TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE MORAL OF THE NORTH LEEDS ELECTION. IT would be most foolish to attempt to minimise the significance of the North Leeds election. Looked at from whatever point of view, it is a danger-signal for the Government. To the declarations that the defeat was due to the Corn-tax or the Education Bill, or both, we do not attach much importance. Of course, these were both good electioneering points for the Opposition, but we doubt whether very many votes were turned by them alone. The dislike inspired by those measures in many minds and the eager agitation in regard to them made, we can well believe, plenty of Liberals keen and active in the election who would otherwise have been far less eager ; but the main injury to the Unionist party came from much larger and much less superficial causes. The chief of these was that natural reaction which in our political system we call the "swing of the pendulum." The tendency in our system is to give first one party and then another a lease of power. This tendency is only checked and prevented from operating when the mass of the people are genuinely alarmed by the professions of the party out of power. If the people as a whole think that the Opposition is committed to dangerous courses, and that their return to power after the normal interval of exclusion from power would injure the best interests of the nation, then they prevent the operation of the law of the pendulum, and keep the old Government in office beyond its normal term. The Unionist party clearly owes its long tenure of office to this fact. In the first place, the dread of Home-rule and its consequences gave the Unionists strength to resist the natural reaction against them, and when that dread was dying out came the war, and the very reasonable belief that if the Liberals returned to power before the war was over they would, to a large extent, throw away the sacrifices made by the nation, and would conclude a foolish, or even an igno- minious, peace. Till peace was made it would have been easier to drain the Channel than to place Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman in power, so convinced was the nation that the Opposition could not be trusted to finish the war and make a sound peace. But though the dread, first of a surrender to the Nationalists, and then to the Boers, as it were dammed up the tide of reaction, it did not and could not prevent it altogether. It merely held back the waters. Behind the dam they increased in weight and volume. Now, however, the dam has been, if not altogether removed, yet weakened and breached, and the waters have begun to pour through. In other words, the war is over and peace made, and, rightly or wrongly, men believe that there is no longer any fear of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and his party being able to undo the settlement. Practically all fear on this head has disappeared from the minds of the ordinary elector. We do not say that the ordinary elector is right to be so con- fident that the Liberal party could now do no harm in South Africa; we do not think he is. We merely state the fact. The dread of Home-rule has even more com- pletely disappeared,—though here, again, without any real warrant. You cannot now get the ordinary elector to take Home-rule seriously. He has made up his mind that the Union is quite safe, and he regards all talk about the wrongs of Ireland as mere political rhetoric. But political rhetoric is a thing in regard to which he is peculiarly tolerant. Vague talk about freeing Ireland, and granting Ireland her just demand to shape her own destiny, and so forth, he considers, even when put in the strongest terms, as the mere babble of the political auction-room. He feels sure it has no real meaning. He has heard it for twenty years, and nothing has ever come of it. The politicians may go on talking about it if they like, but for the country the matter is settled. There is to be no Irish Parliament and no disso- lution of the Union. But when once the ordinary man has convinced himself that there is no real danger in- volved, it is a great luxury to indulge in political reaction, —i.e., in abusing, voting against, and finally kicking out of office the Government in being. It is the natural tendency of Englishmen to criticise and dislike and wish to change the Government. In the first place, "the n1an. in the street" dislikes Goyernments on principle as people who are undertaking to govern him and his affairs, and who visibly do not bdo the job as well as it ought to be done. He looks at the Government, not as a beneficent power above, but as unprofitable servants who are always mismanaging his affairs, and who deserve to be grumbled at to any extent. Go into any casual railway carriage and watch four or five casual men reading their newspapers. It is ten to one that after a very few minutes one of the party will put down his paper with the remark, "Well, they are a lot of drivelling idiots. If they can't manage better than that they ought to be sent to a lunatic asylum. They in such a context is sure to mean the Government, and the commentator has probably been reading a newspaper para- graph describing how, "through want of care and foresight on the part of the Government," this or that trade has been lost to the country, or some foreign Power has stepped in and annexed Little Crab Island,—" a place where the expenditure of a very few millions would easily have created a naval station capable of rendering us untold service in the event of a not impossible, even if unlikely, hostile combination of the Central American Republics, Hayti, Belgium, Portugal, and the Emperor of Abyssinia." As a people we are nothing if not critical. But we are also intensely political in our interests, and those two forces always tell under normal conditions against the Government rather than against the Opposition. The Government is a visible powerful thing,—something worth criticising and attacking.
