TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE POLITICAL SITUATION.
" iirOU can build nothing," said the great Lord Halifax, the Lord Halifax of the Revolution of 1688, " upon a foundation of paradoxes." The present Govern- ment appear to think differently, but before long, probably on or before the 1st of April, they will find out their mis- take. Unquestionably the majority which gives them their power is built upon a paradox,—the paradox that you can eat your cake and have it, have your Budget and not pass it, destroy the House of Lords and reform it at the same time, establish an Irish Parliament and maintain the Union and the integrity of the United Kingdom. It is of little use, however, to argue whether paradoxes do or do not make good ground for the work of the builder. Time will show. At the present moment it is more profit- able to try to see what facts actually emerge from the existing situation.
The first of these, in our opinion, is that the Budget is dead, though not yet buried. We know that this fact is hotly denied by many Liberals, and that they not only profess to believe, but, strange as it may seem, really do believe, that the Budget, against which there is a clear majority in the present House of Commons (a majority of about forty), will somehow or other, though no one exactly knows the day, the hour, or the means, get itself passed. No doubt miracles do occasionally happen in the House of Commons, and we should be loath to say that anything is impossible in the topsy- turvy political world in which we now live ; but what we do assert is that if the men who dominate the situation do what they say they mean to do, and what impartial observers are obliged to admit they are bound to do, the Budget is dead and done with. Here are the plain facts. The Budget cannot pass unless Mr. Redmond and his followers allow it to pass,—by a majority of, say, thirty if they abstain from voting, or by a majority of, say, a hundred if they actually vote for it. But Mr. Redmond has told the Government and the House clearly that he dislikes the Budget, and that he can only allow it to pass at a certain price. That price is that the Government shall not merely give a start to their veto proposals, but that if, or rather when, those proposals are thrown out by the House of Lords, they shall obtain guarantees from the King which will enable them to convert the Resolutions at once into the law of the land. But we all know that it will be impossible for the King to give such guarantees. It would seem, then, that the Irish leader has adopted the device of the old lawyers of putting an impossible con- dition into a bond. For example, in the old days of legal fictions it was a common plan to insert in a bond the condition that such-and-such obligations should only arise "if John Stiles shall ride to Rome in three days." The Irish have put into their bond, the bond conveying their contingent support to the Cabinet and the Budget, the condition that Mr. Asquith shall not only ride to Rome (or rather Windsor) in ten minutes, but that when he has got there he shall make himself Pope. But, it may be said, Mr. Asquith has changed his mind so often of late that when it comes to the question of asking for guarantees he will change it again, and, " swearing he will ne'er consent," will consent to ask the King to make Peers. Yet even assuming this change of attitude, there can only be one result,—namely, that Mr. Asquith's request will be refused. In that case, what is bound to happen, unless a Coalition or Centre Ministry is formed, is another Dissolution. Mr. Balfour is not at all likely to take office, and if he did so he could do nothing but dissolve. Therefore the end must be Dissolution by one road as much as by the other. But if a Dissolution were to take place under these conditions, there would be no time to pass the Budget. The veto would be in front of it block- ing the path, and Mr. Redmond would be obliged to see to it that action was taken on the veto immediately. The reason for this is obvious. The nearer we get to a Dissolution, the more essential it is for Mr. Redmond and his followers that they should not be asked to allow the Budget to pass. They might conceivably run the risk of going to their Irish constituents a year hence with the odium upon them of having passed the Budget, for though the people of Ireland have long memories, even they forget. What it is quite impossible for the Redmondites to do is to go to the country with their hands still red, as their rivals would put it, from the butchery of the true interests of the Irish people. " If we have got to go to the country, we must go without the brand of the Budget on our brows." That, as far as we can see, is Mr. Redmond's position. Therefore we hold it true to say that, short of a miracle, nothing can save the Budget. In support of this view we may quote one new and significant fact. Thursday's papers contain extracts from a letter by Mr. Redmond to the national treasurer of the United Irish League of America acknow- ledging a draft for £1,000 raised by Mr. Patrick Ford of the Irish World. [Mr. Patrick Ford, it may be remem- bered, was in the " eighties " the persistent advocate of war by dynamite and other " methods of barbarism."] In the course of this letter Mr. Redmond says :—" It seems as certain as anything in political life can be that before many weeks are over we will be once again in the middle of a General Election, and we are threatened on all sides with opposition in every Nationalist constituency." Clearly this means that Mr. Redmond contemplates a Dissolution the moment the Lords have rejected the Veto Resolutions, and that means no Budget.
