Chapter II. The Alternative Policy In Act. (1886-1888)
Those who come over hither to us from England, and some weak people among ourselves, whenever in discourse we make mention of liberty and property, shake their heads, and tell us that “Ireland is a depending kingdom,” as if they would seem by this phrase to intend, that the people of Ireland are in some state of slavery or dependence different from those of England.—Jonathan Swift.
I
In the ministry that succeeded Mr. Gladstone in 1886, Sir Michael Hicks Beach undertook for the second time the office of Irish secretary, while Lord Randolph Churchill filled his place at the exchequer and as leader of the House. The new Irish policy was to open with the despatch of a distinguished soldier to put down moonlighters in Kerry; the creation of one royal commission under Lord Cowper, to inquire into land rents and land purchase; and another to inquire into the country's material resources. The two commissions were well-established ways of marking time. As for Irish industries and Irish resources, a committee of the House of Commons had made a report in a blue book of a thousand pages only a year before. On Irish land there had been a grand commission in 1880, and a committee of the House of Lords in 1882-3. The latest Purchase Act was hardly yet a year old. Then to commission a general to hunt down little handfuls of peasants who with blackened faces and rude firearms crept stealthily in the dead of night round lonely cabins in the remote hillsides and glens of Kerry, was hardly more sensible than it would be to send a squadron of life-guards to catch pickpockets in a London slum.
A question that exercised Mr. Gladstone at least as sharply as the proceedings of ministers, was the attitude [pg 363]
Dissentient Position
to be taken by those who had quitted him, ejected him in the short parliament of 1886, and fought the election against him. We have seen how much controversy arose long years before as to the question whereabouts in the House of Commons the Peelites should take their seats.[219] The same perplexity now confronted the liberals who did not agree with Mr. Gladstone upon Irish government. Lord Hartington wrote to him, and here is his reply:—
August 2, 1886.—I fully appreciate the feeling which has prompted your letter, and I admit the reality of the difficulties you describe. It is also clear, I think, that so far as title to places on the front opposition bench is concerned, your right to them is identical with ours. I am afraid, however, that I cannot materially contribute to relieve you from embarrassment. The choice of a seat is more or less the choice of a symbol; and I have no such acquaintance with your political views and intentions, as could alone enable me to judge what materials I have before me for making an answer to your inquiry. For my own part, I earnestly desire, subject to the paramount exigencies of the Irish question, to promote in every way the reunion of the liberal party; a desire in which I earnestly trust that you participate. And I certainly could not directly or indirectly dissuade you from any step which you may be inclined to take, and which may appear to you to have a tendency in any measure to promote that end.
A singular event occurred at the end of the year (1886), that produced an important change in the relations of this group of liberals to the government that they had placed and maintained in power. Lord Randolph, the young minister who with such extraordinary rapidity had risen to ascendency in the councils of the government, suddenly in a fatal moment of miscalculation or caprice resigned (Dec. 23). Political suicide is not easy to a man with energy and resolution, but this was one of the rare cases. In a situation so strangely unstable and irregular, with an administration resting on the support of a section sitting on benches opposite, and still declaring every day that they adhered to old liberal [pg 364] principles and had no wish to sever old party ties, the withdrawal of Lord Randolph Churchill created boundless perturbation. It was one of those exquisite moments in which excited politicians enjoy the ineffable sensation that the end of the world has come. Everything seemed possible. Lord Hartington was summoned from the shores of the Mediterranean, but being by temperament incredulous of all vast elemental convulsions, he took his time. On his return he declined Lord Salisbury's offer to make way for him as head of the government. The glitter of the prize might have tempted a man of schoolboy ambition, but Lord Hartington was too experienced in affairs not to know that to be head of a group that held the balance was, under such equivocal circumstances, far the more substantial and commanding position of the two. Mr. Goschen's case was different, and by taking the vacant post at the exchequer he saved the prime minister from the necessity of going back under Lord Randolph's yoke. As it happened, all this gave a shake to both of the unionist wings. The ominous clouds of coercion were sailing slowly but discernibly along the horizon, and this made men in the unionist camp still more restless and uneasy. Mr. Chamberlain, on the very day of the announcement of the Churchill resignation, had made a speech that was taken to hold out an olive branch to his old friends. Sir William Harcourt, ever holding stoutly in fair weather and in foul to the party ship, thought the break-up of a great political combination to be so immense an evil, as to call for almost any sacrifices to prevent it. He instantly wrote to Birmingham to express his desire to co-operate in re-union, and in the course of a few days five members of the original liberal cabinet of 1886 met at his house in what was known as the Round Table Conference.[220]
A letter of Mr. Gladstone's to me puts some of his views on the situation created by the retirement of Lord Randolph:—
Hawarden, Christmas Day, 1886.—Between Christmas services, a flood of cards and congratulations for the season, and many [pg 365] interesting letters, I am drowned in work to-day, having just at 1-¼ p.m. ascertained what my letters are. So forgive me if, first thanking you very much for yours, I deal with some points rather abruptly.
1. Churchill has committed an outrage as against the Queen, and also the prime minister, in the method of resigning and making known his resignation. This, of course, they will work against him. 2. He is also entirely wrong in supposing that the finance minister has any ruling authority on the great estimates of defence. If he had, he would be the master of the country. But although he has no right to demand the concurrence of his colleagues in his view of the estimates, he has a rather special right, because these do so much towards determining budget and taxation, to indicate his own views by resignation. I have repeatedly fought estimates to the extremity, with an intention of resigning in case. But to send in a resignation makes it impossible for his colleagues as men of honour to recede. 3. I think one of his best points is that he had made before taking office recent and formal declarations on behalf of economy, of which his colleagues must be taken to have been cognisant, and Salisbury in particular. He may plead that he could not reduce these all at once to zero. 4. Cannot something be done, without reference to the holes that may be picked, to give him some support as a champion of economy? This talk about the continental war, I for one regard as pure nonsense when aimed at magnifying our estimates.
