ART. XI.—THE COUNTRY AND THE GOVERNMENT.

Speech of the Right Hon. Joseph Chamberlain, M.P., at the Albert Hall. Times, July 8, 1905.

IN N June 1885, when Mr. Gladstone's Government was defeated on the Spirit Duties, few men would have predicted that during the succeeding twenty years, with but two short breaks, his political opponents would remain in power. True, in several respects, Mr. Gladstone's Administration had been very unfortunate; but his personality still towered high above his rivals. The Opposition in the House of Commons was singularly weak and ineffective; and for the time being its leaders suffered from the hardly disguised distrust and dislike manifested towards them by the bellicose young Tories below the gangway. The arts of deliberate obstruction had been brought to a high pitch by the members of the so-called 'Fourth Party'; and Sir Stafford Northcote's disposition to check the recklessness of Opposition out of respect to the dignities of the House and the higher interests of the country received little consideration at their hands. If these were the coming men of the Conservative Party in 1885, where was the country to look for that sense of responsibility which it expects from the statesmen who are to govern it? The majority on the Spirit Duties was obtained by the alliance with the Conservatives of Irish Nationalists exasperated by the measures which Mr. Gladstone was taking to enforce law and order in Ireland and to destroy the tyranny of the Land League. The alliance had been skilfully engineered by Lord Randolph Churchill, and the remarkable scene within the House, when the numbers of the fatal division were announced at the table, showed clearly enough to whom the victory of the moment really belonged. What hope was there for a party which would bid so high for a triumph evidently destined to prove as short-lived as it was discreditable?

So, many men on both sides, and the great majority of those who belonged to the Liberal Party, reasoned, and reasoned wrongly, in 1885. They saw the strained relations, perhaps even the personal jealousies and animosities, that existed amongst those who sat on the Speaker's left hand. They failed to recognize the wide differences (kept as long as possible and as much as possible below the surface) that prevailed within their own party. Very well grounded suspicion was general at the time that the

defeat in June was partly due to a calculation that the fall of the Liberal Administration on the Spirit Duties was the best method of avoiding a complete and open rupture in the Liberal Party on deeper issues. Liberals did not and could not, at that time, foresee that Mr. Gladstone would take a new departure in Irish policy which would draw a fresh division between political parties. But the greatest mistake of Ministerial prophets twenty years ago was the assumption that a reckless and irresponsible Opposition, when it accedes to power, will be reckless and irresponsible still. Orthodox Ministerialists, especially if they have been long in power, always genuinely believe that a general overturn must accompany their own fall. It is impossible in their eyes that the country should be well governed by other men. The longer an Opposition is out of office the less responsible its language and action tend to become. It is no doubt very unsatisfactory, to men of judicial temperament, that partisans on the one side and the other should not think and speak with greater calmness. But the country thoroughly understands it all, and discounts the language of politicians in Parliament, on the platform, and in the press, paying due regard to the position of the politicians who address them. The electorate does not for a moment question Mr. Balfour's sincerity in holding that his Administration alone stands between them and national disaster. But being essentially and for the most part intelligent and experienced men, electors take their own view of the situation, intend that the country shall be rationally governed, whoever is in office, and regard no statesman, not even Mr. Balfour, as absolutely essential to that end.

The Prime Minister indeed would at the present time carry far greater weight with the country if he would remember that it is not only his own partisans whom he addresses, and upon whom the prolongation of his power depends. In the recent discussions on the alleged scandals in connection with the sales of stores in South Africa, Mr. Balfour urged, with much party hardihood, that even had the Administration served the country badly and made serious errors, it was perfectly certain that his political opponents, had they been in office, would have done much worse! An observation of this kind always draws hearty cheers from his own benches. But how flat and foolish language of the sort sounds to the ordinary citizen! Of course, if we believe that all patriotism, all political wisdom, and all administrative skill are the monopoly of Mr. Balfour and his friends in

office, there is no more to be said. But this is precisely what the country, irrespective of party, does not believe; and the Prime Minister should be on his guard against manifesting a complacency of attitude in circumstances which the generality of the public cannot but regard as proving deplorable mismanagement of the national business. When Mr. Chamberlain, with much encouragement from the Prime Minister, embarked on his Fiscal Crusade, a deep division amongst Unionists was inevitable. Mr. Balfour entirely failed to measure the importance of what had happened. Mr. Chamberlain cannot be accused of any want of explicitness in the policy which from the beginning he has urged upon the country. Free Trade was ruinous to British labour. Free imports were causing us to lose ground to Protectionist rivals. Corn and other articles of food reaching our shores from foreign lands must be taxed. Duties must be put on imported manufactures to give our home producers a chance. The Colonies would fall away from us if, instead of giving them a preference, we persisted in keeping British markets open freely to the whole world. The commercial and industrial condition was so alarming that an immediate remedy must be found. The case was one of the greatest urgency. There was no time for the delay of a Royal Commission. Complete cure of all our ills was at hand, if we would only rid ourselves of 'Cobdenism,' and imitate the commercial systems of the United States, of Germany, and of Russia. To induce the country to enter upon this Fiscal Revolution, all the old fallacies of Protectionism, all the exploded fiscal doctrines of past generations, have been paraded before us, as if they were the discoveries of an enlightened age. Protection would restore a prosperous peasantry to our deserted fields. It would heighten wages. It would increase the employment of labour, and render the demand for labour constant. It would ensure the British manufacturers the command of British markets. It would enable them to triumph over foreign rivals in the neutral markets of the world. All this we were offered if we would follow the guidance of Mr. Chamberlain.

