But the doctrine of trust takes another and more general form. You may place confidence, it is alleged, in the goodness of human nature, and should believe that the concession of Home Rule, just because it meets the wishes of the Irish people, will take away every source of discontent, and thereby remove any difficulty in making even an imperfect constitution work well.
To this the answer may fairly be made, which I have made in the preceding pages, that Home Rule does not meet the wish of the most important part of the Irish people, but in truth arouses their abhorrence, and that even Home Rulers care much less than Gladstonians suppose about constitutional changes. To give a man a vote for a Parliament at Dublin when he is demanding an acre or two of land, comes very near giving him a stone when he asks for bread. But I assume for a moment that the Irishmen, who express no great enthusiasm for the Home Rule Bill, desire the new constitution as ardently as sixty years or so ago our fathers desired parliamentary reform. Yet even on this assumption the belief in Home Rule as a panacea for Irish ills is childish, and belongs to a bygone stage of opinion. We now know that changes in political machinery, however important, do not of themselves produce content. A poverty-stricken peasant in Connaught will not be made happy because a Parliament meets at Dublin. We now further know that the difficulty of satisfying popular aspirations often arises from the fundamental faults of human nature. Trust in the people may often be wiser than distrust, but to suppose that masses of men are wiser, more reasonable, or more virtuous than the individuals of which they consist, is as idle a political delusion as the corresponding ecclesiastical delusion that a church has virtues denied to the believers who make up the church. On this point an anecdote makes my meaning clearer than an argument. On May 15, 1848, the French National Assembly was invaded by an armed mob, who shouted and yelled for three hours and more, and threatened at any moment to slaughter the representatives of France. From June 22-26, 1848, there raged the most terrible of the insurrections which Paris has seen. For the first time in modern history the workmen of the capital rose against the body of the more or less well-to-do citizens. There was not a man in Paris who did not tremble for his property and his life. Householders feared the very servants in their homes. Between these days of ferocity intervened a day of sentiment. On May 21, 1848, the Assembly attended a Feast of Concord. There were carts filled with allegorical figures, there were processions, there were embraces; the whole town, soldiers, national guards, gardes mobiles, armed workmen, a million of men or more, passed in array before the deputies. The feast was a feast of concord, but every deputy had provided himself with pistols or some weapon of defence. This was the occasion when we are told by the reporter of the scene, 'Carnot said to me with a touch of that silliness (niaiserie) which is always to be found mixed up with the virtues of honest democrats, "Believe me, my dear colleague, you must always trust the people." I remember I answered him rather rudely, "Ah! why didn't you remind me of that on the day before May 15?"' The anecdote is told by the greatest political thinker whom France has produced since the days of Montesquieu. 'Trust in the people' did not appear the last word of political wisdom to Alexis de Tocqueville.[133]
The Gladstonian pleas to which answer has been made are, it will be said, arguments not in favour of our new constitution, but in support of Home Rule. The remark is just; it points to a curious weakness in the reasoning of Gladstonians. They adduce many reasons of more or less weight for conceding some kind of Home Rule to Ireland. But few indeed are the reasons put forward, either in the House of Commons or elsewhere, in favour of the actual Home Rule Bill of 1893. As to the merits of this definite measure Ministerialists show a singular reticence. It may be that they wish to save time and hold that the measure commends itself without any recommendation by force of its own inherent merits. But to a critic of the new constitution another explanation suggests itself. Can it be possible that Ministerialists themselves are not certain what are the fixed principles of the new policy? Everything about it is indefinite, vague, uncertain. Who can say with assurance what Gladstonians understand by Imperial supremacy? Is there or is there not any idea of excluding Ulster from the operation of the Bill? Is it or is it not a principle that members from Ireland shall be summoned to Westminster? Are the Irish members, if summoned, to vote on all matters, or on some only? To each of these questions the only answer that can be given is—nobody knows. But in this state of ignorance it is natural and excusable that apologists should confine themselves to general lines of defence. No politician who respects himself would willingly risk a vigorous apology for the special provisions of a particular measure, when, for aught he knows, the provision which he thinks essential turns out to be an unimportant detail, and is liable to sudden variation.
Chapter V—The Path Of Safety
We stand on the brink of a precipice.[134] To say that Englishmen are asked to take a leap in the dark is far to understate the peril of the moment. We are asked to leave an arduous but well-known road, and to spring down an unfathomed ravine filled with rocks, on any one of which we may be dashed to pieces.