5. With regard to Hartington. What he will do I know not, and our wishes could have no weight with him.... The position is one of such difficulty for H. that I am very sorry for him, though it was never more true that he who makes his own bed in a certain way must lie in it. Chamberlain's speech hits him very hard in case of acceptance. I take it for granted that he will not accept to sit among thirteen tories, but will have to demand an entry by force, i.e. with three or four friends. To accept upon that footing would, I think, be the logical consequence of all he has said and done since April. In logic, he ought to go forward, or, as Chamberlain has done, backward. The Queen will, I have no doubt, be brought to bear upon him, and [pg 366] the nine-tenths of his order. If the Irish question rules all others, all he has to consider is whether he (properly flanked) can serve his view of the Irish question. But with this logic we have nothing to do. The question for us also is (I think), what is best for our view of the Irish question? I am tempted to wish that he should accept; it would clear the ground. But I do not yet see my way with certainty.
6. With regard to Chamberlain. From what has already passed between us you know that, apart from the new situation and from his declaration, I was very desirous that everything honourable should be done to conciliate and soothe. Unquestionably his speech is a new fact of great weight. He is again a liberal, quand même, and will not on all points (as good old Joe Hume used to say) swear black is white for the sake of his views on Ireland. We ought not to waste this new fact, but take careful account of it. On the other hand, I think he will see that the moment for taking account of it has not come. Clearly the first thing is to see who are the government. When we see this, we shall also know something of its colour and intentions. I do not think Randolph can go back. He would go back at a heavy discount. If he wants to minimise, the only way I see is that he should isolate his vote on the estimates, form no clique, and proclaim strong support in Irish matters and general policy. Thus he might pave a roundabout road of return.... In many things Goschen is more of a liberal than Hartington, and he would carry with him next to nobody.
7. On the whole, I rejoice to think that, come what may, this affair will really effect progress in the Irish question.
A happy Christmas to you. It will be happier than that of the ministers.
Mr. Gladstone gave the Round Table his blessing, his “general idea being that he had better meddle as little as possible with the conference, and retain a free hand.” Lord Hartington would neither join the conference, nor deny that he thought it premature. While negotiation was going on, he said, somebody must stay at home, guard the position, and keep a watch on the movements of the enemy, and this duty was his. In truth, after encouraging or pressing Mr. [pg 367]
Round Table Conference
Goschen to join the government, it was obviously impossible to do anything that would look like desertion either of him or of them. On the other side, both English liberals and Irish nationalists were equally uneasy lest the unity of the party should be bought by the sacrifice of fundamentals. The conference was denounced from this quarter as an attempt to find a compromise that would help a few men sitting on the fence to salve “their consciences at the expense of a nation's rights.” Such remarks are worth quoting, to illustrate the temper of the rank and file. Mr. Parnell, though alive to the truth that when people go into a conference it usually means that they are ready to give up something, was thoroughly awake to the satisfactory significance of the Birmingham overtures.
Things at the round table for some time went smoothly enough. Mr. Chamberlain gradually advanced the whole length. He publicly committed himself to the expediency of establishing some kind of legislative authority in Dublin in accordance with Mr. Gladstone's principle, with a preference in his own mind for a plan on the lines of Canada. This he followed up, also in public, by the admission that of course the Irish legislature must be allowed to organise their own form of executive government, either by an imitation on a small scale of all that goes on at Westminster and Whitehall, or in whatever other shape they might think proper.[221] To assent to an Irish legislature for such affairs as parliament might determine to be distinctively Irish, with an executive responsible to it, was to accept the party credo on the subject. Then the surface became mysteriously ruffled. Language was used by some of the plenipotentiaries in public, of which each side in turn complained as inconsistent with conciliatory negotiation in private. At last on the very day on which the provisional result of the conference was laid before Mr. Gladstone, there appeared in a print called the Baptist[222] an article from Mr. Chamberlain, containing an ardent plea for the disestablishment of the Welsh church, but warning the Welshmen that they and the Scotch crofters and the English [pg 368] labourers, thirty-two millions of people, must all go without much-needed, legislation because three millions were disloyal, while nearly six hundred members of parliament would be reduced to forced inactivity, because some eighty delegates, representing the policy and receiving the pay of the Chicago convention, were determined to obstruct all business until their demands had been conceded. Men naturally asked what was the use of continuing a discussion, when one party to it was attacking in this peremptory fashion the very persons and the policy that in private he was supposed to accept. Mr. Gladstone showed no implacability. Viewing the actual character of the Baptist letter, he said to Sir W. Harcourt, “I am inclined to think we can hardly do more now, than to say we fear it has interposed an unexpected obstacle in the way of any attempt at this moment to sum up the result of your communications, which we should otherwise hopefully have done; but on the other hand we are unwilling that so much ground apparently gained should be lost, that a little time may soften or remove the present ruffling of the surface, and that we are quite willing that the subject should stand over for resumption at a convenient season.”
The resumption never happened. Two or three weeks later, Mr. Chamberlain announced that he did not intend to return to the round table.[223] No other serious and formal attempt was ever made on either side to prevent the liberal unionists from hardening into a separate species. When they became accomplices in coercion, they cut off the chances of re-union. Coercion was the key to the new situation. Just as at the beginning of 1886, the announcement of it by the tory government marked the parting of the ways, so was it now.
