CHAPTER XI.
HOME RULE.
About this time Home Rule began seriously to be talked about. It was even hinted that Mr. Gladstone was about to bring in a measure on the subject. In some quarters it was hinted the Conservatives would outbid him in their eagerness to obtain Irish support. Men who belonged to no party could not bring themselves to regard any measure of Home Rule seriously, especially when they saw how by means of it Irish M.P.’s had gained a popularity and a position which otherwise they would never have hoped to attain. An Irish Nationalist had everything to lose by means of a peaceful solution of Irish difficulties—his claim on the funds collected largely in America, his place in Parliament, his position on the public platform. As long as he could teach his ignorant fellow-countrymen and sympathizing Americans that England was the sworn foe of Ireland and did all she could to crush her and keep her down, he had an easy time of it. To abuse England was to play an easy part, and no misrepresentation was too absurd to be put forth to arouse Irish hatred—on which the Catholic priests naturally looked with no unfriendly eyes. For England was a country rich and prosperous and Protestant, and they dared not tell the Irish people that if they copied England Ireland would be as prosperous as any part of Great Britain. Take the case of Mr. Forster, savagely execrated as ‘Buckshot’ Forster. Why was he held up to hatred under that name? Simply for the reason that buckshot not being so fatal as bullets, Mr. Forster had recommended it to the troops in case they should be obliged to resort to arms. The plain Englishman, aware how for fifty years Parliament had been trying to pacify Ireland and to remove wrong where it was admitted to exist, who heard Irishmen declare that they were at war with England, could not be expected strongly to support a movement in favour of Home Rule, especially after Mr. Gladstone’s appeal to him to give him a majority independent of the Irish vote.
Many prejudices had to be overcome. As a rule, the Englishman has slight confidence in Irish oratory. An amusing illustration of its tendency to run into exaggeration is given by that sturdy Irish patriot Mr. John O’Neill Daunt, who in 1882 thus closes his diary for the year: ‘The year now ending has been blackened by most abominable crimes and murders. Parnell and his followers acquired vast popularity by denouncing the evictors, the extortioners, the rack-renters; had they stopped there they would have merited praise. But in attacking all landlords—good and bad landlords—they fatally widened that severance of classes which has always been the curse of Ireland.’
Unprejudiced Englishmen—not excited by hope of triumph for a party—were naturally sceptical about Home Rule for Ireland. The masses were quite content to follow Mr. Gladstone’s lead, and to applaud the Irish orators who from time to time appeared in their midst. As a nation, the Irish are oratorical and poetical. It is by poetry and oratory the Irishman makes his way in the world, and wins fame and fortune; while the Saxon is content to make a fortune by honest industry and commercial enterprise. An Irish poet—one of the most popular of them perhaps—who is more honoured in England than in the land of his birth, wrote:
‘Of all the ills that men endure,
How small the part that laws can heal or cure.’
And they are content to plod on, while the Irishman revels in the excitement of agitation. But Mr. Gladstone’s new policy was to put down agitation, to satisfy his Irish supporters, and to send another message of peace to Ireland by carrying a measure of Home Rule. His initial difficulty was with his Cabinet. The Marquis of Hartington, Lord Derby, Lord Selborne stood aloof, Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Trevelyan remaining with him. Early in the session Mr. Gladstone announced that he hoped to be able to lay before the House his plan for the future government of Ireland. Sir Stafford Northcote saw dangers ahead. In a speech he made at Aberdeen, he said of his old leader: ‘I am prepared from a long acquaintance with him, both as a friend and as an opponent in Parliament, to bear the highest tribute to the great ability of the late Premier; at the same time, I think he is about the most dangerous statesman I know. . . . It always seems to me that the worst sign of bad weather is when you see the new moon with what is called the old moon in its arms. I have no doubt that many of you Aberdeen men have read the fine old ballad of Sir Patrick Spens, who was drowned some twenty or thirty miles to the east of Aberdeen. In that ballad he was cautioned not to go to sea, because his old and weatherwise attendant had noticed the new moon with the old moon in its lap. I think myself that is a very dangerous sign; and when I see Mr. Chamberlain with Mr. Gladstone, the old moon, in his arms, I think it is time to look out for squally weather.’
