MR. MORLEY IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS.
NO one who heard Mr. Morley's speech on Tuesday could well have helped thinking that the one man who could best have replied to Mr. John Morley the Home-ruler, was Mr. John Morley the literary man. What an opportunity the latter Mr. Morley would once have thought it, to have had the chance of following the former Mr. Morley, and demolishing his speech with all the incisiveness, the hauteur, the literary morgue, which that accomplished writer displays 1 We cannot pretend to any skill each as he would have exhibited in accom- plishing such a task ; but we think we can indicate the characteristics of his speech on which the finished writer would have fastened, and the arguments which he would have torn to shreds without exhibiting any plebeian self-gratulation, or anything more than a touch of intellectual scorn. But first, there was a point made which we quite admit to have been a strong one. We refer to the taunt levelled at the Government for having given the Irish tenantry no legal remedy against the fall of prices,—a remedy which, as our readers know, we should have desired to give them, and earnestly advocated giving them in the autumn Session ; for we heartily agree with Mr. Morley that " unredressed grievances, moral wrongs without a legal remedy, and then the resort to illegal acts to secure justice," is " the history of Ireland in a nutshell." But what is the excuse of the Government,—we do not say the justification, and do not think it a justification, but the excuse, the plausible excuse, — for refusing the tenants that legal remedy for the fall of prices ? The very first use made of such a remedy as Mr. Parnell's Bill, even altered as Mr. Morley proposed to modify it, would have provided, would have been the reserve by a vast number of well-to-do tenants of a considerable portion of rent which they had not only agreed to pay, but were well able to pay, in the hope that, if the full payment had been once delayed and sub- mitted to the arbitration of a Court, the chapter of accidents might be in their favour, and perhaps enable them to escape paying it altogether. Now, that would have been a very serious " unredreeeed wrong " to which the better landlords, already heavily mulcted year after year, would have had to submit ; and though on the whole we agree with Mr. Morley that it would have been the leas evil of the two, we do not wonder that the Government, being fully aware of the dis- position of the National League when granted an inch to take an ell, and dreading above all things the dangerous effect of the mere appearance of subserviency to the dictation of that League, refused. The troth is, that with the dominance of a body so powerful as the National League, a body, too, eo un- just, and so determined at all costs to render the government of Ireland by the British Executive impossible, there is no possibility of granting any concession to justice that will not be also converted into a source of serious injustice ; and though we differ from the decision actually arrived at by the Govern- ment, we admit that it must have been a choice between fright- ful evils, whichever course they had determined on. If they had yielded to Mr. Parnell's demand, the National League would have exulted in its triumph over the Government, and would have redoubled its exertions to prevent the landlords from ever recovering the fraction of rent which then might legitimately have been for a time withheld. They chose the other altema-
tive, and landed themselves in the difficulty of granting no legal remedy for a serious injustice to which the tenants were liable. But the real deterring cause was the existence of that formidable and sinister organisation which has since manifested its temper in the evil-omened "Plan of Campaign."
Now we come to the worst part, and we are afraid we must say the principal part, of Mr. Morley's speech,—the lofty refusal to pass any judgment on this "Plan of Campaign," and the attempt to throw ridicule on the notion that English Liberals axe in any way bound to denounce the immoralities and the illegalities of their Irish allies. There was a time when Mr. John Morley would have exposed this politic plea of irresponsibility, this convenient reticence as to the guilt which your chosen allies had incurred, with a lofty scorn. At the time he wrote his book on " Compromise," we think we can hear how he would have denounced a compro- mise such as this. Mr. Morley knows well that, in the first place, he and his friends could not justify the "Plan of Cam- paign" as Mr. Labouchere has justified it, without losing their own self-respect, as well as losing political caste. He unfortu- nately knows also that he cannot denounce it as his own con- science and political honour would teach him to denounce it, without losing the valuable help of that party which counts the famous eighty-five votes. So he has recourse to this very un- worthy compromise of asking whether he is his brother's keeper ; whether it is wise to be always preaching at the Irish Party and reproving their peccadilloes ; whether the British politicians who cannot approve what the Irishmen do, had not much better leave them to correct their own immoralities and find out their own moral deficiencies. Well, all we can say to that ie that it is destructive of all national morality, properly so called. Who wants Englishmen to be always preaching against Irish peccadilloes ? Let them preach chiefly against their own peccadilloes ; but let them recognise that when Irish leaders adopt a political course which is one