THE DUKE OF BUCCLEUCH.
THE movement for recognising in some public way the ser- vices rendered to Scotland by the Duke of Buccleuch is receiving the cordial adhesion of the abler and more influential of his political opponents, and probably nothing but the Duke's own modesty will prevent it from attaining complete success. Such a movement is characteristically Scotch ; it has only to take the familiar shape of the presentation of "an address and a purse of sovereigns," to become completely so. Wherever the flippant heresies of Mr. Mallock's "Social Equality" may have been received with favour, there is no hope of their taking root north of the Tweed ; there man is recognised as above all things a labouring animal. Since the Union, still more since the breaking-up of the Highland Clans, the struggle for existence in Scotland has not been 80 desperate as it was up to the beginning of the eighteenth century ; and, man for man, the Scotch commonalty is probably batter-off at the present moment than the English. But creed and climate have perpetuated the tradition—which, after all, is religion in daily life—that whatever a man finds to do, he is bound to do it with all his might. Every Scotchman is expected to go through life resolutely performing his duties, expecting no reward but that given by a good conscience, receiving no encouragement from the undemonstrative but vigilant observers of his career, except an occasional but encouraging grip of the hand from some brother-labourer, saying to all ener- vating temptations to tarn to the right or to the left, in the words of Burke,—but under his breath,—" For God's sake let us pass on, for God's sake let us pass on I" When, at last, he has achieved what material and moral success is open to him, and when he is in the vale of years, his contemporaries discover that he has been a credit to his parish or his profession, to his country or his species. A committee is formed, to organise a demonstration in his honour. A dinner is given him, and an address presented testifying that he has been a good and faithful servant, and above all things indicat- ing the lesson of his life for other and younger men. If the committee, after due deliberation, come to the conclusion that a purse of sovereigns is not likely to turn the head of a man of threescore and ten, or to have a demoralising effect on his family, that is presented along with the address, as, to use the old-fashioned and somewhat metaphysical Scotch phraseology, 'a tangible token of our esteem.'
Scotch Peers, in spite of their curious relationship to the Scotch Democracy, are expected to work hard. If any one of them figures before the world as a debauchee or a spendthrift, his Order treat him as a pariah. When in the course of their history they have as a class seemed lazy and indifferent to the public welfare, such an ominous and revolutionary growl has reached them from below as found expres- sion in Carlyle'a " Diary " during his days of -sansculotte Radicalism, " Canaille faine'ante, que faites-vous la? Down with your double-barrels. Take spades, if ye can do no better, and work or die 1" As a matter of fact, the Scotch Peers of the present day do such public work as comes to them to the best of their ability. Probably not more than three of their number could be 'mentioned who are not serving, as presidents, or as secretaries, or in some other post, on a politi- cal, or philanthropic, or ecclesiastical committee. Of the dozen Or so of young politicians who might at the present moment be described as Mr. Gladstone's hopefuls, at least a fourth are Scotch Peers on the bright side of forty. The Duke of Buccleuch has, after his fashion, worked bard and long and quietly. He is recognised throughout Scotland as having meant well and done well, according to his lights. No fainéant or absentee landlord, he has sought to promote the interests of his tenants, his dependants, and his country. He is in his seventy-seventh year, and surely the time has come to give him a dinner and an address.
The Duke of Buccleuch is the survivor of four very dissimilar Scotchmen, whose names some fifteen years ago the traveller north of the Tweed found in every one's mouth, whose influence was coloured by, if not due to their personality, and whose successors their country has yet to discover. There was James Baird, the man of iron and Evangelical, but energetic, orthodoxy, the Dumbiedykes of his Church, anxiously asking of his clerical advisers, as a theo- logical or ecclesiastical difficulty presented itself, "Will siller dae't I" and ready with his half-million. There was Norman Macleod, a Burns in gown and bands, yet Celtic to his finger- ends, and whose Broad Churchism was really the enthusiasm of Wordsworthianism. There was Alexander Russel, with his masculine humour and his ready pen, the last and, perhaps, the robustest of the Scotch Voltaireans, not believing much more, perhaps, than that the earth is less the inheritance of the Saints than the hunting-ground for a succession of clever fellows, yet the sincere foe of intolerance, illiberalism, and oppression, in every shape and form. Beside these three, resisting here, co-operating there, or rather around them, a social atmosphere fully as much as a person, there stood the Duke of Buccleuch. They have gone, and he remains, as he was then, the leviathan of land and of the natural Conservatism that rallies round land, floating over many a square mile in many a county. You cannot be a day in Scotland but you find that in most public, and in not a few private transactions, "the Duke "—for there is but one Duke in Scotland, though several "his Graces ":--has to be calculated with. The battle of Liberalism in the North has been essentially a struggle against his influence, from the day when he nailed his political colours to the mast down to the Midlothian Campaign. Much of this influence may, no doubt, be ascribed to his
