TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE CARLOW ELECTION.
IF Mr. Parnell has anything like the political long- sightedness for which the world at one time almost universally gave him credit, he will feel that the Carlow election has put an end to his hope of substantial political influence in Ireland. A majority of considerably more than two to one against him in a county which was generally supposed to be almost the stronghold of his party, looks very much as if his political influence had been not only broken by the events of the winter, but had been rapidly waning since it was first broken. That is not a result which we can in the least regret. When Mr. Parnell's influence in Ireland was at its highest, and when Mr. Gladstone held that influence up as one of almost pure and undiluted good, we steadily maintained that he had originated and forced on a policy pregnant with the most deadly and malignant fruits. We hold now what we held then, and if we could think that the Carlow election implies a reaction against Mr. Parnell's whole policy in Ireland, against that policy of terrorism, selfish- ness, and universal suspicion which Mr. Parnell initiated, we should rejoice in his defeat with something like abso- lute exultation. But we cannot as yet satisfy ourselves that this is so. The Irish Bishops have denounced Mr. Parnell, and have put forth the strongest possible exhor- tation to their flocks to repudiate his leadership ; but they have not ventured to put it on the broad ground that in starting the evil policy of boycotting, he had encouraged Irishmen to break the moral law, and had inundated the country with political cruelty and intimidation. On the contrary, they have founded their denunciation of him solely on his sins as revealed in the Divorce Court, and on his subsequent attempt to set Irishmen against each other, and to withdraw them from the political influence of the Roman Catholic Church. The great question now is, whether the complete victory which they have gained over Mr. Parnell will or will not encourage them to think that they need not fear for the collapse, or even for the substantial diminution, of their political influence in Ireland, in case they recur to the policy which they have now supported for at least ten years, and devote their whole influence to the support of the Nationalist cause, so far as the Nationalist cause is taken out of Mr. Parnell's hands and represented by such counsellors as Father MacFadden and the two Mr. Healys. Archbishop Walsh and Archbishop Croke have both of them quite recently indicated plainly enough their fear that Ireland is not yet fit for Home-rule ; but the line they took on this subject was apparently due to the great influence which Mr. Parnell still wielded in Ireland, and it is perfectly possible, not to say probable, that so soon as their fears on that head are laid to rest, they will return to their old advocacy of a separate Legislature and Administration for Ireland, and, what is far more important, to their apologetic attitude in regard to the methods, severely con- demned though they have been by the highest authority in their own Church, by which it has hitherto been attempted to extort these concessions from Great Britain. We cannot but fear that this may be the result. It is quite true, of course, that the Bishops have at last begun to appreciate the extreme danger of fostering an agitation which ignores the laws of charity and the laws of property, and encourages the priesthood throughout Ireland to wink at acts of political persecution of the grimmest and most ruthless kind. They have begun to see that this cannot go on long without paralysing their influence generally, and rendering the Church itself a far less important factor in Irish life than it has hitherto been. But it is one thing for the Irish Bishops to have at last got an inkling of this danger, and quite another thing for them to be able to bring it home to the pea- sant priests through whom they must work. Had Mr. Parnell carried with him any really formidable party, the priests might have been as much alarmed as the Bishops. They would have felt that the spirit of insubordination had got a formidable hold on their flocks, and that even when they exerted their whole strength to put it down, they had only obtained a very partial success. That would have opened their minds to the fatal mistake they had made in encouraging the unscrupulous violence of Irish agitators, and they might have set themselves earnestly to retrace their steps, and to discourage the anti-social an tyrannical methods by which the peasantry had been driven into the ranks of the political agitators. Will they do so now ? Will they not be so far reassured by- their repeated victories over Mr. Parnell, that they may be quite indifferent to the danger which is involved in setting the moral law, even as reinforced by the Pope's Rescript, virtually at defiance, and that they may fee/ themselves quite safe in returning to the old revolutionary, policy, so soon as they have convinced themselves that when they do unite against what they deem the only inexcusable immorality, they can still command the, obedience of the great majority of their people ? They have had a great fright, and their Bishops at least have discovered that they had by their unscrupulousness more or less earned the fright from which they have suffered. But it is extremely uncertain how far the same conviction has been borne home to the hearts of the priesthood, and we have some reason to fear that they have been too completely and too early relieved from their fears to appropriate the lesson which those fears should have impressed upon them. Instead of having fully convinced themselves that the Church cannot throw over, for political ends, the virtues of justice and charity without undermining the influence of the Church herself, they have perhaps persuaded themselves that they will be quite safe in taking distinctions between private and political morality, and in supposing that so long as it suits them to wink hard at the manifold cruel- ties of popular dictation, they may do so without injuring the Church, on condition only that they never consent to wink at the profligacy of private life. That is not a policy which will answer in the end. But it may answer long enough to sap their spiritual power by fostering in the people's mind the notion that their priests do not dare to condemn any of the sins to which the people at large are notoriously inclined.
We may hope, however, for better things. It is not, after all, a very cheerful fact for the spiritual leaders of the people that among 5,000 voters there should be no fewer than 1,539, including some priests, who entirely reject all the political counsels of the Church, and prefer the candi- date whom Mr. Parnell nominates over the candidate with whom the spiritual influence of the Roman Catholic Church is absolutely identified. A triumph by more than two to one may assure them that there is no immediate danger for their political influence with average Irishmen ; but political influence is one thing and moral influence is another, and there are very few communities in which the parish priest would be content to think that nearly one-third of the people were indifferent to his political counsels, even when they were based on the most serious moral grounds. If once the Irish priests would set their faces absolutely against any sort of intimidation, we should be quite content that they should advocate the cause of Home- rule as a counsel of perfection. Indeed, we have no belief at all that Home-rule, without the violence and intimidation by which it has been hitherto accom- panied, would ever earn any success in Ireland. It is a. doctrine which is so fatal to the unity of the United Kingdom, that unless it is urged with all the force of an unscrupulous agitation, it will never surmount the natural difficulties of an impracticable case. The only force behind it is a disintegrating force, and so soon as disin- tegration is discountenanced and disavowed, all enthusiasm for it must necessarily evaporate. We may hope, there- fore, that if once the Church sees the full danger of lending any countenance to the Fenian and American- Irish spirit, she will soon come to see the full danger of preaching the only kind of Home-rule that has ever taken, or is at all likely to take, a strong hold on the Irish imagination. But till the Irish Catholic Church begins strenuously to condemn lawlessness of all kinds, we shall not feel any confidence that her condemnation of private profligacy will suffice to wean the people from those antinomian political principles in which, for ten years at least, the priesthood have generally acquiesced.
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