6 MARCH 1886, Page 5

THE RUMOURED DEL AY IN HOME-RULE.

THERE has been a very persistent and confident rumour prevalent this week that when the Irish policy of the Government is stated, we shall have no legislative change pro- posed for the present except on the agrarian question, and that the Government, though pledging itself probably to grant an Irish Parliament, will postpone any scheme of legislation on that subject till next Session, perhaps even till the end of next Session. It is not for us, with our view of the dangers of Home-rule. to enter the smallest objection to the policy of delay. We may fairly say that this is one of those neck-or-nothing leaps which no sensible Legislature is likely to take deliberately; that, indeed. the best chance which the Home-rule Party have is to hurry Par- liament into rash precipitancy before it can clearly estimate the magnitude of the danger. But heartily as we approve of delay, if delay can be secured, whether in propounding or in carrying out the Irish policy of the Government, we certainly see great difficulties in the way of postponing to a date which will seem to many of the parties concerned quite indefinite, that part of the Irish legislation on which Mr. Parnell and his followers have fixed as embodying the very essence of their demands. Nor is this the only difficulty in the way of such a postpone- ment. According to the only scheme which has as yet attracted much public attention,—the only scheme which any one outside Ireland has yet thought feasible,—the means for de-ding with the agrarian difficulty on a large scale could only be provided by the transfer to the Irish Ex- chequer of half the present rental of Irish land, the Imperial Exchequer buying out the landlords, and saving the interest on the purchase-money by ceasing to pay the Irish local charges. If this operation is not to be undertaken, where will the means N. found for buying out the Irish landlords and greatly reducing the rent of Irish tenants ? Of course, Mr. Glad- stone may have some new plan of which no one has ever t b.eight for buying out the Irish landlords ; but even he has no financial magic at his disposal ; and any notion of putting. however temporarily, an enormous additional burden on the En dish taxpayer is not one that would enter his head, or that 11 would venture to propose to Parliament even if it did. W are entirely at a loss, therefore, to guess how it is possible

to separate any agrarian operation that may be thought of in Ireland, from the political operation necessary to provide the means for effecting it. And yet this is only a small part of the difficulty.

The real difficulty of so long postponing the measure which the Government propose for the reorganisation of Irish politi- cal institutions, is that, so far as we can see, not only is "social order," on the restoration of which they lay the greatest stress, very closely connected with it, but the hostility of the Par- nellites to the Administration cannot otherwise be removed. We are aware that in Thursday's debate Mr. Gladstone some- what pointedly denied that the chief remedy for Irish disorder was conceived by the Government to be political at all. We conclude that he meant to imply his belief that the agrarian question has more to do with Irish lawlessness than anything else. Granted ; but that being so, and being recognised by the Parnellites as being so, is it credible that they would allow the Government to take out of their bands the chief lever which they possess, without granting that for which chiefly they prize the possession of that lever? Let us admit, what we are well disposed to admit, that if only the agrarian question could be well settled,—a fearful if,' by the way,—it is quite possible that the National League would lose its power, and that order might be restored in Ireland. But that is the very reason why it seems to us simply impossible that the political leaders should permit the agrarian question to be separated from the political question, so far' of course, as they have the power to prevent it. It is like asking a victorious army to lay down its areas and sur- . render at discretion, to ask the Nationalists to give up the agrarian grievance without securing the political terms they so passionately desire. We all know that Mr. Parnell would never have "taken off his coat" to settle the land question, if ho had not thought it the best means of acquiring influence for the settlement of the political question. And that is just what he has found it. It was the credit given him by the peasantry for passing the Land Act that enabled him to dictate his own terms to the Irish constituencies at the last election on the subject of the Constitutional struggle. They argued that as Mr. Parnell had done so much, he could do more, and that their best chance to get the land into their own power at prairie value,' or some- thing near 'prairie value,' would be to vote for whatever he wished, and trust to him to do the rest. Let them once believe that he has done all on this subject that he could do, that even with an Irish Parliament he would not be able to make the life of an Irish farmer any more comfortable or prosperous than he had made it already, and unquestionably the spell which his name now carries with it would disappear. We can, then, hardly conceive it possible that Mr. Parnell would permit the agrarian question to be dissociated from the political question. And we observe that the organs of the Nationalist Party are saying the same thing. If they allowed a whole Session to intervene between the settlement of the agrarian question and the settlement of the political question, they might very well find that Parliament was no longer in a humour to settle the political question in their sense at all, and that Mr. Gladstone himself,—faithful to his promises though he would undoubtedly be,—might have lost his control of the question altogether.

Moreover, there is another aspect of the matter which appears to point to the difficulty of delay. It is certain that the House of Lords will welcome any solution of the agrarian question which extricates the Irish landlords from the perilous position in which they undoubtedly stand. It is not probable that they will accept, under any conceivable conditions, the proposal to grant the Irish a separate Parliament in Dublin. But it may be by no means impossible so to connect the two

• measures that neither should take effect without the other. The scheme connected with Mr. Giffen's name undoubtedly had this merit in the eyes of Nationalists, that it did so connect them. It suggested a plan by which the Irish landlords could be paid off only on condition that the independent Irish Parlia- ment had been secured. The effect of that would undoubtedly have been, we do not say to prevent the House of Lords from rejecting the double measure, but at least to diminish vastly the reluctance felt in the House of Lords to accept the double measure, so that if once an appeal to the country should show the country to be favourable to the proposal, there would be nothing further to apprehend from the Hou,e of Lords. That is a matter of the greatest possible importance to the Irish agitators, for they are well aware that even if the main features of any scheme for Irish Home-rule are approved

by the country, the House of Lords will still have it in its power so to modify and cripple it, that Home-rule as carried would be very inadequate to their purpose, if not even a mockery to their hopes. And on this ground, also, we apprehend that the Nationalists will be utterly averse to divorce the scheme for the removal of agrarian discontent from the scheme for the restoration to Ireland of an Irish Parliament.

On the whole, greatly as we wish for delay,—the longest possible delay,—in the production of a measure which we regard as fraught with the ruin of Ireland and a most serious injury to the power of England, we are not at all sanguine that the delay is possible. Mr. Gladstone may be convinced that the disorder in Ireland is the product of agrarian despair, and he is probably right. But the Nationalist leaders are quite as likely to be convinced of it as he is. Their remedy for the social disorder in Ireland is to make the National League to all intents and pur- poses the Government of Ireland ; and they are not un- reasonably sanguine that the transfer of all Irish legislative power to an Irish Parliament will in effect secure this. Their remedy for the prevalent disobedience to good laws is to change the good laws into bad laws, which laws they may then hope to get obeyed. And that is a complete remedy for the moment, though only for the moment. It is quite true that the National League, if established by law, would very soon make Ireland uninhabitable. But that could hardly be known till its rule had been tried for a few months, and proved to be intolerable. In the meantime, those who have been the inspiration of the National League will certainly not lay down their arms till they have got the Imperial Parliament to sanc- tion the transfer of English power to the hands of the men who, up to this time, have issued the orders and executed the decrees by which the British government of Ireland has been so effectually paralysed.