TOPICS OF THE DAY.
MR. BAXTER AT MONTROSE.
IT is certainly full time that we Liberals were out in the cold. Here is Mr. Baxter, an able man, a thorough- going Liberal, and an ex-Minister of some authority, though not of Cabinet rank, making a speech on the political situation with hardly more than one or two points of which we can profess to feel any sympathy. He is very fair to the party in power, but with one or two exceptions, what he approves and hopes for from them, we disapprove and hope they will refuse ; and we may as well confess that till we see the formation of a new Liberal party on a programme very different from Mr. Baxter's, we shall be as content as he is, though on different grounds, to acquiesce in the interregnum of a Conservative Government. Clearly, as Mr. Baxter justly observes, while there is this wide diversity between the aims of professing Liberals, the Liberal party must proceed tentatively, and cannot look for a powerful and united organisation. There are certain key-notes of sound policy which the Conservatives have, by acci- dent, as it were, for the present made their own, which we in- deed believe to belong to no party creed, but if to any, certainly not especially to the Conservative ; but so little regard has Mr. Baxter for these, that he congratulates himself on the excellent chance which Mr. Disraeli has now got of ridding himself of the accidental connection of the Tory party with them, and of falling into the very blunders for which, in part, the Liberals have suffered. Again, there are causes to which, in our esteem, the Liberals have no choice but to be faithful, even at the cost of staying out of power till the nation is recon- verted to them ;—but on these Mr. Baxter seems quite willing to display a judicious caution. The outcome of his speech seems to us to be mainly this,—that if the Conservatives, on the one hand, abandon all their best principles, and the Liberals, on the other, freely modify some of their best princi- ples, both parties will be so popular that there will be very little to choose between them. We agree that there will be in that case very little to choose between them, because the Liberals won't be hot and the Conservatives won't be cold ; but between Laodicean Conservatives and Laodicean Liberals, we confess that the only matter for choice would seem to be which of them the nation should take the earlier occasion to expel beyond " the barrier of its teeth."
First, Mr. Baxter is sanguine as to the probability of Mr. Disraeli's cutting down the Army, and openly recognising that a great change has passed over our foreign policy, which renders it quite unnecessary to provide for the contingency of any inter- vention of England in Continental affairs. He encourages Mr. Disraeli to educate his party on this point, and praises him freely for having appointed to the War Office and the Ad- miralty strong civilians, for the most part versed in finance, from whom a policy of this kind may be hoped, and even expected. Even as a question of mere administration, this policy of never leaving the Army alone, but always pottering away at its numbers, seems to us a miserable mistake ; but our objection goes further than that. In another part of his speech he presses on the Government the duty of contracting our territorial possessions in bad climates, and indeed his advice seems to be in favour of virtually retiring from the Gold Coast. Now we must say once more what we have said so often,— that whichever party in the State first avows its belief that England should efface herself on the Continent of Europe, and should, on whatever score, contract her field of energy in those regions where she is the pioneer of progress and the tutor of barbarians, will (very surely, and not without reason,) sacrifice its own prospects, and without any better result to the nation than to dwarf its energy even in home affairs, and diminish generally the enterprise, the self-reliance, the high practical initiative, of Englishmen. We have no wish at all either to see England meddling in quarrels in which Englishmen have no concern, and with none of the parties to which they can have any hearty sympathy, or to see her an- nexing territory from motives of ostentation in places where she has founded nothing, and whither she is drawn, therefore, by no principle of duty or of order. But once let Englishmen make up their minds that England has no duties in Europe except those which she owes to her cus- tomers and the foreign manufacturers from whom she buys, and we may be quite certain of this,—that even in relation to foreign customers and foreign manufacturers, we shall soon take a much humbler position. And once let Englishmen determine on the policy of contracting our circle of colonial poSsessions, and we may be quite sure that from that time the spirit evert of England's home industry will become less hopeful, and the elasticity of her confidence in the successful solution of her vari- ous class-struggles will decline. You cannot diminish the whole area in which a great nation feels her strength and recognises. the legitimate influence of her vitality, without seriously dimin- ishing her strength and her self-confidence even in the nar- rower fields which are left. The conditions of the case are very much the same as those which affect the missionary enterprises of the Church. No Church has ever been known to give up missionary enterprise in the view of retiring upon more strictly obligatory work, without losing hope and life in that field of strictly obligatory work. The field of our activity is the measure of our energy ; you cannot enlarge it without giving incidental evidence that the vitality of the nation- is growing, or contract it without giving equally impressive evidence that the vitality of the nation is on the decline.
So far are we from agreeing with Mr. Baxter, that we hold it the chief advantage of the present Conserva- tive Government that it is committed, so far as it is com- mitted at all, to a policy of tenacity, not of retreat, on the points indicated by Mr. Baxter. We no more hold this to be in the party sense a Conservative policy than we should regard it as, in the same sense, a Conservative policy to enforce the authority of the law and keep up the standard of Education. But assuredly to our minds the true Liberal policy is not to diminish the range of national energy and hope, but cautiously and prudently to extend it.
