245

TOPICS OF THE MONTH.

THE HISTORY OF A TORY REFORM BILL.

NOTHING has been talked about for a month past but Reform. The extraordinary shifts of the Ministry, as rapid and numerous as the transformations in a modern pantomime, have served to keep the interest of the public in the subject keenly alive. Never was a grave political question treated in such fashion, and as each new turn in the scene brings more strikingly into view the utter absence of principle in the leaders of the Cabinet wonder gives place to indignation. The country feels that it is being played with, and, angry at the loss of political honour among those who have undertaken to manage its affairs, is ready to sweep them aside with displeasure. Mr. Horsman now lectures the Conservative party on political morality, and Lord Cranborne and General Peel are the only remaining types of Tory honour.

Ministers have themselves been kind enough to give us a full account of the transactions behind the scenes, and a very curious story it is; Mr. Bright says it is instructive; it would be incredible if the authority were not so undeniable. Early in the autumn, Mr. Disraeli tells us, Lord Derby sent him word that it was "absolutely necessary that the Ministry should deal with the question of Parliamentary Reform, and that it must be dealt with in no niggard spirit." He requested, therefore, that the right honourable gentleman should give his best attention to the subject, which we may be sure he was in no way loath to do. Here was the opportunity he must have long desired of giving effect to the ideas which at various periods of his political career he has not obscurely shadowed forth. But whatever pretence of consistency may be made for Mr. Disraeli none can be made for the rest of the Ministry, whose whole attitude has been hostile to Reform. They reached office by assisting to defeat the very moderate Reform Bill proposed by their predecessors. Yet as soon as they were securely in the saddle they set about concocting a measure which should, at least in appearance, be more liberal than that which they had just upset. Thus their whole policy is based on a shameful political immorality, an original sin which has tainted all their actions, and sufficiently accounts for all their humiliating vacillation. To carry out their purpose it was necessary to cajole the country, to cajole Parliament, to cajole their party, to cajole those of their own colleagues who held their Tory principles more dear

than their places. General Peel says that he never would have taken office at all if he had supposed that he would thereby have been obliged to have taken up the question of Reform, and Lord Derby informed his brother peers that his urgent personal solicitations were necessary to induce the General to waive his objections. The temporary assent of others in the Cabinet appears to have been gained by keeping back from them all details, and telling them in a general way that a very dextrous plan had been hit upon by which great seeming generosity in the extension of the borough franchise would be balanced by such "counterpoises" and " securities" as should really keep the power in the hands of its present possessors. Thus the Queen's Speech was settled, and Her Majesty was made to express a wish that measures might be adopted which "without unduly disturbing the balance of political power, should freely extend the elective franchise." Next it was resolved to "proceed by way of resolution," for the purpose, unblushingly avowed, of first trying what the House of Commons would put up with, and then of shifting the responsibility of the measure afterwards to be introduced from the shoulders of the Government to those of the Parliament. On the 11th of February Mr. Disraeli introduced a string of vague resolutions, taking care to give no explanation of their meaning, and indeed scarcely alluding to their contents. Lord Derby and his Chancellor of the Exchequer were just feeling their way inside the House and out of it-inside his own Cabinet even, and among his own party outside it. The fifth resolution dimly propounded the plurality of voting idea-the dodge by which the ill effects of a large extension of the borough franchise were to be neutralized. At the time it was laid on the table we have Lord Cranborne's word for it that "no detailed or definite agreement had been come to" in the Cabinet as to the measure which was to be founded on those resolutions. But as soon as the resolutions were published, it became evident to Lord Cranborne and "many of his colleagues," that the nation would not have the fifth resolution; therefore, when on the Friday after Mr. Disraeli's first speech, the Bill which he and Lord Derby had agreed upon-the household suffrage Bill with dual voting which is now before the country-was produced at a Cabinet council, he at once declared that it was inadmissible. All the next week seems to have been devoted to an attempt to satisfy Lord Cranborne and the honest Tories that this Bill would answer their purposes. It was not until the morning of Monday the 25th that Lord Cranborne, having sat up all Saturday night and used all Sunday in examining the statistics with which he had been furnished, came to the conclusion that the Bill would not do, and he tendered

his resignation. But that very evening Mr. Disraeli had to make his second statement to the House. What then was to to be done? Sir John Pakington most naively told his constituents what was done. The programme was all supposed to be arranged on Saturday the 23rd. Lord Derby went to Windsor on that day to tell Her Majesty what measures were agreed upon, and he was to let his supporters into the secret at two o'clock on Monday. But at half-past twelve Sir John was summoned, post haste, to a Cabinet Council extraordinary. The rest we must leave him to tell in his own lively language :—

"When he got there he found three or four members of the Cabinet assembled, but as they had anticipated no such summons the messengers could not find all the members of the Cabinet, and it was more than halfpast one Lord Derby having to meet the Conservative party at twobefore the Cabinet could be brought together, and as each one dropped in, the first question was, 'What is the matter?' Then every one in succession was informed of the fact that Lord Cranborne and Lord Carnarvon had seceded from the adoption of the Bill which the Cabinet had adopted on the preceding Saturday. He had the greatest respect and regard for his noble friends, but he could not help thinking that in so acting they were precipitate. They might imagine, therefore, the extraordinary difficulty and embarrasment which must have attended a Minister of the Crown placed in this position. Lord Derby had to address the Conservative party at two o'clock. He (Sir John) did not think they had more than ten minutes in which to make up their minds. They knew the result. It was determined by a majority of the Cabinet to propose, not the Bill which had been agreed to on the Saturday, but an alternative measure in the place of the larger and bolder scheme."

