SIR G. TREVELYAN'S CHOICE.
I_13 GEORGE TREVELYAN'S speeches, ever since he Ai accepted the Glasgow candidature, have read to us like the speeches of a man who, having with pain and inward doubt decided to abandon a post which he did not see his way to maintain, though all in him that was highest had pleaded with him to hold it to the last, now assuages the pain with which he is haunted, by dwelling with all the imaginative strength in him on the heavy price paid by more faithful colleagues for their adherence to the lost cause, as he has counted it, and by telling over afresh on every occasion, suitable or unsuitable, the causes which he has gained the right to dwell upon by way of equivalent for the great cause he has given up. Of this class eminently is his first and only im- portant speech at Sunderland. To us it is a pathetic speech to read. He solaces himself, first, by taunts directed against Lord Hartington for the sacrifices involved in his alliance with Lord Salisbury ; and, next, by expatiating with unneces- sary and morbid diffuseness on the Liberal causes to which he and his friends are committed, and which one day they may take up actively, so soon as they shall emerge from that wilderness into which they have led their followers, the wilderness of Irish Home-rule. Now, we are willing to admit to Sir George Trevelyan that the Liberal Unionists have made sacrifices, and that, to some of us, they have been painful sacrifices, for the sake of standing by the cause which Sir George Trevelyan has now abandoned, and for abandoning which he evidently finds it so difficult to forgive himself. We will admit quite frankly that Lord Salisbury, loyally as he holds by the practical alliance with the Liberal Unionists, does not speak our language, and often utters a note which jars painfully upon us. We will admit that Mr. Balfour, though he seems to us to be a milder ruler of Ireland than the great duumvirate to whom, under the constantly recurring refrain, "Lord Spencer and I," Sir George Trevelyan so per- petually refers, shows a Conservative indifference to his more painful duties which we should gladly see exchanged for some sign of reluctance. Nay, further, we will admit that there are some among the very distant reforms to which Sir George Trevelyan so fondly turns as themes which he has at least, by his great renunciation, earned the right to dwell upon, which we should have been glad to assist in carrying, and have indeed much more hope of carrying with the help of Conservatives than with the help of Liberals. But none the less, we cannot allow Sir George Trevelyan to ignore the cause he has betrayed, while he relieves his burdened mind, by diverting attention to that aspect of the picture which is, for him, the more pleasant. The cause he took up in 1886 was the cause of justice in Ireland,—the defence of the loyal minority, most of them not men of station, but poor, defenceless men who, for doing their duty by their country and their Queen, have rendered themselves obnoxious to the managers of the National League, and who have been again and again threatened with vengeance so soon as Home-rule in Ireland shall have been carried. It is the cause of these men which Sir George Trevelyan, who a year ago was foremost in pleading for them,—and pleading for them in burning words,—has betrayed. And when he talks of Mr. Gladstone's "concessions,"—the concession, forsooth, that there shall always be plenty of Irish Nationalists at Westminster to defend the oppressions of Irish Nationalists in Ireland, and the concession that British electors shall not be asked to spend a penny in order to atone for their agrarian mismanagement in Ireland,—we can hardly help saying bluntly that he ought to be ashamed of himself. Both these boasted concessions tend to aggravate, instead of to mitigate, the one evil of which he himself was the eloquent spokesman, —the evil of giving up Ireland to the rule of such men as the Parnellites, of whom he had once so many wholesome truths to tell, but who are now for him become the holy patriots of a glorious struggle. What we insist on is this,—that at the crisis when Sir George Trevelyan turned his back on the Liberal Unionists and fell into Mr. Gladstone's arms, it was essential for all who had taken up his position to choose between two courses neither of which was altogether agreeable,—the course of saying " No " to the Irish demand, and of accepting the alliance of the party which alone had the power to make that " No " effectual, on the one hand,—or, on the other hand, the course of saying " Yes " to that demand, and virtually abandoning the Union, with all the disastrous consequences of that abandonment. Lord Hartington chose the one alternative ; Sir George Trevelyan chose the other. In both choices