THE IRONY OF PROVIDENCE.
WE remarked a fortnight ago on the special irony of Mr. Gladstone's position. A statesman, whose great function in life it has been to promote economy and peaceful industry, to condemn the arrogance of Lord Palmerston 's imperious policy, to maintain that we ought to treat the weaker States of the world with the same scrupulous equity that we show in dealing with those who can protect themselves, and to hamper the Imperial ostentation of colleagues notoriously eager for the prizes bf war, it has become his duty, towards the close of his long political life, to occupy Egypt and defeat an Egyptian army, to control, by the display of military power, the very Republic which he himself had practically set upon its legs in the heart of Africa, and in all appearance at least, to begin that struggle with Russia which he had made it one of the greatest of the objects of his foreign policy to deprecate and resist. He must have felt as if Lord Palmerston were looking-on with cynical eyes on Thursday, when he had to tell the House of Commons of the gravity of the position in Afghanistan, and to intimate that so far as he had then the means of judging, the Russian attack on the Afghans was an unprovoked aggression. This is, however, nothing more than an illustration of the severe irony of Providence of which we have had many illustrations before, even in the present century. When the Minister chosen to defend the policy of Protection, abolished, with the aid of a Parliament elected to defend the policy of Protection, not only the Corn-Laws, but a great number of other Protective duties at one stroke, we had as happy an instance of that irony of Providence as we can ever have again, even though it should be Mr. Gladstone's fate to wage a successful war with Russia, and to accept the burden of that Egyptian administration from which he has so consistently and so tenaciously shrunk back. The truth is, that there is a kind of reason why the highest instrument of a great work should not unfrequently be the man who had most steadily set his face against it. Nothing can prove better to a people who more than half distrust their own right to accomplish a particular bit of the world's work, that that work has really been assigned to them, than its being forced, as it were, on the very hands which were most eager to reject it. Even in greater things than politics, this has held true. It was only when Jewish prophets predicted, and a Jewish Messiah proclaimed, a universal religion from the very heart of one of the most exclusive of national faiths, that the world first learned to accept the possibility of that grand and, as yet, most distant consummation. And it was in great measure the fact that a few illiterate fishermen sowed the seed which resulted in the great triumphs of that religion, which has brought home the reality of its power to the heart of man. The less promising the instrument of any great change may be, the more readily do we accept the conviction that, since it has come from such unpromising hands, an invisible power is controlling the hands which wrought it. Undoubtedly it was the marvellous victory of a woman over the most seasoned troops of England, that helped to convince the English people that France was not intended to fall under her rule. It is the unwilling minister who accomplishes the greatest revolutions. Many saw a sort of handwriting on the wall when Alexandria was bombarded by a nation of which John Bright was at the time one of the principal rulers, and none the less because he resigned his place on account of the course taken. That only showed how manfully he had .struggled against what was done ; and the manner of his resignation proved how well he knew that no overthrow of the Government, even if he could have accomplished it, would end in any result except the substitution of another which would do willingly and eagerly what his own colleagues had done reluctantly and with many compunctions. Men like Lord Beaconsfield, who anticipated a great Eastern policy and the annexation of Cyprus thirty years before he had the opportunity of realising his own forecasts, do what they had intended to do, and yet fail, because they are working-out the dreams of—a strange genius, it may be, but a genitis spurredon to premature action by self-will. Men like Mr. Gladstone, who very early in life condemned the proposal to disestablish the Irish Church, who then allied himself heartily with the Protectionists, and who has always pleaded that Russia had a great mission in the East which we ought not to hamper her in performing, do time after time what they had never intended to do, and succeed, because they do it only as the instrument of that higher power which controls the reluctant mind ; and however firm the position thy have themselves previously held, they do their work well, for they know all that can be urged against them, and insist on scrupulously fulfilling all the conditions which are necessary to justify a course which they, of all men, have been most unwilling to take.
Mr. Gladstone may take this comfort, that there is certainly no more honourable precedent for him in going to war with Russia than the example of the late Lord Aberdeen, who was Minister when the last war with Russia was declared. He, too, was a man of peace at least as emphatically as Mr. Gladstone ; and it was in his Government that Mr. Gladstone hoped to reduce permanently the interest on the public Debt, just as Mr. Childers had hoped to reduce it a few months ago. Indeed, it seems to be Liberals who make war against their inclinations, and Conservatives who make Reform Bills against their inclinations,—the latter achieving this feat, indeed, as Lord Salisbury and his colleagues have just done, even when they are not in office. Some of the greatest of the revolutions in history have been done by either unwitting minds or unwilling hands. The most orthodox of all " Defenders of the Faith " threw off the Pope's authority in England, and the most Protestant of all the Governments of this century established the rights of the Roman Catholics in the United Kingdom. It was the Slave States in America who virtually gave the coup de grace to slavery ; and it was the Napoleoniste and Royalists in France who established the Republic. Again, it was the anti-German fanaticism in France which created the German Empire ; and we should be almost tempted to expect that it will be the anti-English fanaticism in Ireland which will finally cement the Union. That, however, is still in the world of conjecture ; but it is history, and not conjecture, which tells us how often men, both great and small, have been made instruments in the hands of Providence to do the very thing which their whole genius had seemed to refuse and repudiate : "See in Kings' Conde loth Jeremiah plead,
And slow-tongued Moses rule by eloquence of deed."
The shepherd-boy was hardly more astonished, we should think, by finding himself the champion of the Hebrew host against Goliath, than Mr. Gladstone will feel if he has to bend all his energies to conduct a great war against Russia ; or Mr. Childers, if he has to throw fresh burdens on posterity instead of taking them off. After all, " the divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will," constantly turns our rough-hewing to the most startling and unexpected account, and we find ourselves doing with the fullest conviction that which we had vowed that we would never do, or undoing with tremulous eagerness what half a life had been endeavouring toilsomely to build-up.
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