154 



Leading Articles in the Reviews 



THE POLITICAL OUTLOOK. 



Conservative Hopes — 



" Curio," writing on " The Turn of the Tide " in the 

 Fortnightly Review for February, is quite sure the 

 Tories are coming in. The present Government has 

 not two years to live. The turn of the tide is sure 

 to come, but Ministers have ante-dated that turn, .^t 

 the same time he warns the Tories that it won't do 

 for them to take up a purely negative attitude ; neither 

 the Church nor the Union, nor Tariff Reform, will in 

 the long run be assured if Toryism does not succeed 

 in saving the revolting masses from the arms of 

 Labour. It will not do for the Tories to come in on 

 a programme summed up in the phrase " anything for 

 a quiet life " i — 



For the temper of the industrial districts at the present 

 moment it will not do at all — and it is in tlie industrial dislricts 

 that the vast bulk of the seats have got to he -won. The aspira- 

 tion there, as present and continued Labour trouble proves, is 

 not for a quiet life but for a better one. 



— AND FEARS. 



Mr. F. E. Smith, in the Oxford and Cambridge 

 Reviav, dilates with glowing hope on Unionist 

 prospects. The change from October to January in 

 the outlook of the Party is, he says, prodigious. The 

 Insurance Act — the underlying conceptions of which 

 Mr. .Smith is careful to say are bold and beneficent — 

 and the circumstances under which it became law, 

 have powerfully contributed to the growing un- 

 popularity of the Government. He anticipates that 

 the forthcoming session of Parliament will carry still 

 further that unpopularity. " None of its proposed 

 measures will win it a vote : some of them will lose 

 many in different parts of the country." Mr. Smith 

 goes on to rejoice in the split in the Ministry over 

 Female Suffrage, but at the same time reveals his 

 anxiety about a division in the Opposition on the 

 same question. He urges even those Unionists who 

 believe in enfranchising the propertied woman to 

 prevent the beginnings of what may prove to be the 

 terrible evil of general female franchise. 



TORY DEMOCRACY — 



That seems all pretty plain sailing until we read the 

 next article in the Fortni'^liily by Mr. .-Vrlhur A. 

 ]?aumann, entitled "Is a Tory Revival Possible?" 

 " Yes," says Mr. Baumann, " not only possible but 

 certain, if the leaders of the Tory Party would turn a 

 deaf ear to other advice and absolutely refuse to 

 make any attempt whatever to outbid the Liberals in 

 their appeal to the democracy." He implores Mr. 

 Bonar i^aw and his colleagues to recur to the honest 

 name of Tory, or the respectable appellation of Con- 

 servative, but, he says : — 



We are compelled to ask to-day, as Disraeli "asked in 1844, 

 what docs the Conservative Parly conserve? Is the Tory 

 tradition a myth, the hocus-pocus of political priests, or is it a 

 living principle, adaptable to the conditions of modern politics_? 



— "a disorganised hypocrisy.' 

 " Tory democracy," he says, " is disorganised 

 hypocrisy." He denounces Mr. Balfour for declar- 

 ing that " the protection of the rights of property is 

 in no sense the special function of the Conservative 

 Party." That, Mr. Baumann maintains, is in truth 

 its first function. " The Conservatives," he says, 

 " had much better leave Social Reform alone for the 

 present, first, because the nation has had its bellyful 

 of Social Reform during the last three years ; and 

 secondly, because we Tories do not really understand 

 the question." Two-thirds of the educated skill of the 

 country are Conservative ; nine-tenths of the accumu- 

 lated wealth of the country are Conservative. If 

 public credit is to be restored, and the national 

 finances put in order, this is not to be done by 

 publishing a pale copy of Lloyd Georgeism. ffhe 

 electors ought not to be asked to choose between 

 two competing programmes of Socialism, but between 

 Socialism and the strong and orderly government of 

 the Empire. 



■ CLAIM OF THE UNDERFED MILLIONS. 



Now this too seems plain sailing ; then we turn ,over 

 a few pages and we come to a paper on Strikes by 

 " G.," who draws a lurid picture of the growth of 

 Syndicalism'and the prospects of revolutionary anarchy, 

 which for the most part of it would appear to confirm 

 Mr. Baumann in his contention that the supreme 

 need of the hour is to rally round threatened property, 

 lust as we are settling down to this comfortable con- 

 viction we are pulled up short by a warning that the 

 condition of the people question is such that unless 

 something is done, and that right speedily, there 

 is nothing before us but \vide wasting desolation. 

 "G."says of John Bull :— 



These children of his hard work ; they have helped to buiM 

 up a great luiipirc, a world-wide couimerce. And what is his 

 care ol ihtm 7 In a typical English city one-sei'eiilh of the wai^c- 

 earneis, all loafers being excepted, were recently receiving wages 

 insuffieient to keep them in bare physical efficiency — that is, for 

 bare housing, bare clothing, bare food. In_the capital of the 

 Kmpirc, thirty per cent, of London w orking men receive wages 

 below the sidnisteiice li-vcl. Beguiled in his distress, in his 

 stupefied brain and underfed body, Ijy false leaders, the working 

 man is at last embarking on iheoidy prompt measures offered to 

 his hand — the strike, the multiplied strike, the general strike. 



What About "Prince Proletariat"? 



Another paper very much on the same lines is 

 Mr. Walter Sichel's essay, which he calls " Prince 

 I'roletariat." He also speaks in an uncertain voice. ' 

 He asks : — 



Why should not the Tory Party stir Labour to emancipate 

 itself from the Unions as at present conducted, or, rather, why 

 should it not frame some plan for the reconsti'.ution of those 

 Unions on proper lines? The national safety is at stake, and 

 the national party should act as if philosophic doubt had not 

 wholly whittled away ihe resources of inspiration. 



On the whole our Tory friends seem very much 

 more certain that they are going to succeed to jiowci 

 than they are as to what use they will make of the 

 power when it is placed in their hands. 



