TOPICS OF THE DAY.
MR. GLADSTONE AND THE RADICALS.
THE Radicals are turning against Mr. Gladstone. On Tuesday night they had a great disappointment. Mr. Gladstone, instead of commencing the campaign against the House of Lords with the rain of shot and shell which had been expected from him, proposed on Tuesday that "the order for the consideration of the Lords' reasons and the Lords' amendments to the Commons' amendments to the Lords' amendments to the Employers' Liability Bill " be discharged. And he proposed this in a speech not only wholly destitute of passion, but which the Daily Chronicle describes, more ungratefully than unaptly, as " a few words of whispering humbleness." Mr. Asquith, it says, did what he could to cover the retreat of his chief, but " no young Minister could completely discount the discourage- ment which Mr. Gladstone's carefully selected phrases conveyed. The Liberal Party has, we think, a right to know where it stands in this matter. The time has come to ask Mr. Gladstone plainly what he intends to do." And then it proceeds to ask the question not only plainly, but indeed angrily, "if Mr. Gladstone feels that age and infirmities press too heavily upon him for the leadership of an uncompromising crusade, it is for him to say so. We think he is bound to say so, and to let us know how the situation rests." And it intimates not obscurely that the Liberal Party, as it calls the Gladstonians, ought to require the resignation of its leader, unless he will enter heartily into the crusade against the Upper House, and ought to go into the fight without Mr. Gladstone, but with some younger and more stout-hearted leader (like Mr. Asquith, we suppose, or perhaps Mr. Campbell-Banner- man) in his place. What the Daily Chronicle evidently wishes for,—though it does not venture to say so in the most appropriate words,—is the deposition of Mr. Gladstone.
The deposition of Mr. Gladstone, however, is not exactly the kind of opening for a campaign against the House of Lords, which would promise a very favourable issue to that somewhat serious undertaking. A campaign which begins by deposing the only leader under whom the party could have fought hitherto with the least chance of success, is a good deal more likely to end in disaster, or even in disgrace, than in triumph. The Daily Chronicle knows as well as possible that the deposition of Mr. Gladstone would be the greatest blow ever struck at the cause of Irish Home-rule,— a cause to which Mr. Gladstone, and Mr. Gladstone alone, has got the English people to lend a hesitating hearing. Now, of course, with Mr. Gladstone's deposition, the affiance with the Irish Party, which is even more essential to the prosecution of the war with the House of Lords than the alliance with the Labour party, must drop. If we understand our contemporary's policy aright, it would be only too glad not only to depose Mr. Gladstone, whose heart has never really been in the ranks of the Labour party, but to depose the Home-rule question from its leading place in the policy of the Gladstonian Party, and to sub- stitute the Eight-Hours question and the Trades-Union question, and, in general, the leading Labour questions, in its place, and to attack the House of Lords expressly on the ground that they favour the capitalists, and care nothing for the labourers,—a view from which we our- selves entirely dissent. But, as we have said already, it does not promise well for a great constitutional revolution, such as is now contemplated, to begin it by swapping horses while they are crossing a very swift stream, —to begin it, indeed, by a double change of front, an act of ingratitude to Mr. Gladstone, and an act of something like desertion of the Irish Party. The Glad- stonians owe everything to Mr. Gladstone. Without the support of his name, they would now be in a minute minority. To go to the country with the sin of ingrati- tude to Mr. Gladstone, not only plausibly, but justly, charged against them, would lead to the most dramatic political collapse of modern times. There is something of _positive indecency in this violent assault on the only leader who could by any possibility have kept the party together since Home-rule was proposed. The Gladstonians without Mr. Gladstone would be sheep not only without a shep- herd, but almost without even a shepherd's dog. Mr. Asquith might, perhaps, persuade a few to follow him, Mr. Burns a few more, Lord Rosebery a good few ; but which of them would persuade these miscellaneous shep- herds to unite their contingents ? With the head-shepherd gone, where would be the flock ? The Daily Chronicle forgets the conditions of the contest. The country is not only not Socialist as yet, but extremely anti-Socialist. A great leader like Mr. Gladstone, who has been anti- Socialist all his life, might perhaps be able so far to soften the hearts of the English people as to get them to try a few Socialistic experiments. But, on the whole, in spitz, of Trades-Unions, England is still individualist to the core. And the only consequence of deposing Mr. Gladstone and substituting the Labour policy for the Irish policy at the- head of the Liberal programme, would be to frighten a great number of the Gladstonian Members out of the ranks of Liberalism, and to repeat in enormously exag- gerated proportions the disaster of 1886. The Daily Chronicle may take to heart this conviction, that it cannot depose Mr. Gladstone without shattering to atoms the artificially composed party of which it boasts itself the chief organ.
It is, however, a very curious question how this sudden change of attitude in Mr. Gladstone has been brought about. It is simply ridiculous to regard the Speaker's. ruling, that the motion of which Mr. Gladstone had given notice was out of order, as the explanation. Granted that it was out of order, Mr. Gladstone might surely have proposed to disagree with the Lords' reasons for insisting on their amendments, and might have proposed this in the very warlike speech which it was generally given out that he was to deliver. He had no occasion to propose dropping his own Bill, and still less to propose dropping it in a fashion so meek and even deprecatory. Was his heart softened by the attitude of the Unionists on the Lords' amendments to the Local Government Bill ? Did he feel that the reluctance of the Unionists to wreck that Bill deserved some equivalent concession on his own part, and render him unwilling to begin that great constitutional campaign on which it was supposed that he had deter- mined ? That is quite possible, for Mr. Gladstone has always been disposed, in his own words, to " think once, to think twice, to think three times," before pro- posing to abolish the House of Lords. Or did the peers in his own Cabinet revolt ? Or is it that some supreme authority in the State intimated that this assault on the Constitution would be viewed with great disfavour in higher quarters? We do not know, of course. Any one of these causes, or all of them, may have been at work to change Mr. Gladstone's attitude. But in any case Mr. Gladstone's followers may be sure of this, that it would not have been altered without what seems to Mr. Glad- stone very good cause, and that, too, a cause profoundly affecting the chances of his party with the country at large. Doubtless, Mr. Gladstone does not wish to leave his party broken up into mutually hostile fragments, and that is the supreme danger of the moment, for no one can suppose that the Irish party, the Labour party, the Dis- establishment party, and the Temperance party have sub- stantially the same objects in view. Mr. Gladstone has kept them together hitherto, but it is pretty clear, we think, that if he delivered himself over heart and soul to any one of these sections, especially, perhaps, the Labour party, that course would tend towards breaking the combina- tion to pieces. A battle-royal with the Lords, founded on the cry of the Trades-Unions alone, especially with a very considerable number of working men on the other side, would not be at all promising. And Mr. Gladstone was probably right in shrinking back from his resolve to declare war with them on such a pretext. At all events, it would be pure insanity for a party of which Mr- Gladstone himself is the only effectual bond, to depose him with something like contumely, and then set up a. sectional leader in his place. The Gladstonians are placed in a very unhappy position. But they will not mend the matter by revolt against their leader. The worst of the policy of depending wholly on one man, is that they cannot depose him without defeating themselves. Indeed it is far from wise to kick against the pricks. The Daily Chronicle would have done better if it had marvelled in admiring tones at Mr. Gladstone's wonderful forbear- ance and moderation, and had called upon his followers to emulate those eminent characteristics of their great leader.
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