At two o'clock therefore Lord Derby ordered his followers to support a Bill, fixing the franchise at £6 rating in the boroughs, and £20 rating in the counties. In the evening Mr. Disraeli expounded this scheme to the Commons, "frankly" giving up the fifth resolution—the one providing for the plurality of votes. The plan was received with the utmost disfavour. The majority of the Conservative members emphatically condemned it, and before the week was out Lord Derby had decided that he must "fall back upon his larger measure." Sir John Pakington says that "the unanimous feeling of the Cabinet, after they had met together, was that they had made a mistake," and so they backed back upon the scheme which Mr. Disraeli had matured during the recess, and which no doubt embodies very completely the political ideas, which have always have been seething in the right honourable gentleman's brain. They were amply expounded in "Coningsby" two and twenty years ago, and appear more or less in all his speeches on Reform, since he spoke on Mr. Hume's resolution in 1849. He regards the franchise as "a privilege" which the governing class should confer from time to time upon "the people" as a reward for good behaviour, taking very

good care however that its bestowment should never place any real power in their hands. For the fourth time therefore, on Monday the 18th of March, the Chancellor of the Exchequer made his bow to the House with a new Bill, which Mr. Gladstone, at a meeting of the Liberal party, next day, described as the worst Reform Bill ever proposed.

The Ministry would like it to be regarded by the populace as a household suffrage Bill, but so far as it has any principle at all, it is a measure for making voting synonymous, not indeed with rating, but with ratepaying, and this makes all the difference. In the greater number of boroughs the rates in houses under £10 are paid or compounded for by the landlords, and the Bill would therefore enfranchise but a comparative handful of people." Starting with a pretence of enfranchising 750,000 occupiers, Mr. Gladstone reckons that it would really only enfranchise some 120,000. There is no lodger franchise in the Bill, and without this it would not enfranchise a single artizan in the Metropolis; the fancy franchises are well enough in their way, but their effect would be inappreciable. If "the dual vote" were retained the working classes would be at a much greater disadvantage under the Tory Reform Bill than they are at present. The measure is a mockery and a snare, and the attempt to palm it on the nation will recoil on the heads of those who have attempted the trick. We do not believe in the possibility of amending it in Committee. The Ministry will be broken up by it, and the Conservative party will be broken up too.

Some very charitable persons may, by stretch of candour, be able to give the Tory leaders credit for patriotism in their dealing with this Reform question, but their behaviour in the Churchward affair proves them to be, at heart, still mere place-lovers, and partizans who have a natural affinity for trickery and corruption. Twice have Committees of the House of Commons reported that Mr. Churchward has been guilty of political corruption. Once their finding has been deliberately endorsed by the House itself, and the character of the Dover contract has long been settled in the mind of the public. Yet no sooner are the Tories in power than they reward their old friend with a seat on the magistrates' bench. When the appointment was impugned, Mr. Walpole actually ventured to excuse the Lord Chancellor on the ground that his Lordship did not know that Mr. Churchward had been so stigmatized by Parliamentary Committees. The House of Commons was asked to suppose that Lord Chelmsford, one of the keenest politicians in the country, never so much as heard of the charges against Mr. Churchward! A motion being made to address Her Majesty for Mr. Churchward's removal from the Commission of the Peace, Sir Stafford Northcote and Lord John Manners undertook

to whitewash Mr. Churchward, though his condemnation stands on the records of the House. To render the motion ineffectual, an amendment was moved to enlarge its application. Mr. Gladstone warned the House that the amendment was not genuine, but the original motion was defeated by Tory stratagem, amidst the uproarious cheers of the party who supposed that they had thus effectually screened Mr. Churchward. But when the amendment came in natural course before the House, as a substantive motion, Mr. Disraeli suggested that it was too broad, and had better not be adopted. The indignation with which Mr. Gladstone sprang to his feet, flung his hat upon the table, in brief and fiery words laid bare and denounced the trick, and in honest scorn pointed to Mr. Disraeli as "the engineer hoist with his own petard," was a passage that will be for ever famous in Parliamentary annals. Never were political honesty and party trickery more suddenly and sharply contrasted. Mr. Gladstone's sentences were like a forked flash of lighting, revealing darkness. Mr. Disraeli positively cowered, while his great antagonist towered over him in moral grandeur.

While these Reform debates have occupied attention, the Fenian rebellion has died away and other topics have faded from the public mind. Even the announcement that proceedings have been commenced against the Ritualists at St. Albans, that Lord Shaftesbury has introduced a bill for putting down vestments, and tha tthe Bishops have agreed to put off the awkward and perilous task of dealing with the divisions in the Church, by asking for a Royal Commission, have excited very little notice. That Mr. Coleridge's Bill for abolishing tests in Oxford University should have passed a second time without a division, and that the Church Rate Abolition Bill should have passed a second reading by a majority of 76-the largest majority ever gained for it in the House of Commons-show that whatever else may be at a stand still, the cause of religious equality is advancing to victory with rapid strides.

Dr. Livingstone has, we fear, been murdered by the savages whom he was trying to bring into contact with the blessings of Christianity and civilization. There is very little room for hope that the men who tell the tale of his death are other than true witnesses. Their story is coherent, it accords in details of time and place with what are known to have been Dr. Livingstone's purposes and intended route, and it has undergone the sifting of Dr. Kirk, than whom, perhaps, none is better qualified to test the probability of such a report. If it proves true, the nation will have to mourn the untimely, but not inglorious death of the very noblest of modern travellers.