The very excess of the peril hides its existence from ordinary citizens. Mr. Gladstone, they argue, is a wise man and a good man, his colleagues are partisans, they are not conspirators; it is incredible that they should recommend a measure fraught with ruin to England. But the matter is intelligible enough. Mr. Gladstone's weakness, no less than his strength, has always lain in his temporary but exclusive preoccupation with some one dominant idea. The one notion which possesses his mind—to judge from his public conduct and speeches—is that at any cost Home Rule, that is, an Irish Executive and an Irish Parliament, must be conceded to Ireland. Enthusiasm, pride, ambition, all the motives, good and bad, which can influence a statesman, urge him to achieve this one object. If he succeeds his political career is crowned with victory, if not with final triumph; if he fails his whole course during the last seven years turns out an error. But it has long been manifest that only with the greatest difficulty can English electors be persuaded to accept Home Rule. Hence it has been found essential that the principles of the measure should not be known before the time for passing it into law. Hence the ill-starred avoidance of discussion. Hence the ultimate framing of a scheme which is made to pass, but is not made to work, and which probably enough does not represent the real wishes or convictions of any one statesman. Where is the Minister who will tell us that this particular Government of Ireland Bill is according to his judgment—I will not say in its details, but in each and all of its leading principles—the best constitution which can be framed for determining the relations between England and Ireland? This Minister has not appeared—I doubt whether he exists. The Bill may be a model of artful provision for conciliating the prejudices or soothing the fears of English electors, but it is not a well-digested constitution. It is inferior to the Home Rule Bill of 1886. Another consequence of the circumstances under which the Bill has been framed is that its authors themselves have never had the benefit to be derived from the mature discussion of its principles. Mr. Gladstone himself cannot say what are and what are not the fundamental ideas of his scheme. He obviously held, at any rate when the Bill was introduced, that the presence of the Irish members at Westminster was a detail, whereas it is in reality the fact which governs the character of the new constitution. To imply that such a matter can be treated as subsidiary is, in the eyes of any student of constitutions, as ridiculous as it would seem to Mr. Gladstone for a Chancellor of the Exchequer, on introducing his budget, to assert that, whether he maintained or did not maintain the income tax, was an organic detail which did not fundamentally affect his financial proposals. The Ministry are as much at sea as their chief; nor is this wonderful. There are two things of which English statesmen have had little experience. The one is a revolutionary movement, the other is the construction of a constitution. But the Home Rule Bill is at once the effect and the sign of a revolutionary movement, and the task in which the Gladstonians are engaged is the formation of a new constitution. Blind leaders are leading a blind people, and our blind leaders, some of whom care more for Radical supremacy in England than for Imperial supremacy in Ireland, are like many other men of our time, the slaves of phrases, such as 'trust in the people,' which pass muster for principles. If the blind lead the blind, what wonder if they stumble over a precipice?
The peril in which the country stands is concealed from us by a curious reaction of opinion. Good political institutions, it was at one time held, were the cause of a nation's happiness, and England, it was firmly believed, owed her prosperity wholly to her constitution. A century of revolutions has taught us all that a good form of government cannot of itself save a state from ruin, and many of us have come to think that forms of government are nothing, and that no constitutional changes can impair the strength of England. No delusion however is more patent or more noxious. Never was a country richer in the elements of strength than were the Thirteen Colonies when their independence was acknowledged by England. Yet the Confederation by the vices of its constitution filled the colonies with discord, and made them both weak at home and contemptible abroad, whilst the creation of the United States restored them to peace and opened for them the road to greatness. The predominance for more than fifty years of the Slave Power in the politics of the American Union, the struggle measured by centuries through which at last the Protestant and progressive Cantons of Switzerland asserted their rightful supremacy over the Catholic and unprogressive Cantons of Switzerland, the weakness of Prussia when, not much more than forty[135] years back, she could hardly maintain her rights and her dignity against Austria, the classical instance of Germany, which though possessed of every source of power lay for generations at the mercy of France, mainly on account of vicious political institutions, are proofs, if evidence were wanting, of the capacity of ill-designed constitutions to hamper the action and threaten the prosperity of great nations. A constitution in truth is a national garb. A good constitution will not make a weak country strong, but an unsuitable constitution may reduce a strong country to feebleness. A weakling does not become a strong man by putting on armour, but a giant can derive no advantage from his strength if once he be got by fraud or force into a strait waistcoat.
Strength, it is true, will in the long run assert itself. The artificial supremacy of Ireland, or of a faction supported by Irish votes, will not last for ever; probably it will not last long. If the new constitution prove unbearable by England it will not be borne; it will be overthrown or evaded. Far am I from asserting that the breach or evasion will, when it shall occur, be justifiable. Englishmen's ideas of good faith are strict, but they are narrow. One main reason for dreading the new constitution is that it may try beyond measure the patience and the honesty of England. If, for instance, Ulster should resist the legal authority of the Parliament at Dublin, there may arise one of those terrible periods in which the observation of pledged faith seems inconsistent with the natural dictates of honour and humanity, and weak concession at the present moment will, at such a crisis, be found to have contained among its other perils the danger lest England, when at last she re-asserts her power in Ireland, should not re-establish her justice.