directly corrupting to the integrity of the Irish people, they are bound by the very claim of that real Union of heart and life for which they profess to be struggling, to speak out openly what they think of such a course, and to declare how indignantly they would repudiate it in England. Is this, then, what the rhetoric about turning the sham Union into a true Union is come to,—that English statesmen, when they see Irish statesmen recommending to their poorer neighbours a policy destructive of all integrity of life, are to retreat into their English shell, and say, This does not concern me ; if it were proposed in England, I should be bound to express hearty indignation ; as it occurs only in Ireland, I had better close my lips and make as little mischief as possible.' Verily the Union is indeed at an end when such a politician as Mr. Morley can advocate such a doctrine as that in a matter which concerns not only the political but the moral and social integrity of one of these islands. And then he tries to fortify his humiliating position by minimising the consequences of the "Plan of Campaign." If the con- sequences are comparatively but small, why are they so small ? Because the Government withstood Mr. Dillon, if not exactly in time, at least before he had got real hold of the country. If Mr. Morley had been in power, and had acted, as we hope he would not have acted, on the principles he now avows,— or if Lord Randolph Churchill had had his way,—a most un- worthy way, the " Plan of Campaign," instead of being com- paratively a failure, would be by this time in full swing all over Ireland. We have never heard any portion of a political speech with greater regret, or more sense of the mischievous effect of ambiguous political ties in chloroforming a fine nature, than Mr. Morley's apology for passing no censure on Mr. Dillon's "Plan of Campaign."
Then there was the bitter attack on jury-packing in the case of the Sligo juries, and the brilliant epigram on the Irish Attorney-General's remark that the Catholic jurors were chal- lenged because the Crown wished to secure the attendance of "men of independent thought." "Now, I do not believe," said Mr. Morley, " that in the racy and exuberant history of Irish humour there is a nobler euphemism than that. A man of
independent thought is a man to whom the Crown can trust to give you a conviction." Mr. Morley knew better. He knew that what the Crown wanted was not a conviction, but a con- viction or an acquittal where the evidence would have pro- duced a conviction or an acquittal in England or Scotland. And he knew, too, that in a country where the Irish priest- hood are in the vast majority of cases members of this detestable National League, and where Irish newspapers are allowed to preach the coming of a day of vengeance on all those jurors who convict against the will of the League, it is by no
means an easy matter to get a jury that will look at the evidence oily, and acquit or convict according to the drift of the evidence. There was a time, too,—a time when we differed from Mr. Morley as much on religious grounds as we now do on moral and political grounds,—when he would have sneered at juries notoriously under clerical influence because they were under clerical influence, and would have argued that such juries were not to be trusted under any circumstances. There we should have been very far from agreeing with him. Bat when the Roman Catholic Church has identified itself so widely as it has in Ireland, with such a political agency as the National League, we do think that a Government anxious to have moral, social, and political offences tried fairly, is justified in objecting to jurymen notoriously identified with the clerical party. Of course, there may be a serious difficulty on the other side. It would not do to refer such offences to a jury of land- lords. And between the two, we confess we see enormous diffi- culty in obtaining fair juries in Ireland at all. Still, it hardly lies in Mr. Morley's mouth to treat a priesthood who are almost all members of the National League, as if they were just and wise guides of the political conduct of their people.
Again, the passage in which Mr. Morley argued that because the various very favourable offers to the tenants to buy their own farms are not very freely accepted, no agrarian scheme can succeed which is not backed up by an Irish Legislature and Administration, was one of the weakest in the speech. Why are these offers not accepted V Because the peasantry firmly believe that Mr. Parnell and his friends will give them their land on better terms, and because they prefer to wait for those better terms. Who have raised the Irish farmers' hopes of this consummation almost to certainty ? Why, Mr. John Morley and his colleagues. So that he is certainly more or less responsible for the very reluctance of the peasantry to accept good offers which he treats as a reason for the failure of all agrarian plans which are not coupled with Home-rule. Let one more Election go as the last Election went, and we should find the Irish peasantry as eager to acquire their farms on any reasonable terms, as, at present, under the influence of the hopes raised by Mr. Gladstone's conversion to Home-rule, they are reluctant. We have not demolished Mr. John Morley's speech as Mr. John Morley could, and in other days would, himself have demolished it ; but we think we have shown pretty conclusively that Mr. John Morley the politician, is sinking materially below the intellectual and political level Qf Mr. John Morley the author.
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