MR. GLADSTONE ON THE IRISH DEMAND.
MR. GLADSTONE'S paper in the Nineteenth Century for February is in style and spirit one of .his best political essays. It shows his own deep, though far too suddenly expressed, conviction that Home-rule for Ireland is the true remedy for the evils of the situation, and it breathes the generous, if excessively sanguine, belief that it is safe to trust Ireland with a complete measure of virtual independence. There is much in it with which we heartily agree, though much more from which we utterly differ. For instance, we agree entirely with the drift of the opening passage, in which Mr. Gladstone treats the majority gained against Home-rule as very far indeed from final. We agree, too, with the tone of his first counsel to his friends and followers not to attempt to gain their point by addressing threats to England. It is the one course which might, we think, infuse a little tonic into the hearts of Tories, and a little tenacity into the minds of waverers like Mr. Chamberlain. Again, we agree with Mr. Gladstone as to the physical strength of Great Britain. And if she were in the least inclined to use that strength in such a struggle as this, his inference from it would be weighty ; but as it is of the very essence of the situation that she will not use that strength even when there is the strongest obligation to do so, we do not see how her physical strength affects the
question. We agree heartily with what we understand him to imply, that in the debates on the Irish Question, it was England, the physically stronger Power, that showed timidity as to the future,—very wise and justifiable timidity in our opinion,—,and Ireland that showed audacity. We agree that more " firmness " in the government of Ireland, un- accompanied by other measures,—a firmness which, by the way, we are as little likely to display in our present mood, as we are to return to a policy of brutal oppression,,--would work no miracles, even if it could be looked for, and would not restore Ireland to tranquillity. We agree that a great deal of local business is grossly neglected, both in Ireland and in Great Britaip, on account of the ignorance and incompetence of the central Parliament for such tasks, and owing to the great strain upon its energies. And we agree, finally, that the Irish character has or had many noble virtues, though they were never political, and though in the most recent times the political deficiencies have, under the training of the most unprincipled and unpatriotic party which ever obtained the confidence of a people, developed into very active political vices. But here all our agreement with Mr. Gladstone on large plate of policy ends, and we have to enumerate our points of radical difference, And, in the first place, we do not agree at all that, in her attitude towards Ireland under the existing democracy, Great Britain can with the smallest justice reckon her physical strength as tending to success in thwarting Irish schemes of injustice, if Mr. Gladstone's proposals, or any at all like them, were adopted. On the contrary, it is the chief source of our indecision. To any one who has watched public affairs with any care, nothing is more remarkable than the change which has come over the nation within a hundred years, since the epoch at which we were ruled by a cross between a dull oligarchy and an unscrupulous aristocracy. Then there was hardly any brutality which the Government did not either commit or ignore, for the sake of establishing our control over Ireland. Now there is not the heart of a chicken in any Government for strong action of any kind, however considerate and humane, so long as it can give no better reason for its action than that it is its duty to govern Ireland, and to put down resistance to its authority. With our irresistible physical force, what have we to be afraid of, asks Mr. Gladstone ? Why, we are afraid of ourselves, and all the more afraid of ourselves on the very ground that we are so much stronger than Ireland, and shrink from the taunts levelled by the world against reputed oppressors. Was it not a Liberal Government which abandoned power rather than renew some of the most just pro- visions in any criminal law,—provisions which the Scotch law recognises and retains as of the very essence of criminal lustice,—against the shriek of protesting Irish Members Was it not a Tory Administration, in the very act of preaching by the mouth of its chief Minister that a firm government is the one condition of Irish prosperity, which not only gave up at once any aspiration after the renewal of those provisions of the Crimes Act, but which, on the dictation of the Irish Home- rulers, agreed to reconsider the justice of the sentences passed on a band of ruffians who had massacred a whole family in oold blood, though that Government well knew that those sen- tences had been carefully reconsidered by one of the justest of English statesmen? What we are afraid of is not want of physical power, but want of moral nerve in dealing with a democracy which is always ready to shriek out against us that we are oppressors, and which always gets a ready ear from a large proportion of our own English voters. When Mr. Glad- stone displays the great physical resources of this island, he really wastes his breath. We are not afraid of any failure in our physical resources. What we are afraid of is deficiency in nerve to wield them amid the shrieks of the electorates on both aides of the Channel. And what we vainly urge to Mr. Glad- stone's deaf ears is, that if we have been and are in a panic about enforcing the commonest justice on the murderers of peasants, and about putting down a widespread system of palpable and gross injustice like the "Plan of Campaign," even when we have a majority in Parliament, even when there is no separate Irish Parliament to call us bad names and give the cue to the senti- mentalists here, we shall be thrice as cowardly when there is such a Parliament, and when any interference will cost us the greatest possible difficulties of procedure unless we are pre- pared to override the new Constitution and go to war at once. We fear that the grant of a separate Irish Legislature would be the surrender, for we know not how long, not of the physical power, but of the moral strength for any interference of any effective and maseuline kind in the acts of injustice which we have good grounds for believing that the Parnellite majority, in their land-hunger and land-greed, are fully prepared to
