TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE ATTITUDE OF THE IRISH IRRECONCILABLES. THERE are many of the Irish Members, and many of the Irish Liberal Members, who are amongst the very best representatives in the House of Commons. The Ulster Liberals, for instance, and not a few who risk much more than the Ulster Liberals risk by their absolute reasonableness and manliness, such Members as Mr. P. J. Smyth, Sir Patrick O'Brien, Mr. Errington, and both the Blennerhassetts, really represent the interests of Ireland with simplicity and courage, while never indulging in that curiously artificial rage and that absolutely insatiable political greed which render the Irreconcil- able party more completely unfit for the business of representa- tion than anyParliamentary party known to us, unless it be a few crotchety French Reds and Italian dreamers of the Irredenta school. But though it would be most unfair to confound the Irish Irreconcilables, who do not number above thirty-two at most, with the Irish Party in the House of Commons, it is certain that their demeanour deserves study; and that it is a misfortune for the country that the debates in the Com- mittee on the Land Bill are so ruthlessly abbreviated in the Press, that it is only those who are present in the House of Com- mons who have any opportunity of really knowing what that demeanour is. Nor is it the accident of a few individual temperaments which comes out in that demeanour. Where is the man fuller of keen intellectual insight and reasonable judgment than Mr. Justin McOarthy ? Yet, Mr. Justin McCarthy belongs to the very inmost phalanx of this irrecon- cilable clique, certainly far surpassing Mr. Parnell himself in the élan of his denunciations of the United Kingdom for acts of which we do not think he would feel called upon to speak with any bitterness, if he were writing his history, instead of addressing the House. The truth is, no doubt, that there is a real correspondence between the attitude of the Irrecon- cilables, and something very deep in the average Irish nature ; otherwise, there is nothing in the personnel of the men who give most exaggeration to their expression of it that would make the study of their attitude interesting at all. Mr. Gladstone, when replying on Tuesday to Mr. Justin McCarthy, both sketched and criticised this attitude very powerfully :— " The honourable Member for Longford," he said, "expressed no gratitude to the Government for the extraordinary proposals they have incorporated in this Bill, so far as the tenants are concerned ; and he went the length of saying that for a century or more, every good measure has been denied to Ireland, and every bad measure passed." Here Mr. Justin McCarthy inter- posed, to explain that what he had said was that every good measure which had been denied to Ireland had been denied in deference to the British taxpayer ; whereupon Mr. Gladstone proceeded,—" The honourable Member said that the Govern- ment has spent £17,000,000 on the Afghan war, but will not spend anything in reclaiming the waste lands of Ire- land. I ask the honourable Member whether the honourable Members representing Irish constituencies used any effort to pre- vent the expenditure of money in Afghanistan ? I have looked at the division lists, and have not found a single one in which a majority of the body calling itself Irish Representatives took part in checking that expenditure. It is said that we, the English Parliament, are misgoverning Ireland. But let us remember that Ireland is represented in this House in a much larger proportion to its population than Scotland. The honour- able Member for Cork (Mr. Parnell) shakes his head. He says that 60 Members for three and 'a half millions of people are a larger proportion than 103 Members for five and a quarter millions. Such is the arithmetical doctrine of the honourable Member for Cork. I must say it is time that those who repre- sent Ireland here in such numbers and power,—in numbers beyond the proportion to which the population of Ireland entitles them,—are bound to cease from this habit of speaking of themselves as if they were petitioners at the Bar, and had not equal privileges with the Representatives of other portions of the kingdom with respect to the delibera- tions of this House." And no doubt they would cease from that habit, if there were not something in it which suits the tone of popular feeling in the Irish people. For as we have already said, the rage of a great number of the Irish irrecon- cflables is visibly and curiously artificial, and their vociferous insatiability of demand covers often a profound secret satisfaction in what they get. Some of the Irish irreconcilables them- selves hardly conceal from themselves, in their private conversations, that this Irish Land Bill is more than
they had ever ventured to hope, and, as regards the
