_FLACCIDITY_
My discourse on "Induration" was intended to convey a warning which,
as individuals, we all need. But Governments are beset by an even
greater danger, which the learned might call "flaccidity" and the
simple--"flabbiness."
The great Liddon, always excellent in the aptness of his scriptural
allusions, once said with regard to a leader who had announced
that he would "set his face" against a certain policy and then
gave way, "Yes, the deer 'set his face,' but he did not 'set it
as a flint'--rather _as a pudding_."
To set one's face as a pudding is the characteristic action of all
weak Governments. Lord Randolph Churchill once attracted notice
by enouncing the homely truth that "the business of an Opposition
is to oppose." A truth even more primary is that the duty of a
Government is to govern; to set its face, not as a pudding, but as
a flint, against lawlessness and outrage; to protect the innocent
and to punish the wrong-doer.
This is a duty from which all weak Governments shrink. If a Minister
is not very sure of his position; if he is backed, not by a united
party, but by a haphazard coalition; if he is unduly anxious about
his own official future; if his eye is nervously fixed on the next
move of the jumping cat, he always fails to govern. He neither
protects the law-abiding citizen nor chastises the criminal and
the rebel. In this particular, there is no distinction of party.
Tories can show no better record than Whigs, nor Liberals than
Conservatives. It is a question of the governing temper, which is
as absolutely requisite to the character of the ruler as courage
to the soldier or incorruptibility to the Judge.
It used to be held, and perhaps still is held, by what may be styled
the toad-eating school of publicists, that this governing temper
was an hereditary gift transmitted by a long line of ancestors,
who in their successive generations had possessed it, and had used
it on a large scale in the governance of England. "How natural,"
they exclaimed, "that Lord Nozoo, whose ancestors have ruled half
Loamshire since the Conquest, should have more notion of governing
men than that wretched Bagman, whose grandfather swept out the
shop, and who has never had to rule anyone except a clerk and a
parlourmaid!"
This sounded plausible enough, especially in the days when heredity
was everything, and when ancestral habit was held to explain, and if
necessary extenuate, all personal characteristics; but experience
and observation proved it false. Pitt was, I suppose, the greatest
Minister who ever ruled England; but his pedigree would have moved a
genealogist to scorn. Peel was a Minister who governed so effectually
that, according to Gladstone, who served under him, his direct
authority was felt in every department, high or low, of the
Administration over which he presided; and Peel was a very recent
product of cotton. Abraham Lincoln was, perhaps, the greatest ruler
of the modern world, and the quality of his ancestry is a topic fit
only to be handled in a lecture on the Self-Made Men of History.
When we regard our own time, I should say that Joseph Chamberlain had,
of all English statesmen I have ever known, both the most satisfactory
ideal of government and the greatest faculty for exercising it. But
the Cordwainers' Company was the school in which his forefathers
had learnt the art of rule. Ancestral achievements, hereditary
possessions, have nothing to do with the matter. What makes a man
a ruler of men, and enables him to set his face as a flint against
wrong-doing; is a faculty born in himself--"the soul that riseth
with him, his life's star."
And it has no more to do with politics than with pedigree. Sydney
Smith, though he was as whole-hearted a reformer as ever breathed, knew
that sternness towards crime was an essential part of government, and
after the Bristol Riots of 1831 he warned Lord Grey against flaccidity
with great plainness of speech. "Pray do not be good-natured about
Bristol. I must have ten people hanged, and twenty transported,
and thirty imprisoned. You will save lives by it in the end."
It was a Tory Government which in the London Riots of 1866 made, as
Matthew Arnold said, "an exhibition of mismanagement, imprudence,
and weakness almost incredible." Next year the Fenians blew up
Clerkenwell Prison, and the same acute critic observed: "A Government
which dares not deal with a mob, of any nation or with any design,
simply opens the floodgates to anarchy. Who can wonder at the Irish,
who have cause to hate us, and who do not own their allegiance
to us, making war on a State and society which has shown itself
irresolute and feeble?"
But the head of that feeble State, the leader of that irresolute
society, was the fourteenth Earl of Derby, whose ancestors had
practised the arts of government for eight hundred years.
In Ireland the case is the same. Both parties have succeeded in
governing it, and both have failed. Mr. Balfour has been justly
praised for his vigour in protecting property and restoring order;
but it was Lord Spencer and Sir George Trevelyan who, four years
before, had caught and hanged the assassins of the Phoenix Park, and
had abolished agrarian murder. It was, alas! a Liberal Government
that tolerated the Ulster treason, and so prepared the way for the
Dublin rebellion. Highly placed and highly paid flaccidity then
reigned supreme, and produced its inevitable result. But last December
we were assured that flaccidity had made way for firmness, and that
the pudding had been replaced by the flint. But the transactions
of the last few weeks--one transaction in particular[*]--seem worthy
of our flabbiest days.
[Footnote *: A release for political objects.]
