LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 
 
§g % satw ^tttjpr. 
 
 CIVILIZATION AND PROGRESS, 
 
 Being the outlines of a New System of Political, 
 Religious, and Social Philosophy. 
 
 14^. 
 
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 " An original thinker and a clear, forcible writer." —Scotsman. 
 
 " This is a work of real ability. It is full of thought, and its 
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 stream of strong thinking from point to point, until at last, 
 when he pauses to get a little mental breath, he finds that he 
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 so stimulating and suggestive is the book ; and so full is it of 
 discriminating, vigorous, and subtle ideas." — Inquirer. 
 
 " There can be no doubt, we think, that Mr. Crozier has put 
 his finger upon the weak point in the speculations of previous 
 writers, and that he has himself laid hold of the right method 
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 pressed Full of original criticism Great literary 
 
 faculty It will rectify much that is faulty in the views 
 
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§g % smra ^ttffjor. 
 
 THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 
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 ponents is Crozier, in his ' Religion of the Future/" — Cooke's 
 Life of Emerson. 
 
 " Mr. Crozier has at least the credit of striking out a path 
 as yet nearly untrodden. He walks in it with steady step, and 
 shows himself a competent guide to others." — Liverpool Herald. 
 
 * His thoughts are massive and granite-like in their strength. 
 His principles draw deep and reach far. His system as a whole 
 is one which, when duly wrought out and weighed, cannot but 
 carry conviction on the main point for which he contends. . . . 
 A luminous, sure path by which to pass from the region of the 
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 — Glasgow Christian Herald. 
 
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 "An able dissertation against Atheism." — Secular Review. 
 
 " Mr. Crozier considers that the leading causes in philosophy 
 and life which have prevented a harmonious view of the World, 
 may be arranged under four heads, i. The neglect of the 
 scale in the mind. 2. The attempt to account for the World 
 from without instead of from within. 3. The confusion in the 
 choice of the instruments by which Truth is apprehended. 4. 
 The looking at the World with too microscopic an eye. These 
 he discusses with much acuteness and logical power. . . . The 
 speculations he occupies himself with are stated with quite as 
 much verve as the subject is ever likely to command." — The 
 Examiner. 
 
LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL 
 
 ^.Stttbs of 
 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN BEATTIE CROZIER, 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 
 * CIVILIZATION AND PROGRESS, ' ETC. 
 
 LONDON : 
 SWAN SONNENSCHEIN, LOWREY & CO. 
 
 PATERNOSTER SQUARE. 
 1887. 
 
fffi 
 
 RrcHARD Clay & Sons, 
 
 BREAD STREET HILL, LONDON, 
 
 Bungay, Suffolk. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 I. INTRODUCTORY ... ... ... ... I 
 
 II. THE COGERS' HALL ... ... ... ... 12 
 
 III. THE HOUSE OF COMMONS ... ... ... 36 
 
 IV. THE RISE OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL ... 5 1 
 V. LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL AS ORATOR ... 93 
 
 VI. LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN ... 115 
 
 VII. THE DANGERS OF ENGLISH DEMOCRACY ... l6l 
 
 VIII. THE PRESS AND THE DEMAGOGUE ... ... 189 
 
 IX. THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS ... ... 203 
 
 283585 
 
LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 I propose in the following pages to examine 
 the political career of Lord Randolph Churchill, 
 his principles, methods, and political aims ; to 
 take stock and inventory of the amount and 
 quality of ability and character that have gone 
 to make up his success ; and more than all, to 
 discover, if possible, the conditions at present 
 existing in English Politics and Society, which 
 have assisted or permitted such a man, with 
 such intellectual and moral outfit, to rise to his 
 present position of influence and power. In 
 what I have to say I shall, I trust, maintain a 
 perfectly neutral and disengaged attitude, avoid- 
 ing all subjects of party controversy ; I shall 
 assume no political premises but such as may 
 
 v 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 be admitted with eqiial . readiness by Radical 
 and Tory alike ; and shall enunciate no political 
 doctrines but such as may be held with equal 
 sincerity by both. 
 
 In selecting Lord Randolph Churchill as a 
 subject for study, I propose to regard him from 
 a political rather than from a personal standpoint ; 
 for however interesting a man may be in him- 
 self, for political purposes no qualities however 
 eminent will repay the trouble of investigation, 
 unless the success they have brought to their 
 possessor is an index and symbol of beliefs, 
 prejudices, opinions, and modes of political judg- 
 ment in the public mind ; — of which indeed this 
 very success is itself the product and outcome. 
 Now did I believe that Lord Randolph Churchill 
 had been thrust into power by aristocratic pres- 
 sure, that his. political rise and ultimate success 
 were due entirely or even largely to the accident 
 of birth, or were, as was the case formerly, the 
 appanage of a particular family, I should have 
 nothing to say. I should feel that the public 
 had had no part in determining his career, that 
 it might have witnessed his elevation without 
 admiration, as it would have acquiesced in his 
 degradation without censure, and accordingly I 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 should pass him by unheeding. But it is 
 because it is claimed for him by his admirers 
 and a large section of the public, that his rise 
 has been due almost entirely to his superiority 
 in ability and_chaj^±eiv-ihatJ[ am forbidden to 
 pass him by ; and that his career, by the light it 
 throws on men's political judgments and modes 
 of thought, is so pregnant with interest and 
 instruction at the present time. 
 
 It has been so often repeated that it has almost 
 passed into a truism, that the success of modern 
 popular governments will depend largely on the 
 kind of men in whom the People choose to 
 repose confidence. However this may be, there 
 can be little doubt that in such men, and espe- 
 cially in the circumstances of their rise, you may 
 see what it is that the political public regard 
 as ability, and what, for the time being at least, 
 they regard as great and admirable. And, ac- 
 cordingly, believing as I do that in the rise of 
 Lord Randolph Churchill you have imaged as 
 in a mirror many if not all the vices, weak- 
 nesses, and illusions which still hang around 
 the neck of Democracy and drag it down; and 
 feeling the vast and supreme importance of this 
 subject to all thinking minds (standing as we 
 
 B 2 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 do still in the dawn of the new democracy), I 
 have felt that my end would be best subserved 
 by concentrating a steady light on this single 
 prominent and representative figure, rather than 
 by any merely general or abstract dissertation, 
 however otherwise interesting or instructive. 
 To avoid misunderstanding, however, I may as 
 well perhaps say at once, that I have no fear of 
 Democracy in itself; I am no political pessi- 
 mist; and can contemplate the widest and most 
 fundamental changes in the constitution of States 
 unmoved, provided only that they are brought 
 about w r ith honest intent and with deliberate and 
 well-grounded conviction. I have no sympathy 
 with the perennial and ever-recurring cry of 
 6 the State in danger; ' nor do I share the fears of 
 those who compare the approach of Democracy 
 to the entrance on the Niagara rapids, and 
 its advent to the shooting of the gulf; and as 
 for the Demagogue, I know well that whatever 
 else befalls the Democracy of the future, it will, 
 like the good earth with its fungi and parasites, 
 convert again into nutriment for itself such poor 
 and imperfect instruments as from time to time 
 it throws up to work out its purposes and 
 minister to its designs. As for the old fear of 
 
INTRODUCTORY, 
 
 Despotism, the ghost of which is still so often 
 raised to flutter the ignorant and weak-kneed, 
 it has practically ceased to have any bearing 
 on the future of the great majority of existing 
 European States, and so far as we in England 
 are concerned, it has almost entirely passed 
 away. But there are nevertheless still certain 
 defects bound up with all existing democracies — 
 flaws inwoven in their texture — which are rather 
 due to the age of the world and the stage of 
 civilization reached at the present time, than 
 inherent in the principle itself; and which in 
 our own special form of democracy in England 
 lie so close-hidden, so immediate to the very 
 heart of the institutions from which we draw 
 our political life, that in the clash and uproar of 
 party strife, they have been almost entirely over- 
 looked. These flaws and patches, like the wastes 
 and morasses of the world, breed their own 
 special and peculiar forms of life — forms which 
 in rankness of growth, though not in body and 
 fibre, often overtop the firmer and hardier 
 products of the fields. Now it is in these 
 swamps and watery wastes of the political world 
 that are engendered., and. .nourished careers like 
 thar oFLord Randolph Churchill, and out of 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 which shoot and blow such reputations as those 
 of which his is the supreme and topmost 
 efflorescence. 
 
 As a diligent student of the relations existing 
 between different kinds of political soil and the 
 products that thrive on them, I have long been 
 familiar with these unhealthy and noxious spots 
 in our political system, and as I followed the 
 course of public events with them in my mind, 
 and observed the noble lord as a political seed- 
 ling almost from his very inception and planting, 
 I foresaw and even predicted his success from 
 the outset ; and when (his political fate having 
 hung trembling in the balance for a moment 
 while I hoped that my prediction might be 
 falsified) his full-blown triumph at last justified 
 my worst fears, I felt that such a blow had 
 been given to all that intellectually and morally 
 I had been taught to regard as great and 
 honourable, as had not occurred in my time. 
 As I watched the process from day to day, and 
 saw the cheap expedients by which the whole 
 business was accomplished; as I noticed the 
 adaptation of the tree to the political compost 
 on which it fed and out of which it grew, and 
 saw the germs of notoriety reduplicating on 
 

 INTRODUCTORY, 
 
 themselves and blown into the general air till 
 they filled the political sky, and his name became 
 in every mouth a household word; I said to 
 myself, not all the regiments of priests that 
 patrol this land, with the innumerable bands 
 of guerilla preachers at their back, will avail 
 by their sweetest moral exhortation and ap- 
 peal, to neutralize the deep temptation of this 
 glittering career, or avert the steady gaze of 
 young ambition from this blazing comet set 
 in the sky for its imitation and worship. With 
 this example ever before them, I asked my- 
 self, why should young political ability take 
 the high and honourable road of tried and 
 gradated service, waited on by the old English 
 virtues of patience, moderation, and self-restraint, 
 when it sees a licentious and unbridled tongue 
 the shortest cut to the goal ; when it has ocular 
 pFdoTBefore it that by the breach of all disci- 
 pline and the casting aside of all those soft 
 and restraining forms which alone make regu- 
 lated and steady political action possible, you can 
 so debauch and seduce the rabble and camp- 
 followers, as at last to overcrow the General 
 himself and alienate the common allegiance? 
 And why, I still ask, waste the midnight oil 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 over the laws of Political Economy and the 
 deeper problems of States ; why ransack History 
 for the secret causes ; of the decline and fall of 
 nations; or ponder over constitutions and codes, 
 "and tHeir adjustments to circumstances of time 
 and place ; why travel in distant lands to mark 
 the safeguards which wisdom and experience 
 have devised to meet the shifts and prepon- 
 derance of power; why, in a word, go into 
 training for the higher qualities of the States- 
 man, when the supreme prize the Empire holds 
 out to tried and experienced capacity, the very 
 jewel of the Crown and service, can be snatched 
 from its shelf by the first light and dexterous 
 adventurer that passes by — in this case by one 
 whose stock of ability, natural and acquired, 
 for the higher requirements of Statesmanship, 
 I pledge myself to show, before I have done, to 
 be the slenderest and most shallow that have 
 raised demagogue to power since the time when 
 Cleon of Athens made the name a hissing and 
 a byeword to men? Not that I for a moment 
 dream, in saying this, that any words of mine 
 or another's will avail to affect in the smallest 
 degree the future and outlook of this once mili- 
 tant but now laurelled and triumphant politician. 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 There is a certain state of public sentiment 
 (and you can feel it in the very air), when a 
 reputation or notoriety once engendered, breeds 
 in on itself in such multiple and ever-increasing 
 ratio, that like those rabbit-warrens in Australia, 
 or locust flights in Western America, the efforts 
 of individuals to stay or arrest it are as impotent 
 as to oppose the onward rolling sea. Nor can 
 any merely political reverse or vicissitude do 
 it; and in a state of public sentiment where 
 political bribery leaves no personal stain, where 
 the amusing political mountebank is as popular 
 and safe from arrest as his brother of the music- 
 hall and circus, and where, so long as party 
 phrases are inviolate, political principles and 
 even political allies may with impunity be 
 whistled down the wind, there is not the slightest 
 chance of it. I know of nothing that will do 
 it, unless perchance it be a personal felony, an 
 offence against the common law, the cheating 
 at cards, or the suspicion of a liaison with a 
 neighbour's wife. With the future career of the 
 noble lord,* now complacently seated on the 
 chair of State, I have no concern. I care not 
 how in the future he may add to his stock of 
 * Autumn '86. 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 political knowledge, how he may change his 
 tactics, trim his principles, or alter his political 
 methods ; nor shall I seek to anticipate (now 
 that he has snatched the prize and is already 
 showing signs of throwing away hi^ J^a£_and- 
 bells) the gravity and weight of public care with 
 which his brows will be overhung — with all this 
 I have no concern. But one thing I know, and 
 that is, that whatever political fate await him, 
 nothing can choke the strong conception of his 
 rise under which I have groaned — and the many 
 others, I trust, of whom for the time being I 
 have ventured to make myself the mouthpiece. 
 In taking up my pen therefore in this cause, 
 it is not that I imagine that I can affect, nor do 
 I wish to affect, his political future ; nor would 
 it avail anything if I could, for why try to 
 uproot one political fungus when the political 
 soil from which it has sprung continues to send 
 up thousands more, if need be, to reproduce its 
 kind ? My only hope is that by setting him up 
 as an illustration and example, I may strike at 
 those fictions, illusions, and false political ideals 
 which overrun ancL^encumber the political field, 
 and which havejrvade-Tt"possible for ability such 
 as this to climb to the topmost boughs of 
 
INTRO D UCTOR Y. 1 1 
 
 influence and power ; and so, by gazetting once for 
 all these blots and excrescences in our political 
 system, to make, if possible, the attempt by 
 another to play again the same game without 
 detection, for his own political aggrandizement, 
 difficult or impossible of success. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE COGERS HALL. 
 
 Some years ago, with the view of making clear 
 to myself if possible the impressions made on 
 miscellaneous popular assemblies by various 
 types of oratory and public speaking, with the 
 view too of defining more scientifically the form 
 and type of political oratory that most easily and 
 naturally bears sway over large representative 
 assemblies, and especially the relation such type 
 of ability bears to the real requirements and true 
 qualities of statesmanship, I was in the habit of 
 frequenting the rooms of a well-known debating 
 society which held its meetings nightly in one 
 of the old courts of Fleet Street, and which was, 
 and I believe is still, known by the name of the 
 Cogers' Hall. Lying as it did in the very centre 
 of London, and in the immediate vicinity of the 
 Temple and the great central offices of Literature 
 and the Press, this well-known debating-room 
 
THE COGERS" HALL. 13 
 
 drew together in the course of a year a greater 
 variety and range of talent perhaps than could 
 elsewhere be met with ; and not only by reason 
 of the motley and ever-changing character of 
 its audience, but from the variety of thought, 
 style, and personality of the different speakers, 
 furnished as just a mirror and epitome of public 
 opinion as one could wish to find. The society, 
 as I have already said, was an old one, and had 
 held its debates night after night for a period 
 far beyond living memory. "The subjects for 
 discussion," as I have elsewhere described, " were 
 usually the political and social topics of the 
 hour, varied on rare occasions by light excur- 
 sions into the region of religion, science, and 
 philosophy. All sides of the political world 
 were fairly represented ; and if on one evening 
 the Liberal, Radical, or Irish element in the 
 room preponderated, on another, perhaps, the 
 balance would incline to the High Tory or Con- 
 servative side. No restraint was put on the free 
 expression of opinion, whether of applause or 
 censure ; so that the effect produced by the style, 
 thought, or personality of the different speakers 
 could be easily seen. The audience, too, was 
 well adapted for purposes of observation, the 
 
14 THE COGERS HALE 
 
 circulation of fresh blood being constantly kept 
 up ; for, besides the old habitues who were a kind 
 of constant quantity in the room, every evening 
 brought in a fair contingent of casuals — passers- 
 by who happened to read the subject of debate 
 on the window outside and were attracted by 
 curiosity to see what was going on, strangers from 
 the country desirous merely of passing away the 
 evening, or foreigners from various parts interested 
 in politics and debate. 
 
 "The personnel of the room, too, was suffici- 
 ently varied and picturesque. Besides the ordinary 
 Englishman of the middle class, who formed 
 perhaps the staple of the meeting, there were 
 to be seen in these rooms young barristers from 
 the Temple, glowing with political or professional 
 ambition, and come to cultivate the invaluable art 
 of public speaking ; hacks of the Press, broken 
 down litterateurs^ seedy Bohemians, with their 
 coats out at elbow and driven to the wall by 
 dissipation, who had dropped in to end the day 
 over their pipes and punch, and who every now 
 and then interrupted the debate by their confused, 
 incoherent, or maudlin ejaculations ; superior 
 Working-men (with hair thrown back to bring out 
 the intellect), who had gained praise and distinction, 
 
THE COGERS' HALL. 
 
 perhaps, among their own class in some local 
 debating club in the suburbs, and who (although 
 modestly deprecating their want of classical 
 education) evidently rated themselves accordingly, 
 and had come down to this central hall to try 
 their prowess with the old veterans of debate* 
 There, too, were to be seen Secularists of the 
 Bradlaugh type, fed on Volney's Ruins of Empires 
 arid" Paine' s Age of Reason, who, with affected 
 moderation of tone and studied reference to 
 authorities, were prepared to demonstrate against 
 all comers that kings and priests were the stand- 
 ing disgrace of the world, the long unmitigated 
 curse of every nation and every age ; brilliant 
 young adventurers from Ireland, fresh from 
 college and without any definite profession, 
 who had come to London to push their fortunes, 
 and were full of eloquence, fervour, and bright 
 ingenuity ; faded old book-worms, moths of 
 the British Museum, who had come out quietly 
 at night to this well-lit hall from its dusky 
 recesses, where for years they had been collecting 
 evidence to show that Julius Caesar never existed, 
 and that the ancient historians were impudent 
 and unblushing forgeries of the Middle Ages ; — - 
 all these were to be found here in this old hall 
 
1 6 THE COGERS* HALL. 
 
 on one or other evening, in hot but genial debate ; 
 and, with suffused and fiery-eyed demagogues 
 screaming with excitement ; Fenians, Socialists, 
 and Red Republicans, threatening the general 
 overturn of society without apology or disguise ; 
 old bachelors, city-clerks, half-pay captains, High 
 Church curates, and occasionally some man 
 well known in public life, come down to open 
 a debate on the stirring question of the hour, 
 made up as interesting and diversified an assem- 
 blage of characters as could well have been 
 brought together. 
 
 " With an audience so varied, so shifting, and 
 so rapid-changing in its composition, with debate 
 untrammelled, and no restraint put upon a fair 
 expression of feeling or opinion whether of 
 applause or censure, the conditions needed for the 
 observation of the effects of different forms and 
 types of eloquence were peculiarly favourable. 
 Nor, indeed, was the speaking less varied than the 
 character and composition of the audience ; but 
 ranged through all stages of the good, bad, and 
 indifferent. The most persistent and fatal type, 
 perhaps, was the Bore — the old and well-seasoned 
 bore — with good matter often, and sometimes 
 ideas, but costive and speech-bound in utter- 
 
THE COGERS' HALL. 17 
 
 ance, whom nothing could kill or repress, who 
 would wrestle with a platitude all night without 
 remorse, and whose rising, by the ingenuities 
 of torture with which it threatened the room, 
 was the signal for a general stampede. A 
 common type, too, was the ambitious Tyro who 
 burned with some single idea, perhaps, which 
 he could not repress, but who had not learned 
 the art so well known to the old stagers, of 
 making a single idea carry him with credit 
 through a whole speech ; and who, when he 
 had polished and condensed his one idea into 
 some weighty and audacious epigram (while 
 the preceding speaker was addressing the room), 
 and at last found his opportunity, rose and with 
 rhetorical flourish fired it off with eclat and 
 satisfaction ; but having nothing further with 
 which to follow it up, was left standing speech- 
 less, and so becoming confused, stammering, 
 and, at last, hopelessly belated, sat down over- 
 whelmed with confusion and shame. Then there 
 was the Logic-chopper, with whom politics was 
 a chain of syllogisms, and who insisted on wire- 
 drawing each smallest platitude, and dividing it 
 into its component parts, although the whole 
 argument was of so thin, patent, and transparent 
 
 c 
 
■i 8 THE COGERS' HALL. 
 
 a character that you could foresee his point, and 
 have ample time to fall asleep, while he was 
 winding his dreary and monotonous way among 
 the successive links which he had interposed 
 between his first premises and his ultimate con- 
 clusion. More tough and irrepressible, if not 
 more wearisome, were the Hobbyists — the Anti- 
 vaccination, Anti-vivisection, but particularly the 
 Protection-hobbyist, who traced the decadence of 
 England to her one-sided system of Free Trade, 
 dragging it into every debate, and winding up 
 invariably with the unanswerable poser, which 
 he hurled as a Parthian shot at his opponents, 
 ' What is the use of your cheap loaf if you 
 have no Saturday night ? ' Of less frequent 
 occurrence, but coming as it were from some 
 higher atmosphere down to this worldly forum 
 of debate, were to be seen the Idealist, young, 
 soft, and of consumptive aspect, to whom this 
 tough world offered no more difficulty for the 
 construction of his airy dreams than if it were 
 cobweb ; the confirmed and unbending Moralist, 
 who saw no reason why the millennium should 
 not be realized now and here, if men would but 
 follow the dictates of simple morality, and who 
 would begin at once to inaugurate it by giving 
 
THE COGENS* HALL. 19 
 
 back Gibraltar to Spain, India to its own native 
 population, and the blessings of ' home rule ' and 
 a ' constitution ' to negroes, Zulus, Hottentots, 
 and all the dwellers in the Southern Seas. 
 
 "The foregoing specimens, although typical 
 and characteristic, were, most of them, loose and 
 irrelevant in debate ; but there were others deep 
 in political knowledge, dangerous antagonists, 
 who stuck to the subject in hand, going into 
 matters elaborately ; who came down to the 
 rooms bristling with dry but pregnant and ugly 
 statistics ; men who knew the details of budgets, 
 of exports and imports, of income-tax and 
 legacy-duty, with the minuteness of an under- 
 secretary to the Treasury ; who could tell you 
 the price of the quartern-loaf for each of the 
 forty years preceding the repeal of the Corn 
 Laws, and for each of the forty years since ; who 
 knew all about county government, rotten ships, 
 and especially rotten boroughs, for which indeed 
 they were prepared and armed with a complete 
 scheme of grouping, redistribution, or extinction. 
 Others again there w r ere, whose memories were 
 a complete repertoire of all the parliamentary 
 debates of the last quarter of a century, men 
 who knew what Lord Beaconsfield had said at the 
 
 c 2 
 
THE COGERS HALL. 
 
 Mansion House, or Lord Derby at Liverpool, 
 and who, instead of meeting their opponents 
 by direct, arguments, pelted them indirectly 
 with damaging phrases that at one time or 
 another had fallen from their Parliamentary 
 leaders; rolling under their tongues as if they 
 were utterances of momentous import, such 
 mystic and sublime phrases as 6 peace with 
 honour/ ' scientific frontier,' ' residuum/ c Whigs 
 bathing/ ' mending and ending/ ' plundering 
 and blundering/ 'leaps and bounds/ 'extinct 
 volcanoes/ and the like. 
 
 "Such were a few of the leading types of 
 speakers who kept up the dreary hum and 
 monotone of debate, and who, although in many 
 cases exhibiting, in spite of defective utterance, 
 genuine insight and common sense, made little 
 or no impression on the room. But among the 
 casual or habitual frequenters*, there were always 
 to be found one or more speakers of a different 
 order, men, who although knowing little perhaps 
 of the real difficulties of practical politics, and 
 less of political detail, could by their brilliancy 
 of handling, carry the room away over the 
 heads of men of much more practical wisdom, 
 business knowledge, and insight into the world 
 
THE COGERS* HALL. 2 r 
 
 and men." Now as I had observed that however 
 much the audience changed in composition and 
 character from night to night, these latter 
 speakers maintained their popularity and suprem- 
 acy undisputed throughout, it became my main 
 concern to find out if possible what was the 
 distinguishing feature in their speaking that gave 
 them their pre-eminence amid all changes of 
 audience and among men of all shades of 
 thought and culture ; — knowing well that if I 
 could once succeed in seizing it, in insulating 
 it, and in giving to it anything like firmness of 
 outline and scientific precision, I should then 
 be able (by comparing it with the type of 
 intellect demanded for real statesmanship) to 
 resolve the main question on which my mind 
 was working, viz. : — What are the qualities which, \ 
 in governments carried on by public discussion / 
 in large representative assemblies (like our own x 
 House of Commons), naturally rise to suprem- 
 acy ; and to what extent these qualities coincide 
 with, or differ from, the qualities demanded for 
 the best government of States? 
 
 Now owing as I have said to the great 
 freedom of debate in these rooms, and to the 
 full liberty that was accorded to all reasonable 
 
22 THE COGERS 1 HALL. 
 
 manifestations of applause or censure, you could, 
 after watching for a time the effect produced 
 by the different speakers on the various changes 
 of audience, forecast almost to a certainty from 
 the style alone of the speakers, irrespective of 
 their matter, the permanent estimation in which 
 they would be held by the room, and the 
 permanent level of prestige to which they would 
 attain. And as the relative ranking of the 
 different speakers was not a mere individual or 
 private estimate, but was usually the solid opinion 
 of the whole room, you could as easily have 
 predicted, had the audience been called on to 
 form a Cabinet, who would have been chosen 
 as Prime Minister on either side, and who 
 as chief lieutenants and subordinates, as you 
 could the selection of a representative team of 
 cricketers from a large and varied collection of 
 the best known players. And the longer I sat 
 in these rooms, the more increasingly clear did 
 it become to me, that in popular political 
 assemblies men, if left to themselves, take grade 
 and ranking not at all, as might be expected, 
 in proportion to the real depth, complexity, and 
 extent of their knowledge of the subject in hand, 
 nor yet of their knowledge and judgment in 
 
THE COGERS* HALE 23 
 
 general, but rather in proportion to their pos- 
 session of certain extrinsic, irrelevant, and more 
 or less ad captandum qualities, which are as 
 often to be found united with shallowness and 
 superficiality as with real depth and insight. 
 A speaker, for example, might have a deep 
 knowledge of the question in hand, and of course 
 the more of it the better; a clear and connected, 
 even if more or less flimsy, thread of argument 
 he must have ; and, the debates being serious, 
 a certain show at least of earnestness and con- 
 viction too was indispensable ; but the distinctive 
 feature, the feature that gave rank and eminence 
 to the debaters, was the power of brilliant personal 
 characterization, conveyed in a metaphorical and 
 glowing, and above all in a rapid flowing style 
 — a power I have remarked which seems to be 
 so level with, and so accurately adapted, pitched, 
 and attuned to the great ruling illusions, admira- 
 tions, and ideals of the average human mind, 
 cultured and uncultured alike, as to impress it, 
 when the opportunity offers, more than aught 
 else besides, and to seem synonymous with 
 ability or genius itself. A man might show 
 himself to be an excellent debater, so far as 
 practical judgment and knowledge of the 
 
24 THE COGERS' HALL. 
 
 question in hand were concerned, whether in 
 principle or in detail ; he might see clearly the 
 causal relations and connexions of the facts 
 with which he was dealing, and abound in 
 statistics, facts, and figures having an intimate 
 bearing on the subject under discussion ; but 
 if he happened to be slow, con strained, and 
 hesitating in speech, or delivered himself in 
 a cold, dry, or uninteresting manner, he would 
 make little or no impression on the bulk of 
 the audience, and the room after listening 
 for a time with apathy or weariness, would, 
 if his speech were prolonged, begin slowly to 
 empty itself. One man in particular I remember 
 whose speeches gave me personally more real 
 insight into what I myself wanted to know in 
 order to arrive at a sound judgment on the 
 many questions that came under discussion than 
 those of any one else in the room, but owing to 
 his somewhat irregular r spasmodic, and speech- 
 bound style and manner, all his fine points did 
 him but little service with the audience, and 
 were speedily neutralized or spirited away by the 
 swoop of some light and facile Bohemian, per- 
 haps, who would follow him in the debate, and 
 who, instead of dealing directly with the political 
 
THE COGENS' HALL. 25 
 
 facts and their meanings and connexions, would, 
 by giving the debate a personal turn, by personal 
 invective or light and easy banter, by cunningly 
 diverting the audience to the style and pecu- 
 liarities of his opponent, or by assuming a high 
 superiority of view, and gratuitously character- 
 izing his method of argument as pedantic, petti- 
 fogging, or worthy of a vestryman, steal away 
 the admiration and suffrages of the room. In- 
 deed this trick of starting a personal diversion 
 when the subject was dry, or your knowledge 
 of it was scanty, was a favourite one with the 
 more alert and brilliant speakers (more especially 
 when they were conscious of lack of matter), and 
 never failed, to my remembrance, when brilliantly 
 and dexterously executed, and when judiciously 
 intermingled with a show of earnestness and 
 logical coherence, to impress the room with a 
 vague but none the less potent impression of 
 the speaker's general intellectual superiority. 
 
 Now, as a man may have a clean-cut image of 
 a complicated subject in all its bearings and 
 relations, and yet from want of practice or 
 original power of expression may be unable to 
 do justice to his knowledge in a speech, and so 
 fail to convince and persuade a popular audience, 
 
26 THE COGERS' HALL. 
 
 it is evident that the supremacy accorded in 
 popular debating assemblies to the orilliant, 
 rapid, flashing litterateur over the man of wise, 
 practical, and solid judgment, can only be 
 possible in subjects where the truth or untruth 
 of different opinions cannot be brought to 
 any immediate, practical, or decisive test. Were 
 the problem to be solved, for example, one 
 in mathematics, or in physics, astronomy, or 
 practical medicine, where the sight and demon- 
 stration of the truth can be made to follow close 
 on the heels of the hypothesis raised, all this 
 superficial verbal decoration which under other 
 circumstances is so attractive, all these pleasing 
 and titillating personalities, these strokes of caustic 
 humour which the stream of eloquent speech 
 bears along with it, and which emblazon its rich 
 and flowing robe with metaphors as with jewels, 
 would be felt to be an impertinence, glamour, 
 or evasion, and would be resented as such ; and 
 provided only the speaker could give us assur- 
 ance that the truth was being evolved like the 
 statue out of the marble, and that each blow or 
 stroke of thought was bringing us a step nearer to 
 it, he might go on stumbling and stammering all 
 along the line of his discourse (as I have heard 
 
THE COGENS' HALL. 27 
 
 done) without serious detriment to his reputation 
 or authority. But in Practical Politics, where 
 (the complex nature of Man having to be dealt 
 with) the effect of any proposal, however simple, 
 is at best more or less a matter of speculation 
 only ; where your opinion right or wrong cannot 
 (and this is the fatal circumstance) be verified 
 or refuted in the sight of gods and men, but 
 must await the dilatory lapse of time 5 where 
 even the wisest judgment must often at points, 
 instead of touching solid ground, swim on a 
 sea of probability and hypothesis merely; and 
 where one man's opinion being regarded as as 
 good as another's, all are considered more or less 
 shaky and uncertain ; a speaker's reputation and 
 authority will depend rather on his mode of 
 handling the question, than on the real depth 
 of his insight into it, and will turn chiefly on 
 the skilful use he makes of all those pleasing 
 and decorative arts, those airy personalities, 
 metaphorical allusions, pictorial bye-play and 
 quotation, which although they often, like per- 
 sonal beauty, tend to falsify the issue rather 
 than to irradiate it, nevertheless by certain laws 
 of the mind leave the impression of general and 
 all round superiority and power. Nor, indeed, 
 
28 THE COGERS HALL. 
 
 if we search for these laws shall we fail in dis- 
 covering them. Truth, absolute Truth, is, if 
 I may say so, the supreme goddess of man 
 (as Belief, its counterpart in the mind, is his 
 most powerful spring of action), and when she 
 is in presence, all lesser deities shrink abashed 
 away ; but in her absence flights of inferior 
 spirits issue from their hiding-places, and by 
 the illusions which they create, as in a fairy 
 dream, become for the time being all-powerful. 
 These rapid and tricksy turns of allusion, meta- 
 phor, personality, quotation, wit and fancy, by 
 their spontaneity and the impossibility there 
 is of predicting their impact or the direction 
 of their flight, interest and arouse the imagin- 
 ation on their own account ; and whatever arouses 
 the imagination, by that fact alone has commu- 
 nicated to it a sense of unknown charm and 
 illimitability. And just as when the absolute 
 truth about a man or woman cannot be known, 
 personal beauty, as being the natural expression 
 of an internal and hidden beauty, carries with 
 it great weight by the charm which it produces, 
 and as, alas ! too often happens, encourages an 
 easy and fatal credence to a corresponding 
 beauty of character, which, however, in real life 
 
THE COGERS' HALL. 29 
 
 need not exist ; so, in Politics, where no de- 
 monstration is forthcoming, where truth is not 
 in visible presence and cannot be had for the 
 asking, and where time alone can test the value 
 of opinion, the dazzling arts and graces of the 
 orator or phrasemonger are sure by their 
 stimulus to~ the- imagination to prevail, unless 
 indeed we are armed and on our guard against 
 them, and this for the simple reason that when 
 genuine they have, like Beauty, their roots deep 
 down in the heart of man, and like it are the 
 clothing and vesture with which Nature endows 
 a full and various, a refined or beautiful mind. 
 
 Now this tendency in popular political as- 
 semblies, whether cultured or uncultured, to 
 select men as leaders rather for their mode of 
 handling a question than for their real judgment 
 and insight into it, was the first important truth 
 that established itself to my own satisfaction, and 
 with something like scientific precision, at the 
 old Cogers' Hall; and now that we have our- 
 selves entered on the reign of Democracy, where 
 the all-important point in success is the choice 
 of good leaders, the knowledge of this law of 
 popular assemblies, by keeping the judgment 
 awake to one of the main sources of illusion by 
 
30 THE COGERS HALL. 
 
 which it is dazzled and deflected, will be seen to 
 be in its bearings and significance of cardinal 
 and indeed world-wide importance. 
 
