THE ACCUSING SPIRIT OF THE LIBERAL PARTY.
AN accusing spirit is, if we may trust the book of Job, a very old public institution, and we may infer, therefore, not without its uses. Mr. Roebuck has, for a whole genera- tion, fulfilled that function for the Liberal party to the best of his ability, which would have been even better if he had not made his temper, an admirable one for its purpose, do- double duty both as temper and judgment, for the last of which services it was very ill qualified. Still, he has been of use. He was of use, perhaps, in his earliest displays of venom against the Whigs. It is even possible that he was of use- in that violent outbreak against the Press which involved him in his innocent " affair of honour " with the Editor of the Morning Chronicle. It is certain that he was of use in the attack on the Aberdeen Administration which resulted in. the appointment of the cumbrous Sebastopol Committee. He began, indeed, to miss his way during Lord Palmerston's last administration. Earnestly desiring to accuse the English Government of having adopted the wrong policy, he un- fortunately abandoned the safe line of mere carping for an imaginative treatment of facts, took up the cause of Austria against France with an incoherent wildness of advocacy which simplypuzzled his English constituents, and afterwards, in 1864,
plunged deep into an unfathomable and utterly unintelligible mare's-nest on the subject of the French Emperor's policy towards the Confederate States, the alleged treachery shown by Eng- land, and the private message sent by the Emperor through him (Mr. Roebuck) to the English Commons. In this field of diplomatic accusation Mr. Roebuck was never at home. He never had temper to get his facts right before preparing his acte d'accusation ; he was so eager to fire his shot, that he always contrived to burst his gun. But in 1866, and again last year, he came back on the familiar English subject of Reform to his old functions of Accuser-General against the Liberal party with all his old opulence of gall. He had no longer to roam to Vienna or Compiegne for his materials. He rested once more " from going to and fro upon the earth, and walking up and down in it," to explain after his old fashion that Mr. Gladstone and the other Liberal leaders did not serve the nation " for naught." It was a new spring of youth to him to be able to support the Tories last session against his own party, and launch his double-edged sarcasms at both parties at once. He told his constituents last week at Sheffield, with one of his bilious smiles, that Mr. Gladstone " had no power over his friends. He always had great power over his enemies ; he always made them more inimical than they were before, but his friends he never could conciliate." However untrue of Mr. Gladstone, that would be a very happy description of himself, if he had ever had a political friend to conciliate, which we doubt. But, for all that, he has his uses. The political asp in Mr. Roebuck has not been without its salutary effects for the public. The excessive fermenta- tion of his self-love, which makes him rave almost deliriously at the Press for rebuking him,—" Oh dear, poor creatures !" " Oh wretched people, to teach me 1" are the frenzied inter- jections on such critics (like the " 0 popoi !" of Greek tragedy) with which he liberally garnished his speech last week,—has been to him, in certain cases, a sort of antidote against fear of either the popular party or the people. He was rejected at the elections in 1837 for his plain-speaking against the Whigs, and again in 1847, probably for the same reason. If he is willing to sit in the Reformed Parliament, he may very likely be rejected again in 1869 for the same virulent plain-speaking against what is held to be the popular cause. Though Mem- ber for Sheffield, he has never disguised his savage anta- gonism to the Trades' Unions, which have had a greater and a worse influence in that town than in any city of the kingdom. His questions on the Trades' Unions' Commission of last session were a continued fire of cross-examination for the prosecution, and his speech of last Monday in the Temperance Hall on the cruelty of Trades' Union restrictions on labour was as bitter and unqualified an attack as if his seat were in no wise connected with the unpopular character of his opinions. Nothing could have been nobler than his attack on that cruelty, if the attack really proceeded from a conscientious spirit of sympathy with the oppressed and indignation against the tyrannical oppressors. Recognizing as we do in every act almost of Mr. Roebuck's life the delight he takes in the duties of an accusing spirit, we can scarcely give him credit for the highest class of motives in what he did. It was probably an inordinate joy to him to plunge his political rapier deep into the hearts of the Sheffield Unionists. The more they howled at him, the keener he felt the pleasure of the operation. In describing Mr. Gladstone's power " over his enemies," he had not the pleasure of seeing the pain he inflicted. But when he dealt with the cruelty of Trades' Unions he had his patients on the operating-table before him ; and as a somewhat kindred spirit, Mr. Busfeild Ferrand observed gloatingly the other day at Bristol in executing a similar operation, " the flesh would quiver when the pincers pierced,"—and Mr. Roebuck evidently did not dislike to remark the same phenomenon. But though it is impossible to give the same credit to a man who has been an accuser by profession all his life long, for driving the steel home when he has to tell unpleasant truths to the people, that we give to such a man as the Member for Lambeth, for example, when he tells his constituents that the number of convictions for unfair weights and measures is a disgrace that they ought to take to heart, we cannot any the less recognize the great usefulness of the function thus performed. Whatever the root of the courageNto one can help admiring its result when Mr. Roebuck, in the very centre of the worst Trades' Unionismin England, indulges in such lumin- ous and frank exposition of the evil cherished at its heart, as he did on Monday. He first casually remarked, with ironical sim- plicity, that the mode adopted in China, and elsewhere in the East, to limit the labour market was infanticide. That was not the mode, he gravely said, adopted in England :—