II
We must now with reasonable cheerfulness turn our faces back towards Ireland. On the day of his return from [pg 369]
State Of Ireland
Ireland (August 17, 1886) Mr. Parnell told me that he was quite sure that rents could not be paid in the coming winter, and if the country was to be kept quiet, the government would have to do something. He hoped that they would do something; otherwise there would be disturbance, and that he did not want. He had made up his mind that his interests would be best served by a quiet winter. For one thing he knew that disturbance would be followed by coercion, and he knew and often said that of course strong coercion must always in the long run win the day, little as the victory might be worth. For another thing he apprehended that disturbance might frighten away his new political allies in Great Britain, and destroy the combination which he had so dexterously built up. This was now a dominant element with him. He desired definitely that the next stage of his movement should be in the largest sense political and not agrarian. He brought two or three sets of proposals in this sense before the House, and finally produced a Tenants Relief bill. It was not brilliantly framed. For in truth it is not in human nature, either Irish or any other, to labour the framing of a bill which has no chance of being seriously considered.
The golden secret of Irish government was always to begin by trying to find all possible points for disagreement with anything that Mr. Parnell said or proposed, instead of seeking whether what he said or proposed might not furnish a basis for agreement. The conciliatory tone was soon over, and the Parnell bill was thrown out. The Irish secretary denounced it as permanently upsetting the settlement of 1881, as giving a death-blow to purchase, and as produced without the proof of any real grounds for a general reduction in judicial rents. Whatever else he did, said Sir Michael Hicks Beach, he would never agree to govern Ireland by a policy of blackmail.[224]
A serious movement followed the failure of the government to grapple with arrears of rent. The policy known as the plan of campaign was launched. The plan of campaign was this. The tenants of a given estate agreed with one another what abatement they thought just in the current half-year's [pg 370] rent. This in a body they proffered to landlord or agent. If it was refused as payment in full, they handed the money to a managing committee, and the committee deposited it with some person in whom they had confidence, to be used for the purpose of the struggle.[225] That such proceeding constituted an unlawful conspiracy nobody doubts, any more than it can be doubted that before the Act of 1875 every trade combination of a like kind in this island was a conspiracy.
At an early stage the Irish leader gave his opinion to the present writer:—
Dec. 7, 1886.—Mr. Parnell called, looking very ill and worn. He wished to know what I thought of the effect of the plan of campaign upon public opinion. “If you mean in Ireland,” I said, “of course I have no view, and it would be worth nothing if I had. In England, the effect is wholly bad; it offends almost more even than outrages.” He said he had been very ill and had taken no part, so that he stands free and uncommitted. He was anxious to have it fully understood that the fixed point in his tactics is to maintain the alliance with the English liberals. He referred with much bitterness, and very justifiable too, to the fact that when Ireland seemed to be quiet some short time back, the government had at once begun to draw away from all their promises of remedial legislation. If now rents were paid, meetings abandoned, and newspapers moderated, the same thing would happen over again as usual. However, he would send for a certain one of his lieutenants, and would press for an immediate cessation of the violent speeches.
December 12.—Mr. Parnell came, and we had a prolonged conversation. The lieutenant had come over, and had defended the plan of campaign. Mr. Parnell persevered in his dissent and disapproval, and they parted with the understanding that the meetings should be dropped, and the movement calmed as much as could be. I told him that I had heard from Mr. Gladstone, and that he could not possibly show any tolerance for illegalities.
That his opponents should call upon Mr. Gladstone to denounce the plan of campaign and cut himself off from its authors, was to be expected. They made the most of it. [pg 371]
Plan Of Campaign
But he was the last man to be turned aside from the prosecution of a policy that he deemed of overwhelming moment, by any minor currents. Immediately after the election, Mr. Parnell had been informed of his view that it would be a mistake for English and Irish to aim at uniform action in parliament. Motives could not be at all points the same. Liberals were bound to keep in view (next to what the Irish question might require) the reunion of the liberal party. The Irish were bound to have special regard to the opinion and circumstances of Ireland. Common action up to a certain degree would arise from the necessities of the position. Such was Mr. Gladstone's view. He was bent on bringing a revolutionary movement to what he confidently anticipated would be a good end; to allow a passing phase of that movement to divert him, would be to abandon his own foundations. No reformer is fit for his task who suffers himself to be frightened off by the excesses of an extreme wing.
In reply to my account of the conversation with Mr. Parnell, he wrote to me:—
Hawarden, December 8, 1886.—I have received your very clear statement and reply in much haste for the post—making the same request as yours for a return. I am glad to find the —— speech is likely to be neutralised, I hope effectually. It was really very bad. I am glad you write to ——. 2. As to the campaign in Ireland, I do not at present feel the force of Hartington's appeal to me to speak out. I do not recollect that he ever spoke out about Churchill, of whom he is for the time the enthusiastic follower.[226] 3. But all I say and do must be kept apart from the slightest countenance direct or indirect to illegality. We too suffer under the power of the landlord, but we cannot adopt this as a method of breaking it. 4. I am glad you opened the question of intermediate measures.... 5. Upon the whole I suppose he sees he cannot have countenance from us in the plan of campaign. The question rather is how much disavowal. I have contradicted a tory figment in Glasgow that I had approved.
At a later date (September 16, 1887) he wrote to me as to [pg 372] an intended speech at Newcastle: “You will, I have no doubt, press even more earnestly than before on the Irish people the duty and policy of maintaining order, and in these instances I shall be very glad if you will associate me with yourself.”
“The plan of campaign,” said Mr. Gladstone, “was one of those devices that cannot be reconciled with the principles of law and order in a civilised country. Yet we all know that such devices are the certain result of misgovernment. With respect to this particular instance, if the plan be blameable (I cannot deny that I feel it difficult to acquit any such plan) I feel its authors are not one-tenth part so blameable as the government whose contemptuous refusal of what they have now granted, was the parent and source of the mischief.”[227] This is worth looking at.
