MR. BALFOUR'S LEADERSHIP. T HERE has never been more angry criticism
of any Leader of recent times, unless perhaps it was of Sir Stafford Northcote for a few years before his retirement, than has been poured out on Mr. Balfour during the early months of this Session. But the difference between the two cases is this, that Sir Stafford Northcote's leadership was resented chiefly by his own party, while Mr. Balfour's has been attacked almost exclusively by his opponents. We are now close to Whitsuntide. He has passed two of his principal Bills through their second reading by majorities considerably in excess of his proper party majority, and in one case by not very much short of three to one ; Supply is very well advanced ; and there seems to be an excellent chance of his passing three great measures in this Session in spite of the reluctance of the Anti-Parnellites to give him any substantial support. Of course this forward- ness is due to his successful use of the Closure, which is not only the great instrument but the absolutely necessary and perfectly legitimate instrument of every Govern- ment in the present state of the House of Commons. But the real difference between one Leader and another is not in the extent to which the Closure is used, but in the skill and the sort of purpose with which it is used. The last Government used the Closure very clumsily and to very bad effect. They used it to demonstrate to their party that they sympathised with all the various cliques of which it was made up, and the consequence was that they kept them all in tolerably good humour, but got extremely little work completed, in fact hardly attempted to get it completed. Possibly if they had had a tractable House of Lords they might have adopted a more hopeful policy. But knowing that the House of Lords would fail them, they saw nothing better to do than to try to throw odium on the House of Lords ; and there they did not succeed, partly because the country sympathised much more with the House of Lords than with the narrow majority in the Commons, but also because they were so anxious to "fill up the cup " that they hardly succeeded in getting any measure except their financial measure, which the House of Lords could not refuse, to the stage in which the House of Lords had the chance of re- jecting it. They tried to fill so many cups that they got only one cup really full, and that was a cup which the House of Lords could not refuse to drink. Mr. Balfour has been much wiser. He has limited his efforts to the forwarding of his principal measures and his dealing with Supply, and when the House separates for Whitsuntide, be will certainly be in a better position than any Leader of recent times. Of course, there is the great difficulty of the Committee stage of all his principal Bills still before him. And we cannot say as yet how the Government will get through the crush of possible and impossible amend- ments with which the Education Bill at least is now loaded. But in Mr. J. W. Lowther, the Government has, we believe, a very strong Chairman of Committees, and with that perfectly placid but still admirably firm use of the Closure which Mr. Balfour has made,—and has been supported by a Speaker of his opponents' party in making,—we may fairly hope that even the Committee stage of these complicated Bills will be passed with far more success than his antagonists at present predict. Mr. Balfour has one great advantage over• most Leaders of the House of Commons. He does not worry himself with studying the hostile criticisms on him in the Press. He appears quite unconscious of any criticism except that which he hears in the House itself, and that he meets with the most genial and even kindly nonchalance. He shows not a trace of temper, but also not a trace of weakness. Indeed, the secret of his imper- turbability is that he does not brood at all on what his antagonists say of him. He is thinking of something else whenever he has time to think of anything but tbe. imme- diate course to pursue. He is thinking of the basis of belief, or of the play on the golf-links, or of the explanation of the alleged irrefrangibility of the X rays, and not troubling his head at all about the Daily Chronicle's wrath or the imaginary resentment of the Conservatives at Mr. Chamber- lain's prominence in a Unionist Ministry. He has all the ardent interest which Mr. Gladstone shows on subjects that are not political, without his transient sensitiveness and contentiousnes on subjects that are. He has the happy art of not attending to mere twinges of the political nerved, which only perplex the mind and give it no light at all as to what is practically wise to do In other words, he is not at heart interested in the attacks made upon him unless they are brought definitely before him in the regular business of debate. His political heart is clad in that " triple bronze" which renders him invulnerable to whispers which he is not obliged to hear. Very few Leaders of the House have been so entirely wanting in hyper-sensitiveness as Mr. Balfour.
Nothing could have been better, for example, than his course in relation to the Education debate. He would have liked to terminate it on the third night, but he felt that that would have been arbitrary,—indeed, the Speaker might reasonably have refused the Closure at so early a stage,—so he gave way to the demand for two nights more, and then when Sir William Har- court bad ostentatiously abandoned his right to sum up the objections to the Bill, in favour of private Members who rather bored the House, he gave a new significance to the debate by his own speech, claimed, and gained, the Closure, and demonstrated to the public that his Bill is supported not only by an all but unanimous Unionist party, but by a very large contingent of his most strenuous antagonists.
No leader has been more successful than Mr. Balfour in diverting to his own side the quieter and more reason- able Liberalism of his opponents. The Nonconformist Unionists have been a great source of strength to him, because he has been shrewd enough to see that a good deal of the Nonconformist Radicalism is half-hearted, and quite ready to be conciliated by any honest proffer of a remedy for their grievances. No doubt there were a good many of them mho, like the late Lord Derby's Irishman, " preferred the grievance " to any redress of it. And such Nonconformists as those, of course, Mr. Balfour never attempts to convert. They are far more useful as antagonists. But those who do really think themselves aggrieved by there being no alternative between Church teaching for their children and no religious teaching at all, were well worth consideration, and undoubtedly in the Education Bill they have been considered, even though very few of them may wish to avail themselves of the offer of separate religious teaching by their own ministers which the Bill makes to them. There are not a few adversaries who resent nothing so much as an offer which threatens to cut the ground from under their feet. But, again, there are those who have no wish to remain aggrieved simply for the sake of being aggrieved, and these reasonable opponents Mr. Balfour has gained over to his own side. It is pleasant to some invalids to have maladies to boast of. And it is pleasant to a very con- siderable class of politicians to have injuries of which they can boast. A mild kind of oppression is agreeable to them. They would feel as if they were in the receiver of an air-pump without it. They would hardly know them- selves without their wrongs. Their wrongs are a part of them, even a cherished part. Mr. Balfour does not address himself to such as these. On the contrary, no one knows better that he would address himself to them in vain, that they would instinctively and almost uncon- sciously find a producible reason for rejecting any healing measure he might propose, perhaps even for rejecting it with the contumely with which many of the Nonconformists have rejected the proposals of the }linea- tion Bill. But the reasonable minority who really do not hold to their grievances even more tenaciously than they hold to their rights,—who do not regard grievances as a specially sacred kind of rights,—Mr. Balfour has conciliated. He has shown them that a popular Conservative Government may be as sincerely anxious to meet the conscientious requisitions of Non- conformists as to meet those of Roman Catholics or Anglicans. And he could not have adopted a more wisely and benignantly Conservative policy than that.
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