IRISH ORATORS AND STATESMEN.*

Ma. LECICY'S praiseworthy carefulness for his long-established reputation as an historian has compelled him to republish this extremely interesting, accurate, and most fair-minded work. His success in serious literature has been so marked, has been attained and maintained by qualities of so sterling and statesmanlike a character, that he not unnaturally desires to perfect work produced not only in early days, but in days when the full development of the policy which dictated the Act of Union of 1800 had not yet seen the light. Mr. -Leaky, in fact, while desirous of adding both literary and historic value to this important contribution to the modern history of Ireland, was also determined to eliminate from it anything of a tractarian character. The history of the book is instructive. It was published anonymously in 1861, when the author was in his twenty-third year. Only about thirty copies of the work were sold, and it "fell absolutely dead." Ten years later, when Mr. Lecky's name had spread beyond Trinity College, Dublin, he published an enlarged and care- fully edited edition under his own name, with an introduc- tion dealing with the Irish problem as it then stood. It had by that date become an urgent problem. In this new and successful edition the author " emphatically repudiated" the creation of a dependent Irish Parliament as a principle of solution. He thought that self-government should be cautiously restored, and he believed—a belief rudely shaken by the events of the last thirty years—that Mr. Gladstone's Land Act of 1870, by giving increased security to tenants, would close the division of classes.

Mr. Lecky's book in its latest form shows bow absurd is the claim of the modern Home-ruler when he demands the restoration of the Parliament that was destroyed on August 1st, 1800. The modern Irish Parliament as conceived in the mmd of Mr. Gladstone could have no possible relationship to the extraordinary body which died with the eighteenth century, and was in every characteristic a product of that remarkable period. The first Irish Parliament after the Revolution met in 1692, having been called merely for the purpose of granting supplies. At this date the legislative union of England and

• loadtrs of PaLlio Onion in ileland. By Williams Edward Itartpole Lecky. vols.- New Bdition. London Longmans and Co. [25s. net.]' Ireland was desired by the ablest of Irish thinkers, men such as Ifolyneux. But England would have no such union. It "preferred the alternative of governing Ireland through a

completely subservient legislature." The Protestants in such a union would have found protection for their creed and freedom for their trade, while the Roman Catholics would have been protected from the Protestants. The selfish Pro- tectionist policy of England was ruining Irish commerce, and the Protestants, hopeless of help from England, gladly saw the Roman Catholics crushed with fearful penal laws. England could thus, acting through an entirely subservient Irish Par- liament, render Ireland quite innocuous from the point of view of either trade competition or religious belief. It was

an opportune and fatal policy that is bearing its fruit to-day. For the maintenance of such a policy it WaS 11ZCC sary f( r the English Government to retain a complete control over the Irish Parliament. In order to do this a huge Pension List was essential, and the financial question thus became one that tended to create a Constitutional party in the Irish House of Commons. When, after the death of George II. in 1760, a

new Parliament was elected, this Constitutional party was in a position to wage conflict with the Imperial Government.

Henry Flood was the leader of this new movement, and he gave the Irish Parliament some of the qualities of a repre- sentative Assembly. The battle was severe, and to secure

a majority in the Parliament of 1771 the Government was compelled to expend half a million of money in bribery. Even after such an expenditure the influence of Flood, "the

greatest popular orator that his country had as yet produced," was a force which could not be stemmed ; "he had created a party before which ministers had begun to quail, and had inoculated the Protestant constituencies with a genuine spirit of liberty and of self-reliance." Whether Flood, at the height of his fame, was justified in taking office is a matter difficult to de3ide. That it was done from corrupt motives it is impossible to believe ; it certainly seemed the best course to adopt from the Constitutional point of view. But the fact laid him open to suspicion (the Irish have too often suspected their best friends), and his place as leader of the Opposition was filled by a far greater man—Henry Grattan—who in the seven years that Flood remained in office secured the complete con- trol of the Irish Constitutionalists. The breach between these two men makes sufficiently sad reading,—each above suspicion, each casting scorn upon the other, each ready to believe, at any rate in public, that the other was black with the infamies of the time. The quarrel is admirably described by Mr. Lecky, and exhibits the Irish temperament in all its strange- ness. It is not possible here to follow Flood's later career in the Irish and English Parliaments,—the career of a noble but embittered nature that sacrificed to jealousy and dis- appointed hopes many of the greatest attributes of patriotism.

