MR. LOWE'S WEAK POINT.
THAT Mr. Lowe has plenty of genius, no one who has watched his course in Parliament could for a moment honestly deny. But mere genius may almost disqualify a
man for a successful politician, instead of qualifying him for that role, and Mr. Lowe's shortcoming seems to us to have
been curiously illustrated since he took the high office he now occupies, and to be entirely due to one cause,—his unqualified contempt for common-place people and common-place judgments. You see it in every speech he makes.
For instance on this question of the Budget he cannot conceal, or even restrain, his contempt for the view that the
Government's course in heaping the payment of the taxes on a single quarter may embarrass the Bank of England. When men of great authority and weight in the City, like Mr. Crawford and Mr. Fowler, speak of the .difficulty which may arise if the Government should chance to want pecuniary help from the Bank at a time when their own deposits have run very short, and when, for any special reason, the credit of the public is also paralyzed, Mr. Lowe only feels confirmed in his course, and repeats, with his usual tone -of irony, that the Government has something else to do than study its duties to the Bank of England,—a saying which would only have pertinence if the bank were really a private 'bank, and not placed in command of a monopoly by our past legislation ;—and what is more, a saying which does not meet the point of the help the Government may need from the Bank at times when, by the previous policy of the Government, the Bank is least able to give that help. No doubt Mr. Lowe would say, with his usual short laugh, that the City need not take more anxious thought for the Government than the Government takes for itself, and that it might at least -wait till the Chancellor of the Exchequer goes begging to the Bank. But that, of course, is no answer. Every one knows that wh6n the Chancellor of the Exchequer does go begging to the Bank,—whether it be Mr. Lowe or another,—it will be on some national emergency which no prudence of his could have averted ; and it is, as Mr. Fowler pointed out, quite unsound to assume that the Bank will be as able as ever to help the Government, on the ground that the private deposits will gain what the public deposits lose. That might be so in ordinary times. But in the case supposed, it -would be as likely as not that the private deposits would be `kept by the country bankers against local emergencies, and not sent up to London at all. It is obvious that in this matter, and also as regards the great inconvenience to small capitalists in paying so large a proportion of their taxes in one quarter of a year, Mr. Lowe makes merry with a difficulty because it is one patent to common-place minds, whereas that is just the reason why it is a grave difficulty, and not a trivial one. The politician has to deal exclusively with common-place men. If he takes to
despising their difficulties, he takes to despising the only things with which politics, on the whole, profess to deal. No politician, however brilliant, is worth much without the largest amount of common-place at the bottom of his genius.
Mr. Lowe, who earned so great a debt of gratitude from the nation by engrafting on our educational grants the thoroughly common-place principle of " payment by results," should be the first to see this. But while he is often ostentatiously common-place in his own judgments, if it is he himself who has the credit of bringing down politics from the skies,—as in the case we have mentioned, and also with regard to the "cheap and nasty " place he proposes for the Courts of Justice,—he is apt to sneer as ostentatiously at other commonplace objections when they are presented as obstacles to a brilliant scheme of his own by men to whom he has not learned to defer. Nothing, for instance, could be wilder than his serious proposal to divert all our present educational endowments from truly educational purposes to free libraries, museums, and the like, in order to get rid of the evils so often connected with endowments. That was the plan of a wild revolutionist, not of a sober politician, though it was a fair corollary from an imperfect generalization of his own that no one can interfere in education without mischief who is not himself a loser by any false step that is taken. Mr. Lowe is always perfectly logical in applying the principle which satisfies him at the time, — cost what it may, — and throwing aside with contempt all the difficulties which suggest themselves from any other side. But then he is by no means a sure judge of the principle which is really applicable to the case in point. In the Education controversy his principle was a mere weapon seized in anger against some of the obvious evils of trust-endowments. In the case of this budget question, his principles seem to be two,—to get the most money he can this year for the relief of taxation, and to treat the Money Market as if it were,—what it is not, though he would wish it to be,—a money market completely independent of Government. In the question of the Courts of Justice his only principle seems to have been to save money for the moment, at whatever ultimate cost you please. But, whatever he adopts for the moment as his principle, he brandishes =flinchingly in the face of all opponents, and with something like scorn for any of them who wish to judge of it " by results." He tramples on the herd who get in his way without either directly assailing his principle or attacking his logic. Such opponents he treats as if they were not worthy of his steel.
And this will be the rock on which Mr. Lowe's political fame is not unlikely to split. "Odi profanum vulgus at arceo" is a motto which he would certainly not accept in its obvious sense, for, very rightly, he makes tie interests of the profane crowd his chief object. But he does really adopt this motto in his treatment of the common herd of politicians. He has no respect for the average sense which is in them, and which all really great politicians know well how to get out of them. Mr. Lowe does not know this. He is so cavalier in his political conceptions, and in the logic by which he works them out, that it never occurs to him how much ho himself might learn from listening to ordinary objectors. Political genius really means the power of manipulating with an unusually lucid intellect the average ideas of ordinary men. Mr. Lowe's genius for public affairs, on the other hand, is the power of selecting a few important, but by no means exclusively important, notions from amongst them, and pursuing them into all their consequences without the slightest regard to the remainder. And he is very fitful in the choice of these ideas, sometimes hitting on one that is really popular, but harsh and insufficient, sometimes, as in the Reform de
bates, on one that is highly unpopular, though equally harsh and insufficient. No one can say that he aims at popularity.
If he did, he would be a greater statesman than he is.
Hitherto at least he has not, in any degree, acquired the art of learning from the House of Commons. He is simply bored by the House of Commons, and thinks in his heart how tire some it is that he should be fettered in his policy by a number of such tedious and illogical minds as belong to the majority of the bodies which people it. But in reality, in those very
fetters he ought to find the source of his political power. If he does not, and should ever really break away from them, his political career will soon be over, and he will sail off like that
unfortunate gigantic balloon the other day, brilliantly but quite uselessly, into apace. If he is ever to become the really great Minister for whom some of his brilliant talents appear to fit him, he must learn something of real respect and deference for the common-sense of common minds.
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