THE LIBERALS AND THE WORKING-MEN.
THE Liberals of Chelsea prefer Sir Henry Hoare to Mr. Odger. The claims of Sir Henry Hoare to the position of a member of Parliament are, we believe, two,—his baronetcy, and his having been unseated at Windsor for bribery. Mr. Odger's claims were not, perhaps, positively very strong, but at least as strong as it is possible that men who have hitherto had no admission to the field of politics proper, and who have laboured under some special disadvantages in education, could have had. He has taken the lead in forming the views of his class on several great political questions, especially the Ameri- can War. He has studied minutely, and shown before a Parliamentary Committee that he has studied to advantage, those questions arising out of the relations of capital to labour, out of co-operative enterprises, and out of Trades' Union rules, which are likely to form the subject of much legislation for the next few years ; and he has proved his independence of many of the prejudices of his own class by opposing their views in relation to machinery, and moderating their warlike dispositions in disputes between them and their employers. These are considerable claims for one who has had so few opportunities of establishing claims on public confidence at all. Chelsea, however, does not see it. Liberal Chelsea prefers the baronetcy and the éclat of the Windsor scandal. And the pseudo-Liberal journals applaud. "We do not mean to say," says one which diffused sedulous misrepresentations of Mr. Odger first, and now justifies Chelsea's decision in a tone of the most sublime political foppery, "we do not mean to say that a working-man might not have qualities which ought to seat him in the House of Commons, just as a man who happened to have an odd name might have such qualities ; but it would, we think, be as unwise to elect a few working-men as specimens of their class, as to elect a man who had a very odd name as a specimen of the class of men who have very odd names." Did political foppery ever reach a siLlier and more extravagant point ? The writer, we suppose, means to say that the fact of belonging to the greatest of all the classes of the nation, is a peculiarity politically as deplorable and as irrele- vant to all political questions, as the possession of a very odd name. Would he,—or any one else with less supercilious- ness and more sense,—say the same of landowners, of bankers, of merchants, of tenant-farmers, of lawyers ? Does any man pretend that it is not an advantage to the House .of Commons, an advantage of which the House is well aware, to have the most instructed members of the various great upper classes amongst them ? Without lawyers, of course, every one admits that a law-making body would get on but badly. But who that knows the House of Commons does not know with what attention Mr. Read is listened to on any subject closely touching the interests of tenant farmers, or an Ex-Governor of the Bank on currency, or Mr. Henley on labourers' cottages and the law of settlement, or Mr. Baring on the commercial interests endangered by a rash foreign policy, or even Mr. Bass on the malt-tax? Next to individual o.bility and the special local connections which the different members ostensibly represent, the circumstance which ranks first in determining the wish of the House to hear any member, is of course, and very justly, the special practical educaticn which may have fitted him if not to form an accurate judg- ment, at least to bring new light to bear, on the matter in debate. To talk of the special preparation of a life devoted to daily labour, and closely bound up with Trades' Unions and their rules in relation to the employers, as resembling the qualification of bearing a very odd name, is an impertinence which stamps the most abject political dandyism on the writer who ven- tures to put it forward. Nobody that we ever heard of wants " to elect working-men as a specimen of their class " at all. What is desired is to have men as an fait at the issues between capital and labour on the labour side, as we already have on the capitalist side. If that is not a great advantage, not only to a deliberative but to a governing body, NVO can only con- clude that a governing body does not govern the better for having full data for its decision before it decides. We all know that plenty of positive errors, errors of excess, and plenty of negative errors, errors of deficiency, have been made in the laws affecting labour, for want of this sort of familiarity with the status of labour in the House of Commons. The leaning of Chelsea to a baronet who can bring nothing fresh to the deliberations of the House except his special experience of a void election, does credit to the sort of teaching which simpers about working-men as if they wore in the position of unfortunate creatures with very odd names, who, however, by possessing great extraneous merits, might become just support- able in Parliament, in spite of those names.
