I
The atmosphere in London became thick and hot with political passion. Veteran observers declared that our generation had not seen anything like it. Distinguished men of letters and, as it oddly happened, men who had won some distinction either by denouncing the legislative union, or by insisting on a decentralisation that should satisfy Irish national aspirations, now choked with anger because they were taken at their word. Just like irascible scholars of old time who settled controversies about corrupt texts by imputing to rival grammarians shameful crimes, so these writers could find no other explanation for an opinion that was not their own about Irish government, except moral turpitude and personal degradation. One professor of urbanity compared Mr. Gladstone to a desperate pirate burning his ship, or a gambler doubling and trebling his stake as luck goes against him. Such strange violence in calm natures, such pharisaic pretension in a world where we are all fallen, remains a riddle. Political differences were turned into social proscription. Whigs who could not accept the new policy were specially furious with whigs who could. Great ladies purified their lists of the names of old intimates. Amiable magnates excluded from their dinner-tables and their country houses once familiar friends who had fallen into the guilty heresy, and even harmless portraits of the [pg 322] heresiarch were sternly removed from the walls. At some of the political clubs it rained blackballs. It was a painful demonstration how thin after all is our social veneer, even when most highly polished.
When a royal birthday was drawing near, the prime minister wrote to Lord Granville, his unfailing counsellor in every difficulty political and social: “I am becoming seriously perplexed about my birthday dinner. Hardly any peers of the higher ranks will be available, and not many of the lower. Will the seceding colleagues come if they are asked? (Argyll, to whom I applied privately on the score of old friendship, has already refused me.) I am for asking them; but I expect refusal. Lastly, it has become customary for the Prince of Wales to dine with me on that day, and he brings his eldest son now that the young Prince is of age. But his position would be very awkward, if he comes and witnesses a great nakedness of the land. What do you say to all this? If you cannot help me, who can?” Most of the seceding colleagues accepted, and the dinner came off well enough, though as the host wrote to a friend beforehand, “If Hartington were to get up and move a vote of want of confidence after dinner, he would almost carry it.” The Prince was unable to be present, and so the great nakedness was by him unseen, but Prince Albert Victor, who was there instead, is described by Mr. Gladstone as “most kind.”
The conversion of Peel to free trade forty years before had led to the same species of explosion, though Peel had the court strongly with him. Both then and now it was the case of a feud within the bosom of a party, and such feuds like civil wars have ever been the fiercest. In each case there was a sense of betrayal—at least as unreasonable in 1886 as it was in 1846. The provinces somehow took things more rationally than the metropolis. Those who were stunned by the fierce moans of London over the assured decline in national honour and credit, the imminence of civil war, and the ultimate destruction of British power, found their acquaintances in the country excited and interested, but still clothed and in their right minds. The gravity of the question was fully understood, but in taking sides ordinary [pg 323]
Subterranean Activity
men did not talk as if they were in for the battle of Armageddon. The attempt to kindle the torch of religious fear or hate was in Great Britain happily a failure. The mass of liberal presbyterians in Scotland, and of nonconformists in England and Wales, stood firm, though some of their most eminent and able divines resisted the new project, less on religious grounds than on what they took to be the balance of political arguments. Mr. Gladstone was able to point to the conclusive assurances he had received that the kindred peoples in the colonies and America regarded with warm and fraternal sympathy the present effort to settle the long-vexed and troubled relations between Great Britain and Ireland:—
We must not be discouraged if at home and particularly in the upper ranks of society, we hear a variety of discordant notes, notes alike discordant from our policy and from one another. You have before you a cabinet determined in its purpose and an intelligible plan. I own I see very little else in the political arena that is determined or that is intelligible.
Inside the House subterranean activity was at its height all through the month of May. This was the critical period. The regular opposition spoke little and did little; with composed interest they watched others do their work. On the ministerial side men wavered and changed and changed again, from day to day and almost from hour to hour. Never were the motions of the pendulum so agitated and so irregular. So novel and complex a problem was a terrible burden for a new parliament. About half its members had not sat in any parliament before. The whips were new, some of the leaders on the front benches were new, and those of them who were most in earnest about the policy were too heavily engrossed in the business of the measure, to have much time for the exercises of explanation, argument, and persuasion with their adherents. One circumstance told powerfully for ministers. The great central organisation of the liberal party came decisively over to Mr. Gladstone (May 5), and was followed by nearly all the local associations in the country. Neither whig secession nor radical [pg 324] dubitation shook the strength inherent in such machinery, in a community where the principle of government by party has solidly established itself. This was almost the single consolidating and steadying element in that hour of dispersion. A serious move in the opposite direction had taken place three weeks earlier. A great meeting was held at the Opera House, in the Haymarket, presided over by the accomplished whig nobleman who had the misfortune to be Irish viceroy in the two dismal years from 1880, and it was attended both by Lord Salisbury on one side and Lord Hartington on the other. This was the first broad public mark of liberal secession, and of that practical fusion between whig and tory which the new Irish policy had actually precipitated, but to which all the signs in the political heavens had been for three or four years unmistakably pointing.
The strength of the friends of the bill was twofold: first, it lay in the dislike of coercion as the only visible alternative; and second, it lay in the hope of at last touching the firm ground of a final settlement with Ireland. Their weakness was also twofold: first, misgivings about the exclusion of the Irish members; and second, repugnance to the scheme for land purchase. There were not a few, indeed, who pronounced the exclusion of Irish members to be the most sensible part of the plan. Mr. Gladstone retained his impartiality, but knew that if we proposed to keep the Irishmen, we should be run in upon quite as fiercely from the other side. Mr. Parnell stood to his original position. Any regular and compulsory attendance at Westminster, he said, would be highly objectionable to his friends. Further, the right of Irish members to take part in purely English as well as imperial business would be seized upon by English politicians, whenever it should answer their purpose, as a pretext for interfering in Irish affairs. In short, he foresaw, as all did, the difficulties that would inevitably arise from retention. But the tide ran more and more strongly the other way. Scotland grew rather restive at a proposal which, as she apprehended, would make a precedent for herself when her turn for extension of local powers should come, and Scotchmen had no intention of being shut out [pg 325]
Strength And Weakness