The Life of Henry Grattan as written by Mr. Lecky makes charming reading, and brings before the mind in the highest degree the greatness of the orator and the man,—a greatness that amounts almost to aloofness :— " No British orator, except Chatham, had an equal power of firing an educated audience with an intense enthusiasm, or of animating and inspiring a nation. No British orator except Burke had an equal power of sowing his speeches with profound aphorisms and associating transient questions with eternal truths. His thoughts naturally crystallised into epigrams; his arguments were condensed with such admirable force and clearness that they assumed almost the appearance of axioms ; and they were often interspersed- with sentences of concentrated poetic beauty, which flashed upon the audience with all the force of sudden inspiration, and which were long remembered and repeated he had no advantages of person and no grace and dignity of gesture ; but his strange writhing contortions, and the great apparent effort he often dis- played, added an effect of surprise to the sudden gleams of luminous argument, to the severe and concentrated declamation, to the terseness of statement and the exquisite felicities of ex- pression with which he adorned every discussion."

When, through the united efforts of Flood and Grattan, the complete independence of the Irish Parliament and of Ireland as a commercial community was secured in 1782, Grattan's great speech in Parliament was calculated to keep alive the

highest patriotism. "Ireland is now a nation," he cried. "In that character I hail her, and, bowing in her august presence, I say esto perpetua !"

It is impossible in a brief review to trace the history of Ire- land from that great hour,—the history of that dash of Saxon

., and Celtic temperaments which has undone so much of what - Grattan rendered possible. .!the-light that .Mr. Lecky throws on the history of the Union in the latter part of the first volume is very valuable, and makes the book a final authority on some aspects of the period. The relationship of Grattan . to the Union is traced with consummate fairness, while the • part played by him in the English House of Commons will be read with keen interest. Up to the very last he "rose higher and higher in the estimation of the educated of all parties." Grattan is probably the greatest Irishman who has yet lived.

• He stands alone in unsullied fame, and Ireland will long wait for such another man to same her from herself. His dust lies _in Westminster Abbey mingling with that of Pitt and Fox. " Not a, bust, not an epitaph marks the spot where the greatest of Irish orators sleeps ; but one stately form seems to bend in triumph over that unnoticed grave. It is the statue," says Mr. Lecky with a touch of fine and unusual irony, "it is the statue of Castlereagh, 'the statesman of the Legislative Union."

• .We have left ourselves no space to write of Daniel O'Connell the Liberator. Mr. Lecky devotes a whole volume to him and the Irish movement that ended with his death. The value of the volume is great. In the light of it the modern affairs of Ireland seem to some extent comprehensible. That O'Connell was a very great man, who combined in his personality the peculiar genius and the peculiar faults of his race in the highest degree, we cannot doubt. The extraordinary range of his intellect as a lawyer, as an orator, and as an organiser is here exhibited with clearness and judicial force, while we realise that he was a man much slandered by his enemies, but far more slandered by himself. The subtilty and variety of his character were worthy of a study by Robert Browning. The magical fascination that he exercised over the Irish Roman Catholics may perhaps not seem very remarkable to those who recall the fascination which Parnell—a lesser man in every way—exercised later. But what is remarkable indeed was the restraint that he placed upon the monster which he created. The mighty Repeal meetings of 1843, when as many as a quarter of a million assembled, as at the Hill of Tara, to hear the great orator denounce England, never led to disorder. "Beneath him, like a mighty sea, extended the throng of listeners. They were so numerous that thousands were unable to catch the faintest echo of the voice they loved so well; yet all remained passive, tranquil, and decorous." O'Connelrs abiding respect for constitutionalism in public life had a counterpart in his insistence upon the value of true religious belief, whatever its character might be. He was neither a bigot nor a rebel, yet his work had results which we cannot but deplore, and we must agree with Mr. Lecky when he says that "it may be questioned whether his life was a blessing or a curse to Ireland." His evil spirit was a passion for immediate results. "A great speech is a fine thing," he is reported to have said; "but, after all, the verdict is the thing." History, however, teaches that the great statesman works only for the verdict of a far-off posterity. But though O'Connell is not among the one or two immortal stars, his was perhaps the greatest ephemeral reputation of the nineteenth century.