THE PRELIMINARY SKIRMISHING.
THE preluding for the great battle has begun. Mr. Asquith in his speech at Liverpool on Friday week, tae Duke of Devonshire in his speech of the following day, and Mr. Chamberlain in his speech of Tuesday, have all shown their readiness for the general engagement which is not far off. And it is somewhat remarkable that all three seem to indicate a preference for serious fighting in anticipation of the Home-rule Bill, rather than for post- poning a pitched battle till the proposals of the Govern- ment are fully before us. It is easy enough to understand why Mr. Asquith should prefer a series of engagements to one turning exclusively on Irish Home-rule. In the New- castle Conference, it was expressly proposed that Irish Home-rule should be sandwiched between progressive proposals more popular in England ; and, indeed, if the .Government win at all, they must win by putting heart into some of those English sections of their party for whom Irish Home-rule has no intrinsic attractions. This can only be done by carrying the fight as soon as possible into the heart of questions in which the advanced party in Scotland and Wales take a first-rate interest. But it is obvious that the Duke of Devonshire and Mr. Chamberlain are as eager for engagements all along the line as Mr. Asquith, both of them expressly stating that it will be necessary to elicit the views of the Government on various questions of principle on which, so far as they can judge, the highly complex army which is supposed to be under Mr. Gladstone's command, may not agree, before the pitched battle concerning Home-rule can possibly come off. Why is this ? We suppose that they think it de- sirable to show that Mr. Gladstone's nominal followers really differ as much among themselves on various impor- tant British questions, as they do on the kind of Home-rule which should be given to Ireland; and that they believe that this can be shown. As has been more than once pointed out, the concurrence of all the Gladstonian contingents to get rid of the Unionist Government, by no means implies their con- currence to keep Mr. Gladstone in power. The dismissal of Lord Salisbury was not followed by any House of Commons vote of confidence in Mr. Gladstone, and it remains to be seen what will be the effect on these various contingents of the various announcements of Mr. Glad- stone's policy with which the Session will open. The Duke of Devonshire is not so sanguine as to expect that the host will dissolve when these announcements of policy are made, but he is evidently dubious whether there may not be some defections so important as to leave the majority on which Mr. Gladstone can safely count for the chief measures of the Session, in a feeble and perhaps unsteady condition. The impression evidently is that, even if no other part of Mr. Gladstone's force wavers, there may be a conspicuous failure of heart in the centre of the allied army. How will the avowed moderates take the prospect already opening before them, of showing sympathy for the dynamitards, at a moment when France is convulsed by horror of the Anarchists, and even in the United States there is something like a panic at the unscrupu- lous vindictiveness with which one Labour party seeks to spread dismay among those who repudiate the authority of the regular Unions ? Will not the release of the men cone victed of causing Inspector Martin's death at Gweedore, the liberation of the dynamitard Callan, and the grant of a ticket-of-leave to Egan, Daly's colleague, after the expira- tion of less than half his sentence, convince the soberest of the Englieh Home-rulers that, whether the Home-rule Bill be weak or strong, the Irish Nationalists are really in command of the situation, and control the strategy of the Government ? It will not be of any use to say that Mr. Matthews had himself anticipated the recon- sideration of one of these sentences after a fixed period, and that the issue of a ticket-of-leave is not the same as the cancelling of the rest of the sentence. Of course, that is so. But, in the first place, it would have been quite com- petent to the Unionists to have condemned Mr. Matthews for making any concession to criminals of this gross type ; and, in the next place, what might have been done with far less risk if the Unionists had re- tained the government of Ireland in their own bands, may precipitate danger of a very formidable kind, if the impression gains currency in Ireland that the era of repression is over, and the era of laxity begun. Mr. Chamberlain's remarks on the public scandal which has been caused by these remissions of punishment, will not fail to produce their effect on the minds and consciences of the hesitating Gladstoniens, of whom there are assuredly not a few. Clearly, too, if Egan were convicted on false evidence, the policemen whose testimony convinced the jury should have been prosecuted., for perjury, and if they had been convicted, Egan should have received a free pardon. If not, there never was a case in which the full sentence should have been more strictly enforced. The grant of a ticket-of-leave is a wholly inapplicable course in Egan's case. His guilt was of the highest kind, if he were guilty at all. Mr. Asquith, in