TOPICS OF TI-IE DAY.
THE GLA.DSTONIC RADICALISM.
H. GLADSTONE'S political creed may be described ILL as a chemical combination between the ideas of Oxford and Manchester. In the last of the cycle of seven speeches with which he delighted Lancashire last week, he explained with some pathos how difficult he had found it as member for the University of Oxford to harmonize the thoughts of Oxford and of Lancashire. "For many long years," he said, "it has been my undeserved but happy lot to represent in Parliament one of the ancient Universities of the country. Often and long have I deplored, and sensibly have I felt, the difficulty of keeping together in harmony and efficiency the older and newer pursuits of our Christian civili- zation." Between civilization as understood by Oxford, and civilization as understood by Manchester, he explained, a gene- ration or two ago there was "little sympathy or connection." And even now there is but an imperfect understanding be- tween them which much needs to be rendered wider and more profound. We would not assert that Mr. Gladstone is pre- cisely the man to mediate between these different worlds, though lie has deep sympathies with both. For we very much doubt whether the teeming and ingenious intellect of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, fertile as it is in subtle dis- tinctions, finesse of thought, and delicate artistic playfulness, is precisely of the sort to impress Manchester with the advan- tages of a scholastic training. Much as be has politically in common with Manchester, his modes of conception and expres- sion are too complex, not broad and emphatic enough, to fasten on the imagination of Lancashire, nor, on the other hand, do we think that they adequately represent the proper results which Oxford culture tends to produce. Mr. Gladstone's intellect is so to say furrowed or " chased" with Oxford dis- tinctions and subtleties, but they have never run deep enough into him to merge in that ultimate simplicity and unity of conception—in one school or another—which is the most re- markable result of Oxford training on the minds which have exhausted the utmost power of that discipline. There are many representatives of the typical Oxford culture whose modes of thought would find their way much more easily to the hardy understanding of Manchester than Mr. Gladstone's. For he has grafted what we may call a multitude of the secondary ideas of one particular Oxford school, rather than the ultimate principles of any, on a mass of intellectual tenden- cies which are indigenous in the manufacturing districts. But whether Mr. Gladstone is the man to interpret Oxford to Man- chester, or whether, as we suspect, he is much better fitted to interpret Manchester to Oxford, it is not now to our purpose to inquire. What we want to discover is how far the type of Radicalism into which Mr. Gladstone's powerful mind is steadily drifting differs from the ordinary creed which has hitherto been known by that name.
And it is necessary first to notice that even of the old Radical creed there were always two very different branches, —the one proceeding from the proud independence of the capitalist, which distrusted legislation, pleaded for laissez faire (meaning by laissez faire free dictatorial power to control labour so far as money can control it), and cared for Parliamentary reform rather as an engine to be used against the special pri- vileges of the aristocracy than from any deep value for the political dignity and education of the poor ;—the other branch of Radicalism proceeding from the political aspirations of working-men, who have always contemplated the intervention of legislation between themselves and the power of the purse, and yet have desired Parliamentary reform for its own sake, to relieve them from a reproach and a disability, quite as much as for any legislative results they have expected from it. The former type of Radicalism has always insisted specially on economy and non-interference in foreign affairs from a real jealousy of the influence of Government, a strong utilitarian trade feeling, and distrust of the power of any political prin- ciple but self-interest. The working-class type of Radicalism, on the contrary, has always been tolerably willing for lavish expenditure, eager for the extension of imperial influence, and credulous of the power of propagandist efforts in the cause of freedom. Thus the two types of Radicalism have had little in common but the name, together with a common profession of dislike for aristocratic prestige and a desire for Parliamentary reform as the supposed instrument for sap- ping its roots. Now, as the complex network of secondary Conservative ideas (chiefly of ecclesiastical origin) has gradually worn away from the surface of Mr. Gladstone's intelect, the type of Radicalism which has manifested itself has been no doubt rather of the former,—the capitalist laissez-faire kind,—than the latter. The economist's dislike