MR. GLADSTONE AND PROFESSOR TYNDALL.
IT seems something like cynicism to say,—what, human nature being what it is, is nevertheless, we believe, true,—that alike in Mr. Gladstone's speech on Tuesday in Hawarden Castle courtyard, and in Professor Tyndall's on. Wednesday at Guildford, there is discernible a genuine !effort to •be moderate and fair to the other side, which the othet side will almost certainly fail, and completely fail, 'to see. Mr. Gladstone's speech was not, we need hardly say, what we think the great leader's of the Home-rule Party might have been and should have been, if he were but able to remember, what it is obviously the most difficult or impossible thing in the world for him to remember, that a few years ago he was assailing his own present political position with all the vigour, all the whole- ness of heart, and more than all the oratorical power which he is now devoting to the defence of that position. Mr. Gladstone is one of those great orators whose chief force, as well as chief weakness, consists in the fact that they live in their own present, and cannot by any effort of imagination live even in their own past. He is one of those who move " altogether if they move at all," and who turn their backs upon themselves with even more completeness, even more inability to return to the former .but now abandoned attitude of mind and character, than • they exhibit in entering into the attitude of mind and ..character of opponents with whom they have never agreed -%at all. Mr. Gladstone is now so genuinely possessed . by his present view of the Irish Question, that it never even seems to occur to him that his own Government was .at one time, and that not a very distant time, obliged to 'apologise for affrays precisely like the Mitchelstown affray, in which innocent lives were sacrificed, in one of which, indeed, the lives of women were sacrificed, and that his • Government felt no more shame in defending itself then, than the present Government, on which he heaps 'Mich' earnest and bitter reproaches, feels in defending itself now ; and yet, so completely has he become %possessed with his latest view of the political situation, that, this, consideration never occurs to him to tame his party pride and to moderate his self-confidence. If he tries to be moderate, as he evidently does, it is not in the least because he is recalling to himself how much astray, according to his own present reckoning, he must have been Iieven or eight years ago in acting far more stringently than the present Government is acting now,—of that con- sideration he never seems to exhibit the slightest conscious- Ineas,—but because he remembers that it is his duty to be 'oharitable in judging very grave offences. For example, 'he evidently made a great effort to say in his speech on Tuesday; of the lives lost through the fire of the police at -.Mitchelstown :—" It was a shameful matter, and for this • I have not called it murder, but I have called it ruthless slaughter, and so I believe it was. For this, as I have said, the Government of the country made themselves respon- sible. and declared that the police fired in self-defence. Novv I believe, gentlemen, that these statements are statements no one of which can be corrected, can be ..sotif Cited. I have endeavoured to avoid everything like `exaggeration in making them,"—and we are disposed to think that Mr. Gladstone's endeavour was genuine, -.and- the only point on which it failed was that he never for a moment asked himself how it happened that 'lie ',himself had once been responsible for collisions 'between the Irish police and Irish crowds of precisely -the same nature and having precisely similar conse- quences as that at Mitchelstown, and that when he was thns.responsible, much as he regretted them, he no mere saw how they could have been avoided, if the law were to be enforced in Ireland, than his opponents see sew..' These collisions are the natural and inevitable con- sequences of a deep and wide conflict of policy between the Irish revolutionists and the conservative statesmen of the United Kingdom, of whom he was formerly one ; and so long as you can neither bring over the Irish revolu- tionists to the side of the British statesmen, nor bring over the British statesmen to the side of the Irish revolu- tionists, these collisions will happen again and again. A few years ago Mr. Gladstone thought, as his opponents now think, that by a wise and conciliatory policy he might in time bring over the Irish people to the view of the conservative British statesmen. Now he thinks that he may bring over the majority of British statesmen to the view of the Irish revolutionists ; and of course the two views are perfectly incompatible in relation to the Irish policy which they engender. We do not in the least complain, as Professor Tyndall complains, of the vast change in Mr. Gladstone's views. He has convinced himself,—quite wrongly, we think, but still he has con- vinced himself, —that the problem of bringing about a true union of the two peoples should be attacked from the opposite side from which he formerly attacked it, and from which his opponents attack it now. But we do regret, deeply regret, that he should be quite unable,— and we heartily believe that he is really quite unable,— to give his opponents credit for standing firmly on the same ground now on which he himself stood firmly enough eight years ago. Instead of that, he can only make ineffective efforts to apply to their case the sort of Christian charity with which a chaplain views the heart of a criminal that he is endeavouring to touch. I will not call your offence complicity in " murder," he says in effect, blandly ; I know the various self- deceptions of the human heart, and I do not suppose you really did think or do think it murder ; I will only call it complicity in " ruthless slaughter," for I endeavour to avoid anything like exaggeration in speaking of your political sins.' Well, that is a very unfortunate line to take where the statesman who takes it has himself been respon- sible for precisely similar conduct, though at that time it never even occurred to him that he was responsible for " ruthless slaughter," and ought to have pleaded guilty to the sort of indictment which he now brings. We deeply regret that Mr. Gladstone cannot see how much stronger a position he would occupy, as leader of the Home-rule Party, if he said frankly that the Government are following in his own footsteps ; that his grave mistakes of former times ought to have been warnings to them ; and that he wishes he could help to make them so, but that he admits at once that, till he can convince them that the Union never can be saved by insisting on the submission of Irish to British views, and can only be saved by insisting on the submission of British to Irish views, he-has no chance of converting his antagonists to a better state of mind and heart.
Professor Tyndall also made a serious effort to be moderate in his very eloquent invective against Mr. Glad- stone. He spoke of the music of Mr. Gladstone's voice, of the fascination of his presence, of the impression he once gave him of " strength, courage, capacity, and truth." And then he went on to charge him with handing him- self "over to the pushes and pulls of mobs and masses." We believe Professor Tyndall to be as mistaken in this matter as Mr. Gladstone is in his judgment on his own antagonists. We believe that Mr. Gladstone never showed more courage, if he ever showed so much, than when he veered round from the British statesman to the patron of Parnellism. It is perfectly true, in our belief, that he never made so profound an error, never anything like so profound a moral error as his spurious constitu- tionalism brought upon him when he surrendered to the Irish majority, in spite of the deep moral stain on the policy which its leaders had adopted, and had " ruth- lessly " pursued. But it was very far indeed from a change that showed want of courage. Mr. Gladstone's fault has been that he has always had too much courage, if we may so speak, in abandoning old convictions ; that he has never shown the tenacity which other and deeper minds have shown in clinging fast to the moral fibres of their conviction even when, for the moment, the intellectual auxiliaries of those moral fibres seemed to be disappearing. He changes his convictions too fast and too completely. His preposses- sions vanish in a night, and seem to him all prejudices. There is no warning instinct in him that it is not good to go into captivity to comparatively shallow constitutional maxims, where there are the deepest possible moral con- siderations on the other side. He finds it as much too easy to change his whole attitude of mind, as Professor Tyndall finds it too hard. The Professor himself might have been warned by his former feeling for Mr. Gladstone that there is something great and courageous and chivalric in Mr. Gladstone, in spite of his lamentable instability of judgment. And it was clearly unreasonable in an orator who was reproaching Mr. Gladstone's followers with obey- ing the word of command so implicitly and almost slavishly when Mr. Gladstone gave it, also to reproach him for giving it in obedience to the "pulls and pushes of mobs and masses." Yet it is a singular illustration of the limitations of our nature, that both these able and eloquent men can make a real endeavour to be moderate in speeches which nevertheless exhibit as their most distinctive charac- teristic, a strange incapacity for anything like the successful achievement of that praiseworthy endeavour.
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