My Memory of Gladstone

by Goldwin Smith

In the case of the Transvaal Republic, Gladstone had the moral courage, in face of the agitation caused by Majuba Hill, to avow that he shrank from “blood-guiltiness,” and to keep the nation in the path of honour and justice. His biographer, in dealing with this case and its sequel, has been evidently restrained by his desire not to multiply points of controversy. He might otherwise have greatly strengthened his proof that the claim of suzerainty was a fraud. Not such would have been the treatment of a breach of the plighted faith of the nation had Gladstone lived.

The last act of this wonderful life and its closing scene connect themselves with the history of Ireland, and are scarcely of a brighter hue than the rest of that sad story. The history of the case with which, at this juncture, statesmanship had to deal, if it was clearly apprehended, was never, so far as I remember, very clearly set forth, either by Mr. Gladstone or by anyone who took part in the discussion. Cromwell had given Ireland, with union, the indispensable boon of free trade with Great Britain. Succeeding Governments, less wise and magnanimous, had allowed British protectionism to kill the great Irish industries, the cattle trade and the wool trade. The people were thus thrown for subsistence entirely on the cultivation of the soil, in an island far the greater part of which is too wet for profitable tillage, and lends itself only to grazing. Then came the Penal Code, and to economical destitution was added utter social degradation. The people were reduced to a state bordering on absolute barbarism, a state in which they could look for nothing beyond bare food, while even bare food, the treacherous potato being its staple, periodically failed. In such a condition, all social and prudential restraints on the increase of population were lost, and the people multiplied with animal recklessness far beyond the capacity of the island to maintain them. Desperately contending for the soil on which they solely depended for their maintenance, they became, in the most miserable sense, tenants-at-will, prædial serfs of the landlord, who ground them through his middleman, and sometimes through a series of middlemen forming a hierarchy of extortion, while what the middleman had left was taken by the tithe-proctor. All the improvements of the tenant were confiscated by the owner of the soil. The only remedy for over-population, apart from the fell agencies of famine and disease, was emigration. The remedy for the agrarian evil and grievance, so far as it could be reached by legislation, apparently was some measure which would give the Irish tenant-at-will the same security for his holding which had been given to the English copyholder by custom and the favour of the courts. To buy out the Irish landlord was hardly just to the British people, and was a measure in itself of dangerous import. The abolition of the Irish gentry by any means, if it could be avoided, was a social mistake. The peasantry would thereby be deprived of the social chiefs, whose influence it specially needed, and there would be danger of handing the island over to the demagogue or the priest.

The political part of the problem, which concerned the relations between the two islands, had, when Mr. Gladstone came to deal with the question, assumed the aspect of a struggle for Home Rule. This was an ostensibly reduced and mitigated version of the struggle for the repeal of the Union, which had been set on foot by O’Connell, and, passing from him into more violent hands, had in 1848, under Smith O’Brien, come after a feeble outbreak to an unhappy end. The political movement, apart from the agrarian insurrection, had never shown much force. It was not on political change that the heart of the Irish people was set, but on the secure possession of their holdings and their deliverance from the grasp of famine. But the new leader, Charles Stewart Parnell, a real statesman in his way, combined the two objects, and the movement, carrying the people with it, became formidable in its political as well as in its agrarian form.

There had been, as we know, an immense Irish emigration to the United States. This, while it had somewhat relieved the pressure of population, had in another respect greatly added to the difficulty of the case. It had given birth to American Fenianism, with its Clan-na-Gael, an agitation wholly political, sanguinary in spirit, formidable from the influence of the Irish vote on American politicians, having its headquarters and its centre beyond the reach of British repression.

Gladstone had been in Ireland only for three weeks, and then, Mr. Morley says, he had not gone beyond a very decidedly English circle. There is, at all events, no trace of his having studied on the spot the character of the people with whom he had to deal, the influences which were at work, the various forces, political, ecclesiastical, social, and economical, to the play of which he was going to deliver the island. Had he done this, he might have known why it was that Irish Liberals, like Lord O’Hagan and Sir Alexander Macdonald, while they were Irish patriots to the core, and because they were Irish patriots to the core, shrank with horror from the dissolution of the legislative Union. He might have seen the probable futility of any clause of a Home Rule Act forbidding preference of a particular religion, and the ease with which it could have been practically nullified by the Roman Catholic hierarchy and priesthood, wielding the influence which they possessed over the people and over popular elections. He might also have more vividly realized the danger attending the relation of Protestant and Saxon Ulster to the Celtic and Catholic part of Ireland, when they came to face each other in a separate arena and their conflict was uncontrolled.

