THE CURRENTS OF POLITICS.

(Times.)

. . . . It is assumed, however, that the admission of the new voters to electoral rights, whatever may be the result as between Conservatism and Liberalism, must tend to strengthen the extreme and aggressive as against the moderate sections in each party. It is contended that Whigs and Whig principles must give way to Radicals and Radical principles, and the recent speeches of Mr. Chamberlain, especially that delivered before the Ipswich Reform Club on Wednesday, are based upon that assumption. We are not concerned to dispute the assertion that a democracy is likely to favour a democratic policy ; but we cannot be so sure as Mr. Chamberlain appears to be that the democratic policy of the future will follow the lines of controversial Radicalism in the past. . . He expresses his belief even that "the old shibboleths will be found insufficient" under the new political dispensation. He has, therefore, provided himself, in addition to these "old shibboleths," which he does not, however, disdain to use freely, with a selection from the ideas of Mr. Henry George and even of some more thoroughgoing Communistic propagandists. But, in the meantime, there are not wanting signs that the political cleavage of the new system will run athwart the lines separating Whigs from Radicals, or Moderate from Advanced Liberals. The sentiment that the unity and the greatness of the Empire are inseparable from the prosperity of England and the progress of the English race is rapidly gaining ground among the working classes. The conference on Wednesday at the Farringdon-street Memorial Hall in favour of Imperial Federation is, perhaps, the beginning of a movement which will more powerfully attract the masses than the semi communistic crusade against owners of property proclaimed by Mr. Chamberlain. The danger of a breach with the colonies, through official incapacity or popular ignorance, is coming home to the mind of the English artisans, who see the markets of the world one after another closed to them by protective tariffs, and who on the lowest material grounds would have bitter cause to regret the disintegration of the Empire. It is not, indeed, to be anticipated that the working men will adopt the extraordinary measures of retaliation recommended by way of bringing foreign countries to their senses and of binding the colonies to the mother-country, by Mr. George Potter and others, whose good intentions are more conspicuous than their economical acquirements. The Liberal party, if it adheres, as we have no doubt it will faithfully do, to the sound principles of free-trade asserted at Liverpool on Wednesday by Mr. Henry Fowler, will have to combat opposition from within as well as without. But the strength of the sentiment of Imperial unity may well dispense with illegitimate support. It is not, at any rate, a concoction of worn-out or reactionary Whiggism. Lord Rosebery and Mr. Forster cannot be spoken of as Whigs, and the energy of conviction with which they express their belief that this is "pre-eminently a working man's question," is significant of currents of opinion not running by any means in the direction in which Mr. Chamberlain would steer the vessel of State. . . .

Mr. Chamberlain does not belong to the school of politicians, now rapidly dwindling to extinction, whose ideal of English developement is purely insular. He is not impatient at the "burden" of our colonial Empire, nor is he solicitous to force the action of the State into narrow limits. But he is so busy with projects of domestic revolution, for they are nothing less, which he hopes will attract the new voters that he has no time, we suppose, to bestow upon the danger to the working classes of the United Kingdom from the loss of the colonies and the closing of foreign markets by the acquisitions of other Powers hostile to freedom of commerce. We admit those projects are large enough to occupy even the mind of the President of the Board of Trade. Mr. Chamberlain is contemptuous of "old shibboleths," but his appeal to "natural rights" is among the oldest, and we had imagined, the most completely exploded of political quackeries. The brilliant tissue of fallacies with which Rousseau dazzled the imagination of Europe, before it perished in the fiery furnace of the French Revolution, was woven into "the glittering and sounding generalities of natural right, which make up the Declaration of Independence." But practical men and close thinkers soon detected the error, and even Mr. Chamberlain himself does not now profess to believe that "all men are born free and equal." The doctrine of "natural rights" has passed away, with that of the "social contract," into the limbo of obsolete theories, as Mr. Chamberlain might discover if he would condescend to discuss the question with some members of his own party—Mr. John Morley, for instance, or Mr. Bryce,—who have studied, we will not say "the language of the schools," so scornfully dismissed by Mr. Chamberlain, but the elements of political science and jurisprudence. It is no answer to what has been said in our columns of Mr. Chamberlain's resort to an obsolete hypothesis to quote a casual expression from an article published in the Times more than forty years ago. "The right to live" is a rhetorical statement of a moral fact recognised in every civilised community and defensible on the plainest grounds of expediency, which, we need hardly say, we should never dream of contesting. But this does not carry Mr. Chamberlain far towards the establishment of "natural rights," which he does not attempt to define, as the basis of constitutional Government. Even if Mr Chamberlain's doctrine were not unsound and unscientific —and it is as absurd to censure us for asserting this as to gibe at the "cruelty" of political economy—the impossibility of applying it in practice must be apparent to the humblest intelligence. Who is to define the "natural rights" by which all legislation and all institutions are to be measured? Every man may have his own conception of what they ought to be, and the confusion would be used to cover not only iniquitous spoliation, but action paralysing the vital energies of modern society.

It looks as if Mr Chamberlain had been stirred to something like emulation by the recent proofs of Mr Parnell's success as leader of the Irish masses. That success has been achieved by very simple and old fashioned methods, such is a Cleon or a Clodius might employ, by offering the needy majority of the population direct and immediate material boons at the expense of the owners of property. Mr Chamberlain has not yet sufficiently disclosed his plans to produce any great effect on the minds of the English labouring classes but in vague and highly coloured language he endeavours to raise hopes which we venture to think can only, end in disappointment. As Mr. Chamberlain describes the condition of the labourers in former days, when each man had his apportioned place in the world and his clearly defined rights in the State, we are reminded of Mr Froude's lament over the failure of the Tudors to keep English society in the ancient mould, but we should hardly expect to find the complaint echoed by the preacher of latter-day Radicalism. These blessings have, according to Mr Chamberlain, "been bartered away for a mess of pottage, by which can only be meant the vast industrial and commercial expansion of modern England. While that development is going on — as it is, in spite of temporary checks—it is idle to talk of reproducing a social system in which the agricultural labourers would become yeomen, content to live in their "apportioned places" in a country parcelled out into small holdings. Mr. Chamberlain dismisses emigration as a remedy for distress almost as disdainfully as Mr Parnell does. When, however, he comes to explain how the dispensation is to be brought in, he fails to convey a very clear idea of his policy. He will not, indeed, be content with any measures of land law reform, however drastic,..... If more than this is to be demanded, capital will cease to be accumulated, and within a few years the last state of the working men will be worse, not than their first state, but than anything they now conceive to be possible in the most trying times.

 The Brisbane Courier 7 March 1885,