TOPICS OF THE DAY.
MR. GL.ADSTONE'S AMENDMENT.
WE read the notice of Mr. Gla.dstone's amendment to Mr. W. H. Smith's motion of next Monday with amazement. The Leader of the House of Commons is, as our readers are aware, to move on Monday : 'That, Parliament having constituted a Special Commission to inquire into the charges and allegations made against certain Members of Parliament and other persons, and the Report of the Commissioners having been presented to Parliament, this House adopts the Report, and thanks the Commissioners for their just and impartial con- duct in the matters referred to them ; and orders that the said Report be entered on the Journals of this House." To this resolution Mr. Gladstone has given notice of the following amendment : "To leave out all the words after House,' in line 5 [i.e., before the words "adopts the Report"], in order to add the words, WE read the notice of Mr. Gla.dstone's amendment to Mr. W. H. Smith's motion of next Monday with amazement. The Leader of the House of Commons is, as our readers are aware, to move on Monday : 'That, Parliament having constituted a Special Commission to inquire into the charges and allegations made against certain Members of Parliament and other persons, and the Report of the Commissioners having been presented to Parliament, this House adopts the Report, and thanks the Commissioners for their just and impartial con- duct in the matters referred to them ; and orders that the said Report be entered on the Journals of this House." To this resolution Mr. Gladstone has given notice of the following amendment : "To leave out all the words after House,' in line 5 [i.e., before the words "adopts the Report"], in order to add the words, deems it to be a duty to record its reprobation of the false charges of the gravest and most odious de- scription, based on calumny and on forgery, which have been brought against Members of this House, and par- ticularly against Mr. Parnell ; and, while declaring its satisfaction at the exposure of these calumnies, this House expresses its regret for the wrong inflicted and the suf- fering and loss endured, through a protracted period, by reason of these acts of flagrant iniquity." In other words, Mr. Gladstone proposes to take no notice at all of the finding of the Commission on any subject whatever, except on those on which the members of the Parnellite Party have been exonerated from all guilt or blame by the Com- mission; to fix the attention of the House of Commons exclusively on these false charges ; and to brand the conduct of the Times in bringing these false charges as acts of "flagrant iniquity." It is difficult for us, and difficult for the first time, to enter into the state of mind in which Mr. Gladstone gave this notice. For our own part we should have thought him and his party quite reasonable if they had added to the motion of the First Lord of the Treasury a sentence congratulating the House on the acquittal of Mr. Parnell and his colleagues of the gravest accusations brought against them, and branding with strong disapproval the culpable carelessness in the scrutiny of evidence without which some of these charges could not have been made. There would have been reason and justice in such a course. But in the course which is actually to be taken there is neither reason nor justice. If the finding of the Com- missioners is to be accepted on some of the heads, it should be accepted on the others. Mr. Gladstone really proposes to say that while he and his followers eagerly accept the judgments of the Commissioners so far as they like those judgments, and so far as those judgments play into their own hands, they will wholly ignore them in every respect in which the judgments of the Commissioners are vexatious to their party and deal a blow at their policy. Now, is this judicious even for party purposes ? That it is not fair or equitable in a large sense, is as obvious as that it is a policy of pure partisanship. But even as a partisan move is it sober, is it judicious to say= We are delighted to find calumnies exposed and forgeries detected on which some of these accusations are based, but we will take no notice at all of those very important and far-reaching conclusions which show that the Times was substantially right in its dread of the conspirators, and its estimate of the mischief which they were doing, though it was misled,—partly, no doubt, by its deep sympathy with the Mr. Gladstone and Sir William Harcourt of eight years ago,—into exaggerating mere faint suspicions into fixed beliefs and definite accusations, and into assuming that men who showed themselves so callous of the criminal consequences of their conspiracy, were hand and glove with the persons who conceived and executed the crimes by which the "all-pervading tyranny" of the League was sustained.' There is something so capricious and arbitrary in accepting all that the Commissioners have said in exoneration of the Parnellites, and maintain- ing s, dead silence as to all that they have said in condem- nation of the Parnellites, that we venture to think Mr. Gladstone certain to lose instead of to gain ground in the confidence even of his own party by pursuing that unreason- able course. We see it stated by a contemporary that the Judges are mere Tory politieians in a panic, who deliver themselves of twaddle. Well, they must be in a very mild kind of panic to take such clear distinctions as they de between the disproved facts, tho unproved facts, and the proved facts. If they had been Tory politicians twaddling in a panic, they would have made thrice as much as they have of the evidence of Mr. Parnell's disposition to play fast and loose with his own words, evidence on which they have touched significantly, but very lightly indeed. If they had been Tory politicians twaddling in a panic, they would hardly have put their names to a Report which the Radical journalists greeted with a chorus of premature triumph. The truth is that nothing can be more carefully weighed and more calmly discriminated than the character of their different judgments. There is not a trace of passion, or dread, or prejudice in them'. They are the judgments of men anxious. to define exactly what the proved facts are, and where it is impossible to determine the facts at all. To claim the utmost authority for the judgments which suit the Gladstonians, and to pass over without remark the judgments which do not suit them, is really like playing- on the conditions, "heads I win, tails you lose." Mr.. Gladstone might, if he had taken the view of the most. violent of his lieutenants, have moved an amendment that the Report of the Judges was disfigured by political passion, and not worthy of the attention of the House,—at which everybody of any ability would have laughed,—but the course he actually takes in singling out for notice what pleases him and ignoring all that displeases him, is even more flagrantly unreasonable and unjust.
