THE IRONY OF IRISH FATE.
MHERE is nothing so patent or so painful to the im- partial student of the history of Ireland, as the irony so often visible in her destiny, irony as strange as if that little bit of the world had been entrusted to some satiric Demiurgus, who amused himself with making everything go wrong. The very data, the fixed, points, as it were, of national history are all awry. So small an island ought, for its internal peace and the consistency of its develop- ment in civilisation, to have been occupied by one people : and it is occupied by two, differing in race, in aspirations, and in creed, each unable, after a struggle of centuries, to conquer the other, and both unable to effect a lasting or harmonious amalgamation. From its position in the ocean, from its wonderful water privileges, and from the character of its one great resource, fine herbage, Ireland ought, as we said twenty years ago, to have been settled by a people like the Dutch, half-sailors and half-milkmaids, who, while fattening cattle on her splendid pastures, would have seized on the carrying-trade between Europe and the Western world : and it is occupied mainly by Celts, a race devoted to peasant culture, and with every gift except a proclivity to seamanship. She is just weak enough and near enough to England and the Continent, to make a se_parate existence nearly impossible, and just separated enough to make her feel as if absorption in any other State was fatal to her national dignity and visibleness in the world. The strongest aspiration of her people, their thirst for security and dignified life, is precisely the one which their many capacities do not enable them to gratify ; while amidst their many virtues, good citizenship, the one which would make their State what they desire it to be, is the one most perceptibly lacking. Finally, as they were to be united with some other and greater people, they should have been joined with a race akin to their own, and sympathetic with their own, but possessing, like the French, for instance, some separate quality of efficiency: and they are linked indissolubly to a just and able, but domineering and interfering Teutonic people, which sym- pathises neither with their character nor their aspirations, and which is to themselves at once disagreeable and hard to understand. The two nations jar on each other most when they approach most nearly, and of course, when they collide, it is always the feebler which yields and suffers. It is just the same with Irish history. The Celt, like the Saxon, was conquered by the Norman, and absorbed his conquerors ; but while the Saxon gained by the absorption, acquiring in return for his losses precisely the stimulating leadership he needed, the Celt lost his natural chiefs, only to receive rulers who either exaggerated his own foibles, or remained so separate that social co- herence, that union of the castle and the cottage which in all early societies breeds civilisation, and which has permitted it even when, as in Athens, the cottier was a slave, was rendered hopeless for centuries, and a people who among all mankind are, next to the people of India, the most inherently aristocratic, were driven to seek refuge in a democracy so distasteful, that by a sort of compelling instinct they escape from it by a perpetual effort to appoint Dictators. Once they had a full chance of being utterly subjugated,—by the two Cromwells, Oliver and Henry; but the conquerors, meaning well all the while, behaved with cruelty so abhorrent and so unaccountable—for in England they were just men —that the only permanent result was to deepen and to justify, the social cleavage. Once, again, the Irish had the chance of gratifying all their aspirations, of becoming a separate State, with a people politically united, and set free, under the shelter of a strong affiance, to work out their own civilisation. No one can doubt who has studied, like Mr. Lecky, the bases of Irish historical knowledge, that had Earl Fitzwilliam been allowed to carry out the mission with which he was for a few weeks entrusted by Pitt, he would have left Ireland a State with a free Parliament, a suffrage unspoiled by religious or caste distinctions, an old but still popular aristocracy, and the right, in all but questions of foreign politics, to build up her own civilisation. The experiment might have failed, we think would have failed, for the elements of civil war existed everywhere in the island ; but the power to make it would have been given, when suddenly, inexplicably, as if the satiric Demiurgus himself had intervened, the mind of the English Premier changed, and Ireland was flung once more into the ancient groove, the peculiarity, the sardonic peculiarity, of which was this, that the nation which was bound to it, whether it receded or advanced, whether its motion was rapid or imperceptible, never arrived any- where. Subjugation and enfranchisement were both for a moment in sight, and neither happened ; yet the most acute of historians cannot in either case convincingly explain the cause. William the Norman never conquered England as the Cromwells conquered Ireland ; Mr. Parnell has never ventured to ask what Earl Fitz- willia,m was practically—we are aware of the technical disputes—empowered to give : yet conquest and concession alike proved utterly unfruitful. Always some accident, or some oppression, or some change of purpose in a bene- factor, occurred to intercept the great change apparently at hand ; and events rolled on in their sterile, bewildering, and, as even some Irishmen now describe it, truly Irish way.
