MR. CHAMBERLAIN'S SPEECH.
MR. CHAMBERLAIN'S speech had two great charac- teristics which will make all the Unionists of Great Britain grateful to him. He was as firm as a rock in his Unionism ; and he was as earnest as if he had been an Irish- man in his wish to relieve the real sufferers in Ireland, and to urge on the Government the most applicable of practical remedies. There were many other effective aspects of his
speech besides these. He was unanswerable when he told Mr.
Gladstone's followers that if they voted for Mr. Parnell's address assuring her Majesty that " we deprecate any exten- sion of State-aided purchase on the basis of rents fixed when prices were higher than they now are," they would pass a censure on the late Government, which undoubtedly proposed State-aided purchase fixed on that basis. He was unanswerable, except on the ground that he was for the moment out of order, and liable to be stopped by the Speaker, when he retorted on Sir William Harcourt's comparison between the artist in Red Lions and the Government of Commissions, that he too (i e., Sir William Harcourt) had been a great artist in Red Lions of the same kind. And he was unanswerable when he pointed out that in 1880 the Irish Members had left the Government without any hearty support in the attempt to pass the Com- pensation for Disturbance Bill, against which, indeed, they moved an amendment on the third reading, and remarked that the attempt which he had desired to make last spring to deal effectually with unjust evictions in the same spirit, would have been checkmated in the same fashion. But as we have said, the great features of his speech were its immoveable Unionism and its earnest sympathy with the Irish people, two aspects of the Irish Question which cannot be disjoined without equal danger to each. If we are to maintain the Union, we must remove the grievances which make the Union press so hard upon the Irish. If we are to take the responsi- bility and the risk involved in removing the grievances of Ireland, we ought to maintain the Union. The two points are really inseparable. And Mr. Chamberlain, in his very powerful speech, made the House feel that they were insepara- ble, that the stronger we are as Unionists, the more bound we are to take up seriously the agrarian problem in Ireland, and that the more serious are our responsibilities for the solution of the agrarian problem in Ireland, the more are we bound to keep within the United Kingdom the territory for which we have undertaken responsibilities so serious.
Mr. Chamberlain was very impressive on both points. It
had, he said, always been his wish to put an end to the system of dual ownership. "It is only by a great scheme of peasant-proprietorship, as in Germany, in Russia, and Bavaria, that you can settle the Irish Question. You cannot create a peasant proprietary except in one of two ways,—by a vast confiscation of the property of indi- viduals, which is not advocated by any Member of the House of Commons, or by a great scheme of State-aided purchase. That is the only alternative, and of that I have always been in favour." He opposed Mr. Gladstone's scheme because he thought it far too risky, and especially because he thought it gave us no security at all that the proprietary we were going to create would strengthen, or truly belong to, the Kingdom which was going to create them. " I said I would not be a party to lending money, British money, to what was
going to be practically a foreign country It is one thing that the whole resources of the Empire should be devoted to adding to the happiness and prosperity of those- for whose happiness and prosperity the Imperial Parliament is directly responsible, and it is another thing altogether to lend money to a foreign country. I will put the case of Canada. I ask whether the House would lend £150,000,000, or £50,000,000, or even £1,500,000, in order to buy out Canadian landlords. The thing has only to be stated to show its absurdity." In other words, Mr. Chamberlain insists that for Ireland we should make a great sacrifice, if Ireland is to remain a solid part of the United Kingdom. If it is not to remain a solid part of the United Kingdom, if, indeed, it is to become one of the most serious of the minor dangers to which Great Britain is exposed,—as the Chicago orators evidently wish,—then Mr.
Chamberlain sees no reason to make a great sacrifice for Ireland. This is powerfully put, and put so as to impress the imagina- tions even of Irishmen. And Mr. Chamberlain added to the force of what he said by declaring that, so far as he could judge, Mr. Parnell's suggestion that a periodical revision of rents according to a sliding-scale depending on the price of produce, would meet the immediate exigencies of the case in Ireland, so far as regards the too high averages adopted by the Land Commission.
But this concession to Mr. Parnell, ill received as it was by the Irish Members,—who, as Mr. Chamberlain truly said, interrupted him when he opposed Mr. Parnell, and in- terrupted him equally when he agreed with him,—was made all the more significant by his warning to Mr. Parnell, that as he had apparently been able to diminish outrages in Ireland during the reign of a Government which he favoured, he would be greatly and justly distrusted if he did not exert the same influence under a Government which he dislikes. In referring to the Chicago Convention, he asked how we were to give it credit for the moderation imputed to it, when in a carefully written address to that Convention, Mr. James Redmond had de- liberately said :—" It is impossible for England to govern Ireland. It will be the duty of the Irish Members to make the government of England in Ireland impossible." And he told Mr. Parnell that if the National League continued to render it necessary for tenants who think their rents perfectly fair and who are quite ready to pay them, and who do pay them secretly by night, to attempt to get the credit of withholding what they are personally eager to pay, the Government are bound to expose and to punish the perpetrators of such a tyranny. In fact, Mr. Chamberlain, while heartily identifying himself with the wants and grievances of the people of Ireland, held towards Mr. Parnell, Mr. Redmond, the National League, and the conspirators who defy the authority of the law, that firm and manly language which we expect from our Unionist statesmen, and of which Mr. Gladstone himself, so long as he was a Unionist statesman, set the example.
Mr. Chamberlain's speech seems to us a great event. It_, marks out the policy of genuinely Liberal Unionists, and it marks it out in lines so clear and vivid that it will give a new strength to the confidence of the Liberal Unionists in Parlia- ment and in the country. As Mr. Chamberlain very justly says, if a new dissolution could be forced, it is not the Unionists who would lose ground. He made the same prediction before the last dissolution, and it was verified. We believe that the prediction which he now makes will be even more remarkably verified if the Radical allies of the Parnellite Party are ill- judged enough to hurry into a new struggle.
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