MR. MORLEY'S SPEECH.
TT is curious to contrast Mr. Morley the political phila- sopher and Mr. Morley the party tactician. Away from a Newcastle platform, Mr. Morley would no doubt still consider that the statesman above all things should be reasonable, should never allow his own sentiments to refract or pervert his opponent's true position. Whatever maybe thought of the enemy's case from a moral or intellectual point of view, he would admit that it is worse than unfair, it is unintelli- gent, to dress up a dummy and call him your antagonist. The statesman's business is not merely with his own arguments. If he is wise, he masters his opponent's views, and deals with them as they are, not as it would be convenient to him to have them. We do not imagine that we are doing Mr. Morley any injustice if we suppose that such are his abstract moll- meats as to the manner in which one politician should handle another's case. Yet how differently did Mr. Morley act when, as on Saturday last, he undertook to criti- ciao in public the action of the Government and the Unionists. He entirely ignored the real Unionist case, and dealt exclusively with a dummy antagonist of his own creation. Though doing this, we have not the slightest doubt that Mr. Morley was acting with the most perfect intention of fairness, for Mr. Morley is the last man in the world who would willingly represent any question in public in a light different from that in which he saw it in private. Mr. Morley, like a great many other men, has simply suffered that perversion of judgment which fierce opposition in company with unscrupulous allies, and dependence on the masterful will of another man, so often produce.
As an instance of Mr. Morley's evident inability to perceive what the Unionist position really is, let us take his remark as to the intended Land-purchase scheme of the Government.
"The landlords, they the Tories, as Mr. Morley seems to prefer to call the Unionists indiscriminately] tell us again and again—they have told us a million times in this controversy—the landlords are the one set of friends in Ireland that the English connection possesses. There- fore, the Tory policy at this moment, or the promise of their policy, consists in a measure for buying out and removing the only friends of the English connection." Is it possible to imagine a more inaccurate statement than this? During the General Election, it was not the Unionist argument, bat the Gladstonian argument, that the landowners were the only friends of England in Ireland. Mr. Gladstone, in effect, said, —‘ My Land Bill makes my Home-rule Bill fair, because it protects the only class which leaned on England, and so would suffer by Home-rule.' To this the Unionists responded on every platform,—' It is not the landlords alone who are the friends of England ; why look after the rich, and abandon the thousands upon thousands of poor Loyalists who are just as loyal, and who just as much require protection ?' Even more astonishing is the remark by Mr. Morley that one of the chief features of the Session has been "the shameless and unexampled betrayal of election pledges." This" shameless and unexampled betrayal," Mr. Morley goes on to show, is the Crimes Act. Does Mr. Morley seriously mean that the country did not know that if the Unionists came in, they would do what Mr. Gladstone had intended to do in 1885,—pass a Coercion Act ? Can Mr. Morley have forgotten that he himself, just before the Election, described the policy of the Unionists as a policy of "manacles and Manitoba " ? Does he not remember that a Unionist speaker could, during the Election of 1886, hardly speak in public without being greeted with constant cries of " Coercion" from his opponents, and that it was a commonplace for Unionist speakers to declare that though they would regret being obliged to have recourse to coercive legislation, they con- sidered such legislation a far less evil than the coercion of outrage and intimidation practised by the National League ? Mr. Morley may no doubt be able to produce a certain number of election addresses by obscure candidates in which all idea of coercive legislation was discarded ; but he cannot possibly deny that the main line on which the election was fought was that expressed by the phrase used on every Home-rule platform,— " Coercion, or Conciliation 1" That was the question asked by every Gladstonian candidate, and with what result we know. It is idle for Mr. Morley to attempt to extricate himself from this difficulty by putting his proposition in the form that the Unionists declared that there was to be equality of law between England and Ireland. The Unionists, no doubt, were and are in favour of treating Ireland as England is treated. Had Mr. Gladstone and his colleagues been willing that the Crimes Act should be extended to England, there could have been no objection to such a course. It would, however, have been ridiculous to have attempted