TOPICS OF THE DAY.
LORD ROSEBERY'S CLAIM TO THE LIBERAL LEADERSHIP.
ACORRESPONDENT who is certainly thoroughly informed as to what goes on in the higher world of Liberal politics, maintains to-day in another column that the true successor to Mr. Gladstone would be Lord Rosebery, notwith- standing the disadvantages attaching to his sitting in the House of Lords, if, indeed, those disadvantages outweigh,— which he evidently doubts,—the advantages which a leader in the House of Lords possesses, of greater leisure for those important duties of Prime Ministers which lie quite outside the sphere of the House of Commons. Our correspondent con- tends, and contends with great justice, that many of the worst faults of recent governments have arisen from the inability of a Prime Minister sitting in the House of Commons, to give that general supervision to the affairs of the Govern- ment which it is a Prime Minister's duty to provide, —that careful attention to the drafting of new measures, and that constant regard to the manner in which the adminis- trative work of the Government, especially in relation to Foreign and Colonial affairs, is done, on which so much of the smooth working of the machinery of an Administration depends. So far as this contention goes, no well-informed politician will disagree with him. Unquestionably, while Mr. Disraeli led the House of Commons, as well as during both Mr. Gladstone's Administra- tions, very great errors were committed which were mainly due to the enormous pressure caused by the work of the House of Commons on the time of the Prime Minister. In fact, it often happened that neither Mr. Disraeli nor Mr. Gladstone knew sufficiently accurately what their colleagues were actually doing in matters closely affecting the loyalty of the Colonies and the conduct of our Foreign relations, to supervise their administra- tion ; and as for the legislative measures of the Government, it was usually only when a matter directly affected the divisions of the House of Commons that they were troubled about them at all. We do not for a moment differ from our correspondent that one of the neglected duties of a Prime Minister who leads the House of Commons, is the duty of keeping before his mind a general view of the whole work of the Government, and seeing that there is a general harmony of aim between all its different parts ; and certainly we do not differ from him that this duty can hardly be well .performed by any Minister who has to spend the nights of six months of the year in the House of Commons, and to make up for that enormous drain upon his strength during the other six months by resting his exhausted brain.
Nor do we differ from our correspondent in recognising the great promise of Lord Rosebery, though undoubtedly as yet it is rather promise than performance. If we had to criticise the statesman, we should say that the one sign of weakness in him is that leaning of his to a Federation of the Colonies, not merely as a precautionary measure against needless mistakes, but as a final constitution for the government of the Empire, referred to by our correspondent,—a leaning which seems to us to show that he has not grasped the practical conditions of government in such a realm as this, more especially if that federation is really regarded as opening the way to the inclu- sion of Ireland in the federal system. That seems to us to imply a belief that a powerful Government can be constructed out of a voluntary association of fragments distributed over all parts of the world. Yet no one can deny that it would be altogether beyond the power of any such association to keep at the same time a dissatisfied Australia and a dissatisfied Canada to their allegiance to a little State like ours. The Southern States of North America very nearly maintained their right to secede, though they were on the same continent with the Northern States, and in continuous connection with them. Had the United States been scattered all over the world, as a British Federation would be, no power that the Northern members of that Federation could have put forth, could by any possibility have pre- vented the dissatisfied members of it from seceding at will. We therefore regard Lord Rosebery's leaning towards the Federation of our Colonies as so very far from opening any appropriate means for the satisfaction of the Irish demand for Home-rule, that it would be our chief ground of distrusting his capacity for any critical and crucial experiment of that kind. We grant willingly his popularity, his oratorical skill, his con- ciliatory disposition, his humour, his great influence in Scotland, —no slight qualification for success,—the administrative ability which he has shown at the Foreign Office, and the regard in which he is held by foreign statesmen. But for the purposes of a Prime Minister, we confess that we regard him as an untried man ; and that for the special purpose of introducing Home-rule into the Empire, we greatly distrust his known bias. We believe that if that bias continued, he might con- trive an Association of States separated by the whole diameter of the planet, without any controlling force of gravity at the centre to keep them from slipping the knot at pleasure, and imagine that in such an Association,—which could only be purely voluntary,—he had found a substitute for the United Kingdom. Mr. Gladstone's scheme for Ireland, utterly impracticable as it appeared to us, at least recognised that Ireland must be bound to the United Kingdom by much more positive ties than the distant Colonies. And though that seemed to us to be utterly inconsistent with Ireland's demand to be treated as a nation, it proves at least that Mr. Gladstone was not possessed with the dream that a powerful Kingdom could be maintained on so loose a principle of association as any which the self-governing Colonies will be prepared to• recognise.
But then, even if Lord Rosebery could be made nominally the Prime Minister, could he be in any real sense the head of the Government if he were dependent on his leader in the Commons for the guidance of the House of Commons 1" That leader would probably be, as we said last week, Sir William Harcourt, a very able and very ambitions man, who has studied Mr. Disraeli's career closely, and has learned from it many a lesson. Lord Rosebery would not even have the advantage which Tory Prime Ministers in the Peers have, of commanding a majority in the House in which they sit. Unlike the late Lord Derby and Lord Salisbury, he would be powerless even to control the House of Peers, and therefore would be a very much less influential Prime Minister than either of them. Practically, he would be running a most unequal race with his lieutenant in the Commons for the control of his party,—that lieutenant having the enormous advantage of constant contact with the party which he wished to rule. Could Lord Rosebery be more than the cipher which Lord Russell was during the Session in which Mr. Gladstone first became leader of the Commons, the Session of 1866 I It is true that Lord Russell was then an old man, and worn out by the toils of office ; but he had at least the authority of large experience, in which Lord Rose- bery would be'deficient, and he certainly had in Mr. Gladstone a much more deferential lieutenant than Lord Rosebery would have in Sir William Harcourt. We all know how Mr. Disraeli made the late Lord Derby do exactly what he wished in the Session of 1867, when he introduced his famous Reform Bill ; and yet the late Lord Derby had a great traditional hold on his party, and a complete command of the House of Lords. We do not think that Lord Rosebery in the Lords could do more to con- trol Sir William Harcourt in the Commons, than the driver of a tandem can do to control a refractory leader which is disposed to turn round and look his coachman in the face. Sir William Harcourt would, we believe, be even more completely in com- mand of the situation with Lord Rosebery as his nominal chief, than he would be if he himself were weighted with the full weight of the responsibility of the chief, for in the former case he could cast a good deal of responsibility for the blunders he might make, on the man who would, before the nation, appear to have the chief responsibility for the Government, and in the latter case this would be impossible. On the whole, the prospect of a young and untried nobleman,—of genius, it may be admitted, but of genius of which no one knows the calibre,—at the head of an Administration with such a dema- gogue as Sir William Harcourt for his lieutenant, fills us with nothing but foreboding and dismay.
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