FOOTNOTES:
[99] Croker's 'Boswell,' pp. 767, 8vo. ed.
[100] 'The Choice of Books,' p. 37.
[101] Mr Lowell's Address at the dedication of the Free Public Library, Chelsea, Massachusetts.
[102] Notes to Bacon's 'Essays.'
[103] Mr. Lowel.
Art. IX.—1. Popular Government. Four Essays. By Sir Henry Sumner Maine. Second Edition. London, 1886.
2. Democracy in America. By Alexis de Tocqueville. Translated by Henry Reeve. New Edition. London, 1862.
3. On the State of Society in France before the Revolution of 1789. Translated by Henry Reeve. Second Edition. London, 1873.
4. Correspondence and Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau W. Senior, 1834-59. London, 1872.
5. On the Government of Dependencies. By Sir George Cornewall Lewis. London, 1841.
6. On the Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion. By the Same. London, 1849.
7. A Dialogue on the best Form of Government. By the Same. London, 1863.
8. The English Constitution. By Walter Bagehot. Revised Edition. London, 1883.
Of the latest Work on the Characteristics of Democracy we are precluded from speaking, as Sir Henry Maine's valuable Essays first appeared in the pages of this Review. But we desire on the present occasion to call attention to some writers on the subject, who are almost unknown to a younger generation, or known only by occasional references made to them by those who were well acquainted with the writers and their works. And among these half-forgotten names few perhaps will recur more frequently in the recollections of the best-informed men of from forty-five to sixty, or more surprise those who have entered on life since their owners left it, than those of Alexis de Tocqueville, Nassau William Senior, and Walter Bagehot. Among the statesmen of the last generation, few who will fill so small a space in history are so often or so reverently quoted by those who remember Lord Palmerston's Government, the Crimean War, and the Indian Mutiny, as Sir George Cornewall Lewis. Most men under forty will hear with surprise that in the City, at least, he was deemed a sounder and safer financier than Mr. Gladstone; honoured as the Chancellor of the Exchequer who first redeemed the financial reputation of the Whigs from the discredit that had clung to the party of retrenchment and reform for a whole generation. Of the small minority who know him as the founder of the English school of historical sceptics, how many have heard of his multifarious literary and political works, or his shrewd, genial, two-edged, criticisms on public and social life? It seems too probable that our grandchildren will retain nothing of his save the characteristic saying, that 'life would be very tolerable but for its pleasures;' and that, probably, will be assigned to some more famous and far less wise causeur or phrasemaker, losing half its force in the transfer. Even Mill is known to the passing and the rising generation by different works and diverse characteristics. To the one he is little more than the greatest, most original, and most heretical of English economists; a standard author on logic and metaphysics. The other prefers to remember him by his later and lesser writings; those sexagenarian and posthumous Essays, in which the riper wisdom of a mind, very slow to learn the lessons of practical life, was gathered, and the wilder errors of his earlier theories modified or corrected. Much of that which is really best in his thought and teaching, set forth in these last writings, bears a close analogy to the views of Tocqueville Senior, and Bagehot, and shows that a tardy, hardly-acquired, unwillingly accepted, knowledge of men and women, of the real and ineradicable tendencies of human nature, brought the giant of the closet into nearer accord with the practical philosophy of a man like Sir George Cornewall Lewis, wise, calm, and judicial, by natural temper, wiser yet by the closet-study which had analysed the experiences of the literary, business, and political, world, of administration, Parliament, and the Cabinet.
One common and very striking feature characterizes the political thought of all these men—all of them Liberals in more than mere nominal profession or party connection. All regarded the triumph of Democracy as near and inevitable, and all, from different points of view, regarded it with a mixture of resignation and distrust, strangely significant in men of such different views, of such diverse character, mental training, and personal experience. None of them were fatalists, much less pessimists; none inclined à priori to that political superstition which recognizes, in the tendencies of a thing so uncertain and changeful as the spirit of the age, the hand of Providence, or the indication of 'manifest destiny.' All were men of more than average independence of temper, an independence which, in one or two, approached nearly to that which practical politicians call impracticability. None of them were disposed to be silent when the many-headed Cæsar had spoken. Mill's most striking, and—to the credit of Democracy be it spoken—most popular characteristic, was a stern and almost pardoxical defiance alike of personal consequences and of public opinion. On the verge of his entrance into public life he affronted the working-classes by telling them, with more than Carlylese directness and exaggeration, that they were 'mostly liars.' If ever there were a man sure to protest to the last against false doctrines and mischievous tendencies, to protest the more fiercely the more certain their victory seemed, it was John Stuart Mill.
Tocqueville, conscious of no common political and administrative capacity—a statesman whose strong popular sympathies, practical wisdom, contempt of popular catchwords, knowledge of and respect for concrete facts; above all, whose signal freedom from the characteristic weaknesses and vices of French statesmanship, rendered him the fittest of all men to direct the destiny of France, whose counsels and guidance would have saved her from all the worst mistakes and most signal disasters—was content to spend a lifetime first in opposition, afterwards in absolute exile from public life, rather than go 'the way that was not his way for an inch.' An Orleanist, an enthusiastic lover of Parliamentary institutions, he would not stoop with Guizot and Thiers to serve a King whose power was founded on corruption. A minister of the President, he held aloof as sternly from the despotism of the Empire as from the factions of the Republican Assembly. He never designed to conceal or soften the expressions of the most unpopular sentiments or convictions.
Sir George Cornewall Lewis was an eminently English statesman, fully aware of the necessity of mutual concession—more willing than most to be guided as a Minister by the tradition of his office, to leave the administration for which he must answer in Parliament to the practical experience of his permanent subordinates—but one whom, assuredly, no one ever accused of undue pliancy, or excessive deference to party or popular feeling.
Mr. Bagehot alone of the three was a man likely, cœteris paribus, to prefer the winning side; to believe that the belief of the many was likely to be right; looking, however, to the opinion of the many educated and thoughtful rather than of the many ignorant and over-occupied. Yet all agree at once in treating the coming rule of numbers almost as a law of nature, which it were folly to criticize and madness to resist; and in anticipating its advent with doubt and distrust, with deep and sometimes gloomy apprehension. Their constant, thoughtful concurrence in both convictions, their equal assurance that pure Democracy was dangerous and that it was inevitable, deserves a profound significance from their utterly distinct points of view; from the utter unlikeness of their tempers, their experience, and their natural bias.
Sir George Cornewall Lewis, as a Liberal politician, was decidedly distrustful of electoral reform, and accepted it only as a party necessity. His personal delight in the exposure of popular errors, his insistence on the value of authority, and the immense extent of the sphere in which the thought and conduct of the many are necessarily controlled by the authority of the few, the spirit of such books as his 'Essay on the Government of Dependencies' are those of a mind wholly adverse to democratic theories, and intensely mistrustful of popular judgments. He was not fascinated by what he describes as 'the splendid vision of a community bound together by the ties of fraternity, liberty, and equality, exempt from hereditary privilege, giving all things to merit, and presided over by a government in which all the national interests are faithfully represented.' He put these words into the mouth of the advocate of Democracy in his 'Dialogue on the best form of Government,' which he published shortly before his death. In this work his own views are expressed in the person of Crito.
'Even if I were to decide in favour of one of these forms, and against the two others, I should not find myself nearer the solution of the practical problem. A nation does not change the form of its government with the same facility that a man changes his coat. A nation in general only changes the form of its government by means of a violent revolution.... The history of forcible attempts to improve governments is not cheering. Looking back upon the course of revolutionary movements, and upon the character of their consequences, the practical conclusion which I draw is, that it is the part of wisdom and prudence to acquiesce in any form of government, which is tolerably well administered, and affords tolerable security to person and property. I would not, indeed, yield to apathetic despair or acquiesce in the persuasion that a merely tolerable government is incapable of improvement. I would form an individual model, suitable to the character, disposition, wants, and circumstances of the country, and I would make all exertions, whether by action or by writing, within the limits of the existing law, for ameliorating its existing condition, and bringing it nearer to the model selected for imitation; but I should consider the problem of the best form of government as purely ideal, and as unconnected with practice; and should abstain from taking a ticket in the lottery of revolution, unless there was a well-founded expectation that it would come out a prize.'
The conservatism of Lewis was that of a profoundly sceptical instinct, of practical cautious incredulity. Bagehot's was the conservatism of middle-class English thought and experience. Tocqueville's was that of wide observation and bitter disappointment. Mill was a Conservative only so far as conservatism was forced upon a mind essentially radical and even revolutionary, imbued with a profound faith in abstract principles leading far beyond universal suffrage to, if not across the verge of communism, by the danger which he foresaw to individual liberty and unfettered intellectual freedom from the ascendency of mere numbers. Upon this point he agreed closely with Tocqueville, though upon nearly every other their views were as opposite as their character and experience; and their teaching has been fully confirmed by the actual working of the most successful, the most tolerant, and the most fortunately situated democracy that the world has ever seen.
The tendency of Democracy to naked despotism is obvious enough in the recent history of France; but sanguine democrats ascribe the special experience of France to the intense centralization inherited, as Tocqueville shows, by the Republic, the Constitutional Monarchy and the Empire from the Ancien Régime; the absence of any local school of practical discussion, mutual tolerance, and co-operation; the bitterness of factions fighting not for administrative or legislative control, but for fundamentally incompatible forms of Government,—to anything rather than the unfitness of the French nation for Teutonic liberties. Conservative pessimists and democratic optimists can only find a common ground, a test which both will accept, in the experience of the United States. Whatever vices are found in American democracy must be inherent in democracy itself; and it must be granted that, looking on the surface of public life, the larger facts of national history, and the material condition of the people, there is no evidence, obvious to the hasty observer, of interference with personal freedom, of any demoralizing or weakening influence on individual character exercised by political or social equality. It is outside of the proper field of politics, in facts invisible to distant observers, and not visible at a glance to thoughtful travellers, that we must seek for proof of the bearing of democratic institutions and ideas upon personal and social liberty, upon the maintenance of individual and collective rights.
Upon such a point the remarks of a leisurely, thoughtful, cultivated writer, like Richard Grant White, a man who had enjoyed exceptional opportunities of comparing the effect upon daily life of English aristocracy and American democracy, are more instructive than the elaborate treatises of political theorists or the generalizations of historians. The testimony of such writers bears out the inference which careful students might draw from English history, that the influence of a local and landed aristocracy is far more favourable, than that even of a landed democracy, to the jealous and resolute assertion of legal rights, to a strenuous and successful resistance to the encroachments of power, social or political, upon the property, the comfort, the liberty, and the privileges, of individuals or communities. The moral of Mr. Grant White's sketches of English and American life is, that the English peasant or tradesman is far safer from practical oppression or injustice than the American farmer or citizen; that an Englishman, whatever his rank, is far more free to speak his mind, and far more likely to have a mind worth speaking, than one of the same position in France, or even in Massachusetts. The lively interest in, the diffused knowledge of, politics and public matters, found among educated, and even half-educated men and women throughout the upper and middle classes of England, evidently impressed Mr. White by the contrast it presented to the indifference of American 'Society' to State and Federal politics. He notes particularly the higher tone, the wider knowledge, the freedom from petty class and personal concerns, the broader range of thought, the familiarity with subjects of general human interest, which characterize the conversation of an English dinner-table or drawing-room, as compared with that of American clubs and parlours. He speaks, with the bitterness of a man often and deeply bored, of the limited range of American table-talk, the prominence of the 'shop,' the professional interests of each chance assemblage; the price of stocks and railway shares, and the chances and changes of Wall Street; the inferior tone of thought among men and women alike, in the best or at least the wealthiest society of New York and Philadelphia. In this he is incidentally confirmed by so observant and candid a social critic as Laurence Oliphant. There is an American society of higher cultivation and loftier interests; but that society, except in Boston, is necessarily scattered and somewhat exclusive; and, standing wholly aloof from politics, lacks the knowledge of history, of legislation, of social and economic interests, of current opinion, of foreign affairs—which is in itself a sort of liberal, if necessarily superficial, education. American ladies, and even gentlemen, hardly know who are the Senators for their State, much less who is the representative of their district; care nothing for, and know little of, the debates in Congress, still less in the State Legislature, deeply as these may affect the well-being of the community, the laws under which they and their children are to live.
But this lack of interest in public affairs has a deeper and far more reaching consequence. Everybody's business is nobody's business. In a community really democratic there are no natural leaders; none bound by rank, station, and recognized primacy, to originate resistance; none too strong to be crushed by the animosity of a Fiske or a Gould, or grievously wronged by a corrupt corporation like that of New York, a dishonest political organization like Tammany Hall, or a powerful Tramway or Railway Company. The consequence is, that not only the individual citizen, but a whole community submits to high-handed oppression, to administrative and judicial corruption, to impudent usurpation and flagrant illegalities, such as the greatest of English corporations would never dream of attempting. Perhaps the most oppressive and insolent exactions, to which living Englishmen have as yet submitted, are those of the Water Companies of London; but the offenders have repeatedly been resisted and brought to justice; and it is in London alone, the one English city which lacks natural leaders and protectors, which is too large for any citizen or body of citizens—save that great City Corporation which English Radicalism has marked for destruction—to speak and act in its name, that the Water Companies would have been endured for five years. Even in London, no such high-handed interference with the rights of property and the comfort of families, as the Elevated Railways of New York, with their uncompensated destruction of individual privacy and comfort throughout many of the wealthiest streets of the first city in the Union, would have been obviously and utterly impossible.
The tolerance of Democracy for what seem to English ideas the grossest form of oppression—oppression systematic and legal, arbitrary power and class privilege, formally embodied in the law and made a fundamental principle of government—is illustrated by that clause of the Code Napoleon, which exempts the whole bureaucracy of France from civil or criminal liability. No official can be prosecuted, no redress sought at law for the abuse of powers the most extensive, affecting every man's daily life—powers which enable their holder to harass and almost ruin individuals and communities at his pleasure—save by permission of the Council of State, a body of officials inclined of course to believe and to shield its subordinates. This law has been sustained by each successive Government that has seized the reins of centralized power; nor are we aware that any serious effort has been made to repeal it.
The tyranny of democracy is, as Mill insists, the most formidable, searching, and irresistible of all. Under an autocracy or oligarchy, public opinion is the protector of the injured, and imposes limits on arbitrary power. Assassination is the resort of the victim driven to frenzy by individual oppression, and tempers the sternest despotism; but Demos wields opinion and defies the dagger. By general confession life is far less free, individual taste, caprice or eccentricity is kept under far sharper restraint by fashion and feeling, in America than in aristocratic England. At every epoch of American history, the freedom of opinion has been curtailed at certain points within strict if ill-defined limits. The patriots of Virginia proclaimed in 1775 that any who dared 'by speech or writing to maintain' Royalist or Constitutional views should be treated as an enemy of his country. A similar ban was put some fifty years ago upon the Abolitionists of Illinois and Connecticut. A time came when it was almost equally dangerous to maintain the constitutional doctrines which the Abolitionists had assailed. Nowadays, of actual persecution there is little, because there is little need; because the repression acts, save with the most independent, original and contradictious tempers, upon thought rather than expression. No human intellect or character can resist the universal, insensible, unconscious, pressure of the atmosphere which surrounds it from the cradle. Upon certain political, social, and ethical dogmas, wherever national pride and democratic prejudice are touched, it is scarcely an exaggeration to say, that the 'unanimous opinion' of the North and West has demoralized or extinguished thought itself.
Demos is not only tyrant but Pope. He feels, and his courtiers venture openly to claim for him, not only the royalty which can do no wrong, but the infallibility which can define right and wrong themselves. He resents, we are told upon democratic authority, all pretension to special knowledge.
