TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE ROUSING OF ULSTER. THERE is an old. Irish legend, the subject of a poem written long before the Christian era, that at one time the whole of Ulster,—Uladh, as it was called in the old story,—was covered. with a preternatural apathy to danger which threatened her from the South. In Mr. De Vere's spirited version of it :— "A mist hung o'er it heavy, and on her sons, Imbecile spirit, and a heartless mind And base soul-sickness."
"Shepherds set the wolf to guard their fold," while the King, his lips curled in an idiot smile, replied. to the warnings of his friend, "What will be, will be. All things go well." It is not Ulster who is in that half-unconscious swoon now. She is fully alive to the danger of her situa- tion; but the mist has crept from Ireland to England, and the lack-lustre eyes with which Ulster is said in the old days to have contemplated her danger, are now seen in the heads of the English people. As Mr. Gladstone truly says, it is the diminished hostility of England which has furnished. the new chance to the disloyal section of the Irish people ; and while Ulster is exerting her whole force to repel the threatened danger, Englishmen are sunk in an unnatural stupor, are in- dulging in a fond delusion that the danger is purely imaginary, and that the Irish Party who have so often ex- pressed with perfect frankness their wish to see England humbled to the dust, are in reality England's best friends and wisest counsellors. Ulster and England, if they really held together, could easily crush Ireland with Scotland and Wales thrown in. The people of Ulster tell us that Belfast alone has in the last year contributed towards the revenues of the Union hardly less than Mr. Gladstone considers to be the share of Ireland in the common work of the United Kingdom. Yet Belfast is to be wrenched away from her loyal allegiance to the Government of the United Kingdom, and compelled to contribute her wealth to a government which she dreads, detests, and. has every reason to regard as profoundly hostile to her prosperity ; while England in her stupor mutters over the promises of the Newcastle Programme, and broods over the thought of revolu- tions of which she knows little and for which she really cares less, taking no heed of her most loyal fellow-citizens, but listening rather to the spells which Ireland chaunts through Mr. Gladstone's eloquent and eager lips. The aged. orator rehearses the passionate applause which Belfast accorded a century ago to those who conspired against the Government of this island. But a century ago disloyal Belfast was a small town of nineteen thousand inhabitants, while the Belfast of to-day, which is far more resolute in her loyalty to the Constitution of the United Kingdom than the Belfast of 1798 was in her disloyalty to it, represents a population more than fourteenfold that of the disloyal Belfast,—a city which has been converted by just, beneficent, and liberal government, to cordial friendship with the government which she then repudiated. If England listened to the voice of those Irishmen who love her best, she would no more think of inviting Mr. Dillon, Mr. O'Brien, and Mr. T. P. O'Connor to guide the policy of the Irish Legislature and Administration, than France would trust her policy to the dictation of Germany, or Germany apply for counsel to the Czar.
To do the Irish Home-rulers mere justice, they do not even pretend. to echo the language by which Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Morley endeavour to persuade us that the guaran.- tees for the protection of the minority which the Bill professes to provide, are both effective and superfluous. Mr. Gladstone maintains that they are both ; while Mr. Morley maintains that, whether effective or not, they are at least superfluous. Irishmen may be trusted, he thinks, if once YOU act generously to them, to take no advantages of their opponents. But we hear nothing of that kind from the panegyrists of the boycotting policy and the "Plan of Campaign." They sit and cheer Mr. Chamberlain when he points out that, with an Irish Legislature and an Irish Administration dependent on it, nothing short of an Act suspending the new Constitution, and a reoccupation of Ireland by military force, would really be effective in putting down a renewed" Plan of Campaign." The Irish National- ists have never withdrawn their boast that they would purge Ireland of Landlordism; they have never assured us that, under the new regime, every shilling of debt contracted under the Ashbourne Act and the measures which sup- plemented it, would be fully paid up. They have never assumed the airs of converts to the policy they used to attack so bitterly. So far as we can judge, they justly think that the so-called guarantees are utterly worthless, and that is exactly the reason why they are so thoroughly satisfied with Mr. Gladstone's Bill, and support him so loyally even when, as on Tuesday, by supporting him they throw over a favourite political fad of their own leader, Archbishop Walsh. Archbishop Walsh declared himself strongly in favour of Bimetallism, and it was supposed that the Anti-Parneliites would take up that crotchet in de- ference to his authority. On the contrary, they voted in a. solid phalanx for Mr. Gladstone, so perfectly satisfied are they, that, if once they can pass this Bill, :Ireland will be practically in their hands, and that the guarantees will all be found to be pure moonshine, the traps by which weak- minded English Home-rulers will have been deluded into putting Ireland beyond their power, unless, indeed, they are willing to undo all they have done and confess that they have taken a false step which it is necessary, at great cost of blood and bitterness, to retrace. We cannot find a single indication that those who have always triumphed. in the success of the policy which treats land-grabbers as lepers, have ever said a word to show that they do not triumph in it still. When Mr. Morley declared that, as regards the three years' delay in handing over the Land Laws of Ireland to the Irish Parliament, there was no intention at present of proposing immediate legislation in the Imperial Parliament, unless events rendered that course necessary, no complaint arose from the Anti- Parnellite ranks. On the contrary, they seemed well satis- fied with the arrangement that, for the next three years, nothing more should be done,—after which the Irish Parliament could treat the land as it pleases. Three years are soon over ; and then how would the instalments still payable under the Acts for creating freeholders be paid P They would be paid. at prairie rates, or not at all. We may depend upon it that the whole machinery of the pre- tended guarantees is regarded. by the "patriots" of Ireland as so much dust thrown into the eyes of English Home- rulers, who want to be provided with a decent excuse for doing what they are very loth to do. The Anti-Parnellites do not even profess to take these clauses seriously. They avow their belief that they have been acting justly throughout the whole history of the Land League and National League, and in that sense, and in that sense only, they intend to act justly still. In other words, they intend to confiscate the land of Ireland by claiming it at merely nominal values for the tenant-farmers, and to crush all those who stand in the way of any policy of that kind. If Ulster changes her mind, and makes common cause with them, they will find it worth their while to let Ulster off easily. If not, they will find the means of ruining Ulster, and making her repent her loyalty to England. For the present at least there is no danger that Ulster will change her mind. She is fully awake to the danger of identifying herself with a conspiracy which has adopted methods of agitation so ruinous tethe principles of civilisation. But there is no knowing what she might do, if the intolerable sense of in- jury in having been deserted by England, in spite of all her faithful loyalty, came fully upon her. As yet it is not Ulster that hesitates, but England. Bewildered by Mr. Gladstone's eloquence, and the fascinations of the New- castle programme, the mist is upon her eyes, and the palsy on her hands. Mr. Gladstone's more moderate followers are so anxious to be deceived, that many of them are deceived. Unless the constituencies awaken to the danger, their repre sentatives will follow hesitatingly, but in adequate numbers, where Mr. Gladstone leads them. Even the Noncon- formists will not stretch out their hands to their Presby- terian brethren in Ireland. Excusing themselves with the boast that they retain the power to overrule injustice if they choose, they will not choose to overrule it. And we shall lose the most faithful of our fellow-citizens, while Ireland will lose the prosperity of the most prosperous of her provinces, only because a glamour has fallen on Mr. Gladstone's eyes, and a strange illusion upon his heart.
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