land question, is nearly all they desire. The reason- able section of the Irish Representatives do not pretend to conceal it, but loudly proclaim it in Parliament. And yet there is a feeling in Ireland that half the sweetness would be taken out of the concession, if Irishmen acknow- ledged any satisfaction in it, if they did not season their enjoy- ment with outcries against the wicked hardfistedness of the Government which gives them all this generous justice. They do not enjoy even a good political meal, without indulging freely in vituperation and lamentation while it lasts. And the- vituperation is about as real as the lamentation. Mr. Biggar, when he wished Mr. Forster to be sent to a" warmer climate than India, the other day, was simply trying to gratify that, curious passion which Irish constituencies apparently feel for invective against English statesmen, without possessing either any germ of the faculty for invective, or even the sense to perceive that he does not possess it. For our own part, we believe that the scurrilous abuse lavished upon Mr. Forster by a small minority of the Irish Members, has little or no relation to the facts of his Administration ; that it would have been much the same if he had proposed no Coercion Act ; and would have been perhaps more, and not less, savage than it is, if he had been even more moderate than he has actually been in the use of his powers under the Coercion Act. There is something in moderation which appears to excite especially the political spleen of Irish popular feeling. If a man is to- sin against Ireland at all, the average Irishman will forgive him most readily if, as Luther said, he will but sin strongly.. A steady man like Mr. Forster, who shows fortitude, constancy,, and equanimity in all he does, seems to drive the average Irish politician to a sort of frenzy. We suspect the reason is. that though, of course, the Irish people do not in reality prefer the sense of wrongs to the removal of those wrongs, they are so accustomed to hug the upbraiding attitude and to value the advantages it gives them, that the more justice is done to them, the more artificial passion they throw into their declamation against the evils which remain. When Mr. Glad- stone on Tuesday observed that Mr. Justin McCarthy had expressed no gratitude for the great and unexampled concessions to the tenants, Mr. Healy ostentatiously shouted out, amid the laughter of the House, "Not a bit I" and Mr. Leamy on Wednes- day did his best to illustrate Mr. Healy's remark by accusing the Government of not taking • the slightest interest in the Irish Land Bill, on the ground that the Premier and the Irish Secretary were rather too late in reaching the House,—an accidental- con- sequence of the absence of the usual number of questions. This strange disposition to lash themselves into artificial wrath when- ever there is no ground for reasonable displeasure, has been ex- hibited over and over again during this Session, and has, we verily believe, been rather stimulated than diminished by the profound, though, in part, secret conviction, which all Irish Members feel, that this Land Bill is a measure of justice of the largest and rarest kind. As the sense of real grievance begins to vanish, the popular Irish feeling snatches with a sort of desperation at every trace of the old state of things,—perhaps from sheer inability to accept the attitude of conscious power and dignity which Mr. Gladstone presses on the Irish Members as that which best befits both their strength in the Legisla- ture and the special political influence which they have been accorded in it.
What could illustrate this curious state of mind better than- the tone taken towards the Emigration Clause, which the Irish Members fight against with as much passion as if it were, not an Emigration, but a Transportation clause. There is no- manner of doubt in the world that, do what you will to im- prove Ireland, there will for many years to come be a great number of Irish families in the western counties who would prefer taking their chance in the New World, to toiling on under great disadvantages in the Old. But because every Irishman who leaves Ireland to some extent diminishes, we sup- pose, the relative political significance of the island, the Irish Irreconcilables agree to regard it as a gross national insult that the Government should contemplate the possibility of Irish peasants preferring the New World to the Old. On Thursday the ill-temper and ferocity exhibited would have been a dis- grace to any Legislature, and is a blot on the history of the House of Commons. We sincerely believe that the Irish Irre- concilables would prefer a clause prohibiting emigration, and so interfering in the grossest way with the liberty of Irish- men, to a clause which enlarges greatly their liberty of choice. Nothing more utterly indefensible than the attempt to treat the help offered to emigrants to take their families with them, as
if it were a violent expatriation of Irish citizens, has ever been heard in Parliament. But this is all.of a piece with the artificial passion on the part of the Irreconcilables which has characterised the whole Session. We wish the Irish constitu- encies would but mark at the next election how infinitely they prefer the substantial patriotism and sagacious constancy of men like Mr. Shaw, Colonel Colthurst, and those whom we have before mentioned, to the theatrical wrath of Mr. Leahy and the open maledictions of Mr. Biggar.
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