FLACCIDITY.

Mount Ida Chronicle, Volume XLV, Issue XLV, 26 October 1917, Page 1

FLACCIDITY.

[By the Bight Hon. G. W. £. Russell, in the 'Daily News.'J

My recent article on ' Indication' was intended to convey a warning which, as individuals, we all need. But Governments are beset by an even, greater danger, which the learned might call flaccidity-' and the simple "flabbineas." The great Liddon, always excellent in the aptness of his Scriptural allusions, onco said, with regard to a leader who had' announced that he would "set his face" against a certain,-policy, and then gave way: "Yes, the dear man 'set his face''; but ho did not 'set it as a flint'—rather as* a pudding." To set one's face as a pudding is the characteristic action of all weak Governments. Lord Randolph Churchill once at-/ tracted notice by enouncing the homely ; truth that "the business of an Opposition is to oppose." A truth even more primary is that the duty of a. Government is 10 govern.—to set its face (not as a pudding, but as flint) against lawlessness and outrage ; to protect tho innocent and to punish the wrongdoer. This is a duty from which all weak Governments ahrink. If a Minister is not very suro of his position, if ho is backed not by a united party but by a haphazard coalition, if he is unduly anxious about his own official future, if Ins eye is nervously fixed on the next move of the jumping cat, he always fails to govern. He neither protects the law-abiding citizen nor chastises the criminal and the rebel. In this particular, there is no distinction of party. Tories can show no better record than-Whigs, nor Liberals, than Conservatives. It is a question of tho Governing Temper, which is as absolutely requisite to the character of the ruler as courage to the soldier or incorruptibility to the judge. THE HEREDITARY LEGISLATOR. It used to be held, and perhaps still is held, by what may be styled''the toadeating school of publicists, that thi6 governing temper was a hereditary gift transmitted by a long line of ancestors who in their successive generations had possessed it, and had used it on a large scale in the governance of Britain. " How natural," they exclaimed, "that Lord Nbzoo, whose ancestors have ruled half Loamshire since the Conquest, should have more notion of governing men than that wretched Bagman whose grandfather swept out the shop, and who has never- had, to rule anyone except a clerk and a parlormaid 1" This sounded plausible enough, especially in the days when Heredity wa6 everything, and when ancestors! habit was held to explain, and of necessary extenuate, all personal characteristics % but experience and observation proved it false. Pitt was, I suppose, the greatest Minister who ever ruled Britain; but his pedigree would have moved a genealogist to scorn. Peel was a Minister who governed so effectually that, according to Gladstone, who'served under him, his direct authority was ;felt in every department, high" or low, of the Administration over which ■ he presided ; and Peel was a very recent production of cotton. Abraham Lincoln was perhaps the greatest ruler, of the' modern world; and the quality! of his ancestry is a topic fit only to be handled in a lecture on 'The Self-made Men of History.' / THE RULING FACULTY. When we regard our own time, I should say that Joseph Chamberlain. had, of all English' statesmen I have ever known, both the most satisfactory ideal of government and the greatest faculty for exercising it. But the Cordwainers' Company was the school in which his forefathers had learnt the heart of rule.. _ Ancestral achievements, hereditary possessions, have nothing to do with the matter. What makes, a man a ruler of men, and enables him to ■ set his face as a Hint against wrongdoing, is a faculty born in himself—- " the soul that riseth with him, his life's star." And it has no more to do with politics than with pedigree. Sydney - Smith, though he was as whole-hearted a Reformer as ever breathed, knew that sternness towards crime was an essential part of government, and after the Bristol riots of 1831 he warned Lord Grey against nac r cidity with great plainness of speeclil "Pray do not be good-natured about Bristol. I must have 10 people hanged, and 20 transported, and 30 imprisoned. You will save lives by it in the end." ' It was a Tory "Government which, in the London riots of 1866, made, as Matthew : Arnold said: "An exhibition of mismanagement,, imprudence, and weakness al--1 most incredible." Next year the Fenians

blew up Clerkenwell Prison, and the same acute critic observed.: " A Government which dare not deal with a mob of any nation, or with any design, simply opens the floodgates to anarchy. Who can wonder at the Irish, who have cause to hate us, and ; who do not own their allegiance to us, making war on a State and society which has shown itself irresolute, and feeble?"'

But the head of that feeble State, the leader of that irresolute society,' was the fourteenth Earl of Derby, whose ancestors had practised tho. arts of government for 800 years.

THE CASE OF IRELAND. In Ireland the case is the same. Both parties have succeeded in governing, and both have failed, Mr Balfour;has been justly praised for his vigor, in protecting property and restoring order, but it was Lord Spencer and Sir . George Trevelyan who, four years before, had caught and hanged the assassins of.the Phoenix Park and had abolished agrarian murder. It was, alas! a Liberal Government that tolerated the Ulster treason, and so prepared the way for the Dublin rebellion. Highlyplaced and highly-paid flaccidity '' then reigned supreme, and produced its inevitable result. But last December we were assured that flaccidity had made way for firmness, and the pudding had been replaced by the flint. But the transactions of the last few weeks—one transaction in particular—seem worthy of our flabbiest days.

I turn my eyes homeward again, from Dublin to the House of Commons. The report of the Mesopotamia Commission has announced to the world a series of actions which every Briton feels as a national disgrace. Are the perpetrators of those actions to go unpunished? Arc they to return the honors, and emoluments, the confidence of their 'Sovereign, and the approbation of his Ministers? If so, flaccidity will stand revealed, as what in truth it has always been—the one quality which neutralises all other gifts and makes its possesor incapable of governing.