'No observer of American polities' (Mr. Godkin admits in his reply to Sir Henry Maine) 'can deny that, with regard to matters which can become the subject of legislation, the American voter listens with extreme impatience to anything which has the air of instruction; but the reason is to be found not in his dislike of instruction so much as his dislike in the political field of anything which savours of superiority. The passion for equality is one of the very strongest influences in American politics. This is so fully recognized now by politicians, that self-depreciation, even in the matter of knowledge, has become one of the ways of commending one's self to the multitude, which even the foremost men of both parties do not disdain. In talking on such subjects as the currency, with a view of enlightening the people, skilful orators are very careful to repudiate all pretence of knowing anything more about the matter than their hearers. The speech is made to wear as far as possible the appearance of being simply a reproduction of things with which the audience is just as familiar as the speaker. Nothing is more fatal to a stump orator than an air of superior wisdom on any subject. He has, if he means to persuade, to keep carefully, in outward seeming at all events, on the same intellectual level as those whom he is addressing. Orators of a demagogic turn, of course, push this caution to its extreme, and often affect ignorance, and boast of the smallness of the educationale opportunities enjoyed by them in their youth, and of the extreme difficulty they had in acquiring even the little they know. There is nothing, in fact, people are less willing to tolerate in a man, who seek office at their hands, than any sign that he does not consider himself as belonging to the same class as the bulk of the voters—that either birth, or fortune, or education has taken him out of sympathy with them, or caused him, in any sense, to look down on them.'
Historians treat the vote of the present generation as decisive, morally as well as practically, on the issues of the past. The people has, by chance or caprice, passed judgment upon questions, in discussing which consummate statesmen with intimate practical knowledge of their bearings profoundly differed; and that judgment concludes the controversy, determines the right or wrong, the wisdom or folly, of men like J.Q. Adams, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun. We have seen too much of this abject superstition in recent English historical essays, as well as in political polemics. It is needless to point out the debasing effect upon all discussion of such anticipatory appeal to the arbitrary decision of Pope or posterity. No man can reason vigorously, frankly, forcibly, and fully, who feels that he, or the heirs of his thought, may be forced not merely to accept defeat, but to cry 'peccavi.' The maxim 'securus judicat orbis terrarum' has no place in historical criticism; and if it had, one nation is not the world, nor the next generation a posterity on whose experience and impartiality reliance might be placed.
M. de Tocqueville is known to the world chiefly by two great works. His 'Democracy in America' was the production of his early manhood. In New England he saw democracy at its best and brightest; saw nothing of that deterioration which the decay of the old Puritan severity, the infusion of a strong foreign element, the corruption and the passions of the Civil War, have confessedly caused. The colonial traditions and principles were still in modified force; simple habits of life, a general prevalence of competence, the absence of ostentatious wealth and luxury, left women content to be mothers and housekeepers; a position of which, as trustworthy witnesses allege, modern luxury, culture, and love of leisure, have rendered them impatient; while the impossibility of devolving their domestic duties upon servants makes the family a burden, and maternity no longer the deepest instinct and strongest hope of womanhood. He saw no beginning of that manifold change of morals and manners which the survivors of an elder generation now regard with deep dismay. His portrait of Democracy, as seen in New England, is decidedly rose-coloured. He saw enough in the Middle and Southern States of the working of democracy under different social conditions, to tinge that picture with the hues of doubt, if not yet with the sombre colours of deep apprehension.
How apt to be partial is the widest and closest political observation is shown by the very partial lessons derived from the experience of the New World. Few observe how signally the history of Central and South America contradicts the inferences so confidently drawn from the United States—or rather from the New England of yesterday, and the present condition of California and the States bounded by the Lakes and the Ohio, the Mississippi and the Alleghanies. Among the States of Spanish and Portuguese speech and civilization—it would be too much to say blood—the failure of democracy has been complete, glaring, and ruinous. Social and political anarchy, utter insecurity of life and property, incessant revolution and murderous war, have been its only fruits. The happy accident of hereditary princes, exceptionally wise, able, and forbearing, has barely saved Brazil. The one prosperous, solvent, orderly State between the Rio Grande and Cape Horn is the aristocratic republic of Chili. So large, striking, and impressive a fact can hardly have escaped a thinker like Tocqueville, whose French birth and experience protected him in great measure from the insular ignorance, rather than arrogance, which leads the ablest English writers to base their political philosophy exclusively upon Anglo-Saxon experience and examples: yet it is strange to find so striking a lesson so lightly touched by the wisest, widest, most reflective, and best-informed, among the political teachers of his age.
In the Ancien Régime we see the seeds of all that is worst and most dangerous in the modern French polity: the hothouse which fostered into a growth, unknown elsewhere, that passion of envy, which Tocqueville regards as the radical vice, the paramount impulse, the fundamental principle, of Democracy. The peculiar reasons for this dominant sentiment of hatred and jealousy in the democracy of France will be found in his own writings. Much as there was to admire in the old nobility of France, the people saw it only in an aspect calculated to excite unmingled hatred and contempt. It had ceased to govern, to render any service in return for privileges, exemptions, and exactions so odious, vexatious, and oppressive that no service could atone for them. Even these were forgiven to the resident aristocracy of La Vendée. But absentees supported by such exactions, an Order known to the people not even by neglected duties and ill-directed interference, but solely by demands and extortions unconnected with any remaining or remembered functions, a class whose wealth and luxury were supported not by rents or other returns paid by the tillers of the soil to its original owners, holders, or 'lords,' but by rates, tithes, fines, heriots, monopolies (to use the nearest English equivalents) levied for their benefit, and levied in the worst possible way—what feelings could these excite among a people consciously fainting beneath the load of taxes, corvées, restrictions and imposts, fees and stamps, of which only a part ever reached the empty Treasury of the State? Is it strange that so monstrous a fabric, when those on whose living bodies it was built rose in revolt, should have fallen with a great ruin, and have crushed all whom it had sheltered? 'The guilt of an Order cannot palliate the massacre of its Innocents.' True; but human nature being what it is, the unreasoning burst of fury which strove to stamp out every trace of old institutions, to exterminate the race of the unconscious oppressors, was less strange than the fidelity of the Vendéans.
And yet that massacre is in itself suggestive. The wholesale butcheries of the Terror are accountable; even the attempt of Robespierre, St. Just, and Barère to suppress revolt and discontent by noyades and mitraitlades, if fiendish, is intelligible. It had a political aim. It satisfied a definite if diabolical desire. But the executions of veteran philosophers, of grey-haired parish-priests, of harmless nuns—the deliberate cold-blooded cruelty which punished with death the resentment, the imprudence, often the mere birth, of orphaned lads; the prayers or the tears of schoolgirls who might well hav urged the piteous plea of Sejanus' infant daughter—these recal the indiscriminate ferocity of wild beasts, the atrocities occasionally committed by destructive maniacs in an excess of fury, or the infectious frenzies of lycanthropy and similar forms of epidemic madness, rather than such human cruelty as prompted the massacre of Drogheda, the butchery of Melos, or the destruction of Carthage. What could schoolboys have done worthy of the guillotine, even in the eyes of the Jacobin Club? Girls, like children, can try the temper and patience of manhood, and among rough men or in rough times get roughly punished; but when, save in 1793, did men ever think of killing them? There was but one fault besides their birth—a fault almost inseparable from their birth—which the boy-ensigns and pages, the convent-bred demoiselles, shared with their parents; that inalienable, instinctive, inborn grace, that sense, air, and bearing of superiority, which we find acknowledged alike by the noble and the bourgeois, the von Adel and the bürger, acknowledged by those who regret or resent as distinctly as by those who would uphold it. The unpardonable sin of the noblesse, the inheritance of which they could not be deprived but with their lives, the secret sting that maddened the Jacobin to slay not merely the beardless heirs but the innocent and helpless daughters of the captured chateau, may perhaps be hinted in a question and answer like the following, between Senior and De Tocqueville, after the third Revolution had proved its impotence to efface the footmarks of nature:—
'I said that I was told that the distinction between noble and roturier existed in its full force in real life.
'"Yes," said Tocqueville, "it does, meaning by noble, gentilhomme; and it is a great misfortune, since it keeps up distinctions and animosities of caste; but it is incurable—at least, it has not been cured, or perhaps much palliated, by our sixty years of revolution. It is a sort of Freemasonry. When I talk to a gentilhomme, though we have not two ideas in common, though all his opinions, wishes, and thoughts are opposed to mine, yet I feel at once that we belong to the same family, that we speak the same language, that we understand one another. I may like a bourgeois better, but he is a stranger." I mentioned the remark to me of a very sensible Prussian, bürger himself, that it was unwise to send out as ambassador any not noble. I said it did not matter in England, where the distinction is unknown. "Yes," he replied, "unknown with you; but you may be sure that when any of our bürger ministers meets one who is von Adel, he does not negociate with him on equal terms; he is always wishing to sneak under the table."'
In these conversations, preserved in a separate series of Senior's Journals, we have the best, latest, and wisest, of De Tocqueville's thoughts; none the less valuable, and to English readers all the more intelligible and impressive, that we have them in undress; put into the terse, pithy, concentrated style of summarized oral conversation by the recorder, instead of being elaborately tricked out in all the formal grace of French literary diction by one of the most fastidious of French writers. Senior, who habitually wrote down in his Journals the conversation of the great, wise, and thoughtful—the leaders of political action or literary criticism, the statesmen and thinkers—with whom in the course of a leisurely life of social observation he was brought into intimate intercourse, had a gift of getting from each man the best he had to give. His friends knew that their table-talk was recorded, often themselves read and corrected the record, and therefore gave him what they were willing to give not to the contemporary world, but to posterity; those opinions upon the current facts of the day by which they were willing to be judged hereafter. No opinions upon the tendencies and consequences, the prospects and passions, the strength and weakness of democracy, could well be more valuable than those which the painter of Democracy in America—after the experience of many years in the public life of France, in the Representative Chamber of the Orleans Monarchy, and in the Legislature of the Republic,—delivered for the benefit of readers far removed by time and distance, during the latter months of the rickety infancy of that ill-starred Government and the first period of the Second Empire. Tocqueville spoke from a point of vantage, such as few other men have attained, upon a theme which he had studied profoundly in youth, and upon which Fate had ever since been writing elaborate commentaries. He spoke with a mind naturally calm, candid, and judicial, enriched by a deeper knowledge than any other Continental writer enjoyed of the working of popular institutions in England and America, matured by the experience of a lifetime; spoke while the most critical experiments in democratic Constitutionalism and democratic Cæsarism were being worked out before his eyes.
Founding a so-called Constitutional Monarchy upon a corruption as gross as that of Walpole, Louis Phillippe had rendered his power absolute at the price of sapping its foundation; and Tocqueville had predicted the Revolution long before accident precipitated it—predicted it as an inevitable result of the corruption he denounced, and indicated the forces of silent discontent which were sure to overthrow it. In 1848, and still more in 1871, the people of France at large turned instinctively to those natural leaders whom at all other times they had so persistently ostracized. Alarmed in the first case by an unexpected and undesired triumph of the Parisian populace—in the second, chastened by a great national disaster, without definite views or objects of their own—they deliberately trusted their interests to the larger landowners, whose interests must coincide with theirs; to the men of hereditary culture, of thoughtful habits, and wider experience, in whom they recognized a natural capacity to deal with problems that bewildered themselves, with events that had taken them utterly unawares. But, save at such times, and under the sobering influence of such lessons, equality, and not liberty, is the root of French Democracy. To equality, liberty is readily and unhesitatingly sacrificed.
'"Égalité," said Tocqueville, "is an expression of envy. It means in the real heart of every Republican, 'No one shall be better off than I am;' and while this is preferred to good government, good government is impossible. In fact, no party desires good government. The first object of the reactionary party is to keep down the Republicans; the second, if it be the second, object of each branch of that party, is to keep down the two others. The object of the Republicans is, as they admit, égalité—but as for liberty, or security, or education, or the other ends of government, no one cares for them."'
It was the passion for Equality that made the Second Empire possible. The city prolètariat would endure anything but a privilege of class, a constitutional monarchy associated in their experience with an artificial peerage and a narrow uniform franchise; the bourgeoisie, terrified by socialism—that is, confiscation—would accept any Government strong enough to put and keep down the Reds, the Anarchists, who under the Republic had kept Paris always within a week—had brought her more than once within twenty-four hours—of sack and pillage. The peasantry hated privilege and Socialism with an equal and impartial hatred. The First Empire had given them much of what they most prized in their actual condition, and was credited with all. Its one hateful association was incessant and at last disastrous war, anticipated conscriptions, and foreign invasion. The Second Empire, with its promise of peace, was the embodiment of their ideal. It promised work to the operative, opportunities of fortune to the restless, and safe investment to the prudent among the middle-class. Its protectorate of the Pope secured the clergy and the women; and it mattered nothing that, crushing under foot the freedom at once of the press and the tribune, it incurred the bitter hatred of the intellectual classes in a country where pure intellect is more ambitious and more immediately powerful than in any other. It stood firm and unshaken while it kept its promise of peace and prosperity—the firmer that it embodied so distinctly the errors and illusions of the many, and not the less popular that it showed so profound and cynical a contempt for the intelligence of the few. Its Budgets alone would have been fatal to a Government resting on and responsible to Opinion, for the rapid growth of the Debt in a time of peace and plenty would have terrified men accustomed to sift the 'capital' and 'revenue' accounts of great Companies, and to calculate the resources of Empires as a peasant the yield of his farm. But the millions were content; the worse the credit of the State, the higher the interest on their savings; the embellishment of Paris and other great public works were a practical acknowledgement of the droit au travail; and the calculations of those, who criticised the fearful waste (coulage) of such a system, proved to demonstration that a spendthrift State must come to the end of a spendthrift rentier—with what consequences the Commune of 1871 bare witness—found no attention; spoke in a tongue not understood by the people. The masses were not even alarmed by the warnings of veteran statesmen, consummate financiers, and doctrinaires of every school. Only in those great crises when all that is left to wisdom is a choice of calamities, as in 1848 and 1871, does Demos abdicate; recognize for a moment that all men are not born, much less trained to remain, free and equal, and entreat the pilots by hereditary profession to see the ship of State through the breakers.
In the criticism, and especially in the best, most thoughtful, and least obvious criticism, provoked by the long foreseen electoral settlement of last year, the direct and indirect influence of Mr. Bagehot's writings was constantly to be traced. On this subject he had looked back and looked forward farther than most political reasoners. Household suffrage seemed to him the inevitable consequence, the logical development, of the reform of 1832. It was at that point, as he considered, that the right and wrong path had diverged; that chance and destiny, rather than choice, determined at the moment the adoption of that which led necessarily and logically to sheer Democracy. The practice of the old system had become throughly vicious, but the underlying principle was sound and safe. All classes, all interests, were represented; but accident had given, not to wealth or birth, but to a particular kind of wealth, a certain set of families, an enormously disproportionate representation. The landed interest was wronged in the utterly inadequate representation of the counties. Ireland was misrepresented; and the Scotch people could not be said to be represented at all. But every class, every great interest, had its spokesmen; exercised a direct and independent influence in the national councils. Rotten or pocket boroughs were not only nurseries of professional statesmanship, but a back door through which interests, whose direct representation was impossible, found access to Parliament. The West Indian interest, the East India Company, and the statesmen trained in its service, with their special knowledge and zealous care for the welfare of our Oriental empire, could secure a hearing for views to which no English constituency would listen. Under such a system our Australian Colonies, the great Dominion of Canada, the English minority which sustains the Imperial cause in South Africa, would never have complained, as now, that their voice was unheard, their feelings unreflected, in an assembly which is no longer merely the Parliament of Great Britain, but the Senate of an Empire greater than that of Rome.
The working classes were represented through those numerous constituencies in which the scot and lot franchise prevailed. It was imperative that the abuses of the system should be redressed; that the new communities which had grown up since the Restoration should be directly represented; that the borough proprietors and the great families should be deprived of their excessive weight in Parliament; that the middle class should acquire a power more adequate to its new social and political importance; that Scotland, again, should be really and directly represented. But in Mr. Bagehot's view universal and varied representation was of more consequence than arithmetical proportion. No class, no interest, represented in the House of Commons, was likely to be grossly wronged, none could be neglected or unheard. No class intelligent enough to understand its own grievances, to have distinct ideas and desires of its own, would have failed, under a reform retaining the principle of the old system, to command attention and secure redress. Had Pitt been able to carry out his well-known and thoroughly sincere scheme of practical reform, or had Canning and his followers sided with the Whigs upon this as upon almost every other question, reform might have anticipated revolution. It was the weakness, rather than the will, of the Whigs that compelled them to go not only farther and faster, but in another direction, than their actual opinions and traditional inclinations would have carried them. They were compelled to present a scheme broad, simple, and extreme enough, to attract irresistible support.
