LORD GRANVILLE ON THE WEAKNESS OF OPPOSITIONS.
THE meeting at the Westminster Palace Hotel on Wednes- day between 330 representative Liberals and the Liberal leaders will not, we fear, greatly strengthen the Opposition. The representative men were very earnest in deprecating war, but Lord Hartington was evidently undecided, not, indeed, as to his preference for peace, but as to the best means of making that preference evident and effective. He had, it is said, been told by some fifty Liberal Members that they would not resist the calling-out of the Reserves, and he evidently did not know how best to frame his resistance to the Government policy. His nearest approach to a practical suggestion was a repeti- tion of the old idea that Europe should act together, and the general, though doubtless the unintended, effect of his speech was disheartening. Lord Granville was more cheerful and more decided, but even he took for his main point the dictum that an Opposition can rarely or never resist a war desired by the Government. The leaders in power, representing as they do a majority, supposed as they are to know all the facts, and supported as they are always by the national pride, wounded by the mere suspicion that the nation will not fight, is always able, if it pleases, ' to drag the country into war for almost any cause. There is not a case, Lord Granville says, when a Cabinet resolved on war has been compelled to maintain peace, except the single one in which Mr. Fox defeated a demand for war lagainst Russia because that Power had taken Ocksakoff. This is the instance to which we ourselves have pointed in which the events of to-day were foreshadowed,—a Conservative Government declaring that if Ocksakoff were lost, the prestige land power of the United Kingdom were gone for ever. Now I no one remembers where Ocksakoff is. Lord Chatham land Mr. Burke entirely failed in preventing the war with our American Colonies, which cost us our mighty dominion 'there, and laid the seeds of the deep-seated jealousy 'between the two branches of the English-speaking people. Mr. Fox failed in preventing Mr. Pitt from engaging in the long war with France which piled up the National Debt to its present height, and left behind such years of misery and ex- haustion. Lord Aberdeen's Government could have gone to war about the Pritchard affair in Tahiti, and a majority in the Commons entirely failed to arrest a second Chinese war. The Government could at any moment have intervened in the American war, as Napoleon implored us to do ; and even in the Franco-German war, Lord Granville, a perfect authority on the subject, declares that we could easily have slid out of our neutrality. The truth is, the Executive Government in Eng- land, as in every other country, is on such a point quite abso- lute. What with national pride, and the latent love of excitement, and the instinctive and, in all but extreme cases, sound feeling of the people that when their Government threatens, it ought to be supported, there is no leverage for solid resistance, nothing on which to base the usual
appeal to the electors. All the Opposition can do is to reason, and reason, and reason, in the hope, often futile, that the Government itself may at last see that war is undesirable, or unnecessary. The most terrible preroga- tive of States rests in England almost as much as in Russia with those who at the moment happen to hold the reins. It is only when the people begin to weary of the war, or when 'reverses occur, that the Opposition again obtains its full hold upon the national ear.
This argument of Lord Granville's, though it is true, and though it must in a measure dishearten the Opposition, ought not to prevent them from doing their duty, which we conceive to be this. Up to the declaration of war, they should discharge their consciences by keeping up an unceasing protest., as strong as is consistent with allowing to Government the power to make the preparations which, if war is at hand, must always be wise, and to which the nation has acceded. When the war has commenced, their function of criticism, both upon methods and objects, commences also, and should be as fearlessly performed as it was performed, for example, by Mr. Disraeli during the Crimean war. Especi- ally s uld this criticism be directed against any extension of the 'r, any vagueness as to its objects, any deviation from the poliqy which, when the war began, the nation believed itself to be pursuing. The object of this war, for example- ' if it is to be—is to limit the pretensions and power of Russia, I not to set up Turkey again, or to re-enslave half-enfranchised IChristian populations. The tendency of every Government
once at war is to lose sight of its objects, to widen its area, to forget altogether the concessions which, if they are proffered, should bring peace. It is to keep up a steady fire of criticism, to impose moderation, to limit in every way the hurtfulness of the war that an Opposition, which believes it to be either unjust or unnecessary, should address itself, and that with as much earnestness as if its original object of peace could thereby be secured. There is nothing gained by silence, or indefiniteness, or shrinking from discus- sion, and still less by that hopelessness which we perceive stealing over the minds of the opponents of the war. We are not willing to blame our own leaders, who are hampered with endless difficulties, and more especially by the critical stage which the controversy has reached; but they do not show the nerve, the doggedness, or the comprehension of their duties which Mr. Disraeli, to do him justice, displayed in a similar situation. They seem inclined to do nothing, to accept the war as a decree of fate, and to await its termination in quiescence ; and we cannot conceive this to be an attitude in which they will benefit either the country or themselves. If Parliament has any meaning, it is to be the deliberative body of the nation in serious crises, and there is no useful deliberation where there is no decided speech. Half-heartedness weakens an Opposition as much as a Government, and there is no reason for half-heartedness, because there is reason in war-time for not weakening the national energy.
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