HOME-RULE ALL ROUND.
IT is evident from Mr. Asquith's speech at Cambridge, that the younger and more vigorous section of the Gladstonian Party have become inspired by a real enthu- siasm for Federation. They are determined that Home- rule shall not be confined to the other side of St. George's Channel, but shall be extended to Scotland and Wales. "Nationality has become a power. Abroad, Liberals were ever its friends. At home, it was now idle to prate ethnology to a Sc,otchman or an Irishman in order to explain away national traditions, history, rallying cries, and names. Scotch Home-rule was ripening into politics." So says Mr. Asquith, and so think "the young Liberal Party," as they are beginning to call themselves. With what is termed the bugbear of the retention of Irishmen to vote on English affairs, Mr. Asquith found no difficulty in dealing. "As a permanent arrangement he admitted the anomaly of it. That was one reason for ripening opinion on Home-rule All Round. But even while it lasted, surely the evils of substituting for a perpetual interference one upon great occasions only were absurdly exaggerated by Unionist rhetoric." In other words, the question of Home-rule for England may be indefinitely postponed, for there is no practical objection to Ireland, and we presume none to Scotland and Wales, governing England, but not allowing her to govern them. Mr. Asquith's chief supporter in the Press has before now defended this posi- tion with great frankness. At present, English affairs are subject to the interference of Irish, Scotch, and Welsh representatives ; therefore England under "Home-rule All Round" will be no worse off than she is now. Under the proposed arrangement she will merely lose what is of no use to her, the right to help manage the affairs of the lesser nationalities.
With so crude a. paradox as this it may perhaps not seem worth while to argue very seriously. As Lord Salis- bury pointed out some months ago, branch railways do not in practice exclude the representatives of the main line from their Boards, and yet insist upon being fully represented on the central directorate. The English people may be as muddle-headed as the Irish think them, but they have at least sufficient clearness of vision to make them refuse any such one-sided bargain. No amount of sophistical rhetoric will, we expect, suffice to convince them that when the Irishman, Scotchman, and Welshman have in turn declared "What's yours is mine, but what's mine is my own," everything has been settled in the most satisfactory way possible. The young Gladstonian Party may be so bitten with the enthusiasm of constitution-mongering that they do not realise that the cry of "Ireland, Scotland, and Wales—each for herself, but the spending of England's millions for them all," would mean political ruin. Mr. Gladstone, however, knows it very .well, and we may be sure that before long he will do his best to relegate Federalism to a position of obscurity. A not uninteresting struggle is then likely to take place between party policy and loyalty to an idea. What the result will be, only time can show ; but meantime it may be worth while to consider how it is that an able and clear-thinking politician like Mr. Asquith has managed to hatch a scheme of Federalism so fantastic that it is obliged to contemplate a state of things under which the Federal Parliament will govern by far the most important portion of the Federation as if it were in the position of the District of Columbia,- i.e., a territory expressly excluded from the enjoyment of local self-government. To begin with, Mr. Asquith has founded his superstructure of moonshine upon the fallacy that Englishmen do not want to have the right to interfere with the exclusive affairs of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, but are desirous of letting those places fry in their own fat, even though the social proclivities of the first of them might lead to the open toleration of violence and public plunder. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. As a matter of fact, the English people are extremely anxious to have their say as to how the internal affairs of the rest of the United Kingdom shall be regulated. So anxious are they, indeed, that they are willing in exchange not only to allow Ireland, Scotland, and Wales to have a more than pro- portionate voice in their affairs, but to share with those nationalities the advantages derived from their own great superiority in wealth. To declare that England would be. only too glad to hand over her power of influencing Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, even though they kept their right of interference in her affairs, is to say the thing which is not. It is true that England has sometimes bitterly resented the action of the Irish Members in governing her, and has seemed half-willing to rescind the bargain of 1800, and to free herself from Irish control at the price of giving up her voice in Irish questions. In the end, however, she has always refused, and her action is not likely to be modified by the excision from the plan of all its advantages. The proposals for the withdrawal of the Irish representatives from Westminster and for the creation of a dependent Irish. Parliament, have on certain grounds a strong attraction for the ordinary Englishman but Mr. Asquith's plan has absolutely none. It is an that is delightful for the lesser nationalities, but unless we consider solely those Englishmen who believe that any race can govern better than their own, there is nothing whatever to be said for it from the English standpoint. The scheme not only rests on a total misapprehension of what the English. people desire, but entirely violates every canon of justice and proportion.
It does not require any very great insight to see how Mr. Asquith and his followers floundered into their Federal dilemma. Though they have doubtless got to. admire and believe in their scheme for its own sake, they originally adopted it merely as a way of escape. After Mr. Gladstone had tried to carry Colonial Home-rule with a rush and failed, his followers became for a time extremely- demoralised and lost to all sense of party discipline. During that period of chaos, one or two propositions somehow or other emerged and became accepted by the Gladstonia.n party as a whole. They were not the result of any conscious deliberation, or of profound if blind con- viction. Rather they were the outcome of the views enter- tained by the mass of beaten electioneerers. Men went about saying, "If we had only gone in for this and that, we should have won," till at last opinion crystallised round the most loudly proclaimed of these points, and they became generally regarded as fundamental. When, then, the wiser heads of the party had to consider what form the new scheme of Home-rule was to take, it was necessary,. they found, to make it fit in with what the country was held to have decided on. The first of these " fundamentals " was, that the Irish Members must be retained at Westminster ; the second, that the existing Imperial Parliament at Westminster was not to be broken up, and the Heptarchy visibly restored ; the third, that no attempt was to be made to draw any distinction between local and Imperial affairs, since "it passed the wit of man to do so ;" and the fourth, that whatever was conceded to Ireland ought not to be with- held from Scotland and Wales. It will be seen that if these propositions, which go very near to being mutually destructive, are all to be included in any practical schemer the only one possible is that devised by Mr. Asquith. It may be anomalous, it may be one-sided, but at least it is.
in accordance with the " instructions " assumed • to have been given by the British public. Mr. Asquith, in fact,.
has discovered the only way out of the impasse in which the Gladstonians find themselves, and for this they owe him a debt of gratitude. It may be that when the road is pointed out, it does not seem a very inviting- one ; but that, after all, is comparatively a small matter. At one time Home-rule seemed to be nothing but a political cul-de-sac ; and any road, however stony* and muddy, is better than that for a party which professes to be progressive.
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