A MODERN SYMPOSIUM.'

IS THE POPULAR JUDGMENT IN POLITICS MORE JUST THAN THAT OF THE HIGHER ORDERS?

MR. W. R. GREG.

Mr. Gladstone's proposition as understood by Lord Arthur Russell, and indeed as .originally enunciated by himself, seemed startling and questionable enough. As it promises to issue from the alembic of this discussion-guarded and mitigated in its terms, limited in its scope, interpreted and exemplified by Mr. Hutton, and modified by the suggestions of more cautious but still sympathetic minds-it seems impossible to deny to it a considerable measure of suggestive, encouraging, and prolific truth, for which it is well worth while to secure a less loose and excessive, and a more precise expression.

Probably it will be found that the essence and sound kernel of the broad proposition we are criticising may be reduced to the following dimensions:-that the mass, the populace, the uneducated classes, are in their political views and conclusions more guided by impulse and less by reflection than those above them in the social scale; that they look rather to the larger and more obvious, which are often the more essential, points of a question, than to its minor and modifying features; that their sympathies are, if not always truer, at least prompter, keener, more unqualified, more imperious than those of the higher orders. Nay, we may perhaps go further and recognise that they are as a rule-certainly often-more generous and hearty in those sympathies, especially with the wronged and the oppressed or those they deem such, and far more to be counted on for obeying these estimable feelings, when once aroused, without regard to selfish interests and consequences, than classes who might be expected to take loftier, wider, and more complex views. It will follow from these admissions that in those grand and simple political issues which every now and then come up before a community for solution, into which morals

enter more largely than considerations of expediency, and in which the impulses of natural and unperverted men, and usually of aggregated men (that is, of masses), may be trusted for substantial kindliness and justice-in questions where the equitable features lie upon the surface and are written in sunbeams, or where the principle involved is so great and clear that the details which obscure and the collateral consequences which complicate may safely be neglectedin those cases, few and rare, yet whose existence cannot be denied, where (to use the noble and convincing expression of Burke) 'the heart of youth may be wiser than the head of age'-it may well be granted, I say, that in issues of this character the 'popular' judgment may be sounder than that of classes far better educated and informed, but whose decisions are much slower to be reached by virtue of the far wider range of the considerations they have to weigh and search for, and whose vision, we must also allow, is apt to be dulled and deflected by inescapable but very grave egotistical bearings.

Further than this I cannot go with Mr. Gladstone. Several of his representations I cannot recognise as more than partially correct; and I entirely demur to the large practical conclusions which he and his supporters draw as being, I consider, but loosely connected with their premisses. Even in the admissions I have made above I can scarcely conceal from myself that the same facts might have been stated in less flattering language, and perhaps less ungrudgingly. I might remark that the masses are apt to be led and governed by their impulses, even when these take the form of vehement passions rather than of generous or kindly emotions. Nor, while recognising to the full the curious sagacity and racy powers of reasoning often very skilfully applied, with which numbers among them are truly credited by Mr. Harrison, and which, as he justly says, constitute in themselves a political education far more properly deserving of the name than that of the idler ranks who may have passed or graduated at Eton or at Oxford, can I recognise, as a general feature of the working classes, that freedom from prejudice and power of doing justice to the arguments of their superiors in rank, nor that facility to welcome instruction and guidance even where they must be conscious of their own ignorance and inaptitude, in which Mr. Gladstone appears to have so large and generous a faith. The Tichborne case, referred to by Lord Arthur, appears to me, in spite of the sarcasm of Mr. F. Harrison, to be singularly significant. The 'Claimant' was upheld, followed, admired, and stuck to with strange enthusiasm by the masses, and not by those of London only. His advocate, with even less rationality, was almost more noisily applauded. Note, too, the analysis, which can scarcely be questioned, of the 'Claimant's' worshippers among the crowd. Half of them gave the measure of their reasoning capacity by retaining their belief and

their adherence in defiance of the crushing demolition of his case by the Lord Chief Justice; the other half, who probably never believed in the justice of his claims at all, were his loyal adherents to the end, and would have given him a verdict without turning in the jury box (while by implication avowing its inequity), because cordially admiring the pluck of a butcher's son for standing up with such gallantry against a baronet.'

Nor, again, can I observe that the working classes have of late shown much of the readiness to be guided by the advice and arguments even of their own admitted friends and recognised leaders, on questions relating to their own interests and where they might be expected to be acquainted with the facts of the case and to be competent to form a sagacious judgment. I do not refer to instances, too many and surprising enough, alas! where Trades' Union chiefs have taken up the shallowest doctrines and the most untenable positions. I speak of the many occasions of disputes about wages which have occurred during the last two disastrous years, when the choice of the men lay between work on the masters' terms or no work at all; when the leaders, who saw this, counselled submission, but the men, who could scarcely deny the truth, found the truth too unwelcome to be candidly recognised; nay more, when meetings were held to which most of the attendants went with the intention of accepting the inevitable and closing with the offered rates, but when this wholesome temper was entirely turned aside and changed into bitterness by the firebrand speech of some reckless agitator, and a prolongation of the strike was carried by an overpowering vote. And this observation reminds us of another danger which reflective public men should be the last to ignore or undervalue—the peculiar proneness, namely, of popular assemblies to be swayed by oratory rather than by reasoning and knowledge: a proneness to which they are liable just in proportion as they are popular (i.e. composed of the excitable and uncultivated masses)—just in proportion, one might possibly add, as the sentiments involved and appealed to are generous and sympathetic.' Susceptibility to eloquence is the notorious danger of liberal constitutions and democratic assemblies, perhaps

