THE RECENT ELECTIONS. T HE events of the week strongly confirm
the view we expressed last Saturday as to the failure of the Government to embody in proposals the latent wish of the community for a further advance in the philanthropic direc- tion. They have caught up too many bits of schemes, some of them the subjects of bitter contention among those who are to benefit by them, and their proposals have con- sequently excited no enthusiasm. To use a bit of expres- sive slang, they have not " caught on." It was after the publication of the Queen's Speech that the Radicals were defeated in Huddersfield ; that they lost half their majority in Burnley ; that in Rochester they had not—and this in the very beginning of a Parliament—spirit enough to risk a contest ; and that in Halifax the Labour Party revolted. It is true that excuses are offered in most of these cases ; but let us admit them all, and still the broad fact remains unchanged. Grant that in Huddersfield the Tory organisation has been excep- tionally good; that in Burnley there was a Labour quarrel, which impeded Liberal voting ; that Rochester had determined to give Lord Salisbury's son his fair chance of a political career, and. still nothing is conceded. If the proposals of the Government had really excited the people—as, for example, Mr. Gladstone excited them by his just condemnation of the Bulgarian atrocities—all those excuses for voting on the Unionist side would have been valueless, drowned in the roar of a convinced and enthusiastic multitude. As it is, nobody who did not care before begins to care because of the promises of the Government ; but either follows his local leaders as in Huddersfield, or indulges his piques as in Burnley, or enjoys, as in Rochester, an opportunity of expressing a kindness for a race that he respects. The Government has not only not fired the prairie ; it has damped the grass. The Unionists have a fresh chance even in difficult places ; and the perception of that fact will undoubtedly give them a new courage and energy to resist what, till these elections, many of them have thought to be "the voice of the People." The Government have tried to express that voice ; tried, with a certain unscrupulousness and readiness, to postpone their own beliefs ; but they have not succeeded. Precisely the same defect is apparent in the debates on agricultural distress, and on Mr. Keir Hardie's motion for the benefit of the unemployed. On both, the Ministry almost necessarily triumphed in divisions ; but it was at the price of confessing that they could do nothing, except, indeed, create District Councils, which will be talking- shops, possibly useful, possibly useless, but in no case remedies operative, except by slow degrees, after careful inquiry and infinite disputation and disappointment. The unemployed want help now, or say they do ; but the only things the Government give them are a Labour Department, which will do nothing except increase information ; and an inquiry into the Poor-Law, which, even if energetically conducted, can hardly report under two years. Mr. M undella says, indeed, that the Government has brought in four Labour Bills, one dealing "with the hours of rail- way servants, another with the notification of accidents, another with conciliation in Labour disputes, and another 'with employers' liability ;" that a fifth would be added raising the educational term one year, and that then the Government would deal with the liquor traffic, which is a cause of constant distress. But what has all that to do with the unemployed ? They are not railway servants, they cannot claim compensation for accidents, they have no Labour disputes, they want to send, their children out to work, not to learn, and they are craving for something to eat and drink, not for laws to shut up little beer- shops. It is almost absurd to offer hungry men such things ; as absurd as to suppose that agricultural distress, which arises from bad crops, low prices, and shameful housing, can be cured or touched by the creation of more Councils.
Be it repeated, we are not blaming the Government for their failure. It is only a failure to do the impossible. They cannot alter the quantity of sunshine, or prevent American freeholders from selling their corn at a loss in order to pay their mortgages, or find remunerative work.
when demand fails, or prevent a per-centage of the popula- tion from being distressed or unhappy or deserving objects of relief. They can keep them from starving, and they do so, but they can do very little more. They are right in inquiring about the Poor-Law, any relaxa- tion in which may demoralise half England. They are right in their educational reform, though it will be terribly costly, for the present time of study is per- ceptibly too short for a generation of poor children which has not yet acquired, as the Scotch and the prosperous have, the transmissible habit of learning quickly. For all we know, a majority of their little. Labour Bills may be good Bills, and we entirely believe that they bring them forward with excellent intentions.. But then these performances, even if realised—and the Home-rule Bill stops them all—are not the promises on which they rode into power. Those promises, uttered on all Radical platforms, and endorsed by all Radical newspapers, composed, taken together, a programme which a large part of the country eagerly accepted, and. which meant that a dead heave upwards was to be given to the condition of the very poor. No such dead heave is given by the Ministry, or can be given. It was given once, when we abolished the Corn-Laws ; but there is no mighty grievance of that kind remaining to be removed, and what further is to be done must be done by a slow and steady pressure, taking years. Mr. Keir Hardie, in practice, fails as completely as the Government he tried to censure. We have read his speech without the slightest prejudice, for we start with the admission that unskilled labour is insufficiently paid; but we can find in it no practical suggestion whatever. His, Labour colonies are really clubs of unskilled men set to do..
unnecessary municipal work, which is a ruinous device alike for them and the ratepayer, or set to cultivate the ground which, even if they could cultivate it, would not repay the cost. It is, therefore, a plan for giving large outdoor relief under pretence of giving work, and it has failed whenever it has been tried. There is nothing else in his suggestions, the truth being that an industrial Utopia, even of a moderate- or mean kind, is unattainable, except through patient and prolonged effort, which does not strike the imagination. You might as well decree sunshine, as prosperity to agri- culture ; and in that, and all other kinds of labour, there will remain always a residuum of the feeble, the sick, the weak-minded, and the incurably lazy, large enough to con- stitute an army dependent on the community for permission to survive. The Radicals, who know this truth perfectly well, ignore it when they are out of power ; they trade on the undying hope of a millennium, which is found, like an instinct, in all races and all countries ; and as when in power they cannot produce one, they reap the consequences we are now beginning to see. They may get wiser plana by-and-by,---a public work, for example, that really repays fluctuating labour, like the Dutch dyke system ; or they may devise some plan that will soften and yet restrict the opera- tion of the Poor-Law ; but the practicable yet enormous scheme which will suddenly raise the lowest of the people —as, for example, many of the education fanatics formerly believed that education would do—is a baseless dream. Mr. Keir Hardie should ask Mr. Mundella to procure for him the statistics of the " tramps" in the United States ; the unemployed who wander from village to village, half- dead of wretchedness, in a country where every man who chooses can seat himself on the land, and where there is at least one form of labour, wood-cutting, which is. open to all, and never ends. If be is a genuine philan- thropist, which we are not doubting, he need not despair, for the world can be made better, but only by obedience. to the rigid law, that he who sows the seed must wait patiently for the harvest. Corn will not grow one minute the quicker because those who sow it are shivering with. hunger. The Government wish to raise the impression that they can accelerate the process by quantities of hot breath ; but implacable Nature is undisturbed by their efforts, and even the hopeful will presently see that in this contest there is, without the aid of time, no victory. The larger and vaguer the promises at a General Election, the greater the loss at by-elections.
Previous page
