THE LIBERAL UNIONIST CONSCIENCE.
IN the speech delivered to the Liberal Unionist Club on Tuesday, Lord Hartington protested that Professor Dicey, who presided, and who had delivered a very brilliant speech in proposing the health of the leader of the party, was not, what some one had termed him, " the keeper of the Liberal Unionist conscience," on the ground that that party no more needs any one to keep its conscience than the Queen needs a Lord Chancellor for a similar purpose. Perhaps no party would be the better for placing an official sentinel over its conscience, since, with such a sentinel on duty, one is very apt to give one's own conscience a com- plete holiday ; and, indeed, if we did need a, keeper of our conscience, we might perhaps regard ourselves as let off rather easily with so very militant a spiritual director as Pro- fessor Dicey, who certainly treats it as nearly the sum and substance of a Liberal Unionist's duty to " fear God and fire low," to fight hard and give no iquarter. But the declara- tion that Liberal Unionists stand in no need of any keeper of their conscience, illustrated as it was by the remarkable speeches both of the chairman and the guest of the evening, does make a natural occasion for saying something on the character of the Liberal Unionist conscience as distin- guished from that Nonconformist conscience of which we have lately heard so much, and the Gladstonian conscience of which we have a good deal more to hear. We should say, then, that the Liberal Unionist conscience, if it is, as we think it is, very fairly represented by the speeches of Professor Dicey and Lord Hartington, is a conscience of the old-fashioned kind, more concerned with positive engagements, with plain responsibilities, with even-handed justice, with avoiding obvious risks and complicated obligations, and taking solid security against impending injury to the commonwealth, than with gratifying the finer susceptibilities of political emotion, or relieving the morbid scruples of a constitutional casuistry. The Liberal Unionist conscience, as Mr. Dicey and Lord Hartington embody it, is certainly not a particularly fidgetty con- science. It is not .afraid of fighting hard, nor, indeed, of confessing to a great satisfaction in contemplating the calamities of opponents. Professor Dicey was not at all too much disposed to spare our foes. Some of his hearers probably thought that, instead of putting any curb on himself when he drew his contrast between Mr. Gladstone and Lord Hartington, be deliberately gave the reins to a power of keen and scornful invective. And Lord Hartington avowed the satisfaction, nay, the pleasure, with which the break-up of the Irish Party had filled him, and said it was more or less akin to the pleasure with which men observe those fallings-out amongst thieves when " honest men come by their own." There was no affectation of loving their enemies or repressing their own wrath, about either Professor Dicey or Lord Hartington. Professor Dicey may be said to have gloried in not making any allowance for Mr. Gladstone's " idiosyn- crasies." Lord Hartington unquestionably exulted in the feud amongst the Parnellites, and chuckled publicly over their misfortunes. Both speeches were manly enough and vigorous enough, but certainly not the speeches of an over-sensitive or over-stimulated magnanimity.. They were the speeches of men who felt keenly what they owe to Irish Unionists, and the risks they fear to the English State. They were the speeches of men who would never willingly misconstrue the meaning of opponents, but who cannot be said to have felt at all anxious to discover excuses for what those opponents have done amiss. Pro- fessor Dicey even laid on the lash, while Lord Hartington did not conceal his scorn for the policy he attributed to his antagonists :—" Be always asking for all you can think of, be always taking all you can get, and when you have got it, be always asking for more." That is pretty hard hitting, though perfectly fair hitting, but quite unmarked by any of that modern tendency to give antagonists credit for possible but nevertheless rather improbable good qualities, which so often diversifies the vigour and vivacity of Mr. Gladstone's rhetoric. Professor Dicey and Lord Hartington do not speak like politicians divided between their wish to discredit• their antagonists and their wish to show their own lenity, but with the most outspoken con- demnation, and even disdain. We take it that the Liberal Unionist conscience is a conscience most keenly alive to the duty which presses upon citizens of the United Kingdom of defending the privileges and guarding against the dangers attaching to the State as a whole. It is a political conscience that is very sensitive to anything which appears to relax the bonds of citizenship or to dissolve society into its elements, and for that very reason it is perhaps apt to make light of those scruples as to local and personal liberty or caprice on which the Non- conformist conscience and the Gladstonian conscience found their claims for a larger sphere of self-government and self-will. The Nonconformist and Gladstonian con- sciences, so far as they are in grim earnest, and not the mere instruments of a party movement, cry out for a roomier sphere of local and individual choice. They feel strongly and represent vividly the oppressiveness of any kind of "coercion" exerted over reluctant parts of a Kingdom by the over-ruling will of the whole. The Liberal Unionist conscience is a centralising conscience, which protests against any particularism that endangers the unity of the State. The Nonconformist and Gladstonian consciences are filled with jealousy of this dominant spirit, and with a prepossession for variety of method and localism of principle, that cannot but endanger the strength and singleness of the State as a State. The issue between the two is like the issue between the head and the members. The head wants to keep an absolute control over the mem- bers. The members want to establish a certain inde- pendence of the head. Of course, carried beyond a certain point, that means anarchy and impotence, and the view always taken is that this point will never be reached. But we all know the danger that it will be exceeded, and we know it so well that we may at times exaggerate the peremptoriness of the con- trol which it is desirable to exert over the spontaneous movements of weary and restless limbs, But even if we are guilty of that exaggeration, the danger of such an exaggeration is insignificant as compared with the danger of once losing that central command without which collective life, nay, patriotism itself, cannot exist. The Unionist conscience no doubt often seems hard and scornful to the conscience which exercises itself chiefly- in moral discriminations and perhaps caprices of a very sub- jective kind. But without a certain amount of hardness, there never was a State or a Government in this world. It is hardness, drill, at the top, which makes national life possible, and without it there would be no social organisation. This is an age in which emotion 4s laying such claims to subjective freedom, that the very life of nations is en- dangered, and nowhere has that claim been put forward. with greater emphasis and greater arbitrariness than amongst the Irish Home-rulers and their Gladstonian allies. The Nonconformist and Gladstonian consciences tend towards the demolition of all true political and social unity. And while that is so, the stern common-sense of our Unionist leaders is a corrective for which all wise sections of the nation can hardly be too thankful.
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