6

order to carry out the opposite policy. When Mr. Forster says that the discussion of the particular charges urged against the Ministry is beside the question, he is quite right, though his practice does not agree with his precept. The policy of the Government,' he says, 'is in a wrong direction; they are on a wrong track. They may show the greatest skill in avoiding rocks and in getting the ship off when aground, but the ship of State cannot avoid injury when steered in a wrong direction. Make what efforts they please, they cannot correct this fatal mistake.' We know, then, on the highest authority, that the Opposition would steer in the opposite direction, if they got hold of the helm; resistance to Russian encroachments in Europe would be abandoned, probably with the instant result that Constantinople and Gallipoli would be seized; the attempt to reform the Ottoman Government would be flung aside, without regard for the collapse of any regulating power in the Sultan's Asiatic dominions; while in Afghanistan neither would the frontier be strengthened nor the admission of English agents insisted upon. This is the policy which the country is expected to support with a Parliamentary majority, in defiance of its acts and pledges last year. There have been unexpected transformations of public opinion, and as democracy advances there will be more, but none has yet been witnessed so humiliating to a great nation as that upon which Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Forster, and Sir William Harcourt found their hopes.

It is not unfair to suspect that the Liberal leaders know how slender a chance they would have of a favourable verdict upon the merits of the question. The old advice, 'When there is no defence abuse the plaintiff's attorney,' has been adopted by Liberal speakers and writers to an extent hitherto unparalleled in English politics. Sir William Harcourt's freedom of vituperation is not perhaps surprising. Macaulay has noted as an instance of Shakespeare's supreme art that Iago degrades and debases every noble idea upon which his mind dwells. The natural perversity of Othello's Ancient is imitated by Sir William Harcourt as a rhetorical device. Many years ago at Cambridge, in the course of a dispute between two distinguished scholars, one of the disputants observed that his opponent was 'a master of that form of controversy which we may often see illustrated in the streets, the point of which consists in making oneself ridiculous in order that one's adversary may feel ashamed.' Sir William Harcourt is, no doubt, aware of the advantages of this method of disputation. His trick of describing his political opponents and their acts by insulting and offensive names is dialectically serviceable. Caricature abates controversy. When Sir William Harcourt wants to produce the impression that Lord Beaconsfield was absurdly wrong in speaking of Cyprus as a strong place of arms,' he calls it 'a strong place of fiddlesticks!' He is perfectly satisfied that no one will undertake the task of proving that Cyprus is not a strong place of fiddlesticks,' and he passes on with a proud consciousness of being

unanswerable and unanswered. Still, when Sir William Harcourt is found using almost the same language about the Ministry and their conduct as that used by Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Forster, and when that language reads like a free translation of Epimenides' diatribe against the Cretans, it is time to ask what this really means.

There are two charges urged with increasing audacity and impunity against Lord Beaconsfield's Government, which are of a kind unknown in modern English politics until the temper of the Opposition was exasperated by frequent defeats. In former times such attacks would probably have led to criminal prosecutions or to duels, but the mild manners of our time leave them unchecked except by social influences. The first is simply that the Ministry cannot be believed upon their words; the second is that they are in a conspiracy to subvert the British Constitution. If those accusations were true, the country would have something much more serious to think about than a change of policy or a change of ministers. The conditions under which public affairs in England have been conducted since the Constitution reached maturity would be suddenly and completely transformed, and it would be impossible to say how far the transformation extends. Certain it is that if such a disastrous miracle has been wrought as is alleged, we cannot hope that it will affect only the leaders of the Conservative party. For what we are called upon to believe is nothing less than this-that a number of English gentlemen, whose honour was never questioned by their opponents until a few months ago, have cast aside all moral restraints, all English traditions of public life, and have become at once careless of the truth and hostile to the constitutional liberties of their countrymen. The bitterest enemies of Toryism never charged the Duke of Wellington or the late Lord Derby with the introduction of lying into political intercourse, or with plotting to degrade Parliament and conquer dictatorial power. Nor until the other day did any one dream of bringing such accusations against Lord Salisbury, Lord Cairns and Lord Cranbrook, Sir Stafford Northcote, Mr. Cross, and Sir M. Hicks-Beach. The Prime Minister, indeed, has long been deemed a proper mark for any sort of insult because, as Mr. Bright explained a few months - ago, he has 'not a drop of English blood in his veins.' But it is not Lord Beaconsfield who is now exclusively, or even chiefly, attacked. The whole Ministry are comprehended in the indictment.