I turn my eyes homewards again, from Dublin to the House of Commons.
The report of the Mesopotamia Commission has announced to the world
a series of actions which every Briton feels as a national disgrace.
Are the perpetrators of those actions to go unpunished? Are they
to retain their honours and emoluments, the confidence of their
Sovereign, and the approbation of his Ministers? If so, flaccidity
will stand revealed as what in truth it has always been--the one
quality which neutralizes all other gifts, and makes its possessor
incapable of governing.
V
_THE PROMISE OF MAY_
This is the real season for a holiday, if holidays were still possible.
It is a point of literary honour not to quote the line which shows
that our forefathers, in the days of Chaucer, felt the holiday-making
instinct of the spring, and that instinct has not been affected by
the lapse of the centuries. It stirs us even in London, when the
impetuous lilacs are bursting into bud, and the sooty sparrows
chirrup love-songs, and "a livelier iris changes on the burnished
dove"--or, to be more accurate, pigeon--which swells and straddles
as if Piccadilly were all his own. The very wallflowers and daffodils
which crown the costers' barrows help to weave the spell; and,
though pleasure-jaunts are out of the question, we welcome a call
of duty which takes us, even for twenty-four hours, into "the country
places, which God made and not man."
For my own part, I am no victim of the "pathetic fallacy" by which
people in all ages have persuaded themselves that Nature sympathized
with their joys and sorrows. Even if that dream had not been dispelled,
in prose by Walter Scott, and in verse by Matthew Arnold, one's
own experience, would have proved it false.
"Alas! what are we, that the laws of Nature should correspond in
their march with our ephemeral deeds or sufferings?" _The Heart
of Midlothian_.
"Man must begin, know this, where Nature ends;
Nature and man can never be fast friends."[*]
[Footnote *: _In Harmony with Nature_.]
A funeral under the sapphire sky and blazing sun of June loses
nothing of its sadness--perhaps is made more sad--by the unsympathetic
aspect of the visible world. December does not suspend its habitual
gloom because all men of goodwill are trying to rejoice in the
Birthday of the Prince of Peace. We all can recall disasters and
disappointments which have overcast the spring, and tidings of
achievement or deliverance which have been happily out of keeping
with the melancholy beauty of autumn.
In short, Nature cares nothing for the acts and sufferings of human
kind; yet, with a strange sort of affectionate obstinacy, men insist
on trying to sympathize with Nature, who declines to sympathize
with them; and now, when she spreads before our enchanted eyes all
the sweetness and promise of the land in spring, we try to bring
our thoughts into harmony with the things we see, and to forget,
though it be only for a moment, alike regrets and forebodings.
And surely the effort is salutary. With Tom Hughes, jovial yet
thoughtful patriot, for our guide, we make our way to the summit
of some well-remembered hill, which has perhaps already won a name
in history, and find it "a place to open a man's soul and make
him prophesy, as he looks down on the great vale spread out, as
the Garden of the Lord, before him": wide tracts of woodland, and
fat meadows and winding streams, and snug homesteads embowered in
trees, and miles on miles of what will soon be cornfields. Far away
in the distance, a thin cloud of smoke floats over some laborious
town, and whichever way we look, church after church is dotted over
the whole surface of the country, like knots in network.
Such, or something like it, is the traditional aspect of our fair
English land; but to-day she wears her beauty with a difference.
The saw is at work in the woodlands; and individual trees, which
were not only the landmarks, but also the friends and companions
of one's childhood, have disappeared for ever. The rich meadows by
the tranquil streams, and the grazing cattle, which used to remind
us only of Cuyp's peaceful landscapes, now suggest the sterner thought
of rations and queues. The corn-fields, not yet "white to harvest,"
acquire new dignity from the thought of all that is involved in
"the staff of life." The smoke-cloud over the manufacturing town
is no longer a mere blur on the horizon, but tells of a prodigality
of human effort, directed to the destruction of human life, such
as the world has never known. Even from the towers of the village
churches floats the Red Cross of St. George, recalling the war-song
of an older patriotism--"In the name of our God we will set up
our banners."[*]
[Footnote: Psalm xx. 5.]
Yes, this fair world of ours wears an altered face, and what this
year is "the promise of May"? It is the promise of good and truth
and fruitfulness forcing their way through "the rank vapours of
this sin-worn mould." It is the promise of strong endurance, which
will bear all and suffer all in a righteous cause, and never fail
or murmur till the crown is won. It is the promise of a brighter
day, when the skill of invention and of handicraft may be once
more directed, not to the devices which destroy life, but to the
sciences which prolong it, and the arts which beautify it. Above
all, it is the promise of a return, through blood and fire, to
the faith which made England great, and the law which yet may wrap
the world in peace.
"For as the earth bringeth forth her bud, and as the garden causeth
the things that are sown in it to spring forth; so the Lord God
will cause righteousness and praise to spring forth before all
the nations" (Isa. lxi. II).