MR. GLADSTONE ON ONE-LEGGED MEN.
IVSt. Helen's a vigilant party leader, at Warrington a great financier, at Liverpool Mr. Gladstone stood forward in the attitude which, among governing men, he can best main- tain, a statesman-moralist. Very few are the orators in England—perhaps Mr. Bright is the only other—who can appeal to principles above politics, and talk for half-hours of justice, and mercy, and right, yet never degenerate into sermonizing ; as few the statesmen who dare quote those virtues as final reasons for great political reforms. Mr. Glad- stone can do both, and both successfully, can throw into a speech on tenures a depth of moral feeling, a warmth of sympathy with God's creatures, a, so to speak, religious solemnity of earnestness which raises his words altogether out of the region of political manifestos. You see as you read, you recognize still more clearly as you hear, that he feels the love of justice he is endeavouring to inspire, that equity of judgment is not with him the result of a mere subjection of prejudices, but an original and creative passion. We doubt if any preacher ever made, under circumstances so unfavourable, a more stirring appeal from the prejudices of his audience to their inner consciences, from the visible truths around them to the invisible convictions within them, from the circum- stances to the laws by which circumstances are controlled. In Liverpool, if anywhere in the world, the strongest prejudice of the Anglo-Saxon, his deep contempt for all races but his own, would seem to be justified by superficial facts. In a city alive with commerce, where every career is open, where labour is always rewarded and enterprise has no limitations, the Irish, without a legal incapacity, are the hewers of wood and drawers of water, the one class which does not rise, the single race on which civilization seems wasted, the one caste which contemns order and defies restraint, the dread of magistrates, the cause of taxes, the despair of schoolmasters and clergymen. In Liver- pool it is the Irish quarter which brings up the death-rate, the Irish who make scientific hygiene impossible, the Irish whose love for alcohol has driven magistrates into wild experi- ments alike in licence and in restraint, the Irish against whom the police are disciplined and armed. Nowhere, consequently, is the contempt for the Irish so deeply felt, nowhere is there such distrust of any measure of Irish reform, nowhere so strong a belief that after all the one evil of Ireland is the Irish character. Men educated and liberal, who will adhere to their principles even when they doubt their efficacy ; who, know well how the Celtic Highlanders were bound to the throne they hated ; who have seen Celtic French Canadians- enthusiastic for an Anglo-Saxon monarchy ; -who have heard how men like Duffy and D'Arcy M‘Gee, and many another- mere Irishman, have risen into quiet, consistent statesmen ; who meet every day traders of all races in the world ; who depend for their wealth on colonists once as despised in England as the Irish are now ; and some of whose richest merchants belong to a people once declared to be accursed of Heaven, with whom no one would marry or associate or will- ingly trade, still in their heart of hearts despair of Ireland. "When all is done that can be done," they say, "they will be- Irish still," and in the name they convey a dictionary of oppro- brium. It was a prejudice thus deeply rooted and supported' by these apparently formidable facts which Mr. Gladstone ven- tured to assail by a splendid appeal to the only solvent of such prejudices, the instinctive reverence of mankind for justice. "There are men," said Mr. Gladstone, "who admit all the miser-- able facts of Ireland, but who dispute the causes, and they tell you with a grave face, and many of them, I believe, are con- scientiously convinced, strange as it may appear, that all this is owing, not to agitation, as a Minister of the Crown thinks, but to some unhappy, incurable perverseness of mind in the Irishman that makes him love to live in the atmosphere of turbulence and discontent, just as much as an inhabitant of any other country loves to live in an atmosphere of content- ment, and loyalty, and peace. Certainly, gentlemen, that is a creed of astounding strangeness. I was going to say it was a libel upon Providence. Supposing it happened that there, was a particular country on the face of the earth where all mankind were born with only one arm and one leg instead of two arms and two legs, we should think it a most strange and incredible circumstance until we had ocular demonstration of the fact. Rely upon it, it is not one whit less strange, not one whit less incredible, that there should be a people,.—a civi- lized people, a Christian people, a people engaged like our- selves in the pursuits of industry, a people living as we our- selves do in every domestic relation of life, and fulfilling their- duties well,—yet that this people should have an insatiable and inextinguishable passion for turbulence and discontent, and a hatred of that state of peace which is the only road to prosperity. I might, I think, stand for the confutation of that belief upon its rank absurdity. When such things aye- told us, we have a right to refuse all credit to them. They involve revolutions of the whole course of nature and the- whole order of the world, which, many as are the imperfec- tions of the state in which we live, nevertheless are not be found,"—which, indeed, if they were found would render human society impossible. That is the true argument to meet that prejudice, the only one which will ever prevail over race-hatred, the only one that can enable an average Englishman to see beyond the facts, to believe as he looks at the Irish cellars of Liverpool that the cause which keeps Irish- men there is to be sought in an injustice at home, the very injustice at which Mr. Gladstone had been striking. It is because his tenure is unjust, because he is dependent on the will of a landlord for the right to labour and to live that the- Irishman leaves home servile, squalid, and reckless, fills- Liverpool with drunkenness and Blackburn with faction. Whatis the use of thrift when its fruit may be taken away in an hour or where the possibility of comfort when property is unknown ? or where the motive of independence when a wrong vote turns its giver a pauper into the road ? We- demand of the Irishman the