June 30, 1885.—Since you have in substance (and in form?) received the appointment [at the Treasury], I am unmuzzled, and may now express the unbounded pleasure which it gives me, together with my strong sense (not disparaging any one else) of your desert. The modesty of your letter is as remarkable as its other qualities, and does you the highest honour. I can accept no tribute from you, or from any one, with regard to the office of private secretary under me except this, that it has always been made by me a strict and severe office, and that this is really the only favour I have ever done you, or any of your colleagues to whom in their several places and measures I am similarly obliged.
As to your services to me they have been simply indescribable. No one I think could dream, until by experience he knew, to what an extent in these close personal relations devolution can be carried, and how it strengthens the feeble knees and thus also sustains the fainting heart.
III
The declaration of the Irish policy of the new government was made to parliament by no less a personage than the lord-lieutenant.[130] The prime minister had discoursed on frontiers in Asia and frontiers in Africa, but on Ireland he was silent. Lord Carnarvon, on the contrary, came forward voluntarily with a statement of policy, and he opened it on the broadest general lines. His speech deserves as close attention as any deliverance of this memorable period. It laid down the principles of that alternative system of government, with which the new ministers formally challenged their predecessors. Ought the Crimes Act to be re-enacted as it stood; or in part; or ought it to be allowed to lapse? These were the three courses. Nobody, he thought, would be for the first, because some provisions had never been put in force; others had been put in force but found useless; and others again did nothing that might not be done just as well under the ordinary law. The re-enactment of the whole statute, therefore, was dismissed. But the powers for changing venue at the discretion of the executive; for securing special juries at the same discretion; for holding secret inquiry without an accused person; for dealing summarily with charges of intimidation—might they not be continued? They were not unconstitutional, and they were not opposed to legal instincts. No, all quite true; but then the Lords should not conceal from themselves that their re-enactment would be in the nature of special or exceptional legislation. He had been looking through coercion Acts, he continued, and had been astonished to find that ever since 1847, with some very short intervals hardly worth mentioning, Ireland [pg 212] had lived under exceptional and coercive legislation. What sane man could admit this to be a satisfactory or a wholesome state of things? Why should not they try to extricate themselves from this miserable habit, and aim at some better solution? “Just as I have seen in English colonies across the sea a combination of English, Irish, and Scotch settlers bound together in loyal obedience to the law and the crown, and contributing to the general prosperity of the country, so I cannot conceive that there is any irreconcilable bar here in their native home and in England to the unity and the amity of the two nations.” He went to his task individually with a perfectly free, open, and unprejudiced mind, to hear, to question, and, as far as might be, to understand. “My Lords, I do not believe that with honesty and single-mindedness of purpose on the one side, and with the willingness of the Irish people on the other, it is hopeless to look for some satisfactory solution of this terrible question. My Lords, these I believe to be the opinions and the views of my colleagues.”[131]
This remarkable announcement, made in the presence of the prime minister, in the name of the cabinet as a whole, and by a man of known purity and sincerity of character, was taken to be an express renunciation, not merely of the policy of which notice had been given by the outgoing administration, but of coercion as a final instrument of imperial rule. It was an elaborate repudiation in advance of that panacea of firm and resolute government, which became so famous before twelve months were over. It was the suggestion, almost in terms, that a solution should be sought in that policy which had brought union both within our colonies, and between the colonies and the mother country, and men did not forget that this suggestion was being made by a statesman who had carried federation in Canada, and tried to carry it in South Africa. We cannot wonder that upon leading members of the late government, and especially upon the statesman who had been specially responsible for Ireland, the impression was startling and profound. Important members of the tory party hurried [pg 213]
The Maamtrasna Debate
from Ireland to Arlington Street, and earnestly warned their leader that he would never be able to carry on with the ordinary law. They were coldly informed that Lord Salisbury had received quite different counsel from persons well acquainted with the country.
The new government were not content with renouncing coercion for the present. They cast off all responsibility for its practice in the past. Ostentatiously they threw overboard the viceroy with whom the only fault that they had hitherto found, was that his sword was not sharp enough. A motion was made by the Irish leader calling attention to the maladministration of the criminal law by Lord Spencer. Forty men had been condemned to death, and in twenty-one of these cases the capital sentence had been carried out. Of the twenty-one executions six were savagely impugned, and Mr. Parnell's motion called for a strict inquiry into these and some other convictions, with a view to the full discovery of truth and the relief of innocent persons. The debate soon became famous from the principal case adduced, as the Maamtrasna debate. The topic had been so copiously discussed as to occupy three full sittings of the House in the previous October. The lawyer who had just been made Irish chancellor, at that time pronounced against the demand. In substance the new government made no fresh concession. They said that if memorials or statements were laid before him, the viceroy would carefully attend to them. No minister could say less. But incidental remarks fell from the government that created lively alarm in tories and deep disgust in liberals. Sir Michael Hicks Beach, then leader of the House, told them that while believing Lord Spencer to be a man of perfect honour and sense of duty, “he must say very frankly that there was much in the Irish policy of the late government which, though in the absence of complete information he did not condemn, he should be very sorry to make himself responsible for.”[132] An even more important minister emphasised the severance of the new policy from the old. “I will tell you,” cried Lord Randolph Churchill, “how the present government is foredoomed to failure. [pg 214] They will be foredoomed to failure if they go out of their way unnecessarily to assume one jot or tittle of the responsibility for the acts of the late administration. It is only by divesting ourselves of all responsibility for the acts of the late government, that we can hope to arrive at a successful issue.”[133]
Tory members got up in angry fright, to denounce this practical acquiescence by the heads of their party in what was a violent Irish attack not only upon the late viceroy, but upon Irish judges, juries, and law officers. They remonstrated against “the pusillanimous way” in which their two leaders had thrown over Lord Spencer. “During the last three years,” said one of these protesting tories, “Lord Spencer has upheld respect for law at the risk of his life from day to day, with the sanction, with the approval, and with the acknowledgment inside and outside of this House, of the country, and especially of the conservative party. Therefore I for one will not consent to be dragged into any implied, however slight, condemnation of Lord Spencer, because it happens to suit the exigencies of party warfare.”[134] This whole transaction disgusted plain men, tory and liberal alike; it puzzled calculating men; and it had much to do with the silent conversion of important and leading men.
The general sentiment about the outgoing viceroy took the form of a banquet in his honour (July 24), and some three hundred members of the two Houses attended, including Lord Hartington, who presided, and Mr. Bright. The two younger leaders of the radical wing who had been in the late cabinet neither signed the invitation nor were present. But on the same evening in another place, Mr. Chamberlain recognised the high qualities and great services of Lord Spencer, though they had not always agreed upon details. He expressed, however, his approval both of the policy and of the arguments which had led the new government to drop the Crimes Act. At the same time he denounced the “astounding tergiversation” of ministers, and energetically declared that “a strategic movement of that kind, executed in opposition to the notorious convictions of [pg 215] the men who effected it, carried out for party purposes and party purposes alone, is the most flagrant instance of political dishonesty this country has ever known.”