Chapter II. The Alternative Policy In Act. (1886-1888)
Those who come over hither to us from England, and some weak people among ourselves, whenever in discourse we make mention of liberty and property, shake their heads, and tell us that “Ireland is a depending kingdom,” as if they would seem by this phrase to intend, that the people of Ireland are in some state of slavery or dependence different from those of England.—Jonathan Swift.
I
In the ministry that succeeded Mr. Gladstone in 1886, Sir Michael Hicks Beach undertook for the second time the office of Irish secretary, while Lord Randolph Churchill filled his place at the exchequer and as leader of the House. The new Irish policy was to open with the despatch of a distinguished soldier to put down moonlighters in Kerry; the creation of one royal commission under Lord Cowper, to inquire into land rents and land purchase; and another to inquire into the country's material resources. The two commissions were well-established ways of marking time. As for Irish industries and Irish resources, a committee of the House of Commons had made a report in a blue book of a thousand pages only a year before. On Irish land there had been a grand commission in 1880, and a committee of the House of Lords in 1882-3. The latest Purchase Act was hardly yet a year old. Then to commission a general to hunt down little handfuls of peasants who with blackened faces and rude firearms crept stealthily in the dead of night round lonely cabins in the remote hillsides and glens of Kerry, was hardly more sensible than it would be to send a squadron of life-guards to catch pickpockets in a London slum.
A question that exercised Mr. Gladstone at least as sharply as the proceedings of ministers, was the attitude [pg 363]
Dissentient Position
to be taken by those who had quitted him, ejected him in the short parliament of 1886, and fought the election against him. We have seen how much controversy arose long years before as to the question whereabouts in the House of Commons the Peelites should take their seats.[219] The same perplexity now confronted the liberals who did not agree with Mr. Gladstone upon Irish government. Lord Hartington wrote to him, and here is his reply:—
August 2, 1886.—I fully appreciate the feeling which has prompted your letter, and I admit the reality of the difficulties you describe. It is also clear, I think, that so far as title to places on the front opposition bench is concerned, your right to them is identical with ours. I am afraid, however, that I cannot materially contribute to relieve you from embarrassment. The choice of a seat is more or less the choice of a symbol; and I have no such acquaintance with your political views and intentions, as could alone enable me to judge what materials I have before me for making an answer to your inquiry. For my own part, I earnestly desire, subject to the paramount exigencies of the Irish question, to promote in every way the reunion of the liberal party; a desire in which I earnestly trust that you participate. And I certainly could not directly or indirectly dissuade you from any step which you may be inclined to take, and which may appear to you to have a tendency in any measure to promote that end.
A singular event occurred at the end of the year (1886), that produced an important change in the relations of this group of liberals to the government that they had placed and maintained in power. Lord Randolph, the young minister who with such extraordinary rapidity had risen to ascendency in the councils of the government, suddenly in a fatal moment of miscalculation or caprice resigned (Dec. 23). Political suicide is not easy to a man with energy and resolution, but this was one of the rare cases. In a situation so strangely unstable and irregular, with an administration resting on the support of a section sitting on benches opposite, and still declaring every day that they adhered to old liberal [pg 364] principles and had no wish to sever old party ties, the withdrawal of Lord Randolph Churchill created boundless perturbation. It was one of those exquisite moments in which excited politicians enjoy the ineffable sensation that the end of the world has come. Everything seemed possible. Lord Hartington was summoned from the shores of the Mediterranean, but being by temperament incredulous of all vast elemental convulsions, he took his time. On his return he declined Lord Salisbury's offer to make way for him as head of the government. The glitter of the prize might have tempted a man of schoolboy ambition, but Lord Hartington was too experienced in affairs not to know that to be head of a group that held the balance was, under such equivocal circumstances, far the more substantial and commanding position of the two. Mr. Goschen's case was different, and by taking the vacant post at the exchequer he saved the prime minister from the necessity of going back under Lord Randolph's yoke. As it happened, all this gave a shake to both of the unionist wings. The ominous clouds of coercion were sailing slowly but discernibly along the horizon, and this made men in the unionist camp still more restless and uneasy. Mr. Chamberlain, on the very day of the announcement of the Churchill resignation, had made a speech that was taken to hold out an olive branch to his old friends. Sir William Harcourt, ever holding stoutly in fair weather and in foul to the party ship, thought the break-up of a great political combination to be so immense an evil, as to call for almost any sacrifices to prevent it. He instantly wrote to Birmingham to express his desire to co-operate in re-union, and in the course of a few days five members of the original liberal cabinet of 1886 met at his house in what was known as the Round Table Conference.[220]
A letter of Mr. Gladstone's to me puts some of his views on the situation created by the retirement of Lord Randolph:—