10 APRIL 1886, Page 5

MR. FORSTER.

TN Mr. Forster, England has lost a considerable statesman, who had an opinion of his own and dared act on it. That, and the consequent trust in his intellectual fortitude, is the reason, and the creditable reason, for the universal regret and sense of loss which have been created by his death. An effective though rugged speaker, Mr. Forster was not a great orator, and it would not be difficult to find among far inferior men speakers who would seem to the head of a Government more ready and more persuasive adjutants in debate. A most dexterous Parliamentary tactician, with a patience t.at nothing could exhaust and a firmness that nothing im- paired, he sometimes lost the full advantage of his powers by rousing a personal antagonism which to those who knew him intimately was unintelligible, but which nothing soothed away, and which distinctly diminished his value as a party leader. This happened with the Nonconformists in 1870, and with the Parnellites in 1880. One of the ablest, and often the most successful, of administrators, as witness the Education Act, he was rather a legislator than a governor, as witness Ireland ; and that is a type which in England, even in the worst days, has never wholly failed. It was not, therefore, either as debater, as party leader, or as administrator that men looked up with respect to Mr. Forster, so much as to a man who, with the full capacities of a states- man, was able to stand alone, who formed opinions for him- self, and who was not, as so many now are, dependent in the last resort on "light from below." He drew his light from within. He understood perfectly well that in a State like ours, opinion is the ultimate master : but he understood also that the leader's duty is to form as well as reflect opinion, and was intellectually wholly unsqueezable. This special quality, the result of moral honesty as much as of mental vigour, was perhaps manifested even more strongly in the great con- troversy over education than in Mr. Forster's subsequent Irish policy. The country, which was, as a whole, in favour of the compromise he suggested, hardly understood at the time, or, rather, did not understand at all, how terrible was the pressure applied by the Nonconformists to Mr. Forster personally. They had repeatedly worked with him, their favour had helped to make him, and they knew that on many subjects he was on their side. Though born and bred a Quaker—and Quakers on many lines of thought are never Dissenters—and subsequently deeply attached to the Church of England, the Nonconformists looked on Mr. Forster as bound to be specially their man. His Radicalism, they thought, was like theirs, and when he attained power he would, in a moderate but strong way, carry out their views. When, therefore, he declared for a denominational system as the only basis upon which it was possible to make education really national, the Nonconformists were furious, denounced their former leader as a renegade, resisted his proposals at every step, and poured upon him, privately and publicly, an amount of insult which, if less ferocious than the Pamellite diatribes, was infinitely more galling. Many of them never forgave him, he lost his chance of the leadership through their opposition, anti but for an unusual personal hold over his con- stituents, Tory as well as Liberal, he would have been sent hunting for a seat. Mr. Forster felt the attitude of his traducers, many of whom were among his oldest friends, most keenly. "They half break my heart," he said to the writer ; but he never swerved. He had convinced him- self that there was no other way "to cover England with good schools ;" that the conscience clause would protect religious liberty ; that the 25th clause, granting exemption of fees to the very poor, was essential if compul- sion was to come and to be tolerable ; and that the direct prohibition of religious teaching by universal statute would make half Englangpagan ; and he fought on with an inflexible decision, which at moments seemed to madden his foes. He carried his Bill, however ; the event proved him right ; and the national education of the United Kingdom rests upon the law which was due mainly to his toil and his unswerving strength of conviction.

