17 MARCH 1894, Page 5

lathIRISH PARTY AND LORD ROSEBERY. T HE little farce of Tuesday

is a good omen for the Unionists, not because it shows the miscalculation of the new Government, which was probably a mere mis- chance, but because it shows the heat and vehemence of one of the Irish parties, and the timidity, not to say the moral cowardice, of the other. Our own conviction is, that Lord Rosebery's position, as taken up m the House of Lords on Monday, that Irish Home-rule can never pass without the/assent of a majority of the people of England to its passing,—which we hope and believe is never likely to be given,—is so sound that if the Irish politicians had had a grain of statesmanship among them, they would have found that out long ago, and set themselves in earnest to the arduous task of trying to effect their con- version, or proving that it is beyond their strength. The only light which Lord Rosebery's sentence that has given so much umbrage to Mr. Redmond and Ireland, sheds upon the Prime Minister's statesmanship, is that it proves him not to have sounded adequately the weak- ness of the Irish political character, and the difficulty they have in facing boldly the plain truth of the situa- tion. For our own part, when we read Lord Rosebery's remark, we were for a moment more anxious than we have ever yet been for the safety of the Union, for it seemed to us to show the only path by which an otherwise im- possible task,—indeed, as we believe and trust, a wholly impossible task, even if attempted from the least impossible side,—could be attempted with the smallest prospect of ultimate success. So long as Mr. Gladstone was deter- mined to talk down, or beat down by main force, the resistance of the English people, with the aid of his Irish, Scotch, and Welsh allies, we felt no kind of doubt that he would reap the ordinary fate of those who insist upon dashing their heads against a stone wall. But when it was clearly suggested to us that the Ministry intended to abandon that very hopeless enterprise, to devote itself to bringing forward measures likely to fascinate a large section of the people of England, to divert attention for a time from the Irish problem without in any way abandoning their pur- pose, to intensify the irritation with which English Liberals and Radicals will regard the disinclination of the House of Lords to accept these measures, and, in a word, to mask their Irish policy under cover of an attack on the Lords, we could not help feeling that this was a policy which, though astute and disin- genuous, was dangerous, and might, owing to the slowness and density of the English political brain, expose the Union to more peril than any other manoeuvre. It is the policy of the Unionists to bring this controversy with Ireland to a speedy and separate issue. We have always insisted, as our shrewdest leaders have always insisted, that it ought to be disentangled from all those many problems in which the disputes between the democracy and the aris- tocracy are involved. Whatever the people of England decide on these questions, they ought not to mix up with . them the perfectly distinct and most important question as to the disintegration of the United Kingdom into separate Cantons. Whether we are to carry democracy to extreme lengths or not, we ought at least to decide separately what the democratic unit is to be, and not to allow that most fundamental of all questions to be con- founded with fifty others not in the least connected with it, certain to obscure it, and probably to conceal it altogether from the political apprehension of the con- stituencies.

Fortunately for us, the Irish party have come to our aid. It would have been a hard task for the Unionists, without their assistance, to impress adequately on the consti- tuencies how great the danger is of confounding this Irish question with a number of other questions of a totally different kind, in which the privileges of a popular majority are directly involved. Our contention is, that if this question were separately submitted to the people of the United Kingdom, there would be no doubt at all as to the response ; but that if it be mixed up inextricably with a number of other questions of a totally different kind, there may appear to be hesitation or weakness. All our efforts are devoted to preventing this mystification of a great problem of the most overwhelming importance to the very life of the nation. And thanks to the sensitive- ness and vanity of the Irish people, the Parnellites are determined to help us in defeating Lord Rose- bery's astute strategy. Mr. Redmond is furious at the Prime Minister's remark that England is " the predominant member in the partnership of the three Kingdoms;" indeed, we have little doubt that he regards the predominant part which for the last fourteen years Ireland has played in that partnership as a positive right of Ireland's, and as one not for a moment to be yielded back to the stronger, richer, and more populous Kingdom. "I repudiate," says Mr. Red- mond, "this idea of predominant partnership. If Ireland is to be a portion of the United Kingdom, she must be so on an equal footing with England, and it is a preposterous and insulting doctrine to say that the votes of Irishmen as partners in the Empire are not of the same value as the votes of Englishmen." Lord Rosebery never said so. On the contrary, he knows, as we all know, that the votes of Irishmen carry a most artificial weight, in many con- stituencies from twice to four times the weight of the average votes of Englishmen. All that Lord Rosebery said was that a country of over twenty-seven millions of people, even excluding Wales, with a vastly greater wealth in proportion to the population than any part of Ireland can boast, must be satisfied with any policy which is to be accepted. by a people of thirty-seven millions, or else that that policy can never work. Mr. Redmond, again, is furious at the prospect of such a delay as would allow the astute policy of Lord Rosebery time to take effect before the Irish question is dealt with. Unless Ireland is kept in the front of the battle, Mr. Redmond will regard Ireland as betrayed by the English Liberals. And what Mr. Redmond says, the Anti-Parnellities are too timid to controvert. They voted with Mr. Labouchere and Mr. Redmond, and had the satisfaction of seeing the Government beaten and humiliated for having withdrawn the Home-rule issue from the forefront of the battle, and countenanced the policy of trying to divert for a time the attention of the English people from a question on which popular opinion is opposed to the so-called Liberals, and trying to turn it to other questions on which it is heartily at one with them. We are grateful to the Irish party for taking this course. Nothing can be more desirable than that the question of Irish Home-rule should be kept prominently before the minds of the constituencies up to the moment of the next General Election. That is precisely what we desire. That is precisely what we are working for, and what the Government in its subtlety was anxious to prevent. Nor are we sorry to see that the Irish party display in their political strategy the very same qualities of impatience, irritability, and inordinate vanity, which seem to us to make it so all-important that they should be merged politically in the people of the United Kingdom, and not assigned a separate and co-ordinate share with the larger island, in the composition of the United Kingdom. While Mr. Redmond speaks and acts as be does, and while the party which professes to be the moderate party, and to co-operate with the so-called Liberals in sustaining the general policy of the Rosebery Government, follows meekly in his wake, we shall have no fear for the result. The only ground of fear is that the conspiracy to throw dust into the eyes of the English con- stituencies, by getting up a violent agitation against the House of Lords, may succeed, and that the Radicals and moderates of the Gladstonian party may contrive to bewilder the constituencies with issues perfectly irre- levant to the great questions submitted to them. While the Irish play into our hands as, fortunately for us, they do now, this fear need not be serious. There is no one like Mr. Redmond for disillusionising the English people. Compared with him, Lord Salisbury, Mr. Balfour, even Mr. Chamberlain, are comparatively ineffective. For he shows us not only by precept, but by example, that Ireland will always block the way, will never be satisfied unless she blocks the way, and that the only way to defeat her is to make her feel her relative insignificance and impotence, when once the English people have made up their mind, and have declared plainly that Ireland shall stand on an equality with Great Britain, but shall not enjoy one iota of privilege which this island does not also enjoy.