TOPICS OF THE DAY.
MR. GLADSTONE'S TASK.
ON Monday, Mr. Gladstone is to make his last great effort to prevent the political fusion of Great Britain and Ireland, by the construction of an elaborate structure of political locks and. sluices, which will tax all his powers of political engineering, and, we feel sure, tax them in vain. We can never sufficiently lament that he has added to the labours of Hercules with which his later life has been burdened, not a few of which were really splendid successes, this latest and most hopeless task of all, which must doom his great career to end in something like a tragic failure,--not merely the Quixotism of a tilting against windmills, but that less fascinating Quixotism which has transformed, in his imagination, agrarian terrorists into "babes and sucklings" to whom a divine strength is ordained. However, it is now too late to turn back. Mr. Gladstone must deliver his last charge against works which even he cannot carry. And we will, in anticipation of his great speech, point out to our readers what the insuperable obstacles are on which he has pledged himself to deliver his great but fruitless assault.
He has to satisfy and organise Irish nationalism, and yet, as he promised. in the Queen's Speech, to devise a Constitution which will "furnish additional securities to the strength and union of the Empire." That is a political problem of no ordinary difficulty, since whatever he does in one direction, he will undo by advancing in the other.
He has already stimulated the Particularism of every dis- tinct section of the people, a Particularism which is now bearing fruit in the separate organisation of the Welsh Members, and the cries of woe from the Scotch, who can neither endure the increasing impatience of Parliament with local Scotch business, nor persuade themselves to sanction any exclusion of Scotch influence from the rich field of English and Imperial enterprise. He has to secure Irish nationalism against the practical interference and meddling of the Imperial Parliament, and yet, at the same time, to assert and maintain the abstract right to interfere with courage and even emphasis. He has to reconcile the representation of Ireland at Westminster with the refusal to let Great Britain be represented in Dublin. He has either to solve a problem which he himself, when seven years younger than he now is, thought so unmanageable, that it surpassed the wit of man,—namely, to draw a clear dis- tinction between Irish and Imperial affairs,—or, if he does not attempt that, he has to persuade the English people deliberately to bow their necks to a monstrous injustice. And again, if he adopts the former alternative, he has to organise anew English and Imperial Administrations, so that it shall be possible for England to be ruled by one party in the State, while the Union is ruled by the other. Further, he has to instal in power across the Channel a; party which has left no stone unturned to undermine the laws of property and to defy the traditions of English policy, and to make believe very much that this will be far from a risky,—nay, a tranquillising and re- assuring course. Most paradoxical of all, Mr. Gladstone has to persuade Ulster either to accept a rule which will seem to her a gross and bitter humiliation, without multi- plying the internal feuds in Ireland ; or to mortify the excited nationalism of Ireland by withholding from the new regime the most prosperous and most powerful pro- vince in Ireland, and. so wounding the very pride of patriotism which it is sought to revive. If Mr. Gladstone can do all this, he is the greatest political conjuror of the age. He will show himself able to surmount obstacles which reach above the clouds, and to attain peace by stimulating all the worst jealousies of the hour.
