THE VACANCY FOR OXFORD UNIVERSITY.
THE first thought probably of every one on hearing that Mr. Hardy is to go to the House of Lords was,—What will the Oxford electors do to fill his place ? The Conservative
wire-pullers, nowhere more alert than at Oxford, have taken care that the question shall not be long left without an answer of a certain kind. It is announced that Mr. J. G. Talbot will contest the vacant seat in the Conservative interest, and under ordinary circumstances this statement would be decisive, not only as to the fact it announces, but as to the election to which it relates. At no time is it of any avail for an ordinary Liberal candidate to contest the University.
The constituency is naturally Conservative, and at pre- sent even the element in it which is ordinarily Liberal is largely on the side of the Government. The Oxford electors are mainly made up of three great classes,—the clergy, the country gentry, and the Bar. The two first are always Con- servative, the third is more Conservative than Liberal on the Eastern Question. Mr. Talbot has all the qualities which would naturally gain the support of Conservative electors, and the fact that he supports the Government will just now be a sufficient title to the votes of many Liberals.
If this were all that there were to say, it would certainly not be worth saying. Oxford can provide Mr. Mowbray with a congenial colleague, without its being necessary for us to trouble ourselves about the matter. But there is something in the coincidence, if it be a coincidence, between the occur- rence of an election for Oxford University with the announce- ment of Mr. Gladstone's intention to retire from the repre- sentation of Greenwich, which will at least set people thinking. What if there should yet be an unexpected return of Oxford upon itself,—a return which not long since would have been regarded as impossible, but which a combination of events has brought within the range of conception, if not of hope, much less of expectation ? What if Mr. Gladstone should end by representing the constituency which has never been so char- acteristically represented before or since he sat for it ? Is such a contingency too wild for anything but dreams, or is it, at all events, one which need not be dismissed without inquiry from our waking thoughts ? Certainly there was an impression in existence some time since that the Govern- ment had this possibility so far in their minds, that they delayed Mr. Hardy's elevation to the Peerage in order that the seat might not fall vacant at that moment. We have no idea whether there was any foundation for the report, but it was so far borne out, that it would have been natural for Mr. Hardy to go to the House of Lords when Sir Stafford Northcote took the leadership of the Commons. It would be natural, too, on the assumption that the delay was really due to this cause, that the Government should think themselves safer in making the change now than they would have been six months ago. There can be no question that the feeling of the country has very greatly changed since that time, and the Government may fairly argue that the Oxford electors are likely to have shared in that change. Putting aside the consideration of this particular eddy of feeling, let us inquire whether there is any reason to suppose that the University of Oxford would be likely to reverse the decision of thirteen years ago, and to return the man whom it then rejected.
We are certainly of opinion that there would be some reasons why it might be expected to do so. They are reasons, it is true, which mainly affect the clergy; but then the clergy form by far the most important element of the Oxford con- stituency, and if we knew which way the majority of them would vote, it would be pretty safe to predict the result of the election. When the clerical electors turned out Mr. Gladstone in 1865, they did so mainly on the ground that they dis- trusted his attitude towards the principle of an Established Church. The event has shown that they were right in doing so as regards Ireland, but now that that burning question is out of the way have they any ground for supposing that he is hostile to the principle of an Established Church as regards England ? Is it not rather true that Mr. Gladstone is the acknow- ledged apostle of the only system under which, as a great many of them think, it is possible to maintain the Established Church in this country ? Since 1865 Lord Beaconsfield has made it clear what his idea of such a principle is, and the Clergy have had ample opportunities of judging which of the two theories is most to their mind ? To Lord Beaconsfield the Church of England is indebted for that inestimable gift the Public Worship Regulation Act. The tokens of his love for her are to be seen in Lord Penzance's new Court, in the little groups of aggrieved parishioners which are scattered up and down the face of the country, in the imprisonment of Mr. Tooth, in the suspension of Mr. Mackonochie, and all the other blessings which are associated with the ill-starred attempt to introduce an impossible uniformity into the ritual and worship of the Esta- blished Church. It is true that the Act was not originally a child of the Government ; but it was the adoption of it by the Government that secured its passage through Parliament, and it was the convictien, real or assumed, of Lord Beacons- field that Ritualism must be put down, that gave it its actual shape. Granted that there was a general determination at that time to pass something, it rested in a great degree with the Government to determine what should be passed. If the Prime Minister had pointed out to the House of Commons, that while it was expedient to protect congregations from having the services to which they had been used changed at the mere will of the ministers, there was no need to insist that congregations to which such changes were acceptable should be debarred from the ser- vices they liked, because their clergy happened to like them too, Parliament would easily have been guided in this direction, and we should have had a Public Worship Regula- tion Act which might have been an olive-branch, instead of a fire-brand. When the clerical electors of Oxford turned out Mr. Gladstone, and elected Mr. Hardy in his room, they did not think they were electing a member of the Cabinet which would hand over the Church of England to Lord Penzance. If Disestablishment is nearer now than it was in 1865, it is because the divisions which are tearing the Church in pieces have been intensified by the mad attempt to reduce the worship in every church in England to the same level. We have no knowledge how the clergy look upon this attempt. For anything we know to the con- trary, they may love to live under the gentle eye of a potential aggrieved parishioner, and see in the Public Worship Regula- tion Act only that salutary restraint which, in their hearts, they know to be good for them. If they are not of this opinion, they could not declare their convictions more plainly than by asking Mr. Gladstone to be again put in nomination for Oxford.
The Eastern Question is another matter on which a large body of the Anglican Clergy may conceivably have minds of their own. They are not politicians before all other things, and to them, whatever it may be to laymen, it is not a shame to give the sufferings of the Eastern Christians some place in their thoughts. If they desired to mark decisively their attitude on this point, they have now an occasion open to them. Whatever faults, whether of excess or defect, Mr. Gladstone's Eastern policy may have, it is at all events animated by a keen sympathy with the Christian subjects of Turkey. By the degree in which their sufferings would be permanently relieved in the present and guarded against in the future he has always been disposed to judge of every proposal that has been offered for the rearrangement of South-Eastern Europe. Here, again, we have no knowledge of the minds of the Clergy. All we know is that if they share Mr. Gladstone's views on this point, and are willing to sink other differences in consideration of this agreement, they have now an opportunity of giving effect to their convictions such as is seldom offered to any- body of men who have only an indirect connection with politics. These are the reasons which would make a re- versal of the verdict of Oxford in 1865 a natural and con- sistent act. At that time the Eastern Question had not arisen, and Lord Beaconsfield had not unfolded his passionate desire for the stamping-out of the Ritualist plague. The rejection of Mr. Gladstone was in effect a vote of confidence in a party which has since shown that its hatred of priests is pretty much on a level with its love of Turks. If the Clergy have not followed their Conservative allies in these later developments, there will be nothing strange in their saying so plainly, when the occur- rence of an Oxford election makes it incumbent on a large and representative section of them to say one thing or the other.
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