THE OVERTHROW OF THE CABINET.
MR. J. P. WALLIS, writing to the Times of Monday, points out that Mr. Gladstone's New Home-rule Bill, if it passes into law, will not only destroy the English Constitution,—as we have known it for the last hundred or hundred-and-fifty years, at least, —but will give the coup de grace to the most characteristic political device of 'modern times.—that unformulated group of leading politicians which we call the Cabinet, —the group which really decides what each Administration shall undertake, and which gives the Administration that particular cast and character which enables it to carry out its intentions. And, indeed, Mr. Gladstone's Home-rule Bill effects the ruin of the Cabinet whichever of the three solutions of the difficulty discussed by Mr. Gladstone may happen to be adopted, —the retention a the eighty Irish Members for all purposes, their retention only for Imperial and Irish purposes, or their complete exclusion from the House of Commons. Let us consider these three proposals, in any one of whioh Mr. Gladstone seemed disposed to acquiesce, if the House should so determine (though he still prefers the last), without a murmur at the rejection of his own preference. The solution preferred and eagerly advocated by the Radical organs of English public opinion, is the retention of the Irish Members for all purposes. What does it matter, they seem to say, that the Irish Members should still continue to vote on the subject of English Railway Bills or English local option measures, as they always have done hitherto, in spite of the fact that English and Scotch Members vi1l for the future have no such privilege in relation to Irish railways and Irish local options ? Why should they be the less fit to do what they have done, just as they have done it before, because the English and Scotch Members have had their duties somewhat attenuated, and, indeed, lightened, by the delegation of a good prop( rtion of their work to local authorities in Dublin ? That would be making the lightening of the work of English and Scotch Members, an excuse for pretending that the Irishmen, whose work will not be lightened unless they themselves choose it, will have suddenly become unfit for a good deal, of theirs. Well, Mr. Glad- stone himself pointed out, with emphasis, and much delicacy, one principal reason,—one with which, as regards the particular purpose of the present article, we are not specially concerned,—why this course is most dangerous,—namely, that it introduces a very powerful motive for a subtle kind of political corrup- tion which it is hardly possible fur politicians, being what they are, wholly to resist. Irish Members wishing, as they must wish, to please their own constituents, and having for the future no reason to fear that they will lose power to please their own constituents by irritating the constituents of Scotch or English Members, will be sorely tempted to make bargains with those Scotch and English Members for the benefit of Ireland,—bargains, for instance, of this kind : If you will vote for, or at least promise not to vote against, the guarantee of our next Irish loan, I will give a vote to that little Scotch or English job of yours though it may be far from beneficial to the interests of Great Britain at large, indeed, as prejudicial to them as this guarantee of an Irish loan would be.' That is a most weighty consideration, but it is not the consideration with which we are just now concerned. We wish to point out how the Cabinet would be affected by the consideration that a party of perhaps eighty Irishmen will be likely to vote on all subjects with a view to get the most they can for Ireland, without any relation to the permanent interests of Great Britain. The result would be that it would be quite essential to have in the Cabinet an Irish statesman per- fectly familiar with all the undercurrents of the Irish political life, and knowing exactly what it would be neces- sary for the Cabinet to propose and to insist upon, if this more or less extra-constitutional body of Irish Members were to be got to support the Cabinet heartily. It would become quite a special and almost technical function to manceuvre Cabinet measures so as to secure the Irish vote, for it would• not only be necessary to know what Irish boons were to be granted in order to secure it, but also what English and Scotch jobs were to be winked, at in order that English and Scotch Members might be diverted from thei' otherwise certain opposition to the support of these special Irish boons. The Irish Members of the Cabi- net, —for Irishmen would thus be more and more wanted in the Westminster Cabinet in consequence of the delegation of Irish business to Dublin,—would assume almost the charac- ter of political agents, so necessary would it be for them to be fully alive to all the intrigues going on between Irish and English, or Irish and Scotch Members. You would find the Irish Ministers,—not the Dublin Ministers, but the Irish Ministers in the Westminster Cabinet, —interesting themselves in the oddest way in all sorts of specially minute and local British schemes, and giving mysterious hints to their colleagues that unless they approved and. supported this new harbour on the Scotch coast, or that new branch line in an English county, they would lose some influential Irish vote, the explanation. being that these proposals were the price to be paid for some influential English advocacy of the next Irish "boon." The final result of retaining the Irish Members for all purposes would be that the Westminster Cabinet, though it would deal with no Irish subjects directly, would have to include Irish Members who would be some of its most weighty and mysteriously important Members, exerting a sort. of influence all the more dangerous because its meaning could not be openly confessed and explained. Well that, we take it, would exert a most prejudicial effect on the British Cabinet. A British Cabinet so piloted by Irish pilots, conversant with all the undercurrents and quick- sands of Hiberno-British negotiation, would soon fall into general and deserved discredit. The second alternative, the alternative now before Parlia- ment for keeping the eighty Irish Members for Imperial and Irish measures, but for no others, has been so thoroughly discussed and discredited in the House of Commons, that we need say very little about it. It would really mean that, as the Bill would introduce the absurdity of two different majorities, one for Imperial and Irish purposes, the other for any Scotch or English purpose, so there would have to be, in effect, at least two Cabinets, one for Irish and Imperial affairs, and another for English and Scotch affairs, and that these two Cabinets would have to be of almost opposite politics, though one would necessarily contain the other. We need not elaborate all the absurdi- ties of that singularly absurd situation. The Cabinet would not long survive that monstrous condition of things. Then, finally, there is the alternative, which Mr. Glad- stone himself prefers, of the exclusion of all the Irish Members from the House of Commons ; and this, he maintains, founding himself on the Colonial precedents, does not in the least involve giving up the supreme con- trol of Ireland. Perhaps not for any country which has not been specially taught, as England has been taught, and taught by him, to regard government against the will of a local majority of the people as almost a foul and wicked proceeding ; but it does seem to us to be almost ludicrously paradoxical to agitate for seven years against the iniquity of governing Ireland by a ,Parliament in which its repre- sentatives are swamped by English and Scotch votes, and yet to advocate governing Ireland in the last resort by a Parliament in which Irishmen have absolutely no voice at all. However, that is not our point now. Our point is how the Cabinet would be affected by excluding the Irish Mem- bers altogether. Now, we maintain that a Cabinet chosen from a Parliament which represented Great Britain, and Great Britain only, would either be altogether incapable of overruling Irish policy, or, if it did overrule the Irish Parlia- ment and Administration with a high hand, it would incur the opprobrium of being a purely despotic and irrespon- sible power. Nothing, we imagine, would be more likely to disgust the English people than either spectacle. A Cabinet afraid to interfere in Ireland at all, what- ever injustice might be going on there, would soon lose Ireland, and ought soon to lose Ireland. A Cabinet which interfered peremptorily, without first listening to what Irish representatives had to say for themselves,—and this, as there would be no Irish representatives, they could not do,—would discredit the principle of representative government altogether. And for Mr. Gladstone,—who has been a sort of fanatic in exaggerating the rights of local majorities to be consulted on the smallest matters,— to advocate such a solution of the problem, is one of those paradoxes which gain for him a reputation of caprice and singularity, which, on the whole evidence of his career, does him, we are convinced, very great injustice. None of the three courses suggested can be pursued without bringing the political expedient of Cabinet Government to a very speedy catastrophe.
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