THE “EDINBURGH REVIEW,” ON THE PAST AND FUTURE OF THE WHIG PARTY.”

Globe, Volume I, Issue 41, 17 July 1874, Page 4

THE “EDINBURGH REVIEW,” ON THE PAST AND FUTURE OF THE WHIG PARTY.”

(From the “ Spectator.”) The “ Edinburgh Review ” has discovered the secret, and with the calm superiority of age and experience discloses it to the world. It knows why the Gladstone Ministry fell. It has all happened because “ in the Whig party lies the centre of gravity of Libeial politics in England,” because Mr Gladstone had swerved from that party towards the Manchester school, and because the bulk of the nation, being still Whig, has therefore rejected him. That he was not a Whig is true, for true Whiggery demands that its professor shall consider Christianity only an acceptable force in aid of police legislation but in what other way did Mr Gladstone deviate from the Whig creed ! If he had been elected, would not the Whigs still have followed him, or would his Whig colleagues, because of bis success, have fallen away from his banner ? It was not in the rush of his legislative career, not while he was sweeping away the Irish church, not, even when he meddled with the Whig ark, the absolute tenure of l.»nd. that he was deserted, but when lie drew hack bis hand, when be became quiescent, when be showed, malgrc lui, a disposition to govern in the Palmerstonian way. But he was not a Whig, and the people wanted a Whig, says the reviewer. Why did not they elect one, then ? Lord Granville, or Lord llartington, or even Mi’. Goschen would have been obeyed at once : but it never came, the people, instead, clamouring for the man who had “ dished the Whigs.” who is of all human beings the least like a Whig, who throughout all his writings has poured out the hottest, or rather most vitriolic, of his vials of wrath upon the Whigs ; who holds, and justly holds, that before bis own lineage the families of 1688 are gutter-blooded barbarians; who, if he ever put forward a cry he believed in, put forward the one which the Whigs exist in order to contemn, “ The Monarch and the Multitude.” It is true Mr Disraeli has selected a Cabinet which, were Lord Salisbury not in it, might be described as Old Whig on all but ecclesiastical subjects ; but the electors who shouted for him did not know whom he would appoint, nor, with the exception of the most determined of Tories, who was nominated, no doubt, by the people for an especial task, did they greatly care. They elected Mr Gladstone’s opponent, and, so far from preferring Whigs, dismissed so many of them that but for the power of a few families wiio happen to bo popular as well as pre-eminent in society, the party of 1688 would have received its coup do grace.