acres and his rental, to the fact that he is a political
symbol, and, as we have already said, a social atmosphere. With no public man of the time would it seem more absurd
to associate brilliancy than with the Duke of Buccleuch. He is no orator, he is, indeed, the reverse of an orator. He once had occasion to make a series of short speeches as chairman at an agricultural dinner, and proceeded to deliver a few
good-natured common-places. Being among his own people, in his own county of Dumfries, he felt at his ease, and was beginning to dwell on some subject in which he had an interest, when he suddenly pulled himself up with the remark that, if he spoke at greater length, "there would be a para- graph in the papers saying that the Duke of Buccleuch had made a long speech." The Duke's comic horror at the bare idea of such a thing resembled nothing so much as David Copperfield's remonstrance with himself on his first
attempt to smoke,—" Copperfield, why did you try it You might have known you couldn't do it 1" The Duke has made
only one humorous remark in the whole course of his life, and he was probably never more terribly in earnest than when he made it. For it was shortly after the Disraeli Reform Act had become law, subsoquently to its transformation in the Commons ; the Duke declared that it contained nothing of the original measure but the word "whereas." Yet it is beyond question that the Duke's influence and popu- larity are due in no small measure to his personality. He has shown himself from first to last a man of invincible amiability. Scotch Liberalism may war with his influence, and denounce his agents and subordinates ; it spares and respects himself. Roxburghsbire and Dumfriesshire tenants are bitter enough on occasions with the Duke's chamberlains, but they evidently think the Duke himself can do no wrong. Then, though he may be intellectually short-sighted, and though his mental movements may be slow, he is a good and careful man of busi- ness. Before the Scotch Patronage Abolition Act of 1874 was passed, he, although an Episcopalian, discharged the difficult duties of patron to a large number of Presbyterian parishes with almost perfect success. His selections of incumbents were seldom, if ever, objected to, because before making them he had studied the characters and ascertained the wants of the congregations requiring spiritual instructors. Above all things, the Duke of Buccleuch's popularity is due to his having, un- consciously perhaps and simply by being faithful to his excellent instincts, converted his position of landlord and feudal superior into a benevolent patriarchate. But little of snobbishness and nothing of flunkeyism mingles with the respect p.tid to the Duke of Buccleuch in Scotland, at all events by humble folk. It is but the expression of a belief that he has lived with, and in many ways for, his people, but never on them, or for himself.
One is so accustomed to think of the Duke of Buccleuch as the typical country gentleman of Scotland, the centre of its landed interest, the improver of estates, the builder of harbours, the natural bulwark of Church and State, that one is apt to forget that he once had a political ambition, and seemed in a fair way to have it gratified. He was a Cabinet Minister at thirty-five, or four years before Sir Charles Mire, the youngest of Mr. Gladstone's colleagues of the inner circle, reached that dignity. He was Peel's colleague from 1842 to 1846, first as Lord Privy Seal, and then as Lord President of the Council. It was his secession and that of the then Lord Stanley which caused Peel to resign, at the most critical moment in the history of the measure for the repeal of the Corn Laws. His return to the side of Peel, his manly declaration in a letter to him, "I am ready, at the risk of any imputation that may be cast upon me, to give my decided support not only to your Administration generally, but to the passing through Parliament of a measure for the final settle- ment of the Corn Laws," had not a little to do with his chief's final resolution to complete his great work. It may be doubted if the Duke's Conservatism has ever been even purged of the Peel leaven, unless, indeed,the successful Midlothian campaign of his old colleague has produced that result. " Dod " still classes him, as it classes Lord Selborne, as a Liberal-Conservative. He never served under the late Lord Derby, and probably had little sympathy with him. It was not till the second adminis- tration of Lord Derby's successor that he could be got to recognise his party authority with even a semblance of hearti- ness. His dislike for Lord Beaconsfield was the dislike of the honest, if rather dull man for the theatrical political adventurer. Perhaps it was just as well for the Buccleuch estates in Scotland, and for the City of Edinburgh, that, with the collapse of the Peel Administration the Duke found his political vocation gone, and devoted himself to the completion of the work of his grandfather, the friend and pupil of Adam Smith. The one might not have obtained their patriarchal government, nor the other have had completed that harbour of Granton, which is the greatest public enterprise ever executed in Scotland at the cost of a private individual, if the Duke had. become a busy partisan and place-hunter. About a generation ago, he found his true mission ; and it is because he has dis- charged that mission faithfully and honourably that S3otland, which has defeated him on a hundred political battle-fields, and hopes to defeat him on many more, sees no inconsistency or degradation in recognising him as a national benefactor.
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