New Crimes Act
Mr. Parnell was in bad health and took little part, but he made more than one pulverising attack in that measured and frigid style which, in a man who knows his case at first hand, may be so much more awkward for a minister than more florid onslaughts. He discouraged obstruction, and advised his followers to select vital points and to leave others alone. This is said to have been the first Coercion bill that a majority of Irish members voting opposed.
It was at this point that the government suddenly introduced their historic proposal for closure by guillotine. They carried (June 10) a resolution that at ten o'clock on that day week the committee stage should be brought compulsorily to an end, and that any clauses remaining undisposed of should be put forthwith without amendment or debate. The most remarkable innovation upon parliamentary rule and practice since Cromwell and Colonel Pride, was introduced by Mr. Smith in a characteristic speech, well larded with phrases about duty, right, responsibility, business of the country, and efficiency of the House. These solemnising complacencies' did not hide the mortifying fact that if it had really been one of the objects of Irish members for ten years past to work a revolution in the parliament where they were forced against their will to sit, they had at least, be such a revolution good or bad, succeeded in their design.
Perhaps looking forward with prophetic eye to a day that actually arrived six years later, Mr. Gladstone, while objecting to the proposal as unjustified, threw the responsibility of it upon the government, and used none of the flaming colours of defiance. The bulk of the liberals abstained from the division. This practical accord between the two sets of leading men made the parliamentary revolution definite and finally clenched it. It was not without something of a funereal pang that members with a sense of the old traditions of the power, solemnity, and honour of the House of Commons came down on the evening of the seventeenth of June. Within a week they would be celebrating the fiftieth year of the reign of the Queen, and that night's business was the strange and unforeseen goal at which a journey of little more than the same period of time [pg 378] along the high, democratic road had brought the commonalty of the realm since 1832. Among the provisions that went into the bill without any discussion in committee were those giving to the Irish executive the power of stamping an association as unlawful; those dealing with special juries and change of the place of trial; those specifying the various important conditions attaching to proclamations, which lay at the foundation of the Act; those dealing with rules, procedure, and the limits of penalty. The report next fell under what Burke calls the accursed slider. That stage had taken three sittings, when the government moved (June 30) that it must close in four days. So much grace, however, was not needed; for after the motion had been carried the liberals withdrew from the House, and the Irishmen betook themselves to the galleries, whence they looked down upon the mechanical proceedings below.
IV
In Ireland the battle now began in earnest. The Irish minister went into it with intrepid logic. Though very different men in the deeper parts of character, Macaulay's account of Halifax would not be an ill-natured account of Mr. Balfour. “His understanding was keen, sceptical, inexhaustibly fertile in distinctions and objections, his taste refined, his sense of the ludicrous exquisite; his temper placid and forgiving, but fastidious, and by no means prone either to malevolence or to enthusiastic admiration.” His business was to show disaffected Ireland that parliament was her master. Parliament had put the weapon into his hands, and it was for him to smite his antagonists to the ground. He made no experiments in judicious mixture, hard blows and soft speech, but held steadily to force and fear. His apologists argued that after all substantial justice was done even in what seemed hard cases, and even if the spirit of law were sometimes a trifle strained. Unluckily the peasant with the blunderbuss, as he waits behind the hedge for the tyrant or the traitor, says just the same. The forces of disorder were infinitely less formidable than they had been a hundred times before. The contest was child's play compared with [pg 379]
First Guillotine Closure
the violence and confusion with which Mr. Forster or Lord Spencer had to deal. On the other hand the alliance between liberals and Irish gave to the struggle a parliamentary complexion, by which no coercion struggle had ever been marked hitherto. In the dialectic of senate and platform, Mr. Balfour displayed a strength of wrist, a rapidity, an instant readiness for combat, that took his foes by surprise, and roused in his friends a delight hardly surpassed in the politics of our day.
There was another important novelty this time. To England hitherto Irish coercion had been little more than a word of common form, used without any thought what the thing itself was like to the people coerced. Now it was different. Coercion had for once become a flaming party issue, and when that happens all the world awakes. Mr. Gladstone had proclaimed that the choice lay between conciliation and coercion. The country would have liked conciliation, but did not trust his plan. When coercion came, the two British parties rushed to their swords, and the deciding body of neutrals looked on with anxiety and concern. There has never been a more strenuously sustained contest in the history of political campaigns. No effort was spared to bring the realities of repression vividly home to the judgment and feelings of men and women of our own island. English visitors trooped over to Ireland, and brought back stories of rapacious landlords, violent police, and famishing folk cast out homeless upon the wintry roadside. Irishmen became the most welcome speakers on British platforms, and for the first time in all our history they got a hearing for their lamentable tale. To English audiences it was as new and interesting as the narrative of an African explorer or a navigator in the Pacific. Our Irish instructors even came to the curious conclusion that ordinary international estimates must be revised, and that Englishmen are in truth far more emotional than Irishmen. Ministerial speakers, on the other hand, diligently exposed inaccuracy here or over-colouring there. They appealed to the English distaste for disorder, and to the English taste for mastery, and they did not overlook the slumbering jealousy of popery [pg 380] and priestcraft. But the course of affairs was too rapid for them, the strong harsh doses to the Irish patient were too incessant. The Irish convictions in cases where the land was concerned rose to 2805, and of these rather over one-half were in cases where in England the rights of the prisoner would have been guarded by a jury. The tide of common popular feeling in this island about the right to combine, the right of public meeting, the frequent barbarities of eviction, the jarring indignities of prison treatment, flowed stronger and stronger. The general impression spread more and more widely that the Irish did not have fair play, that they were not being treated about speeches and combination and meetings as Englishmen or Scotchmen would be treated. Even in breasts that had been most incensed by the sudden reversal of policy in 1886, the feeling slowly grew that it was perhaps a pity after all that Mr. Gladstone had not been allowed to persevere on the fair-shining path of conciliation.