LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
PROFESSOR DICEY ON UNIONIST DELUSIONS.—I.
LTO SHE EDITOR Or THE SPICIUTOS...1
Sra,—It is time we Liberal Unionists should clear our minds, and our language alike, from cant. Delusions are prevalent among us which may bring our cause to ruin. Allow me to-day to note one which is full of pressing danger.
Certain concessions, it is habitually assumed, exist which, if made by Mr. Gladstone, would reunite the Liberal Party. Whether be will make them or has made them, is matter of con- troversy ; the oracle is assuredly not dumb, but oracular deliver. ances admit of diverse interpretations. That, however, the concessions, if made, would reconcile all honest Liberals to Home- rale, is, to judge from current talk, past dispute. Yet, to any man who stands outside politics and bestows on an important matter half-an-hour's patient thought, nothing can be clearer than that the so-called " concessions " will not cure, and ought not to cure, the divisions among Liberals. The concessions obtained or expected from Mr. Gladstone are, to deal only with the most important, twofold.
Mr. Gladstone, we are told, will pledge himself that not one penny from the resources of the United Kingdom shall be spent or risked in compensating Irish landlords for lands or rents taken from them by the action of the State; the policy of the Land-purchase Bill, grounded as it was on a sentiment of justice or of honour, is to be given up; English taxpayers are to be assured that if they suffer in character they shall not suffer in pocket. This is the noble concession which will conciliate men of common pride and common honesty. It is heralded in with triumph by politicians who boast their descent from the reformers of a past generation. Yet the English Abolitionists rightly preferred that England should pay twenty millions, rather than that the emancipation of the slaves should be tarnished by the suspicion of in- justice to slave-owners ; our fathers cared for the greatness of England, and they knew that Imperial greatness is bound up with Imperial honesty. This modern policy of meanness will miss its aim. The people of England are not niggards. Men fighting for the unity of the nation will not hate Disunion, the less because it is coupled with national discredit. Honour is still something, nor is honour alone at stake. Precedent goes for much; wrong done to landowners in Ireland means insecurity to the owners of every kind of property throughout the United Kingdom, and any man who owns a house may be made to. understand that his right to be compensated when a Railway Company takes his shop or his residence, rests on the same basis of morals or of custom as the claim of a landlord to be paid for property taken from him for the benefit of the State. In this matter at least, honest Home-rulers and honest Unionists will be found to be at one. The supporters of a policy recom- mended to them by a semblance of generosity will resent its degradation by connection with the reality of dishonest, parsimony.
Mr. Gladstone, in the second place, will, it is asserted, pledge himself that the proposed Parliament at Dublin shall not rob Westminster of Irish representatives.
This is the concession which Liberal Unionists are expected to hail with delight. What is the blessing which it secures us P Neither more nor less than this: that Mr. Parnell and his followers will, after passing laws for Ireland uncon- trolled by English interference, take their part in legis- lating for England. Englishmen will give up governing Ireland: but the Parnellites will still govern England. Nor do the benefits to England of the proposed arrangement end here.. Irish Members will not, when at Westminster, confine their atten- tion to British or to Imperial affairs. They will keep their eyes fixed upon Ireland; they will be driven not by any natural per- versity, but by the force of circumstances, to bend their whole energies to the prevention of English interference in the affairs of Ireland, and to the nullification of all checks placed by a paper Constitution on Irish independence. How this end will be achieved we all know. The Irish representatives will practise their own Parliamentary arts; they will hold the balance between, English parties ; they will foster English partisanship ; they will play as they have played on the mean ambitions of English statesmanship ; they will enfeeble the action of the British Parliament; they will take care that oppression or insurrection, at Dublin is reinforced by obstruction at Westminster. If Mr. Parnell had refused Home-rule unless it were accompanied by the retention of the Irish representation in the British Parlia- ment, all England would have been up in arms at Irish un- reasonableness. A plan too unfair to have been proposed by the boldness of Mr. Healy, is to be termed a generous concession when forced upon Mr. Gladstone.
