TOPICS OF THE DAY.
M.R. GLADSTONE AT NOTTINGHAM.
WE have read Mr. Gladstone's speeches at Nottingham, and especially the speech of Tuesday, with a stupe- faction so deep as to deaden even our sense of pain. We are not alluding, as we see most of our contemporaries do, to the careful way in which he avoided pledges as to the kind of Home-rale measure which, if he were again in power, he would introduce. No Minister ever can bear to bring forward a great Bill before he is responsible for its details, and Mr. Gladstone more than most Ministers avoids prophetic politics. Moreover, for we may as well speak plainly, we do not greatly desire, as most Unionists do, that he should bind himself by pledges. If Home-rule is to oome at all, the necessary Bill had much better be oceroye' by Mr. Gladstone than manufactured by his comparatively stupid followers. The single off-chance is that the man of genius may be wiser than all the men of sense, he discerning elements in the situation which are outside ordinary reasoning power. With the exception of some financial details, Mr. Gladstone's original Bill is far better than any yet proposed in substitution for it—Lord Thring is quite right about that—and we would much rather entrust the work to him than to any knot of wirepullers, journalists, or Members without political imagination. What dismays us is not Mr. Gladstone's reticence, which we think wise, but his disregard for the supremacy of law and the maintenance of order throughout the United Kingdom. It has been for centuries the honourable and, as we think, the wise tradition of English political leaders, that, whoever bears rule, the mob shall not ; that the agents of law shall be supported against everything except the law ; and that nothing shall be spared to prevent the development of permanent ill-feeling between the populace and the custodians of order. The Courts have always been open for the redress of injuries ; but recognised statesmen have always felt that, subject always to judicial process, the soldiers, the police, and the Judges must be steadily supported, must be held prima facie to have done their duty, and must be made secure that, whatever the momentary opinion of the country, the protection of the chiefs of the State could be implicitly relied on. Without this it was felt that the confidence of the active force which is the condition of its strength could never be counted on without misgiving. Soldiers would not fire, policemen would not act, if the moment they had obeyed orders they were to be given up to the vengeance of those whom that very obedience had almost necessarily converted into malignant enemies. That tradition seems to us the very bulwark of civilisation in every free State where law is administered by independent Judges, and where, therefore, every injury may be redressed. As we cannot conceive of a good society in which the bad are not controlled by force, so we cannot conceive how that force is to act if it is to be at issue at once with the disaffected and the Government. Its heart must be broken ; and without heart, an army or a police force is but a mob in uniform. Mr. Gladstone, however, has departed from this tradition. He censures the police in England merely for seeking to know the objects of a meeting ; and as to Ireland, his speech might have been delivered by Mr. Dillon himself. He speaks of the Irish, who have everywhere the same legal rights as the English in London, as people every- where oppressed, insulted, and disregarded by the police. He does not seem even to perceive that a police incessantly attacked, in daily danger, under hourly denunciation, cannot feel, or even behave, as if they were men welcomed by the people they protect. He tells the story of the killing of Kinsella by an Emergency- man, as if it had anything to do with the Government, or as if the killer were not about to be tried for his life. He repeats on second-hand hearsay—for his authority is only Professor Stuart's report of what other witnesses told him— that an agent who pointed his gun at a boy of fourteen who stoned him, was going to shoot him with it, as if the agent had been acting under authority, or as if the story, even if true, showed anything except that there is a cruel land-agent in Ireland, and that the police, who instantly knocked up his gun, are prompt, sensible, and humane. He intimates that, because the police got their information as to the attack on Mr. Sexton's house from a paid informer who helped to plan the attack, therefore they produced the murder of their own head-constable, Whelehan, and—but we must quote the report textually :—" I remember a case in England which in some degree may serve to illustrate the case of the informer who helped to arrange the murder of Whelehan. It was in the
course of the last century. A body of men entered into a con- spiracy to induce two other men to commit a capital crime. I do not remember what it was, but it was a bad crime. The
