TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE GOVERNMENT AND THE LIBERAL UNIONISTS.
BY their firmness on Thursday night, the Government have greatly improved their position, and have raised the confidence of their supporters that they will act with the strength and fortitude which the critical situation of affairs undoubtedly requires. It is only fair to admit that their apparent vacillation has been due in no slight degree to the vacillation of some of our own friends, the Liberal Unionists. It is not often that we have any fault to find with Lord Harlington ; indeed, there is no statesman of the day in whose action we feel so profound a confidence. But we hold that he erred on Friday week in using his influence to get the debate on the Lords' amendments to the Irish Land Bill adjourned till Thursday, and though we candidly admit that with men of such weight as Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. T. W. Russell against him, the situation was a delicate one, we feel quite sure that the apparent weakness which was forced upon the Govern- ment by Lord Hartington's counsel was far more injurious than any beneficial consequence that could have resulted from it would have compensated. The great danger of the present moment is the danger of losing a Government, in the true sense of the term " government," altogether. What with the skilful organisation of public opinion in a form to shake every one's confidence in the discretion of Governments, we are in the greatest peril in the world of being left to that most hopeless of all forms of imbecility, " government by journalism." Journalism can no doubt do a vast deal in the direction of paralysing government, but it cannot provide a substitute. And we are rapidly approaching a condition in which all our administrative officers, from the Prime Minister to the Judge on the Bench, and from the Judge on the Bench to the policeman in the streets, will be too much afraid of the comments made upon his action to use his best discretion, and show a certain firmness in acting on that discretion. We can hardly imagine any condition of things worse than that. After all, human life must be full of error, even among persons of clear judgment who act firmly on that judgment. But if there is to be a Reign of Terror for every one who exercises a fair discretion,—which the law intended to give him,—to the best of his ability whenever our most bumptious journalists disapprove its exercise, we shall soon have a paralysis of public men to which the evils of the largest con- ceivable number of errors that could be involved in the fair exercise of a fallible discretion, would be sheer child's-play. Now, nothing contributes more to this sort of vacillation in the Govern- ment than its dependence on a small party like that of the Liberal Unionists, who, again, are more than nervous, in the highest degree jealous, of their reputation for popular policy. If they intervene too often and too urgently to alter the course of the Government, even though their intervention should always be wise in detail, it would involve more mischief in diminishing the sense of responsibility and shaking the self-confidence of the Government, than could easily be compensated by the improvements in legislative or administrative detail which they might bring about. The Liberal Unionists have forgotten this of late. They have run great risk of weakening the Govern- ment by their impromptu counsel and pressure, much more than they could mend it by the character of the changes they may effect.
More especially is this the case in relation to the advice tendered by Mr. T. W. Russell and others in relation to the Lords' amendments ; for we believe it, on the whole, to have been bad advice. The Land Bill now before Parliament is confessedly a mere stop-gap, to alleviate rather than to remedy the hardships inflicted by a great fall of agri- cultural prices. Most of the criticisms which have been passed on the Lords' amendments have ignored this. The arguments by which the instruction to the Land Commissioners now embodied in the Bill has been condemned, are mostly argu- ments which implied that the Commissioners, if left to exercise a fuller discretion, would have been able to go into the rights and wrongs of every tenancy in detail, and revise the rent as it was intended that they should do under the original Land Act of 1881. That was absolutely out of the question. All that was possible, all that was intended in the new Land Bill, was to reduce an admitted grievance for a time, till a complete policy of purchase could be agreed upon. And by far the greater number of those who took part in the debates of the House of Commons unquestion- ably understood that what was to be done was to compel
a reduction of judicial rents fixed before 1886, in proportion to the fall of the price of produce in each district,—not, of course, with any view of extinguishing the hardships of the tenants, but with the view of sensibly attenuating them. It was not till the question was raised as to the extent of the Land Commissioners' discretion, that any one imagined that the Land Commissioners were to be empowered to reduce rent, in a very much greater proportion than that of the fall of prices. But the moment it was suggested that the Commissioners might, under the vague wording adopted in the Commons, have had the power so to reduce it, the Parnellites, of coarse, seized eagerly on the suggestion, and are now threaten- ing us with a new outbreak of outrages in Ireland as the consequence of the definite instruction which has been embodied in the Bill. At least, if Mr. Parnell's deliberate remark that he would rather see the Bill rejected, and those who suffer by its rejection looking "to methods outside- the Constitution " for redress, does not mean a threat of outrages, we cannot conceive what it does mean. Mr. Parnell has seldom made a more serious mistake than in uttering this threat, for it is a mistake which enormously strengthens the hands of the Government, and will let the country into the secret which Mr. Parnell has for some months back been so diligently trying to keep,—that he looks to terrorism as the last resort, and that the last resort is not far off. To threaten terror on occasion of a Bill which, even by his own admission, confers. an immense boon on the Irish leaseholders, and promises the Irish tenants whose judicial rents were fixed before 1886 a reduction of from 15 to 20 per cent. in their rents, is an example of more naked impudence than any which we can remember even in the records of the Parnellite Party. It ought to open the eyes of the Liberal Unionists to the great dangers which they are causing by attempting to force the Government into a see-saw policy whenever their own judgment. happens to differ from that of the Administration.
No doubt the Liberal. Unionists are very jealous of their reputation as Liberals, and are most anxious to let it be seen that their policy is as popular as ever,—even more popular than ever, we think we might say ; for some of their recent sug- gestions really mean that in many parts of Ireland, rent to which, a Parliamentary title was given in 1881, should be altogether suspended for the next year or two, and in other parts of Ire- land, should be reduced by 60 or 80 per cent. But they should remember that if they really wish to maintain the Union, they cannut,do so except by acting cordially with the Conservatives,. and that it is the wildest conceivable illusion that they can persuade the Conservatives to agree, as a mere incidental and tem- porary measure, to something like the extinction of judicial rent in many parts of Ireland without compensation. The Parnellites are fully aware of the value of the maxim, Divide et impera. They have been devoting their whole energies latterly to driving in a wedge between the Liberal Unionists and the Con- servatives, and by the weakness of one or two Liberal Unionists, they have partially succeeded. The events of Thursday night show, however, that Lord Harlington and his most important followers stand firm, and we trust that these events will teach them to stand by the Government when they proclaim, as we hope and believe they mean to do, the National League, and to accept the challenge which Mr. Parnell so imprudently threw down, to try conclusions with the National League on a new policy of outrage. It is only by standing well together that we can have a Government worthy of the name, even in England. And without a Government worthy of the name in England, we can hardly expect to win a battle in Ireland which will try the courage of the steadiest, and take all the might of moderation, and all the constancy in enforcing law, of which even the highest forms of English character have shown themselves capable.
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