If what we expect does happen, we shall not pretend to be anything but well pleased. As our readers know, though we disliked the increase of the Death-duties as likely to interfere with the accumulation of capital, and though we thought the licensing provisions, if sound in principle, unjust in certain particulars, our essential quarrel with the Budget was based upon the land clauses.. In our opinion, the land clauses were objectionable in a high degree for the principles on which they were founded, for the manner in which those principles were exerted, and, still further, for the intolerable burden which the valuation of the land of the United Kingdom would have laid. upon the country in general, and the holders of a certain kind of property in particular. The land valua- tion would have wasted ten or twelve millions of the money of the taxpayer, and probably a good deal more, and in addition must have cost the owners of landed property an equal, or probably a larger, sum out of their private pockets. Against this monstrous piece of injustice and extravagance we protested in season and out of season. If therefore the Land-taxes disappear, as we believe they will, we shall feel profoundly relieved. The notion that it is right to tax people not because they are rich, but because their money happens to be invested in a particular kind of property, is not only grossly unjust to individuals, but is fraught with the gravest peril to the material interests of the State. We have not, of course, forgotten the proverb of crying before one is out of the wood. But at any rate it is safe to say that if the Budget disappears, and with it the Land-taxes, the country will have escaped a great disaster.
If we are right in what we have written above, not only is the Budget dead, but there will be a Dissolution, as Mr. Redmond says, " before many weeks are over." In addition to this, it is by no means improbable that the Cabinet will come to grief over the Resolutions dealing with the House of Lords question. It is assumed by the Radical Press and Radical speakers that the moderates in the country and the Liberal Party have been entirely beaten, and that the proper interpretation of Mr. Asquith's speech on Monday is as follows :—" The Government are going to concentrate upon the veto, and the question of reform is to be left over till the Greek Kalends, or, in Parlia- mentary phraseology, till next year. The moderates have been entirely beaten on the question of reform, and the House of Lords is to be only emasculated, reference to reform next year being merely put in to soothe the feelings and save the face of certain members of the Cabinet." No doubt Mr. Asquith's words lend themselves to this inter- pretation. It may be noted, however, that there is a school among those who busy themselves with the interpretation of Ministerial utterances, after the manner of Biblical or classical experts, who declare that this view is entirely mistaken, and that if Mr. Asquith's words are read care- fully enough it will be seen that the Radicals are as mistaken on this occasion as they were when they imagined that the now famous passage in the Albert Hall speech was meant as a pledge that the Ministry would not stay in office unless the King would consent to give a guarantee in regard to the creation of Peers. It was wittily said of Mr. Gladstone that the path of his oratory was like the trail of an Arctic explorer. In the course of his speeches he prepared elaborate caches in which he deposited things for future use, and then covered them with the snow of words. He could when necessary return to these caches and dig up what he had hidden there. So now it is suggested that in Mr. Asquith's speech of Monday there is a cache which may be dug up at the end of the month when the Prime Minister needs what is contained therein. We shall not attempt to decide the knotty point as to what Mr. Asquith's words really mean. We may as well, how- ever, set them forth verbatim. Our readers may find it an interesting game to see whether they can discover in these words, which certainly bear the appearance of being " settled by counsel," something which, though they now appear to " dish " the moderates in the party, will in the end " dish " the Radicals :— "Immediately on its reassembly [after Easter], subject, of course, always—I must make that safeguarding provision—to un- foreseen exigencies, we shall present our proposals with regard to the relations between the two Houses of Parliament, and present them in the first instance, as I have already intimated, in the form of Resolutions. Those Resolutions will, I hope and believe, be both few and simple. They will affirm—I am speaking now in general terms—the necessity for excluding the House of Lords altogether from the domain of finance. They will ask this House to declare that in the sphere of legislation the power of veto at present possessed by the House of Lords shall be so limited in its exercise as to secure the predominance of the deliberate and considered will of this House within the lifetime of a single Parliament. Further, it will be made plain that these Constitutional changes are without prejudice to and contemplate in a subsequent year the substitution in our Second Chamber of a democratic for an hereditary basis. If this House should assent to the Resolutions a Bill to give effect to them will without delay be introduced. LORD Huall Cacth.—Not the proposals for reform? MR. Asuurra.—The operative proposal'. LORD HUGH CECIL.—The academic proposals will not be included ?
