In the doubt as to your movements I direct to Hawarden, where I hope you will see the excellent, learned, homely, humble Bishop of Chester, whose virtues ought to disarm even the recalcitrant Dean.[[232]] In about two months I hope we shall meet.
*****
St. Martin Sept. 10, 1884
I was able to realise your late experience,[[233]] even to the tones of voice in certain passages, and I envied you. It must make one change. He[[234]] cannot any longer elaborately and perversely ignore the fact that he himself is the life and the force of the Liberal party. His reception by Midlothian in 1880, when he did not appear as a candidate for office, constrained him to become Prime Minister; and the more definite issue laid before Midlothian in 1884, still more emphatically answered, determines that he must remain P.M. Just as he accepted the consequences then, when they involved withdrawal of public declarations, he must accept them now, when they compel, and are very definitely designed to compel, the surrender of private aspirations.
The public voice has spoken this time more loudly and more consciously. It would not be right towards the country, but especially towards his colleagues, to obey it then and to resist it now. It would be not only a breach of the contract now made by something more than implication, but a yielding up of the party to its enemies in an inextricable crisis. I have not the least doubt that the position will be so understood.
I think less of the gain which the Ministry derives from the policy, the limitation and the enormous effect of the speeches. It is possible, I think, to detect a weak place in them. When one speaks in answer to opponents who are present, and who state their own case, the thing to do is to demolish it. But when one addresses the public, in the absence of debate, it is often good policy to state the opposite case in one's own way, prior to demolition; one's own way is the way one would state it if it was one's own: and everybody knows that he would make the Tory position more logical, more plausible, and stronger than they make it themselves, if he was on their side. It is a process one has to go through for oneself, to see what the adversary's case looks like, stripped of all the passion, ignorance, and fallacy with which he presents it. We are not sure we are right until we have made the best case possible for those who are wrong; and we are strictly bound not to transform the sophisms of the advocate into flaws in his case.
An intelligent Tory might say that this figure or precept of rhetoric was not followed, and that their argument was presented, not unfairly, but not at its best.
Of course he would see the point of the speeches in the restraint of agitation, and the offer to make terms. I hope—against hope—that this moderation is founded on knowledge of what is going on among the Tories. One sees signs of collapse in their policy of reform, but not in their determination to resist, and my own impression is that even Wemyss meant to fight it out, only in another way. But if there is no collapse, I see no resource except the agitation which Mr. Gladstone still deprecates.
To my mind the most significant passage was that in which he spoke of the probable fall of several Ministries. That means that the Home Rulers are going to be the arbiters of party government. That means ruin to the Liberal party. Many Liberals see the moment looming when they will have more sympathy with a party led by moderate Conservatives than with a party inspired by Radical Democrats. The looming will be quickened by the necessity of presenting a front to the Irish. But that is only a small part of the argument accumulating against retirement before the next Parliament, when the new constituencies will be fixed for generations.