ENGLAND'S MESSAGE TO IRELAND.
WE trust the country will not allow itself, in its admiration of Mr. Gladstone's speech on the Irish Church, to forget the moral grandeur of the occasion on which it was delivered. The night of the 1st March, 1869, ought to mark, we believe, will mark, an epoch in the relation between England and Ireland. For the first time in the history of that long connection, now six hundred years old,—twice as old as the connection between England and Scotland, three centuries older than the unity of the Spains,"—the elder and stronger partner has frankly recognized the moral equality of the younger and feebler, has acknowledged that his sympathies and instincts, as well as his legal rights, should be reckoned among the bases for the action of the firm. Once, and once only in those six centuries, in the vote for the relief of the Famine, has England in her treatment of Ireland risen above justice ; and of all forms of human sympathy, almsgiving is the one which retains least of its grace, and which, therefore, excites least sympathy in return. We gave our millions ungrudgingly, but it was as the rich give to the poor, with no sigh of regret, but yet with a half-suppressed contempt that the gift should be required. Catholic Emancipation was avowedly conceded only because the alternative was civil war, and the nation and their king to the last admitted that the alternative would have pleased them best. Peel's greatest administrative measure, the Encumbered Estates' Act, cost England nothing in feeling or in cash, and did but add one more to those material benefits, those stones in apology for bread, which our people, so just and yet so unsympathetic, are always so ready to bestow. Never once in that long connection, which will one day be the despair of the philosopher, that marvellous association of centuries during which no Irishman has ever loved England or betrayed her, ever pronounced her good or shrunk from her sharpest service, ever believed in her liberality or refused her wages, has England passed a measure for Ireland out of affection, or gratitude, or even that kindly courtesy which is so pleasant a substitute for friendship. The little marks of equality in position, of kindly esteem, of friendliness which grants without thinking of concession showered upon Scotland,—that cordial waiver, for instance, in her case of any attempt at Imperial uniformity in laws, habits, and even national insignia like the soldiers' clothes—have been coldly refused to Ireland ; and while the national dress of one Celtic race is honoured alike. in the field and in the palace, the national colour of the other dooms its wearer to penal servitude. We have said that we were just, and perhaps we have intended to be so, but where, throughout our laws, is a concession to Catholic ideas like the concession to Presbyterian ideas involved in our recognition of Scotch marriages ? where in our social habits is there an insult to Scotland like the one every newspaper offers in its advertisements to Ireland ? where, in our whole language, is there an expression equivalent, as regards Irishmen, to the "kindly Scot "I An overweening individualism, a rooted belief that we arc better and wiser and more gifted than our partners, that our responsibility in governing is not to them, but to God for them, as it is for the llindoos, has marked every step of our action, even the wisest, oven the noblest, even the most self-sacrificing.
But it is over at last. For the first time, the British people, repressing prejudices which seemed almost part of its being, and sympathies arising from its whole history, unmoved by any pecuniary interest and unterrified by any immediate danger, in the teeth of censures from the National Church, and in the face of the whole landlord class, has elected a Government in order to carry out a measure which, except as a measure of sympathetic justice to the Irish people, it has no special reason to desire. For the first time, a strong Cabinet has staked its existence on a proposal which can bring to it nothing except the hearts of the Irish people. A great Minister, himself an intense Churchman, himself filled with the idea of the economic sacredness of property, himself perhaps of all men alive the least Irish,—for Mr. Gladstone's genius, like his blood, is essentially Scotch—has, to win Irish loyalty, bestowed on a Bill for her benefit alone the labour and the intellect he would have bestowed on a campaign, though half the Churchmen of England tell him his measure will recoil on the Church he loves, and though all its landlords feel that it threatens the economic laws he has so rigidly maintained. That power of repressing their own instincts, that habit of defying hostile forces, that vast capacity of detailed labour which English Ministers have so often displayed for the interests of the Empire, have all at last been shown for the benefit of Ireland. Had the Kingdom been the Empire, had the Irish vote been unanimous and been final, had the existence of Government been at stake, no higher effort could have been made than Mr. Gladstone, and the House of Commons, and the nation itself have made to prepare a measure which, but for Irish feeling, would have been either superfluous or unwise. The labour of love has been performed as thoroughly as a hundred labours of hate, and the penal laws were not more perfectly drawn, more searching, more far-reaching than the measure which sweeps the last relic of them away. The entire power of the British Government, that most irresistible of political forces, which for centuries has so uniformly crushed the opposition of Ireland, has at last been strained in her behalf, strained not to make her quieter, or richer, or more civilized—though incidentally it may do those things also—but to win her affection, to assure her equality, to convince her once for all that England can sympathize not only with her interests, but with her prejudices and her pride. And this has been done not easily, or carelessly, or without suffering, but at the price of sacrifices. It is no painless operation for a people intensely Protestant to declare that henceforth Protestantism shall in Ireland have no advantage even of social standing, no trifle for the Liberal party to forego, for years it may be, the support of the National Church, no light matter for Mr. Gladstone to acknowledge that the convictions of half a life have been unfounded. And yet it has been done, done thoroughly, done cordially, as work which pleased the doers. That change of spirit is real, and is the change which will make the 1st of March such a landmark in our history.
