The actual provisions of the Home Rule Bill do not at all convey the magnitude of the issue or explain the gravity with which it was regarded. A proposal to establish by statute, subject to guarantees of Imperial supremacy, a colonial Parliament in Ireland for the transaction of Irish business may indeed be unwise, but is not, and ought not to be, outside the limits of calm and patient consideration. Such a proposal is not necessarily fraught with the immense and terrific consequences which were so generally associated with it. A generation may arise in England who will question the policy of creating subordinate legislatures as little as we question the propriety of Catholic Emancipation and who will study the records of the fierce disputes of 1886 with the superior manner of a modern professor examining the controversies of the early Church. But that will not prove the men of 1886 wrong or foolish in speech and action.
The controversy of 1886 can never be resolved. Whatever may happen in the future, neither party can be brought to the bar of history and proved by actual experience right or wrong. The cases of Catholic Emancipation, of the Great Reform Bill, of the Repeal of the Corn Laws, are differently placed. We know that in certain circumstances a great change was made and that that change was immediately vindicated by events and afterwards ratified by posterity. The opponents of the change stand condemned. No such assured conclusion of the Home Rule Question of 1886 can ever be reached, unless by some unthinkable coincidence the actual circumstances of that time were reconstructed.
Mr. Gladstone ultimately succeeded in convincing not only his personal friends and half his fellow-countrymen of his entire sincerity, but his most capable opponents also. Yet at the time his motives were impugned, and not without much reason. Concessions to Ireland made by any British Government which depends for its existence on the Irish vote, will naturally and necessarily be suspect. There must always be a feeling in English minds that such a government is not a free agent, that it is trafficking for personal or party advantage with what belongs to the nation. In 1886 Mr. Gladstone’s Administration lay under deep suspicion. His own appeals for an independent majority at the election; the sudden conversion of his principal colleagues; the absolute dependence of his power upon Mr. Parnell’s followers; the precipitate haste with which he had taken office; all tended to confirm the distrust and prejudices of his opponents. Whether his Bill was proposed upon its merits or not, it was not considered, and could not be considered, upon them. It looked like surrender—not advance; and surrender made shameful by the party advantage that was its first-fruits. The violent scenes in the House of Commons, the declarations of hatred towards England reiterated by Irish Nationalism, however historically excusable, the long nightmare of outrage and unrest through which Ireland was struggling, the American gold, the dynamite explosions, the bloody daggers in the Phœnix Park, had bitten deep into British minds and memories. The tireless conflicts of Catholic and Protestant, of landlord and tenant, provoked and disquieted statesmen of every complexion. Some there were who rose to Mr. Gladstone’s level of enthusiasm, who shared his consciousness of unswerving rectitude and dreams of glorious achievement; but by most of the eminent men in England the Irish proposals of 1886 were regarded as the surrender of national heirlooms at the compulsion of public enemies, involving an act of practical secession with potential consequences of revolution and civil war. And once this conviction was adopted, all chance that the plan itself would be fairly weighed was inevitably destroyed. Radicals who, like Mr. Chamberlain, were committed to all sorts of schemes of devolution, who looked with favour upon National Councils or Legislatures of the Canadian provincial type, were, by the stroke of crisis, united with the ultra-Conservatives and authoritarians. A state of war existed and political leaders selected their positions upon tactical reasons alone. Here it was good to fight; there it was bad. At this point a stand might be made; that it would be well to concede. All question of a reasonable settlement vanished. Every man chose his ground and fought upon it to win. ‘Never,’ said Lord Randolph in after years to a friend, ‘have we approached the Irish Question avec de bonnes paroles et de bons procédés.’
