CLUBS AND CAUCUSES.
ONE of the principal duties of the Liberal Leaders in these days is to go down to the large country towns, and open, with jubilant political speech-making, Liberal Clubs. Statues are at a discount. It is deemed far preferable to set up a Palmerston Club instead of a representation in bronze or marble of a favourite statesman. Nobody believes much in the efficacy of circulating political literature ; pamphlets have had their day ; and organs which, as Mr. Carlyle says, hang out their sails in the popularis aura to grind meal for the party, are not supposed to be of much use. But Conservatives and Liberals alike at present are at one in believing in the power of comfortable, well-appointed Clubs, in good situations ; and whenever Lord Granville or Lord Hartington has opened one in one town, Mr. Hardy or Mr. Cross is sure soon to he called upon to give his blessing to a Conservative Club erected in some other town. In fact, all the busy wealthy provincial towns have erected, or are about to erect, handsome buildings of this character in their best streets ; and so far as many excellent Liberals are concerned, there is a general feeling that if there be faith in good principles, and the Wine and Kitchen Committees do their duty, and the billiard-rooms are nice, these Clubs will go a long way to revive the party. and will be, each one of them, a redoubt blocking the road of reaction. Mr. Fraser Rae, who writes in the new number of the Nineteenth Century of English political clubs with a good deal of knowledge of the political by-paths of last century, and with all the advantages of having had access to the minute-books of the Westminster Club, the precursor of the Reform, gives a douche of cold water to these schemes. Clubs, as he reads our political history, have never done much for any party ; they have been the fly on the wheel, admiring the dust which they stirred up. Harley and St. John did not profit much by the Society of Brothers which Swift founded. The October Club and its successor, the March Club, drank much strong liquor of their own favourite brew ; but they were no real aid to the Ministry which they urged to take extravagant measures. "The Club." which played a far more important part in the politics of this country than any of those mentioned by Mr. Rae, had a short period of factitious influence ; it succeeded in keeping together an unnatural majority for a time in the Scotch Parliament : but its reign was brief, and its fall complete. As Lord Macaulay tells us, "from being a bugbear, it became a laughing-stock," and that soon. The Westminster Club, a Radical association, the sole surviving members of which are, as Mr. Rae observes, Mr. Michael Bass, Mr. Edmund Beales, M.A., of Hyde-Park fame, and Lord Beaconsfield, never distinguished itself by anything except a protest, which it once sent to Earl Grey. As to the Reform Club, and the Carlton, whatever they may have done through the instrumentality of Mr. Coppock, or of Mr. Rose and Mr. Spofforth, they have ceased to exercise much direct influence on elections.
Mr. Rae, however, is disposed to rate too low the political effect of Clubs. We dismiss, of course, as idle day-dreams the thought that they can procure money and candidates whenever wanted, jockey elections, step into the shoes of the old boroughmonger, or draw up programmes which people outside their doors will take to. The idea that a vigorous constituency in the North of England, say, will quietly submit to the dictation, or even often accept the advice, of any Club in London, no matter how influential may be its politi- cal committee, is out of the question. Even Political Clubs in provincial towns—the political club of the future—will not, as some sanguine Liberals conjecture, work miracles. They will not cure blindness to facts or principles. They will not make the weak, timid, and the nerveless strong and confident. They will not exorcise the demon of discord, and will not cast out evil spirits, in the form of crotchets, which have entered into and possess a whole district. Swift's notion of the advantage of a political club was that "a number of persons, Members of Parliament, true lovers of our Con- stitution in Church and State, meeting at certain times and mixing business and conversations together, without the forms and constraint necessary to be observed in public assemblies, must very much improve each other's understand- ing, correct and fix their judgment, and prepare themselves against any designs of the opposite party." If, which we much doubt, any Club ever had this effect, it must have been a very long time ago; and the very idea of a Club improving the mind of anybody, cannot fail to strike most persons as very grotesque. On the contrary, it very frequently produces the very opposite effect,—pinches and narrows the judgment, obscures the vision, and produces the finical, self-satisfied view of men and things which, like a fungus in a cellar, grows, perhaps, only in full perfection in a comfortable and exclusive club. When men meet together day after day, hear the same talk, and console each other with the same flattery, there is a very evident danger of their nourishing prigs within their bosom. What the fathers of the Club have said is apt to seem law, and what the smoking-room thinks is the opinion of the country, whatever a few million malcontents out-of-doors may say to the contrary. Clubs are in the matter of politics like a room full of mirrors to a vain man, who delights to see his form reflected in many ways ; and it is to be feared that if they were scattered over the country, they would be often places where minorities would nurse and dandle their prejudices, mistake exclusiveness for solid superiority, and breed a hothouse form of Liberalism. It is certainly not ex- pedient to take artificial means to separate classes in this country any more than they are ; and if the effect of the establishment of political clubs would be, as it might be, to sever sharply the clubhouse from the unclubhouse Liberals, those above the salt from those below, their influence would be pernicious. These are dangers which are not trivial, but to which Liberal leaders, called upon for their benediction, never refer.
Still, we must come back to the fact that Englishmen, time out of mind, have always, whenever they really woke up to the worth or imperfections of their institutions, set up a club of some sort. There is a good deal, as Dr. Chalmers said in his ponderous way, in "juxtaposition." Having all things in common, which is generally supposed to be most productive of harmony, is not exactly realisable, but at least, as a compromise, taking a chop together is not without its effect. If any further reason must be given for the multiplication of party clubs, it is enough to say that the political world may as well have its clubs, as sporting or fashionable society, and that it is no very bad sign of the times if an interest in public affairs proves a stronger bond than a liking for horses or high play. Canning or Palmerston Clubs, therefore, are English institutions ; what is not at all English, and what we do not wish transplanted to this country, is the Caucus in any form. We do not wish to see England covered with a number of societies worked by local professional politicians, who. should give the word of command to everybody, telling them what they were to believe, and whom they were to take as their representatives. Organisation is all very well, and it is not inopportune to preach it ; but neither the Caucus nor the Convention, as under- stood in the United States of America, is a desirable impor- tation; and we agree with Mr. Rae in thinking that we should be purchasing organisation at a heavy price if we had to suffer the tyranny which stifles American political life. "Slaughter-House Conventions," at which all able men with any peculiarities are pushed aside to give place to colourless candidates, are undesirable features of English political life. But we do not see that Mr. Rae is right in saying that "the Six Hundred" of Birmingham or "the Five Hundred" of Greenwich are the beginnings in England of the system which has produced so much mischief in America. They have some features in common, and it is just conceivable that the Birming- ham organisation might grow into a tyrannical Convention. But for the present it is nothing of the sort, and as tried in Southwark it has produced results the very opposite of those which the American Convention never fails to effect.
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