TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE GOVERNMENT AND THEIR CONCESSIONS.
ItT THIERS'S somewhat pathetic expression for the .1‘./. • French Republic—" the form of government which divides ns least,"—often recurs to the mind of the journalist when he is criticising modern events even in England. We have to choose and be content with not the best possible Government, but the Government which offends us least. No one can say that the Government has come out of the Irish crisis of the week with flying colours. We ourselves have no special reason to find fault, for as long ago as last September, we were disposed to think that there might be a justification for the compromise which has been now conceded, and we earnestly pressed on the Government to consider such a compromise if their information showed them that it would be at all likely to prove one conceived in the true interests of both tenants and landlords. But had that been done either in Septem- ber, or even when Lord Cowper's Commission first delivered its Report, it would have been done with comparative dignity, and without conveying the impression which we fear very much that the transactions of the present week will convey to Ireland, that a sufficient amount of popular pressure will squeeze anything out of any Administration which can be set up in this country, and that the only real problem of practical politics is to judge how to apply that popular pressure with sufficient adroitness at the moat opportune moment for pro- ducing the maximum effect. It would seem from what has happened this week, that even the most steady statesmen we can find, can resist popular pressure only on one point at a time, and that if a General Election can be so managed as to steel them against concession on one great issue, there is all the more reason to suppose that they will be found indefinitely compressible on every other. That is a very disastrous state of things for Great Britain as well as Ireland, but it is, under present circumstances, peculiarly disastrous for Ireland,—peculiarly disastrous as a discipline for a country of freeholders who are to be trained by "the magic of property " for a life of hardy and incessant industry.
A good many of our readers seem to suppose that we grudge the Irish tenant that improvement in his condition which a fair reduction of rents would involve. Nothing can be more contrary to the fact. We earnestly supported the Irish Land Bill, on the ground that the tenant-farmers of Ireland had not, as a class, been really free to make a contract for themselves on independent terms. We were anxious last autumn that if there were adequate ground for fearing what Mr. Parnell prophesied,—an invasion of the potato- disease, which never occurred,—or even for believing that the fall in the price of produce had made it positively hopeless for the landlords to obtain their rents without a considerable reduction, some remedy for such a state of things should have been applied spontaneously by the Government without pressure from without. Further, when this was not done we earnestly supported Lord Hartington's appeal to the Irish landlords to reduce their rents voluntarily, even though they were judicial rents, to a point at which the tenant-farmers could be expected to pay them without ruining themselves. And even now, so far as the consent of the Government to adopt a sliding-scale by which, during the interval between the pre- sent time and the adoption of an adequate measure of pur- chase, the rents not voluntarily reduced may be made more tolerable, improves the condition of the tenants, we heartily rejoice in it, and cannot conceive how any man could find it in his heart to grudge them such an improvement in their condition. But what we do fear is this, that the tenant- farmers of Ireland,—the future freeholders,—will get a great deal more harm from the ultimate consequences of this political transaction, than they will get good from the relief which they are promised. What they have learned from the agitation of the autumn and spring, from the " Plan of Campaign," and from this sudden concession of their claims by the Government under pressure from Liberal Unionists and Conservatives alike, is that they are not to look solely to their own industry and frugality and capacity for success, but that by a sufficient manipulation of political pressure, they can usually get some slice of profit of which they had otherwise no hope. How is that to affect their destiny as freeholders ? Why, first, so long as their instalments of purchase remain unpaid, it will make them confident that they can get remis- sions of the purchase-money, and greedy to insist upon such remissions with their representatives. And then, when the whole purchase-money is paid,—or some paid and some remitted,—and probably, if the precedents of the present year are to be followed, a great deal of it will be remitted,—the recollection of what has happened will make them indolent and helpless, always disposed to think that Government will intervene in any time of distress to save them from the consequences of their own unthrift. We assert, that it is impossible to conceive a worse mode of inaugurating a regime of peasant-proprietorship than this. The landlords are milch-cows who, at this rate, will soon have yielded all the milk to be got out of them. And conceding what we con- cede, and indeed maintain, that very many of them have richly deserved to suffer for their past extortions, yet that does not in the least attenuate,—indeed, it greatly enhances,—the bad effect upon the Irish tenant of the experience of the last seven years. The more arbitrary was the regime under which they suffered before that political scourge came into their leader's hands, which he has known how to use so well, the more de- moralising will be the effect upon them of having been taught during these seven years that they have had a great deal more to gain by secret or open political combination, than by working honestly at their farms. The art of squeezing the Legislature which has been so artistically practised, will not be abandoned when the excuse of excessive rent is removed. The competition of parties under a democratic suffrage has taken all bone out of the House of Commons; and we hardly know how Ireland is to learn, without some very sharp preliminary experience, that even freeholders must in the end bear for themselves the losses which the seasons and the fierce competition of other and richer lands impose. Nor will they learn it till they have drained all the classes richer than themselves as dry as a democratic Legislature will consent to drain them.
We do not know that the Government are so much to blame for the collapse now, as they were five months ago, when the Cowper Commission reported. They ought then to have foreseen that some temporary relief of the kind now con- templated would be pressed upon them with a pressure that they would not be able to resist, and should have done then with a good grace what they have done now under the immediate application of the screw. No one gained by the surrender of Tuesday and Thursday except Mr. Parnell; but the address with which he seized the occasion to patronise the Government, and assure them of his support so long as they granted the moral corollaries of their concession, as he insisted that they must do, gives` us an even higher opinion of his abilities than we had before,—and that was sufficiently high. If Mr. Parnell had any of the aims of a British statesman, and were not the instrument of a tyranny stronger than himself, what a figure he might have made in leading Ireland back
into the paths of true political freedom I • We see that some of our contemporaries argue that this is the right moment for a reconstruction of the Government on a Liberal Unionist basis. We cannot agree. It is no secret, we imagine, that the prime mover in the pressure put by the Liberal Unionists on the Government was not Lord Harlington, and we very much doubt whether the concessions made are really in keeping with Lord Hartington's own convictions. If not, then the real object of the cry for the reconstruction of the Government is a wish to use up Lord Harlington, not to profit by his firmness and resolution. Indeed, the desire for reconstruction really proceeds from those who with to see Lord Randolph Churchill again at work in the development of his democratic Toryism, and we cannot imagine any change for the worse so great as that. Lord Randolph Churchill's whole policy is the hand-to-month policy, the policy of pleasing the people without the smallest regard to their true welfare. We do not doubt that if Lord Hartington were to join the Govern- ment at the present crisis, no stone would be left unturned to destroy his influence, and that of Mr. Goschen, who is the one statesman on whom at present we rely most, and prepare the way for the Randolph Churchill regime which would succeed. We have long wished to see Lord Hartington at the head of a strong Government ; but certainly the most fitting moment for a transformation of that kind is not the moment when other counsels have prevailed over Lord Hartington's, and when he would therefore come in, if he came in, to carry out a policy very far removed from that which he would himself have designed.
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