TOPICS OF THE DAY.
MR. PLIMSOLL AND THP. GOVERNMENT.
WE were evidently right last week in anticipating that Mr. Plimsoll's loss of self-control in the House of Commons would be likely to gain him a greater hold over the country than even all his former persevering and enthusiastic efforts. Nor can we regret in this particular instance that it has been so ; for Mr. Plimsoll's apology to the House was so frank, and the excuses for his excitement,—when one considers the strain of constant anxiety, sometimes from midnight telegrams as to the imminent departure of crazy outward-bound vessels, sometimes from harrowing stories of wrecks, which he believed that his proposed measure would have averted,—were so suffi- cient, that if we were not afraid that the lesson of Mr. Plim- soll's success may be laid to heart by less conscientious and less scrupulous agitators, we should feel nothing but relief that the country has at last been roused to feel a sincere and definite political interest in a good cause. We cannot, however, be quite free from the fear that very different men from Mr. Plimsoll may study the lesson of the last week, and that a mode of action which will diminish the authority of the House of Commons as a deliberative Assembly, and foster the habit of brow-beating it from outside under the protection of excited popular feeling, may gradually grow up,—a state of things which would, of course, very rapidly lead to the de- generation of English representative government. But for the present, we obviously need not indulge fears of this sort. The complete failure of the Kenealys at Hartlepool may in- deed, perhaps, be to some extent ascribed to the contrast so forcibly presented to English electors between Mr. Plimsoll's genuine, though somewhat morbid, earnestness and enthusiasm, and Dr. Kenealy's political charlatanerie ; so that any effect which the Plimsoll incident may have had in encouraging
auitators to override the House of Commons will have been 0 more or less compensated by this—let us hope final—bursting of the Kenealy bubble, which must tend in the opposite direction. The genuineness of Mr. Plimsoll's passionate sympathy with the sufferings of the people has come so opportunely to disenchant the English public with a mere political mountebank, that we may fairly set off his pardonable error against the unmistakably true ring of his popular sympathies, and congratulate ourselves that the man who certainly set a rather dangerous example has by his sincerity of purpose fortunately given the people the means of testing the hollowness of a rival agitator of very dif- ferent qualities. And as regards the future, we can only hope that the English people will be very wary in encouraging others to imitate the questionable example which Mr. Plimsoll has himself been the first publicly to censure and frankly to regret.
Passing from the larger and more conspicuous effects of Mr. Plimsoll's outbreak on popular feeling and opinion, to its immediate results to the Government, we shall hardly find those results less important, though in this case there will certainly be no difficulty in judging how very little way the favourable consequences will go towards balancing the unfavourable consequences. Last week Mr. Disraeli, in moving the discharge of the order for the resumption of the Committee on the Merchant Shipping Bill, gave no indication whatever of any intention to ask the House to replace it by a temporary measure. But no sooner had the wave of feeling raised in the country by Mr. Plimsoll's impetuousness been reflected back on the House, than the Government were compelled to give notice of a Bill asking for special power for a single year to restrain unseaworthy vessels from going to sea, in order to avert the fatal results to the lives of sailors which Mr. Plimsoll in his protest had predicted from the withdrawal of the Government Bill. Of course nothing could have had a more mischievous influence on the reputation of the Adminis- tration. Here was a Minister who had deliberately withdrawn a Bill which he now at last admitted to be of such vast im- portan& to the country that he had to ask for the means of hastily and imperfectly guarding himself against the consequences of his own grave error. The Constituencies are not blind to the meaning of such a fact as that. They know perfectly well that Mr. Gladstone, by his energy and mastery of his duties, pushed through measures of much greater difficulty, and of a far more bitterly contested character than the Merchant Shipping Bill, year after year,—simply by using a little foresight and then exercising a great deal of resolution and self- command. The present Government, however, threw away its most important measure with its own hands, and then had to come to Parliament to condone its legislative blunder, and ask it to lodge very unusual administrative powers in quite untried. hands. The powers which Sir Charles Adderley's late-born. Bill asks for the new Inspectors are very unusual powers, and of a nature which clearly require careful legislative definition, and this the Bill does not propose to give. Nothing is more certain than that, as Mr. Rathbone says, the tendency, of greatly increasing the administrative checks adopted by Government, is greatly to decrease the sense of responsibility on the part of ship-owners ; and that this loss of the only efficient check on unscrupulousness is a much more serious one than the gain of any kind whatever of merely official check on it. We strongly suspect that Mr. Plimsoll will succeed, not only in forcing the Government to legislate this year,— that is almost done,—but that he will force them to legislate rather in his sense than in theirs ; that he will introduce into their Bill securities against deck-loading, and against grain cargoes lodged in bulk, and perhaps also in favour of a system of classification, which will alter the purpose of the Govern- ment as to the kind of measure to be passed, as much as it has been already altered as to the passing of any measure at all. But if this should prove so, it is a sort of blow which the repu- tation of Mr. Disraeli's Government will hardly recover. To have so decisive a censure passed on the withdrawal of their Merchant Shipping Bill as the country has already passed,—so decisive, indeed, that they have been forced to shape their course anew,—and then to be per3mptorily overruled by the House even in relation to what they then propose to do, that will clearly give something like the coup de greice to any chance of earning credit as a sound business Administration, for good-sense, clear judgment, and strong will. In that case, the Government will not only have wavered as to what course to pursue, when it should have been firm, but after wavering and wavering, it will have chosen the wrong course. A Government which delays action till the country has condemned it for inaction, and then chooses the sort of action which the House condemns as the wrong sort, obviously forfeits every kind of pretence to prestige. The country wants guidance as to what new laws it should adopt, but this Government goes for guidance to the country. The House wants guidance as to the shape those laws should assume, but if Mr. Plimsoll should succeed in essentially altering the outlines of the Government's last proposals, then this Government will have fallen back on the guidance of the House even as to the detail of its recommendations. An Administration which wakes up to a great need only when the country begins to clamour, and is quite at a loss how to meet that need till the House takes the matter into its own hands, is not likely to. earn credit of any sort.
The truth is that Mr. Disraeli is trying to live by tact. The tact with which he accepted Mr. Plimsoll's apology on Thurs- day was as conspicuous as ever. On great occasions, he can almost always catch the mood of the country and the House, and appear even to redeem a blunder by the grace of his apology. But no Administration can live by tact, even in quiet times like our own. Govern- ing well is stiff work ; governing decently is not easy ; governing by chaff and tact is not possible at all. You cannot make social qualities do duty for political qualities. You cannot make a good Prime Minister out of a ready man of the world, who is merely that, and nothing more. Industry, knowledge, intensity of purpose,—all the qualities for which iff.r. Gladstone received so much contumely,—are necessary to carry through a great Administration, though they may be all the better for being modified by the lighter qualities in which Mr. Disraeli shines. At his present age at least, we fear that Mr. Disraeli has hardly the stuff left in him for a Prime Minister ; and his colleagues must be content to suffer for the blunders which his indolence and nonchalance have caused.
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