TOPICS OF THEliDAY.
THE LIBERAL LEADERS.
IN the course of the vivacious and very forcible speech delivered by Mr. Goschen on Tuesday at Frome, he made one remark which his audience, a large gathering of West- countrymen, enthusiastically cheered. " The Liberals," he said, "were proud of the last five years, and every Liberal in the country looked with unaltered attachment upon the Chief who had conducted them. He expressed the opinion of every Liberal, when he said he hoped they would continue to secure the services of that great statesman." That remark and those cheers alike indicate what seems to us the main result of the last Session upon the Liberal personnel. Mr. Gladstone has been replaced in his position. So strongly after five years of power had the tide begun to run against him, that on the meeting of Parliament, even his own followers had begun to wish him away, to doubt his capacity for management, to forget his marvellous power in Parliamentary debate. He had made an enormous blunder,—one nearly as great as that by which Lord Palmer- ston, suddenly and as it were of malice, shattered his Govern- ment to atoms, and enabled his enemies to say that he, of all English statesmen, was truckling to foreign power,—and the Liberals were for the moment disenchanted. Mr. Gladstone's name, once a spell, ceased to elicit cheers. Liberal Clubs were full of speculations as to his possible successor. He himself grew weary, or, to speak more plainly, just a little sulky, and retired, leaving the party with an organisation which it soon became clear could not last for any long period of time. It seemed as if the Liberals were hopeless, when sud- denly the inconceivable folly of the Premier in allow- ing ecclesiastical questions to come to the front, and of the Ultra-Tories in attempting to pass a reactionary Bill, brought about a change. Mr. Gladstone was roused out of his partial retirement, and separate as his position was, and wide as were his ecclesiastical differences with his closest colleagues, his ascendancy in debate was at once as marked as ever. Nobody could look at his shield, let alone touch it, without fall- ing before his lance. His argument on the Scotch Patronage Bill convinced the Tories as much as the Radicals, and but for the ties of party discipline and the conduct of the Duke of Argyll, would have stopped the destructive " reform" midways. On the Church Regulation Bill he made the House pause,— pause in a regular rush, as no other human being could have done alone. His calumniators did, of course, their very best to misrepresent his attitude. Having proposed in his Resolutions as one special object of them a Bill for abating Ritualism, he was denounced by his opponents as a Ritualist so besotted that he would cast away his party for a mere chance of defending the very excesses which he proposed to repress by legislation, and in many quarters outside the Houses the denunciations told. There are people in England who would believe Mr. Mall a Ritualist if, in a debate on liberty, he stood up for liberty of ceremonial ; and there are men who know perfectly well that Mr. Gladstone has an almost fanatical horror of the Dogma, and yet describe him every day as a crypto- Ultramontane. That kind of abuse, however, has much less influence in the House than out of it—for in the House men know well that Members of all shades of opinion are honestly friends to the Church—and in spite of the un- popularity of his views, of the misunderstood reference to the Canonists, and of the bigotry which, for the moment, had infected the air, Mr. Gladstone distinctly rose during that debate. The House, in its fiercest mood, half doubted itself, questioned whether Mr. Gladstone was not more truly liberal than Mr. Disraeli, and had unpleasant little reminiscences of its folly in 1851. It listened attentively, for all its bitterness, to his masterly argument for comprehension instead of repres- sion, and while cheering Sir W. Harcourt's attacks, positively hungered to see their author thoroughly put down. A little fear is sometimes a great help to respect, and the way in which that punishment was administered—the cool, slow serenity with which the intellectual whip was laid on—extorted even from Tories, as subsequently from the Times and the Pall Mall Gazette, a sort of groan of admiration. If they denied the Protestantism of the speech, they at least allowed its per- fection, and this admission was most favourable to the Liberal ieader. The House of Commons, like every other debating assembly in the world, appreciates first of all the great debater ; and amid the petty criticisnis on his Government, when, as Mr. Goschen says, a ship could not be stranded without its being reckoned among the Liberal blunders, the superiority of Mr. Gladstone in his capacity as debater had been, as it were, for- gotten. Confidence in him did not, of course, fully revive— that requires more time—but admiration for him did, and admiration for a political chief is very soon transmuted into confidence. You cannot hear a perfect singer without losing, for the time at least, all anxiety as to conceivably false notes. On the Endowed Schools Bill the whole party rallied behind its ancient leader, the very Tories were attracted to his side, and when the Session ended, the phrase`" Mr. Gladstone, if he pleases, must lead," had ceased to be a form of words. It is not only that Mr. Gladstone could not be pushed aside—that was always acknowledged—but that his stepping aside would be recognised as a nearly irreparable loss. The change of feeling is far too subtle to admit of definition, but it exists, and before another Session is over will have exercised a most perceptible effect on the conduct of public affairs. Once well in the saddle, Mr. Gladstone can ride. That he has founded no school, that after forty years of public life there is no Glad- stonian in the House, we have ourselves remarked as often as his enemies. That he is a hard chief, too apt to postpone everything, the just claims of his followers included, to the demands- of public business and his view of public con- venience, may be conceded to any one who asks for the con- cession. But, nevertheless, as Mr. Goschen told Frome, five years—years filled with work of the most important character, years in which every kind of burning question, domestic or foreign, came to the front, years in which Mr. Gladstone was attacked as a quasi-Dictator—no man quitted an over-numerous Cabinet, and its apparent unity did not give way under a process of reconstruction. Mr. Disraeli is a master of tact, it is said, compared with Mr. Gladstone, and Mr. Disraeli's- Cabinet quarrels in the " blissful honeymoon."
