l'ael TORY GRUMBLERS.
Q IR HENRY HOWORTH'S letter to Tuesday's Times kJ is a remarkable performance,—in the first place, for its literary skill in so stating the facts of the last General Election as to make it appear that he was warranted in expecting an obstinate Tory resistance to all progress, however cautious and reasonable; and in the second place, in making it appear that what the Government have done and are doing is not cautious and reasonable. We hold him to be, however skilful as a literary advocate, con- spicuously wrong on both heads. He rightly represents the Conservative Government as " presiding over the most powerful coalition of modern times," but no sooner has he uttered the word " coalition " than he forgets it, and proceeds to argue as if the Liberal Unionists were of no account at all, and might for all practical purposes be neglected in considering the policy of the present Government. And yet Sir Henry Howorth is the last person in the House of Commons who ought to forget the conditions of that coalition. The alliance, though not the coalition, subsisted during the whole of the period between 1886 and 1892, and Sir Henry Howorth let us know on more than one occasion how bitterly he complained of the consequences of that alliance. He led the attack,—the futile and we may say, though we ourselves felt a good deal of sympathy with it, the utterly insignificant attack,— on the Free Education Bill, on the ground which seemed to us a legitimate ground, that parents owe to their children a duty in the matter of education, and ought to contribute towards it whatever they can in the form of school-pence, though they may be fairly exempted on the ground of extreme poverty where they are really unable to make the sacrifice; and he not only failed, but he failed we might almost say ostentatiously, in persuading the great majority of his own party to support that view, reasonable in its foundation, as we must say that it seemed to us. Not only the Liberal Unionists, but by far the greater number of the thoroughgoing Conservatives, united in maintaining that it was a sufficient sacrifice to demand from the parents that they should give up the hope of adding to their narrow wages by the earnings of their children, and that they ought not to be asked also to contribute school-pence towards their education. We hold that after that experience Sir Henry Howorth had no right to expect that the Liberal Unionists would not endeavour to infuse new life into the education move- ment from the point of view of sympathy with the popular cause ; and that when he sneers, as he does in the present letter, at the policy of " reaping Radical harvests with Conservative sickles," he sneers at what he had sneered at years ago, and what he well knew that he could .not persuade the great majority of his own party to sneer .at with him.
But that is not all. Sir Henry Howorth should have known perfectly well that the Liberal Unionists not only hold views divergent from those of the old Tory party,— views, however, with which the new Tory party agree, —on education, but bold views of a like kind on the subject of the Irish Land-laws. When Mr. T. W. Russell was asked to enter the Government, every one knew that he bad made terms with that Government on the subject of Irish land legislation, and that he would have refused to join it had it not conceded a good deal to the Ulster tenants which the Ulster landlords disap- prove. Everybody knows that Mr. Balfour, who conducted almost the whole of the Irish policy of the Government throughout the years 1886-92, and of whom Sir Henry Howorth appears to speak as amongst the " English amateurs at legislation who know as much of the external economy of Ireland as most of us know about the other side of the moon," is convinced that after the land legislation of 1881, it is both necessary and right to accept some of the principles for which Mr. T. W. Russell conditioned, and that the new Government had consented to make concessions in that direction. If Sir Henry Howorth was not prepared, as we are sure that even he was not prepared, to repeal the Irish Land Act of 1881 altogether, it was simply impossible at the end of the first period of fifteen years from its passing, not to revise some of its provisions in a sense favourable to the tenants who had by some imperfection of the Act failed to obtain what they had seen their brother-tenants obtaining, under its clauses. Sir ,Henry Howorth, like every politician who engaged in the contest of last year, had the fullest notice that some such measure as the present Irish Land Bill would be brought in ; and to cast any imputation of bad faith on the Government that has brought it in because it has thrown over the principles on which the political victory was gained, is more than unreasonable, it is a perfectly topsy-turvy view of the situation. He says that in voting against the Government " we no doubt voted in a minority, but it must be remembered that the minority included the two sons of the Prime Minister, and the two nephews of the Duke of Devonshire." We do remember it, but we remember also that the Prime Minister and the Duke of Devonshire had thought it right and reasonable to concede what the two sons of the former and the two nephews of the latter, with their very slight know- ledge of the history of the question, had decided to resist, and what it would have been more modest if they had declined to resist in that ostentatious fashion. For the present Government to have guided themselves by the counsels of Lord Macnaghten and Mr. Carson would have not only been unwise, but suicidal. Every one recognised that when Mr. T. W. Russell was admitted into the Administration, Mr. Balfour and his brother had declared in favour of yielding some of the demands of the Ulster tenants. Indeed, without so doing, it would have been impossible to accept the policy of the Irish Land Act of 1881 at all.
When Sir Henry Howorth declares that he and his friends are " bound to maintain that the function of a Conservative Government is to carry out Conservative principles and to protect and cherish the rights of property as well as other rights," in a sense fatal to the Irish Land Bill, he ignores two most glaring facts. The first is that the Government is a Unionist Government, and that the maddest thing a Unionist Government could do, would be to drive all the Ulster tenants into the Irish Home-rule movement, as they would have done by refusing at the appropriate time to amend the Land Act of 1881 so as to rectify its anomalies. And the second and even more important fact which Sir Henry Howorth ignores is this, that those statesmen who, looking at the matter from the Conservative side of politics, and not even from the Liberal Unionist side, have studied the complicated issues raised on the question of the Irish Land-laws, have come to the conclusion that justice is by no means altogether on the side of the Irish landlords, nay, that, on the contrary, a great deal of injustice has been done to the tenants. And though they would have much preferred to remedy that injustice by promoting purchase, and by that policy alone, they are absolutely unable to do so after the legislation of 1881, and after those fifteen years of its embodiment in practical administration, which have identified the Act of 1881 with the interests of a large proportion of the Irish people. It is not only in foreign policy that a Government of one political bias is bound to accept, more or less, a policy inherited from a Government of a different political bias. There are situa- tions in which a home policy may be adopted by one party, which the other party, when it comes back to power, can no more pretend to pluck up by the roots than it can pretend to reverse a deliberately adopted foreign policy which has been long and steadily pursued. In our opinion the Irish Land Act of 1881 has brought about a situation of this kind. The least Conservative policy we can even imagine,—the policy least adapted to promote Conservative principles in Ireland, principles fostering loyalty and strengthening the faith in justice,— would be to go back on what had been done and could not be undone without political disaster of the most serious kind; yet this it is of which Sir Henry Howorth and the ultra-Tory grumblers must be understood to complain, when they accuse the present Government of rashly and unjustly attempting to inaugurate an anti- Conservative policy. If they want to force on revolution in Ireland, that is precisely the course into which they should launch Lord Salisbury's Administration. Sir Henry Howorth does not know it, but he is really a revolutionist in Conservative disguise.
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