THE MINISTRY AND THE SHIPPING BILL.
UR. DISRAELI'S mismanagement of the Unseaworthy- In Ships Bill is more remarkable than his abandonment of the Merchant Shipping Bill. He is like a horse that stumbles. at the beginning of a hill, and goes on stumbling to the bottom, for no apparent reason but that he has already stumbled at the top. When it became clear that the nation were really roused by Mr. Plimsoll's outburst, there were two ways out of the difficulty open to the Government. They might have consulted their dignity, or they might have consulted their interest. They might have said, This is an acci- dental and causeless excitement, and we will not yield to it. The regulation of merchant shipping is a work of immense delicacy. A very slight difference in the wording of a clause may exert an unexpected and disastrous influence on the trade of the country, or may expose sailors to a new and unforeseen class of dangers. This is not a matter to be taken in hand in the closing hours of a Session. Blame us if you will for our neglect in not pushing the Merchant Shipping Bill on earlier, but do not blame us for refusing to legislate under the double draw- back of absence of time and presence of excitement. The House of Commons is never fit to discuss questions of this kind in August, and least of all is it fit to do so in an August which has been ushered in by a Plimsoll incident.' If the Govern- ment had put their foot down in this way, they might have been called hard, cruel, careless of human life, but they could not fairly have been called weak. From their own point of view, indeed, they would have had the best of the argument, and the best of the argument is not an advantage to be despised, even when the nation is in one of its most sentimental moods. Or they might have taken the exactly opposite line, have merged their own personality in that of the House of Commons, have proclaimed their readiness to adopt such precautions against the despatch of unseaworthy ships as would by general consent be adequate to meet the immediate need, and then have worked their Whip to death in order to ascertain what this general consent amounted to. In this case, they would have said very little about themselves, and a great deal about the national feeling of which they had constituted themselves the mouthpiece. Of course, a Ministry which so andisguisedly resigned itself to follow public opinion, instead of guiding it, must have been content to take a humble place in public- esteem. But when the country wants a particular thing done, it is glad to find some one ready to do it, and as at this period of the Session only Ministers can get a Bill through Parlia- ment, any lack of self-respect involved in their consenting to do what they were bidden, rather than what they thought best, would soon have been forgotten or condoned.
The line the Government have actually taken is a perversely ingenious combination of these opposite methods. There is all the sacrifice of dignity which belongs to the one, and all the risk of unpopularity which belongs to the other. Ministers have not resisted the enthusiasm of the moment, and at the- same time, they have not been able to make up their minds to- fall in with it. They have allowed the rising tide to dislodge them from their original position, but they have not suffered it to carry them onward to a new position. The consequence is that they have been struggling aimlessly in the waves, without either the courage to resist or the wisdom to yield to them. They have not even stood by their own second Bill. The idea of that Bill was at least an intelligible one. There was no time, the Government said, to define the conditions of safety in sea-going ships, but it was possible to send down surveyors armed with large and uncertain powers of stopping any ship which appeared to them not to fulfil those conditions. The- Government have now discovered that the country will not be satisfied with this. One surveyor may judge sea-going ships strictly in the interest of the sailors, but another may judge them laxly in the interest of the shipowners. There are some points, at all events, which seem to be sufficiently well estab- lished to allow of their being laid down in the Bill, and among these points may certainly be included the fixing of an owner's load-line, the limitation of deck cargoes, and the prohibition of carrying grain in bulk. When once Ministers had made up their minds to carry an Unseaworthy Ships Bill, it would not have cost them much more to make it in these respects such a Bill as would have satisfied that public sentiment in deference to which the Bill was introduced. Or, if that is asking too much, they might, at any rate, have kept themselves open to convic- tion, and have accepted the suggestions of the House of Com- mons with decent promptness, instead of rejecting them as long as it could be done without risk of defeat, and then yielding with the worst possible grace to unmistakable pressure. On
Monday the Chancellor of the Exchequer devoted precious time, great ingenuity, and much hastily-acquired knowledge to proving that even an owner's load-line could not be prescribed by the present Bill. Another year, with a session before instead of behind it, the House of Commons might take up the question anew, and settle it as the Government had themselves proposed to settle it in the withdrawn Merchant Shipping Bill. Later in the even- ing, Sir Charles Adderley, naturally thinking that he could not go wrong in being firm where Sir Stafford Northcote had been firm before him, declared that he " could not, unless larger opportunity for discussion should now be afforded, accept even the proposal to enact the clause relating to load-lines which was included in the measure introduced and afterwards with- drawn by Her Majesty's Government." The experience of two Sessions has not enabled Sir Charles Adderley to calculate Mr. Disraeli's orbit. The Prime Minister stood ready to " aid, not coerce," his colleague, and his notion of aid was to rise shortly afterwards and "suggest for the adoption of the Committee a course which he believed would meet the exigencies of the case." The course which Mr. Disraeli believed would meet the exigencies of the case turned out to be to throw the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the President of the Board of Trade overboard, and to promise on behalf of the Government " to bring up in the report a clause conceived in the spirit of their own proposition in their own original Bill." If Mr. Disraeli had gone on to say that the principle of leaving the surveyors free to frame their own canons of seaworthiness having once been infringed, the Government would consent to the prohibi- tion of deck cargoes and of carrying grain in bulk, he would have done all that was still in his power to do to cover the retreat of - the Cabinet. He preferred, however, to insist on fighting and defeating the first proposal, and on fighting and compromising the second. Deck cargoes are to be permitted, unless the surveyors choose to forbid them, and cargoes of grain in bulk are to be permitted under the same limitation, provided that the grain so carried does not exceed one-third part of the cargo. The force of weakness could no further go. Enough has been conceded to make the Bill inconsistent ; enough has been refused to leave the Bill incomplete ; and the general result is that every one is dissatisfied, and yet the Government have not got their own way. This is the spectacle presented, at the end of their second Parliamentary year, by a Cabinet which was beyond all others to be a Cabinet of practical statesmanship and businesslike energy ; and the Minister who is chiefly responsible for this state of things is the Minister who has the reputation beyond most of his contemporaries of being a man of tact and Parlia- mentary discretion. Where is the tact of allowing one Minister after another to say that a thing is impossible, and in the end getting up yourself to promise that it shall certainly be done? Where is the discretion of first setting up a principle by which Parliament is to be guided, and then insisting that this principle • shall be strictly adhered to in one out of three substantially identical cases, while allowing it to be waived in the other two ? These are not the mistakes of a careless leader, who finds that he has bit by bit involved himself in difficulties out of which he cannot see his way. That was a fair excuse for the original blunder of allowing the Merchant Shipping Bill to he so long on the stocks that there was no time left to deal with it properly ; but it is no explanation of the mistakes of a leader who, after rousing himself to recognise the existence of a strong feeling out-of-doors, cannot, or will not, resist the lethargy which steals over him so soon as the immediate need for satisfying that feeling seems to have passed away.
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