HOME-RULE ALL ROUND.
WE should be very sorry to assume that the choice of Mr. Asquith as the mover of the amendment on the Address expressing want of confidence in the Govern- ment, is an indication that Mr. Gladstone intends to commit himself to Mr. Asquith's suggestion in favour of Home-rule all round. Indeed, it might very possibly mean that Mr. Gladstone wishes to recognise frankly, though without compromising himself, the conspicuous ability of one of his supporters with whose conception of the solution of the Irish problem he would rather not be identified. But as Mr. Asquith has certainly committed himself to the scheme of formal federation as the best way of fulfilling the pledge to admit Irish representatives to the Supreme Parliament, since that would not involve giving them the unique privilege of meddling in what does not concern them as well as excluding Great Britain from meddling in what does, we may fairly regard his selection to move the amendment on the Address as at least a signal mark of respect for the earliest and boldest representative of the federal solution of the question. And we wish, therefore, to express beforehand, without in the least intending to depre- ciate Mr. Asquith's great abilities and the conspicuous lucidity of his intellect, our profound distrust of this dan- gerous principle of action, which makes the concession of Home-rule to Ireland the starting-point of a vast consti- tutional revolution for which the only excuse is the necessity of giving symmetry and some sort of theoretical complete- ness to the insulation of Ireland as a State within a Kingdom. Mr. Stead has proposed, what Mr. Asquith has not as yet proposed, that this artificial symmetry shall be carried farther, and that in order to keep Ireland, Scotland, and Wales in countenance, England also shall be broken up into something like a Heptarchy again, though, so far as we know, not a single Englishman has ever felt or expressed the wish for such a subdivision. If we are once to adopt the principle of finding pendants and appropriate develop- ments for every concession yielded to local pressure, we shall soon find ourselves an uncommonly feeble and faddist people, who work in politics on aesthetic lines, and carve out new provinces for the separate existence of which there is no excuse, since they are called into existence only to redress the balance when it is weighed down by the exigeance of Irish self-will. No conceivable policy can be worse than this creation of new political units, without any other excuse for them than that due to the supposed necessity of keeping one self- willed land in countenance, and of finding her sufficient partners in the political dance. Artificial politics cannot go farther. If statutory Legislatures and national institu- tions are to be forced into existence as artificially as mushrooms are reared in a hot-bed, just to reproduce ex- perimentally some imitation of the conditions which were brought about in the United States under the pressure of grievous wrong, we need not be surprised if the statutory Parliaments so conjured into being should find themselves under some necessity to invent the grievous wrongs of which they had never before heard, just by way of com- pleting the analogy.
In the case of Ireland, however unreasonable it is that the close of the half-century in which the effort to remedy her wrongs has been incessant and even exaggerated, should be chosen as the appropriate occasion for the outbreak of political hatreds of which there was never before anything like the same evidence, there is at least a sufficiently black history to account for the deep-rooted prejudices and suspicions which render her so wilful and intractable ; and therefore, though we believe that a little steadiness, tempered by hearty good-will, such as Mr. Balfour has shown us how to apply, is all that would be necessary to remove that prejudice, it is impossible to feel the indignation which the caprice and arbitrariness of this new political demand for Home-rule all round should excite in every reasonable politician. We can understand, though we resent, the attempt to claim for Ireland an external position towards England which will both endanger herself and bring weakness upon us. But we can feel nothing but impatient scorn for the pro- posal to foster artificially into life a host of local jealousies which have as yet no existence, and which are called into being at the very crisis when there is least possible excuse for their existence. We are really becoming, not simply just to the various local aspirations manufactured by political fancy, but hypersensitive to every trace of them. Our national pride is decaying, our local caprices are pushing up their heads like so many rank weeds which we have not the energy or the courage to destroy, and the thicker they grow, the more we find statesmen dis- posed to water and protect them. And yet at such a time as this, we are pressed to multiply artificially, and without the smallest show of popular emergency, the number of our divisions ; to reproach Scotland for not having insisted on that localism of feeling which she has voluntarily resigned; to encourage Wales to go back to the obsolete attitude of the reign of Edward I.; to persuade England that she ought to revive local prepossessions of her own which have long been extinct, and even, if Mr. Stead is to be listened to, to revive Mercian and East Anglian and Wessex, and God knows what traditions, which were buried long ago in a past as irrecoverable as that which contains the relics of the mammoth or the Stone Age. Such a superfluity of naughtiness as this new craze for the revival of antiqua- rian distinctions out of compliment to Ireland implies, we could hardly have credited, unless we had actually beheld the growth of the political logic which has forced it upon us. First came the morbid sympathy with Ireland ; then the obvious difficulty of gratifying that sympathy without the introduction of a symmetrical federal system such as the United States present to us ; then a growing fancy to dabble in federations, and to emulate, without excuse, our cousins in the States, and our children in Canada and Australia; and so at last we are face to face with a party who ask for Home-rule all round, and even more than all round, Home-rule where there is no political Home to furnish an excuse for it, Home-rule where there is not so much even as a Church quarrel on hand to prepossess the people in favour of its introduction.
In the face of such morbid taste as this, we do hope to see even many of the Gladstonians putting down the foot firmly and abjuring all this nonsense. As for its winning any favour from an intellect so keen and lucid as Mr. Asquith's, we cannot understand it for a moment. Surely abstract logic never gained such a triumph in this world as it must have gained in his case, if he seriously wishes to see Scotland and Wales and England once more culti- vating carefully their centrifugal tendencies, and trying to reanimate traditions which are utterly incompatible with the whole structure of our modern life. Irish Home-rule is plausible, almost even rational, compared With aspirations such as these, aspirations which are not in reality aspirations at all, but bizarre fancies, the product of analogical reasoning, or else inventions of an ex- travagant sympathy with that piecemeal structure of English-speaking communities across the Atlantic and at the Antipodes, which we have outgrown, and which they, too, will probably outgrow as they develop the kind of life which is proper to the United Kingdom. Never was there a more curious illustration of the tendency of extremes to meet, than this joining of hands between the brand-new Socialism of the nineteenth century and the political chaos of the Heptarchy,—and one, too, which has been brought about chiefly because Ireland, being discon- tented, something like the Heptarchy would reconcile her claims with ours, and also assimilate our polity to that which has grown up in America and Australasia under conditions which have no existence at all amongst ourselves. Well may the Irish Nationalists exult, if they can ever boast of having taken their revenge on Great Britain by overpersuading her sons to break up their fair realm into fragments much more arbitrary, and certainly not much less disunited and weak, than Ireland herself !
Previous page