The concession, it will be urged, is made in deference to the request of Unionists. This plea may for a moment satisfy disputants in search of a verbal triumph. Bat in the eyes of any man who looks at facts instead of words, the apology is futile. The case stands thus : Mr. Gladstone was last year placed in effect in this dilemma: "If you do not," said his opponents, "re- tain the Irish representatives at Westminster, the sovereignty of the British Parliament will be, under the terms of your Bill, no more than a name ; if you do retain them, Great Britain will lose the only material advantage offered her in exchange for the local independence of Ireland." Gladatonians, in substance, replied that the devices embodied in the Government of Ireland Bill at once freed the British Parliament from the presence of the Parnellites, and safeguarded the sovereignty of the British, or (for in this matter there was some confusion) of the Imperial Parliament. On this point issue was joined. The other horn of the dilemma fell out of eight, and some Unionists, rightly believing that the Bill as it stood did not preserve the supremacy of the British Parliament, pressed the Ministry hard with all the difficulties involved in the removal of the Irish Members. In the heat of debate, speeches were, I doubt not, delivered in which the argument that you could not, as the Bill stood, remove the Irish Members from Westminster and keep the British Parliament supreme in Ireland, was driven, so far as to sound like an argument in favour of, at all costs, allowing Members from Ireland to sit in the English Parlia- ment. Those who appeared to fall into this error were, it must be noted, but a fraction of the Unionist Party, and their mistake was little more than verbal. When the Ministry maintained that the removal of the Irish Members from Westminster was a main feature of their Home-rule polio'', opponents naturally insisted upon the defects of the scheme laid before them, and did not insist on the equal or greater defects of a plan which the Government did not advocate. Mr. Gladstone, we are now told, has changed his position, and assents to the principle that Ireland must be represented in the British Parliament. If this assent be represented as a concession to the demands of Unionists, my reply is that it is no each thing. It is merely the accept- ance of a different horn of an argumentative dilemma. Grant for the sake of argument (what is by no means certain) that the supremacy of the Imperial Parliament is really saved. The advantage offered to England in exchange for Home-rule is assuredly gone. My friend Mr. John Morley used to argue in favour of Home-rule from the necessity of freeing the English Parliament from Parnellite obstruction. As a matter of curiosity, I should like to know what he thinks of a concession which strikes his strongest argumentative weapon out of his hands. My curiosity will be satisfied on the same day which tells us Lord Spencer's reflections on the surrender of the policy represented by the Land-purchase Bill. Meanwhile, I know well enough the thoughts of every Unionist who is not tied by the exigencies of his political ante- cedents or utterances. To say that in the eyes of such a man the proposed concession is worthless, is to say far too little. It is not a concession which he rates at a low price ; it is a proposal which he heart and soul condemns. What concessions from Home-rulers will, it may be asked, satisfy Liberal Unionists P The answer is simple,—None. The maintenance of the Union and the repeal of the Union are as inconsistent in fact as they are in logic. The only concession which can or Ought to satisfy a Unionist is the surrender of the claim for Home-rule. The simple truth is, that the case is one not for -compromise, but for conflict. Neither an honest Unionist nor an honest Separatist—and there are honest men enough ranged on each side in this battle—can think of parley. Unionists, at any rate, should recognise that the idea of asking for con- cessions is no better than a delusion. The special concessions offered are, to sum the whole matter up, worse than illusory. The Gladstonian policy possessed, with all its radical defects two merits. The Land-purchase Bill was an attempt to save English honour ; the removal of the Irish Members from West- minster was an attempt to reinvigorate the British Parliament The policy of Home-rule is made not better, but infinitely worse, -by concessions which entail dishonour on the English nation and weakness on the English Parliament.—I am, Sir, &c.,
A. V. DICKY.
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