Mr. Gladstone's recovery in his party—for whatever its extent or its cause, the recovery is decided—is all the more• remarkable because it has not been caused by his attitude regarding any popular cry. He has not spoken a speech this: Session except on the Endowed Schools Bill with which the majority of the electors have agreed cordially, or one which has created undivided enthusiasm. The whole progress has been up-stream, and against a stream, moreover, which ran at one time like a tidal wave in the Severn, and which would have drowned any feebler swimmer than himself. It is all the mom noteworthy, also, because his lieutenants have not lost ground.. The best and most dignified speech made by the Liberals against the Irish demand for Home rule was made by the. Marquis of Hartington, who contrived to condemn it as utterly inadmissible, quite outside the domain of practical politics, yet to avoid that sectarian bitterness to which Dr. Ball gave the rein, and those threats of force which should never be made until the time comes for action. The resistance to the Endowed Schools Bill was led by Mr. Forster, in a speech which. almost soothed the fanatics who would rather see the Liberal party perish than pardon the author of Clause 26 ; and he, and he alone, of the Liberal chiefs pleaded boldly the claim. of the agricultural labourer to be admitted within the pale of the Constitution. It was a decided line to take, and it was taken with decision, and like every other act of leadership, increased the reputation of him who led. Every party in a deliberative Assembly is afraid of initiative ; and a beaten_ party is more afraid than any other, and a feeling of gratitude mingles with its respect for any one who will show it the way to transmute a fluid sentiment into a definite course of action. It is vain to say, as so many have said, and as we understand Mr. Goschen to hint in his speech at Frome, that the question being thus started, Mr. Disraeli may take it up, and that under his manipulation nobody knows what the result may be- -for, in the first place, result is not the best test of an act of justice; and in the second, Mr. Disraeli cannot do it. He would` pulverise his power. The farmers cannot be more opposed to the Liberals than they are now ; but Mr. Disraeli, with the farmers in inmate, would be a leader without an army, a Commander-in-Chief with few troops, no officers, and rather less than a third of a staff. We doubt Mr. Goschen's wisdom in desiring so strongly to delay this reform, but we do not doubt that he also has risen during the Session. He is doing what he should have done before, throwing off the mannerism which disfigures his speeches, that over-candid and deferential way which is in politics what the " Oxford manner " is in society, very pleasant indeed to opponents, and to nobody else. He is hitting out hard ; he gave Mr. Ward Hunt a rattling fall at the beginning of the Session ; he overwhelmed Mr. Cross with an unexpected shower of sarcasms, and his review of the Session at Frome has a ring in it such as we
have not heard for many a long day. It is a great thing in a leader to be able to encourage his followers, and the effect of Mr. Goschen's speech will be to encourage the hopefulness and increase the audacity of every Liberal in the country. There has been quite enough, as he says, of reticence and of eating humble-pie, and it is time to begin to criticise, even though criticism does not take the form of holding Mr. Disraeli re- sponsible for every capful of wvad that may blow at an incon- venient moment in the Bay of Biscay. When a Conservative Premier, with a majority of sixty at his back, cannot pass a measure unless it is Liberal enough to delude • Liberals—as they have been deluded about the Church Bill—our day is not far off.
And what shall we say of Si William Harcourt ? This, we think,—that in civilised countries the Free-lance rarely or never rises t6 the top, but as a Free-lance the Ex-Solicitor: General has risen both in power and in notoriety. If he had, or let us be kind, like Mr. Gladstone, and say, when he has, a little more weight of political character, when he ceases to fight so visibly for his own hand, when he can recognise the fact that for a leader a party is a necessity, he may become a Parlia- mentary personage, instead of remaining, as, after all his dis- plays of the Session, he still remains, a Parliamentary person. His improvement as a debater has been most marked. He still talks too much like a pleader, still inserts most tedious essays into his sharpest speeches, and still contrives to make every Member say in his heart, with Punch's famous loafer, " I don't know as I ever knowed a man as knows as much as you knows." But there can be no doubt that he is a larger figure than he was before the Session. We record the fact to com- plete our commentary, and must excuse our recording it in a Sketch of the Liberal personnel by the plea of use and wont.
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