V
Mr. Gladstone's cardinal deliverance in November had been preceded by an important event. On October 7, 1885, Lord Salisbury made that speech at Newport, which is one of the tallest and most striking landmarks in the shifting sands of this controversy. It must be taken in relation to Lord Carnarvon's declaration of policy on taking office, and to his exchange of views with Mr. Parnell at the end of July. Their first principle, said Lord Salisbury, was to extend to Ireland, so far as they could, all the institutions of this country. But one must remember that in Ireland the population is on several subjects deeply divided, and a government is bound 'on all matters of essential justice' to protect a minority against a majority. Then came remarkable sentences: “Local authorities are more exposed to the temptation of enabling the majority to be unjust to the minority when they obtain jurisdiction over a small area, than is the case when the authority derives its sanction and extends its jurisdiction over a wider area. In a large central authority, the wisdom of several parts of the country will correct the folly and mistakes of one. In a local authority, that correction is to a much greater extent wanting, and it would be impossible to leave that out of sight, in any extension of any such local authority in Ireland.” This principle was often used in the later controversy as a recognition by Lord Salisbury that the creation of a great central body would be a safer policy than the mere extension of self-government in Irish counties. In another part of the speech, it is true, the finger-post or weather-vane pointed in the opposite direction. “With respect to the larger organic questions connected with Ireland,” said Lord Salisbury, “I cannot say much, though I can speak emphatically. I have nothing to say but that the traditions of the party to which we belong, are on this point clear and distinct, and you may rely upon it our party will not depart from them.” Yet this emphatic refusal to depart from the traditions of the tory party did not prevent Lord Salisbury from retaining at that moment in his cabinet an Irish viceroy, with whom he [pg 243]
Declarations From Lord Salisbury
was in close personal relations, and whose active Irish policy he must have known to be as wide a breach in tory tradition as the mind of man can imagine. So hard is it in distracted times, the reader may reflect, even for men of honourable and lofty motive to be perfectly ingenuous.
The speaker next referred to the marked way in which Mr. Parnell, a day or two before, had mentioned the position of Austro-Hungary. “I gathered that some notion of imperial federation was floating in his mind. With respect to Ireland, I am bound to say that I have never seen any plan or any suggestion which gives me at present the slightest ground for anticipating that it is in that direction that we shall find any substantial solution of the difficulties of the problem.” In an electric state of the political atmosphere, a statesman who said that at present he did not think federal home rule possible, was taken to imply that he might think it possible, by-and-by. No door was closed.
It was, however, Lord Salisbury's language upon social order that gave most scandal to simple consciences in his own ranks. You ask us, he said, why we did not renew the Crimes Act. There are two answers: we could not, and it would have done no good if we could. To follow the extension of the franchise by coercion, would have been a gross inconsistency. To show confidence by one act, and the absence of confidence by a simultaneous act, would be to stultify parliament. Your inconsistency would have provoked such intense exasperation, that it would have led to ten times more evil, ten times more resistance to the law, than your Crimes Act could possibly have availed to check. Then the audience was favoured with a philosophic view of boycotting. This, said the minister, is an offence which legislation has very great difficulty in reaching. The provisions of the Crimes Act against it had a very small effect. It grew up under that Act. And, after all, look at boycotting. An unpopular man or his family go to mass. The congregation with one accord get up and walk out. Are you going to indict people for leaving church? The plain fact is that boycotting “is more like the excommunication or interdict of the middle ages, than anything that we know [pg 244] now.” “The truth about boycotting is that it depends on the passing humour of the population.”
It is important to remember that in the month immediately preceding this polished apologetic, there were delivered some of the most violent boycotting speeches ever made in Ireland.[157] These speeches must have been known to the Irish government, and their occurrence and the purport of them must presumably have been known therefore to the prime minister. Here was indeed a removal of the ancient buoys and beacons that had hitherto guided English navigation in Irish waters. There was even less of a solid ultimatum at Newport, than in those utterances in Midlothian which were at that time and long afterwards found so culpably vague, blind, and elusive. Some of the more astute of the minister's own colleagues were delighted with his speech, as keeping the Irishmen steady to the tory party. They began to hope that they might even come within five-and-twenty of the liberals when the polling began.
The question on which side the Irish vote in Great Britain should be thrown seems not to have been decided until after Mr. Gladstone's speech. It was then speedily settled. On Nov. 21 a manifesto was issued, handing over the Irish vote in Great Britain solid to the orator of the Newport speech. The tactics were obvious. It was Mr. Parnell's interest to bring the two contending British parties as near as might be to a level, and this he could only hope to do by throwing his strength upon the weaker side. It was from the weaker side, if they could be retained in office, that he would get the best terms.[158] The document was composed with vigour and astuteness. But the phrases of the manifesto were the least important part of it. It was enough that the hard word was passed. Some estimated the loss to the liberal party in this island at twenty seats, others at forty. Whether twenty or forty, these lost seats made a fatal difference in the division on the Irish bill a few months later, and when [pg 245]
Irish Manifesto
that day had come and gone, Mr. Parnell sometimes ruefully asked himself whether the tactics of the electoral manifesto were not on the whole a mistake. But this was not all and was not the worst of it. The Irish manifesto became a fiery element in a sharp electioneering war, and threw the liberals in all constituencies where there was an Irish vote into a direct and angry antagonism to the Irish cause and its leaders; passions were roused, and things were said about Irishmen that could not at once be forgotten; and the great task of conversion in 1886, difficult in any case, was made a thousand times more difficult still by the arguments and antipathies of the electoral battle of 1885. Meanwhile it was for the moment, and for the purposes of the moment, a striking success.