 The second great truth which I learned at 
 these old discussion rooms — a truth allied to the 
 first, and one which from its wide applicability 
 to life, and especially from its bearing on our 
 judgments of men and the illusions against 
 which we have to guard in our estimate of them, 
 is also of first and cardinal importance — was this, 
 viz. that men take rank in public estimation 
 according to the side at w r hich they are viewed, 
 so that the same man shall show brilliant or dull, 
 shall be voted a genius or a bore, according to 
 the angle at which he chooses to present himself 
 for judgment or estimate. If you take, for 
 example, a number of practical business men, 
 and set them down around a table with a view 
 to their deliberating on some public or private 
 course of action or conduct, you will find that 
 (as mere empty declamation or rhetoric would be 
 entirely out of place around a table) the man 
 among them who will most clearly seize the 
 point on which the business in hand hinges, no 
 matter how slow and hesitating his utterance 
 may be, will be awarded the place of honour — 
 
THE COGENS' HALL. 31 
 
 his imperfect powers of expression not dero- 
 gating in the least from his position of power 
 or authority ; but if you put the same men 
 through the ordeal of explaining, elaborating, 
 and enforcing their views before a popular 
 assembly, the chances are that the light, nimble, 
 and vivacious talker among them, the one who 
 by mere rhetoric and the manipulation of 
 phrases can make the worse appear the better 
 reason, will bear away the palm. Here is a great 
 mathematician, for example, a great scientist, 
 a great theologian, physician, or even a great 
 chess-player, men who if you set them down 
 before the great problems that are to be solved 
 in their various lines of thought, will by the 
 width and extent of their knowledge, their depth, 
 farsightedness, and comprehension of view, tower 
 away over all competitors ; but if you will insist 
 that they shall make good their superiority before 
 a popular .audience by speech alone (especially 
 if you cannot bring the matter to a decisive 
 and convincing test) in the face of a number of 
 superficial and hostile wits and sciolists, the 
 chances are that your great men will be out of the 
 running altogether. So great a difference does it 
 make to the repute in which you are held in this 
 
32 THE COGERS' HALL. 
 
 world, whether you have to exhibit your talents 
 under conditions where, as around a small table, 
 pure insight and power of thought alone tell, 
 and are alone available, or whether you have 
 to exhibit them before a large assembly where 
 fluency and rapidity of speech, and the arts and 
 graces of rhetoric and illusion, can so dazzle and 
 perplex the issue as to obscure the truth. I have 
 known ranters who, appearing before a hard- 
 headed political gathering, disgusted them by 
 their merely sentimental appeals, and were voted 
 of no weight or consequence, but who would 
 carry all before them with ease at a temperance 
 society, a mothers meeting, or with a religious 
 and fanatic mob. Humorists again you will 
 have noticed who are at their exact and proper 
 angle in an after-dinner speech, and can with ease 
 and grace keep the table in a roar, but who quite 
 lose their wits, their very sense of humour for- 
 saking them, when they have to give their minds 
 to the connected links of thought and argument 
 involved in a long and serious debate. It is not 
 uncommon to find that the very men who when 
 criticizing the schemes of others are masters of 
 personal invective, when set down to construct 
 a scheme of their own are impotent or lost. 
 
THE COGERS* HALL. 33 
 
 The most brilliant, polished, and splendid speaker 
 I have ever known was in his private convers- 
 ation so wanting in form, his tone and bearing 
 were so loose and familiar, so wanting in dignity, 
 simplicity, and reserve, that, to those who did 
 not know him as an orator, he left almost in- 
 variably the impression (quite unjustly too) of 
 insincerity, cheapness, and worse than all of 
 commonness. On the other hand, again, it is a 
 common observation that gentlemen (often of 
 the aristocracy) whose personal manners are 
 impressive and dignified, who have a high tone, 
 and bear about with them an air of distinction, 
 whose personal and private observations, too, are 
 marked by great good-sense, propriety, and 
 measure, when they rise to address a popular 
 audience, find themselves at so false and un- 
 accustomed an angle for the exhibition of their 
 proper merits, that they seem quite to lose all 
 their impressiveness, and end by leaving on the 
 audience a sense only of boredom or stupidity. 
 I have heard at one time or another most of the 
 great Thinkers, Scientists, Theologians, and Pub- 
 licists of the day addressing public audiences, and 
 so poor at best are they as mere public speakers 
 that, I can confidently testify, if they appeared 
 
34 THE COGERS' HALL. 
 
 unknown and unrecognized before an audience 
 at the Cogers' Hall, each and all of them with 
 scarcely an exception would, if he spoke extem- 
 poraneously, weary if not empty the room. So 
 strange is it, and yet so true, that were there 
 no other medium for the communication of 
 thought but the public platform, the greatest 
 intellects of the day would have to bend, if it 
 came to the popular vote, before the over-blown 
 phrasemongers, pulpit-orators, and demagogues 
 of the hour, following in their train and gracing 
 their victorious procession as captive kings in 
 a Roman triumph. 
 
 So important is it that we should see these 
 things (if in our judgment of men from the angle 
 at which they happen to present themselves we 
 are not to be swamped and sunk in illusion), that 
 I consider these two great truths which I learned 
 at the Cogers Hall, and reduced there almost to 
 a scientific certainty, have, in the age of Demo- 
 cracy which is now come upon us, alone more 
 than repaid me for the many hours which I 
 sometimes thought I was wasting, as I sat a 
 silent listener night after night in these old 
 discussion rooms. Carrying then with us these 
 two great truths — first, jjiat in j his-world men 
 
THE COGERS? HALL. 35 
 
 take rank and position according to the angle 
 from which they are viewed ; and secondly, that 
 the talents that give supremacy (and are at their 
 proper angle) in representative political assemblies, 
 are not, like the talents that give supremacy 
 around a council table, the true qualities of 
 knowledge, judgment, and practical wisdom that 
 are required in the wise government of States — 
 as torches against darkness, and charms against 
 enchantment or illusion, we will now proceed 
 by their light and protection to trace the political 
 career of Lord Randolph Churchill, and to note, 
 without dazzle or bewilderment, the successive 
 steps by which he has attained to his present 
 position of authority and power. But first a 
 word or two on the House of Commons. 
 
 d 2 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 
 
 In the last chapter I endeavoured to indicate 
 the type and quality of public speaking which 
 gave pre-eminence and prestige under the entirely 
 free and natural conditions of debate, as it was 
 carried on in the old discussion rooms off Fleet 
 Street. With the view of still further testing, as 
 it were, by a kind of crucial experiment, how 
 far the same qualities bore sway under less free 
 and spontaneous conditions, I was in the habit, 
 during the period I am describing, of going 
 down to the House of Commons for an hour 
 or two in the evening, not only on the occasion 
 of important debates, but during its ordinary 
 sittings. Here I found, as I had expected, that 
 great deductions would have to be made, and 
 many complex considerations taken into account, 
 before the normal effects of different kinds of 
 oratory and debating power could be clearly and 
 distinctly seen. 
 
THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 3 7 
 
 In the Cogers' Hall, there being, as we have 
 seen, little or no restraint imposed on the 
 audience in their manifestations of applause or 
 censure, if a speaker bored the room he was 
 promptly and peremptorily ' roughed' down. 
 In the House of Commons, on the other hand, 
 members being there rather in a representative 
 than in an individual or personal capacity, they 
 could not, if they became wearisome, be treated 
 quite so unceremoniously ; and in consequence 
 might often be seen stretched over the House 
 like a pall through long regions of the night. 
 At the Cogers Hall, again, there were no moment- 
 ous issues hanging on the results of debate to 
 cloud the brow ; no constituents lying at the 
 speakers back like menacing shadows to warn 
 him off dangerous or uncertain courses; wealth 
 and birth gave no distinction or advantage ; 
 there were no great prizes of office at stake ; 
 and as the room was constantly changing in 
 composition and character, neither fear of con- 
 sequences, traditional respect for individuals, 
 nor deference to customary forms or established 
 reputations, interfered to disguise one's percep- 
 tion of the oratorical or debating qualities that 
 were at heart most admired. It might therefore 
 
38 THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 
 
 fairly be claimed that the type and quality of 
 speaker who maintained his supremacy through 
 all changes of audience, was a very accurate 
 measure and index of the type and quality of 
 speaker who under free and spontaneous con- 
 ditions would rise to supremacy anywhere. But 
 in the House of Commons all this was changed. 
 Far from being the democratic assembly where 
 personal merit alone prevailed, and where men 
 took rank and status purely according to the 
 exhibition of personal ability or power, it was 
 still largely aristocratic in temper, tone, and 
 habits of thought ; wealth and birth still counted 
 for much, and in the race for office, gave high 
 and various points of vantage. Models of public 
 speaking, too, had long become stereotyped; 
 many of the members had long been invested 
 with all the halo that comes from age, genius, 
 or prestige ; important debates were apt to end 
 in practical action involving grave consequences 
 to the lives and fortunes of many; and behind 
 all, the constituencies stood like sentinels, with 
 bayonets fixed, in the shadowy background. 
 Opinion being thus handicapped in so many 
 different directions, the difficulty in determin- 
 ing the type of public speaking that was most 
 
THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 39 
 
 admired, and which, if an opening presented itself, 
 would naturally rise to supremacy and power, 
 was much increased. One common feature, 
 however, it was curious and interesting to note 
 by the way, amid these many different conditions 
 presented by the two places, and that was that 
 the same old types of speakers that we saw at the 
 Cogers' Hall reproduced themselves here in all 
 their ancient picturesqueness and variety. Here 
 too was the old bore — the impenetrable, pachy- 
 dermatous bore — who had neither matter nor 
 manner, and who made frantic efforts to deliver 
 himself but in vain ; the young and nervous 
 but ambitious beginner with one idea, which he 
 hastened to sow all at once like a whirlwind 
 and then collapsed 5 the tedious and fretful 
 logic-chopper, whose steps were so slow and 
 painful that you could fall asleep between them 
 and miss nothing of importance ; the Hobbyists 
 — anti - Vaccination, anti-Vivisection, anti - Con- 
 tagious Diseases Act, but chiefly Protectionist — • 
 who shot their hobbies at their antagonists like 
 bolts before they sat down ; the idealists, the 
 enthusiasts, the high attenuated moralists, the 
 peace-at-any-price men. Here were also the 
 genial and kindly humourists, the specialists, the 
 
40 THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 
 
 platitudinarians, the pessimists, the quoters from 
 other men's speeches, and the masters of 
 statistics and detail. Here they all were in their 
 naked reality, humming and hawing, stuttering 
 and shuffling and stumbling as I had seen their 
 prototypes in Fleet Street — and before the re- 
 porters in the gallery had trimmed, clean-shaved, 
 and made them respectable for the morning papers. 
 So like indeed in style, manner, and delivery 
 was the average member of the House to the 
 average Coger, so similar was the impression 
 that he produced on the mind, and so like was 
 he in the handling of the questions that came 
 before him, that you had only to close your 
 eyes during a debate and listen, and you would 
 imagine yourself back again in the old rooms. 
 The bulk of honourable members had evidently 
 made a wide and extensive study of the sub- 
 jects to which they had given their attention; 
 but so over-freighted were they with stolidity 
 and phlegm, that they were unable to give to 
 their ideas anything like rapid, brilliant, or 
 effective utterance ; and depended rather, for 
 the painting out arict^ expression of their finer 
 shades of meaning, on emphasis and gesticula- 
 tion than on speech ; and when they did succeed 
 
THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 41 
 
 in preserving the appearance of smoothness (and 
 getting time as well for fore-thought), it was by 
 the mechanical repetition at the beginning of 
 each sentence of the concluding words or clauses 
 of the last. And yet they kept their eyes in 
 great measure well on the practical issues and 
 concrete bearings of their subject, and concealed 
 beneath their stolidity a large measure of good 
 sense and sobriety of thought. The only type 
 of speaker I missed from the House of Com- 
 mons (but now that the suffrage is extended I 
 do not expect we shall have to wait for him 
 long) was the ranter — the seething and foaming 
 ranter — whose words, which were of the cheapest 
 newspaper quality, ran like a watery flux, but like 
 shadows left no abiding image in the mind, and 
 disclosed behind them neither grasp, power, nor 
 hold on reality. 
 
 Such was the House of Commons before, and 
 indeed since, the last extension of the suffrage ; 
 and in spite of the important issues hanging 
 on its debates, and the good sense and practical 
 knowledge they exhibited, when one remembered 
 by contrast some of the great nights at the 
 Cogers' Hall, when party feeling ran high on 
 some sore or exciting topic of the hour, and 
 
42 THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 
 
 when one recalled the rapid, brilliant assau ts 
 of the leaders of the opposing forces with their 
 concentrated fire of eloquence, invective, quota- 
 tion and personality, all playing around one's 
 head like forked lightning, one was bound to 
 confess that a night at the House of Commons, 
 except perhaps on the most momentous occa- 
 sions (and even these as mere oratorical displays 
 were pale and colourless in comparison), was 
 such a bore and weariness as was not elsewhere 
 to be met with. I remember taking a friend 
 with me to the House one evening on the 
 occasion of an important debate in which many 
 of the best speakers were engaged, and on our 
 leaving somewhat wearied, my friend, who had 
 been in the habit of going with me at times 
 to the rooms off Fleet Street, burst on me in 
 a tone of mingled surprise and disappointment 
 by observing that in his opinion not one of 
 these distinguished members whose names were 
 known over the wide world could be fairly 
 ranked higher as a mere speaker, than what he 
 was pleased to call a ' second-rate Coger.' And, 
 although I myself felt, and had long before 
 perceived, that, so far as mere oratorical power 
 was concerned, his remark was perfectly just and 
 
THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 43 
 
 true, I nevertheless felt bound to remind him 
 that members were elected and sent to the 
 House of Commons, in the great majority of 
 cases, not for their oratorical powers at all, but 
 as practical and trustworthy men to manage the 
 affairs and business of the nation ; and that it 
 was unreasonable and even absurd to expect, as 
 the public apparently did, that these men — 
 business men past middle life who had not been 
 accustomed to cultivate the arts of speech or 
 produce their knowledge at their tongue's tip 
 at a moment's notice, or country gentlemen 
 who by their position and training would but for 
 the necessities of debate be naturally inclined 
 to despise these accomplishments — should be as 
 amusing and as brilliant, as mere speakers, as 
 young men with a natural genius for oratory 
 who had gravitated to the public discussion 
 rooms from the wide waste of natural talent 
 drifting about the London streets. And further- 
 more, that it was equally absurd to expect that 
 debates which were to end in some course of 
 practical action often affecting seriously the lives 
 and fortunes of men, and which in consequence 
 were weighted down to the ground by documents, 
 statistics, reports, figures, and other tedious and 
 
44 THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 
 
 wing-clipping technicalities and detail, should 
 rise to the same easy flights of rhetoric and 
 fancy, and be as amusing to listen to, as mere 
 rhetorical exercises which had the boundless air 
 wherein to execute their ideal sweep, unclogged 
 by earthly detail, and which could sail along the 
 wind without ballast of personal responsibility or 
 rudder of definite goal. But my friend who had 
 been born and brought up under the supposition 
 that the Statesman and the Orator were one, was 
 disillusioned notwithstanding, and went away be- 
 reaved. The truth is, the reputation of the House 
 of Commons for oratory as such is a mere fiction, 
 an illusion of the public mind which has been 
 accustomed to associate the names of great states- 
 men with great orators — Burke, Chatham, Pitt, 
 Fox, and the rest — and so by habit has come to 
 imagine statesmanship and oratory to be more 
 or less synonymous. And this illusion has been 
 seconded and reflected by the Press, and this 
 for two reasons ; — first, in a general way, with 
 the object of keeping up the public confidence 
 in statesmen as such, which without some quality 
 which could be held ^prominently for admir- 
 ation would be apt to flag ; and secondly, in 
 special instances, for Party purposes, and in 
 
THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 45 
 
 order to give the requisite outfit, finish, and 
 completeness to party leaders or party men, 
 whom for other reasons it is desirable to aggran- 
 dize and invest with the qualities which the 
 public from long habit have been accustomed 
 to expect. And yet in spite of the fact that 
 members are not returned on account of their 
 possession of the qualities that go to make up 
 the brilliant talker, or to do work for which mere 
 speech however brilliant is best adapted, as I sat 
 listening to these debates and observed (as the 
 dreary waste of speech dragged its slow length 
 along) what a relief and godsend any little 
 audacity, impertinency, or joke was to the bored 
 and jaded honourable member; how highly a 
 little personal satire, mild banter, or even third- 
 rate metaphor was appreciated by him ; as I wit- 
 nessed the laughter and applause that arose over 
 a piece of coarse but perhaps pungent invective ; 
 I said to myself, were a few men of real rapidity, 
 brilliancy, lightness of touch, and power of 
 personal characterization (even if their real know- 
 ledge of public business and affairs were merely 
 nominal), men of such qualities as I remembered 
 in one or two brilliant instances in the old debat- 
 ing rooms, to be let down into the House of 
 
46 THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 
 
 Commons in the democratic days that are now 
 coming over it, they would as surely, if more 
 slowly, rise to pre-eminence and power there, 
 as they did\^t the old Cogers' Hall. I am 
 not forgetful of course of the old sneer that 
 men are soon made to find their level in the 
 House of Commons — a sneer which expressed 
 a sufficient truth at a time when the men of 
 birth who ruled were able to put down the men 
 of mere talent (at whom alone you will observe 
 the sneer is usually levelled) who might have 
 disputed their supremacy. At the time of 
 Burke, for example, when the aristocracy reigned 
 alone and supreme in the Commons, men were 
 said to find their level there, and so indeed it 
 proved to be ; for so heavily did they bear on him 
 with their whole weight that he was never able 
 to rise to a seat in the Cabinet. During the 
 Middle-class regime, again, of the last fifty years, 
 when the Times made the sneer seem a truism 
 by the persistency with which it hurled it at 
 great Thinkers and writers, John Stuart Mill, 
 whom not only the ordinary member but 
 Cabinet ministers now quote as if he were a 
 kind of political pope, was made to find his level 
 in the House by having his political opinions 
 
THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 47 
 
 more or less generally ignored. The phrase 
 might indeed have been used, and with as little 
 sense, of Shakspeare himself, who owing to his 
 lowly birth and position was regarded by the 
 kings and lords of his day as of so little account 
 that he was allowed to find his natural level by 
 living and dying almost entirely unknown and 
 unrecorded. 'Tis a poor superstition this, and 
 one not yet exploded, of men finding their level 
 in the House of Commons, and it may be pre- 
 dicted that now that Democracy is here, and the 
 Aristocracy and Plutocracy combined can no 
 longer by themselves alone countervail the influ- 
 ence of men of talent, this purse-proud sneer 
 will work in the opposite and inverse direction ; 
 and instead of the wonder being that a man like 
 Burke was not allowed to rise to a seat in the 
 Cabinet, the wonder will be that men with the 
 qualities of wisdom, knowledge, and far-sighted- 
 ness which go to make up real statesmanship, 
 will be displaced by qualities which are more 
 nearly at the right angle for success in popular 
 assemblies, viz. the qualities of the first-class 
 6 Coger.' All lines of observation and thought in- 
 deed lead up to this, and even now, when I look 
 around for the make-weights and compensating 
 
48 THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 
 
 checks which are to prevent such a consum- 
 mation, I confess I .am not able to find them. 
 The Prime Minister for the time being, as we 
 see, recruits his Cabinet largely from men pos- 
 sessed of this class of ability, making as they 
 do the most showy and effective skirmishers for 
 attack or defence ; and they in turn by the mere 
 lapse of time gradually succeed, as was the case 
 with Lord Beaconsfield, in the reversion to the 
 leadership. The average Member of Parliament 
 again (like the motley and ever-changing throng 
 that from first to last I saw pass in and out of the 
 old discussion rooms), if you will listen carefully 
 to his expressed estimates of men, regards this 
 class of ability as synonymous with genius itself, 
 and bends before it as before a natural superiority 
 - — always premising that the jokes, sarcasms, 
 personalities, and ' happy phrases ' are addressed 
 to the House itself by honourable members, and 
 are not the mere cuttings from a penny news- 
 paper — the offspring perhaps of the brain of 
 some poor hack out at elbows. And lastly, the 
 Press, which is mainly if not wholly instru- 
 mental, in the first instance at least, in giving 
 members of Parliament their rank and prestige 
 in the country, is, as I shall show further on, 
 
THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 49 
 
 equally under the dominion of this idea ; but 
 even were it not so, it is "so bound up with 
 Party Politics that its individual organs, from 
 the Times downwards, are forced to take 
 advantage of every form of ability however 
 flimsy that finds favour with the great masses 
 of voters, in order to strengthen and reinforce 
 themselves against their opponents. Which- 
 ever way we look, therefore, all the influences, 
 currents, and winds of opinion that sweep 
 through the Democratic Era on which we are 
 now entering, make for the aggrandizement of 
 the Talker, the Phrase-monger, the Demagogue, 
 and tend, as we shall see more clearly further 
 on, to accelerate rather than retard his rise. 
 
 Such were the observations and reflections I 
 carried away with me from the House of 
 Commons, and when, not long after when I had 
 ceased my attendance there, the name of Lord 
 Randolph Churchill began to attract attention, 
 and became familiar to me through the space 
 he occupied in the Press, it occurred to me, 
 with what truth we shall afterwards see, that 
 here possibly was a man of the type of ability 
 that I had been looking for in the House of 
 Commons, and who, I had predicted, would, 
 
 E 
 
So THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 
 
 if he made his appearance there, soon make for 
 himself a distinguished mark and position. 
 
 In my next chapter therefore I propose to 
 trace the risejof Lord Randolph Churchill, and 
 to follow the connection and interaction of the 
 causes and influences that have lifted him to 
 his present position of influence and power. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE RISE OF LORD RANDOLPH 
 CHURCHILL. 
 
 Lord Randolph Churchill was already past 
 thirty years of age, and had sat in the House of 
 Commons for some six or seven years, taking 
 little or no part in debate, when the general 
 public were first made aware of his existence 
 by his procedure in the Bradlaugh debates, when 
 he and a few other malcontents openly mutinied 
 against their leader, and formed a Cave under 
 the designation of 'the Fourth Party.' After 
 seven years of unexampled power and pros- 
 perity the Conservatives had been thoroughly 
 defeated at the recent elections, and on returning 
 to the House were to be seen sitting nightly, like 
 mourners at a funeral service, on their thinned 
 and empty benches, speechless, drooping, and 
 altogether broken in spirits. Not that there was 
 anything unusual in this sudden reversal at the 
 polls ; on the contrary, it was quite within the 
 
 E 2 
 
52 THE RISE OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 
 
 normal course of party politics; and with a little 
 vigilance and patience on the part of the Con- 
 servatives, opportunities would soon again have 
 presented themselves for routing their opponents 
 in the open field, and in fair and honourable 
 debate. But as the memory of their long pros- 
 perity fell athwart the gloom of their present 
 fortunes, it brought with it a feeling of discon- 
 tent, discontent in turn engendered restlessness 
 and impatience, and all combined moved them 
 to seek a present consolation by casting a dark- 
 ening shade on their high-minded and chivalrous 
 leader, who was felt to be too ' slow,' and to have 
 too little ' go ' to stem the hot and pent-up tide 
 of long-delayed but now triumphant Liberalism. 
 The mutineers of the Fourth Party who shared 
 this latent and diffused feeling more largely 
 perhaps than others, and from a variety of causes 
 fretted under it with more impatience, were the 
 first to give expression to it by casting off the 
 authority of their official leader publicly and 
 without disguise, and betaking themselves to 
 the open country, where, like a gang of gipsy 
 bandits who had thrown off the soft and restrain- 
 ing forms of civilized w r arfare, they were prepared 
 to carry on a kind of desultory Ishmaelitish 
 
THE RISE OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 53 
 
 struggle, their hands against every man's, and 
 where, like a band of Choctaw Indians, they 
 could come to scalps without formality, neither 
 giving nor receiving quarter. Holding as they 
 did that the main function of an Opposition 
 was to oppose^_rigKtl^_or wrongly, instead of 
 giving spirit and life to that opposition by 
 bringing to the great topics of debate a greater 
 brilliancy of handling, or a wider range and 
 sweep of thought, they sought rather to gain 
 their ends by arts more adapted to their powers 
 — the meaner and baser arts of obstruction, ex- 
 aggeration, and personal abuse. Instead of a 
 finer and more central characterization of men 
 or measures, they relied on the cheap tricks of 
 the caricaturist and sign-painter ; for substantial 
 argument they substituted abusive personalities ; 
 and instead of turning aside the stream of hostile 
 legislation by greater agility, subtlety, or power, 
 they blocked it bodily by great boulders of 
 mechanical obstruction. They might have been 
 seen night after night when any Bill of great 
 reach and importance was before the House, 
 sitting over it like cats over rat-holes, ready to 
 strangle each detail the moment it emerged, 
 while in the meantime the great principle and 
 
54 THE RISE OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 
 
 scope of the Bill (of which these petty details 
 were but incidents), like some great mammal, 
 passed by unheeded ; and this proceeding, which 
 gave them a show of industry and zeal, was 
 characterized by them and their partizans as a 
 ' fighting of the measure clause by clause.' So 
 essentially poor and mean (although useful, as 
 the event has proved to themselves) were their 
 tactics, so insignificant were their personal powers, 
 and so long had the spirit in which they con- 
 ducted debate been outgrown in all civilized 
 assemblies, that had each of the party gone on 
 his own way separately from the others, voting 
 as he pleased, acting as he pleased, speaking as 
 he pleased, in all probability nothing more would 
 have been heard of them. But by formally and 
 deliberately cutting themselves off from the 
 general leadership and forming a separate camp 
 within the borders of their own party ; by assum- 
 ing for themselves and policy a distinctive name 
 and title ; and by choosing for themselves a 
 leader; they excited in the House a degree of 
 curiosity and interest that would otherwise have 
 been denied them. And as all this was enacted 
 on the high and imperial stage of the House 
 of Commons, to be seen of every eye and 
 
THE RISE OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 55 
 
 blown by the Press to the four corners of 
 the world^ it gave to these political seedlings 
 in their germ and inception just that amount 
 of flutter, titillation, and interest in the popular 
 imagination which was so necessary and in- 
 deed indispensable to their personal designs. 
 In the House itself, where their insignificance, 
 their unscrupulousness, and their levity were 
 most apparent, they were regarded as objects 
 of curiosity and speculation rather than of 
 anxiety or fear. But into the dignity, decorum, 
 and, it must be added, mortal dulness of debate 
 they let in the new and more lively elements of 
 familiarity, buffoonery, and personal abuse — - 
 elements which, however much in the end, like 
 punning, destructive of all serious debate, for 
 the time being gave the appearance of greater 
 life, vivacity, and 'go'; and Lord Randolph 
 Churchill as being at once the youngest, the 
 most irrepressible, and most abusive, drew to 
 himself the largest share of interest and atten- 
 tion. Not knowing at any moment the curve he 
 was likely to take, or the character and pose he 
 was likely to assume, his movements by reason 
 of this very uncertainty were watched with as 
 much interest, and excited as much curiosity, 
 
56 THE RISE OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 
 
 as those of the Prime Minister himself. What 
 with his rank, his reputation for youth, his 
 transparent but studied insolence; what with 
 the free and ambi-dextrous way in which he 
 struck out on all sides of him, and the levity 
 with which he relieved and lightened it all ; he 
 enjoyed the rare felicity of being petted in turn 
 by each of the parties whom he in turn supported, 
 without exciting the alarm of any ; while his 
 political insignificance, and the derisive laughter 
 he evoked when each in turn became the target 
 for his vituperation, shielded him from their 
 malice and resentment. He was not, in a word, 
 regarded as a serious politician, or indeed as a 
 politician at all ; but was looked on, as was natural 
 from his procedure, as a spoilt child, to be petted 
 and caressed rather than coerced ; or rather per- 
 haps as a mischief-making antic retained on the 
 premises for the entertainment and amusement of 
 the House. Imbued with this feeling, which 
 indeed was general among honourable members, 
 and little recking of the dangerous nature they 
 were warming to their bosom, the leading men on 
 both sides amused themselves immensely with his 
 diversions, and by their countenance encouraged 
 him in what they regarded as after all mere 
 
THE RISE OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 57 
 
 freaks of naughtiness or whim. The rank and 
 file of both parties did the same. The long 
 rows of Squires, in particular, who sat more or 
 less speechless themselves behind the front Con- 
 servative Bench, who were too indolent to trouble 
 themselves seriously with the conduct and morale 
 of their party, and who sat or lounged there 
 night after night, dry and bored, awaiting the 
 dinner-hour, — gentlemen who were themselves 
 too deeply imbued with the old spirit of parlia- 
 mentary courtesy to strike at their opponents 
 'below the belt/ but who naturally hated the 
 Government and all its works (now that their 
 dearest privileges were beginning to be attacked) 
 with the mortal hatred of men fighting for their 
 lives, — were secretly delighted to have found an 
 instrument who under the guise of youth and 
 recklessness had no such scruples, and cheered in 
 consequence his most caaf^e and heartless strokes 
 till the roof rang with the echoes of their applause. 
 The Liberal members, on the other hand, 
 while immensely enjoying the insolence with 
 which he flouted his own leaders, regarded these 
 stabs and thrusts at theirs as but the sham 
 and mock-heroic outbursts of an over-flattered 
 impotence, as the ravings of some moon-struck 
 
58 THE RISE OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 
 
 envious comedian practising the part of heavy- 
 tragedy before the glass, but with the lines of 
 low comedy all too deeply ingrained to be 
 erased ; and joined accordingly their shouts of 
 derisive laughter to the chorus of Opposition 
 applause. So entertaining indeed did he become 
 all round, and so much ' go/ as it was called, 
 did he give to the dreary routine of debate by 
 these irrelevant and even vulgar personalities, 
 that the House, which could scarcely keep to- 
 gether a sufficient number of members at the 
 dinner hour for the transaction of serious public 
 business (unless, indeed, on questions of urgent 
 and momentous importance), would witness them 
 trooping in, night after night, in great numbers, 
 to enjoy the sight of this versatile comedian — 
 now as a little gladiator putting on and off his 
 sword, now as a merry-andrew changing his cap 
 and bells, now indulging in idle horse-play like 
 .a rustic at a village fair. And this too when 
 he was already over thirty years of age, and had 
 sat in Parliament for the greater part of a de- 
 cade ! Had he indeed literally as well as 
 metaphorically come down to the House with 
 his sword, drawn it on the open floor, and, like 
 Mark Antony after the battle of Actium, chal- 
 
THE RISE OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 59 
 
 lenged the Prime Minister to mortal combat, 
 he could not have been taken less seriously 
 — except occasionally, perhaps, by the Prime 
 Minister himself. As it was, I am convinced 
 th^lfhad the debates been more or less private, 
 as in the time of Pitt, and he and his diversions 
 been left in consequence to be dealt with by 
 the House itself, he would have remained to this 
 day, as I shall show further on, a mere appanage 
 to the establishment, to be brought in and out 
 as occasion served to relieve the tedium and 
 monotony of debate. But there were two great 
 forces in operation — forces which, however 
 right, necessary, and indeed inseparable from our 
 present stage of civilization and development, 
 will, if a man is so fortunate as to be caught in 
 their sweep and current, like the rise of eunuchs 
 in the Byzantine Empire, carry him on to for- 
 tune and power, not so much by his glory as by 
 his shame. These forces are the power of the 
 Public Press, and the operation of the system 
 'of Party Politics. 
 
 The Press, whose public function in a demo- 
 cratic age is, as I shall hereafter show, to stand 
 as a winnowing-fan or disinfecting sheet between 
 Parliament and the People, to prevent the 
 
60 THE RISE OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 
 
 passage of germs of morbid or unhealthy 
 notoriety into the general air, there to infect 
 and poison the minds of men ; which should 
 have a care that none but qualities of real 
 statesmanship should by mere reverberation and 
 repetition have a chance of fastening themselves 
 on the public imagination, but should ruthlessly 
 insulate and destroy all morbid activities in their 
 very inception ; the Press, I say, whose public 
 function is this or it is nothing, finding that 
 the procedure of Lord Randolph Churchill had 
 become an object of interest and curiosity out 
 of doors, and that a record of his personal 
 scurrilities enlivened the dreary columns of 
 debate provided for consumption at the morn- 
 ing breakfast-table, took almost from the very 
 beginning to reporting his impertinences, buf- 
 fooneries, and exaggerations at full length and 
 in large saturating doses, bestowing as much 
 space and comment on them as on the details 
 of a divorce suit, a prize-fight, or a trial for 
 murder. In thus sending up his name like an 
 air-balloon in the gaze of the gaping world, and 
 blowing it around the pendant globe to be seen 
 of every eye (the first thing that met you in 
 the morning on the placards was most likely 
 
THE RISE OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHLLL. 61 
 
 to be in staring type, ' Scene in the House of 
 Commoms — Lord R. Churchill and Mr. Glad- 
 stone '), the Press stamped him deeply into the 
 public imagination from the very beginning, 
 and gave him at his very birth as a politician 
 more importance and consequence than the 
 founders of most religions have received at their 
 death. Nor would this have been surprising 
 had they believed they had discovered in him 
 any hidden germs of real statesmanship. On 
 the contrary, they regarded him from the begin- 
 ning (and I appeal to the memory of my readers 
 in support of this) as an impertinent vulgar 
 lampooner and buffoon ; they spoke of him 
 habitually as a political Puck ; the Comic Illus- 
 trated Papers especially reflecting the prevailing 
 opinion by picturing him at one time as a little 
 merry-andrew amusing the House with his cap 
 and bells; at another, as a sulky, brazen-eyed, 
 self-important pug ; and again, as an unfortunate 
 cur let loose on the Derby course with a tin-kettle 
 tied to its tail for the amusement of the crowd. 
 
