- THE BLACK SPOTS ON THE POLITICAL SKY.
THE immense commotion caused by Mr. Chamberlain's fiscal proposals has rather blinded politicians to some Of their incidental results. The greatest of these is the sudden explosion, or, as Mr. Winston Churchill puts it, the sudden " clattering down," of the Unionist party, the most powerful instrument of government which this country has seen for many years. The chiefs of that party, supported as they were by a very large and un- usually solid majority in Parliament, were independent of the Irish vote, cared nothing about smaller groups, and dared attempt in freedom things from which ordinary party. chiefs would have shrunk in dismay. They actually legahied, for example, a social revolution in Ireland with- out their supporters fully perceiving that they were carry- ing through one of those measures which from time to time deflect the expected current of history. They per- formed, no doubt in a rough and blundering way, one of the most extraordinary feats of war recorded even in our story,—massing and maintaining till victory came an army of nearly half a million men on a territory six thousand miles off across the sea. They passed, with a kind of motor-car rush, an Education Bill which, whatever its other merits or demerits, at least provided State educa- tion for the entire population. They might have reorganised the Army, or remodelled the Poor-laws, or even have dealt with some effect with that all too gigantic question, the rehousing of the people. There was, in fact, nothing which owing to its mere magnitude was impossible to them. Now that party lies shattered and broken. Its chief has suffered a fall in political repute which is without a parallel in our time ; for though the nation rejected Mr. Gladstone's plan for Ireland, it never denied that he and his plan were alike to be reckoned among the great. Its Executive Committee is hardly regarded with tolerance, and when Parliament meets, or perhaps before that event, its serried ranks will be seen broken into groups anxious only to fly at each other's throats. The Government will possibly be beaten on some comparatively insignificant issue like the Roman Catholic University for Ireland, and then we shall see a General Election with all the parties melted and disorganised,— Tories and Radicals, Imperialists and Little Englanders, all confused by fresh issues, new officers, and, above all, new enemies. It is as if an army had been offered a new opportunity of plunder, had felt the offer as a solvent to its discipline, and had broken at once into competing or warring fragments.
And this shattering of the instrument of government has occurred, not during one of the frequent lulls in history when no internal movement in any one State seems to signify, but at a time when the march of events, already too rapid for the quickest brains, has acquired. an almost bewildering momentum. Any twenty-four hours may bring news of an explosion in the Far East the first consequences of which will tax to the utmost the strength as well as the capacity of the British Government. Our Treaty with Japan, the prudence of which we ventured at the time it was made to question in the teeth of a nearly universal sentiment, may, as it were in a minute, involve us in a most formidable war. We are not bound to move unless Japan is assailed by more than one Power, and we all think France will abstain from breaking the new entente; but suppose that, in spite of denials, Germany has an agreement with Russia, and sees her way to an expansion of territory beyond seas. No one knows precisely the objects of Germany in the Far East, or how far a promise of support on the Yangtse- kiang would tempt her ruler to accept and endorse a project of Russian aggrandisement. Only two things are certain,—that whatever happens, the happening will be on a grand scale, and that whenever Russia is visibly ad- vancing it takes a strong Government and a clear-sighted Government to hold the British people steadily in leash. Our people are mostly Palmerstons as Palmerston is described in Mr. Morley's " Life of Gladstone." There is no telling how great a "crisis " may be suddenly upon us in the Far East, yet it is no greater than the crisis already visible in the Eastern Mediterranean. The Great Powers are, we believe, sincerely anxious to postpone any struggle there ; but who will venture to assert, in the present posture of affairs, that an outbreak of Ottoman fanaticism provoked by menace to Mussulman ascendency, or of Bulgarian emotion provoked by some unendurable horror in Macedonia, may not in an hour reopen the whole Eastern question, in which may lie embedded half-a-century of wars ? The cooler heads among us believe that we are out of that danger because we hold Egypt ; but it may take a most resolute Government to keep us out, and to prevent all Europe plunging into war. And this war would find. us in the throes of military reorganisation. We all know the danger as regards men ; but will anybody affirm that our military stores, so deeply depleted by the South African. War, have been replenished ; or that if, as in the Napoleonic days, we had again to call on the patriotism of the unarmed people, we have the means to place the population, or any appreciable section of it, under arms ? We say nothing of that dangerous Alaskan Boundary Commission ; nor of the financial troubles looming ahead, the coming battle over expenditure, or the Black Friday which may arrive if the Trust bubble bursts in America, for we believe England to be too rich to suffer seriously from financial perturbations ; but the aspect of foreign affairs alone demands in Great Britain a strong, resolute, and well-supported Government,—which does not exist.
We are of those who believe in the fortune of Britain, relying always on that vast store of undeveloped capacity within her, which, as the wise Lord Derby once said to the writer, is " probably more than equal to the visible reservoir " ; and we have no wish, we need not say, that the " weary Titan " should falter in her path uphill ; but we cannot look round and see the immense questions coming forward, the feebleness of the men who form the Executive, the disorganised condition of parties, the fierceness of the factions, and the momentary bewilderment of the people without occasionally feeling that many of the elements of national disaster—it may be great disaster—are well in sight. This country will survive the disaster, should it arrive, as it has so often done before ; but if it arrives the people will look for guides in whom they may place confidence, and we ask men of every political party and every shade of fiscal opinion whether they think those in whom they now perforce must trust for executive action will be adequate to any serious 'occasion. If they doubt— and they must doubt, for the men who formed the strength of the Executive are all gone, and its head proclaims himself in his speeches a mere opportunist, without nerve to act on his own convictions—is not that proof that the time for a change of Govern- ment has arrived ? It must have arrived soon, for the Report of the War Commission showed that the kind of brain which makes great efforts succeed was painfully wanting in our councils ; but it was hurried on, needlessly,as all Conservative observers will agree, by the determination of the late Secretary for the Colonies to make his own economic ideas prevail. Patience is not in Mr. Chamberlain, the bomb was thrown, and we are all staring, it may be a little stupid from the shock, at the smoking ruins. There is nothing the country can do except clear them away and rebuild, and that the process may be speedy and complete must be the prayer of every patriot with ability to see that even if it were the end of States to become rich by trade, you cannot become rich by telling all customers that you regard them as foes to be coerced. How many goods would Mr. Chamberlain, if he were in business, sell if he shook his fist at every buyer, and told him loudly of his intention to get the better of him ?
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