ART. XI.-Hansard's Parliamentary Debates. August 1892. THE HE future Government,' declared Mr. Gladstone in the House of Commons on August 9, whilst still leading the Opposition, must be judged upon its acts and words 'when it comes into existence, and cannot possibly be judged 'while it remains a nebulous hypothesis.' The nebulous hypothesis' has come to pass, and a wondering people is awaiting, not without anxiety, the acts and words' of Mr. Gladstone's third administration.

Six months ago, on the supposition that Mr. Gladstone would obtain a majority at the then impending General Election, we ventured to suggest for the consideration of our readers the not unimportant question of what he would do ' with it.' To that question the experience of the next few months is to give an answer. Mr. Gladstone, whilst in alliance with the Irish Home Rulers, at last finds himself supported by a majority of the House of Commons. He has already carried in that House a vote of no confidence in the Ministry of Lord Salisbury. He has formed his Cabinet. In February next he will meet Parliament prepared to lay before the country in detail that policy for the reconstruction of the British constitution which, till he had been voted into office, he was determined to keep concealed from the British people.

To the very last moment the policy of secrecy, based upon the double distrust of their own plans and of their own supporters, has been maintained by Mr. Gladstone and his friends. The recent conduct of Home Rule statesmen in the debate, which ended by placing them in office, would surely have moved to laughter all in whom the sense of the ridiculous is not dead were it not, alas! that there are issues at stake which make the advent to power of Mr. Gladstone no laughing matter for his country.

He

Never in our previous history has there been so singular a Parliamentary crisis! In the House of Lords Lord Kimberley, as leader of the Gladstonian Peers, declared himself in agreement with the speech from the throne. abstained from all criticism of the policy or action of the Ministry and from any suggestion that a change of Government would benefit the people! So much for the Peers!

In the House of Commons Mr. Asquith was put up to move an amendment of no confidence to the Address-that is to say, an amendment which declared that the Government

ought to possess, but did not possess, the confidence of that House and of the country. Surely on such an occasion the representatives of the people would debate the policy of the Government they were invited to condemn, and would hear some announcement of policy from statesmen to whom they were asked to entrust the destinies of the State. But no! It did not suit the Home Rule party that politics should be discussed in the face of the enemy. They might wax eloquent on party platforms, but on those occasions their opponents were not present, and most of those who cheered their speeches might be trusted never to hear the other side. The Home Rule party would be false to its whole history of the last six years were its leaders to fall into argument with its Unionist opponents. It is not Mr. Asquith's fault that nature and training have made him a lawyer rather than a statesman; but surely on such an occasion even he might have remembered that the House of Commons is the arena upon which the great political differences between parties have to be fought out, and that it is impossible to narrow a Parliamentary discussion, on a vote of confidence, to the mere terms of an amendment in the way he would himself confine an argument in banco to the construction of a particular document or keep a jury to the single issue with which they have to deal. There is something positively refreshing in the naïveté of his contention. The amendment contained an expression of 'opinion and a statement of fact. The opinion that the Government of her Majesty ought to possess the confidence of the House and of the country, no one would, he imagined, be prepared to controvert. The amendment must, therefore, be opposed upon the statement of fact. No other topic was relevant to the issue.' Therefore, to discuss Home Rule in a debate which was intended to end in the placing in power of a Home Rule administration would be irrelevant; to refer to the wrongs done or to mistakes made by the Government which it was intended to turn out would be irrelevant in short, to debate in any way the great issue between the Unionists and the Gladstonians, between the Government and the Opposition, in a debate the very object of which was to make the Government and Opposition change places, would be irrelevant.' This ingenious contention found favour with Mr. Gladstone, yet Mr. Asquith himself, in dire necessity, trespassed a little beyond the limits he had prescribed. In the eyes of this singular Liberal the • Pory party' was much to blame, for it had actually abandoned its old Tory ism and even compromised its traditions.'

t had gone in for a mass of peddling and hysterical legisation' in order to gain the support of a wretched band of beral Unionists, gentlemen who had shown in their support the Government a perverted fidelity which was rare in the annals of political apostasy.' 'More matter with less art,' next time, Mr. Asquith, and beware of being led by an expression of opinion' into making what is the very reverse f a statement of fact'!

It seems hardly credible that no Liberal statesman, with he exception of Mr. Gladstone himself, should have spoken n support of the no-confidence amendment. Mr. Balfour and Mr. Goschen, Mr. Chamberlain and Sir Henry James, Sir John Lubbock, Mr. Jesse Collings, Mr. T. W. Russell, and many other able men of varied eminence and of many shades of opinion, put forward their views. Irish members pressed for an answer to questions which they had a right to ask. Sir William Harcourt, Mr. Morley, Sir George Trevelyan, Mr. Fowler, and the whole front bench of the Opposition remained silent. Seldom have men been more severely scourged in debate than were those luckless lieutenants of Mr. Gladstone during the hour that they sat listening to the withering scorn and unanswerable reasoning of Mr. Chamberlain. To questions, as to arguments, they were deaf

'Not theirs to make reply,

Not theirs to reason why.'

