THE "NEW SPIRIT IN POLITICS."
ONE of the defeated candidates at the last General Election Mr. John Page Hopps, who contested South Paddington with Lord Randolph Churchill, writing in the Inquirer of last week, gives a very good description of the change which has come over politics since the Home-rule Question has been started, but seems to miss all insight into the Unionist point of view even more completely than any of us miss the new enthusiasm which Mr. Gladstone has certainly succeeded in exciting for the policy of winning Ireland "by love." Mr. Hoppe describes so well the secret of the enthusiasm which really animates the more ardent Home-rulers, that we shall transfer some of his words to our own columns, for we quite agree with him that those Unionists altogether ignore the real significance of the situation who do not see that a new political emotion is fermenting in the Home. rulers' ranks, and that it is one which excites the utmost enthusiasm. This is what Mr. Hopps says, and, to our thinking, says very well, though we feel perfectly certain that the enthusiasm which the new ideas engender, praise- worthy as it is, is entirely inappropriate to the conditions of the case to which it is applied, and is as likely to lead to disaster of the most serious kind, as if it were to be invoked in favour of throwing open all the prison-doors in the British realm, disbanding the Army, dismissing the Police, and treating the possession of firearms or the use of bolts and bars as a culpable practice, as the stricter Quakers of the old regime used to regard it :— " Those of us who have been concerned in the political straggles of the past thirty years remember nothing like the peculiar tone and Spirit now so noticeable in the Liberal ranks and in this Hoine.rule campaign. It is no disparagement of our past to say that to an appreciable extent party interests entered into the old struggles and that both the leaders and led had all along a keen eye to the bearing of each 'reform' upon the party programme. Hence energy, heat, agitation, hard hitting, resolution ; bat no pity, tenderness' self. abandonment worth mentioning. But all that is altered now. Many of the old, seasoned Liberal politicians hardly know what to make of it, and some of them hardly know what to make of themselves. This Irish business has brought home to hundreds of thousands a sense of shame, a spirit of self.surrender, a feeling of brotherliness, quite new to us in party polities, and in a way that has given an entirely altered tone to our political meetings. One might almost say there is a kind of religion in it. We need to light for oar party ; now we are on a crusade in behalf of our long misunderstood and ill-used brothers and sisters across the sea. Once we fought to win something for our- selves; now we are willing to struggle and make sacrifices for others. Once we marched to the cry of Britons never will be slaves;' but now we burn with indignation at the thought of making other people slaves. We may be mistaken, but we believe we are for once true to the prophet's cry: 'What doth the Lord thy God require of thee, but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk !nimbly with thy God r "
And then Mr. Page Hoppa makes his application of his general view to the particular case in the following passage
The devotion to Mr. Gladstone is not by any means personal, still less is it the devotion of partisanship. It is a moral devotion, and is the symbol of consecration to an almost sacred cause. The most startling thing I ever heard in my life occurred at Notting- ham, when one of the speakers ended his brief speech with a great buret of prayer that fairly took one's breath away,—' Great God, prolong his life ! ' and the mighty audience almost sobbed its sadden Amen.' This is the spirit that has to be reckoned with in England, to.day ; and the men who are flippant or perverse, or masterful or obstinate, would do well to note it. We do not believe that the Irish people, for the sins of a few desperate men, should be treated as murderers, cattle-maimers, and rebels. We believe they have been cruelly misrepresented and ill-used. We believe they have earned the full right to take their lives into their own hands. We believe that they desire to live in peace, and to make Ireland prosperous and happy ; and we believe they will do this if we will give them a chance, and entrust to them, in the right spirit, the great duties and responsibilities which only a patriotic and an enterprising people would desire."
Now, we fully agree with Mr. Hoppe that he has found the secret of the new enthusiasm, and we recognise the general sin- cerity of the sentiment which inspires the more ardent of the Home-rulers. What he does not seem to understand is that the Unionists generally fully appreciate the force at work, and regard it as the very essence of the danger that such generous feelings as these are excited in favour of a policy to which, in
fact, they are quite inapplicable. And nothing can illustrate their inapplicability better than the curious passage in which Mr. Page Hopps says that the Home-rulers do not think that "the Irish people, for the sins of a few desperate men, should be treated as murderers, cattle-maimers, and rebels." Whoever proposed that they should be so treated ? What provision is there in the Crimes Act which could molest a single Irishman who wishes to abide by the law as we know it in England ? We have no objection in the world to the English Home-rulers showing their shame and humiliation at the heartless way ha which England formerly treated Ireland in any manner they please, except one which would add to that heartlessness the very gross aggravation involved in handing over a million or two loyal Irishmen to the vengeance of their bitterest foes. An act of penance which involves a repetition of the sin is not a sign of true penitence. We maintain that the Crimes Act is the protection of those who hate murder, cattle-maiming, and rebellion, against the few who use those vile instruments of terror to overawe the timidity of the many, and that what the Home-rulers, in their enthusiasm for their Irish brothers, propose, is to give up. Ireland to the control of persons like Mr. O'Brien, who has been spending all the last few years of his life in threatening men who wish to pay what they know to be due because they have contracted to pay it ; in warning jurors that they will suffer from the wrath of the people and of the future Govern- ment of Ireland, if they keep their oath to give an honest judgment on the evidence of crime with which they have to deal; and in denouncing the British government of Ireland ia words whose violence and truculence could not be exceeded if his aim were to excite a rebellion.