The Cowper Commission, in February 1887, reported that refusal by some landlords explained much that had occurred in the way of combination, and that the growth of these combinations had been facilitated by the fall in prices, restriction of credit by the banks, and other circumstances making the payment of rent impossible.[228] Remarkable evidence was given by Sir Redvers Buller. He thought there should be some means of modifying and redressing the grievance of rents being still higher than the people can pay. “You have got a very ignorant poor people, and the law should look after them, instead of which it has only looked after the rich.”[229] This was exactly what Mr. Parnell had said. In the House the government did not believe him; in Ireland they admitted his case to be true. In one instance General Buller wrote to the agents of the estate that he believed it was impossible for the tenants to pay the rent that was demanded; there might be five or six rogues among them, but in his opinion the greater number of them were nearer famine than paying rent.[230] In this very case ruthless evictions followed. The same scenes were enacted elsewhere. The landlords were within their rights, the courts were bound by the law, the police had no choice but to back [pg 373]
Ministerial Vacillations
the courts. The legal ease was complete. The moral case remained, and it was through these barbarous scenes that in a rough and non-logical way the realities of the Irish land system for the first time gained access to the minds of the electors of Great Britain. Such devices as the plan of campaign came to be regarded in England and Scotland as what they were, incidents in a great social struggle. In a vast majority of cases the mutineers succeeded in extorting a reduction of rent, not any more immoderate than the reduction voluntarily made by good landlords, or decreed in the land-courts. No agrarian movement in Ireland was ever so unstained by crime.
Some who took part in these affairs made no secret of political motives. Unlike Mr. Parnell, they deliberately desired to make government difficult. Others feared that complete inaction would give an opening to the Fenian extremists. This section had already shown some signs both of their temper and their influence in certain proceedings of the Gaelic association at Thurles. But the main spring was undoubtedly agrarian, and the force of the spring came from mischiefs that ministers had refused to face in time. “What they call a conspiracy now,” said one of the insurgent leaders, “they will call an Act of parliament next year.” So it turned out.
The Commission felt themselves “constrained to recommend an earlier revision of judicial rents, on account of the straitened circumstances of Irish farmers.” What the commissioners thus told ministers in the spring was exactly what the Irish leader had told them in the previous autumn. They found that there were “real grounds” for some legislation of the kind that the chief secretary, unconscious of what his cabinet was so rapidly to come to, had stigmatised as the policy of blackmail.
On the last day of March 1887, the government felt the necessity of introducing a measure based on facts that they had disputed, and on principles that they had repudiated. Leaseholders were admitted, some hundred thousand of them. That is, the more solemn of the forms of agrarian contract were set aside. Other provisions we may pass over. [pg 374] But this was not the bill to which the report of the Commission pointed. The pith of that report was the revision and abatement of judicial rents, and from the new bill this vital point was omitted. It could hardly have been otherwise after a curt declaration made by the prime minister in the previous August. “We do not contemplate any revision of judicial rents,” he said—immediately, by the way, after appointing a commission to find out what it was that they ought to contemplate. “We do not think it would be honest in the first place, and we think it would be exceedingly inexpedient.”[231] He now repeated that to interfere with judicial rents because prices had fallen, would be to “lay your axe to the root of the fabric of civilised society.”[232] Before the bill was introduced, Mr. Balfour, who had gone to the Irish office on the retirement of Sir M. H. Beach in the month of March, proclaimed in language even more fervid, that it would be folly and madness to break these solemn contracts.[233]
For that matter, the bill even as it first stood was in direct contravention to all such high doctrine as this, inasmuch as it clothed a court with power to vary solemn contracts by fixing a composition for outstanding debt, and spreading the payment of it over such a time as the judge might think fit. That, however, was the least part of what finally overtook the haughty language of the month of April. In May the government accepted a proposal that the court should not only settle the sum due by an applicant for relief for outstanding debt, but should fix a reasonable rent for the rest of the term. This was the very power of variation that ministers had, as it were only the day before, so roundly denounced. But then the tenants in Ulster were beginning to growl. In June ministers withdrew the power of variation, for now it was the landlords who were growling. Then at last in July the prime minister called his party together, and told them that if the bill were not altered, Ulster would be lost to the unionist cause, and that after all he must put into the bill a general revision of judicial rents for three years. So finally, as it was put by a speaker of that time, [pg 375]
Singular Operations
you have the prime minister rejecting in April the policy which in May he accepts; rejecting in June the policy which he had accepted in May; and then in July accepting the policy which he had rejected in June, and which had been within a few weeks declared by himself and his colleagues to be inexpedient and dishonest, to be madness and folly, and to be a laying of the axe to the very root of the fabric of civilised society. The simplest recapitulation made the bitterest satire.
The law that finally emerged from these singular operations dealt, it will be observed in passing, with nothing less than the chief object of Irish industry and the chief form of Irish property. No wonder that the landlords lifted up angry voices. True, the minister the year before had laid it down that if rectification of rents should be proved necessary, the landlords ought to be compensated by the state. Of this consolatory balm it is needless to say no more was ever heard; it was only a graceful sentence in a speech, and proved to have little relation to purpose or intention. At the Kildare Street club in Dublin members moodily asked one another whether they might not just as well have had the policy of Mr. Parnell's bill adopted on College Green, as adopted at Westminster.
III
The moment had by this time once more come for testing the proposition from which Mr. Gladstone's policy had first started. The tory government had been turned out at the beginning of 1886 upon coercion, and Mr. Gladstone's government had in the summer of that year been beaten upon conciliation. “I ventured to state in 1886,” said Mr. Gladstone a year later,[234] “that we had arrived at the point where two roads met, or rather where two roads parted; one of them the road that marked the endeavour to govern Ireland according to its constitutionally expressed wishes; the other the road principally marked by ultra-constitutional measures, growing more and more pronounced in character.” Others, he said, with whom we had [pg 376] been in close alliance down to that date, considered that a third course was open, namely liberal concession, stopping short of autonomy, but upon a careful avoidance of coercion. Now it became visible that this was a mistake, and that in default of effective conciliation, coercion was the inevitable alternative. So it happened.
