OUR PUBLIC MEN.

[From the Daily News.]

THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY.

Lord Salisbury is one of the most striking, and, in a certain sense, one of the most pathetic figures in modern political life. He is a hopeless statesman, or is animated only by such hope as is too like despair to impose on patience the painful necessity of smothering it. An artist might take him for a picture of forlorn suspense, or as the central figure in the representation of a dauntless struggle against overwhelming odds. There is a certain grimness of aspect about him, as of the leader of a lost cause resolved to fight on though well assured that nothing but defeat awaits him. He is a political Prometheus, whose breast the Radical vulture tears, an Ajax defying the lightning, an Ixion on his wheel, anything which symbolises defiance and resistance to a power with which it is vain to contend ; or he may be compared to Enoch Arden upon his desert island—"a ship-wreck'd sailor waiting for a sail—no sail from day to day." Lord Salisbury is waiting for a phantom or a foundered vessel, the Conservative Reaction, which does not heave in sight, to bear him from exile. " It cometh not," he saith ; " I am aweary, aweary." He is at war with the tendencies of his age. He has set himself seriously to do that which the late Lord Derby undertook as a mere matter of phraseology, and in gaiety of heart as blithe as M. Emile Ollivier's—and that is, to stem the tide of democracy. This he essays, not with Lord Derby's reserved intention of going along with the tide if it should prove the stronger, but with a misgiving that, after all, he cannot stem it, but that it will sweep him away. His attitude is that of some heroic watchman upon a dyke in Holland, when the sea threatens to break in ; and no one but himself will perceive the danger. Lord Salisbury is animated by false alarms, but they are true to him ; and while the peril is in his view real and close at hand, the rescue is distant and problematical. The Conservative reaction may not come at all, or it may come too late to save anything. It is a fancy with which his imagination plays ; an illusion which does not deceive him ; a day-dream of which he perceives the flimsiness. In the mean time, his resolute integrity and almost cynical candour will not allow him to make any compromise with the false principle which is in the ascendant. He will not burn incense to it, or enter on its service ; but will only and always resist and expose it.

Circumstances which would have made the career of any other man of at all equal, or even of much inferior capacity, have been fatal to Lord Salisbury. They have probably forfeited him his place in history. He will always be a conspicuous figure in the Parliamentary skirmishes of his times ; but a member of Parliament is like an actor—he is forgotten when he is off the stage. Lord Salisbury was intended to play, for good or for evil, an heroic part, and he has been reduced to commonplace. Under a despotic Government Lord Salisbury might possibly have been a wise and beneficent ruler. He would even now, it is most likely, be a first-rate Viceroy of India. In France, had he been Minister 42 years ago, he certainly would have overturned the throne as Polignac did ; but he would most likely have made the very principle of Monarchy so odious as to have anticipated in July, 1830, the Republic of February, 1848. In Prussia, at the present moment, as a member of the House of Lords, he might lead an opposition to Bismarck, which would make a blank tablet of existing institutions and introduce the spectral figure of the Revolution, which haunts his dreams and waking hours too. The inheritance of a great name and of an historic peerage, and of immense wealth, and social influence, have made him simply a Parliamentary gladiator and critic. He cannot become the administrative or legislative instrument of the convictions of his countrymen, because he does not share them, and is too honest to affect to share them ; he has not even such sympathy with the ideas of his age and country as would enable him to influence them. He cannot lead the party of resistance ; for there is really no party of resistance. There is a Conservative majority (so calling itself) in the House of Lords, which applauds his attacks on the Ministry, which is delighted with his often very just and searching criticisms of their legislative and administrative blunders, and which assents in the abstract to the maxims of policy he lays down ; but which for six months of office would do all, and more than all, it has denounced, and would cap reform by revolution.

