TOPICS OF THE DAY.
MR. GLADSTONE'S "NOTES ON THE IRISH DEMAND."
ir R. GLADSTONE'S paper in the Contemporary Review -_1. is as free from any admixture of political prejudice or moral partisanship as it is possible for any State paper on such a subject to be. Mr. Gladstone frankly recognises in it the moral weight of the Unionist alliance, which not only com- mands a great Parliamentary majority, but one which is " not a party majority," since it includes " nearly seventy men who have been professed and habitual opponents of the Tory Party, with which they now devotedly co-operate ; and in this important contingent are included many cases of keen and extreme, some of eminent, and one at least of splendid and never-to-be-forgotten Liberalism. The alliance has been tested to the uttermost by the strain of circumstances, and it has borne the strain. This large proportion of the House of Commons has at its back nine-tenths of the House of Lords ; nine-tenths at least of what is termed the wealth of the country and of the vast forces of social influence ; an overwhelming share (in its own estimation) of British in- tellect; and undoubtedly an enormous proportion of those who have received an academical education in England." That is a generous testimonial, to which we can only reply that Mr. Gladstone himself, and, indeed, as regards popular feeling, almost alone, though he has not yet hoisted this great mass of con- viction and moral momentum, as Homer makes the father of gods and men boast that he could hoist all Olympus, if opposed to him, out of its strong position, has made the strain so great that his opponents have sometimes been disposed to give up in despair the apparently unequal contest. If they have not done so, it is not because they regard the political forces which they have at their disposal as superior to Mr. Gladstone's im- promptu levies, but because they are so deeply convinced that Mr. Gladstone's whole view of the Irish problem is fundamentally mistaken, that, in their opinion, the longer the sagacious character of the British voter is saturated with it, the more certainly will he turn away dissatisfied even from the leader whom, with his whole heart, he had adopted as the spokesman of the national mind. Perhaps the best way in which we can bring out our difference from Mr. Gladstone, is by taking up the points on which his mistaken assumptions seem to us to vitiate his whole argument.
And, first, there is his mode of looking at the " loyal " Irish minority, where his inverted commas are evidently intended to suggest the deepest doubt of the appropriateness of the epithet "loyal." He only refers to the subject in a short paragraph, in which he parenthetically remarks that Mr. Bright's estimate of its numbers as two-fifths of the Irish people is " high- flown,"—which we can concede, for we should be disposed our- selves to estimate it at three-tenths,—and then indulges in some- thing like a taunt that this " loyal " minority never has held its own against the Irish majority on any historical occasion, in spite of its greater share of the wealth of Ireland. Well, perhaps not. But how does that bear upon the drift of his argument ? So far as we can judge, it bears upon it very unfavourably. Were there in Hungary, were there in Iceland, were there in Norway or Sweden, were there in Finland, three-tenths of the local population earnestly protesting against Home-rule, and declaring that they would not even endure it ? And if there had been, though there were not, would the fact that these three-tenths had never held their own against the other seven-tenths in former times, have been an argument for forcing upon them a form of government to which they were utterly and passionately opposed, or for seeking some other mode of appeasing the discontent of the majority ? And at this question Mr. Gladstone does not even glance. Yet the circumstances of the mischief which has brought this great problem upon us, show it to be the question of questions. Mr. Gladstone knows, and proved that he knows, better than any man, that the one thing to be apprehended in case of Irish autonomy, was a particular act of confiscation which would have struck a most deadly blow at a considerable section of this minority which " never on any one historical occasion has held its own," as well as other acts of oppression which, whether probable or not, are at all events most acutely dreaded by this minority. Was it not, then, the part of a statesman to say,— 'Whatever may be the case for Home-rule in Ireland, we must not entertain it for a moment till we can remove the causes which have set one section of the population so vehemently against the other ; and if by doing this we can undermine the wish for Home-role, so much the better. If not we can at least take up the question again when Ireland represents homogeneous and not a bitterly divided people of whom three-tenths cling to the British in spirit and policy, and expect nothing but injustice at the hands of the other seven-tenths.'
