MR. ASQUITH IN GLASGOW. T HE chief interest of Mr. Asquith's
speech of Tuesday in Glasgow consists in the light it throws on his own character and views. He is supposed, it is true, to have made an important statement about next Session ; but we do not see that when examined his statement comes to much. He says that people have placed an inaccurate and unjust " construction on Mr. Gladstone's words about the Home-rule Bill emerging from the waves which have engulfed it, and declares that the Government has no fixed determination to reintroduce the Bill early next Session,—but is not that rather a superfluous assertion than a revelation ? Whoever supposed that the Govern- ment had any determination of the kind ? Certainly, we did not ; for the very point of our argument was that the Government as such could have no determi- nation until Mr. Gladstone bad made up his mind ; that he had not made it up yet, but that he probably would make it up in favour of an immediate redemption of his pledge to Celtic Ireland, Statesmen of eighty-four are not tolerant of the waiting game. Mr. Asquith, doubtless, thinks he knows Mr. Gladstone's mind upon the subject ; but Mr. Gladstone's mind is always described by himself as an open one, and he is perfectly capable of keeping it open till February next, and then announcing to the Cabinet a decision, based upon his years and his health, to which Mr. Asquith and the rest of his colleagues must submit, or go. If the Premier says the Home-rule Bill must be the main object of next Session, it will be the main object, let the Cabinet or the Party or the con- stituencies kick with vexation as they like. They are beaten men if Mr. Gladstone disappears ; and in that fact is the secret of his autocracy. The statement therefore does not impress us, and would not if Mr. Gladstone made it himself ; but the speech itself has an interest which makes it worthy of study. In it Mr. Asquith shows himself more clearly than ever before as a Radical with one reserve. The reserve is that he will have order. The curious tolerance for anarchy which infects so many of our Radical journals, and even a few Liberal leaders—including in Ireland Mr. Gladstone himself— has no place in Mr. Asquith's mind. The fuss made by Labour leaders at the employment of soldiers and police during the recent riots in the coal districts—a fuss, no doubt, which has met with but little popular response— has not daunted him at all. He is quite willing to grant inquiry, if people have been killed during the execution of repressive orders; but if it is necessary to maintain order, he will go on killing. After pointing out, we must say with justice, the absurdity of the idea that the Glad- stonian Government, which is dependent upon the votes of the masses as opposed to the classes, would use force unjustly on the side of the employers, he proceeded to say, amidst an outburst of enthusiasm which might give some of the Labour leaders warning :—" There is one thing which neither I nor any other Liberal Minister who is worthy the name will ever tolerate, and that is, the use of disorder, of lawlessness, or of riot either upon the one side or the other. I do not care upon which aide it is employed, I do not care who it is that instigates it, or who it is that defends it. So long as I am responsible, not only to the Sovereign, but to the people of this country, for the proper use of the executive forces which the law places at the disposal of the Administration, riot and disorder shall not be allowed to prevail." In the steady defence of this determination Mr. Asquith has always been consistent ; and, as the scenes in the coal districts show that he means what he has said, his last utterance will be received with satisfaction by the country. He is, and will remain, one of the leading minds of the Liberal Party ; while they are in power he will always be a promi- nent Minister ; he may even, being a, fortunate man, one day be the favourite claimant for the Premiership ; and it is pleasant to all grave men to know that, as against mob-rule and anarchy, we have one strong Radical who will, if necessary, shoot. But for the rest, Mr. Asquith is a Radical, probably all the stronger because he in a, rather marked way abstains from using the usual dialect of the party. He dislikes angry drivel. He does not, for instance, abuse the House of Lords for their recent vote, but taunts the people with leaving such enormous power to the House of Lords. The Peers have always, he says, rejected important measures if introduced by Liberal Premiers ; and this time they have only been true in a very striking way, owing to the weight of the majority, to their historic tradition, " I venture to say this to you, that so long as you tolerate the system which places this gigantic power in irresponsible hands, so long, gentlemen, you have yourselves, and nobody else, to blame for its normal and its natural effects." That is effective Radicalism, which abuse usually is not ; for it means that Mr. Asquith, if he had the power, would sweep the House of Lords away, or so limit its functions that it could no longer oppose the popular will. The House does not, he says, oppose any barrier to bad or revolutionary legislation when introduced by Tories ; it does arrest the public will when expressed through Liberals, and therefore the people should, if they understand their business, bring it to an end. The same spirit comes out in his sentences about the Registration Bill. This Bill will be, in fact, a Reform Bill of a sweeping character, and it therefore rouses in Mr. Asquith an enthusiasm which is at one point expressed involuntarily in a rather comic way :—" We have to shorten. the period of qualification which, in its present form, annually disfranchises a very large number of capable and intelligent subjects of the Crown. We have to prevent the illegitimate use of the lodger franchise which, by an artificial limit of value, admits freely and wholesale to the register men who happen to be well off or well placed from a social