 Now it was about this time (say a year or 
 two after his first appearance) that, interested 
 to learn what style or quality of speaker and 
 debater he was, and with my old experience 
 
62 THE RISE OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 
 
 of the Cogers' Hall at my back as a kind of 
 metre or standard of judgment, I determined 
 to go down to the House and hear him for 
 myself. And reserving details of what I have 
 to say of him as a public speaker until the next 
 chapter, I may be permitted to observe here in 
 passing, that when, to my disgust, I found the 
 object of all this public interest and attention 
 popping up at every angle and pause in debate, 
 and in the most insolent, frivolous, and, worse 
 than all, palpably vulgar and insincere manner 
 wasting the time of the House with his irrelevant, 
 irritating, and trivial questions, and amusing or 
 disgusting it with his abusive personalities; and 
 all too, to my surprise, on a range and scale of 
 speaking ability which I can testify would have 
 shamed a third-rate ' Coger' ; and when I remem- 
 bered the real wealth of speaking and debating 
 ability that could on any night be had (out at 
 elbows) in the old discussion-room for a pot of 
 ale ; when I thought of all this, I said to myself, 
 Here is a man who, merely because he acts 
 on the exalted stage of the House of Commons, 
 where he is seen of all the world, and the Press 
 carries his every word to the ends of the earth, 
 threatens, by the interest which his eccentricities 
 
THE RISE OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 63 
 
 have excited, to become a minister of the Crown, 
 if not Prime Minister himself; and all too on a 
 basis of talent and achievement which if reduced 
 to writing would be unworthy a penny-a-liner, 
 and of debating power which if exercised at the 
 ' Cogers' ' would have emptied the room. I was 
 forced to ask myself the question — Is it really 
 possible that the mere stage and arena on which 
 a man struts, can by its effects on the imagina- 
 tions of men so transform his very complexion 
 and personality in their eyes, as to entirely alter 
 his outlook, standing, and fortune in this world ? 
 And for reply I was bound to answer,— not only 
 possible, but certain. For it is demonstrable 
 that if you can once make a man's name a 
 household word by blowing on it sufficiently, 
 and especially if It is in a cause like politics, 
 where sides are taken, or in judicial evidence 
 where there is room for discrepancies or differ- 
 ences of opinion, you will have gone a long way 
 in rooting him in the imaginations or hearts of 
 the people. The effect of mere publicity itself 
 — of mere reverberation, of being isolated, 
 brought out of the crowd, and set on high — 
 by its effect on the imagination alone will do 
 it. You have only to look at the way in which 
 
64 THE RISE OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 
 
 some poor Tichborne Claimant, some felon in 
 the law courts, or pathetic disconsolate Jumbo, 
 can by mere publicity so concentrate on himself 
 public interest and attention, that for the hour 
 he divides the sympathies of the nation with 
 its rulers themselves, to feel what the effect of 
 the same advertisement must be when the object 
 of it cannot die with the day, or pass into 
 oblivion by distance or lapse of time, but lives 
 on under one's eyes, born anew every morning 
 in the perennial flow of printed debate, each day 
 bringing a new change of performance, a new 
 occasion to men for the display of prejudice, 
 partisanship, or pride. So clearly indeed did I 
 perceive from the outset what the effect of this 
 world-wide advertisement of his name and per- 
 formance by the Press for the titillation of its 
 readers' palates would be, that at a time when 
 to have predicted his rise would have been to 
 draw down on you the derision of all serious 
 politicians, I ventured, in a work I was writing, 
 to assert with confidence that he would rise, 
 and that in no long time, to be a minister of 
 the Crown ; and when I found that a journal 
 of the great power, candour, and seriousness of 
 the Spectator, in order to neutralize the bane- 
 
THE RISE OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 65 
 
 fill effects of this world-wide advertisement, was 
 obliged to have an editorial on him every few 
 weeks, struggling to keep out the ocean with 
 its broom (and with about as much hope of 
 success as would attend the efforts of a regular 
 physician to overtake the world-wide adver- 
 tisement of some 'Holloway's pill'), I felt the 
 more strongly that his success was assured. 
 
 Such was the part played in the rise of Lord 
 Randolph Churchill by the mere echo and re- 
 verberation of his name in the Public Press, 
 surrounding him, as it naturally did, in the mind 
 of the multitude with an areola of real but vague 
 and indefinite superiority. By its action on the 
 imaginations of men alone, it dilated his essen- 
 tially small bulk, as in a camera, until it became 
 of world-wide importance, while at the same 
 time it gilded, transmuted, and idealized it until 
 it became the image and embodiment of power ; 
 it took him out of the ordinary mob of honour- 
 able members, and, like the birth of an heir- 
 apparent in the direct line of legitimacy (for to 
 the great masses of men the stamp of public 
 reputation alone gives legitimacy), gave his party 
 a name and object round which they could rally ; 
 and so indirectly gave him high claims on the 
 
65 THE RISE OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 
 
 reversion to the sovereignty. But if the Press 
 by mere advertisement alone gave him in this 
 way general bulk and prestige in the eyes of 
 his party and the world, it was left for the 
 operation of Party Politics to build for him a 
 reputation for ability and character piecemeal 
 and in detail; and that too, as I shall show 
 further on, on a range and basis of ability and 
 achievement smaller and meaner perhaps than 
 in open competition has ever won high place in 
 recorded history. 
 
 The Party journals, as I have said, although 
 they would have blushed to have connected his 
 name with the thought of Statesmanship in 
 general, nevertheless, as was natural, snatched at 
 any isolated remarks of his that could by any 
 possibility lend a show of temperance and 
 decency to his erratic speeches, and used these 
 as weapons to beat their opponents withal ; and 
 as he opposed everything right and left that fell 
 from the Government, hitting about him freely 
 at all points of the compass, and, like a tipsy 
 'slogger,' was sure occasionally to get in an 
 effective blow through the most experienced 
 fence, these journals w r ould pounce on it as a 
 prize ; and while passing lightly over the speech 
 
THE RISE OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 67 
 
 as a whole with the remark, perhaps, that it 
 lacked form a little, or was disfigured in parts 
 by personality or exaggeration, would turn their 
 full emphasis on some isolated observation 
 (generally a platitude I noticed), and characterize 
 it as a very pointed example of acute and 
 effective criticism. So pleased, indeed, were they 
 to discover a lucid interval, or even the veriest 
 commonplace that gave token of sanity in his 
 long tirades of intemperance and exaggeration, 
 that by that old trick of the mind, which like 
 the old ' confidence \ trick is ever green and 
 young (the trick whereby courtiers will erect 
 the one presentable feature of a prince into a 
 general beauty, and fond and doting mothers 
 the one generous action at the end of a long 
 course of filial infamy into a reformation), they 
 were so dazzled by the general imaginative halo 
 with which the Press had surrounded him,*that 
 they saw in his veriest platitudes germs of a 
 hidden statesmanship which, when age had 
 brought discretion, and experience had damped 
 the intemperance of youth, would yield a splen- 
 did fruition. And if perchance amid the flight 
 of wide-winged shafts which passed for political 
 criticism (most of which, however, either struck 
 
 F 2 
 
68 THE RISE OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 
 
 his own friends or the ceiling), one should hap- 
 pen to find its way anywhere near the target 
 at which it was aimed, the Party journals would 
 proceed to dig down into the dreary columns of 
 debate to bring it up again to resurrection and life, 
 would set it up on a pedestal and walk around 
 it in admiration, surveying it on all sides, and 
 unanimously proclaiming to all the world that 
 here indeed was the making of a political reputa- 
 tion which the world would not soon or willingly 
 let die. 
 
 Such was the transformation that, within 
 the memory of all, his intellectual standing 
 underwent in the eyes of Party-love, as one 
 watched it during the short years of its inception 
 and growth — a transformation, indeed, which 
 may be seen going on at this hour. But not 
 only his intellect, his very character also under- 
 went a transformation under the same genial 
 influence. So grateful indeed, as was natural, 
 was his own party for the work of opposition 
 and obstruction he was doing for them (however 
 much they may have secretly disliked his means), 
 that like the Irish, who condoned the murder of 
 Carey, and transfigured his assassin into a kind 
 of hero and martyr, they, to salve their con- 
 
THE RISE OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 69 
 
 sciences and justify to themselves their applause, 
 gave to his most vulgar and insolent attacks 
 all the gloss, phrase, and varnish of virtue. His 
 most coarse and brutal thrusts they characterized 
 by a fine euphemism as but a dash of devil-me- 
 caredness — a breezy freshness of youth — which 
 time would mollify; his sullen and most intem- 
 perate impudence and abuse were but a pretty 
 insolence and sauciness; the rockets of abuse 
 which he sent flying among friends and foes alike 
 were but a healthy dislike of conventional formal- 
 isms ; his want of reverence alike for age, ability, 
 and experience was a natural aversion to a 'gang' 
 of old fogies, or a genuine contempt for humbug. 
 In this way for party purposes (and them- 
 selves coming more and more under the illusion 
 which by puffing they had produced) the Party 
 journals gave a factitious and exaggerated im- 
 portance to particular utterances of the noble 
 lord, and so built up for him insidiously, and by 
 piecemeal, a reputation for ability in particular-, 
 which for decency's sake they had not as yet the 
 hardihood to affirm in general terms ; while in 
 the mean time the lower orders of Party journalism, 
 by continuously writing up his tawdry metaphors, 
 his caricatures, and his exaggerations (specimens 
 
70 THE RISE OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 
 
 of which we shall see further on), as the happiest 
 efforts of genius, played on the imaginations of 
 those inclined to his political views, and suc- 
 ceeded in getting these rhetorical efforts as 
 seriously regarded as strokes of genius by the 
 rank and file of the party, as the poetical efforts 
 of Robert Montgomery were by their fore- 
 fathers until Macaulay pricked the over-stuffed 
 effigy and let out the sawdust. 
 
 Meanwhile, it was interesting to note the 
 effect and reaction of all this on Lord Randolph 
 Churchill himself. Swollen to the bursting 
 point by the attention and interest which the 
 Press had been the means of attracting to him, 
 he be-rattled the stage worse than ever, delivering 
 in the course of a short session some hundreds 
 of obstructive and erratic speeches, and abusing 
 in turn the time and dignity of the House by 
 his successive appearances in one or other of 
 his old and well-recognized characters. At one 
 time he would run amuck of his own party, to 
 its amusement, bewilderment, or dismay ; at 
 another, he would with mock-heroic indignation 
 draw his little sword before the whole House, 
 and pose as another Miltiades, the saviour of his 
 country; while at another, he would be seen 
 
THE RISE OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 71 
 
 improving his reputation for diligence and 
 industry by sitting over the details of measures, 
 chattering and pecking at them like a daw, and 
 calling it, as we have seen, ' fighting the measure 
 clause by clause/ 
 
 More important, however, than the effects on 
 Lord Randolph Churchill of the action of the 
 Press and Party Politics, were their effects on 
 the great body of the People themselves ; and it 
 is to this that I am now desirous of drawing the 
 attention of the reader. What with the Press 
 advertising him over the wide world as some 
 new Barnum's wonder, and reporting his speeches 
 verbatim, and in large type, not for their merits 
 (as they themselves tacitly admitted), but to tickle 
 the palates of that large class who in regard to 
 serious politics are much like old Polonius, and 
 must have ' a jig, or a tale of bawdry, or they 
 sleep ; ' what with his obstructive tactics, which, 
 good for immediate party ends, would if per- 
 sisted in by minorities generally, render all 
 government impossible ; his brutal personalities 
 which, although as congenial to the excited 
 partizan as the secret daggers and poisoned 
 chalices of the Borgias, would, if they became 
 general, have honourable members at one another's 
 
72 THE RISE OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 
 
 throats within the week ; what with a style of 
 rhetoric and debate, which although, as I have 
 said, if printed, would be worthy only of the 
 poorest penny-a-liner, if spoken at the Cogers' 
 Hall, would have emptied the room, was never- 
 theless regarded by speech-bound honourable 
 members as so clever that the atrocity of cha- 
 racterizing Mr. Gladstone as 'the Moloch of 
 Midlothian whose hands were literally dripping 
 and reeking with blood/ was regarded by them 
 as a bright particular stroke of genius which it 
 were difficult to match ; — what with all this, the 
 effect was to fix him in the imagination of his 
 party as a star of the first magnitude, — waverers 
 who were still unconvinced by the reverberation 
 of his name and the noise and uproar he was 
 causing, being secretly converted, all their doubts 
 and fears being allayed and smoothed away, by 
 the hints and whispers that were dropped abroad 
 that on him had fallen the mantle of the sainted 
 Beaconsfield-Jhkxis^lf. In this way this steady 
 and unbroken course of insolence, buffoonery, 
 and abuse, in a man who had now reached his 
 thirty-fifth year, was by a kind of alchemy of 
 the imagination gradually transfigured into a 
 radiant and golden career of youth, pluck, and 
 
THE RISE OE LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 73 
 
 political promise ; the illusion being either 
 engendered directly by puffing, or passed like 
 an infection from one class to another down the 
 descending links in the chain of society (outside 
 the circle of the really cultured), from nobleman 
 and ' gentleman ■ to the Music Hall habitue 
 and the Conservative working man. 
 
 His earliest supporters were drawn from the 
 ranks of his own party in the House itself. 
 The fine old-crusted Tories, the country gentle- 
 men who sat in mass behind their leaders on 
 the Front Bench, and who were humourously 
 described by one genial and impartial observer 
 as so afflicted with ennui, indolence, and speech- 
 lessness, that as the clock turned to the dinner 
 hour, they trooped away to one diversion, to 
 return when Lord Randolph rose to another — 
 these gentlemen, who regarded him as diverting 
 and amusing, but of no political significance, 
 were so secretly delighted by his brutal attacks 
 on one whom they held as their mortal foe, that 
 whenever he rose to speak they applauded him 
 to the echo, and were thus the first who by 
 their countenance and encouragement warmed 
 to their bosoms the asp that was to sting them. 
 For I will, without hesitation, give them this 
 
74 THE RISE OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 
 
 as their dowry, that whatever Lord Randolph 
 Churchill may do for them and their class in 
 the future, he has already, by the support and 
 impetus he has given to essentially Radical 
 opinion, let down the peg of old Tory policy 
 to so low a pitch, that whatever party may 
 in future happen to be in power is pledged 
 already to carry out reforms which must be 
 fatal in the end to that landed and aristocratic 
 predominance they so much prize — reforms 
 which but for him might by a united Tory 
 party have been honourably postponed for 
 many a year to come. By their unreflecting 
 haste to applaud the dishonourable tactics prac- 
 tised by him on their opponents, they gave 
 edge and efficiency to the very weapon which 
 was to do execution on themselves ; for with 
 Lord Randolph Churchill as their leader to 
 flirt with triumphant Democracy, one may justly 
 parody the language of Shakspeare and say, that 
 " not poppy, nor mandragora, nor all the drowsy 
 syrups of the world shall ever medicine them 
 again to that sweet old Tory sleep which they 
 owed yesterday." 
 
 Descending in lineal sequence from the Squires, 
 his next recruits were drawn from the large 
 
THE RISE OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 75 
 
 body of Villa Residents living in the centres or 
 suburbs of great cities and towns, men as a 
 rule engaged in commerce or manufactures, 
 whose conversation and point of view are to a 
 large extent the echo of the Times newspaper, 
 and who, from their alleged absence of general 
 culture, are known among men of culture as 
 the ' Philistines.' These men originally and 
 instinctively liked neither the smell nor com- 
 position of the hotch-potch and patent-treacle 
 which Lord Randolph Churchill was offering 
 them under the name of Tory Democracy, 
 but being ever alive to the lightest note or 
 whisper that may chance to drop over the out- 
 side walls from the higher spheres of ' society/ 
 and being reassured by the plaudits of the 
 Squires within ; being secretly delighted too 
 with any personal attack, however coarse, that 
 gave voice and echo to their deep dislike of the 
 Liberal leader, they were not long in enrolling 
 themselves among his admirers, and after a little 
 incubation among his followers. Besides, from 
 their imperfect culture they really thought his 
 style and rhetoric brilliant, and himself a miracle 
 of cleverness. I have heard them as they came 
 into the city in the morning by train exclaiming 
 
76 THE RISE OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 
 
 to one another over the top of their newspapers : 
 " Splendid fellow, Churchill. Brilliant speech 
 last night. Didn't he let into that old hum- 
 bug. He's the coming man no doubt." And 
 on glancing down my own paper to see where 
 the brilliancy specially appeared, I would come 
 to the passage that most probably gave rise to 
 the exclamation (all the rest of the speech being 
 mere commonplace) in the remark perhaps that 
 Mr. Gladstone was * a purblind and sancti- 
 monious Pharisee/ or John Bright a ' senile and 
 infatuated hypQcrite ! ' Such was the style of 
 political metaphor and criticism which these 
 men really regarded as evidence of ability so 
 great that (when delivered on the floor of the 
 great House of Commons, and not merely 
 scribbled in a penny paper by some ' low 
 fellow ' possibly out at elbows) it was sufficient 
 to mark him out as the coming man ; although 
 in the body of these same speeches were senti- 
 ments so radical and even socialistic in tend- 
 ency, as to have helped to bring the destructive 
 policy of which they were the symptoms (and 
 which these men most dreaded) within measurable 
 distance of practical legislation. But with the 
 glare of notoriety full upon him, and reassured, as 
 
THE RISE OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 77 
 
 I have said, by the plaudits of the Squires, these 
 residents of the villas passed lightly over the 
 obnoxious sentiments, and gave diligent ear only 
 to the more attractive and exciting personali- 
 ties. And here, again, one may truly say that 
 Democracy being now here, and determined by 
 open or secret courses to have a larger share than 
 heretofore in the earth's produce, and as there 
 are only two heritages out of which rightly or 
 wrongly it can be carved, — the land, and the 
 commercial and manufacturing capital of the 
 country, — that these gentlemen should dream 
 that so lively and unscrupulous a circus-rider 
 as Lord Randolph Churchill, whom a healthy 
 instinct should have taught them to shun as 
 the Devil from the beginning, will fail to settle 
 on one or the other of these, or both, according 
 as the shouts of the victorious and applauding 
 multitude shall dictate — " Caesar, thou hast sub- 
 dued their judgments also." 
 
 The next order of recruits whom Lord Ran- 
 dolph Churchill succeeded in gaining to his 
 allegiance, through the action of the Press and 
 of Party Politics, was drawn from the large army 
 of Clerks, Travellers, and Dependants generally 
 of the two former classes. Fortified by the 
 
78 THE RISE OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 
 
 applause and good opinion of the higher mem- 
 bers of the party, they found no difficulty in 
 regarding him from the outset as the c coming 
 man.' Unlike their masters, however, they took 
 him from the first seriously, and not as a joke, 
 and that too without hesitation., repulsion, or fear. 
 Without property themselves, or the sense of 
 responsibility which it brings ; with little or no 
 hope of rising out of the positions in which they 
 serve, and desirous above all things of main- 
 taining that tone and appearance of ' respect- 
 ability' which alone on their small means can 
 distinguish them from the rude unwashed throng ; 
 debarred too by their position and training of the 
 opportunities of any real or genuine culture ; with 
 no sense of historical perspective ; and nothing to 
 break the clouds of illusion in which they are 
 enveloped ; they regarded this erratic knight- 
 errant in the cause of Jjoxj Democracy as a kind of 
 hero from the very outset, and supported him with 
 a more fiery zeal than their masters themselves. 
 
 With that mortal reverence and awe with 
 which men of this type regard any one in the 
 ' position ' of a Cabinet Minister, the very idea 
 that Lord Randolph Churchill should take the 
 field against all corners^ and like another Jack 
 
THE RISE OE LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 79 
 
 the Giant-Killer, should not only dare to beard 
 the Prime Minister himself, but should flaunt 
 his own leaders as a ' gang of old fogies ' much 
 too ' slow ' to lead a great historic party, so 
 overawed and stunned their imaginations as to 
 irradiate and transfigure his long trail of inso- 
 lence and abuse into a glorious career of political 
 audacity and pluck : and with the Press blow- 
 ing on him as with a bellows from behind, and 
 more than all with the whispers that came to 
 them that he was the legitimate heir to the 
 Beaconsfield tradition ; — all compelled the con- 
 viction that here indeed must be a man of 
 unique and extraordinary genius. But the 
 greatest satire of all was, that at the very time 
 when respectable Party journals were for decency's 
 sake obliged to apologize for his outrages on 
 the grounds of youth, hot-headedness, and in- 
 experience, these gentlemen would boldly avow 
 their honest admiration for these very outrages 
 (his insolence, I noticed, they always spoke 
 of as i pluck,' and his newspaper style of vitu- 
 peration as ' extraordinary power of language') ; 
 and among their own circle of friends you 
 would overhear such outbursts of enthusiasm 
 on his behalf as these : " Wonderful fellow, 
 
80 THE RISE OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 
 
 Churchill ! awfully clever, and with any amount 
 of pluck ! Sir Stafford a good sound man, but 
 too slow, you know ! Churchill is the man we 
 want," until one was obliged to stop one's ears 
 and run for it. 
 
 The last order of adherent whom Lord Ran- 
 dolph Churchill succeeded in gaining to his 
 standard was the Conservative Working-man, 
 for whose character indeed, if not judgment, 
 all must feel the highest respect. Like his more 
 ambitious brother — the City Clerk — it was both 
 natural and right that (with that weight of habit 
 and tradition on him which with most men is 
 the best guarantee of sobriety and respectability) 
 he too should feel more confidence in adhering 
 to the ancient ways, and acquiescing in the 
 ancient structure of society in Church and 
 State, than in any new-fangled schemes for the 
 reconstruction of society, which however neces- 
 sary, and in the end inevitable, were as yet raw 
 and untried. Warmed as he was by the feeling 
 that his opinions were in accordance with those 
 of his masters (and in this the Conservative 
 Working-man is most loyal), and having 
 besides his own proper pride and sense of 
 dignity, it was natural that when he found a 
 
THE RISE OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 81 
 
 person sufficiently accredited coming forward 
 and announcing that he was the representative 
 of Tory Democracy, he should feel that his own 
 importance in the State would no longer be 
 ignored, and that he would be more respected 
 than under the older Tory regimes ; and in con- 
 sequence might go bravely forward, nothing 
 doubting, prepared to fall down in admiration 
 and worship as at the feet of a new and lawful 
 king. 
 
 Now as these two latter classes — the Clerks 
 and the Conservative Working-men — made up 
 numerically his most numerous clientele, and 
 having the votes were in consequence the most 
 important ; and as they were just at that intel- 
 lectual point of view where his clap-trap rhetoric 
 and metaphor seemed to them, like a music-hall 
 song, to be the very high-water mark of genius 
 itself; it became at once a foregone conclusion 
 that having secured these hehacl now nothing 
 more to do but to go on boldly and to conquer. 
 
 In this way, then, Lord Randolph Churchill 
 gradually succeeded in fixing his authority on 
 the neck of his party, and in gathering around 
 him a compact and enthusiastic body of ad- 
 herents — primarily by the puffing of the Press 
 
82 THE RISE OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 
 
 (for all mere advertisement, if on an extensive 
 scale, by taking a man out of his surroundings 
 gives him greater bulk and radiance in the 
 common eye, and so by its mere action on the 
 imagination becomes an indirect species of 
 puffing) ; secondly, by the action of Party 
 Politics, which, too, by a kind of mental alchemy 
 converts even the grosser and baser elements into 
 lustres ; thirdly, by his style and quality of 
 rhetoric and debate, which although they bore 
 as much resemblance to real oratory and states- 
 manship as the style and quality of a penny-a- 
 liner do to Shakspeare, nevertheless by the great 
 masses were quite as highly appreciated ; and 
 lastly, by his character and procedure generally, 
 which (in connection with his so-called youth, 
 and owing to the high stage on which he 
 acted, and the antagonists with whom he was 
 brought into contact), although vulgar, insolent, 
 and abusive to a degree almost beyond belief, 
 nevertheless were regarded by the pit and gallery 
 as entirely heroic, transmuted as they were by 
 party-love into a splendid audacity and virtue. 
 The result of all this was so to burn his name 
 and personality into the popular imagination, 
 that when the smaller but more reputable portion 
 
THE RISE OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 83 
 
 of his party resolved at last to shake him off, 
 their voices were drowned by such a chorus 
 of opposition from the pit and gallery, that they 
 were obliged in despair to relinquish the attempt. 
 His influence, meanwhile, was, as one could have 
 foreseen, gradually becoming more and more 
 assured, till you now saw it openly making itself 
 recognized. One compliment after another was 
 paid to him by various portions of his party in 
 town and country. He was made chairman of 
 the National Union of Conservative Associations, 
 President of the Primrose League, and altogether 
 soon became universally regarded by the rank 
 and file of the partyZout of doors as one of its 
 most prominent^ able, and rising members. 
 
 And now, it may be asked, what was the 
 attitude of the Press in regard to this trans- 
 formation in Public Opinion ? 
 
 Having for its own ends, and the delectation 
 of its readers at the breakfast-table, been the 
 means of giving him notoriety, and this noto- 
 riety (by its action on the imagination) having 
 united with certain factitious elements to produce 
 a glorified image of genius and character alto- 
 gether irrecognizable in the original portrait, the 
 Press now began, like another Pygmalion or 
 
 G 2 
 
84 THE RISE OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 
 
 barbarian idolator, to worship the idealized image 
 or overgrown simulacrum of a deity which its 
 own hands had created; bending before it in 
 admiration and worship at all points, and that 
 too although in the mean time neither his style, 
 manner, or form of achievement had, as itself 
 admitted, in any way changed. Having begun 
 by giving their readers a crude and literal image 
 of him as he was, which these in their turn 
 idealized, transmuted, and gilded by the action 
 of their minds (for no mere brazen serpent once 
 erected on high, and on which all men have 
 looked, is ever again the same brazen image as 
 it was before), they ended by accepting from 
 their readers this glorified and transmuted image 
 as his true likeness. The respective organs of 
 opinion, with that dignified complacency which 
 is so essential to their influence, began gradually, 
 you observed (in proportion as their constituents 
 out of doors were being impressed by his 
 achievements), to take him more seriously. They 
 spoke vaguely, but often, of his cleverness, his 
 sarcasm, his brilliancy^xhis- power of argument 
 and debate, his pluck, his audacity, and the 
 like ; and would search^jif~they had to go to 
 the very centre, till they had recovered the needle 
 
THE RISE OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 85 
 
 of commonplace out of a whole haystack of ab- 
 surdity ; the Comic Papers alone as chartered 
 libertines still continuing, however, to picture him 
 as before, but with some mitigation perhaps 
 of severity. Even the Spectator, which had 
 struggled breathlessly, as we saw, in its endeavour 
 to keep out the inundation with its broom, now 
 strove hard, with its usual fairness and candour, 
 to find a single spot of sound and solid substance 
 (even under the microscope) on which to plant 
 a fixed and steady compliment, but in vain. 
 
 Meanwhile the effect of all this was to stimu- 
 late Lord Randolph Churchill to still greater 
 exertions, and to confirm and strengthen his 
 own belief in the efficacy, for his own objects, 
 of the style and tactics he had been pursuing. 
 Indeed at this period (speaking roughly about 
 four years after his first appearance) he outdid 
 all his previous record in prodigality of abuse, 
 exaggeration, and personality, tearing a passion 
 to very tatters to split the ears of the ground- 
 lings (who had the votes), defying his opponents, 
 flouting his own leaders, and heaping on them 
 in the face of the world every form and variety of 
 contumely ; while at the same time he increased 
 his reputation for serious work and industry, by 
 
86 THE RISE OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 
 
 sitting watching more closely than ever the rat- 
 holes and details of the measures and policy that 
 passed before him. But it was soon felt that 
 this fussy, impotent, and fretful show of activity 
 would not atone for the wild and incalculable 
 flights of policy to which he was subject. 
 So extraordinary indeed did his political pro- 
 cedure at last become ; so inconsistent were 
 his doctrines with those of the party to which 
 he professed to belong ; so loose, crude, and 
 dangerous did his opinions seem to them 
 to be (his opinions on landed property, on 
 county government, his sympathy real or pre- 
 tended with the Irish patriots, and the like) ; 
 so light and facile was his power of executing 
 a volte face on all possible subjects according 
 to the political exigencies of the moment or 
 the direction of the popular gale ; such was his 
 want of tact, his bad taste, and his growing 
 reputation for unscrupulousness, that he suc- 
 ceeded at last in thoroughly alienating the recog- 
 nized leaders of his own party, and in spreading 
 a general dismay through all its ranks. 
 
 The Tory squires who had been the first to 
 applaud his coarse and brutal attacks on the 
 Liberal Leader (and who indeed to this day can 
 
THE RISE OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. S? 
 
 listen to this abuse with pleasure and applause), 
 were the first to take the alarm — which soon, 
 however, became general among honourable 
 members, who, being on the spot, saw most 
 clearly the dangers to which, from division, the 
 party was now exposed. They paused for a 
 moment in their encouragement, silenced their 
 applause, and threatened to desert him in mass. 
 The Standard, as the leading organ of the 
 party, feeling already that he was doomed, 
 stepped at once to the front, and giving voice 
 to what (had it not been for the exigencies 
 of Party or the breakfast-table) had long been 
 the real opinion of all sound and thoughtful 
 politicians in and out of Parliament, told him 
 in other words that he was an impudent, un- 
 blushing, impostor, with no more real knowledge 
 of politics than an overgrown schoolboy, and too 
 ignorant even to know the depths of his own 
 ignorance ; and that, in a word, he had better 
 take himself off and be gone. And had the 
 result indeed depended on these honourable 
 members and their organ in the Press, there 
 can be little doubt that he would forthwith 
 have been thrown incontinently overboard. But 
 they had reckoned without their host. It was 
 
88 THE RISE OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 
 
 not for nothing that the united bellows of the 
 Press (that of the Standard included) had been 
 blowing on his name and reputation during all 
 these years, until, like some Holloway's Pill, it 
 stared on you from every placard and boarding — 
 in newspapers, magazines, railway stations, and 
 books. So deeply indeed had they burnt his 
 name into the imaginations of men throughout 
 the length and breadth of the land, that like the 
 wise general he was, when attacked he had only 
 to do nothing, and for reply to snap his fingers, 
 whistle, and go on his own way. For it is a 
 demonstrable truth (the bearing of which on 
 democratic governments we shall see farther 
 on), that if you snatch the first man you meet 
 in the street, and give him for a term of years 
 the political advertisement, that was given to 
 Lord Randolph Churchill (whether avowedly 
 for the interest and amusement of readers or no, 
 matters not), you shall, by its mere effect on 
 the imaginations of men, put him on so lofty 
 a pedestal, that no mere political inconsistencies, 
 no atrocities of speech or political audacities, no 
 mere clique of editors and honourable mem- 
 bers, nothing indeed (except perhaps a personal 
 felony) shall take him down again. And if one 
 
THE RISE OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL 89 
 
 thing more than another could prove, and that 
 conclusively, that his rise was due to puffing, 
 and puffing alone (in the sense in which I 
 have described it), it is the fact that the Stand- 
 ard, the daily organ of the Conservative Party, 
 after watching his career for four or five years 
 and secretly conniving for party purposes at his 
 unscrupulous tactics, and moreover at his rising 
 reputation, should have been able to discover so 
 little real substance in him, that when at last it 
 was obliged to speak out, it had to confess that 
 he was nothing more or less than an impudent 
 political fraud, with no more knowledge than 
 an overgrown school-boy — and that too, if I 
 mistake not, within a very few weeks of the 
 time of his accession to the Cabinet, if indeed 
 not after. But be this as it may, Lord Randolph 
 Churchill when they attempted to remove him 
 could safely snap his fingers at them, and go 
 gaily on his way; for however easy it may be 
 for a clique of journalists and politicians to put 
 a man on the throne, once there — and with all 
 the power of the State, that is to say public 
 opinion, at his back — it is not so easy to take 
 him down again. And as result, we found that 
 when about the time of this emeute a junction of 
 
90 THE RISE OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 
 
 the Parnellites with the Conservatives enabled 
 the latter to defeat the Liberal Government and 
 come into power, Lord Randolph Churchill, by 
 the hold he had acquired on his party out of 
 doors, was able to dictate his own terms in the 
 formation of the new Government, of which he 
 became one of the most prominent members, 
 and at last, # as we now see, leader of the House 
 of Commons^_ 
 
 Such in brief was the rise of Lord Randolph 
 Churchill as it went on from day to day under 
 the eyes and in the memory of all — a rise un- 
 irradiated by real greatness at any point in its 
 course, and accomplished by such a combination 
 of cheap expedients (as I shall now show) before 
 the eyes of what is called the free and enlight- 
 ened English people as has nowhere been known 
 within living memory, and well deserves there- 
 fore to live in history — a career unbrightened 
 from first to last by any gleam of generosity, 
 nobility, elevation of political principle, or hon- 
 ourable political practice ; and worse than all, as 
 I shall now endeavour to make good, unirradiated 
 by any but the cheapest, meanest, and lowest 
 order of ability — an order of ability, however, 
 * Autumn 'S6. 
 
THE RISE OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 91 
 
 which I grant you is so level with all that is 
 superficial and ignorant in human nature, that 
 if well planted, so as to command the great 
 masses of men, it will like a debauching harlotry- 
 succeed where virtue fails, and outface the 
 modesty oFgenius itself. A combination of cheap 
 expedients, I say, which I foresaw from the first 
 would be successful, and which moreover, unless 
 burnt into the public mind with the same per- 
 sistency as his own name has been, can be played 
 over and over again with equal certainty of suc- 
 cess. If, as Burke says, the road to great place 
 should not be made too easy, it may well be 
 said of Lord Randolph Churchill, that instead 
 of forcing his way up the rugged steeps to 
 the summit by sheer power (as was the case 
 with Burke himself), he has been blown thither 
 like thistle-down by puffing and levity only. 
 No ^Esop's fly sitting on the axle of a chariot- 
 wheel, and imagining itself the cause of all the 
 dust that rose, could be more ridiculous than 
 Lord Randolph Churchill sitting on the wheel 
 of the parliamentary chariot, as it was driven 
 around the world by the Press, and imagining 
 that all the commotion caused was due to his 
 sole power and ability. To do what in me lies to 
 
92 THE RISE OF LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. 
 
 prevent the really disgraceful exhibition of another 
 rise to power by the same arts, I propose now 
 to examine Lord Randolph Churchill's actual 
 achievements in detail, — what he has done or 
 said ; what the scope of his political principles 
 is ; what range and quality of ability are involved 
 in his style, tactics, and principles ; what the 
 tricks are by which he has imposed on his ad- 
 mirers; and the like,— and for this end I pro- 
 pose to make use of the volume of his public 
 speeches prepared and edited by one of his 
 earliest admirers — speeches which, with all that 
 was unworthy in his purely parliamentary pro- 
 cedure eliminated, present him in his most sober, 
 respectable, and serious garb. 
 
 Before doing this, however, it were as well 
 perhaps to endeavour to fix his place as a mere 
 Orator or Public Speaker, in order the better to 
 eliminate at the outset from the factors that have 
 gone to make up his success the acknowledged 
 effects of popular oratory on the great masses 
 of men. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL AS 
 OR A TOR. 
 
 In the present chapter I propose to consider 
 Lord Randolph Churchill with reference rather 
 to the style, manner, and other external qualities 
 of his speeches than to the depth, range, and 
 variety of their subject matter (which I have left 
 for my next chapter) — to consider him, that is 
 to say, with reference rather to his qualities as 
 an Orator than as a Statesman. 
 
