TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE KEOGH DEBATE.
THEgreatest of all the difficulties of the British govern- ment of Ireland is that, while the British House of Commons is capable of making and has made great and even heroic efforts of justice to Ireland, its natural mind is so completely out of sympathy with the natural mind of any assembly really representing the Irish people, that it does almost more harm by its mere behaviour, than it can ever do good by its most conscientious efforts. For instance, Mr. Henry James, in his very able and eloquent speech, carried away the whole House of Commons into the most passionate cheering, and yet that speech was one which simply could not have been delivered by an Irishman in any Irish Assembly ; it was a speech not indeed animated by bigoted feeling against the Irish national religion,—had it been so, it might have been far more than paralleled by the representative of a Protestant faction speaking the views of his faction in an Irish House of Commons,—but it was a speech which, while intending to be just, was simply and characteristically obtuse to the moral features of the situation. It was such a speech as would have come naturally from the mouth of an English Protestant if—which is of course impossible—the Roman Catholic priesthood here had attempted to impose its will with a high hand on the English nation. Mr. Henry James, while showing his remarkable powers as a speaker and an advocate, showed himself also without the slightest glimmering of the instincts of a statesman. He had no imagination, no dream even, of the relation of the Irish priesthood to the Irish people. He had forgotten, if he had ever realised—which seems very doubtful—that the Irish priesthood have been by a history of common misfortune and common martyrdom so absolutely identified in interest with the Irish people, that it is simply inevitable that they should act as leaders of the popular party, and use their whole influence,—peasants do not dis- tinguish between the influence they have gained as patriots and the influence they have gained as priests,—to resist the powers arrayed against them by the unpopular party in Ireland, the representatives of the landed interest and of the Protestant union. The storms of angry cheers with which Mr. Henry James's very telling and unanswerable illustrations of the authority assumed and even flaunted by the Irish priest- hood in this election were met in the House of Commons, must have made any loyal Irishman almost despair of the possibility for the present of a hearty legislative Union. Those cheers were based, as Mr. James's eloquence was based, entirely on the hypothesis that here was the exposure of a great and wicked conspiracy against the freedom of popular voting. Why, if that were so, the violent and often dic- tatorial speeches of Mr. Bright and the friends of Reform in the Reform crusade of 1858 might have been so denominated. Mr. Henry James never gave even a hint that the line taken by the priests was due, not to any difference on spiritual questions beween the priests and the landlords, but to the agitation of a question specially and warmly affecting the tenants and peasants, as tenants and peasants, on which the priesthood, who are peasants in soutanes, had naturally taken up a very strong position. The Archbishop of Tuam, in one of the first letters he wrote on this subject, put this question of restitution for evictions in the very front of the battle, and it was because be did so that the Irish landlords—Catholic and Protestant alike—took the violent line they did in opposition to the popular and sacerdotal candidate. View the thing as we may in England, no one who has studied the evidence, and who is capable, as Mr. Henry James appar- ently is not, of entering into the political feelings of the people of Ireland, can have the smallest shadow of a doubt that Mr. Justice Keogh was giving judgment on a great and most profoundly agitating political strife, in which the land- lords and priests were each straining their influence to the utmost, and that that judgment had, in the most violently marked form, all the signs of the passions of a partisan who was thoroughly enraged with the priests—not for their 13] tra- montane views or spiritual pretensions,—but for combining with peasants to defeat the landed gentry of Galway. That is the true rationale of the judgment to every man who studies the evidence with the slightest tinge of political insight. And it can do little but harm to the Irish people to see the unquestionable and very numerous cases of sacerdotal violence paraded before the House of Commons as evidence of the equitable character of a judgment which, is impeached not because it alleged and demonstrated the fact of undue sacerdotal influence,—a fact as clear as the sun in heaven,—but because it alleged and demonstrated that fact in the spirit of a partisan of the opposite and almost equally undue influence, and lashed the sins of the sinners on one- side, while showing passionate sympathy with the equally grave- and much more anti-popular sins of the sinners on the other side. We have no hesitation in saying that when Mr. James adopted, as he did, Mr. Justice Keogh's judgment, not only as regards the intimidation exercised by the priests, but as regards. also the absence of any like intimidation on the part of the landlords, he proved himself to be so blinded by violent pre- judice, that the burst of cheers amidst which he sat down. would be justly felt in Ireland as cheers for the apologist for judicial partisanship,—judicial partisanship with the cause• of caste and privilege in Ireland.