Hence Lord Salisbury's tears ; and hence the mission that he has undertaken. He knows that there is no party of resistance in England ; and he has set himself to create one. A few years ago he had persuaded himself that it was all Mr. Disraeli's fault, and that once rid of him, the Conservative party would resume its old function in English political life. He has since enlarged his studies of history, and has discovered that the sinister tactics which he regarded as the invention of Mr. Disraeli were pursued before him by the Duke of Wellington, by Sir Robert Peel, and by the late Lord Derby, if indeed, as a Minister, the late Lord Derby can be distinguished from Mr. Disraeli. But the lesson which he might have learned from those long-delayed researches has apparently not been brought home to him. When he finds four men so different as the Duke of Wellington, Sir Robert Peel, Lord Derby, and Mr. Disraeli pursuing, through nearly half a century, a similar course on each great public question as it arises ; when he finds that in office the Conservative party invariably carries out the Liberal policy ; and that the question is simply one of instruments—Wellington or Grey, Peel or Russell, Disraeli or Gladstone—the doubt might present itself to a mind even less acute than his, whether any elimination of distrusted leaders, or any manipulation of parties, can produce a change. The spirit of the time, or to narrow the phrase to more apprehensible limits, the definite convictions and the indefinite feelings of all classes of Englishmen, set in a particular direction—the direction of what we should call Liberal; and what Lord Salisbury calls revolutionary idea. The Conservative party, though the fact is concealed from them by the inheritance of party phrases and the impulses of opposition, really share those ideas ; they make only a mock resistance out of office, or if the resistance is strenuous, then it is merely to prepare the way for an absolute capitulation when they are in what they are pleased to call power, and when responsibility for the actual administration of affairs strips off their illusions. If this be not the true account of their conduct, we cannot suggest any other reconcilable with personal or political honour. This fact, it it be recognised as one, explains Lord Salisbury's position. Although he sits on the front Opposition bench in the House of Lords, and lends the Duke of Richmond his best help in the annoyance of the Ministry, he practically stands outside both parties. He is a solitary statesman. A close union could only be effected in one or other of two ways—either by his declining into the tactics of acquiescence pursued by Wellington, Peel, Derby, and Disraeli, or by his impressing his convictions and purposes upon the Conservative party, and in the first instance of course upon the Conservative majority in the Peers. The result in the latter case would be a conflict between the two Houses, and a reproduction here of the crisis through which Prussia is passing, and which Conservative prudence avoided in England 40 years ago. Lord Salisbury deserves honour, if for no other reason than that he has the courage, very rare in these times, to be himself. But he is not content with this : he wishes that the Tory Peers and squires should be himself too. He thinks he can convert his character into their policy ; and that because he has the courage to breast the tide of public opinion, or to stand aside and let it float others to place and office, he can impose this stoical attitude upon that average mass of English human nature which is called the Conservative party. It would be as easy to transform common clay into cast-iron or Bessemer steel.