"Trades' Unions were the means employed in England to limit the number of the labourers to be employed. The cruelty thus perpetrated has not, I think, been sufficiently dwelt upon. One of the favourite means employed to this end is the limitation imposed by various trades upon the number of apprentices to be taken by the master. Let us learn the true character of this proceeding, which I believe I shall be able to show to be cruel, selfish, and grossly unjust. And, first, as to its cruelty I will not take a fictitious instance, but I will not mention names. The thing I am about to describe has happened in your midst, and, perhaps, the person who narrated the facts to me is present.. I will endeavour to be as accurate as I can, and I hope not to over-colour the transaction. The brother and brother's wife of John Thomas—the name is fictitious, but I use it for convenience—both died, leaving a boy of about ten years of age. John Thomas felt as a good man should feel, and took the helpless orphan to his home and cherished him ; but Thomas was not rich, and the only means of providing for the boy and enabling him to get his own bread was to teach him hi, own trade. Thomas had a son of his own and apprenticed both boys to him- self; he was shortly afterwards waited on by the authorities of the Union, who said they did not object to him having his son as an apprentice, but that his nephew was not the son of one who was or had been a member of their trade, and that he must at
once discharge the boy from his indentures. But the boy,' said Thomas, is the son of my brother, who is dead. The boy's mother is also dead, and it is my duty to protect him, and provide for him the means of getting his bread. I can only do this by teaching him my trade. I have not the means of putting him out elsewhere, and if I don't teach him he must grow up in ignorance and idleness, and be a burden to himself and all connected with him.'—' We can't help it,' said the deputation ; it is against our rules.'—'And I,' answered Thomas, 'can't help that. I will not treat my dead brother's child thus cruelly; I will not desert him.' Well, the answer was, 'We shall take all the hands out of Mr. So-and-So's shop until you comply with our demand and obey our rules,' and they were as good as their word. I have not heard what was the result. Now, consider this case. The first effect proposed was to slant a poor boy out of an honest livelihood. The sufferer was one of themselves, one who had been visited by a terrible calamity, and who, therefore, should have been dealt with mercifully and tenderly; but the hearts of those who dealt with him were as hard as the nether millstone, and not only were they cruel, but they were also pre-eminently selfish. The poor boy was to suffer, but who was to gain ? Why, the very men who laid down this cruel rule. To lessen their own labour, to increase their own enjoyment, they risked without pity or shame the well-being of the orphan child, who had been a fellow working-man. I suppose that these men would have shrunk from infanticide, and would have called me a libeller if I said they wore guilty of a crime very little, if at all, less black than infant murder. But what was this cold- blooded cruelty but something very like murder ?"
And Mr. Roebuck went on to observe that in this would-be "friendly and benefit society," which tried to cut off an orphan boy from a chance of making his living, " cruelty and hypocrisy were closely allied." Is it possible to drive home an unanswerable moral criticism with greater vigour or more terrible truthfulness ? If there were signs here of Mr. Roebuck's positive pleasure in scarifying an audience it was the only fault in a most able and faithful exposure of a sin of popular cruelty, the more dangerous and deadly because it is popular. So noble is the passage, that we can hardly believe Mr. Roebuck did not get deeper than the overweening egotism which usually inspires these attacks, into a clearer region of true public duty, while he was delivering it. It is true that he soon relapsed into the main article of his creed,—John Arthur Roebuckism. " It has been my fate, Sir," he said later, " often to be opposed to what is called public opinion, but in the long political life that I have led, I have found my countrymen coming round to my opinions, and never receding from them," &c., &c.,—a delusion which is most common, as far as we have observed, with men who, like Mr. Roebuck, have been making blunders all their life,— blunders as grave as Mr. Roebuck's last blunder concerning the American Civil War. But ridiculous as is Mr. Roebuck's egotism and vanity, disagreeable as is his deep well-spring of gall, it is well for us that if there be not courage enough of the more prophetic kind—of Felix Holt's kind,— of Mr. Hughes's kind,—to tell the people of their sins, there should be some whose secret strength is an overweening arrogance of self-esteem if it results in stripping away the cloak of evil as uncompromisingly as this. After all, Satans, political and otherwise, have their use. It is tolerably clear that Job found a weak spot or two revealed by that restless spirit's accusations which it was just as well he should know. And Mr. Roebuck, if he would only show as much keenness as his great prototype in laying bare real and not imaginary sins,— if he would only be as keen to expose the truth on all sub- jects,—capitalists' sins as well as operatives',—as he was on this matter last Monday, might still have a work to do in England. It is the intensely disturbing force of his own vanity which so much limits his usefulness. If he would but expose moral evils which are not the counterparts of his own glorious virtues, there would be few more useful members of the Liberal party.
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