MR. BRYCE AT OXFORD.
SPEAKING at the annual dinner of the Palmerston Club at Oxford last Saturday, Mr. Bryce observed that he was one of the oldest of its members. He must, therefore, have a specially keen consciousness of the irony which has made the festival of a club bearing such a name appear the natural occasion for the delivery of speeches setting forth the point of view of present-day Radicalism, whether in regard to the domestic affairs of these islands or to their Imperial relations. If anything can be predicated with certainty of any dead man we may with absolute confidence say of Lord Palmerston that he would have regarded the legislative policy of the late Government, both before and after Mr. Gladstone's resignation, with feelings of the profoundest aversion, and that he would have felt himself entirely out of sympathy with four-fifths, if not nine-tenths, of Mr. Bryce's denunciations of the measures brought forward by the present Unionist Govern- ment at home and their line of action abroad. He would have loathed Home-rule; he would have despised the piecemeal onslaught on the Church ; he would have resented with alarm and indignation the attempt to stir up the country to demand the destruction of the House of Lords as an effective portion of our Constitution. He would, in our belief, have scoffed at the idea that there was anything contrary to "old Liberal prin- ciples," on which Mr. Bryce was great last Satur- day, in a five years' grant of partial relief from rating burdens to the sorely distressed interests of agriculture, or in the general scope of the measure by which the Government have responded to the general feeling in favour of diminishing the severity of the struggle for existence on the part of Church of England and other denominational schools which have discharged and are discharging a large proportion of a recognised public obligation at a great saving to the country. More than that, we may reasonably feel sure that Lord Palmerston, man of the world though he was, would have recognised to the full the value, from a high political and social point of view, of giving reinforcement to organisations affording a guarantee for the maintenance of a strongly religious element in popular education. On both these points of the policy of the present Government, in a word, Lord Palmerston, with all his levity, would have shown much more of that note of true culture which Matthew Arnold described as the allowing our consciousness to play freely about our principles, than is shown by Mr. Bryce, with all his earnestness and massive learning, and so far would have been a far better guide to young University Liberals.
" What," Mr. Bryce asked at the Palmerston Club dinner, " bad become of the old Liberal principles ? One of them was that legislation should be in the interests of the country, and not of a, class ; but nearly all the legisla- tion proposed by the present Government was class legislation, and much of it was class legislation of that peculiarly odious kind which consisted of dipping the hands of one class into the pockets of another." The Agricultural Rating Bill, we are to understand, is a signal example of this repulsive violation of Liberal principles. As our readers are aware, we have not been able to regard the Agricultural Rating Bill as a final expedient for the relief of a distressed industry. But to argue that such a measure is fundamentally bad because it is directed to the benefit of one industry, is to ignore that, as the whole nation may undoubtedly suffer very seriously from the injury of one of its most im- portant constituent elements, so it may quite conceivably be worth the nation's while to make some sacrifice for the relief of that element. It is all a question of degree. No one, certainly not Mr. Bryce, would dispute the propriety of Imperial grants for the relief of a famine in Ireland. We should presume that Mr. Bryce, whenever the Irish Church surplus is finally exhausted, if at that time the Union still stands, would approve of an Imperial grant in aid of the work of the Congested Districts Board in Ireland. The principle on which such a grant could and would be justified is precisely the same as that which can be adduced in support of special legislation for the diminution of the burdens on English agriculture. Not to see this, and to denounce the Agricultural Rating Bill as Mr. Bryce denounces it, is not to worship principle but to make a, fetish of a phrase.
Other main principles of the Liberal party, as explained by Mr. Bryce to the members of the Palmerston Club, are the desirability of improving and developing our educa- tional system, and the association of public control with grants of public money. These principles, it appears, are violated by the Education Bill, and, to the distress of those who hold them, " the Bill is discussed in the Press almost entirely as a question between the clergy of the Church of England and a certain group of ecclesiastical laymen, and the rest of the country." As to the first of the principles just mentioned, we all hold it, and so with the second. We think that, in the main, the scheme of the Bill is well calculated " to improve and develop our educational system," and Mr. Bryce thinks otherwise. We think that the Bill extends public control over voluntary schools in full proportion to its proposed exten- sion of the grants of public money to them, and we have difficulty in understanding how a contrary opinion can be held. As to the issue described by Mr. Bryce as discussed in the Press we should put it the other way about. The country at large, judging from its voice given in constitu- tional fashion, favours the maintenance of the denomina- tional schools, and desires to diminish the difficulties now besetting them. Mr. Bryce and the minority are entitled to entertain their own opinions on the subject. But they are not entitled to speak as if the denominational schools, whose services the country has distinctly recognised, were maintained in furtherance of an unintelligible fad, having no relation to the question of the value of the education given in them. We do not say that Mr. Bryce puts that view of the case in so many words, but it certainly appears to us to underlie his references to it at the Palmerston Club. A very large section of the community hold that the definite teaching of religion in elementary schools is of much greater consequence to the well-being and happiness of England in the future than any improvement ' whatever that could be introduced into the secular instruc- tion imparted in those schools. This belief is the chief inspiration of the efforts made for the maintenance of denominational schools, and it ought to be recognised, however strongly it may be repudiated, by undenomina- tionalists.
To us it certainly seems unfortunate that one of the most distinguished of Oxford Liberals in his speech to the young Liberals of the University should exhibit both a rigid idolatry of sets of words and an unreadiness or inability to understand and enter into the governing principles of his opponents. It is not thus that that " highest type of Liberalism " of which he thinks, and justly, that the University ought to be the " seed-plot " can be cultivated.. At the University, if anywhere, the so-called principles of parties should be considered and reconsidered in the light of changing public needs, and receive restatement in a form intelligibly applicable to those needs. At the University, if anywhere, men should learn to comprehend what is best in the point of view of their opponents. At the University, if anywhere, great purposes should be recognised even when it is thought needful to criticise the methods of their execution. An observance of this duty would have completely altered the criticism, with which much of Mr. Bryce's speech was taken up, of Mr. Chamberlain's policy. It would have kept him from being content with a frigid allusion to Mr. Chamberlain's very important speech at the opening of the Congress of Chambers of Commerce as an illustration of the unsoundness of the Government on Free-trade, and it would have taken what we must regretfully call the venom out of his sketch of Mr. Chamberlain's treat- ment of the South African question. It is profoundly to be desired that the flower of the young men of England should catch the inspiration of the undoubted enthusiasm of the Colonial Secretary for the consolidation of the British Empire. In the main, as we believe, he has steered a difficult course with wisdom and vigour, and there is no doubt that he has developed in the Colonies an increased sense of satisfaction in the Imperial connection, and an increased desire to see it strengthened. Those are great national services, and it is much to be regretted that Mr. Bryce should set the example to the young Oxford Liberals of treating them as of no account. We are inclined, however, to hope that the generosity of their natural instincts will, in this matter at least, altogether overbear the influence of Mr. Bryce's recent speech.
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