With the agrarian grievance Mr. Gladstone undertook to deal by means of land legislation, purchasing for the people, or giving them the means of purchasing, the freehold of their lots. The operation, as has been said, was perilous, as it involved exceptional dealing with contracts, as well as an unusual employment of public money; and in its course it exposed Mr. Gladstone to angry charges, not only of violent legislation, but of deception, to which colour may have been given by some shifting of his ground. A simple Act of the character above suggested, if it had been practicable, might possibly have solved the problem with less of a shock to the sanctity of contracts and less disturbance of any kind.

The political part of the Parnell movement Mr. Gladstone had for some time strenuously and vehemently opposed. He denounced Parnell’s policy as leading through rapine to dismemberment. He applied coercion vigorously to Irish outrage, imprisoned a number of Parnellites as suspects, and himself proclaimed the arrest of Parnell to an applauding multitude at Guild Hall. He allowed his colleague to rise night after night from his side, and denounce the Home Rule movement in language even stronger than his own. But, having been defeated in the election of 1885 by the combined forces of Conservatives and Parnellites, he suddenly, to the amazement of everybody, and the general consternation of his party, turned round, declared in favour of Home Rule, and coalesced with Parnell, by whose assistance he ousted the Conservative Government of Lord Salisbury, and reinstalled himself in power. It is not necessary to charge him with being actuated by love of power, or to say that his conversion was not sincere. It is due to him to bear in mind that the Conservative leaders, in what was called the Maamtrasma debate, had unquestionably coquetted with Parnellism, one of them, Sir Michael Hicks Beach, courting Parnellite favour by censuring Lord Spencer; and that by this conduct on their part the aspect of the question had undergone a certain change. On the other hand, it is impossible to forget that Gladstone’s position was that of leader of the Opposition, wishing to reinstate his party in power, and seeing that this could be done only by the help of the Irish vote. Nor can we easily bring ourselves to accept the account of his gradual conversion to Home Rule put forth in his History of an Idea. If he felt that his mind was moving on the subject, how could he have deemed it right not only to mask his own misgivings by vehement denunciations of Home Rule, but to lead his party and the nation on what he had begun to feel might prove to be the wrong line? His honesty, I repeat, need not be questioned. But neither his consistency nor the perfect singleness of his motive can very easily be maintained. He was a party leader; a full believer in the party system; and his party wanted to prevail over its rival. It is only by contention for power that party government can be carried on.

Gladstone proposed in effect to break the legislative Union by giving Ireland a Parliament of her own. This Parliament he styled “statutory.” Restrictions were to be laid upon it which would have made its relation to the British Parliament one of vassalage, and against which it would almost certainly have commenced, from the moment of its birth, a struggle for equality and independence. If it was baffled in that struggle, it might even have held out its hands for aid to the foreign enemies of Great Britain. The framer of the measure apparently had not distinctly made up his mind whether he would include the Irish in the Parliament of Great Britain or exclude them from it. That he should have rushed into legislation so momentous, legislation affecting the very existence of the United Kingdom, without having thoroughly made up his mind on the vital point, is surely a proof that, great as he was in finance, mighty as he was in debate, powerful as he was in framing and carrying measures of reform, when, as in dealing with Irish Disestablishment or the Universities, a clear case was put into his hands, he was hardly one of those sure-footed statesmen to whom can be safely intrusted the supreme destinies of a nation.

If after the equitable settlement of the agrarian question and the reduction of the population to the number which the island can maintain, the political enmity generated by the long struggle continues unassuaged, and the Irish contingent remains, as it has now for many years been, an alien and rebellious element in the British Parliament, disturbing and distracting British councils, there may be a sufficient reason for letting Ireland go. It would be folly to keep her as a mere thorn in the side of Great Britain. It would be more than folly to attempt to hold her in bondage. It is not unlikely that, after a trial of independence, she might of her own accord come back to the Union. But all wise statesmen have united in saying that there must be legislative Union or independence. Two Parliaments, two nations.[1]