THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. No. XXVII.-MAY 1879. THE NATION BEFORE PARTY. In the month of March last I ventured to suggest, in a letter to the newspapers, that it might be possible to form a new party in politics which should embrace the moderate men of both sides. The suggestion was a good deal commented on at the time, being favourably received in some quarters and denounced in others. Of the reception it thus met with—at least so far as the commentary was relevant to the text, which it was with one notable exception-I have no reason to complain. Every one who utters boldly the thought that is in him is pretty sure to expose himself to attack, if the thought emerges in the slightest degree from the region of the accepted commonplace. The wisest men of the world are probably those who refuse to think at all, except according to the dictates of their party, or who, if they do think, take care to conceal their opinions until the time for their promulgation has fully come. What I desired to do was to call attention to the present state of parties as being a matter of national interest, and one which is becoming more so every day. We are, if not on the eve of a general election, not far removed from it, and the air is already astir with speculations as to what its result will be. But there is still time to pause before the fray begins, and to consider what are the issues to be decided by the electorate, and how far the electorate will have a chance of forming a judgment upon them. It would be too much to expect the professed wire-pullers to care for anything beyond VOL. V.-No. 27. 3 D carrying the particular candidate whom they have determined to run, and even if they became conscious that their man had moulded his convictions to suit the constituency, instead of suiting the constituency to his convictions, they would no more consent to look out for another than-to use a phrase now much in vogue-'to swap horses while crossing the stream.' It is not to these, or such as these, that the following pages are addressed; my appeal is to the much larger mass of the nation who are not enslaved by party ties, and have no personal ends to serve by the ascendency of either of the sections which at present compose the body politic. In noting the divergencies of existing parties, little is gained by going back to their origin. The terms Cavalier and Roundhead, the Court and the Country Party, Tory and Whig, were really antithetical and mutually repellent when they first came into use, but before the end of the seventeenth century the antithesis had lost nine-tenths of its point. The questions which agitated England in the prerevolution times were mainly questions of dynasty and religion, and have no counterpart at the present moment. No sane man now wishes to change the succession to the Crown, and very few are fanatical enough to suppose that the people as a whole will ever be converted to Roman Catholicism. The divine hereditary and indefeasible right,' 'passive obedience,' 'non-resistance,' and 'popery,' which were the notes of Toryism in the time of the second Charles, have long since disappeared from the programme of practical politics, and each party now professes-in spite of certain recent inconsistencies on which I shall say something hereafter the original characteristics of Whiggism, viz., the authority and independence. of Parliament and the power and majesty of the people.' We may go further still. The propositions condemned by the Tory University of Oxford in 1683 as 'destructive of the sacred powers of princes, their state and government, and of all human society,' might, with very few exceptions, be framed and glazed in the Carlton Club; for it is no longer denied-except, perhaps, by Lord Beaconsfield—that, if lawful governors become tyrants or govern otherwise than by the law of God and man, they ought to forfeit the right they had unto their government,' or 'that the sovereignty of England is in the three estates of king lords and commons, and that the king has but a co-ordinate power and may be overruled by the other two.' These once extravagant tenets have become articles of our common constitutional creed, and are as freely held by the moderate Conservatives as by the Opposition, although, when the former are called by the older name of Tory, the point of contact is apt to vanish out of sight. When the Protestant succession was established on a firm basis, and the differences which had given occasion to the formation of the two parties had become reconciled in the manner indicated, their distinctive names, by that law of vis inertia which is characteristic of our national mind, remained unaltered, but they were thenceforth marks of tendencies rather than of definite aims, of predilections rather than of courses of action. It is true that among the Tories were to be found, in the days of the early Hanoverian sovereigns, many adherents of the Pope and of King James, just as among the Whigs were to be found many republicans and enemies of the Church; each such offshoot or excrescence being too weak to form a separate party of its own. But the bulk of the members of the two parties really held common opinions, although, owing to the busy misrepresentation that beset them, each had constantly to disavow the principles attributed to it by its opponent. If all the Jacobites, on the one hand, had openly proclaimed their adhesion to the Stuarts, and the enemies of the Church, on the other, had shouted for disestablishment, an apparent as well as a real fusion of the intermediates would have taken place; and a strong government would have been formed which would have kept both extremes at bay, and have rendered impossible the rebellion of 1715 by demonstrating beforehand its utter hopelessness. It was because the ultra-Whigs were known to entertain propensities for spoliation of ecclesiastical property that the ultra-Tory chiefs were able to raise the cry of the Church in danger,' and to commit their followers to the paradox of saving it by rallying round a popish pretender. The defeat at Preston and the timely passing of the Septennial Act1 once more healed the national schism, the one by proving the military weakness of the insurrectionists, the other by stifling the flame of local disaffection which was ready to burst forth against an unpopular king at the first opportunity. At the close of the reign of this same king, the nation had become reconciled to the new dynasty, and the spirit of party again slumbered for a while. Whatever may be conjectured as to the hidden motives which dictated the celebrated letters in the Craftsman, it is plain that that periodical would not have met with the success it did if the proposals for fusion which it urged had been political chimeras. It matters not whether Pulteney or Bolingbroke, or some inferior writer inspired by them, declaimed against the rancour of faction as destroying our inward peace, weakening our national strength, and sullying our glory abroad.' The