MR. GREG'S POLITICAL PROBLEMS.*
WE are always compelled to admire, but very seldom allowed to agree with, Mr. Greg's political writings. He is an ideologue, with the style of a consummate journalist and the knowledge of a practised statistician. He supports theories which seem to us almost perverse in their impracticability with the arguments of an adroit politician, the eloquence of a Parliamentary debater, and a logic which, its data once granted, seems almost irresistible. If there is a living being who could write up oligarchy, or despotism, -or vote by plebiscitum as English methods of government, it is Mr. Greg, and the wilder the proposition, the more reasonable he would make it seem. The English constitution, with all its weak- nesses and all its absurdities, yet contains one secret of power wanting to every other constitution in the world. Under it the legislative and executive powers are ultimatelyidentical, there can be neither heartburning nor war between them, and no circum- stances can exist, or arise, or be imagined in which the governing power is debarred frem effective action. Absolute power is not only lodged somewhere, but it is so lodged in a visible body that it can on an emergency be effectively exerted. This is, we verily believe, the root alike of the efficiency and of the duration of our system, as the want of it is the cause of every failure which has yet attended constitutions otherwise based upon the English theory. Yet—we had almost written therefore—Mr. Greg -selects this very point for his most deadly assault. For years past he has been pouring out papers, articles, reviews, all admirable in their way, and all intended to support the same thesis—that party government is an error, that for ad- ministration to be strong the chiefs of departments must be per- =went, that Cabinets are mistakes, and that every Minister should mule, at an events until displaced by a vote intended to remove him. He has not advanced in all these years one step nearer to his object, the tendency of events having been to increase rather than diminish the unity between the Legislative and the Executive, or rather Representative and Executive, powers ; but he fights on undaunted, and will, we believe, fight on to the last. We have no desire to recommence for the hundredth time an intellectual contest which, under a Ministry like the present, has very little practical meaning, government by party having for the time given us a dictator liable to interfer- ence or control only from the nation, and we turn away gladly to • Political Problems. By \V. E. Greg. London: Triibner. 1870. recognize the force with which Mr. Greg, though always intent on his main end, government by an elected oligarchy of competent administrators, sometimes strikes en passant at a curable
abuse. The case against vestrydom, for example, the habit of employing an oligarchy of incompetent men to administer both justice and local affairs, could hardly be better stated than it is in Chapter xi. of the volume before us, though even in this Mr. Greg allows his dislike of popular administration to carry him too far. We are, no doubt, " as a nation, reluctant to recog- nize the changes which yet we all feel in our secret souls to have passed over us," and tolerate all manner of institutions which in private we acknowledge to be either worthless or, at best, of doubtful utility. The Crown is paralyzed, yet the object of our judicial proceedings remains the protection of the subject against the Crown. For this we remit evidence which only a trained judge can thoroughly appreciate, to the consideration of a jury obliged to be unanimous, and therefore of course controlled by the most stupidly obstinate of its members. For this we abstain from appointing public prosecutors, who would prosecute in the interest of the law, instead of that of private passion or revenge. For this we refuse to arm our police, ordering them to arrest all criminals, and then forbidding them the protection which would make arrest easy. For this we entrust all power in the counties to landowners, simply because they are leading subjects, without taking the slightest guarantee for competence, or even for know- ledge of law, thus making the irresponsible but qualified clerk to the mazistrates the virtual judge, and themselves an irregular jury with power of modifying sentence. For this dread of the central power we keep up the machinery of the Poor Law, under which all the abuses of the old law are reviving ; and for this, Mr. Greg says, we leave our municipalities in the hands of men untrained in administrative functions. That last denunciation is true his- torically, municipal life having, no doubt, arisen out of resistance to kings and barons ; but on this point, as on the Imperial one, Mr. Greg lets his zeal for efficiency carry him too far. We cannot suppress municipal life for the sake of scientific administration, any more than we can suppress Parliament for the sake of getting better departmental chiefs. The real object should be to tempt the best men into the municipalities as we do into Parliament, by giving them the chance of carrying out their ideas,—that is, by the very system of rotation in office which Mr. Greg deprecates,— and the real evil is one which, as regards Parliament, he has him- self pointed out with his usual clearness and force :—
