THE LIBF.RAT , LEADERS AND COUNTY SUFFRAGE.
WE sincerely trust that when Mr. Trevelyan takes his division on County Suffrage, which will probably be next Friday night, all the Liberal leaders will be found voting on his side. There has been a division of opinion among them evident in all previous divisions, and it is time that it should end, and that they should all accept the new piece of work which has fallen to their hands to do. We stated last week many of the arguments which prove the exclusion of the rural householders from the franchise to be both unjust and impolitic, but there is another broader and more important than them all, and that is, the duty of Liberals to apply their principles to rural affairs and rural organisation. From the day of the passing of the Reform Bill, the Liberal party has been far too exclusively the party of the boroughs. The Chandos clause placed the counties at the mercy of the land- lords, the great majority of the landlords turned Tories, and the counties became the strongholds of the Conservative party. But that a few great families still adhere to their traditional and wise policy of leading rather than resisting the people, there would scarcely be in Parliament a Liberal County Member. The Liberals have therefore turned naturally to the boroughs, have fought for changes which the boroughs desired, and have avoided all rural questions, even when, as in the instance of the demand for the repeal of the Malt Tax, all Liberal principle was upon that side. The Land Laws, passed to sup- port a previous state of society, have been left unreformed. Rural Taxation has been so neglected, that while the ploughman pays as much as the artisan, the inheritor of land pays less than the inheritor of Consols. The grand oppression upon the rural workmen, the weight with which the expense of con- veyance falls upon a small transfer, has never been removed. The minor judicial power has been left to landlords almost as an inheritance, till the son who succeeds his father regards his omission from the list of the magistracy as a personal affront. The Building Acts and Lodging-House Acts, so rigidly worked in well-managed towns, are not applied at all to cottages, while the municipal liberty so fully conceded to citizens has for country residents no meaning. No parish can vote its own cleansing or a water-supply for itself through an existing Council ; there is no organisation through which a rural district can tax itself, or express its views, or show itself an entity in any way, while in none of the Boards which manage the Highways and the Poor Law have the labourers their fair share of influence. Every county is practically a close borough in the hands of a caste, and the Liberals, whose raison d'dtre is the superiority of elective Government both to despotism and to oligarchy, have never secured or tried to secure to the people as much elective power as is enjoyed by the peasantry either of France or Germany, not to mention Italy and Switzerland. It is time this neglect, so thoroughly discreditable to the party, should cease, and the more speedily because one strong reason, and the only just excuse for it, has at last passed away. The Liberal party has been fully occupied for the last forty years in sweeping away abuses felt by those who supported it with their votes, their speeches, and their money,—in modifying the laws till their defect is mildness, in reforming Imperial taxation till it is scarcely felt, and in sweeping away religious disabilities till the Pope declares England the only country where his faith is free ; till any creed, or the negation of all creeds, may be preached with impunity, and till a preference for disestablishment bars no man from any office in the State. This preoccupation has ceased, ceased so completely that the Liberal party, like an over- prosperous individual, has grown dyspeptic for want of work to do. No gain to it could be so great as a large programme, involving wide and difficult changes, which nevertheless it could support with its whole heart, and with the inner feel- ing always essential to Liberals, that moral right is on that side. Moral right is on the side of this programme. There is no justice whatever in our law of inheritance as regards land. There is no justice whatever in our system of devolving the magistracy like property. There is no justice whatever in taxing whole communities for local expenditure, and leaving them without even a nominal control of their own affairs, while their fellow-countrymen who happen to live in the towns enjoy such control to the full. There is no justice in refusing the best of educations, free municipal life, to men who, by the Constitution which is applied to everybody else, have a dis- tinct right to it. And finally, there is no justice in a class- division of political power based not upon capacity, or taxation, or responsibility to the State, but upon the frequency of the
houses in the places where people live. There is an immense evil, or rather a long series of evils, to be remedied, and it is no slight gain to the party which ought to remedy them that in doing it, it must become larger- minded, must attend to affairs which it has never studied, must comprehend classes to which it has never listened, must give up its preposterous notion that because men live by the oldest and most honourable of all occupations, therefore they are politically fools. Rural reform will enlighten, if not educate, the whole Liberal party. That Mr. Trevelyan's pro- ject, if accepted, will tend directly to restore the old connec- tion betwixt Liberalism and the land, once the sheet-anchor of English politics, is at least one more reason why the party should not reject it. Historically, the names most sacred to its ears are those of mighty squires, like John Hampden, who, because he had 80,000 acres, was an unswerving Liberal ; its most devoted rank and file till 1832 were the yeomen free- holders ; and its army in serious crises was made up of the men who are now refused the vote.
But the labourers will be Tories ! So be it, if only they are citizens. It was not to reinforce their own ranks that the Liberal chiefs, angry as they were with the juggling Premier, passed his Household Suffrage Bill, and as it proved, placed him and his ceiffrhres in power ; nor was it to attract followers that they swept away the grievances of Irish Catholics so com- pletely that the Members of that country and faith, wanting nothing more of them, issue declarations of independence which, whether they intend it or not, tend to keep Tories in power. If the labourers are Conservative, let them be Conservative, till by assiduous teaching, teaching such as converted artisans to free-trade, they have been instructed in better ways. For ourselves, we disbelieve in this rather mean hobgoblin, dis- trust entirely the assertion that English labourers will be found on the side of the party of content; and should rather dread that, on certain subjects, they might need restraint, than fear they would require an impetus. But even if it is so, the work ought to be attempted and completed without reference to immediate party profits, without calculations whether doing jus- tice will or will not help to place Radicals in power. Very possibly it will not. As a rule, it is just before an injustice is swept away, not after it, that Radicals are strong, but that has never yet been with them a reason for laying aside the broom. The Nonconformists might just as well vote for the existing Law of Burial, upon the plea, undoubtedly true, that if this grievance is abolished there will be no unjust privilege, felt by every- body, to use as a weapon against the Church. As a matter of fact, we believe that the disenfranchised classes, including certainly all rural non-voters, will desire Rural Reform, and will adhere to the party which secures it for them ; but if they do not, the Liberals will benefit none the less by taking up a great and most difficult work, to be done without hope, offer, or reward.
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