The secret of Lord Salisbury's "stern and unbending Toryism"—that which differentiates it from the pliant Conservatism of his political neighbours—lies in his deep-seated scepticism as to human nature, and his desponding views as to the course and tendencies of society. We have, he seems to say, an existing social order, perhaps not very good in itself, certainly not the best conceivable." But it has this advantage over all possible rivals—that it exists and they do not. A sort of secondary English nature has adapted itself to the laws and institutions which we find among us ; the habits of men recognise those old restraints. Remove them, and this secondary English nature goes with them. The state of primitive nature, which in Lord Salisbury's theory, as in that of Hobbes, is a state of war, returns, and the aboriginal savage leaps forth. Lord Salisbury has apparently been a close student of the first French Revolution ; and its wild horrors and follies, and the century almost of unsettlement which has followed, have had a sort of terrible fascination for him. But his studies here also do not begin early enough. He fails to perceive that it was the blindness of obstinate resistance which brought about the French Revolution, and that the tactics of timely concession which have been pursued by Wellington and Peel, by Derby and Disraeli, and which he laments and denounces, have preserved England. We agree with him that these statesmen would have exhibited a higher political morality if they had supported in Opposition the measures which they denounced until they found it convenient to propose them in office. But this question of personal and party ethics being put aside, there can be no doubt that Mr Disraeli and his predecessors in the Premiership have been more truly Conservative statesmen than Lord Salisbury. The moral, or, as old writers would call it, the complexional scepticism which is the intellectual ground of Lord Salisbury's Toryism is no new phenomenon. It was exhibited before him by Hobbes and Bolingbroke, by Gibbon and Hume, though in their case it was combined with a religious scepticism which is foreign to Lord Salisbury's convictions and habits of mind. His attitude more resembles that of Father Newman and divines of his school, who find the only refuge from bewildering doubt or positive disbelief in the peremptory authority and definite dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church. The whole social order, in their view, is divided but by a thin crust from the abyss. The stable and regular rests upon the tumultuous and chaotic. The certainties are at the surface, the uncertainties are below. Lord Salisbury does not believe that the human nature out of which the present adjustment of affairs has sprung would, in case of disturbance, secrete institutions and usages as suitable to it. The England of the present day is the result of a chapter of accidents ; and he has no confidence that accidents would be as favourable if we trust ourselves to them again. Defending English institutions, not on the ground that they are in harmony with reason and justice, but because they exist, any reform basing itself on reason and justice is especially distasteful to him, inasmuch as those principles admit of revolutionary applications. The smallest change is a denial of the argument of a right to perpetuity from the fact of existence; and the more significant it appears the more insidious and dangerous it is. This attitude of mind is impressed on Lord Salisbury's speeches and writings. He stands always on the offensive. It is not efficient pleading for an institution to say merely that it exists, which is usually all that Lord Salisbury is disposed to say for it ; but it is often a telling argument against a proposed change that it disturbs a present arrangement, and carries within itself the germs of greater disturbances ; that it is dangerous in going so far and inconsistent in not going farther than it does.

In this kind of argument, which is but the political application of the weapons, skilfully wielded by the more recent Roman Catholic apologists, Lord Salisbury is a master. A keenly analytic mind, and a style cultivated by literary practice, give wonderful effect to his trenchant criticisms, which make up in directness for what, according to Mr. Disraeli, they lack in polish. Lord Salisbury is, indeed, intellectually too sincere to take much pains in polishing his invectives and sarcasms. He said at Manchester the other day that it was his aim in all that he said to speak out his own mind simply and truthfully ; and that, though what he thought might sometimes be wrong-headed and absurd, still, being what he thought, he did more good by expressing it, and letting it serve as an element in the formation of a right public judgment, than by paring it down or dressing it up to suit the views of others. This is very laudable ; but it is matter for regret that the self which he expresses is not a larger and more sympathetic one ; and that in the formation of his opinions that wisdom of all the world, which is usually better than the wit of any one man, goes for so little. In refusing any half-honest surrender of individual conviction to public opinion, Lord Salisbury, is in danger of shrinking into a starved and narrow and defiant egotism. It is a misfortune that Lord Salisbury has never been placed in a position which would overcome or counteract his native difficulty of understanding the majority of his countrymen. Among the bene nati, bene vestiti, and mediocriter docti, who form the select society of All Souls, at Oxford, and as a representative who never had a constituency—for the member for Stamford is practically member for " Burleigh-house by Stamford town "—Lord Salisbury has had little opportunity for knowing his fellow-countrymen, or learning to abate that scorn of them to which his temperament and his habits as a man of letters incline him. The scorn, it must be admitted, is impartially distributed over all ranks. If his distrust seems greatest of the labouring classes, it is probably because, in his view, they are held to good behaviour by less powerful artificial restraints, and by a less developed second nature than the upper and middle classes. He seems, indeed, to be haunted by the image of Mr. Odger and Mr. Bradlaugh leading revolutionary mobs into Hatfield Park, and committing the Elizabethan mansion to the flames, Lord Salisbury's unchecked individuality makes him an interesting subject of political study ; but it almost disqualifies him for modern statesmanship. His revolt against the policy of the Liberal party and the tactics of the Conservative leaders is a revolt against the very conditions of Constitutional Government. While he remains what he is, he can never be the leader of the Conservative party. In conceivable, but almost impossible, circumstances, he might be the chief of a counter-revolution.

 The Mercury 11 March 1873,