KR. CROSS ON PARTY DISTINCTIONS.
MR. CROSS'S two first speeches at Birmingham may serve as a warning to non-party politicians who go out of their way to speak in a party sense. When we call Mr. Cross a non-party politician, we do not in the least mean that he hangs loosely by his party. That last, worst sin in an Englishman's eyes is not his. We understand by a non-party politician a man whose main interests in politics lie outside party questions. There are many such men both among the Liberals and among the Conservatives. They range themselves on one side or the other, because, without doing so, it is, in this country, almost impossible to achieve anything. Under a system of party government the work of legislation must be done by the party that happens to be in power, and if non-party politi- cians were to constitute themselves an independent body, and to reject the ordinary Parliamentary machinery, they would find that Tories might come and Whigs might go, but that social re- forms would remain unaccomplished. Consequently the non- party politician accepts party allegiance as an inevitable necessity, and as is the wont of men in presence of inevitable things, learns at last rather to like the machinery with which he is obliged to work. Still, if he is well advised, he will say as little as he can about this machinery. If he once forgets this caution, his secret suspicion that some of his colleagues or followers think him careless about the pronunciation of their shibboleth will be sure to lead him into difficulties. Birmingham is a Radical stronghold, and until now the mi- nority have been so few or so faint-hearted that they have not returned the third Member. It was impossible for a Cabinet Minister to make a speech in such a constituency as this, and not to try to rouse the Conservatives to greater activity. It is plain that party enthusiasm cannot be awakened by a mere reference to such measures as the Artisans' Dwellings Act or the Enclosure Act. Some more stimulating food had to be pro- vided, and Mr. Cross set to work with, we suspect, a heavy heart to define the difference between a Conservative and a Liberal. It was natural that he should derive some satisfac- tion from the thought that Mr. Lowe had just been doing the very same thing. It ought to be a great deal easier to describe a Conservative, when an ex- Minister has described a Liberal only the week before. And if Mr. Cross had been a man of Mr. Lowe's turn of mind, it would have been a great deal easier. One cannot help wishing that the parts had been reversed, and that Mr. Cross had made Mr. Lowe's speech in the character of a Liberal, and that Mr. Lowe had had to answer him in the character of a Conservative. Mr. Lowe had described a Liberal as a man who takes the better rather than the worse view of human nature ; who does not think what effect a measure will have upon his private interests or the interests of his clique, his town, his trade, or his county ; who supports institutions, not because they axe, but because they ought to be. If it had been Mr. Cross who had said all this, and Mr. Lowe who had had to pick it to pieces, Mr. Lowe would have accepted the definition as accurate, and have gone on to show what a hollow and foolish thing optimism is, and how much oftener from the stand-point of practical statesmanship the worst view of human nature is the truest view. Then he would have pulled to pieces the ridiculous cosmopolitanism of preferring remote things to near, and applying the principle of division of labour to politics, have shown that if the interests of cliques, towns, trades, and counties were all properly looked after, the interest of the country, which is made up to all these separate interests, could not be really neglected. The true Conservative motto, he would have said, is, "Every man for himself, and the Govern- ment for us all." Then he would have charged the Liberals with impiety in not recognising that that which exists is neces- sarily providential, so that reform is really apresumptuous endea- vour to substitute man's handiwork for God's. Mr. Lowe would have been quite at home in reasoning of this kind, and as he built up one paradox after another, his hearers would have thought that never had the philosophical basis of Conservatism been so firmly established. Mr. Cross has none of the audacious par- tisanship which would pick holes in the Beatitudes, if they were adopted by the Opposition. He greatly wanted to answer Mr. Lowe, but when he came to look at his definition of a Liberal, he found that he liked it so well that he could only remonstrate against its appropriation by the other side. 'I, too,' he pleads,' take the better rather than the worse view of human nature. I, too, think more of my country than I do of my county. I, too, support a variety of institutions because they ought to be, as well as because they are. You have no right much to be grateful for. to claim all these nice, proper views for your own party. They belong to us as much as to you V ' This is a terrible anti-climax for a Cabinet Minister who has to persuade his hearers that it is their duty to move heaven and earth to secure one Member out of three at the next general election. If Mr. Lowe's definition of a Liberal is Mr. Cross's definition of a Conservative, it cannot be so very im- portant that Mr. Cross's views should be represented rather than Mr. Lowe's. Mr. Cross had to set to work, there- fore, to invent a distinction. Liberals and Conserva- tives, he said, agree in holding that when an institu- tion is bad it must be got rid of ; the difference between them is that the Liberal wishes to get rid of institu- tions which are neither good nor bad, whereas the Con- servative always asks himself whether he will be better off after they are destroyed than he is now while they exist. We should be sorry to deprive Mr. Cross of the solitary consideration which has made him a Conserva- tive rather than a Liberal, so we will only ask him, for his own sake, not to let his mind dwell on this distinction more than he can possibly help. If he uses it as Don Quixote used his helmet, it may, by good- fortune, serve his purpose a long time ; but if he at- tempts to. test it by experiment, it will certainly give way under him. No Liberal who wants an institu- tion destroyed is content with saying that it is doing neither harm nor good. He has already persuaded himself that it is doing harm, and Mr. Cross admits that as soon as this conviction is attained even a Con- servative is bound to act upon it. Now, as there are hardly any institutions that have not a bad side to them, there are hardly any which a man of a revolutionary cast of mind may not bring himself to condemn, on Mr. Cross's own principle. He has only to feel assured that the harm which an institution does is greater in kind than the good which it does, and the formula is satisfied. It has ceased to be an institution which does neither harm nor good, consequently it is not an institution that even a Conservative can hesitate to destroy. When Mr. Cross bids young Conservatives build their faith on such a foundation as this, he is leading them to accept a quicksand for solid earth. There is no wretchedness of Radical living into which they may not fall, if they have not a clearer understanding of their principles than that with which he has armed them.
Perhaps Mr. Cross felt that the evening's definition did not quite bear the morning's reflection, for when he addressed the Conservatives on Tuesday he was provided with a new mode of distinguishing a Conservative from a Liberal. The Liberal treads on people's corns : the Conservative leaves people's corns alone. Mr. Cross was seemingly better satisfied with this formula than he was with his first, for he ventured to apply it publicly as soon as he had uttered it. Look,' he said, 'at my Artisan's Dwellings Bill. The Liberals would have had me tread upon the corns of all the corporations. of Eng- land by making the Act compulsory. I knew better, and left the corporations to apply it at their pleasure, and see how generally they are taking advantage of the permis- sion I' We suspect that five years hence Mr. Cross will not be inclined to repeat this boast. By that time most of the great towns will have used the powers given them by Mr. Cross, and there will remain a few recalcitrant corpora- tions among those affected by the present Act, and the small towns, as to which Mr. Cross himself declares that similar legislation must follow before long. Of these small towns a majority probably will not be inclined to carry out the Act, and how Mr. Cross proposes to make the Act a reality as regards these towns without treading on somebody's corns we do not see. So long as people take their corns out of the legislator's way, it is no merit to him that he does not tread on them; but if they refuse to move and he is determined to get on, he has no choice left but either to tread on them, or to stand still. When it comes to this point, Mr. Cross, we fancy, will be found to tread just as heavily, though, perhaps, not quite so cheerfully, as any Liberal Home Secretary. If he does not, he will find that corns will become every day more numerous and more tender. There are interests which feel attacked when there is even a scent of legislation in the air, just as there are people whose corns shoot before rain ; and before Mr. Cross has been a social reformer many Sessions more, he will discover that if he has net given adverse interests anything to cry for, he will not have given his clients
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