LORD ROSEBERY AT BRISTOL.
TORD ROSEBERY is a brilliant speaker, but we regret to see his usual pleasant vein of sarcasm becoming a little, if only a little, venomous. He spoke at Bristol on Wednesday in a very triumphant strain, but still in the tone of a man who was sore as well as triumphant, and who could not entirely suppress a desire to wound his opponents as well as to defeat them. To speak of Mr. Goschen as "financial agent" of the Government was not at all witty, and hardly courteous ; and to declare that in the Unionist deliberations he saw nothing but "hatred all round, hatred to Ireland, hatred to Mr. Gladstone, hatred to each other," seems to us almost malignant. Lord Rosebery says of Lord Hartington that his speeches have pervaded, the country with "the diffusive gloom of a November fog," a very bad simile for the most temperate, lucid, and distinct of all political c6unsels • and whatever may be said, and said fairly enough, of Lord Hartington's entire frankness as to the uncertainty of the issue,—the only point on which there was any resemblance at all to gloom,—it would be impossible to find speeches more com- pletely free from any dash of hatred than those of the Liberal Unionist leader. Lord Rosebery himself, however, may, for the very first time; be accused of showing gleams of hatred towards his opponents in the speech at Bristol, and we think he would have done well to take the beam out of his own eye in order that he might see clearly to take the mote out of his brother's eye.
The general purport of Lord Rosebery's speech seems to us to have been to divert attention as much as possible from the Irish Question, and to magnify the Liberal policy on all other questions. That is a. very astute policy, especially as the success of the Liberal Party at the polls would hardly involve the redemption of any single pledge except the pledge given to solve the Home-rule problem ; whilst all or almost all the other promises would be mere I.O.U.'s, redeemable some time in the twentieth century,. Is it not Mr. Gladstone's own dictum that "Ireland stops the way," that what he calls the heavy arrears of legisla- tion can never be made up till after the Irish problem has been successfully settled ? And if Lord Rosebery knows when that will be, even on the hypothesis of his party's victory at the next General Election, he is far more keen- sighted than he himself would ever have the bad taste to assume to be. To imagine that, in the heat of such a con- troversy as the controversy concerning Ireland's demand for a separate Parliament and Administration, it would be possible, for instance, to disestablish the Scotch and Welsh Churches, and carry a " drastic " reform of the House of Lords, appears to us a mere dream. All these great efforts would be deferred, and must be deferred, to "a more con- venient season." A Prime Minister who had the former job on his hands would be about as willing to take up the latter jobs, with all the divisions they would cause in his own camp, as Felix was to hear St. Paul dilating on "righteous- ness, temperance, and judgment to come." Nothing can be pleasanter for the Liberals now than to dangle these attractive promises before their followers, knowing well how exceedingly minute is the chance that in any near future they would be called upon to redeem them. Perhaps the only advantage of having a totally unmanageable problem like Irish Home-rule to solve, is that it enables the party which is so overburdened, to put in any number of touches of picturesque politics in the background, in the profound confidence that in the background they must remain. We do not feel confident that a single one of the " planks " in Lord Rosebery's programme would be made the subject of practical legislation before Home-rule had been submitted to Parliament, and we are sure that none of the more important and attractive elements of that pro- gramme could possibly be submitted to Parliament during the agitation of the great issue. It is, therefore, perfectly safe for Lord Rosebery to make the most of a policy which is a mere group of "castles in Spain," so far as the responsibilities of the next Gladstonian Ministry can be concerned, and it furnishes him with an excellent excuse for evading the true difficulty with which his leader and his party are weighted ; which accordingly he does evade. He delivers an exceedingly vigorous philippic against the notion that there is anything historically sacred in the Act of Union,—which we were not aware that any Unionist had contended,—but he observes a. silence even more rigorous than Mr. John Morley's, in relation to the one knotty point of the Gladstonian policy, the mode of solving the question how to keep the Irish in the Central Parliament without adopting an elaborate federal system. Like Mr. Morley, he ridicules the idea of revolutionising the Constitution in order to obtain a logical excuse for the 'Irish Parliament. But, unlike Mr. Morley, he does not give the slightest hint of how he would get over the difficulty. Mr. Morley did seem to us to suggest that there is no sound reason why the Irish should not vote our taxes and determine our criminal and civil law for us, after we had surrendered our right to vote Irish taxes and determine Irish criminal and civil law for them. But Lord Rosebery keeps a judicious reticence for the present. There is to be no great and sensational revolution, he says,—and there he stops. The Irish Members are to be retained in the Central Parliament, and the Irish Parliament is to spring into existence ; and that is all that a reasonable elector need care to know. To -which the natural reply is, that what Mr. Gladstone seemed to think surpassed the wit of man in 1886, it is not very unreason- able to feel some vivid anxiety about in 1889, especially as the General Election is to turn upon it. How are we to judge whether Mr. Gladstone's wit in 1889 or 1892 will surpass what we have hitherto regarded as the extreme limit of the wit of man ? And yet, if it does not, it appears likely to break down in an attempt which he judged beyond the resources of that wit three years ago. Lord Rosebery is very effective when he tells us how the Act of Union was carried,—neither the British nor the Irish Parliament having been specially dissolved in order to give the people the chance of declaring their views on the subject,—and asks if an Act so carried .can lay claim to any special sacredness. Of course not. We never heard that any one ever said that it does. But this at least is clear,—that the solution then arrived at, that of representing Ireland adequately (and now, at least, much more than adequately) in the Central Parliament, and allowing the Irish representatives to plead their special grievances freely there, is the only endurable democratic solution of the question, if the nation is not tobe broken up into two or more fragments ; and that that is the pros- pect which creates such legitimate dismay in the minds of all genuine Englishmen. If we are to go back to the time before the Union, we shall go back to what we found in- tolerable then, and, moreover, to what the Irish themselves are disposed to reject now,—for they would not accept a separate Parliament without a separate Parliamentary Ad- ministration ; so that they ask more, not less, than their old Constitution. There is no very hopeful prospect, there- fore, in that policy. And if we give all that Mr. Glad- stone proposes, we shall provide the materials for ten times as many quarrels as we have now, and not only the materials for verbal quarrels, but the materials for transforming verbal quarrels into physical struggles. It is not the historical saeredness of the Act of Union, but the firm con- viction of a whole series of great statesmen that Mr. Pitt was right in what he did,—whether he did it in the right way or in the wrong,—which makes it so dangerous to re- trace our steps. Lord Rosebery, like the other Home-rulers, ignores the one great difficulty, and dins the Irish dissatisfac- tion with things as they are into our ears. Of course the Irish are dissatisfied -with things as they are, and will be dissatisfied for scores of years to come, with things as they will be ; but the true question is whether they are not very much less dissatisfied now than they would be after Mr. Gladstone's heroic measure had been carried. That is a question for British judgment at least as much as for Irish judgment. We have a right to judge from the past how a most delicate and complicated arrangement, based on no clear principle, like the principle on which Irish repre- sentation now stands, is likely to work in the future. And this Lord Rosebery tries to ignore.
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