THE LEADERSHIP OF OPPOSITION.
SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT'S speech at Kirkcaldy suggests an inquiry of some interest as to the use and function of a leader of Opposition. No one, we suppose, will question Sir William Harcourt's provisional right to that title. Whatever may be Lord Rosebery's political future, he has completely got rid of his political present ; and with Lord Rosebery out of the way Sir William Harcourt is the only man who even professes to speak on behalf of the Liberal party upon all subjects that present themselves. Other members of the late Government criticise the departmental action of their successors in office, but Sir William Harcourt takes the whole policy of the Government for his subject, and invites his countrymen to say whether he has made good his indictment. It will be observed, however, that this is the only invitation he addresses to them. We rise from reading the Kirkcaldy speech with no knowledge whatever of what Sir William Harcourt would do if he were in office. There is a long criticism of the Forward policy on the Indian Frontier with which the Spectator at all events is not disposed to find fault. There is a sneer at the Government's attitude towards bimetallism, arising' from the fact that the Leader of the House is.a bimetal- list, which was to be expected from Sir William. There is a challenge to Army reformers to say whether they are prepared to give more millions to men whom they them- selves describe as "old fossils," which will possibly come home to many who are not Liberals. But we look in vain for any positive declaration of policy, for any indication of what we may expect from the Liberals in the way of legislation supposing that legislation were in their power.
We know, of course, what will be said in answer to this complaint. It may be summed up in two well-known epigrams: "The business of an Opposition is to oppose" and "A physician does not prescribe until he is called in." 'There is truth, no doubt, in both, but it is not a truth which can be stretched to cover Sir William Harcourt's case. The maxim "The business of an Opposition is to oppose" refers to work in Parliament. It is of the highest importance to the country that every Government should prepare its measures in the consciousness that they will be subjected to the most watchful and jealous scrutiny. 'There is no such trustworthy guarantee that Ministers will bestow on these measures all the care and skill that -they can command. When the Session has begun we do not ask of the Opposition Front Bench that it should tell us what they would have done had they themselves been in office. It is enough if they give their reasons for asking Parliament to disapprove of what the Government are doing. In three months' time Mr. Balfour will be trying to carry an Irish Local Government Bill, Lord Lansdowne will be explaining a scheme of Army reform, and Mr. Ritchie will be busy in defining the several powers of the London County Council on the one hand, and of the subordinate municipalities of Kensington and Westminster on the other. No one will expect the Opposition leaders to be ready with alternative proposals on all these subjects. They will have done all that is required of them when they have stated why, in their opinion, all these schemes are too faulty to merit accept- ance. So, again, with regard to the other maxim. It has to do not with legislation, but with administration. A doctor is only expected to prescribe when he is in a position to make a full diagnosis of the patient's symptoms. He must know all the particulars of his disease before he can pretend to cure it. Lord Kimberley may show where he thinks that Lord Salisbury has failed, but until he has access to all the materials in the Foreign Office he cannot be expected to say what steps ought to be taken to turn success into failure. An Opposition Front Bench labours under the 'standing disadvantage of having to apply old knowledge to new circumstances, to use information gained one, or two, or five years back for the criticism of action taken in the full light of in- formation which is up to date. Criticism resting on this foundation must be to a great extent negative. The physician has not the means of saying what medicines the patient should take ; he must confine himself to insisting that the medicines he is taking are doing him more harm than good.
The position of an Opposition leader outside Parlia- ment is not subject to these drawbacks. He can, of course, if he is so minded, confine himself to serving up once more the comments which he made on the Govern- ment measures of the previous Session. But rewarmed criticism is like rewarmed meat,—a good deal of the flavour and the nutriment has gone out of it. A Recess audience likes to have something positive set before it. Only a Minister can gratify this taste by the fore- shadowing of actual Bills to be brought forward in the coming Session. But a leader of Opposition, if he cannot be so precise in his promises as a Minister, can be far more magnificent. He will not, like the Minister, be asked to make good his words before the winter is well over,—at least, there is no probability that Sir William Harcourt will have any such demand made on him in the near future. He has only to describe the general course and character of the legislation of which the country stands in need, to arrange in something like the order of their relative importance the proposals which his party will lay before Parliament when the opportunity of so doing is once more theirs. If we had to construct a Liberal policy from Sir William Harcourt's speeches all we could do would be to set out the policy of the present Government, and then to prefix a minus sign to every particular. What will you do about the Army ? Not what Lord Lansdowne is doing. What are your views about education? Nothing like the Duke of Devon- shire's. What is your foreign policy ? What Lord Salisbury's is not. No doubt replies of this kind lend themselves in the mouth of a speaker of Sir William Harcourt's calibre to some very telling repartees. But parties cannot live by repartees alone, and we suspect that the electors of Kirkcaldy must have felt the need. of some more satisfying food, if not while they were actually listening to Sir William Harcourt, at least when they read his speech the next morning.
What has been said would apply to an Opposition leader at all times and in any circumstances. But it applies with much greater force in the circumstances in which Sir William Harcourt now finds himself. If the Liberals are to regain power at the next Election it must be his doing. He is the one man on that side—so long as Lord Rosebery remains outside politics—who has the faculty and the tradition of command. He has at least led the House of Commons ; and though this does not by itself establish his claim to the leadership of the party, it does, as things stand, mark him out as the man by whom, if by any one, the party must be reorganised. Moreover, the need of reorganisation is extraordinarily urgent. There has been a remarkable unanimity in the explanations given of the Liberal defeat. It has been recognised on all hands that it was due to the passion for programme- making, and to the necessity of keeping every separate group in good humour by giving it at least a splinter of a plank to itself. On the morrow of the last Election there was hardly a Liberal politician of any importance who did not agree that the first step towards recovery was the selection of a few leading objects to which the energies of the whole party might be directed, to the exclusion of the multitude of demands which appealed only to this or that section of it. More than two years have goee by since then, but the Liberal party is no nearer the discovery of these objects than it was in 1895. Its leaders have given it no help in the search, and without such help there is not the slightest probability that the party will follow it out with any degree of success. In one important respect, indeed, they are worse off now than they were then. Then the programme-makers were at least discouraged and ashamed. They were only anxious to conceal themselves from view, and to have their share in the Liberal disaster condoned, if not forgotten. Now, as we see from the wonderful Report of the Political Committee of the National Liberal Club, to which we called attention last week, the groups and the fractions of groups are once more raising their unabashed heads, and finding in the absence of any authorised policy a justifica- tion for airing anew their own special crazes. Apparently Sir William Harcourt thinks this a healthy and hopeful revival. At all events, he does nothing to check it. In a sense, of course, all this is no business of ours. A party without a policy, and a leader who can do nothing but find fault, are not adversaries whom we need be in. a hurry to get rid of. But in the long run the country is best off when each party knows its own principles and knows also the principles of its opponents. The Unionists certainly have not the latter advantage, and unless Liberals are gifted with an, extraordinary faculty of 'divination, they must equally lack the former.
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