THE PITY OF IT.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE " $PECTLTOR."1
SIR,—Are you not rather hard on the Birmingham rioters ? Taking the Hyde Park palings as a precedent, their proceeding is exactly the vox populi which Lord Salisbury asked for at the time when he lavished all his old Saturday Review power of scorn upon the orderly remonstrance of the crowd in London. Now he has got his von, and what does the man want more? Now, of course, what he said he would accept as "the people" has become, in the usual conciliatory epithets by which he hopes to win independent England to his side, "the hired ruffians who were sent to break into Aston Hall," from the context, presum- ably by Mr. Chamberlain. The Spectator, I think, has a little forgotten that Lord Salisbury, being discontented with bread, asked for a stone, and got it.
Will Lord Salisbury never realise, or somebody for him, how deeply he and such henchmen as the Churchills and Lowthers, not so much by their opinions as by the language in which they enforce them, are driving into the ranks of the enemy—(for whom, if you please, we will say Mr. Chamberlain)—all the cultivated and manly intellects, whose original education and social sympathies would naturally enlist them as friends upon the general questions of the world? If ever man "set class against class "—to use the phrase with which it so amuses him to irritate everybody who cannot take his own class at its own estimate—until at last, "Si Natura negat, facit indignatio Radicalem,' " it is my Lord of Salisbury. I am—or at least I believe Tam (or was)—by birth what is called a "gentleman," by education a scholar, by political belief a con- vinced but very quiet Liberal. As I was, so were thousands ; and what is Lord Salisbury making of us ? Speaking from feel- ing, all I can say is that I feel as if my lord had been good enough to call me a hired ruffian, and am bound to love him accordingly. Most of my personal acquaintances—friends, even—are naturally more or less "on the other side" from me, who cannot myself see why political discussion cannot be carried on with scarcely an acrimonious word,—certainly without vulgar personality. I have never lost a friend upon such questions. The letter of " Vicesimus " to the Times admirably expressed the depth of a growing feeling among the really "cultivated," because inde- pendent, minds of England—disgust. And, as in the end all good and thoughtful citizens must take a side, who can doubt what side the vast majority will take, if they don't happen to be "in the purple " ? They must be hired ruffians, that's all. And, great Heaven, who can doubt which must win? Lord Salisbury must have had enough of Shakespearian quotation, but there is one so apposite, that I may venture to introduce it. What says the Lord Salisbury of King John to the bastard Faulconbridge, a high-spirited gentleman who was as a hired ruffian in his lordship's eyes ?— " Stand by, or I shall gall you, Faulcoubridge!"
To which that bastard answers, plainly enough :—
"Thou wert better gall the devil, Salisbury !"
May I add one word more ? Lord Salisbury's action is
generally supposed to represent, be it right or wrong, the incar- nation of hereditary pride. Why ? The speeches of the Duke of Argyll do really represent that ; and he thinks himself a Liberal, as on many points he really is. It is impossible,—at least to any one possessed of a little quiet humour,—not to regard both with amusement and respect the Duke's delight- fully unconscious magnificence. They are so funny and so perfectly natural. But is it not fair to contrast with the Loki Salisbury that is, the Lord Robert Cecil that was-P He was a younger brother fighting for his hand, as a professional and literary man like many of us,—bitter then, apparently, because he was not a magnate ; bitter now, because he is. He came to rank and riches unexpectedly ; and if ever a man's sympathies should be with freedom and independence, with abilities of such singular brilliance as his, surely his sym- pathies should have been. I sincerely trust that I may not be transgressing, in saying so, the rule whose transgression I deplore ; but I always seem to read in Lord Salisbury's speeches something which does not so much resemble the instincts of hereditary pride, as the hysterica passio of the parvenu. As for the harm that he has been and is doing to the tone of English public life, threatening at last to be so dangerously followed by the other side, what can an old- fashioned Englishman say but this,—" The pity of it !"-1 am,
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