Squally weather it was at any rate the misfortune of Mr. Gladstone to encounter in his new endeavour. There was at this time no one in the ranks of the Opposition at all approaching Lord Randolph Churchill in force and vigour as an orator; and in a speech delivered in Manchester he made an eloquent appeal to Liberals to join with Conservatives in forming a new political party, which he named ‘Unionist,’ to combine all that is best of the Tory, the Whig, and the Liberal.
In the interval of suspense which preceded Mr. Gladstone’s declaration as to his Irish scheme, there was no ambiguity in the utterances of the Whig leaders, and he was made perfectly aware that if his Bill would confer a practically independent legislature on Ireland, he must prepare for opposition not only from them and the Tories, but also from Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Trevelyan, his colleagues in the Cabinet. In March it was announced that they had resigned.
On April 8, 1886, Mr. Gladstone moved his great and long-expected measure. The desire to hear the statement of the Premier was intense, Nationalist members sitting up all night to secure their places. Never was there such a struggle on the part of members to obtain seats. Chairs were set on the floor of the House, by which means seventy or eighty additional seats were provided. The galleries, the nooks—in short, every foot of standing ground was crowded with chairs. Language fails to do justice to the intense excitement of the hour, or to note the competition for every seat in the Strangers’ Gallery; the scramble of the Lords, too, for room in places assigned to them, the ovation rapturously afforded by his followers to the hero of the hour, the physical and mental efforts of the orator for more than two hours, the rapt attention, diversified by bursts of cheers from one side and ironical exclamations from the other, and the vociferous applause at the close, are things never to be forgotten in the history of our Parliamentary annals. The speech with which he wound up the debate on the first reading in April was wonderfully fine. ‘He raised,’ writes Sir R. Temple, ‘the drooping spirits of his followers; he held his head aloft; and in his wrath against the dissentient Liberals he seemed to stand higher by inches than his ordinary stature.’ His next effort, in unfolding his scheme for buying out the Irish landlords, was not so successful. After Mr. Chamberlain’s attack on it, he is described as having left the House apparently in high dudgeon. The second reading of the Home Rule Bill was moved by Mr. Gladstone amidst cheers from the Nationalist members alone. The debate was animated and prolonged. On the closing night Mr. Gladstone rose at midnight to deliver his fourth speech on the Bill. ‘For the last twenty minutes or so,’ writes Sir R. Temple, ‘I have never heard such oratory anywhere from any man; indeed, he poured his very soul into it.’ But all in vain. The Ayes were 311, the Noes 341. Parliament was dissolved, and in the General Election Home Rule was smitten, as far as England was concerned, hip and thigh. Lord Salisbury was Premier, Mr. Goschen joined the Unionist party; and Mr. Chamberlain suggested the Round Table Conference to fill up the Liberal ranks, to which Mr. Gladstone heartily consented, but which came to nothing after all.
The chief event of this short session was a Tenant Relief Bill, introduced by Mr. Parnell, providing for the suspension of the ejectment of any defaulting tenant who should pay half his rent and half his arrears. Let us add, this session was memorable as the most trying one that had ever taken place, from the acrimony of its debates and the late hours of its sittings. However, Mr. Gladstone had got back Sir George Trevelyan and three or four small men besides. Meanwhile, the Government had to wince under the loss of several seats at by-elections. At Southampton, the Unionist majority of 342 had been turned into a Gladstonian one of 885; and the Ayr Burghs followed suit, by replacing a Unionist, whose majority had been at the General Election 1,175, by a Gladstonian whom they preferred to the extent of 53 votes to the Hon. Evelyn Ashley. It was not till Christmas Eve that Parliament adjourned. Government met Parliament the next year under great discouragement. Before the debate on the Queen’s Speech was begun, Sir William Harcourt raised the question of privilege, of which he maintained a breach had been committed against the House by Tories in the matter of the charges against the Irish members; and the diminished majority by which his motion was rejected—58—testified to the loss of prestige by the Government, as a consequence of their supposed connection with a case bolstered up by the forgeries of the Irish informer Pigott. On the second reading of the Local Taxation Bill, Mr. Caine moved an amendment refusing assent to any proposal to extinguish licenses by means of public money. Mr. Gladstone, in supporting it, defended himself from the charge of having violated pledges given to his Midlothian electors, declared that since those pledges had been given ‘the law had been cleared and settled in a manner not only unfavourable to the doctrine of vested interests, but likewise to the doctrine of permanent interest, on the part of a publican in an annual license.’ However, Mr. Gladstone spoke in vain.