The government again unlocked the ancient armoury, and brought out the well-worn engines. The new Crimes bill in most particulars followed the old Act, but it contained one or two serious extensions, including a clause afterwards dropped, that gave to the crown a choice in cases of murder or certain other aggravated offences of carrying the prisoner out of his own country over to England and trying him before a Middlesex jury at the Old Bailey—a puny imitation of the heroic expedient suggested in 1769, of bringing American rebels over for trial in England under a slumbering statute of King Henry VIII. The most startling innovation of all was that the new Act was henceforth to be the permanent law of Ireland, and all its drastic provisions were to be brought into force whenever the executive government pleased.[235] This Act was not restricted as every former law of the kind had been in point of time, to meet an emergency; it was made a standing instrument of government. Criminal law and procedure is one of the most important of all the branches of civil rule, and certainly is one of the most important of all its elements. This was now in Ireland to shift up and down, to be one thing to-day and another thing to-morrow at executive discretion. Acts would be innocent or would be crimes, just as it pleased the Irish minister. Parliament did not enact that given things were criminal, but only that they should be criminal when an Irish minister should choose to say so.[236] Persons charged with them would have the benefit of a jury or would be deprived of a jury, as the Irish minister might think proper.
New Crimes Act
Mr. Parnell was in bad health and took little part, but he made more than one pulverising attack in that measured and frigid style which, in a man who knows his case at first hand, may be so much more awkward for a minister than more florid onslaughts. He discouraged obstruction, and advised his followers to select vital points and to leave others alone. This is said to have been the first Coercion bill that a majority of Irish members voting opposed.
It was at this point that the government suddenly introduced their historic proposal for closure by guillotine. They carried (June 10) a resolution that at ten o'clock on that day week the committee stage should be brought compulsorily to an end, and that any clauses remaining undisposed of should be put forthwith without amendment or debate. The most remarkable innovation upon parliamentary rule and practice since Cromwell and Colonel Pride, was introduced by Mr. Smith in a characteristic speech, well larded with phrases about duty, right, responsibility, business of the country, and efficiency of the House. These solemnising complacencies' did not hide the mortifying fact that if it had really been one of the objects of Irish members for ten years past to work a revolution in the parliament where they were forced against their will to sit, they had at least, be such a revolution good or bad, succeeded in their design.
Perhaps looking forward with prophetic eye to a day that actually arrived six years later, Mr. Gladstone, while objecting to the proposal as unjustified, threw the responsibility of it upon the government, and used none of the flaming colours of defiance. The bulk of the liberals abstained from the division. This practical accord between the two sets of leading men made the parliamentary revolution definite and finally clenched it. It was not without something of a funereal pang that members with a sense of the old traditions of the power, solemnity, and honour of the House of Commons came down on the evening of the seventeenth of June. Within a week they would be celebrating the fiftieth year of the reign of the Queen, and that night's business was the strange and unforeseen goal at which a journey of little more than the same period of time [pg 378] along the high, democratic road had brought the commonalty of the realm since 1832. Among the provisions that went into the bill without any discussion in committee were those giving to the Irish executive the power of stamping an association as unlawful; those dealing with special juries and change of the place of trial; those specifying the various important conditions attaching to proclamations, which lay at the foundation of the Act; those dealing with rules, procedure, and the limits of penalty. The report next fell under what Burke calls the accursed slider. That stage had taken three sittings, when the government moved (June 30) that it must close in four days. So much grace, however, was not needed; for after the motion had been carried the liberals withdrew from the House, and the Irishmen betook themselves to the galleries, whence they looked down upon the mechanical proceedings below.
IV
In Ireland the battle now began in earnest. The Irish minister went into it with intrepid logic. Though very different men in the deeper parts of character, Macaulay's account of Halifax would not be an ill-natured account of Mr. Balfour. “His understanding was keen, sceptical, inexhaustibly fertile in distinctions and objections, his taste refined, his sense of the ludicrous exquisite; his temper placid and forgiving, but fastidious, and by no means prone either to malevolence or to enthusiastic admiration.” His business was to show disaffected Ireland that parliament was her master. Parliament had put the weapon into his hands, and it was for him to smite his antagonists to the ground. He made no experiments in judicious mixture, hard blows and soft speech, but held steadily to force and fear. His apologists argued that after all substantial justice was done even in what seemed hard cases, and even if the spirit of law were sometimes a trifle strained. Unluckily the peasant with the blunderbuss, as he waits behind the hedge for the tyrant or the traitor, says just the same. The forces of disorder were infinitely less formidable than they had been a hundred times before. The contest was child's play compared with [pg 379]
First Guillotine Closure
the violence and confusion with which Mr. Forster or Lord Spencer had to deal. On the other hand the alliance between liberals and Irish gave to the struggle a parliamentary complexion, by which no coercion struggle had ever been marked hitherto. In the dialectic of senate and platform, Mr. Balfour displayed a strength of wrist, a rapidity, an instant readiness for combat, that took his foes by surprise, and roused in his friends a delight hardly surpassed in the politics of our day.