 On the few occasions on which I had the 
 opportunity of hearing him speak in the House 
 of Commons, his remarks were more or less 
 short and fragmentary in character, being either, 
 as I have said, of the nature of interruption, or 
 of captious and impertinent comment and objec- 
 tion, raised apparently for obstructive purposes, 
 and bearing about as much relation to serious 
 debate as the wanton and obtrusive comments 
 of schoolboys do to the serious conversation of 
 
94 LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHLLL AS ORATOR. 
 
 their parents or elders. This apparent absence 
 of seriousness and sincerity was seen, I may 
 perhaps explain, rather in the import and matter 
 of his remarks, than in their style or manner, 
 which from my old experience of public speakers, 
 and on the principle of ex pecle Herculem, I felt 
 was not the style or manner of either a rapid, 
 brilliant, or effective Speaker. His voice was 
 deep, harsh, and^witHout inflexion, and although 
 there was little or no halting and stammering, 
 there was just that degree of slowness and hesita- 
 tion in his utterance which made me feel that his 
 natural powers in the way of free and spontaneous 
 speech must be strictly limited and confined. 
 Being aware, however, of the great difference 
 sometimes observed between a man's oratorical 
 powers when making a few discursive, negative, 
 or critical remarks, and these same powers when 
 fully engaged on some large constructive and 
 connected speech, and feeling that it would not 
 be fair to make the one the measure of the 
 other; being desirous also of dealing only 
 with such large characteristics of his style as 
 from their inherent and essential nature could, 
 when eliminated and defined, be fairly expected 
 to hold good of his oratory at any time or in 
 
LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHLLL AS ORATOR. 95 
 
 any place, I had determined (should no further 
 opportunity present itself of hearing him in a 
 connected speech) to deal with the matter only 
 of his collected speeches, as on these speeches 
 all claims that could be put forward in his be- 
 half as a serious statesman up to the time of 
 his advent into the Cabinet must be founded. 
 But knowing as I did the effect of mere oratory 
 as such on men's estimation of a man's powers, 
 and the great part it plays in the politics of 
 the present time, I still longed for an oppor- 
 tunity of hearing him in some well-pondered 
 and connected speech, as this would enable me 
 to give to my sketch of his political career a 
 greater fulness and completeness. By good for- 
 tune my desire was at last gratified, and an 
 opportunity presented itself of hearing him in 
 the speech of two hours' duration which he 
 delivered to his constituenfe-at Paddington on 
 the eve of the~TasF~e!ection. 
 
 A friend of mine, a man of untrammelled eye, 
 not to be daunted or overawed by mere reputa- 
 tion or prestige, and entirely without personal 
 or political bias, offered to accompany me to the 
 place of meeting ; and as we walked along specu- 
 lating on what we were likely to hear, we agreed 
 
95 LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL AS ORATOR. 
 
 that if he should really turn out to be a brilliant, 
 fluent, and effective speaker, that fact alone would 
 in some measure help to explain, if not to justify, 
 his sudden rise and popularity. On arriving at 
 the Riding School in which the meeting was to 
 be held, we found it packed and thronged by 
 an immense assembly of his supporters and ad- 
 mirers ; and as admission was by ticket, and all 
 rude or hostile elements were in consequence 
 excluded, all the conditions essential to a free and 
 effective speech were abundantly present. The 
 subject of his remarks, too, which was to be the 
 great Home Rule problem then agitating the 
 country and exercising all minds, although it had 
 already been severely thrashed out by the Press 
 and by the leading men of all political parties, 
 still left abundant room for original handling, 
 constructive ingenuity, and all the arts and 
 graces of the rhetorician and orator. After 
 some delay Lord Randolph Churchill at last 
 entered the hall amid the waving and cheer- 
 ing of the dense audience, and as he made his 
 way forward to the platform in evening dress, 
 and with a large red rose in his button-hole, he 
 seemed to be a' slim, narrow-shouldered man of 
 about or below the medium height, his move- 
 
LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL AS ORATOR. 9? 
 
 ments having more or less of that slow and 
 £/tfze-aristocratic air which one would have 
 expected rather in the lounger of a West End 
 Club than in_an active and pushing politician. 
 His face was small and pale, his head high and 
 conical, and his features were readily distinguish- 
 able as those which during the last few years 
 have been made so familiar to us by means of 
 prints, photographs, and cartoons. There were the 
 same large and prominent eyes ; the deep heavy 
 moustache with its twisted ends ; the prominent 
 ears ; the short, aggressive nose ; the expression 
 neutral or complacent, and with just a shade of 
 sullenness in it about the cheek and eye ; while over* 
 the whole face there was (what is not seen in the 
 photographs) a milk-white paleness, which, taken 
 with the large prominence of the eye, gave the 
 appearance, from tFe distance where I was sit- 
 ting, of pKysicaT delicacy, almost of sybaritic 
 effeminacy. 
 
 WTien the shouting and cheering which greeted 
 his entrance had subsided, and all was again quiet, 
 he rose and began to speak in the slow and delib- 
 erate manner which you would have expected 
 from his ZVaze-aristocratic air, but in a voice 
 which at once struck you by its deep, almost 
 
 H 
 
98 LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHLLL AS ORATOR. 
 
 harsh tones, and which, although corresponding 
 in a measure to the sullen expression of the face 
 and eye, arrested attention by its marked contrast 
 with his appearance of physical weakness and 
 effeminacy. 
 
 A few introductory remarks delivered in these 
 slow, deep, and somewhat harsh tones, thanking 
 the electors for the honour they had done him 
 in again choosing him as their representative, 
 passed off without comment or remark, and 
 brought him at once face to face with his cele- 
 brated ' Paddington Address,' which had then 
 just recently been published, and which had 
 caused such a feeling of indignation throughout 
 the country, from its tone of cold, calculated, 
 and heartless scurrility. The remarks he had to 
 make on this matter were delivered in the same 
 slow, monotonous manner with which he began ; 
 each sentence ending in a fall of the voice, 
 followed by just sufficient pause to enable him 
 to see to the end of the next sentence without 
 stammering or stumbling by the way. The 
 audience, as is so often the case when a vast 
 throng of men come together to do honour to 
 one whom they regard with admiration, seemed 
 to be in a state of nervous titillation and excite- 
 
LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL AS ORATOR. 99 
 
 ment ; and at the first reference to this episode 
 of the ' Address,' seemed to anticipate some 
 brilliant and wonderful exhibition of rhetoric, 
 sarcasm, or wit. Nothing of this nature came, 
 however, nothing but the harsh and grinding 
 cadence and uniformity of the sentences, cold 
 and passionless and slow. And when the end 
 and upshot of it all was to reiterate that he had 
 carefully weighed the words of his i address,' 
 and that they were all true, the great audience, 
 like some demoralized mob that had lost its 
 head, cheered the base and unworthy sentiment 
 until the rafters rang with the applause. The 
 truth was, that instead of a number of separ- 
 ate and isolated individuals exercising separate 
 and independent judgment, they had already 
 run together into a herd, and were in that state 
 of mental tiptoe and expectancy that makes 
 men ready to applaud atrocities of speech or 
 conduct which in fKelr. individual and better 
 judgments they would have reprobated. Passing 
 on from this ugly episode, he next by a kind 
 of tuquoque, and by way of indirect justification 
 of himself, attempted to fasten on Mr. Glad- 
 stone the same charge of personal scurrility 
 that had been brought against himself. Mr, 
 
 h 2 
 
100 LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL AS ORATOR. 
 
 Gladstone had, it appears, in reply to some ques- 
 tion addressed to him in reference to Mr. Peter 
 Rylands (who had deserted him in his Home 
 Rule policy), made use of the expression that 
 ' our old friend Peter has gone to the bad.' 
 On this palpably facetious and, I presume, merely 
 passing remark Lord Randolph Churchill seized 
 as a godsend, and it was evident from the manner 
 in which he set out that he was determined to 
 make the most of it. With a show of serious- 
 ness and solemnity over this veriest of trifles 
 which was in itself a study, he asked the audience 
 in his slow and heavy way what they could think 
 of a statesman who could so indulge in personal 
 abuse as to publicly assert that ' our old friend 
 Peter had gone to the bad/ Not content with 
 putting it thus plainly, he continued to turn it 
 over on all sides, placing it in different lights, 
 revolving and tumbling round it until you could 
 have gone to sleep, and finally ended like some 
 heavy quadruped of the field, by rolling over it. 
 My friend, who had waited patiently and given 
 him ample time to kindle the fire of oratory and 
 passion, finding that, instead of the flames of 
 eloquence leaping forth, nothing issued but this 
 slow and wooden monotony, without humour, 
 
LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL AS OR A TOR. ior 
 
 wit, or passion, at last ventured to break the 
 silence, and whispered secretly into my ear the 
 ominous words — a bore ! The audience, too, 
 feeling instinctively the note of insincerity that 
 ran through this feeble attempt to extract a 
 subject of vituperation out of so palpable a trifle, 
 and with a finer sense of measure and proportion 
 than their master, evidently began to feel wearied, 
 and certain of their number gave symptoms 
 of impatience for work of a more red-handed 
 character. So deeply indeed had the idea of the 
 lively lampooner got associated in their minds 
 with his name, that like boys who pull a mon- 
 key's tail to get it to perform its favourite tricks, 
 they commenced to throw out trails across his 
 path ; and whenever he mentioned any name 
 that was likely to form a subject of abuse, they 
 hooted and cheered in order to draw him on, 
 but in vain,— Jie continued on his slow and 
 stolid course unheeding. But although he was 
 not to be drawn out of the course he had marked 
 out for himself, he nevertheless had no intention 
 of falling below his own reputation, or of dis- 
 appointing the expectations of his hearers, but 
 had come down prepared with deep-dyed patches 
 of more express and concentrated abuse, which 
 
102 LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL AS ORATOR. 
 
 he plastered on here and there at intervals 
 along the course of his speech. To become 
 lively, however, was too much for him. He 
 had already been speaking some twenty minutes 
 or more, and, for my own part, all hope of 
 finding in him the lively buffoon of public 
 opinion had long been resigned. It was evidently 
 a false reputation (this of his being a lively 
 speaker), engendered by the Press, which in in- 
 tending to characterize the lively matter of his 
 speeches, used words and phrases which covered 
 their manner also ; and thus the public had 
 read into his printed speeches precisely that 
 amount of rapidity and life which they had been 
 taught to associate with his name. Nothing 
 could be further from the fact than to imagine 
 him a rapid or a lively speaker. On the con- 
 trary, a more heavy, sullen, and dreary speaker, 
 for one making any pretence to the art, I have 
 rarely or never heard ; and when he produced 
 his first red-dyed patch of personal abuse by 
 calling Mr. Gladstone a madman, and went on 
 to advise him (plagiarizing from Lord Beacons- 
 field) to sail for Anticyra, there to take hellebore 
 as a cure for it, the whole affair was so leaden, 
 dull, and long drawn-out, that you saw his point 
 
LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL AS ORATOR. 103 
 
 long before he got to it, and as a piece of wit 
 it fell in consequence dead as lead. 
 
 He had already been speaking for half an hour 
 or more, and his remarks had hitherto been 
 directed rather to interest and attract the gallery, 
 than the graver portions of his audience. He 
 now came to the more serious aspects of his 
 speech ; but lest his audience should be lying in 
 wait for a joke when his intention was to be quite 
 serious, he began by explaining that he was 
 about to enter on a long and connected argu- 
 ment against Home Rule, which would demand 
 all their consideration, and to which he invited 
 their most close and earnest attention. 
 
 All being again quiet, he made preparations 
 for his new departure, glanced at his notes, and 
 walked slowly up and down (his hands in his 
 waistcoat) with all the pose and solemnity of an 
 aged statesman. It was curious to note the im- 
 pression this pose of the serious political teacher, 
 coming as it did from a politician of yesterday, 
 with such history and antecedents, made on a 
 large portion of the audience, and the difficulty 
 they found in making it harmonize with his 
 traditionary reputation. For no sooner had he 
 opened his argument by the grave announcement 
 
; io4 LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL AS ORATOR. 
 
 that Ireland was an island, than the audience, 
 who were still on the flighty tip-toe of titillation 
 and expectancy, burst into laughter, as if the 
 statement were but the preliminary to some 
 concealed joke of more than usual brilliancy. 
 He stopped, assured them that he was really 
 in earnest, and that on this apparent platitude of 
 Ireland being an island hung an argument of 
 great force and cogency. Having in this way 
 quelled their levity, he was again allowed to 
 proceed, and at once plunged into a long disser- 
 tation through which ran indeed a thin strand 
 of argument, but of so light and unimpressive 
 a nature that little more remains of it with me 
 now than the upshot, which was to this effect — 
 that as the Catholic Parliament of Tyrconnel 
 had persecuted the Protestants, and the Protest- 
 ant Parliament of Grattan had persecuted the 
 Catholics, and in both instances the strong hand 
 of England had had to intervene to keep the 
 peace and see that justice was done, the result 
 would be the same again to-morrow if Ireland 
 were allowed Hojne__JRule. Now, as an argu- 
 ment this was of course all right enough, and 
 would have answered its purpose sufficiently 
 well; but so long drawn-out was it, so tedious 
 
LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL AS ORATOR. 105 
 
 in its development, that the audience, before it 
 was done, were palpably wearied and exhausted, 
 and you saw them here and there secretly 
 yawning behind their handkerchiefs or hats. 
 The truth is, one had heard so much of his 
 rhetorical brilliancy, his lightness and audacity, 
 that one pictured him as some rapid and 
 brilliant sabreur with his keen and swift thrust 
 and defence, as some brilliant, bright, glib- 
 tongued, and caustic wit and humourist ; and to 
 this impression indeed his very impertinences, 
 buffooneries, and antics lent support rather than 
 otherwise. But no impression could have had 
 less real foundation. No elephant jumping over 
 bars and tables in emulation of a light-heeled 
 monkey could have been more dull, ponderous, 
 and leaden - footed. His argument, as I have 
 said, was drawn out to an interminable length, 
 dragging its slow length along with such pause 
 and interval between the sentences that they 
 must have been jewels of wit or wisdom to 
 have borne the strain ; and had the audience 
 been hostile, the opportunities offered for inter- 
 ruption and obstruction would have speedily 
 brought it to a standstill. The yawning in 
 consequence continued, and even spread as he 
 
io5 LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL AS OR A TOR. 
 
 went along, those who still held out being kept 
 awake either by their interest in the subject it- 
 self, or by their anticipation of some joke or 
 piece of sarcasm, which however only came at 
 rare and uncertain intervals. He himself seemed 
 to be not altogether at home in this element 
 of serious discourse, but walked cautiously along 
 it like a man on a plank, and with so little mo- 
 mentum that the slightest disturbance was suffi- 
 cient to shake his balance, and throw him off 
 the track ; one poor devil who was standing 
 against the door, and who in the heat of the 
 room every now and again drew the bolt to let 
 in a breath of fresh air, distracting completely 
 the attention of the room (a thing that would 
 be impossible under the spell of a great orator), 
 and so seriously disturbing his balance that at 
 last he came to a standstill altogether. Some 
 of the audience, who still hoped to get him on 
 to his more accustomed element of personality, 
 continued to draw herring-trails across his path 
 as he went along, but without success. He 
 trudged onward as if carrying a load of most 
 momentous import on a precarious and uncertain 
 footing, every now and then lighting up the way 
 with a red-glaring patch of vituperation, and 
 
LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL AS ORATOR. 107 
 
 struggling to throw a show of force and convic- 
 tion into his remarks by stertorously beating the 
 fist of one hand on to the palm of the other — 
 much in the manner in which you have seen 
 some belated minister beat the pulpit when his 
 argument was weak, or his fertility of thought 
 and invention were beginning to fail. 
 
 When you read his speech in the morning's 
 newspapers, the long trail of words of which it 
 was made up seemed spontaneous enough (for, 
 as I have said, you can always read into & 
 printed speech just that amount of rapidity and 
 animation which you have been accustomed to 
 associate with the character and style of the 
 speaker) 5 but when you heard it delivered, it 
 was slow, painfully constrained, and instead of 
 being emitted with lightness, fluency, and above 
 all rapidity, was tediously protracted ; so that 
 with his deep harsh voice and want of inflexion, 
 the speech as a whole went grating along like 
 the rasping of a keel over a gravelly bottom. 
 
 Of the matteju& his collected speeches I shall 
 have more to say in my next chapter, but of 
 this particular speech, which occupied about two 
 hours in the delivery, I may remark here, that 
 there was little or no meat or nourishment in 
 
io8 LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL AS ORATOR. 
 
 it, that it was little more than an elongated 
 skeleton of words, with a thin skin of argument 
 stretched over them to keep them together. No 
 thought, I can safely say, above the veriest 
 commonplace of the newspapers, lifted its head 
 anywhere over the dreary waste to arrest your 
 attention ; no thought, political, social, or moral, 
 that gave the least indication of grasp, penetra- 
 tion, or power. The allusions too and meta- 
 phors with which his speech was stuck round 
 were of the most common and tawdry character, 
 and so painfully wire-drawn and elongated were 
 they, that you could anticipate them and go 
 to sleep. Besides, in his remarks on men and 
 things, there was no measure or gradation; his 
 characterizations were altogether out of propor- 
 tion to their object ; all was strained, in extremes, 
 and in the superlative degree. If a thing was bad, 
 it was characterized as ' atrocious,' or ' abomin- 
 able/ or * unparalleled in its infamy ' ; if a riian's 
 conduct was bad, it was ' monstrous,' ' idiotic/ 
 ' bloodthirsty,' ' unscrupulous,' or of like import ; 
 while to supply the place of a free and spon- 
 taneous utterance, he had recourse to the repeti- 
 tion of whole phrases, or parts of sentences, in 
 the manner so familiar to me in the ' third-rate 
 
LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL AS ORATOR. 109 
 
 Coger.' Instead, for example, of saying that 
 'a nation can never be prosperous, happy, or 
 free until/ &c, he would say, ' a nation can never 
 be prosperous, a nation can never be happy, a 
 nation can never be free until,' &c, accompany- 
 ing each phrase or clause of the sentence with 
 a bend of the body forwards, and an emphatic 
 gesture of the hand, in the manner which the 
 reader will no doubt have often noticed in the 
 tedious and would-be impressive stump-orator. 
 
 My friend, who had long resigned himself 
 to the boredom 'of the speech, could at last 
 bear it no longer, and at some pause or turn 
 of the discourse whispered to me, " If Lord 
 Randolph Churchill is what they call a lively 
 speaker, what must the i old gang ' have been ? " 
 He had already gone on for nearly an hour 
 and a half, and the audience indeed, many of 
 them, seemed to be feeling much like my friend ; 
 they had seen their hero, and having given 
 up all hopes of his falling a-cursing any farther 
 for the night, considered the show as good as 
 at an end ; those in the back part of the room, 
 who could get out without too much difficulty, 
 dribbling away quietly and imperceptibly along 
 the side walls to the door. Wearied out ourselves 
 
no LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL AS ORATOR. 
 
 at last by the prolonged dulness and monotony, 
 we also made our way to the door, the last 
 words we heard as we passed into the open 
 evening being his accusation (in the old slow, 
 harsh, and monotonous style) of the Irish 
 members in the House of Commons being 
 kept by ' Yankee gold/ Slow, slow, heavy as 
 lead, was our verdict as we got outside. Had 
 the speech, by greater rapidity and animation 
 in delivery, been compressed into half an hour 
 (I myself read it next day in full in the Times 
 in less than twenty minutes), it would have been 
 tolerable enough; but stretched as it was on a 
 hot summer's night over two mortal hours — 
 unless a man were maddened with party-rage, 
 or so drunk with admiration in the presence 
 of his god as to convert all his platitudes into 
 oracles of gold as they fell, it was indeed difficult 
 to be borne. 
 
 Such in a general way were the leading 
 characteristics of this speech of Lord Randolph 
 Churchill's, as, without personal or party bias, 
 they impressed themselves on my mind at the 
 time — characteristics so typical of his style and 
 manner, and so inherent in their very ^nature, 
 that they must hold good of his speeches at 
 
LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHLLL AS ORATOR, in 
 
 any time or in any place. Altogether a most 
 slow, poor, and ineffectual speech, harsh and 
 monotonous, such as one could hear any day in 
 the pulpit or market-place — a speech that can 
 only be described by negatives, the matter being 
 of so poor and second-rate a quality that had 
 it been printed in a magazine to be judged by 
 experts (instead of being delivered to an indis- 
 criminating crowd by a Cabinet Minister) it would 
 have been passed over unheeded ; the manner 
 and style cold, pinched, and passionless to a 
 degree, without lightness, facility, fluency, or 
 grace. Instead of his allusions and metaphors 
 falling in easy and dazzling profusion along his 
 track, as is the manner of great orators, the few 
 that did appear were so long drawn-out (as in 
 his ' naviget Anticyram ') as to fall flat and dead. 
 There was no spontaneous fire in the speech, 
 as one would have imagined from his reputation ; 
 on the contrary, the whole seemed to be a 
 prepared and closet performance, cold and heart- 
 less in its calculated ingenuity of abuse, without 
 lightness, vivacity, or grace ; the only appearance 
 of animation being, as I have said, the effort to 
 give to his exaggerations and platitudes the air 
 and similitude of seriousness and truth by forcibly 
 
H2 LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL AS ORATOR. 
 
 beating them out with one hand on the palm 
 of the other. No single quality of the orator 
 (and I watched carefully) anywhere appeared — 
 neither rapidity, spontaneity, fluency, passion, 
 earnestness, or heat. Had his personalities been 
 thrown off rapidly and with spirit, although 
 caricatures, and often brutal in their coarseness, 
 they would (so great a point in oratory is 
 rapidity) have answered their purpose for the 
 moment, and been effective enough ; but when 
 prepared in cold blood, and tediously drawn out 
 in a speech of two hours' duration, they became 
 wearisome. Slow, slow, was the word that best 
 expressed it all ; with nothing to redeem it from 
 boredom itself but the titillation and expectancy 
 kept up by his name and reputation, the excite- 
 ment of party warfare, and the absorbing interest 
 at the moment of the great Home Rule question 
 on which he was engaged. Had he gone with 
 his speech to the Cogers Hall, with no reput- 
 ation at his back to excite expectation and turn 
 his poor and tawdry personalities into gold, 
 he would, I can confidently testify, have been 
 listened to from the outset with ennui, and if 
 he had continued would have gradually emptied 
 the room. It is simply incredible that he could 
 
LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL AS ORATOR. 113 
 
 have ever established a reputation for oratory 
 in the open arena and competition of the world ; 
 and only proves again to me what can be done 
 by a man of the most limited oratorical power 
 in the House of Commons, where he is seen of 
 all the world, and where the Press blows his 
 every word into every eye, — in the House of 
 Commons, composed as it chiefly is of members 
 who, from their antecedents and habits of life, 
 make no pretence to oratory as such, and have 
 had little or no scope for its exercise. 
 
 I am of course only too well aware how 
 overdrawn my description of Lord Randolph 
 Churchill's oratory will seem to those who have 
 not yet got their eye on the power of political 
 puffing to gild a man's natural powers, and 
 transform mediocrity into genius ; and it is 
 precisely because I desire to bring this matter 
 to the test, and not from any the least personal 
 or political bias, that I have selected a concrete 
 example in the person of the noble lord, and 
 have endeavoured to emphasize only such lead- 
 ing and larger features of his style and manner 
 as from their essential, inherent, and central cha- 
 racter will be found when brought to the test to 
 hold true of his oratory at any time or under any 
 
 1 
 
ii4 LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL AS ORATOR. 
 
 conditions. And when I think of the esteem in 
 which oratory is held at the present day, and of 
 the important part it plays or is believed to play 
 in our political system, and then consider that 
 by its supposed possession a man who is not even 
 a 'third-rate Coger' has been enabled to climb 
 to the uppermost offices of State, I am simply 
 struck dumb with amazement at the thought of 
 what puffing and a raised platform will do for 
 men in this world. And when, furthermore, I 
 think of the range of qualities, intellectual and 
 moral, which have called forth this world-wide 
 advertisement, I cannot too strongly repeat my 
 conviction that whatever the future of Lord 
 Randolph Churchill may be, the methods by 
 which he rose to power have been a greater blow 
 to all those ideals which men hold dear than 
 any which have been employed in my time. 
 
 In the next chapter I shall direct attention 
 to the matter of his public speeches, with the 
 object of discovering whether his claim to the 
 title of Statesman has any more real foundation 
 in fact than his claim to the title of Orator. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL AS 
 STATESMAN. 
 
 In examining the political speeches of Lord 
 Randolph Churchill with the view of determin- 
 ing the special characteristics of the matter of 
 which they are composed, as distinct from their 
 style and manner, and of discovering, if possible, 
 the depth and range of ability on which a success 
 so swift and unprecedented as his has been built, 
 I propose to consider, as I have said, only his 
 most deliberate and well-grounded utterances as 
 contained in the volume of collected speeches 
 on which his reputation for statesmanship rested 
 up to the time of his accession to power. And 
 in order that I may not weaken my case by 
 introducing into it anything hypothetical or un- 
 certain, I have studied to avoid as far as possible 
 imputing to him motives, whether honourable 
 or dishonourable, confining myself entirely to 
 his own recorded utterances, and endeavouring 
 
 I 2 
 
n6 LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN. 
 
 to discover from these alone the methods on 
 which he has proceeded, the range and extent 
 of knowledge or political capacity which he has 
 exhibited, and the qualities by which he has 
 recommended himself to the favour of his 
 admirers and the public generally. But as I 
 desire that my analysis may be as central and 
 thorough-going as possible, and that my own 
 point of view may be made perfectly clear, I 
 have deemed it best to begin by explaining in 
 a word what I mean by the term ' Statesman/ 
 as thereby we shall have found a simple and 
 uniform standard by which his performances, 
 not only in the past but in the future also, 
 may be appraised and judged. 
 
 Now perhaps there is no better way of bringing 
 out my meaning than by contrasting with the 
 ' Statesman ' the ' Demagogue,' and this contrast 
 again will become all the more apparent if we fix 
 our minds on what to the general public is per- 
 haps a more obvious contrast, viz. that between 
 the scientific physician and the medical quack. 
 The scientific physician differs, one may say, 
 primarily from the quack in this, that he has 
 a distinct image in his mind of the various 
 organs, functions, and processes of the body 
 
LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN. 117 
 
 in their relations to one another and to the 
 whole, both in health and disease, and, like the 
 engineer with his engine, in the event of any- 
 one part or function becoming disordered or 
 thrown out of gear, sees at once how it will 
 affect all the other organs or functions, and 
 knows in consequence where and how to apply 
 the remedy. The quack, on the contrary, has 
 no such image or knowledge of the parts and 
 functions of the body and their relations to one 
 another ; but as he must somehow get credit for 
 this knowledge before he is called in to pre- 
 scribe, he is obliged to resort to all those arts 
 and expedients by which confidence is inspired, 
 and the appearance as distinct from the reality 
 of knowledge is attained. Hence, instead of 
 relying mainly (as the scientific physician does) 
 for his success on his knowledge of the facts 
 with which he has to deal, the quack relies on 
 those merely personal arts by which confidence 
 is inspired — the high pose, the mingled air of 
 dogmatism and reserve, the sublime affectation 
 of scorn for the humbler and more laborious 
 methods of the scientific physician (I have 
 known a quack who professed to know all 
 about your inside by merely looking at your 
 
ii8 LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN. 
 
 eye), and the like. Now if we keep in view 
 this difference between the methods of the 
 physician and the arts of the quack, we shall 
 be able at once to distinguish between the 
 methods of the true statesman and the arts of 
 the political impostor and demagogue. 
 
 The first and all-important object of the 
 Statesman, as of the Physician, is to obtain a 
 true knowledge and image of all the facts of the 
 body politic with which he has to deal, — eco- 
 nomical, financial, industrial, foreign, — and to 
 attain to such a height of vision that he shall 
 be able to see them all clearly as in a bird's- 
 eye view, in their connections, dependencies, and 
 relations to one another and to the whole. The 
 Demagogue, on the contrary, like the quack, 
 having as such no wide knowledge of facts, or 
 central point of view, is obliged to rely for 
 success on certain arts or tricks which simulate 
 knowledge, and which, as we shall presently see, 
 unless specially safe-guarded against, pass with 
 the unreflecting for wisdom. Bearing this dis- 
 tinction in mind, if we run along the great 
 statesmen of the past, whom all parties alike 
 delight to honour, we naturally alight on the 
 great name of Burke as a typical representative 
 
LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN. 119 
 
 of a statesman of the first order, and although 
 all his speeches bear more or less closely on 
 the special political problems of his own day, 
 the most cursory perusal will show in abun- 
 dance on every page the two great character- 
 istics of the practical statesman, viz. an intimate 
 and minute knowledge of the facts with which 
 he is dealing, in all their variety, complexity, and 
 detail, and a point of view in regard to them 
 so central and commanding that their relations, 
 connections, and dependencies are so clearly 
 seen as in a manner practically to exhaust their 
 purport and significance. 
 
 Now if we turn for purposes of comparison 
 from the speeches of Burke to those of Lord 
 Randolph Churchill, we shall see that while 
 Burke's bear all the marks of the true statesman, 
 Lord Randolph Churchill's bear all the marks 
 of the demagogue or political impostor. I have 
 gone through them most carefully over and 
 over again, with the object of seizing if possible 
 their main characteristics, and as result I find 
 that they are all consciously or unconsciously 
 constructed on a few leading arts or tricks, 
 if I may be permitted to call them so, tricks 
 which, although they bear the same relation to 
 
120 LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN. 
 
 the legitimate methods of the statesman as the 
 arts of the quack do to the methods of the phy- 
 sician, nevertheless by the illusion and glamour 
 they create, exercise, until they are ticketed and 
 exposed, a vague but potent influence over the 
 minds of men. With the reader's indulgence, 
 therefore, I propose to examine and expose these 
 tricks separately and individually, and by lifting 
 them high into the light, hope to make it more 
 easy to guard against them in the future. 
 
 The first and most characteristic of the tricks 
 on which these speeches are constructed, and 
 the one which obtrudes itself on one's notice so 
 persistently from page to page as almost to shut 
 out all else, is the cheap but ever-effective trick 
 of the Old Bailey barrister, whereby instead of 
 dealing with the simple facts and their bearings 
 and relations (in which alone, as I have said, 
 true statesmanship consists), he deals with the 
 persons who are engaged on the facts, and 
 makes abuse or criticism of them stand for 
 insight into and grasp of the facts themselves. 
 Now although to men of any penetration this 
 is one of the poorest and sorriest of expedients, 
 it nevertheless is one of mighty potency with 
 the multitude of all classes and ages (who love 
 
LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN. 121 
 
 to see facts through the medium of persons 
 rather than in their abstract nakedness, just as 
 they prefer human life when exhibited in novels 
 and biographies rather than when expounded in 
 abstract philosophies), and unless ruled out as 
 irregular by an intelligent and vigilant Press 
 (as the bombast and irrelevancy of the barrister 
 is by the vigilant judge), will steal in insidiously, 
 and before you are aware of it will have drawn 
 away the allegiance of men. Most of the real 
 work of practical politics, if we consider it, deals 
 with dry and uninteresting facts, great Saharas 
 of statistics and reports and details, which in 
 themselves can be of little or no interest to any 
 human soul, except perhaps to ministers and 
 officials who are charged with them, and who 
 are bound in one way or another to master them. 
 Consider, for example, the question of County 
 Local Government, with its over-lappings and 
 intersections of vestries, poor-law boards, high- 
 way boards, quarter-sessions, and the like, in all 
 their confusion and complexity, and say whether 
 in an age when readers can scarcely be tempted 
 beyond a novel, a biography, or a history, any 
 human being would, if he could avoid it, take 
 off his coat to descend into such a cave with 
 
122 LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN. 
 
 the object of evolving if possible order out of 
 its chaos, unless either from a sense of duty, or 
 from the power and honour which the control 
 and mastery of these obstinate and reluctant 
 details would bring him. Not even Sir Charles 
 Dilke himself, with all his acknowledged mastery 
 of the subject, could keep his bored and wearied 
 audience from falling asleep while he expounded 
 it. How easy and pleasant therefore (but also 
 how unprofitable) were it, if instead of having 
 yourself to strip and clean out this Augean stable, 
 you could get as much credit by standing kid- 
 gloved by, and pouring vitriol and abuse on the 
 head of the unlucky statesman who was attempt- 
 ing to grapple with the work, amid the plaudits 
 of the amused spectators. This trick of Per- 
 sonality, as we may call it, was a favourite one, 
 as I have said, at the Cogers' Hall, where I have 
 watched it played off with success night after 
 night, and always to the vast entertainment of 
 the miscellaneous audiences that congregated 
 there ; one poor man in particular, who was 
 really a master of certain aspects of our political, 
 economical, and financial affairs, being so set 
 upon by the lighter and more superficial news- 
 paper wits and orators, and so pelted, ridiculed, 
 
LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN. 123 
 
 and flaunted for his devotion to his statistics 
 and details, that his very excellences were made 
 to appear to his discredit and almost to his 
 shame. 
 
 Now, it was chiefly on this trick of standing 
 aside and indulging in abusive personalities on 
 the ministers charged with the knotty facts 
 involved in practical legislation, that Lord Ran- 
 dolph Churchill relied when he set out with 
 the fixed and deliberate intention of conquering 
 Parliament and the country. Instead of grap- 
 pling with the facts of his opponents directly, 
 as he would have been obliged to do if he had 
 been seated around a table of business-men, with 
 no public out of doors on the qui vive for his 
 abuse, or bored House of Commons longing to 
 be roused from sleep or ennui ; instead of show- 
 ing by a larger acquaintance with the principles, 
 complications, or details of his opponent's policy 
 that it was illusory, short-sighted, or grasped 
 with insufficient power, he relied, as I shall 
 show, for his success, on abusive personalities, 
 on blowing out the mental and moral features 
 of his opponent until he got them to that size, 
 angle, or point of distortion where he could 
 dance round them, knocking them about, amid 
 
124 LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN. 
 
 the exultation of his followers, as boys do the 
 stuffed effigies around the bonfires on Guy 
 Fawkes' night ; the Press in the mean time, 
 instead of ruthlessly suppressing his personalities 
 as foul, publishing them in all their plenitude 
 and verbosity to whet the appetites of its readers 
 at the breakfast-table ; and the populace, instead 
 of, as Carlyle would have recommended, " drum- 
 ming the ring-leader out and flinging dead cats 
 after him," lifting him on a pedestal to the chair 
 of honour. Not that personal characterization 
 is not at times a most legitimate instrument for 
 laying bare the truth, more especially when it 
 is employed as a symbol or visible image of 
 your opponent's deeper qualities, of his real 
 limitations in insight or habits of thought. 
 Lord Beaconsfield, who if he was distinguished 
 for one quality more than another was distin- 
 guished for insight into and contempt for con- 
 ventional illusions both in politics and society, 
 used this weapon of personality at times with 
 great and legitimate effect. But it was employed 
 by him, and is always applicable, rather to those 
 higher aspects of politics and administration where 
 insight into men is required, than to ordinary 
 legislation, where a knowledge of mere external 
 
LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN. 125 
 
 detail — land tenures, local government boards, 
 and the like — is chiefly necessary and valuable. 
 