When once uniformity of franchise and proportionate representation were made the basis of the electoral system, the extension of the former, the more and more accurate adjustment of the latter, became a mere question of time. The poorest class of householders in towns in 1886 are probably as intelligent and competent as were the ten-pounders of 1832. The masses might have been satisfied with the gradual enlargement of their old representation; having been once disfranchised by wholesale, it was certain that they would ere long demand and ultimately secure that wholesale enfranchisement, by which every other class must necessarily be swamped. Minority representation, electoral districts, and single seats, are at best lame and unsatisfactory methods of engrafting on pure democracy securities and checks, which were essential and natural parts of the old representation of classes and interests. When once every borough below a certain numerical standard had been extinguished, and all below another deprived of their second member, the upward extension of the principle became a logical and historical necessity. So again much, perhaps most, of what has been written upon the contrast between the American and English constitutions—the two great types of popular government, Parliamentary and Presidential, the direct and indirect election of the actual Executive, terms fixed by law or dependent upon Parliamentary favour—was anticipated in the best chapters of Mr. Bagehot's 'English Constitution.'
Few writers so terse, compact, and clear, have been so completely free from the temptation of deliberate phrase making as Mr. Bagehot; yet few professional phrase-makers have left in the minds of their readers so many telling, forcible, and suggestive phrases; sentences in which a novel or striking thought, an impressive view of new or old truth, a principle apt to be forgotten or imperfectly appreciated, is vivified and incarnated in a few emphatic words. It would be difficult to quote any passage of ten times the length half so suggestive of the exceptional conditions that have secured to England peace and stability during the last two centuries of storm and shipwreck, revolution, and reaction abroad, any phrase so expressive of the distinctive character of the nation and its Government, as the two aptly chosen epithets employed by Mr. Bagehot—the 'dignified parts' of the English Constitution and the 'deferential tendency' of the English people. In both instances he has, as we think, overstated his point. The dignified parts of the Constitution are more real and living, are more intimately associated with the practical work of Government, than he was disposed to allow. Popular deference is paid more to truth and less to fiction than he supposed. It is eminently characteristic of the cautious English temper, the distrust of sharp contrasts and clever paradoxes engrained in his nature, that (so far as we remember) he never adopts the familiar saying of Thiers, that a constitutional Prince règne et ne gouverne pas. But his actual conception of the English monarchy approaches far too near that misleading and mischievous fallacy.
It is a little strange that so devoted a disciple of Darwin, a writer who applied the principle of Evolution with so much skill, insight, and success, to the life of nations and the course of politics, should have allowed so little weight to the natural selection which operates so powerfully upon the character of hereditary Princes and aristocracies. It is far from obvious why so close and careful an observer should have drawn his illustrations of the working of constitutional monarchy so exclusively from the past, and especially from the examples of George III. and William IV., ignoring so completely the experience of the present reign; the deep, lasting, and for the most part wholesome, influence exercised in European politics by men like Leopold I., Prince Albert, and the present Emperor of Germany. Prince Bismarck owes to Royal favour and trust the foundation of his power, the strength which enabled him in the teeth of a short-sighted Liberal opposition to create that Prussian army, to carry out that ruthless but eminently successful policy of blood and steel, which excluded Austria from her place in the Confederation, put an end to the old dualism, and achieved the union of Germany. Italy owes everything to Cavour; but she owed Cavour to Victor Emmanuel. The selection of Russian, Austrian, and German ministers, the consistency of their policy, the power or rather authority, most judiciously used by the Crown at more than one critical period of recent English history, completely refute Mr. Bagehot's theoretical and historical doctrine that a Parliament must be wiser than an average sovereign. He forgets that a Prince is exempt from the influence of party, whose disastrous action in the great crisis of the national fortunes has been brought home of late with painful force to all thoughtful Englishmen.
Nor has he escaped that influence in his criticism of George III. It would be easy to show that the modern theory of Parliamentary Government, the theory accepted by his immediate predecessors and now firmly established, was one on which no scrupulous and conscientious Prince in the position of George III. could possibly have acted. The King found throughout the earlier years of his reign, until the younger Pitt obtained an actual potent and controlling influence in the Houses and in the closet, that the influence which secured a Parliamentary majority was not his ministers' but his own. The dismissal of the elder Pitt and Newcastle broke at once the strongest coalition of aristocratic and popular influence, the mightiest league between intellect sustained by national confidence, borough-mongering wealth, and family interest, that ever dominated the unreformed Parliament. It was in the King's power to give the control of the House to whom he would—to Chatham, Grafton, Rockingham, or North. The one thoroughly unconstitutional use of the Royal influence, with which the King can fairly be charged, was employed to defeat the most unconstitutional and indefensible measure ever brought forward by a corrupt and unprincipled coalition—the India Bill, which endeavoured to secure for Fox and North personally the power and patronage of our Oriental Empire. The King could not shift the responsibility of administration upon ministers who owed office and Parliamentary support to himself. The American war was not his work. The Stamp Act was brought in during his first illness by the minister he most hated. The Tea Duty was the madness of Townshend; and the step, which gave the signal for revolt, was really a remission of two-thirds of that duty. True that the King was the last man to agree to the disruption of the empire, the abandonment of thousands of American loyal subjects, to lower the flag of England before her coalesced European enemies; but in that perseverance, surely not unkingly, he had one enthusiastic supporter; and those who censure the King pass the same censure on the dying speech of Lord Chatham. The one fatal error of a long and conscientious reign should be laid to the account less of George III. than of those who betrayed Pitt's counsels and played upon the conscientious vagaries of a half-crazed brain.
Mr. Bagehot dwells exclusively upon the unfavourable incidents of a royal education. He overlooks the direct and indirect influences which are brought to bear from the very cradle upon an hereditary Prince—the sense of responsibility, the consciousness of a great position, the familiarity with the gravest interests, a youth passed under the tuition of the ablest masters, and above all that constant intercourse with the finest intellects of the age, which secure for a future King a moral and intellectual training unequalled in its excellence. The effect of that training we see in our own Royal family, unfortunate as they have been in the withdrawal at the most critical period of a father's control and guidance. Of the Queen's daughters it is needless to speak. Her sons are, by general admission, soldiers and sailors of more than average professional ability. The Crown Prince of Germany, the late King of Spain, the present heir of the House of France, Leopold II. of Belgium, and King Humbert of Italy, are generally credited with high ability; and more than one of them would take rank among the first statesmen of his Kingdom. A Prince of fair abilities, with such a training and such knowledge of the men with whom he is necessarily brought into contact, has every means of knowing, at least as well as Parliament, who are the most competent and most trustworthy statesmen to whom he can commit the fortunes of his Kingdom. His continuous, experience of politics, legislation, and government, his access, especially with regard to foreign affairs, to wider and more impartial sources of information, lend to his counsels an authority which no prudent or thoughtful statesman will disregard. He looks at affairs from a higher point of view, with a wider survey as a rule, and also with a calmer and more unbiassed judgment.
Mr. Bagehot dwells at length on what may be called the fictitious value of Constitutional Monarchy; and this he was evidently inclined to exaggerate. The English people, he thought, are, as a rule, too ignorant to understand what the Queen's Government really is—how completely it is carried on in the Royal name by Parliamentary Ministers. For them the law is really incarnate in the Sovereign; in yielding obedience to magistrates and policemen, to common law and Parliamentary statutes, in forbearing or resisting riot, they obey or uphold the Royal authority. Were they aware that at each general election they choose their real and effective rulers for an indefinite period, they would be confused, alarmed, and bewildered, to a degree which would render them incapable of a real and intelligent choice. The people—the lower orders—may have been, when Mr. Bagehot wrote, and probably are now, somewhat wiser and better informed as to the real character of the Government—the actual responsibility for particular measures—than their critic supposed. But it is beyond doubt that the Queen's name is a great power. The law is too mere an abstraction, the names of Ministers represent too much party feeling, excite too much antagonism, to command the prompt obedience, the loyal reverence, the enthusiastic support which is rendered to the name of the Sovereign. In France and America a very different feeling prevails.
Mr. Senior, than whom no Englishman of his day was more intimate with a number of French statesmen of different parties, views and character—than whom there was, perhaps, no cooler, closer, or more constant observer of French politics—remarks that Frenchmen are always weak and timid in upholding, daring, resolute, and even fierce in resisting the powers that be. Confidence, enthusiasm, conviction, seem in every case of insurrection and dangerous riot to be on the side of the mob. The revolution of 1848 afforded very striking examples of this contrast. The overthrow of Louis Philippe, deeply as the King himself was disliked and despised, narrow as was the electorate, unpopular as was the Ministry, was the act of a small minority. The Republic was imposed upon France by a knot of reckless journalists and semi-communistic dreamers, backed by the dreaded populace of Paris, against the will of the peasantry who formed four-fifths of the voters, and of the educated or semi-educated classes, amounting to one half of the remaining fifth. Again and again was the Provisional Government—though backed by all who had anything to lose, by all who dreaded anarchy—on the point of overthrow, and saved only by Lamartine's eloquence from the conspiracy of a few thousand desperadoes, and the stormy passions of a mob that hardly knew what it wanted. The Assembly itself was invaded and terrorized for several hours: the lives of the leaders, to whom all France looked up with reverence, were in imminent peril at the hands of a faction numerically insignificant. Only in the terrible days of June did the National Guard, after four months of distress and incessant panic, of daily and hourly fear of sack and pillage, act with energy and decision; and even then the struggle between the army, supported by the National Guard and the Anarchist faction of the barricades, was long balanced and doubtful: yet the party of order in Paris itself constituted an overwhelming majority.
In America, New England perhaps excepted, the mob and the people, the party of lawless force and law-abiding principle, meet on more equal terms. No one dreams of disputing, in the last resort, the authority of the Sovereign, but that Sovereign is invisible and inaccessible. It must be remembered, moreover, that more than one of the hundred popular risings, that the Union has seen during its hundred years' existence, were risings, not against the law, but for the law against the laxity of its administrators. This very fact makes it the more clear how uncertain and ineffective is the authority of abstract law and an impersonal Sovereign. The legal authorities, State or Federal, are not necessarily representative of the power by which they are elected. In California, after a period of anarchy, the respectable classes rose with the tacit support of the people against the State Government which the people had elected; deposed it almost without an effort, and established in its place the arbitrary rule of a self-appointed Vigilance Committee, whose members no one knew. That lawless Government hanged as many rowdies, pilferers, highway robbers and card sharpers as it thought fit; banished hundreds under penalty of death—a penalty sure to be enforced—re-established order, and laid down its power without having encountered the shadow of legal or popular resistance. We have seen an actual insurrection of the better elements of society provoked by the escape of murderers and other criminals through the hands of lax or corrupt juries, and of an administration whose use of the prerogative of mercy was imputed to partisanship or to bribery. But in a great majority of instances, riots that have reached the proportions of insurrection have been simply anarchical or rebellious. It is not so long since the railway employes of Pennsylvania, striking work upon an every-day quarrel between employer and employed, took possession of the iron highways of the State, intercepted communication, seized the great railway arsenal of Pittsburg, and fought a pitched battle against the militia, as obstinate and almost as sanguinary as the minor combats of the Civil War. While we write, another strike of the same class has suspended the traffic of the great Western railway line. In three States the militia have been called out to protect property and liberty, the rights of capital, the freedom of labour, the interest of the public, against a class insurrection; the public authorities have been forcibly resisted, and lives have been lost in a skirmish with fire-arms between the posse of the Sheriff and the insurgent Knights of Labour. Every American mob feels itself invested with something of the majesty of the sovereign people. Every body of English rioters—political, social, or simply lawless—knows and feels itself guilty of resistance to the Sovereign. The truncheon of the police, the uniform of the soldier, unquestionably represents the legal will of the Sovereign; and before that will the largest and most excited multitude gives way at once.
Mr. Bagehot overlooks the certainty which personal sovereignty gives: the absence of a moment's possible doubt on which side is that supreme arbiter, sure to be backed by nine-tenths of the physical forces of society. He underrates, if he does not altogether ignore, the much wider and deeper influence of the Royal name; its power over passion as well as over ignorance. The omnipotence of Parliament, even when, in the belief of half the nation, a Parliamentary majority represents a minority of the people, is due less to traditional respect for the House of Commons, or superstitious reverence for a majority vote, such as prevails in America, than to the fact, that resistance means rebellion, visible, unmistakable disobedience to the Queen. It is therefore deeply to be regretted, not for any sentimental reason, but for the sake of order and the protection of life and property, that the democratic changes in our Constitution are gradually undermining the habit of submission to the Queen's Majesty which still characterizes, to a great extent, the English people. The Services still feel proud to consider that they serve, in their own phrase—not the State but—'the Queen.' That sentiment of loyalty, which Mr. Bagehot ascribes to the ignorant alone, is as strong in the upper or middle as in the lower orders; has a far wider, deeper influence than he allows, than it was consistent with the whole scope of his work on the English constitution to recognize.
One of the most remarkable and interesting points in Tocqueville's conversations, as recorded by Mr. Senior, is the value which he and other interlocutors ascribe to the English Poor Law. Mr Senior had seen its essential principle, the right of subsistence, worked out farther—to extremer and more dangerous consequences—than perhaps any other political or social experiment, before the practical common sense of England interfered. Under the old Poor Law, at least in the rural districts, the income of a household was regulated by its number. Every head of a family was entitled to an allowance, increasing with its increase, and wholly independent of his earnings. Nominal wages had been actually forced down below the starvation point. The law had demoralized industry by placing the idlest ditcher on a level of comfort with the best ploughman, and threatened to swallow up property in the support of poverty. Tocqueville and his friends had seen the danger from another point of view. The most popular and most formidable of the dogmas of that Socialism, which had infected so deeply the prolétariat of Paris and other French cities, was in another and yet more insidious and destructive form the doctrine of the Poor Law. The right of subsistence was admitted by the establishment of the ateliers nationaux, and asserted by the insurgents of June, 1848, under the nobler and more dignified guise of the droit au travail. The State was bound, according to that doctrine, not to keep the idle alive, but to furnish the industrious with work suited to their skill at market rate of wages; a rate which had no right to fall below the average standard of an artizan's needs, or rather of his habits.
A principle which contradicts the laws of nature is obviously false; and the right to subsistence—if claimed not for all who do, but for all who may, exist in a given country—yet more clearly the droit au travail of which this is the practical meaning—involves the demand, that agricultural production shall keep pace with population. But, save for checks all ultimately reducible to the fear of want, checks which it is the essential object of a Poor Law to relax, population would rapidly, in any old country, overtake subsistence. That, were the population of England or France to multiply at an American rate, it would soon lack standing room, is mathematically demonstrable. A poor law then must be attended by checks on population as effective as those of Nature herself; and from their artificial character necessarily more offensive, revolting, and difficult to enforce. None the less, Englishmen familiar as Senior with the ruinous operation of the old Poor Law, Frenchmen confronted like Tocqueville by the terrible theory of the droit au travail, the alarming experience of the ateliers nationaux, were inclined to regard that admission of the right to subsistence—limited to those actually born—which is the fundamental principle of the present Poor Law, as a most valuable, if not an indispensable, guarantee of social security; a signal instance of that practical English wisdom, which refuses to push admitted principles, sound or false, to consequences undeniably logical, but practically dangerous.
