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1885.] their policy there and elsewhere does not necessitate an absolute increase. This growth of expenditure, coincident, as we believe it will be, with a diminution of revenue, will bring Government and Parliament in a year or two face to face with the whole question of our fiscal system – the most delicate and most dangerous of all problems to be submitted to the arbitrament, in the last resort, of the newly enfranchised millions. The doctrinaires of the Cobden Club will probably before long bitterly regret that they obstinately adhered to their theories, when they might have modified them to meet the obvious change of circumstances and popular feeling, while retaining the cardinal principle of a tariff for revenue and not for protection. We earnestly hope that the Conservative party will be able and willing to place before the new constituencies a reasonable; scheme of fiscal readjustment, by which the glaring injustice and absurdity of less than £20,000,000, out of a total of £135,000,000, raised by taxation for imperial and local purposes, being received at the Custom House, will be remedied.

It is, we are convinced, a delusion to suppose that the doctrines of political economy or the system of free imports are popular with democracies, whether in the Old or the New World; and that after 1886 the House of Commons will represent the democracy of the United Kingdom, with whatever safeguards and counterpoises, we hold to be an indisputable political fact. In that year our Constitution will exhibit the untried and unique combination of a hereditary Monarchy, a hereditary Second Chamber, and a democratic House of Commons; and yet we are bold to say that the dangerous experiment will succeed, and that owing to the gradual process by which the last and greatest change in the representative system has been arrived at, and the happy blending of courage and caution which presided over the final rearrangement of the electoral areas, King, Lords, and Commons will still continue to play their proper and distinctive parts in the government of this historic empire.

In support of this cheerful view of the future, we would direct attention to some of the circumstances attending the recent treaty of peace, and to the leading provisions of the new representative Constitution.

In our last number we cited a remarkable article in the 'Daily News' to show that Lord Salisbury and Sir Stafford Northcote, in accepting the olive-branch tendered to them publicly on the 17th, and privately with fuller and more satisfactory explanations on the morning of the 18th of November, did not derogate from the position originally assumed and consistently maintained throughout the struggle by the House of Lords; but as attempts have been since made, by politicians differing so widely as Mr Chaplin and Mr John Morley, to represent the agreement as a surrender on the part of the Conservative leaders, we here reproduce the deliberate conclusion of that able organ of metropolitan Liberalism, which expresses the exact and literal facts of the case: –

"The Government have receded from the demand that the undertaking of the Peers to pass the Franchise Bill shall be a condition precedent of the submission to the Conservative leaders of the Redistribution Bill. The latter must be 'seen and approved' by Lord Salisbury before he will enter into any arrangement; so