a Government in need of support. It was received in the House of Commons with a chorus of praise, and to criticise it adversely is difficult, if not impossible. An honest effort to pay off war debt, and a substantial reduction of the duty on tea, which presses so hardly on the poorest of the poor, are just policy and sound finance. The income tax cannot be substantially lowered until the country chooses to adopt a lower scale of expenditure and a more efficient system of control. That the Budget contains no trace of preference or protection is a fact in accordance with Ministerial pledges, and will smooth its passage into law. Nothing, on the other hand, has come of the attempt to play off Home Rule against Tariff Reform, and to show that Liberals are as much divided as Conservatives on a principal question of the day. After weeks of arduous balloting a member hitherto unknown to fame secured the first place on a Wednesday evening, and moved a vote of censure on the Leader of the Opposition. As the Speaker refused the closure, and the debate was not exhausted, there could be no division. But while such a motion could at almost any time be passed, its effect must, of course, be nugatory, since the appropriate punishment, loss of office, cannot be inflicted on a man who holds none. It was just a case for Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's pawky humour, and general opinion pronounces that he never spoke better in his life. The appearance of the Prime Minister gave him an excellent opportunity for sarcasm. For had not Mr. Balfour declared it his duty to absent himself from debates on questions which cannot be settled in the present Parliament? That is a negative characteristic which Home Rule shares with Tariff Reform. The difference, or one difference, between them is that Home Rule, unlike Tariff Reform, cannot be settled in the next Parliament either. I have no belief in mandates. A Protectionist majority would introduce Protection, whatever might be said to the contrary. But no Government could carry a Home Rule Bill unless the British electorate had pronounced in favour of it, for the good and sufficient reason that the Lords would otherwise throw it out. That is the Duke of Devonshire's real answer to Mr. Chamberlain's odd complaint that he is endangering the Union. Far heavier artillery than Mr. Chamberlain's is needed to destroy the Duke's position. Never, since he put himself at the head of the resistance to Home Rule, has the Duke of Devonshire spoken with the vigour and the power that he exhibits now. While Ministers seem to be safe for the present in their places, they must have an uneasy sense that the crash will come, and will not be lighter for delay.

The formal and ostensible reconciliation of Mr. Balfour and Mr. Chamberlain has much impressed all who thought that these two practitioners were at enmity between themselves. Free-traders do not waste their time in drawing distinctions where no difference exists. For them retaliation is as bad as preference, both being theoretically

inconsistent with a tariff for revenue only, and both practically involving duties either on food or on raw material. The manœuvres of the two chiefs are designed to embarrass the enemy, and the enemy is not the foreigner, but such of their own countrymen as adhere to the principle of Free Trade. Whether two General Elections, or three, will be necessary before they can severally adjust the indispensable preliminaries of their joint programme is a question with which a Liberal could not meddle without inexcusable presumption. To dissolve Parliament in June would spoil the season. To get a solid majority when Parliament is dissolved may be called the business of Free-traders, because it would spoil the Protectionist game.

HERBERT PAUL.

The Editor of THE NINETEENTH CENTURY cannot undertake to return unaccepted MSS.

THE past two years have been very remarkable ones in our political history. And they have been years especially interesting to those who watch with sympathy the career of Arthur James Balfour, philosopher and statesman. On the 3rd of October 1903 the Spectator, reviewing Mr. Balfour's policy of the previous four months, immediately after the Sheffield speech, declared ex cathedra that Mr. Balfour's political reputation was for ever at an end. He was only a 'feeble shadow of Mr. Chamberlain,' who agreed with Mr. Chamberlain intellectually, but lacked the courage of his convictions. He had allowed himself to forget the maxim that 'on a grave and burning question it is absolutely essential for an effective politician to be clearly and definitely on one side or the other.' The writer was very sad, but very positive.

We cannot help a deep feeling of personal chagrin [he wrote] at Mr. Balfour's failure. Sunt lachrymæ rerum, and, being mortal, we cannot but grieve at the overthrow of a personality in many ways so attractive as that of Mr. Balfour. We are using no hyperbole-an overthrow it is. Whatever else may happen, Mr. Balfour's day as a great British statesman is over. No turn in the political kaleidoscope can restore to him the confidence of the country.