It might be thought that in a Christian, and especially a Roman Catholic country, the danger of starvation could never be very practical—that men, and still more women and children, bearing in their forms and faces the stamp of actual want, of pinching hunger, would never be denied. But Senior's experiences of the Irish famine pointed to a different conclusion. Death by famine is at last rapid, sudden, and unexpected. On the road to Kenmare, from which many Irish emigrants were despatched to America, corpses were daily found with collapsed stomachs and money in their pockets. Hoping to reach the port, keeping their money to pay their passage, death had overtaken them unawares; and this in the face of organized measures of relief, the largest and most liberal that public or private charity has ever provided. In cases of prolonged and extreme distress, but for the Poor Law, hundreds would die of want almost unawares, before want had overcome their reluctance to beg. And if actual starvation were rare, yet in the absence of a recognized right to food and shelter, the fear of starvation must be ever present. This spectral horror, Tocqueville evidently thought, haunted the imagination of the French operative; and had much to do with the popularity of Socialism in a country of diffused property and general thrift, and with the ferocity of Socialistic or Red Republican insurrections. Charity, however liberal, is an uncertain and—to their credit be it spoken—to the majority of French operatives, a repulsive and degrading resource. It cannot exorcise the hideous spectre of actual famine, which, though remote, seems ever to threaten them, their wives and their children; and which in times of distress and depression looms terribly near, distinct, and horrible. No wonder that men haunted by such a spectre should be driven to gloomy envy, sullen hate, and outbreaks of ferocity worse than those provoked by actual suffering. No wonder that any schemes, however frantic and however unrighteous, should have charms for a class whose reason is disturbed by the perpetual vision of that ultimate but undeniably possible horror. We have seen in France within the last few weeks moral portents which can hardly be ascribed to any other final cause an atrocious murder committed by workmen, and, what is infinitely worse, extenuated and almost approved by responsible legislators. It is probable that the Belgian riots approach as near as any witnessed in Europe during the last two centuries to a revolt of actual want. Belgium has secured an artificial manufacturing prominence—a disproportionate trade to hard toil and low wages. The latter had lately been forced down to the minimum, as profits had been well-nigh extinguished, by the general depression of business. In fear of actual want, the populace rose, wasted farms, destroyed factories, plundered and levied blackmail—in a word, tried to inflict on others the misery that had maddened themselves. The word has been given to the most quiet and law-abiding people in Europe to defend themselves: a step far more significant of stern intentions than the sharpest military repression. Yet the Government is forced to accompany its preventive measures with an expenditure of 20s per head of the population on public works—equivalent to an English rate in aid of twenty millions! Could there be a more conclusive proof that the dread of hunger is a real and a terrible power for evil among Continental nations; that their choice lies, in a word, between a recognition of the right to subsistence—a Poor Law with severe labour tests and restrictions—and periodical, spasmodic measures of relief enforced by insurrection? Or can there be a doubt, that the latter is infinitely the more dangerous and demoralizing alternative: that only the adoption of a Poor law can prevent the lessons of 1886 from shaking the very foundations of order, property and civil government in countries situate as are France and Belgium?
It seems strange that French Democracy should not have long since insisted on laying for ever the spectre of starvation by a Poor Law more liberal than that of England. It must be remembered, however, that the democracy of France is a propertied and landed democracy, heavily burdened with taxes and interest on mortgages, pinched by necessity, and pinching itself by thrift. No class is so hard to want, so ruthless to idleness, as a peasantry which wins for itself a bare subsistence by constant toil, and provides for the future by constant self-denial.
The temper of a progressive and prosperous democracy is very different. Many, perhaps most of the American States, are without a Poor Law. Slavery dispensed with it, and the race antagonism consequent on the manner and circumstances of emancipation has rendered a thorough revision of social relations—a systematic attempt to meet the new and very exceptional conditions of Southern society in its present form—hitherto impossible. Yet, by the confession of one of their bitterest enemies, no people are so tender, so generous, so lavish of active sympathy towards the sick, the bereaved, and the unfortunate. In States which, probably from an instinct under their circumstances just and wise, refuse to recognize the right to subsistence by a legal provision for the poor, whereby the idle and vicious would chiefly benefit, nevertheless paupers by the visitation of God—the aged and infirm, the blind, the deaf, and dumb, lunatics and idiots—are amply provided by public and private charity with all that can alleviate their lot: or teach them, as far as possible, the means of self-dependence. American charity towards the victims of great natural catastrophes, far more common there than here—communities burned out by a forest fire, or ruined by a flood—and yet more the personal sacrifices made, the readiness with which men and women devote their leisure thought, and energy to the supervision of public institutions, the efficient distribution of public subscriptions, the succour and nursing of a community stricken by pestilence, are above praise. A careful study of Transatlantic examples might put our own boasted lavishness of charity to shame.
Even in England, organized private charity, wisely directed, might surely contrive to effect a discrimination between those who are paupers by vice, unthrift, and idleness, and those whom God has striken for no fault that humanity is entitled to pass judgment upon; between the fitting inmates of the workhouse, and those—helpless from age, infirmity, accident, and disease—to whom the associations of the workhouse are humiliating, painful and demoralizing. Nothing is more essential, under democratic rule, than the maintenance of due severity towards those who will not work; nothing more likely to relax that needful severity than its indiscriminate application to those who cannot.
ART. X.—1. Fourth Midlothian Campaign. Political speeches delivered, November, 1885, by the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, M.P. Edinburgh, 1886.
2. John Morley: The Irish Record of the New Chief Secretary, 1886.
3. Ireland; A Book of Light on the Irish Problem. Edited by Andrew Reid. London, 1886.
4. Home Rule. Reprint from the 'Times' correspondence, &c. 1886.
5. Social Order in Ireland. Irish Loyal and Patriotic Union. Dublin, 1886.
6. Speech of Mr. Gladstone in the House of Commons, April 8, 1886, on moving for leave to bring in a Bill to make provision for the future Government of Ireland.
The fate of the scheme for the Government of Ireland, which Mr. Gladstone disclosed in the House of Commons last week, has been practically determined. Whether the Bill be rejected on the second reading, whether amidst the currents of adverse opinion which have already set in, it slowly goes to wreck upon the shoals of Parliamentary procedure, its ultimate doom is already settled, but the mischief which has been done will not be removed so promptly. A great blow has been struck at the United Kingdom. The proposal to recognize Irish nationality as a political force apart from Great Britain—a proposal made by a Prime Minister, a leader of a great Parliamentary party—will for many a day to come stimulate in Ireland all the elements of disorder, which a noble series of statesmen, from Burke to Peel, have resolutely laboured to eradicate.
It was no surprise to the House that had listened to the marvellous dream of Mr. Gladstone, when Mr. Parnell rose to express his gratitude in terms almost of emotion:—
'It will prove a happy and fortunate thing, both for Ireland and England, that there was one man living, one English statesman living, with the great power and the extraordinary ability of the right hon. gentleman to lend his voice on behalf of poor helpless Ireland. He had devoted his great mind, his extraordinary energy to the unravelling of this question and to the construction of this Bill.... To none of the sons of Ireland—at any time has there ever been given the genius and talent of the right hon. gentleman—certainly nothing approaching to it in these days.'
The people, whom a few months ago Mr. Parnell denounced as representing to him and his friends 'imprisonment, chains and death,' now came to offer him a scheme of Irish nationality, and Shylock, recognizing the wisdom of the sham Balthazar, was not more appreciative: 'A Daniel come to judgment, yea a Daniel,' but, like Shylock, Mr. Parnell relied upon his bond. Whilst he accepted the offering with the effusion of a successful speculator, he took care to remind his hearers that he was not bound to take it in discharge of his claim. He reserved any 'definite or positive expression of opinion;' 'there were undoubtedly great faults and blots in the measure,' but he could safely say, 'whavever might be the fate of the Bill, the cause of Ireland, the cause of Irish autonomy, will enormously gain by the genius of the right hon. gentleman.' This is the solid result of the strange events which have been passing for the last three months. A distinguished public man has been called to office by the Parnellite vote. He has demanded and obtained ample time to consider the difficulties of his position and offer his solution.
A glance at the new scheme shows that the proposal is at once disingenuous and fantastic. The Prime Minister shrinks from admitting the nature of the work he is engaged in. He breaks up the unity of the Kingdom, but he will not allow that his Bill involves the repeal of the Union. But whatever quibbles may be indulged in, the main principle of the Act of Union, that Ireland should be represented at Westminster is swept away. As Irish nationality is not to be ignored, it finds expression in a Parliament in Dublin; but Ireland is to pay a contribution towards the debt and towards public defence, and in the application of this money is to have no voice. Thus we have Irish nationality started with machinery which sets aside the first principle of free governments, that there should be no taxation without representation; and the internal arrangements of the Dublin Parliament are equally suggestive of confusion in the future.
The Prime Minister does not ask Parliament to disregard the risks to which property and loyalty will be exposed in the Dublin Assembly, and he proposes to satisfy our conscience by giving them the security of representation in Dublin by a special Order. The Dublin Parliament is divided into two Orders, each of which shall have a veto on the legislation of the majority. The First Order consists of persons who must be possessors of 4000l. or an equivalent income. That is their personal qualification, and they are to be elected by occupiers rated at 25l. Property qualification for Members of Parliament was abolished in England some thirty years ago. Rating, as a qualification for electors, has been abandoned in a series of deliberate public measures from 1866 to 1885; but it is these old clothes of English Parliaments which Mr. Gladstone offers to his new nationality. Why should these expedients be adopted in Ireland? Checks upon legislative action, a second Chamber, a Second or a First Order, are questions upon which theorists are divided. They are certainly not questions which have occupied the National League. These 'Orders' in Parliamentary life are not native Irish ideas. These reproductions of quaint customs, such as we might find in some ecclesiastical synod, or in the village organization of some old Scandinavian community, are England's guarantees for the security of property in the Sister Island. That Island, we know, has been abandoned for some years to the National League, whose power was founded on their opportunities of excommunicating any one who did not subscribe to their funds and obey their decrees. The principle of the National League was that property in land was an outrage on Irish opinion; and we are asked to believe that this American-Irish organization, clothed with Parliamentary power in Dublin, will be kept in check by a device, which has no sanction in ancient tradition, in local sympathy, in recognized opinion. The First Order in the new Chamber will be so many people marked out for plunder. If any one possessing 4000l. worth of property, which he can convert into cash, is venturesome enough to accept a seat in the Chamber, what will become of him and his electors, people who are scheduled in each locality as the owners of property rated at 25l. a year? The majority of them in the South and West will be tenants who have not dared to pay their rents, because the National League prohibited the payment. Let us suppose people are found to constitute the First Order, and they veto some scheme of the majority, and a general election occurs, will the expedients which have made the League what it is be suddenly forgotten? Can we doubt that the First Order and its electors would be straightway boycotted out of existence? The Ministerial proposal is an attempt to meet the views of Mr. Parnell; and, without admitting that it is all he requires, the Irish leader cordially accepts it, but he wants, he has told us, 'the full and complete right to arrange our own affairs and make ours a nation—to secure for her, free from outside control, the right to direct her own course among the peoples of the world.' We are asked to suppose that he and his friends, started in their new career, will be stopped by such a ridiculous invention as this First Order. And it is a project like this, inconsistent with itself, implying constitutional degradation of the very people whom it is supposed to conciliate, patched up with strange curiosities as unknown in England as in Ireland, which Parliament is asked to accept as a 'final settlement' of our Irish difficulties.
The Bill proposed settles nothing. Its only result is a renewed manifestation of the power and influence of the Irish agitator. In this extraordinary state of affairs men are apt to forget the series of events which have brought about our present condition. Ministries come and go at the bidding of Mr. Parnell. English policy in the future, important schemes affecting the gravest concerns of England, of Scotland, of Ireland, depend not on any principle accepted by the British public, but on the humour of the Irish leader. The existence of the House of Lords, the legal position of the Church of Scotland, the maintenance of our most important military reserve, the right of the Sovereign in relation to peace and war, are exposed to critical divisions, not because British opinion is eager for revolution, or has become indifferent to the vast interests involved, but because the Nationalist party wish to remind us of their voting power.
Our alarm at all this should not make us lose sight of the antecedent facts which have built up this force of mischief. Mr. Gladstone is Prime Minister by the favour of the Irish party, and this party is the outcome of Mr. Gladstone's own policy. Whether the fluent rhetorician foresaw his present position, whether perched on his slender ledge of power he now enjoys it, we need not stop to consider. What we would remind our readers is that for nearly twenty years past he has, in the main line of his public life, notwithstanding some convulsive oscillations, pursued with the pertinacity of one possessed the policy of which the present Irish organization is the natural and the logical development. The National League represents the spirit to which Mr. Gladstone appealed at Southport in 1867. In the December of that year he charged the new voters, in words of solemn adjuration, to look at Ireland from the Irish point of view. This appeal had an electric effect upon the population of that island. In the years which have passed since, his own injunction has been sometimes rudely disregarded by Mr. Gladstone himself, but he never long delayed to turn again to his favourite theory, to make another effort to justify the principle with which he had started, and at each renewal of his enterprise he plunged himself and his party deeper into the morass of Hibernian disorder. Mr. Gladstone's admirers are very proud of his numerous successes in carrying important Bills through Parliament, but it is forgotten that his Irish Bills, though carried, have never attained the ends for which they were passed. Twice have all the resources of his genius, all the machinery of his party, been called into requisition to bring about a final settlement of the Irish Land question, and yet the work is still to be done. The explanation is not far to seek. Mr. Gladstone's passionate recklessness committed him in 1867 to an enterprise, the magnitude of which excited his vanity, the actual nature of which he only dimly perceived.
In the year we have named he was trying to recover his footing after a heavy fall in his first start as leader of the Liberal Party. A scheme of Parliamentary reform, carried by his political opponent, had marked the commencement of another epoch. In the new arena of public life two centres of political energy were certain to be strongly represented in the organization which Mr. Gladstone hoped to lead back to office. The Spirit of Dissent was all powerful among the English householders. The Irish tenant, whose electoral strength, directed by the Roman priesthood, had been exhibited with much effect in 1852, was sure to receive a great increase of power under the new Reform Bill. To combine these influences was one of the conditions of any prolonged tenure of office by the Liberal party. The Irish Establishment had been forsaken by English opinion in previous years. Its overthrow would be hailed with enthusiasm by the Dissenting communities, whilst the Irish priesthood would regard disestablishment with undoubted satisfaction. The condition of Irish Land Tenure was admitted by all parties to require amendment, and its settlement would be a substantial benefit to the Irish farmer.
These were subjects which naturally tempted the daring energies of a man occupying Mr. Gladstone's position in the winter of 1867. Turned out of office after the death of Lord Palmerston, his subsequent management of the reform question, as leader of the Opposition, had only increased the distrust of his party. He was without a constituency at the coming election, and he went down to Lancashire to seek in that great centre of hard-headed Englishmen the confiding constituency which he subsequently found in Midlothian. New legislation on the Irish Church, a reform in Irish Land Tenure, were subjects for which his party, for which the majority of Englishmen were pretty well prepared. The Liberal Churchmen, like Sir Roundell Palmer, who held back on the subject of Disestablishment, were more than counterbalanced by the Dissenters, who were attracted by the scheme. Popular Legislation on these subjects might have been granted to Ireland as the matured outcome of British opinion. Such a mode of approaching the work in hand did not suit the exuberant temperament of Mr. Gladstone. Whilst the report of the Clerkenwell explosion was still echoing through the land, he announced his policy as one to be recommended, not because the great British community had examined and adopted the proposed measures, but because Irish opinion was to be henceforth accepted as our guide in Irish Legislation. With characteristic recklessness he hurried to turn to the account of his own ambition the throb of excitement which he saw traversing the nation. He appealed to his audience to regard the Fenian outrages as a sort of revelation from heaven, to commune with their own hearts, not on the state of Ireland, and the remedies sensible men could offer, but on the sentiments of Irishmen. His final test of legislation was to be, not its consonance with the judgment of the British people, but with the demand of the Irish crowd.
