TOPICS OF THE DAY.
HOW MR. GLADSTONE HAS DISAPPOINTED EXPECTATION.
IT has been observed that in his speech at Nottingham on Monday, Lord Hartington abandoned the attitude of respect and reticence with which he had previously treated Mr. Gladstone ; and that, while "there was no unnecessarily bitter word from one end of the speech to the other," there was yet "no attempt to palliate or conceal the facts on which it was Lord Hartington's duty to comment." The change of tone is indisputable ; nor, much as we regret it, do we think that it is possible to blame Lord Hartington for that change. For though Mr. Gladstone has never in any part of his career in- dulged in personal attacks on his opponents, and has certainly hardly lost an opportunity of speaking of Lord Hartington with respect, his mode of dealing with the Irish Question has become month by month, and even day by day, more and more careless of every consideration, personal courtesy alone excepted, which would have enabled his Unionist opponents to understand and respect his abrupt change of political position in 1885. What, then, are the considerations which we should have hoped to see Mr. Gladstone, in spite of his Home-rule convictions, and even out of tenderness for his Home-rule convictions, treating with sedulous deference in his capacity of leader of the Home- rule Party ? We will enumerate some of the most important. He should, we think, have taken the utmost pains to show that, whatever the excesses into which the Parnellite Party had been forced, as he would think, in their hopelessness of obtaining Home-rule by any but revolutionary methods, he, the first statesman of England, who had held for forty years a leading place in the councils of English Ministers, was not prepared to lend the least countenance to those excesses, and was resolved to let the country know that it is not by violence or threats that Ireland can ever hope to win her game. Surely the man who had converted so many Liberals to Home-rule by his own personal authority, and who hoped to make it the creed first of the whole Liberal Party, and then of the country at large, ought to have taken the most scrupulous pains to clear his creed of the taint which Irish weakness and Irish violence had imparted to it. He should have made it known at once that while he advocated the principle of Home-rule for Ireland, he would make no terms with the Parnellite policy of the past, and must see that policy altogether reformed if his aid were to be actively lent to obtain the boon they de- manded. He should have declared that those portions of the Crimes Act for the renewal of which he had asked in 1885, would receive his cordial support, and that though he was not willing to go farther, he was also not willing to carry opposition to the views of the existing Government in these matters beyond the point of temperate and constitutional opposition. He should have told his Irish allies, with something cf that air of authority to which so great a convert was entitled, that, in his opinion, the one effective argument against Home- rule was the system of secret terrorism and hostility to the law which had prevailed in Ireland, and that while he could find something like an excuse for the guilt of such methods so long as the Irish Party was destitute of solid English support, he could not rightly or effectively press on the English people the duty of handing over Ireland to the National League. And he might even have insisted that his active support for Home-rule must depend on the frankness with which Irish Home-rulers might accept his counsels and adopt an attitude likely to allay the fears of the English people. Above all, he should have set his face resolutely against any resistance to the law, any threats of confiscation, any defiance to the Queen's proclamations and attacks on the police. While ready to criticise freely in Parliament any action of the Irish Executive that he thought wrong, any legislative or adminis- trative policy that he held to be unjust to the Irish people, he should have denounced illegality in Ireland, have given the whole weight of his authority to severe condemnation of Mr. Dillon's "Plan of Campaign" and denunciations of the police, and made it clear to foes and friends alike that if he advocated Home-rule, it was on condition that Irishmen should make a frank advance towards conciliation, and not as a step to be taken at all hazards without any evidence to the people of the more powerful island that Home-rule really might bring the people of Ireland into willing co-operation with their fellow-citizens here. Had this been Mr. Gladstone's attitude, we should not, indeed, have
been any more convinced than we are now, that any scheme of Home-rule could be worked which would satisfy in the least what the Parnellites mean by the national aspirations of Ireland ; but we should undoubtedly have said that Mr. Gladetone's attitude was in the highest degree dignified and commanding, and worthy of all deference even from those who hoped nothing from the new line of policy on which he had embarked.
As a matter of fact, Mr. Gladstone's attitude has been very different. He has not shown that detachment of mind of which an orator of such genius, and a statesman of such ex- perience as his, should have given us an example. His great earnestness and eagerness of purpose have in this case de- generated into violent invective. He has seemed utterly unable to account for the policy of his opponents,—closely resembling,. though it does, his own policy a very short time ago,—exe,ept- by attributing to them the most disgraceful indifference to both liberty and equity. He has seen every blunder and crime of the Parnellite Party through rose-coloured spectacles. He- has palliated their boycotting, and excused their "Plan of Cam- paign." He has accepted discrediting fables concerning the Irish loyalists without sifting the evidence for them. He has held up the Irish police to an odium which has doubled the personal danger in which they stand, and he has given the weight of his authority to the merest rumours unfavourable to them. More- over, he has denounced the Queen's present Government in Ireland in terms which the Irish people will regard as well-nigh justifying civil war. Yet he has done all this, we have not the least doubt, in the feverish ardour of a sympathy with the Irish people which is so engrossing, and, in our opinion, is becoming so extravagant, that it utterly blinds him to the English side of the question, and makes him act as if he were rather an O'Connor or an O'Grady than a Gladstone. Nay, he has gone further still in his speech at Nottingham, and his still more bitter speeches at Leeds and Ripon. He has accused this Government of outrage upon outrage, though it has acted with far greater lenity in the face of outrage than his own. And, stranger still, as Lord Hartington pointed out at Notting- ham, he has actually held out the prospect of getting the Scotch and Welsh Churches disestablished, and his own Reform Act of 1885 stripped of the conservative provisions which only two years ago he prided himself upon because they proved his dislike to excessive change, as a motive to those who would not otherwise be eager for Irish Home-rule, to carry Irish Home-rule in order that the way may be cleared for these further innovations. Now it is, we must say, a very new thing to find a statesman of Mr. Gladstone's rank so headlong in his desire to carry his new policy, that he holds out the Diseetablishment of a Church as a prize which may be earned at the irifting cost of turning Home-ruler. Surely a statesman of Mr. Gladstone's power, with any of that wholesome conservative instinct for which we once gave him credit, would have at least rejected with disdain the temptation to whip-in supporters for Irish Home-rule from amongst Disestablishers and Radicals who have no special conviction on Home-rule, though they wish to see their own pet reforms carried. He would have at least repudiated support on so great a question as Home-rule from any quarter in which the conviction was not deep and clear that Home-rule is right. But so impetuous is Mr. Gladstone in his desire to secure the triumph of his cause, that all is grist which comes to his mill ; and he does not scruple to say in effect,—If you want to disestablish a Church, or to abolish all proprietary votes, make up your minds to vote for Home-rule in Ireland ; in that way, and no other, you can open the floodgates of change. We ascribe this insensibility of Mr. Gladstone's to every considera- tion which would alienate allies, this openness of his to every consideration which would bring him fresh allies, to the eager- ness, and even dangerous impetuosity, of his nature, which has increased instead of diminishing with years. But we cannot deny that it furnishes statesmen like Lord Hartington with sufficient excuse for the growing alarm with which they watch his course, and the shock with which they see a statesman of the first rank fast becoming an apologist for the bitterest enemies of the Queen's Empire, one who throws over them his great tegis, however violent and threatening may be their designs.
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