PATIENCE!
THERE is one error current in the political mind upon the subject of this Irish struggle which we are sorry to see. Speaker after speaker of the first rank suggests that it will be ended at the next Election. Mr. Gladstone has repeatedly hinted his conviction in that sense ; Lord Rosebery has openly expressed it ; Lord Harlington, though less definite, has said much which might be so interpreted ; and inferior orators are never tired of promises and prophecies. They may all be wrong. If, indeed, the constituencies at the next Election decide for Home-rule, the end may be in sight ; for the House of Lords could not disregard what would be equivalent to a direct plebiscitum, and the Unionists would refuse, even in such an extremity, to adopt the policy of obstruction, a policy which combines moral treason against the State with a total contempt for gentlemanly feeling. If the decision of the people is on that side, Home-rale must be granted ; and it will only remain to make it as complete, and therefore as little an occasion for fresh quarrelling, as is possible. It is much more probable, however, that the decision, when it comes, will go the other way ; that the Parnellites and Radicals, though defeated, will refuse, as they have once already refused, to accept the verdict; and that, at Election after Election, Home- rule, though a slowly dying cry, will still be the pivot round which the voting will turn. We see nothing in history, little in the situation, which should suggest that the Irish quarrel will come to any sudden or dramatic end. The American War was fought out in four years ; but the States' Rights dispute lasted fifty, and is still the ultimate dividing-line between American parties. The Poles in the Prussian Diet have remained a party since the Constitution was granted ; the Bohemians have claimed their " rights " in the Austrian Reichsrath for twenty years or more ; and time seems rather to increase than diminish the separateness of Dutch and English citizens at the Cape. The Irish are among the most persistent people in the world ; and although the present position of Irish Home-rulers as the subsidised protégés of a party among their own colonists cannot lad, they may maintain their separate and quasi-hostile position in politics for more than a generation. We do not say they will, for we have a genuine confidence in the greatness of the political effect often wrought by a revolution in tenure, and we do not forget how completely Irish economic prosperity is bound up with that of Ireland's only market ; but they may, and if they do, there is no course for Englishmen except to display a pertinacity—if possible, a silent pertinacity—equal to their own, and to wait on from Session to Session, Parliament to Parliament, generation to generation, until the end is reached. The Irish will not rise in insurrection, the English will not sanction revolutionary methods ; and so the struggle may last like that of the wave and the cliff.
We state the ease in this emphatic way because we doubt whether our readers are even yet aware of the extent of the draft which this struggle may make upon the English reserve of staying-power. The issue will depend upon that, and that almost alone, and they do not like to think so. They hope for a dramatic, or at all events a visible ending to the quarrel, if it be only some vote by ballot which nobody will have the energy to disobey. We do not wonder at their hope, or blame them for it in the least degree ; for but for it, political life would have become almost intolerable. Lord Salisbury's sentence, in which he compared the Irish Question to a night- -mare, is as true as it was rhetorical. There never was in history a campaign so dreary, so unmarked by relieving incident, so paralysing to the forces which find their sustenance either in excitement or in hope. The very method of the contest, a battle fought out through the" dreary drip of dilatory declamation," is almost as fatal to energy as it is to cheerfulness. There is nothing left to say of interest, nothing to do that will suddenly advance either cause, nothing to propose that will even seem to bring victory near, Endless assault is met by endless resistance, and when the assault fails, it has to be begun again. The battle of words brings out no orators, the struggle of the nations no heroes, the long-drawn conflict no days of jubilation. Some- thing in the nature of the two peoples forbids their complete -sympathy even as combatants, and neither quite understands 'what to the other appears at least a partial success. Parlia- mentary reports have become unreadable, the newspapers are deadly dull, the very conversation of society has grown tedious, and yet the subject holds us all in an unrelaxing grip. The actuality is as painful as the prospect, which stretches out end- lessly, like a Lincolnshire road, on which a coach, though it be driven fast, makes no perceptible way; or like one of those dreary Russian plains which are said, in their never-ending flatness and tame similarity, to have begotten in the Russian mind that note of despair, and that quality of resignation, which now appear its national characteristics. Men under middle age may grow old, and yet live in a society which argues about Home-rule, and may feel, we must add, that in consequence death has lost some of its terror. Heaven, at least, is not under Parliamentary government.
It is a melancholy outlook ; but then, it is precisely the out- look which Englishmen believe themselves by their nature most qualified to face. Perseverance is, or was, their especial quality. They have gone through a twenty years' war for an object far smaller than the subject of the present struggle, which is nothing less than the disintegration of the Kingdom, or, to put it more from the Home-rule point of view, the remodelling under compulsion of the British Constitution. They fought with Spain for thirty years, with America for eight years, with France for fifteen years ; and of the three struggles, they won two. If they can bear such losses as those struggles involved—losses in blood, losses in treasure, losses in the consumption of energy—surely they can bear the loss of some of the cheerfulness of life which is what this one chiefly involves. If they could persist through campaign after campaign, why not through Session after Session? The hatred of Ireland is no worse to bear than the hatred of France. The dreary drip of ineffectual talk in Parliament cannot wear out men who bore for thirteen years at least continuous tidings of the victories of their foes. The shame of it ? That is on the other side. The loss of it ? What section of the nation is the poorer, unless it be the very Irishmen who are invited to make peace ? The tedium of it ?. Yes, there is tedium worse than any this generation has known ; but Lord John Russell told a Committee of the House of Commons that it always took seven years of weary debating to pass an important Act, and it took sixty to rid us of the Jacobites, who held North Scotland almost as the Parnellites hold South Ireland, who actually penetrated in arms to the heart of England, and who then so vanished out of English life, that but for Scott, none but historians would remember who they were. Allowing for the increase of population, and for the fact that on the slightest gleam of hope the Irish Catholics would all have been Jacobite, the Parnellite Party is not half so strong ; yet the Jacobites passed away as if they had never been. It is painful to wait, more especially when the waiting is for years ; but it is not more painful than to bear defeat in war, and this we all pro- fess our readiness to do. That, we shall be told, is a duty ; but then, this is a duty too, though we admit it is a far humbler one, and one which demands a display of the feminine rather than the masculine aide of the national quality of endurance. In the statesmen, courage is required—it may prove, by-and-by, even physical courage of that high quality which rises superior to the hourly danger of assassination— but a nation is beyond the knife, and of the nation only passive endurance, unflinching patience, unswerving pertinacity, the capacity to bear pain, to conquer tedium, to survive delay, are now required. England has to guard her own, not so much like a Boadicea as like a Griselda, patiently, even humbly, but inflexibly pursuing a straight and level, and therefore unromantic path of duty. " Patience " ought to be the motto of the hour,—patience like that of Nature when she builds an island out of corals, patience such as shall defeat even the most notable phenomenon of oar time, the full revelation of the Irish genius for worry.
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