LIBERAL FAINTHEARTEDNESS. A GENERAL dullness and even melancholy is evidently creeping
over the Gladstonian party. No doubt, as we have formerly maintained, this is in great part due to Mr. Gladstone having forced the pace too much by insisting on applying the constitutional doctrines which are appropriate to nations, to fragments of nations, and thereby lowering the national sense of self-esteem. The consequence was a gigantic effort which utterly failed. And as a burnt child dreads the fire, so a denationalised party dreads the process by which it has been forced into an anti-national policy. It is no new thing for a democratic policy to come into rude collision with the pride of a nation in its integrity, and to be shattered by the shock. It happened in the United States when the South tried to build up slavery on Home-rule, and it has just happened there again at the present moment when Mr. Bryan attempted to build up the pros- perity of the silver States on a policy that discredits the good faith of the Republic as a whole. The Gladstonian party in the United Kingdom is suffering under the very same moral calamity. It has attempted to transform a strong nation into a weak federation, and it has failed, and the shame of the failure has destroyed its courage and sent a thrill of languor and disappoint- ment through every nerve. It is obvious that the so-called Liberals are out of heart. Some of the old chiefs have shown their reluctance to fight, and their wish to retire from the fray. In East Bradford the Gladstonians can only get a respectable municipal sort of Politician to represent their cause, and even he comes forward without any great hope. It is a very uphill battle to fight when a party that has had a, great national fame and has achieved great national feats, comes forward to plead for a purely municipal policy, and to ask its members to lower the national standard till it is hardly more than half-mast high.
The truth is that there always comes a time when the triumph of what are called popular causes leads to a certain smallness and pettiness in popular demands. And this defeats itself and extinguishes the glow at the heart of a popular policy. In England both parties have now become popular parties, and the issue between them is no longer the issue between self-government and class-government, but the issue between a self-government which concerns itself chiefly with petty rights exercised on a small scale, and self- government exercised in the name of a powerful nation. The American Democrats long ago took up State Rights as their leading principle, and State Rights have more than once led them into national discredit. Now the same catastrophe is coming on English Liberals. They have identified themselves with municipal cries which merge the nation in those pettier units that, taken together, constitute it, and the result is that they have given a stimulus to Conservatism such as the Conservatives them- selves, without the aid of this blunder on the part of the Gladstonian party, could never have achieved. Unionism has grown out of Conservatism, and Unionism has satisfied many of the higher instincts expressed by the words "Liberty" and "Liberals," after a fashion which would have been impossible had not the popular party pushed their popular doctrines into suicidal extravagance. It is not only Home-rule which has ruined the Liberals, though Home-rule has had more to do with it than any other policy. But with Home-rule there has very naturally come an eagerness to cripple the national policy which resists Home-rule, by belittling the historic pride of the nation, by crying out against large navies and expensive armies, by snubbing Colonial aspirations, and by pressing petty economies, premature grudges against royalty and aris- tocracy, and, indeed, against all kinds of personal distinc- tion, and so striking at the heart of all national symbolism and rendering it nearly impossible to express honourable patriotism in an effective form. It is very natural that patriotic feeling should sometimes betray the national party into the vulgarities of what has been called Jingoism. And it is equally natural that the municipal view of popular rights should often betray the Liberal party into violent reaction against this vulgar Jingoism, and, indeed, against all ostentatious craving for external recognition. But true Liberalism will endeavour to hit the mean between these opposite tendencies of popular feeling, and to give all reasonable verge to the desire for popular institutions on a small as well as a large scale, without striking at the very root of national spirit and national dignity.
What has injured the prospects of the Liberal party even as much perhaps as its extravagant municipalism is the loss of the great leader who had imbibed a good deal of the largeness of the older Liberal traditions, in spite of the extravagant lengths to which he pushed his sympathy with municipal liberties. Mr. Gladstone had at least his own conception of what the honour of the nation required. He insisted on keeping his pledges to Greece, and on compelling the Turks to give up Thessaly to them as the Berlin Treaty required. He took a very strong line against Russia when he thought that she was dealing unfairly with us as to the Afghan boundary, and he put down the resistance to our Egyptian protectorate with a strong hand. But this traditional sympathy with the national feeling, which he had perhaps imbibed as an old colleague of Lord Palmerston's, has not descended upon his successors in the leadership of the Liberal party. Lord Rosebery, as we all know, has got a sort of panic upon him lest England should be attacked by a great combination of powerful European States, and holds that caution,—even ostentatious caution,—is the paramount duty of English statesmen in the present crisis of affairs. He has not the faintest sympathy with Mr. Gladstone's optimistic view of the vast power of the English Navy, and all but reproaches himself for having lent his sanction to that increase of England's Colonial possessions in Africa which has so greatly enhanced both the jealousy of her felt by the other Powers, and the difficulty of defending our Colonial possessions if they should be attacked by a Great Power. Then Sir William Harcourt, though he has not thus trumpeted his fears to the world after the fashion of a nervous leader of a great herd of elephants, is well known to incline in theory to the Little England party. It was with the greatest difficulty that lie could be persuaded to consent to the building of the East African Railway, and it is always said that it took all the energy of Lord Spencer to over- come Sir William Harcourt's objection to that larsze expansion of the Navy to which at last he reluctantly consented. Then everybody knows that Mr. John Morley has exerted his influence in the same direction, and that in relatiln to the Egyptian policy of the Government ha has always been in favour of attenuating our responsibility to the utmost, and is vehemently opposed to the advance on Dongola. From one cause or another,—chiefly, we imagine, from the natural consequence that a disintegrating policy at home has necessarily become a retiring policy abroad,— the Liberal leaders have all been more or less identi- fied with the Radical policy of economising to the utmost the use of our resources for the purpose of extend- ing the Empire, and are inclined even to contract it within narrower limits. That has naturally alienated a, considerable number of the greater constituencies which feel more and more the necessity of finding room for that overspill of our great population which can no longer find full employment at home, and we have no doubt that a good part of the unpopularity of the Radical party has been due to this feeling that the desire of the Radical leaders to belittle England really implies a much greater suffocation of the energies of our race, than it implies increase in our immediate resources for paying our way. The Radical party have not only failed in their great venture, but that venture has very naturally induced them to contract their ventures in other directions, and the consequence has been to identify the party not only with a diminution of the strength of the central Government, but with a reluctance to enter upon larger responsibilities abroad. What the Radicals need is first to rid themselves of the Home-rule stone round their neck, and next to produce a leader who can stimulate the energies and hopes of what is at present a languid and almost inert school of political conviction.
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