commit. Is this fear weak and unpatriotic ? Let us judge by facts. To straightforward undoctored English consciences, a more grossly immoral policy than the "Plan of Campaign" recently adopted in Ireland cannot be conceived, What is the attitude of our high-minded statesman towards it? Mr. Gladstone is most anxiously non-committal in his attitude. He knows what it will cost his party to alienate the Par- nellitee, and he easily finds reasons for remaining silent upon its moral character. His lieutenants follow his guidance. Mr. Labouchere, and a few shrieking Radicals like Mr. Conybeare, endorse it with all their hearts. And even Lord Randolph Churchill cannot leave the Government without twitting it with making too mach of the immorality of the "Plan of Campaign," and without trying to conjure back a little of his lost Irish popularity by siding with those who would have left it alone. Is this a state of things in which it is reasonable to suppose that if we had a separate Irish Legislature doing in Ireland things of which England should be and would be ashamed, England would venture to interfere with the authority with which she would be bound to interfere in order to pre- vent gross injustice under the shield and sanction of her great physical power ? If we do not interfere in the green tree, what hope is there of our interfering in the dry ? Take another instance of the same change of attitude within a very few months under the necessity of conciliating the Irish democracy ; and again it shall be from Mr. Gladstone s own policy. In the summer of 1885, he urged in favour of extending the suffrage to Ireland on the same terms as to this island,—urged, we thought at the time, with unanswerable force,—that if the Irish minority should be inadequately represented, represented, that is, by much lose than its fair number of representatives in the House of Commons, the majority of the English and Scotch representatives would virtually protect and represent them. The deed was done, and directly it was done, Mr. Gladstone was himself the first to propose a change of government under which the shield of the English and Scotch majority would at once have been taken away from before the exposed heads of the Irish minority. Had his Irish Government Bill been carried, the security offered for the Irish minority by the votes of the English and Scotch majorities would have been cast away for ever. Now, we ask whether, with so little consideration as this betrays for the interests of minorities, in the present democratic temper of the times, we can con- template with the smallest satisfaction Mr. Gladetone's plea, that with our vast physical superiority to Ireland we have nothing to fear, since we can at any time intervene to protect the injured with overwhelming power. The simple answer is that what we notoriously shrink from doing when it is much easier to do it..we certainly shall not do when it becomes much harder. We have nothing to fear in the physical power of Ireland. We have everything to fear in the proved moral weakness of Great Britain.
But, further, it is not on account of events in Ireland alone that we have grave grounds for fear if Home-rule is to be granted for Ireland. Mr. Gladstone's assumption throughout his article that Ireland is "integrally " concerned, Great Britain only " partially " concerned, is surely a moat mistaken assump- tion. We are " integrally " concerned in any disintegrating process. And that, if his proposed measure should take effect for Ireland, disintegration far beyond the point of legiti- mate decentralisation will make rapid progress on this side of the Channel, seems to us all but certain. Already we have proposals for Scotland and Wales which would most materially weaken the union of the nation, and prepare the way for political decomposition. The Constitutional future of this country seems to us a matter so important that nothing short of a claim of absolute justice should be allowed to en- danger that future. Yet on the plea of such justice, we are asked to hand over Ireland to the most immoral party which has been organised in this country for a hundred years, even though the immediate result must be to weaken seriously the unity of this nation, and to render our Constitution, with its new Imperial Parliament, Irish Parliament, and, for anything we see, English, Bedell, and Welsh Parliaments, one mass of political confusion, a confusion without historical excuse, and from which the only escape could be found through the helpful audacity of some twentieth-century Cromwell. Mr. Gladstone seems to us throughout his interesting and earnest paper, to shut his eyes resolutely to all the innumerable signs of a growing moral weakness in England, of a growing inx4 moral audacity in Ireland, and of a growing flabbiness of fibre in our Parliamentary institutions and Parliamentary life, all of which would be aggravated almost indefinitely by the triumph of Irish Home-rule.
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