The San Francisco call., 1896-06-21
Parliament Dare Not Ignore the
Demand That Rhodes
Be Tried.
PLIGHT OF A TORY MAJORITY.
Unable to Pass the Education Bill
Over Numerically Weak
Opposition.
tCopyright 1896 by the New York Times.l

LONDON, ENG, June 20.-Although
Parliament as an institution is good
many hundred years old in England its
capacity for novelty is by no means ex-
hausted. We are witnessing something
now at Westminster which no one has ever
seen before-that is, the spectacle of a
party with $50 majority quite unable to
pass its principal measure. Those who
say frankly that the education bill is dead
are probably nearest the truth. The pro-
longed and anxious Cabinet councils and
the personal conferences among groups of
Ministers which have been held all the
week are going on still with view to
finding something to tell the party on
Monday which will not be confession of
blank hopelessness; but it is not likely
that they will succeed.
In most other parliamentary countries a
majority is always primarily a majority,
and it behaves as such. In England
alone can you find a majority of immense
dimensions, armed with the powerful
and sufficient weapon of closure and with
no opposition worth considering, which
suddenly stops on the path it has marked
out to follow, meditates, gets nervous, ex-
amines it's conscience fearfully and finally
turns tail in panic of Its own creation,
trampling on its leaders and abandoning its
party baggage in undignified, unintelligi-
BILE fight.
That is how the situation reveals itself
to the superficial view. A closer examina-
ton, however, shows something more and
better. 1t shows that Englishmen are
really governed by reason, and that not
even a majority of $50, bound together by
perhaps the strongest disciplinary ties
that any modern British party has known,
can be dragooned into passing bill which,
upon reflection, it sees would be bad for
the country.
That is the true explanation of what has
happened. 1t is also true of course that
Balfour has proved himself altogether un-
equal to the task of managing this huge
Tory majority. No one wants him to re-
tire, because he is such nice fellow, but
everybody sees and admits that he is
grievous failure. There is much less di-
vision of opinion about his uncle, Lord
Salisbury, of whom the rank and file of the
party are bitterly sick, and for whom in
the bargain, they personally have no affec-
ton.
His foreign performances and his do
mestic statesmanship are alike incompre-
hensible to them and they fiercely blame
his bigot son, Lord Cranborn, for having
loaded the education bill with impossible
masses of sacerdotal and sectarian dead
weights. The Cecil family stock, in other
words, is down very low in Tory estima-
ton.
1t was easy to foresee, as these dis
patches did last autumn, that something
like this breakdown would occur. 1t is
not so easy to guess now from day to day
what shape events will take. Chamber
lain is moving cautiously about in the OBJ
scurity of the Unionists' welter, feeling
his way to secure profit for himself out of
the disaster. There is an indefinite feel
ing that next week he will assert himself
somehow and drag the party out of its
mess. He has hated the education bill
from the beginning and it's collapse leaves
him quite unscathed. If he were not lust
the man be is this crisis might bring h i'm
to the top with an irresistible rush, but
being what he is no one quite trusts him.
Possibly things might take shape so
that the Tories would consent to follow
him for little while as they did Disraeli,
but he lacks thu genius which enabled
Disraeli to convert that reluctant assent
INTO fervent loyalty.
Obviously next week is also to be q
Transvaal week. This interminable issue
alternately fades out of sight and then
bursts flaming upon the vision with the |
calculated regularity of planet. In some |
this new formal demand from
Pretoria for the Immediate trial of Rhodes.
Belt and Harris is the most serious phase |
which the whole business has yet as |
Because of the form in which the |
demand is put it is very difficult for the |
British not to tell Kruger TO mind his own
business, but they know very well that he |
is really in the right, and half of them
perhaps many more than half-will say so. |
1t is all an extremely delicate and difficult
question which the English, who are
deeply ashamed of the part they are made |
tn play in it, would gladly have kept quiet
till it was settled by silent press of time;
but these implacable, dogmatic Calvinists
Of Dutchmen may keep holding it up and
rubbing the nose of the British lion with
it until, as have always feared from the
outset, irritation gets the better of honor
here, and then the Englishman will kick
the Boer to pieces.
The English papers know a good deal
more about America than they used to.
and the press comments here on the st.
Louis Convention are quite conventionally
correct, though not especially interesting,
nasmuch as the London editors rarely
read anything except the National from
our side. Their opinion OF Mckinley Is
1ot high. but they do not seem to be
afraid of him, as might have been ex-
oected. The dear old Daily News, in its
cable dispatch achieved one very charac-
eristie blunder. 1t announced that "for
ice-President Mr.. George has been
,lected,'' and added that he is "a Hobart
If New Jersey"
What "a Hobart is, or how their Jer-
ey kind differs from others, the News did
lot explain. A letter was written to the
ditor, ingeniously begging information
IN this point, but it failed to get into
ype.
|