THE RECENT INTERREGNUM.
IT was quite time the interregnum should end. Students of English politics are well aware of the frequent falsity of the opinion formed, or rather, said to be formed, during a Recess, of the mistakes constantly made as to the relative im- portance of events, of the exaggerations to which all parties give way, of the decline visible as the time advances in poli- tical common-sense. The leaders of parties are absent or occupied, the politicians are scattered and separated from each other, the journalists have too few facts before them, and thresh them out till the dust is stifling; everything gets out of proportion, and everything often seems going wrong, till Parliament meets, real business begins, and it is discovered that half the " facts " upon which so much has been based are unfounded, and half the rumours are distortions of a few facts not very significant. It
has not seldom happened, indeed, that with the opening of a Session the topics which interested men in the Recess have snddenly died away, and it has been discovered that the real masters of the country were thinking of things totally different, of events hardly noticed, and of changes scarcely foreseen. The constituencies had been pondering anything but the things most talked about. All the evil tendencies of a Recess are intensified tenfold in an interregnum such as has just elapsed between the elections and the reading of the Queen's Speech. A Revolution has occurred, and men's minds are still hot. The victors have not settled down to their new position. The defeated have not recovered their tempers, lost in the contest ; or their judgment, up- set by an immense surprise. There is a new Government, and yet no Government is in evidence. Parliament, though sitting, is not at work. Ministers, though in office, are not half of them in Parliament. The Cabinet has only half made up its mind on many points, and reserves all statement on others for the regular meeting of the Houses. The small- fry of politics are as busy as bees, and the eagerness to peep into the immediate future is so great, that rumours acquire all the consistency of official statements, a process assisted on this occasion by the curious momentary condition of the London Press, in which a kind of anarchy is reigning. The Press was in the main devoted to the defeated party, and is now snarling at everything,—swearing at large, as it were, to relieve its mind. It will leave off that by-and-by, and, then the public will get the facts, just now only half revealed, or wholly obscured by temper and absence of settled chan- nels of information. Of course, a great deal oozes out, and being unexplained, unaccompanied by reserves, and instantly distorted, the facts which ooze out are even More misleading than the fictions. Fortunately, the public, as a whole, is very patient, and has plenty of daily work to do, and waits quietly till the leaders have spoken ; but the public which cannot live without chatter becomes feverish, sees men as trees walking, and grows ready to believe anything, how- ever monstrous. A crowd waiting for a race will believe any- thing till the horses start, after which it would hardly attend to a fiery scroll in the heavens. Look at all that excitement about the Gladstone-Karolyi correspondence. Five-sixths of it would have disappeared if Mr. Gladstone or Lord Granville could have made an authoritative statement of the facts,—of the ends they wished to secure by their action, and of the general views by which they are guided as to European action in the East. The comments of the journals, and especially of half-inspired foreign journals, only heat the air ; it is a definite Parliamentary statement which clears it. Members, too, when they come fairly to- gether, find they do not believe much in the Premier's humi- liation, and do believe very strongly that he is going to pro- duce a supplementary Budget, which will greatly engage the thoughts of their constituents. They cool by contact with each other, as enthusiasm does when critics are many. Then there is foreign policy as a whole. The air has been filled during the " interregnum " with declarations that everything is going on as before and must go on and shall go on, and all that, which is really protest, and not statement, and will be seen to be such the moment the Houses begin to discuss foreign policy seriously. Then it will be found that everything is changed except the facts, among which the acts of the late Ministry have to be counted. The objects of the Government, their motives, the opinions of the majority, the agents en- trusted with power at a distance, all are changed, and so will action be also. No two men are identical, much less any two parties, and you might as well expect Smith always to give the same advice as his rival Brown, as expect two Ministers to follow in sincerity the same policy. The notion that every- thing will be the same is the notion of an interregnum, when everybody asks questions, and getting no authoritative reply, answers them for himself according to his own wishes. " Opinion " on such matters, while the leaders are silent, is mainly deduction from rumour. Then there is Ireland. If the Liberals have a policy in their heads, it is to remove Irish grievances as far as they can, and especially grievances which arouse a sense of affront and of exceptional distrust ; yet it was stated and believed that Mr. Forster, who is the embodiment of the sounder English feeling in re- spect to Ireland, had proposed the renewal of the Co- ercion Bills. Reams of paper were uselessly filled with discussions based upon that hypothesis, which had no founda- tion, and had Parliament been sitting, would have been disproved in a moment. Mr. Johnson, the Solicitor-General for Ireland, did indeed remove the agitation in Mallow, by quoting from a letter of Mr. Forster's a distinct denial that he had made any such recommendation ; but if Parliament had not met, the " impression " in England that the Liberals had turned round on this point also would have been tempor- arily irremovable.
The most extraordinary illustration of the imperfect opinion which prevails during a recess or an interregnum is the view which has grown up in some quarters of party chances. Two or three elections have gone wrong from easily explicable causes. A Cabinet Minister has lost his seat ; another Minister has made a blunder about the time when some information was received. The Foreign Office has published a letter of apology, without a history of the facts which drew it forth. All the journals of the losing party thunder, and so great is the n.oise, that people just defeated declare, as Tadpole and Taper used to do in "Coningsby," that there are visible "signs of reaction." Nothing has been done and nothing explained ; the Ministers have scarcely said a word, and their greatest agents, Lord Ripon and Mr. Goschen, have not arrived at their posts, and still there is obvious "reaction." A belief of that kind is not an opinion, much less a fact, but only an "impres- sion," which is dissipated when actual business commences, and the great men on both sides appear upon the scene. It is, of course, an injurious impression, as all erroneous impres- sions must be ; but its force lasts but a little while. When Parliament is once at work, the actual strength of govern- ments and parties soon begins to be perceived and weighed, and the discontented either resign themselves, or gird up their loins for serious and long-continued combat. The leaders see at once and their followers see soon, that the reaction is un- real, and that they have to wait as usual through long sessions of defeat before they even get a glimpse of their Promised Land. A foreigner who should form an opinion on English politics during an interregnum of the kind just ended, would be as well informed as an Englishman who landed in New York during a "heated term," and pronounced the State a tropical region, in which immigrants could not live by labour.
It is momentarily very like the tropics, only rather worse ; but that is not the climate in which New York has grown, but a momentary variation on it, which only helps to make up a very different average. Public opinion in London during an interregnum is very apt to be thus momentarily tropical, but that is not the intellectual climate 'which governs the year.
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