TOPICS OF THE DAY.
MR FORSTER.
AIR. FORSTER'S speech at Bradford yesterday week is not .1.11 one that can lose significance by one week's or indeed by many weeks' interval. He had nothing very new to communicate, except what is of the most importance of all from a man in his position,—fresh means of weighing the force, breadth, and weight of his own character as a states- man. But this he gave us in a much more ample mea- sure than any speech of his colleagues for many months' back has given us for a similar estimate of themselves. Com- pare, for instance, Mr. Lowe's wedges of thin, theoretic rea- soning, and snatches of shrill, caustic wit, with Mr. Forster's weighty, massive, and singularly dignified exposition of policy and pdrpose ; and every one, friend or foe, will admit at once that the difference between them is the difference between a talent for remark and a genius for statesmanship. Mr. Lowe is keen, but he uses actual political events only as the hook on which to hang abstract trains of reasoning, mostly inapplicable, and which he hardly even attempts adequately to apply to the questions of the day. Mr. Forster never shoots a single arrow into space. Sagacious moral judgment, never vague, always as lucid and significant as the conditions of the moment admit, always sympathetic with "the dim common populations," yet always scrupulously fair to the sincere perplexities of those who seem for a time the enemies of the masses, never for a moment plausible, because preferring so very much fairly to admit and recognise a difficulty than to evade it,—this is of the substance of Mr. Forster's speech, which embodies with singular force the vigorous political conscience of a democratic statesman who desires nothing so much as to build up a new political order out of the wreck of the aristocratic system that has been gradually subverted, and to resist in the name of the people, and for the sake of the people, everything like that democratic levity, caprice, destructiveness, and anarchy that have so often brought, and justly brought, failure and disgrace on the Democratic cause. Every section of Mr. Forster's address is not only practical and constructive, but full of a deep feeling for the dignity of the statesman's office, of the need which the people,—far more even than-the governing class of the people, —have for strong and resolute government in their own name. Grave responsibility, in the form not of weak and feverish scruple, but of manly and energetic pride in the deliberate execu- tion of a policy once submitted to and sanctioned by the nation, speaks throughout the whole. Even in relation to compara- tively small matters like the Ballot, you see how clearly Mr. Forster had considered the distinction between what he had made up his mind to do if he did anything, what he merely desired to do, and what he only suggested doing in the absence of any better method, and how determined he was not to sacrifice the best thing in his power to effect for the sake of any ideal measure which he could not carry. Mr. Forster knew exactly throughout what he would surrender for the sake of substan- tial success, and what it would be virtual failure to surrender at all, and he rightly despised the affectation of threatening what he did not intend to do. Even on these small matters his speech was weighty, because it showed how completely he has made himself master of the best principle on which to accommodate himself to the actual condition of political things. He has made up his mind to work with the materials at hand, and not to reserve himself for an ideal and unattain- able future when the materials at hand shall not impose any limitation on his own political discretion. Mr. Forster is one of those statesmen who will do what good he can, without sulking at his inability to do what he can't. Of his sympathies and political hopes Mr. Forster gave a very significant hint, when he remarked, at the conclusion of the section of his speech devoted to the Ballot, that he was much struck by the impression produced and confessed in the minds of some of the least advanced Liberals,—for example, Mr. Walter, M.P. for Berkshire,—that the passing of the Ballot would help on quickly the passing of household suffrage for agricultural labourers and for the constituencies of the counties; and still more in the admirable criticism on the farmers' feel- ings in relation to the agricultural labourers' agitation, with its candid confession of the employer's natural bias on the subject, and his wise counsel to them to struggle against it :— " I hope none of you will be tempted to rejoice that our friends in the agricultural districts have these difficulties, as we have had them for a long time ; but I think we may very fairly give them one result of our experience in the matter, a result which, I venture to say to employers there—being myself au employer here—is this, that employers in the agricultural dis- tricts