TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE GREATER CONSEQUENCES OF THE CRISIS.
WE are far from affirming that Irish Home-rule has suffered a mortal blow from the events of the last fortnight ; but it has suffered a serious disaster which may prove mortal if the Unionists are wise and steadfast. One result is conspicuous. Even the divided Irish Party are now unanimous in demanding higher terms than Mr. Gladstone had intended to offer, and Mr. Parnell, we may be sure, to accept ; while the English Gladstonians are far more indisposed than ever they were to grant even the lower terms. Now, this is in itself a great result. There can be no doubt that, whether or not Mr. Parnell is right in speaking of thirty-two as the number of Irish Members whom the Gladstonians proposed to seat per- manently in the supreme Parliament at Westminster, the intention was to reduce the number of a hundred and three to a point at which it would be almost insignificant in debate. Again, whether ten or twelve years were contemplated as the time during which the central authority would retain the command of the Irish Constabulary and the appoint- ment of the Irish Judiciary, it was certainly intended to soothe English fears by declining to hand over either the Constabulary or the Judiciary to local control for a term of years long enough to give a fair sample of the working of the new institutions. And no doubt, whether Mr. Parnell made the objection to Mr. Gladstone or not,—and of the truth of his own assertion that he did, there may be reasonable doubts,—it would be a very great humiliation to the Home-rule Party in Ireland to be deprived of the most important of all the administra- tive privileges of a Government during a considerable term of years, for the whole period of which they were to have no adequate representation for Ireland in the supreme Legislature where all the ad interim battles would have to be fought out. Once more Mr. Gladstone's indisposition, either to insist on settling the Land Question in a fashion satisfactory to Ireland before granting Home-rule, or to remit the question frankly to the Irish Legislature, is perhaps the most formidable of all the doubts thrown upon the genuineness of his Irish concessions. Now that Mr. Parnell has been driven to bay, and proposes to render any such limitations as these on Irish Home-rule impos- sible,—though we feel no doubt that, if he had retained unchallenged the leadership of the Irish Party, he would have conceded them readily enough,—indeed he did concede something of the same kind readily enough, at a time when it was not proposed to leave any Irish representatives in the supreme Legislature,—it has become impossible for any of his rivals to yield what he refuses ; and the consequence is, that at the very • moment when the. English and Scotch constituencies are most averse to conceding the Irish demands, the Irish are obliged to raise their demands, and to press them with a new obstinacy. All this tells heavily for the present against the Gladstonian cause. Indeed, the only set-off is the new enthusiasm for Mr. Gladstone amongst those who were almost as enthusiastic as they could be before, due to the stand taken by Mr. Gladstone against Mr. Parnell, in defiance of all the moral logic of Home-rule, so soon as Mr. Parnell's claim to be supra mores was so unflinchingly endorsed by his fellow-countrymen both in Parliament and out of it. That is a very slight set-off indeed, and counts for nothing against the universal distaste with which British constituencies regard the utter moral indifference of 'Irish constituencies in the matter, and the anxiety with which they see so unscrupulous a statesman wielding in Ireland a power so vast. We cannot doubt for a moment, if the General Election should occur before anything has happened to subdue the existing uneasi- ness, and to re-excite the amazing superstition which the genuine Home-rulers entertain, that nothing but Home-rule can ever reduce Ireland to tranquillity, we cannot for a moment doubt, we say, that the Gladstonians would find their forces so dwindled at the polls as to leave them hardly any hope of a return to power. The plain truth is, that it is Mr. Gladstone's influence, and Mr. Gladstone's influence almost alone, which has brought the Liberal electorate of Great Britain to believe that Home- rule is identified with the policy of justice to Ireland. But Mr. Gladstone's influence has always been more or less counterbalanced by the general distrust of Irish politicians,. which it was never easy for British Liberals to surmount.. And while Mr. Gladstone has perhaps even gained per.. sonally with the Liberal electors as a consequence of his demand that Mr. Parnell should retire, that gain has been accompanied by so sharp a stimulus to the distrust towards Irish politicians that the total result has been extremely un- favourable to the Irish cause. What was wanted was something to soothe the fears entertained by Englishmen of Irish politicians. What has happened has been an immense stimulus to those fears. Mr. Gladstone will be credited by numbers of Liberals with the noblest of motives ; but none the less his Irish policy is now regarded with more and more misgiving. Has not Mr. Gladstone himself, it will be asked, been compelled to interfere with the natural operation of Irish Home-rule, just to prevent what would otherwise have been a most mischievous effect of Irish self-government ? And if Mr. Gladstone has been compelled so to counteract one of the most obvious applications of his own principle, can any elector be blamed if he hesitates to vote for a principle to which even his great leader has not been faithful ?