 But this high, subtle, and refined form of 
 personal characterization is a fine art in itself, 
 demanding as it does some of the finest quali- 
 ties of the intellect, and to it Lord. Randolph 
 Churchill is a stranger. He has not the power 
 of shading or graduating the expression of his 
 thought so that it shall be a faithful mirror 
 or image of the persons or facts ; nor indeed 
 for his purposes was such a power necessary. 
 A broader and less refined form of character- 
 ization is all that is required of the demagogue 
 who appeals to the great multitude, — what may 
 be called the Circus-canvas Style of political 
 portraiture, where the colours are laid on in thick, 
 gaudy, glaring masses of light and shade, without 
 gradation, subtlety, or truth ; and where the 
 picture exceeds as much in demoniac darkness, 
 ferocity, or beauty the real person portrayed, as 
 the paintings on the circus-canvas do the animals 
 or men within. For with the careless and inar- 
 tistic public (as with children) on the look-out 
 for excitement and amusement, these daubs and 
 caricatures serve their purpose admirably, and 
 excite more wonder, awe, and admiration than the 
 
126 LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN.* 
 
 literal truth would do ; and in democracies there- 
 fore you may confidently predict that they will 
 cease to be employed by the demagogue only when 
 their counterparts on the circus-canvas shall cease 
 to be employed by the enterprising Barnums of 
 the future. But as in Party Government the 
 latent antagonism and passion secretly felt by the 
 opposing parties (owing to their real divergencies 
 of interest) are easily blown into a flame, political 
 success, you will find, attends the steps not of 
 the genial and kindly political caricaturists, — the 
 Sir Wilfrid Lawsons of debate, — who, although 
 amusing, are too humourous and gentle to arouse 
 political passion (the secret object of all party 
 agitation), but of the virulent and abusive fire- 
 brand — the Pawnee who brandishes his tomahawk 
 with the intention of taking scalps, and who can 
 excite hope or fear in consequence in the breasts 
 of friends or foes. This is the man who in Party 
 Politics tends to become a political power when 
 governments approach a democracy, more espe- 
 cially in the party whose future outlook is to fight 
 a losing battle. In the days before the first Re- 
 form Bill, when the People could scarcely be said 
 to be represented in Parliament at all, the virulent 
 demagogue was to be found chiefly among the 
 
LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN. 127 
 
 disfranchised classes; the aristocratic members 
 of the House, on the other hand, being in style 
 and manner conspicuous models of courtesy, 
 moderation, and dignity. But now that the cause 
 of the People is everywhere triumphant, the Privi- 
 leged Classes, who are everywhere fighting at a 
 disadvantage, want not the light and genial, but 
 the abusive and rancorous leader, and are prepared 
 to reward him when found with authority, place, 
 and power ; the People, on the contrary, having 
 become by victory and success so careless and 
 relaxed, that I personally shall not be surprised 
 (unless indeed the Press in the mean time should 
 take upon itself once more its true office of 
 winnower) to see before long the ' political racon- 
 teur, the joker, and after-dinner speaker seated 
 in the chair of state. 
 
 Now Lord Randolph Churchill having thrown 
 in his lot with the classes who are fighting a 
 losing battle, and feeling himself " expected," 
 as he says, " to garnish his speeches with every 
 variety of vituperation," adopted in his personali- 
 ties (and that too as much from the limitations 
 of his mind as from personal choice) not the 
 genial style of the kindly political humourist, 
 but the ruthlessness of the Pawnee clothed in 
 
128 LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN. 
 
 the language of the Western Editor — a style 
 of political warfare long since extinct in all 
 civilized assemblies, and to be met with in its 
 perfect form only in the newspaper controversies 
 of rival editors in the backwoods of America. 
 The advantages of this style are, that it is 
 always effective in a Democracy when it can 
 reach the People through the Press, and that, 
 like highway robbery, it is open to the capacity 
 of the meanest intellect stimulated by ambition 
 or greed, and unrestrained by conscience or 
 heart. All you have to do is to take a dic- 
 tionary, and for shot and ammunition make a 
 collection of all the long-winded and abusive 
 adjectives expressive of personal or moral re- 
 probation you can find, fire one or other of these 
 at your opponent on every occasion on which 
 you have to mention his name, and the thing is 
 done. Lord Randolph Churchill accordingly, as 
 I have said, adopted this style as at once effective 
 and within the limited scope of his powers, and 
 his speeches in consequence abound in super- 
 lative epithets drawn from the utmost range of 
 the personally and morally repulsive. By his 
 language alone, and his epithets applied to his 
 opponents (which are laid on thick with the 
 
LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN. 129 
 
 big brush and in the sign-board style), you will 
 almost know him anywhere out of the said 
 backwoods of America. As samples of what 
 I mean, take the following cheap phrases which 
 he applies to his political opponents, all, the 
 reader will observe, in the moral superlative 
 — ' venomous/ ' remorseless,' ' blatant/ ' flagrant,' 
 ' squalid/ ' renegade/ i bloodthirsty/ ' nefarious/ 
 ' baneful/ i prodigious/ ' audacious/ • treacherous/ 
 ' ineffable/ ' awful/ f tremendous/ ' immense/ and 
 the like. 
 
 By way of illustrating these poor tricks on 
 which his speeches are constructed, and by which 
 he rose to his present position, I determined to 
 mark a few passages (from the printed speeches 
 I have mentioned) for quotation, but so thick and 
 fast did they fall under my pencil as I went 
 along, that I was obliged to select only a few of 
 the more typical, by way of making my meaning 
 more clear to the reader. If it be urged that 
 these are matters of style rather than of substance, 
 I reply that it is just one of those cases where 
 the style is the man, and the whole man. These 
 tricks are the very staple and body of his 
 speeches ; there is no substance in them beyond 
 this ; the thin and watery show of thought and 
 
 K 
 
130 LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN. 
 
 argument running through them being, as I 
 shall demonstrate farther on, so poor and unsub- 
 stantial as not to be worth mentioning. And yet 
 in adducing even the following few quotations, I 
 feel I am trespassing on the reader's indulgence, 
 and must apologize to him for resurrecting 
 passages of so little intrinsic worth from those 
 faded controversies which are as uninteresting 
 now as the old newspapers in which they lie 
 entombed. My only excuse for venturing to 
 ask the 'reader to accompany me through these 
 quotations is the hope that we may so truly 
 seize the round and scope of his mind, as to 
 be able to base on this knowledge some solid 
 generalizations for the future. Now in these 
 passages which are typical of his general manner, 
 you have the tricks of the demagogue which I 
 have just exposed, mingled and united in all 
 combinations; sometimes the personality striking 
 you most forcibly, sometimes the caricature and 
 exaggeration, sometimes the use of the moral 
 superlative, and again the war-paint of the 
 savage. 
 
 Here are a pair of portraits of Mr. Bright and 
 Mr. Gladstone, for example, in the circus-canvas 
 style, which fairly represent the sort of thing by 
 
LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN. 131 
 
 which Lord Randolph Churchill has climbed to 
 be a minister of the Crown. The reader will 
 especially observe in his choice of epithets the 
 free use of what I have called the c moral super- 
 lative.' Of Mr. Bright he says, "The savage 
 animosity which Mr. Bright has breathed into 
 his speeches has raised a corresponding spirit 
 among his opponents. The robe of righteous- 
 ness with which he and his confederates have 
 clothed their squalid and corrupted forms shall 
 be torn asunder, naked and ashamed shall they 
 be beheld by all the intelligent public, and all 
 shall be disclosed which can be, whether it be 
 the imposture of the so-called people's tribune, 
 or the grinding monopolies of Mr. Chamberlain, 
 or the dark and evil deeds of Mr. Schnadhorst " 
 (Woodstock, 1884). Again, of Mr. Gladstone 
 he remarks, that "from the disastrous day on 
 which he shattered Arabi till now he has 
 wandered amid the devastation purposeless and 
 bewildered, has made no effort to relieve from 
 their burdens the Egyptian people ; but haunted 
 and distracted by the guiltiness of his intervention, 
 he has added misery to misery and woe to woe, 
 till he has transformed the fair land of Egypt 
 into a perfect hell upon earth " (Blackpool, 1884). 
 
 K % 
 
132 LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN. 
 
 In the following, again, you have the war- 
 paint laid on thick and strong. After describ- 
 ing the Liberal ministry in power as having 
 " on their souls the blood of the massacre of 
 Mainwand, the blood of the massacre of Lang's 
 neck, the blood of Sir George Colley, the 
 blood of Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr. 
 Burke, and many other true and loyal subjects 
 of the Crown in Ireland, the blood of Hicks 
 Pasha and his 10,000 soldiers, the blood of the 
 army of General Baker, the blood of Tewfik Bey 
 and his 500 heroes," he goes on to say, "For 
 four years this ministry has literally waded in 
 blood ; their hands are literally dripping and 
 reeking with blood. From massacre to massacre 
 they march, and their course is ineffaceably 
 stamped upon the history of the world by an 
 overflowing stream of blood " (Woodstock, 1 884). 
 Of the colleagues and supporters of the Liberal 
 Leader, he says, " These parties have so wallowed 
 in a stifling morass of the most degraded and 
 servile worship of the Prime Minister, that they 
 have sunk below the level of slaves ; they have 
 become mere puppets, the objects of derision and 
 contempt ; they have lost all claim to the title of 
 Englishmen, and I think they have lost all claim 
 
LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN. 133 
 
 to the title of rational human beings " (Piccadilly, 
 1884). And almost on every page you come 
 across such deep-dyed patches and daubs as the 
 following, and all, as you will observe, in the moral 
 superlative : — i gangs of political desperadoes,' 
 6 legions of foul fiends,' i corrupt and filthy 
 dynasties,' ' most desperate instincts of the human 
 race,' ' ill-omened and sinister machinations/ c un- 
 masked impostors,' ' poltroons and traitors,' *■ pro- 
 digious imbecility,' ' transparent humbug,' ( public 
 malefactors,' \ evil and moonstruck minister,' € pur- 
 blind and sanctimonious Pharisee,' and the like. 
 
 And it is for such stuff as this, which let 
 the reader decide whether in the open market 
 it cannot be turned out by the ream for a 
 penny a line, and which I will myself undertake 
 to supply from the Cogers' Hall in unlimited 
 quantities for a pot of ale, that a man (with the 
 Press to advertise it and blow it round the world) 
 may become Leader of the House of Commons, 
 and possible Prime Minister of England ! 
 
 But the Demagogue, when for any reason he 
 cannot venture safely on blowing out the mental 
 or moral features of his opponent until they 
 become caricatures, can always exaggerate or dis- 
 tort his policy and facts ; and so get them at that 
 
134 LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN. 
 
 angle where they will afford matter for abuse 
 or ridicule according as circumstances or the 
 exigencies of party warfare may demand. Now 
 this too, like the circus-canvas style of personal 
 portraiture, is at once the lowest and easiest 
 kind of political criticism, and Lord Randolph 
 Churchill in consequence was not slow to adopt 
 it ; the two together making up almost the entire 
 body and staple of his political utterances. It 
 is, as I have said, one of the cheapest of tricks, 
 all you have to do being to represent your 
 opponents mole-hill of fact as if it were a 
 mountain, or his mountain as a mole-hill, 
 when the policy of course which is naturally 
 adapted to the one will show disproportioned 
 and absurd when applied to the other. Or 
 again, if your opponent has fairly adapted his 
 means to his ends, or to the obstacles to be 
 overcome or passed, you have only to blow up 
 his gnat to the size of a camel, and then by 
 demonstrating how impossible it is for this camel 
 to pass through the eye of the needle which was 
 to receive it, you make your opponent appear 
 like a fool or worse, and yourself remarkably 
 clever. It is in the field of Foreign Policy 
 especially that this poor expedient of the 
 
LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN. 135 
 
 demagogue is most available, and can be played 
 with the least danger of immediate detection. 
 What with the ignorance of the general public 
 in reference to all matters of external policy, 
 and the want of the minute diplomatic know- 
 ledge necessary to understand the action of the 
 ministry in power, what with the sensitiveness 
 of the nation at home, and the necessity of 
 walking warily so as not to give needless offence 
 to foreign Powers, Foreign Politics is the very 
 harvest-field of the political impostor ; as that 
 class of medical cases where the prejudice or 
 ignorance of the patient unites with the obscurity 
 of the disease is the very field for his medical 
 prototype. Here you can pose, exaggerate, 
 bully, or denounce at will, without let or hind- 
 rance, and with the least danger of exposure. 
 Lord Randolph Churchill with the true eye of 
 the demagogue perceived this, and instead of 
 seizing the large scope and intention of his 
 opponent's policy, and dealing with that by a 
 larger perception of its legitimate effects ; instead 
 of allowing for the way in which this policy has 
 to be deflected, as in a game of chess, by unfore- 
 seen circumstances ; he sits over each separate 
 incident and detail, and like that countryman 
 
136 LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN. 
 
 who went to hear Paganini play, and brought 
 away with him only the number of times the 
 great virtuoso's elbow moved during his per- 
 formance, he counts the number of separate 
 incidents and details, exaggerates these into 
 separate policies (much as if he were to repre- 
 sent the separate moves of a great general as 
 separate campaigns), and because he cannot 
 find in the separate details the unity that he 
 might expect in the whole policy, he holds 
 them up for ridicule or reprobation. He dis- 
 covers, for example, eighteen different policies 
 of the Government in Egypt, and ten different 
 policies in Ireland, and like those old gossips 
 who give an appearance of credibility to their 
 exaggerations and romancings by affecting to 
 give them precision and circumstantiality, he 
 enumerates these different policies in detail, 
 giving them each secretly, however, at the 
 same time just that little jog of exaggeration 
 necessary to throw them out of the line of 
 their true course and reason, thus making the 
 whole seem to reel as in a drunkard's dream. 
 And having in this way torn up the separate 
 rails on the line and placed them more or less 
 at angles to each other, he then takes the high 
 
r LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN, 137 
 
 pose, and asks you to observe how absurd it 
 was for his opponent to imagine that he could 
 run a connected train of policy over them. 
 He drugs the facts, poisons them with exagger- 
 ation, and then asks you to observe their 
 absurdity. 
 
 Now this poor and miserable expedient of 
 giving his opponent's facts just that little or 
 greater push from the actual truth which will 
 enable him to throw vitriol on them (for of 
 genial humour in all this long desert there is 
 none) is of the very essence of the procedure 
 by which he has raised himself to power, and 
 marks the main characteristics of his mind. 
 Through all his speeches runs this continuous 
 thread of exaggeration and misrepresentation, 
 consisting generally in broad obtrusive exagger- 
 ations, but sometimes being seen rather in 
 omission than in commission. He leaves out 
 the qualifications by which his opponents have 
 hedged their general principles ; he dilates the 
 part to the dimensions of the whole, or contracts 
 the whole to part; and by the free use of his 
 war-paint and the ' moral superlative ' generally, 
 makes his criticisms almost useless except for the 
 lowest party ends. Not only does he do this 
 
138 LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN. 
 
 from choice, but from the natural limitations 
 of his mind he is obliged to do it, or he 
 would have little or nothing to say. For if 
 you can measure a man's intellect as you can 
 an artist's ability, by the power he has of so 
 shading the expression of his thought as to 
 make it the exact image of the fact to be 
 represented (exaggeration being the sign of 
 want of intellect, as the violent colours of the 
 daub and sign-board are of the want of art), 
 you may truly affirm that Lord Randolph 
 Churchill has no other resource to keep him 
 going than some more or less mingled and com- 
 bined forms of personality, exaggeration, and 
 abuse. If it be true that a Burke could see in 
 the simplest political facts, real relations and con- 
 nections of such ever-widening scope and com- 
 plexity as would fill many speeches, it may be 
 said of Lord Randolph Churchill, that without 
 the opportunity of ' scoring ' which in Party 
 Governments personality, caricature, and pose 
 afford him, he would come to a standstill alto- 
 gether. Here, for example (and by way of illus- 
 trating my meaning), are a few instances of the 
 kind of exaggeration of which his speeches are 
 composed ; and you will observe that when the 
 
LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN, 139 
 
 exaggerations in each are cut down to something 
 like the measure of truth, the propositions become 
 platitudes, without meaning, instruction, or point. 
 "The Liberal Party of the present day has not 
 one single common principle of policy either in 
 home or foreign affairs on which for purposes 
 of efficient government it can unite even for a 
 day" (Blackpool, 1884). Of the Crown, Lords, 
 and Commons, he says, " The Radicals tell you 
 that these institutions are hideous, poisonous, 
 and degrading, and that the divine caucus is 
 the [only machine which can turn out, as if 
 it were a patent medicine, the happiness of 
 humanity" (Blackpool, 1884). Again of the 
 Liberal Government he says, "Talk of Bulgarian 
 atrocities, add them together, and even multiply 
 them if you will, and you will not exceed the 
 total of the atrocities and the infamies which 
 have' distinguished with an awful repetition the 
 most blood-stained and withal the most cowardly 
 government which England has ever seen" 
 (Piccadilly, 1884). Of the same Government 
 he further remarks, — " I know that Her Majesty's 
 Government have a great and ineffable contempt 
 for the House of Commons, and if it is any 
 satisfaction for honourable gentlemen to know. 
 
Ho LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN. 
 
 I might say that the House of Commons have 
 the same contempt for them" (House of 
 Commons, 1884). And again of the Radical 
 party he says, " In its blind and unreasoning 
 fury against political opponents it has finally 
 and forever lost whatever of truth and what 
 little of patriotism it ever possessed w (Birming- 
 ham, 1884). Of the condition of our industries 
 in 1884 he remarks, — "Your iron industry is 
 dead, dead as mutton ; your coal industries, 
 which depend greatly on the iron industries, are 
 languishing ; your silk industry is dead, assassin- 
 ated by the foreigner ; your woollen industry is 
 in articulo mortis, gasping, struggling ; your 
 cotton industry is seriously sick " (Blackpool, 
 1884). And so on throughout. 
 
 But as these tricks of Personality and Exag- 
 geration (all, as the reader sees, in the circus- 
 canvas style and in the moral superlative) would 
 in themselves have been insufficient for his 
 purposes, and would have been detected and 
 exposed, they had to be supplemented by a 
 third, which was necessary to cloak his real 
 ignorance, and would stand in place of true 
 knowledge, and which indeed is of as much 
 service to the political as to the medical quack, 
 
LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN. 141 
 
 — the trick, I mean, of Superior Pose, whereby 
 you assume that your opponent's facts, methods, 
 and details are on quite an inferior plane to 
 your own, and are to be slighted in consequence 
 as altogether beneath your point of view. For, 
 as we have seen that it is essential to the medical 
 quack that he should affect to despise the 
 physician's patient and laborious methods of 
 scientific observation and experiment, and with 
 his eye-glass pretend to read your inside at a 
 glance by his superior intuition ; so the political 
 quack, who is cunning enough to know that the 
 genus i Statesman ' may range all the way from 
 the scope and policy of a vestryman to the high 
 political and philosophic wisdom of a Burke, 
 finds it one of his most efficient resources to 
 take his stand on the plane above you, and pose 
 there as if the facts which seem to you so 
 essential and important are not necessary to 
 his superior intuition and penetration; thus 
 justifying his ignorance of detail by the as- 
 sumption of a greater range of thought and 
 a higher rank in the scale of statesmen. 
 And yet this most poor and patent device, 
 which one would have imagined would have 
 been hooted down at its very inception as an 
 
i 4 2 LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN. 
 
 insult by a body of gentlemen supposed to fairly 
 represent the intelligence of the country, was 
 seized on by Lord Randolph Churchill, and 
 played off with cool and consummate impu- 
 dence before the House and the Country with 
 as much success and as little suspicion of im- 
 posture as if we had been a nation of Yahoos. 
 Take, for example, one or two instances as 
 specimens. In the last parliament of Lord 
 Beaconsfield, Mr. Sclater Booth had introduced 
 a Bill dealing with Local Government, a Bill 
 involving of necessity a vast multiplicity of 
 detail, such as could only be within the 
 reach of Government officials having access to 
 full sources of information. Lord Randolph 
 Churchill, who had already been in the House 
 nearly four years, but had only spoken once 
 before, showed, as might have been expected, 
 as little knowledge of the subject in its entirety 
 (and had indeed almost as little opportunity 
 of knowing) as a boy in the street. But 
 with the instinct of the poseur looking out for 
 an opening, he seized the opportunity thus 
 afforded him of playing off on the House this 
 trick of superior pose. He characterized the 
 Bill of Mr. Sclater Booth as *■ Brummagem stuff/ 
 
LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN. 143 
 
 and as "stuffed with all the little dodges of a 
 President of the Local Government Board when 
 he came to attempt to legislate upon a great 
 question ; " ending by remarking, " I have no 
 objection to the President of the Local Govern- 
 ment Board dealing with such questions as the 
 salaries of Inspectors of Nuisances, but I do 
 entertain the strongest possible objection to his 
 coming down here with all the appearance of a 
 great law-giver, to repair according to his small 
 ideas and in his little way breaches in the British 
 Constitution." There you have the trick of 
 Superior Pose complete, played openly and with- 
 out disguise ; and with such eclat and success that 
 the Editor of his speeches (now the Editor of the 
 Daily Neivs) bent before it in good faith (espe- 
 cially before the last sentence) as before a stroke 
 of genius. Or take again the late Egyptian 
 expedition, and mark the superior pose in the 
 ease with which this Bobadil of politics would 
 have settled the difficulty. To arrest the Mahdi, 
 he says, "All that was necessary was a slight 
 movement of troops, a small equipment, a little 
 more energy, a little more precision, a little 
 more common-sense, a little more consistency in 
 your foreign despatches, and the thing is done." 
 
144 LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN. 
 
 Now I have known men whose dislike of 
 being practised upon was so strong that they 
 would virtually find ground for quarrel in a 
 straw rather than be c taken in ' ; but that this 
 poorest of tricks, which I have seen played 
 off night after night at the old Cogers' Hall 
 until one blushed at it, should be swallowed 
 by the public without a strain and in all sim- 
 plicity and good faith, and that as reward for 
 being so practised upon (and with so little dis- 
 comfort), the dexterous operator should be made 
 minister of the Crown and Leader of the House 
 of Commons would, had it not happened under 
 one's very eyes, have almost surpassed belief. 
 
 " But surely," I can fancy the reader exclaim- 
 ing, " there must be something more than this 
 in a man who has risen to be Leader in the 
 House of Commons and one of the foremost 
 political figures of the time!" Ah, that is in- 
 deed the wonder of it, and the pity of it too ; 
 and it is precisely because it was by these poor 
 tricks and these alone that he rose to his present 
 position, that I am here to protest against it 
 with all the energy in my power. For, if it be 
 true that a man may rise to power by such arts, 
 we may as well all lay down our pens, close our 
 
LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN. 145 
 
 books, cease from all liberal studies, renounce 
 all high ideals and exemplars, and armed with 
 bludgeons, take to the political highway at once ; 
 for if our object be political success, we shall 
 in this way sooner attain it. I have gone 
 through these speeches, I can conscientiously 
 say, with the greatest care, and with the desire of 
 discovering, if possible, any connected scheme of 
 policy, any evidence of genuine penetration, any 
 observation, or series of observations, such as 
 would justify his rise to his present excep- 
 tional position ; and in firmly declaring that 
 in the long and dreary waste through which I 
 have had to plod, none such appear, my only 
 regret is, that as I cannot quote the whole volume 
 of these speeches, and cannot in consequence 
 prove a negative, I am obliged (while showing 
 what I do find there) to throw on his supporters 
 and admirers the burden of producing such 
 evidences of originality, penetration, or power, 
 if they are to be found. I have looked care- 
 fully, for example, for evidence of some wide- 
 embracing scheme of policy in his shibboleth of 
 Tory-Democracy ; but find it instead to consist, 
 on the one hand, of certain ideas borrowed 
 from the Radicals — on land, education, county- 
 
 l 
 
146 LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN. 
 
 government, Irish affairs, the suffrage, and the 
 like, — ideas which he takes up and lays down 
 again as suits his convenience and designs ; and 
 on the other hand, of a defence of the existing 
 British Constitution — Crown, Lords, Commons, 
 and Church, — by precisely the same old argu- 
 ments which we have seen and heard in Press or 
 on Platform since our infancy, — the Crown on 
 the ground of stability and continuity ; the Lords 
 as checks to popular impulse and defence against 
 the one-man-power or demagogue ; the Church 
 on the ground of some vague and indefinite good. 
 And so he goes sailing along in glorious un- 
 consciousness of the impossibility in any govern- 
 ment where there is only a limited quantity of 
 power available, of giving it to one without 
 taking it away from the others ; as if you could 
 give the effective power (which the democratic 
 part of his programme implies) to the People, 
 without taking it away from the Crown, the 
 Lords, and the Church, and leaving them stand- 
 ing there like empty clock-cases, dignified, im- 
 posing, and useless. I have looked also for 
 evidences of originality in these speeches, think- 
 ing possibly that I might alight on something 
 which for the moment at least might have 
 
LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN. 147 
 
 seemed to be the words of a new oracle ; but 
 after careful searching I have come across only 
 two propositions that in any way lie outside 
 the beaten track, — the one, his proposal to re- 
 store Arabi Pasha after his banishment, to the 
 government of Egypt ; and the other, his pro- 
 posal to turn out the then Liberal Govern- 
 ment by stopping the supplies ! I have looked 
 again for evidences of elevation, range, or com- 
 prehensiveness of political view ; but instead of 
 finding them, I constantly come on him turning 
 his eye-glass on some insignificant detail, work- 
 ing at it with a great show of industry, and by 
 laborious calculations appearing to go to the 
 very root of things, — as when he calculated the 
 amount of money that would have to be raised 
 by the county of Norfolk to give every agri- 
 cultural labourer in it three acres and a cow ! 
 I have kept a look-out for any evidences of in- 
 itiative ; but except in regard to the above cases 
 of restoring Arabi and stopping the supplies, I 
 have come across only the ' old hat trick,' by 
 which he brings out of the hat what has already 
 been put into it, brings out as an independent 
 policy what has already been put into it by 
 Public Opinion and the Press. On the other 
 
 l % 
 
148 LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN. 
 
 hand, I have searched for any central observ- 
 ations on human life generally, such, for ex- 
 ample, as we so often come across in Burke, 
 — observations which by their deep harmony 
 with the laws of the world and the human 
 mind, and by their bearing on the welfare of 
 societies generally, give evidence of their depth 
 and greatness ; but instead of these I meet with 
 mere solemn platitudes, mere ' opinions,' having 
 no deep roots in the subsoil of the mind or 
 the world, and which, like the guesses of the 
 ignorant, may in any given instance be true or 
 false, but can carry conviction only to those 
 whose interest or policy it is to believe them. 
 And lastly, I have watched his manner of 
 dealing with the arguments of his political 
 opponents. Instead of taking the method of 
 Burke, viz. of breaking the back of his opponent's 
 policy by swinging it around some more com- 
 prehensive scheme, with whose deep ramifica- 
 tions and connections it is shown to be out 
 of harmony, he has resort to all the pinchbeck 
 arts of the attorney and village politician. The 
 first and most prominent of these is to quote 
 contradictory passages from the speeches of 
 your various opponents, and by allowing these 
 
LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN. 149 
 
 to neutralize each other, to claim the field for 
 yourself. Another is to show some contradic- 
 tion between what your opponent said twenty 
 years ago perhaps, and what he says to-day 
 under widely different circumstances. A third 
 is to attach hypothetical motives to everything 
 your opponent says or does, and to see in every- 
 thing a manoeuvre — a manoeuvre to keep in 
 power, or to catch votes, or to prolong debate, 
 or to interpose delays, or the like — and then 
 by professing to expose these manoeuvres, to 
 get credit for marvellous subtlety and pene- 
 tration. And if all these arts fail, and your 
 opponent shows himself steady and consistent 
 in his policy, and does not change, your cue then 
 is to accuse him of being a pedant or doctrinaire ; 
 while if he alters his procedure with circum- 
 stances and occasions, you charge him with 
 being fickle, inconsistent, or irresolute. Now 
 all these are the mere vulgar tricks of the 
 attorney, and have on them the brand of the 
 Demagogue, not the hall-mark of the States- 
 man; and it is of these, and the like of these, 
 that the thin and flimsy thread of argument 
 which I have admitted to run through many of 
 these speeches of Lord Randolph Churchill is 
 
ISO LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN. 
 
 entirely composed. Any the smallest mark 
 of originality, penetration, or power, I must 
 challenge his admirers to produce. 
 
 Now if the range of ability which is exhibited 
 in the procedure and methods by which Lord 
 Randolph Churchill rose to power be such as I 
 have described (and if I have not exaggerated), 
 what I have said of him ought to hold good in 
 his future as well as in his past career. I have 
 watched the course of political speakers over 
 long periods of time, and have invariably ob- 
 served that the early characteristics of their 
 style and manner (after the mere nervousness 
 and novelty have worn off) — the relative pro- 
 portion of thought, insight, imagination, power 
 of expression, and the like, observable in their 
 earliest efforts — were still preserved in their 
 latest. What habit or ability there was at the 
 first of tracing political cause and consequence, 
 that habit or power remains, and may be pre- 
 dicted at the last. What facility and fluency, 
 what range and variety of thought, what brilliancy 
 or subtlety, what flavour and quality of sarcasm, 
 wit, or humour there was in the earliest, the 
 same proportion and admixture may still be seen 
 under the newest conditions. More experience 
 
LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN. 151 
 
 and knowledge of facts a speaker may have, more 
 expertness in the acquired ruses and tactics of 
 the game, more of the little arts of the ' old 
 Parliamentary hand ' ; but these are only the 
 expansion of old faculties, not the development 
 of new ones ; while in his great central method 
 of grasping and handling complicated facts of 
 various orders, in his method of undermining a 
 great subject and getting at its heart, in his 
 natural elevation and breadth of view, no change 
 can be looked for or entertained. The old 
 Burke as a speaker is the same as the young 
 Burke, the old Pitt as the young Pitt, the old 
 Gladstone or Disraeli as the young Gladstone 
 or Disraeli. And even with greater truth, if 
 possible, may this be predicted of Lord Randolph 
 Churchill. Here is a man who entered Parlia- 
 ment at the early age of twenty-four, sat in it 
 dumb (with one or two exceptions) for six or 
 seven years, and when he did speak, exhibiting 
 those characteristics which we have since in his 
 days of notoriety learned to associate with his 
 name. Suddenly, and at the age of thirty-one, he 
 deliberately and with fixed purpose lays himself 
 out, by the expedients I have detailed, to con- 
 quer the House of Commons and the Country. 
 
152 LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN. 
 
 Meeting at the outset with almost universal 
 ridicule and contempt, he still persists, carrying 
 out his favourite but discreditable methods of 
 attack remorselessly and without apology or 
 disguise, and as is so often seen to be the case 
 with the unworthy as well as with the good, 
 succeeds at last. To imagine, therefore, that at 
 his time of life (he is now thirty-seven *) he is 
 likely to spring any essentially new or original 
 faculty or combination of faculties on the world, 
 that in essentials he will be in the future other- 
 wise than he has been in the past, is a dream. 
 It is for these reasons, then, and to give the 
 reader an opportunity of testing for himself 
 whether I have been guilty (as many will 
 suppose) of exaggeration in the foregoing pages, 
 that I am prepared to affirm that the same old 
 combination of tricks which I have endeavoured 
 to expose, and by which he has risen to power, 
 will be seen in his future as in his past career. 
 I am of course well aware of the serious nature 
 of prophecy, and of the great risks one incurs 
 in entering on it, but so great is my contempt 
 for the poor and miserable range of ability which 
 these speeches reveal, that, for my own part, 
 * Autumn '86. 
 
LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN. 153 
 
 after what I have said, not to give him or his 
 admirers the opportunity of showing that I am 
 wrong, would seem to me to be a kind of intel- 
 lectual cowardice ; and moreover, I shall be more 
 than rewarded if I can only succeed in getting 
 the public to observe for themselves the cheap 
 tricks and impostures which I have detailed, and 
 which, as I shall show in my next chapter, will, 
 if not exposed and hung up for reprobation, in 
 time deliver us over body and soul to the Dema- 
 gogue alone. I expect then to find that his 
 political speeches in the future as in the past, 
 instead of being characterized by depth and 
 capaciousness of insight, and a wide and subtle 
 perception of the connection of political facts 
 with one another and the whole, will when he 
 is in Opposition (and therefore on the aggressive), 
 be constructed mainly on the same lines of abuse 
 and personality as of old. And further, that 
 instead of producing a really fine and truthful 
 portrait of his opponent, a portrait whose fine 
 shading and gradation will stamp it as a piece 
 of art, you will have the same old sign-board 
 style of portraiture, with the features of his 
 opponents so caricatured and blown out as 
 to be almost irrecognizable ; and the whole will 
 
154 LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN. 
 
 then be held up and bespattered (for the amuse- 
 ment of the pit and gallery) with epithets 
 drawn from the repertoire of the Western Editor, 
 flung on in great red patches, without decency, 
 discretion, or point — the old stock-in-trade 
 phrases of the demagogue and penny-a-liner, 
 all in superlatives and extremes, — ' blatant,' 
 'mendacious,' c awful/ ' immense/ and the rest. 
 Nor am I prepared to assert that this is due 
 entirely to a deficiency in moral sense, as some 
 might imagine. On the contrary, I affirm that 
 it is due to a deficiency of intellect, and further- 
 more that he indulges in this daubing with the 
 big brush, not so much because it politically 
 pays, as because he cannot, if he would, give to 
 the expression of his thought the shading and 
 delicacy of truth. I can still hear him jolting 
 and rasping along in that Paddington speech, 
 as over boulders and gravel, endeavouring in 
 vain to beat out with his fist some epithet 
 that would express his meaning, but getting 
 no nearer to a decent fit than the helmet of a 
 giant might be if put on the head of a pigmy. 
 And furthermore, I shall predict that when he 
 does leave personality aside for the moment, 
 and proceeds to deal with his opponent's facts 
 
LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN. 155 
 
 and arguments, instead of taking the statesman- 
 like method of lifting them off their existing 
 basis and swinging them around some more 
 central and profound policy, instead of annihi- 
 lating his opponent by a deeper insight into 
 the legitimate connections and ramifications of 
 his steps, facts, and arguments, he will (to 
 hide his want of real insight) adopt his old 
 and favourite expedient of jogging them each 
 a little from its exact and linear course, and 
 then will call on you to observe how they 
 stagger and reel. And I will go still further, 
 and assert, that when he does undertake to 
 examine the facts fairly and without exagger- 
 ation, he will turn over only such superficial and 
 surface aspects of them as lie immediately under 
 his eye (as in his calculations about the three 
 acres and a cow), while their deeper roots and 
 connections remain all unexplored. 
 
