MR. GLADSTONE'S CHALLENGE.
THE Irish Debate has not been barren either of great speak- ing or greater doing. In political life words are often deeds ; that is, the resolve which usually immediately precedes action must there immediately precede speech, and the speech once launched on the world, is in fact the action which follows the speaking, not in the sense in which effort may (or may not) follow resolve, but rather as the movement of the arm follows the excitement of the nerve. Mr. Glad- stone's great speech of Monday night was, in this sense, more an action than a speech. It was the final and now irretrievable act which will compel the Liberal party,—when- ever they may have the power,—and which will probably give them the power,—to remove once for all the Protestant Establishment in Ireland. If there be,—as there probably will be,—Liberals to whom that policy is an offence and a stumbling-block, that will be their personal loss ; but they will have no power to arrest the rapidly increasing momentum of a popular conviction, which, slow as it was in reaching maturity, is now accumulating a new mass of adherents, and visibly accelerating its rate of motion towards its end, with every fresh week and month. In the recent debate three prin- cipal figures, three great statesmen, are so prominent as to make all the others, however eloquent, seem mere contributors of words beside them ;—for these three have undoubtedly in their several ways contributed what is much more than words, —words that are embryo things,--to the result ; we need scarcely say that we speak of Mr. Bright, Mr. Gladstone, and Mr. Disraeli.
Mr. Bright, in the noble and massive entreaties of his speech of Friday week, seemed to be, and was, stretching forth to Ireland rather earnests and pledges of a totally new spirit in England than any individual opinions or ideas. When he insisted that Mr. Disraeli's offer of a Catholic University at the present crisis was like the policy of the mountebank who sold pills " that were very good against the earthquake," he only expressed with his usual humour the indignation which Ireland must feel at an offer so irrelevant to the great injustice of Protestant ascendancy of which she complains. But when he warmly pressed his own Nonconformist friends to sacri- fice something of their most treasured prepossessions for the sake of a settlement that may soften the bitterness of feeling on the part of those whose interests are as- sailed, when he asked for the removal of the Establish- ment not as a triumph for a party cry, but as the means whereby all the mutually hostile religions in Ireland may be able to meet on equal ground without envy, without bitterness, and without grudge, even as souls of different faiths may meet in the world of spirits when the " liveries " of sec- tarian opinion are stripped off, he did much more than shake the Establishment by his eloquence,—he made Catholics and Nonconformists feel that there would be real pain in the duty before them, and that any concession by which they could honourably diminish that pain would be even more welcome to them than to their opponents ; and he made the truest friends of the Established Church feel that there would be something hard and almost' intolerable in the old attitude
of defiant and unyielding resistance. A speech nearer to an action,—and to an action of the grandest kind,—a speech which gave a more direct impulse to the forces of mutual forbearance and self-denial on all sides, a speech more full of sympathy with all parties without partizanship 'for any, and yet at the same time more directly practical in facilitating retreat and promoting concession, a speech which succeeded better in making all realize that there would be moral dignity and not humiliation in the sacrifices which were required from them, was never delivered in the House of Commons. It was a speech which made the bitterest Tories relent in their attitude of hard resistance, and the bitterest Radicals soften the rude, aggressive tone of their attack. There have been greater adepts at mere compromise than Mr. Bright. But no man ever gave so great a nobility to the proposal of conceding all that justice would permit, or so great a dignity to the tone of pathetic and disinterested entreaty, in which he implored all parties to rise above the blinding mists of party feeling, and sacrifice something of cherished preference for the national peace and welfare. No man ever succeeded so well in completely exchanging the ride of an agitator who rouses lass against class, a role which has so often,—and not always quite without justice, been attributed to him, for that of a genuine peacemaker, not one who offers hollow and tricky com- promises, but who appeals so earnestly to the heart of all parties as to divest compromise of every appearance of politic bargain or vulgar expediency. Mr. Bright's grand speech did more to draw the noblest men of all parties nearer to each other than long years of discussion had effected before.