This was the grand work which Mr. Forster did for his country and generation, and it would of itself be sufficient reason for the respect in which he was held ; but he showed the same characteristics in another field, where he was not victorious. He was not equally successful in Ireland, but in the midst of failures, he left on Englishmen, even when they doubted the wisdom of his acts, the same impression of conscientious firm- ness. He held that the duty of the British Government with respect to Ireland was to maintain the Union, to carry out, temperately but firmly, all laws, and to find some solution for the agrarian problem which should not involve robbery ; and to those opinions he steadily adhered, struggling on to his end undismayed even by the hatred of a nation, though he felt it to the depths of his being. Mr. Forster had, during the Irish famine acquired a great liking for the people of Ireland. He believed that they could be reconciled by a firm government ; and besides having the Quaker horror of bloodshed in his very veins, he was wholly opposed to a policy of mere repression. Unfortunately, it became his duty to coerce—that is, to re- establish the authority of law—and he judged it best to do it through a widespread system of arreets, which irritated the people as much as courts-martial would have done, without in the least alarming them. They did not care for six months' detention, when the reward was, for the leaders, secure seats in Parliament, and for the rank and file, reputation as patriots ; and they defied the law, pouring out on its presumed author the concentrated malignity of a whole people. The Invincibles sentenced him to death, and but for accidents so unaccountable that they looked like interventions of Providence, they would have executed the sentence. The people railed at "Buckshot Forster through their journals in language that was scarcely sane, while their members, night after night, with a pitiless malignity, subjected him to the torture of questions every one of which was intended to be either an insult, a threat, or an annoyance. Our Parliamentary system lends itself too easily to this form of assault, and it was used with the cool cruelty only possible to men in whom political passion had overwhelmed alike justice, courtesy, and self-respect. Mr. Forster, who, under his rough exterior, was one of the most sensitive of men, full of tenderness and sympathy for individuals, and full, too, of the Quaker horror of oppression for peoples, bore that situation for two years without flinching, without modifying his course, and without, so far, at least, as the world could see, changing his opinions, which he repeated, after the gravest consideration, from his sick-bed. Ireland, he believed, must be ruled temperately and justly, but with firmness, or it could not be ruled at all. He bore the pressure of a nation's hate as he had borne the pressure of the spite of sects, entirely unmoved, and refused to give way even when his colleagues, who saw clearly that there had been no success in his management of Ireland, refused him the extra powers which, after the murders of the Phcenix Park, were granted to his successor. That the final inci- dents of the struggle left him unembittered we shall not assert, for they would have so left no one. Mr. Forster, we believe, after leaving for two years hourly danger to his life, after working,

as he always worked, as if the day had only twelve hours, and after enduring for two Sessions the outrages of the Irish Members, outrages the more painful because he was conscious of his own sympathy for the Irish people, felt himself deserted by his colleagues, and occasionally punished them with blows which wore resented by those who still remained his friends and theirs. He was, however, so little embittered as to Ireland, or brought to despair, that he voted for the extension of the Irish franchise, and to the end of his life drew a full distinction between the Irish people, and the faction which, in his judgment, while using its name, deprived it even of liberty to obey the law. Such fortitude in opinion is becoming daily more rare, and it gradually became recognised by the country, till, as the struggle grew hotter and disintegration seemed to draw closer, the Moderate Liberals once more recognised Mr. Forster as one of the men without whose assistance their Cabinet could not be formed. Unfortunately, his enemies in Ireland had done their work. Incessant anxiety, never-ending work, and bitter disappointment had sapped a constitution originally strong ; and when he was attacked on the Continent by some one of the maladies which produce blood-poisoning, he had not strength to recover from the assault. He lingered long, more than eight months ; but from the first those around him entertained the gravest fears, and at last he sank, a good soldier of the State, who had made some mistakes, and even lost some battles, but who had won one great victory, and under any stress of battle or storm had carried the standard high.

There has often been discussion of late as to Mr. Forster's true party. We believe him to have been from first to last a Radical of the old and better type, modified by two influences, —one, his Quaker training, which had made of him a real philanthropist, who could be furious at injustice, especially to the weaker races of mankind ; and the other, a profound con- viction that the greatness of England, her direct strength, and power in extremity, of intervening, is one of the few securities for the happiness and progress of mankind. He had dreamed a dream of which Imperial Federation was only a part, a dream of a cordial alliance between all the peoples who spoke English, an alliance in the shadow of which all weak States that chose might rest secure, and the world be gradually and willingly brought under the domain of law. To the fulfilment of this dream—one of the noblest ever entertained, and yet not out- side the limits of the practicable—the greatness of England is essential ; and therefore Mr. Forster, though always convinced that the people should be governed for the people and through the people. was also an Imperialist, utterly unwilling to part from any English-speaking country, and resolved not to resign one of the many "trusts," like India, which had been com- mitted to the English race. We are still far from such an alliance ; but those who regarded the deceased statesman as a "mere Englishman," and therefore narrow, are as far from the truth as the Irishmen who thought one of their best and truest friends a mere enemy of their country and nationality.