And now look round on a scene such as we venture to say was never witnessed among the white nations before. The writer is a strong Unionist, who not only thinks that the policy shortly described as "Home-rule" would be injurious to Great Britain and fatal to Ireland, but that it is too directly opposed to modern tendencies ever to be adopted; but he would not dream of denying that only a fortnight ago all the apparent omens seemed to show that the ex- periment would be tried. The Irish majority was quietly submissive to a strong dictator whom they had selected, who had convinced or captured Mr. Gladstone, and who had cemented an alliance with the Liberal Party so strong that it bore even the terrible strain put upon it by the cruel practices sanctioned or ordered in the name of the Irish Revolution. That Liberal Party, though powerless in Parliament except for obstruction, was winning seat after seat at by-elections ; was to all appearance wor- shipped in Scotland, in the North of England, in Wales, and in many districts of the South ; and reckoned, not only with confidence but with a kind of certainty, that the General Election, whenever it occurred, would end in reseating Mr. Gladstone with a majority of seventy at the lowest. He, it was believed, would produce an improved Home-rule Bill ; the Lords would ask for some changes rather than for another dissolution ; and in three years at farthest, possibly in two, Ireland would have a Par- liament of her own, and a vote at Westminster strong enough to prevent any interference with its action. Moreover, the new Constitution for Ireland would be in working order, for all the Irish Home-rulers now in Parliament would be trans- ferred bodily to Dublin, and they had a Premier ready-made whom the majority would, at first at all events, most eagerly accept. The situation, from the Irish point of view, was startlingly favourable, so favourable that the Demiurgus of Ireland looked down, and in an instant shattered the scene to pieces. As usual, amid all apparent good fortune, everything was arranged unluckily for Ireland. The moment of Ireland's renewed hope was one when the English people was once more developing its strong though usually latent Puritanism, and abhorrence of what Macaulay in a celebrated passage distinguished as "the softer vices ; " when the Liberal leader was a man who owed his power as much to the loftiness of his moral character as to his intellectual strength ; and when a myth had a,ccreted round the Irish leader's character, through which he was seen as a lofty patriot of the Deak type, cold, retiring, and secretive, but determined and pure, devoted to his country before all things, and ambitious only for her sake. At this moment a verdict was given in an undefended suit in the Divorce Court, and in less than twenty-four hours every condition of success for Home-rule was altered or reversed. English Puritanism was shocked into revolt, the Liberal leader broke with his ally, and all the glamour which surrounded Mr. Parnell dis- appeared. The English people, the English Liberal chief, and all Mr. Parnell's English devotees were disenchanted at,a blow. Home-rule is thrown back into the far distance, the party which befriends it is prostrated, and yet the Mr. Lecky of the future, as he relates the story, will be puzzled to offer a full explanation. But for the combination of conditions, the shattering could not have occurred. It is only at intervals that Puritan feeling explodes in England, though, as we read our history, it always exists • not one leader in ten would have acted like Mr. Gladstone ; and we cannot remember when the myth which has so fatally damaged Mr. Parnell, the utter misconception of his essential character, has ever gathered round an Irish leader before. It needed a com- bination of unusual, or at least intermittent conditions, to cause the explosion that has wrecked Ireland's hopes ; and lo ! at the precise moment when an explosion would find on all sides the point of least resistance, it has occurred. It is the very irony of fate.
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