He is actually the only statesman in Europe who follows a policy of principle; the only one seeking the triumph of his opinions by the sole help of reason. All the others, from the most famous to the most obscure or passing politician, are only jobbers. Disraeli had too much of the mountebank about him to have been able to secure the respect of posterity. Gortschakoff was only a courtier of the old school; Cavour a clever lawyer; Thiers a dwarf, in a moral and political, as in a physical, sense. Bismarck profits by a state of affairs which he did little or nothing to create, and at the most is the belated representative in our times of fossil feudalism. Gladstone alone is a truly modern statesman, and therefore is destined to be set by history above all his contemporaries, if only he succeeds in carrying out his great enterprise; for the more we go the more nations shall be restricted to politics of principle, both because all other systems are exploded, and because the diffusion of learning will be for the future an almost insuperable obstacle to petty or brutal diplomatic conspiracies.
Great Britain, it is earnestly to be hoped, will consent to follow her great leader in the way he has shown to her. She is offered the most splendid opportunity of doing what no nation has achieved as yet,—atoning, of her own free will, for centuries of injustice, and trying one of the noblest social experiments that can ever be attempted. It would be the beginning of a new era in the history of human societies, and pure glory for those who initiated it. Not only could such results be attained at little cost, but the most obvious, the most pressing interest of England invites her to the enterprise. Let her make haste. After having affirmed for half a century the sovereignty of peoples, and their right to govern themselves according to their will, she cannot give herself the lie at home. After having protested against Bomba and the Bulgarian atrocities, she cannot in her own dominions remain beneath “the unspeakable Turk.” After having assumed before the world the attitude of a systematic foe to slave-trade and all kinds of oppression or cruelty, after having carried it even to maudlin sensitiveness, as in the case of pigeon-shooting, “birds’ corpses on women’s hats,” and the like, she cannot decently carry on the slow destruction of a sister race through starvation. She cannot and she will not do it, for it would be branding herself for ever as Queen of Humbug, Empress of Sham.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Absenteeism, in its present form, seems to date only from Grattan’s Parliament, but in some shape or another it may be said to date from the British invasion of Ireland, and to result from the very nature of an insular kingdom transferred wholesale to the nobility of a neighbouring state.
[2] A later instance. On August 30th, 1887, two men armed with guns and wearing masks entered the house of Mr. R. Blennerhasset, at Kells, near Cahirciveen; they went upstairs to Mrs. Blennerhasset’s room and demanded money, which they got to the amount of about £2.
[3] My guide was quite right. In a statistical table of trials between July, 1885, and July, 1886, for the County Kerry, I find the following items: maiming cattle, 9; injury to person, 7; murders, 3; firing at persons, 8; firing into houses, 15; threatening letters, 125; intimidation, 36; malicious injury, 22; arson, 19; assaults, 22. The above figures, it should be observed, only relate to outrages brought home to their authors; there can be no doubt that a much larger number of agrarian outrages remain unpunished.
APPENDIX.
EXTRACTS FROM SOME LETTERS ADDRESSED WITHIN THE LAST TWO YEARS TO AN IRISH LANDLORD BY HIS TENANTS.
The Times has published, on October 10, 1887, an exceedingly interesting batch of letters selected from some three hundred addressed within the last two years to an Irish landowner by his tenants. As the editor of those letters wrote most appropriately, there is perhaps no means whereby truer insight can be obtained into the ways and habits of the Irish peasantry than by studying the letters written by the people themselves. Typically enough, however, the same editor only saw in those letters how “unbusiness-like and illogical is the Irish tenant,” and “the various reasons that an Irishman gives for not paying his rent. One is unable to pay because his uncle is confined to bed, and his daughter suffering from a sore eye; another because a relative has died; a third because his brother-in-law has brought an action against him for money lent, and he has had to pay; one because his family is small, and another because it is large; another—and this is the most common excuse—because he has been unable to sell his stock; another because his wife has a sore hand; another because of the death of a cow; another because the weather is severe and there is a sheriff’s bailiff obstructing him from making up the rent; another because it was God’s will to take all the means he had; another because of the agitation.”