MR. GLADSTONE'S ANATHEMA ON IRISH LAW AND GOVERNMENT.
MR. GLADSTONE certainly succeeds in inflicting great pain on his opponents by his speeches on the Irish Question. But we doubt whether the kind of pain which he inflicts is exactly of the kind he would really choose to inflict. The pain we feel,—and it is very great, pain that when once he is on the war-path, he can so entirely forget the responsibility which attaches to a great Minister who has long been, under the Sovereign, the chief figure in the United Kingdom,—that he can apparently drive this absolutely from his mind the moment he has conceived it to be his duty, as no doubt he does deem it to be his duty, by every legitimate means, to expel the present Government from power. We have no quarrel with him on that account, though we regret the intensity and urgency of his conviction. We have no quarrel with him for his deep and evidently solemn belief that it is a constitutional duty to concede Home-rule to Ireland, though we differ from him toto ccelo. Both impressions are perfectly consistent with his character as a statesman, and widely as we differ from him, it is of course conceivable that we are in the wrong and that he is in the right. But what- ever may be the right opinion as to the merits or demerits of the present Government, whatever may be the right opinion as to the constitutional claim of Ireland to a Legislature of her own, it is surely beyond doubt that a statesman who has bad for many consecutive years the whole responsibility of Maintaining the law and supporting the government in Ireland, should not tell the Irish people that he holds the law under which they live to be thoroughly bad, and the administration which puts that law in force to be worse even than the law itself, since it contrives to make the law hateful, and, indeed, deserving of hate, in Ireland. Can Mr. Gladstone really plead that he would as soon have anarchy as the existing law administered by the existing Government ?—that he would as soon have a complete paralysis of the Irish Administration, as steadiness and efficiency in carrying out the law as they understand it ? It is one of the gravest steps which the chief of Opposition in such a country as ours can take, to announce that he.. thinks the law incurably bad, and the administration of the law something worse than hateful. It is true that Mr. Gladstone hesitated to say that the Irish people should disobey the law, but he certainly hesitated still more to say that they should obey it. His language was probably more inveterate against both law and government than was ever before used by a statesman in his position :— " You know very well—I am not going to dilate upon that point at the present—you know very well that they persist in governing Ireland under a system of coercive law totally different from that we have on this side of the water, and a system to which the people of this country never would submit for a moment. But that is not all, though it is much ; for you cannot expect the Irish people to be satisfied with anything less than being governed on equal terms. Then how can you ask from them the conduct of submission, the confidence in the law, the confidence in the agents of the law, which happily prevails in this island ? How can you ask that from them, when our action towards them is founded upon principles totally opposite to those which prevail in this country ? But that is not all. I carry the charges against them further; and I wish to be intelligible, and I will say this,—the administration of the law is a great deal worse than the law itself. The administration of the law is such that it causes the law to be hated by the Irish ; yes, and causes such a state of things that the Irish ought to hate the law. I will not say that even under these circumstances they ought to break the law. No, I will not say that. If they have the smallest self-respect, the smallest love of country, the smallest love for their wives and children, these laws, and above all the system under which they are administered, ought to be hateful in their sight ; and I go further, and say this,—that the conduct of the wIlninie. trators of the law is in many respects such as to amount to a continual provocation to the breaches of the law, and to make it perfectly wonderful that these breaches of the law are not in Ireland infinitely more frequent than they are. Nor, gentlemen, shall I stop there. For the worst count of my indictment of the Government is this, that the Government itself is of all the greatest master and the most perfect pattern of illegality."
That is language which amounts to saying that the Irish are at least perfectly excusable for breaking the law, though Mr. Gladstone deliberately stops short of saying that they ought to break it. No one can pretend for a moment that Mr. Gladstone condemned those who do deliberately break the law as it is administered by the present Government. Any Fenian who might have been listening to him, must have carried away the notion that an Irishman who does deliberately break the law as it is at present administered, is a great deal more to be respected than an Irishman who not only does not break it, but fails to see anything hateful in it, and submits to it with hearty good-will.
