MR. HEALY.
INR. T HEALY is looming rather larger in the ranks of A. the Irish party. He has always been a man of mark in the party, partly because he is a shrewd lawyer, partly because he is a good deal less inaccurate and indifferent as to actual facts than most of his colleagues. He was but young when he began political life in 1880, at twenty- five, considering the laborious part which he at once took in the legal discussion of the first great Irish Land Bill, and even now he is only forty, about the most productive of all the ages for ordinary public men. When he addressed Mr. McCarthy the other day, who is twenty-five years his senior, as "My dear Justin," it was very easy to see that he contemplated taking a new departure in the Irish politics of the day ; and we should think it probable that he is aiming at the leadership of the Anti-Parnellites, and is emulating to some extent the original strategy of Mr. Parnell. There is no doubt of his cleverness nor of his tenacity, but he lacks what Mr. Parnell never lacked, that note of authority, bred in the very blood, which Irishmen discern almost by intuition, and to which they respond as they never respond to mere talent and industry. Perhaps Mr. Healy hopes to make up by coolness and resource, in neither of which is he at all deficient, for Mr. Parnell's inborn masterfulness, but he will not find them suit his purpose with his Irish colleagues half as well. Mr. Healy is not born to rule, though he is born to rebel, and to rebel with a certain fertility of ingenious plausibility which has something of the springiness and versatility of genius. "My countrymen,' said the late Mr. Cashel Hoey, who had a great deal of the genius of the Celt with the saving sobriety of the Saxon, "have a great capacity for worry," and not one of them, not even Mr. Parnell in his most industrious mood, ever showed the capacity for worry which Mr. Healy exhibits from day to day and from year to year. He began the present campaign with two strokes of policy on which no doubt he has congratulated himself heartily. At Omagh, on July 8th, he worried greatly the leaders of the Anti-Parnellite party by magnifying into a great crime and treachery, their negotiation with the Gladstonians for the transfer of a couple of Ulster seats to the English branch of the Home- rule party. And when he had accomplished that effectively, and had shown his nominal chief that he could command very nearly equal numbers to his own and a good deal more of political ingenuity and mobility, he opened the present short Session by an exhibition of his cleverness in tor- menting the new Unionist Government, of which it was the only fault that it was really too clever by half in the perversity of its motive, and in the deliberate confusion of his manipulation of the circumstances. The new Irish Secretary, Mr. Gerald Balfour, who has begun his reign with a happy mixture of strength and conciliatoriness, has been anxious to delay the Irish Land Bill which must be passed to place the judicial rents of the next period of tenancy on a right footing, till its clauses and conditions can be thoroughly discussed and sifted, and yet to do this without depriving the future tenants of the advantages of any of the provisions intended to remove the grievances of which many of the tenants have justly complained. For this purpose he inquired of Mr. Justice Bewley, the Chief Commissioner of the Land Court, whether the fixing of the new rents might not be so managed, even if no Land Bill were passed before the end of this year, as to secure to the future tenants the concessions, whatever they may be, which the Irish Land Act of 1896 may contain. Mr. Justice Bewley had replied, showing how this might be done by a little delay in the proceedings of the Land Com- missioners, without in any way injuring the tenants who had applied to have their rents fixed afresla The 'whole proceeding was perfectly frank. There was no sort of underhandedness about it. It was confessedly con- ceived in the interest of the tenants, and no one could doubt for a moment that it would have been a very serious grievance if the judicial rents of the future had been fixed on the lines of the present law, when every one knows that that law is thought to press in some respects unfairly on them, and to need certain modifications by the light of the past fifteen years' experience. Mr. Healy, however, has managed so to present the case to the new House of Commons as to make it appear that this transaction was a kind of plot between the Government and the Chief Commissioner of the Land Court to cheat the Irish farmers of their right to a speedy fixing of their future judicial rents. Mr. Healy's own legal acumen is considerable ; but it often takes the form of secreting a dusky fluid of the cuttle-fish order, which renders the whole surface of a question quite opaque and its main features indistinguishable. He exhibited this capacity in its most characteristic form in the debate of yesterday week, and brought himself several times into collision with the new Speaker in the course of his tenacious and perverse speeches, by his eagerness to kill two birds with one stone, —to embarrass the new Government of Ireland and to discredit Mr. Justice Bewley, the Chief Commissioner of the Land Court. But Mr. Healy's cleverness here quite overreached itself. Even the Irish Members, who knew perfectly well what the purpose of the question put to Mr. Justice Bewley by the Government was, and what the drift of his reply meant, did not follow his lead. The legal astuteness of his attack was too perverse even for effective skirmishing. Mr. Healy showed that he could give trouble and waste time without any excuse at alL And he got more credit from Gladstonian critics, who did not understand, and did not even wish to understand, the drift of his remarks, than he got from the Irish Members who did. The former praised him for greater activity in Opposition than had been displayed by Sir William Harcourt himself,—who, by the way, was far too sensible of what the English Opposition desired, to give any substantial support to Mr. Healy in his factious opposition to the Irish Government,—but the latter were not at all anxious to do anything that might have deprived the Irish tenants of the advantages of the next Irish Land Bill. Mr. Healy did more to get a cheer from them by calling John Daly, the dynamiter, on Tuesday "the honourable Member for Limerick," which he is not, and while he remains in prison, or even a ticket-of-leave man (if he should ever get his ticket-of- leave), never can be, than he did by trying to bring artificial discredit on Mr. Justice Bewley and Lord Cadogan. Again, he made a slight hit by attempting to treat the omission of the Government to move a new writ for Limerick, as if it vitiated the declaration that John Daly was absolutely disqualified to sit in Parliament, though the attempt was futile. There can be no reason at all for haste in filling up a seat which the constituency tried to fill by ostentatiously displaying a profound contempt for the principles of the Constitution. The longer Limerick remains without a representative, the better it will re- member for the future that its representative must not be chosen from the class of convicted criminals. But even this stroke of Mr. Healy's, though it only showed how determined he is to take no notice at all of English feeling, was better adapted to win the Irish party, than his attempt to mystify the House in relation to the "con- spiracy" between the Government and Mr. Justice Bewley.
Mr. Healy, with all his cleverness, will never fill the place of Mr. Parnell. He is perhaps more than his equal in adroitness, and fully his equal in tenacity, but he will never be his equal in authority. He has not, and never will have, the same air of command. Like Mr. Parnell, he is a political gladiator, but he is a gladiator who uses the net with much more skill than the sword. He is a political retiarius. He does not know how to inspire fear, though he does know how to inspire insub- ordination. But the man who can make others in- subordinate to an authority to whom both owe nominal obedience, never goes very far unless he can also make others subordinate to his own authority. This Mr. Parnell could do, and Mr. Healy never will. He is much more formidable with his net than he is with his spear. He can spread mutiny, but he will not manage to impose discipline. There is nothing of the rock in Mr. Healy as there was in Mr. Parnell. The Irish party will never look to him for shelter and protection. They may look to him for clever tactics, but not for impressive and audacious strategy. He is fertile in ingenuities often much too ingenious. But he is not, and never can be, a statesman of the massive and commanding kind.
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