THE DEBATE ON ROMAN CATHOLIC DISABILITIES.
CONSTITUENCIES are certainly not institutions likely to improve either the logic or the moral simplicity of the human mind. The mind of the repre- sentative is a very complex thing. He must, after some fashion or other, work out a sort of artificial unity between what he would like best to say and what he would like best that his constituents should hear him saying. And the artificial unity in question is not gene- rally a very imposing one. Mr. Gladstone's speech on Catholic Disabilities was tolerably satisfactory, because he did in the main deliver his own personal convictions, and, moreover, his own personal convictions as they are modi- fied by the political situation of the moment, so that he spoke without any oppressive sense of embarrassment. He was introducing a measure which he knew would please the Irish Nationalists of both parties; and it is the Irish Nationalists whom at the present moment he most wishes to please. He did not please Dr. Joseph Parker, and, indeed, many of his closest Nonconformist allies pro- bably read his speech with very uncomfortable sensa- tions. But then, he has so lately been consulting their prepossessions in insisting on the retirement of Mr. Parnell, that he can afford for a time to ignore their views ; and it is certain that, while he omitted a good deal -which would have made his attitude more intelligible to the country in relation to his own past Administrations, the arguments for the admission of Roman Catholics to the offices of Irish Viceroy and English Lord Chancellor were delivered con am ore, and with all the earnestness which best befits his oratory. Yet even Mr, Gladstone's speech was not free from embarrassment. He was playing a very different part from that which he took up in 1874, after the Irish Roman Catholic hierarchy had crushed his Irish University Bill, and so led to the downfall of his Govern- ment ; and he did not wish to retract what he had said in 1874 against Vaticanism, which had, indeed, ensured him wide popularity amongst his Nonconformist allies. He had to fall back on the admission, made a year later, that English Catholics had satisfied him that there was no practical danger of their subordinating their loyalty to the Crown to their loyalty to the Pope, which is not a very good reason for declining to guard against dangers of so general and serious a character as Mr. Glad- stone had represented them, else we might always accept present assurances that men are not going to be biassed by their dominant passions, as if on such a point they could adequately answer for themselves. And, again, it was impossible for Mr. Gladstone to explain why, during his ten years' Ministry, he had omitted to pass the Bill which ho now presses as leader of Opposition. He would have had to say what it would not have been convenient to him to say, that he was then too dependent on the support of Dr. Joseph Parker and his friends to think of proposing a measure which would have alienated their support.
But Mr. Gladstone's speech was, evidently enough, a speech of eloquent personal conviction,—though the con- viction was not certainly the less eloquent because he saw that all the converts be might make would be so many obstacles in the path of the Ulster Orangemen, who are now his most formidable antagonists. The resistance of the Government, however, was certainly not the resistance of eloquent personal conviction. We may perhaps be hasty in inferring from Lord Cranborno's vote in favour of Mr. Gladstone's Bill, that Lord Salisbury is at heart per- sonally favourable to it, though that is the impression which we should derive from all we know of his previous career. But it is hardly possible to read Mr. W. H. Smith's and the Attorney-General's speeches against Mr. Glad- stone's Bill without feeling satisfied that neither the one nor the other was a speech of warm personal conviction. All that they had to .say was, that Mr. Gladstone in power declined to do wiat Mr. Gladstone in Opposition advocates, and that the logic of his speech would involve the repeal of the Act of Settlement, and the opening of the Throne to Roman Catholics. We are disposed to admit both assertions. Mr. Gladstone tried to draw a strong distinction between excluding Roman Catholics from offices open to all the political world, for which a Roman Catholic might well happen to be the best of all conceivable nominees, and excluding from the English Throne individuals whose birth would otherwise entitle them to ascend it, on the ground that Roman Catholicism, or any profession of faith except that of the Established Church, is a personal disqualification. It is more essential, he seemed to say, not to disqualify by virtue of his religious belief, a person who might otherwise be regarded as the best possible Viceroy of Ireland, or the best possible Lord Chancellor of England, than it is not to disqualify the next heir to the Throne for the same reason. The Throne is not filled by selection of the fittest, but by hereditary descent, and there is less anomaly in narrowing still further the narrow outcome of the principle of hereditary descent, than in breaking in upon so imperious a principle as the selection of the fittest, by an exclusion which might necessitate the choice of the second-best. That was an ingenious distinction, but hardly, we think, a very solid one. There seems to us more real grievance in the ex- clusion of an individual whom everybody would otherwise recognise as entitled to a lofty position, than in the exclusion of an individual who might never have suspected that he was the fittest for a post, and whose friends could hardly by any possibility know that he had been disqualified for it only on account of his religion. A disinherited son has certainly more to complain of than a candidate for office who did not even know that but for his religion he would have been the most worthy candidate in the field. The true answer to the argument that Mr. Gladstone's logic would have led him to repeal the Act of Settlement, would be that England is not governed by logic ; and that it may be perfectly right to maintain an exclusion the removal of which would give rise to a riot, and perhaps. what is much worse than a riot, a general state of distrust and suspicion, while it is perfectly wrong to continue two arbitrary proscriptions which very few people really care about, and to the continuance of which the working classes of this country are heartily indifferent, in spite of Dr. Joseph Parker's wrath.
What the Government would have said, if they had told the real truth, was, that they could not very well afford to offend the genuine Tory squirearchy, who regard a few Roman Catholic disabilities as a sort of privilegium to which they are entitled ; and that they could not at all afford to alienate the severe Protestants of the North of Ireland, who are their best protection against the Nationalists. If they had been quite frank, the Government would have said that they saw no answer to Mr. Gladstone's argument, except the answer that they should incur superfluous unpopularity at a critical moment by accepting it. But they might have added that, at all events for Mr. Glad- stone himself, that ought to be a sufficient answer, since it was practically the answer which had determined him when in power not to do that .which he now demands in Opposition. Unless a measure be very urgent, no Govern- ment will propose one which will increase the number of its foes muoh more than it will increase the number of its friends. That was really Mr. W. H. Smith's reason for resisting Mr. Gladstone's Bill, though he did not think it prudent to say so. We wonder whether it would really have been imprudent. Perhaps it would. But telling the plain truth is not always quite so imprudent as the world, in its genuine horror of the unvarnished truth, is apt to think it.
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