Their business was to vote out of office the Government, and to vote into office themselves; and the less reasoning and discussing of the why and the wherefore the better for them! Oh! gallant three hundred !

The debate was a one-sided one, as the Opposition refrained persistently from attempting to make out any case either for the condemnation of the late Ministry or for their own claim to the confidence of the public. This was the very characteristic closing scene of the strange drama of the last six years. The debate of last August was but the finishing touch, so to speak, to that discreditable and deliberate policy of mystery and concealment which Mr. Gladstone has pursued since the country rejected his famous Home Rule Bill in 1886. The game of silence was a difficult one to play, but Mr. Gladstone has played it with complete success. He has brought himself into office, and his party for the moment into line, but it is by force only of having excluded from that party, or suppressed within it, every appearance of political individuality, every sense of personal

responsibility at a time when the country has great need. both in its public men.

The curtain will shortly lift for the last act of the Home Rule play. Home Rule has many supporters in the Cabinet in Parliament, in the country, who will remain Home Rulers without flinching so long as the Home Rule itself remains but a blank sheet of paper. Some of M Gladstone's followers ardently desire that for yet a link longer it should so remain. They rest happy in possession! of the information vouchsafed to them before the General Election by Sir William Harcourt that their policy is 'justice to Ireland in the form of Home Rule.' They are at the present time more free than ever from doubts and difficulties, for has not Mr. Gladstone himself in the late debate just assured them that his Home Rule principles are limited on the one hand by the full and effectual maintenance of the imperial supremacy which pervades the whole of the Empire, and on the other hand by an equally full and effectual transfer to Ireland of the management of her 'local concerns'? These sanguine dreamers will have a rough wakening. The Cabinet will meet a few weeks hence with the aforesaid sheet of paper before them. For a few weeks more it will still be possible to shroud their meetings in all the mystery of those dark séances so dear to the spiritualistic medium. Light, however, must be admitted at last, and then the British public will judge by the result whether the men they have put in power and the methods these men have pursued have been the right men and the right methods to bring about changes in our constitution of a more fundamental and far-reaching character than the last two centuries of British history have witnessed.

We wish to consider the immediate political future of the country; both the work that Mr. Gladstone has undertaken to do, and the qualifications of those who are to do it. It is only by appreciating clearly the nature of the work that we can estimate beforehand the qualifications of the workmen. Again, we do not ask our readers to contemplate individual Ministers merely as the chiefs of the departments to which they have been appointed. It may be that Sir William Harcourt is a heaven-born Chancellor of the Exchequer, that in the natural fitness of things Mr. Arnold Morley is the right man to direct the Post Office, Mr. Bryce to perform the mysterious functions of the Chancellor of the Duchy, and Mr. Herbert Gardner to superintend the interests of British agriculture. True, the British public does

not know this, but then how can it? It is the collective wisdom of the Cabinet, their collective character, their collective capacity to govern the country, which is all-important at the present time. How much weight should be attached to the wisdom, political character, and capacity, of the most prominent amongst the present advisers of the Queen, the British public has had before it ample material for judging. It is two years and more since Sir George Trevelyan loudly rejoiced that after a quarter of a century of Parliamentary life he was now sitting in the front of a party which was truly Liberal.' The expression was admirably chosen.

No one who remembers the late House of Commons could suppose that Sir George Trevelyan was one of the leaders of the Liberal party, but he and his present colleagues indubitably sat in front of' those who sat behind them. Of the members then sitting on the Speaker's left hand, there were, however, more than 150 who did not profess allegiance to the Gladstonian Front Bench at all, and of the remainder there was a large number who most assuredly were in the habit of looking for guidance elsewhere. The Opposition was one of groups, and the only group which could be said with any truth to be really led by the Front Bench was not a very large one. Without the Irish Separatists, and without the followers of Mr. Labouchere, the Opposition during the whole of the late Parliament was, in point of numbers, contemptible. And, let it be observed, no one knew this better than the Front Bench itself. Yet it is from the official section alone of the late Opposition that Cabinet Ministers have been chosen.

The first duty of the Government is to maintain the law and to preserve the peace in every part of the United Kingdom. They must provide, out of the taxes which they impose, for the necessary requirements of the public service. They have to protect the dignity and the interests of Great Britain against any slight or injury they may receive from the other nations of the world. These duties claim their attention as a Government, even before those which Mr. Gladstone and his colleagues have taken upon themselves with regard to future legislation.

Now it happens that it is the performance of these elementary duties of government which has been the main subject of censure by the late Opposition. To denounce the policy of passing the Crimes Act was one thing; to denounce the conduct and character of every judge, magistrate, policeman, or other official engaged in carrying out the law which