MR. BALFOUR'S BILL.
WE can see no reason in Mr. Balfour's speech on his Local Government Bill, to modify the attitude we have consistently maintained towards that measure. The Bill is a very good Bill in itself, so good that we hope it will be supported by all Liberal Unionists ; and three or four years hence it might be put in operation with the best results ; but it is at present inopportune. Ireland is not as yet pacified enough to allow of the creation oT nearly two hundred democratic assemblies—I50 District Councils and 32 County Councils—each one of which will become, under a Gladstonian Government, a centre of agitation and an instrument for making war upon the proprietors of the soil. If the new Purchase Act had been accepted more readily by the people, and a great body of peasant freeholders stood prepared to rule the Councils and defend owners against unjust taxation, we should have no fear of the great internal change which the Bill will introduce ; but there is some hitch in the working of the Bill—probably caused by hope of a Government which will regard landlords as enemies—and the mass-vote will be in the hands of those who now elect the Guardians. We consider that for the present unsafe, and likely to revive and intensify the agrarian war, and we see nothing in Mr. Balfour's speech to extinguish that fear. He offers, in fact, but one argument,—namely, that all parties are pledged to give Ireland democratic local govern- ment, which is true ; but no party is pledged to choose a moment when an agrarian revolution already sanctioned still awaits actual and visible completion. The Unionists certainly are not, for they one and all believe that agrarian reform of a radical kind is the road to Irish contentment ; and the Gladstonians are not, for the essence of their posi- tion is that the organisation of county administration should be left to a Dublin Parliament. The measure could wait ; and in spite of our respect for Mr. Balfour's opinion, the value of which he has proved beyond doubt by his successful administration of Ireland, we still think it would have been far better to postpone it to the next Parliament.
For the rest, the Bill is an excellent Bill, which, as far as its provisions are concerned, all Unionists can support. Ireland is locally governed at present by two bodies, the Presentment Sessions of the Barony—the Barony may be taken as roughly equivalent to the Hundred, though it varies much more in size—and the Presentment Sessions of the County. Both these bodies are filled by men who are technically "elected," but under systems so capable of control and manipulation, that in practice they are always country gentlemen or their nominees. Forms are observed, but as a matter of fact, both " Sessions " have been close boroughs in the hands of a dominant caste, and were intended so to be. They have been part of the machinery for the old system of governing Ireland ; and though they have been worked with rather remarkable efficiency and economy—allowing always for some jobbery in making roads for private benefit—they are now inconsistent with democratic institutions. Mr. Balfour boldly sweeps them away, and replaces them by elected bodies, to be chosen in the same way and by the same men as similar bodies in Great Britain, and to exer- cise the same powers. The only difference made in the franchise is that the illiterates will not vote, and that qualified women will. That is simple and courageous ; but in view of the special circumstances of Ireland, he puts in certain riders. There is, as everybody knows, a cleavage in Ireland between owners and tenants, and as the minority ought to be represented, he allows the cumulative vote. Our impression is, that in the South of Ireland generally this will not do much to remedy injustice, the minority, as we see at elections, being too small ; but still, it will do something, and any one educated man elected may secure the influence of a moderating adviser. An able lawyer, for example, would be sure to secure it, or a man with large means not derived from land. Then, as the Councils may go wrong—the Guardians often have gone wrong—Mr. Balfour allows the Lord-Lieutenant, on the petition of twenty voters and a decision by the Judges that their case has been proved, as an election petition is proved, to supersede a faulty Council by a Com- mission. As the Lord-Lieutenant is not fond of putting his finger into hornets' nests, and as there is to be a regular judicial procedure, and as there are eighty- six Members in Parliament who would delight in getting up a case for morally skinning the Lord-Lieutenant and Judges alive as " oppressors," or "Jeffreys," or "known traitors to their own countrymen," that is not very tyrannical ; while the power, when wisely used, may prevent irreparable blunders. Moreover, as the worst of such blunders are committed in raising money, any action in raising or spending capital is liable to revision by a ,c?ntral County Committee of landowners and others, as to the composition of which Mr. Balfour still expresses him- self uncertain. His suggestion is hardly a good one, though it works fairly in Scotland ; but he said himself that it was open to revision, and it may be revised so that the financial veto shall remain, as it should remain, with a responsible agent of the Crown. That is the Bill, and we cannot see why, if any Bill is to be passed on the subject at so inopportune a time, it should not be this one. The Parnellites and Anti-Parnellites and Gladstonians all shrieked at the Bill as "insulting to the people of Ireland ;" but as it places them almost precisely in the position of the people of Scotland, one hardly sees where the insult comes in. There must be a veto somewhere on the possi- bility of mad expenditure which always exists in a demo- cracy; and it is applied to our Parliament itself in a much more stringent way, no Member of the House of Com- mons having the right directly to propose new expendi- ture—indirectly, of course, he can propose it—without the consent of the Crown. As to the power of dis- solving the Councils, the Judges in England have the power of nullifying any election vitiated by corrupt practices ; and we never heard that the Commons who enacted that law considered themselves insulted by it. The truth is, the combined Opposition were determined to accept no Local Government Bill at all, because they know that many Tories and Unionists regard any such Bill as inopportune, and hope, therefore, to throw it out, and force on a dissolution to what they fancy will be a popular cry. We trust the Unionists will disappoint them, that they will modify some of the clauses in agreement with Mr. Balfour, and that they will then pass the Bill, as proof positive that even at inopportune moments they are prepared to treat the people of Ireland precisely as they treat the people of Great Britain. We wish heartily that the whole matter had been postponed ; but as it has been thought necessary to bring it to the front, we trust that the united majority will give one more proof that they hold no measure important in comparison with the peremptory duty of supporting a Government which governs Ireland well and justly, but refuses to change the United Kingdom, with its history of development and success, into a Federal Monarchy.
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