TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE SHEFFIELD ELECTION.
THE Sheffield Election has resulted in a genuine though rather narrow Liberal triumph, over a very formidable body of not harassed, but petted interests. The Jingoes, the interests which gain by war, and the Licensed Victuallers have all ostentatiously supported the present Government ; and in Sheffield, where the late Mr. Roebuck may be accounted to have been the primitive Jingo, where a certain class of manu- facturers greatly gain by a War Ministry, and where the Licensed
Victuallers are said to number fifteen hundred, and have an array of dependents who march at their bidding, such a com- bination as that is but too likely to ensure success. Had not the Liberals been very enthusiastic and worked with a will, under the present register it would have secured success. The Liberals hold, as we believe with good reason, that the narrow majority does not represent at all the actual feeling of
the Sheffield of the present,—that under the register of next year the majority might have been as many thousands as it was hundreds. All the more do we owe hearty gratitude to the men who have worked so hard for the purpose of inflicting a check on the Government, under conditions so favourable to its supporters and so vexatious to those who knew that they had to contend with the difficulties offered by the register of an obsolete constituency, and that their candidate, even if returned, would only sit as their representative for a few months before the fight must be fought over again. No circum- stances could have been better calculated to provide excuses for indifference and want of zeal. But among the Liberals of Sheffield, there was no indifference and no want of zeal. On the contrary, they felt that to beat the Government under the conditions most favourable to the Government, would be infinitely more telling than to beat the Government under the conditions most favourable to a Liberal success, and they have achieved that more difficult task, to their own great honour. Indeed, it seems pretty certain that the late Mr. Roebuck himself, had it been possible for him to have fought the election in Mr. Wortley's place, would have also failed. We doubt whether there were many scores of votes given to Mr. Waddy which, in case Mr. Roebuck had stood in Mr. Wortley's place, would have been given to Mr. Roebuck. So completely was the battle fought out on the foreign policy of the Government,—on the question of Jingoism or a sober foreign policy, that we strongly suspect Mr. Wortley polled virtually all Mr. Roebuck's adherents, and perhaps not a few Conservatives who might have hesitated to vote for a nominally Liberal Jingo, as well.
The result, then, is satisfactory, but it is far from satisfac- tory to consider that, even in the very centre of Jingoism, even in the constituency which "Tear-'em" educated to enjoy barking for the sake of barking, there should be no fewer than 13,584 electors desirous to record their confidence in the foreign policy of this Government. That less than 500 men out of some 27,000 should hold the balance on which the question of approval or disapproval turns,—that the willing- ness, if there had been any such willingness, of only 250 men out of 27,646 to desert to the Government, should have been sufficient to give a yea instead of a nay to the question as
A
to the constituency's approval or disapproval of the policy of the Government, seems to UB a melancholy though, under the circumstances, not an ominous fact. For- tunately, that does not represent the present state of opinion in Sheffield, No doubt, there will be many more Sheffield electors a week hence determined to vote for Mr. Waddy than were able to vote for him last Monday. No doubt there may be not a few who supported Mr. Wortley last Monday who will have no vote to give to Mr. Wortley next year. But making every allowance for these considerations, the startling fact remains that 13,584 sane persons out of something less than 28,000—chosen a year and a half ago, by the tests which the Constitution regards as establishing the fitness of an Englishman to judge—have expressed their con- fidence in the foreign policy of her Majesty's Government. There is no denying that this is a formidable fact. It may well be true that in no other English town so great as Sheffield, could a judgment so nearly balanced have been expressed ; it is certainly true that in hardly any great town has there been so much sympathy with a policy of brag ; but even taking Shef- field as an exceptional town, under electoral conditions especially favourable to the Tories, we admit that we are appalled at discovering that, after full experience of all they have done and are doing to impair the honour of England and injure the rest of the world, anything approaching to half an, immense constituency should be disposed to consider that the Government have upheld the honour which they have so seriously stained, and have inflicted on other countries no evil which, under the circumstances, it was not natural, legitimate, and even righteous to inflict. For that, so far as the electors understand their vote at all, is what they ought to have understood, and no doubt generally have understood by that vote. They have meant by it that the Government have not been guilty of rash, reckless, and unjust aggression in Afghanistan, have not worked hard on the wrong side in Europe, and have, in a word, done nothing to disprove their fitness to guide this country through another long period. of trial. Indeed, if they have not meant this by their vote, they must be quite unfit to have a vote, and have meant nothing of any political significance by it at all. The only reasonable assumption is that even in Sheffield as it now is, a very large party, though certainly a decreasing party, holds to Mr.. Roebuck's views so far as they were Tory views,—which in alL that was essential they were in a most aggravated form,— while the party which denounces these views, though it is an. increasing party, have as much as they can do to make steady way against the noise and blare of the enemy.
