Page:Reform of Parliamentary Procedure.djvu/9

 It is essential to the fair discussion or effectual treatment of the various defects which are to be found in the existing procedure of the House of Commons that the Ministers who undertake to deal with them should possess the confidence, so far at least as this subject is concerned, of the bulk of the members of that House. Mr. Gladstone unhappily, as has been already shown, had not by his recent declarations done much to inspire this confidence. He has shown that while he is ready to suppress the utterances of a large minority of the Irish members upon a question of absolutely vital importance to the Irish people while he is in office, he has been no less willing to palliate offences of the most unabashed faction when they have served to embarrass a Government to which he has been opposed. People out of doors, who, like other lookers-on, see most of the game, cannot but think that Obstruction in Mr. Gladstone's eyes is only culpable when directed against himself, and that, like another distinguished theologian, he holds orthodoxy to be his "doxy" and heterodoxy to include everything which that "doxy" does not enforce. We shall, indeed, endeavour to hope that a couple of Sessions spent in controversy with Mr. Healy and the Messrs. O'Connor have taught him how impolitic as well as disingenuous was his apology for their forerunners in 1879. And the danger to be apprehended in his case is obviously the risk that the present swing of the pendulum many carry him just as far beyond the middle line of equity as his unlucky sophistry fell short of it when Sir Stafford Northcote was leader of the House.

If, however, Mr. Gladstone has not inspired absolute confidence as to the public spirit or prudence with which he may be expected to handle the very delicate structure of our Parliamentary liberties, his first lieutenant has most miserably contrived to make his task tenfold more arduous. Lord Hartington usually passes for a comparatively discreet politician. When a man of this sort makes a blunder it usually is one of almost prodigious magnitude. The enfant terrible of a Government is always a source of anxiety to his friends, but if he occupies, as he generally does, some humble post which enables his chief to profit from time to time by his almost irresponsible eccentricities, he may be kept about the premises as a creature not altogether without his advantages. But when the colleague who cannot be disavowed without a rupture of the Ministry deliberately admits to a public meeting that which if alleged by a poltical adversary would be attributed to malignant and baseless suspicion; when that impression, which it must be the first aim of the Ministry to dispel, is emphatically enforced by its most stolid and least rhetorical representative, it must in all probability be impossible to obtain for the proposals thus disparaged by anticipation any attention more favourable than that which the captain of a merchantman bestows upon the suspicious vessel which, having suddenly hauled down the neutral colours previously