TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE NEW DEPARTURE.
NO one, we imagine, will doubt the courage of the Cabinet in taking its new departure. The mere loss of Mr. Forster is a great blow, every secession, and especially the secession of such a man, injuring a Cabinet. To suspend or aban- don Coercion in Ireland is to enrage every Tory in the country, to create doubts even in Liberals, and to incur from the unthink- ing of both parties alike the reproach of vacillation. To sus- pend it at a moment like this, when the Parnellites show symptoms of a return to political life—they have for the last twelve months been, in Parliament, a mere faction of Enrages— is to expose the Government to a suspicion of compromise with an anti-national party, and to charges in all the wilder news- papers of " capitulation " before rebels. The corn age of the Government in facing all that opprobrium is patent, and it is only about their wisdom that serious discussion will arise. We need not say that we believe them wise. We believe that repression is everywhere as useless as persecution, unless it in- volves the penalty of death, for which, without a rising in arms, there can be no justification. From the first we have distrusted and deprecated Coercion, and events have now revealed its failure to the whole world. The power of arbitrary arrest, no doubt, enabled the Government, as they say, to start the Land Act, and also to break up an organisation which threatened to develope into a secret government; but it has not helped to pacify, still less to reconcile, the people of Ireland. It has not improved the general situation, for the leaders left behind have shown themselves as dangerous as the leaders arrested, and more impracticable, and it has, if anything, weakened the authority of regular law. Nothing discourages trial like the power of punishment without it. The " village ruf- fians" who were to have retreated in affright cared nothing about a gentle detention at Kilmainham ; juries as a body still shrank from their duty ; and the law was, on the whole, less put in force than before, the magistrates and local administrators relying upon the exercise of the power of arrest. Outrages increased rather than diminished, and gradually assumed a darker and more murderous character. On the other hand, the Act will expire within five months, and any demand for its renewal would have to be made in the teeth not only of the whole body of Irish Members—for even Ulster distrusted the Act— and of a growing aversion among English Liberals to the indefinite detention of untried men, but of the confession made by Government itself that a repressive law abhor- rent to English ideas had been enforced without the de- sired result. A partial failure was admitted by the highest members of the Government, including Mr. Forster himself, and the Cabinet, if it had asked for a renewal, would have been compelled to plead for powers outside the law, while stating that those powers could be of little use. Under such circumstances, with symptoms appear- ing of returning reason among the Extremists, with the No- rent agitation dying away, and with all Ireland eagerly await- ing the next step, the Government was, we believe, wise in abandoning the Act, and trying once more to govern Ireland through the ordinary law, strengthened, if needful, to meet the collapse of the Jury system. The release of the political suspects was, of course, an inevitable corollary of that decision, even if Government had not the strongest reason to believe that they were willing to use their great influence for the restoration of order. That the law must be strength- ened, nobody denies, though there is much contention about the method. It is the first interest of Ireland, as of every other country, that crime—ordinary crime, the crime condemned in all lands by the instinctive conscience—should be swiftly and certainly punished, and upon this point there must be no hesitation. That punishment, however, is not only consistent with the withdrawal of Coercion, but depends upon it ; and the Government, while openly recognising this truth, pledges itself to introduce the measures necessary to make the criminal law, already stronger than is popularly believed, thoroughly effective. What they will propose we do not know, but the object of their proposal is clear from the necessities of the position. It must be one to make the ordinary and regular law work with certainty and effect, The new policy would be right, in our judgment, even if the results were uncertain ; but there is already evidence that the recur• rence to legality is soothing away irritation, and that Ireland, weary with a struggle which, without insurrection, can end in nothing but increased human suffering, will, if Coercion is withdrawn, sink back into her normal tranquillity. If that result is secured, it is worth any sacrifice short of one of principle, for though Great Britain is not disturbed by the disturbance of Ireland—Consols rising above par in the deepest throes of the Irish movement—when Ireland is quiet, Britain can move forward.
It follows, of course, that the Government having decided to recur to a policy of legality, must once more address itself to the task of removing the grievances which have brought the law into disrepute. These grievances now, as ever, are agrarian. The Land Act has succeeded splendidly upon one point, in stopping those excessive exactions of rent which, in a country where agriculture is the main dependence of the people, and in which the land has few owners, make a prosperous society impossible ; but it has not removed the great source of rural disquiet, the practice of eviction. The tenantry are still burdened with arrears, which afford the landlords an instrument as powerful as the absolute property abolished by the Act. The clauses of the Act intended to remove this evil have failed, and it is essential, if there is to be peace, that new measures should be adopted to compro- mise arrears. It is most difficult so to frame them that the tenant who could pay, but failed to pay, shall not have the benefit of his recusancy ; but, after all, a just rural Bankruptcy Act cannot be beyond the re- sources of legislation, and we understand from Lord Gran- ville's speech that the Government have devised a scheme, and, indeed, drawn a Bill, which will, as they conceive, remove all difficulties. Such a scheme must involve outlay, but out- lay to any moderate extent is cheaper than social disturbance, and a great change of tenure covering a country cannot be accomplished without some sacrifice. It is well that it is not one of human life. With rents reduced and arrears cleared away, a road must be opened by which the mass of the agri- culturists, now turned into tenants under a limited copy- hold, shall be able to turn themselves at will into pro- prietors, and so be rid once for all of the terror of evic- tion. The necessity of this reform has been acknowledged by both parties in the State,—by the Liberals in Mr. Bright's Clauses, and by the Tories in Mr. Smith's motion—and the Government is evidently prepared to accept it as part of its task. None of these " concessions" are outside justice, the greatest of them will be welcomed by landlords as well as people, and the sacrifices they involve, if not too great, may be richly repaid by the termination of the Irish social revolution. The end of that may be also the end of the political difficulty, but if it is not, if even it is, as Mr. Litton expects, the commencement of a sharper phase of that difficulty, at least the difficulty will stand alone. Better a veiled insurrection or open insurrection for such a purpose as nationalism, than a veiled insurrection prompted by greed, and accompanied by demoralising social disturbance. We can deal with resistance in the field ; it is resistance in the fields which our institutions are so incom- petent to meet.
There remains the Executive organisation of Ireland, upon which we can only say that Mr. Gladstone, while refus- ing all details, for which the time is not ripe, shows himself perfectly willing to introduce extensive change. It is too soon to discuss the line of that change, but of its necessity we entertain no doubt. The simple and sufficient answer to those who defend the existing plan of administration—a muddle of the English system, which is based on willing obedience, with the Continental system, which is based on force—is that it has failed. It was intended to keep up English ascendancy, to maintain order in times of com- motion, and to strengthen law. It has helped to make English ascendancy hateful, it has never prevented or punished outrage, and it has begotten in the Irish mind a conviction that law, properly the best protection of the feeble, is an instrument in their enemy's hands. With a garrison ten times as strong in proportion as that of England, there is in Ireland no sense of security ; the police are most efficient for everything except the prevention and detection of crime ; and the officials, instead of being considered, as in France and Scotland, the people's protectors, are so hated, that to take permanent office is to betray the national cause. It is time the system were changed, and in Mr. Gladstone's language we have the assurance that, at least, the possibility of changing it has entered into the Cabinet plans.
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