 But stay ! there is another alternative open to 
 him. For although I anticipate that his future 
 procedure will be marked by the same old tricks 
 as his past (though perhaps in new and more 
 judiciously admixed combinations to render them 
 more difficult of detection), it is still open to 
 him, now that by means of these tricks he has 
 
156 LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN. 
 
 raised himself to power, to kick away, if he 
 sees advisable, the base ladder by which he has 
 ascended, and to apply himself to the legitimate 
 methods of the true statesman. In that event 
 I venture to anticipate that his performances, 
 except in so far as they are here or there 
 leavened with the old salt of abuse (which will 
 be in itself a feat for him to avoid), will be 
 as flat and wearisome as the Paddington speech 
 I have already described, as uninteresting to 
 the multitude as the performances of the old 
 parliamentary officials whom by his novel 
 methods of warfare he has succeeded in 
 displacing. 
 
 Will he then be a failure ? and will his party, 
 when they have had sufficient experience of him, 
 hurl him from his place as a convicted impostor ? 
 Those who imagine this, in spite of all that 
 might seem to point in that direction, are to 
 say the least simple-minded. On the contrary, 
 the same arts that have carried him to power 
 will, if judiciously played, keep him there ; and 
 whatever befalls, he will flourish more and more. 
 The old circus daubs which so attracted me as 
 a boy are still to be seen to-day long after I 
 
LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN. 157 
 
 have ceased to admire them ; the old melo- 
 dramas still draw crowded houses long after I 
 have ceased to attend; the old music-hall and 
 negro-minstrel songs still hold the field long 
 after I have outgrown them ; and when the 
 Barnums of the future cease from their canvas 
 daubs, when melodramas cease to draw, and 
 music-halls and negro establishments close their 
 doors, then will the arts of the Demagogue which 
 I have described, and by which Lord Randolph 
 Churchill rose to power, cease to be admired, 
 and he himself become a superannuation and a 
 failure. Once get a hold on your Party by any 
 means, and it is comparatively easy to retain it. 
 The Party Journals and the general consensus 
 of opinion largely foreshadow the general out- 
 lines of policy ', and the Permanent Secretaries 
 and higher officials can be always relied on for 
 the details. In administration, too, these same 
 secretaries and officials will, if a Cabinet Minister 
 places himself in their hands, keep the most 
 ignorant, reckless, or flighty in the straight path. 
 How great indeed is the part played by these 
 permanent secretaries, and how little knowledge 
 of his own department is required in a Minister 
 
158 LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN. 
 
 of State, the public have little or no conception ; 
 but I have it on the best authority, that it is 
 the opinion of Mr. Gladstone himself, with his 
 forty years experience of office, that if you want 
 an administration to work smoothly, you must 
 allot ministers to those departments of which they 
 have the least knowledge, in order to prevent 
 friction between them and the permanent officials ! 
 The reader will judge therefore whether there 
 is much likelihood of Lord Randolph Churchill, 
 if he chooses to place himself in the hands of 
 those concealed but most potent despots, the 
 permanent officials, becoming a failure from the 
 mere want of knowledge or experience. And 
 above all, when the general Press, in a manner 
 which in my next chapter I hope to make visible 
 to the dullest, begins (as I predict it will as sure 
 as gravitation or the return of the tides) to see 
 in the lightest word that falls from him, greater 
 and greater ranges of ' insight,' 'tact,' 'adroit- 
 ness,' 'political sagacity,' 'happy phrases,' 'ca- 
 pacity for public affairs,' and the like, — the 
 deliberate impostures and unscrupulousness of 
 his rise under which I and others groan being 
 all condoned and forgotten in the general blaze 
 
LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN. 159 
 
 of vulgar success, or even transfigured by it 
 into a kind of virtue in men's memories, and 
 serving as direct precedent, incentive, and even 
 encouragement to the first reckless, unscrupulous, 
 and ignorant adventurer that passes along, — 
 what hope is there of getting rid of him or the 
 like of him in this world ? 
 
 And now taking my leave of Lord Randolph 
 Churchill, I come to the main design of this 
 work. I should not, metaphorically speaking, 
 have taken off my coat to expose the tricks of 
 this poorest and most transparent of dema- 
 gogues, were it not that by giving them definite- 
 ness and precision, I hoped to fix them more 
 firmly in the public mind; and by enabling 
 the reader the better to realize the weak- 
 nesses in our political system which have made 
 it possible for such a man to rise by such 
 arts to such a position of influence and power, 
 to have taken the first steps toward their 
 removal. 
 
 In the remaining pages therefore I propose 
 to exhibit these flaws and weaknesses separately 
 and in detail, drawing them out in threads from 
 the complicated warp of our political and social 
 
,i6o LORD R. CHURCHILL AS STATESMAN. 
 
 system, and by concentrating attention on them 
 more fixedly, to make a resort in the future 
 to the same tricks as those by which Lord 
 Randolph Churchill has risen to his present 
 pre-eminence, difficult if not impossible. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE DANGERS OF ENGLISH DEMO- 
 CRACY. 
 
 Nothing perhaps can better illustrate the fatal 
 influence of a false political method than the 
 continued existence and vitality of the old 
 political fallacy, that because throughout re- 
 corded History, from ancient times downwards, 
 democratic and popular forms of government 
 have ended in anarchy and despotism, therefore 
 they must always continue to end so. This 
 fallacy indeed is one which never seems to go 
 entirely out of fashion with journalists, practical 
 politicians, and even political Thinkers ; and to 
 this hour it still continues to wave its old ragged, 
 faded, and weather-beaten sides to the wind, as 
 if it were the very emblem of political truth. 
 At the present time the most profound and 
 illustrious, perhaps, of the exponents of this 
 doctrine among political Thinkers is Sir Henry 
 Sumner Maine. This highly accomplished and 
 
 M 
 
1 62 THE DANGERS OF ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. 
 
 cultivated Philosopher had already done yeoman's 
 service in the cause of truth by his thorough- 
 going application of the historical method to 
 the phenomena of early societies, and to the 
 existing records of ancient law and custom, — 
 as seen in the old Roman Law, the Brehon Law, 
 and the customs of village communities in the 
 East and West. Accordingly, when it was an- 
 nounced that he was preparing a work on Popular 
 Government, the Press, hushed into a kind of 
 religious silence, awaited his voice as that of an 
 oracle ; and when the book at last appeared, so 
 great an effect had the old historical treatment 
 of the question on the graver journalists and 
 publicists, that it was authoritatively announced 
 that a severer blow had here been dealt at the 
 popular confidence in democratic governments 
 than it had ever yet received. Now it so hap- 
 pened, that previously to the publication of this 
 work, I had already, in a book of my own on 
 Civilization, endeavoured to give the coup de 
 grace once for all to this old and superannuated 
 superstition of the hopelessness of Democracy as 
 a form of Government; but on turning to the 
 work of Sir Henry Maine, to my surprise the 
 same old fallacy was borne triumphantly along 
 
THE DANGERS OF ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. 163 
 
 on the crest of his brilliant and varied argument 
 — an argument based chiefly, as I have said, 
 on historical data, but propped and surrounded 
 here and there by certain shrewd and even pro- 
 found incidental observations which although 
 giving a show of power and variety to his thesis, 
 were after all but of secondary and subordinate 
 importance. On seeking for the reason of this 
 continued apotheosis by Sir Henry Maine of the 
 old and worn-out fallacy that Democracies must 
 necessarily end in anarchy and despotism, I 
 found it to be due entirely to his false political 
 method. Instead of taking his stand on a just 
 insight into the world of To-day, and using 
 historical facts, however true, as illustration and 
 appendage only ; he makes History the entire 
 basis and mainstay of his argument, to the dis- 
 paragement of a just insight into the problem 
 as it stands at the present time. Because, for 
 example, he finds a number of democracies 
 scattered up and down the pages of History — 
 Rome, Greece, Italy, France, South America, — 
 and because, on following their course he finds 
 that they all have gone the same road through 
 anarchy and despotism onward to destruction, he 
 concludes that all future democracies must follow 
 
 m 2 
 
1 64 THE DANGERS OF ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. 
 
 the same course. He might as well indeed 
 have argued that because certain trees have not 
 flourished on certain soils, they will not flourish 
 on any soil. For democracies, like trees, have 
 a vital principle as well as an environment in 
 which they are planted ; and no merely historical 
 method of argument (proceeding as it does on 
 concrete instances where both vital principle and 
 surroundings are lumped together) can give us 
 the least insight into their future destinies when 
 placed under other and more favourable con- 
 ditions. For if you have planted a democracy 
 on an unfavourable soil and amid unfavourable 
 surroundings, and it decays and dies, you have 
 still (before the fact can be of any use to you 
 for future guidance) to inquire whether its death 
 was due to its unhappy conditions and surround- 
 ings, or to the weakness, falseness, or impotence 
 of the democratic principle itself — quite a dif- 
 ferent matter. Now in my work on Civilization 
 already alluded to, I have shown that in the 
 instances in which democracies have failed in 
 ancient and modern times, the failure has been 
 due to their conditions of existence rather than 
 to the principle of Democracy itself. I pointed 
 out, for example, that among the main causes of 
 
THE DANGERS OF ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. 165 
 
 the downfall of the Roman Republic was the 
 institution of Slavery ; that this institution work- 
 ing with other economic causes led to the ex^ 
 propriation of the smaller landed proprietors, 
 and the cultivation of large tracts of country in 
 consequence by great gangs of slaves ; that this 
 again brought about a great concentration of 
 power in the hands of a few wealthy patricians, 
 and led to the crowding of the expropriated 
 proprietors into the city, where they soon became 
 a hungry and dissolute mob, lending themselves 
 to the quarrels of rival patricians, and willing 
 for ' bread and the circus ' to sell their allegiance 
 to the first passing adventurer. I pointed out 
 also that the downfall of the old democracies of 
 Greece was due largely to their smallness of size, 
 whereby the whole people could take part in 
 every smallest act of administration however 
 delicate or important, thus laying themselves 
 open to anarchy and corruption on all hands, 
 and to the chance, nay to the certainty, there is 
 in all large public assemblies of being led away 
 by envy, hatred, cupidity, vanity, jealousy, or 
 revenge. Besides, the republics both of Greece 
 and Rome were warlike, and liable in conse- 
 quence to destruction by other Powers ; War 
 
1 66 THE DANGERS OF ENGLISH DEMOCRACY, 
 
 itself was a necessity inherent in the very age 
 and circumstances of the world, when boundaries 
 were uncertain, prescription had not attained the 
 force of right, and successive hordes of barbarians 
 rendering all unsettled, kept swarming into the 
 sunny lands from the surrounding darkness. 
 And when one empire rose after another out 
 of the chaos, and Rome at last conquered the 
 world, the necessity of keeping the peace among 
 so many tributary and mutually hostile states, 
 and of protecting the provinces from spoli- 
 ation by her own rapacious patricians, of them- 
 selves necessitated the deposition of supreme 
 power in one single despotic hand. It is the 
 same too in Modern Times. Slavery, as all 
 know, came near to wrecking the great Ameri- 
 can Republic in our own time. The fall of 
 the first French Republic was due largely to 
 the excessive centralization of the government 
 which had come down from the old despotic 
 regime, and which when war made concentration 
 necessary, lent itself with the greatest ease to the 
 ambitious designs of the military usurper. And 
 the present French Republic is still unsteady, 
 owing chiefly to the old relics of Feudalism, 
 Catholicism, Militaryism, and Caste, which still 
 
THE DANGERS OF ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. 167 
 
 mingle with the strictly democratic elements of 
 Science, Industry, and Peace. 
 
 Now the above, which were all main causes in 
 the decline or fall of the democracies of the ancient 
 and modern world, lay, as is evident, in the un- 
 favourable conditions of soil and environment in 
 which these democracies were planted, rather 
 than in the essential principle of democracy itself. 
 If therefore ancient democracies perished from 
 slavery, why should modern ones fall, now that 
 slavery is everywhere abolished ? If they perished 
 from their smallness of size and the direct inter- 
 vention of the people in every act of adminis- 
 tration, why should modern republics which are 
 large and are governed only through the system 
 of representation, go the same way ? If from 
 ?uar, unsettlement of boundaries, and absence of 
 prescriptive rights, why now, when every day pre- 
 scription becomes more binding, boundaries more 
 defined, and war in consequence more remote ? 
 Or if from excessive centralization, why now, when 
 the tendency is everywhere to local self-govern- 
 ment ? Or from the conflicts of interests and sen- 
 timents caused by Militaryism, Feudalism, and 
 Caste, when every day brings us a step nearer to 
 the reign of Science, Equality, Industry, and Peace ? 
 
1 68 THE DANGERS OF ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. 
 
 But if ancient and modern democracies, then, 
 have fallen rather from the unfavourable con- 
 ditions of the soil in which they were planted, 
 than from the inherent viciousness of the 
 principle of Democracy itself; and if these 
 unfavourable conditions are to a large extent 
 absent in our own time, or are becoming day 
 by day less dangerous, we have still to inquire 
 whether (as the political millennium has not yet 
 arrived) there are any conditions at present 
 existing in English Politics which would tend to 
 make the practically democratic regime under 
 which we are now living dangerous or unsteady ; 
 and if so, whether any natural checks are to be 
 found which if recognized and applied would 
 neutralize, limit, or entirely remove the dangers 
 to which from these unfavourable conditions we 
 are exposed. 
 
 Now to answer these questions aright, we have 
 first to ask whether there is anything in our foreign 
 relations which, by the dangers to which it would 
 expose us in the event of war, would, if not threaten 
 our existence as a nation, make grave alterations 
 in our constitution a necessity? and secondly, 
 whether there are any great natural cleavages of 
 interest, sentiment, or condition among our % oivn 
 
THE DANGERS OF ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. 169 
 
 people themselves which, like the antagonism of 
 interest and sentiment between the North and 
 South in America before the Civil War, are in 
 danger of being so strained as to make anarchy 
 a possibility, or a restriction of liberty inevitable ? 
 In answer to the first of these questions — viz. 
 as to our Foreign and Colonial relations — it is 
 enough to say that England is an Imperial and 
 European power, to make (at the first blush) her 
 need of a steady and concentrated executive, and 
 her unsuitability for government by a democracy 
 dependent on parliamentary majorities, apparent. 
 And yet on further inspection, this fact of our 
 being an Imperial and European Power (which 
 to most other European States would spell ruin 
 if under a democracy), although at critical times 
 always a possible source of danger, is not in 
 a general way really so dangerous as would at 
 first sight appear. In the first place, England 
 herself being an insular Power, and practically 
 safe from attack behind her wooden walls, is free 
 from the dangers to which all other European 
 States (having frontiers to defend) are liable. 
 In the second place, her Colonies are practically 
 self-governing, and most of them, as so happens, 
 lie in quarters of the world where the chances 
 
170 THE DANGERS OF ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. 
 
 of quarrels which might lead to serious collisions 
 with other States are few and remote ; while the 
 government of our Indian Empire being left 
 mainly (except perhaps in reference to foreign 
 affairs) in the hands of the Governor-General 
 and his Council, is thereby taken out of reach 
 of the shifting and unsteady control of party 
 politics, and governed on the spot as its safety 
 or necessity dictates. In answer to the second 
 question, as to whether there are any causes of 
 conflict or antagonism among our own people 
 themselves which might prove to be sources of 
 danger, the first thing that strikes one, leaving 
 Ireland out of the question, is the sudden im- 
 planting of an essentially full-blown democracy 
 on a soil still largely feudal both in its tenure 
 of land and its material and social conditions. 
 Now, to believe that a Democracy with full 
 political power will not strive slowly or quickly 
 to realize its own strength, aspirations, and ideals, 
 and at the expense, if necessary, of the owners 
 of the soil or the wealthy capitalists, to carve out 
 for itself a state of society in its own image and 
 interests, is simplicity. And yet, on the other 
 hand, to imagine that these* same landowners 
 and capitalists who at present possess (and can 
 
THE DANGERS OF ENGLISH DEMOCRACY, 171 
 
 handle and control as they please) the accumu- 
 lated wealth of the soil and of industry, will allow 
 this wealth to be filched away from them without 
 a struggle, by the incantation over them of a few 
 fine phrases about 'the rights of labour/ 'the 
 rights of the people/ and the like, previous to 
 these phrases being solemnly turned into legal 
 enactments, is even a greater simplicity. Hence, 
 during the struggle, be it swift or be it gradual, 
 one might expect a period of great tension and 
 antagonism between the propertied classes gener- 
 ally and the great body of the people. And as 
 all see that the struggle is sooner or later in- 
 evitable, the answer to the question whether it 
 will be gradual and healthy, or swift and revo- 
 lutionary, whether wise and moderate, or reckless 
 and anarchic, whether the State will bear up 
 gaily against the strain, or relax towards anarchy 
 and despotism, will depend entirely on the choice 
 of leaders. Whether you shall strain the cohesion 
 and stability of the State by the antagonism and 
 passion that must inevitably be aroused by any 
 sudden attempts of the masses to realize their 
 ideals, either by the expropriation of landlords or by 
 socialist violence ; or whether, on the other hand, 
 you shall accommodate opinion and sentiment 
 
172 THE DANGERS OF ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. 
 
 to necessity by a series of gentle gradations 
 (something in the manner in which the Crown 
 has been smoothed gradually into acquiescence 
 with the will of the people by the gradual de- 
 rogation of power which has taken place from 
 the time of Charles I. to our own day), and all 
 so softly and smoothly, broadening down from 
 precedent to precedent, that nothing seems to 
 have been filched away at all ; must manifestly 
 depend entirely on the justice, moderation, and 
 ability of the men whom the different parties will 
 select as their guides and leaders. How much 
 depends on the ability and character of a ruler 
 or leader who has once become accredited, may 
 be seen, in the past, in the lightness with which 
 nations and peoples have followed the most giddy 
 and frivolous of kings into caprices and follies 
 which have ensured their downfall; and in our 
 own day, by the large following admittedly given 
 whether rightly or wrongly to Mr. Gladstone's 
 Home Rule Bill on the mere prestige of his 
 name alone. So supremely important is it, there- 
 fore, in the times of tension and antagonism be- 
 tween the various classes in our country that 
 are visibly coming on, whether your leader shall 
 be a Burke or a Lord Randolph Churchill ! 
 
THE DANGERS OF ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. 173 
 
 For if the danger to the State which must 
 always arise when great and powerful interests 
 and classes stand glaring at one another in fierce 
 antagonism and passion cannot be averted by 
 the wisdom, foresight, and moderation of the 
 men chosen as leaders, how indeed can it be 
 averted? It is hopeless to imagine that once 
 having arrived at the goal of pure democracy 
 you can go back again to a restricted suffrage, 
 or to any form of fancy franchise, plural voting, 
 and the like expedients of other days ; there is 
 something in the very genius, impulse, and on- 
 ward march of the world which forbids the 
 thought in its inception. Democracies must 
 first of all realize in outward fact their inner 
 and essential principle of equality, in every sphere 
 of life, before they can be induced even to look 
 about them for checks to their weaknesses or 
 dangers. It is not likely, therefore, that before 
 they have accomplished their mission they will 
 consent to unseat their dignity by returning to 
 the restricted suffrages and other outworn instru- 
 ments of the old regimes. Nor would it avail 
 them aught if they did. Good government is 
 not to be conjured back again by returning to 
 the limited franchise of select classes, with the 
 
174 THE DANGERS OF ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. 
 
 selfish class legislation which would return with 
 it as surely as the tides with the moon ; nor by 
 any system of handicapping by which power 
 would be thrown into the hands of the educated 
 classes, who, although having sufficient intelli- 
 gence to see the effects of political measures 
 intended for the benefit of the many, would, when 
 the measures ran against their own interests, be 
 prevented by selfishness from acting up to their 
 insight. As all hope therefore of benefit to be 
 derived from restricting the suffrage is futile, 
 whatever dangers still cling to our democracy 
 in face of the external or internal antagonisms 
 and strains to which it is exposed, must be met, 
 if met at all, in some other way. Now it is 
 the virtue of despotisms and oligarchies, that 
 in the calm discussion of public business around 
 a table, where all mere rhetoric would be an 
 impertinence, where nothing but facts and their 
 significance are admitted, and any unhappy 
 member who should attempt to orate would be 
 immediately gagged, you have a policy of State 
 marked by intelligence, consistency, and con- 
 tinuity; while their vices are their want of 
 morality, and the injustice they habitually do 
 both to persons and classes. The virtue of 
 
THE DANGERS OF ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. 175 
 
 democracies is that by allowing the free repre- 
 sentation of every variety of opinion and interest 
 in their midst, they thereby insure that a general 
 even-handed justice is done to all persons and 
 classes ; while their vices, on the other hand, are 
 their muddle-headedness, their want of intelli- 
 gence, and the absence in them of a continuous 
 and consistent policy. But to imagine, as some 
 do, that democracies will reinforce themselves 
 against their own vacillation and stupidity by 
 renouncing their very essence, viz. equality of 
 conditions, and by a restriction of the suffrage 
 become something else than democracies, that 
 is to say oligarchies, is a dream. If democracies 
 are ever to become safe and efficient instruments 
 of government, it will be not by renouncing that 
 which is their special virtue, — equality to all of 
 privilege and right, — but by adding on to their 
 own special virtue the virtues of their opponents 
 — viz. intelligence, consistency, and continuity 5 
 and this, as I have already said, can only be done 
 by the selection as leaders of wise and good men. 
 To this one conclusion, therefore, all roads 
 lead. So long as a democracy remains a de- 
 mocracy, a continuous and intelligent foreign 
 policy can only be had, if had at all, by the 
 
176 THE DANGERS OF ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. 
 
 selection of wise leaders ; so long as there is any 
 great antagonism of interest among the various 
 classes of its people, as may be the case with 
 ourselves, this antagonism will not be removed 
 by merely sprinkling rose-water on it, but can 
 be wisely met only by the selection as leaders 
 of men of real insight and character. 
 
 The question then arises, whether a democracy 
 can of itself be entrusted with the choice of wise 
 leaders. To this I should reply in the negative, 
 and for several very valid reasons. To begin 
 with, I would point out that just as the laws 
 of bodies in the mass are different from, but 
 quite as certain as, the laws of the particles of 
 which they are composed, so the laws of the 
 action of men when congregated in masses are 
 different from, but equally true with, the laws 
 of their action as individual units. And it is 
 just because of this difference between the action 
 of men in masses and their action as individual 
 units, that democracies are not to be trusted 
 to choose for themselves wise and good leaders. 
 It will, I presume, be generally admitted that 
 what is wanted in a practical statesman is not 
 so much the man who by merely mounting the 
 stump echoes the passions, interests, or desires 
 
THE DANGERS OF ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. 177 
 
 of a particular class or community, as the man 
 who is equipped with the wisdom and knowledge 
 necessary to carry these desires into wise and 
 legitimate action; just as in a general we want not 
 the man who can shout c to Berlin,' ' to Moscow/ 
 but the man who can successfully take us there 
 — quite a different matter. Now it is the first 
 law of men when gathered into masses that they 
 tend to select as leaders those who merely echo 
 their interests or sentiments, rather than those 
 who know how to give effect to these interests 
 and sentiments in wise and harmonious legislation. 
 This holds true from the practised demagogue, 
 who from his choice of phraseology can ring 
 all manner of changes on the prevailing senti- 
 ment or passion of the hour, to the ignorant 
 and vulgar demagogue who can but parrot some 
 popular cry, as ' Down with the landlords,' ' Down 
 with the priests,' ' Cheap loaf/ 'Protection for 
 native industry/ and the like. And hence it 
 happens that if among the dead level of heads in 
 a crowd one man can manage to get above the 
 rest so that all eyes can be focussed on him (even 
 if it were by taking advantage of some chance 
 stump, roof-top, platform, or through the columns 
 of a newspaper), and from the point of vantage 
 
 N 
 
178 THE DANGERS OF ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. 
 
 thus gained, utters what everybody has just been 
 saying in the crowd below, he ceases to be quite 
 the same ordinary man he was a moment before ; 
 he becomes surrounded by a kind of lustre 
 which exceeds his own natural lustre as much 
 as the concentrated passion or sentiment of a 
 crowd exceeds that of any individual. And just 
 as men become frightened when they see others 
 frightened, and as the object of their fears as- 
 sumes an appearance dark and menacing out 
 of all proportion to the reality ; so a man whose 
 remarks if made in private would seem only 
 natural, usual, and just what we ourselves should 
 say, seems, when he makes precisely the same 
 remarks in public, and they are heard through 
 the chorus of applause which ascends to him on 
 all sides, suddenly to acquire a new importance 
 and distinction. His very isolation and elevation, 
 and the consciousness that he is the object of a 
 common sentiment and sympathy, surround him 
 with a kind of halo as of a person apart, and he 
 is never again quite the same poor creature he 
 was before. Even a piece of bunting, a banner 
 with an inscription on it, or better still perhaps 
 some mechanical clock-work figure that could 
 be made to shout the sentiment or cry of the 
 
THE DANGERS OF ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. 179 
 
 moment, one can almost imagine gathering such 
 a halo around it as would lead, if the thing were 
 possible, to its being approached by its devotees, 
 like some heathen god, for advice, consultation, 
 and direction. And when we remember how we 
 look on any one whom we regard with love and 
 admiration as being in some way possessed of 
 a vague and general all-round excellence and 
 superiority, we can easily imagine that whatever 
 the cry may be — ' Cheap loaf/ ' Justice to Ire- 
 land,' 'Protection for native industry,' ' Chinese 
 Labour,' 'The land for the people,' 'Freedom to 
 oppressed nationalities,' ■ Federation of the Em- 
 pire,' ' Spirited foreign policy,' ' The poor man's 
 beer,' or any other cry however legitimate and 
 right — we shall have a tendency to select the 
 man who has already excited our admiration by 
 his lively expression of the sentiment in question, 
 as the man to be entrusted with the work of 
 carrying it into practical effect, however ignorant 
 he may be of political economy, financial know- 
 ledge, or any one form of practical wisdom in- 
 volved. And thus two qualifications which in the 
 nature of things are distinct and separate, be- 
 come mixed and confounded : the Sentimentalist 
 takes the place of the practical Administrator, 
 
 N 2 
 
180 THE DANGERS OF ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. 
 
 the Talker of the Thinker, the Demagogue 
 of the Statesman. Even in large deliberative 
 assemblies like the House of Commons where 
 the questions dealt with are of necessity of the 
 most practical and business-like character, honour- 
 able members cannot escape this tendency of 
 men in masses, but, as we have seen, tend to 
 choose the phrase-mongers and echoers of some 
 popular sentiment as their leaders, rather than 
 the men who are known to have the deepest 
 insight and business-like knowledge. It is one 
 of the great and even damnable illusions of the 
 world, and is so deeply ingrained in men when 
 they come together in large numbers, that it 
 is hopeless to imagine they will escape its in- 
 fluence; and is the deep and secret reason why 
 democracies (where the masses in the long run, 
 as having the votes, are all-powerful) cannot be 
 entrusted of themselves with the selection of 
 wise and good leaders. 
 
 If the choice of wise leaders is our only hope 
 of salvation in the conflicts both from within and 
 from without that may in future be in store for 
 us ; and if democracies cannot, by their very nature 
 (as coming under the law of the action of men 
 in masses, whether in Parliament or acted upon 
 
THE DANGERS OF ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. 181 
 
 by the Press, or from the Stump), be entrusted 
 with the choice of these leaders ; if, moreover, 
 having once given the suffrage to the people we 
 cannot take it away again and place it in the 
 hands of any select class, however otherwise ad- 
 mirable ; we have now to inquire how these wise 
 leaders are to be chosen, and whether there is 
 any organization at present existing whose proper 
 and essential function it is to stand between Par- 
 liament and the Public, and by winnowing out 
 the false and incompetent competitors, to take 
 care that the Commonwealth shall suffer no 
 detriment from the choice of its leaders. 
 
 Now in all well-ordered States, and especially 
 in countries like Britain where from time im- 
 memorial political changes have been gradually 
 brought about by a kind of evolution (in spite 
 of the fact that a fully developed Democracy has 
 now been planted on a soil still largely feudal 
 in its material and social conditions), a careful 
 inspection will almost always reveal institutions, 
 or the rudiments of institutions, which shall 
 serve as balance and corrective to the special 
 evils and dislocations to which these societies at 
 different periods of their evolution are liable. 
 In looking around among ourselves for the 
 
1 32 THE DANGERS OF ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. 
 
 particular institution on which from prescriptive 
 allowance, common consent, and natural fitness 
 the task devolves of selecting wise men for 
 the leadership, one naturally falls on the News- 
 paper Press as the only one available for the 
 purpose. The Church cannot do it ; for, in 
 the general way, it restricts itself to its accus- 
 tomed routine of prayer, praise, and the exposition 
 of the Pauline Theology; and when it does 
 interfere in Politics it can deal only with the 
 moral results of legislative measures (and even 
 in this, owing to its connection with the State, 
 very tenderly), but can take no part in the selec- 
 tion of the men to whom these measures are to be 
 entrusted. Individual Great Men, the € superior 
 persons' at whom the Times delights to sneer, 
 cannot do it ; and for the very good reason, that 
 they have no influence with the masses, to whom 
 even by name they are mostly unknown ; so that 
 when they do occasionally venture to send a 
 communication to the Press on current politics, 
 the Editor is obliged to introduce and explain 
 them to his readers with a pointer, as if they 
 were statues or fossil remains in the British 
 Museum. If the views of the Great Man 
 happen to agree with those of the Editor him- 
 
THE DANGERS OF ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. 183 
 
 self, he is perhaps heralded in this way, — "A 
 letter in our columns to-day from the great 
 Thinker, Mr. Herbert Spencer, lends weight to 
 the opinion we have all along expressed in refer- 
 ence to the," &c. &c. ; whereas should they dis- 
 agree, it will perhaps run somewhat after this 
 fashion — "Our readers will not attach undue 
 weight to remarks contained in a letter in our 
 yesterday's issue from the pen of Mr. John Stuart 
 Mill (of whom perhaps many of our readers will 
 never have heard), when we inform them that he 
 is a mere viewy doctrinaire, who by his writings has 
 acquired some influence over certain advanced 
 sections of the Radical Party," &c. Mr. Free- 
 man himself, with all his knowledge of the history 
 of the constitutions of States and the causes and 
 circumstances of their rise and fall, has to com- 
 plain that what he has to say on current politics 
 falls on ears deaf and unheeding, and has little 
 or no influence on the course of practical legis- 
 lation. But even were the general public on 
 the watch for the opinion and guidance of what 
 are known as its ' Great Men,' these great men 
 themselves are not always en evidence, and indeed 
 are rarely or never to be found when wanted. 
 Where, for example, were Mr. Herbert Spencer, 
 
iS 4 THE DANGERS OF ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. 
 
 Mr. Matthew Arnold, Mr. Froude, Mr. Lecky, 
 Mr. Freeman, Mr. Ruskin, Prof. Tyndall, Prof. 
 Huxley, Mr. Frederic Harrison, and the other 
 watch-dogs of society, when Lord Randolph 
 Churchill, by arts such as I have described, was 
 entering the undefended gates, and (beaten up 
 by the drums of the Press) was being borne 
 triumphantly to the citadel on the shoulders of 
 the populace? Where were they? I ask. Silent 
 all, or barking ineffectually into the vacant night 
 — issuing their manifestoes and pamphlets and 
 protestations against some point of policy, foreign 
 or domestic, of the then Prime Minister, all 
 unheeded as they themselves complain. The 
 multitude who had the votes, deceived by the 
 noise and reverberation which the Press and the 
 Music Hall were giving to the speeches and 
 writings of Lord Randolph Churchill (and daz- 
 zled by his sign-board style and his free use 
 of the moral superlative), honestly believed these 
 speeches to have in them the ring of true genius, 
 and accordingly elevated him to authority and 
 power. The ' Great Men/ on the contrary, knew 
 them to be trash of the cheapest and lowest 
 order such as could any day be had by the ream 
 in the garrets of Grub St. for a penny a line. 
 
THE DANGERS OF ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. 185 
 
 And yet, instead of pointing this out to the 
 people, they sat by silently witnessing his shame- 
 ful rise, or barking their protestations against 
 his opponent into the drowsy night. Had they 
 indeed turned on the impostor, and uniting their 
 voices silenced the drums of the Press, and 
 blocked the triumphal procession while it was 
 yet time, proclaiming aloud the scandal and dis- 
 grace of allowing a man to snatch at the highest 
 positions in the State by playing off a few cheap 
 tricks on the ignorant multitude — they might 
 have done the State some service. But to wait 
 until he had seized the prize, and then to begin, 
 as they doubtless will again, barking as before 
 into the empty darkness — issuing again their pam- 
 phlets, and manifestoes, and protestations to an 
 unheeding people — and above all, to know with 
 what cynical contempt he will fling these ' unau- 
 thorized ' impertinences (with a tail of one) into the 
 waste basket ! — it is evident there is little hope of 
 the ' Great Men ' saving us from the demagogue, 
 or helping us to choose good and wise leaders. 
 
 The individual Constitnericies (as distinct 
 from the democracy in general) cannot help 
 us in the choice of wise leaders ; for their choice 
 is restricted to single members, and when 
 
1 86 THE DANGERS OF ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. 
 
 uninterfered with from without, usually results 
 
 in the selection of some largest land-owner, 
 
 brewer, manufacturer, biscuit-maker, or other 
 
 merely local potentate as their representative 
 
 in Parliament, — men indeed who, if they sat 
 
 quietiy round a council table and restricted 
 
 themselves to public business, would have little 
 
 or no difficulty in selecting the best leaders 
 
 available among their own numbers, but who 
 
 unfortunately when they take their seats and 
 
 form what is known as the House of Commons, 
 
 are prevented from selecting the best men by 
 
 several very potent influences. What with their 
 
 time of life, and the nature of their occupations, 
 
 which render them more or less speech-bound 
 
 and unfit to address public audiences, more or 
 
 less wanting in rapidity, vivacity, and literary 
 
 finish ; what with the Press out of doors pressing 
 
 on them the pretensions of some light buffoon 
 
 or scurrilous ruffian of debate, who by the report 
 
 of his speeches at full length has tickled the 
 
 general ear ; what with the bayonets of their 
 
 constituencies at their back; and more than all 
 
 with their having to split themselves up into 
 
 hostile parties when they take their seats ; it is 
 
 evident that they will select as their leader, and 
 
THE DANGERS OF ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. 187 
 
 carry to the seat of power, not the man with 
 most real knowledge, experience, and judgment 
 (for what is the use of these unless you can 
 keep the House awake?); but either the most 
 impudent and wordy dialectician who will worry 
 and harass his opponents ; or the most virulent 
 caricaturist and sign-painter who can excite and 
 interest the mob; or the lightest and most un- 
 scrupulous tactician who, like the Canadian 
 lumberman on the St. Lawrence, can keep 
 himself and his party afloat on a rolling log 
 for the longest time and in the deepest waters ; 
 or finally (especially if their cause or party is 
 triumphant), the most genial after-dinner racon- 
 teur^ music-hall humourist, or political negro- 
 minstrel. Wise parliamentary leaders, it is true, 
 once accredited could no doubt select good men 
 as their lieutenants, but they have themselves 
 first to be chosen, which is just the problem 
 before us ; as it is, they are obliged, as we have 
 seen, to select their lieutenants for the party 
 support they can give them by length or 
 sharpness of tongue rather than for their real 
 worth, and to appoint them to offices (according 
 to Mr. Gladstone) of which they have the least 
 knowledge and experience ! 
 
