LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
THE NEW HEAT OF PARTISANSHIP.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."]
Sta.,—Home-rule has at least this Evangelical characteristic, that it divides households and families as sharply as a sword. My esteemed cousin, Lord Arthur Russell, is a Dissentient Liberal. He confides to you the difficulties which he feels in social intercourse with Home-rulers, and he seeks to trace these difficulties to their source. This he does, apparently, much to his own satisfaction. But his letter suggests one or two com- ments from the opposite point of view. Affection forbids me to characterise as they deserve, his calm assumption of ethical superiority and his comical condescension towards those with whom he disagrees.
I notice that Lord Arthur speaks throughout of " we" and "us." Unless this is the Royal or editorial " we," it seems to imply that the writer speaks in the name and by the authority of others. This is formidable. For my own part, I am only what Mr. Matthew Arnold called " a feeble unit," and I should shrink from controversy with the spokesman of a party. But I shrewdly suspect that, in spite of " we" and " us," my kinsman's utterance is quite as individual as my own.
Lord Arthur "leaves aside the numerous class who sincerely believe that means can be found of shirking plain duties by the repetition of amiable phrases." In this he is clearly right. A person who so believed would be an idiot, and with that afflicted portion of the community no one holds political dis- cussion. An excessive "repetition of amiable phrases" is certainly not a controversial fault with which Lord Arthur can justly charge himself, when, leaving these imaginary opponents, he turns upon "professional politicians who have thought it their duty to follow Mr. Gladstone," and describes his difficulties in conversing with them.
I presume that "thought it their duty" is, as Artemus Ward would say, " rote sarkastic ;" for what a man really thinks his duty cannot be made ground for ethical reproach. The sting, I take it, lies in the word "professional," and I under- stand my friend to mean that a man who is really a Dis- sentient, and professes to be a Home-ruler in order to gain some personal end, is a contemptible being, and that it is difficult to converse with him. This proposition is true, but much too narrow. All dishonesty is contemptible; and there is nothing more contemptible in a " professional " Home-ruler than in a " professional" Tory, whose real leanings are towards freedom and progress, but who finds his interests in adherence to the party of privilege; or a "pro- fessional" Dissentient, who in his inmost heart believes that Ireland is entitled to self-government, but opposes Home-rale from personal hatred to Mr. Gladstone, or from the hope of making his seat secure by Tory votes. If this be the true sense of the word " professional," we are all agreed. Honest politicians must feel a difficulty in associating with dis- honest or " professional " politicians, of whatever type. But is there any reason why honest Dissentients should not associate on easy and pleasant terms with honest Home- rulers? For my own part, at least half my friends are of a different way of thinking on politics from my own._ Many of them are Tories, some Dissentient Liberals. But the cases in which I have found any difficulty of inter- course are very few. The mere fact that a man thinks that a, subordinate Legislature in Ireland would be an evil consti- tutes for me no such difficulty. I happen to disagree with him ; but he may be quite as pleasant and as easy to associate with as the most rampant Home-ruler. The difficulty only arises if he becomes rude and tiresome and aggressive; insists on turning the conversation to the subject on which we dis- agree ; abuses one's friends ; slanders Mr. Gladstone ; imputes, base motives; questions the sincerity or the intellectual com- petence of his opponents; insinuates that for a man to change his opinion about the best method of governing Ireland is in_ itself a vice, and to retain his opinion on that subject,. unaltered by experience, is in itself a virtue.
Lord Arthur says that Home-rulers suffer from a " soreness and irritability " which are due to dislike of " the society into which Mr. Gladstone has dragged them, and the views and methods they are obliged to defend." But, really, even if this were true, they would be in no worse case than other politicians, and would not increase their agreeableness by turning their coats. If they were Tories or Dissentients, they would be- " dragged into the society," politically speaking, of Pigott, and might even find themselves " obliged to defend " a policy which winks at, if it does not incite to, forgery.
To conclude. In order to preserve easy and pleasant rela- tions with Gladstonian Liberals, it is only necessary for Dissentients to realise that even a Home-ruler is entitled to- his own opinion ; that his convictions may be to the full as conscientious as Mr. Chamberlain's, and as intelligent as Lord Hartington's ; that the mere fact that his view of a highly complicated question of policy has, in the lapse of time, under- gone a greater or less change, is in no sense or degree a. reproach to him, and does not in the least warrant his- opponents in an unmannerly imputation of motives, or a. grotesque assumption either of purer virtue or of stronger intellect. To ignore these considerations is to be guilty of a. rudeness which makes social intercourse not only difficult, but
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