fact that such an appeal was made by the leading statesmen of that day, not once only but many times. over, is proof that it was well founded, and that it struck a responsive chord in the hearts of the people. History often repeats itself; and, with such variation of particular expressions as the lapse of 150 years requires, there are many amongst us who would readily join in the following exhortation contained in one of these remarkable papers:- 1 Mr. John Bright has been taken to task for misrepresenting this Act in his speech at Birmingham of the 16th ult., and the authority of Hallam has been quoted against him. A reference to Boyer's Political State, vol. xi., or to Parl. Hist., vol. vii., will show that Mr. Bright's statement was not incorrect. Let all persons, however distinguished by party appellations, consolidate themselves into a body, and unite in measures against the common enemies of their country, whether foreign or domestic. Let them forget all their unreasonable animosities, and whilst they are equally exerting their endeavours to accomplish the same end, viz., the happiness of their country, let them not quarrel one with another about any differences in judgment concerning the means. Let the Whig enjoy his liberty and property in its fullest latitude without reproaching the Tory as an enemy to both, and let the Tory in his turn drop all his bitterness and malevolence against the Whig as disaffected to monarchy or religion, or rather let the very name of Whig and Tory be for ever buried in oblivion. ... These last are bold and startling words, and are not to be adopted in 1879 without an explanatory disclaimer. They were written at a time when the country was utterly weary of the lengths to which party spirit had been carried. They are repeated now because at the present juncture, and under the shadow of an approaching dissolution of Parliament, party spirit instead of sound judgment threatens again to assert its sway. I do not in the least intend to suggest that we should make an effort to do away with Government by Party: let this be made clear as the noonday. To Government by Party in the past English liberty owes its present stability, and it will doubtless gain still further strength by the like government in the future. The benefit that has been secured to us by the birth of freedom in the domains of political and religious thought consists not so much in the victory that has been gained over the narrow exclusiveness which once cramped the national growth, as in the struggle which preceded that victory; for conquests so won are imperishable, and their fruits can never be taken from us. The very prolongation of the contest conduces to the brilliancy of its after-effects. The question of Parliamentary Reform was before the country full fifty years before Lord John Russell's Act was passed, even if we go back no further than the time when the younger Pitt, then just returned to the House of Commons as member for Appleby, first pressed it on the notice of the Rockingham Administration. The resistance which was finally overcome by the efforts of its partisans had thrown the people into a thoroughly energetic mood, and to this rather than to the provisions of the Act itself is to be ascribed the splendid legislation that followed it. The Act, in short, served to shift the balance of Parliamentary power, but it added nothing to the sum of the weights in the opposite scales. The same remark is true of the other great measures which were carried about the same time. The Catholic claims made slow progress, from Canning's famous resolution in 1812 to Sir R. Peel's conversion in 1829; and when the Bill for the Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts was passing through the Upper House, the veteran ex-Chancellor, Lord Eldon, was able to tell the assembled peers that he had voted against a similar Bill before many of them were born. So long and so difficult is the march of great measures, although, when the advance is once made, there is, by reason of the very obstacles that have been surmounted, no possibility of their backsliding. If there had been no Government by Party, there would have been no such obstacles, and, therefore, no history teaching by examples to guide us farther on the road of progress. 6 Whether we regard the natural combativeness of Englishmen, or the obvious advantages which it affords, Government by Party is in no danger of dying out so long as Parliament maintains its own between the executive on the one hand and fugitive popular demands on the other. The danger lies in its tendency to overstrain itself, and so to frustrate its proper end. It is prone to accentuate differences instead of composing them, for the sake of snatching a momentary triumph, and, as in a recent instance, to confound detail with principle, in order to weight the censure it brings to bear. It often jeopardises the existence of an administration, and occasionally overthrows it on an entirely false issue. The ins' cannot yield the point for fear of being taunted with tenacity of office after they have lost the confidence of the country, and the 'outs' cannot forego the attack lest their opponents should interpret their abstention as weakness. If the measure proposed be one of domestic interest, party spirit never rests until it has proved that some particular class of the community will be injured or harassed by it, while it sees a blunder in every act of foreign policy that is not attended by immediate visible success. Such lavish criticism seldom assists the cause of wise government, and usually impels the objects of it into one of two courses—either that of defiant action, if they have an aptitude for origination, or that of total inaction, if they have not. We have seen striking illustrations of both these results during the last eleven years, and it is to be feared we shall see still more, unless there is a reconstruction of party on some broader basis than that marked out by the ancient lines. If we consider the influence of excessive party spirit on the individuals whom it dominates, we cannot but admit its pernicious effects on them. Except with the few master-minds who direct and rule the rest, it crushes individuality of thought and cripples vital energy. It forces a man to follow another's lead, and to sacrifice his deepest private convictions on the altar of political duty. Allegiance of this sort is no doubt useful, as adding a vote to the division list; but when exacted too rigidly it sears and deadens the conscience of the voter. It does still worse. It lowers the character of Parliament, by making it unnecessary that those who enter it should have any special fitness for their trust. At this rate one member is not only as good as another, but, if he will only answer the whip obediently, a great deal better too.' It divides every society into two factions, for which it provides appropriate names, and every man who is not willing to rank as a 'Jingo' must submit to stand convicted of being |