There was another important novelty this time. To England hitherto Irish coercion had been little more than a word of common form, used without any thought what the thing itself was like to the people coerced. Now it was different. Coercion had for once become a flaming party issue, and when that happens all the world awakes. Mr. Gladstone had proclaimed that the choice lay between conciliation and coercion. The country would have liked conciliation, but did not trust his plan. When coercion came, the two British parties rushed to their swords, and the deciding body of neutrals looked on with anxiety and concern. There has never been a more strenuously sustained contest in the history of political campaigns. No effort was spared to bring the realities of repression vividly home to the judgment and feelings of men and women of our own island. English visitors trooped over to Ireland, and brought back stories of rapacious landlords, violent police, and famishing folk cast out homeless upon the wintry roadside. Irishmen became the most welcome speakers on British platforms, and for the first time in all our history they got a hearing for their lamentable tale. To English audiences it was as new and interesting as the narrative of an African explorer or a navigator in the Pacific. Our Irish instructors even came to the curious conclusion that ordinary international estimates must be revised, and that Englishmen are in truth far more emotional than Irishmen. Ministerial speakers, on the other hand, diligently exposed inaccuracy here or over-colouring there. They appealed to the English distaste for disorder, and to the English taste for mastery, and they did not overlook the slumbering jealousy of popery [pg 380] and priestcraft. But the course of affairs was too rapid for them, the strong harsh doses to the Irish patient were too incessant. The Irish convictions in cases where the land was concerned rose to 2805, and of these rather over one-half were in cases where in England the rights of the prisoner would have been guarded by a jury. The tide of common popular feeling in this island about the right to combine, the right of public meeting, the frequent barbarities of eviction, the jarring indignities of prison treatment, flowed stronger and stronger. The general impression spread more and more widely that the Irish did not have fair play, that they were not being treated about speeches and combination and meetings as Englishmen or Scotchmen would be treated. Even in breasts that had been most incensed by the sudden reversal of policy in 1886, the feeling slowly grew that it was perhaps a pity after all that Mr. Gladstone had not been allowed to persevere on the fair-shining path of conciliation.
V
The proceedings under exceptional law would make an instructive chapter in the history of the union. Mr. Gladstone followed them vigilantly, once or twice without his usual exercise of critical faculty, but always bringing into effective light the contrast between this squalid policy and his anticipations of his own. Here we are only concerned with what affected British opinion on the new policy. One set of distressing incidents, not connected with the Crimes Act, created disgust and even horror in the country and set Mr. Gladstone on fire. A meeting of some six thousand persons assembled in a large public square at Mitchelstown in the county of Cork.[237] It was a good illustration of Mr. Gladstone's habitual strategy in public movements, that he should have boldly and promptly seized on the doings at Mitchelstown as an incident well fitted to arrest the attention of the country. “Remember Mitchelstown” became a watchword. The chairman, speaking from a carriage that did duty for a platform, opened the proceedings. Then a file of police endeavoured to force a way through the densest part of the [pg 381]
Mitchelstown
crowd for a government note-taker. Why they did not choose an easier mode of approach from the rear, or by the side; why they had not got their reporter on to the platform before the business began; and why they had not beforehand asked for accommodation as was the practice, were three points never explained. The police unable to make a way through the crowd retired to the outskirt. The meeting went on. In a few minutes a larger body of police pressed up through the thick of the throng to the platform. A violent struggle began, the police fighting their way through the crowd with batons and clubbed rifles. The crowd flung stones and struck out with sticks, and after three or four minutes the police fled to their barracks—some two hundred and fifty yards away. So far there is no material discrepancy in the various versions of this dismal story. What followed is matter of conflicting testimony. One side alleged that a furious throng rushed after the police, attacked the barrack, and half murdered a constable outside, and that the constables inside in order to save their comrade and to beat off the assailing force, opened fire from an upper window. The other side declared that no crowd followed the retreating police at all, that the assault on the barrack was a myth, and that the police fired without orders from any responsible officer, in mere blind panic and confusion. One old man was shot dead, two others were mortally wounded and died within a week.
Three days later the affray was brought before the House of Commons. Any one could see from the various reports that the conduct of the police, the resistance of the crowd, and the guilt or justification of the bloodshed, were all matters in the utmost doubt and demanding rigorous inquiry. Mr. Balfour pronounced instant and peremptory judgment. The thing had happened on the previous Friday. The official report, however rapidly prepared, could not have reached him until the morning of Sunday. His officers at the Castle had had no opportunity of testing their official report by cross-examination of the constables concerned, nor by inspection of the barrack, the line of fire, and other material elements of the case. Yet on the strength of this [pg 382] hastily drawn and unsifted report received by him from Ireland on Sunday, and without even waiting for any information that eye-witnesses in the House might have to lay before him in the course of the discussion, the Irish minister actually told parliament once for all, on the afternoon of Monday, that he was of opinion, “looking at the matter in the most impartial spirit, that the police were in no way to blame, and that no responsibility rested upon any one except upon those who convened the meeting under circumstances which they knew would lead to excitement and might lead to outrage.”[238] The country was astounded to see the most critical mind in all the House swallow an untested police report whole; to hear one of the best judges in all the country of the fallibility of human testimony, give offhand, in what was really a charge of murder, a verdict of Not Guilty, after he had read the untested evidence on one side.
