THE ELECTION FOR EAST STAFFORDSHIRE.
THIS Election for East Staffordshire will be watched by politicians as anxiously as they can watch anything, under a degree of heat which, if it were permanent, would soon dispose of Parliamentary Government in England. Every party in the country is likely to receive a hint there of the highest importance for its future guidance. In the first place, we shall see whether complete devotion to the Birmingham League will be fatal to a county candidate otherwise fairly acceptable to the Liberal electors. Secondly, we shall dis- cover whether a tinge of Unionism is a disqualification on county hustings. Thirdly, we shall ascertain if old Radical opinions still live in Counties. Fourthly, we shall make up our minds as to the county strength of the great liquor interest. And fifthly, we shall see the exact force of the new cry for equality of suffrage. The county is by tradition Liberal, the last eleption having yielded a majority of 1,000 for the Liberal side, and intense anxiety seems to be felt within it to retain its political character. The Liberal Committee, however, found it difficult to obtain a local candidate who would produce unity, for it was not till an ironmaster and a Peer's son had declined, that Mr. John Jaff ray's offer was finally accepted. The fact that he had been for thirty years the Editor or Proprietor of the most powerful journal in the Midland Counties seems to have counted for nothing, and Mr. Jaffray was compelled to show that he was deeply inter- ested in business in the county,—business of the concrete sort, metal-making and the like, intelligible to the minds of men who regard a newspaper as so much printed breath. The Birmingham League also came into the field, Mr. Chamberlain threatening to stand if any Liberal were selected who was less determined on the educational question than Mr. Chamberlain himself. Mr. 'affray, being a member of the League, had no scruples on that point, and so at last it came to this,—that a Leaguer was accepted in a Liberal county as the representative of the united party, of a party which has always carried the county, and which ought always to carry the county, full as it is of suburbs of Birmingham, of growing towns for which Bir- mingham finds opinions, and of villages full of Radicals. If a Leaguer could win in any county, it is in East Staffordshire, and Mr. Jaffrey himself is far from an inferior candidate. Everybody knows him through his paper, the ablest Radical paper in Birmingham or Mid-England ; he has fought the battle of the party for a life-time ; on some points he is moderate and on others sensible, and he is, if not eloquent, at least fluent in defence of the old Radical policy. He is for equal suffrage—household suffrage, we believe, but the re- porters make him appear to have advocated manhood suffrage— for a gradual redistribution of power by a great „transfer of seats from small boroughs to large boroughs or 'populous counties, for the payment of electoral costs by the electors, for the revision of the Landlord and Tenant Law in the interest of the tenant, and for the reduction of the national expenditure to fifty-five millions—Why not to five ? He stands up manfully, too, for some opinions of his own, refuses to support the Per- missive Bill, declines to denounce the Contagious Diseases Acts
in garrison towns, and while refusing to pledge himself to vote for Disestablishment, refers to his career as proof positive of his bias whenever the question became practical, though, for the present, he is churchwarden to a rather Ritualistic rector. Could anything be more satisfactory ? The county is Liberal, the towns are many, the candidate is not, excepting on education, an extreme man, he is personally acceptable to the electors, and he has for opponent Mr. Allsopp, son of the great brewer, who is keeping much in the background, who is suspected of want of eloquence, and who has this fact against him, that his colleague in the representation would be Mr. Bass, jun., so that, to use Mr. Bass's own expression, " two taps of pale ale would be set running in the same county." Under such circumstances, if Mr. Jaffrey fails, will it not be nearly a certainty that his failure will not be due to a local accident, not to any decline of Liberal voters, not to any reaction, but to the absolute refusal of large bodies of Liberals to be coerced by the League, or to swallow down all that stuff about immense reductions of expenditure—which can only be effected by attenuating the Army—or to exert themselves for any one of the hundred promises for which they have in the main ceased to care. If with a good constituency, a good candidate, energetic Committees, and the Press to back them, the Liberals cannot retain an old seat, what is there to say, except either that they are tired of the existing Government, or that there is some one point in the popular programme on which they are asked to yield what a majority or heavy minority will not give up ?
We believe that Mr. Jaffrey, whom we should personally be delighted to see in Parliament, more especially if he kept out one more of these everlasting brewers, who seem both inclined and able to drown both parties in their own vats, will be beaten at the polls ; that silently, quietly, but effectually the Liberals will suffer him to be defeated by the Tories, as they will do in every great borough and county where the party suffers the League to insist on its own candidate, under a threat of splitting the electors. The Liberals will let them have their way, and silently secede, leaving the Tories practically a walk-over. The unity produced by violence or threats of violence from the minority will prove to be no unity at all. The Ballot will protect the Moderates as well as the Ultras, and the Liberal Left will receive one more tremendous fall by being thrown into the hands of a silent and obedient follower of Mr. Disraeli, who, however squeezable upon other points, dare upon this point give them nothing. We do not speak with the slightest bitterness, for we entirely acknowledge the right of Dissenters to set their principles, however mistaken they may be, above their party ties, and think that their action, if it gives the Tories a safe and considerable majority at the general election, will give us, within three years, the best and strongest Liberal ,Parliament we have ever yet had. Three years of honest Tory misgovernment, supported by the silent votes of Watney and Allsopp and all their kind, will squeeze all the flabbiness out of us, and make once more a party that can work. We want a test case or two, to prove that this is the line in which affairs will go, and here is the very test of all others to be desired. If an unknown heir of mashtubs, who to all appearance cannot speak, who does not stump the county, and has the enormous disadvan- tage of another heir of mashtubs for his colleague, can carry East Staffordshire against Mr. Jaffrey, a picked candidate, and personally as superior to his rival in all political qualifications as man is to the beer he drinks, simply because the better man is a Leaguer, the League will never be master of the House of Commons.
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