The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1884-02-23 00:00:00

PARTY WARFARE.

YFARS may come and years may go • but party
warfare goes on for ever. From go;
days of
Qeetr. Anne to those of Queen Victoria there
have been two great rival sets of politicians in
the Ftate, the Whigs and Tories at the begin-
Leng of the eighteenth century being quite as
active and as earnest in the exposition of their
creed as those in the declining years of the
nineteenth. Next to religion, politics un-
deubtedly arouse the strongest forces of op-
position of which the human heart is capable in
the way of manifestation. Not that the political
controversies of our own time are by any means
so bitter as they were a centuwy ago. It is just
a hundred years since William Pitt, a very young
man, of about three or four and-twenty, became
Prime Minhoer of England ; and Mr. Trevelyan,
V:e present Chief Secretary for Ireland, bets, in
his biography of Charles James Fox, shed £lOlllO
light upon the public life of that time. The in-
tellectnel encounters between Pitt and Fox in
the House of Commons are imperishable
reonuments of the stagnance of British etatea-
men, and will enrich the pages of Parliamentary
debate as long as our Constitution lasts or
history endures.
Pitt, "the pi:ot that weathered the storm,"
was at the helm ef State eighteen tempsstuous
years, from 1873 to 1801, a period embracing
some of the momentous events that ever happened
in European annals. When he tookoffice the vices
and iniquities of preceding reigns wale gather-
ing to a head in France, and the unmitigated
oppressions from which the people had suffered
so long, hung heavily over the nation. It was
during Pitt's premiership that the French
Revolution burst like a thunderclap upon an
amazed world, held it spell bound for years with
error at the excesses committed, and was at
last awed into submission by the iron hand of
oieon, who, when the time arrived for Pitt
temporarily to leave office, in the first year of
the present century, had become First oneul,
and tees Tepidly approaching the position which
he soon afterwards reached—that of Dictator of
Ccetinental Europe. Even at this distance of
tine :he echoes of the great coefficts in the Par-
liamentary arena seem to be heard amid the din
of the strife of our own days. There were
certainly giants in that far-off period, intel-
lectual gladiators who made the legislative
Collosenm ring with the thunders of their elo-
quence. After the death of Pitt and Fox, both
of whom were removed in 1806, Peel and
Brougham, Canning and Huskisson, Palmerston
and Russell, took up the story. Although Mr.
Gladstone was a colleague of both the last-men-
tioned statesmen, he belonged to a later genera-
tion of men. He was a quarter of a century
younger than Lord Palmerston, who was laid in
!-..ire grave in Westminster Abbey nearly twenty
years ago.
Whatever might have been the merits of the
intellectual wrestles between Pitt and Fox, or
Canning and Peel, there is little doubt that
those of our own time will hold their own in
comparison with any of them. Some of the
most famous of the Parliamentary duels of the
last five-and-twenty years have been between the
present Premier and his predecessor in office,
before Mr. Disraeli became the Earl of Beacors-
field and sought repose in the declining years of
a long life amid the cool shades and venerable
associations of the House of Lords. A man
need be no partisan to have the highest admira-
tion of the surpassing ability of a public man
either on one side or on the other. Liberals who
did not like the politics of Mr. Disraeli never
failed to recognise the surpassing genius of the
man. Conservatives who most strongly con-
demn the views of Mr. Gladstone, do not
hesitate to pay a tribute to the superiority of his
debating powers. Party spirit is not so
rancorous as it was in the days of Pitt and Fox;
but that is a very long while ago, and the
manners of men, both in Parliament and at
home, are now very different from what they
were a century ago. The home-thrusts given
in debate are even now, however, sufficiently
pointed to suggest the idea that rival statesmen
can scarcely be expected to be personal friends.
It is true that Mr. Gladstone and Sir Stafford
N orthcote sometimes apt ak of each other as "my
right hen, friend," but they were associated in
early life, the one as Minister and the other as
Private Secretary, and they cannot altogether
shmke off the memories of forty years ago. This
is an exceptional instance ; as a rule, while the
courtesies cf dot ate are observed, there is a COll-
- era"-:',. proportion of Parliamentary rough and
tnrabl, ii.)t likely to die out for a very long
time come.