Now, when we hear such language as this used by a great ex-Minister who has for full ten years been respon- sible for the government of the United Kingdom, and who has for more than four of those years administered a much severer law in Ireland than the law which the present Government administer, and administered it in precisely the same if not a still more drastic fashion, we do not scruple to say that we are filled with apprehension and dismay. Has Mr. Gladstone so little sense of the continuity of Governments, of the joint responsibility of successive Administrations for preserving peace and order in the country which they rule, that he can deliberately wish to undermine the authority of Govern- ment, as Government, not merely by the usual means of getting the electors to withdraw their confidence from it at the polls, but by using language the obvious tendency of which is to promote a spirit of defiance to the law while it is law, and of positive detestation for those who administer it ? Yet this appears to be his earnest wish, even though the only difference between that law and that administration which he thus does his best to undermine, and the law and the administration which he himself upheld five years and a half ago, is that the law is much milder now than it was then, while the Administration acts on exactly the same prin- ciples, and finds itself committed to exactly the same kinds of struggles and collisions with the Irish people, to which Mr. Gladstone's Administration was committed. Mr. Gladstone knows perfectly well that the events of Mitchels- town and Tipperary, which he harps on with so much tenacity, were exactly paralleled under his own Govern- ment ; that if three men were killed in one of these frays, two women were killed under very similar circum- stances under his own Government ; that if the present Government have granted no Commission of Inquiry in the one case, his Government never thought of such a Commission of Inquiry in the other case. It is true, of course, that after the Belfast riots in 1886, which were on a much greater scale, a Commission of Inquiry was, after great delay, appointed at the last moment. Then, however, Mr. Gladstone had adopted Home-rule, and the principles of his Irish government had been necessarily changed. We are now speaking of the principles of his administration before he passed over to the Parnellites, and not afterwards. And what we say without fear of being contradicted is this, that a very much severer law was administered less than six years ago by Mr. Gladstone on precisely the same principles as those on which the present milder law is administered in Ireland, and that if at that time the leader of the Opposition had declared the law bad and the administration so much worse that all Irishmen ought to regard it as hateful and provocative of resistance,—all Irishmen, that is, who have " the smallest love of country, wives and children,"—he would himself have been dismayed and more than in- dignant, and have recognised that the great difficulty of his task in governing Ireland had been rendered tenfold more difficult in a single instant. Have we, then, come to this, that a Conservative Government is to be denounced in terms that render its hold of Ireland as difficult as an ex-Prime Minister can make it by any denunciations of his, for being six years or so behind the Liberal Government in its principles, or not even quite so much as that, since the law that the Conservatives are administering is in various respects far milder and less exceptional than the law which the Liberal Government of six years ago administered with the general concurrence of the whole country ? Is it to be understood that if the party of resistance to change is in its policy nearly six years behind the party which advocates change, the former deserves to be reviled by responsible statesmen in terms which, if Irishmen were as inflammable now as they were under Mr. Gladstone's rule (which fortunately they are not), would make the government of Ireland all but impossible ?
And that reminds us that Mr. Gladstone assumes as absolutely certain that the improvement in Ireland is due, not to the firm enforcement of a very mild Crimes Act which dispenses with trial by jury for a certain class of offences that in England would be so tried, but to the fact that a great English party has identified itself with the Parnellite cause. There cannot be a less reasonable assumption. What are the facts ? The facts are, that under the severe Crimes Act of 1882 the state of Ireland rapidly improved ; that it was not till 1885, when the Act was about to expire, that Ireland began to fall back ; that it was known as early as the December of that year that Mr. Gladstone had declared for Home-rule ; that in January, 1886, it was not only known that he had declared for Home-rule, but that he was at the head of a Ministry pledged to introduce Home-rule in Ireland if Parliament would consent, but that none the less, throughout that year in Ireland, Ireland did not improve ; the boycotting became more cruel and more general, and the state of Ireland became materially worse than when the Coercion Act of 1882 expired in 1885. It was not Mr. Gladstone's declaration for Home-rule, but the renewal of certain parts of that Act in the much milder Act of 1887,—against which Mr. Gladstone struggled with all his might,—that first set in motion the improvement admitted by Mr. Gladstone, and which he refers to the announcement of the Liberal Party, made a year and a half sooner, that they advocated the Home-rule policy. That declaration rather increased than diminished the terrorism in Ireland. It was not till the new Coercion Act, as he calls it,—in reality, a mere selection from his own Act of those provisions which secure the punishment of tyranny and terrorism by mild penalties without rendering them inoperative by insisting on trying them before a jury which will not convict, because it fears the terrorists more than it fears the law,—had been passed in the summer of 1887, that Ireland gradually returned to the tranquillity of 1885. We do not ourselves think it at all doubtful that, if Mr. Gladstone could return to power this year, and were to repeal the Crimes Act of 1887 before the close of it, we should have a winter of far greater terrorism and crime in Ireland than any of the last three. That, however, is a matter on which, of course, Mr. Gladstone does not agree with us, and is entitled to his own sanguine opinion. But he is not entitled to assume what is dead against all the evidence that we possess, that the great improvement in Ireland, which did not begin till after the Crimes Act was passed in the middle of 1887, was due to an event which occurred a year and a half sooner, and which pro- duced absolutely no pacifying effect in Ireland at all. The truth is, that so long as terrorism went unpunished, terrorism was widespread, and that so soon as it was steadily punished, it collapsed.
We are very far from denying, what Mr. Gladstone insists on with so much passion, that the Irish Executive is often ill-judged and provocative. It was so,—it was, we believe, still more so,—under his own government. It is so now. It will be so as long as the Parnellite Party organises bodies whose attitude leads Irish bullies and vagabonds to believe that they will be sympathised with and protected in resisting the power of the law, and in maltreating those who appeal to the protection of the law, whenever they can do so. We have no doubt that the subordinate officials of the Castle are often injudicious, and inspire some of their leading constables with injudicious zeal. We regret this as deeply as Mr. Gladstone can do, and are as eager to reform it. But we see no hope of reform in the direction of breaking up the unity of the United Kingdom, and introducing a system under which the leading administrators of justice and order in Ireland would be the very men who have diffused terror through- out the land, and have led the loyal minority a life of panic and persecution, of suffering and dread.
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