" If the upper classes wish to become the leaders of the people under the new regime, they must mingle with them, they must instruct them and enlighten them, they must teach them political economy, they must no longer stand aloof from them everywhere save at the hustings; they must descend not only to study their views, to enter into their feelings, to ascertain their grievances and their wants, but to discuss these points with them, explain to them where they are wrong, admit and adopt their notions when they are right, and thus beat the democrat at his own weapons. They must no longer leave even municipal matters and offices to local agitators and vestrymen ; they must assert the rights of superior intellect and station by discharging all its duties ; they must, at whatever cost and with whatever labour, inoculate the constituencies with their own ideas, or accept the ideas of the constituencies where these happen to be sound. Above all, they must show—and they can show only by sincere feeling—a determination to grapple at once, and in a practical, honest, energetic temper, with those questions which more directly affect the masses, which help to render their daily life comfortable or wretched, which decide their elevation or their degradation—those questions, in fine, which to the working-man are nearly everything, and which he will no longer endure to see treated as if they were tedious or insignificant. In fact, the governing classes must henceforth do their proper duties, if they would hold their proper place ; they mat act for the people, as the people would act for them- selves if they were as sagacious as they are virtually powerful; they must ' achieve greatness' and leadership—they will no longer inherit it or have it thrust upon them.' " This is just what the town aristocracies, whether of position or of intellect, have for years past been in the habit of doing. They have resigned out of an irrational contempt functions they ought to have assumed ; have allowed power to slip from their hands into the hands of those who, whether their inferiors in capacity or not—by no means a settled point—are decidedly their superiors in willingness to do the work required. Their failure is a reason for urging them, as Mr. Greg does, to resume the lead in local affairs ; it is not a reason for superseding them in the municipal government which, bad or good, does educate the people to its great political function, that of choosing the governors for the British Empire. To make the administration of justice a machinery for political education is, we agree with Mr. Greg, an error, or even a crime, but that objection does not apply to municipal administration. Vestrydom is there in its place, and the only needed reform is to secure the best
vestrymen, which, as we think, but Mr. Greg probably does not, would be most easily attained by giving the municipalities more real power.
Mr. Greg's advice to the upper class, as quoted above, is thoroughly sound, but in his eagerness to enable them to retain power he sometimes puts aside political principle, and even sup-
presses his own knowledge of economics. In the chapter on the results of the new regime from which we have taken that paragraph, a chapter with much of which we entirely coincide, he advises the Liberal leaders to condone, or rather to permit financial extrava- gance, because if they do not the new electors will dislike them :— "They know well enough—what the hustings' advocates of economy seem always to forget, and what some of its most zealous preachers deliberately keep out of view—that three-fourths at least of the expen- diture of the Army and Navy goes directly or indirectly into the pockets of their class ; in the pay and keep of soldiers and sailors, in wages to artificers, in naval and military stores which they manufacture, in gun- powder which they fabricate, and the materials for which they procure, in arms which.employ the factories at Birmingham and Enfield and the ironworks in Staffordshire and Lanarkshire. They believe, in short (and they are about right), that of every additional four millions laid out on the national defences, in reference to which the Tories are said to be so wasteful, three millions are paid by the middle and upper classes, and are spent in the wages of labour. Why, then, should they be in love with economical administrations 2" In other words, the Liberals are to buy the votes of the poor by alms to be extracted from the rich in the shape of wages for work,
which those Liberals deem entirely unnecessary. Is not this ruling on party principles with a vengeance ? Is there no moral duty owing to the State that we should thus waste its resources, and encourage a tone of wastefulness which of all known political vices most speedily destroys efficiency? Is it Spain which has a strong army, with her officer for every four privates, her lavish command allowances, and swift promotion ; or Prussia, which pays starvation wages, allows but fourteen officers per regiment, and pares down commands till her generals are paid like clerks elsewhere ? That England can bear extravagance is true, but Mr. Greg must have forgotten much of his old learning when he says, "The total margin between the strictest parsimony which a responsible Liberal Government would think it safe to urge, and the boldest expenditure which a respon- sible Conservative Government would venture to propose, would not make a difference of four shillings a head throughout the nation, nor certainly a penny a week to each poor man's family." What kind of calculation is that ? Four shillings a head is only six millions a year, and that sum may be a trifle in itself, but is not a trifle in the energy which if employed as working capital it
would develop. If left in the pockets of the people it would be so employed, would be a source of never-ending new wealth. Put six millions, one years' savings, into agriculture, and we have not six millions, but a ten per cent. return on six millions, that is, in a century, sixty millions added to the sum-total of the national resources. Mr. Greg says himself, " What we look for from the new regime,—from the vast accession of electoral influence which the lower classes have obtained,—is not so much aid or guidance as impulse ; not wisdom in helping us to solve these problems, but power and resolution to insist that the wisdom of the nation shall at once apply all its resources to their solution ; and strength
of volition to bid back or beat down all selfish interests and nar- row prejudices that would interfere with the great work." That is as true as it is well put, and that impulse will be strong enough in the direction of expenditure, without the Treasury encouraging or tolerating extravagance.
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