We hear it said that to advocate the election of picked members of the working-class is an obvious insincerity; since if the working-class is to have the full importance in Parliament which it has in the nation, the majority of the House should consist of members of this class, i. e., should be carpenters, masons, cotton-spinners, and so on, instead of country gentlemen, merchants, lawyers, and so forth. That would be true enough, if only the working-classes were as well educated as the classes with more leisure, and were as able to spare the time. We do not hesitate to say, that if the mass of working-men were as well educated as the mass of literary men, and had as much leisure for politics as the mass of peers' sons, the House would gain greatly by having the same pro- portion of working-men within its walls which the class generally bear to the nation. Of course that is only saying that if the world were exceedingly different from what it is, it would be well to have a Parliament exceed- ingly different from what we have. On the whole, of course, and cceteris paribus, wealth is a great advantage for legislative functions, because it gives leisure and independence ; and a liberal education a still greater advan- tage, because it gives intellectual resource. And because these are great practical advantages, we never expect to see,— what would, under the absolutely impossible conditions we have named, be desirable,—any proportion of the working-class in the House of Commons at all approaching to its weight in the nation. But what can be more absurd than to argue that because want of time, want of ,knowledge, and want of means must necessarily shut, out the great majority of a par- ticular class from Parliament, there is no good in securing for Parliament those exceptional members of it who have, from whatever cause, enough time, enough knowledge, and enough means to enter Parliament with advantage ? We might just as well say that because it is necessarily out of the question for active soldiers and active sailors to enter the House, the House can gain nothing from the services of men like Captain Sherard Osborn or General Peel. Less leisure, less general knowledge, and less means, with a special command of facts and habits of thought that are of the first importance to an enormous class of Her Majesty's subjects, may fairly outweigh more leisure, more general knowledge, and more means without any such special aptitudes. A certain amount of educated intelligence, and also a certain amount of leisure,—though not necessarily greater than a barrister in full practice can command,—are conditions sine qua non for Parliamentary usefulness of any sort ; and between them they unfortunately shut out a vast majority of the working-class from any prospect of such use- fulness,—but to argue that on that account those who com- bine with a moderate amount of both, a large store of special qualifications for discussing a certain class of questions, are rightly rejected by constituencies in favour of better educated nonentities with much leisure and an infinitesimal chance of ' turning it to any good Parliamentary account, is like arguing that no bread is better than half a loaf.
We feel the more strongly upon the point of this mis- chievous pseudo-Liberal dandyism, because we are sure that not only is the nation losing a great opportunity, but the Liberals are gravely injuring their prospects with the bulk of the new electors by this purblind policy of snubbing the working-men, and paying obeisance to wealth and titles for their own sakes. The Conservatives already see the blunder, and are doing all in their power to irritate the working-class against
the impertinent Liberalism which implores their votes, but will not so much as touch one of their own candidates with the tongs. The Conservatives, for their part, are welcoming "the Conservative working-man," doing their best to make much of him, and it may be even flattering him with very ques- tionable taste. We want to see nothing of that kind. But we do want to see not only a frank admission of the perfect right of the new electors to put forth whom they please as the most typical representatives of their views, but a hearty dis- position on the part of the middle class to meet them half-way and weigh the candidates so proposed on their own merits, and without these contemptible sneers at their proletariat caste. A member of Parliament is no better for being a working-man, except so far as he contributes a special experience by virtue of his calling. But, so far, he is the better as a member, and he is at any rate none the worse for it ; though he may be the worse for the deficiencies which a life of physical labour has involved. We may be sure of this, that if the Liberals of the middle class hold aloof from the new electors in that spirit of petty social aristocracy which some of their public instructors strive to inculcate, the Conservatives will soon outbid them, as they are already striving to do. Nor will it be by any means without precedent for the Conserva- tives to take a more generous line in social policy than the Liberals. On the Ten Hours' Bill every one admits that the Conservatives were ahead of their opponents, and that they then initiated a reform which has had a more beneficent influ- ence on the life of the working-class than any reform of recent years except the abolition of the protective system. For the present, the immeasurable services of Mr. Gladstone, and his great genius for the whole class of social reforms, has restored the Liberal party to its proper influence over the working-class. But these pseudo-Liberal airs and graces, which treat the return of a working-man to Parliament as a sort of vulgar freak of nature, which may, indeed, be got over, like the accident of a ridiculous name, for very strong reasons indeed, but is not the less regrettable and distressing, tend directly to throw back the class on the Conservatives, who will doubtless receive them with open arms. Contempt of this sort, not without aid from deliberate unfairness, has succeeded in Chelsea only too well. The middle- class Liberals of other boroughs will be wise if they listen to more manly counsels and repent in time. The day may come, as it has come in times past, when those who boast of being the foremost in political progress, may lose, by their own act, the sympathy of the greater half of the nation, and show neither the will nor the power to lead the claimants of social reforms.
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