BANQUO'S GHOST.
ON Monday night, there was a strange scene in the House of Commons. Mr. Chamberlain had the singular and somewhat painful experience of touching Mr. Gladstone's political conscience to the quick ; and the situation which ensued was one which the House of Commons has hardly ever experienced before. Mr. Chamberlain had been charged by Mr. Gladstone with regarding the whole Irish people as entirely without any human qualities, except those which give them the outward forms of men ; and this Mr. Gladstone demonstrated by showing that, if this Home- rule Bill passes, Mr. Chamberlain expects the Irish People to avail themselves of every opportunity it gives, —and undoubtedly it gives many,—to harass and fatigue the people of this country into granting them the full measure of their dream. Mr. Chamberlain replied that he had never imputed to the Irish people a double dose of original sin. He supposed only that if we were going to concede what clearly falls far short of their political aspirations, they would not be contented, but, like other human beings in the same position, would be restless till they had grasped what they regarded as the substance of those aspirations. But while he did not suppose that the Irish people would. act otherwise than any other people would. act under the same circumstances, he did think, and was not singular in thinking, that they had unscrupulous leaders who would not hesitate at making the most of what they got, to extort all that they were refused. And then he quoted a series of denuncia- tions by which Mr. Gladstone and his present colleagues had proved seven or more years ago that they too shared these anticipations, referring, of course, to the classic passage in which Mr. Gladstone himself had denounced those who were marching through rapine to dismem- berment. Mr. Gladstone, ever on the watch to prevent the dismemberment of his party,—which is, no doubt, much more likely to crumble to pieces than his count.7,—interposed to say that this attack was made exclusively on M.r. Parnell, and not on his colleagues. Mr. Chamberlain rejoined that when not only the plural number had. been used, but, moreover, a metaphor which could have no force unless the march of an army were spoken of, and not the march of a single man, it was idle to talk of that powerful denunciation as having been con- fined to Mr. Parnell. Here Mr. W. Redmond cried out,— The3:, put all the blame on Parnell because he is dead." Yee, said Mr. Chamberlain, "Mr. Parnell is dead. But it appears there are still some of his friends and followers who will defend him if it be necessary." And he concluded with a singularly fine passage representing that Mr. Glad- stone invited the whole English people to trust the Irish ;Members, " all or not at all," just as Vivien in the Idyll invited Merlin to trust her all or not at all, and then used the charm which he had revealed to her to bury him in an eternal sleep. In the meantime, it would seem as if the reproach which .Mr. W. Redmond had blurted out so brusquely, that "they put all the blame on Parnell because be is dead," and Mr. Chamberlain's reference to the preternatural sleep into which Merlin had been betrayed by trusting so com- pletely to the fascinations of Vivien, had been working on Mr. Gladstone's political conscience. When Mr. Cham- berlain sat down, Mr. Gladstone started up and delivered a singular apology,—nominally to Mr. W. Redmond, in excuse for having said. what hurt his feelings, really perhaps to Mr. Parnell's ghost, which seemed to have stalked, like Banquo's at Macbeth's feast, through the House of Commons,—explaining that the words he had quoted were not in any sense repeated by him in order that he might justify them. He had quoted them as a mere matter of history. He had used them originally under an impression which might have been mistaken, but which was at the time perfectly genuine, that Mr. Parnell was trying to defeat the beneficent provisions of the Irish Land Act. Subsequently to Mr. Parnell's release from Kilmainham, he had never made any further charge against him, and had, indeed, assured Mr. Parnell that he would for the future encounter no difficulties of his causing, "in pursuing the purposes he had in view, which from that period I believe to be purposes beneficial to Ireland." Mr. W. Redmond accepted graciously this singular apology, which certainly did not seem to be addressed nearly so much to him as to Mr. Parnell.
Mr. Gladstone has evidently been uneasy for the last couple of years when he has reflected upon the part he took in de- posing Mr. Parnell from the leadership of the Irish party, and he seems to have almost addressed himself on Monday to the shade of the late Irish leader, calling him to witness the absolute confidence he had placed in him ever since the tragic occurrences of 1882. He was doubt- less remorseful for having singled out Mr. Parnell for any special blame in connection with the events of that and the previous year. Hence the somewhat incoherent soliloquy, like that of Macbeth to Banque's ghost, "Thou canst not say I did it ! "—with this great difference, of course, that Mr. Gladstone was really a hearty " favourer " of Mr. Parnell's for the whole period between 1882 and 1890, and. that even now he is disposed to reproach himself for having rashly assumed that Mr. Parnell was leading his followers "through rapine to dismemberment." But the strategic instincts of the "old Parliamentary Hand" are sometimes too much for him. He felt it so necessary on Monday to keep the living Irish leaders in good humour, that he actually persuaded himself, in spite of all the evidence of grammar on the other side, that Mr. Parnell personally was the only object of the great historical denunciation to which he had committed. himself. But he had hardly done so before he repented. He felt that he had really drawn no such distinc- tion between Mr. Parnell and his followers, and that if he had drawn any, he ought to have drawn it in Mr. Parnell's favour. Again and again he has assured the world that after 1882 he regarded. Mr. Parnell as a moderating force in the Irish party, and yet here he caught himself hastily asserting, without the least justification for the asser- tion, that the thunderbolt of 1882 was launched solely. at Mr. Parnell,—an assertion obviously, and on the very face of it, entirely inaccurate. No wonder he felt a ghostly face glaring at him in reproach. After yielding to the Nonconformist conscience so far in 1890 as to refuse to co-operate any longer with this "moderating force" in the Irish party, it was hardly excusable in him to go further still, and condemn him more than the fol- lowers whom Mr. Parnell had "moderated." Hence the uneasy soliloquy addressed on Monday night in the startled House of Commons to the astonished Mr. Red- mond, who appeared. to be treated as the represen- tative of Mr. Parnell's injured fame. We decline to regard this incident as some of our contemporaries do, as if it were a mere evidence of subserviency to the Irish party. On the contrary, we feel no doubt that Mr. Gladstone really reproached himself for having represented Mr. Parnell for a moment as the sole object of his indignation in 1882, all the more, perhaps, as he was undoubtedly the sole object of attack in 1890, when the divorce suit had rendered the Nonconformists so determined to have nothing more to say to him. Mr. Gladstone was conscious that fate had apparently made him seem unjust to Mr. Parnell, for whom he has privately felt considerable political admiration ever since 1882, and so it happened that his conscience compelled him to utter the singular soliloquy in which he excused himself. for more than one apparent act of unintended and reluctant hostility. The scene was certainly a very remarkable one. It is the ill-fortune of Great Britain that, at this critical 'moment in her history, she is ruled by a statesman of so complex an intellectual and moral constitution that, after 'denouncing with all his force the evil genius of Ireland, he could yet be conquered and fascinated by that evil genius, cmld borrow all his Irish policy from him with an almost passionate enthusiasm, and yet throw him over on the first ,indication that the private character, which was all of a piece with his public policy, had offended the most formidable of the Minister's own allies. Surely, the people of England should distrust the political judgment of the man who having thus passed from a noble moral indignation to an attitude of unique submissiveness, and recoiled again under the influence of political perplexities into coldness and in- difference, now finally wavers between the temptation to exempt all Mr. Parnell's colleagues from the blame of Mr. Parnell's initiative, and the generous wish to testify the confidence which he once felt in Mr. Parnell, and which the more spell of Mr. Parnell's name compels him to avow once more. Is it to such a judgment as that that we should trust in a moment of political peril far more critical than any which England has encountered during the century which is now coming to a close ?
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