LORD ROSEBERY ON MODERATION. L ORD ROSEBERY has the merit, the
very great merit, of bearing prosperity well. A better speech could not have been made under the circumstances than that which he made in East Finsbury on Monday. Any- body can appear courageous in defeat or modest in success. Those are the virtues appropriate to the two states, and if it is hard to possess them, it is easy to simulate them. But to be triumphant over a victory, and yet not to hurt your adversary's feelings, is a very much more difficult achievement, and it is one which may fairly be placed to Lord Rosebery's credit. He could hardly have been more cheerful, more rollicking even, than he was on Monday ; but no Moderate who reads his speech will grudge him any of his fun. It was perfectly fair and perfectly good- tempered. Like other fun, it had a large element of exaggeration. Lord Rosebery's repudiation of moderation was perhaps a little unguarded. It is not a popular quality ; it does not, as we have just seen, win elections ; it is very capable of misrepresentation ; it is constantly being parodied by those who have no real claim to it. But when all these disadvantages have been freely admitted, we submit that it is a virtue which can hardly be done without. Mr. Labouchere, we know, says boldly that he wishes the world were entirely made up of black men and white men. Let us, he cries, have no whitey-brown men. We are familiar, too, with the same thought in the writings and speeches of advanced teetotalers. They would be happy—comparatively—if they had to do only with total abstainers and confirmed drunkards. It is the moderate drinker that moves their wrath, inter- feres with their projects, and is the favourite object of their controversial comments. Which of us has not known the typical teetotaler in humble life, who will leave ninety-nine drunkards to themselves in order to concentrate all his energies on the conversion of an aged and reprobate rela- tive who cannot be induced to abandon his or her daily half-pint ? Yet it is permitted us to doubt whether, if their labours were everywhere successful, and there were no choice left us but to be drunk inside a public-house or denouncing the liquor-traffic outside, the world would be either better or happier. In the case of medicine, again, there is something to be said for moderation. Drugs may be dispensed with altogether, as by the Peculiar People or the Faith-Healers ; or the patient may be drenched with every variety of draught and bolus that pharmaceutical ingenuity can suggest. But is there no virtue in modera- tion here ? Is it the part of a wise man either to reject arsenic altogether, or to take it in quantities fatal to life ? Is there nothing to be said for the use of infinitesimal quantities by way of tonic ? Or, in food, is there to be no mean between gluttony and. starvation, between the man who lives to eat, and the man who will not, or cannot, eat to live ?
Perhaps Lord Rosebery will reply that he was speak- ing only of politics, and that in politics, especially municipal politics, all virtue lies in extremes. You must know your own purposes, and be prepared to carry them out at all hazards and at any cost. But if this is the spirit which Lord Rosebery wishes to see dominant in the London County Council, his speech at Finsbury should have been conceived in a very different spirit. In his sketch of what the new Council is to do—and all that went before this was, as he was careful to explain, "banter and badinage "—three things were mainly insisted on. In the first place, the Council must take thought for the small ratepayers, and not forget that what to the large rate- payer means at most an inconvenience, means to the small ratepayer "a pinch, and a denial sometimes of the necessaries of life." Secondly, the Council must recol- lect that it is a second Parliament, and so "cannot afford to disregard the accumulated experience of ages." Thirdly, the Council must face "those large and unprece- dented problems which London largely furnishes in the spirit of men who watch." We could not wish for a better description of the essentials of a Moderate policy in municipal matters. The new Council is to cut its coat according to its cloth. It is to weigh the advantages of every proposed outlay against the sacrifices which it will impose on many who can ill afford to make them Consequently, it will often hold its hand when its ex- treme advisers are pressing it to go forward without hesitation. It will remember how many promising under- takings have come to bankruptcy, just for want of a little prudence, and how careful a Municipality ought to be when entering a country the geography of which is wholly unknown. Such a body cannot venture to throw history to the winds. It must needs go to the past to seek in- struction for the present. All these conditions postulate an attitude which to impartial critics will seem one of mere observation. We see, they will say, that you are watching ; we only wish that something more came of it. You forget that you were elected, not to learn, but to act; not to find out how things can be best done, but to do them somehow.'
Our readerswill think that we have simply been setting out the main features of a Moderate policy, and the judgment passed on it by Radicals. But if they turn to Lord Rosebery's speech, they will find that what we have written is simply a paraphrase of what the Progressive Chairman of the London County Council said to his con- stituents. There is really nothing in his address to which we can take exception, beyond the fact that his conception of Moderation must be a very different one from ours. A Moderate policy, as Lord Rosebery understands it, is a policy of negatives, and then with a momentary lapse into solemnity, he assures his hearers that they will never move great masses of their fellow-countrymen to any great enthu- siasm on behalf of negation. But the policy which Lord Rosebery described. on Tuesday is not a Moderate policy at all. Moderation is a mean between extremes, the extreme of doing nothing and the extreme of doing too much. To say that it is pure negation, is to say that it is the extreme of doing nothing, a description which may be convenient enough on the occasion of celebrating a party victory, but has the drawback of having no connection with the thing described. We have not the slightest desire to see the London County Council sit down and fold their bands before them. On the contrary, we hold that there is abundant work for them to do, and real need that it should be done.
There is, it must be admitted, one point, and that a Feint of great importance, on which the Moderates have in the past been divided among themselves. There have been those who would have liked, as John Stuart Mill would have liked, to see London broken up into half-a- dozen great cities. Whether this would have been a good arrangement or a bad one, does not, in our judgment, matter a straw. Be it good or bad, it is an arrangement which is no longer within our reach. The creation of the London County Council made 'the unifying of London" only a ques- tion of time. It determined that London should be a single great city, not " a mass " of great cities all heaped together. We have already expressed our regret that the Moderate programme should have been framed in disregard of this fact ; but considering the language the Progressives have used on the subject, we cannot wonder that the Moderates have been slow to admit that the City and London cannot for ever remain distinct and separate. In many Pro- gressive speeches and Progressive leading articles, the attitude taken up has been that of a conqueror pointing out to his soldiers what a magnificent booty awaits them when they have scaled the walls of the fortress. The Corporation has been treated simply as an enemy to be plundered. Naturally, therefore, both the 'Corporation itself, and those outside who recognise what a splendid history the City has behind it, what excellent service it has done in the past, and in how many ways it has of late years adapted itself to the needs of the present, have been irritated by the false accusations and groundless abuse with which Progressive oratory has been charged. That the incorporation of the true City into the technical City is still a matter of controversy, is due, as we believe, to the action of the Progressives themselves. If they could have borrowed a little of the moderation they despise, they would have been a good deal nearer the point they wish to gain.
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