THE POLITICAL MELODRAMA OF TUESDAY.
THERE was a little overacting on both sides of the House in the scene of Tuesday night. Sir William Harcourt overdid his reluctance to apply the closure, and Mr. Balfour even overdid his indignation at finding him- self closured. Then Mr. Morley overdid his wrath with Mr. Balfour. Mr. Chamberlain, indeed, was an exception to the universality of the overacting. He had really wished to arrive at some understanding with the Govern- ment, and lie expressed with great force and simplicity his disappointment that no such understanding was possible. Mr. Courtney, however, overdid the grief of the heavy father who lectures both the antagonists on their irascibility and irreconcilability, for he surely must have understood better than he appeared to understand the key to the situation, and overacted his own dis- may at the result. He reminded us somewhat of Mr. Pecksniff when he says of Mr. Chuzzlewit,—" He beat me with a stick which I have every reason to believe has knobs on it, but I am not angry." Mr. Courtney's impartiality of mind is certainly a little ostentatious. He errs, no doubt, on the side of charity, but he overdoes the unction and the pathos of his desire to forgive and forget. As we understand the situation, Mr. Morley and Mr. Chamberlain were both sincerely desirous, on Friday week, to come to some arrangement which it would have been possible for both parties to agree upon, and ultimately for the House of Lords to pass ; but that arrangement could only have found a solution for the case of those of the evicted tenants who had been either misled by agitators, or who had in other ways been hardly dealt with by the law, and it would have left the Anti-Parnellites with the very tenants still on their hands for whom they were most deeply pledged to find some way out of their difficulties. Mr. Morley, on Friday week, was evidently dis- posed to leave those tenants who had gone to the United States to the destiny they had chosen for themselves, as he had first intended to do when he wrote the letter quoted in the House excluding them from the scope of the Bill, and he also seemed disposed to drop the compul- sory element of the arrangement which, as he well knew, the Unionists could not possibly accept. But in this reasonable and statesmanlike attitude of mind he found himself powerless to persevere. His masters, the Anti- Parnellites, were too many for him. They could not afford to give up compulsion to which they were deeply pledged, and they were not sorry to pose as determined that non-resident landlords should be debarred from resisting the reinstatement of evicted tenants, so long as non-resident or non-domiciled tenants were not to be secured against the displeasure of their landlords. After the debate of Friday week, therefore, Mr. Morley found that his Irish masters would not allow him to make the concessions he had contemplated to the Opposition, and after that discovery the best course seemed to be to render all compromise hopeless by applying the closure in its extreme form to the Committee on the Bill, and bringing matters to an open rupture. That course had at least the advantage of gratifying the resentment of the Irish party, humiliating the Unionists, identifying the House of Commons with the Irish irreconcilables, and more- over, of also furnishing the Government with a new excuse for pushing the crusade against the Lords. Accordingly, Sir William Harcourt curtly presented the pistol at the head of the Opposition, made no attempt to justify the act of violence, and left them either to waste time by going through a week of fragmen- tary speeches and useless divisions, or to take the course they did take of seceding, and so shortening this weary and dismal Session. Probably it would have been decidedly wiser to use the curtailed power of resistance still allowed them, to protest with all their force against the principle of the Bill, and to move three or four important amendments on that principle, than to retire in dudgeon as Mr. Balfour did retire. He had the excuse of knowing that his resistance would be all in vain, and that he would have to leave to the House of Lords, after all, the duty of avenging his party's humilia- tion; but we doubt much whether he acted for the best. Englishmen justly appreciate any evidence of tenacity in a party which thinks itself in the right. And to retire from the contest does not give evidence of the tenacity which the English people love. Mr. Balfour was no doubt really indignant, but he overdid his indignation. He was not so angry as he seemed. He was relieved at the prospect of an early adjournment. And he was not sorry to give the Lords the sole credit of saving the nation once more from the dictatorial arrogance of the Irish party. His speech on Tuesday certainly expressed more displeasure than he really felt at the turn things were taking. On the other hand, Mr. Morley's wrath was altogether overdone. He was quite conscious that but for the Irish Members he would have gladly accepted a compromise minimising the measure, and yet relieving those evicted tenants who most deserved it. But as his masters would not permit this, the only way out of the difficulty appeared to be to exag- gerate all the righteous indignation he could manage to summon up, and to take credit for inexorability, though it was only his Irish allies who made him inexorable.
But, after all, Mr. Courtney's part was the most osten- tatious in the closing scene d the melodrama. He could hardly have been quite unaware that the symptoms of coming to terms which had marked the debate of Friday week had been noted and resented by the Irish party, and that it was they who had rendered a compromise and a minimising of the measure impossible. Yet he indulged himself in all the airs of a rather ostentatious grief at the self-will of both Government and Opposition, and. might have been thought by an observer unacquainted with his rough and even austere truthfulness, to be out-Tartuffing Tartuffe in his assumption of superiority to the party- spirit of the contending hosts. We have a great respect for Mr. Courtney, and earnestly hope that his constituents will continue ti return him to the House of Commons. He often does much good by his somewhat too osten- tatious independence. Ho is really more capable than most men of seeing what his antagonists have to say for themselves, and appreciating all that is sound in it. But he is a little too proud of that unique distinction, and calls attention to it with a superfluity of emphasis and self-satisfaction. He was greatly admired and praised on Tuesday night, but, to our minds, he deserved the praise and admiration much leas than on many former occasions. He must have known perfectly well that the evil result of compelling landlords to restore tenants evicted for deliberately breaking their contracts would do far more mischief in the Ireland of to-morrow than any temporary tranquillity gained in the Ireland of to-day would com- pensate. If at a time when the British Parliament is multiplying every day its own functions as a landlord, it also fosters the impression that the payment of rent, as Mr. Chamberlain says, is rather a praiseworthy volun- tary action than a positive duty, what will happen when the State finds rent withheld by its own tenants ? A compulsory reinstatement of tenants who have voluntarily broken their contract is one of the most dangerous pre- cedents that can possibly be set for the future prosperity and civilisation of the country. Yet Mr. Courtney threw in his influence with those who wish to compel the reinstate- ment of tenants evicted for breaking their own voluntary engagements whenever an Arbitration Court, created for this express purpose, thinks the landlord wrong in objecting to their reinstatement. Mr. Courtney got all the credit for his impartiality which a man who lectures his own side more than he lectures his opponents can always secure ; but he seems to us to have overdone his part, and for once to have been so anxious to show himself superior to his friends, that he abdicated his proper function as a moderate and judicial opponent. Mr. Courtney often plays the part of a Rhadamanthus to his friends as well as to his foes. But on Tuesday he was a Rhadamanthus who positively strengthened the hands of his foes, while he weakened the hands of his old allies.
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