The position of the Government,— especially when we- remember that it is a Government, no doubt absurdly and very unjustly credited, but still credited, with active- sympathy with the party of Papal Infallibility and Jesuit intrigue,—was extremely difficult ; but we do not think that; the Attorney-General's speech was the beat way out of the difficulty. No doubt it was very prudent ;—too prudent in the narrow sense to be prudent in the larger and broader- sense. When the public mind is really roused, non-committal speeches which carefully avoid any opinion on the justice o£ the case are seldom the wisest. They show want of courage„ want of confidence in the justice and integrity of the Govern- ment itself. Sir John Coleridge spoke as if he were exe- cuting a dance among a labyrinth of eggs. He said; —what no man in his senses can doubt—that very many of Mr. Justice Keogh's sentences against the Galway priests for' intimidation were just ; and he added very fairly that the- Government had not made up its mind, and could not properly make up its mind in the absence of much of the evidence which, the Judge had before him, that any of them were unjust. Sce far all was well. But when he went on to assert that goin so far with the Judge, the Government could not properly express any opinion whatever which would have the effect of- diminishing the force of his judgment, ho made in our view- a very grave mistake. A Government which has to deal with, such a matter as this, in which all Ireland is passionately interested, in which the dignity of Irish justice is virtually concerned, cannot afford to maintain the justice on one• side of a controversy, and to ignore entirely the justice on the other side. Conceive the case of an Irish House of Commons dealing with this judgment. Is it even conceiv- able that a purely Irish Government, while refusing, probably, on the highest principles, to remove the Judge, would fait to pass any opinion as to the extreme and grave nature of his. mistakes ? We confess that we think Mr. Pim's amendment was treated very badly by the Attorney-General on Thursday night, and had Mr. Pim himself been more of an orator an a statesman, it would have been easy for him to expose the- excessive weakness of the objections to his moderate but most just censure. The Attorney-General says that to refuse to, remove a judge, and yet to weaken his position on the Bench by a partial censure of his language, is the worst of all middle- courses. But the alternative was not open. All Ireland and all moderate men in England have already censured the violence and passion of that most unjudicial language. Nothing that the Government could say or could refuse- to say would make any difference on this head. It is simply impossible that Mr. Justice Keogh can ever exercise again the full influence in Ireland of a perfectly impar- tial judge. The Government of the country may hide its head, like the ostrich in the sand, or it may look the question straight in the face ; but the only difference between those- different courses will be in relation to its own position, and not in relation to Mr. Justice Keogh. Indeed, it is in the highest degree probable that a temperate and guarded expres- sion of regret by the Government and the House of Com- mons at the violence of language which ev-ry man of sense regrets, whether he says it or no, would have diminished most materially the force of the resentment entertained in Ireland against Mr. Justice Keogh, instead of in any way weakening a judicial position which must for the future be very weak. We know the full gravity of the objections against interfering with the independence of the Judges for any cause whatever short of corrupt judgment. Nobody imputes corrupt judgment to Mr. Justice Keogh. But almost everybody,—almost everybody who has read the
evidence and has understood it,—imputes violent party spirit to him in relation to the great struggle on which he had to adjudicate. We maintain that one of the most important of the duties of a popular Government is to give a certain moderated and dignified expression to all just currents of popular feeling, and that it would have been in the highest degree worthy of the Administrative Government of the United Kingdom,—if not of the House of Commons,—to have expressed candidly sincere regret for the tone and temper of a judgment which it does regret, and which even Sir Johu Coleridge, with all his painstaking, did not succeed in hiding from the House of Commons that he did regret. It was hardly worthy of him too, to imply that the Government had sanctioned implicitly all the substance of Mr. Justice Keogh's judgment, by ordering the prosecution of 23 out of 36 persons named by the judge as guilty of spiritual intimidation. There was a most substantial part of that Judgment, —the part deciding that the Galway landlords had been guilty of no such intimidation on the side of Captain Trench,—which this substantial agreement with Mr. Justice Keogh did not even touch. It was quite open to the Law officers of the Crown to have declared that in their opinion the evidence did not bear out Mr. Justice Keogh in that decision,—for it certainly does not. But this part of the subject was simply evaded by the Attorney-General, with that over-anxious caution that conveys a most painful impression of weakness. Assuredly the debate of Thursday night is one to excite a sort of de- spair in the minds of those who wish to see Parliament truly representing all the Three Kingdoms of the Union. We should have rejoiced to have heard the unanswerable justice of Mr. Justice Keogh's condemnation of the sacerdotal inter- ference in the Galway Election duly upheld by impartial men in the House of Commons, but we should have liked to see the fall evidence of their impartiality in moderate and tempered blame of his manifest and melancholy partisanship of tone. The fear which tied the tongues of the Government, and the gross prejudice which blinded the eyes of such an orator as Mr. Henry James, took from the confirmation of Mr. Justice Keogh's censure of the sacerdotal order all the judicial im- partiality with which it would otherwise have been clothed to the minds of the Irish people.
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