LIBERAL PROGRAMMES.
[TO THE FD1TOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."] SIR,—I should like to make a few remarks, suggested by what you said on Saturday week about " crotcbetty " Liberals. 'Whenever I read a speech made by some Liberal leader, I look to see on what platform he proposes to reunite the party, and every speech seems as barren as the east wind. I should be extremely obliged to you, or any one else who would enlighten me as to this. You complain that the Liberal party is broken into fragments, and point out a number of " crotchets " as being the cause. But is that true? Is not the party broken into fragments, not because it thinks differently on minutiae, but on great questions which will divide the nation in coming years? I can see no magic in the letters which make the word " Liberal." I can understand what it meant when Mr. Bright was in his prime, and how he never tires of fighting his battles over again. But even to men not without capacity for enthu- siasm, the psalms of thanksgiving for cheap groceries have grown somewhat stale. The Liberals of those days may have been saints and heroes, but their holy war is done and won. Surely, instead of trying to conjure with old cries, it would be wiser to frame a common programme for the future, or cease to pretend to act together as a party. The split must come, sooner or later. Many so.called Liberals are as Conservative as Conservatives with regard to disendowment, the land question, and that curse of rural England, the Game-Law system, and when either of these be- comes the burning question of the hour, they will join the Con- servative camp, or form some nondescript party yet unborn. Instead of the cheerless sham of a nominal union of incoherent atoms, the Radical Liberals may well prefer soon to stand aloof and act for themselves. If few, they would at least have the keen pleasure of fighting an uphill, but hopeful fight. There is no comfort and no wisdom in that sort of self-satisfied humility which regards the mortifications of discipline as good per se, and which, in working for a party, purrs over the very littlenesses of its work. I can see that a very strong party would advocate disendowment now, and I believe it will grow. Many Liberals disapprove of that " peace at any price " policy which has practically been the foreign policy of the party for some time. As to the land ques- tion, I believe that when the labourer has a vote, it will be found that the talk of the alehouses, which no man with broad-cloth on his shoulders ever hears, has been of quite a different sort from any broached at local Associations, whether Conservative or Liberal. In his " Field-Paths and Green Lanes," Mr. Jennings relates a conversation which he had on the road with a Guildford shop- keeper, which, to some extent, I suspect, draws aside the curtain. " What I say is," summed up this man, " that if you offer a fair price for the land, you ought to have it, and that a few hundreds of men ought not to be allowed to monopolise all England." A more philosophical observer noticed how things were tending long ago. Miss Martineau remarks in her "Autobiography " that "the old practice of man holding man as property is nearly ex- ploded among civilised nations, and the analogous barbarism of man holding the surface of the globe as property cannot long survive ;" and she asks whether, in view of the " admission, by some of the most cautious and old-fashioned observers of social movements, that we in England cannot stop short of a modified communism, the result is not likely to be a wholly new social state, if not a yet undreamed-of social idea."
The men who can satisfy such cravings may hope to form a party, but those who hope by calling themselves Liberals, and making ad nzisericordiam appeals to past history, to rally the masses round them and remount the saddle of office, are reckon- ing without their hosts. In politics especially, gratitude is a lively expectation of favours to come.—I am, Sir, &c., Summerfeld, Marlborough, March 25. A. H. BEESLY.
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