BIRMINGHAM AND LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL.
THE Conservatives of Birmingham may or may not owe as much as some of them appear to think, to the energy and cleverness of Lord Randolph Churchill ; but some of their leaders must have forgotten that a good deal has happened since that contest in 1885 in which he is said to have done so much for the stirring-up and organisa- tion of the Tory Party. And a great deal of what has since happened has been of a nature to throw a certain ambiguity round Lord Randolph Churchill's political character in the eyes of all men. In the first place, Lord Randolph changed his mind rather suddenly on rather important subjects, such as the sum which the nation ought to devote to the support of the Navy. In the next place, he abandoned the Government at a very critical moment, when he was not only Chancellor of the Exchequer, but Leader of the House of Commons, and that, as the nation thought, without any sufficient reason. In the third place, he renewed his attacks on the Government even since the present Session began, and gave grounds for thinking that he might very seriously imperil its position if opportunity offered. Now, all this appears to us to go far towards explaining the difficulty felt in carrying out the vague under- standing which had no doubt been arrived at between some of the Tory leaders in Birmingham and at least one of the Liberal organisers, as to accepting Lord Randolph's candidature for Central Birmingham. When the moment came for carrying out that understanding, it was probably discovered that, as Mr. Chamberlain seems to have inti- mated, it did not lie with the leaders to act precisely as they pleased,—at least, if the seat was to be secure. Whatever glory Lord. Randolph may have gained from three to four years ago, he is not now so little known to the people of Birmingham as he was then. They have had plenty of opportunities of watching his statesman- ship, and of estimating the kind of confidence which Unionists should feel in him. We do not doubt that when the moment came for deciding whether or not he should be accepted as the successor to Mr. Bright, it was found that a, considerable number of the electors, whether Liberal Unionist or otherwise, would have been very seriously aggrieved at being asked to vote for a man who is not only not at all of Mr. Bright's type, but has rendered even his own party uneasy again and again as to his stability, and especially within the last month or two. What is the use, they would ask, of cementing an affiance between Tories and Liberal Unionists, if you magnify the position of a man who may at any time break up the Tory Party itself ? If Liberal Unionists are to be asked for a sacrifice, let it at least be a sacrifice to a Tory of constancy and unquestionable loyalty. In replacing such a leader as Mr. Bright, the very first requisite is to find a new guarantee for the fidelity of Tories and Liberal Unionists to each other. Liberal Unionists could afford to give ground to the Tories, if in doing so they obtained additional security for mutual co-opera- tion ; but how could such security be obtained by re- turning a statesman who appears to fight so often for his own hand? We are not behind the scenes, and know nothing of the unacknowledged political considerations of the occasion. But we can conjecture, on obvious grounds, that there may have been very serious reasons for doubting whether the rank and file of either section of the party would have obeyed its leaders, if they had insisted on their voting for Lord Randolph. We know how solidly they supported Mr. J. A. Bright, in spite of the avowed efforts of party leaders to get them to vote differently or not to vote at all. Does not that indicate pretty clearly that had such a candidate as Lord Randolph been pro- posed, a great many more electors would have declined to support him than declined to support Mr. Bright, or would perhaps have even preferred to vote for Mr. Beale ? It is obvious that Birmingham was even pleased to have a chance of returning Mr. J. A. Bright. Mr. Chamberlain and the other leaders must have had good grounds for knowing that their followers' discipline would hardly have borne the trial of being asked to accept a candidate who was rendering even his own party not less suspicious than the Liberal Unionists, by his strange manoeuvres and political caprices. Lord Randolph showed himself a very good electioneerer three years and a half ago. But a very good electioneerer who has since proved himself a very unsafe colleague and a very shaky ally, may easily turn out to be a very unsatisfactory candidate. We do not doubt that many intimations of distaste for Lord Randolph's candidature- have reached the ears of the Birmingham leaders, and have rightly affected their willingness to carry out the vague• understanding of a year ago.
The correspondence between Lord Randolph Churchill' and Mr. Chamberlain seems to us to illustrate more than anything the very great mischief in which the self-love of leaders may result to the political cause with which they are- identified. Mr. Chamberlain's first letter was not as wise as the very temperate and judicious one with which he closed the controversy ; but it was wisdom and self-restraint itself compared with Lord Randolph Churchill's, which seemed intended to make the people of Birmingham feel to the very bottom of their hearts what an escape they had had in not substituting for Mr. Bright a clever, spit- fire Tory Democrat who cares for the political cause in which he has embarked, say, a twentieth part as much as he cares for the notoriety of his own name. If Lord Randolph had intended to reconcile the people of Birmingham to the loss of his services, and yet at the same time to remind them of the talents by which he had almost persuaded them to return him, he could have written no better letter. Probably he had only the latter purpose in view. But, like many other clever men, he succeeded even better in what he had no intention of- doing, than in that which he deliberately proposed to him- self. In every line of that letter, you can read comparative indifference to everything except the glory of Lord Randolph Churchill,—the very qualities by the careful cultivation of which he has made himself conspicuous, and by the steady development of which he is now losing the position he had acquired. He has evidently studied Lord Beaconsfield's career to little purpose. No sooner had Mr. Disraeli gained the position which he gained much as Lord Randolph Churchill has obtained his, than he carefully avoided the display of the Vivian Grey side of his character, and assumed the frigid and impartial air of a statesman who had the public weal to consider above every personal con- sideration. And there really was enough of " detach- ment " in Mr. Disraeli's mind to render it quite possible, if not even easy, to him to study the public interest as a matter more or less distinct from his own. But here Lord Randolph Churchill seems quite unable to follow him. When he is irritated, he cannot even assume the manner of an impartial statesman ; he can only coin keen sentences which show how irritated he is. The letter which appeared on Tuesday will, in our opinion, render Birmingham so thankful that it never chose him, as to extinguish all probability of his future election ; and if that is not the effect produced, Birmingham has not the shrewdness for which we give it credit. One other lesson we think the correspondence teaches us, and that is the extraordinary difficulty of persuading two parties which are really working for precisely the same ends, that their different traditions in the past should not separate them for all time. No doubt, men being what they are, it is not easy to convince people who have felt at once irritated and contemptuous at reading accounts, say, of the Habitations of the Primrose League, that these Primrose Leaguers are now working only for institutions as solid and important as the Parliamentary Union of the two Kingdoms. And perhaps it is not easy for those who have regarded attacks upon the House of Lords as the most characteristic notes of Liberal strategy, to understand that even the very Liberals who had joined heartily in such attacks are now much more anxious to strengthen the Union even by a wise reform of the House of Lords, than they are to bring the hereditary Peers into disrepute. Yet such is the fact ; and the first duty of both Conservatives and Liberals at the present time is to convince themselves, and to convince each other, that there is no real obstacle to prevent their cordially united action not only in the present but in the future.
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