TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE BARNSLEY ELECTION.
E Barnsley (West Riding) election is at least as satisfactory in its evidence as to the state of feeling in the country as any by-election taken at the present moment in one of the largest and most devoted of Gladstonian con- stituencies could be reasonably expected to be. The poll was a very high poll. Lord Compton, the Gladstonian candidate, was as good a candidate as could well have been found. The moment was one when all the fighting men of Mr. Glad- stone's party were so confident of a great triumph, that some of them at least expected to see the Unionist Party collapse like a windbag when it is pricked or broken. Mr. Gladstone and Lord Rosebery and Sir William Harcourt and Sir George Trevelyan had all been crying aloud that Liberal Unionism is dead, and that nothing but a dwindling Conservative Party remains. If ever there was a moment when we might have expected the Parnellites to be gaining ground, and the anti-Parnellites to feel that the crisis was not propitious, it was in the election of Tuesday. But the result was a slight improvement on the Unionist poll of 1886, and a very great improvement on the Conservative poll of 1885, and this though much the largest poll since the Reform Act of 1885 was registered. It is, therefore, simply impossible that the number of Liberal Unionists in Barnsley can have diminished, much less vanished, as Mr. Gladstone and Lord Rosebery and Sir William Harcourt have prophesied that it would vanish. In that case, the majority of Lord Compton would have been as great as was the majority of Mr. Kenny in 1885, whereas it is less by 1,532 votes, and less even than the Glad- stonian majority of 1886 by 57 votes. Thus, on the more adequate register of the present year, the Unionists have gained ground, in spite of all the special disadvantages under which the contest was conducted. We have always insisted that, so far from its being certain that the Radicals would gain by an increase in the number of qualified voters, the chances are that, whatever the drift of opinion might be amongst those who had previously taken pains to establish their right to vote and to give their vote, it would probably be found to be just the same amongst those who had been too busy or too careless of their political privileges to take the proper steps for getting their names put on the register. And so certainly it appears to be at Barnsley. The new register is much more extended than the old, but the proportion of the two parties has not materially changed since 1886. The freshly registered voters have yielded the same proportion between the Gladstonian and Unionist sympathisers as the voters of three years ago. And we venture to say that if by reducing the term of residence necessary to qualify for a vote, and by throwing on the officers of the constituency the duty of seeing that every man entitled to a vote shall be placed on the register without his lodging any personal claim, the numbers of electors registered become more numerous by another 25 or 30 per cent., the consequence would only be that the drift of opinion as indicated by the change between the votes of 1886 and of 1889 in the present electorate, would be a little more emphatically expressed. The Gladstonian would still win, but he would win by a majority slightly less than that by which Lord Compton has just won. The confidence of the Radicals, that the more adequately you poll the con- stituency, the li6ger will be their majority, is pure illu- sion. It would be sp, doubtless, if opinion were running strongly in the Radical direction. But it would be just the reverse if opinion were running strongly in the Con- servative direction. Just at present, we take it that opinion is not running strongly in either direction, but is veering steadily but slowly towards the Conservative side. The proposal for a separate Legislature and Administration for Ireland is losing favour, but is losing favour very slowly. There are very few counties even in the North in which it has found much more favour than in Yorkshire ; but even in Yorkshire it loses favour from year to year, instead of gaining it. Three years more of steady and prudent government might very likely show the ebb of popular feeling in a form impressive enough to extinguish the confidence of the Home-rulers.
The obvious indifference of the great Barnsley con- stituency to the perfectly irrelevant question of the forged letters, is at least conspicuous, and it is a very satisfactory indication of the good sense of the democracy. If Mr. Parnell could be proved to be a saint, instead of the admitted author of the disgraceful proposal to treat as lepers all those who take farms from which other tenants have been evicted, it would be precisely as dangerous to give a separate Legislature and Administration to Ireland. as it is now. And yet, till this election took place, nobody believed that the constituency would see the complete irrelevance of the point in dispute to the great political question at issue. We have always hoped rather than firmly believed that, whatever unreadiness the democracy may betray to appreciate the larger issues of states- manship, it would at least betray an equal unreadiness to be led astray by those small personal by-issues on which what is called Society, and we fear not only Society, but too often journalism, dilates, as if they were anything but mere accidents and symbols about which antagonists who have really something much more serious to fight about, agree to fight, because in their irritated state of mind they would agree to fight about the dot to an " i." It is, of course, a very serious question indeed whether the Parnellite movement has not been conducted throughout in a spirit of thorough hostility to those principles of order and equity which are of the very essence both of Irish prosperity and of any hearty co-operation between Great Britain and Ireland. But it is not a question that touches more than the merest outside fringe of the political issue, whether Mr. Parnell would or would not have disavowed publicly the course which he was privately pursuing. We are very glad to find that he is not a man who would do so, for we heartily recognise the great mischief of unscrupulousness even in war, and the great advantage of knowing that there are moral limits which even the leaders of a war policy would not transgress. But in reality, the abler and less utterly unscrupulous the leaders of such a body as the National League may be, the less likely are they to disgust their own followers, and the more serious we may find their opposition. It is this truth which the great electorate at Barnsley has had the sobriety and good sense to grasp. If a separate Irish Legislature and Administration be intrinsically dangerous, it will be not the less but probably the more dangerous for being under the control of men who thoroughly see how suicidal it is to preach one doctrine in public and to hold quite a different doctrine in private. We are not resisting Mr. Gladstone because he thinks a particular statesman's character higher than we happen to think it ; we are resisting him because he wants to reintroduce, and to exaggerate the evils of, a political method which would be fatal to our little Kingdom, and especially fatal to that part of it which hopes to set the example of substituting a loosely knitted and unmanageable compost of incoherent popular elements, for a single great democracy.
We attach, we confess, a great deal more importance to the negative than to the positive evidences of the Barnsley election, to the proof that the question of the forged letters did not divert the electors into staking the issue of a great controversy on a totally irrelevant point, than to the proof that opinion, so far as it is changing at all, is changing in the direction of Unionism. On the latter point, we are sure that a General Election would be a far better test of the real opinions of the people than any by- election. English electors frequently put aside the main issue in a by-election, when they will not put it aside in a General Election. But the drift of social opinion at the moment, however irrelevant it may be, is sure to show its effect at a by-election if it shows its effect at all, and in this case it has certainly not produced any measurable effect. And therefore we argue, and, we think, argue safely, that whether opinion in Yorkshire is making progress in what we think the right direction or not, it is at least not shifting from one point of the compass to another under the breath of influences which have about as much right to affect the great issue se the names of the candidates or the colours of their flags.
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