We say boldly it " will " make it, though we neither desire nor expect immediate or obvious gratitude from Ireland. Why should she be so grateful for not being insulted, or injured, or treated as a prize of war, or even for receiving a first instalment of the justice so long defiantly refused ? But, with Mr. Gladstone, we utterly refuse to believe in a race of one-legged men,—in a race without reverence for justice, or capacity of gratitude, or affection ready to respond to love, or, to put the matter within British grasp, without perception, when all causes for heartburning have ceased, of its own interest. Did any of our readers ever think what sort of a compensation we make to Ireland for the loss of her independence, of what the appointment of Lord Mayo to the Indian Viceroyalty means, of what Ireland would be to Irishmen without our imperial careers, without our army, our colonies, our place in Europe and the world? Upon this matterat least we have been just as between country and country, for if we have refused service to the Catholic of Connaught, we have refused it also to the Catholic of Lancashire ; if, since a Catholic Admiral beat back the Catholic Armada, we have robbed every Catholic of his natural chance of a career, we have at least plundered him without reference to his nationality. A Weld of Lulworth, English as the Ashburnhams, has had no better chance than an O'Donoghue or O'Neill ; apart from creed, no man in England has ever thrown an Irishman's nationality in his teeth ; and the two men best rewarded in our time, rewarded, if anything, above their claims, have both been Irishmen. Who objects on the ground of birthplace when a baton falls to the most distinctively Irish of Generals, or the Indian throne to a man who boasts in the House of a pedigree almost unmixedly Milesian ? So enormous is this advantage, so completely does it outweigh every material disability, that were Ireland free to-morrow, the fact once realized that Irishmen were foreigners in the Empire would almost suffice to recement the Union ; and what must be the depth of the bitterness, the extent of the irritation, the permanence of the distrust which renders Irishmen willing to forget all this so utterly that it is as if it had no existence. The material advantages of the Union are without an exception on the aide of Ireland, and if the " sentimental " disadvantages are one by one swept away, if her honour, and her creed, and her economic ideas are respected as those of Scotland have been and those of Grdt. Britain always are, it is to those material advantages that herregards must turn, and there, at least, we have nothing to repent of or extenuate. Ireland is Catholic ? Celtic ? rebel t So were the French of Lower Canada when they descended into the field, and now, when all sentimental grievances havebeen redressed; when their Church has been secured, and their social system guaranteed, and all disabilities, even of opinimr, swept away, what is England's difficulty with the French Canadians but this, that they love England too much to set up for themselves. We ask any decent man not stupid with prejudice to tell us what the difference is between the Catholic Irishmen who recently left the criminal dock exulting because they had to suffer for "ould Ireland," and Sir Etienne Cartier, the Celtic Catholic rebel counsellor of Her Majesty, or assign one intelligible reason why the treatment which made of him, Papineau's ci-devant lieutenant, a fanatic upholder of the• Empire, should make of an O'Kelly a bitter foe ? It will not be so, though, if it were, our duty would none the less be plain. and pressing. So surely as we redress the " sentimental" wrongs of Irishmen, so surely as we acknowledge in word and deed that they are our equals, entitled to respect even in their idiosyncrasies, to tolerance even in their prejudices, to argument even in their errors, so surely shall we find that they are willing on those terms to be our comrades—nay, that they have always in the worst hours been—our cordial friends in every task which lies before the at last United Empire. What that friendship is worth to us as a people we shall not attempt to describe, for this is not the moment to tell how bitterly our Saxon people need the aid the Celt alone can bring, the genius and the dash, the light-heartedness and the imagination of the Irishman,; but we may use one material and unanswerable argument. We are now but twenty millions, for of our nominal thirty the Milesian five neutralize by their discontent the strength of at least five more. When Ireland is reconciled, we shall. be thirty millions.
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