SWEATING A CONSTITUTION. T HE last thing we should ever have
supposed possible would have been that Mr. Gladstone would employ the latest years of his great political career in the ignoble work of teaching his party how to drive the Parliament of this country into the hasty and slovenly construction of a shoddy Constitution for the United Kingdom and Ire- land, —a Constitution full of the worst faults, its material bad, its fastenings loose, its machine-made stitches all ready to ravel out,—partly because the overseers had no time for superintendence, partly because the work itself was undertaken in a violent hurry for the starvation- wages of partisan purpose. Yet that is precisely the effect of the resolution carried yesterday week by a majority of 32,—to get the Home-rule Bill finished, in four compart- ments, at a given hour on a given day, whether the requisite attention had or had not been given to the gigantic and responsible task so rashly taken in hand. Nor is there the slightest excuse for all this fierce haste, except the excuse of Irish and Gladstonian impatience. The greatest possible political problems are being slurred over without even a decent attempt at the pretence of delibera- tion. On Thursday last at 10 o'clock, the great constructive clauses of the Irish Constitution were voted with a cynical indifference to their want of logic, their slovenly and hap- hazard combination of an American deference for the central power, with an Irish determination to make central control virtually impossible, that would threaten us with civil war and Ireland with anarchy in a few months' time, were it not for that House of Lords on whom these poli- tical slop-sellers are themselves relying to stop all this bad work, while they are telling the country that the Lords are knocking nails into their own coffin by rejecting what no sane Legislature would think of accepting. This Constitution, as every one knows, is made, like a bad razor, to sell and not to use. If the Lords were not pledged to reject it, we do not believe that even the majority in the Commons, eager as they are to attain a party victory, would venture to pass it. It proposes to follow American prece- dents, and it discards those precedents with the most insolent indifference at the most critical points. Instead of founding itself on a, scheme constructed in secret consultation by the ablest men of all parties, after the maturest consideration, the Government have astonished the Kingdom by causing a succession of brawls, in which neither time nor temper admitted of deliberate judgment. Often Parliament has more resembled Donnybrook Fair than a constitutional Congress. If any Member of the victorious party, if Mr. Labouchere, or Mr. Reid, or Mr. Cromer himself were suddenly told that the Lords, for some inscrutable reason, had determined at the last moment to give way and pass the Bill as it leaves the Commons, if it ever does leave the Commons, we believe that he would turn pale with fright, instead of rejoicing in the unexpected victory. Every- thing of importance, except the absolute necessity of galloping down hill, is to be left unsettled for the future decision of a Parliament of which nobody can anticipate the constitution, and nobody knows who will be the leading mind. If the party now in power gains a majority in the next Parliament, the leading mind will very likely be Mr. Asquith's ; in other, words, that of a man pledged to Federalism in exce1818, who will transform the United Kingdom, if he remains of the same opinion, into a group of cantons, with a feeble kind of Amphictyonic Council at the head. If, after passing this broken-backed measure, the Conservatives are returned to power to see how far they can repair the cruel political waste of their predecessors, they would come into power with the positive duty either of undoing all that had been done, and restoring order in Ireland by military occupation, or with an undertaking so utterly hopeless to patch up what they could not mend, that we doubt whether any statesman of repute would so much as venture to attempt a compromise. If this measure passes, everything would be unsettled, and nothing settled. It would be simply absurd to continue the provisional financial arrangements which Mr. Gladstone confesses to have been adopted mainly to .avoid the great complexity of his original plan. The notion of Ireland's contributing to the common expenses only one-third of her own means, and not any fixed proportion of those common expenses, is altogether monstrous. And yet the six years of preliminary squabble between England and Ireland as to the proper share of Ireland, and the right of England to collect a revenue which Ireland has no wish to pay, would certainly not facilitate any understanding between the two countries. Then the Land question would have remained unsettled for three years, and if at the end of that time Ireland claimed her right to settle it in her own way, we may be perfectly sure that the second half of the six years of delay would be passed in fierce con- troversy between the English and the Irish peoples on that most critical of all subjects. Add to this that the Irish representatives would have been present in our Westminster Parliament during the whole period, either making all steady government impossible by the ridiculous " in-and-out " scheme, or rendering it equally impossible by voting on subjects in which the Irish constituencies will have no interest of any kind except to buy from England the largest amount of political concession to Ireland,— and the Government of 1900, whatever it may be, would have as nice a hodge-podge of problems to settle, in whatever direction it was their wish to settle them, as the Government now in power. All that would be done by the present Bill, if by any possibility it could pass into an Act, would be to make either a new civil war certain in six years' time, or else a fresh step in the direction of Separation absolutely inevitable. Mr. Gladstone, if he could pass his ill-drawn, ill-considered, ill-botched Bill, would -have simply devolved on his suc- cessor, at the beginning of the next century, the necessity of drawing up a new Constitution to replace the shoddy article which would by that time be in tatters,—a mere scarecrow of a Constitution.
Nothing is, to our minds, more humiliating and astonishing than this great effort at political sweating with which Mr. Gladstone is closing his career. A cynic might fairly say that his real motive would seem to be the restoration of the House of Lords to popular favour ; and though we do not believe that Mr. Gladstone is in the /east capable of such an act of disinterested hypocrisy as that of leading his followers into a desperate situation, in order that the House of Lords may have the credit of rescuing them from that desperate situation, that is really the most probable result, though we have no doubt the perfectly unintended result, of what he is now doing. He has pro- duced a Bill which professed to keep the central authority perfectly intact, and which really gives it away in every clause ; a Bill which professed to settle Ireland's share of the common expenses, and which really says, 'Oh, give us only a fixed proportion of your available income ; ' a Bill which, according to his own declaration in 1886, ought to have settled the Land question, and which leaves it unsettled for Ireland and England to quarrel over three years hence ; Bill which should, above all, have determined the relation of Ireland to the Parliament of the United Kingdom, and which merely postpones that delicate question for six years, during which Ireland is to govern us without our governing Ire- land ;—and then he calls that a Home-rule Bill for Ireland, —though it is only a Bill for making it impossible to govern Ireland. without either going much further, or drawing back at the cost of civil war. That is not a statesman's work. It is a mere bit of political botching, driven through Parliament by a reckless gagging resolu- tion, at perfectly unmeaning speed, without any urgency, and without even an excuse except the promises hastily made to political partisans for the hurrying-on of the most difficult and responsible work ever undertaken since the days of the Commonwealth. The work of this Session will be a mere prodigy of political sweating,—cheap and nasty work certain to end in dear and nasty consequences.
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