The rest was all of a piece. The coroner's inquest was held in due course. The proceedings were not more happily conducted than was to be expected where each side followed the counsels of ferocious exasperation. The jury, after some seventeen days of it, returned a verdict of wilful murder against the chief police officer and five of his men. This inquisition was afterwards quashed (February 10, 1888) in the Queen's bench, on the ground that the coroner had perpetrated certain irregularities of form. Nobody has doubted that the Queen's bench was right; it seemed as if there had been a conspiracy of all the demons of human stupidity in this tragic bungle, from the first forcing of the reporter through the crowd, down to the inquest on the three slain men and onwards. The coroner's inquest having broken down, reasonable opinion demanded that some other public inquiry should be held. Even supporters of the government demanded it. If three men had been killed by the police in connection with a public meeting in England or Scotland, no home secretary would have dreamed for five minutes of resisting such a demand. Instead of a public inquiry, what the chief secretary did was to appoint a [pg 383]
Intervention From Rome
confidential departmental committee of policemen privately to examine, not whether the firing was justified by the circumstances, but how it came about that the police were so handled by their officers that a large force was put to flight by a disorderly mob. The three deaths were treated as mere accident and irrelevance. The committee was appointed to correct the discipline of the force, said the Irish minister, and in no sense to seek justification for actions which, in his opinion, required no justification.[239] Endless speeches were made in the House and out of it; members went over to Mitchelstown to measure distances, calculate angles, and fire imaginary rifles out of the barrack window; all sorts of theories of ricochet shots were invented, photographs and diagrams were taken. Some held the police to be justified, others held them to be wholly unjustified. But without a judicial inquiry, such as had been set up in the case of Belfast in 1886, all these doings were futile. The government remained stubborn. The slaughter of the three men was finally left just as if it had been the slaughter of three dogs. No other incident of Irish administration stirred deeper feelings of disgust in Ireland, or of misgiving and indignation in England.
Here was, in a word, the key to the new policy. Every act of Irish officials was to be defended. No constable could be capable of excess. No magistrate could err. No prison rule was over harsh. Every severity technically in order must be politic.
VI
Among other remarkable incidents, the Pope came to the rescue, and sent an emissary to inquire into Irish affairs. The government had lively hopes of the emissary, and while they beat the Orange drum in Ulster with one hand, with the other they stealthily twitched the sleeve of Monsignor Persico. It came to little. The Congregation at Rome were directed by the Pope to examine whether it was lawful to resort to the plan of campaign. They answered that it was contrary both to natural justice and Christian charity. The papal rescript, embodying this conclusion, was received in [pg 384] Ireland with little docility. Unwisely the cardinals had given reasons, and the reasons, instead of springing in the mystic region of faith and morals, turned upon issues of fact as to fair rents. But then the Irish tenant thought himself a far better judge of a fair rent, than all the cardinals that ever wore red hats. If he had heard of such a thing as Jansenism, he would have known that he was in his own rude way taking up a position not unlike that of the famous teachers of Port Royal two hundred and thirty years before, that the authority of the Holy See is final as to doctrine, but may make a mistake as to fact.
Mr. Parnell spoke tranquilly of “a document from a distant country,” and publicly left the matter to his catholic countrymen.[240] Forty catholic members of parliament met at the Mansion House in Dublin, and signed a document in which they flatly denied every one of the allegations and implications about fair rents, free contract, the land commission and all the rest, and roundly declared the Vatican circular to be an instrument of the unscrupulous foes both of the Holy See and of the people of Ireland. They told the Pope, that while recognising unreservedly as catholics the spiritual jurisdiction of the Holy See, they were bound solemnly to affirm that Irish catholics recognise no rights in Rome to interfere in their political affairs. A great meeting in the Phœnix Park ratified the same position by acclamation. At Cork, under the presidency of the mayor, and jealously watched by forces of horse and foot, a great gathering in a scene of indescribable excitement protested that they would never allow the rack-renters of Ireland to grind them down at the instigation of intriguers at Rome. Even in many cities in the United States the same voice was heard. The bishops knew well that the voice was strongly marked by the harsh accent of their Fenian adversaries. They issued a declaration of their own, protesting to their flocks that the rescript was confined within the spiritual sphere, and that his holiness was far from wishing to prejudice the nationalist movement. In the closing week of the year, the Pope himself judged that the time had come for him to make known [pg 385]
At Sandringham And Windsor
that the action which had been “so sadly misunderstood,” had been prompted by the desire to keep the cause in which Ireland was struggling from being weakened by the introduction of anything that could justly be brought in reproach against it.[241] The upshot of the intervention was that the action condemned by the rescript was not materially affected within the area already disturbed; but the rescript may have done something to prevent its extension elsewhere.
VII
Among the entries for 1887 there occur:—
Sandringham, Jan. 29.—A large party. We were received with the usual delicacy and kindness. Much conversation with the Prince of Wales.... Walk with ——, who charmed me much. Jan. 31.—Off by 11 a.m. to Cambridge.... Dined with the master of Trinity in hall. Went over the Newnham buildings: greatly pleased. Saw Mr. Sidgwick. Evening service at King's.... Feb. 2.—Hawarden at 5.30. Set to work on papers. Finished Greville's Journals. Feb. 3.—Wrote on Greville. Feb. 5.—Felled a chestnut. Feb. 27.—Read Lord Shaftesbury's Memoirs—an excellent discipline for me. March 5.— Dollis Hill In June (1887) Mr. Gladstone started on a political campaign in South Wales, where his reception was one of the most triumphant in all his career. Ninety-nine hundredths of the vast crowds who gave up wages for the sake of seeing him and doing him honour were strong protestants, yet he said to a correspondent, “they made this demonstration in order to secure firstly and mainly justice to catholic Ireland. It is not after all a bad country in which such things take place.” It was at Swansea that he said what he had to say about the Irish members. He had never at any time from the hour when he formed his government, set up their exclusion as a necessary condition of home rule. All that he ever bargained for was that no proposal for inclusion should be made a ground for impairing real and effective self-government. Subject to this he was ready to adjourn the matter and to leave things as they were, until experience should show the extent of the difficulty and the best way of meeting it. Provisional exclusion had been suggested by a member of great weight in the party in 1886. The new formula was provisional inclusion. This announcement restored one very distinguished adherent to Mr. Gladstone, and it appeased the clamour of the busy knot who called themselves imperial federationists. Of course it opened just as many new difficulties as it closed old ones, but both old difficulties and new fell into the background before the struggle in Ireland. June 2, 1887.