'Ireland is at your doors. Providence has placed her there. Law and legislation have been a compact between you. You must face these obligations. You must deal with them and discharge them. As to the modes of giving effect to this principle I do not now enter upon them. I am of opinion they should be dictated, as a general rule, by that which may appear to be the mature, well-considered, and general sense of the Irish people.'—20th Dec. 1867.
At this date 'the general sense of the Irish people' was, to Mr. Gladstone's mind, the policy formulated by the Irish Episcopacy, the scheme which at a later stage of the campaign in the following year he described as the lopping off the three branches of the Upas tree of Protestant ascendancy. He failed in Lancashire, but his success in other parts of the kingdom was complete; and then ensued the abolition of the Irish Establishment and an adjustment of the land question which carried the recognition of local customs farther than Englishmen had anticipated.
The Liberal party had been charged to consult Irish opinion. As long as Cardinal Cullen and Mr. Gladstone were agreed all went merrily, even if some rude coercion like the Westmeath Act was required to deal with Irish ideas which did not find expression in the Cardinal. But whilst the English Minister and the Irish Primate declared, that Ribbonism was an impudent pretender to any representative character and must be rooted out, a third organ of opinion claimed the benefit of the Southport principle in the form of the Home Rule Association, and Mr. Gladstone at Aberdeen replied with angry scorn:
'Can any sensible man, can any rational man, suppose that, at this time of day, in this condition of the world, we are going to disintegrate the capital institutions of this country for the purpose of making ourselves ridiculous in the sight of all mankind, and crippling any power we possess for bestowing benefits, through legislation, on the country to which we belong?'—26th Sept. 1871.
The ideas expressed by the Roman hierarchy, attracted by the Disestablishment, substantially interested in the better position of the farmer, and confidently anticipating for themselves the acquisition of a power over public education such as their order enjoyed nowhere else in the world, these were ideas which Mr. Gladstone recognized as national. On the subject of education, however, he was not able to go as far as the Ultramontane party required. They directed the Irish members to vote against him. The coalition between Dissent and the Roman Hierarchy was dissolved. The Minister, who had brought it about, suddenly awoke to a sense of the evil teaching of his late allies in the government of Ireland, and 'Vaticanism' held them up to the reprobation of Protestant England.
The new Liberal discovery, the principle of Irish ideas, had broken down as a party engine. It had made the Ministry of 1868, but it had failed to preserve it. Mr. Gladstone retired from the leadership of the party to the greater freedom of an independent member of Parliament, and in this capacity led the stormy agitation against Lord Beaconsfield, making the foreign policy of England a party question.
Meanwhile the theory of the Southport speech, and the results which had attended it, were not forgotten in Ireland. The Home Rule movement, which was denounced so angrily at Aberdeen, enlisted all the resources of local sentiment, feelings similar to those which make a Lancashireman proud of Lancashire, a Scotchman delight in Scotch associations. Among its promoters were professors, poets, Irish Catholics, who were glad to show themselves on a public platform without being the puppets or the opponents of their bishops, Irish Protestants, who were irritated at the desertion of the Irish Church, a number of well-meaning people who were attracted by the opportunity of talking eloquently and vaguely about nothing in particular. This Academic scheme of Home Rule found an admirable exponent in Mr. Butt, an able lawyer of ambitious politics.
What answer were Liberals to give to this new embodiment of their great statesman's theory? They denounced Mr. Butt, pondering feebly meanwhile what it all meant; but the Home Rule organization, once set a-going, was soon permeated by the Fenian spirit. Platitudes about 'patriotism' and 'green Erin' meant to an Irish crowd, 'Down with England and with landlords.' That great hotbed of disatisfaction, Irish popular feeling, supplied stimulating nutriment to the new party. In proportion as hostility to England was more openly declared, funds came in rapidly from the Irish in America. Year by year the Home Rule members gained in parliamentary power, one section of the Liberal party after another giving them encouragement—in the first place because they were troublesome to a Tory Ministry, in the second because the flaccid thought of modern Liberalism made them welcome any organization, which would save them the trouble of facing the difficulties of Irish administration.
In 1880 the public took no heed to Lord Beaconsfield's historic warning, that danger was brewing in Ireland. The Liberal legislation of ten years before had, they tried to believe, disposed of Irish difficulties in their most serious aspect. Both before and after the General Election they were assured by Mr. Bright and Mr. Gladstone, that Irish affairs were proceeding satisfactorily. The new Ministry had, however, to face a formidable parliamentary party, who refused to recognize the legislation of 1869 and 1870 as any settlement of the Irish question. Their first device was to abandon the Act of their predecessors, passed in 1875, which applied some of the milder provisions of the Westmeath Act to the whole of Ireland. A reconstruction of the Local Government of the United Kingdom, and a new Reform Bill, were the tasks assigned by public opinion to the second Gladstone Ministry; but finding the abandonment of coercion did not conciliate the Irish party, the Premier returned with a rush to the policy of 1867. He determined to justify his claim to be the statesman who had found out the secret of Irish administration. Within two months after the Ministry was formed the public were warned that they were within measurable distance of civil war. This danger was not urged as a reason for recurring to accepted principles of government; on the contrary, it was a plea for new expeditions in pursuit of the ignis fatuus of Irish opinion. We know the events which followed.
The Compensation for Disturbance Bill seemed a small matter in itself, but involved principles fatal to all security for property. During the next autumn and winter, Ireland was abandoned to the savage dominion of the Land League. The quiescence of the Government excited remonstrance even from advanced Radicals like Mr. Leonard Courtney. That stalwart Liberal had not been then in office, had not had the experience he has since acquired. He had not yet learned the dutiful lesson that, whatever his own convictions, the probabilities were in favour of the view that his great leader was in the right, or at least, might be successful. As a concession to public opinion, a Coercion Act was passed, new fangled and hesitating. But it was not so much on effective legislation and a resolute determination to curb disorder that the Ministry relied, as on the recognition of Irish opinion which the Land Act of 1881 embodied. It was truly said of that measure by an exulting Radical, that it struck a blow at property which was felt in every country in Europe. In his main calculation, his purpose to win popularity in Ireland, Mr. Gladstone failed, as he has so often failed; and as usual the failure was due to the wickedness or perversity of some one else. In 1874 it was Pius IX. and the Jesuits who had misled his Irish friends. In 1881 the evil influence was Mr. Parnell.
In the autumn the Prime Minister startled his hearers at Leeds by a passionate complaint, that—
'a small band of men had arisen who were not ashamed to preach in Ireland the doctrine of public plunder ... now that Mr. Parnell is afraid, lest the people of England by their long continued efforts should win the hearts of the whole Irish nation, he has a new and enlarged gospel of plunder to proclaim.'
He went back with a swing to the high-handed policy he had so often denounced. Irishmen must be made to recognize Gladstone, and not Parnell, as their true friend. The Land League was dissolved by proclamation, its principal leaders, including Mr. Parnell, were clapped into jail, and it was proclaimed at Knowsley that the Cabinet were going 'to relieve the people of Ireland from the weight of a tyrannical yoke.'
These speeches, full as they were of denunciation of Mr. Parnell, were still on the lines of the Southport speech. They were not declarations of the opinion of the British community, warnings to Ireland to take account of the settled judgment of the nation, of which the sister island must always form part. They contrasted with the manly utterance of Mr. Chamberlain on this subject, the same month, at Birmingham. They were angry appeals to Ireland to quarrel with her chosen leaders. Mr. James Lowther was denounced for stating, that 'the party headed by Mr. Parnell commanded the support of the large majority of the people of Ireland.' Mr. Gladstone added, 'The proposition here made is one on which we are entirely at issue. I profoundly disbelieve it; I utterly protest against it. I believe a greater calumny on the Irish nation,... a more gross and injurious statement could not possibly be made against the Irish nation.'
In the following year it was found that the recognition of Mr. Gladstone, as the father of the Irish people was still remote; whilst Mr. Forster declared, that a stronger Coercion Bill was necessary, if life was to be protected in Ireland. Then came another plunge after the coveted ideal. Mr. Forster, who had so generously devoted himself to his party and his leader in the pursuit of a new Irish policy, was abandoned to the Irish members, and to Mr. John Morley's crusade against him in the columns of the 'Pall Mall Gazette.' Mr. Parnell was called out of jail to secure votes to the Government, and order in Ireland, by the help of Mr. Sheridan and other ex-convicts. The Phœnix Park murder, following on the Kilmainham Treaty, postponed the full carrying out of this arrangement. The sort of measure, which Mr. Forster had been refused a month before, was now passed with provisions of excessive stringency; and Lord Spencer, who had been sent to Ireland to win that popularity, which the late Chief Secretary had been unable to obtain, was chiefly occupied in curbing the violence which that Minister had denounced, in bringing to justice the criminals whom he had not been allowed to reach. We recollect that the new Viceroy was exposed to a storm of unpopularity so violent and outrageous, that the public readily forgot the discreditable folly of his original enterprise, and honoured the resolution and dignity with which he discharged the laborious duties of a thankless office.
The construction of the Irish Government at this time was such as to make the Lord Lieutenant personally responsible for the administration of justice, and the carrying out of the main provisions of the Crimes Act. He was in the Cabinet, whilst his chief Secretaries, Mr. Trevelyan and Mr. Campbell-Bannerman, were only subordinate members of the Ministry. They conducted Irish business in the House of Commons, representing in their relations with the Irish members, as far as circumstances allowed, their leader's yearning after Irish popularity, whilst Lord Spencer, the Whig Earl, who belonged to things that had been rather than to the rising power of the Radical party, bore all the odium of unpopular imprisonments or executions.
The significance of such an arrangement was not lost on the Irish crowd. By the end of 1882 the Land League was reconstructed under the name of the National League. The new organization, of which 'United Ireland' was the especial organ, gradually established branches from one end of Ireland to the other. Strong as the provisions of the Crimes Prevention Act were, no attempt was made to bring the new society under its operation. The columns of 'United Ireland,' on the other hand, bore plenty of evidence of a disposition to move on. The Irish farmers were reproachfully asked if they were content with a paltry reduction of rent. 'Had they no other account to settle with England?' The leaders reminded their followers that the Crimes Act would expire before long. They renewed with savage energy that campaign against the personnel of the Irish administration, which Mr. John Morley had so warmly espoused up to the murder of Mr. Burke. A continual storm of abuse and calumny was directed against Lord Spencer and every one else concerned with Irish government. Mr. Clifford Lloyd and Mr. Trevelyan were removed by way of warning, that there was no room in Ireland for public servants who did their duty. The National League, in fact, became in each district a conspicuous and formidable power. Their representatives in Parliament received much attention from the Prime Minister and his colleagues. They exercised great influence and had many chances before them in the new organization of the electorate. With all these advantages on the side of the Irish Revolution, the Queen's Government had nobody to champion it but the not imposing personality of Lord Spencer.
It is not surprising that in such a state of things Ireland was already, at the commencement of 1885, like a country occupied by two hostile armies. There was the National League camp with its scouts and emissaries all over the country, with a vigorous Press proclaiming its policy and success. The Government forces remained within their lines, attempting nothing, doing nothing, unless some outrage by a moonlight gang compelled them to make some show of interference to check violation of the truce between treason and loyalty. The greatest care was taken not to identify the Government with the scattered Loyalists. They might be very worthy persons, but they were the special aversion of the Nationalist party, and the business of the Government was not to protect or encourage loyalty, but to prevent Nationalism from going too fast. The Nationalist aspirations of Mr. Gladstone's friends were not to be irritated by attentions shown to their adversaries.
When Parliament reassembled in the spring of 1885, men asked what provision was made for renewing the Crimes Act, which would expire in the autumn. Week after week passed, month after month; and it was impossible to extract from the Ministry what their policy was as regards the government of Ireland. At length, in the summer, it was announced that on a day, which was never fixed, a Bill would be introduced renewing certain provisions of the expiring Act. This announcement from the Treasury Bench was followed at once by a notice from Mr. John Morley to oppose the Bill. So much time had already been lost, that it was practically impossible for any Ministry to carry a Coercion Bill against the determined opposition of the Irish members, without the most resolute effort on the part of Mr. Gladstone and his colleagues. Were they prepared to make these exertions? One of the conditions, on which the Reform question had been settled, was the definite postponement of a dissolution until after the 1st November. Each day men became more and more engrossed with the great question of the winter—the new election—more indifferent to the business of the Session; the Parnellite party more exultant and defiant. Rumours of dissensions in the Cabinet, had been already rife, and grew more frequent every day. The country awoke one morning to find that the second Gladstone Ministry, with its clear majority of over eighty, was at an end. Rather than confess their disunion, the ministry had allowed themselves to be defeated on another question, and Mr. Parnell came before his countrymen as the avenger who had chastised the suggestion of renewed coercion by destroying the Government which made it.
In this collapse of administration the only course open to the Tory party was to prepare as rapidly as possible for an appeal to the country, doing what they could meanwhile in foreign and in home affairs to mitigate the mischief which they were powerless to remedy. When the dissolution came, Mr. Gladstone opened his canvass in Midlothian by many sneers at the election policy of the Irish Nationalists. He reminded his hearers, that the subject of extending local government in Ireland must come forward in the new Parliament, and urged that, 'in dealing with this question the unity of the empire was not to be compromised or be put in jeopardy.' 'Nothing was to be done which should tend to impair,—visibly or sensibly to impair,—the unity of the Empire.' Auditors who had made no special study of Mr. Gladstone's phraseology interpreted these words as a declaration against a separate Parliament in Dublin. He apparently was prepared for large schemes of decentralization, either specially for Ireland or in connection with the projected reform of local government in England; but there was to be nothing which should 'visibly impair' the Imperial unity. He went on to dwell on the danger of 'condescending either to clamour or to fear,' and added:—
'But quite apart from the names of Whig and Tory, one thing I will say, and will endeavour to impress, and it is this, that it will be 'a vital danger to the country if at the time that the demand of Ireland for large powers of self-government is to be dealt with—it will be a vital danger to the Empire if there is not in Parliament ready to deal with that subject, ready to influence the proceedings upon that subject, a party totally independent of the Irish vote.'
Even the most enthusiastic followers of the Liberal chief have learnt to be very cautious in saying what meaning is to be attributed to his utterances, but there can be no doubt that this language was read by the public as saying, 'whatever lengths I may go in working out the principle of local government, whatever may be the understanding between the Home Rulers and the Tories, I at least will not accept the principle of an Irish Parliament.' Not only was this the natural reading of Mr. Gladstone's declarations at the election, but nearly every member of his party, who referred to this question at all, spoke in the same sense. Mr. Campbell Bannerman denounced the Parnellite demands as 'separation under one name or another,' and many other Liberals were equally emphatic, whilst a still larger number never alluded to the subject.
Well may Lord Hartington protest against the competence of the present Parliament to deal with the legislation now proposed.
'There was no thought, no warning held out to the country, that a radical reform in the relations between Great Britain and Ireland would be the main work of the present Parliament.... The country had no sufficient warning—I think I may say the country had no warning at all—that any proposals of the magnitude and vastness of those which were unfolded to us last night were to be considered in the present Parliament, much less were to form the first subject of consideration upon the meeting of this Parliament. I am perfectly aware that there exists in our Constitution no principle of the mandate. I know that the mandate of the constituencies is as unknown to our Constitution, as the distinction between fundamental laws and laws which are of an inferior sanction. But, although no principle of a mandate may exist, I maintain that there are certain limits which Parliament is bound to observe, and beyond which Parliament has morally not the right to go in its relations with the constituencies. The constituencies of Great Britain are the source of the power, at all events, of this branch of Parliament, and I maintain that in the presence of an emergency which could not have been foreseen, the House of Commons has no moral right to initiate legislation, especially upon its first meeting, of which the constituencies were not informed, and of which the constituencies might have been informed, and as to which, if they had been so informed, there is, at all events, the very greatest doubt what their decision might be.'
Over and over again in the Parliament of 1874 and of 1880 have we heard Mr. Gladstone appealing to this principle, that schemes of crucial importance ought to be discussed before the constituencies; yet the most important proposal made in Parliament for some generations is presented after a general election, in which the constituencies were invited by the Prime Minister and his colleagues to believe, that this particular question was outside the region of practical politics.