Sir William Harcourt said at Oxford:

How are we to act with such a government? All the relations of confidence and trust between Parliament and the Administration are at an end. It is absolutely in vain that the Government now protest that they are meditating no strange enterprises. We have learned to interpret their language, like morning dreams, by the rule of contrary. As Hamlet says, 'We must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us.' We have heard ministers give assurances of the maintenance of a policy which at the time they were actually engaged in reversing, or deny the authenticity of documents to which they had just set their hands.

This representation is simply incredible, unless we believe that some judicial madness, like that which smote Ajax, has fallen upon the chiefs of the Conservative party. Nor is the other charge less ridiculous. Mr. Forster warns the country that it will have to pronounce not only on these vital questions of foreign and Indian policy, but on a still more vital question-whether Parliament shall determine them at all. I do believe,' he continued, that the privileges and powers of Parliament are at stake-the power of the English people to govern themselves through their representatives.' Sir William Harcourt, with his impressive historical air, assures us that we are under the influence of the principles of Lord Bolingbroke and the system of Lord Bute.' And these are the men who taunt the Ministry with inventing bogeys' to frighten the country!

6

If what Mr. Forster and Sir William Harcourt allege were trueor even a tenth part of it--it would be necessary to revert to extreme and obsolete remedies for an inexplicable and monstrous disease. Political and social ostracism would be too slight a punishment for the habitual mendacity of which ministers are accused; impeachment would be the only appropriate and effectual method of dealing with their designs against the Constitution. Yet if the Opposition came into power to-morrow with a majority to back them, does anybody imagine that the Liberal leaders would give effect to the charges they level at Lord Beaconsfield and his colleagues? Of course not. The Liberal Ministers would be as friendly as usual with the Conservative Opposition, and the conspirators against the Constitution would calmly discuss points of constitutional practice with its defenders in both Houses. This habit of producing gross charges against political opponents during a campaign and coolly hanging them up afterwards is common in the United States. Beginning with imputations upon truth and fairness, it has descended to the exchange of taunts implying pecuniary dishonesty or personal immorality, from which, however, the combatants seem to receive no more enduring impression than street boys do from snowballing. Mr. Caleb Cushing, who died the other day, was envoy in China under President Tyler. His proceedings there, according to Senator Benton, bespoke an organisation void of the moral sense, and without the knowledge that any one else possessed it;' and this description has often been outdone since in damaging effect, though not in pungency, by the every-day language of American politicians. Are we desirous to introduce the tomahawk and the scalping-knife of the savage' into political warfare in England? The loss, it is plain, would be great and irreparable. There is much to be said for Spinoza's opinion that in politics motives are of secondary importance, and that, if bad men govern well, we must look only at results; Animi enim libertas, seu fortitudo, privata virtus est; at imperii virtus securitas.' But in England the moral qualities of public men cannot be left out of

sight without altering all the rules of the political game. It has been a fixed principle of English politics that our politicians, whatever may be their party names and party connections, are governed in their public conduct by the same dictates of personal honour which rule their private conduct. And this high standard has been maintained by assuming that it is always observed. In an English public school, where boys are trusted upon their words, truthtelling is the rule; I believe it is otherwise in a French lycée, where suspicion and scrutiny are constantly at work. The difference between American and English standards of political honour may be accounted for in the same way. It is only by the fault of our public men themselves, if they begin to bandy about charges of mendacity and dishonesty, that the security which the British Government possesses beyond all others, in its administration by men of unimpeachable honour, will be destroyed.

