TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE SO-CALLED COMPROMISE. LET those laugh who win. We can hardly understand the pretension of the Conservative journals to be entitled to laugh—and a very odd sort of grimace simulating laughter it is ; nor can we understand the apparent suffocation with which one or two of our Liberal contemporaries have appeared to swallow what they call the surrender made by the Government to the House of Lords. We should like to know what it was that the Govern- ment surrendered. The Government have steadily declared that they would not give the Lords a fresh excuse for rejecting the Franchise Bill by introducing a Redistribution Bill, unless they knew that this Redistribution Bill was not, in their judgment, likely to be made an excuse for throwing out the Franchise Bill. But they have as steadily asserted that they were per- fectly willing to give the Tories any information they could on the subject of their Redistribution scheme,—nay, to mould it so far as possible to their wishes,—so long as that, course tended to help on the Franchise Bill, and not to give plausible pleas for rejecting it. Till this week the Conservative Party have refused to respond to this invitation. In the Commons, Sir Stafford Northcote had treated it with dis- dain as an attempt to force him into an avowal of his wishes with regard to Redistribution—into a surrender, that is, of his freedom to criticise the Government Bill in the fashion most effective for the purposes of the Tory leaders. Further, the ex- treme Tories, like Lord John Manners and Mr. Lowther, had vehemently protested that the Conservative Party would not endure any negotiation on the subject; so that the Tory tactics appeared to be intended to force the hands of the Liberals,— first, to produce a Redistribution Bill for which the Tories should have no responsibility, and then to use that Redistri- bution Bill as a legitimate excuse for the rejection of the Franchise Bill by the House of Lords. Mr. Gladstone has entirely foiled these tactics. By offering to do all in his power to satisfy the Tories that their demands as to Redistri- bution shall, if reasonable, be embodied in his measure, on con- dition that, if they are satisfied, they will pass the Franchise Bill at once in the House of Lords, he has undermined the foundation on which the Tories stood. The Tories took their stand on the absolutely inseparable character of the two measures, and evidently wanted nothing less than to lose the pretext on the strength of which they reserved their judgment on the first measure till they had seen and approved the second. They did not want to approve the second, and therefore they did not want to see it. If the Government would but produce the second measure without consulting them, they could, they felt, trust themselves to pick holes enough in it to render their persistent refusal of the first pleasure plausible. But that is just what Mr. Gladstone would /lot do. He persisted that the Franchise Bill, even taken alone, would greatly improve the Constitution, and that he would offer this and nothing more to the House of Lords, unless he had good reason to believe that he could offer a second measure which would remove, instead of supplying, ex- cuses for the rejection of the first. Well, now he has such reasons. Lord Salisbury was well aware that after Mr. Glad- stone's frank offer to satisfy the Conservative scruples, if it were possible, in relation to the Redistribution Bill, he could not de- pend on his own followers to support him in case that offer were sullenly rejected or ignored. Had Lord Salisbury declined that offer, Lord Granville would, in all probability, have carried the provisions of the Franchise Bill against Lord Salisbury,—so many and grave would have been the desertions from the Tory rank and file. He was, therefore, compelled to accept the offer. Sir Stafford Northcote was compelled to give up that absolute secrecy as to his own views of Redistribution to which he had so resolutely clung ; and now, unless the Tory Party choose to take up some perfectly untenable position as to Redistribution,—which would ruin them in the country if they did take it up,—Mr. Gladstone will secure their assent to a Redistribution Bill which will take away the last excuse for delaying the Franchise Bill.
The only conceivable pretexts for regarding this step as derogatory to the Liberal Party are two : first, that Mr. Glad- stone might have forced the Franchise Bill through the House of Lords by advising the creation of Peers, and so have ridden roughshod over the Tories ; next, that by making the con- cession he has made, he may have rendered it inevitable that the Reform measure as a whole will be less Liberal and less thorough than it otherwise would have been. There is no force in either objection. The creation of a great number of Peers for the purpose of passing the Reform Bill would have been a measure most displeasing to the most Liberal of the Liberals, even if the Queen were known to be willing to consent to it. The House of Lords is not an Assembly in which any sound Liberal wishes to see a great numerical increase. Unfor- tunately, Peers who are Liberal to-day are Conservative to-morrow ; and, as experience proves every year, the atmos- phere of the House of Lords infects with a dangerous Con- servatism all but the very strongest men whom it contains. We believe that no expedient would have been regarded with less favour by the advanced Liberals than a large creation of Peers at the present crisis. For one Liberal who would like to see the House of Lords expanded, there are five who would like to see its dimensions effectually contracted. And besides all this, there is the great question whether the Queen would have been willing to create the Peers, for constitutionally she may undoubtedly decline to do so. If she had refused, Mr. Gladstone must have resigned ; and as a con- sequence, Lord Salisbury would have been able to gain his putpose of dissolving Parliament on the basis of the existing Franchise. So that those who think that Mr. Gladstone should have applied this Constitutional resource, rather than take the Conserva- tives into counsel on the Redistribution Bill, seriously misunder- stand the wishes of the Liberal Party at large ; and, probably, they greatly overrate the chance of applying this Constitutional resource with success.
The other objection is more vital, but, as far as we know, even less plausible. If there had been any real danger of getting, on the whole, a worse Redistribution Bill by taking counsel with the Conservative leaders, Mr. Gladstone would certainly have had to weigh very carefully the pros and cons before taking such a step. But, as every one knows, all that Lord Salisbury has said on the subject of Redis- tribution has gone upon the assumption that the basis of population should be more strictly regarded than, as he supposed, it would have been regarded in the scheme disclosed by the Standard; and that is, to the minds of all good Liberals, so very healthy an assumption, that Mr. Glad- stone was perfectly safe in inviting the co-operation of a leader who had emphatically taken that line. No doubt there is danger,—danger that we trust the Liberals will bear in mind,—of stripping the counties far too bare of urban elements, before constituting them into new constituencies. But that danger will certainly be felt by Conservatives as well as by Liberals, for the danger of isolating any one class too completely has always been recognised by the moderate men of all parties. On the whole, there can be little doubt that a previous consultation with the Conservatives will result in modifying the Liberal Bill for the better, rather than for the worse. The Tories are highly sensitive to the danger of sanctioning a very temporary scheme,—to the danger of leaving anomalies so serious as to be made the object of a new Radical assault before many years are over. And they are, moreover, very anxious to get rid, so far as they may, of the reproach that they utterly distrust the people. When they come to advise with Mr. Gladstone, they will, undoubtedly, endeavour to pose as friends of the people, not as enemies of the people, though they would never have stirred in the matter for themselves. We believe that the competition of the parties for the reputation of placing confidence in the people will issue in a better and more really final measure than could have been produced by either of them without the rivalry of the other.
On the whole, the so-called compromise seems to us to issue in pure gain for the Liberals. It cannot be denied that, except by the use of the expedient of a great creation of Peers, the Liberals had no means at all of preventing a Dissolution under the old franchise. That expedient is a very unpopular one—and, we think, a justly unpopular one —in the Liberal ranks ; and it is by no means certain that it was in Mr. Gladstone's power to adopt it. Now we have every probability of passing both Franchise Bill and Redistribution Bill before this Parliament is dissolved, and, as we believe, of passing a stronger and more just Redistribution Bill than we could otherwise have hoped for. That is all gain, and, as it seems to us, gain which could not have been secured without great courage on Mr. Gladstone's park—the courage, namely, in which he has never been lacking, to disappoint those who think more of their dignity than they do of carrying the legislation they desire, for the sake of those who think more of carrying the legislation they desire than they do of their dignity.
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