The Unionists are not surpassed by Mr. Gladstone in their eagerness to do true justice in Ireland. What we deny is that we can do such justice by giving over Ireland into the hands of a party such as this, a party that did its best to crush Mr. Gladstone himself in his first great efforts to do justice to Ireland, and that only supports him now because it sees that he is working in its interest, and will, if he succeeds, enable it to carry out the fierce and shocking threats with which the minority opposed to the revolutionary schemes have been denounced. We have said that "the new spirit in politics," so- far as we understand it, might just as well be applied to regions of political life with which Ireland has no special connection. Indeed, to some extent it is being so applied by those who are denouncing the police and commiserating the victims, as they call them, of our judicial system. The new spirit in politics is an indiscriminate application of the principles of generosity and trust to persons in whom, so far as experience can guide us, no trust can well be placed, and by whom. generosity will be repaid with cynical ingratitude. We are far, indeed, from applying such expressions to the Irish people, in whom we discern, and have always discerned, very many fine qualities, though not qualities which prevent them from falling under the control of unscrupulous leaders who bait their demands with promises of giving them their land for next to nothing, and who disguise the selfishness of their objects under the name of patriotism. What is there to distinguish the new enthusiasm in its application to the present Irish crisis, from the same kind of enthusiasm if it were to demand the abolition of our law against mutiny, for instance, or our law against desertion, or our law against rebellion, so far as it bears on any case in which it could be shown with that slender amount of
evidence which is sufficient for the satisfaction of a kindly heart, that the recalcitrants against the law are actuated by some genuine conviction that the authority against which they have turned is in the wrong ? Suppose the Welsh were to put down tithes, not by altering the law, but by overpowering the officers of the law, as they seemed, inclined to. do a few months ago, and as the Irish are supported in doing by those who plead "the new spirit in.
politics" on their behalf. Would not it be quite as reasonable, quite as much in keeping with that "new spirit," to maintain that brotherly love requires us to forgive them at once, and to concede all they ask afterwards? Suppose "the unemployed" sack Regent Street, would not brotherly love be greatly outraged if we gave the ringleaders fourteen years' penal servitude, and a few of the followers six months' imprisonment with hard labour ?- Suppose a mutiny in the Army for which a certain amount of palliation could be pleaded, would not brotherly love require it to be passed over with very light reproof, and then demand an immediate redress of the supposed grievances which had caused the mutiny ? It seems to us that "the new spirit in polities " means, in fact, the relaxation of all those bonds which really 'stake a State a State, and that it would result in a condition el political disorganisation and disintegration which must involve the greatest possible suffering to the community at large. We recognise thoroughly that " the new spirit in politics" is of more or less theological origin, that it is an enthusiasm springing from a deep belief in God's love, and in the conse- quent duty of following, so far as we can, the example of that love. What we earnestly deny is that it counsels a true, or wise, or even plausible application of that principle to actual life. God's love is no doubt the deepest of all the principles of his nature ; but in its application to our life as we know it, it is marvellously limited by the necessity of training us to observe a large number of laws, many of which appear to us very arbitrary, but for the transgression of which we must none the leas pay the cost of life, or, worse still, of lifelong suffering. So, too, man's laws must, in particular cases, seem very arbitrary ; and yet ifs State once relaxes the authority of law, while it is law, only on the ground that it seems to many arbitrary, the very key-stone of civilisation is displaced. We could understand a party that offered Home-rule to Ireland as the " crowning of the edifice," when once it had been proved that the Home-rule Party had abandoned the cruel and tyrannical methods by which the Parnellites have hitherto promoted their cause, and had fallen into fair, orderly, and constitutional habits of agitation, though even then we should claim to judge the panacea byits results to the United Kingdom at large, and not by the wishes of the majority of the Irish people taken alone. But we cannot understand a party which, merely on the inapplicable plea of brotherly love, advocates the relaxation of all the laws which secure the integrity of the State, and promotes the triumph of the worst foes of order and justice.
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