—Off at 11.40. A tumultuous but interesting journey to Swansea and Singleton, where we were landed at 7.30. Half a dozen speeches on the way. A small party to dinner. 3.—A “quiet day.” Wrote draft to the associations on the road, as model. Spent the forenoon in settling plans and discussing the lines of my meditated statement to-morrow with Sir Hussey Vivian, Lord Aberdare, and Mr. Stuart Rendel. In the afternoon we went to the cliffs and the Mumbles, and I gave some hours to writing preliminary notes on a business where all depends on the manner of handling. Small party to dinner. Read Cardiff and Swansea guides. 4.—More study and notes. 12-4-½ the astonishing procession. Sixty thousand! Then spoke for near an hour. Dinner at 8, [pg 387] near an hundred, arrangements perfect. Spoke for nearly another hour; got through a most difficult business as well as I could expect. 5.—Church 11 a.m., notable sermon and H. C. (service long), again 6-½ p.m., good sermon. Wrote to Sir W. Harcourt, Mr. Morley, etc. Walked in the garden. Considered the question of a non-political address “in council”; we all decided against it. 6.—Surveys in the house, then 12-4 to Swansea for the freedom and opening the town library. I was rather jealous of a non-political affair at such a time, but could not do less than speak for thirty or thirty-five minutes for the two occasions. 4-8 to Park Farm, the beautiful vales, breezy common and the curious chambered cairn. Small dinner-party. 7.—Off at 8.15 and a hard day to London, the occasion of processions, hustles, and speeches; that at Newport in the worst atmosphere known since the Black Hole. Poor C. too was an invalid. Spoke near an hour to 3000 at Cardiff; about ¼ hour at Newport; more briefly at Gloucester and Swindon. Much enthusiasm even in the English part of the journey. Our party was reduced at Newport to the family, at Gloucester to our two selves. C. H. Terrace at 6.20. Wrote to get off the House of Commons. It has really been a “progress,” and an extraordinary one. In December 1887, under the pressing advice of his physician, though “with a great lazy reluctance,” Mr. Gladstone set his face with a family party towards Florence. He found the weather more northern than at Hawarden, but it was healthy. He was favourably impressed by all he saw of Italian society (English being cultivated to a degree that surprised him), but he did his best to observe Sir Andrew Clark's injunction that he should practise the Trappist discipline of silence, and the condition of his voice improved in consequence. He read Scartazzini's book on Dante, and found it fervid, generally judicial, and most unsparing in labour; and he was much interested in Beugnot's Chute du Paganisme. And as usual, he returned homeward as unwillingly as he had departed. During the session he fought his Irish battle with unsparing tenacity, and the most conspicuous piece of his activity out of parliament was a pilgrimage to Birmingham (November 1888). It was a great [pg 388] gathering of lieutenants and leading supporters from, every part of the country. Here is a note of mine:— On the day of the great meeting in Bingley Hall, somebody came to say that Mr. Gladstone wanted to know if I could supply him with a certain passage from a speech of Lord Hartington's. I found him in his dressing-gown, conning his notes and as lively as youth. He jumped up and pressed point after point on me, as if I had been a great public meeting. I offered to go down to the public library and hunt for the passage; he deprecated this, but off I went, and after some search unearthed the passage, and copied it out. In the evening I went to dine with him before the meeting. He had been out for a short walk to the Oratory in the afternoon to call on Cardinal Newman. He was not allowed, he told me, to see the cardinal, but he had had a long talk with Father Neville. He found that Newman was in the habit of reading with a reflector candle, but had not a good one. “So I said I had a good one, and I sent it round to him.” He was entirely disengaged in mind during dinner, ate and drank his usual quantity, and talked at his best about all manner of things. At the last moment he was telling us of John Hunter's confirmation, from his own medical observation, of Homer's remark about Dolon; a bad fellow, whose badness Homer explains by the fact that he was a brother brought up among sisters only:— αὐτὰρ δ᾽ μοῦνος ἔην μετὰ πέντε κασιγνήτῃσιν.[242] Oliver Cromwell, by the way, was an only surviving boy among seven sisters, so we cannot take either poet or surgeon for gospel. Time was up, and bore us away from Homer and Hunter. He was perfectly silent in the carriage, as I remembered Bright had been when years before I drove with him to the same hall. The sight of the vast meeting was almost appalling, from fifteen to seventeen thousand people. He spoke with great vigour and freedom; the fine passages probably heard all over; many other passages certainly not heard, but his gestures so strong and varied as to be almost as interesting as the words would have been. The speech lasted an hour and fifty minutes; and he was not at all [pg 389] exhausted when he sat down. The scene at the close was absolutely indescribable and incomparable, overwhelming like the sea. He took part in parliamentary business at the beginning of December. On December 3rd he spoke on Ireland with immense fervour and passion. He was roused violently by the chairman's attempt to rule out strong language from debate, and made a vehement passage on that point. The substance of the speech was rather thin and not new, but the delivery magnificent. The Irish minister rose to reply at 7.50, and Mr. Gladstone reluctantly made up his mind to dine in the House. A friend by his side said No, and at 8.40 hurried him down the back-stairs to a hospitable board in Carlton Gardens. He was nearly voiceless, until it was time for the rest of us to go back. A speedy meal revived him, and he was soon discoursing on O'Connell and many other persons and things, with boundless force and vivacity. A few days later he was carried off to Naples. Hereto, he told Lord Acton, “we have been induced by three circumstances. First, a warm invitation from the Dufferins to Rome; as to which, however, there are cons as well as pros for a man who like me is neither Italian nor Curial in the view of present policies. Secondly, our kind friend Mr. Stuart Rendel has actually offered to be our conductor thither and back, to perform for us the great service which you rendered us in the trip to Munich and Saint Martin. Thirdly, I have the hope that the stimulating climate of Naples, together with an abstention from speech greater than any I have before enjoyed, may act upon my ‘vocal cord,’ and partially at least restore it.”