After all, what the country most wants to know is not what the individual culpability of the Parnellite Members is, but what the political character of the party as a party has been ; how far its success would endanger or not endanger the country ; how far these are or are not men to whom the government of Ireland might safely be com- mitted without imperilling the safety of Great Britain. This seems to us a far more important political question than any of those,—no doubt vastly important in their way,. and to the persons chiefly concerned,—which affect the individual honour or dishonour of individuals ; yet Mr. Gladstone's amendment passes it by as if it were either supremely insignificant, or had not been raised in the inquiry before the Commission at all. Surely this is not the policy of a great statesman and patriot. It is more like the policy of a party chief to whom the order of the realm and the future of Great Britain are quite secondary to the triumph of party and the defeat of an antagonist.. We are perfectly aware that Mr. Gladstone in his heart. absolutely identifies the order of the realm and the future' of Great Britain with the triumph of Home-rule in Ireland. He is deeply convinced that the latter is the only adequate means to ensure the security of the former.. But this is precisely what bewilders and distresses us,— that Mr. Gladstone, with his long experience of dis- appointments in regard to Irish affairs,—with his vivid memories of what he hoped from the Disestablishment of the Irish Church, and the wreck of those hopes,—with his vivid memories of what he hoped from the first Irish Land Act, and the wreck of those hopes,—with his vivid memories of the still greater and more reasonable hopes which he. indulged in reference to the Land Act of 1881, and the cruel wreck of those more reasonable hopes,—should still persist in pinning his faith implicitly to a still more pro- found confidence in a far less hopeful and more barren measure, and should absolutely avert his eyes from all the impressive and startling evidence which goes to show how unscrupulous is the conduct and how rancorous is the temper of the party to whose tender mercy he would commit Ireland, and to whom he would hand the power to trample the minority under their heels.
The Commissioners tell us very plainly what these men have done ; and Mr. Gladstone would be the last to, question the inspired judgment,—" By their fruits ye shall know them." They show that under the influence of the Land League, the eviction of 3,415. families caused in a single year (1881) more crime than the eviction of 58,423 families caused during the four years 1849-52 inclusive. They show that the leaders were well aware of this, and that one of them, Mr. T. P.
O'Connor, declared at Chicago in 1881 that if he were the agent of an insurance society, he should not like to hava his capital dependent on the farmers who had supplanted the evicted tenants. Indeed, he explained that "the shooting of the land-grabbers was one of the incidents of the civil war." In other words, it was a civil war, and the meanest of civil wars,—a civil war where the victims had no notice of their danger,—which these Parnellite leaders were waging, and they not only knew but realised it. They did not directly incite to crime, but they did incite to intimidation, which, as they well knew, led to a mass of crime greater by some sixty- fold than the far more numerous evictions of the period following the great famine. But to all these facts Mr. Gladstone proposes to turn deliberately a blind eye, and to do all in his power to encourage the party which follows him to turn a blind eye too. I have been miserably deceived three times already,' he might say in my most sanguine hopes of pacifying Ireland, but this fourth time I shall not be deceived. Tell me, if you will, that there is every evidence that the men who would rule the Irish Parlia- ment and the Irish Administration are men who do not shrink before an orgy of crime ; show me, if you will, that their spirit has not changed, that the " Plan of Campaign," which is their last achievement, is conceived exactly in the animus of that deadly and malignant boycotting which was their first great achievement; insist, if you will, that the Judges have shown the utmost impartiality where im- partiality was most difficult, and have given Mr. Parnell the benefit of the doubt in the case of apparently violent insinuations which he afterwards wished to disown, and that nevertheless these impartial Judges proclaim the party to be a nest of criminal conspiracy ; accumulate all your evidence as effectively as you will, yet on me at least it will produce no impression. I am so deeply committed to this great political venture, that I prefer to ignore every par- ticle of the evidence except what suits my case. I stake all my political reputation on the success of Irish Home-rule ; and what is the use, therefore, of scrutinising evidence which, though it once convinced me of the great public risks hanging over us, as it has convinced the Commis- sioners, now only makes me uncomfortable, and convinces me no longer ? I have nothing to do with the political conduct and character of these men. What I trust to is the abstract policy of throwing Ireland on its own re- sources ; and what is the use, therefore, of alarming us with consequences which we are in any case bound to brave ? Mine is an abstract remedy, and I therefore abstract my mind from the teaching of experience, except so far as it shows that my opponents were credulous pes- simists who exaggerated the iniquities of my allies, and shut their eyes against the glorious promise latent in the use of my constitutional talisman. Let me alone ; I will select and dwell on those facts which raise my hopes, and the rest I will not see.' Mr. Gladstone will not speak, we suppose, quite in that vein. But his amendment, which uses the Commissioners' Report only where it white- washes his clients, and ignores all the important elements of its political bearing, implies to our mind a state of feeling of which such a confession as that, would be the only true expression.
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