Thus it happened that in the tremendous enterprise upon which Mr. Gladstone had now determined to embark, he found arrayed against him nearly all the leading men and most of the strongest forces in England and Scotland. When a party has been for many years supreme in the State, it draws into itself by its prestige and authority many men who are not really with it in sympathy and opinion. The Whigs and many moderate Liberals had long been estranged. They were held by the force of party associations alone and most of them welcomed a shock which ended the strain and freed them from obligations they could no longer faithfully discharge. The wealthy Whig Peers were glad to escape from Radical associates and to be ranked in the mass of their order. Statesmen of the old school like Mr. Bright, Lord Hartington and Mr. Goschen, with many followers whose talents adorned the Liberal party, were quite unprepared to adapt themselves to the new conditions which a democratic franchise had imposed. The Home Rule proposals—already in themselves a sufficient cause for final separation—were, besides, a convenient opportunity. All this was to have been expected, and no doubt the Irish accession was estimated to fill the gap. But a Radical defection was utterly unforeseen.
Of all the men who followed Mr. Gladstone into the Lobby on the night when the Jesse Collings amendment dismissed the ‘Ministry of Caretakers’ from office, Mr. Chamberlain stood to gain the greatest profit, both in the furtherance of his political opinions and in his personal advancement, from the turn events were taking. For five years he had battled with the Whigs in the Cabinet; for five years they had checked him. He had declared he would not serve with them again. Now they were going. Their influence alone had enabled the Prime Minister to moderate the Radical demands, of which he was the champion. In the place of that influence was now to be substituted the party of Mr. Parnell. If Mr. Chamberlain had been powerful before, what would he be in the Liberal Governments of the future? If Mr. Gladstone had yielded much to his insistence in the past, what must he concede thereafter? At the very moment when the Radical movement was growing in strength, after an election in which the ‘Unauthorised Programme’ had saved the counties from the Tory triumph in the towns, the whole composition of the Liberal party was to be changed—and changed wholly in his favour. The Prime Minister was a very old man. The path was already almost clear. The future of the party lay at the feet of the leader of thorough, precise and militant Radicalism.
And if in one direction all prospects looked so bright, the other seemed entirely barred. He was in acute antagonism with Lord Hartington. Lord Salisbury had just called him ‘Jack Cade.’ The Whigs regarded him as the cause of their undoing. To the Tories he was a warning of the wrath to come. By many acts of his public life, by a hundred speeches, by the affirmation of important principles and the support of definite measures, he had cut himself off from Whigs and Tories alike. Many men will wrestle with their own party or change to another party, but few will face political extinction. That such a man, careless perhaps of office, but ambitious for power, should in such circumstances quarrel with Mr. Gladstone, tear his own Radical following to pieces and go forth into the night-storm almost alone, was a fact not in human wisdom to be known or imagined in dreams. Yet his reply to Parnell’s demand had been prompt and plain. ‘If these, and these alone, are the terms on which Mr. Parnell’s support is to be obtained,’ he declared as early as September, ‘I will not enter into the compact.’
That Lord Randolph Churchill was consistent and sincere in his opposition to Home Rule was at the time much questioned by both sides, and some shadow of that suspicion has remained. He it was who had rendered possible the co-operation between the Irish party and the Tory Opposition, which had placed and maintained the late Government in office. He was known to hold liberal views on Irish problems. He was described as being unscrupulous in Parliamentary manœuvre. He had opposed the renewal of Coercion. He had defended the Maamtrasna inquiry. If it were true that the Conservative Government had had any Home Rule dealings as a Government, he was reputed their agent. If any Minister had trafficked independently, he was that Minister. Many Home Rulers and Orangemen, agreeing in nothing else, agreed in believing that he at any rate had been ready upon a Home Rule basis to bargain with Parnell. These suspicions are injurious. No man was more vigorous in his public resistance to Home Rule or more vehement in his language than Lord Randolph Churchill; and if in the midst of his denunciations of Mr. Gladstone, while he was rousing England and inflaming Ulster, it had been true that he was fortified by no real conviction, and had been ready a few months before to sell all that he now declared sacred, an odious charge would have been brought home.
