THE APPEAL TO DEMOCRATIC FEELING.
BY far the most formidable, we do not say the most able, speech delivered in defence of Home-rule has been the one in which Mr. Gladstone summed up the debate on Tues- day night. It positively cowed and bewildered men who remained all the while, and knew that they remained, hostile to the project. It was in its essence a bold and determined assertion of that ultimate democratic doctrine of confidence in the ability and the will of a free people to govern its affairs well and wisely, which lies at the very root of all demands for broad franchises and extensions of representative power. " You," said Mr. Gladstone to Mr. Goschen and those who cheered him, " have no faith in the people. Those who make these declarations seem to me to shut out popular influence, and regard it as a source of danger. In this happy country we have found it a source of strength, and the enterprise we are now engaged in is to see whether we cannot also find security for it in Ireland that it shall be a similar source of strength under circumstances happier than those of her history heretofore." That is a direct appeal to the British democracy to trust Irishmen as it trusts itself. It had astonishing effect, many of the audience literally quailing under it, while hundreds burst into enthusiastic cheers ; and it expresses, we do not doubt, the very root of Mr. Gladstone's thought about Ireland. He has so convinced himself of the truth of the central democratic idea, and has in this country been so successful in applying it, that, though he recognises clearly the circum- stances of Ireland and the causes which in Ireland develop social war and foster contempt for social morality, he believes in his inmost heart that self-government will be a final cure for them, that the democracy, once enthroned, will develop the qualities and the abilities the want of which have made Ireland what it is. He cares nothing for limitations on the suffrage, which, indeed, in the draft Bill he expressly allows the Irish Parliament to abolish, and is avowedly contemptuous of the guarantees and restrictions which he has himself admitted into his Bill, not, as he says, because he desires them, but in order to soothe away the timid distrust of those who are less confident than himself. For himself, we gather, he would trust Ireland entirely, leave her as unfettered as the United Kingdom is, and rely absolutely on the sense of her sons, and on that wisdom which is found in a democracy once set free, for the judicious settlement not only of her own affairs, but of her place within the Empire. He would trust all to the Irish people,—he says it avowedly,—even the duty of perceiving that an alliance with the men they think their foes is their strongest interest. The Parnellites could hardly ask more than the Premier, if unfettered by colleagues or opponents, would gladly accord, and he would as soon grant supreme power to an Irish House elected by universal suffrage, as to the carefully, even fastidiously, arranged House which he has actually proposed.
This is bold speaking, as bold as the idea implied in the celebrated sentence about " our own flesh and blood," and we do not doubt that, like that, it will attract thousands, scores of thousands, of minds which are able to receive a great dogma without being able to recognise its limitations. And such sentences will be the more welcome and efficacious because they are not open to the answer which at first rises to every lip. There may be races, in English judgment there are races, so undeveloped that they are as incapable of self- government as children are of governing the house, and the Irish may be among them ; but Englishmen cannot with any pretence to historic logic employ that final argument. They have emancipated the Catholic Kelts. They have admitted them to power. They have conceded them the suffrage which they deem wisest for themselves, and have given them their full share—in fact, more than their share as tested by numbers —in the sovereignty of the Empire. Unless the British are hopelessly immoral, they have done these things in full con- fidence that the Irish are competent to bear their part not only in representative government, but in the control of the unrepre- sented millions whose destiny Providence has seen fit to confide to the United Kingdom, and it cannot, therefore, lie in their months to say that the Irish is one of those peoples to whom the great democratic dogma does not apply. That consciousness will add greatly to the weight of Mr. Gladstone's utterance with thousands, who will never see that there are limitations to its truth which he has entirely passed over. He has forgotten, and they will not perceive, that the argument for self-govern- ment is no argument for segregation ; that if absolute at all, it is only absolute for a society ; and that Ireland in quitting the Union, is quitting that society as much as a village would be if it claimed the self-government of a county. It is throwing off the grand check which invests a community with more rights than an individual. He forgets, and they will not perceive, that even a nation could claim its rights only on con- dition of being wholly responsible for its own acts, and that Ireland is not intended to be responsible, but is to be protected against herself, and against the endurance of any educative miseries she may bring upon herself, by British restrictions upon her sovereignty, British arrangements for her representation, British protection against invasion or punishment by war, and British guarantees against that final touchstone of a nation's wisdom, national insolvency. It is as if a wife were invested with full independence and control of the joint purse, while her husband guaran- teed her against all assailants and all creditors. In- dependence is the very essence of the democratic argument when it is based upon broad considerations of right ; but the absence of independence is a fact wholly neglected by Mr. Gladstone, and will, we fear, to thousands of voters seem wholly impertinent to the matter. They do not see that the right to self-government flows ultimately from the fact that they will bear the penalties if their self-government is bad, and may therefore be trusted to learn wisdom in the great school of responsibility. But both Mr. Gladstone and the voters may perhaps acknowledge the force of this, that, granting the democratic dogma to be true, there may be moments and situa- tions in which it may be inapplicable even to peoples about whose permanent capacity no one argues. It is not in the middle of a war that one applies the elective principle to an army. It is not when John is at Thomas's throat that one maintains the right of the individual to be free from State control. It is not when the house is a scene of conflict that one announces the inviolability of the domicile. The contention of the opponents of Home-rule is not that Ireland is, by any defect of Nature, incapable of self-government, or even of self-government within the Imperial limits, but that she is incapable just now, by reason of causes which have temporarily demoralised her people, have evolved social war, have deprived her of guidance alike from states- men and from Churches, and have produced so bitter and unreasoning a hatred of her partners in freedom, that wise or safe collective action is impossible. Does any one doubt—be the cause what it may, and we certainly acknow- ledge misery to be one of the causes—that the true sense of property has died out among the Irish masses ? Yet we, who affirm that, no more doubt that the sense of property is inherent in Irishmen, than we doubt that the instinct of closing the eyelids to guard the eyes is inherent in them. The temporary suspension of that sense is of itself a final argu- ment against the concession of a sovereign right to deal with property until it has been recovered ; but that plea is no denial of the truth of the democratic dogma, or of its application to the Irish people. We do not question the right of Ireland to arise and walk if she can, but we say that she is bidden to arise and walk just when she is unable from sickness to guide her steps, and that such an order is opposed to all human prudence, and could safely be issued only by a Divine being, able by fiat to bid the impediment depart. Mr. Gladstone accuses all who oppose him of attributing to Irishmen " a double dose of original sin ; " but the gibe is only in appearance a bright one. There are men, we believe, who hold the Irish to be hopeless, but those are not among them who plead that the Irish should be retained, with the full rights of all other members of the community. Unfortunately, all history shows that races, like individuals, possessing only their fair share of the inheritance from Eve, may yet, under the influence of external causes, be what Scotch theo- logians describe as " utterly left to themselves ;" and that is the present position of the Irish masses, to whom we are to entrust all power. All men are not bad because there are moments in all men's lives when the restraining influence of the community is needed to prevent their doing their momentary will.
Previous page
