TOPICS OF THE DAY.
MR. MORLEY AND THE HARUM-SCARUM GOVERNMENT.
IT is a curious failing for a man of Mr. John Morley's intellectual calibre, to be liable to fall into such an ecstasy of exultation as he displayed at Manchester on Wednesday night. His speech, which was no doubt, after its fashion, a very effective one, was effective chiefly because he gave himself over to so vehement a spasm of triumphant political crowing, that he succeeded in making all his audience crow with him, and filled the air with those sounds of premature self-satisfaction which the early village cock gives forth when he perceives signs of the returning dawn. It is given to Mr. Morley to see disasters for himself and his friends before they come, and no one was less inclined than he to blind himself to the collapse which was about to fall on his party a year ago. But it is also apparently given to him to see dis- asters for his foes in still earlier vision, and to ignore that slip between the cup and the lip which the sober mind of political leaders should never forget. We never read a speech which had less in it of the calm, detached critic than his speech of Wednesday at Manchester. It was one long and loud crow, and penetrated with the greed of anticipated victory. He began by crowing over the disap- pointment of the bimetallists that this Government will do nothing to raise their hopes. Well, there we agree with Mr. Morley, and only hope that he may be right in thinking that there is no immediate fear of the rise of a dangerous currency craze in the English democracy. But we hardly know why the disappointment of the bimetallists should fill him with delight when Mr. Balfour fairly warned his party that he was not going to make any experiments in that direction, and when it would have been such a great proof of the " harum-scarum " character which he attributes to the Government, if he could have pointed to its adoption of this curious fanaticism. For our own part we feel less confident than Mr. Morley that this bimetallist passion may not spring up suddenly, it may be in the Unionist, or it may be in the Gladstonian ranks. When we see how this epidemic grows and spreads in such countries as the United States, we never feel much assurance that it may not grow and spread here. When men like Mr. Courtney lend it their counte- nance, and the shrewdest economists of modern times go over to it, we cannot but fear that our own people may catch the contagion. Anyhow, Mr. Morley has no ground for either taunting the bimetallists as he seems to do, with a, disappointment of which they had full warn- ing, or for congratulating his own party on their freedom from the taint. Sir William Harcourt is not more orthodox than Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, and we should be as little surprised to find it introduced as a plank into the Glad- stonian programme, as to see it adopted by the Unionists into their own. It only shows how unnaturally elated are Mr. Morley's spirits that he dwells upon the subject at all.
It is very curious to find Mr. Morley descanting on this subject just before he announces that this is so harum- scarum a Government that " they will take any leap you like, only they will not look before they take the leap." At all events they looked at the bimetallist leap and refused it. Mr. Morley had half expected, he says, a policy of " honest humdrum," and he finds the most harum-scarum Govern- ment of this century. Of course he produces the Agricultural Rating Bill by way of proof. The Agricultural Rating Bill is nothing but a temporary remedy for an alarmingly and almost fatally sick industry, and the harum-scarum character which he attributes to it depends entirely on the Gladstonian hypothesis, which we believe to be atrociously and demonstrably false, that it will all go into the pockets of the landlords instead of relieving the farmers. The measure is only good for five years, and that is not a period within which the landlords are likely to recover any portion of it by way of increased rents. The next proof Mr. Morley produces of the harum-scarum character of the Government is, of course, the Education Bill, over the difficulties of which Mr. Morley almost screams with delight. The chief difficulty of that Bill is a question of time, and it is hardly a proof of intolerable rashness that Mr. Balfour is so unwilling to ask of Parliament immediate and severe sacrifices, when he thinks he sees a possibility of doing without them. We hold that he is too sanguine. But we hold also that his sanguineness is all on the side of caution. Mr. Balfour sees that a little delay in passing a really great Education Bill will not be in any sense fatal either to the country or his party. There is no such hurry as to anything but the clauses aiding the voluntary schools, unless the mortification of a little party vanity in submitting to delay, is the immense calamity which Mr. Morley and his colleagues desire to think it It does not seem to us a ground for calling Mr. Balfour a harum-scarum leader that he thinks time altogether on his side, as we believe it really is. The panic of the School Board interest is a ridiculous panic. In our firm belief, the County Councils and Borough Councils to which the Government propose to transfer the constitution of the Education Authority, will be just as careful to watch over the development of education, as the present School Boards, and will have the enormous advantage of holding in their hands the leading threads of all the other branches of the local expenditure. It is pure nonsense to suppose that in the present state of public opinion any popularly elected Authority can afford to starve education. Look at the eagerness of such popularly elected Boards to foster technical education all over the kingdom. We hold the School Boards to have done very good service. But the County Councils, when elected with their new function explicitly imposed among their other duties, will be just as anxious to appoint Education Authorities well up to the mark. The importance attached to primary education is in the air. The Gladstonians trade on one of Lord Salisbury's careless and rather rash remarks in favour of keeping down the Education rate. Lord Salisbury is almost as powerless to keep down the Education rate as Phaethon was to drive the chariot of the sun. What we do really want is more co-ordination between the various items of local taxation and local expenditure, and this is what the new Education Bill will give us.
