Our alarm at all this should not make us lose sight of the antecedent facts which have built up this force of mischief. Mr. Gladstone is Prime Minister by the favour of the Irish party, and this party is the outcome of Mr. Gladstone's own policy. Whether the fluent rhetorician foresaw his present position, whether perched on his slender ledge of power he now enjoys it, we need not stop to consider. What we would remind our readers is that for nearly twenty years past he has, in the main line of his public life, notwithstanding some convulsive oscillations, pursued with the pertinacity of one possessed the policy of which the present Irish organization is the natural and the logical development. The National League represents the spirit to which Mr. Gladstone appealed at Southport in 1867. In the December of that year he charged the new voters, in words of solemn adjuration, to look at Ireland from the Irish point of view. This appeal had an electric effect upon the population of that island. In the years which have passed since, his own injunction has been sometimes rudely disregarded by Mr. Gladstone himself, but he never long delayed to turn again to his favourite theory, to make another effort to justify the principle with which he had started, and at each renewal of his enterprise he plunged himself and his party deeper into the morass of Hibernian disorder. Mr. Gladstone's admirers are very proud of his numerous successes in carrying important Bills through Parliament, but it is forgotten that his Irish Bills, though carried, have never attained the ends for which they were passed. Twice have all the resources of his genius, all the machinery of his party, been called into requisition to bring about a final settlement of the Irish Land question, and yet the work is still to be done. The explanation is not far to seek. Mr. Gladstone's passionate recklessness committed him in 1867 to an enterprise, the magnitude of which excited his vanity, the actual nature of which he only dimly perceived.
In the year we have named he was trying to recover his footing after a heavy fall in his first start as leader of the Liberal Party. A scheme of Parliamentary reform, carried by his political opponent, had marked the commencement of another epoch. In the new arena of public life two centres of political energy were certain to be strongly represented in the organization which Mr. Gladstone hoped to lead back to office. The Spirit of Dissent was all powerful among the English householders. The Irish tenant, whose electoral strength, directed by the Roman priesthood, had been exhibited with much effect in 1852, was sure to receive a great increase of power under the new Reform Bill. To combine these influences was one of the conditions of any prolonged tenure of office by the Liberal party. The Irish Establishment had been forsaken by English opinion in previous years. Its overthrow would be hailed with enthusiasm by the Dissenting communities, whilst the Irish priesthood would regard disestablishment with undoubted satisfaction. The condition of Irish Land Tenure was admitted by all parties to require amendment, and its settlement would be a substantial benefit to the Irish farmer.
These were subjects which naturally tempted the daring energies of a man occupying Mr. Gladstone's position in the winter of 1867. Turned out of office after the death of Lord Palmerston, his subsequent management of the reform question, as leader of the Opposition, had only increased the distrust of his party. He was without a constituency at the coming election, and he went down to Lancashire to seek in that great centre of hard-headed Englishmen the confiding constituency which he subsequently found in Midlothian. New legislation on the Irish Church, a reform in Irish Land Tenure, were subjects for which his party, for which the majority of Englishmen were pretty well prepared. The Liberal Churchmen, like Sir Roundell Palmer, who held back on the subject of Disestablishment, were more than counterbalanced by the Dissenters, who were attracted by the scheme. Popular Legislation on these subjects might have been granted to Ireland as the matured outcome of British opinion. Such a mode of approaching the work in hand did not suit the exuberant temperament of Mr. Gladstone. Whilst the report of the Clerkenwell explosion was still echoing through the land, he announced his policy as one to be recommended, not because the great British community had examined and adopted the proposed measures, but because Irish opinion was to be henceforth accepted as our guide in Irish Legislation. With characteristic recklessness he hurried to turn to the account of his own ambition the throb of excitement which he saw traversing the nation. He appealed to his audience to regard the Fenian outrages as a sort of revelation from heaven, to commune with their own hearts, not on the state of Ireland, and the remedies sensible men could offer, but on the sentiments of Irishmen. His final test of legislation was to be, not its consonance with the judgment of the British people, but with the demand of the Irish crowd.
'Ireland is at your doors. Providence has placed her there. Law and legislation have been a compact between you. You must face these obligations. You must deal with them and discharge them. As to the modes of giving effect to this principle I do not now enter upon them. I am of opinion they should be dictated, as a general rule, by that which may appear to be the mature, well-considered, and general sense of the Irish people.'—20th Dec. 1867.
At this date 'the general sense of the Irish people' was, to Mr. Gladstone's mind, the policy formulated by the Irish Episcopacy, the scheme which at a later stage of the campaign in the following year he described as the lopping off the three branches of the Upas tree of Protestant ascendancy. He failed in Lancashire, but his success in other parts of the kingdom was complete; and then ensued the abolition of the Irish Establishment and an adjustment of the land question which carried the recognition of local customs farther than Englishmen had anticipated.
The Liberal party had been charged to consult Irish opinion. As long as Cardinal Cullen and Mr. Gladstone were agreed all went merrily, even if some rude coercion like the Westmeath Act was required to deal with Irish ideas which did not find expression in the Cardinal. But whilst the English Minister and the Irish Primate declared, that Ribbonism was an impudent pretender to any representative character and must be rooted out, a third organ of opinion claimed the benefit of the Southport principle in the form of the Home Rule Association, and Mr. Gladstone at Aberdeen replied with angry scorn:
'Can any sensible man, can any rational man, suppose that, at this time of day, in this condition of the world, we are going to disintegrate the capital institutions of this country for the purpose of making ourselves ridiculous in the sight of all mankind, and crippling any power we possess for bestowing benefits, through legislation, on the country to which we belong?'—26th Sept. 1871.
The ideas expressed by the Roman hierarchy, attracted by the Disestablishment, substantially interested in the better position of the farmer, and confidently anticipating for themselves the acquisition of a power over public education such as their order enjoyed nowhere else in the world, these were ideas which Mr. Gladstone recognized as national. On the subject of education, however, he was not able to go as far as the Ultramontane party required. They directed the Irish members to vote against him. The coalition between Dissent and the Roman Hierarchy was dissolved. The Minister, who had brought it about, suddenly awoke to a sense of the evil teaching of his late allies in the government of Ireland, and 'Vaticanism' held them up to the reprobation of Protestant England.
The new Liberal discovery, the principle of Irish ideas, had broken down as a party engine. It had made the Ministry of 1868, but it had failed to preserve it. Mr. Gladstone retired from the leadership of the party to the greater freedom of an independent member of Parliament, and in this capacity led the stormy agitation against Lord Beaconsfield, making the foreign policy of England a party question.
Meanwhile the theory of the Southport speech, and the results which had attended it, were not forgotten in Ireland. The Home Rule movement, which was denounced so angrily at Aberdeen, enlisted all the resources of local sentiment, feelings similar to those which make a Lancashireman proud of Lancashire, a Scotchman delight in Scotch associations. Among its promoters were professors, poets, Irish Catholics, who were glad to show themselves on a public platform without being the puppets or the opponents of their bishops, Irish Protestants, who were irritated at the desertion of the Irish Church, a number of well-meaning people who were attracted by the opportunity of talking eloquently and vaguely about nothing in particular. This Academic scheme of Home Rule found an admirable exponent in Mr. Butt, an able lawyer of ambitious politics.