TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE POLITICAL SITUATION.
THE guiding men in the constituencies should carefully consider whether they do or do not intend to permit a change of Government ; for matters are not going well for the Ministry in Egypt. It is true the pressure, the immediate pressure, is growing lighter in the Soudan. The immediate friends of General Gordon, those alone who have the right to speak for him personally, tell the world through the Contem- porary that he has never asked for troops, that he is not and never has been in any personal danger, that he utterly rejects the idea of" Sarawaking the Soudan," and that his sole object in re- maining in Khartoum is to organise some sort of government, so that there should be no massacres. He asks only instruc- tions; and these in some form or other he will receive. The tribes round Dongola have received a check, and the Egyptian Army has occupied Assouan and Siout, and, unless the Mahdi advances in person, can hold them for a few months. The British Government, therefore, as far as the Soudan is concerned, gain time, and are relieved from the pressure of the personal question of General Gordon's safety. The difficulty as to Egypt Proper has, however, been in no degree lessened. It is possible still that, as the Govern- ment cannot satisfy the financial Rings whose mouthpiece M. Ferry has made himself, the negotiations with France may yet be broken off, not to be resumed. The British Government will then be at liberty to seek for a new policy ; but even then it is quite possible that the policy it selects will not be a popular one, and conceivable that if it involves advances to the Egyptian Treasury, to be made before the fate of Egypt is decided, it will be bitterly disliked. The British people will not send millions to Cairo unless Cairo is theirs. The chances are, however, that M. Ferry, finding the British Government un- bending on the financial side, and aware that it is impossible to embarrass the British Treasury, may modify his financial pretensions, if only he can obtain an apparent political success, —that the negotiations may proceed, and that the Ministry, in their anxiety to avert a permanent occupation of Egypt, may accede to agreements which will be unacceptable to the House of Commons. We do not say that they will. In politics there is a thirteenth hour sometimes ; and while Prince Bismarck sways the Continent, all Powers are liable to be affected by his powerful and sometimes un- certain influence. But they may ; and if they do, the dis- pleasure within the House of Commons will be very great. We do not believe that story of the Telegraph about a number of Liberal Members, sufficient to turn a division, who have signified to the Premier that if he makes any concessions to Europe in Egypt, they will not support him ; but we all know how the Whigs feel upon the question ; we have all read Mr. Eylands's significant speech; and we all understand that there are Radicals who, if we are again pledged to evacuate Egypt, yet do not evacuate it now, cannot be relied on for support. Still less can Government rely on the Parnell- ites, who are at heart most anxious to see a dissolution before any extension of the franchise takes place, and who would rise sharply in Irish popularity, as against the more violent Nationalists, if they could pose on any one great night as arbiters of the fate of Ministries. It is possible, therefore, that when the vote is taken which Mr. Gladstone has promised to take, the Liberal majority, unless swelled by mandates from the electors, may prove insufficient.
The electors, therefore, should come to a decision and act ; the question before them, stated with brutal plainness, being whether they will allow the Liberal Ministry to be expelled because of its conduct in Egypt. It is a most serious question, for it may affect the whole future of the country for years ; and for ourselves our answer is clear. With in- finite reluctance, and even anger, we must pronounce that, grievous as such a policy in Egypt as we have admitted to be possible would be, it must be condoned rather than Lord Salisbury should be placed in power. In our judgment, Mr. Gladstone is upon Egypt the victim of an illusion, the nobility of which may be recognised without its unreal character being overlooked. In our judgment also, if we retire from Egypt leaving no trustworthy and automatic Government there, we shall have failed to do a piece of work in which we ought to have succeeded. We shall not have improved the position of the Egyptian Government, or of the Egyptian Treasury, or of the Egyptian people, and we shall not have arrested the most dangerous movement which in modern times has shaken the liussulman world. We shall leave Egypt poorer in men, in money, and in the prospects of good Government, than when we entered it. But deeply as we deplore this failure, and heartily as.
we hope that at the last moment it may be averted, we can- not reconcile ourselves to the only alternative—the ascendency of Lord Salisbury for six years. Mr. Gladstone may have missed a great opportunity of doing good to Asiatics ; Lord Salisbury will seize opportunities in the Balkans of doing harm to Euro- peans. He consents avowedly that the peoples but just escaped from the Turk shall pass under the more durable yoke of the Austrian. . Mr. Gladstone may lose us the oppor-
tunity of winning Egypt, but Lord Salisbury may lose us the Empire. Time has taught him nothing ; he still believes that the people is at heart Jingo, and at Plymouth only. on Wednesday he declared that not only must we be paramount.
in Egypt, though we need not interfere in its internal ad- ministration,—that is, we must rule Egypt, but not for the
benefit of its people,—but that we must be ready in all corners
of the Empire to break the peace if need be, and that in especial we must hold India by the keenness of the British
sword, and by showing her people—who do not know where Europe is—that Russia and France cannot advance in our despite. These two great Powers are to be perpetually held back, but at the same time we ourselves must advance per- petually. "Your Empire, if you mean it to live, must grow, must steadily grow. If it ceases. to grow, it will begin to decay."
That sentence' logically construed, implies the conquest of the
world ; and if we acquit Lord Salisbury of logic, it implies a renewal of those horrible six years of Lord Beaconsfield's ad- ministration when every week produced a new military enter- prise, and when all cool men said that if the Beaconsfield policy continued, the alternatives were some terrible humilia- tion for England, or a resort to the conscription. Better face the dangers of retreat—for the evacuation of Egypt with nothing accomplished is retreat—than commence six years of adventure such as Lord Salisbury shadows forth.
Even on foreign affairs such a prospect frightens us ; and at home, what should we lose? The Times tells us, in that calmly
irritating way in which men propound platitudes as unanswer- able that the Kingdom can wait for internal changes, however beneficial. Of course it can,—for some changes, at all events ; but Lord Salisbury does not intend it to wait. He intends, he avows, to bring in a Reform Bill with a Redistribution Bill embedded in it, which shall re-establish that conservative influ- ence which he says the farmers exercise now. He was eager, eloquent, even diffuse, on Thursday on this topic. The "balance," he says, has in this Kingdom been maintained by the votes of the farmers ; and he will so manage Redistri- bution that other influences shall be created as conservative as they are, even if he has to give them an " arithmetic- ally excessive " share of power. In other words, he intends so to separate the urban and rural constituencies that they shall counteract each other, and that landlords ruling within the latter shall retain their power of influencing elections and forbidding or delaying all advance. The Reform Bill is to be granted, but rendered useless in the granting. We say nothing of his threats about other reforms, and especially the government of London, which he evidently dreads may become popular ; for his remarks upon the Franchise Bill sufficiently reveal the drift of his inner thought. The English people are, if Lord Salisbury has his way, to obtain paramount power in Egypt, without the government of Egypt, at the price of six years of Jingoism abroad and landlordism at home. That is the issue placed before us and eagerly as we
desire to see Egypt English, and the us; of centuries
terminated by the sway of a British nominee, we say distinctly "No" to that offer. And whatever the temper of the House of Commons—which, no doubt, has many reasons for its irritable condition—we are utterly mistaken if the con- stituencies, once warned of the prospect before them, will not say " No " too.
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