his Liverpool speech, taunted the Unionists with their analysis of the English elections. This suggested, he implied, that they are not true Unionists, not willing to be guided in their policy for the United Kingdom as a whole, by the judgment pronounced by the electorate of the United Kingdom as a whole. The Duke of Devon- shire's reply was most effective and even unanswerable. Yes,' he said, in effect, if you are really going to retain in your hands for the future the power you are exerting for the present, nothing is more contrary to our wishes than to look microscopically at the details of the majority, and ask of .how many English, of how many Scotch, and of how many Irish-votes it is composed. In that case, we regard the vote as the vote of the people of the United Kingdom as a whole, and we deprecate any analysis. But if you want to use the electoral power you have obtained for the very purpose of break- ing up the Kingdom into its national constituents, and in order that you may refer Irish questions for the future to the separate decision of the Irish vote, then undoubtedly we do entirely object to this virtual dissolution of the Union without first giving back their freedom of choice to the several distinct partners in the Union. While the partnership lasts, the votes of the majority of the partners carries the firm. But if you are voting power to one partner to decide for the future questions which hitherto, by the terms of the partner- ship-deed, had been decided by the firm, it is monstrous to pretend that there is no power lodged in each separate partner to object on his own account to this revocation of the terms to which originally he was bound. What originally required his separate and individual assent, should require his separate and individual renun- ciation. Otherwise you have got him into the firm on false pretences. He agreed to be guided by a majority only for the purposes for which the partnership was formed, and not for the purpose of enabling the other partners to cancel his right of voting on some of the most important questions that could come before the firm. If A, B, and C enter into an agreement to regard all the affairs of each as common affairs, B and C cannot claim to outvote A on the question whether or not for the future C's affairs shall be reserved for his own private and personal judgment, A and B being excluded from direct control over them. That is a violation of the agreement. And if the agreement is to be drawn up afresh, each party to it must first recover his original individual liberty to acquiesce in or reject its terms.' There is no possible answer to that. It is a species of trickery to use the majority for a purpose which it was not properly competent to bring forward at all. And that is what is done when what is virtually a dissolution and reconstruction of the Union is voted without first giving back to each country its free- dom to reconsider the position. And we should add, too, that the monstrous character of this course is enormously exaggerated by the proposal to let C vote away A and B's capital without letting A and B exert any similar control over C's. Taking power to do this without the separate con- sent of A and B is not only unjust, but absolutely cynical in the degree of its injustice. Mr. Asquith never made a more unfortunate hit than when he taunted the Unionists with not being content to abide by the decision of the United Kingdom as a whole. That is just what we are content to do, and what he proposes to steal from us, our right of doing for the future. Mr. Asquith is naturally very anxious to divert the War from Ireland to other fields of combat. He is eager to take credit for Mr. Acland's administration of the Free Education Act, and to take a good deal more credit than he deserves,—and a good deal more than he himself took when he first dealt with the subject of the Trafalgar Square meetings,—for his own course upon that delicate question. He insists again upon his own praiseworthy services to the artisans and assistants in the various insanitary shops and "dens," doing but scant justice to the course of his pre- decessor in the Home Office, some of whose orders he ignores, and some of whose administrative difficulties he overlooks. We feel no disposition at all to question either Mr. Acland's zeal or Mr. Asquith's own. We feel no doubt that their zeal is genuine, though the slur which is cast upon the course of the Ministers who preceded them may be quite undeserved. It is usually true that with every change of Ministry we gain something at first by the fresh zeal of new and more vigorous work. New brooms proverbially sweep clean, and we are very glad that it should be so. But these minor advantages in a change of Ministry will be dearly purchased at the cost of a new stimulus to the anarchic forces which are threatening the foundations of European society, and a new impulse to that policy of disintegration which is undermining the peace of Ireland. and the power of the United Kingdom. We cannot allow petty administrative diversions to' distract the attention of the people of Great Britain fiom the greater catastrophes with which wo are menaced.
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