To us it seems that not theory only, but the past and present experience of our own and other countries, show the disastrous folly of the policy Mr. Chamberlain wishes to revive. We do not, however, wish to reargue the great controversy of Free Trade versus Protection; but we would point out that the Protectionist leader has as yet apparently made no way whatever with the electorate, and has not obtained

in his campaign the assistance of any English statesman of high standing. He has succeeded in evading the discussion on the merits of his policy in the House of Commons. On the other hand, he has achieved considerable success with electoral organizations, and he has been widely supported by the newspaper press. In short, he has gone far to identify the Conservative Party with his policy, and in so doing has brought about results little less than disastrous to the influence of that party in the country. Such changes in the balance of power are never fully realized at first by the public. For the most part politicians are party men whose wishes colour their beliefs. A Government has always great influence with those who interpret public opinion. In their eyes criticism of the Administration never means more than an impatient desire of political opponents to enter upon office. Their public meetings are always declared to be enthusiastic.' Till rupture has actually occurred, differences of opinion, however deep, between members of the same Administration, or within the party ranks, are officially and vigorously denied. Party caucuses send to headquarters the most loyal promises of the heartiest support. Bye-elections are said to offer no indication of the general feeling of the country, though from one end of it to the other they seem to tell the same tale of no confidence in the Government. And so men are persuaded to dwell in a veritable fool's paradise till comes the grand crash of a general election, and a great party falls-possibly for a generation.

In 1886 Mr. Gladstone carried with him the great majority of his party; but, though he little knew it at the time, he had lost for ever the support of a majority of British constituencies. The cause on which he had embarked was declared to be the great end and object of the Liberal Party. But the country would have none of it, even when it was brought forward by a statesman it revered, and made the first plank in the policy of a party which had hardly yet known defeat to any of the great causes it had espoused. And why? Because Home Rule-the system of governing the United Kingdom by the instrumentality of two national Parliaments-was in flagrant opposition, not merely to political feeling in Great Britain, but to the existing conditions of the country and the age. As a working system it was hopelessly out of date; but not more so than would be the revival of Protection-the adoption of the commercial and industrial systems of our own past, and of the United

States and Germany of to-day by the industrial and commercial England of the twentieth century. There is but one fate for a party blind to the conditions of the country and the time. Should the Conservative Party adopt as its own the policy of Mr. Chamberlain-the policy hitherto known at home, in the United States, and in our Colonies, as the policy of Protection-its ruin is certain; and at last, after nearly two years of controversy, the Prime Minister is beginning fully to recognize the danger, for which it must be confessed he is himself very largely responsible. The Unionist Party and the country have indeed just reason to be dissatisfied with the shrinking, timid attitude of too many Unionist statesmen in the face of a great peril. Mr. Balfour and Lord Lansdowne have either been in agreement with Mr. Chamberlain or they have not. Many of their friends urge to-day that they look upon his policy as a whole with the strongest disapproval. Yet the former allows himself, without public remonstrance, to be made use of by Mr. Chamberlain and the Tariff Reform League to promote their policy, and the latter approves the reconstitution of the Liberal Unionist Association and takes a chief place in its management, though it is known to him and to all men that that Association has been reconstructed for the express purpose, which it is now fulfilling, of providing to the hand of Mr. Chamberlain an instrument to promote Tariff Reform-a policy in very little favour, be it said, with Liberal Unionists as such outside the Birmingham area. Never was a political association constructed for one purpose more cynically converted to another. It would have been more frank and honest to have changed the name as well as the object of that organization. The country, however, understands all this perfectly. When the Duke of Devonshire left the Liberal Unionist Association, which he had been mainly instrumental in founding, and Mr. Chamberlain took his place, Liberal Unionists who accepted the change in personnel were of course ready to accept the changes in political object, and they have naturally continued to give active or tacit support to the Chamberlain policy.

Mr. Balfour's action during the last two troubled years is regarded by some of those who assert their own disapproval of Mr. Chamberlain's proposals, as establishing the far-sighted prudence of his statesmanship. From the beginning, it is asserted, the Prime Minister disbelieved in the policy of the 'crusade.' Time alone was wanted to expose the fallacies of the Tariff Reformers and to