point of view, and at the same time excludes men equally well qualified in fact—ah, yes, and equally within the scope of the intention of the law as it was passed in, Parliament—from the exercise of electoral rights; and we shall not complete that great and urgent work of reform until we have secured that no man, whatever may be the number of his qualifications, shall be entitled to exer- cise more than one vote. A measure to secure those great ends will certainly be passed through the House of Commons in its next Session. What fortune may befall it in ' another place,' I do not venture to pre- dict; but let the House of Lords reject it, and I do not think we shall be very slow to respond to the appeal of our Unionist friends, to take the opinion of the country about it." So intense is Mr. Asquith's desire for more votes, so zealous is be for enlargement of the suffrage, that he openly rejects his own arguments when they militate against it ; and after proving for a quarter-of-an-hour that if the Government dissolved on a vote of the Lords against a Home-rule Bill, it would be false to its trust from the people, he threatens immediate Dissolution if a Registration Bill is rejected ! The fate of the Empire may be involved in the Home-rule Bill, but that does not signify . and its rejection need not produce :n appeal to the people. But registration is a vital matter, i. and before it even high constitutional principle, though affirmed in public only the minute before, must be per- mitted to give way. That is Radicalism in its nstkedest form, the Radicalism which considers that nothing is rightly settled, nothing is even bearably settled, until the multitude is in a position to give final orders upon all things. Mr. Asquith, be it remembered, is not a wire- puller. He is not seeking this great change merely to weaken, as it will do, the Tory vote in London ; he is sin- cerely convinced that the multitude ought to rule, and to enable them to rule, would postpone even his most mature constitutional convictions. If the Lords are for the Union, so be it ; Ireland must wait. But if they are against an extended suffrage, we must appeal instantly to the people. So excited does he grow, that he does not even remember that his words may cause the rejection of the Bill as the quickest way of forcing the appeal to the people, which the House of Lords for once earnestly desires. Even this, however, is not the strongest of Mr. Asquith's Radical utterances. Greatly to our surprise, he is ready, rather than forego a Radical triumph, to resort to what we can- not but regard as, in a political sense, unfair means. He declares, with a vehemence that perhaps indicates a secret doubt, that the Irish will co-operate with the Govern- ment even if Home-rule is delayed a Session, and affirms that,—" It is upon the cordial, the continuous, the unbroken alliance of the democracy of Ireland with the democracy of Great Britain that the chance of securing the ends which are dear to them, and the ends which are dear to us, entirely depends. That alliance has stood the !strain of seven years of bard-fought conflict ; and for my part I am perfectly certain it will endure to the end." If tihe Irish are removed from the House, the words we have italicised become meaningless or deceptive ; and as Mr. ,.Asquith does not talk nonsense or deceive anybody, they can but mean that he intends, as far as in him lies, to keep the Irish delegates in Parliament. In other words, he is willing, rather than forego Radical " ends," to keep in Parliament a body of " foreigners " who will vote for and against Bills which will in no degree affect their own constituents ; who will, for instance, support a. shilling Income-tax voted to pay pensions to the aged poor, in the comfortable certainty that their supporters will never have to pay one extra penny.
We had scarcely expected avowals so extreme from Mr. Asquith; but we are rather wasting argument. Mr. Asquith would not deny that he was a Radical, and in his peroration, by far the most genuinely eloquent passage we hate ever seen in a speech of his, he thus defends his faith :—" We are concerned with a complex historic society which requires for its readjustment the finest insight and the most delicate touch. But there is all the difference in the world in the treatment of these great social questions, in the success which attends their treat- ment, according as they are approached in an attitude of hope or in an attitude of despair. It is not a difference of mood or of. temper. It is a. difference of conviction and of faith. If it be true that progress is an illusion, if the organised efforts of men to improve the con- ditions of life are nothing more and nothing better than an impulsive and credulous flight from known to unknown evils, why then we will agree, and it is wise for the rational than to lie back with folded hands and to allow the current that carries the fortunes of us all to drift him where it will ; but I spoke to you of the Liberal party, —that is not our faith. We believe that in the history of our race and of our own country there is an increasing purpose of which the larger abundance and the fairer apportionment of happiness is the end, and the associated energies of human beings in society and in the State are the means. That is our creed." That is the creed, no doubt, of all the saner Radicals, most felicitously expressed. For ourselves, while we entirely acknowledge that the creed has a certain attraction, and that it is rapidly capturing the multitude throughout the Western world, we take leave to doubt whether happiness instead of nobleness is the true end, and whether the vote of the ignorant—for it is to this that the "associated energiee of human beings " in politics always comes—can be the wisest means. It the doctrine is true, it is true Of all mankind, and we have only to apply it to the inferior races to see its utter folly. Yet these races differ from us mainly in their degree of ignorance.
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