TOPICS OF TUE D.Y.
THE PRESENT SOCIAL DISTRACTIONS.
Ix considering the extraordinary multiplicity and consequent con- fusion of interests obtaining at the present day in our highly com- plicated social system, we can never go wrong if we take fin• a key to all the jostlings and perturbations which accompany it—the common principle of selfishness. The selfishness of chi.oss is much greater than that of individuals—greater even than the proportion of the unit to the mass. Every member of a class brings to it, first, the heavy subscription of his own natural personal selfishness, and, over that, a sort of premium. or entrance fie in the same precious coin, applicable to general purposes. As a class man, he has two sorts of selfishness—a private and a public one ; he has a prayer for himself as a limb of the body, and another for the body—which includes himself. And this class selfishness, again, derives all the greater force from the specious covering that is to be fist flor it. That which Smith segregarious would be asisomed to errogate to himself, Smith corporate makes it a boast to exact. All the dif- ference in the world is to be found between " the agricultural inte- rests" and " Smith's bread and butter ;" but they mean the same thing with Smith. For a particular parson to hold flash as thus, " Rather than that I, the well-provided, comfortable parson of this ill-provided, comfortless parish, should incur so much as a risk, how- ever imaginary, of losing any particle of my present influence and importance—any atom of an advantage I possess—I will see my parishioners starved in mind and body ; and, though it is by BD means probable that I should sustain the slightest inconvenience if the:Education Bill were passed to-morrow, yet I prefer, for security, that the British people should remain in protbund ignorance, and misery to the end of time,"—this would be held a monstrous, ini- quitous declaration : but to say, " I fight fur the Church, I stand by my order," passes for a thing respectable, if not admirable. The spirit is the same, the very meaning is the saute, but the speech is dif- ferent. The gross worldliness, the horrible indifference to all feel- ings but his own, the beastly devotion to. self which is implied in the postponement of the pressing wants of a whole people to some single imaginary interest of the speaker or the speaker's class— these are the same, be the speech moulded as it may. But in the one form they come forth in their true colours ; in the other, they are elegantly merged in generalities and commonplace. Men may be as selfish at heart in their individual as in their coporate capa- city, but in point of speech and action—in the amount of what they are prepared to do and to vindicate, it is undoubtedly in the latter relation that their selfish instincts come into the most unobstructed and shameless exercise.
Great allowances are to be made for conscientious Tories, who, tracing all present social disturbances to the encouragement given to popular claims, can find no words bad enough to apply to the first movers in such a course of policy. Certainly, it' any man seri- ously believes that the people ought, not less for their own than for the common weal, to remain ignorant and dependent—that know- ledge and liberty are only fine names for misery and crime (opinions still represented, though not openly expressed perhaps, in the Legis- lature, especially in the Upper branch)—such thinker may in all consistency regard with horror the first instigators of that popular agitation which, seven years ago, led to the success of the Reform measure, and which is now knocking still louder at the gates of the constitution. These are your half-reasoners, who lake so much of an argument as jumps with their passion, and leave the rest. If to their half-reasoning we could oppose such whole reasoning as might be happily drawn from the acts of a firm, vigorous, yet kindly Go- vernment, we should have nothing to lament beyond the fact that there remained any politicians unconvinced by so wise and exem- plary a party. Unfortunately we have nothing of the kind to bless ourselves with. Half-reasoning looks over from the Tory benches and sees nothing to rebuke it ; men " of one idea" arc met by men of another idea ; there is much differing, but small difference; all is but variety of littleness; the petulant pigmies will fight, but find nothing but cranes to engage withal. If' popular govermoent had for its patrons men of the right stamp, with high hands and whole hearts—men who could do and would do whatever the great expe- riment of political justice required—we should soon see the pugna- cious pigmies dwarfed to their right proportions ; their extinction might then be counted on. But, considering into what hands, by the evil destiny of the times, the cause of Reform has fallen, the only wonder is that it has not lost every supporter it ever numbered. If the enemies of popular government reason by halves, its nominal advocates keep them in countenance by the same practice, applied with a difference; thus opposing a perpetual bar to political truth. For half an argument will never carry conviction ; any other half- argument will be as good and cogent. A part being blinked, the whole becomes equivocal; if your counsel refuse to call half his witnesses, who shall say but the missing evidence might have in- validated all the rest ? Emboldened in their half-reasoning by the absence of any larger intelligence on the part of their ostensible ad- versaries—whom they find committed to a line of politics which, in word, they arc incapable of justifying, and in action, seem for the most part irresolute to follow—the Tories have gone on steadily increasing their ranks, and, but for the Queen's politics, had long ere now returned to office ; having shown themselves several times this session within a trifle of realizing that good fortune which the father of the Reform Bill so generously planned for them, when he " scanned the general scope" ;of that great and final measure, and " calculated that the Tories would always have as fair a prospect as
any other party of obtaininga position," &c. ; and to which he mustnow, we presume, rather rejoice than otherwise to see them pro,
gressively attaining by nice minorities, " beautifully less," of 10,5, and 2.
