"WHAT -MIGHT HAVE BEEN."
(To THE EDITOR op THE " EPECTATOR."]
Sza,—Mr. Gatty's George Wyndham, although more in the nature of a votive offering than a biography, contains one State document of high value which, I trust you may agree, ought not to be allowed to escape public attention. It is the letter (pp. 146-153) in which Mr. Wyndham describes the reception by the people of Dublin of King Edward and his Queen in July, 1903. The brilliant young Chief Secretary, whose famous Land Purchase Bill wen passing its third reading with an unbroken chorus of assent in the House of Commons on the day of the King's entry. into the Irish capital, was really the hero of the hour, as the King with characteristic bonhomie recognized by taking him into the Royal carriage during their progress through the delirious city. With good cause, for he had been the first statesman of England to declare that no English Government could solve the problem of Irish landlordism—the most seemingly insoluble Irish problem of all—that it could only be solved by agreement among Irishmen themselves—and his daring had been rewarded by the unanimous acceptance of the agreement formulated by the Irish Land Con- ference. Here are a 'few samples of the effect upon the entire population of the city whose chief thoroughfare had to be shelled into a heap of ruins during the Insurrection .of 1916. He writes to his sister from the Chief Secretary's Lodge, July 25th, 1903 :— "1 must begin a letter to you to-day—perhaps finish it—as you more than any one else will appreeiate the dramatic and pathetic completeness of the triumph which th,e King and Queen have won in Irish hearts. . . . We drove, mostly at a walk, through eleven miles of bunting and cheering crowds; growing denser and. more vociferous. It culminated in the triangular space bounded by Trinity College and the old Parliament Homo. My companions of the English Court began to admit that the people were really there and really jubilant. Every windew and housetop was packed. . . . They cheered me a good deal, and the Land Bill and Wolseley and Bobs. . . . The enthusiasm of the crowd was even greater than on Tuesday. For three miles te Trinity one roar of cheers and frenzy of handkerchiefs. kzery woman with a baby in Dublin was there to jump him op and down at the King. . . . We returned by Sackville Street—the finest in Dublin "—[Eheuf Troja juitf]—"and here the people became merely delirious. . . . We went on through the poorest parts by North Circular Road, and ever and always, there was the same intense emotion. It brought tears to the Qoeen's eyes, and a lump in my throat. No one who did not drive in their carriage will ever know how mesmeric it way. . . . 4nd then to the Review. This was the culmination. . . . At the gate a seeps, which I shall never forget, began. The Phcenix monument was a pyramid of mad humanity, screaming, blessing, waving hats and handkerchiefs, and so on down an interminable lane of frenzied enthusiasm. . . . Even the horses of the Blues got quite out of control, rearing and pirouetting. It looked as if they must knock the King over. . . . The horses, maddened by the cheers from a nation, did knock down the whole of the Admirals and Captains specially invited from the Fleet. . . . The King kept nm after all were gone, thawed the most intor cleonre to
understand every twist in the labyrinth of Irish life, and was so k'ud to me that I cannot speak of it," &c., &c.
Ring Geoege may well re-echo the anguished cry of his ancestor en the field of Dettingen : "Cursed be the laws that deprive me of such subjects!" Wyndham's Celtic imagination enabled him to see that the Home Rule problem had only to be tackled by the seine means to be solved with infinitely more ease, and long before the outbreak of the war the Irish Difficulty would have been as victoriously set at rest as the centuried Land War is. How he was baffled will yet be told on one of the most absorbing pages of contemporary history, but Mr. Gatty tells us Wyndham's " political memeranda are under seal," and the seals will probably not be opened until those who, for good or ill, participated in the tragedy shall have followed him into the shadoWland. Enough to know that he was only fourteen years in advance of his English Cabinet colleagues and of the Redmondite wreckers of his policy of conciliation, both the one and the other of whom are now frantically grasping at that Home Rule settle- thent by consent for barely hinting at which he was driven out of the Cabinet and into his grave. The intolerable thought- is that the threads are being taken up now under conditions that might make the stoutest-hearted blench and in a ruined city transfornied into the citadel of Irish disaffedtion.—I am, Sir, tec.,
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