CONSERVATIVE LANGUOR.
pROBABLY too much has been said of the weak attendance of Unionist Members in the preliminary divisions of the House of Commons. It is not usual with the Whips to strain the bonds very tightly during the early weeks of a Session which is expected to be one of severe struggle. The necessity has hardly arisen for pitched battles, and it is not good policy to forestall neces- sity. The rider who takes all the wind out of his horse in the first few minutes, will hardly get a good spurt out of him at the supreme moment of the race. On the other hand, it can hardly be doubted that, even amongst Con- servative Members of Parliament, there is a very strong disposition to deprecate the necessity for another Dissolu- tion within the year, or indeed in the present year at all. Election funds are exhausted, electoral energies are exhausted ; electoral hope is not vivid, for in the greater number of county constituencies where the rural squires still retain a good part of their former ascendency, the Gladstonian Party have made so many assaults on their seats, and have so much diminished their majority in a great many cases where they have not carried the seat, that it is a very faint-hearted feeling with which the squires look to a renewal of the battle so lately fought, and in which, after so much uphill work, they attained so very moderate an amount of satisfaction. It is different, no doubt, in the great towns and cities of England. Here for the most part, there is a growing sense of security. But most of the recent by-elections have been fought, and especi- ally most of the recent reverses have been experienced, in the rural constituencies ; and there it cannot be doubted that the feeling of depression amongst the Unionists has been sufficiently conspicuous. The prospect of any early renewal of the great struggle, is looked forward to with very great blankness by all those county Unionists who are not so deeply convinced of the danger of any great relaxation of the Union between this country and Ireland, that all personal considerations fall into the shade in the ardour of their desire to defeat Mr. Gladstone's plans. We fear that, after all, the chief reason for a certain languor among the Conservatives is chiefly this,—that they hardly realise the enormous relative importance of the question of the Union, while they do realise, in a manner which Liberal Unionists cannot altogether appreciate, the hopelessness of preventing the encroachment of Liberal ideas on other and more social aspects of the issues between the two parties, They feel that in the new County Councils democratic ideas have dangerously undermined the social influence of the county families ; they are alarmed at the upheaval of new couches sociales, new strata of society ; and they hear every day doctrines propounded as to" unearned increment" and the payment of Members, which render them very much more uneasy than the prospect of that relaxation of the tie between Ireland and England, the effect of which they hardly realise, and which certainly does not come home to their hearths and bosoms as do matters which threaten the order of the society in which they live, and the immediate means of living of half their relations and friends. In short, they find it difficult, as they recall the struggles of the last seven years, to per- suade themselves that the one great issue on which, if they would only pull strongly together, they might very easily gain a complete victory, is anything like as important to them as the many issues on which they are certain of ultimate defeat. Consequently, they cannot help a certain indifference creeping upon them as to the ultimate fate of the one great battle which they might assuredly win, when they think of the very many battles which they are yearly losing, and which even their new leaders are eager to impress upon them that they not only must lose, but must be quite willing to lose, and to assure their constituents that they are even anxious to lose. We do not feel the least doubt that this is one of the great reasons why many of the political and local leaders of Conservatism seem to be so apathetic in fighting the great battle of the day. They put forth all their energies during a seven years' war of no ordinary severity, and were beaten ; and though the beating was not at all decisive on the one great question of the day, it was accom- panied by so many disheartening surrenders on minor questions, that the disappointment of the defeat told much more severely upon them than it would have done had they not sacrificed so much that was dear to them socially in order to turn the political scales, and sacrificed it apparently in vain. To see their landed property undergoing deprecia- tion, their social station attacked, their influence rivalled or even exceeded by that of professional politicians, to find their judgment puzzled by all seals of philanthropic proposals which seem at once vague and dangerous, yet to which they dare not turn a cold shoulder without being aware that it will ruin their political influence at once, is full of paralysing significance to all genuine Conservative instinct, and operates, we think very naturally, though very unfor tunately, by cooling Conservative zeal even for the one cause whiela is still hopeful, and on which, if they only cared enough about it, they might still easily win a final and decisive victory. If the old order is changing so rapidly and so completely that they will hardly recognise the world of their youth in the world of their manhood, even though the union of Ireland and Great Britain be maintained, they find it hard to be enthusiastic about maintaining it, since there is so much that has gone, or must go, without which the Union will hardly seem worth maintaining. These are considerations which very naturally affect the old Conservatives much more than they affect the Liberal Unionists, and no doubt it is amongst Conservatives of the older school, and not amongst Liberal Unionists, that the languor of which we speak chiefly prevails. Many of the Liberal Unionists,— Mr. Chamberlain, for instance,—sympathise very keenly with the tendencies which are undermining all the old Conservative traditions. But till a race of Conservatives has grown up which is refashioned in the mould of the democracy, it is impossible to be surprised at the depressing influence which is produced on Conservatives by the rapid advance of all the assumptions of the new democracy, and the sense of weakness and lassitude which makes it difficult to fight hard even on issues where the general conditions favour success.
Nevertheless, we think the Conservatives to blame in not throwing more heart into the contest. After all, social mistakes always have a tendency to correct themselves, though they do turn things very much upside down until the correcting influence makes itself felt. The attempt to legislate away social inequalities will soon show itself to be an impossibility, and, not only an impossibility, but a blunder which aggravates the inequalities that it attempts to remove. But a fundamental constitutional change of a mischievous kind has no tendency to correct itself. It weakens the State in which it occurs without restoring the elasticity necessary to undo what has been done. Let England once succumb to the lawless agitation which has done so ;much to injure Ireland, and she will take a step down in the world from which we could hardly expect her to recover. A nation that has lost self-confidence in its own genius is very apt to go steadily downwards. And if we are once beaten in England by the agrarian conspiracy in Ireland, we shall lose self- confidence in our own genius. The main characteristic of the modern Gladstonians as distinguished from the old Liberals is a spurious humility which begs pardon of the lawless for having arrested them in their career, and abases itself before those who stimulate the evil passions of selfish men, because it has not recognised the latent good involved in all that fierce and furious impatience of misery. The Gladstonians want us to go about hat in hand to every cruel and selfish combination of popular wrath, on the ground that had we not made some grave mistake in the past, this cruel and selfish com- bination would never have come into existence. Per- haps not. But no ' great State can afford to grovel before lawless evil, simply because lawless evil is often the offspring of narrow and blundering statesman- ship. The true Liberalism, like the true Conservatism, punishes lawlessness first, and finds the remedy for bad statesmanship afterwards. If we suddenly stop, as Mr. Gladstone stopped in mid-career of a great effort to reform the Irish land system, in order to flatter Boycotters and excuse Campaigners, and ask them to take our places in the government of Ireland, we shall forfeit our rank in history, and ruin Ireland as well. Hard as it may be for the old Conservatives to throw their whole hearts into so purely political a battle, when they see so much that they prized disappearing around them, they may be sure of this, that if they do not fight and win this battle, in which the ancient ways are certainly the ways of righteous- ness, they will give a shock to the greatness of England and the cause of Constitutionalism, from which Conserva- tives will not recover for many generations.
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