EDUCATED POLITICIANS.
WHEN Truth becomes triumphant she loses some of her old friends. It is eot everybody who can acquiesce in the logic of accomplished facts. Many half-generous, half-petulant natures prefer rather to err with the unfortu- nate than to be right with the successful. M. de Montelem- bert is a tolerable specimen of the class. Liberal principles lose their charm in his eyes when they begin to be acknow- ledged by the world. He had sooner be found by the side of mourning Poland than of renascent Italy. Eloquent, generous, and cultivated, he is led away by an almost feminine instinct, which induces him to fling himself into the ranks of every dying cause. It is partly from such chivalrous sensi- bility, though still more, perhaps, from the infatuation natural to an Ultramontanist, that his sympathies are given to Warsaw while they are denied to Florence and to Milan. Several other distinguished members of the French Liberal Opposition for a long time followed in his train. Even at this moment, with a chivalry worthy of a better cause, Men like M. Guizot, M. Villemain, and M. Lamartine, do not blush to avow themselves the foes of Italian independence.
Their reasons are obvious to the world. They cannot bear to be on the side of Caesar and his legions. They dislike Napoleon 111., and they extend their aversion to all that is under his protection. Even so, they have little sympathy for Liberty as soon as she appears before them radiant with prosperity and elated with her own good fortune.
There are, unhappily, too many among ourselves who are inclined to abandon any cause when it is once victorious. Some of the political thinkers of the present day who con- tribute the most to the Conservative reaction which is said to be prevalent, are men who are Liberals at heart, and gifted with many generous and noble instincts. Had Liberal prin- ciples been the faith of an oppressed minority, they would have been found leading a forlorn hope in favour of the most unpopular creed. They would have been Reformers, if only to be a Reformer was to be the scouted of society. They would have shouted for free trade when protection was the cry of all but a few scientific theorists. Ca- tholic emancipation would have won all their suffrages when to be a Catholic involved a loss of political and social freedom. If Dissenters were a class condemned by the will of an intolerant majority to loss of civic privileges and per- sonal position, they would, whatever its cost, have raised their indignant voices to testify to the injustice of the system. But the triumph of their own principles has ren- dered them discontented. Liberty and Reform are marching slowly but triumphantly throughout the land. Toleration has become the law of the country, so far as at least politics are concerned. A new era has indeed begun, and in the distance may be seen the clouds of dust which portend the approach of mighty and perhaps lawless armies who fight under the banner of Liberalism. It is at such a moment that the Catos of their age desert the cause for which, had its triumph been hopeless or problematical, they would willingly have contended. They cannot brook the noisy enthusiasm of their intoxicated comrades in arms. Libe- ralism as she approaches seems not as fair as she seemed to them when she was afar off. Aniabant madam, °donna felicem. Cynicism may attribute to unworthy motives a tergiver- sation at first sight so inexplicable. It may be said of such Liberals that, like Jupiter, they are jealous of their own children. Perhaps the truth may be that some slight mixture of anxious vanity is to be found residing in their minds, as a scene-shifter, whom duty has brought in front upon the stage, might be unwilling to have the curtain lifted lest his labours should be terminated, and he should again sink into insigni- ficance. The missionary's value is gone when his gospel is accepted. Others arise whose mission is to perfect and to improve, while he, the first teacher and protomartyr of the new faith, is forgotten among the crowd of his own converts. The morning stars dwindle into nothing as the day dawns more and more ; and it is conceivable that even generous minds should be affected by an unacknowledged fear that they who deserve so well of truth and freedom may be passed over amid a multitude of less deserving votaries. Yet, after all, the truest account which can be given of many of them 18,1 that they are above all things intolerant of noisy and clamorous success. They choose with Cato to oppose the cause on which the gods have smiled, even it it be the cause which they have had once at heart. To say that they are not lovers of what is liberal would be to do them an injustice. They love Freedom still, BO long. as she does not offend, against their taste. But the rattle of her triumphant chariot- wheels, the roar of the vulgar crowd who follow cheering in her train, the glare of her untempered prosperity, is more than they can endure. They once were Liberals—they have become backsliders. Their temper and their refinement in- capacitate them for accepting the Liberal creed with all its obvious and incidental defects. They. object, in fact, to the spots upon the sun. In order to excuse their apparent perversionfrom the Liberal faith, they are obliged to adopt a line of apology which would be fitter in the mouths of Conservatives than of Liberals. England, they argue, is well enough governed, and, above all things, England is content. Let us not administer stimu- lants to make the country hunger after change. Change is good in season, when the world is changing; but at present change is not needed, for the world is standing still. Reform they treat as an admirable dish, for which the