THE EAST BRADFORD ELECTION. T HE East Bradford election has ended
in the return of Captain Greville, the Unionist candidate, by a sufficient majority in the place of the former Unionist, Mr. Byron Reed, who was a great favourite in the constituency, and had carried two preceding elections, that of 1886 and that of 1895;—he lost that of 1892, but considerably increased his majority between 1886 and 1895. Captain Greville did not, indeed, secure as large a majority as Mr. Byron Reed obtained a year and five months ago, though it was larger than Mr. Byron Reed's majority in 1886; but the circumstances of the election were very different, as Mr. Keir Hardie obtained a considerable vote as a Labour candidate on Tuesday last, while no Labour candidate had canvassed the constituency on any previous occasion. The consequence was that while the Unionist poll was diminished from 5,843 in 1895 to 4,921 last Tuesday, or by 922 votes, the Gladstonian candidate's poll was re- duced from 5,139 only to 4,526, or by 613 votes ; and it is argued that in all probability the Unionist vote dwindled from intrinsic causes, while the Gladstonian lost ehiefly through the competition of the Labour candidate. The in- ference is that the Gladstonian would have won last Tues- day, had there been no Labour candidate in the field. It may have been so, but the inference is very far from cer- tain. In the first place, the total poll of Tuesday was considerably the largest which East Bradford has reached in recent years. It yielded a total of 11,400 votes, while the heaviest previous poll had been 10,982 in 1895; and this probably indicates that a good many Labour votes were given on Tuesday which would not have been recorded at all but for the appearance of a dis- tinctive Labour candidate, so that the Labour vote on this occasion may not have been in the main drawn away from the Gladstonian poll of a year and a half ago. But, in the second place, it is by no means unlikely that the Unionist poll suffered a good deal more from Mr. Keir Hardie's candidature than the Gladstonian poll. In the great manufacturing towns of Yorkshire and Lancashire the Irish Home-rule cry is by no means intrinsically popular except so far as the illusion prevailed that if Irish Home- rule were carried it would attract the Irish labourers back to Ireland. That illusion has been gradually dispelled by observing how certain an Irish Parliament would be to undermine instead of increasing the prosperity of Ireland. And as there is no love lost between the Irish and the English artisans, it is likely enough that a good many of those who would have supported the Unionist rather than the Irish cause, in the absence of any distinctive Labour candidate, may have voted for the Labour candidate last Tuesday from a real preference for shorter hours of labour or some other bias of the semi-Socialist kind. In the great Northern constituencies there are not a few opera- tives whose views are Radical enough on every subject except Irish Home-rule. They have no wish to give the Irish element in the constituency any support which would not be directly advantageous to themselves. If they had not had a candidate after their own heart, they would have voted against the Irish cause rather than in its favour. We are very much inclined, therefore, to believe that the Unionist poll lost more by Mr. Keir Hardie's candidature than the Gladstonian poll, especially as the total vote was certainly swelled by the appearance of a Labour candidate, —which seems to show that there was a distinctive Labour party in the borough which had previously been more or less indifferent to Unionists and Gladstonians alike.
However that may be, it is very satisfactory to see that a stranger to the borough like Captain Greville succeeded in carrying off so large a proportion of the vote which an old favourite like Mr. Byron Reed had attracted. As a rule, when such a favourite dies, he friends show their regret by either staying away from the poll or voting for an opponent, especially at a by-election where they think that no great political consequence will result from the return of a political opponent. On this occasion there cannot have been very many abstentions or the total poll would not have increased, but it is far from un. likely that a good many of Mr. Byron Reed's most devoted adherents, who gave their votes to him as a Tory Democrat, seized the opportunity to vote for Mr. Keir Hardie, rather than for a stranger apparently belonging to a different social caste like Captain Greville. It is not improbable that Captain Greville even obtained not a few votes from Irish electors who cared more about denominational education than they cared about Home-rule, and lost still more votes from English electors who cared a great deal more about the hours of labour than they did about abstract Unionism when Home-rule was for the time shunted, and the Unionist cause had ceased to be repre- sented by an old friend.
One thing seems pretty certain, that so far as the North is concerned, the swinging back of the pendulum which usually follows a General Election has not yet set in, or if it has set in, has been neutralised by the ostentatious reluctance of the Opposition to take up any distinct line of its own. Lord Rosebery's resignation of the leadership, and the very uncertain sound with which that resignation has been received in the ranks of the Gladstouian party, have surely told in the direction of keeping the Govern- ment majority intact. Note particularly the speech of Sir Frank Lock wood at York on Tuesday,—his indigna- tion with Sir Edward Clarke for pronouncing so em- phatically in favour of the Venezuelan case against the British Government, and his satisfaction that neither Lord Salisbury nor Mr. Olney had taken the least notice of Sir Edward Clarke's speech. That is one of the straws which show which way the wind is blowing. English constituencies will not veer over to the Opposition when they find that the Government's foreign policy is at least in the right direction, while that of the Opposition is quite uncertain, divided between Roseberyites and Harcourtites, and not very dis- tinctive either as represented by Lord Rosebery or by Sir William Harcourt, or, indeed, by Mr. John Morley, who evidently desires much more eagerly to see us abandoning Egypt, though that would give over the country and its people to its old chaos, than even to strengthen Lord Salisbury's hands for the tardy saving of the poor Armenian remnant. With an Opposition whose leader has deserted his place because he can neither agree with his great predecessor nor with his chief lieutenant, and which can find nothing to pique itself upon except the great feat of having blocked a democratic education measure which was crowded with complicated detail,—an Opposition, too, whose chiefs go about the country singing hymns to themselves for the effectual accomplishment of that wonder- ful piece of strategy,—it is no wonder that the usual swing of the pendulum from the side of the Government to the side of the Opposition is conspicuously retarded. Whatever else may be alleged in favour of the Opposition, no one can say that it knows its own mind either on the critical subject of British foreign policy, or on the principles which should govern the treatment of the great religious and ecclesiastical institutions which have grown up in England during so many centuries, and which now excite the spleen of the Opposition without inspiring in them any manly and coherent purpose of either restraining or extermina- ting the National Establishment.
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