When Mr. Gladstone rose on Monday night, he had quite a different function to perform,—not to dispose all inde- pendent minds towards an equitable settlement, but to make Ireland feel that one party, at least, in the State had a leader who, whether followed by his party or not, would resist any further delay in the removal of the one visible injustice, the character of which was acknowledged, and the remedy for which is simple, though not easy. He had to show that the time for action is ripe, is over-ripe, and also what kind of action is now possible. And he had to pledge himself that, as far as his responsibility extended, the dilatory policy should be at an end. His words, therefore, were weighty with great and inevitable consequences. They were far more than words, they were felt as powers in a thousand Irish parishes,—powers transforming and mortgag- ing the future. Mr. Gladstone evidently felt this, and spoke not only with his usual eloquence of speech, but with something of what Dr. Newman calls " eloquence of deed." Ho spoke as if his own long hesitation, though he was notoriously at the head of a divided and unprepared party, had weighed upon his own mind. He spoke as if he had keenly felt the painful character of the duty of suspending the Habeas Corpus Act in Ireland, first suspended, as Mr. Disraeli needlessly insisted, at Mr. Gladstone's own instance two years ago,—without pro- posing simultaneously what might tend to reconcile the more reasonable Irish to our rule. He pointed out, as we have so often pointed out, how greatly the improved physical condi- tion of Ireland aggravates the symptom of a widely existing disaffection, and that this disaffection, " if not more violent, was more reasoned and deliberate than ever." He insisted, with a depth and warmth of pathos that must have gone to the heart of the Irish people, on the impos- sibility that a stream of exiles so vast and continuous would leave Ireland with the same deep passion for their old home, and the same deep resentment against the laws and government by which that home was ruled, if there were no justification for such a feeling,—that here, at all events, the vox populi had a vox Dei within it. He drew the true infer- ence from Lord Mayo's unfortunate remark that Irishmen in Canada and Australia are heartily loyal, while Irishmen in the United States are savagely hostile to England,—namely, that in Canada and Australia their security of tenure as farmers and their equal religious treatment under a British Government obliterate the old resentment against Great Britain, while in the United States their bitter memories alone determine their feeling towards us. He pointed out how the careful primary education which we now give to Irish children tends at once to make them better men and,—so long as these grievances continue,—worse subjects, because more awake to political wrongs. He exonerated himself from all responsibility for the Ecclesiastical Titles' Act, on which at the first he had bestowed, he said, " anything but benediction." He declared his willingness to help any reasonable railway scheme for Ireland, "provided " the pecuniary help it offers to Ireland " be equal, provided it be public, provided it be undisguised, and provided it operate not on this class or on that class or section, but go to the whole community." He opposed with warmth,—but in no sectarian or anti-Catholic, but rather in a strongly anti-sectarian spirit, the proposal of the Govern- ment to appropriate anew annual grants of money to sec- tarian purposes, such as the proposed Catholic University, " with a phantom train of figures," namely, possible grants of the same kind to various Catholic Colleges—" what we know not, and how many we know not "—in the rear. He earnestly deprecated this retrogressive policy of Government grants to special religious sects, gently bantered Lord Mayo on the coaxing and endearing boast he had made of entrusting his " first confidences " on this subject to Parliament, in the hope of reconciling it to this foolish policy of retrogression, and pointed out that this untimely birth, and the equally un- timely suggestion of an increased grant of Regium Donum to the Presbyterians, were meant as mere supports and buttresses of the existing anomaly of an endowed Protestant Church,— mere modes of diminishing the scandal attaching to our enjoyment of " the blessing and the luxury of the Irish Establishment." On the land question Mr. Gladstone went as far as a leader who must always wait for at least the majority of his followers could possibly go. He declared against the principle of the English custom of giving the tenants' improve- ments to the landlord, in the absence of any specific provision, —insisted on the necessity of setting up the opposite rule in Ireland,—and declared his wish, in case the State became possessed for any purpose of the ecclesiastical estates of Ireland, that Mr. Bright's plan for creating a farming proprietary should be tried with such estates. Coming to his greatest theme, the Irish Church, he made most eloquent and impressive use of the hostile questions put early in the evening from opposite sides of the House with respect to the dangerous and violent language recently used—in opposite senses, of course — by a Protestant clergyman, a Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, and a Catholic priest, at public meetings in Ireland. The richly endowed fellowships of Trinity College, Mr. Gladstone observed, yield much the same description of fruit as the poverty of the Catholic Church. " The man that smarts under inequality uses violent and unseemly language, and the man who is threatened with nothing but equality uses language of the same violent and unseemly character." What, then, was to be done but to lay the axe to the root of the tree " which engenders this poisonous and pestilential fruit " $ And then in a powerful and most impressive conclu- sion, Mr. Gladstone " developed " the meaning of the religious equality for which he contended, explaining it as "disestablish- ment,"—a disestablishment to be effected with all possible allow- ance both for vested interests and for the embarrassments of an established faith suddenly thrown on voluntary resources,—but still disestablishment. In words only less eloquent than the re- solve he had taken and the intensity of purpose with which he had adopted it, Mr. Gladstone concluded the noble speech which registers the doom of the Protestant monopoly in Ireland.
