TOPICS OF THE DAY.
Tar, EXPLOSIVE FORCES OF EUROPE. THE Conservatives have been holding a high feast this week in Oxford and elsewhere. They are delighted, very naturally and harmlessly delighted, with their own success.
They exult in the reaction in favour of repose which they observe around them. Mr. Mowbray is so much pleased at the demand for tranquillity, and the complete way in which the present Government, by withdrawing almost all even of the measures it regarded as necessary, has
satisfied that demand, that he says he has almost forgotten already the sufferings of the previous five years. If so,. we think we may very fairly infer that these sufferings had not those permanent roots which Tories like to depict,—that they were due more to the fears of the subjects treated, than to the active measures of the late Government. Drastic and dangerous medi- cines do not leave the patient strong and happy the moment they are discontinued. Mr. Mowbray would not be all at once so sensible of the charms of restored tranquillity, Mr. Hall would not be so full of overflowing jollity, if Mr. Gladstone's Government had unsettled everything, and devolved on its successor the duty of being "a repairer of the breach, a restorer of paths to dwell in." But the Conservatives, in these their moments of hilarity, might, if they were wise, be more than content,—they might be grateful to their predecessors. Did Mr. Mowbray and Mr. Hall, we wonder, read, on Thursday, the very remarkable documents from the International Congress at Brussels published in Thursday's Times? Even if they did, perhaps they only drew from them a very superficial ground for further exultation over the fact that in England a Conserva- tive Government is in power which will sit heavily on the safety- valve, like the negro in the racing steamer on the Mississippi, in case any such alarmingly explosive forces should give signs of life in the United Kingdom. That is not our view of such matters as the address of the Italian delegates to the International Working-Men's Congress at Brussels. That address, and the somewhat similar address of the Spaniards, do not represent a reasonable element in human nature at all ; they represent simply the immense explosive force of unreasonable passion amongst classes never taught to regard themselves as reasonable beings, but educated only to feel the superincumbent weight of an oppressive social regime, and to feel that keenly. Words 1 ke the following used by the Italian delegates, do not repre- Int any intellectual condition, but rather the explosive forces which are apt to underlie intellectual conditions where the poor feel themselves underneath a dead-weight in which there is no sign of thought or feeling for them :— "It is with a heart filled with an immense faith in the realisa- tion of that programme that to-day we conspire for the com- plete destruction of the State, with all its malevolent institu- tions, the annihilation of every kind of authority, under whatever form it may present itself, and for taking possession by the uplifted masses of all the implements of labour, machines, and raw material, including the soil and all the riches which, by the most flagitious robbery,—the exploitation of the starving multitude,—alone it has been possible to accu- mulate in the hands of a small number of enjoyers. These acts we propose to carry out with a provident promptitude, not by decreeing to accomplish with an efficacious energy, not by proclaiming ; we find all summed up in the two words ' Anarchy ' and Collectivism,' conditions which we consider indispensable to ensure the triumph of the social revolution and the realisation of our programme." Such words must seem insane to ordinary English working-men, who know as well as possible that " Anarchy " and " Collectivism " are opposites, and not equivalents ; and that under no conceivable system of things could the collective Whole gain anything at all without an overruling law very strictly applied. Even the more sane of the working-men in Congress saw this themselves. The Belgian delegate took some pains to show that though he wished the State to be transformed in principle and motive, he regarded the State as a most valuable and essential machine, quite as useful to industry as those other machines for the destruction of which ignorant labour once so blindly cried out. It is only in countries where there has been no sign of a sympathetic understanding between the higher and the lower strata of society, that words such as those used by the delegates of Italy, Spain, and even some foolish persons from the Jura, could be uttered. They are words:representing simply the same kind of blind effort to throw off dead-pressure which a sleeper makes when he feels something on his chest. We are far too apt,—all by the very necessity of their functions, in studying and reasoning upon the troubles, and complaints, and grievances represented to them, are far too apt—to forget that there is a preliminary stage to the rational representation of grievances, which is also a much more dangerous stage—the dumb stage—when the mouth is unable to utter any coherent account of the evils under which the sufferer groans. This is the stage in which the explosive force of passion is most dangerous, and it is obviously the stage at which the Italian and Spanish, and some even. of the Swiss, delegates to the International Congress. still stand. For such a condition of things what remedy is there ? None anything like so effective as bring- ing home to the poorest class that the richest and' most prosperous are spontaneously studying their conditiom
and its miseries, and anxious to find the true remedy.. It has been the total want of sympathy between wealth
and labour abroad which has made the cry for ",the Commune" so inexpressibly dangerous and so terribly inarticulate. It is periods like those of Mr. Gladstone's: Administration which adjourn indefinitely the possibility of such a cry in England. If the Conservatives knew what they are about, they would see in that five years. of remedial legislation the guarantee, not only for a good- humoured toleration by our people of a gentle Conserva- tive reaction, but for the steady diminution of that irrational explosive force of social passion which a policy of prolonged_ Conservatism so rapidly accumulates.
It is curious to find French writers like M. Milsand, in the Revue de Deux Mondes, rallying us on the empty idealism of Mr. Gladstone's reforms, and asserting that in these reforms: for the first time England abandoned her historical habit of mind of doing only what was necessary to silence violent. agitation, and adopted in its place the Continental habit of regarding" the administration of society as a romance." Eng-
land used, till recently, says M. Milsand, to laugh at those "who thought that the art of the legislator consisted in first imagining the ideal best adapted to satisfy his desires, and.
then in merely dreaming how to gain a triumph for that ideal.. Now she has no longer the right to throw stones at others..
What good there can be in the radical transformations which
she is grafting into her Constitution, or in the overthrow or her traditions by declaring, in relation to Ireland, for the
absolute neutrality of the State in reference to religious education, or in creating exceptional privileges for the advantage of the farmers, God alone knows,"—in other words, M. Milsand does not know, but thinks these changes merely sentimental efforts to show sympathy with people who were not strong enough to make any effective demand for themselves. It seems to us that in these measures,. so far from approaching the empty idealism with which M.. Milsand upbraids Continental politics, we were, on the con- trary, taking the very path through the neglect of which France has suffered so much. If the French middle-class had applied spontaneously to the grievances of the classes below them, the remedies which Mr. Gladstone applied to Ireland and England,.
the French democracy would never have been, as it now is, so- destitute of leaders round whom the people can rally, and in whom the people can trust. It is a poor teaching this, that practical: statesmanship consists in waiting till the pressure from beneath renders a concession necessary. That is the very delusion which leads to such irrational and volcanic passion as the Italian delegates to the International Congress at Brussels pour forth. The first great stage in social organisation is to make the least prosperous class firmly believe that the more prosperous classes care for their happiness, and are anxious to promote it. If once this impres- sion is produced, however faintly, there is a safety-valve for misery ; and the moral gunpowder of ideas like those of the International is damped at once. And our own Conser- vatives would do well, instead of exulting in M Milaand's very unintelligent condemnation of the late Government,. to consider what such lurid phenomena as those at the Inter- national Congress at Brussels really mean. Clearly they do not mean anything worth intellectual discussion as contribu- tions to the ideas of the age. But they do mean something very well worth moral study. They do imply long generations of utter estrangement between the owners of property and the labourers. And the safeguard against moral explosions of that kind is not the Conservatism which sits on the safety- valve to prevent the escape of steam, but the Liberalism which goes a little in advance of popular demand, till it brings home to the labouring classes of a country, the conviction that justice can be easily gained through the State, and can never be gained at all without the help of the State.
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