurious, in many respects beneficial, but nothing less than revolutionary. "Our own flesh and blood" are found to exhibit our own prejudices. and passions, our own limitations, our own conventionalisms, our own impatience, our own generous hopes and desires, on a
larger and rather more clumsy and unmanageable scale. But they are ourselves "writ large" after all; and there is no sort of fear left that an English democracy will go about, like the gods born of Chaos, seeking to devour its own children. The danger is not that the English democracy will be too easily persuaded to adopt revolutionary counsels, but that it will be - too obtuse to recognise the need for change,—that it will cling too tenaciously to the pursuit of wealth and the respect for rank, so long as the path to both wealth and rank is left open to the humblest and is not closed against the people. Reaction hardly dares now to hold up its bead,—simply because reaction has learnt that its favourite ends of life are also favourite ends of life with the great majority of the new electors.
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