TOPICS OF THE DAY.
AN ORGANIZED HYPOCRISY.
WE said last week that we hoped to take an early opportunity of pointing out what in our opinion is the proper course for the Opposition to adopt in attacking the present Government and turning them out of office. That much-needed work could never, we asserted, be accomplished by putting forward constructive policies on behalf of the Unionists, but solely by "showing up" the defects of the present Government. Ministries are not overthrown on a hypothesis—the hypothesis that the Opposition have got some wonderful patent way of curing the ills of the nation. They are overthrown by criticism of their intrinsic demerits. They fall through their failures and their follies. In what points is the present Cabinet specially open to attack ? How can it best be proved to the country that it is unworthy of its confidence ? What is the ruling passion or failing that is common to all its acts and makes its iniquities plain ?
To use a famous phrase, the present Government is "an organized hypocrisy." This taint of organized hypocrisy runs through all the corporate acts of Ministers and of the Liberal Party. They profess one set of opinions ; they act upon another. They are strong to denounce individual failings in their rivals; they pass those failings by without notice when they are to be found in their friends. They talk Socialism and practise capitalism. They are devotees of Free Trade and the bitter assailants of free exchange. They denounce Protection in the abstract and coquette with it in practice. Ministers drive in luxurious motor-cars from some millionaire's country house to a popular meeting and denounce the wickedness of the rich and their selfish pleasures — pleasures which Ministers have themselves enjoyed that very day or intend to enjoy on the morrow. They proclaim and belaud their poverty and their independence, and practise them in hotels de lure, sometimes at their own expense and sometimes at the expense of their capitalist acquaintance. They abominate sweating, yet but for the dogged resistance of the medical profession they would have sweated the doctors to the bone. The majority of the Liberal Party profess to be ardent in the cause of votes for women, yet contrive to escape, or assent to contrivances which enable them to escape, from their promises as to the franchise. They denounce slavery as the vilest of crimes, but rigidly maintain our alliance with a slave Power. Earnest Liberals condemn gambling and betting as causing evils as great as, if not greater than, the evils of intemper- ance; yet a large portion of their press performs the function of a public gambling table, and those who protest against such hypocrisy are told that they do so either because they do not realize the sanctity of Liberal principles or because they want to prevent the working classes from hearing the glad tidings of Radicalism. Captain Coe and his betting tips, his "Naps," and his "Morals," become indeed the evangel of purity, of high principle, and of civil and religious liberty.
Ireland is to become a nation because the will of the local majority must prevail in the matter of domestic government. But the northern counties of Ulster are to be coerced with blood and fire because there the will of the local majority differs from the will of the Nationalists of the rest of Ireland. It is "up with the local majority" in Dublin and Cork, and "down with it" in Belfast, Antrim, and Armagh. Liberal Ministers are to be free as air to invest or speculate, as long as they do not contract with a Govern- ment department and as long as they can plead good intentions. If their acts create an atmosphere of suspicion, those suspicions are due to "the nasty minds" of their opponents and to nothing else. If Ministers are reminded I hat they thought differently and spoke differently when their rivals were in power, we are naively told that circum- stances alter cases. What in a Liberal Minister is but a good investment, in a Unionist rival is flat wickedness. It is a high constitutional duty for Liberals to reform the House of Lords, but this duty is satisfied by a preamble— a promissory note, any talk of the redemption of which is an insult to be resented like a blow. Our Parliamentary system presents two great anomalies—plural voting and the endowment of one locality with twenty times the voting power possessed by another. Therefore the anomaly which is injurious to the Liberals must be altered, and the anomaly which is injurious to the Unionists left without change.
One might give plenty more examples, both in speech and action, of the growth of this organized hypocrisy which is now the Liberal Party, but what we have said must suffice for the moment. We may, however, before we leave the subject for the present, quote a specific example to show how far the demoralization of the Liberals has reached. It is a symptom clearly indicating the disease. After the Kendal election the Westminster Gazette gave prominence to an article entitled "The Kendal Majority : An Analysis by a Westmorland Elector. Special to the Westminster Gazette." The main idea of the article was to explain the reasons why the Liberals did not do as well as they ought to have done at the poll. After a good deal of criticism of the way in which the meetings were conducted and arranged and the nature of the speeches, the writer concludes with some general reflections as to how the Liberals should conduct by-elections. Mr. Somervell, it may be remembered, was the Liberal candidate :— " Finally, no speaker should take part in such a contest who does not know local conditions. We had, for instance, a lurid picture of what was called a Kendal slum,' which district happened to be Mr. Somervell's stronghold, and held not from a landlord but largely on freehold. At another meeting farmers were told that they must all work for 'a tax on land.' rhis scintillation came in the middle of a vigorous exposition of Ireland's wrongs, and was left quite without qualification. To be frank, the meeting had as well not been held—though otherwise it had been most pertinent and businesslike!'
What is the obvious meaning of this passage ? It is that Liberals ought only to talk about the evils of slums when those slums are held by wicked Tory landlords. When the shims cannot be described, after the manner of Mr. Lloyd George, as the devilish product of Unionism, the inevitable outcome of dukes and feudal landlordism, they should not be bothered about. When they are actually the product of the Liberal freeholder, " mum " must be the word. Again, "the tax on land," though it may be all right in Limehouse and when presented to urban audiences, must not be used in country districts. There it must be a case of
"Oh no, we never mention it, Its name is never heard ; Our lips are here forbid to frame That once familiar word."
Such "scintillations," to use the phrase of the writer in the Westminster Gazette, are, in places like Kendal, to be suppressed as most inexpedient. Delightful, too, is the reference to Ireland's wrongs. These, presumably, are only to be mentioned when there is an Irish vote to be won. There was no Irish vote in Kendal, and therefore a. "vigorous exposition of Ireland's wrongs" was quite out of place. It is astonishing that such an article should have been written. It is even more astonishing that so able and so cautious a newspaper as the Westminster Gazette should have inserted it"quite without qualification." It only shows that in this case, as in all others, political hypocrisy clouds the mind. It is a kind of dram-drinking which makes people soon lose all sense of proportion.
Previous page
