MR. GLADSTONE AND MR. LOWE ON PARLIAMENTARY DETERIORATION.
MR.GLADSTONE and Mr. Lowe have now both stated, and stated very strongly, their view as to the county franchise, and as our readers are well aware, our own judgment as well as sympathies go very strongly with Mr. Gladstone, and not with Mr. Lowe. But there is an intermediate ques- tion on which Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Lowe are not at issue, though they differ widely as to the true interpretation to be put on the impression in which they agree. Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Lowe are both strongly agreed as to the deteriora- tion in the personnel of recent Parliaments, and as to the proximate cause of that deterioration in the return of a much larger number of middle-aged and old Members,—middle- aged and old, because it takes the best years of life to acquire the riches now necessary for a Beat in Parlia- ment, and to acquire the reputation which follows self- made riches in the local opinion of the constituency for which they are returned. "The spirit of the times," said Mr. Lowe, "and the direction in which our institutions are obviously tending, call for some change which shall raise the standard of senatorial ability, and make the House more fit for the new duties which it is every Session taking upon itself, and which it will be less eager to assume just in proportion as it is more able to discharge them. The accomplishment of this task is becoming year by year more necessary and more difficult. The opportunity for entering Parliament once open to young men of talent through nomination boroughs is gone. It has been extremely difficult for any one except the son of a large landed proprietor to enter Parliament except under the condition of being old and rich,—old, that he may have acquired the con- fidence of electors, who exercise such judgment as they possess on men rather than on measures ; rich, that be may be able to bear the tremendous legitimate expense of modern elections." Mr. Gladstone here echoes Mr. Lowe. "Amidst all our vaunted and all our real improvements," he says, "I see in some very important respects a sad tendency to decline. It seems to me that, as a whole, our level of public principle and public action was at its zenith in the twenty years or thereabouts which succeeded the Reform Act of 1832, and that it has since perceptibly gone down. I agree with Mr. Lowe that we are in danger of engendering both a gerontocracy and a ploutocracy " [in simpler language, a Government by the aged, and a Government by the wealthy]. "He asks whether any one is bold enough to allege that household suffrage has improved the House of Commons. I have already pointed out the essential point in which it has" [namely, in its greater sympathy with the conditions of manual labour], "but under the mixed conditions of human life, it often happens that what is improving in one point of view, may at the very same time be decaying or declining in another. This gradual movement in favour of gerontocracy and ploutoc- racy did not begin with household suffrage, nor am I aware that their advance has been accelerated by it." "The two circumstances which strike me most forcibly, and most pain- fully, are, first, the rapid and constant advance of the money power ; secondly, the reduction almost to zero of the chances of entrance into Parliament for men who have nothing to rely upon but their talent and their character ; nothing, that is, but the two qualities which certainly stand before all others in the capacity of rendering service to the country. These, again, are chiefly the young, for such men have usually by the time they reach middle life attained withnut great difficulty to wealth or to competence. But they have then passed the proper period for beginning an effective Parliamentary education. There have been honourable and distinguished exceptions, but as a rule, it would be as rational to begin training for the ballet at forty- five or fifty as for the real work of the Cabinet. That union of suppleness and strength which is absolutely requisite for the higher labours of the administrator and the statesman is a gift, the development of which, unless it be exorcised betimes, nature soon places beyond reach." Here, then, is a point on which the two adversaries are agreed, and on which, let us observe incidentally, that the deficiences of one of them,—by no means the less naturally endowed of the two,—curiously illus- trate the reality of the evil described. Mr. Lowe, though
strong enough in purpose and in conviction, is entirely without that elasticity of mind which makes a man great in council, and probably no one has added so little to the weight of the Cabinet to which he belonged, and so much to its elements of weakness as Mr. Lowe. And part, at least, of the disqualifi- cation must be due to his want of proper training for delibera- tive purposes. He was over forty when he first entered Parlia- ment,—having been well-disciplined first in the magisterial attitude of a tutor,—and afterwards, though a member of a colonial Council, having doubtless found himself matched against men by no means his equal, and with whom deliberation on equal terms was hardly possible. Before he became the member of an English Cabinethe was fifty-seven years of i age, and no doubt by that time t was even harder to bend than to break him. Mr. Gladstone, on the other hand, has been educated from his earliest youth for the career he has since led, and though gifted with many characteristic qualities which make true deliberation not the easiest of his duties, it is easy to see how much he has gained by the discipline of his Parliamentary life, and how infinitely more fit he is at the present moment to mould and be moulded by,—for both are equally necessary,—the people whom he has to convince, than Mr. Lowe.