there was something to give up as well as something to gain. But there was no real middle course, as Sir George Trevelyan himself perceives. What we maintain is, that Lord Hartington chose the nobler, and Sir George Trevelyan the ignobler course. Lord Hartington chose to fight for that which, if he can win his battle, must affect for the better our whole history ; that which it concerns English honour to defend ; that which, genera- tions hence, our children's children will thank him for having helped to save, just as, generations hence, the posterity of Cavour and Ricasoli will bless the memory of those great statesmen for having held by the unity of Italy, and resisted the miserable alternative of federal disintegration. Sir George Trevelyan chose the alternative of giving up this great cause for the com- paratively petty gain of boasting that he had never sullied his. pure Liberalism by fighting under a Conservative gateman,. that he had never allied himself with men who are unlikely to reform the House of Lords, certain not to disestablish the- Church in Wales, and very prone to say things which (like Lord Salisbury's sneer at the light weight of eighty-six Parcel- lites, with their broad brogue, when placed in the scale against a single one of his own Conservative colleagues) jar on the taste of English Liberals.
Thus Lord Hartington and Sir George Trevelyan have alike made sacrifices ; but Lord Hartington has sacrificed his political taste to the cause of equity and country, while Sir George Trevelyan has sacrificed the cause of equity and of country to his refined Liberal sensitiveness. It is not an agreeable thing to desert one's party, as Lord Hartington has done, and it is still less agreeable for him when, as Sir George Trevelyan points out, illogical admissions were made by bins a year and a half ago in order not to break wholly with Liberal friends,—admissions which have proved to be unfortunate and which are now withdrawn. We, at least, may truly say that we always disapproved of these admissions, and foresaw that they would but embarrass the situation. But we can well. admit the extreme difficulty of that situation, and make allow- ances for statesmen who went further than they ought to. have gone, in order to keep open the chance of reunion with. their friends. But this we say,—that to draw back from the tentative scheme of carefully limited Home-rule sketched by Lord Hartington in his address to the electors of Rossendale, as the very maximum which statesmanship should consider, when it was found to be dangerous, was infinitely more candid and nobler than to draw back, as Sir George Trevelyan has virtually drawn back, from the conditions which he, in his turn, laid- down as absolutely essential to any safe Home-rule in relation to the administration of justice in Ireland and the effectual protection of the loyal minority there. It was a post of honour which he gave up. He had identified, himself with the protection of the weak and helpless Irish. classes who had acted on the impulse of their British sym- pathies in reliance on the protection of the British power, and he has now ceased to condition for their protection. Lord Hartington has given up no post of honour. He has only withdrawn, after seeing that, in the view of statesmen, it is impracticable, from a profession of willingness to concede - a kind of self-government to Ireland which might perhaps have been safely granted to a loyal and contented section. of the Empire, but which it would be stark madness to. grant to a disloyal and anarchical confederacy. It was a. choice of evils both for Lord Hartington and for Sir George Trevelyan. But Lord Hartington has chosen the great good and the little evil. Sir George Trevelyan has chosen the little good and the great evil. We do not grudge him his happy visions of the day when he will bring in a Bill to legalise the principle of " One man, one vote,"—a principle which he abandoned as a Minister in 1885,—and when he will throw his weight into the scale of the Disestablishment of the Welsh Church. But he should at least consider that these are very distant visions,—deferred interests which must wait till the United Kingdom shall have been disintegrated, and till the disintegrated fragments shall have settled down again after a frightful convulsion. In the meantime, he will have to fight on the aide of those who threaten with their vengeance the very men whom he so eloquently called upon us to protect, and will see Lord Hartington standing in the breach where, had his
better genius not deserted him, he himself might have claimed to •be foremost. We do not grudge him his small consolations ; and in spite of those consolations, we do not envy him his political reveries.
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