VOL. LVII-No. 340

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Day after day the witty caricaturist of the Westminster Gazette represented the Prime Minister as a roi fainéant, and Mr. Chamberlain as the Mayor of the Palace-the real leader of the party; and such manifestations in the press represented a very widespread feeling. Nay, it was a feeling which seriously infected the Unionist party itself in the House of Commons and in the country. A doctor dubitantium was not an effective figure in a moment of excitement when placed in competition with the positive, sanguine, enthusiastic Secretary for the Colonies. The man who was occupied in delineating with delicate hand fine shades and subtle lines of distinction and graduation in a picture as yet avowedly incomplete, which was to represent faithfully the anomalies and complexities of the actual world of commerce, seemed insignificant by the side of the painter who, unhampered by close regard to the practicable or the actual, depicted the broad scenic effects of an unhesitating and thoroughgoing policy of Colonial preference involving the taxation of food, and of retaliation by rival tariffs.

Yet, as the drama developed itself, time has had its revenges. We have seen the change of fortunes which so often comes in a competition between fine and calculating perception on the one hand, and undiscriminating and passionate energy on the other. It can scarcely be questioned that, so far as pre-eminence in the House of Commons is concerned, the positions of Mr. Balfour and Mr. Chamberlain have been, in the last twelve months, reversed. It has been a case of FitzJames and Roderick Dhu; the cool perception and the rapier thrust of criticism were in reality steadily telling for victory, while to the average onlooker sheer strength and vigour seemed to be carrying all before them. And the space of a year brought the contrast between the night when the Prime Minister had to be content to risk defeat rather than press the Wharton amendment-which was identical with his own policy-against the threatened mutiny of the Chamberlainites, whose excesses it disowned, and the night when the thoroughgoing Chamberlainites had become numerically so weak that they gladly agreed to decline the combat on Mr. Ainsworth's resolution. The contrast has been faithfully depicted by Mr. Gould, and last month he gave us Mr. Chamberlain, no longer as the real leader of the party, but as a suppliant before the gates of Pope Balfour's castle at Canossa.

This change in the situation was brought about by some very remarkable qualities in the Prime Minister. Far from being a shadow of Mr. Chamberlain, or feebly echoing his views, two more different intellectual attitudes towards a great problem could hardly be conceived. Mr. Balfour with sure instinct noted at the outset that Mr. Chamberlain's views had not attained that practical precision which could either evoke an echo or call for an unequivocal disclaimer in a really accurate mind. In the first Parliamentary debate of the 28th of

Yet the Prime

May 1903, indeed, they were avowedly undefined. Minister could not treat them lightly. Mr. Chamberlain was a colleague and friend: Mr. Balfour naturally had confidence in his insight into the necessities of the Colonies; and he had raised questions of importance. Colonial preference had already appealed to Mr. Balfour as a possible instrument of political value in cementing our union with the Colonies-if it should be workable. Retaliation as opposed to complete laisser faire had long been among the modifications of the existing fiscal system which he had contemplated as desirable. He had ever deprecated burking discussion on such subjects in the name of the a priori dogmas of Free Trade. To reject Mr. Chamberlain's policy wholesale, or to accept it wholesale, was equally impossible in the circumstances. The first obvious duty was to plead that we should think, examine, discriminate before we decide, instead of deciding in a complex matter before it is thought out at all. Yet the multitude loves to be addressed in tones loud and positive. Well-balanced thought ever seems to it a shadow. Strong statements mean strength; guarded statements, weakness. Thus the Spectator writer did express accurately the impression produced on the masses by the only possible attitude of a thoughtful man who was suddenly called upon to decide on a problem not ripe for decision, and to formulate a large policy on a subject which he did not consider to have as yet reached such definite issues as could justify concrete proposals suitable for the basis of a large policy.

Mr. Balfour had deprecated at the outset (in his speech of the 28th of May 1903) the attitude of complacent orthodoxy assumed by extreme Free Traders, and their charges of 'heresy' against all who called their formulæ in question; and, indeed, the situation was curiously similar to that which we see in the sphere to which such phrases primarily belong-that of divinity. Thinkers in all religious communions are just now very busy discussing the modifications in the current theology which are called for by the advance of the positive sciences. On the one hand we have the liberal thinkers, flushed with the most adventurous theories of the higher critics, and with speculations suggested by researches in the early Christian history, clamorously calling upon those in authority to transform the received teaching, and to bring it into accord with these bold and vivid speculations as though they were accurately ascertained facts. On the other hand, we have those who stand in the ancient ways, and condemn as heresy-as subversive of dogma-any attempt to call in question its received theological exposition. The wise ruler yields to neither party. He

'Nothing in the nature of a complete plan can be put before the country,' Mr. Chamberlain said, in reply to Mr. Lough, who urged that the right honourable gentleman should tell us his plan' (Hansard, May 28, p. 184).

2 See, on this subject, his speech in the House of Commons on the 24th of June 1880 (Hansard, vol. ccliii. p. 772).