Granted, however, the fact of a serious deterioration in the personnel of recent Parliaments, a deterioration the beginning of which, as it will be observed, Mr. Gladstone dates from long before the last Reform Bill,—indeed, from 1852,—and the causes of which he thinks quite independent of the lower- ing of the suffrage, it becomes a matter of the greatest importance to determine whether Mr. Gladstone is right on this head, or whether, on the contrary, Mr. Lowe is right in attributing the declension in political capacity of the re- presentatives chosen, to a declension in the capacity of the constituencies who choose them. Now, it seems clear to us that on this head the truth lies between Mr. Lowe's view and Mr. Gladstone's view. On the one hand, it is quite certain that Mr. Gladstone is right in saying that, "whether from moral causes, or for whatever other reason, the popular judgment on a certain number of e f important an t qd thus more just than that of he they" [i.e., the new and larger n constituencies] " arc not more incapable, but more capable. On the other hand on questions which do not touch a genuine vein of popular senti- ment, it seems quite clear that large masses of men are guided by a vulgarer set of leaders than small. Mr. Gladstone him- self admits that the more ignorant the electors, the more open are they to advice and influence ; or as he subtly puts it, the more have they of the character of political 'adjectives,' rather than of political substantives. But that being admitted, the question is, of what substantives do these masses act as the political adjectives ? Is it of the men who have real political experience and knowledge, or rather of the men who from various causes,—especially, say, because they are locally more substantial people, perhaps even because they are creditors having a running account against groups of electors who are in their debt, and who are on that account all the more ready to defer, half unconsciously it may be, to the opinions of those whose hostility would be inconvenient, —have power over them. A constituency svpuweirltya dangerous, aopgpaei i ns.seiiouvnse:
interested mind on questions n no really policy p oy i because where there s
the opinion of vulgar and men is far more likely to lead the crowd than the opinion of the few who really make an effort to form it on good grounds. Doubt- less the keepers of alehouses formed in a very large degree the opinions of the Conservative majority at the last general election. And these are not the sort of political substantives to which we wish to see the masses of the electors acting the part of adjectives ; for though on subjects which reach the popular sentiment, the masses generally judge better than the middle- class, on subjects which do not, they judge worse, because they judge under the influence of a more selfish and more ignorant set of prompters. Where the ten-pounders went with their own men of influence,—possibly the deacon of their chapel, or the mayor, or the bank manager, or lawyer they knew best—the householders are too apt to go with the leading talkers of the alehouse at which they oftenest drink, or at the club to which they sub- scribe as an insurance against sickness. So far, then, it seems to us true that on all small questions, and especially—which is, perhaps, most important of all questions not of the first magnitude,—the question of the hind of candidate to be selected,—very large constituencies will be generally guided by vulgarer prejudices than the smaller constituencies which they have replaced. But though this be 80, and though, so far as it goes, it consti- tutes a real argument against the lowering of the suffrage for any reason not touching the highest interests of the people, it is a most insufficient argument against extending to the rural dis- tricts the popular suffrage already accorded to the towns. For after all, vast as is the importance of getting an efficient per- sonnel in Parliament,—one competent to discuss ably and to criticise boldly a flashy legislation,—it is second to the importance of getting a Parliament that really feels the urgency of the first popular necessities. Say what we may against the Reform Act of 1867, it can hardly be doubted that it was that and that alone which rendered possible the Education Act of 1870, no less than the amendment of the Labour Laws in 1875. And who shall say that a Par- liament capable of the greatest debates, but afraid of passing a compulsory Education Act, is on the whole more efficient than a Parliament which should hardly equal even a Vestry in power of discussion, but which should be capable of understanding the absolute urgency of popular education ? We must test the efficiency of Parliaments, after all, not merely by the dignity and quality of their deliberations, but by the moving power they give to reforms of the first magni- tude. And as it seems to us, Mr. Lowe is hopelessly in the wrong when he wants to maintain that it is of less importance to identify the rural labourer with the great popular mea- sures of recent days,—with the progress of popular education, with the revision of the Labour Laws, with the tendency of English political thought on the great question of Establishment or Disestablishment, and with all import- ant national action in reference to a disinterested foreign policy,—than it is to get an Assembly competent to conduct dignified and effective discussions at Westminster. As Mr. Gladstone most truly says, great improvements in one direction cannot always be prevented from involving great loss of power in other directions. We think it most likely that a certain degeneration in what may be called the liberal education of Parliament has resulted and will result, from the extension of the suffrage to a great mass of electors who do not themselves appreciate or understand what the air of liberal education means. But so long as this degeneration is accompanied by an immense gain of force for the most urgent of civilising agencies, for the great work of education, for the opening up of a com- paratively hopeful future to the "dim, common populations," for the association of the masses in the noblest international enterprises, we maintain that we ought to regard the loss as much more than balanced by the gain. It is a loss, no doubt, to see the secondary questions of polities discussed in a feeble, a selfish, and even a parochial spirit. But the gain of getting the nation itself behind the Government on the greatest of all questions—the questions on which the destiny of the mass of men in great measure depends,—is so enormous, that it ought to reconcile us to the humiliation of seeing a real degeneration in the calibre of Parliamentary eloquence and the intellectual conduct of Parliamentary debates.
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