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famous Grand Vizier and of Shahab Eddin Suleiman Bey, the well-known publicist. And the threat was carried out. One afternoon a fortnight later, Samim Bey, who had just quitted his friend, Mouhtar Bey, was shot dead in Stamboul. He was only twenty-six years old, and he left a widow and four children. The juge d'instruction, whose function it is to hear the evidence and say whether there is a prima facie case against anyone, heard the witnesses but refused to prosecute. The officer, XBey, was promoted; he now occupies an enviable position near the person of the Sultan.

Under such conditions it is natural that the Committee should carry its eagerness for the retention of power to the extreme point of readiness to fight, and fight hard for it. The cardinal fact for Turkey, and indeed for Europe, is this resolve of the Committee to resist, by foul means or fair, every attempt, constitutional or other, to wrest the reins of power from their hands. Said Pasha is the Grand Vizier whom they have chosen as their champion; and his recent attempt to alter the Constitution is a significant strategical move. It closes the legal door to the redress of intolerable grievances. The interest of Europe is accordingly centred at its highest pitch in the struggle which is now impending, and in which there is as yet no protagonist. It is well to remember that this contest is but the culminating point of a slow process which is radically changing Turkey's status for the present and permanently altering her direction in the future. As soon as a treaty terminates the war and responsibilities are fixed, the chassez-croisez of the ins and outs' will begin; and, unless Damad Ferid Pasha, Sadik Bey, and their political friends come forward quickly and apply drastic remedies unstintingly, the 'sick man' will be well launched on the second phase of his lingering illness, and the interested Great Powers will discern their way more clearly towards the last political Eldorado.

E. J. DILLON.

Vol. 216.-No. 430.

S

Art. 12. THE DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE AND THE LIBERAL UNIONISTS.

1. The Life of Spencer Compton, Eighth Duke of Devonshire. By Bernard Holland, C.B. Two vols. London: Longmans, 1911.

2. The Life of George Joachim Goschen, First Viscount Goschen. By the Hon. Arthur D. Elliot. Two vols. London: Longmans, 1911.

THE death of the Duke of Devonshire in 1907 was the turning of the last page in the longest, and in some respects the greatest, chapter in English political history. It was the end of the Whigs. The Whig party had, indeed, as Mr Holland points out, ceased to exist some years earlier. It lasted almost exactly two centuries, from the Revolution of 1688 to the Liberal Unionist acceptance of office in the Conservative Ministry of 1895. But, so long as the Duke of Devonshire lived, the Whig spirit was still visibly a great power in the political life of the nation. Perhaps no one in all the course of these two centuries embodied it quite so perfectly as he in whom it died.

What is a Whig? No word has suffered more from the looseness of definition which has always been characteristic of politicians. Throughout the eighteenth century almost every statesman, Harley as well as Somers, Chatham as well as Walpole, Burke as well as Fox, called himself a Whig. But Chatham and Burke, at least, were men of ideas; and, as we look back and watch the essence of Whiggism gradually solidifying, gradually taking its proper and definite shape, we see that no man of ideas can really be a Whig. The beginning of Whiggism is the Great Revolution, the most useful, the most sensible, the most legal of Revolutions, but also the least glorious, the least imaginative, the least connected, either as child or parent, with ideas. The Whigs who made it might talk of such theories as the original contract; but what they had in hand was for them, as all subsequent questions were for their true descendants, a matter of business and of common sense. Their whole turn of mind was equally far removed from the principle of the Divine Right of kings as taught by

Anglican bishops, and from that of the inherent lawfulness of rebellion and the rule of the saints which inspired the conscience and excused the ambition of Cromwell. Things rather than words, practice rather than theory, a working solution for the moment rather than the establishment of any eternal principles-these were from first to last the characteristics of the Whigs. And no one illustrated them more exactly than their last and, perhaps, most honourable exponent, Spencer Compton Cavendish, who was for half a century one of the principal figures in English politics as Marquis of Hartington and finally as Duke of Devonshire.

