THE LOSS OF THE TORY OPPORTUNITY.
THE Tories have lost a great opportunity, and most likely some of them are conscious how considerable an oppor- tunity they have lost. We are quite aware that that oppor- tunity depended, as we said last week, on Mr. Disraeli's willingness to cede the first place to Lord Derby. The whole secret of the position lay in this, that there is, owing to many causes,--to the irreconcilability of Ireland, and her hostile or at least grudging attitude towards the great leader who has done so much for her,—to the reaction against Catholicism due partly to the Vatican Council and partly to events in Germany,—to the amount of alarm caused chiefly to the lower middle-class by the strikes all over the country,—a great distrust for the moment of the policy of action, and a great fancy for the policy of rest. But we quite admit that in order to have used this opportunity at all,—and certainly in order to have used it to the uttermost,—the Conservative party must have been represented by a statesman who ex- pressed to the mind of the country the idea of Conservatism, the notion of rest. No one can for a moment pretend that Mr. Disraeli is that statesman. He expresses almost anything rather than that. What the squires, and the alarmed farmers, and the anxious shopkeepers are dreaming of, is a statesman of plain sense, with a disposition, as Lord Derby himself once said, to distrust empirics. But Mr. Disraeli, as Mr. Bright has said, is the great empiric, the mountebank " who had a pill that was very good against an earthquake." The Anti- Catholics, again, are looking for a plain, strict Protestant, who will not be so much inaccessible as insensible to the casuistry of Rome. But Mr. Disraeli, though he was very careful indeed on Thursday night to disavow the Pope and all his works, could not refrain from referring gloomily even then to the loss of the secular power of the Pope,—a loss which, as it is well known, he deprecated earnestly before it happened, and has deplored ever since. Again, the Tory party, high and low, want an interval of rest, and Mr. Disraeli suggests to them restlessness of every kind. He is always inventing new con- stitutional theories, sometimes as to " the attributes of the Monarchy," sometimes as to the education of the Conserva- tive party, sometimes as to the balance of power in Europe, sometimes as to the law which governs the development of the power of Russia in the East. He is a statesman who, while he lives, will never be content to put the plain facts in the plain way Englishmen most like, without inventing for them some astounding intellectual hypothesis which startles everybody who thought himself familiar with the facts. It is this defect of his which has given Mr. Gladstone so great an advantage over him. A sober-minded Conservative statesman like the late Sir Robert Peel would have had a hundred advantages against the brilliant Liberal leader in relation to qualities with regard to which Mr. Disraeli has been simply at a great disadvantage. He has less knowledge by far of the common-place English view of a question than Mr. Gladstone ; he is intellectually more restless ; he is more viewy ; he is far less intelligible to ordinary men. Therefore he is the last man to appeal to English constituencies on a negative and neutral policy such as would, in the mouth of Lord Derby, have had a very great fascination for them at the present moment. It is perfectly true, indeed, as Mr. Disraeli was at such pains to show on Thurs- day night, that it would be very difficult, if not impossible, for the Conservatives to devise a policy and a cry on the spur of the moment. But that would have been precisely the advan- tage of the moment in the hands of such men as Lord Derby and Mr. Gathorne Hardy. They would have said to the con- stituencies that Mr. Gladstone had ruined his administration just by having so grand a policy ; that he had had a policy for Ireland, and that it had failed ; that he had had a great Admiralty policy, and that the most impartial (Conservative) judges believed it to have failed ; that he had had a great Army policy, and that it was a question with officers of the highest rank and largest experience whether the English regiment would ever be again what it was under the Purchase system ; that he had had a great Educa- tion policy, and that it had already come to a point when even the party of movement were afraid to press it on, and when the country was quite disinclined to push it to its logical results ; in short, the genuine Conservative statesman would
selfish fears of Liberal Members have have felt to the very bottom of his heart that it was his in- of the Liberal party ; and that the ability and his positive dislike to present a great policy to the
crisis which they fear. nation that formed the best plea for his appeal to their confi- dence. " You have had enough of ideas and of burning' questions," he would have said ; " let us have a little quiet sense and sagacious action, without any sort of show or fuss I about it." And a statesman so saying, and incarnating as I Lord Derby or Mr. Gathorne Hardy would have incarnated, the significance of his words in his own personal life, would have had a very good chance indeed just at present of persuading the country that his voice was the voice of wisdom, and that his ways would be the ways of peace.
The opportunity is gone, and it is far from certain whether it will recur. Mr. Gladstone is a man of genius, and the fascination with which he inspires the constituencies and the country, though it has received a rude blow by his recent failure to legislate on a subject in which they did not sympa- thise with him, may easily be revived by raising some much more popular question. He has laid aside the unpopular Bill on which the English were unwilling to do justice, and the Irish were unwilling to accept as justice what was offered them, and it is as likely as not that on the next topic on which he encounters a check due to the failing allegiance of his followers, he will be able to arouse a real enthusiasm in the country, and to dissolve Parliament with the result of recovering a united party and a solid even if a diminished majority. The critical moment has been lost by the Conservatives. Lord Derby probably had not the opportunity of seizing it. If he had, he would very likely have thrown it away, out of the very excess of that Con- servative caution which makes him so admirable a repre- sentative of Conservative ideas, and yet for that very reason so timid a chief of the Conservative ranks. What the Conser- vative party need is a leader with the courage of Mr. Disraeli and the mind of Lord Derby. The Liberal party have some reason to rejoice that the Conservatives have not such a chief at their disposal.
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