nation will ring when it is wanted. Cure is better than prevention, and it will be time enough to enlarge the franchise when famine or taxation has rendered the unfranchised alive to the sense of their discomfort. These are not, as might be supposed, arguments extracted from the effete pages of a consumptive Tory press. They are drawn from the organs of a more edu- cated and cultivated class. They are to be heard from the mouths of men, who though cynical to a fault, are still in many respects both generous and chivalrous. A certain amount of class feeling is mixed up with these reactionary sentiments. The gentlemen and the scholars of England have hitherto played an important part in the poli- tics of the nation. If the suffrage is to be widened ; if democracy is to mount on the ruins of aristocracy ; if rotten boroughs are to be utterly and absolutely extin- guished; if patronage is to be checked ; if expenditure is to be too narrowly scrutinized, what is to become of the gen- tlemen ? what is to become of the scholars ? Are not me- tropolitan constituencies a type of what is to be looked for from the advance of democracy ? And what can be more vulgar even than the virtues, what more offensive than the vices, of a metropolitan borough? There is something that is not quite unselfish about these fears, but they are the fears of minds which very frequently are full of noble ideas. The men who are so timid and so sceptical of the future of the world are not unseldom liberal- minded and generous. They are Liberals individually, only they are devoid of liberal sympathies. They have, so to speak, nothing of the natural fibre of Liberalism in them. But they forget that in spite of all their opposition, the reign of Liberalism is sooner or later coming upon the country. The question is not whether or no the principles of reform and retrenchment will finally be victorious, but how to temper and moderate the excesses of the supporters of these prin- ciples in the hour of victory. Democracies, the sceptic tells us, lead, by an inevitable chain of circumstances, to the tyranny of the one or of the many. It must be confessed that history has given us many instances of the occasional truth of the cynical assertion. The reason is obvious. Freedom hitherto has usually been won by long conflict, and her reign been inaugurated by deplorable reactions. If we would avoid the reaction, let us avoid the preliminary con- flict. It is for the educated classes of the country to deter- mine whether the Liberalism of five years hence shall assume a coarser or a finer shade. Heaven has not given to any class of men, far less to the educated and sensitive classes, permanently to retard the progress of the world. All that is left them is to choose whether or no that progress is to be accomplished under their guidance, and moderated by their sense. Gentle and accomplished natures are naturally irri- tated by the extravagance of that semi-animate portion of the political creation who are struggling slowly out of the state of political fungi into the regeneration of political life. Where a statesman sees the first stage of future vitality and order, a sensitive and nervous semi-Liberal sees but lifelessness and deformity. But a wiser and more hopeful mind will pardon the unsightliness of the slowly quickening mass. Marylebone, it is true, is vulgar and hard-toned. The Tower Hamlets have no keen eye for detecting worth or refinement. Lam- beth and Southwark are noisy, and sometimes almost dis- reputable. What of that ? Despite of their many failings, a true Englishman will accept these great boroughs as an unpleasant discipline. He will recognize in them the first stage of political life—a rough and rude beginning of con- stitutional government—the first initiation of great and undisciplined multitudes into the mysteries of electoral power.
Neither the scholars nor the gentlemen of England need fear to commit themselves to the great current of Liberalism which may be delayed and obstructed, but cannot ultimately' be dammed. In the time of the first Reform Bill there were not wanting political Cassandras to predict the ruin of so- ciety and the destruction of all the influence of property. The event has proved that the influence of property required no rotten Tory props to stay it up. The body admitted to the franchise had some of the virtues and all the weaknesses of their earlier enfranchised countrymen. Property was as omnipotent as ever ; because respect for property is a virtue which Englishmen, whatever their station or degree, carry even to excess. Education and talent are like property. They have an influence which can never be swamped, because it is one that appeals directly to all English hearts. The educated classes may lose something, it is true, at the first outset by the triumph of the class immediately below. But education has a value of which it can never be deprived, unless it ranges itself deliberately on the side of reaction and obstruction. It is a light that is not easily hid under a bushel. Men of ability and merit will mount to the crest of the waves, if they strike out manfully and boldly with the stream. The old and thrice-worn parable of the sybil may be repeated once more for their benefit and warning. She comes to the educated classes, and offers them power and prestige if they will do her bidding, and dare to lead whither they cannot choose but follow. The longer they delay the smaller will be the price she offers ; and if they refuse, once for all, to adopt her counsel, when it is too late they will find that they have rejected the opportunity given them of occupying their natural place in the political body.
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