No sooner had it become apparent that the country had refused that renewal of power which Mr. Gladstone had asked for, than his resolution not to accept defeat was promptly manifested. Public men remembered his use of the Royal prerogative in 1872, to carry into execution a scheme for which he had sought and failed to obtain the consent of Parliament. He had not been a week at Hawarden after his journey from Scotland, when people became conscious that the return to office, which he had told the country would be their security against Mr. Parnell, he was now ready to seek with the aid of that leader.
It was on the 8th of December, just after the main results of the elections were settled, that Mr. Herbert Gladstone wrote from Hawarden to a casual correspondent, 'If five-sixths of the Irish people wish to have a Parliament in Dublin, for the management of their own local affairs, I say in the name of justice and wisdom, let them have it.' A few days afterwards the Press announced that the Liberal chief had, in consultation with some former colleagues, matured a scheme which embodied the points desired by Mr. Parnell. The announcement was immediately followed by a telegram from Hawarden, denying the accuracy of the scheme as sketched in the Press. On the main point, whether he was prepared to co-operate with the Home Rule Party, whether he had recovered from the fear he expressed at Edinburgh, that it would be a 'vital danger' to the Empire, if Home Rule came on for discussion 'without the presence in Parliament of a party totally independent of the Irish vote,' on these questions, with which all England was busy, Mr. Gladstone said never a word. He relied on the virtue he assumed to protect him from inconvenient questionings, and meanwhile the Nationalists were invited to reflect during the Christmas holidays, that perhaps after all their best friend was at Hawarden.
Mr. Chamberlain followed up the rumour of a settled scheme by a prompt denial that he was a party to it, and added an emphatic statement of the way in which he and his friends read the Midlothian speeches—'all sections of the party were determined that the integrity of the Empire should be a reality, and not an empty phrase.' Mr. Chamberlain had listened to his great leader too long not to be aware of the importance of marking the distinction between a 'reality' and a 'phrase.' In a few days Lord Hartington too wrote to say, that he was no party to the suggested policy.
The ultimate result of the elections left the government at Christmas only 251 votes, and the Liberals 333. Had it been clear that the Liberal party were united in a scheme, which was consistent with the current of British opinion, the solution would have been simple enough. Had the appeals for straightforward dealing, made more than once during the election by Lord Salisbury and Lord Randolph Churchill, been responded to, the Government might have made way for a Liberal Ministry, the best men on both sides recognizing, what the soundest public opinion required, that the Irish vote of 86 should be disregarded on questions affecting the existence of a Cabinet; but before the elections were all over, the divisions in the Liberal party were obvious. Mr. Gladstone had returned with more eagerness than ever to the policy of Irish ideas, whilst experience had at length opened the eyes of his ablest lieutenants.
In such a condition of affairs, the only course for Lord Salisbury's Government was to await the onset of their opponents, meanwhile applying themselves to settle that scheme of Irish policy which they as a party were prepared to champion in office or out of office. They met Parliament with an emphatic declaration to maintain the Union, and a few days afterwards announced that further legislation in defence of public order was necessary. This announcement was made on the 26th of January, when several of the Amendments in the Address were still on the paper. Before the House rose, the Government had ceased to exist. By a majority of 79, in a House of 583; a Resolution in support of a policy advocated by the Radical section of the Liberal party was carried against the Government. The motion of Mr. Jesse Collings was, it must be remembered, not a necessary assertion of a particular principle. The importance of the questions of allotments was acknowledged by the Ministry collectively and individually. It was not supposed, even by Mr. Collings himself, that the carrying of this particular Motion on the Address would advance legislation on the subject by a single day. The motion was one of those demonstrations of opinions, ordinary enough in Parliament, and generally resulting in a debate without a division or if pushed to a division, in the withdrawal from the House of all but declared partizans. On this particular occasion the motion was taken up and pressed to a division, in order that the National League was to be put down, was followed in a few hours by a vote which, in the existing constitution of parties, necessarily involved the restoration of Mr. Gladstone to power. So transparent was the object of the division that 13 Liberals voted with the Ministers, among others such staunch adherents of Liberalism as Lord Hartington and Sir Henry James.
When the new Ministry was formed, two extraordinary circumstances came to light. Lord Hartington, the heir-apparent to the Liberal Leadership, Lord Derby, Mr. Gladstone's most distinguished proselyte, Lord Selborne, and other eminent colleagues in the conduct of the Liberal party, would have nothing to do with the new scheme for the final settlement of Ireland for the third time. Another still more singular fact was soon disclosed. All the members of the new Cabinet, who had any future before them, had come in with reservations of a right of further consideration, when the subject of Irish policy should be brought up for discussion.
One remarkable ally, however, Mr. Gladstone had found in his momentous enterprise. The appointment of Mr. John Morley to the principal post in the Government of the part of the kingdom, which had fallen under the sway of such an organization as the National League, was in itself a revolution. The new Chief Secretary had no official experience, and no parliamentary position. A favoured person, who had audience of great Trades' Union gatherings, he was observed with some interest by the late Parliament, busy with speculations on the character of the new Electorate. But, if his parliamentary work had been slight, he had considerable literary reputation, and had taken an active part, in the press, in discussions on the Irish question. The apologist of Danton, the champion of the Jacobin Club, he was the one English political writer who believed himself able to find in the throes of the French Revolution valuable examples of public policy. The figures of that terrible convulsion did not attract him so much by their range of human passion, by the largeness of the space they filled in a great drama of humanity. It was their fanaticism which inspired him. Their capacity to combine, with the perpetration of atrocious crimes, an ardent apostolate of abstract ideals, had for him a vivid fascination. A gentle critic of Robespierre, he could see in the execution of Marie Antoinette traces of discriminating statesmanship. Entering on political work with such dispositions, he was early attracted to the seething cauldron of Mr. Gladstone's Irish policy. Having satisfied himself that Ireland was in a state of revolution, he regarded murder and robbery as necessary incidents. When an unfortunate lady driving in the evening along a country road was shot dead beside her husband, whose only offence was that of being a landlord, the public were lectured for the inconsequence of their indignation. On the Dublin conspirators, who were watching to murder Mr. Forster, were not lost the lessons which Mr. Morley had been preaching on the vileness of the permanent officials at the Castle. They determined to murder Mr. Burke, and in killing him slew his companion also; and Mr. Morley deprecatingly reminded his readers, that the death of Lord Frederick Cavendish was 'almost an accident.' With these professed opinions, it was easy for him to acknowledge what Mr. Gladstone might have hesitated to confess, that Mr. Parnell and the National League were the true expression of 'the general sense of the Irish people.'
The Nationalist party had long recognised the value of his aid in Parliament. They felt the truth of the saying, that he was 'Mr. Parnell in an Englishman's skin,' and consequently enjoying more freedom of action, able, on occasion, to do more service for the National League in a Parnellite Cabinet than Mr. Parnell himself. Although the principles he had laid down, strictly applied, would oblige him to say, let Ireland take care of herself and work out her own destiny, he has qualified his faith—he has never very clearly explained why—by a declaration in favour of the integrity of the Kingdom. A believer in revolution, Mr. Morley is astute enough to be ready to take what he can get. 'We do wrong,' he said, writing after the breakdown of the Kilmainham Treaty, 'in being content with nothing short of perfection and finality. If we see our way to the next step, that is enough.' 'Perfection' in Irish affairs would perhaps be that Irish opinion should be organized in a convention at Dublin, and then, tempered by a full course of revolution, should come to the conclusion, that the Union after all was the best thing for both islands. As the public are not yet prepared for trying this experiment, we are to have a succession of 'next steps.'
As a set off to Mr. Morley's want of official experience and of weight in the House of Commons, Mr. Gladstone placed the consideration he enjoyed with the Parnellite party and a disposition, composed of fanaticism and adroitness, fitting him well to co-operate in the schemes which were to follow from the wild passion of the National League in combination with the skill of the 'old Parliamentary hand.'
No sooner was the new Ministry formed than the Nationalist party recognized the greatness of their opportunity. An attitude of reserve was taken up by the Nationalist members and their Press. The Ministry had not been a week in office, when the most advanced and outspoken of the Irish leaders, Mr. John Dillon, presiding at a meeting of the National League, frankly declared 'he never felt more inclined to say nothing than to-day, the present Ministry had been formed on one question and on one question alone, and that was the rights of the Irish nation.' With Mr. Gladstone in office, the policy of the League was to apply the policy of silence so often inculcated by Mr. Parnell. Speaking out might only embarrass their new allies.
The country, up to a week ago, knew nothing of the momentous scheme on which the Ministry were engaged. One Cabinet council considered it with the result, that the collective action of the Cabinet ceased for the next fortnight; and then the only two public men of weight, whom Mr. Gladstone had induced to give his scheme the compliment of a hearing, retired from the Ministry. Our readers are now in possession of so much of the new scheme as they may be able to discern through the glamour of Mr. Gladstone's rhetoric; but the condition of affairs during the last three months is a picture to remember for all time.
When the Hawarden scheme was disclosed before Christmas, Mr. Gladstone's principal organ in the London Press declared within a week that the game was up. The public would have none of it. The return of Mr. Gladstone to office, with Mr. John Morley as Irish Secretary, suddenly revived the hopes of the 'Pall Mall Gazette.' His new start in pursuit of the Irish ideal banished the despair which had settled upon even the most reckless of his adherents. The age, the physical power of the Premier, his long public career, called up reflections which could not be disposed of in a moment by foes, still less by former allies. He claimed time, and he has taken the most important part of the Session, to mature his plans, amidst the silence of the Opposition and of his Home Rule allies.
But, if his opponents were silent, his nomination of Mr. Morley to the most important place in his Cabinet was not lost upon the motly crowd outside. All the dancing dervishes of politics rushed upon the scene to amaze a bewildered public with fantastical gyrations. 'The Empire of Liberty,' cried one, 'can never employ coercion.' Another enthusiast exclaimed, after reviewing the course of events since the Hawarden revelations, 'To call these things to mind does one's heart good. It seems as if nothing need be despaired of, as if words of hope need never be empty words.' A well-known economist tried to ease the public conscience, and to neutralize the resistance of the unfortunate Irish landlord, by a nebulous scheme for buying up the landlords' rights, but what the supply of money is to be, and who is to supply it, are questions to which the answers vary every hour. A separate Parliament is to be accompanied by a system of guarantees, and Professor Rogers declares that the surest guarantee was the hostages we have in the two millions of Irish inhabiting Great Britain; as if these unfortunate persons could be made liable to imprisonment or torture in order to secure the good conduct of Mr. Parnell's Dublin Cabinet, as if such an arrangement, if made, would have the slightest effect upon the Irish revolutionists.
But whilst Mr. Gladstone lingered, waiting to see how far the outer public could be brought into sympathy with his schemes, he did not hesitate a moment to consolidate the power of the National League. The subject of evictions for non-payment of rent was brought before the new Government in the form of a question, alleging that a particular eviction was not in strict conformity with the landlord's right. Mr. Morley offered to consider the question of right, and added that what was much wanted in Ireland was 'a strict and scrupulous and literal spirit of legality.' Later on the same evening, Mr. Dillon made a vigorous appeal to the Chief Secretary not to give the aid of armed force to carry out evictions. Mr. Morley responded with alacrity. 'I for one am not prepared to admit that we are justified in every case, in which a shadow of legal title is made out, to bring out the military force to execute decrees which, on the ground of public policy as well as that of equity, may seem inadvisable and unnecessary.' Legal right, if it is relied on in favour of the subjects of the Land League, must be interpreted in a 'scrupulous and literal spirit.' If it is acted on by the landlord, there come in considerations of public policy and of equity.
The result of a long debate was that organized resistance to the execution of the law would not be interfered with, unless the Government were satisfied that in particular circumstances equity required such interference. We have thus arrived at once at a system of official despotism. The law is not to be a guarantee of the rights of the subject, unless so far as the Minister may think fit to permit it. And this dispensing power is to be exercised in favour of the subjects of the National League.
The self-sufficiency of the Liberal party had been vigorously appealed to during the years 1883-5. Liberals tried to persuade themselves, that the comparative repose of Ireland was due to, or was likely to generate, a Conservative feeling amongst the farmer class. Their harvests were good, and they had got so much from the Land Bill, they had so much, in fact, to lose now, in comparison with their condition in former years, men argued, that they would not care to risk their well-being in pursuit of Nationalist projects, with the certainty of being subject to the village ruffians Mr. Forster had described whilst the struggle was going on, with the probability of having to share what they had with these same ruffians as soon as an Irish Parliament obtained power.
This reasoning took little account of historical experience in cases where property is suddenly given to one class by an arbitrary act. Care for what one possesses, forethought to avoid its loss, come only with habits of acquisition. The Irish farmer was confessedly careless in the past, because, it was said, providence could be of so little use to him in the then state of the law, but his prosperity under the legislation of 1881 was not the result of his own industry. It was due to a long course of agrarian outrage in Ireland and of Parliamentary outrage at Westminster. A favourite commonplace of Land Reformers is the conservatism of the French peasant, turned into a proprietor by the decrees of the Legislative Assembly of 1791. We are reminded of his industry, his self-denial, his distrust of the revolutionary spirit which rages in the towns, but we forget the date at which this sober, assiduous, conservatism made its appearance in history. The immediate result of the change made in 1791 was a savage orgie of bloodshed and outrage, nor was the wild fury, once let loose, sated by the blood of Frenchmen. It was nearly a generation before the fire of Revolution burnt itself out. The French peasantry of 1815 only came to value the land they acquired, to devote their lives to its cultivation, after twenty-three years of savage warfare had strewed the bones of their fathers and their brothers over every battlefield from Salamanca to Borodino, after Teuton and Cossack and Saxon had traversed French territory from end to end.
Nor does the work of revolution produce other effects among the backward turbulent British population, whom Irish rhetoric describes as the Irish nation. Whatever we might hope from the children or grandchildren of those farmers who profited by the change which Mr. Parnell had already brought about, to suppose that prudence and a judicious spirit of self-interest would come to them as rapidly as the reduction of their rents, was to ignore all the facts of human nature. The desire for further winnings possessed them, as the passion of a gambler. Mr. Parnell's triumphant personality was the first thought in their minds. He had already taken 20 per cent. off their rents. Next time they were confident he would take off 50 per cent. or abolish rent altogether.
The Liberals who had been dreaming complacently about the happy results of Mr. Gladstone's Irish policy awoke to find Ireland in possession of the powerful, well-organized, hostile, combination known as the National League.
To make our readers understand what this power means, we should like to be able to bring them within the closed doors of the room where the League Committee sits in the remote country village. We should then hear the report of the member, respecting the funds obtained, their review of the wealth and independence around them, within their reach, but not yet brought under tribute, the gleeful narrative of resistance subdued, the dark hints of resources for future conquest. The details of the action of the League, as avowed by their press, have been published by the Loyal and Patriotic Union, and would fill many pages of this Review.
The rapid growth of the new organization is easily understood. They had the past success of Mr. Parnell to work on, and this success was both appreciable in their balance of unpaid rent at the Bank, and stimulating to the imagination. The whole island was busy observing the execution of Mr. Parnell's behests in the re-adjustment of contracts for land. The Ministry, which had rebelled against his criticism and sprung at his throat, had been compelled to bring him out of jail supplicating for his alliance. The object of creating the new body was not so much to move forward as to keep Mr. Parnell's friends well together, to take advantage of the effect on the popular mind, which Mr. Parnell's achievements were producing in every hamlet. The practical advantages already won were an earnest of the future, secured new support, and would give greater momentum and unity to the Parnellite movement; when the time came for another attack upon property. The suspects who had been imprisoned by Mr. Forster, constituted local centres for the establishment of branches of the League. Every country public-house was a place of meeting for the branches or their agents. Once the League was organized in a particular district, the next point was to secure subscriptions. Land-grabbing, that is, becoming tenant of land from which some one else had been evicted, was the offence against which the League in the first place directed its energies, and this disregard of popular opinion was punished by social excommunication; but the system of boycotting once called into requisition involved new duties and responsibilities. If a man had not taken land himself, he might have worked for some one who had, or bought cattle from a land-grabber. The League in Kerry enjoined the following procedure on their subscribers:—
'That any person found communicating with a few obnoxious individuals in this locality will be expelled from the league. That every person presenting cattle for sale at a fair shall produce his card, and that no buyers shall purchase from any person without producing the same.