Ma. ASQUITH.—We shall see whether they are academic when the time comes. The Bill will give effect to the operative parts of the Resolutions. But without waiting for that Bill to pass through all its stages in this House, we have come to the conclu- sion—and in this respect only I have to vary what I said about procedure a week ago—that in order to avoid waste of time and labour, and to bring the main issue to a trial and conclusion at the earliest possible moment, the Resolutions so assented to by this House will be submitted to the House of Lords. If that House agrees with them, well and good; but whether it does or whether it does not, we—I mean his Majesty's Government— regard the placing with all possible promptitude upon the statute- book of provisions which will set free this House from the veto of the House of Lords, not only as the first condition of the legisla- tive dignity and utility of the House of Commons, but as our own primary and paramount duty. In the prosecution of that course, we shall adopt all such measures within the limits of the Constitu- tion as seem to us proper and adequate, and upon its successful accomplishment we stake not only our fortunes, but our existence as a Government."
For ourselves, we can only say that the art of Asquithian interpretation is entirely beyond us ; but then so is a great deal both in statement and comment at the present time in other quarters. For example, the British Weekly of Thursday, March 3rd, contains a long article entitled " On the Edge of the Precipice " which ends with the following cryptic utterance :— " Lady Granville, in her Letters from Paris, tells us of a plain- speaking Englishman who said to a lady who recounted the result of her bargaining in the Palais Royal, You have been diddled, most thoroughly diddled !' It takes the energy out of us if we think that our leaders are Gallios or bunglers. Since our horses were over, in the branches of the olive-tree overhanging the sea, we cannot be quite sure of them all at once. They must give us time and they must show that they have profited. They must take counsel not only with Labourists and with Nationalists, but with their own followers. If they manage to get rid of certain members of the Cabinet, we fancy they will be all the stronger. All will come right. The Progressives will present a solid front to the foe, and sooner rather than later they will win.
Above all, perhaps, it should be remembered that everything is not known. We wrote years ago about THE ONE FACT MORE. We can only give our opinion on the materials before us. A single fact might completely alter our view, and that fact is hidden from us. Behind all these stumblings and blunderings there must be something. Our leaders, with hardly an exception, are good and true men, and the more kindly interpretation of their action is almost certainly the more accurate. One thing we will venture to say : The One Fact More is not the King."
What all this is about, and especially the last paragraph, we are absolutely at a loss to say. It only produces in our mind the effect of Mrs. Camp's immortal speech which begins " Naming no names," &c. Here, however, there is room for another game. The Liberal leaders, we are told, are all good and true men, " with hardly an exception." Who, we wonder, is the exception ; or is " hardly " an adverb of multitude ?
One word more. We may note that the British Weekly gives in special black type the following quotation from Mr. Asquith's answer to the Scottish heckler who asked him what the Government were going to do to improve the House of Lords :—" We are not going to improve the House of Lords at all. What we are going to do is to deprive the House of Lords of its veto." We are not surprised that in view of this answer many Radicals are now wondering what is the difference between reforma- tion and improvement. Can one be reformed without being improved ? If so, the process is rather a cynical one for a Minister to enter upon. But we must stop, for mysti- fication is contagious, and we feel ourselves becoming as cryptic as Mr. Asquith or the British Weekly.
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