Handbook of Home Rule: Being Articles on the Irish Question

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a practical, and often very close, though unavowed, Parliamentary alliance with the Nationalists in the House of Commons. The student of history will, however, conceive that the Liberals have a stronger and higher defence than any tu quoque. Issues that involve the welfare of peoples are far too serious for us to apply to them the same sentiments of personal taste and predilection which we follow in inviting a dinner party, or selecting companions for a vacation tour. If a man has abused your brother, or got drunk in the street, you do not ask him to go with you to the Yellowstone Park. But his social offences do not prevent you from siding with him in a political convention. So, in politics itself, one must distinguish between characters and opinions. If a man has shown himself unscrupulous or headstrong, you may properly refuse to vote him into office, or to sit in the same Cabinet with him, because you think these faults of his dangerous to the country. But if the cause he pleads be a just one, you have no more right to be prejudiced against it by his conduct than a judge has to be swayed by dislike to the counsel who argues a case. There were moderate men in America, who, in the days of the anti-slavery movement, cited against it the intemperate language of many abolitionists. There were aristocrats in England, who, during the struggle for the freedom and unity of Italy, sought to discredit the patriotic party by accusing them of tyrannicide. But the sound sense of both nations refused to be led away by such arguments, because it held those two causes to be in their essence righteous. In all revolutionary movements there are elements of excess and violence, which sober men may regret, but which must not disturb our judgment as to the substantial merits of an issue. The revolutionist of one generation is, like Garibaldi or Mazzini, the hero of the next; and the verdict of posterity applauds those who, even in his own day, were able to discern the justice of the

cause under the errors or faults of its champion. Doubly is it the duty of a great and far-sighted statesman not to be repelled by such errors, when he can, by espousing a revolutionary movement, purify it of its revolutionary character, and turn it into a legitimate constitutional struggle. This is what Mr. Gladstone has done. If his policy be in itself dangerous and disloyal to the true interests of the people of our islands, let it be condemned. But if it be the policy which has the best promise for the peace, the prosperity, and the mutual good will of those peoples, he and those who follow him would be culpable indeed were they to be deterred by the condemnation which they have so often expressed, and which they still express, for some of the past acts of a particular party, from declaring that the aims of that party were substantially right aims, and from now pressing upon the country what their conscience approves.

However, as the Home Rule Liberals and Nationalists, taken together, are in a minority (although a minority which obtains recruits at many bye-elections) in the present Parliament, it is not from them that fresh proposals are expected. They will, of course, continue to speak, write, and agitate on behalf of the views they hold. But practical attempt to deal with Irish troubles must for the present come from the Tory Ministry; for in the English system of government those who command a Parliamentary majority are responsible for legislation as well as administration, and are censured not merely if their legislation is bad, but if it is not forthcoming when events call for it.

Why, it may be asked, should Lord Salisbury's Government burn its fingers over Ireland, as so many governments have burnt their fingers before? Why not let Ireland alone, giving to foreign affairs and to English and Scottish reforms all the attention which these too much neglected matters need?

Well would it be for England, as well as for English Ministries, if Ireland could be simply let alone, her maladies left to be healed by the soft, slow hand of nature. But Irish troubles call aloud to be dealt with, and that promptly. They stand in the way of all other reforms, indeed of all other business. Letting alone has been tried, and it has succeeded no better, even in times less urgent than the present, than the usual policy of coercion followed by concession, or concession followed by coercion.

There are three aspects of the Irish question, three channels by which the troubles of the "distressful island" stream down upon us, forcing whoever now rules or may come to rule in England to attempt some plan for dealing with them. I will take them in succession.

The first is the Parliamentary difficulty. In the British House of Commons, with its six hundred and seventy members, there are nearly ninety Irish Nationalists. They are a well-disciplined body, voting as one man, though capable of speaking enough for a thousand. They have no interest in English or Scotch or colonial or Indian affairs, but only in Irish, and look upon the vote which they have the right of giving upon the former solely as a means of furthering their own Irish aims. They are, therefore, in the British Parliament not merely a foreign body, indifferent to the great British and imperial issues confided to it, but a hostile body, opposed to its present constitution, seeking to discredit it in its authority over Ireland, and to make more and more palpable and incurable the incompetence for Irish business whereof they accuse it. Several modes of doing this are open to them. They may, as some of the more actively bitter among them did in the Parliaments of 1874 and 1880, obstruct business by long and frequent speeches, dilatory motions, and all those devices which in America are called filibustering. The House of Commons may, no doubt, try to check these tactics by more stringent

rules of procedure, but the attempts already made in this direction have had but slight success, and every restriction of debate, since it trenches on the freedom of English and Scotch no less than of Irish members, injures Parliament as a whole. They may disgust the British people with the House of Commons by keeping it (as they have done in former years) so constantly occupied with Irish business as to leave it little time for English and Scotch measures. They may throw the weight of their collective vote into the scale of one or other British party, according to the amount of concession it will make to them, or, by always voting against the Ministry of the day, they may cause frequent and sudden changes of Government. This plan also they have followed in time past; for the moment it is not so applicable, because the Tories and dissentient Liberals, taken together, possess a majority in the House of Commons. But at any moment the alliance of those two sections may vanish, or another General Election may leave Tories and Liberals so nearly balanced that the Irish vote could turn the scale. Whoever reflects on the nature of Parliamentary Government will perceive that it is based on the assumption that the members of the ruling assembly, however much they may differ on other subjects, agree in desiring the strength, dignity, and welfare of the assembly itself, and in caring for the main national interests which it controls. He will therefore be prepared to expect countless and multiform difficulties in working such a Government, where a large section of the assembly seeks not to use, but to make useless, its forms and rules—not to preserve, but to lower and destroy, its honour, its credit, its efficiency. In vain are Irish members blamed for these tactics, for they answer that the interests of their own country require them to seek first her welfare, which can in their view be secured only by removing her from the direct control of what they deem a foreign assembly. Now that the demand for Irish

self-government has obtained the sympathy of the bulk of English Liberals, they are unlikely forthwith to resume the systematic obstruction of past years. But they will be able, without alienating their English friends, to render the conduct of Parliamentary business so difficult that every English Ministry will be forced either to crush them, if it can, or to appease them by a series of concessions.

The second difficulty is that of maintaining social order in Ireland. What that difficulty is, and whence it arises, every one knows. It is chronic, but every second or third winter, when there has been a wet season, or the price of live stock declines, it becomes specially acute. The tenants refuse to pay rents which they declare to be impossible. The landlords, or the harsher among them, try to enforce rents by evictions; evictions are resisted by outrages and boycotting. Popular sentiment supports those who commit outrages, because it considers the tenantry to be engaged in a species of war, a righteous war, against the landlord. Evidence can seldom be obtained, and juries acquit in the teeth of evidence. Thus the enforcement of the law strains all the resources of authority, while a habit of lawlessness and discontent is transmitted from generation to generation. Of the remedies proposed for this chronic evil the most obvious is the strengthening of the criminal law. We have been trying this for more than one hundred years, since Whiteboyism appeared, and trying it in vain. Since the Union, Coercion Acts, of more or less severity, have been almost always in force in Ireland, passed for two or three years, then dropped for a year or two, then renewed in a form slightly varying, but always with the same result of driving the disease in for a time, but not curing it. Mr. Gladstone proposed to buy out the landlords and then leave an Irish Parliament to restore social order, with that authority which it would derive from having the will of the people behind it; because he held that when the