GLADSTONE AND IRELAND

BOOKS OF THE DAY

By H. A. L. FISHER

IN the disastrous eclipse of liberty now darkening the continent of Europe the name of Gladstone recovers some- thing of its original lustre. Scholars and publicists, not in Britain only, are drawn to the great Liberal and Christian humanist, whose faith in moral forces and in the healing virtues of freedom marks him out so distinctly from the sinister figures who dominate the European scene. Morley's three- volume biography, full and substantial as it is, no longer suffices. New monographs proceed in showers from the Press: New biographies, notably those of Chamberlain and Carnarvon, shed fresh light on passages where uncertainty previously prevailed, and now comes that distinguished historian and publicist, Dr. Hammond, in whom the liberal faith is as ardent as ever, with a full, satisfying and eloquent treatise on the most important of all Gladstone's political dealings, his relations with Ireland.

As was only to be expected, Dr. Hammond has a deep veneration for Gladstone's great qualities, for his European sense, his steady moral and religious fervour, his prodigious capacity for work, his high standard of public duty, and noble gift of speech. He has no difficulty, from the ample stores of knowledge which now lie to his hand, in demonstrating the fallacy of the most grievous charges to which in the heft of a bitter party conflict Gladstone was exposed ; such as that he had adopted a policy of Home Rule for Ireland in the autumn and winter of 1885 from a desire for office, or that a taint of dishonour and hypocrisy rests on his dealings with Parnell. Gladstone is for him " the loyal Minister of the Queen, the faithful servant of the nation, the glory of the Parliament."

But, at the same time, he notes certain blemishes which, though not detracting from Gladstone's stature as a man, make him less effective as a Prime Minister than he might have been. His tact in dealing with individuals was by no means equal to his skill in the managing of assemblies. He was singularly unfortunate, for instance, in his handling of Chamberlain and Harlington. His power of intense con- centration on the subject in hand prevented him from using a balanced judgement over a wide field of politics. Thus, while justice to Ireland had been present to his mind as an urgent problem as far back as 1845, it was long displaced by a succession of other interests further removed from the centre of British politics ; by Italy and Bulgaria, by Afghanistan and Egypt, by the Zulus and the Boers. Indeed it was not till the latest stage of his long career that Gladstone regarded himself as having a mission to bring justice to.Ireland. In his Second Administration, when he felt himself compelled by force of circumstances to pass the Land Act of 1881, " the most revolutionary measure that passed through Parliament in the nineteenth century," he was so far from regarding himself as harnessed to the Irish question that he contemplated an ex- change of the active for the contemplative life. Homer and Dante, Augustine and Butler, and all the splendid resources of the Hawarden library were tugging at his heart. His view was that he had retired from active politics in 1874, and that he was only brought back by the Bulgarian atrocities.

Thus there was a curious spirit of improvisation and attend- ance on events in his treatment of the Irish question. The Land Act of 1881 was launched upon the world without any previous

Gladstone and the Irish Nation. By J. L. Hammond. (Long- mans, Green. 36s.)

inquiry by a Royal Commission into the Irish land question. No Irish leaders were taken into consultation. The main part of the Bill was drafted single-handed by the Prime Minister himself. Finally, while the Prime Minister at the age of thirty-six had been impressed by Guizot with the importance of bringing justice to Ireland, he only once visited the island (1877) and then without seeing any of the things which a statesman having Irish interests at heart should have been at pains to notice. In view of the importance of keeping touch with the leaders of Irish opinion, it was a major tragedy that Gladstone established so little direct contact with Parnell. • But Parnell was guilty of an offence which in the eyes of a great English Parliamentarian was unforgiveable. He defied the British Parliament and deliberately tried to make it ridiculous and unworkable. Any other sin would have been by comparison venial. For Gladstone, steeped in reverence for Parliament, for its tradition, its dignity, its forms, its great services to the cause of human freedom, this sin was mortal and a fatal blow to friendly intercourse.

The intellectual influences which moulded Gladstone's mind were other than those which might have been expected to fashion the thoughts of a great English Liberal parlia- mentarian. Unlike Salisbury, he was foreign to the new scientific knowledge of his age. The seminal minds in the English Liberal movement, Locke, Bentham, Adam Smith, meant little to him. As Dr. Hammond points out, his spiritual roots were in religion and poetry, in the Bible and Homer, in Dante and Butler, and so from men like Chamberlain, who were little versed in the great tradition of European humanism, he felt a sense of estrangement. It is curious to note, too, how faintly his mind was touched with the need for developing the social services. When Chamberlain, with his splendid record of municipal improvements in Birmingham, was first invited into the Cabinet, he was offered, with a curious lack of discernment, the Admiralty, and when this had been declined, and the Irish or Colonial Offices, fields in which his great administrative talents might have been bril- liantly deployed, had also been denied to him, was finally fobbed off with the Local Government Board and there starved of effective legislative opportunity.