of interference in foreign affairs and jealousy of public ex- penditure, that distrust of national propagandism which the complete self-sufficiency of trade and its well-defined insulation from all the other interests of life pod ace on the managing capitalist,—that tendency to test moral results by success, — the reverence for dictatorial power, at least with respect to all moral contracts, and that delicacy about weakening it even by remonstrance which the con- duct of large commercial transactions ensures,—all crop out occasionally in Mr. Gladstone with the force of an inherited nature from beneath the modifying influences of his intellec- tual culture. You see it in the hard view that he takes of the American contest, which is not only utterly without sympathy with the imperial instincts of a great nation, but also quite irrespective of the rights of the slaves, and as if the question were, for the North, merely one of meddling or not meddling in the affairs of an independent section of the country. Yon see it again in the root, though not in the mode, of his constant advocacy of a " chastened " modesty in the attitude of Eag- land towards the rest of the woad, her own colonies included. His d'slike to a wide territorial empire is a growing one. He feels that it perplexes and embarrasses our financial calcula- tions, and he suspects that it is an inflated ambition to attempt to control so wide a surface from a single centre. The busi- ness side of politics influences his creed more than either the purely moral or the imaginative side.
On the other band, Mr. Gladstone's Radicalism is essentially modified from the Lancashire, or what we have called the capitalist typo, by two disturbing causes, his inventive and discursive intellect, and his Christian sentiment. It would be impossible for Mr. Gladstone to acquiesce completely in the hard bare doctrine of the laissez-faire economical school, which reduces the State to a mere body-and-goods insurance society, and looks upon working-men as machines with the power to make contracts. H knows that this is false economy. He feels that it is false doctrine. He has a greater respect for the State and its power of modifyiwe the relations between class and class than the Manchester; School. In this direction he is nearer to the working-class type of Radicalism. He can see how the State may organize and express the real interests, of the community in a way quite impossible to individual or even corporate efforts, and he can estimate the different degree of confidence placed in the State and in any other possible organization by the people, and estimate the moral value of this difference,—as he has recently shown in his Annuities Bill. This truer estimate of the State and its influence has modified Mr. Gladstone's Radicalism in the direction of the type we have called the working-men's Radicalism, as distinguished from that of the jealous economical school. But on the other hand, the deep vein of what we have called Christian sentiment, as distin- guished from the sturdy Christian ethics, in his mind, the pacific humanitarian feeling which makes him shrink from all war, not on principle, but by instinct, which again when he has accepted it makes him writhe painfully under the duty of' prosecuting it, and which makes him feel the consummation of a great injustice preferable to resisting it at the cost of blood,—the intellectual refinement which gives him a distaste for the use of physical force as something coarse and vulgar even when most necessary,—the Peelite prudence which over-estimates the risk of a strong policy and under- estimates the risk of a vacillating one,—all these qualities tend to modify Mr. Gladstone's type of Radicalism in the opposite direction to that of the working-class type, and to strengthen in effect while touching with a softer and warmer colouring the policy of the Manchester School. In short, Mr. Gladstone's Radicalism is, in rough type, that of the capitalist class,—eager, active, fertile of economies and improvements, caring more for the free scope of energy and capacity than for the protection of feeble individual rights such as those of the slave. But the hardness of the outline is modified considerably both by intellect and sentiment. It is in its picturesque effect as different from Mr. Cobden's as the iron outline of the horizon in a March east wind from the blue distance of a summer sky. His reverence for the State—closely connected with his rever- ence for the Church—brings him nearer to the working-class ; his somewhat feminine Christianity and deficiency in sympathy with rude popular justice, takes him, further in the opposite direction. But considered as a whole .his Radicalism, though not perhaps of the most masculine type; has a more refined, a more delicate, a more intellectual essence, than any of the somewhat harsh and narrow creeds which have hitherto gone by that name.
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