And beyond all this, Mr. Gladstone ought to show,— what, we fear, that instead of showing, he will take for granted, though it is one of the weakest points in his case, —that Irish political life is not developing far more effec- tively and satisfactorily .for its own sake, under the con- ditions of free political competition with English political life, than it is at all likely to develop, if Mr. Gladstone has his way, and Ireland is thrown back into a separate political compartment of her own. Nothing seems to us more conspicuous than the advantage the Irish Members have gained during the last seven years by the necessity they have been under of agitating in Great Britain in order to carry the British constituencies with them. The Anti-Parnellites tell us, with perfect truth we have no doubt, that Irish constituencies, though they let the priests dictate to them how they shall vote, would never be guilty of the coarse corruption to which English electorates submit themselves,—in other words, of voting just as the man who can provide them the largest number of treats and Saturday excursions and illustrated. lectures and gratuitous musical entertainments, would have them vote. We fully believe that Irish constituencies are less open to material bribes of this kind than English constituencies, though they are more open to super- stitious influence and the dictation of the priest ; and long may they remain so. We agree with the Irish agitators that priestly dictation is the less ignoble political influence of the two, though it is not a legitimate one. But the competition of the Irish politicians with the more material and even (if you like) the more vulgar political mind of England has done them good, has sobered and weighted. them, has put common-sense into their speeches and taken gasconading out of them ; has made of them comparatively reasonable thinkers, who, instead of appealing to the wilder imagination, have learned to appeal to our political instinct and sagacity and the homely Saxon self-interest. The Irish rhetoric has improved as much under the discipline as a wild. Irish mare improves when yoked between two steady roadsters of English breed. The political discipline which the Irish most need is just what their Members get by the necessity, which Mr. Gladstone is, unfortunately, en- deavouring to remove, of bringing over English con- stituencies to their own mind. What they need is the habit of co-operating with our no doubt stupider, but also more sagacious and less fanciful, political mind ; and we see the result in the speeches of these Irish canvassers on English, as comparedwith their speeches on Irish, soil. The former are speeches which push aside the threats and the incitements and the political terrorism of the shillelagh and the bomb, and aim at putting arguments derived from national self-interest in a straightforward and common- place, even though frequently a humorous, way ; while the latter are still full of hectoring and covert threats, and impatience of compromise, and the notion that it is easier to frighten than to persuade. What the Gaseous gained from the Alsatians in France, the Irish have gained from the English in England ; and yet that is just what Mr. Gladstone wishes to deprive them of, by relegating them to their own insular solitude. According to our notion, Mr. Parnell, though he improved the discipline of his Irish followers by imposing on them the self-denying ordinance that they should refuse all offers of patronage under English Ministers, injured, instead of developing, them as politicians so long as they sat apart and sullen, and attempted no appeal to English notions of justice and expediency. But the moment they entered. upon a sys- tematic English canvass, they began to improve, and have since gained as much by their alliance with the Glad- stonians as the Gladstonians have lost. Now, what we wish to see is the continuation and development of this Irish appeal to English constituencies, which now professes to be merely tern porary, and limited solely to the purpose of carry- ing Home-rule. What we desire is to see it made permanent, so that Irish politicians shall always find that, for any great and conspicuous change, they must carry not only the fluid and fluctuating opinion of Ireland with them, but also the stolid and stable English opinion. Nothing would do them more good. Indeed, nothing has done them more good already. If Mr. Gladstone succeeds in compelling Irishmen to retreat once more, as regards at least all Irish questions, into their Irish solitudes, and in breaking off all co-operation with their duller and more earthly English compatriots, he will do them more harm than any glorifi- cation of Irish nationalism can possibly compensate. We have no jealousy at all of Irish nationalism so long as it is confined to the moderate Scotch limits, and is duly subordinate to the greater nationality of the United Kingdom. But that due subordination is just what it needs to make it worth anything, and that is what, of late years, it has been gaining from the mere necessity of securing English votes for sanctioning this mischievous retreat into the old isolation. What is needed is a remedy just the antithesis of Mr. Gladstone's,—not Irish segregation, but the blending of the dreamy Irish idealism with English common-sense, the remedy which Mr. Gladstone was steadily and wisely applying till 1885, when he suddenly turned round and proposed that fatal concession to the Irish dreamers which has hitherto heightened every Irish misery, and has pro- duced but one good effect, and that only temporary and accidental, the necessity of trying to obtain the consent of England to a step which England should for ever refuse ; though if the Irish can be persuaded to give up the end, and adopt the means for obtaining, not this single revolu- tion in method which is wholly injurious, but all the more substantial reforms which Ireland really needs, she would take a longer step in advance in her political evolution than any imaginable Constitutional change could ever secure her. Mr. Gladstone, for the last seven years, has been quite off the track of legitimate Irish advance.
Previous page
