TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE TORY VIRUS IN THE GOVERNMENT.
I T has been frequently remarked,—and we ourselves make I. the same remark elsewhere in these columns,—that with the concession of genuinely democratic institutions, that differ- ence of kind between Conservative and Liberal ideas which has determined the history of English political controversy for so many generations, tends to disappear, and to leave us with a number of political questions of detail, on which there is no reason in the world why those who were once Liberals or Tories should agree with each other any more than with their opponents. But however true this may be,—and we have explained our view of the matter with some care in another page,—it is quite certain that the Tory modes of thought peculiar to the past are as yet by no means de- prived of all their practical importance by the settlement or partial settlement of the questions which best illustrated them. The Conservative Government, led by the great democratic Con- servative whose triumph it was to educate his party into a democratic policy, has now been in office for a year and seven months, and there are but two great departments of the Administration in which the virus of the old Tory ideas has not shown itself with considerable force. Those two depart- ments are the Colonial Office and the Home Office. We can- not say that in either of these departments there has been any sign of a reversion to obsolete Tory ideas ; and indeed, in his reform of the Labour Laws, Mr. Cross has accomplished, with Liberal help, what the Liberals failed to effect ; while in Natal, South Africa, and Fiji, Lord Carnarvon Ras carried out a policy perhaps even more truly national, even if not more truly Liberal, than any Liberal Colonial Minister might have ventured to broach. But with these two exceptions, which we acknowledge gladly and with hearty respect, where is the great department into which vanquished, and as we had hoped, finally repudiated, principles have not begun to creep back, so as to exercise in it a most insidious influence ?
The first to show traces of this hankering after a forbidden policy was the Department of Education, no doubt under the inspiration rather of Lord Salisbury than of Lord Sandon. The one great fiasco of the Session of 1874—the Endowed Schools Bill—is of course still vividly in the remembrance of the public. But that was not the only evidence of a reactionary leaven in the Educational policy of the new Government. The reduction of the Educational standard which the children of the agricultural labourers must pass before they can be legally em- ployed in agricultural work, and the retrogressive tone visible this year in Lord Sandon's language in the debate on compul- sion, when he certainly spoke as if the prospect of any fresh advance in that direction was receding, instead of coming closer, have both indicated the latent sympathy in Conservative minds with the old policy that depreciates the importance of popular education. On the other hand, it must in fairness be admitted that Lord Sandon's new code is a step in the right direction, so far as it encourages a better sort of education, and offers a new advantage to masters who can excite the intellectual vivacity of children, as well as teach them the routine answers to routine questions. We do not doubt, indeed, that Lord Sandon him- self is one of the most Liberal of the Conservatives, and that the Tory virus in what he has done has been due to the views of others rather than to his own ; nor that, even when he has seemed to take up the battle most vehemently for obsolete views, the sting of his words was rather due to the awkward- ness of a reluctant agent overshooting his instructions, out of his own fear lest he should be unconsciously disloyal to them, than to the zeal of a true convert.
But whatever may be said of Lord Sandon's reluctance to acquiesce in a reactionary policy, there can be little doubt that both in the Army and Navy the reactionary ten- dency is fostered by the chiefs of those departments. In the discussion on the Army Exchanges Act, Mr. Gathorne Hardy scarcely concealed his own preference for the old Purchase system, though he professed to be quite innocent of any intention to bring it back. Indeed, the measure avowedly legalised, and was intended to legalise, the reintroduction of payments between officers exchanging from one regiment into another. And that the Admiralty, under the new regime, is anything but favourable to open competition, we have been warned by more than one speech during the last Session of Parliament. Mr. Lowe and Mr. Fawcett have alike given us notice of the danger which threatens the whole system of open
competition ; and unless the public wakes up to the danger, there can be little doubt that we may soon have a system of more or less modified patronage introduced throughout the Civil and other services, in place of a system which, with all its defects, produces an indefinitely better class of public servants, a far juster distribution of political influence, and a much greater diminution of the scope for political or Parlia- mentary corruption, than any other system which has ever been tried.
Again, take the legal policy of the Government. What was ever more humiliating than the way in which Lord Cairns was compelled to waive his own strong and avowed opinions, in deference to a mass-meeting of Conservative Peers, who con- fessed their reluctance to give up one of the most impressive functions of the House of Lords,—its right to hear and decide appeals from the Courts of Justice ? That capitulation of the Government to a pack of anonymous Peers was the most significant surrender of the last eighteen months, and ought to have warned the public, as if it had been written in letters of light, of the hopelessness as yet of getting a Conservative Govern- ment that should be emancipated from the dominion of obsolete Tory prejudices. It is the House of Lords, and not the House of Commons, which really governs us now. And whatever may be thought of the Conservatism of the House of Commons, which has no doubt lost some of its most dangerous elements in passing through the test of popular election, the Con- servatism of the House of Lords, at least, is far above the re- proach of being enlightened and progressive. Lord Cairns, eminent at once as a lawyer and as a Conservative though he is, has to succumb to the caprices of a host of unknown Lords, whose opinions, or whatever it be which, in the absence of opinions, they are pleased to call by that term, are only be- trayed by their votes.
And now at last the crowning touch has been put to this display of reactionary feeling in the various branches of the Administration by the issue of the inexplicable order about fugitive slaves, the net result of which is to declare to the world that England no longer ranks herself with the Powers hostile to Slavery, but, on the contrary,. with the Powers whose first object it is to maintain " order," and as M. Buffet says of France, to resist " revolutionary ideas." Hitherto Englishmen have been proud to maintain that they could hardly recognise as " Order" any political organisation of force at all which was not founded in a greater or less degree on liberty,—on the tacit or express consent of the individual citizen to the authority he obeyed. Now the Toryism of the Lords of the Admiralty haa changed all this. They have made it evident to the meanest capacity that what the new Government wishes to think of first, in determining their action as to any slave's attempt to escape, is not his slavery or liberty, but the safety of the social system under which he was legally a slave. The new order openly says that it is only for the sake of saving life that a slave is to be admitted on board an English ship. " The reason for this rule is that, were it otherwise, the prac- tical result would be, in the first instance, to encourage and assist a breach of the law of the country ; and next, to protect the person breaking the law." No language could say more plainly, that to discourage any breach of ' order,' however vicious may be the basis of that order, is an object more sacred with the new Government, than to discourage that abuse of the principle of all order in which the institution of slavery is rooted. The next step should be for Great Britain to enter into a Holy Alliance for discouraging anything like revolution, or the resist- ance of subjects to intolerable internal oppression. The Ad- miralty Circular of the 31st July is the very outcome and blossom of those reactionary sentiments with which the worst European Toryism has usually been associated. We should not have expected it even from Toryism in modern England, if it had not actually proceeded out of it. And certainly nothing ought to teach us how impossible it is for the Ethio- pian to change his skin or the leopard his epots, if the issue of this reactionary Circular from a British Board of Admiralty presided over by an English barrister who may be assumed to be fully imbued with the spirit of English law, and responsible to a Prime Minister who has always striven to " educate " his party into a direct sympathy with popular views, does not prove it. A coarse expression says that as you can- not make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, bad blood in a man will show itself in his behaviour, sooner or later. Apparently, in like manner, bad traditions and anti-popular sympathies will show themselves, sooner or later, even in a Government which boasts of leaning on the favour of the masses and of owing _ power to the democratic Conservatives of the Residuum. The
Conservative Government is showing in many directions the poisonous virus of the old Toryism.
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