It may perhaps be not quite safe to appeal to the sentiments of the masses during the phase of popular excitement through which we are now passing; but it is questionable whether the majority of the people-of those whom we may speak of as the unpropertied classes—is not to be ranged on that which Mr. Gladstone has taken such effective pains to persuade us is the wrong and the unrighteous side. 'Society,' we know the idler and military ranks, the 'upper ten thousand,' &c.—incline mainly and passionately to the Turkish side; the middle, the intellectual, the commercial classes, are chiefly Russian, or at least hostile to the Porte; but is it not the case, especially in the metropolis, that far the larger portion of those below them, in spite of Bulgarian atrocities, in disregard of Mr. Gladstone's campaign, are still the vehement backers of the most recklessly warlike and Chauvinist minister we have had for long, in his policy of involving us in hostilities for the maintenance of about the worst government with which we have ever been mixed up?

we might say their besetting sin; and eloquence is mightier far when championing passionate emotion than when pleading the cause of sober wisdom; mightier, too—and this is a matter for grave consideration-when giving utterance to the awakened animosities and prejudices of the hour than when anxiously forecasting graver and

remoter but no less certain issues.

"This is no discussion about a Reform Bill,' says Mr. Harrison, 'nor are we settling the respective claims of popular or oligarchic government.' I beg to remind him that the discussion grew out of the proposal for a new Reform Bill, and the special proposition we are criticising, its soundness or unsoundness, directly involves the justice of those claims. Mr. Gladstone's entire argument implies this; so does Mr. Hutton's skilful and ingenious historical retrospect of the last seventy years. The very proposition itself appears to have been announced in so broad a form distinctly in order to cover and to justify a large modification of our Parliamentary institutions in a popular direction, and to discredit oligarchical pretensions. Both interlocutors argue that the experience of the Past may be taken as a guarantee against the foreseen or fancied perils of the Future-that, because our previous extensions of the franchise have brought us no evils, but, on the contrary, good, therefore we may venture without anxiety—nay, with sanguine confidence-on an extension yet wider and more sweeping.

The plea appears to me to break down, or rather to be inexact and inapplicable; and the immense reliance on it shown by two men so unusually trained in political experience and conversant with political philosophy may almost be characterised as startling. I demur to the conclusions drawn from Mr. Hutton's appeal to the experiments of the last sixty years, confidently as it is made, because those experiments do not embrace any, properly speaking, popular, or perhaps I ought to say populace, electorates; and I object to Mr. Gladstone's apparent hopes from the newest and rashest extension of the franchise, because it has not yet really and fully come into operation, and for another reason which I shall come to presently. To exact reasoners the Past offers no safe augury for the Future. The analogy being far too partial and imperfect.

We have seen several Reform Bills framed on different lines and directed to different issues-essentially and fundamentally different. The original plan, the great and beneficent one, was designed to correct certain flagrant abuses and anomalies in our representation, and to supply certain still more undeniable omissions and defects. It was framed (to speak broadly) with the object of embracing within the electoral pale as many as might be of the qualified classes -i.e. of those possessing property of whatever sort, and education of suitable degree: in a word, that enormous proportion of our population whose claims were universally allowed to be, as a rule, at least VOL. IV.-No. 17.

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equal to the average of those already endowed with the suffrage, and in many cases far superior. So far was that Act from giving votes to the working classes properly so called-those who might be broadly described as habitually uneducated and living mainly or exclusively on wages—that it distinctly recognised their then unfitness-I would rather say unripeness-by ultimately disfranchising all of this description who at that period were on the electoral register, namely, freemen and scot-and-lot voters. The two subsequent measures brought forward by Liberal Governments were, if I remember rightly, framed on the same general lines, but with lower suffrage qualifications, as justified by the progress of the times.

The two last Reform Bills-the Tory measure of 1867, conferring the franchise on the householders in boroughs, and the Liberal measure proposing to extend the same privilege to the county population—were entirely different, not to say alien, in their principle, their object, and their bearings. They admitted to the electoral register en masse, originally all ratepayers, finally all householders and lodgers even who preferred their claim. They were designed to enfranchise virtually nearly the whole class of operatives in towns and labourers in rural districts, with no reference to either property or education. The great distinction then between the two sets of measures may be thus stated with substantial accuracy :—' -The first demanded a property qualification for admission to the franchise; so far from lowering, it practically raised the educational standard of the electoral body, and, while enormously enlarging and liberalising the basis of the Parliamentary Register, it did not enable the new voters to outnumber and to swamp the old ones. The second pretty nearly reversed these features; made a vast stride in the direction of manhood suffrage by requiring a merely residential in place of a property qualification; conferred the franchise wholesale on the millions who live on weekly wages; thus enabling these classes, whenever they please, or as soon as their natural leaders or designing agitators instruct them in the secret of their strength, to outvote all the previous electorate-putting it in their power, that is (for I am anxious not to overstate the case), to acquire the command of both the administrative and legislative functions, and to direct and control both our foreign policy and the amount as well as the incidence of our taxation, perhaps the two subjects which can least safely be entrusted to their decision.

These are the enormous discrepancies between the old Reform measures and the new; and yet Mr. Gladstone and Mr Hutton deem themselves logical and safe in arguing from the beneficent operation of the one to the safety and the desirableness of the other; and our Liberals would proceed with the cœur léger of Emile Ollivier to confer a gift which is not needed, which cannot be resumed, and which may be so fatally abused.