The Bill
inquiry under thoroughly competent and impartial judges, after the right and true method of proceeding had been refused, was still better than no proceeding at all. This much of assent, however, was qualified. “I think,” he said, “that an inquiry under thoroughly competent and impartial judges is better than none. But that inquiry must, I think, be put into such a shape as shall correspond with the general law and principles of justice.” As he believed, the first and most indispensable conditions of an effective inquiry were wanting, and without them he “certainly would have no responsibility whatever.”[250]
For the first few days politicians were much adrift. They had moments of compunction. Whether friends or foes of the Irish, they were perplexed by the curious double aspect of the measure. Mr. Parnell himself began to feel misgivings, as he came to realise the magnitude of the inquiry, its vast expense, its interminable length, its unfathomable uncertainties. On the day appointed for the second reading of the bill appointing the commission (July 23), some other subject kept the business back until seven o'clock. Towards six, Mr. Parnell who was to open the debate on his own side, came to an English friend, to ask whether there would be time for him to go away for an hour; he wished to examine some new furnace for assaying purposes, the existence of gold in Wicklow being one of his fixed ideas. So steady was the composure of this extraordinary man. The English friend grimly remarked to him that it would perhaps be rather safer not to lose sight of the furnace in which at any moment his own assaying might begin. His speech on this critical occasion was not one of his best. Indifference to his audience often made him meagre, though he was scarcely ever other than clear, and in this debate there was only one effective point which it was necessary for him to press. The real issue was whether the reference to the judges should be limited or unlimited; should be a fishing inquiry at large into the history of an agrarian agitation ten years old, or an examination into definite and specified charges against named members of parliament. The minister, in moving [pg 400] the second reading, no longer left it to the Irish members to accept or reject; it now rested, he said, with the House to decide. It became evident that the acuter members of the majority, fully awakened to the opportunities for destroying the Irishmen which an unlimited inquisition might furnish, had made up their minds that no limit should be set to the scope of the inquisition. Boldly they tramped through a thick jungle of fallacy and inconsistency. They had never ceased to insist, and they insisted now, that Mr. Parnell ought to have gone into a court of law. Yet they fought as hard as they could against every proposal for making the procedure of the commission like the procedure of a law court. In a court there would have been a specific indictment. Here a specific indictment was what they most positively refused, and for it they substituted a roving inquiry, which is exactly what a court never undertakes. They first argued that nothing but a commission was available to test the charges against members of parliament. Then, when they had bethought themselves of further objects, they argued round that it was unheard of and inconceivable to institute a royal commission for members of parliament alone.
All arguments, however unanswerable, were at this stage idle, because Mr. Parnell had reverted to his original resolution to accept the bill, and at his request the radicals sitting below him abandoned their opposition. The bill passed the second reading without a division. This circumstance permitted the convenient assertion, made so freely afterwards, that the bill, irregular, unconstitutional, violent, as it might be, at any rate received the unanimous assent of the House of Commons.
Stormy scenes marked the progress of the bill through committee. Seeing the exasperation produced by their shifting of the ground, and the delay which it would naturally entail, ministers resolved on a bold step. It was now August. Government remembered the process by which they had carried the Coercion bill, and they improved upon it. After three days of committee, they moved that at one o'clock in the morning on the fourth sitting the [pg 401]
The Tribunal Opened
chairman should break off discussion, put forthwith the question already proposed from the chair, then successively put forthwith all the remaining clauses, and so report the bill to the House. This process shut out all amendments not reached at the fatal hour, and is the most drastic and sweeping of all forms of closure. In the case of the Coercion bill, resort to the guillotine was declared to be warranted by the urgency of social order in Ireland. That plea was at least plausible. No such plea of urgency could be invoked for a measure, which only a few days before the government had considered to be of such secondary importance, that the simple rejection of it by Mr. Parnell was to be enough to induce them to withdraw it. The bill that had been proffered as a generous concession to Irish members, was now violently forced upon them without debate. Well might Mr. Gladstone speak of the most extraordinary series of proceedings that he had ever known.[251]
III
The three judges first met on September 17, 1888, to settle their procedure. They sat for one hundred and twenty-eight days, and rose for the last time on November 22, 1889. More than four hundred and fifty witnesses were examined. One counsel spoke for five days, another for seven, and a third for nearly twelve. The mammoth record of the proceedings fills eleven folio volumes, making between seven and eight thousand pages. The questions put to witnesses numbered ninety-eight thousand.
It was a strange and fantastic scene. Three judges were trying a social and political revolution. The leading actors in it were virtually in the dock. The tribunal had been specially set up by their political opponents, without giving them any effective voice either in its composition or upon the character and scope of its powers. For the first time in England since the Great Rebellion, men were practically put upon their trial on a political charge, without giving them the protection of a jury. For the first time in that period judges were to find a verdict upon the facts of crime. The [pg 402] charge placed in the forefront was a charge of conspiracy. But to call a combination a conspiracy does not make it a conspiracy or a guilty combination, unless the verdict of a jury pronounces it to be one. A jury would have taken all the large attendant circumstances into account. The three judges felt themselves bound expressly to shut out those circumstances. In words of vital importance, they said, “We must leave it for politicians to discuss, and for statesmen to determine, in what respects the present laws affecting land in Ireland are capable of improvement. We have no commission to consider whether the conduct of which they are accused can be palliated by the circumstances of the time, or whether it should be condoned in consideration of benefits alleged to have resulted from their action.”[252] When the proceedings were over, Lord Salisbury applauded the report as “giving a very complete view of a very curious episode of our internal history.”[253] A very complete view of an agrarian rising—though it left out all palliating circumstances and the whole state of agrarian law!