to force such a measure through the House in opposi- tion to their wishes. The Crimes Act, as it stands, creates no fundamental inequalities between English and Irish law. It makes nothing an offence which was not an offence before, and simply alters the procedure under which acts always unlawful are in future to be tried. Mr. Morley's next accusation against the Unionists is that either section of the party supports measures which it regards as wrong. The Conservatives regard the revision of judicial rents as robbery, and yet pass a Land Bill which makes such a revision. The Liberal Unionists disapprove of the proclamation of the National League, and yet continue to support the Government. Certainly Mr. Morley has not attempted to understand his opponents' position here ; or if he has, has failed most signally. Yet one would have thought that Mr. Morley must know quite well that the great bulk of the Conservative Party supported the Land Bill for just the very reason that Mr. Morley would support it himeelf,—they considered it a measure necessary for the carrying out of the system created in 1881, which must now, whether right or wrong, be maintained till something can be put in its place. The question of the proclamation is still
plainer, for Lord Hartington most fully expressed the views of the Liberal Unionists in Parliament. The Liberal Unionists, as a party, doubted whether the proclamation was politic ; but regarded the matter as one in which the Government, since with them rested the great responsibility for action, ought to be trusted. Yet Mr. Morley can say of these acts, that he cannot imagine "any- thing more fatal to the self-respect and the sense of responsi- bility in public men, more injurious to the fair and right working of Parliamentary government, and more pregnant with danger and disaster to the best interests of the State." It is positively bewildering to hear this from the man who began his speech by announcing that on grounds of expediency he was willing to throw over a principle—the exclusion of the Irish Members from Westminster—which a year ago he seemed to regard as absolutely essential. Mr. Morley speaks of "the curious principle of sea-saw" by which each of these two sections in turn "does something which it knows and believes, and which it admits that it knows and believes to be wrong." Surely he must have been thinking of the Gladetonian Party and its difficulties and compromises over Mr. Gladstone's Land Bill, the retention of the Members, and the exclusion of Ulster. How strong the feeling runs on these questions between the two sections of the Gladstonian Party, and yet how "you have one section supporting the other in what it denounces as being a wrong course "—to use Mr. Morley's own words—may be seen in Mr. Robertson's very able letter in the Times of Tuesday. It only remained for Mr. Morley to represent the Government, which allowed a Session lasting from January to September to be occupied by only one great measure, as throttling free discussion, to show how utterly partisanship has warped the judgment of the political critic, and made him unable to see any side but his own in the present controversy.
Mr. Morley's remark, "You have now got to deal no longer with kid-gloved Conservatism ; you have to deal with the genuine, old, black, tyrannous Toryism," was no doubt a highly effective sentence for a great public meeting. The North of England felt the weight of the old Castlereagh Toryism, and the people of England remember over long periods. To connect the present Government with the policy and principles of Lord Eldon, was therefore a decidedly good oratorical stroke. Yet Mr. Morley most know well enough that this is not really the Toryism which is alive to-day ; and that Governments elected by what is virtually universal suffrage, if they have strength and vigour, derive those qualities directly from the people, not from the traditions of a privileged past. If Mr. Morley really believes that democracies never enforce the law— as his language implies—he must have entirely forgotten the history of the great struggle of the Secession. "Tory principles," says Mr. Morley—meaning, apparently, the main- tenance of the law by force—" never, never have done, and never will" "unite, reconcile, raise up a people." This is a strange saying, when Mr. Lincoln's practice of these same " Tory " principles saved the Union, and ended by uniting, reconciling, and raising up the South. Still more extraordinary is it to notice that he must have forgotten the history of that Revolution of which he is so accomplished an apologist. Were the principles on which the Jacobins treated La Vendee, Tory principles Would Home-rule for Brittany have found much favour with the Convention? Surely Mr. Morley knew once that stern repression is the mark of modern democracies, though he is unable to remember it now.
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