Again, Mr. Baxter seems to hint that it is the true policy of the Liberal party to adapt itself to the timid well-to-doism of the average voter, under our present town and county suffrage. " Let our professional agitators," he said, " take warning by what has happened, and not by their precipitation and want of thought alarm a well-to-do population, and so retard the triumph of measures which they have at heart." This, taken with Mr. Baxter's remark in the previous sentence that we ought to keep in mind " that all classes have now a fair representation," appears to imply that Liberals should not press on at present the extension of the suffrage to the rural labourers, lest we should alarm the well-to-do people who are now our masters. We do not say that Mr. Baxter meant precisely this. But certainly that is the sort of lesson which most of his readers will deduce from what he said, and it seems to us a lesson fatal to Liberalism. We, of course, don't desire to frighten the well-to-do, any more than Mr. Baxter. But if Liberalism has ever meant anything, it has meant a steady advocacy of justice to those who are unable to take care of themselves, in spite of the claim of the well- to-do,' and we don't like the sound of this new warning against reform. The danger of aristocratic wrath had something stimu- lating in it ; the danger of middle-class selfishness had some- thing stimulating in it ; but the danger with which we are now threatened, of the half-apathetic disapproval of a large proportion of the population, too prosperous themselves to for the unsuccessful and struggling members of their own class, is morally suffocating rather than stimulating. It suggests that if you are strenuous in your cause, you will not be so much defeated in a battle of argument and a struggle of sentiment, as find yourself sticking in the mud of a deep, but wide-spread apathy. Liberalism will cease to be a creed altogether, if its wise men are to tell us to study the well-to- do voter, and not agitate his nerves. For our own parts, we be- lieve that the rural labourers are the only class left who seriously and habitually fear, and not unfrequently suffer, class-injustice at the hands of their fellow-citizens ; and that the reason of this is that they cannot as yet make their voice heard in Parlia- ment, and are indeed indirectly represented, so far as they are represented at all, by men chosen chiefly by the class most frequently in keen conflict with their own. Mr. Baxter's desire that Liberalism shall muffle its voice to the note most agreeable to the well-to-do ' mind, is to us something very like the surrender of Liberalism altogether,—that is, if Liberal- ism mean a cause which aims at impartial justice to all sections of the people.
Nor can we say that we feel much compensated for Mr. Baxter's doctrines on the subject of imperial and colonial and electoral policy, by the fancy Budget which he suggested for the amusement of his constituents. The general idea of that Budget was, first, to cut off all the small duties both in Customs and Excise (including several, by the way, which are really outworks of large duties,—for instance, the duty on coffee could not be wholly repealed without a considerable in- road on the tea duty, and the duty on confectionery could hardly go at all if the sugar duty were to remain, as we should get all our sugar sent in the form of comfits) ; then, again, to repeal the railway passengers' duty, to take a penny off the Income-tax, and devote the rest of the surplus to a re- duction of the tea and sugar duties. We do not object to the repeal of the railway passengers' duty, on con- dition, however, that the railway monopolists concede some advantage by which the whole people will benefit as an equivalent, —for clearly there would be no fairness in simply putting an additional dividend into the pockets of railway shareholders,—but as regards the remaining items of Mr. Baxter's fancy Budget, how much would it do either to in- crease the public sense of the fairness of our system of taxa- tion,—a matter of first-rate importance,—or to give a real stimulus to industry V The first point is the one of the greatest importance, for our system of taxation is so light in itself that it is only to certain classes on whom it presses with undue and unequal weight that it is a serious burden at all, and to them it is not only a burden, but justly enough, a grievance. It does seem to us of infinitely more moment that the relatively unequal pressure of taxation on different classes should be adjusted, than that any particular quantity of taxation should be remitted. The Income - tax presses with most unequal pressure at its lower end. It hardly touches the working-classes at all, even those who are in receipt of large weekly wages. But on the small shopkeepers and the humbler professions it presses with most undue severity. Mr. Baxter proposes no relief to this grievance at all, except what is implied in the remission of a penny in the pound to all alike. That leaves the relative grievance where it was. It leaves the prospect of its being just as heavy as ever again, when our necessities oblige us to raise the tax again. We should earnestly regret the adoption of a proposal the drift of which was to diminish the whole quantity of taxation without altering the relative inequality of its strain. Then even as to the very useful simplification of the Customs and Excise system which Mr. Baxter suggests, is it quite wisely conceived ? No doubt, so far as these changes go, they would give a certain impulse to industry, but would they give anything like the same impulse to industry as the new sense of fairness which would result from a more equit- able adjustment of the Income-tax ? Mr. Baxter seems to us to merge the moral in the physical side of finance.
We have said that there were but few points on which we could really recognise the Liberal leader in Mr. Baxter. But there are two such points,—his hearty support of the principle of the factory legislation, and even of the extension of that principle from ten to nine hours, and his unfeigned satisfaction in the prospect of the abolition of the preposterous Scotch law of hypothec. But when these are the sole points of policy contained in a long speech, on which we can heartily go with Mr. Baxter, we fear we must admit that Liberals are for the present at sixes and sevens, and that if Tories are really united, they have every right to reign in our place. With all our respect for Mr. Baxter, we could feel no enthusiasm for a policy such as he sketched out on Monday to his constituents at Montrose.
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