'That no individual shall sell to any dealer without presenting his card, as it is the only way to detect those employed by the Defence Unionists, and that we call on the other branches to follow this example.'—'United Ireland,' Dec. 12th, 1885.
As the power of the League became better established, the subscribers were guaranteed against the caprice of their customers by such resolutions as the following, adopted at New Ross:—
'That we hereby give final notice to Mr. Murtagh Stafford, that if he does not give back his work to the Nationalist blacksmiths, Messrs. Bowe and Busher, we cannot retain him on our league. That we inform all members of our branch that we expect them to patronize National blacksmiths, artisans, etc., if they wish to remain members.'—'New Ross Standard,' Jan. 9th, 1886.
The complicated equities, which arose under the operation of these local tribunals, are illustrated by another case reported from Wexford.
'Farrell and a man named Shee had been partners in a thrashing machine. Shee was boycotted in 1883 for having taken an evicted farm, and accordingly the machine was allowed to remain idle. Under these circumstances both agreed to dissolve partnership, and Farrell purchased Shee's share in the machine for 370l., a sum of 60l. being paid in ready cash and the remainder being secured by a bill of sale. Farrell then went to the Tullogher branch to get "absolution for the machine," but his application was refused, it being decided that Shee still had a certain interest in it. In the "New Ross Standard," on Sept. 30th, 1885, Farrell, it is reported, being desirous of appealing to the Central League in Dublin, had forwarded his statement to the Tullogher branch and declared he was now ready to verify it on oath. His request to have it sent on to the Central League was, however, refused by the local branch.'—'New Ross Standard.'
The election to local public offices soon engaged the attention of the League. The branches were not content with nominating candidates and interfering with the elections; they next assumed the direction of the proceedings of Boards of Guardians and Town Councils. At Ennis this intervention was publicly announced by resolution.
'That in every future election to any office under the board, no candidate shall be supported by the National Guardians unless he be a member of the National League for at least six months previous to the date of the election, and produces his certificate, signed by the chairman and secretary of the branch, and further, that when selecting a candidate to be put forward for election, the minority of the National guardians should be bound to act on vote with the majority present and voting.'—'Clare Journal,' Nov. 11th, 1885.
Contracts were only to be given to Members of the League. No one could be elected to a country dispensary or engaged as solicitor by any electoral body without the sanction of the League. A large portion of the struggling professional classes in the South and West were forced by a sense of self preservation to join the local associations. To remain outside the ranks of the League was to forfeit a man's best chances of getting on in life, and might any day become a personal danger. Mr. Harrington M.P., who has been for some years in charge of the Central Office of the League, tells us that 'at Meetings of the branches of the Organization discussions frequently occur upon incidents in the locality.' We can quite believe it, and are not surprised to find from the columns of 'United Ireland' what is the result of these discussions.
In a system of pillage and tyranny so elaborated, there was no necessity to perpetrate acts of violence, frequently or continually. The daily operation of the League was a standing outrage, bringing a proof of its power to every man's door. A limited number of conspicuous crimes was sufficient for the purposes of the League. Curtin was murdered in November; Finlay, in the West of Ireland, in February; and the local persecution of the families of the victims was even a more awful tribute to the sway of the popular organization.
It is not surprising that Mr. Lecky, in former years the most distinguished advocate of Irish Nationalism, in what may be called its social aspects, should say of the organ of the National League, 'United Ireland,' 'any English statesman who reads that paper, and then proposes to hand over the property and the virtual government of Ireland to the men whose ideas it represents, must be either a traitor or a fool.'
There is no occasion to dwell on the existence of this body or the character of its operations. They are part of the case of the Government. Mr. Morley has frankly told us, that we ought to pass the new Bill, because the League is so strong. If we did not, we should have to quarrel with the League, and to meet not only this great association as we knew it in its times of prosperity, but the League as supported by all the reserve forces of Mr. Egan and Mr. Ford. At present these leaders of public opinion send money; but if the National League, its staff, its secretaries, its branches, its newspapers and Members of Parliament, are not enough, they are ready to send dynamite.
One remarkable fact, however, in connection with the National League deserves special consideration, for it illustrates the singularly disastrous character of Mr. Gladstone's interposition in Irish affairs. The society, which we have endeavoured to describe, and which Mr. Morley recommends to our attention as the locum tenens of dynamite and the dagger, is now officered in nearly every village by the priests of the Roman Church. At the beginning of his career, Mr. Parnell personally was regarded by the Roman Catholic hierarchy with suspicion, if not with hostility. Mr. Butt had never succeeded in securing their hearty co-operation in his Home Rule scheme. Mr. Parnell was not only a Protestant, but expressed his contempt very freely for the adherents of the Roman Church, whilst he avowed his sympathy with Revolutionists, whom the Irish Catholic had been taught to regard as enemies of the Holy Father. We can always trace in the history of this Church two forces at work; the principle of order and authority, worldly and calculating, in sympathy with the powers that be, trusting by skill and caution to manipulate them for its own ends; and on the other hand, the wilder spirit of sacerdotal ambition ready to ride the storm and dare catastrophe. Before Mr. Gladstone's second Administration, the former influence was gaining much strength in Ireland. Even if we make allowance for the social origin of the Irish priests, filled from their infancy with the rebel sentiment of the peasantry, there are many sins that the disposition of their Church was until very recently to rely upon intrigue and organization for gaining its ends, rather than to ally itself openly with the Irish Revolution. Even after Mr. Parnell had secured the allegiance of the farmer class by his great largess in the shape of 20 per cent. reduction of rent, not only did Cardinal McCabe continue to oppose him, but Archbishop Croke evinced a desire to act on the side of Government.
Such a line of action, however, was only possible on the supposition, that government was to be maintained in Ireland; and the tenure of Ireland by Lord Spencer gave no such assurance. We know the passionate efforts which Mr. Gladstone made to exclude Archbishop Walsh from the See of Dublin. Sir George Errington was sent to Rome to get the Pope to do what Mr. Gladstone dare not do himself—bid defiance to the Irish leader. That resolute politician had a policy; the English Minister had none. A quarrel with the Nationalist party meant to the Roman Church loss of income, loss of influence—influence which, in these iconoclastic days, it might take them generations to recover; and, after all their sacrifices, they might find that Mr. Gladstone had capitulated, and had handed them and the rest of Ireland over to the National League. Their only practical course, as discreet politicians, was to throw in their lot with the great Nationalist leader, relying on the old traditions of the Irish peasant to protect clerical interests against the host of Revolutionists, who would, on Mr. Parnell's triumph, flock into Ireland from all the ends of the earth. The priests do not forget that the member for Cork denounced their co-religionists. They have no enthusiasm for a revolutionary dictator, who, whatever his opinions on religious matters, cannot be claimed as a son of the Church. Mr. Gladstone, however, left the sacerdotal power no choice but to make the best terms they could with the Irish leader, who was only too glad to secure their co-operation. Archbishop Walsh has been accepted as a sort of ecclesiastical assessor to Mr. Parnell's government, and at the last election the priests went as one man for the National League.
It is an Ireland, thus abandoned for years to the evil spirits evoked by the rhetorician of Southport—an Ireland, in which the natural springs of Conservatism have been dried up by the fever of slumbering revolution—that England is now called upon to deal with, and the remedy of the Ministry is to call into power a public opinion schooled in conspiracy and violence; for now at length Mr. Gladstone has given up the notion of intervening between Mr. Parnell and the Irish crowd. The preachers of the gospel of plunder are invited to share in the government of a part of the Kingdom.
We shall not attempt to examine further the scheme which Mr. Gladstone has foreshadowed, but which, as we write, is not yet published in detail. One characteristic, we may note, in the Prime Minister's speech was very unusual with him. It is full of admissions which seem to be due not so much to his habitual daring as to unconsciousness of their import. He is ready to buy out the landlords at a great cost to the English taxpayer, because the idea of landed property came to the Irishman in English garb, and is therefore not likely to be respected in the new system; but why should he be obliged to make special provision for the Irish judges? They are men of ability, of stainless character. They do not belong to any particular party, or race, or creed; they are members of a great profession which all civilized societies require. They have that experience of their profession which would make their services particularly useful to a community entering on a new social stage; but the mere fact, that they have been engaged in applying the law, makes their position dangerous, and Mr. Gladstone is obliged to ask England to provide that they shall not suffer in purse from the opening of the new era which he proposes in that part of the United Kingdom where he has undertaken to reconstruct society.
For the moment Mr. Morley prefers the rôle of Siéyes rather than of Danton, but the outcome of the legislation, proposed by the Ministry with the assent of Mr. Parnell, must be to advance, if not to consummate, the theory of Irish Independence. We thus arrive at that result which Mr. Morley, on his own principles, would find it difficult to refuse assent to. He has told us that his policy is to be 'thorough.' A separate Irish nationality or reconquest must be the ultimate consequence of any substitution of local institutions in Ireland for the Parliament at Westminster, unless so far as the proposed substitution were part of a scheme common to all four components of the kingdom. Most people will agree with the old Duke of Wellington, that 'the repeal of the Union must be the dissolution of the connection between the two countries.'
To withdraw the English flag from Ireland as we did from the Ionian Isles, to have a Convention called at Dublin to determine the future government of the Island, such a plan would have the advantage that it recognizes the one political opinion, which we can trace in Irish popular expression—the desire to be done with England. It is true, that the policy of Irish ideas declared at Southport was a means to an end—the better union of the two countries—but pledged to two antagonistic principles, Mr. Gladstone must some time choose which he will abandon.
On the other hand, in accepting Irish independence we shrink from responsibility for the acts of England. We know that the disorder now ruling in Ireland is, to some extent, the result of English misgovernment in past generations, and instead of attempting by firmness and patience to remedy the mischief our fathers have done, we leave the future to Providence. In this aspect of the question, we would remind our readers of the words used in our article on 'Disintegration' not three years ago:—
'The highest interests of the Empire, as well as the most sacred obligations of honour, forbid us to solve this question by conceding any species of independence to Ireland; or, in other words, any licence to the majority in that country to govern the rest of Irishmen as they please. To the minority, to those who have trusted us, and on the faith of our protection have done our work, it would be a sentence of exile or of ruin. All that is Protestant—nay, all that is loyal—all who have land or money to lose, all by whose enterprize and capital industry and commerce are still sustained, would be at the mercy of the adventurers who have led the Land League, if not of the darker counsellors by whom the Invincibles have been inspired. If we have failed after centuries of effort to make Ireland peaceable and civilized, we have no moral right to abandon our post and leave all the penalty of our failure to those whom we have persuaded to trust in our power. It would be an act of political bankruptcy, an avowal that we were unable to satisfy even the most sacred obligations, and that all claims to protect or govern any one beyond our own narrow island were at an end.'—'Quarterly Review,' October, 1883, pp. 593, 594.
Mr. Gladstone assured his hearers last week, that he was bent on consolidating the unity of the kingdom; he would not tolerate that his new constitution should be called a repeal of the Union; but his final argument was this, 'Do not let us disguise this from ourselves. We stand face to face with what is termed "Irish nationality."' Now, what is this 'Irish nationality'? Let us examine it from the point of view of the welfare of the Irish population. It may be conceded at once that there is a strong current of local sentiment running through the Irish population of the south and west. This is a tender, home feeling—a very different thing from the stronger, more complex, and more highly developed, conception round which a political nationality gathers. It is such a sentiment as exists in one form or another in every group of counties, in every county, in every country-side, in almost every village. It is a kindly recollection of old memories, associated with a disposition to stand up for our own. It is the result of intimate knowledge of certain habits and ideas, and a tender reminiscence of the best types of character associated with those habits. This sentiment of local feeling is the germ of nationality, but it exists in many regions where the wider ideas of nationality have never supervened. There are many other places again, where this same feeling remains fresh and vigorous after the political nationality connected with it has passed away, merged in larger conceptions, in a sense of more extended interests.
Such was the feeling of Cicero when he said that he had two countries. His Volscian home was the country of his affection, but Rome that of duty and right. Arpinum will always be my country, said he, but Rome still more my country, for Arpinum has its share in the honours and dominion of Rome.
Such is the feeling of the proud and vigorous nationality occupying North Britain, various in race, in creed, and in social condition, but united in mutual knowledge, in local sympathies, and in self-respect. The Scotch, as an aggregate, are intellectually, physically, and in their local institutions and habits one of the most distinct national types existing. They are drawn together by a strong sentiment of patriotism, but they are as little likely to demand a separate political system, a parliament sitting at Edinburgh, as the members from Hampshire and Wiltshire are likely to combine for the establishment of parliamentary government on the banks of the Itchin.
Now what is Ireland, and what indications has that portion of the population known as Nationalist given of a capacity to form itself into a nation? Ireland has a geographical boundary in a sea channel crossed from Great Britain in three hours or in an hour and a-half, according to the line of passage selected. It is inhabited by some five millions, whose native language is English, with the exception of a decimal percentage of mountaineers, who nearly all speak English as well as Irish. The race is more mixed than in any other district of the kingdom containing the same amount of population. The northern coasts are thickly peopled by Scotch settlers. In the south and west are many varieties of race not of English introduction, but strongly different from each other. In many of the most Catholic districts of Munster and Leinster we find, in the names, physique, and temper, of the people, evident results of the Cromwellian settlements, although the faith and political principles of their forefathers have passed away. With this mixed population we have a social cleavage probably the most remarkable in Europe. The mass of the people, except in about one-fifth of the island on the north-east coast, are Roman Catholic, Celtic in their traditions and habits, and extremely poor. The Northern fifth is industrious, order-loving, prosperous, Protestant, and British in sentiment. Next to the masses of the population in importance are the great landowners, of whom six-sevenths are Protestants, and nearly the whole of Norman, Scotch, or English origin. There is no important mercantile class, except in the towns of Belfast, Dublin, and Cork; and the professional classes, with the exception of the Catholic priesthood, are chiefly Protestant and British.
This population, so strangely wanting in homogeneity, have no history which might attract them into unconsciousness of their differences. It has been well said, that 'anybody who knew nothing of the Irish past, except what he got from the speeches of Irish Nationalists, would suppose that at some comparatively recent period the green flag had floated over fleets and armies, and that Irish kings had played a part of some kind in the field of modern European politics.' But as a matter of fact Ireland has no part in European history before its conquest by England. Not only was the kingdom of Ireland, as the style of the island went before 1800, an English creation; but the name of Ireland has never had any political significance except in connection with the English crown.
External signs of difference between English and Irish there are many; nimble apprehension, fluent utterance, genial demeanour, the attraction of the flashing Celtic face, distinguish an Irish from an English group, but characteristics like this do not prove any original or consistent power of thought. They rather perhaps indicate the absence of it. It is not on qualities like these, cemented even by strong feelings of home sentiment, that we can expect to see the foundation of a new Nationality happily laid. With one exception there is not a single idea, which an orator could present to an Irish crowd, that could not be urged with equal chance of sympathy upon an English crowd. Personal liberty, the principles of no taxation without representation, of trial by jury, freedom of conscience, sympathy with the prosperity of the greatest number, all these are English ideas and must be illustrated, where they need illustration, by the events of history peculiar to England or common to the British dominion. The one topic, which is specially attractive to an Irish meeting, is abuse of England as the source of Irish misery. Community of hatred the mixed Nationalist population has, but whether such a passion is sufficiently creative to build up a new national type the reader can judge for himself. With this exception, laws, political teachings, commercial habits, are all of English origin.
