This, to the best of my apprehension, is the Gladstonian argument. My aim has certainly been to state it fairly and in its full force.
Is the argument valid? Is the plea of necessity made out? The answer may be given without hesitation. It is not. The allegations on which the whole train of reasoning rests are tainted by exaggeration or misapprehension, and the allegations, even if taken as true, do not establish the required inference; the premises are unsound, and the premises do not support the conclusion.
The premises are unsound.
The Gladstonians are far too much of parliamentary formalists. Their imagination and their reason are impressed by the strength in the House of Commons of the Irish party. The eighty votes from Ireland daunt them. But wise men must look behind votes at facts. The eighty Irish Home Rulers are, it is true, no light matter, even when allowance is made for the way in which corruption and intimidation vitiate the vote of Ireland. But their voice is not the voice of the Irish people; it is at most the mutter or the clamour of a predominant Irish faction. It is the voice of Ireland in the same sense in which a century ago the shouts or yells of the Jacobin Club were the voice of France. To any one who looks behind the forms of the constitution to the realities of life, the voice of Irish wealth, of Irish intelligence, and of Irish loyalty is at least as important as the voice of Irish sedition or discontent. The eighty votes must in any case be reckoned morally at not more than sixty, for to this number they would be reduced by any fair and democratic scheme of representation. No one can be less tempted than myself to make light of Irish turbulence and Irish misery. But it must not be exaggerated. The discontent of 1893 is nothing to the rebellion, sedition, or disloyalty of 1782, of 1798, of 1829, or of 1848. If Irishmen of one class are discontented, Irishmen of another class are contented, prosperous, and loyal. The protest of Irish Protestants—the grandsons of the men who detested the Union—against the dissolution of the Union, is the reward and triumph of Pitt's policy of Union. The eighty Irish members ask for Home Rule, but the tenant farmers of Ireland ask not for Home Rule but for the ownership of the land; and the Irish tenant farmers will and may under a Unionist Government become owners of their land, and, what is no slight matter, may become owners by honest means. Vain for Mr. M'Carthy[110] to assert that Irish farmers would not have accepted even from Mr. Parnell the most favourable of land laws in exchange for Home Rule. Mr. M'Carthy believes what he says, but it is impossible for any student of Irish history or of Irish politics to believe Mr. M'Carthy. Facts are too strong for him. Mr. Lalor showed a prevision denied to our amiable novelist. Gustave de Beaumont understood political philosophy better than the lively recorder of the superficial aspects of recent English history. Mr. Parnell and Mr. Davitt, and the whole line of witnesses before the Special Commission, tell a different tale. The very name of the Land League is significant. Home Rule was a mere theme for academic discussion in the mouth of Mr. Butt. Repeal itself never touched the strongest passions of Irish nature, though advocated by the most eloquent and popular of Irish orators. Not an independent Parliament, but independent ownership of land, has always been the desire of Irish cultivators. It was a cry for the land which gave force to the demand for Home Rule; and an Irish agitator, if his strength fails, renews it by touching the earth. But why confine our observation to Ireland? We here come upon the passions, not of Irish nature, but of human nature. There is not a landowner in France who does not care tenfold more for the security of his land than for the form of the government. If peasants trembled for their property the Republic would fall to-morrow. This is no mere conjecture; the peasantry were Jacobins as long as the Jacobins gave them the land, they were Imperialists whilst Napoleon was their security against a restoration which to them meant confiscation of land purchased or seized during the Revolution. The country population of France heard with indifference of the fall of Louis Philippe, and possibly approved the proclamation of the second Republic. But the communism of 1848 roused every landowner against Paris. The peasant proprietors filled the benches of the National Assembly with Conservatives or Reactionists who would save them from plunder; fear became for once the cause of courage, and dread of loss of property sent thousands of peasant proprietors to Paris, that they might crush by force of arms the socialist insurrection of June. Perjury, fraud, and cruelty disgraced the coup d'état of 1851. But, as Liberals now see, the second Empire, hateful though it was to every man who loved freedom or cared for integrity, did not owe the permanence of its power to cunning or to violence. It was the dread of the Red Spectre which drove the landowners of France into Imperialism; they may have liked parliamentary liberty, it was a pleasant luxury, but they loved their land and property, it was their life-blood, and by Socialism their land and property was they believed menaced.
As to the Coercion Act, no sensible man, be he Radical or Tory, need trouble himself. The Criminal Law and Procedure (Ireland) Act, 1887, is neither a disgrace to England nor an injury to Ireland. Its permanence, which is the cause of its mildness, is its merit. Well would it have been had the Act been extended to the whole United Kingdom. Local laws are open to some of the same objections as temporary laws. The enactment contains some improvements in our criminal procedure. There is no more idle superstition than the belief that criminal procedure does not, like other human arrangements, require change. If incendiarism should become an element in the conduct of trade disputes, if dynamite is to be recognised as a legitimate arm in political conflicts, the criminal law of the United Kingdom will, we may be sure, need and receive several alterations and improvements.
By far the strongest portion of the Gladstonian argument is the stress that can be laid on the demoralisation of Parliament, produced partly, though not wholly, by the Irish vote. This is a consideration which, as far as it goes, tells in favour of Home Rule. It is, however, a consideration of which the Gladstonian apologist for the new constitution of 1893 [can] make no use. His reasoning of necessity stands thus:
The presence of 80 Irish members at Westminster has demoralised Parliament, therefore we must above all things retain 80 or possibly 103 Irish members at Westminster. He is placed in a hopeless dilemma; he dare not draw the only conclusion to which his argument points, namely, that the Irish members must be excluded from the Parliament at Westminster. By a strange fatality, the policy of 1823 retrospectively condemns the policy of 1886, whilst the very strongest argument in favour of the policy of 1886 condemns the policy of 1893.
The premises, were they sound, do not support the conclusion.
There exists undoubtedly such a thing in politics as necessity.
When England acknowledged the independence of the Thirteen Colonies, or when France surrendered Metz and Strasburg, no one could talk of imprudence of impolicy. The will of Englishmen and of Frenchmen was coerced by the force of events. When all Protestant Ireland was in arms, when the whole Irish nation demanded parliamentary independence, when England had been defeated in America, when France and Spain were allied against her, then the acceptance of Grattan's declaration of right was in truth a necessity. When Wellington became the supporter of Catholic Emancipation because he would not face civil war, when famine was at our gates and Peel repealed the corn laws—then again politicians could plead the excuse of necessity. In these and like crises the wisest men and the bravest men are forced to recognise the logic of facts; and necessity rather than prudence dictates the course of statesmanship. But no such crisis has now arisen. England and Ireland were as safe under the government of Lord Salisbury as under the government of Mr. Gladstone—perhaps safer. No one except an extremely excited and very rhetorical politician will venture to assert that, if Lord Salisbury instead of Mr. Gladstone had last summer gained a majority of forty, any man or woman throughout the United Kingdom would have trembled for the safety of the country. The sky is far less dark than on that fearful day eleven years back[111] when England stood aghast at the assassinations of the Phoenix Park. Irish discontent is an immense evil, of which every just man must deplore the existence; its removal would be the greatest benefit which statesmanship could by any possibility confer upon England. But the immediate dealing with it in a particular way is not a necessity. Were the Home Rule Bill, and every Home Rule Bill, rejected by Parliament, the United Kingdom would be as safe as it has been at any time for the last ninety years and more.