TOPICS OF THE DAY.
SOBER AND PASSIONATE CONSERVATISM. LORD BEACONSFIELD has always been a democratic Tory, and not in any sense a Conservative. And now it is noticeable enough that it is the Tories and the Democrats who are coming to his aid, and not the sober Conservatives who have confidence in Lord Derby, and who would like to see Lord Derby's policy in the ascendent. It is men like Lord Stratheden and Campbell, Lord Dorchester, and Captain Bedford Pim, who now bait the Government from the Tory side, while Mr. Cowen and those whose tendency it is to sympathise with Red Repub- licanism, goad it on to war from the Democratic side. The substantial men of the Conservative party,—the men on whose sobriety under exciting circumstances we can all de- pend,—men like Lord Redesdale and Mr. Russell Gurney,— remain profoundly silent, trusting to the sobriety of the Foreign Office in its present hands ;—while those who step in where true Conservatives fear to tread are men with political gas,—or water—on the brain, like Sir Robert Peel, and the recent interrogators of the Government. This is an anxious thing for the true Conservatives. Mr. Goschen said last week in the debate on the county franchise, that what produced in his mind most alarm in relation to the effects of the last Reform Bill was the diminished resisting power of the Conservative party,—a new tendency in that party to sway to and fro with the wishes of a fickle and unreasoning public outside. We have said elsewhere that on this point Mr. Goschen is almost certainly right. The Conservatives have become less of Conservatives, more of Democratic Tories, under the influence of the policy which has consisted, first, in emancipating the multitude, and then in emancipating the Crown. And the result in this direction is very far from good. The tendency of parties may always be profitably studied in the kind of mouthpieces which they find. Lord Stratheden and Campbell thought he had made a good point on Monday, when he applied to Lord Derby the passage from " Coriolanus :"—
" Sir, those cold ways That seem like prudent helps, are very poisonous Where the disease is violent."
But he did not care to remark that this was a democratic protest against sparing a true Conservative, who had just saved his country, and that it was spoken by a flatterer of the crowd. And when Lord Stratheden and Campbell, in his assumed self-restraint, declined to go on with the quotation, and apply to Lord Derby these further words launched against Coriolanus, " Lay hold upon him, and bear him to the rock," he really only shrank from acting out to the end the part of the unjust and infuriated democrat to whose authority he had appealed. Indeed, the Tory and Democratic attack of the present moment on Lord Derby is not at all unlike the attack made by the fickle mob on Coriolanus in the play from which Lord Campbell and Stratheden so unfortunately quoted. For the violent men of the party appear, like those in Shake- speare's play, to be in the main the weak men too, to whose authority nobody in times of soberness would attach any real weight. It is as far as possible from Conservative to take up the panics of the streets, and rush into war without any clear idea in one's head except Mr. Hardy's, that the flag of England ought to be flaunted in the face of " a monarch of vast resources," who is threatening our com- munications with our Eastern dependencies. That may be Tory policy, as it is no doubt Chauvinism ; but it is not Conservative, —for the Conservative, as such, thinks first of keeping all that is good, and rejects the idea of risking it till he feels sure that the risk is necessary in order to keep hold of the good. More and more it is evident that the old Conservatism, the Conserva- tism of the late Sir Robert Peel—whose title has descended to one who has no conception of the true meaning of the term,—is in danger of being replaced by a tumultuous and passionate Chauvinism, which gathers its inspiration not from a tenacious love of the great and durable inheritance of the past, but from the fluctuating impulses of the momentary present. Of course both the old Conservative and the new Demo- cratic Tories cling to the notion that their main motive is patriotism. But while the old Conservatism was sober patriotism governed by caution and taught by the difficult lessons of experience, the new Toryism is the patriotism of sudden passion and of unreasoning " scares." And nothing in the world can be more really hazard- ous, more likely to result in injury to that rich in- heritance of the past, on the sacredness of which the true Conservative stakes his faith, than this trail ing of coats and brandishing of shillelaghs at a moment when all Europe needs its utmost patience, its utmost coolness, and its utmost wisdom. This is a moment when no statesman not in the Cabinet can define any ob- ject for which we should go to war, or the means we should take to prosecute the war, if we decide on it. It is a moment in which no one out of the Cabinet knows whether Russia will, or will not, ask terms which are either injurious to Europe or danger- ous to Great Britain. But it is also a moment in which idle words and empty boasts spoken in London may provoke a struggle from which no Power in Europe may emerge without suffering and loss. Yet this is the moment chosen by men of the calibre of Lord Stratheden and Campbell, Lord Dorchester, and Captain Bedford Pim, et hoc genus mine, to bait the statesmen on whom responsibility hangs so heavily, and to try to tempt them into imprudent boasts. Whatever this policy may be, it is not Conservative.. It is not the policy of men who wish to guard jealously what they have, but of men who in the blaze of a popular panic wish to say the word and to do the deed which presents itself most easily to a boastful and irritated temper. If this is to continue so,—if the democratic tail of the Conservative party is to have the place of vantage in all great international crises of this kind, the Liberals will have to do for the people the work both of Liberals and also of international Conservatives at least. At present, nothing is more remarkable than the affiance between the Mob,—who hardly know where Constantinople is, or to whom it properly belongs,—and the Turkish Party in Parliament,—to all intents. and purposes a Tory party, though Lord Stratheden and, Campbell, we believe, calls himself a Liberal, and though. Mr. Cowen is unquestionably a Radical. It is not assuredly from the Tory Benches of either House that the thought- ful caution, the sober calculation, the self-restraint of the natural guardians of the country's fame, has been heard.. Lord John Manners months ago sounded the first battle- cry. In Edinburgh in December, Mr. Hardy flaunted the flag in the face of Russia, and has done nothing but flaunt it in his place in Parliament since. And Mr. Cross first roused the country into the mood of panic by the speech as to the Russian advance. Of course the hint has been taken. The old, steady Conserva- tives, who have noted and admired Lord Derby's pacific pertinacity, have found it safest to hold their tongues, while the men of no weight have revelled in spasms of patriotic wrath and angry menace. And yet the Liberals have been able to do little or nothing to sustain Lord Derby and Sir Stafford Northcote and the wiser Minis- ters, for any word they say in that direction is taken as proof positive that England is being betrayed by the only true Conservatives left in the Cabinet.
And yet it will be a very serious matter, if the party of authority is to be also the party of popular passion,—like the Imperialists in France, who, knowing that the name of Napoleon was closely bound up with the France of military victories, were fain to force a pacific people into a war by which provinces were lost, and France herself saved only so as by fire. However anxious the Liberals may be to do the neglected duty of the Con- servatives,—with a Conservative Government in power that will be impossible. Even now, the greatest difficulty of the Moder- ates in the Cabinet is that the Liberals do not assail them for that moderation ; and anxious as the latter may be to serve their country, they can hardly assume a rage they do not feel in order to restore the moderate Conservative Ministers to the confidence of their own intemperate and foolish partisans. In. times like these at least, the decay of Conservative sobriety is a sheer loss to the country and a great danger to the nation.
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