Dr. Hammond makes a good point when he observes that it was a misfortune that Gladstone spent so much time at the Treasury, for though his strict sense of financial responsibility was most valuable to the country, spreading its influence through local administration, it had also its unfortunate side. England and Ireland both wanted a great deal more public money spent upon them. Gladstone grudged every penny :

" He was really a man in whom a luminous European sense struggled with the spirit of a high-principled miser, a great catholic genius with a pedantic reverence for the precedents and traditions of Whitehall. He was a high-principled miser because he firmly believed, as the best men among whom he had spent his youth believed, that the misery of the poor was due chiefly to the public extravagance, and the waste and misuse of the nation's finances. Send his imagination over the mountains of Europe and he had the eye of an eagle. Shut him up in the Treasury cupboards and he was like a captured hawk whose eyes have been sealed."

And yet what extraordinary qualities were shown in Gladstone's long campaign for the redress of Irish grievances I What persistence under disappointments and misfortunes ! What inexhaustible courage and resource ! What faith, magnanimity and insight in refusing to be deterred by Irish crime and Irish calumny from pressing forward with his plans for the righting of Irish wrongs ! The Queen wrecked his plan for the estab- lishment of a Court in Ireland. The Bishops foiled his design for an Irish University. The Parliaments, which were called upon to consider his remedial proposals, debated in an atmosphere of agrarian crime and Irish hostility. At one relatively hopeful moment came the Phoenix Park murders, at another just when Parnell had been cleared of the charges brought against him by The Times newspaper, and it seemed at last as if the Home Rule ship were coming into harbour, came the shattering news of the Irish leader's undefended divorce suit, and the ruinous split in the Irish Party. Yet despite this malignant turn of events, with almost all the British intellectuals arrayed against him, with a most slender supporting majority and a formidable front Opposition bench waiting to trip him up in the House of Commons and certain defeat impending in the Lords, Gladstone at the age of eighty-four passed his final long and intricate Home Rule Bill through the House. Never has there been so great, so astonishing a parliamentary performance.

Dr. Hammond will have the assent of many good judges in regarding the defeat of this measure as a signal misfortune. Had it been passed the Renaissance of Irish culture might, as he suggests, have been associated with a friendly spirit towards England, and have been as cordial as it is now suspicious and remote. We might have been spared the miserable episode of the gunmen. Our public men might have known more of one another, for the Ireland of today, save for the six Northern counties, is in the hands of men who have less knowledge of Englishmen than the leaders of the old Irish Parliamentary Party. Yet would Ulster, even in those days, have loyally accepted a Dublin Parliament ? Bryce, an Ulster man, with some rebel blood in his veins, had doubts. Yet if Gladstone may be criticised, as Bryce criticised him, for having insufficiently weighed the claims of Ulster, it was because he believed that only a single Parliament for all Ireland could satisfy the imagination of the Irish nation.

The hatred against Gladstone in his own lifetime was terrific, the detraction unceasing. His deep religious con- victions and his essential conservatism did not save him from the scorn and animosity of the well-born and the wealthy. Yet he was the greatest popular leader of his age, and this because he offered to the working classes, " not material bribes" but as Dr. Hammond rightly observes, " something to satisfy their self-respect." It is altogether to the credit of British democracy that so many of the poor and disinherited responded to that appeal.

Among the Irish characters depicted by Dr. Hammond in this long and brilliant volume one only is wholly attractive. Michael Davitt, the Fenian and ex-convict who founded the Land League, is one of the saints of Irish nationalism. This poor peasant lad from Mayo who at the age of eleven had lost an arm as a cotton operative in a Lancashire factory was later sentenced to a term of fifteen years' imprisonment for collecting arms and released on ticket of leave in 1877 when he had nearly served half his term. What he suffered in his successive prisons is a grim commentary on the penal methods which then prevailed : " During the ten months he spent at Milbank he was allowed in all twenty minutes' conversation. During the whole time he was at Dartmoor he was never allowed to receive a visitor.. . . On one occasion he was handcuffed to a man out of his mind when travelling by train."

Yet these severities, terrible as they were, did not alter the large scope and generosity of Davitt's nature. Parnell, the Protestant landowner of Anglo-American origin, was a proud, bitter, resentful man. Davitt, though a member of the party of violence, was not resentful, but inspired by a passionate love of Ireland and a desire to bring more happiness into the lives of the poor throughout the world. Dr. Hammond proceeds to note that in him Arnold Toynbee found a con- genial spirit, and from this speculates upon the loss which Ireland suffered through the death of Arnold Toynbee in 1883, following that of T. H. Green in November, x882. The teaching of these two great Oxford men was an important humanising influence in political thought. Yet their message had surely been delivered, and through the lips of their zealous disciples was fast permeating an ever-widening circle, before Gladstone had assailed the sanctity of contract in his Land Act or was fully embarked on the later stages of his Irish campaign.