mast get rid of the notion, as we have had to get rid of it, that there is anything wicked in combining for wages.. They must also get rid of the notion that the men in whom the labourers choose to put confidence to help and lead them in the combination are necessarily bad men ; and in fact,. they had better not call them agitators, or give them any name of that kind. I should be most unfair if I did not at once acknowledge that the natural feeling of every employer —I am sure it has been my own—has been to conduct his arrangements with those whom he employs without the inter- ference of anybody else. lam thankful to say I have been able to do that, and I should regret if the time should come when r should not be able to do that ; but if such time should come, I should be sure it was of no use attempting to get rid ofthose interlopers by calling them names." That is good, not simply because it is plain sound sense, but because it shows, as Mr. Forster always shows, that he can enter into the view of both sides of a great struggle, that even the moral blunders he condemns have their explanation and apology, though not their justification, in his own large political nature. Even more valuable, in a statesman, than the right judgment itself, is the right appreciation of the sources of error. You may have the one, as you sometimes have in Mr. Lowe, in so cast-iron a form that it simply wounds and lacerates all with whom it comes into collision. Mr. Forster tempers discussion as powerfully as he aids it ; he makes it easier to his adversaries to approach him ; he softens the tone of his allies ; he introduces into every question he touches the courtesy of mutual forbearance, and not unfrequently of mutual respect. It is not too much te say that we in the Press have as much to learn from Mr. Forster in this way as have politicians in the House or on the stump. Very justly and characteristically does he say, after his terse and striking description of the Anglo-Saxon victory over the forces of external Nature, and his remark that the same race has come nearest to the solution of the one great political problem, the reconciliation of individual freedom with social order, that the cause of this singular success is chiefly this,—that "Englishmen, true Anglo-Saxons, sympathise with their opponents, feel for and with them more than other people do ; that, on political matters, we are more large- hearted, and therefore more clear-sighted, partly on moral and partly on intellectual grounds," than other races have as yet become. But in this respect the speaker himself is as far beyond average English politicians and political writers, as average English politicians and political writers are beyond French and German politicians and political writers. Mr. Forster is at the farthest possible extreme from being- devoted to what George Eliot makes a day-labourer so hap- pily term the "Big Folks' world." If ever there were a. statesman whose specific characteristic it is to think and fee/ almost passionately for the Small Folks in this quite too. much of a Big Folks' world, it is he. That is the true root of what the discontented Radicals call his Conservatism. He. sees how much that is of the first value and help to the Small Folks, the theoretic Radicalism threatens with wanton destruc- tion. And yet Mr. Forster can enter completely into the difficulties of the Big Folks, whose fault it certainly very seldom is that they are Big Folks, or that they find it ex- tremely difficult to better materially the condition of the Small Folks. With a passionate and unwearied sympathy for the latter, he shows none of that ignorant rage against the former which is most characteristic of those who have not entered heartily into the wants and perplexities of either,— who look at the question involved from the point of view of abstract justice.
Again how strikingly Mr. Forster's defence of the great Arbitration Treaty contrasts with Mr. Lowe's narrow and wholly unhistorical view of that measure. To listen to Mr. Lowe, you would suppose that we had agreed to arbitration simply to soothe the unreasonably irritable feelings of injured Americans, and that the proceeding had hardly any relation to international law at all. It is true Mr. Lowe cursorily excepted the bearing of the three rules on the future, but even as to that he hardly gave his audience any hint that it was a matter of the least importance. Mr. Forster puts the thing very differently and far more justly. Had he been the first exponent of the Government on the Treaty, it would have been impossible for the Pall Mall Gazette to hang upon his speech its curiously distorting and distorted view of the real significance of that engagement. Mr. Forster points out that way as we have admitted our obligation to act on behalf of the United States. No doubt Mr. Forster also insists, and in- sista very justly, on the enormous gain which it is to us THE NEW LORD CHANCELLOR.