His Life was awaited with more than common interest. It was not merely that he was more universally respected and trusted than any other statesman of recent years. Indeed, the qualities that won him the special confidence of the nation were not at all of the sort that make for an exciting biographical story. But it was known that the book was to be written by his former private secretary, Mr Bernard Holland; and those who knew anything of the two men felt that there was a pleasant piquancy in the thought that the life of Lord Hartington was to be written for us by the interpreter of the German mystic, Jacob Behmen. It may be said at once that Mr Holland has accomplished his task admirably, and has given us one of the two or three best political biographies of the Victorian epoch. Assuredly no one was ever less of a Whig than Mr Holland. His previous books had made that clear; but the fact is placed beyond a doubt by his treatment of certain episodes in the Duke's life, notably by his evident feeling about the mission of Gordon, so very different from the attitude of his hero or of Lord Cromer; and again still more conspicuously by his unsympathetic account of the Duke's resistance to the Tariff Reform schemes of Mr Chamberlain. That resistance seemed necessary to the Duke, not because Mr Chamberlain was unorthodox, but because he failed altogether to prove that his schemes would work. The Duke was not the least moved by abstract economic arguments, of which he characteristically said that he never could answer any on either side; but solely by the practical results which seemed to him likely to follow.

It was the same with regard to the Imperialist aspect

of the question. The Duke cared as much about the Empire as Mr Chamberlain, and began caring much sooner. But he was an Imperialist who wanted to see his way; while Mr Chamberlain—and Mr Holland-are Imperialists who live by faith and are prepared for faith's daring and uncertain ventures. The result of this lack of sympathy is that this last section is the only unsatisfactory part of the book. It is written rather lifelessly and perfunctorily; and the author does not appear to have taken pains to understand exactly the Duke's attitude, still less to point out that, while the lapse of eight years has weakened the pure Cobdenite position, it has confirmed the Whig doubts about a workable plan of Tariff Reform. Mr Holland is even occasionally inaccurate in detail. For instance, the Duke was never President of The Unionist Free Trade League.' That body was founded by Sir Michael Hicks Beach, and was dissolved on the foundation of The Unionist Free Trade Club' under the Duke's presidency. Nor did this club perish for lack of funds or support. It died of our party system, under which a voter must vote either Liberal or Conservative; the result being that the members of the club found themselves forced at elections to sacrifice either Free Trade or Unionism, and differed as to which should be the victim.

·

For another and more important inaccuracy Mr Holland is hardly to be blamed, since his error, if, as we believe, it is an error, is one so common as to be almost universal. In his account of the Cabinet differences as to the Budget of 1903, and particularly as to the repeal of the shilling duty on corn, he implies that the repeal was entirely due to Mr Ritchie. But we have very high authority for believing that what actually happened was this. Mr Chamberlain, as is well known, demanded that the duty should be used for the purpose of providing a preference for Canadian corn. To this Mr Ritchie absolutely refused to assent, to the extreme annoyance of Mr Chamberlain, who thought that the Cabinet had, in the previous November, agreed to this policy. Mr Ritchie's resistance prevailed, and no system of Preference was adopted. But, apart from the question of Preference, Mr Ritchie was quite willing that the tax should remain; and the truth is that the repeal of the

duty was due not to him, but, strange as it will sound, to Mr Chamberlain. Mr Ritchie was ready to retain the duty on the principle on which Sir Michael Hicks Beach had imposed it, namely, as a means of obtaining revenue; but he would have nothing to do with Preference. Mr Chamberlain, being unable to get both, refused to have either; he preferred not to have the duty at all if it could not be used as he desired; and the duty was therefore dropped.*

This, however, as we have said, is not a mistake for which Mr Holland can be seriously blamed; and, apart from his treatment of the Free Trade controversy, the book is admirably done, more particularly that part of it which deals with the greatest event in the Duke's career, his successful resistance to Home Rule. That and the penetrating study of the gradual and reluctant but quite fundamental estrangement between Lord Hartington and Mr Gladstone are the most interesting things in a book every word of which is interesting to those who like political history, and doubly so to those who like to see how it is affected by the individual idiosyncrasies that make up the drama of human nature.

It is true that Mr Holland tells us very little of the Duke except the politician. He makes no attempt to be a Boswell; and, if he had tried, the materials would probably have failed him. It was not for nothing that the Duke was a Cavendish. Not even in that stronglymarked family of taciturn aristocrats, doing their duty from generation to generation, without enthusiasm, without illusion, without the slightest desire of praise or popularity, was there ever a man less likely to suffer himself to be made a motley to the view' of the newspaper public. Unlike Mr Gladstone in all ways, he was in none more unlike than in this. Mr Gladstone had so long made a diet of popular applause that he could not live without it. At least he must have public attention; if it could not take the form of a cloud of incense, rather than miss it altogether he would welcome it in that of a shower of stones. The Duke, on the other hand, was equally indifferent to applause and abuse, and much

* Since this paragraph was written, Lord Ritchie of Dundee, who was not our authority, has written to the 'Morning Post' (December 7) to say that it is not true that his father insisted upon the removal of the tax.

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