MR. CROSS IN LANCASHIRE.
IR. CROSS is delivering in Lancashire what must be, we A should think, the most marvellous series of bald electioneering speeches on record. The old idea of speech was that all speech was " winged." But if the early poets had taken their notion of speech from Mr. Cross, such a notion could never have entered their minds. His words are not
only not winged, but they are almost without the power to crawl. They fall upon you with a flat, leaden thump,—with such an impact like balls of clay. Here, for instance, is a speci- men of his most fiery style,—of his style when he becomes animated, as he closes. with his opponents : — "I am sorry to say that some time ago the Opposition accused us of being the cause of the stagnation of trade. I resist that absolutely. It is not the stagnation of trade in England alone ; it is all over the world. and in America more than any- where, and that ought to lead men to think what the real cause of stagnation in trade was,—the over-inflation of trade we had in wears gone by. It is the old story, but it is the true one. But, instead of the Opposition blaming the present Government for the stagnation in trade, I boldly go straight out into their camp and say, 'I attack you. You have talked of trade going by leaps and by bounds, and you have made your legislation accordingly. You ought to have known and you ought to have legislated better, because you must have known, if you had thought, that at the end of the lane of pro- sperity must be a turn, and adversity would come. The turn came—and we happened to come in at that time—and misfortune in trade came in as a necessary consequence, because you cannot go on by leaps and bounds for ever.' " Well, if that be "going boldly straight out into the Liberal camp," it is going there to uncommon little purpose, and ap- parently without any intention of either striking a blow or making a capture when he gets there. All that Mr. Cross does after this magnificent march into the heart of the enemy's coun- try, is to come straight back again. We can all say " I attack you," but after saying it, it is usual to make an attack, which Mr. Cross forgets,—he stops dead, like the prosperity he talks of, just where our expectation is roused. We are expecting a leap or a bound from the Home Secretary, and suddenly find him standing stock still, with such bewilderment on his face as the stout resolve to make a very sharp attack, and the sudden recollection that there is nothing in the world to make it with, naturally produces. No doubt Mr. Cross thought he had something very good indeed to say, but he " lost the idea " at the critical moment, if he ever had it, and the attack ended with that flourish of the quarter-staff with which it ought to have begun. It was still worse with his speech the next day, when he intended to be still more vivacious, for his opponent then was Mr. Gladstone. Mr. Cross was determined to be popular. The intention to be popular naturally suggested to
him the subject of water, all the more, perhaps, that the sub- ject of water was closely associated in his mind, as we shall immediately see, with the notion of extreme populousness,—a quality quite near enough for Mr. Cross to extreme popularity:— "We had a volume in Midlothian in the autumn, and we are having a second volume now. Has any of my hearers seen one of those very large oxyhydrogen microscopes, with which they show you the real constituents of a drop of water? When you see water through these microscopes, it is full of extraordinary animals, with ugly legs, arms, and mouths, at least enough to frighten you to go away resolved that you won't drink it ; but it is wholesome water, after all. And that exactly illustrates what is going on in Midlothian at the pre- sent time, where Mr. Gladstone has got his oxyhvdrogen micro- scope, and is displaying our legs, arms, months, tails, and everything that is horrible, in this magnifying way. We seem to have impressed ourselves on his mind like some nightmare he can't get rid of, but, like the water, you will find that our policy is the wholesome one, after all." As the Dailll News very aptly remarked, it is clear that Mr. Cross gets his notion of wholesome water from the London Water Companies. Water swarming with bacteria is generally supposed to be very far from wholesome. But there was something pathetically helpless in the attempt to enliven the issue between the Government and Mr. Glad- stone by comparing the former to a drop of foul water under the microscope of the latter, and entreating him to turn away his glance from the horrible display of legs, arms, months, and tails, in the minute universe under review, and divert it instead to the horrors of Russian misgovernment, the spread of which the present Government pretend that they have arrested. That the Government, bad as it is, can be fairly compared to a drop of foul water, we should never have imagined, if the suggestion had not come from Mr. Cross ; but we suppose the allusion must be to Turkish and Egyptian affairs, whence, no doubt, the germs of organic life of a very low type indeed have been communicated in plenty to the distilled water of English Administrative purity.
The truth must be that Mr. Cross has made a good administrator in some degree, because, in the capacity of a politician and statesman, he is too dull to get into any of the ordinary troubles of official life. In the Home Office, men like Mr. Gathorne Hardy and Mr. Cross,—men with a stolid mind, but a certain slow fire of indignation against what they cannot understand,--have always done better than more thoughtful, impressible, and intelligent men. It is when Mr. Cross wishes to grapple with a large and complex measure like his Water Bill, or to express his general political convictions in a long canvass, that we see how blank his imagination is. He did not even see in drawing his Water Bill that first-rate security fetches, and ought to fetch, a high price. And in his canvass he sees practically nothing, except what he has been hammering away at for the last year. When he wants to be fiery, he cannot get further than I attack you,"—the attack itself not forthcoming. When he wants to be picturesque, his imagination runs on foul water,—in which he rashly baptises the Government. It is rather a melan- choly exhibition. For the Home Secretary evidently thinks that it is much the same thing to square up to a man as to knock him down, much the same thing to suggest ludicrous ideas of yourself as to make fun of your opponent.
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