SIR MOUNTSTUART GRANT DUFF'S LETTER.
SIR MOUNTSTUART GRANT DUFF'S annual review of the political situation used to be one of the greater helps to which we looked for correcting the customary conception of the politics of the day,—before he went to India to govern Madras. Since his return he has unfortunately not thought it well to re-enter Parlia- ment, but he has nevertheless seized the occasion of Mr. Morley's series of speeches to the Montrose Boroughs to address to his old constituents in the Elgin group of neighbouring boroughs one of those illuminating surveys of our modern politics, which are none the less valuable for being thrown into the form of a letter instead of that of a speech,—a letter published in last Tuesday's Banffshire Journal. He keeps faithfully to the Unionist position, and warns his old political friends as firmly as ever that the advantages or calamities of Home-rule depend upon the place and spirit in which it is applied, and not on the merits of any abstract doctrine at all, that it is crack- brained to apply it so as to paralyse the central govern- ment of a great nation, though it might be wise enough if the country which demands it could be towed to any such distance as that of the Transvaal from Great Britain, and there set to make the experiment of self-government in a sp'ot where its complete failure would not affect the heart of a great Empire, nor make the beat of its pulses, fitful, feverish, and morbid. Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff is just the man to warn us against the danger of falling into those fixed habits, or we might say even, deep ruts of policy which a great controversy will unfortunately establish in a nation's modes of dealing with the problems of the day. The Unionists are perhaps in danger of assailing Home-rule in cases where it might be beneficial, at least as a political experiment, merely because they have got into so fixed a habit of denouncing it where it is certainly and purely mischievous. That is a political mistake, against which it needs the detached vision of a keen onlooker to guard us. It is no sufficient reason, merely because Home-rule has been fatally discredited in one set of circumstances, that it should be disliked and distrusted in another quite different set of circumstances where it does not introduce any of the special dangers for which in the former case we had denounced it. Because it is a very bad thing when it threatens the efficient working of a great nation's brain, it does not follow that it need be a bad thing when it merely sets a dislocated joint in the working of one of its limbs. To warn us against running into mere grooves of political belief, when we are not so much thinking of the individual case as merely continuing to take up an attitude to which we have become accustomed in a con- dition of things to which it is not really suited, is just the service which Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff's political addresses have so often rendered us.
And he renders us just the same service when he tells us in relation to colonisation, that it is "a little silly" for Englishmen to parcel themselves into Big-Englanders and Little-Englanders, and fly at each others' throats on the strength of that very unmeaning, because abstract, dis- tinction. He urges, and urges justly enough, that it is no final reason for taking a new and onerous duty on our shoulders that it will make the Empire bigger. Nor is it any final reason for not handing over to others a region which we do not find it convenient to govern well, and are wholly disinclined to govern ill, that to shrink from attempting the task will make the Empire a little smaller. So it will, and yet the Empire may be all the more powerful and the more effectively organised for that very reason. Surely England gained more in power by handing over the Ionian Islands to Greece, and so removing a very needless and unfortunate grievance of Greece against us, than she did by adding Cyprus to her dominions for a nominal purpose which it has never served ? The controversy between Big-Englanders and Little-Englanders, as such, is, as Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff truly tells us, a " silly" controversy. What we have to consider in relation to any change of this kind, is not whether it will make the Empire bigger or less, but whether it will benefit the region annexed or cut adrift to the advantage of the Empire which makes the change. Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff does us a great service when he ignores the empty controversy between Big-Englanders and Little-Englanders, and recalls our attention to the true question, whether the work can be best done by us or by some other Power, and if it can be best done by us, whether it can be done without over- straining our rather severely tasked resources. There we fully agree with him. But we do not agree with him when he seems to hint that we should do well to disembarrass ourselves of Egypt. For there we have proved our power to raise the whole level of Egypt's prosperity, and still more her standard of justice, without, as we think, over- tasking our own power at all. Being within easy striking distance of our Indian Empire, we can always bring from that quarter a force sufficient to defeat any unneighbourly attack upon our policy ; and never would an immense service to the civilisation of the world and the happi- ness of a harmless and laborious population have been so recklessly thrown away, as by our retirement from a sphere in which we had done vast good and hardly any mischief. We are not sure again that Sir Mount- stuart Grant Duff does not push his generally wide- eyed and reasonable Opportunism too far when he argues that we were quite right in standing by idly while the Armenians were massacred out of existence, simply because we could not engage the Concert of Europe on the side of humanity. We fully recognise the great force of his position. But are not nations like individuals, sometimes shamed into energy by seeing the almost hopeless in- adequacy of the means which a more deeply moved bystander attempts to bring to the rescue of the innocent and the wretched ? Admit that we might have been over- matched. Admit that there was danger of a general con- flagration if we had forced on a combat in which the other great Powers might have taken a good deal more satisfac- tion in making us feel our weakness, than they would have taken in saving the Armenians from destruction. Still, is anything great ever accomplished without running some considerable risk and staking a good deal on the justice and humanity of a cause ? Might not the other Powers have felt that they would be dishonoured by letting us take up the dangerous cause alone ? So far as we can judge, the whole moral tone of European thought has been lowered by the apathy with which the great Powers,— the police of the Continent,—have regarded the monstrous crimes of Turkey. We fully acknowledge the certain peril of the situation. But there are cases in which peril ought not to deter a great nation from maiming an effort in the muse of humanity. And had we made it, we shrewdly suspect that, instead of bringing down upon us a com- bination of jealous Powers, we should have been joined by some of them in an attempt which they must have seen that it would be simply base to resist. Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff touches his highest level of caustic and satirical invective in describing how the late Government, after they had forced the Home-rule Bill of 1893 through the House of Commons, tried to recover popularity by placing themselves at the disposal of a host of local wirepullers whom he thus contemptuously describes :— " From and after their conduct through Parliament of the Home-rule Bill, the late Government did not merely lose the confidence of the country from the kind of intellectual mistakes I have been alluding to ; they earned from it the genuine tribute of undissembled horror, because men saw that their affairs were being managed by a group of politicians, who, as a Government, bad no principles at all, who were guided by the advice of local wirepullers, wretches who stood to Tadpole and to Taper in the relations in which Belial and Mammon stood to the Miltonic Satan. The feeling which nine out of ten educated men in the community entertained towards them was not distrust in the ordinary sense, but the distrust you feel towards a fellow who you firmly believe would cut your throat, if he saw his way to a gain — a clear gain of sixpence."
Literary sarcasm could hardly go deeper. But are not "the wretches "rather severely handled ? Surely the "local wirepullers" acted as local wirepullers must always act,— the manner best calculated to keep the local party to- gether. It is not they who are to be blamed, but the states- men who thought to win the battle by looking through the spectacles of local agents, though they themselves com- manded a much wider political horizon. Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff is a master of literary style, but in this instance we think he throws the blame on the wrong parties, and that if there were any " wretches " at all,— it is a strong expression,—the " wretches " were headed and led by Sir William Harcourt.
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