THE CARDINAL IRISH BLUNDER.
TETresolutions passed at Chicago on Monday in elation to the finding of the jury on the Cronin murder touch so nearly the root of the Irish difficulty, that they ought to be carefully considered by all Englishmen. Thanks to successive Governments which felt no sympathy with murder and rebellion, the Clan-na-Gael represents a more violent form of Irish Association than any which has at the present time any existence in Ireland. Its readiness to murder those who thwart its plans, and its willingness to plot without the smallest respect for the laws of the State within which the plots are hatched, greatly exaggerate the worst features of any illegal Association at present existing in Ireland. But what the speakers at the Chicago meeting complained of, the utter indifference of the mem- bers of the Clan-na-Gael to the obligations imposed by American citizenship, are precisely the characteristics of the Irish agitation carried on in Ireland, and embody the same wish to establish an imperimm in imperio which is the final aim of all Irish agitation. We suppose that the mem- bers of the Clan-na-Gael would hardly affect to be carrying on a constitutional agitation. The Irish agitators in Illinois would defend themselves by saying that though their agita- tion is not constitutional in the United States, yet since it is not directed against the Constitution of the United States, but only against the Constitution of the United Kingdom, American citizens need not take alarm. Unfortunately, however, American citizens do not agree with them. They think that the murder of Irishmen living under the protec- tion of American laws, is hardly at all the less dangerous because it is founded on disgust, not for American laws, but for English laws. The active hatred to English laws which leads to the violation of American laws, is a source of anarchy from which the Americans are pro- bably more likely to suffer serious consequences than the English themselves. Indeed, you can hardly conceive a more cynical indifference to law than is manifested by men who, while professing to respect the laws of the State in which they live so far as those laws are intended to pro- tect the political life of that State, calmly ignore and transgress them only in order to upset the political equili- brium of another State which they detest. Irishmen who ignore American laws in order that they may unsettle Great Britain, have even less excuse for what they do than Irishmen who ignore British laws in order that they may unsettle Great Britain. What should we say to a guest who set his respected host's house on fire only in order that an enemy's house in the neighbourhood might catch fire ? That is what the Clan-na-Gael do when they organise, conspire, and murder in the United States in order to embarrass Great Britain.
But though this cynical indifference to American law is even more culpable and more expressive of utter lawless- ness of nature than the same indifference to British law, we must remark that the Clan-n&-Gael has never even pre- tended to be constitutional, while it is the great claim of Mr. Parnell and Mr. Davitt and their followers that their recent Irish agitation has been in the true sense constitu- tional, although it has attempted to evade the law at every point, and to organise aggressive inroads on the law, like the system of " boycotting ' and the "Plan of Campaign." The cardinal blunder of Irish agitation is that it has no conception of what " constitutional " agitation means. Thus, for instance, Mr. Davitt,—whose frankness and candour no one can help contrasting very advantageously with the consistent evasiveness of other Irish agitators,— explained openly to the Court before which he gave evidence this week, that he regards "the authorities of Ireland as the criminals of Ireland." He did not, he said, communi- cate with the Irish authorities as to the true murderer in a ease where he believed that a wrong person had been convicted of the crime, because he held the authorities to be "the criminals of Ireland, and the cause of all the unhappy outrages that are committed in the country." And yet he claims to take part in a " constitutional " agitation, as if the British Government any more than American citizens could tolerate conduct which assumes as its very basis that the authorities of their own land are the criminals of that land. Mr. Parnell has repeatedly contended that he is in favour of constitutional action and nothing but constitutional action • but, nevertheless, he founded a League of which it was to be the cardinal principle that a man was to be treated as a leper for availing himself of some of the legal rights given him by the law of the country in which he lived. And his lieutenants have founded, against his will it is true, but against his will very timidly and gingerly expressed, a "Plan of Campaign" which is a mere Association for breaking contracts, and for inciting to as obvious a breach of the law as any s-cret Association has ever advocated. What Englishmen feel is, that while this is what the Irish mean by " constitutional " agitation, no compromise with them is even possible. What sense is there in granting Home-rule to a people who begin by telling you that they regard it as con- stitutional to break your laws ? What pretext is there for supposing that they will think it more unconstitutional to break the laws which the Treaty for Home-rule may im- pose, than they think it now to break the laws which are founded on the Treaty of Union ? Here is a section of the people of the United Kingdom who have an exception- ally large and an exceptionally favoured representation in Parliament, who can carry almost anything they wish in Parliament so far as it is consistent with the present Consti- tution of the United Kingdom, who have carried year after year popular agrarian measures of an extraordinary kind which have no match in any other country in Europe Or the United States, and who yet proclaim their right in a strictly " constitutional " agitation, as they call it, to con- spire to break, and to actually break, the law as it exists, instead of simply agitating for the right to make it what they wish to see it. We believe that the Parnellite ideal of constitutionalism is at bottom an arbitrary claim to refuse to be bound by the Constitution, an arbitrary claim to regard the authorities of the country in which they live as "the criminals" of that country, and themselves as the judges of who are criminals and who are not.
We hold very strongly that if the Parnellite movement had really been constitutional, or could even now become so, it would have twice the chance of success which it actually has. If it really respected the existing law,—if it really limited itself to attempts to alter that law in the proper constitutional manner,—if it really persuaded the English people that while the law is what it is, it would be carefully obeyed, and that all breaches of it would be discouraged and strongly condemned by the leaders, then we do fear that the attempt to disintegrate the United Kingdom in a legal manner might only too probably suc- ceed. But so long as this conviction that a constitutional agitation means the free use of every expedient to ignore and impede and escape the law which Irish ingenuity can invent, is diffused through the Parnellite Party, we hold that the English people will decline to listen to the pro- posal for making a new treaty with so-called " constitu- tional " agitators who have not shown the least insight into the significance of what the word " constitutional " should convey.
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