Mr. Disraeli's speech contributed no less, in its way, to the result which is now plainly visible than either Mr. Bright's or Mr. Gladstone's. But its way was not, of course, their way. He came up to the table with all the elasticity and vigour of a general whose courage rises with the breaking- out of the battle. He made merry over the great crisis which had waited seven hundred years according to Mr. Gladstone, in order to overwhelm him, " the most unlucky of Prime Minis- ters," on his first assumption of office. He repudiated Lord Mayo's express words as to the endowment of the Catholic University and Colleges. He quizzed the Liberals on the friendship of Cardinal Cullen, who was, he said, " a distin- guished member of the Liberal party." He laughed at the philosophers, while philosophizing himself on the principle of endowments. He took a mild vengeance on Lord Russell for accusing him of a deceptive policy, by reproaching him for injuring the "perfection of demeanour" proper to the House of Lords. He bantered Mr. Gladstone, who had been pointed to, he said, by Lord Russell as " the young Ascanius of the hour," for proposing an ecclesiastical policy in Ireland quite different from that which Lord Russell had conceived. In short, he used every weapon which a man of genius could snatch at, except serious and earnest argument. From argument he effectually diverted the House. He identified, as far as he dared, the principle of the Irish Establishment with the principle of all religions establishments, and tried to win a victory by enlarging on the destructive character of the policy of abolish- ing good and popular religious endowments,—which was his ex- cuse for not abolishing bad and hateful endowments. This, sup- plemented by a hint (probably not serious, though most menac- ingly pat) of a penal dissolution, was all Mr. Disraeli had to say at this critical moment of his administration. He said no word for the Irish Establishment, but argued zealously for the English and Scotch Establishments, and tried to shelter the injurious endowment under the aegis of the beneficent endowments. In fact, it is the Irish Church Establishment which threatens the English and Scotch Establishments, not the latter which protect the former. If it had not been for the former, the rebellion against the latter would never have been half so fierce. In throwing it over, the principle of established churches is not wrecked, but perhaps saved from wreck. It is this sacrifice which may in all probability so lighten the ship as to enable it to weather the storm. When Mr. Disraeli insisted on the excellence of the principle of endowments as a reason for standing by the Irish Church, he was as reckless as a man who insists on the excellence of music as a reason for perpetuat- ing discords. The truth is, Mr. Disraeli's speech,—keen,. gladiatorial, supremely dexterous as it was,—was an attempt to defeat his opponents with swords of shadow, and confuse- them with threatening puffs of mist. He, the most acute of all combatants, could say nothing for that which he was defending, except what applied only to that which was not attacked. He had to menace with unreal weapons and entice with still more unreal allurements,—to frighten the English Church when only the Irish was in danger, and to allure by promises that he was " on the eve " of some ineffable dis- covery,—a discovery that would " terminate the sorrows of afflicted centuries,"—but which had as yet only reached the stage of sanguine presentiment even in his own mind. When so accomplished a warrior, in his moments of highest, mettle, has nothing better to say than this, he seals his own fate, and echoes the doom which his adversaries have pro- nounced in those most convincing of all accents which bear- witness that he has failed to make a good fight, only because the resources for a good fight have absolutely ceased to exist.
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