TOPICS OF THE DAY.

MR. LOWE ON THE EARNESTNESS OF CABINETS.

MR. LOWE, in his speech at Retford, declared, not for the first time, that the last Government determined to carry out, at whatever cost, the programme of measures to which the leaders

of the Liberal party were, in principle, pledged,—measures, in the first instance, intended to remove all reasonable ground for the assertion that we govern Ireland on principles on which we would not willingly permit any Power to govern ourselves ; next, to give to the electorate which Mr. Disraeli had enfranchised the protection against undue influence, and the education necessary for the proper discharge of their new duties ; and lastly, that rational organisation of the Army and the Civil Service which would ensure for them the highest possible efficiency, and remove the reproach that the prizes of these Services fell to the rich, and not to the competent. Mr. Lowe asserted most justly that in all respects but one,—the concession necessary to give Catholic Ireland a University as suited to her needs as the Universities

of Protestant England are to hers,—this programme was carried out to the very letter. And he indulges in what may fairly

be called a noble pride that the late Government were not content with pledges and promises, but "used up and ex- pended" their majority in fulfilling their pledges and re- deeming their promises, even though temporary unpopularity and reaction followed that large expenditure of Liberal energy.

" One crowded hour of glorious life," quoted Mr. Lowe,

"is worth an age without a name." And while claiming that " crowded hour " for the last Ministry, he taunted the present

Government with earning a " disgraceful longevity" by bring- ing in a succession of colourless and washed-out measures, of interest to no one, which are, indeed, devised and passed only as make-believe redemptions of the pledges of the Con- servative party, but so prudently deprived of all real party significance, that no one knows " whether he would rather have them or be without them." The question thus raised by Mr.

Lowe as to the value of " earnestness " in Governments is really a very important one, and we do not think that he has at all adequately discussed it. It suggests this doubt, how far it is the duty of a party-government to use up all its steam in work too rapid to admit of the gradual production of new steam to

supply the waste ; and if not, what the distinction ought to be between work which ought to be done promptly, at any cost of popularity, and work which should only be done gradually, as the progress of public opinion requires it.

It is no reply to Mr. Lowe to say, as the Times did the other day, that if he were right, it would be the duty of the present Government to "use up and expend its majority" in passing a series of reactionary measures, just to prove earnestness. For though the present Government is committed strongly to the view that the recent reforms were objectionable, it does not at

all follow that it is committed to the policy of repealing them, and as a matter of fact, every one knows that that is not the

case. Nor is it sufficient to reply to Mr. Lowe that to outstrip the great majority of the people of the country in carrying out reforms, is an unfortunate policy if only on the ground that it leads to intervals of weariness and reaction to which a more Palmerstonian policy does not lead. That may very well be so, and yet it might very well be a moral duty to do what the Liberal party had proposed, even at the cost of bringing on such a reaction, supposing the measures promised were of a kind urgently needed by the people, or by the institutions of this country, even though they might be also of a kind to exhaust rather suddenly that Liberal energy by which alone they could be carried. Mr. Lowe might very reasonably main- tain, for instance, that to pass the Education measure of 1870 was worth all, and more than all, the exhaustion of Liberal feeling which probably followed it. For every year of delay in educating the people was a year of moral opportunity lost to a whole generation of Englishmen whom no continuity of Liberal policy in the country could ever reimburse. It seems to us that Mr. Lowe has a very strong case,—in regard, at least,

to several of the late Government's measures,—for saying that it was the duty of a Cabinet really in earnest about them to carry them at any cost of Liberal steam, even though the prospect of the reaction which followed should have been as visible and as certain to the eyes of Ministers then, as it is visible to us all now. In relation, at all events, to measures like the Education Act and the Irish Church and Land Acts, measures which really liberated the conscience of a nation from

the depressing sense of admitted but unfulfilled obligations, Mr. Lowe has the most ample right to say that the late Govern- ment's " crowded hour of glorious life " was " worth an age without a name."

But would the same justification apply to the Ballot Act, the abolition of Purchase in the Army, the Act which brought down on the Government the dire hatred of the Licensed Victuallers, or the extension of open competition to almost all branches of the Civil Service ? We could not maintain with at all equal confidence that it would. The strongest case, perhaps, is that of the Abolition of Purchase by the use of the Royal Preroaative when the House of Lords had rejected the Bill passed by the House of Commons. That was unquestionably a very grand assertion of the resolve of the Government to use all its Constitutional powers to the utmost for the purpose of blotting out a great abuse. We earnestly supported and thoroughly admired that high-handed act of Mr. Gladstone's Government, and we admire it none the less now that it is perfectly evident that we should not have had the utterly rotten system of Purchase abolished at the present moment, if it had not been abolished in that way. But unquestionably that measure made a very important ad- dition to the squeeze in the " crowded hour of glorious life " of which Mr. Lowe boasts, and we cannot feel quite confident, as we look back on it, that if it contributed much, as we fancy it did, to hasten the reaction and exhaust the motive-power of Liberal progress, it was worth the cost. To have fixed on the House of Lords the responsibility of rejecting the measure, and to have bowed to its authority, while insisting on the right of the Government to send up the measure again and again till it should be passed, would have been both a lesson to the country in the Conservative ten- dencies of the House of Lords, and a soothing assurance that the Government did not intend so much to lead as to follow public opinion, in its demand for reforms. A great ad- ministrative reform, a great reform of principle, would have been delayed for years, perhaps for ten years, but by way of com- pensation the Government would have inspired much less fear of the imperiousness of its Liberalism, and would have spread the conviction that the springs of reform must be in the people, and that without a pressure from behind sufficient to convince the House of Lords of the policy of concession, even a Liberal Government would not undertake to do the bidding of Liberal associations. The true question is whether in such a case as this the delay in abolishing a great abuse was so injurious as to outweigh the evil of drawing too fast on the motive-power of Liberal feeling. At the time, we thought it was. We do not feel so confident now that we were right. It was certainly a noble mistake, a mistake in the right direc- tion, if it was a mistake at all. But undoubtedly it is a good rule, in relation to any measure which is not of the first urgency as regards the moral and political needs of the people, to let the people feel that if they will have the measure, they must show their will so unmistakably that no one will accuse a reforming Government of going out of its way to gratify a mere popular caprice. There is nothing better suited to keep up a steady current of Liberal zeal, than to con- vince the nation that the immediate result of any diminu- tion in that zeal is the loss of energy in the administrative response to popular demands. Mr. Lowe is right in praising the earnestness of the late Government. No Government of our time has ever given such great pledges, and none has so com-

pletely fulfilled even the pledges which it did give. But it is certainly possible for governments to be too much in earnest, because it is not true of governments, as it is of individuals,

that " tasks in hours of insight willed, should be in hours of gloom fulfilled." On the contrary, except in relation to duties

of the first magnitude, it is well for popular Governments to let the people feel that the whole heat which should generate motion is with them, and not with their servants. If Mr.

Gladstone's Government failed at all, it failed,—gloriously enough,—in redeeming promises which the people had ceased to give them any active help in redeeming. And though that is in its way heroic, we are not so sure that it always wise.