MR. PARNELL.
MR. PARNELL is a very curious study. An Irishman with hardly a grain of the Irish temperament in him, a leader of a violent and loud-mouthed faction, who has hardly anything of the temperament of the agitator in him, a politician much more naturally inclined to be acrid and bilious than to be daring and dashing, and yet one from whom all his followers expect daring and dashing words, there would be something almost pathetic, if one could feel any genuine sympathy with him, in the way in which he occasionally doles out a carefully- prepared denunciation, and then subsides, with a sort of relief, into the frigid reserve with which willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike, he hints a fault, and hesitates dislike." Nothing can be more remarkable than the contrast between his speech of yesterday week, after he had been un- wisely baited by Mr. Forster into a great effort to revive the rancour of the feeling between England and Ireland, as his followers expected him to do, and his speech of last Monday, when he brought an indictment against the Crimes Pre- vention Act so feeble,—so carefully, elaborately, and in- tentionally feeble, as it appeared,—that it was difficult to believe he was not delivering the nearest thing to an apology for that Act which, in his position, he dared to deliver ; nothing more extraordinary than the contrast between the denunciation of England and the English Government with which the first speech concluded, and the appeal to the English Parliament to do its best to complete its most useful legislative achievement for Ireland which ended the second speech, and which constituted the chief part of the third, on Irish distress. On February 23rd this was his address to Mr. Trevelyan, on whose inability to follow in Mr. Forster's foot- steps he half complimented and half taunted him :—" We say he (Mr. Forster) was deposed from his position, and the right honourable gentleman apprenticed, though a very willing one, in his place. I feel that the Chief Secretary must say to him- self, in the words of Scripture, I am not worthy to unloose his shoe-latchets.' It would have been far better to have the Climes Act administered by the sound politician now in dis- grace. Call him back, send him to help Lord Spencer in the congenial work of the gallows in Ireland, send him to look into the secret inquiries of Dublin Castle, and to superintend the impost for blood-money. We invite you to man your racks. Send the best men forward in the task of misgovern- ing and oppressing Ireland. For my part, I am confident in the future. I believe that our people will survive the pre- sent oppression, as they have survived many and worse ones. I think our progress may be slow, but the time will come when this House and the people of this country will admit once more that they have been mistaken ; that they have been deceived by those who ought to have been ashamed of them- selves ; that they have been led astray from the right method of governing a noble, generous, brave, and impulsive people ; and that they will reject their present leaders with just as much determination and with just as much belief as they re- jected the services of the right honourable gentleman the Member for Bradford." Well, that passage had something of the verve of true hatred in it, though it cooled down, showing Mr. arnell's characteristic inability to keep up above the line of inveterate dislike, towards the close. But after such a denunciation of the regime of the gallows and the rack,—a curiously unfortunate touch of rhetoric, since no Irishman has even ventured to ask a question suggesting the use of the rack in Ireland, numberless as are the fabulous oppressions which Irish questions have suggested to the House of Commons,—one would naturally have expected from Mr. Parnell on Monday such a string of assertions at least as to the iniquities wrought by the Crimes Act, as would have turned the heads of credulous Irish readers with horror and wrath. What do we find ? A list of cases in which people had been apprehended on suspicion, under what is called the Curfew Clause of the Act, and dismissed by the Magistrates because there was no substantial evidence against them,— a declaration that one of the Jurors in the Dublin murder cases had entertained the impression that if he refused to convict he would be boycotted in his business, that ii', would lose the custom of the Castle officials,—a de- monstration that the great majority of the jurors were Protestant,—a statement that no Irishman could have trusted the impartiality of these juries,—and then a strong appeal to Parliament to amend the defects in the Land Act. There was not even so much as a confident statement of Mr. Parnell's own belief that any one of the persons executed for murder in Ireland
was innocent of that crime. There was no attempt to deny Mr. Trevelyan's statement that fifty notoriously and con- fessedly innocent people had been murdered in Ireland, for the five convicted criminals whom some Irish partisans pretend to think innocent, nor that the execution of these criminals has practically stopped the assassination of innocent persons. In a word, it is difficult to read Mr. Parnell's speech of Monday, which should have been delivered to make out the case for his peroration of Friday, without entertaining a certain doubt whether Mr. Parnell really wished to justify the insinua- tions of that peroration, and did not rather propose to go as near as he safely might to toning them down. And the speech of the day before yesterday, exeept for a.
few discreditable sneers at Lord Spencer and Mr. Trevelyan, was the most moderate and conciliatory of the three. It is impossible to forget, to use a metaphor applied, we think,.
to the Land League by some one during the debate, that Mr. Parnell stands in a most perilous position between the devil and the deep sea of Irish unpopularity. and that it is almost im- possible for him to avoid falling into the latter, if he wishes to escape in any degree from the clutches of the former.
Therefore, we incline to think that his language must be con- strued with a good deal of reference to his very painful posi- tion. He knows that it is very dangerous to denounce heartily the outrages of the outrage-mongers, since the Land League would never have attained to the power it did attain without these outrages ; and, therefore, while disclaiming all responsibility for them, he carefully avoids speaking of them with detestation, or even with the least shade of moral disapproval. But he does not really like the outrages ; he would, we believe, have been very thankful if the outrages could have been put down without the stern machinery of the Crimes Pre- vention Act, and yet, well knowing that that machinery has prac- tically put a stop to assassinations, he denounces it bitterly one day, only to draw the feeblest of indictments against it the next. The truth undoubtedly is that Mr. Parnell's heart is not in his position. He has raised a spirit in Ireland which makes him cower as Faust cowered before the vision elicited by his own spells. Mr. Parnell has neither the courage to risk everything by openly deploring any sort of encouragement which his agita- tion has given to crime, and trying to lead the Irish back into the path of strictly just and honest combination for reason- able political ends, nor the evil passion which would delight in taking the lead of the spirit which his methods have evoked, and in hounding it on to worse achievements. As it is, he hesitates between two totally different lines of action, repudiating the alliance with such a statesman as Mr. Trevelyan, when he sees how completely it would paralyse his influence to accept it, and again making dubious advances which seem to beckon on Mr. Trevelyan's reforms, so soon as he seems to himself to have broken too completely with the reformers.
We have never thought well of Mr. Parnell, but we do say this, that he is neither good enough to make a great effort for Ireland which might really be the beginning of peace, nor bad enough to make a great effort for a rupture which might be the outbreak of war. He vibrates between the two policies, and shrinks back from both. He is not strong enough to say that he has done wrong in the past and will devote his life to the attempt to undo that wrong in the future. Nor is he unscru- pulous enough to declare that he has done nothing but right in the past, and that the demon of malice which his policy has evoked ought to be fed daily with fresh acts of acrimony and hatred. On the whole, we not only blame but also. pity Mr. Parnell. And we cannot but think that Mr. Forster made a serious blunder, when he increased last week, by the inopportune revival of a discreditable history„ the difficulty which Mr. Parnell obviously finds in repressing his own more violent followers, even where his own obvious preference for milder methods would have induced him,—so far as, in his position, he dare advocate these milder methods, —to deprecate his adherents' violence, and to meet the British. Government half-way.
Previous page
