LORD SALISBURY.
WE do not know that Unionists need distress them- selves about Lord Salisbury's illness, though it is the irritating specialty of the present visitation of in- fluenza that an attack may mean anything from a head cold to a dangerous fever ; but suppose there had been reason ; that his illness had left the Premier, like so many other men, "a wreck." We fancy the people, including in that word both parties, would very speedily have dis- covered that they had lost out of the national treasury of capacities something very considerable. We, who support this Government, have been severe critics of its conduct, both in Eastern Europe—where, by the way, the clouds are massing up as if for a storm—and India, but the sort of current of depreciation which has set in against Lord Salisbury seems to us monstrously unfair. The charge against him is that he is not a Bismarck; and, oddly enough, it is insinuated first of all by men who, if he were a Bismarck, would declare that they wanted any- thing rather than an iron Constable of the Empire, and would predict the speedy arrival of a big calamity. The truth is that a large section of the public, excited by the incessant hail of telegrams drawn up by men who think that Imperial interests are all concentrated on the par- ticular spot whence they are sending messages, is hunger- ing, as Matthew Arnold once wrote, " for a little success." They want a coup as dramatic as the seizure of Port Arthur or Kiao-chow. Well, success even in their sense is very pleasant, and we are not disposed to deny that Lord Salisbury at times betrays a lordly indifference, and at other times a disposition to wait, born probably of the Cecil temperament, which is not a little provoking; but he never blunders from want either of thought, or of know- ledge, and we are sometimes tempted to doubt, as we look round, whether anybody else would be half as safe a pilot. It is all very well talking about a Bismarck, a Captain with a voice of thunder and a will of steel, but is it not a careful steersman, with a thorough knowledge of the route and a keen eye for the barometer, that the ship just now requires ? The winds are very high, the rocks are not all in full sight, and the cargo—this is the forgotten element in the situation—is almost too heavy for the good ship to carry. There is all the regular freight on board, and God knows how many tons of gold and gunpowder besides. The people have hardly perceived the tremendous energy with which officials, as well as traders, have for the last twenty years pushed British claims and speculations, until at the present moment our interests are everywhere, and our people in most places. There is no corner of the world, not even Klondike, in which we are not in some one's way, or in which, but for us, some Great Power would not be able to get some prize of the first import- ance. The Government has, therefore, to think not only of the result of war as between ourselves and France, or Germany, or Russia, or China,, or America, but of what our " peaceful " friends would be doing while we were occupied in the "roped arena." Just think if we were at war with France, possibly defeating France at sea in the old and satisfactory Nelsonic manner, with shoutings and cymbals, and creations of Peers, how Kiao-chow would grow, how large a portion of Manchuria would become Russian, how the Turkish party in Egypt, which we can assure our readers exists, would swell and struggle and intrigue, how the Irish in America would volunteer to be led to Toronto or Klondike. Those certainties would have to be faced, of course, if we were defied or our clear rights infringed ; but they are things to be thought of, all the more because their occurrence would be independent of our success or failure. The ordinary athlete does not leave a dozen watches in his waistcoat while he strips, and we do. It seems to 118 that under our circumstances, though courage is the first of states- manlike qualities, a Foreign Minister of the type that carries blinkers and can only see in front of him, or of imperfect information, or of that kind of will to which anger lends strength, would be something of a nuisance. A Bismarck who won the West African trade and lost that of China might be a Bismarck worthy of a statue, but he certainly would not be a profitable Bismarck for a. people who live by trading and do not grow their own corn. We cannot see, therefore, that it is any just re- proach to Lord Salisbury that he looks all round before he stirs, that he sees how serious a thing any war would be, or that he should be occasionally inclined to pay something for a clear path instead of kicking everybody out of it. If he is too disinclined to kick them, of course he is an inadequate Foreign Minister for a State with so. many paths to look after ; but is there any clear evidence of that ? The facts are not all known yet, perhaps never will be known, but it looks very much as if in the most really important transaction of the last twelve months, the sudden rush upon China, Lord Salisbury acted with perfect nerve, indeed ran great risks, and on the whole succeeded without committing his country, as her enemies wished, to the care of another huge dominion. We may be wrong, but our own impression is decided that because Lord Salisbury looks before he leaps, and has a certain aristocratic scorn for heady opinions, Great Britain escaped a very serious danger. An indiscreet word would have brought about a partition of China ; and with the valley of the Yangtse upon his hands the "weary Titan" would, as we believe, have stopped dead, a giant beaten in a career of conquest by the weight of his accumulated plunder. To have carried through an affair like that, the greatest perhaps of the decade, amidst e. hundred harassments, one of them, the most trying of all, a domestic one—alarm for Lady Salisbury's health—is to us proof positive that when a thing is big enough fairly to interest him, Lord Salisbury is a most efficient Minister, while a certain detachment of mind, if you will a certain contempt for small things and small people, makes him a very safe one. It was of no use roaring at him about " our share" of the apparently dying Empire. He wanted trade with the whole without the burden of any share, and he got it. It must be terribly hard for Lord Salis- bury to win in such a contest, and yet to know that he is hampered at every turn by an impression on the Continent, diffused by domestic enemies alone, that he has not the nerve to struggle when he is fairly faced. An inferior man would fight, if only to show that this impression was untrue ; and that he does not we owe in part to judgment, but in part also to a certain scorn of general opinion.
The truth of the matter, to put it plainly, is that we have for our Premier a man who, like the Emperor of Austria, would make a perfect General Referee for a com- plex Empire, checking here, spurring there, and deciding on all big questions with great judgment and skill ; and he chooses to be his own Foreign Minister. We think he is mistaken ; that "the King" is wanted here as elsewhere ; that, for instance, if he said a few decided words to Lord Lansdowne, we should obtain a more complete Army Reform than we are likely to have now ; while foreign affairs would go on as before in all great affairs, and rather better in most of their details, which are sometimes, as in the matter of the Tunis bargain, of considerable importance. The Empire, now growing unwieldy, needs a Lord Constable, and has not one because her working head is not content without the control of a great Department, or indeed we may say of this particular Department, Foreign Affairs. There is, we are convinced, a loss of force in that plan, and of force that is much required ; but still it is true that the serious affairs just now are foreign affairs, that when the Premier is Foreign Secretary negotiations can be carried on quickly and silently, and that a man who attended too much to opinion, as almost any other man would, would land us in a very few weeks in a situation which we have for more than a generation successfully avoided. And it is most true of all that you cannot in politics manufacture a queen bee and make her lay eggs when wanted. You have to take the best agent you can get, and when you have found him must give him something of his own way. It is not very much an English Minister gets of that particular form of payments We should like very much to take an English Bismarck and set him down in a Cabinet of eighteen gentlemen, all in theory his equals, and put him under the harrow of the British Press, and giv,- him for Sovereign not a warrior King but the average British elector, and then see how much success he would achieve. He would resign in a month, and in six • be the bead of a revolutionary party. Statesmen must work with the means they have, and do the work that lies before them to be done ; and those conditions once granted, we question if it would be found easy for any party, or any section of any party, to replace Lord Salisbury. If he surrenders British rights, then let the country surrender him ; but until he does it, we may be permitted to ask the question which no Jingo in earnest can ever bear to hear. If we defeated all Europe, what should we ask for that would be in the least degree worth taking ? In the name of common-sense, do we want Algeria, or Madagascar, or Kiao-chow, or Manchuria, or anything else that we cannot obtain by reasonable but courageous and persistent negotiation ?
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