The documents printed in preceding chapters constitute an unassailable defence. No Unionist politician has a clearer record. Lord Randolph Churchill was perfectly willing to work with the Irish members. He understood how much they had in common with the Conservative party, and with the best part of the Conservative party. He had no prejudices and many sympathies in their direction. But his arrangement with them, or with any of them—for he counted on dividing their forces—would have been social, religious or economic in its character. It would never have been of a National character. To give the Irish the educational system they desired, to court and coax the Bishops, to win the Catholic Church to the side of the Conservative party—these were objects which all his life he faithfully pursued. The first political pamphlet he wrote was on Irish intermediate education. Whether as a Minister in 1885, or out of office in 1888 and 1889, he will be found deep in schemes of Catholic conciliation by Irish educational reform—primary, intermediate and university. One of the last letters this account contains returns to and reiterates this long-cherished idea. Almost his last speech in the House of Commons was in defence of Catholic schools. But to the repeal of the Parliamentary Union he was always unalterably opposed. He did not even think it worth while to consider seriously the many modified alternatives in which the times abounded. They might be wise or unwise; but they were not, he thought, within the functions of the Conservative party. He knew nothing of the Carnarvon incident, and was incensed to discover it. His letter to Lord Morris of December 7, 1885, shows how unyielding he was even to the suggestion of a conference, before the great attempt was made. His correspondence with Mr. Chamberlain, who always inclined to alternative proposals, proves him quite unconvinced in later years by the course of the struggle or by the change in his own position. ‘It would require circumstances widely different and pressure of an almost overwhelming kind,’ he wrote in August 1887, ‘to induce any portion of the Tories to look at any scheme of Home Rule. Gladstone alone can deal with that measure; and I hope that if he does, and when he does, he may be kept in check and controlled by a powerful Opposition.’
The advent of this great crisis therefore threw him for the first time into complete sympathy with the whole Conservative party. All his energies and talents were freely expended in a cause for which he cared intensely. Mr. Gladstone’s vast personal power may perhaps be measured by the opponents by whom he was confronted, and by whom he was so narrowly overborne. It would be profitless to compare the relative services of the various distinguished men who now ranged themselves against him; to observe that Sir Henry James made the heaviest sacrifices, that Mr. Chamberlain ran the greatest risks, that Lord Salisbury showed commanding wisdom or that Lord Hartington struck the weightiest blows. But when the history of the famous battle for the Union in 1886 comes to be worthily written, it will be found that no single man fought with effect in more different quarters of the field than Lord Randolph Churchill or was in the heart and centre of more decisive frays.
Outside the walls of Parliament the issue was determined chiefly in the cities of Birmingham and Belfast. The transference of the whole political strength of the great Midland centre of Radicalism to the Unionist cause and the fierce resistance of the Irish North, were the two most serious obstacles which Mr. Gladstone encountered. In both cities the conflict was marked by every circumstance of passion and excitement. In both Lord Randolph intervened as a leader. He possessed in an eminent degree many of the qualities which may be discovered in a successful military commander. He could detect with almost unerring skill the weak points in his enemy’s array. He could make up his mind with bewildering rapidity and act upon the decision so formed with absolute confidence. He knew well how to separate what was vital from what was merely important or desirable. He was quite ruthless in casting away smaller objects for the sake of a greater. Few men were better suited to the storms of violent times. Till the explosion of Home Rule in the early days of December, he was deep in schemes of educational concession to the Catholic hierarchy—schemes which were in themselves delicate and complicated and which, on account of the suspicion they would have excited in Protestant Lancashire, were necessarily secret while a General Election was pending. But no sooner did Mr. Gladstone’s intentions become known with certainty than Lord Randolph looked towards Ulster. All plans of Catholic Universities and nice correspondence with princes of the Church had to be unceremoniously stowed away till calmer weather. Christmas found him planning his visit to Belfast. By the New Year the arrangements were completed. The Ulster Hall was prepared and the Orange drums were beating. ‘I decided some time ago,’ he wrote bluntly to FitzGibbon, on February 16, 1886, ‘that if the G.O.M. went for Home Rule, the Orange card would be the one to play. Please God it may turn out the ace of trumps and not the two.... I expect,’ he added, ‘your old Commission will go to the devil now.’