We have stated our view of the moral of the North Leeds election, but we by no means wish it to be supposed that we think the reaction that is setting in is so strong that the Government will find it impossible to make any headway against it. On the contrary, we hold that the circumstances of the moment give the Unionists an opportunity, if they will only make proper use of it, to stand up against, and even to defeat, the reaction.
That opportunity is the resignation of Lord Salisbury and the impending reconstruction of the Cabinet under Mr. Balfour. If Mr. Balfour is willing and able to make that reconstruction real and thorough, and so vital, he may be able to create an interest in, and a sympathy for, the new Government which will make it secure for the next three years. If in his Government nothing is to be changed except the Premier and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, if it is to remain in fact "the old Government of old men," then we may be absolutely certain that the waves of the reaction will gradually wash it away, and, that it will sink lower and lower in public estima- tion. If, on the other hand, it becomes a new Govern- ment of new men and of younger men, and so, in fact, a different Government under a different Premier, then public interest will be re-awakened, and there will be v., very natural desire to give the new Government its chance. A Government in , which Mr. Balfour and Mr. Chamberlain were the chief figures, supported by a body of able and efficient men, none of whom were worn with years and the routine of office, and who were anxious in every department of State to get the maximum of efficiency out of the machine of Government, would present a really strong bulwark to reaction. But if such a Cabinet is to be formed Mr. Balfour must be willing to carry out that most disagreeable of all public duties,—i.e., superannuation of many men who have served the Unionist party well in the past, but who, though they are not themselves aware of it, have now exhausted their capacity for usefulness. To put it briefly, past services and unwillingness to go must not be considered as impera- tive claims to high office in the new Cabinet. The power to contribute something of vitality and efficiency to the new Administration, and to help it to gain the confidence of the country, must be the one thing thought of. Dignities and honours are the just and. proper rewards for past services, not public employment. Lenliarquisatea, Earldoms, and Baronies be distributed to mark the grati- tude of the nation to its old servants, but not executive offices in which the power of hard work and an open mind are essential. But the whole of the "spade work" required to exhume certain members of the present Cabinet, and to place them in dignified retirement, ought not to fall on Mr. Balfour. He ought to receive, not merely the approval, but the co-operative loyalty, of the rest of the party in the work. Loyalty to their party demands that the men who must leave the Cabinet should •themselves make the task easy. Again, from the bulk of the party should come an un- mistakable mandate that the Cabinet shall be a new Cabinet, and the Cabinet, from top to bottom, of the Premier's own choice. What is wanted is a free hand for the Premier to fit up his house accord ing to his own taste, and not a cumbrous legacy of old official furniture for which house-room must be found at all costs.
A very few days now will show whether Mr. Balfour will be able to give the country a new Cabinet, and one which will win the respect and sympathy of the nation, or whether he will go on with Lord Salisbury's old Cabinet merely patched and repaired. If a real reconstruction takes place, depend upon it, he will have done better for himself, for his colleagues, for his party, and for the nation than if he makes any attempt to grant con- cessions in regard to the Education Bill. Concessions to opponents will not win a single vote. What will help is to push the Opposition hard, and to go into the battle with a new Cabinet evidently capable of plenty of work and plenty of fighting, and able at the same time to win respect for itself owing to the personal keenness, vitality, and. efficiency of those who compose it.
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