But the dust which the Tory and plusguant Tory journals. throw in the eyes of the British public will not be able to conceal that the Liberals do make way. The result tells us that even on the register of 1878, Mr. Mundella, instead of being beaten by Mr. Roebuck, as he was in 1874, would pro- bably have beaten Mr. Roebuck, and very likely, indeed, have beaten him by a considerably greater majority than that which. Mr. Waddy has obtained over Mr. Wortley. Many a Con- servative-Liberal must have preferred a reasonable and. cultivated Conservative like Mr. Wortley, to the rene- gade Radical who for ten years back had been Lour Beaconsfield's best ally in the House of Commons. A genuine Conservative always has it in his power to. exert a considerable check on the caprices of his chiefs, while a deserter from the Liberal ranks has no such power,. since he can neither speak in the name of Conservatives nor in the name of Liberals. The one thing the Sheffield election does not give the slightest support to, is the absurd allegatiorr that Sheffield hesitates between the pseudo-Liberalism of such men as Mr. Roebuck or Mr. Walter and the genuine Liberal- ism of Mr. Gladstone. Even Mr. Roebuck's own election would have shown nothing of the kind, since Mr. Roebuck has never given a genuinely Liberal vote, so far as we recollect,. on any party question whatever that has arisen during the last ten years. He opposed the disestablishment of the Irish Church ; he opposed Lord Hartington's and Mr. Forster's foreign policy with a bitterness at least as great as any he ever showed towards Mr. Gladstone's; he opposed everything which even the most moderate of his party sup.. ported against the Tories, and laid himself out to be, what he was, a thorn in the flesh of the Liberals. How, then, even his re-election could have shown that the Liberals hesitate between Mr. Gladstone's policy and a type of Liberalism less distinct than Mr. Gladstone's, it is quite impossible to understand. But now that a strong party man, confessedly Conservative, has been. put in his place, and every one who has voted for a Liberal at all has voted for a thoroughgoing Liberal, and not for one of the half-and-half type,—to assert that the election proves a liking for half-and-half Liberalism, is to assert what is pal- pably false. We might just as well say that those who, being asked the question, avowedly prefer the Daily News to. the Standard, prove thereby that they would have preferred the Daily Telegraph to either one paper or the other. That is drawing inferences by divination from facts which bear about as. much on the asserted inferences as they do on the state of the weather. What may be inferred from the Sheffield election is. this, that a steady reaction against the party of Lord Beaconsfield had sot in in Sheffield a year and a half ago, and had even by that time made the register such that Mr. Roebuck's party had. dwindled into a minority • that that reaction had not been as. rapid and sudden in Sheffield as Liberals would wish, but was. moving with a somewhat slow current, though the best observers believe that it has run much more rapidly during the last year than it did before ; and finally, that the conflict between the opposite schools of opinion, the school of Tory democracy and the school of sober and sincere Liberalism, is still so nearly even, that the victors need all the organisa- tion, all the effort, and all the earnestness which they have exhibited during the last two or three weeks, to secure the
triumph they have gained, and follow it up by one more signal and decisive, when the present superannuated Parliament shall be dissolved.
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