two men were executed for the crime. It afterwards became. known that they had been induced to commit it by these four men, who conspired together for the purpose. These four men were tried and sentenced to be put into the pillory for the conspiracy. That was the sentence of the Judge and the Court upon them ; but the sentence of the people was a good deal stronger than the law as administered by the Judge and Court. The act of those men was, to my mind, very closely analogous to the action of the police in this instance. The police substantially conspired after the manner of these four men ; and in their case the public indignation burst out upon them. One was actually put to death by the people, and another was- beaten and maltreated within an inch of his life. Do not suppose I justify this ; but I am seeking to point out what might happen when such a case called forth such a manifesta- tion, not among criminals, but apparently a fair average portion of the population in England." We do not doubt that Mr. Gladstone, even in his just fury against an abominable though ancient treachery, holds the lynching to have been a crime ; but is there an Irish Nationalist, accustomed as he must be to the phrase, " I do not justify this,"' uttered by men leas sincere than Mr. Gladstone, who will not see in these sentences an invitation to the popular punishment of the policemen concerned ? We do not defend for one moment the employment of Callinan, if he was intended, as Mr. Gladstone implies, to provoke as well as to report the attack on Sexton's house. H that happened, the police- deserve not only dismissal, but prosecution for inciting to- murder ; but is it for a past Premier, in the midst of a trial, to assume their guilt, and tell to a popular audience, and, indeed, to the world, that story of the vengeance which, in similar circumstances, an English populace took ? Is there, to be brief, a word in this part of the speech of which Mr. O'Brien would not be proud as a high effort of his rhetorical art ? And, finally, Mr. Gladstone, with all the evidence before him, declares that the Mitchelstown affray was pro- voked by the illegal action of the police in trying to force a way through the crowd, and that the deaths in the resulting affray were, morally, almost murders :— " Three human beings lost their lives under the fire of the police. I cannot say three men, for in the ordinary sense of the word they were nbt men,—two of them had been men and were in harmless old age. One of them was growing to be a man, and was still in harmless boyhood. Of the two old men, the one named Lonergan was killed not, in assault on the police-barrack, but standing in the square ; and the distance at which he was shot was a distance measured by Professor Stuart, and found to be a hundred yards. Not one of these three persons is even alleged to have thrown a stone. Not one of them, if I recollect right, is even alleged to have carried a stick ; and what are we to think of two old men who had ceased to be able-bodied, and one youth sixteen years of ago, who, without stones, without weapon of any kind, are represented in the audacious account of Mr. Balfour as those portions of the mob who were engaged in throwing stones f And, lastly, if the mob did engage in throwing stones, we should have read the record of it in the windows of the police-
barracks. How many of these windows were broken ? But is not this a melancholy and a miserable farce,—a farce amusing enough if we had nothing to look at but its extrava- gance, but tragic, too, in the highest degree when we consider that these trumpery proceedings, perhaps of some casual boys or men, who are only able in the utmost of their wrath, and in the supply of stones that they could command, to break two or —making the Government a present of the third window— three windows in the police-barracks, that these are to be represented as leading and heading an attack which caused a humane and intelligent body of the representatives of the Government to fire out of the windows, to kill three persons, one of them distant a hundred yards, and two of them sixty yards away I" Does Mr. Gladstone ever remember a case in which armed force was employed in a civil contest, in which the innocent did not suffer first l That is one of the horrors of such contests, and the first responsibility of those who provoke them. Is it for statesmen to employ their eloquence to deepen those horrors ?
For the first time, we fail to understand Mr. Gladstone. Hitherto, utterly in error as we believe him to be as to the effect of Home-rule, we have regarded him as not only desirous, but passionately desirous, of restoring order in Ireland ; but what are we to believe now ? The Government is striving with all its might to restore the supremacy of law in that distracted country ; it is hampered at every turn by the unreasoning fury of the people, who, except at an eviction, gain literally nothing by stoning the police ; and Mr. Gladstone, incom- parably the greatest figure in English politics, who may have Ireland to govern in a year or two, and who in his own judg- ment will be governing it next year, pours out a speech which, even if his facts are all correct, must operate like the pouring of oil on flame. Imagine the first and oldest statesman in England telling the Irish populace in their present temper, that in his judgment the Irish police connive at murder I Suppose Mr. Gladstone Premier in March, will he disband the police, or will the Nationalist Government, if resisted, permit its representatives to shrink back before a mob? It seems to us that, whether the police blundered or not, whether they were brutal or not, whether in the Whelehan case they were guilty or not, Mr. Gladstone's duty was to demand a suspen- sion of Irish judgment until all the facts had been impartially investigated. The police are liable to trial and punishment for any misfeasance or excess of zeal. It is, at least, Mr. Glad- stone's duty to help in securing to all accused agents of autho- rity a fair trial ; and this speech will be read by, and will pro- foundly influence, every juryman in Ireland.
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