THE HOME-RULERS IN PARLIAMENT.
THE Home-Rule party is strong, but nevertheless it over- calculates its strength, and is not strong enough to wield the "beneficent whip,"—as it doubtless regards that thong which Mr. O'Donnell brandishes so ostentatiously before the eyes of Liberal Members,—without meeting vehement resistance, and exciting a spirit of obstinate defiance in which some other races may even surpass the Irish themselves. Mr. O'Donnell's declaration in the Times that the Home-rulers mean to use their vote with exclusive reference to its effect on the question of Home-rule, was hardly a good stroke of tactics ; nor was he very wise, after seeing the effect it produced in the House of Commons, to reiterate it with something like contemptuous scorn in the Times of Thursday. Mr. Butt, the acknowledged leader of the party, and by far its ablest member, was evidently half disposed to repudiate Mr. O'Don- nell's manifesto, which he confessed "he had not read "—pro- bably because he knew it would embarrass him—while he added that "he would not support any man who would bring undue pressure to bear upon candidates or voters." Even Mr. Sullivan spoke in a semi-apologetic tone of Mr. O'Donnell's letter, as "written with considerable, though justi- fiable warmth ; " and on the whole it is very clear that the open cracking of the whip by Mr. O'Donnell has greatly diminished instead of increasing the efficacy of the instrument he holds. There are plenty of men who will obey an invisible menace, who resist it directly it becomes visible. As it is said that a wife's power depends on its being as latent as possible, so the -menaces of constituents should be clothed in language as courteous as possible, and as little likely to excite the political resentment of manly minds. So long as Members can ignore the fact that they are threatened, and can fancy that they are only urged by their constituents to a particular course, they are likely enough to give effect to the unspoken fears which the urgency has excited. But once let them fully realise that they are threatened, and their self-respect comes to the rescue. Mr. Fawcett's admirable speech on Tues- day stfficiently shows how the Home-rulers have over- done their true strategy. Mr. Sullivan called it a " cruel " speech, but it was cruel, if at all, only in resenting cruelty, and we 'predict that it will rouse a spirit in even the most Hibernicised of English and Scotch constituencies which will defeat the tactics of the Home-rule party, and tend to produce alliances between Liberals and Tories, rather than between either party and the party of Home-rule.
And there is good reason for such a course, though it may be a great misfortune when it becomes necessary at a moment of issues as great as the issues between Conservatives and Liberals on foreign policy are now but too likely to be. There 1E4 something excessively repulsive in a dictatorial attempt to edge in after this fashion, and with hardly any relation to the merits of the case, a policy which will have at least twice as much importance in its Imperial aspects as it can ever have in its Irish aspects. Of course the Home-rulers give out that the effect of Home-rule in Ireland would be to make Ireland heartily loyal. Well, considering that its first and most striking result would be to give a great deal more influence than before in local Irish, affairs to the men who, up to the presenemoment, have earned their popularity by seditious language,that is a tremendous and almost an absurd assumption. But even granting it for a moment, for the sake of argument,—admitting as a bare possibility, and we can hardly call it so much, that Home-rule might conceivably make Ireland content and loyal, in spite of Ireland's realising every day more clearly, as she would, the divergence of her foreign policy from British foreign policy, and the inferiority of her resources to British resources,—yet most certainly the one step which might possibly conciliate Ireland would prove, notwithstanding such conciliation, the beginning of political disorganisation for Great Britain. You cannot turn a homogeneous political unit into a compound unit, and expect the multiplication to stop there ; you cannot break up a State into a Confederation of States, and expect the cleavage to extend no further. If, according to the hypothesis, Ireland were the more content and the happier for separation, you would have put a pre- mium on the policy of disintegration, and would have armed with a new and powerful argument every politician who wanted to apply the same policy to Ulster, or Scotland, or Wales, or any other fragment of the Empire. And apart even from that great premium on innovation,—and we term it great, because there is no political principle which works more powerfully than the force of analogy,—who can tell what the effect would be on such a Government as ours of the first step to dualism, supposing even that it were never followed by further steps of the same kind? As Mr. Forster in his able speech very justly pointed out, even the first step to dualism would involve a paper Constitu- tion to define the relative rights and duties of the federal and the local powers, and a supreme judicature not answerable to either constituent element in the new federation, to determine the legal difficulties which would certainly arise in interpreting the new paper Constitution. How this great change might tell upon our political life,—even if it went no further,—it is by no means easy to say. It would certainly be a great step in the direction of diminishing the power and political importance of Parliament,— and a step not needed, for the natural effect of the last democratic Reform Act has been to diminish in a well- marked degree the influence of Parliament. Nevertheless, another great step in that direction would assuredly be a great step in the downward path of the British.power. And when we consider how unlikely, not to say impossible, it would be that such a policy as federation could be adopted without establishing Home- rule elsewhere than in Ireland, it seems tolerably certain that this first cleavage in the British Parliament would be the beginning of a variety of complex and intricate arrangements certain to end in the dwarfing of our Parliamentary system, and the complete metamorphose of our political methods. Now since the greatness of Great Britain has hitherto grown and dwindled with the greatness of Parliament, the inaugura- tion of a policy which divided and embarrassed Parliament would be the inauguration of a policy which wonld divide and embarrass the national life.
-Moreover, it seems to us perfectly certain that it is quite impossible to set up a subordinate Parliament, dealing with all kinds of delicate questions closely bordering on Ihnperial questions, and yet not foment and foster that separatist spirit for which this device is so strangely proposed as a sufficient remedy. On the Home-rule plan, the Irish Parliament is to have the -whole determination of Irish taxation and finance, but the Imperial Parliament (with its Irish Delegation) is to have the determi- nation of Imperial taxation and finance. Is it not as plain as daylight that the Irish financial statesmen will constantly be hindered and embarrassed by the demands for the Imperial Exchequer, and that they will have found in their local Parlia- ment, and will have ready to their hands, a knot of men admirably qualified to offer every kind of resistance to the finance of the Tm.- penal as the foreign policy of the United Kingdom would often be very different indeed from the foreign policy of Ireland ? and is it not obvious that in such circum- stances, this knot of men would be far more urgently tempted to pursue Mr. Biggar's present policy than even the most extreme Irish politicians are tempted now ? The long and short of the matter is this,—in giving the Irish a Home-rule Parliament, you would evidently give them a most powerful lever for dis- content, if the gift of the lever did not substantially remove the discontent. Now, what possible chance is there that it would ? With new disputes arising every day as to the policy of the country, as to the object of our great military and naval expenditure, and as to the purposes to which it should be devoted, and in all probability, as to a hundred other matters on which Irish sentiment would be offended by the pre- ponderance of Imperial aims over Irish prepossessions, can there be a doubt in any reasonable mind that the new Irish Parliament would be a hot-bed of discontent, and probably of disloyalty, towards the Imperial regime, and that its powers and privileges would become most powerful instruments for giving active effect to that discontent ? These are but two leading arguments out of a score or so to show that the concession of Home-rule would be the entrance upon an untried and most dangerous path, certain to weaken the Empire, and likely enough to promote a rebellion far more dangerous than the rebellion of 1798, or the rebellion of 1848, or the rebellion of 1867. If Ireland is not prepared, as she is not, to demand separation and independence, she must take home to herself the lesson that the safety of the whole must be considered before the welfare of the part, and that the methods adopted for securing the welfare of the part must not be inconsistent with those for securing the safety of the whole.
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