Amongst the symptoms of our present condition which the re missness of the Semi-liberals in the work of Refbrin has lefts the Tories for a cheval de bataille in their half-reasoning warfare on popular rights, we may count it a sufficiently notable one-- that the selfish instincts of every class of the people have been called forth, without any means being adopted to gratify, to moss rate, or to use them. Government, by its encouragement of pope. lar claims, first called round it, as it were, a legion of hungry mouths. What was the next step, in the name of common sense, inoperative and presumable ? To feed those mouths ?—Nothing of the sort was done, or intended. A strong sense of hunger was excited, an appetite not easily satiated was aroused; and then those poor, open, watering mouths, were at once dismissals- not without notice given, that for aught else besides that pleasant tantalizing sensation they bad been permitted to feel, they might just narrow themselves a little and—whistle ! The proclamation of Liberal principles in government was nothing less than an invi. tation to all injured classes of society to come to the doors of the Legislature and have their grievances redressed. " Knock and it shall be opened unto you," was the promise held forth. A mighty summons, truly ; and a bold one, if we consider by whom to whoa given—by the privileged to the non-privileged classes—by the op. pressors to the oppressed ! Such invitations may be given safely may be fulfilled advantageously and honourably ; but they can be broken through when given, only most dishonourably and most dis. astrously. It was an invitation to every class of the community to revise its social relations—to consider well if it were wronged or no—whether, peradventure, it might be bettered. It was a formal recognition of time great principles of political justice, heretofore in innumerable instances practically contravened; and therefore, what- ever might be its professed or even its proposed limitations, it was in effect an advertisement to the country, that irresponsible govern. ment was at an end; that the rights of all classes would be con- sidered now on their own merits, and without reference to partial objects ; that justice, in future, and not expediency, was to be the rule. This was chalking out a course of government and legisla. tion, which, when seen against the dark background of old Tory domination, showed fair indeed. Time has proved that a course of national policy, the greatest and noblest ever indicated, and needing for its agents the wisest, powerfullcst, and most disinte- rested of mankind, has been destined to be connected in its begin. nings with a set of men of whom the world never yet saw the parallel for shallowness, incapacity, and self-seeking. Putting these things together, we may obtain a tolerable insight, not only into the nature, but into the causes of some of the present troubles. Every class of society is more or less conscious of wrongs and privations, suffered in a long course of misrule previous to the present sera. When redress seemed hopeless, those grievances were not less ; but now that they have been taught to believe that their petitions are acceptable and that their claims ought to be attended to, they are roused ; and meanwhile these grievances seem to them more intolerable than ever, from the very circumstance that they consider them more attentively, and because at the same moment they see very clearly that they are falsely dealt with, and that, after all, there exists no real desire on the part of the Government or of the Legislature to lighten them of any part of their load. The same policy, or impolicy, which has operated to this effect on the feelings of the various subordinate classes, (much disunited even amongst themselves from the same causes,) has strung up into redoubled selfish- ness and a fiercer and more disgusting attitude of illiberality, the higher or privileged classes. These, in this mischievous suspense of opposite political principles, have their worst passions most powerffilly worked upon ; for, on the one hand, they vastly exag- gerate, through fear, the disadvantages to themselves to be involved in any concession to classes below them, and, on the other hand, the irresolutioot of the Government and the weakness of the so- called Liberal party giving them a this chance of triumph, sufficient exertions being made in the old spirit, they are wonderfully excited to cooperation, and do not refrain from the hope that they may be able to crush altogether the rising hopes of those classes, and refix the foot of despotism once more firmly on their necks. Any Govern- ment sionply gifted with common sense, would have perceived that under these circumstances, created by itself, the two things needful, not merely to secure proposed political advantages, but to avert evils more serious than any it came to correct, were consistency and promptitude ; that any concession once agreed on ought to have been forthwith substantiated ; that it was as much a matter of political necessity, in that case, to realize the despair of the class obstructing the concession, so resolved upon, as to realize the hope of the expectant class. The MELBOURNE Ministry in its wisdom pursued another course : without effecting a single organic change, it has contrived to throw every class of society into a state of enmity, jealousy, and alarm—such as no actual change, how signal soever, could have produced. It has evoked the whole of the selfishness in society to the surface, and, without even a tangible bone to con- tend about, has plunged all opposite interests into confliction and madness.
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