We ourselves earnestly wish that an autumn Session should be summoned to conclude the discussion of the Bill. But even if it is not concluded, and only a small portion of the Bill is passed this Session, the country will not suffer, and Mr. Balfour will only have proved that he was not so passionately eager to get the credit of crushing a very obstinate and petulant Opposition as his followers think he ought to be. Taking his time in relation to such a measure is not like talking easily a very needful provision for the Navy. To be cautious in declining to spur on your party, even if you have a large majority, is just the opposite of harum-scarum. Mr. Morley thinks it the worst humiliation for a Govern- ment with a vast majority not to crush its opponents. We think that equanimity in these matters is far more cautious than over-haste. Mr. Balfour sees that some of his own followers are in a (very needless) panic about the School Boards, and he thinks it wise to give them time to learn how needless their panic is. We hope he may find it more prudent to pass the main portions of his Educa- tion Bill before the Session closes, but if that is not accomplished there is no more reason to fret and fume about a rout, than there was for Grant and Sherman to fret and fume because they had to spend some years in defeating the forces of the South. The last evidence that would prove a policy to be harum-scarum, is perfect cool- ness in relation to the passage of such a measure as the Education measure, which is not urgent, except as to a very small portion of it, and which will soon live down the foolish panic it has created in the souls of such excitable gentlemen as Major Banes. Then, of course, Mr. Morley tries to substantiate his charge of harum-scarumness by dwelling on Mr. Chamber- lain's individual desire to draw the Colonies closer to England by gratifying them, if it were possible, in regard to preferring their commercial interests to those of the rest of the world. That is not the policy of the Govern- ment. It is simply an effort on Mr. Chamberlain's part to test how far the Colonies would be willing to approxi- mate to Free-trade with the Mother-country, and how much we should have to sacrifice for it. We agree with Mr. Morley that to this country the sacrifice would be too heavy. But we are not at all sorry that Mr. Chamberlain has displayed this eager desire to meet the Colonies half way. It will do great good to convince them that English statesmen are not less, perhaps even more, eager to cement the alliance with them, than our Colonial statesmen are to cement the alliance with us. It is almost childish in Mr. Morley to treat a preliminary overture of this kind for negotiations with our great Colonies as if it were a. declaration of official policy. He will not succeed in stamping a Government as "harum-scarum" because one of its Members favours bimetallism (with a singularly large number of eminent economists), and another would sacrifice something of present Free-trade for what he thinks likely to promote the success of Free-trade in the future, while neither of them have either asked or gained the assent of their colleagues to their individual hopes. And then there is the advance on the Nile, which Mr. Morley treats as if it were the crackbrained policy of a Government of adventurers. We have dwelt on this subject in another column, but we are much mistaken if it will not prove to be one of the wisest and most successful strokes of a really strong and disinterested Government. Mr. Morley has for once got a, bee in his bonnet. This Government is far less of a harum-scarum Government than that of which he was a principal member. It is not attempting impossibilities as his Government did. It is bold in conception, cautious in execution, and too strong to be in a hurry. It is Mr. Morley who is the giddy and harum-scarum assailant, and his opponents who are the cool and prudent guardians of the public interest.
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