Then, again, those Liberal electors who are so deeply grateful to Mr. Gladstone for repudiating co-operation with Mr. Parnell, will ask themselves how far they can trust the Irish democracy to co-operate with the English democracy in future, since the effect of the divorce suit was not to disenchant the Irish people in any degree with a leader whom it taught the English democracy to abhor. Even the Irish Episcopate did not act till Mr. Gladstone had shamed them into acting by taking the lead in demanding that Mr.. Parnell should retire. And in all probability it will be found that the Irish people, far from accepting the decision of the Irish Episcopate in this matter, will only be- spurred by it into more thoroughgoing support of Mr. Parnell. If that should be the result, will not the English electors bethink themselves of the difficulties which may arise if two democracies so divergent in their moral attitude, should be allowed to pull different ways instead of being, politically fused into a single people ? How will the Glad- stonian electors relish the prospect of giving the Irish democracy a separate organisation with one hand, while holding with the other the check-strings of the Constabulary and the Judiciary by which they had hoped, for a few years at least, to manoeuvre them into the right path ? Or how will they like having their great leader's hands forced by Mr. Parnell, and being compelled to give up guarantees which he and his colleagues had thought wise ? We believe that a good many of them, after contemplating the edifying spectacle of the fierce debates in the Irish Party, will silently make up their minds that it is better not to invite the Irish Party to assume a power which they cannot trust them for years to come to use ; and still less to invite them to assume less limited powers at the very moment when they are exciting the most lively distrust. The electors will argue that, whatever may be Mr. Parnell's inaccuracies, even Mr. Gladstone and his colleagues have certainly had great searchings of heart as to the efficacy of the guarantees which they are bent upon providing, and that they are not disposed to recommend. to the British people anything like a frank concession of self-government. Even Mr. Gladstone's and Mr. Morley's very guarded denials of Mr. Parnell's charges sufficiently prove that, in outline and general drift, these charges re- present the character of their proposals. The Judges, the Constabulary, and the soldiers are to take all possible care that the proposed Irish Legislature and Administra- tion shall not follow their own impulses till after they have served a pretty long apprenticeship to the new system. Will not a great number of the electors take that as a very broad hint that Mr. Gladstone is at heart exceedingly nervous as to the orderly and effective working of his own scheme ?
But besides the British elector's recoil from the character of Mr. Parnell and from the people who show no sort of recoil from the character of Mr. Parnell, besides the in- ferences he will draw from his own leader's confessed anxiety to keep a strong curb on the action of the Irish democracy, we believe that he will be profoundly affected by Mr. Morley's plain admission that some provision must be made to save the tenants evicted for combining to enforce the " Plan of Campaign " against the results of their own illegal and immoral proceedings. Mr. Parnell's graphic description of Mr. John Morley throwing up his hands in despair when he spoke of the evicted Tipperary tenants, and Mr. Morley's correction of Mr. Parnell, which in fact goes beyond the original statement, in affirming the necessity of securing the unfortunate victims of the National League against the legal consequences of their own cowardice and pliancy in the agitators' hands, will scare a good many Gladstonian electors who had always supposed that, though their chiefs found excuses for the " Plan of Campaign," and had treated the breach of the law as one qualified by "extenuating circumstances," they had never gone so far as to accept a policy assuming any sort of responsibility for the misguided. participators in that cynical plot for plundering their creditors. Mr. Morley's words will send. a cold shiver through ordinary Liberals who, though committed to Home-rule, never ex- pected to find themselves committed to guarding even Irish peasants from the disagreeable consequences of deliberately breaking their own contracts, and of forcing a similar breach of contract upon their neighbours. " Mr. Parnell's account of what passed on the same occasion on the subject of the evicted tenants on Campaign estates," writes Mr. Morley, " is wholly incorrect. I observed that some direct action might become necessary, though, of course, I foresaw that there were difficulties in the way of legislation. I never said that either I or any of my col- leagues had formed. any conclusion against legislation. I never said or hinted that it would be impossible for an Irish Parliament to do anything in the matter. I did. say that, whether by direct or indirect action, the evicted tenants ought not to be allowed to suffer. As to Tipperary, there is all the difference between sensible perception of difficulties and the despair which Mr. Parnell ascribes _to me." That repudiates Mr. Parnell's statement so far as it would be likely to repel Irish electors, but goes considerably beyond it so far as it would be likely to repel English electors. It exhibits Mr. Morley as explicitly contemplating some step by which the evicted tenants on the " Campaign " estates should be secured by a Gladstonian Government against the results of their own faithlessness and weakness. Doubtless there are plenty of British electors who will enthusiastically praise Mr. Morley for his courage in thus plainly endorsing the policy of Mr. Dillon and Mr. O'Brien. But there are also, we hope, plenty who will be bewildered. and dismayed at the extent to which Mr. Morley accepts that revolu- tionary policy as his own. It is the first time, we believe, that English statesmen have ever admitted that they go so far with Mr. Dillon and Mr. O'Brien as to contemplate the indemnification, or partial indemnification, of distinctly illegal and dishonest acts. The " balancing electors," as Mr. Goschen calls them, are not likely to be attracted to Mr. Gladstone's policy by so distinct an admission of its sympathy with a plundering conspiracy.
On the whole, we cannot doubt for a moment that all the disclosures of the last fortnight will have a highly disillusionising effect on the Home-rule party in Great Britain. If the new Irish demands are conceded, hundreds of English Liberals will revolt ; if they are rejected, Ireland will revolt. Englishmen now know what the hero of the Irish people is like ; they know that his colleagues do not repudiate him, and would. never even have allowed his immorality to influence their conduct, had it not first influenced Mr. Gladstone's ; they know that even the Glad- stonian Cabinet would not trust Ireland with real self- government for a considerable term of years ; they know that the Irish Party unanimously resents this distrust, and is pledged to show that it resents it ; and they know that, by way of removing this distrust, Mr. Morley feels himself compelled to concede a great deal to the lawless strategy which he hopes to terminate for the future. The British elector who realises all this, and who has been so much shocked. at the apparent indifference of the Irish multitude to the breach of the Seventh Commandment, will hardly be disposed to throw in his lot with a party which advocates a relaxation of the law towards those Irishmen who have made light of the Eighth Com- mandment. A flood of light has been shed on the interior of the Irish Party, and on the urgent neces- sities pressing on their English allies ; and the spectacle so revealed will not reconcile English electors to the pro- spect of that distasteful alliance.
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