TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE PAPAL CIRCULAR AND THE LIBERALS. ments used by the Parnellite agitators ; and though the Liberal Party certainly had not the advantage of looking at the matter from the detached and elevated point of view of an ecclesiastical looker-on in the Pope's position, yet they had enormous advantages which he has not, to keep them in the straight path. The Pope and Congregation of Cardinals knew that it was for them a question between losing popularity in Ireland and a Fabian policy of delay. Had they chosen to put off giving any decision at all till the Irish Question had settled itself, they would have lost, perhaps, not only the approval of their own consciences, but a few earnest adherents as well ; yet they would not have lost the adhesion of any great branch of the Roman Church, for the Irish Question did not profoundly interest any section of the Roman Church except Ireland, whose people would, for the most part, have approved the shelving of the matter, though the elite of the English Roman Catholics would have disapproved it. Nothing would have been easier, had a worldly policy prevailed at Rome, than to ignore the issue till the matter had settled itself. But the English Liberals could not have adopted such a policy, and the course before them was plain enough. There was everything in the world to stimulate them to distinguish in the broadest way between such a political remedy as Home-rule,—which implies, or ought to imply, the capacity of Irishmen to shake themselves free from the illegitimate methods of fraud and terrorism, —and the unscrupulous policy of the National League. Nothing seems to us stranger than Mr. Gladstone's failure to understand that though Englishmen in general might be brought to approve his remedy for the Irish difficulty, Englishmen in general could never be brought to extenuate the methods by which the Irish agitators had attempted to force our hand. When a great English party took up the position of approving Home- rule, its very first step should have been to discountenance all the violence and all the sleight-of-hand for which they proposed to substitute a purely political remedy. If the Pope had the advantage, as he had, of an impartial position, Mr. Gladstone had for this purpose the still greater advantage of a partial position, the advantage of knowing what English Liberals in general think of such methods as the "Plan of Campaign " and Boycotting, and how not less impossible than undesirable it would be to alter their judgment on fundamental moralities of that kind.
The only conceivable motive for throwing an aegis over the Irish agitation was the narrowest kind of party feeling, and that motive ought to have been promptly discouraged and disowned. In how much stronger a position would not Mr. Gladstone and his party now be, if by their own action they had anticipated the judgment of the Roman See, and could point out to the Irish Party that they had from the first urged them to pursue the exact course which would have enabled them to carry the Roman Catholic Church heartily with them. Instead of that, they now find themselves in the awkward position of abettors of the Parnellites in relation to the very practices for which Rome sternly condemns them. Rome will almost certainly succeed in detaching the priesthood from the National League. And we can hardly imagine a worse blunder than to have helped to lead the Irish people into this embarrassment, especially when we consider that the English people happen to be even less inclined to extenuate these particular practices than the great Church itself which has to study the history of so many ages, and to regard the interests of so many different peoples, before it passes final judgment such as it has passed now. We should have thought Mr. Gladstone the very last statesman in the world to make such a blunder, for he has always endeavoured to aim at what we may call the international, as distinguished from the merely national, view of human morality, and to purge his mind of local prejudice. Yet here he has failed, and failed egregiously, where either a Russell, or a Palmerston, or even a Perceval would almost certainly have succeeded.
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