to have accepted honestly the principle of arbitration, and QIR RO1INDELL PALMER'S accession to the Woolsack so taken away from the United States every shadow of kJ and the Cabinet will doubtless form a critical point in an official or intelligible right to complain of our conduct, the history of Mr. Gladstone's Administration. Bland, melli- whatever unofficial grumbling may still be left unappeased. fluous, and deeply religions, with a happy art of throwing oil But this would not have been creditable to us,—it would on troubled waters, and an indulgent manner towards all who have been simply mischievous,—had there not been real differ from him which makes him popular even with oppo- ground on our own side to doubt whether we had exhibited nents, moreover with a thoroughly conservative, social temper the kind of promptitude in preventing the escape of beneath the enlightened intelligence which always disposes hostile cruisers from our ports which we should expect from him to get rid of irritating anomalies that cannot last, no one others, and whether we ourselves should be satisfied in the could be better chosen for exercising a genuinely persuasive future to receive from other nations the sort of legal excuses influence over the House of Lords. Lord Hatherley was pro- that we have put forward for ourselves in the past. It would foundly respected, but there was something of the sturdy, antique, have been sheer cowardice to submit our conduct to Arbitra- economic Radical in his nature which prepossessed the House of tion, in case we had felt so absolutely certain of its soundness Lords against his views. Sir Roundell Palmer, while belong- that nothing would induce us to complain of any other ing to much the same school in the Church as Lord Hatherley, Government that should act exactly as ours acted. The —though, no doubt, to a somewhat more literary, more Pusey- simple truth is, that our statesmen know this not to be the ite, and more artistic stratum of the High-Church party, the case. They showed that they knew it when they arbitrarily high and sweet Church rather than the " high and dry,"—is, stopped the Liverpool rams without getting any legal convic- in spite of many wise progressive principles quite consistent tion against them. And therefore, and therefore only, they with Conservative-Liberalism, fundamentally attached to the were perfectly right to submit their conduct to rules more ex- social order of things, as it now exists, and will always be plicit than any laws which were actually recognised before. We able to address the majority of the Upper House as one who could not decently have asked the United States to agree for enters heartily into almost all their strongest veins of sentiment, the future to principles of action which we had just die- while differing from them chiefly in relation to the policy by avowed, to our own great advantage and their great disad- which those currents of feeling may best be spared from rude vantage, in the past. Mr. Forster puts the Arbitration on its collisions with popular aims. It must be remembered that solid grounds,—which certainly are not, as some would have on almost all questions of legal chenge Sir Roundell Palmer it, that we consented to pay for a bonne-bouche to the United has hitherto been at least as Conservative in tone as Sir G. States just to stop the querulous cries and taunts thence Jesse'. He has opposed strenuously the repeal of our law of
proceeding. primogeniture, though there, we suppose, he may now be ex-
Bat perhaps the most important passage in Mr. Forster's pected to give way. He gave the most serious trouble to the speech,—that which gives it its tone of singular weight and present Government in relation to the new Irish Land Act, and promise for all who have eyes to see,—is the passage in which succeeded, indeed, in effecting some serious modifications in it, he speaks of the two apparently somewhat inconsistent duties not, we believe, for the better. Even on questions of international of modern popular administrations,—firm government and law his legal conservatism has repeatedly shown itself. It opinion" is often the name for a shallow, superficial current compulsorily seeder system. On the whole, therefore, of very weak inclination to believe, that changes from month his accession to the Cabinet may be regarded as likely to to month and day to day ; and governments which defer to strengthen the Cabinet in the House of Lords,—where, how- it are governments which no man can know how to trust ever, it can never really have much influence,—and also with or to obey. But even such public opinion always will weaken the Liberal-Conservatives in the House of Commons, but to the nerve of feeble men who are aware, as every one is weaken it with the Radicals, i.e., with those sections of aware, that when it is deep and serious they must either which Mr. Miall and Mr. Fawcett are respectively the most disappear or conform to it. And therefore, what we most notable exponents.
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