THE IRISH PEOPLE AND HOME-RULE.
ACORRESPONDENT whose letter we publish in another column, charges us with being apparently unconscious of the great change which is taking place in the Irish people as regards their attitude towards England. "No one, I think, can deny," he writes, "that the opposition to Irish self-government is rooted in a conviction of the hostility of the great majority of the Irish people to this country, and. to the connection with us. But that con- viction has now, I submit, become a mere 'survival." We can only reply that we never entertained any such con- viction. As matter of fact, we hold that the Irish people have never been in large numbers deeply prejudiced against this country. They showed, indeed, a great deal more geniality towards us than they do now at a time when they had much greater reason to feel a bitter prepossession against us. But that is not because they are now filled with violent prejudices against Englishmen any more than they were then, but because their leaders now persuade them that every one connected with the government of Ireland is utterly malignant and corrupt ; while between fifty and ninety years ago, their leaders were much more anxious to obtain justice from England than they were to obtain separation from England. Mr. Massey altogether misunderstands what it is that we fear in the operation of so-called Home-rule. It is not the ineradicable prejudices of the Irish people, which we have never supposed to exist. We hold that with leaders who had neither motive nor wish to make difficulties between the two nations, the Irish people would be neighbourly and tranquil enough. What we fear, and fear with reason, is the apparently complete inability of the Irish people to form a just judgment for themselves even as to the leaders they ought to trust. They are as much at the disposal of any one who, like Mr. Parnell and Mr. O'Brien, vilify the Government of the day without discrimination and without evidence, as a flute is at the disposal of a skilful flute-player. They voted like one man against Mr. Gladstone in 1885, at the bidding of leaders who assured them that Mr. Gladstone's Government and party had been eager only to send them to prison ; and they will vote like one man in 1891 for the very statesman of whom they were told to think thus unjustly in 1885. Nothing has happened since to change their estimate of Mr Gladstone's policy before 1885, except that he is now allied with the men who in 1885 vilified him so deliberately and so cruelly. Well, that, we say, is not creditable to the judgment of the Irish people. We can understand their coming round to Mr. Gladstone's side, if they thought they had wholly misjudged him before,—which, by-the-way, they had no excuse for doing. But we cannot understand their coming round to his side without formally abjuring the leaders who had so grossly misled them as to Mr. Gladstone's policy and character. We can no more understand that, than we can Mr. Gladstone's own astounding disposition to fall on the neck of those deliberate vilifiers of his name and policy, and to embrace them with every sign of cordial esteem. It seems to us that Mr. Gladstone is in this Hibernior ipsie Hibernicis, more Irish than the Irish, as, indeed, it is the tendency of all Irish converts to become. We hold that the danger to England in Irish Home-rule is not in the least the deep-rooted bitterness of the Irish people, which does not exist, but the readiness with which the Irish people obey every inspiration that comes from the very inferior and sinister or passionate statesmen who constitute themselves their leaders, and the certainty that the passions or self-interest of this class of men will find in the intolerably difficult relations which the proposed Federation will institute between the two countries, all sorts of encouragements to mischief-making which do not and cannot exist under the Union. Take the case of Mr. O'Brien, as sincere a man, pro- bably, as is to be found amongst the Irish leaders, and certainly as deeply devoted in his own ill-regulated and passionate way to what he is pleased to call,— though with rapidly shifting meaning from time to time,—the service of his country. Well, Mr. O'Brien finds it justifiable and right in one year to load Lord Spencer with the most gross and virulent and credulous charges of wickedness, and a year or two later to retract all these charges, and to profess himself quite willing to black his boots. Yet this man, who does not know what limit to put to the credulity of his party passions, is deeply convinced that Lord Salisbury ought to pay him £10,000 damages for saying that when Mr. O'Brien en- couraged the boycotting of landgrabbers, and making their life a burden to them, he virtually encouraged moonlighters to do what moonlighters in Ireland have always done, to commit positive crimes against those on whom the boycotting had not taken sufficient effect. What we say is this,—that a man who shows so much un- deniable power to move the Irish people as Mr. O'Brien, and so complete an absence of power to rule himself, may be the author of untold mischief under a Consti- tution in which Ireland's separate Legislature and Administration would enable her to impede the most important political plans which the statesmen of the United Kingdom might propose, till such time as the leaders of the Irish people,—such leaders as Mr. O'Brien, —should approve of these plans. And what we say of Mr. O'Brien, we say with far greater force of Mr. Parnell, whose statesmanship has never been, and is not now, a tenth-part as frank as Mr. O'Brien's, but whose willingness to " mislead " Parliament has lately been avowed even by himself.
What Mr. Massey fails to see is the extraordinary and bewildering folly of proposing to throw over all our historical precedents, in order to devise a new federal system which,—except in Ireland,—nobody wants ; to create an artificial and highly complex Constitution the working of which no statesman, however far-sighted, can predict, only for the sake of embroiling England and Ireland in a number of quarrels as to how much the Irish Legislature and Administration shall be free to do, and how much of what they do the Imperial Legislature and Administration shall be free to undo ; and this, when all we know of Ireland is that her people, amiable, quick-witted, and humorous as they undoubtedly are, allow themselves to be turned about by every breath of influence proceeding from such frigid manceuvrers as Mr. Parnell, and such childish, impulsive, and passionate orators as Mr. O'Brien. It seems to us, we confess, stark madness. And as for the change of temper in the Irish people, we see only this,—that whereas they now shout for Mr. Gladstone and his friends because they are bid to shout for them, they will shout to-morrow for the down- fall of Mr. Gladstone and his friends just as they did yesterday, the moment their leaders tell them that Mr. Gladstone is not willing to give Ireland the sort of equality with England which, in the opinion of such men as Mr. Parnell and Mr. O'Brien, Ireland has a right to claim. No doubt the violence of 1885 has been succeeded by the very different violence of 1889. But let the leaders of the Irish majority satisfy themselves that Ireland is not getting what she ought under the next Home-rule scheme, and the violence of 1889 will give place again to something very like the violence of 1885. And then we should be saddled with the difficulty of either engaging in a series of the most bitter contests between England and Ireland under conditions ten times as favourable as those which now exist to Irish per- tinacity and petulance, or else withdrawing concessions which no State in its senses would ever have made, when it was perfectly open to the Irish representatives in Parlia- ment,—as it has been, indeed, for the last twenty years,— to obtain anything for their country which that country really needs, without thus revolutionising the history of the United Kingdom.
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