The hypothesis of a swift and unexplained apostasy from honour on the part of all the members of the Conservative Cabinet carries the Liberal critics who fasten upon it to further and more astounding conclusions. The complaint of Jeremiah, as has been said, is theirs : 'The people love to have it so.' Therefore the shame of falsehood, the guilt of treason do not attach to the Ministry alone, but primarily to the ministerial majority in the House of Commons, and indirectly to the English nation. If ministers have been false to their words, unfaithful to the Constitution, what shall be said of those who have abetted and approved them? The Parliamentary majorities of July and August and December, hardly to be matched in the political history of modern England, are so many proofs that one of the two historic English parties, supported, as has been acknowledged, repeatedly by the prevalent voice of the country and by the sympathy of a large section of Liberals, has lost its sense of honour and has entered into a plot to subvert representative institutions and to build up on their ruins a despotism—not even the tyranny of the Stuarts, but a gimcrack imitation of the Napoleonic dictatorship. The charge transcends argument. It can only be met with Scipio's question: 'Utrumne creditis, Quirites?'

Even the ingenious malice of partisanship could not have engendered this monstrous brood of bugbears without some material to work upon. The relations between a democratic Legislature and foreign policy as administered by the Executive Government have lately been obscured by the growing pretensions of the former. Maxims which were accepted a few years ago by all parties as constitutional are denounced now-a-days by the leaders of the Opposition as dangerous and aggressive paradoxes. Mr. Forster, for instance, tells us that the real meaning of the new Imperialism' is that when the people has chosen the House of Commons and the House of Commons has chosen the Premier, the Premier is to tell Parliament what he has done, not what he wants Parliament to give him leave to do.' And this, Mr. Forster contends, is an attempt to replace

the old English system of Parliamentary government by a dictator.' But it is notorious that in foreign affairs, with which alone we are now concerned, what Mr. Forster calls the 'new notions' have always prevailed in England, and, what is more, were adopted with a slight and formal modification in the democratic Government of the United States. It is the duty of the Executive to shape and guide foreign policy, and the duty of Parliament to pass sentence on the results.

Upon this point I will cite the opinion of an illustrious constitutional writer, identified with no English party, and assuredly no advocate of encroachments upon popular rights-Justice Story, the highest authority upon the Constitution of the United States. It must be premised that, under the Articles of Confederation which preceded the Constitution, the treaty-making power in the States was vested in Congress. But, for reasons fully explained and defended in the Federalist, the Constitution transferred the prerogative to the President, specially limiting, however, the English practice by providing that the concurrence of the Senate should be necessary. An English king could perform alone, and without asking for any subsequent ratification from Parliament, what an American president can only do with the ultimate approval of the Upper Chamber. But the intervention of the American Legislature was to be 'ultimate,' not immediate :

No man (says Story) at all acquainted with diplomacy but must have felt that the success of negotiations as often depends upon their being unknown by the public as upon their justice or their policy. Men will assume responsibility in private, and communicate information, and express opinions, which they would feel the greatest repugnance publicly to avow; and measures may be defeated by the intrigues and management of foreign powers, if they suspect them to be in progress, and understand their precise nature and extent. In this view the executive department is a far better depositary of the power than Congress would be. The delays incident to a large assembly, the differences of opinion, the time consumed in debate, and the utter impossibility of secrecy, all combine to render them unfitted for the purposes of diplomacy. And our own experience during the Confederation abundantly demonstrated all the evils which the theory would lead us to expect. Besides, there are tides in national affairs, as well as in the affairs of private life. To discern and profit by them is the part of true political wisdom; and the loss of a week, or even of a day, may sometimes change the whole aspect of affairs, and render negotiations wholly nugatory or indecisive. The loss of a battle, the death of a prince, the removal of a minister, the pressure or removal of fiscal embarrassments at the moment, and other circumstances, may change the whole posture of affairs, and insure success or defeat the best concerted project. The executive, having a constant eye upon foreign affairs, can promptly meet, and even anticipate such emergencies, and avail himself of all the advantages accruing from them, while a large assembly would be coldly deliberating on the chances of success and the policy of opening negotiations.

The contention of the Liberal leaders is that Parliament ought to be informed as to every step in negotiations and every measure of precaution. The Constitution provides, according to Mr. Forster, that, before any new responsibility is incurred, the representatives of the people shall be consulted. This doctrine would have been repudiated as energetically by Hamilton and the other founders of the