Mr. Gladstone ignores the point altogether, though he cannot produce in one of his cases of successful Home-rule anything like the same evidence of deep division and mutual distrust amongst those who asked for autonomy. The social cleavage in Ireland is all the more serious because Mr. Gladstone knows perfectly that the attempt to get up a cry for autonomy wholly failed to stir the Irish heart till the land question was used as the lever by which to excite a national spirit otherwise profoundly apathetic. He himself appreciated the meaning of Mr. Parnell's sudden success directly the land question was taken in hand, and proclaimed the necessity of dealing with it in a spirit of impartial justice. But the hand which he put to the plough he removed again in his im- patience of the difficulties in his way, and removed it just at the moment when it was not only most likely to be fruitful of good, but when it was doing the very work which, as he him- self testified by his proposed Land Bill, needed to be done before any great statesman could concede Home-rule. In other words, he not only abandoned the chief hope of undermining the desire for Home-rule, but he abandoned the task of ful- filling the one condition without the adequate accomplishment of which even the entertainment of any proposal for Home-rule was morally premature, and, in our belief at least, a mere apple of discord tending to make a disunited people more disunited than ever.
But Mr. Gladstone ignores also one of the most characteristic of the Unionists' assumptions. They maintain that either Mr. Gladstone's proposals mean Federalism, or that they are already rejected, and rejected blankly, by his own party in Great Britain. Now, if they mean Federalism, ought not that to be frankly acknowledged ? Can anything be more certain than that Federalism would be a new departure of the most gigantic kind in the history of Great Britain,—a new depar- ture which would make Mr. Gladstone's favourite comparison of the case of Ireland with that of Hungary and Bavaria or the other German States, quite unmeaning ? Were not Austria and Germany organised on the State system long before the extension took place which gave Hungary a separate autonomy, and which drew together the States of Germany into a centralised Empire ? Is Great Britain organised on the federal system? Is there the smallest analogy between such federalism as Mr. Gladstone proposes and the legisla- tive duality in Great Britain and Ireland to which he refers as the historical precedent for his proposals ? That legislative duality was not Federalism in any sense. Ireland was not then represented in the Westminster Parliament, and there were none of the problems to be solved of which he himself pointed out the enormous difficulty, problems affecting the interference of Imperial with local questions in the central Parliament. If he now proposes a recourse to a federal system of which there is no trace in the history of these islands, he should say so, and let the people see the tremendous constitutional questions which would at once arise. The difficulties would be not less, but far greater than those which affect equal Powers. Our difficulty in any federal alliance with Ireland would be not Ireland's strength but Ireland's weakness. Mr. Gladstone speaks as if Ireland's weakness were all in our favour. We hold just the opposite opinion. If there were anything like equality between the two islands, a federal system might possibly be devised which would work fairly enough, had the enormous preliminary difficulty of the fissure in Irish society itself ever been overcome. What is now the vast difficulty of applying the most moderate kind of force to criminal conspiracy in Ireland ? Not any want of physical power, but the absolute supremacy of that power, and the consequent feeling which is aroused in the British democracy that there is something unfair and unmanly in using that power at all, mildly and soberly as it is used. We sin- cerely believe that if Federalism is to be adopted as between England and Ireland, the prospect of adopting it will manu- facture an artificial demand for more equipoise than any tie of that kind could give us, and that even Great Britain would be broken up into political fragments in order to supply the elements of that equipoise. Mr. Gladstone seems to us to miss all these points in the Unionist position. He ignores the social fissure in Ireland. He ignores the absolute deficiency of anything like precedent for a federal system in Great Britain. He ignores the fact that his own followers have rejected, and rejected contemptuously, anything short of Federalism. And he ignores the enormous difficulty of Federalism between two Powers so unequal as Ireland and England, where the weaker of the two has acquired all the habits and qualifications for tripping up the stronger, and the stronger has just begun to be ashamed of using her greater strength against the weaker, and yet has found no substitute for it.
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