Since the foregoing chapter was written the Provost of Trinity has announced to a meeting of Graduates of the College that he has received assurances from the Chief Secretary that in the forthcoming Bill the University of Dublin will be left untouched. I have said enough to show that Irish Nationalist opinion has not been committed to the Bryce scheme to the exclusion of every other solution, but it is to be regretted, in the interests of education, that the proposal which the majority of Irishmen regarded as the solution nearest approaching the ideal should have been launched by the Government merely as a ballon d'essai, to be withdrawn at the first breath of opposition, and to be replaced by what, at the best, can only prove to be a less hopeful compromise. One guarantee of a speedy solution the country at any rate holds—namely, that the Government is pledged to introduce legislation next session, and that the Chief Secretary has bound himself to stand or fall by the fate of the Bill.
CHAPTER VII
UNIONISM IN IRELAND
"When I hear any man talk of an unalterable law, the only effect it produces upon me is to convince me that he is an unalterable fool. There are always a set of worthy and moderately gifted men who bawl out death and ruin upon every valuable change which the varying aspect of human affairs absolutely and imperiously requires ... I admit that to a certain extent the Government will lose the affections of the Orangemen ... but you must perceive that it is better to have four friends and one enemy than four enemies and one friend."
—SYDNEY SMITH, Letters of Peter Plymley, 1807.
From the outcry which arose in the last years of the late Government at the revelations which came to be known as the MacDonnell mystery one would have thought that Conservatives could look back to a record unstained by any traffic with the unclean thing for which they express such horror. I will try to show how small is the measure of truth in this belief, and in what manner it has proved impossible to maintain the status quo in the teeth of democratic feeling without pourparlers behind the scenes, even when in the open such dealings have had perforce to be denounced as impossible.
Twenty-five years ago the rigid application of the Crimes Act by Lord Spencer, the Viceroy, after the Phoenix Park murders had put an end to the "Kilmainham Treaty," and the failure on the part of the Government to amend the Land Act of 1881, together with the sympathetic attitude of Lord Randolph Churchill, then conducting his guerilla tactics as leader of the Fourth Party, all served to make opposition on the part of the Irish members to
[151]the Liberal Government increase, and it was by their aid that in June, 1885, it was thrown out of office on a defeat by twelve votes on the Budget. Lord Salisbury then took office with his "ministry of care-takers," with a minority in the House of Commons, for a general election could not take place until the provisions of the new Franchise Act had come into force.
Colour was lent to the general impression which was abroad that the Conservatives were flirting with Home Rule by the appointment to the Lord Lieutenancy with a seat in the Cabinet of Lord Carnarvon, the statesman who had established federation in Canada and had attempted to bring it about in South Africa, who was familiar with the machinery of subordinate legislatures and Colonial parliaments, and whose sympathies with the Irish people were to be inferred from the fact that he had voted for Disestablishment in 1869, and for the Land Bill of the following year, in a speech on which measure he had urged the House of Lords not to delay concession till it could no longer have the charm of free consent, nor be regulated by the counsels of prudent statesmanship.