virtues of civilization and drive- him by law to savagery, require of him industry and deny- him the security without which he will not work, ask him for cleanliness and declare the hut he has built another's, lecture him on independence and leave him in his own estimation a serf. It does not matter a straw whether he is a serf or not, whether cash wages are- better than payment by a share of produce, whether the large- culture is or is not more productive than the small. The Irish agriculturist tilling his own land feels himself a free man, is a decent, clean, orderly European, with a tendency to excessive- meanness in accumulation. The Irish agriculturist without hold on the soil thinks himself a serf, and therefore has the- ways and most of the vices of a serf. If that were the conviction of the immense majority of Englishmen about themselves they would compel a new tenure in England, or they would cover the land with insurrection ; yet they think it monstrous that Ireland, where that is the conviction, should be disaffected._ Suppose, as Mr. D'Arcy MIlee suggests and Mr. Gladstone approves, we treat them for once as we should treat ourselves, —as we did treat ourselves not five years since in Prince Edward's Island,—do we suppose the disaffection would last, that Irishmen have in them something which refuses sympathy, ignores justice, detests order ? Are they, Mr. Gladstone asks, an exceptional race, monsters, a one-legged people, men with half-minds ? Even Liverpool dare not say so, yet if they are not, whence all this despair of the effect of "equal and exact justice" on them alone of mankind ? Are Irishmen so made that to them quinine is no preventive of fever? The answer, said Mr. Gladstone, is in Canada, and speaking to a popular audience he was right in using illustra- tion for proof ; but there is a higher argument yet, at which he dimly hinted, that if it be so, the order of Providence is a failure, the virtues useless, society a collection of unconnected atoms. If there be a race in whose minds "exact and equal justice," justice such as we give ourselves, sympathetic justice, is no cause of content, then justice has no external use, and the whole moral and intellectual base of political action is slippery or rotten. Such a perversity of character scarcely exists in individuals,—witness Captain Chesterton's singular evidence on the feeling of convicts towards the magistracy ; —but in a race it is as impossible as the existence of a people on whom the laws of gravity do not operate, or among whom tears flow upwards.
Bat, say some of our Irish friends, the natural Irishman is not in question, but the Irishman as made by priests. Does Catholicism condemn justice ? There are, we believe, among us men so steeped in prejudice that they would answer in the affirmative, and for a moment we will argue even with them ; for if Catholicism does prohibit justice, we can predict its fate. There does exist, as it happens, among the subjects of the British Crown a creed which condemns justice, the Hindoo. It is a cardinal article of that creed that the great castes ought not to be equal before the law, that each should for the same offence be tried in a different way and receive a different penalty. That article, so far from being for- gotten, is enforced in all social questions, is urged relentlessly by the priesthood, is obeyed by the people in every matter beyond the interference of the State. And, nevertheless, the one claim of the British to rule which the Hindoos never deny is that they try to do equal justice without respect of caste, and every native ruler, as he rose in 1857, was compelled to promise that in this respect British law should stand. Even superstition cannot destroy the instinctive reverence for justice. As a matter of fact, we believe that the Catholic Irish have the feeling in excess, that distrust of obtaining justice is with them the main cause of their irreverence for the law, the third grand reason for their dislike of British rule. The first is the perpetual robbery which, as they think, is sanctioned by Anglo-Saxon tenure—a robbery Pro- testant Irishmen have in Ulster finally prevented—the second, the very evil to which Mr. Gladstone addressed himself, the monstrous assumption that Irishmen have not the same base of character as all other human beings, that they are morally a one-legged people. This assumption, which per- vades half English political literature, prevents not only amity, but acquiescence, and this not only because of the atrocious insolence it involves. No race with a history really hates another because the other believes itself the noblest in the world. So do the French, and Londoners only laugh. The mischief lies in the proof which Irishmen find in the assump- tion that the more powerful people does not understand them, does not sympathize with them, does not see meaning in their complaints or reason in their wrathfulness, regards them at best as it regards some animals, as beings it is possible to love, but not to understand. Let Englishmen ima- gine their feeling if their Judges or their Parliament told them that they were people on whom justice was thrown away, who would not see it, or be impressed with it, or be contented if they had it, more than if they had it not! The position of the poor relation is painful enough at any time, and Ireland is and will remain poor relation ; but to be a poor relation, and be told, therefore, that you do not belong to the human family This is the feeling against which Mr. Gladstone so nobly protested at Liverpool ; and if anything could remove at once the contempt and the hatred it has excited, it would be the spectacle of a British Premier without an Irish connection, or an Irish element in his mind, telling the most anti-Irish city in the Empire that the people its citizens despised were men even as themselves, entitled to settle as Englishmen settle what their social system shall be,— whether they will seek agricultural wealth, or prefer to it home security or peace. We English part with all we could gain from scientific administration in order to be personally free ; they, the Irish, are content to lose a third of the crop great farms might yield for the sake of the household security little farms may assure. Why, if our costly bargain pleases us so well, should they be considered imbeciles for wishing to make theirs
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