The streets of London were red one day in November, 1909, with placards proclaiming:
"The Lords declare Civil War!"
I suppose the Radicals thought it paid to force the note. Mr. Winston Churchill was their bandmaster for the moment. There is no more effective political rhetorician, provided you accept that fallacy about the folly of the people against which the warning of Mr. Lincoln passes unheeded.
But there was, at least on one side, a state of feeling in the country comparable to nothing I can remember except the feeling which prevailed during the Home Rule crisis, and far stronger now than then. In that crisis also the Lords came to the rescue of the Kingdom, which they saved from disintegration and ruin. Ruin for the moment it would have been; only to be finally averted by the reconquest of Ireland. Even to the spectator those were stirring days. England and Ireland from 1881 onward had become the Wild West. The revolver was the real safeguard of personal liberty. I don't think it will be quite like that now, but it does seem as if the bitterness of contention and the personalities of politics would go further now than then; perhaps have already gone further.
I was in Ireland for a fortnight during one of the worst periods, but there were times when London was as disturbed and distressful as Ireland itself. Those were years of dynamite in England, when, as Lord Randolph Churchill said, the railway stations were flying about our ears, and when London Bridge came near being blown up, and when Englishmen in high place were targets. From the Prime Minister down to his youngest colleague, no man was safe without a guard of detectives; and not then. Mr. Gladstone, whose courage was high, shook off his escort whenever he could. Other Ministers paid more respect to a very real danger. Sir George Trevelyan, who was appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland in 1882, submitted sensibly to the precautions the Home Office and Scotland Yard thought needful. One afternoon I met Trevelyan in a Bond Street shop. We left the shop together. Two quite innocent-looking men were outside the door. "I hope you don't mind," said Trevelyan. "I am obliged to let them follow me." They were Scotland Yard detectives. As we walked down the street they were within earshot all the way, their vigilance unrelaxing. Whether they thought their ward in greater or less danger because I was with him I cannot say. We parted at the corner of Piccadilly. In both streets the throng on the sidewalk was dense, but through it these men made their way without violence, without haste, but never for an instant allowing themselves to be separated from the Chief Secretary by so much as an arm's length. He walked in peril not only real but imminent. Two days before his appointment as Chief Secretary his predecessor, Lord Frederick Cavendish, and Mr. Burke, permanent Under Secretary, had been murdered. To accept that inheritance of probable assassination was a gallant act, quite characteristic of Sir George Trevelyan. But I do not imagine that he or his friends ever while he held that office forgot what had happened in Phoenix Park.
Not many evenings later I met Sir George Trevelyan at dinner. If he had not been famous as a writer and Member of Parliament and Irish Secretary and much else, he might well have been famous as a diner-out. He had the art of conversation. His uncle's influence had left him, in this respect, untouched. Where Macaulay discoursed and reeled off dreary pages of encyclopædic knowledge, Trevelyan talked lightly and well; claiming no monopoly, preaching no sermon, wearying no company too well bred to show itself bored. He had a felicity of allusion which was so wholly free from pedantry as to seem almost accidental. His voice, like Browning's, was strident and his laugh sometimes boisterous; but this was in moments of excitement.
On this particular evening there was something besides his inspiriting talk which drew the attention of the company. So long as the ladies were at table he talked with his wonted energy. When the dining-room door had closed on the last of these departing angels Trevelyan sank into his chair with a sigh, drew a revolver from the breast pocket of his coat, laid it on the table and said to his host:
"Pray forgive me, but if you knew how tired I am of carrying this thing about!"
On Sir George Trevelyan as on others the Irish Secretaryship left its mark. A year of office aged him as if it were ten. He came out worn and grey: not yet forty-five years old. The tragedy was in one particular a tragi-comedy. Half his moustache had turned white; the other half black as before. And I suppose it shook his nerve more or less and was perhaps responsible for that fickleness of purpose or of view which led him first to oppose and then to adopt Mr. Gladstone's policy of Home Rule.
I saw one side of the Irish question during a visit to Lord Barrymore, then Mr. Smith-Barry, and his beautiful American wife, at Fota Island, near Queenstown. Mr. William O'Brien had launched shortly before this his New Tipperary scheme, of which one main object was to ruin Mr. Smith-Barry who owned the old Tipperary. Assassination was then only a political incident or instrument. Mr. Smith-Barry, moreover, was hated not only as a landowner but for having organized the one efficient defence against the spoliation of the landlords which down to that time had been discovered. He had formed a company and raised a large sum of money among his English friends, he himself being the largest contributor. So he held the O'Brien cohorts at bay; at what money cost and at what personal risk few men knew. But I apprehend that but for Mr. Smith-Barry the Plan of Campaign and New Tipperary would have succeeded and the South of Ireland been handed over to the Land League.