TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE LIBERAL DANGER.
THERE is danger, as we believe serious danger, that the Gladstonian Liberals, in their new and strange temper, may inflict a heavy blow upon the permanent prospects of English Liberalism. Those prospects depend entirely upon the electors ; and if we are not mistaken, large numbers of the electors may in this recess and during next Session be irritated and alarmed into temporary Toryism. Those Liberals who have taken up the cause of Home-rule have taken it up with such enthusiasm, and have mingled with it so much party bitterness, that they are losing eight of considerations which still influence the voters. They are in danger of becoming, like so many Englishmen settled in Ireland, more Irish than her people. Mr. Parnell himself hardly goes so far as some English and Scotch Radicals. It was evident, for example. throughout the debate on Mr. Parnell's Land Bill, that there was a bad side to the support given to the measure ; that many Radicals were willing not only to revise rents, as we ourselves were willing to do, on sufficient cause shown, but to throw the landlords overboard altogether. Rather than evict, they would let the whole body of laws which enforce justice between owners and tenants sink into abeyance. They talked all if rent were an extorted tribute, and a law something to be set aside on account of popular displeasure. They were ready, so far as could be perceived, if only they could get an Irish Parliament, to let it deal with Irish land without reference to British pledges, and without compensation to the interests which those pledges protect. They may not have been conscious that this was their conclu- sion ; but this was the tendency of all they said and left unsaid, and especially of all their cheers for the furious attacks upon the Irish landlords, who are often ill-advised, but who are British subjects, as well as vertebrate animals, and entitled to their rights even if they be bad. Character is not essential to a creditor. Judges in England sometimes reduce claims, as visibly exorbitant, but they do not on that plea decline to give decrees. If that course is pursued by the ultra-Liberals next Session, there pill be a vehement outcry among the electors, formidable even if it does not come from the common people. It will be said, and said truly, that civilisation is in danger ; that the Radicals, in their eagerness for a great political change, which may be wise or unwise, but is within the range of discussion, are allowing the law itself, as well as the public faith, to be brought into hopeless disrespect. A suspicion of that kind will cost them thousands of votes, the popular dislike to Mr. Gladstone's Purchase Bill, which no doubt affected the Election, having been based not upon contempt for the Irish landlords' claim to justice, but on the belief that justice could be secured to them in other ways. Mr. Gladstone's own sentence, threaten- ing resistance to any agrarian settlement which burdened the British taxpayer, was, from this view of the matter, most un- fortunate. He may mean something by it which is reconcilable with his own Bill, and we are quite sure that he thinks he means justice ; but the popular view of his utterance, and of his previous sentence about the sands in the hour-glass running down, and of the words in his last manifesto, will be that he intends next time to carry Home-rule without protecting the landlords at all, to give them up to a Parnellite Parliament, as all other classes of income-receivers must perforce be given up. Without the assistance of British credit, said Mr. Morley, the landlords cannot be protected ; and now Mr. Gladstone implies that British credit is not to be used. The landlords are to be abandoned ; that is, are to be liable either to direct confiscation by electors who detest them, or to payment in Irish Bonds, or, which is never mentioned, but is not outside possibility, to special taxation under Schedule A. The Swiss of the Vaud are doing that, though, the majority being freeholders, they wreak their spite on Schedules C and D. That seems to the common English mind, which has no especial hatred for land- lords any more than for annuitants, and which, when not excited, is eager for " fair-play all round," distinctly unfair ; and the mere suspicion that Radicals are accepting the Parnellite creed in the matter is embittering men whose influence at the next Election will turn many boroughs. They are willing to accept a revision of rents ; they are ready to turn tenants into copyholders ; they will insist that if agriculture as an interest is losing heavily, the landlords shall bear their share of the burden ; but they will not sanction either con- fiscation or the grant to an Irish Parliament of the power to legalise it. If the Radical Members think they will, let them
spend part of their recess in cross-examining constituents who objected to Mr. Gladstone's Land-purchase Bill, and see what they really mean. They will find that the people hated that Bill not because of the justice done in it to Irish landlords, and not because it was too liberal in its provisions, but because the liability it created was indefinite, and because Home-rale seemed to them to destroy the offered securities.
Irish credit has still to be nursed into existence. It would have been far easier to obtain from the people a large but fixed grant in aid of a social settlement, and not difficult to obtain a grant intended to form the basis of a special sinking fund, and thus ultimately to relieve British finance of the Irish burden. The Radicals will find that Englishmen do not dislike the notion of extensive purchases which may settle the question for ever, and that if the appeal goes up to them, they will prefer the Tory offer, if a reasonable one, to a continuance of the present agitation.
The Radicals may, however, make a worse mistake even than this. Too many of them showed a kind of favour to the obstructive tactics which for a week or two were once more employed by the Parnellites ; and now it is rumoured they intend to resist the reform of Procedure promised last week by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. We are unable to believe it ; but they intend, it is said, to argue that nothing presses like Home-rule, that the reform of Procedure is a mere excuse for shunting the grand question, and that, in truth, Procedure and Home-rule are so inexplicably inter- mingled, that a reasonable party cannot vote on the former subject till the latter has been decided. Who is to know, they say, what rules will suit a British Parliament when the Irish have departed? If that rumour should prove true, and a reform of Procedure should be resisted by as many Radicals as Parnellites, we do not hesitate to say that the great Tory reaction which may yet be the outcome of all recent proceedings, will be immediately at hand. Even the English voters who are in favour of Home-rule—and apart from Mr. Gladstone's magical personality, they are not so very numerous—will declare that this is not the way to secure it, that the question must be fought out like any other, and that to discredit and paralyse Parliament in order to compel it to a supreme exertion of its powers is disgraceful. Such conduct is borne from the Irish in a way and up to a certain point, because their very claim is to be foreigners, and they say, " End the evil by banishing us ;" but it would not be borne from Englishmen for five minutes. What is regarded in the Irish as the result of a traditional enmity descending to forbidden weapons, would in their allies be regarded as rank treachery. All confidence in the Gladstonian Liberals as a great party would be lost. The Liberal leaders cannot endorse such a policy, for the necessity of a reformed Procedure is one of their first dogmas. They proposed the New Rules which have effected so little, and they appointed the Committee whose Report is to be the basis of further efforts to save time. They have declared consistently, clearly, and strongly against obstruction, and for them to allow it to be protected by their own followers would be to forfeit instantly the national respect. It would be said at once, and said justly, that they cared nothing either for the honour or the efficiency of Parliament, in com- parison with their anxiety for Irish Home-rule. The voters would quit them in great bodies, and swinging as they always do straight to the other side, they would send us up a Par- liament such as we scarcely saw even in 1874. We cannot believe the rumour ; but we cannot blind ourselves to the truth that Home-rule has become with many English minds a kind of fanaticism, and that things are done under its impulse which, before Mr. Gladstone proposed it, would have been denounced by anticipation as impossible.
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