1 88 THE DANGERS OF ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. 
 
 If then the Democracy itself cannot be trusted 
 to choose wise leaders, and if neither the Church, 
 the individual Great Men of the country, the 
 Constituencies, the House of Commons, or the 
 Parliamentary Leaders themselves, for reasons 
 which I have just given, are suitable for the 
 function, it is evident that the only accredited 
 organ that can intervene between Parliament and 
 the People to winnow out, expose, and ruthlessly 
 suppress reputations illegitimately won (by the 
 arts, tricks, phrase-mongering, and other irrele- 
 vant qualities which I have described), is the 
 Newspaper Press. In the first place, it alone 
 has the authority and prestige necessary and 
 equal to the task; in the second, it is the only 
 organization at the present time that really does 
 (whether we will or no) exercise this function 
 of choosing for us 'our political leaders. In my 
 next chapter therefore I propose first to show 
 the way in which the Press actually fulfils this 
 duty ; and next to inquire what the obstacles are 
 which at the present time stand in the way of the 
 proper fulfilment of this its great and essential 
 public function. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THE PRESS AND THE DEMAGOGUE. 
 
 In the old days of Aristocratic and Middle- 
 class supremacy, or roughly speaking, from the 
 time of the first Reform Bill till within the last 
 few years, the Newspaper Press performed its 
 essentially public function of ruthlessly purging 
 away all traces of the Demagogue, and of seeing 
 that the State suffered no injury from the 
 choice of ignorant or incompetent leaders, with 
 admirable insight, discretion, and public spirit. 
 During all those years the Times was the real 
 maker and unmaker of ministries, — a veritable 
 ' king-maker' in its way, — and as far as was 
 possible under its then more or less restricted 
 conditions, allowed nothing to escape into the 
 general air of public opinion but what had been 
 thoroughly disinfected and purified, and was at 
 least wholesome and innocuous. In those days 
 the great mass of the people were still unen- 
 franchised, all political power centred in the 
 
190 THE PRESS AND 7 HE DEMAGOGUE. 
 
 Upper and Middle Classes, and a small body of 
 aristocratic gentlemen belonging to the great 
 territorial families chose the leaders of their 
 respective parties, uninterfered with from with- 
 out, from among their own numbers, or from 
 those of the Middle Class in the House allied 
 to them in interest and sympathy. Radicalism 
 was yet but a struggling and despised wing of 
 Liberalism, a kind of poor relation at best, 
 the more aggressive forms of it current in the 
 present day being in the House almost entirely 
 unknown ; while outside, it lay around among 
 the unenfranchised classes in a diffused, ferment- 
 ing, and as yet inorganic condition, giving signs 
 of its presence and activity only by occasional 
 outbursts of Chartism and the like. Under 
 these circumstances, the course open to a 
 great public journal like the Times was, 
 although comparatively restricted, simple, direct, 
 and straightforward. The Upper and Middle 
 Classes being in a sense the State (as alone 
 having the votes), all power, political, material, 
 and social, was in consequence centred in the 
 same hands ; and as only political stability could 
 keep it there, Politics of necessity became the 
 very essence and raison-detre of the paper; all 
 
THE PRESS AND THE DEMAGOGUE. 191 
 
 other subjects and interests (all the liberal arts 
 and specialisms, all interests of music, poetry, the 
 drama, and the like) being, with the exception 
 of occasional reviews of important books read 
 chiefly by these same classes, or sports in which 
 they were all interested, either disdainfully 
 patronized from afar, or degraded into small 
 type in some outlying corner of its sheets. In 
 Politics, as it could not dictate the choice of 
 leaders (the borough-mongers were still too 
 strong to allow that), its only course was to 
 loyally accept those chosen for it by the great 
 families and their Whig or Tory following, but 
 to hold the balance evenly between them ; while 
 it slighted or ignored the exponents of the 
 unenfranchised classes, cut their speeches down 
 to a skeleton, and scouted all expression of 
 adverse opinion from outside Thinkers, however 
 eminent or profound, as ' merely literary ' or 
 'doctrinaire! And, moreover, as it stretched its 
 authority like a huge canopy over the entire field 
 of journalism, and all the lesser and strictly party 
 journals that lay around it fought in consequence 
 half paralyzed and emasculated under its over- 
 whelming shade, the multitudinous demagogues 
 who were ready at any moment to start up 
 
192 THE PRESS AND THE DEMAGOGUE. 
 
 and make themselves the mouth-pieces of the 
 unenfranchised, and who would, if they had had 
 an organ of sufficient influence in the Press, have 
 risen into influence and power, were as hopelessly- 
 cut off from political life as if they had been 
 negro orators addressing a white population in 
 the Southern States. But in spite of this 
 narrowness of aim which was a necessity of the 
 age and time, the Times did its duty admirably 
 to the Public to whom it addressed itself. It 
 held the balance, as I have said, evenly between 
 the two great political parties in the State, 
 supporting in a general way the government in 
 power in all well-grounded legislation, and 
 although not of itself able to dictate the choice 
 of leaders, took care that when chosen they 
 should fight fairly and with legitimate weapons, 
 admitting in their speeches nothing but well- 
 grounded facts and arguments, and as remorse- 
 lessly shearing away all mere rhetoric and 
 phrase-mongering as it would have done the 
 political irrelevancies of a mime or circus clown. 
 It stood, in a word, between Parliament and 
 the Public, and by its vast influence lopped 
 away all those arts, tricks, and graces of the 
 mere rhetorician which, however attractive to 
 
THE PRESS AND THE DEMAGOGUE, 193 
 
 the multitude, are not statesmanship; much 
 in the same way as a judge stands between 
 opposing counsel and the jury, and rules 
 out in his summing up all those confusing 
 sophistries of counsel and amusing irrelevancies 
 of evidence which, however attractive in them- 
 selves, are not vital to the issue, and would, 
 if admitted, defeat the ends of justice. In 
 this way the Times, edited and manned by 
 men of really statesmanlike knowledge and in- 
 sight, did yeoman service to the country for 
 a period of over half a century. 
 
 But in the mean time, what with the growth of 
 population, the spread of education, and the in- 
 creased facilities opened up by steam communi- 
 cation, a Penny Press was growing up under and 
 around the huge shade of the threepenny Times, 
 and although overshadowed by it, lying more close 
 and immediate to the varied interests, aspirations, 
 and desires of the great body of the people. In- 
 stead of making practical politics its entire aim 
 and concern, and ignoring or degrading the varied 
 interests of art, the drama, music, literature, and 
 the like, as the Times did ; the Penny Press made 
 a point, while remaining still mainly political, of 
 giving full and proportionate importance to these 
 
 o 
 
194 THE PRESS AND THE DEMAGOGUE. 
 
 various aspects of national interest and activity. 
 But while lying thus more closely than the Times 
 to the different interests of different classes of 
 the people, it lay also, it must be observed, more 
 closely to their immediate political interests, preju- 
 dices, and passions. It became, in consequence, 
 more distinctly partizan in spirit ; and instead of 
 standing as the high impartial censor and judge 
 over them, it became the mere agent and reporter 
 among them, whose function it was to mirror, 
 put into shape, and faithfully again reflect the 
 political prejudices or interests of its clients. And 
 now, for the first time, the Demagogue (who had 
 been kept safely under hatches by the Times), 
 by making himself the mouthpiece of neglected 
 or injured interests, and being taken up by the 
 journals which watched over these interests, began 
 to lift his head into public recognition. As time 
 passed, and the franchise was at last extended to 
 the Working-classes, a still further change came 
 over the face of Politics and the Press. By 
 this political innovation the Upper and Middle 
 Classes gradually lost their political supremacy; 
 the Times in consequence (being too expensive 
 for the Working-man) was unable to stretch its 
 influence and jurisdiction athwart the whole field 
 
THE PRESS AND THE DEMAGOGUE. 195 
 
 of voters ; and accordingly, like a judge without 
 jurisdiction over all the parties to a suit, was 
 forced from its former dignified and judicial 
 attitude of high political impartiality, and thrown 
 for support on those Upper and Middle Classes 
 who had been its public and supporters from the 
 beginning. And as these classes became more 
 and more forced into Conservatism as a make- 
 weight against the growing Radicalism of the 
 working-classes and their organs in the Press, 
 the Times was obliged to follow in their foot- 
 steps, and to gradually transform itself into a 
 mere party organ. The consequence was that it 
 lost its old high tone of dignified impartiality, 
 and its statesmanlike point of view; and as 
 its general sympathies have not since expanded 
 (it still prefers the alderman to the Thinker) 
 its partizanship has gradually deepened, its 
 political views have become narrower, its insight 
 into the whole range of political cause and 
 consequence has become shallower, until now 
 its political leaders are at times as virulent and 
 abusive as those of the veriest old hack in the 
 ranks. All this was of course natural, and could 
 have been predicted a priori. But the conse- 
 quences of it are lamentable, and do not yet 
 
 o 2 
 
196 THE PRESS AND THE DEMAGOGUE. 
 
 seem even to have dawned on the ordinary 
 editor or leader-writer, who, like the light and 
 happy negro on the old plantations, goes dancing 
 and laughing along as if all were sailing merrily 
 on a sunny sea. It does not appear even to 
 have occurred to them that with no independent 
 organs of sufficient influence and importance to 
 deal alike with men and measures in a rigorous, 
 statesmanlike, and impartial spirit, the News- 
 paper Press, Penny and Threepenny alike, has 
 become not the guide, but the slave of the great 
 masses of political passion, prejudice, and self- 
 interest into which the country is divided ; and 
 that the People themselves being left without 
 guidance, like a jury without the impartial 
 summing-up of a judge, are at the mercy of 
 all kinds of special pleaders, charlatans, and 
 phrase-mongers; and (by the law of men in 
 masses which I have before described) are the 
 very slaves, not of those who exercise their 
 intelligence, but of those who tickle their vanity, 
 amuse their dulness, excite their passions,, or 
 impose on their credulity or their hopes. And 
 furthermore, now that the People, thus released 
 from all restraint and guidance, insist on taking 
 matters into their own hands, and choosing their 
 
THE PRESS AND THE DEMAGOGUE. 197 
 
 own leaders, the Press may be seen consenting 
 to play the part of procuress, and spreading out 
 before them all the manifold attractions of the 
 Parliamentary artistes for their choice, printing 
 the speeches of the favourites at full length, — - 
 jokes, epigrams, happy phrases, buffoonery, scur- 
 rility, negro-minstrelsy and all ; the Leaders in 
 the end being selected, like the favourites at a 
 music-hall, for the interest, liveliness, or titillation 
 of their minstrelsy or song. And when the 
 People at last have made their selection and 
 declared their choice, the Press of either party 
 in its impotence and for its own self-preservation 
 is, as we see, bound to accept the creatures thus 
 thrust upon it ; and is pledged under penalties to 
 discover tones of seraphic music as of a Handel 
 or Beethoven, strokes of genius as of a Shak- 
 speare, in the veriest emanations of the tap-room 
 and the music-hall; flaring the author's name 
 around the county like a fiery cross (as we have 
 seen in the case of Lord Randolph Churchill), 
 and summoning men to his allegiance, thus still 
 further heightening and extending his reputation, 
 and fastening him like a halter still tighter and 
 tighter around its own neck, until at last, by the 
 pressure of what is called ' public opinion/ it is 
 
198 THE PRESS AND THE DEMAGOGUE. 
 
 forced on its knees before the very over-stuffed 
 image which itself has made. Even the Times, 
 which would once have started at the sight of a 
 demagogue, like Brutus at the ghost of Caesar, 
 now welcomes him (if he is on the right side) 
 with open arms. 
 
 And thus it has come about that the Press, 
 which was once the main instrument in defend- 
 ing us from the Demagogue, is now the main 
 instrument in thrusting him upon us ; all the 
 virgin conditions for his success lying blown 
 and ripe under the open sky, and ready to be 
 plucked by the first audacious and unscrupulous 
 adventurer that passes along. 
 
 If further proof indeed of this were necessary 
 it could nowhere be better found than in the 
 career of Lord Randolph Churchill, a career 
 through which as through a window you can 
 see the very genius of the Press in its relation 
 to Politics and the Public. Instead of hurrying 
 into the dust-bin the speeches of this most 
 poor, harsh, and unscrupulous of demagogues, 
 and disinfecting them before they were carried 
 like a miasma into the general air (for the 
 blasting contagion of his rise will infect the 
 political atmosphere for many a day), instead of 
 
THE PRESS AND THE DEMAGOGUE. 199 
 
 incontinently excising his buffooneries, scur- 
 rilities, and personalities, as the Times in its 
 old days most assuredly would have done, this 
 very Newspaper Press (which in the person of 
 its representatives I have seen responding to 
 toasts drunk in its honour as a public servant) 
 did at the very time that itself admitted that 
 he was not to be taken seriously, seize on and 
 detail at full length his parliamentary vagaries 
 as if they were tales of murder or adultery, 
 placarding the walls of the empire every morn- 
 ing with their advertisement to arouse the dull 
 curiosity of the bored and frivolous multitude 
 and when at last it had made his name a house- 
 hold word, and given him that notoriety which 
 in this world is ninety-nine points of success, 
 when it found it had lifted him to so high a 
 pedestal of importance that it could not take 
 him down again, it bent the knee to him in a 
 kind of Oriental idolatry ; and now has the un- 
 enviable honour of having foisted on the country 
 a man of whom it may with strict justice be 
 said (for it is within the memory of all), that 
 whatever his future may be, and however his 
 procedure may change, he rose to power, and 
 that too by the admission of this same Press 
 
200 THE PRESS AND THE DEMAGOGUE.- 
 
 that helped him there, by baseness and baseness 
 alone. 
 
 Such is the Newspaper Press, and such is the 
 way in which, while having toasts drunk to its 
 honour at public banquets for its public services, 
 it has so whetted the appetite of the Public for 
 political scandal and personality, that the arts 
 of the Demagogue, naked and undisguised, have 
 become the surest passports to power. 
 
 To this charge, however, which I have deliber- 
 ately brought against the Press in general of 
 precipitating on us the Demagogue instead of 
 defending us from him, I desire to make among 
 others one notable exception — -and that is the 
 Spectator. On this journal has descended the 
 mantle which the Times, for reasons which I 
 have given above, was obliged to drop when the 
 franchise was extended to the great body of the 
 people, the mantle, viz. of sobriety of tone ; high 
 impartiality and absence of party bitterness ; the 
 endeavour, like a wise judge, to place the con- 
 nections, sequences, and involved results of oppos- 
 ing views fairly before the reader; the exclusion 
 of all mere rhetoric, verbiage, and personality; 
 and the dealing with facts and their import and 
 connections, and with these alone. Unlike the 
 Times, however, when in its best days and as 
 
THE PRESS AND THE DEMAGOGUE. 201 
 
 a true public servant it held the scales evenly 
 between the old and narrower political divisions 
 of Whig and Tory, the Spectator represents the 
 larger aspirations and more advanced political 
 ideas of our own day ; and although progressive 
 in tendency, its Radicalism is so Conservative, 
 and its Conservatism so Radical, that it may 
 fairly be said to be, so far as circumstances will 
 allow, a most high and trustworthy example of 
 political impartiality. And further, instead of 
 degrading, like the Times, into small print or 
 ignoring altogether all political thought and 
 social activity that cannot cramp itself into the 
 narrow and severely practical limits of the old 
 aristocratic regiment welcomes in its pages thought 
 of all ranges, from the solidly practical beneath 
 our feet, to the point where the ideal of the 
 future becomes for the present the impracticable 
 or doctrinaire. Unlike the Penny Press, on the 
 other hand, instead of taking its opinions from 
 the vague and hasty impressions of its readers, 
 it imposes its opinions on them (at least in the 
 first instance) for consideration ; instead of dealing 
 largely with personal recrimination and retrospect, 
 it deals with present facts and their inherent tend- 
 encies and consequences, and with these only ; 
 instead of retailing the impertinences, frivolities, 
 
202 THE PRESS AND THE DEMAGOGUE. 
 
 and personalities of the demagogue for the break- 
 fast table, it shears them unmercifully away as 
 irrelevant, dangerous, and misleading ; instead of 
 trading on happy phrases, sign-board portraiture, 
 exaggeration, and personality, it leaves them all 
 alike severely alone. A high-toned, serious, and 
 even great journal, which in itself is a political 
 education ; and had all the daily papers done 
 their public duty as conscientiously and well, no 
 Lord Randolph Churchill would by playing off 
 on the Public a few poor and wretched tricks 
 have worked his way into power. But unfor- 
 tunately by that baulking of fate which is always 
 present to prevent trees growing into the sky, 
 or progress over-leaping the element of Time to 
 its millennial goal, this journal, which is a six- 
 penny weekly \ is beyond the reach of the great 
 masses who have the votes, and in consequence 
 has almost as little influence over them as if 
 it were buried in the centre of the earth. The 
 result is that the great Public who now control 
 by their suffrages the destinies of the Empire 
 are left entirely without direction or guidance, 
 and are at the mercy of the first political gust 
 that whirls up from the pavement some light 
 irresponsible shaveling to the seat of power. 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 We have already seen in a previous chapter 
 that now that we have entered on the era of 
 Democracy, the important point in the event 
 of any extreme danger or antagonism threaten- 
 ing us from within or without is the choice of 
 wise and good men as leaders. We have seen 
 also that democracies when left to themselves 
 cannot be entrusted with the choice of these 
 wise and good leaders, and further, that among 
 ourselves there is at present existing no institu- 
 tion or body of men with the influence, prestige, 
 and authority necessary for the performance of 
 this high function, unless indeed it be the News- 
 paper Press. On inquiring farther as to how 
 the Press fulfilled this function, we found that 
 instead of standing (in the persons of its 
 various representatives) like flaming cherubim 
 at every portal of Stare, and relentlessly cutting 
 off the Demagogue and expelling him from 
 
204 THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 positions of power and authority — a function 
 which the Times in its old days and under its 
 more limited conditions admirably fulfilled — it 
 had now, owing to circumstances and conditions 
 partly inevitable and partly perhaps remediable, 
 become the very sport and echo of opinion, con- 
 verting the Empire by means of its great range 
 and influence into a vast auditorium, into which 
 as into some great sounding gallery it shouts 
 the names and performances of the various 
 mimes and play-actors on the political stage 
 (as much for the amusement as for the instruc- 
 tion of the people), until it so far magnifies and 
 inflates their bulk and proportion in the common 
 eye, that the State is literally, and I say it 
 advisedly, at their mercy. But besides the 
 tendency of the Press to thrust the Demagogue 
 upon us, owing to its position in relation to 
 Parliament and the Public of which I have 
 already spoken, it would almost assuredly be 
 bound to do so by reason of certain weaknesses 
 inherent in itself, certain illusions by which it is 
 possessed, and which must be exorcised before 
 it can worthily perform its great and high public 
 function. In this chapter, accordingly, I propose 
 to. point out what these illusions are, and in 
 
THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 205 
 
 doing so I trust I may not be thought guilty 
 of presumption or impertinence; for in the 
 history of the decline and fall of States it has 
 often been under the ribs of some great and 
 flourishing institution throbbing with life that 
 the germs of future decay have all unconsciously 
 been permitted to nestle. In order then that I 
 may make my meaning the more clear, I have 
 deemed it expedient to arrange these illusions 
 under three different heads, viz. — 
 
 i . The illusion of Happy Phrases. 
 
 2. The illusion of the Grand Tour. 
 
 3. The illusion of the Doctrinaire. 
 
 But before entering on this part of my task 
 I wish to say that in the remarks I am about to 
 make on the Press, I allude exclusively to the 
 great London ' Dailies/ as being the Papers with 
 which I am best acquainted, and in these only 
 to the political editorials — all the other parts, 
 which are under the direct charge of men of 
 special knowledge and ability in the various 
 departments of literature, art, music, the drama, 
 trade, and the like, being on the whole excellent. 
 
 (1) And first as to the Illusion of Happy 
 Phrases. These ' happy phrases/ as they are 
 
2o6 THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 called by the Press (and which now appear to 
 be the main foundation on which political reput- 
 ations rest), consist in certain light and more or 
 less flippant epigrams, such as ' mending and 
 ending/ ' plundering and blundering/ ' rescue and 
 retire/ and the like, which by their piquancy or 
 picturesqueness strike the fancy and abide in the 
 memory, but which like puns are in themselves 
 mere literary exercises, mere exaggerations, 
 which like artificial crystals can only get their 
 appearance of regularity and finish by the* process 
 of trimming down, filling out, or in other ways 
 rounding off the rough edges and corners of 
 truth ; and in the complex web of facts involved 
 in practical politics serve rather to perplex and 
 obscure than to instruct the judgment. They 
 are, as I have said, mere literary exercises, and 
 afford therefore as little evidence of qualification 
 for the high duties of the Statesman and practical 
 politician, as they do for those of the engineer, 
 the soldier, the surgeon, or the shoemaker. They 
 are admissible, it is true, in the barrister, as his 
 business is to do his best by word-glamour and 
 sophistry to make the worse appear the better 
 reason; but then he is perfectly harmless, for 
 you have a judge above him to reduce his 
 
THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 207 
 
 high-flown and vaporous epigrams to their 
 true proportions. But in Parliament and 
 Politics where you have no high and judicial 
 authority to intervene, where the People are 
 at the mercy of the phrase-monger, and the 
 Press shares the illusion of the People, these 
 6 happy phrases,' to which the Press attaches 
 so much importance, become positively noxious, 
 and are a source indirectly of real public 
 danger. Now all greatness whatever, it will be 
 generally admitted, whether it be of the Thinker, 
 the Poet, the Mathematician, the General, the 
 Physician, or the Chess-player, consists in the 
 perception of wider, more varied, more subtle, or 
 more complex relations between the real facts or 
 things with which it deals ; and the same is true 
 of Statesmanship. But so little evidently has 
 this facility in producing epigrams, puns, or 
 other ' happy phrases' that depend on literary 
 exaggeration or distortion, to do with it, that, as 
 we should expect beforehand, the two qualities 
 or kinds of ability are very rarely found united 
 in , the same person. Instead therefore of the 
 Press taking it for granted (or allowing it to be 
 taken for granted) that the one kind of ability 
 affords a presumption of the other, it ought 
 
2oS THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 rather to start with the assumption (unless on 
 special and rigorous proof shown) that the 
 possession of the one renders the presence of the 
 other unlikely. For after all, what is this illusion 
 of ' happy phrases ' but another form of the same 
 illusion which we saw was so common among 
 men when gathered in masses, the illusion, viz. 
 of taking the Talker for the Thinker, the man 
 who gives expression to a common want or 
 sentiment, for the man who is fitted by nature 
 or study to see its worth, weigh its wisdom, or 
 devise means for carrying it into practical effect ; 
 the only difference being that whereas the People 
 in general will (as we saw in the case of 
 Lord Randolph Churchill) swallow the 'happy 
 phrase' in its most crude, virulent, and un- 
 digested state, the Editor in his study prefers it, 
 if it can be had, in a more refined, polished, and 
 literary form. But if, as we have seen in a 
 previous chapter, the qualities essential to the 
 Statesman are as different and distinct in nature 
 from those of the ' happy phrase-monger ' as the 
 qualities of the skilled physician are from those 
 of the quack ; and if the object of all political 
 effort is to find the man most capable of 
 grasping the central truths on which the 
 
THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 209 
 
 complex facts of political affairs turn ; it is 
 evident that the political guides who confound 
 them, instead of guarding us from the Dema- 
 gogue, must be mainly responsible for thrusting 
 him upon us. And that this is indeed what 
 the Press has done, and is doing, I shall now 
 endeavour to prove. 
 
 I take up, for example, a random copy of the 
 Pall Mall Gazette, which happens to be lying 
 beside me on the day on which I am making 
 notes, for this and the preceding chapter, and 
 on looking through it come on some comments 
 of the Editor on a speech of Lord Salisbury's, 
 then recently delivered, which may serve to illus- 
 trate my meaning. The Editor, after remarking 
 that the speech was full of happy phrases, 
 mentions the following remarks as great hits, — - 
 (1) "Progress has different definitions in different 
 countries, and in this country it means taking 
 something from the landlords;" (2) " Confidence 
 is frequently a short and easy course to the 
 Bankruptcy Court 5 " (3) " Coercion is nothing 
 more than forcing people to abstain from a 
 peculiar mode of propagating their political 
 opinions," and admiringly asserts that these 
 happy phrases are just the sort of thing to make 
 
 p 
 
210 THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 a reputation in the House of Commons, that 
 is to say, to pave the way to a seat in the 
 
 • Cabinet and on to the Premiership itself. Now 
 the most cursory examination of these specimens 
 of ' happy phrases ' will show that the first is 
 not true, and can only get what pregnancy it 
 has by stretching the truth to that point of 
 exaggeration where it becomes a falsehood ; the 
 second is a pure platitude a la Martin Tupper ; 
 and the last, in the sense in which it is applied 
 to the Irish people, is a mere stilted form of 
 expression, nothing more. The reader will 
 therefore judge whether such purely literary 
 
 •trifling should be any better passport to success 
 in Parliament and a seat in the Cabinet, and iq 
 
 -consequence to the making or mending of laws, 
 than to a seat on a bench of physicians or 
 cobblers, and the curing of bodies or mending 
 of shoes ; and whether it constitutes any higher 
 qualification for the management of the business 
 of a nation, than it would for the management 
 of a private business like that of Mr. Shoolbred 
 or Mr. Whiteley. And yet this stuff, which 
 could, I will venture to say, be turned out by 
 the ream by the worst paid hack on his own 
 journal, is the sort of thing the Editor admir- 
 
THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 211 
 
 ingly admits is fitted to make a reputation in 
 the House of Commons! The same journal, 
 commenting a short time afterwards on a speech 
 of Mr. Sextons in reply to one of Mr. Cham- 
 berlain on the Irish Home Rule Bill, selects 
 the following passages from the speech as ' a 
 series of extremely brilliant thrusts,' with the 
 remark that at the end of the speech, "the 
 House roared with laughter and rang with 
 cheers, and Mr. Sexton had placed his claim to 
 rank among the three best debaters in the House 
 beyond a doubt/' Here are the ' extremely 
 brilliant thrusts' referred to: — (1) "Powerful as 
 a coadjutor, impotent as a rebel;" (2) "Speaking 
 with a sepulchral voice like one which comes 
 from a cave;" (3) "The ally of Tories, the 
 confederate of Whigs, the deserter of his own 
 party ; " (4) " The nature and intent of the 
 Right Hon. Gentleman is to be a mayor." Now 
 it is apparent that all this is a mere exercise 
 of literary ingenuity, differing in no other respect 
 from the stuffed-club style of Lord Randolph 
 Churchill than in having a more refined literary 
 edge; and bringing us no nearer the solution 
 of the Irish or any other problem than the 
 problem of the moon. For, as before, the most 
 
 p 2 
 
212 THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 casual examination will show that the first of 
 these ' extremely brilliant thrusts' is a mere 
 exaggeration, so manipulated (to get the anti- 
 thesis) as to become untrue ; the second is a mere 
 play on words ; the third a piece of high-sounding 
 rhetoric only ; and the last a purely personal im- 
 pertinence, The above are only a few examples 
 picked up at the time, but the point of view of 
 the paper is still essentially the same. The reader 
 will therefore judge for himself whether an Editor 
 who of all others pretends to lead the van and 
 to believe that * government by journalism 9 has 
 now come, yet who is so lost in admiration of 
 this kind of trifling, and so sunk in the illusion 
 that adroitness and facility in turning out this 
 mere literary and rhetorical jingle, establishes a 
 man's rank as a debater and statesman, is more 
 likely to precipitate the phrase-monger and 
 demagogue upon us, or to defend us from him. 
 
 Take again the Daily News, the organ of 
 the Liberal Party, and a high-class journal of 
 unimpeachable respectability and wide political 
 influence. Some time about the beginning of 
 the present year '86, a remarkable change was 
 observable in the tone of the leading articles in 
 this paper towards the personality and perform- 
 
THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 213 
 
 ance of Lord Randolph Churchill. Hitherto 
 it had regarded him (according to Lord Ran- 
 dolph Churchill himself) as an ' incompetent 
 idiot/ and a ' most abandoned and unscrupulous 
 politician/ when lo ! all of a sudden a leading 
 article appeared in which he was described, 
 intellectually at least, in terms of the highest 
 eulogy and admiration. Surprised at this un- 
 expected change of tone, on making inquiries 
 I ascertained that there had been a change in 
 the editorship of the paper, and that the new 
 Editor was none other than the Editor of Lord 
 Randolph Churchill's own speeches, in the intro- 
 duction to which I had already observed what 
 appeared to me some most curious and un- 
 accountable political and literary judgments. 
 On further inquiry I learned also that he was 
 the author of a work entitled A Diary of two 
 Parliaments, and being curious to know what 
 the literary standpoint could be from which such 
 singular judgments had proceeded, I at once 
 turned to the volume, and had not read many 
 pages before my curiosity at what had previously 
 puzzled me was fully set at rest. " Here/' I 
 said to myself as I read along, "you have the 
 admirer of ■ happy phrases ' in his highest state 
 
214 THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 of ecstasy ; " and as I observed the way in which 
 he bent before the coiners of these phrases, 
 and the tortures to which he himself put the 
 English language in his efforts to emulate them, 
 I felt that if imitation is the sincerest flattery, 
 there could be no doubt of the depth and 
 sincerity of his admiration. As regards the 
 matter of the book, I have no call at present 
 to speak. I may only say in passing, that it 
 is precisely what you might have expected from 
 one who had been condemned to sit for years 
 as a reporter in the gallery of the House of 
 Commons. A mere chronicle of the remarks 
 made by honourable members to one another 
 and to the House, of their appearance and move- 
 ments, but especially of their changes of cos- 
 tume, ' of their cuts and condescensions,' of 
 how this noble lord was seen talking to that hon. 
 member, and the like ; — and all with the pomp 
 and gusto with which the footman might recount 
 the conversation of his master's guests in the 
 servants' hall; the entrance-' of some of the 
 poorer Irish members into the House being 
 regarded with that horror and supercilious dis- 
 gust with which one of these well-fed lacqueys 
 regards the presence of the /poor relation' in 
 
THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 215 
 
 the drawing-room. But it is in his style and 
 manner, as I have said, that you see the man 
 and his admirations, and the secret of his literary 
 and political judgments. Of this style and 
 manner I can give the reader no better general 
 impression than by remarking that they bear 
 the same relation to ordinary English that the 
 Christy minstrel version of the song of 'Old 
 Uncle Ned' bears to the original version. The 
 original has it that old Uncle Ned who lived a 
 long time ago " had no hair on the top of his 
 head, just the place where the hair ought to 
 grow." In the Christy minstrel version it runs 
 that " he had no capillary substance on the sum- 
 mit of his pericranium, just the position where 
 the said capillary substance ought to vegetate. " 
 Now this is precisely the style and key in which 
 the Diary of Two Parliaments is written through- 
 out, but lest this may seem an exaggeration, 
 I may be permitted to give a few quotations 
 picked out here and there at random. One hon. 
 members handkerchief becomes in the author's 
 description, " this particular article of portable 
 property ; " the snuff-box of another is " not 
 an article that would lie in the waistcoat-pocket, 
 t?ut a roomy box such as might on occasion 
 
216 THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 serve to carry the necessaries of a night's 
 journey, or perad venture to accommodate itself 
 as a portable bath ; " while the hon. member 
 who sat on the bench immediately beneath it is 
 described as having " moved away lest he should 
 be crushed in its ruins as it fell " ! General 
 Burnaby made a short speech of " five sentences 
 long," which is characterized as " a jewel worthy 
 to sparkle for all ages on the outstretched fore- 
 finger of Time"! The Whigs are described as 
 u those uncertain compounds of slow-moving 
 impulse, entrees in the feast of politics." Of 
 Lord Spencer and his brother it is remarked, 
 that " by the grave face of the Earl who knows 
 so much about Ireland are displayed the dazzling 
 glories of the laundress which shed a starchy 
 halo around the form of his young brother " ! 
 Twice in four pages tailoring is described as 
 the ' sartorial art.' On a rose in Mr. Gladstone's 
 coat we have the following remark, — " The only 
 truculent thing anywhere about was the great 
 red rose in the Premier's coat with its leaves 
 all awry, as if it had already been in battle;" 
 and on a new coat worn by him, " The Premier 
 had relinquished a tenant's interest in a familiar 
 garment, and had entered upon a fresh holding, 
 
THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 217 
 
 where (as is provided for in the fourth clause 
 of the Land Bill) he found the incidence of 
 tenancy subject to incommodious statutory 
 conditions ! V 
 
 Such is the Editor of the Daily News, and 
 the reader will now have little difficulty in under- 
 standing the sudden change that came over the 
 paper with regard to the ability and performance 
 of Lord Randolph Churchill, and will realize 
 that its Editor would naturally see in such 
 kindred examples of his style as I have quoted 
 in a former chapter, strokes of real genius, and 
 in his career one which " for brilliancy it would 
 be difficult to parallel/' The reader will also 
 judge whether one who is so great an admirer 
 of ' happy phrases,' and who in his own most 
 ambitious efforts to imitate them can rise no 
 higher than the Christy-minstrel version of ' Old 
 Uncle Ned/ is an intellectual instrument fit to 
 instruct the Public in its choice of wise states- 
 men, or is likely soon to purge the Phrase-monger 
 and Demagogue away. 
 
 Take again the Times and the Standard. 
 Of the Editor of the Standard I am unable 
 to judge from his articles to what extent he is 
 himself personally under the illusion of ' happy 
 
•2\ 8 THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 phrases • ; but I can only remark, that if he was 
 sincere in his judgment of Lord Randolph 
 Churchill (and I am obliged to take Lord 
 Randolph Churchill as my text, as. being in 
 style, ability, and general pose the only example 
 of the pure demagogue at present in the front 
 ranks of English politics), when about a year 
 ago, after contemplating his whole career, he said 
 that he had shown no more political knowledge 
 fitting him for his high position than an over- 
 grown schoolboy, it is simply incredible that he 
 can be sincere now* when he preaches the opposite 
 view, and bows to that public opinion which by 
 advertisement he has helped to create ; and if he 
 had the insight to see through his poor tricks 
 then, but (failing to bring the party over to his 
 views) now shuts his eyes, winks hard, and ap- 
 plauds with the multitude ; the result is the same 
 as if he were himself personally under this illusion 
 of ' happy phrases.' In either case he is useless 
 in helping us to keep out the Demagogue, or in 
 assisting us in the choice of wise and good leaders. 
 Of the Times itself little need here be said. 
 I have already shown how relentlessly in the old 
 days of its undisputed supremacy it drew the 
 * Autumn '86. 
 
THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 219 
 
 line between the Phrase-monger and the States- 
 man ; and I still can perceive in its leaders that 
 the traditions of its prime, although too often 
 ignored, are not altogether forgotten. But 
 having become a mere Party journal, it is obliged 
 to respect the feelings of its clientele^ and uses 
 its better insight rather for the aggrandizement 
 of its own party than for the public good. 
 Instead of applying its gauge rigorously to friend 
 and foe alike, it now applies it arbitrarily ; so 
 that while rarely failing to point out that any 
 specially telling personality in the speech of its 
 political opponents is not ' statesmanship,' it quite 
 overlooks this distinction in similar remarks of 
 its political friends. And accordingly in almost 
 every issue while the House is sitting, you will 
 find its editorials all cunningly constructed on 
 this one plan. If, for example, the phrase-monger 
 who makes the ' happy hit* is on its own side 
 in politics, the editorial comment will run some- 
 what in this way — "The vigorous and pungent 
 strictures of the hon. member fell with telling 
 force on the House," &c. ; if on the opposite 
 side, the hon. member will have "surpassed him- 
 self in audacious quibbling with plain issues, in 
 juggling with empty phrases, and in perverting 
 
220: THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 notorious facts," or the like. If, on the contrary, 
 the speech of its opponent is dull, the hon. 
 member will have "bored the House with his 
 dreary platitudes until its patience was exhausted," 
 &c. ; while the dulness of its friend's speech will 
 be treated in this way. — " We have no attempt here 
 at windy rhetoric, no turning aside to substitute 
 the pitiful dexterities of personal dialectics for 
 a business-like examination of the issue before 
 the House/' And so on throughout. It is 
 evident therefore that the Times, like the Stan- 
 dard, although not so hopelessly sunk in the 
 illusion of ' happy phrases ' as some other leading 
 journals, is impotent to defend us from the 
 Phrase-monger and Demagogue whom it once 
 so much dreaded, by reason of its having now 
 become a mere Party organ, and thus having 
 placed its great powers at the service of a class 
 rather than of the State. 
 
 I have selected the four journals above men- 
 tioned as being those with which I am personally 
 most familiar, and whose tone and point of view 
 I have most carefully watched, and also as being 
 fairly typical of the best London journalism; 
 the other papers, so far as I have read them, 
 differing from these in no essential respect either 
 
THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 221 
 
 in their tone or point of view. And now before 
 passing on it may be interesting to inquire how 
 this excessive reverence for ' happy phrases,' this 
 tendency to mingle and confound the Phrase- 
 monger and Statesman, has originated. For my 
 own part I believe it to be largely due to the 
 combined influence exerted over the Press as a 
 body by the great names of Macaulay and Lord 
 Beaconsfield. Many of the leader writers on the 
 great ' Dailies,' who are at once literary men and 
 politicians, have consciously adopted Macaulay 
 as their model of literary style ; and all of them, 
 I presume, have been deeply impressed with the 
 success of Lord Beaconsfield's political career. 
 And as both Macaulay and Lord Beaconsfield 
 (who were themselves at once literary men and 
 politicians) rose into power in the first instance 
 by the same means — Macaulay by his ' epigram- 
 matic style/ Beaconsfield by his ' happy phrases,' 
 < — it is evident that unless great discrimination 
 were exercised, there would be a tendency to 
 confound ' phrasemongering ' in general with 
 1 statesmanship,' and to augur a like success to the 
 aspiring imitators as had attended the careers 
 of their illustrious prototypes. For although 
 it is now generally admitted that it was by 
 
222 THE ILLUSTOXS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 over-straining his epigrams to the point at which 
 they did violence to the truth, that Macaulay 
 succeeded in getting some of his most brilliant 
 effects, nevertheless his name with the Press is 
 still a potent one to conjure with. And although 
 Beaconsfield's rise into power by means of his 
 ' happy phrases ' occurred at a time when no great 
 domestic problems connected with land or capital 
 had yet arisen to divide and exasperate classes, 
 when a government still aristocratic gave strength 
 and directness to foreign policy, and the Times sat 
 high over all guarding the interests of the State 
 (and when the country in consequence would 
 have run little risk even if the Whigs and Tories 
 had selected their respective champions from the 
 men who could stand longest on their heads) ; 
 still when a man rises to be Prime Minister by 
 any means, I for one should despair of proving 
 to the great masses of men that these means were 
 poor and unworthy. And yet to tolerate that 
 at the present time when circumstances have 
 entirely changed, when foreign policy is almost 
 literally at the mercy of the distracted multitude, 
 and when the war between landlord and tenant, 
 capital and labour is about to begin, a man 
 should rise by mere ' happy phrases ' to positions 
 
THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 223 
 
 of political power, can only be possible to those 
 who are so wrapped up in hearsays and great 
 names that they will not take the trouble to lift the 
 veil that enshrouds them and shear the illusions 
 away. And it is in my opinion precisely because 
 the Press has not taken the pains to do this, 
 that you have it still holding on to the shadowy 
 weapons associated with the names of these great 
 men (at a time too when circumstances have 
 entirely changed, and weapons other than mere 
 literary phrases are necessary to meet them) ; still 
 pushing into public notice and awarding the 
 palm of honour without suspicion or hesitation to 
 all manner of word-mongers, virulent or refined ; 
 the consequence being, that aspirants for Parlia- 
 mentary position (taking advantage of this weak- 
 ness of the Press) instead of applying themselves 
 to the great principles of government, and storing 
 their minds with great masses of orderly and 
 digested detail, are to be seen competing with 
 one another in the privacy of their studies in 
 the manufacture of ' happy phrases,' which, in- 
 tended at first for some local audience perhaps, 
 are really constructed with an eye to their effect 
 on the Press — which will report them, appraise 
 them, circulate them, and give them currency 
 
224 THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 with the masses. And hence it is that you have 
 political reputations almost literally made in the 
 first place, and afterwards sustained, by such 
 phrases as ' Mending and ending/ ' Whigs bath- 
 ing/ ' Rescue and retire/ ' Extinct volcanoes/ 
 ' Peace with honour/ ' Plundering and blunder- 
 ing/ ' The policy of scuttle/ ' Leaps and bounds/ 
 and the like; even a man of the intellectual 
 calibre of Mr. John Morley being obliged to 
 play down to this poor illusion; — and all this 
 too (greatest satire of all) when you can find 
 as much of this stuff and of as good a quality 
 in a week in Punch and the other comic and 
 satirical journals as would supply the whole 
 House for a session ; the professional authors 
 differing from the amateurs only in this, that 
 instead of looking forward to a seat in the Cabinet, 
 or to the Premiership itself as the result of their 
 efforts, like other caterers for the Public they 
 are only too happy if they can make sure of 
 punctual pay and steady employment. 
 
 (2) If, as we have seen, some of the London 
 ' Dailies/ although practically bending to the illu- 
 sion of ' happy phrases/ are less immersed in it 
 than others ; all alike may be said to be submerged 
 in the second illusion which I have mentioned 
 
THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 225 
 
 above, viz. the Illusion of the ^ Grand Tour' And 
 perhaps I cannot better explain what I mean by 
 this than by saying that if you take three or 
 four of the younger leaders of either of the 
 great Parliamentary parties (all about equal in 
 position and popularity), and start any one of 
 them in a period of political expectancy on a 
 starring expedition through the country, making 
 the ' grand tour ' around by Edinburgh, Glasgow, 
 and the North ; you will find that although in 
 his progress he has only given expression to the 
 ordinary recognized and long understood policy 
 of the Party, the din and uproar caused by the 
 political and party bagpipes in the Press will 
 have so stamped his name on the public imagin- 
 ation, that on his return the old equality of 
 political rank between him and his comrades 
 will have undergone a complete and entire 
 metamorphosis; the same change and evolution 
 having taken place among them as is seen when 
 an ordinary bee is, by the greater attention paid 
 to it, fattened into a queen bee ; the mere echo 
 and reverberation of his name throughout the 
 length and breadth of the land (for no number 
 of isolated, casual, or irregular speeches in- 
 adequately reported can compare in effect with 
 
 a 
 
226 THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 the concentration of the whole Press on a single 
 speech, or series of speeches) having so height- 
 ened his reputation, and filled the public ear, 
 that his former equals, by a kind of public and 
 informal plebiscite, will have quietly and uncon- 
 sciously sunk the while into an inferior and 
 subordinate position. I happened, for example, 
 to be in Scotland in the autumn of '85, when 
 Mr. Chamberlain started on his grand tour 
 through the North ; and in the absence of any 
 other star of the first magnitude on the political 
 horizon he so concentrated on himself for a 
 week or two the gaze and attention of the Public, 
 that although at starting he was confessedly only 
 one among a number of prominent Radicals all 
 about his equals in political rank and repute, by 
 the time he returned (although he had only been 
 the mouthpiece for the time being of what govern- 
 ment members of the party had long been advo- 
 cating in the magazines and journals, in Parlia- 
 ment and out of it) he was dilated to so portentous 
 a bulk that from that day onwards his comrades, 
 in presence of the surge of admiration that 
 swelled around him, could only sink back and 
 hide for the time their diminished heads in the 
 crowd. So great indeed was his success, that 
 
THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 227 
 
 in the temporary silence and retirement of Mr. 
 Gladstone he so overshadowed for the moment 
 his old leader, that the latter had to be heralded 
 back into the field again with the sound of 
 trumpets, and there put forth the whole strength 
 of his great name and prestige to regain his 
 former authority ; almost endangering the unity 
 of the party before he succeeded in superseding 
 the ' unauthorized programme ' of his ambitious 
 subordinate by a programme of his own. The 
 same change in relative positions occurred when 
 Mr. John Morley, owing to his Home Rule 
 predilections, was made Irish secretary; and so 
 shared with Mr. Gladstone the attention of the 
 world. Mr. Chamberlain having accepted a less 
 prominent situation in the Cabinet, and being for 
 the moment left in the political shade, the Press 
 immediately fell into its old illusion, remarking 
 that " Mr. Morley had improved his position in 
 the party at the'expense of Mr. Chamberlain ; " — 
 poor Mr. Trevelyan, in the meantime, who had 
 refused office in the Government, and who for 
 some length of time had kept in the political 
 background, being out of the running alto- 
 gether. Indeed it was not until the opposition 
 to the Home Rule Bill became acute under 
 
 Q 2, 
 
228 THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 the leadership of Lord Hartington and Mr. 
 Chamberlain, that the latter, by the interest 
 which was again concentrated on him by the 
 Press, succeeded in making himself once more 
 an object of interest and attention. Even as I 
 write,* the same effect of the grand tour may 
 be seen going on before our very eyes. Lord 
 Salisbury, at a time when the whole country is 
 eagerly waiting for some intimation of the new 
 Tory Programme, instead of coming forward in 
 person to announce the policy of the Govern- 
 ment (holding all his subordinates in the leash 
 the while), consents (fatal error) to allow Lord 
 Randolph Churchill to go to Dartford and 
 Bradford as its exponent and spokesman. The 
 result has been what indeed might have been 
 foreseen ; the whole Press at once, and with one 
 accord, seize on the circumstance as another 
 proof that Lord Randolph Churchill is the real 
 leader of the Party, and treat him as such ; 
 whereas had Lord Salisbury come forward with 
 his policy in person, the Press, however much 
 they might have suspected that Lord Randolph 
 Churchill had secretly initiated it, would have 
 felt and announced that Lord Salisbury was 
 * Autumn '86. 
 
THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 229 
 
 still the strong man in the Cabinet; and he would 
 thus have immensely strengthened a position 
 which by this false step has for the time being 
 been seriously weakened. It was said to be the 
 secret of Buonaparte's military success that he 
 exhausted all his ingenuity in manoeuvring to 
 bring his battalions at such an angle to the 
 enemy that against each of their men he should 
 be able to confront two of his own. It is the 
 secret of Parliamentary success, to manoeuvre so 
 as to get yourself at that angle where the Press 
 shall be obliged to mention your name twice to 
 your opponent's or competitor's once. This, in 
 a word, is the meaning of that illusion of the 
 ' Grand Tour' in which the Press is immersed; 
 and by taking advantage of which you may 
 almost undertake to predict that by judicious 
 management and handling, out of an ordinary 
 working member of Parliament a Cabinet 
 Minister may be made in six months, with the 
 possible reversion to the Premiership in twelve ! 
 Is this not pitiful ? That the People should 
 imagine that they hear the voice of a god in one 
 with whose name the whole land is ringing, and 
 that with them a man's reputation should rise or 
 fall according to the number of times his name 
 
230 THE ILLUSIONS' OF THE PRESS. 
 
 is mentioned in a penny newspaper, is (in the 
 absence of any other means of knowing) natural 
 enough ; but that the Press, whose office it is to 
 be the zealous guardian of the State, and to 
 smelt away the dross from the gold in political 
 reputations, should be brow-beaten and subdued 
 by this shallow artifice, proves how far towards the 
 reign of the Demagogue we have already arrived. 
 
 (3) If the two illusions of the Press which 
 I have just illustrated — the illusion of ' happy 
 phrases' and the illusion of the ' grand tour' — 
 have a direct tendency to thrust on us the Dema- 
 gogue instead of defending us from him, this 
 tendency is indirectly furthered by a third 
 illusion and prejudice under which the Press 
 labours ; and by which the natural enemies of the 
 Demagogue and Phrase-coiner — viz. the men of 
 Thought — are prevented from exercising their 
 normal and legitimate influence over the People. 
 This illusion and prejudice, which operate in 
 much the same way as a prejudice against cats 
 might do when it was a question of the extermin- 
 ation of rats, I have called the Illusion of the 
 1 Doctrinaire? 
 
 In the old days, when the country was 
 governed by the great Territorial Houses ; and 
 
THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 231 
 
 men of wealth and material standing were alone 
 possessed of the franchise ; literary men of all 
 kinds — philosophers, publicists, political thinkers, 
 historians, and the like — were not encouraged by 
 the ruling powers to interfere in politics ; and the 
 Times, which directly represented the feelings, 
 interests, and prejudices of these privileged 
 classes, would sooner, as has often been said, 
 have seen the country elect an alderman or 
 fox-hunter than any political thinker however 
 eminent or profound. But while thus jealously 
 repudiating the Political Thinker, the ruling 
 families of both Parties were always glad to 
 secure any facile phrase-monger, literary fencer, 
 or the like (who had by accident or good fortune 
 succeeded in getting into the House), to lead 
 the debates ; and were always ready and willing 
 to give him, if successful in fighting their 
 battles and carrying out their wishes, substantial 
 recognition, promotion, and advancement; as 
 was the case with Burke, Canning, Disraeli, 
 Gladstone, and the rest. But although in 
 a Parliamentary Government where legislation 
 goes by public speaking, the Phrase-monger and 
 literateur must always occupy an important 
 place, the ruling powers did not wish it so to 
 
232 THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 appear to the world ; for had once the idea got 
 abroad that ' literary men ' were the natural leaders 
 of the respective parties ; and that (when once 
 accredited) they would tend more and more as 
 Democracy approached to initiate and direct 
 policy as well as to expound and defend it ; all 
 Grub Street, swollen into importance, would 
 have risen in mutiny at its exclusion from 
 political influence ; and the Aristocracy would 
 in a great measure have lost their political 
 prestige and authority — a result which no class 
 of men accustomed to power could be expected 
 patiently to abide. Accordingly a set of phrases 
 had to be invented which would instil the neces- 
 sary distinction into the public mind ; and keep 
 all sweet, smooth, and tranquil as before. The 
 Times accordingly, as the literary agent of the 
 ruling classes, undertook the problem 5 and suc- 
 ceeded in striking out the necessary distinctions 
 with entire and happy success. For from thence- 
 forth, through its promulgation, it became estab- 
 lished that the literary leaders of the respective 
 parties inside the House (who had been recruited, 
 as I have said, from the literary class, for their 
 power of coining ' happy phrases,' and whose style 
 and methods were still as literary as in their days 
 
THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 233 
 
 of obscurity) should be dignified by the title of 
 1 Statesmen ' ; while the whole body and tribe of 
 them outside the House or Cabinet — publicists, 
 literateurs, thinkers, political historians, and all 
 — were mere ' viewy literary politicians,' mere 
 ' doctrinaires] and the like. No sooner was this 
 distinction announced and spread abroad by the 
 Times, than all those who were, possessed of 
 the franchise — the manufacturers,, merchants, 
 shopkeepers, and financiers, in a word, all the 
 monied classes in the kingdom who had been 
 nurtured in aristocratic traditions of Government 
 — accepted it with delight as a kind of ordinance 
 of nature. For although it is as certain as that 
 a stone when thrown into the air will fall to the 
 ground, that in Parliamentary Government by 
 Party and Debate, the literary fencer will lead ; 
 and that (unless sternly suppressed by the Press) 
 to him and his like the best offices will fall ; still 
 it would be too much for human nature to allow 
 that men whom they had regarded from afar off 
 as a herd of scribblers (many of them out-at- 
 elbows) should have the control of that high 
 imperial policy which had hitherto been the 
 prerogative of the Aristocracy alone. And 
 accordingly from this time onwards, the flimsy 
 
234 THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 and baseless distinction between the ' Statesman ] 
 and the 'Doctrinaire 9 (according as they were 
 ivithin or without the enchanted circle of the 
 Cabinet) became embodied as an article of belief 
 in English politics, where it remains to this day. 
 
 Now all this was natural enough at a time 
 when the Aristocracy was the ruling power in 
 the State ; when the franchise was limited to a 
 select and monied class brought up in traditions 
 of aristocratic prestige and predominance ; and 
 when the Times as their literary agent and repre- 
 sentative upheld the solid political and material 
 interests of both. What I find fault with is, 
 that now that the Aristocracy is no longer the 
 ruling power in the State ; that by the extension 
 of the suffrage Democracy is practically here, 
 and the arena in consequence is open to talent ; 
 now that all the currents both of public opinion 
 and the Press have set towards the apotheosis 
 of the happy Phrase-monger and the Dema- 
 gogue ; men of political thought and culture 
 (who are the natural enemies of these and the 
 best make-weights against them) should be 
 boycotted and handicapped by this old, absurd, 
 and empty illusion, indoctrinated in other days, 
 by other men, and for other purposes. That this 
 
THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 235 
 
 is so there can be little doubt. When John 
 Morley, for example (a typical instance of the 
 deep and cultured political thinker), had made 
 his way into the Cabinet independently of the 
 Press, both Lord Salisbury and Lord Randolph 
 Churchill (God save the mark !) took the oppor- 
 tunity of referring to the appointment in public ; 
 and while admitting his eminence in literature, 
 questioned whether a mere ' literary man' was fit 
 to administer the affairs of a great country ; and 
 in both instances, I observed, the remark was 
 not only received with applause by the respective 
 audiences (as was natural from the ideas with 
 which they had been indoctrinated), but was 
 acquiesced in, as far as common decency would 
 permit, by a large section of the Press. So 
 deeply indeed had both the Public and the Press 
 been imbued with this old illusion of the Times, 
 that it never seems to have occurred to them 
 that both Lord Salisbury and Lord Randolph 
 Churchill had themselves made their way into 
 the Cabinet because they were ' literary men': 
 the former, because of his power of caustic 
 epigram which pleased the cultivated, and was 
 a relic of the time when he was a Saturday 
 Reviewer; the latter, because he was a literary 
 
236 THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 ' bruiser' and lampooner who had pleased the 
 mob ! And yet after all this objection and 
 hesitation shown to Mr. Morley before and at 
 the time of his entering the Cabinet, he had 
 only to be in it a month or two when, hey, 
 presto ! he is suddenly transformed from the 
 'doctrinaire' to the ' statesman ' (as if his mode 
 of argument and debate after entering the 
 Cabinet could have differed in any respect from 
 that adopted while he was outside it) ; all the 
 other political thinkers meanwhile who were still 
 without the fold, having the door shut in the 
 face of their advancement (by reason of the 
 prejudice excited against them as 'doctrinaires') 
 until they shall be able to make their way into 
 it either by turning their wits to epigram 
 making, political lampooning, or some other 
 species of phrase-mongering, or by taking the 
 ' stump ' and going the round of the country on 
 the ' grand tour.' Even the Times itself, which 
 was, and still is, the main repository of this illusion 
 and prejudice ; and which still professes to over- 
 rule the decisions of Cabinets ; — what is its editor 
 but a ' doctrinaire ' t and what are the political 
 arguments by which it advocates or rejects any 
 course of policy but (by its own definition) the 
 
THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 237 
 
 arguments of a doctrinaire? So that as effect 
 and upshot of this really poor illusion we have 
 this curious result, that if a man belongs to the 
 lower or lowest type of literary man, if he is a 
 maker of epigrams, a punster, or even a literary 
 lampooner like Lord Randolph Churchill (and 
 so is either useful in the House as a party 
 skirmisher, or out of it pleases the dilettante by 
 his epigrams, or the mob by his violence of 
 language), he can be almost assured of attaining 
 a seat in the Cabinet and councils of State, 
 and so becoming a ' Statesman ' ; while, on the 
 contrary, if he is the high type of literary man — 
 the wide and cultured political thinker like Mr. 
 Stuart Mill or Mr. Morley — he can barely attain 
 a seat in the House (let alone in the Cabinet), 
 because of the prejudice excited against him by 
 the Press ! But the absurdity reaches its climax 
 when we consider that it is not even of the 
 best literary men in their own line that Cabinet 
 Ministers and Premiers are made, but only of 
 such a scratch assortment as by other means — 
 wealth, position, local influence, and the like — have 
 succeeded in making their way into the House. 
 For I will undertake to find in a single article 
 of the Saturday Review more epigrammatic 
 
238 THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 power than in a dozen speeches of Lord Salis- 
 bury ; more real humour, fun, and effective 
 political caricature in a single number of Punch 
 than in half-a-dozen nights' debates ; and more 
 real insight into political facts and their relations, 
 connections, and meanings in a single copy of 
 the Spectator, than in all the collected speeches 
 by which Lord Randolph Churchill rose to 
 power. And yet if the one set of men appeared 
 on a political platform to solicit the suffrages 
 of their fellow subjects, the fact of their being 
 literateurs, even political literateurs, would detract 
 from, rather than add to, their chances of success 
 as being ' doctrinaires ' ; while the others would, 
 as K statesmen,' strike the stars with their sub- 
 lime heads. And with what further result ? 
 Why this, — that men whose shoe-latchets Cabinet 
 Ministers, in that very line by which they rose 
 to power, would be unworthy to unloose, are 
 obliged in the great problems of society and 
 the world to subordinate their own special and 
 peculiar genius ; and to become to these, ministers, 
 train-bearers, and satellites merely. Here, for 
 example, is Lord Randolph Churchill, whose 
 spoken or written thoughts or style never rise 
 above the level of the most ordinary country 
 
THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 239 
 
 newspaper ; who, I will venture to say, could no 
 more write a connected treatise on Politics, 
 Political Economy, Political History, or the like, 
 that first-rate literary men would recognize and 
 pass, than build the pyramids ; yet when he 
 brings his poor stock-in- Tade of literary ware — 
 his ' immense deliberation,' * tremendous liabili- 
 ties,' c prodigious imbecility,' ' sinister machin- 
 ations/ &c. — to the House of Commons ; and 
 firing them off recklessly at friend and foe alike, 
 has them blown around the world by the Press ; 
 he soon comes to bestride the political world ; 
 and literary men of great reach and ability are 
 forced to walk between his legs and find them- 
 selves what independent foothold and leverage 
 they may. But this illusion, bred and propagated 
 by the literary men of the Press themselves, is 
 sadly avenged on them. For to be condemned 
 to go through this life studying and discussing 
 (as if they were serious political achievements) 
 such mere paltry literary phrases as € the policy 
 of scuttle,' ' Whigs bathing," ' rescue and retire,' 
 ' extinct volcanoes,' and the like — I never think 
 of it without being reminded of those priests of 
 the Grand Lama of Thibet, who regarded his 
 very excrement as of so sacred and sovereign 
 
240 THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 a nature, that they reverently collected it, and 
 with their own hands patiently worked it up into 
 dough pills for the cure and salvation of the 
 world. And thus the tendency to choose the 
 Demagogue which arises from the illusion of 
 ' happy phrases ' and of the ' grand tour ' with 
 which the press is imbued, is aggravated by the 
 further prejudice excited against men of real 
 thought and culture by this illusion of the ' doc- 
 trinaire? Under these circumstances the reader 
 will judge whether, with its manifold mops, the 
 Press is likely to succeed in keeping out the 
 evils that come with the advancing sweep of 
 Democracy, or the Demagogue that rides on 
 the crest of its wave. 
 
 Such then are the three great intellectual 
 illusions under which the Press labours at the 
 present time — the illusion of ' happy phrases/ of 
 the ' grand tour,' and of the ' doctrinaire? — each 
 of which has a tendency to precipitate on us the 
 Demagogue rather than to defend us from him. 
 
 Now if the conclusions arrived at in the 
 present and preceding chapters be true, and if 
 I have been guilty of no exaggeration of fact 
 (for some exaggeration of phrase perhaps was 
 inevitable to emphasize my meaning), they should 
 
THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 241 
 
 hold good in the future as well as in the present 
 and past ; and so be capable of being brought 
 to a definite and practical test. And as I believe 
 that the relations of the Press to Politics and 
 the Public are likely to remain pretty much the 
 same as they are now through the whole of what 
 may be called the Newspaper Era ; and as, further- 
 more, I consider that no speculative Thinker is, 
 vulgarly speaking, ' worth his salt ' unless his 
 opinions lie so close to the central and moving 
 tendencies by which society is impelled, that they 
 will in their general scope and direction bear 
 the strain of prediction, — to this test I am accord- 
 ingly willing to submit them. And hence I am 
 prepared to affirm : — 
 
 (1) That in all large popular and representative 
 bodies, where Government is carried on by Debate 
 and by the rotation of Parties, there must at all 
 times and places be a tendency for the Dema- 
 gogue or Phrase-monger, unless specially guarded 
 against, to rise to power. 
 
 (2) That in the Newspaper Era of democracies,, 
 when the Press (as at present among ourselves) 
 is from circumstances obliged to renounce its 
 high and proper function as the impartial judge 
 and ivinnower of reputations, and to become a 
 
 R 
 
242 - THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 mere organ for focussing, concentrating, and in 
 the end echoing and reflecting the public opinion 
 of the different parties in the State ; when (with 
 Demos sitting as judge) it follows pen in hand 
 the track of rival political orators and epigram- 
 matists, reporting their public and parliamentary 
 speeches at full length for the breakfast-table, 
 and (itself under the illusion of \ happy phrases/ 
 or forced to appear so) picks out their epigrams 
 as particular plums in the banquet, setting them 
 flying around the world to be read of all ; you 
 can predict with as much certainty that the 
 Phrase-monger and Demagogue will become 
 triumphant in Politics, and that to the best 
 performer in these lines the best places in the 
 government will fall (provided all start even), 
 as you can that the like success will attend his 
 brother of the theatre or Music-Hall; while 
 political thinkers of insight and culture (who are 
 the natural enemies of the Phrase-monger and 
 Demagogue) are kept out of power by the pre- 
 judice excited against them as ? doctrinaires ' by 
 the Press. 
 
 (3) That if, on the other hand, one of a number 
 of political aspirants of equal promise should 
 by chance or circumstance get the start of the 
 rest, and by being first in the field (doing the 
 
THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 243 
 
 c grand tour/ and making himself for the time 
 being the mouthpiece of the party) so concen- 
 trate on himself the attention of the entire Press 
 day by day as to make his name a household 
 word ; you will then have as leader, a hap-hazard 
 leader, — a man of real ability or of none, as the 
 case may be, — and political reputations will be 
 seen to rise or fall in relation to each other 
 largely in proportion to the prominence with 
 which respective politicians keep themselves 
 before the public eye. 
 
 (4) That, owing to the relation of the Press 
 to Party Politics, and the pressure thus put upon 
 it, individual newspapers sitting in political judg- 
 ment will be obliged to see brilliancy and wit 
 in the efforts of the men thus thrust into positions 
 of importance, which, were they sitting in literary 
 judgment, they would pass by with contempt 
 and reprobation; and will be obliged to find 
 in political platitudes such as may be any night 
 heard at a boys' debating school, masterpieces' 
 of statesmanship and genius. 
 
 (5) And worse than all, that, as we saw in the 
 case of Lord Randolph Churchill, the Press 
 (having to reflect and echo, and not to direct 
 the opinion of the party and the hour) while 
 not denying that a course of unscrupulous 
 
 r 2 
 
244 THE ILLUSIONS' OF THE PRESS. 
 
 conduct, which on any theory of reward and 
 punishment should have consigned its author to 
 political damnation, has really been the means 
 of his political apotheosis ; assents to it not only 
 without reprobation, but (as one sees between 
 the lines) with a kind of secret admiration ; thus 
 indirectly encouraging all ambitious men to 
 reach at political power by these or the like 
 unworthy means ; and so rendering it probable, 
 nay certain, that in future (and indeed so long 
 as the present relation of the Press to Parliament 
 and the Public lasts) to the vices of the political 
 Phrase-monger and Demagogue to which the 
 Press must lead us, you will have to add the 
 vices of what Mr. Goldwin Smith calls the 
 i political scoundrel.' 
 
 ' And now I have done. I have traced in a 
 general way the career of Lord Randolph 
 Churchill from the time of his emergence on 
 the political horizon, to the time of his accession 
 to power. I have described the vicissitudes of 
 his rise, the impressions made by his perform- 
 ance on the House, the Press, the Public, and 
 his own Party, at the various stages of his career ; 
 and the way in which these various elements of 
 opinion acted and reacted on each other (each 
 heightening and intensifying the rest), until his 
 
THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 245 
 
 reputation, which started on an admitted basis 
 of levity and unscrupulousness, grew (by the 
 mere echo and reverberation of itself in the 
 Press as he went along) in bulk and importance, 
 like a snowball, rather by the accumulation of 
 the same than by the incorporation of new and 
 higher elements, until, filling the political horizon, 
 and tinged by imagination, it stood out against 
 the sky transformed into a colossal image of 
 political power and greatness. I next, in order 
 to discover the real basis of power and ability 
 on which so huge a superstructure had been 
 reared, submitted his political performances to 
 analysis ; and found that as regards his Oratory 
 (which I had good opportunity of comparing 
 with both great and ordinary models) it would 
 with its slow, harsh, and leaden delivery, un- 
 relieved by any gleams of genial humour, 
 brilliancy, or wit, and grinding along in a sullen 
 monotony of vituperation and abuse, instead of 
 entitling him to become a Minister of the Crown, 
 have given him not even a third-rate position 
 at Cogers' Hall ; and that as regards his States- 
 manship, nowhere in the long line of speeches 
 by which he rose to power, and through which 
 I had to wade, did one single political principle, 
 observation, or reflection emerge which could 
 
246 THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 with fairness be regarded as above the level of the 
 most ordinary and current platitude ; that instead 
 of the grasp and comprehension of the Statesman, 
 you had the arts of the Demagogue flourishing 
 in all their luxuriance throughout — arts which I 
 then proceeded to illustrate at full length, and in 
 abundance of detail. But knowing well that the 
 dazzling radiance of his success would not only 
 palliate and gild the deep reprobation of his rise, 
 but would (in spite of all I could say) be held as 
 symbol and guarantee of a wide sea of hidden 
 and unfathomable power yet to be revealed ; and 
 perceiving as I did that his rise was due, not to 
 any particular ability or virtue in himself, but 
 to defects in the institutions which permitted and 
 even aided it ; I felt that my demonstration would 
 have little effect, unless I could put my finger on 
 those flaws and spots in our political system which 
 permitted so great a success to erect itself on so 
 slender a stock of ability ; and so show that his 
 rise, instead of being unnatural, was, when well 
 seen, precisely what under favourable circum- 
 stances you could have predicted, and can predict 
 again. With this object in view I then entered 
 on an examination of our present democratic 
 institutions, — their dangers, their tendencies, 
 their safeguards, and the like, — and at last came 
 
THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 247 
 
 to the breach in that ring-fence which hedges 
 the approaches to power through which not 
 only he had entered in, but through which his 
 successors may still follow. I showed that the 
 only institution which had the power and prestige 
 necessary to keep out the Demagogue — viz. the 
 Newspaper Press — was the one which, instead of 
 shutting him out, freely invited him in ; and on 
 inquiring finally how this curious result arose, 
 I found it due in the first place to the almost 
 inevitable relation at present existing between 
 the Press on the one hand, and Parliament and 
 the Public on the other ; in the second place, to 
 certain great intellectual illusions with which the 
 Press is imbued — illusions which have a direct 
 tendency to precipitate the Demagogue on us, 
 and not to defend us from him. In this way 
 I have endeavoured to make it apparent that the 
 success of Lord Randolph Churchill on the poor 
 stock of ability with which I have credited him, 
 is not a miracle, but is a necessary result of 
 political conditions existing at the present time ; 
 and that under favouring circumstances a like 
 success could be predicted again to-morrow. 
 
 And now in conclusion I desire to say, that 
 feeling as I do that in the rise of Lord Randolph 
 Churchill a greater blow than any in my time 
 
248 THE ILLUSIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 has been struck not only at those high intel- 
 lectual requisites for Statesmanship which we 
 expect in the rulers of a great Empire, but at 
 political morality itself; as well as at all those 
 great ideals of thought, conduct, and action 
 which men hold most dear ; and feeling also that 
 the fact that so great a success could be reared 
 on such ability and conduct has already let down 
 the tone of political honour to a depth from 
 which it will not again easily emerge (for who, 
 with this splendid example before him, will hesi- 
 tate to misrepresent, to exaggerate, to lampoon, 
 to caricature, and to abuse, when such a course, 
 if not openly applauded, yet secretly favours 
 rather than retards, both with the Press and the 
 Public, the chances of that very success which 
 with the majority of mankind is itself the sign 
 of greatness) ; I determined that no effort of 
 mine, however inadequate, should be spared to 
 direct the attention of the Public, and especially 
 of all leaders of opinion, to the subject ; and so 
 to make a repetition of a like success by the like 
 discreditable arts difficult if not impossible. 
 
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 NOV I r 1981 i i 
 
 .80*0 OCT 16 19111 
 
 LD21A-40m-ll,'63 
 (E1602slO)476B 
 
 General Library 
 
 University of California 
 
 Berkeley