Mr. Gladstone, in recommending to the House of Commons his scheme for the establishment of an independent Parliament in Ireland, cited as precedents the independent Legislatures of Sweden and Norway, and of Austria and Hungary. He dwelt particularly upon the precedent of Norway:—
'The Legislature of Norway has had serious controversies, not with Sweden, but with the King of Sweden, and it has fought out those controversies successfully upon the strictest constitutional and Parliamentary grounds. And yet with two countries so united, what has been the effect? Not discord, not convulsion, not danger to peace, not hatred, not aversion, but a constantly-growing sympathy; and every man who knows their condition knows that I speak the truth when I say, that in every year that passes the Norwegians and the Swedes are more and more feeling themselves to be the children of a common country, united by a tie which never is to be broken.'
If Mr. Gladstone had been better acquainted with the recent historic and economic condition of Norway, of which we have given some account in our present number,[104] he might have quoted that country as a warning rather than an example. The 'Storthing,' or Parliament of Norway, is omnipotent, and two-thirds of its representatives are permanently in the hands of the peasant proprietor. The King has only a suspensive veto on Bills enacted by the Storthing, which therefore become law, if passed in their original form by three successive triennial Parliaments. The recent dispute between the King and the Parliament, to which Mr. Gladstone alluded, related to the right of the King to exercise an absolute veto in the case of Bills affecting the principles of the Constitution. The existence of such a right was denied by the Radical majority in the Storthing, which established in 1884 a Supreme Court of Justice composed exclusively of Radical members, and the Judges of the ordinary High Court of Justice. It was a packed Court, bound to secrecy; and the tribunal thus constituted condemned, in violation of the first principles of justice, all the King's Ministers in Norway to deprivation of office and to pecuniary fines, for having advised their master, that the Constitution could not be altered without his sanction. The King was compelled to yield, though he was supported in his opposition to the Storthing by his Swedish Cabinet; and his ultimate submission to the Radical majority in Norway was followed by a Ministerial crisis in Sweden. The Swedes rightly argue that, if the King has no absolute veto on matters affecting the principles of the Constitution in Norway, there is no obstacle to an abolition of the Monarchical form of government in that kingdom, or to a repeal of the union between the two countries. There is in consequence much discontent in Sweden at the conduct of Norway; and the Norwegians, on their side, have an intense and ever-growing 'hatred and aversion' to the Swedes. Hence has arisen a considerable tension in the official relations between the two countries instead of the 'constantly growing sympathy' of which Mr. Gladstone spoke. It is characteristic of the Prime Minister's mode of stating a case, that he tells us the Norwegian controversies are 'not with Sweden but with the King of Sweden.' Sweden has nothing to say in Norwegian affairs, except in the person of the King. The King is the only connecting link between the two countries. If the Dublin Parliament should impeach the Irish Viceroy, we suppose Mr. Gladstone would tell us that the difficulty was not with England but with Queen Victoria.
Nor was Mr. Gladstone much happier in his allusion to Hungarian Nationality in recent times. For more than 150 years Austria endeavoured to extinguish the national life of Hungary. In 1867 this policy was definitely abandoned, and Hungary was called to a share in the Empire of the Hapsburgs. As recently as last October Mr. Parnell, when insisting that Ireland must have an independent Parliament, said: 'We can point to the example of other countries—to Austria and to Hungary—to the fact that Hungary, having been conceded self-government, became one of the strongest factors in the Austrian Empire.' The favour, with which these references have been received by the Liberal party, is a singular example how far afield they are ready to go in search of an argument. Austria, in 1867, was a great military despotism, tottering to its fall amidst a group of eager rivals. A general appeal to the nation, such as France made at the commencement of the Revolutionary war, was out of the question. Differences of race, differences of language, differences of social condition, made national unity impossible within the wide dominions of the House of Austria. The government at Vienna consented to the division of its territories into groups of nearly equal strength. In each of these groups various alien nationalities were clustered round a central power more advanced in politics, in civilization, and in wealth, than the adjacent territories. Instead of trying to weld their multiple varieties of race into one great popular community, Austria, smitten at Sadowa, shared her dominion with Hungary, and asked her to take charge of the Government of the East Leithan Slavs, whilst the German population of Austria dealt with the Czechs and Moravians and Carinthians on the western side of the river.
Sir Henry Elliott has well pointed out, that what success the experiment has had is in no small degree due to the large powers still enjoyed by the Crown, and to the personal character and influence of the Emperor Francis, the connecting link between the two dominions; but apart from this actual result, the feasibility of the dual scheme depended on the following considerations. In the first place, there was no alternative in the condition in which the House of Austria found itself in 1867, defeated in battle and bankrupt in finance. Without some such arrangement civil war was inevitable, with the ultimate prospect of the absorption of the various races by the hostile neighbouring Powers. In the second place, the allies were pretty nearly equal in strength as regards each other, whilst they were each similarly weighted by the difficulty of holding their own within the respective territories assigned them. They were each so busy with their subordinate territories and the less advanced populations inhabiting them, that it was not their interest or their inclination to bring about conflicts with each other. Hungary boasts a larger area than Austria, and a population equal to three-fourths that of the Western Monarchy. On the western side of the Leitha the dominant race, dominant by force of nature, by brain power, and the traditions and acquirements this power has given them, are 36 per cent. of the whole population. In the Transleithan provinces the race similarly situated, the Magyar, constitutes about 40 per cent. of the whole population.
There is not a single circumstance in the relations between England and Ireland to make reference to the creation of the Empire-Kingdom anything but an absurdity. Ireland never can compare with Great Britain in material resources. Her population is hardly one-sixth that of the larger island, whilst her area is little more than a third. She is deficient in climate, in soil, in mineral resources, and in population. Not only is she without a well-organized aristocracy skilled in political science, such as Hungary boasted; Ireland, as the term is understood by the National League, is without an educated class. Her intellect is represented by the moonlight maurauder and the fanatic priest. As regards England, the parallel is still more preposterous: She is not a military despotism, but a well-organized community, boasting parliamentary traditions of a thousand years. Her shores are guarded by sea from foreign interference. Notwithstanding many scandalous shortcomings in her rulers, her influence and her power are still unrivalled in the world. However long Mr. Gladstone may rule, her Sadowa is yet to come; and, if it did come, the example of the Dual State would offer no solution of our Irish difficulties, for none of the conditions which made the Dual State possible exist in the case of the two chief British Islands.
The delusive character of Mr. Gladstone's reference to the Dual State is best illustrated by the facts, that the council for common affairs consist of an equal number of representatives from each side of the dominion, that this council is concerned with military and foreign affairs, two subjects on which, according to the new scheme, Ireland is to have no vote.
It will be found, on a little examination, that appeals to the example of the foreigner are as misleading as the theory of nationality. All such arguments are only endeavours to divert the public from the exercise of their own judgment and common-sense in dealing with the mischiefs which the perverse genius of Mr. Gladstone has created. Recognized principles of government, the ordinary traditions of England applied with the happy immunity from friction, which the commercial policy of modern times makes possible, would have long since settled the difficulty, but it would have been settled in disregard of that popular Irish feeling which, in 1867, Mr. Gladstone pledged himself to follow. He would have had to admit that his new Irish policy was a mistake; and he never admits that he has made any mistake—unless it be in Egypt—or in acting on the opinion of other people. When he has discovered a new line of policy, he believes himself infallible. Let us assume for a moment, that the combination of the personal adherents of Mr. Gladstone and of Mr. Parnell enables the Prime Minister to pass some measure on the lines he has selected, or on those laid down by Mr. Davitt, and that the rowdy treason of a Dublin Cabinet proceeds to bring within the sphere of its operations what wealth and civilization has hitherto escaped the National League.
In the struggle which must ensue, we shall have within three hours of our shores a raging volcano of revolution, threatening the peace of Europe and our own. Fenians, Nihilists, and Irish Yankees, will flock to the new vantage ground. The conflict between Socialism and property, between infidelity and superstition, will be fought out amidst the strangest complications of local hatred and of fiscal disorder. If foreign governments abstain from interfering, and we escape consequent difficulties with them, are we sure that we ourselves will be able to remain passive spectators? Many of us are old enough to recollect the agitation which shook this kingdom during the struggle between North and South on the other side of the Atlantic. No question of Home politics for generations past had so deeply moved our people. It required all the exertions of the most sober part of the nation to prevent our becoming involved in the conflict, and we recollect the help this party of wisdom got from the impulsive statesman who has undertaken for the third time the final settlement of the Irish question. If the great American Civil War, desolating a country three thousand miles away, thus stirred popular feeling, what will be the result of a Civil War between, on the one side, the Irish Celt animated by religious hatred and love of plunder, and supported by the Irish American, and on the other the loyalty, endurance and Protestantism of Ulster—a Civil War almost within sight of our shores?
But, if we turn from the suggestions of empiricism and vanity and come to those practical considerations which affect men's minds in matters so important as political organization, the main argument pressed on English people is that we cannot go on as we are. 'Irish Government is a failure.' 'We must close this terrible crisis as rapidly as possible.' 'Separation itself, could not be worse than the present state of things.' 'The Act of Union has completely failed. After eighty-four years it has given an Ireland more hostile to England than at any period of its history.' Mr. Gladstone recites the number of Coercion Acts, which have been passed since 1832, and declares 'we are like the man who, knowing that medicine may be the means of his restoration to health, endeavours to live upon medicine.'
Before considering whether this confession of failure is true, we would remind our readers what it implies, what it leads up to. It is now proposed as an argument for establishing a separate Parliament in Dublin. The establishment of this separate Parliament is necessary, because we must give Ireland the opportunity of doing what we ourselves are unable to do, to find the best machinery they can to carry on the business of government. But, when this machinery is once found and invested with the resources and influence of a Government, we cannot suppose that our troubles will be at an end. If disputes arise in the working out of the new Irish Constitution, the popular majority will not be slow to call in the aid of the American Irish who have founded the National League. Mr. Jennings, whose opinion on this matter is entitled to great weight, from his long residence in the United States, reminded the House that
'one consideration which they must bear in mind was that of the formidable difficulties which would inevitably arise from the action of the great body of Irish Americans. If this Bill granted to Ireland a free and independent Parliamentary Assembly with full powers over the Executive, as proposed by the Prime Minister, there would inevitably come a time when either the payment of the interest due, or some other cause, would bring the Irish Parliament into antagonism with the English. If they were to endeavour to demand what was necessary, whether payment of interest or what not, and to threaten to use force, could any one suppose that the great body of Irish Americans would stand by silently and see that done? He believed that the United States would say to them: "You have acknowledged your incompetence to govern Ireland; you have given her practical independence, now you must take your hands off her; we will not stand by and see her crushed." He believed that there was no government in the United States which could withstand such pressure as that which would be brought to bear on it by the Irish Americans, especially if a Presidential election were near.'
But is this allegation of failure actually true? For our part we are inclined to agree with Lord Hartington, that the argument founded on the paralysis of government in Ireland in recent years is allowed more weight in this question than it should have. In the first place, it is difficult to see how any government conducted as ours has been during the last few years, could be other than disastrous, Mr. Gladstone, at the commencement of his career as leader of the Liberal party, pledged himself to the policy of Irish ideas, ignorant, if not reckless, of what the term meant. Year by year he has been getting a closer view of the creed he had unconsciously adopted, and, after a struggle, he accepts one dogma, then another. The great dogma of all in the Home Ruler's creed, that Englishmen should be sent bag and baggage out of Ireland, has not yet been adopted; and naturally the Home Ruler keeps his resources ready for that ringing of the chapel bell to which Mr. Gladstone alluded in speaking of the Clerkenwell explosion and its effect on the question of the Irish Establishment. The 'dynamite and the dagger,' to which Mr. Morley recently appealed as conclusive reasons for passing the Cabinet scheme, retain their fascination for the Irish mind.
As long as Mr. Gladstone is a power in English public life, and his pledges given in Lancashire are unredeemed or unrepudiated, the Home Rule party will press him without mercy; but it is not reasonable to argue from their success, a success which Mr. Gladstone has given them, that they exercise a permanent influence on Irish affairs. When the Southport pledges were given, the Irish land laws were yet without that reform which a series of Governments, Tory as well as Whig, had admitted to be necessary. It could not be said until after 1870 that the book of English neglect of Irish interests was finally closed, and that is only sixteen years ago. During this period we have seen the great English Parliamentary Ruler continually plunging after coercion, and returning to make some other big concession to agitation. Thus Ireland has had no chance of trying what a good system of laws consistently administered could supply. The principle of the Land Act of 1870 was a provision for the protection of property—the tenants' property recognized by custom during a long course of years, although ignored by the law and exposed to confiscation by the reckless Whig legislation of 1850-2. The Land Act of 1881 was an arbitrary attempt to remedy the misfortunes of an improvident agricultural interest by legislative interference with contract. Contracts were readjusted and finally settled for fifteen years to come. Political economy was bidden to take itself off, but prices varied quite regardless of Mr. Gladstone's arrangements, and the weather did not pay them the least consideration. The passion for revolution was stimulated, and a large number of Mr. Gladstone's clients are as badly off as before. Might it not be worth while to try for a time how far good government, after the removal of all substantial grievances, might supply that 'real settlement,' 'that finality,' which the country is now asked to find in Dublin Parliaments, First Orders, and bribes at the cost of the English taxpayer?
This counter-policy of maintaining order and good government in Ireland should be emphasized by measures to make that island, even more completely than she now is, a part of the United Kingdom. The Queen's laws in Ireland are the same, except in some slight details, as in England. The Irish judicature might be made part of the High Court at Westminster. The Queen's writs from Westminster should run throughout Ireland as they have done for hundreds of years throughout Wales. Limerick or Sligo are not so remote from London now as Harlech or Durham were in the reign of George I. The Irish judges would form no undistinguished addition to the English Bench, while the presence of English judges on circuit in Ireland would have the best effect in disarming the animosity of the people against the law. It is too often forgotten in these days that, however rapidly we move from place to place, however swift the transmission of intelligence, the human mind has not yet acquired the nimbleness of the telegraph needle. Habits of thought are not changed as rapidly as the fashions of our dress. It is only sixteen years since our Irish legislation has assumed its present form, and we are ready to throw to the winds all maxims of statecraft, all principles hitherto recognized in the delicate work of government. We are in despair, and call in the company of à priori statesmen—men whose sole qualification to deal with complex questions is the fact that they have studied the science of revolution. Why should we not try, now that we have provided for manifest Irish grievances, what time, and resolution, and common-sense, might do for us and our Irish fellow-subjects?
The first part of the Government policy is disclosed. We have still to learn what its complement, the Land Purchase Bill, is to be, what proposal is to be made about loyal Ulster, the subject on which Mr. Gladstone was so strangely vague, on which Mr. Parnell was discreetly silent. These further manifestations of Cabinet wisdom can hardly save the scheme now lingering on to death. We wish we could be certain, that this collapse would rid Parliament and Ireland of all such projects for the future. But, whatever be the fate of the present Ministry, we may be sure that the end is not yet, unless Mr. Parnell's faction is completely broken, unless the policy urged by Lord Hartington is firmly adopted, and party life reorganized in England, on the principle of excluding the Irish vote from consideration in our party conflicts. If no such resolution is enforced by English patriotism, Irish Nationalists will return to their demands, enhanced in power and renown by the tribute they have extorted from the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
On these events of the future we shall not now speculate; but if past history throws any light on the character of our population, one thing may be confidently predicted. If Home Rule should be ultimately conceded to Ireland, the political party which may be responsible for the carrying of the scheme, will have to look forward to a long period of exclusion from public confidence. However the British people may be worried or deluded into forgetfulness of their duty to themselves and to Ireland, the working of a Dublin Parliament will soon rouse them, the reaction will set in; and the authors of the scheme will have before them as lengthened a banishment from power, as the country gentlemen suffered when their chivalrous devotion to the House of Stuart blinded them for a time to the practical interests of England; as was the fate of the Whigs at the beginning of this century, when they identified their party with implacable opposition to Pitt's struggle to deliver Europe from the tyranny of Bonaparte.