WHAT WILL YOU CALL YOURSELVES P
Jounicurszs are placed in the most awkward predicament by the total break-up, nay, the advanced decomposition of parties ; since the very names are becoming absurd. It is as if you should talk about " my sheep," meaning the mutton that you have eaten in years past; or discourse gravely and natural-philosophically of " the beaver tribe," meaning hats which have ceased to have about them any particle of beaver however dead. Philip Pusey is en- posing the hollowness of the Protection pretence, and cutting up Disraeli as a Protectionist, with a force and completeness that old Free-trade -writers might envy : but Pusey has the beginner's ad- vantage, that delightful freshness of voice which no skill can retain. And the last Protectionist candidate, the one at Bath, is found to be inexorable against giving any Protectionist pledge. Protection- ist, we say, from habit ; for is it not absurd to call a man Protec- tionist when he disclaims Protection P These most recent facts be- long to a protracted series • they are only the newest signs of the decomposition which is abolishing even the carcass of Protection.
Yet there is something which we so absurdly call by the name, only it wants both a name and an object. You can't call it the Richmond party, except in poetry, as you call the ocean "the wave." You can't call it the Conservative party, since that name is a generic expression, which includes things as opposite as going on and going back—witness the Peelites and the Sibthorpites. At present the only way in which you can approach to a correct de- signation of the party to which we are alluding without being able to name it, is to take a division-list on the most characteristic motion, and recite the names : but the list of a chorus in extenso is at the best a very cumbersome mode of nomination. Mean- while, we might resort to some such device as that of arithmeti- cians, who express an unknown quantity by the letter x. That would save one from talking of a Protection party which includes those who avoid Protection like the Bath candidate, those doubly converted and now receding from it like Lord Stanley, traditionary and prospective Free-traders like Mr. Disraeli, and capital exposers of Protection fallacies like Mr. Pusey. Indeed, the same difficulty haunts one in regard to other great parties in the state. You feel a certain shrinking when you use the word "Radical," since it hazards your reputation for philo- logical accuracy in a very painful degree. " Radical" means of or belonging to the root—really we are ashamed of getting up this boy's learning, but the striking philological aberration of existing practice must be our excuse. The Radicals were so called from their sturdy independent resolve to go to the root of the matter ; which is now precisely the last thing that they would do,—unless Lord John Russell is always the root of the matter, for they trace every question up to Lord. John. The Radical party might more properly be called the Russell party, only that such a use of his name would savour of " high life below stairs "; for Lord John makes them know their place, and keeps them in the kitchen of legislation, not free of the more splendid drawingroom in which he and his hereditary friends enjoy themselves. You cannot call them the Hume party—they are so angry with " Old Joe " for his want of tact and Russellism. They quite shut the door in his face, while their flirtations proceed.
" There 's somebody in the House with Dinah ; There 's somebody in the House, I know !"
but Old Joe can't get in. Now, can you call Dinah " the Hume party " ? is she not Lord John's—what shall we say ? Perhaps the mostwill appropriate name would be to call it " the Walmsley
party" : that do ?
But the Whigs—how are you to apply to the men who go in and out of office with Lord John Russell the same epithet that his- tory applies to Charles James Fox and the late Earl Grey ? Speak- ing of some classic potentate, such as Solomon, and Ikey Solomons, Coleridge said, with his subtile irony, " Both Jews, you will ob- serve " : but we seldom use that word "Jew" without a qualifying context or intonation implying a distinction as great as that be- tween a bow and a sneer ' • and we make a correlative distinction between " gentlemen of the Hebrew persuasion" and Jews of the Old Clo' tribe. "Persuasion," we say, with a nicety of genealogical innuendo seldom equalled; as the truly noble Guardsman that suc- ceeds to some "puny insect shivering at a breeze," but wears a bar sinister only in his aspect and not at all on his escutcheon, might be called " a gentleman of the De Plantagenet persuasion." Politi- cally, Lord John wears no bar sinister, but talks as if he were legiti- mately born of the true Fox blood-politic ; he is " a gentleman of the Fox persuasion." But how any traditional adherent of hearty Charles James can lend the epithet " Whig " to Lord John—or to Diplomatic Palmerston—or to the Colonial Earl Grey—that we can- not understand. The misnomer is just the reverse of the one in the Radical case; it is not an aberration, but a philological pedanbry. If parties would look about them and each take to itself some ob- ject, then we might find out a way of designating them ; at present we might perhaps make a shift just by applying a privative to the ordinary designation, and it will be found that such a combi-
nation will exactly express all that distinguishes either from the mass of mankind : we should then say the Whig-less party, the Anti-Protectionists, and the Non-Radicals. But it is only a phi- lological question : the present names have the same privative ac- ceptation.
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