THE WITHDRAWAL FROM THE COMMISSION.
MR. PARNELL and his colleagues have withdrawn their counsel from the Commission Court at a time when it will hardly produce the dramatic effect upon public opinion here which it is intended to produce. So far as Ireland is concerned, we have no doubt that whenever they had withdrawn their counsel,—from the opening of the Commission to its close,—the majority in Ireland would have given them all their sympathy and support. Nobody doubts that, for the present at least, the Parnellites can elicit what tones they please from the Irish people, whether of indignation, pity, or enthusiasm. But it is not for the sake of the Irish people that the Parnellites have been so long employing counsel to place their case effec- tively before the people of the United Kingdom. It is for the sake of the people of Great Britain ; and we feel very confident that so far as the people of Great Britain are concerned, this last move will not be an effective one, but will fall quite dead. What will be said will be that practically the counsel for the Parnellite Members had exhausted all they had to say before the Commission, that Sir Charles Russell had made his great speech, and., indeed, had somewhat anticipated the time when the great peroration would have been most opportune, and that the stream of Parnellite evidence to the justification for the League's proceedings was evidently beginning to run very low ; that but for events which have recently happened in America, and which have rendered it inoppor- tune to pose just now as martyrs, the withdrawal might probably have taken more effect some weeks ago ; but that, at all events, the excuse urged for it now has been a poor one, and will not impress the British public. It will be felt that Sir James Hannen only expressed in the most temperate manner the-obvious duty of the Court not to interpolate a new and very different inquiry in the labours of the Commission,—an inquiry for which he had no sort of justification in the terms of the Act which appointed it. That is not saying, of course, that a plausible argument might not be constructed to show that it would be a justifiable thing to investigate the doings of the Loyal and Patriotic Union, and to trace the origin of the Times' charges, so far as they could be traced to the operations of that Union. For our own parts, we do not think that Parliament would have been wise to engraft a new mistake of this sort on the old mistake. We hardly know where such pleas might end. Mr. Gladstone, we are sure, could make out a plausible case for going into all the antecedents of the Act of Union, and showing that the sense of injury in the breasts of the Irish people dates at least from the attempt to pass the Act of Union, if not from a much earlier date. Yet, if Sir Charles Russell had claimed Sir James Hannen's attention for a stream of evidence intended to show the flagitious character of the Act of Union, the British public would hardly have looked on with equanimity while that new enterprise of historical tunnelling had been opened up. The truth is, that in a case• of this kind plausible pleas may be made out for alnaost, any extension of the inquiry, whereas the only hope of getting any practical result at all is to do as Sir James Hannen has done, to limit the inquiry as closely as possible to the definite purpose enforced upon him by the Act appointing the Commission. Indeed, any such enlargement of its task would evidently require a new Act of Parlia- ment, which the English democracy would never sanction. That being plainly the position of the Commissioners, this attempt to engraft upon the long inquiry still pending, a. new inquiry as to the connection between the Loyal and Patriotic Union and the Times' charges, would have been resented by the British public as an unjustifiable gloss on a business already far too unwieldy. There is hardly a sensible electorate anywhere, Gladstonian or Conservative, that would not have resented the supereroga- tory incursion of these special Judges into a new and laborious field. And the attempt to make it appear a wilful act of partiality on Sir James Hannen's part, to decline the enterprise, will utterly fail. The three Judges, as every one knows, can ill be spared from their ordinary work. To have imposed upon themselves fresh work for which even Mr. Asquith's ingenuity barely served to suggest a plausible excuse, would have been a weak surrender to a most arrogant demand.
We think. that the almost universal view will be that if the National League leaders had wished to make their move effective, they should have chosen some earlier occasion for it, before they had practically reaped all the advantage of _ Sir Charles Russell's and Mr. Asquith's and Mr. Reid's skill. Human nature generally has a disposition to com- plain if it cannot secure the double advantage of eating its cake and yet keeping it for future consumption. And the Irish leaders have not shown themselves at all more superior to that very widespread weakness of human nature than the weakest of their fellow-creatures. Having eaten the cake of Sir Charles Russell's skill and eloquence, and that of his eminent colleagues', they now wish to reap all the , advantage of having refused it, and so they find an oppor- tunity for declining, with a flourish of trumpets, to eat any more of it when there is hardly a crumb of it left. That will hardly do. It will be, we think, a coup manqué. Not that we have any disposition to deny that by investigating all the proceedings of the Loyal and Patriotic Union it is quite possible that the Parnellites might have scored a point or two against their opponents. Still, for the purposes of the inquiry instituted under the Commission Act, that point or two would have been quite. irrelevant. As Sir James Hannen says, what he and his colleagues were directed to investigate was the truth or falsehood of the Times' charges. One or two of these charges have been shown to be false. On the other hand, a great mass of evidence has been given of the effect of which on the Judges' minds we are still waiting to hear the account. But that effect could not possibly have been altered by a new investigation as to the mixed motives of the members of the Loyal and Patriotic Union. If it had been shown ever so clearly that that Union set the Times on the track of its charges, that would not have helped the decision of the issue,—Are those charges true or false ? We know that they are not all true ; and if not all false, which of them are true and which false ? This is what the Commission has still to decide. And no question could have been more destitute of bearing on the issue than the question as to the historical connection between the operations of the Loyal and Patriotic Union and the indictment brought by the managers of the Times. The Parnellite leaders are not without skill in melo- drama, as Mr. O'Brien has repeatedly shown us,. But this last stroke of melodrama, though Mr. Healy has done his best to tell us what it means in his most characteristic language, will not bring down even the occupants of the political gallery on this side of the ChanneL
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