All went well at the meeting. A letter from Mr. Bright is said to have turned the scale. Fifty-five gentlemen attended, and their resolve to vote against the Second Reading doomed the Bill. Radical Associations might assert their loyalty and support; democratic enthusiasm might rise to fever-heat in the country; but, so far as Parliament was concerned, the issue was settled. After this eventful interlude there was little left but to go to a division, and at the end of the next sitting Sir Michael Hicks-Beach announced that the Front Opposition Bench would take no more part in the debate. Yet the discussion was prolonged throughout another week, in the hopes that wavering rebels might return; and to that end every influence which the Government could employ, from the personal power and charm of the Minister to the discontent of local organisations, was sedulously employed.
At last the day of decision came. An anxious crowd hung about the precincts of Westminster. The House was packed in every part. A final sensation remained. Mr. Parnell had waited till the end of the debate and he had something in reserve which might well have shaken opinion. ‘When the Tories were in office,’ he said, in the course of one of his ablest speeches, ‘we had reason to know that the Conservative party, if they should be successful at the polls, would have offered Ireland a statutory legislature with a right to protect her own industries, and that this would have been coupled with the settlement of the Irish Land Question on the basis of purchase, on a larger scale than that now proposed by the Prime Minister.’
Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, when his turn came to conclude the debate on behalf of the Conservatives, met this statement with the bluntest of denials. ‘I must for myself and my colleagues,’ he said, ‘state in the plainest and most distinct terms that I utterly and categorically deny that the late Conservative Government ever had any such intention.’ Parnell’s answer was staggering. ‘Does the right honourable gentleman mean to deny that that intention was communicated to me by one of his own colleagues—a Minister of the Crown?’ ‘Yes, sir, I do,’ said the Leader of the Opposition at once; and then he added prudently, ‘to the best of my knowledge and belief; and if any such statement was communicated by anyone to the honourable member, I am certain he had not the authority to make it.’ ‘Name! name!’ cried the members imperiously in their excitement. ‘Will the honourable member,’ said Sir Michael, ‘do us the pleasure to give the name to the House?’ ‘I shall be very glad,’ replied Parnell, amid renewed cries of ‘Name!’ from all sides, ‘to communicate the name of that colleague when I receive that colleague’s permission to do so.’ Every eye was turned upon Lord Randolph Churchill, sitting on the Front Opposition Bench. But he remained gravely silent, twisting his moustache moodily. Not until Lord Carnarvon’s explanations two days later in the House of Lords was he relieved from a suspicion so injurious to his character.
This was the end; and after it Mr. Gladstone brought this great debate to a close in a manner worthy of its memorable importance and surpassing all the fire and eloquence which had illumined its progress.
‘I do not deny,’ he said, ‘that many are against us whom we should have expected to be for us. I do not deny that some whom we see against us have caused us by their conscientious action the bitterest disappointment. But you have power, you have wealth, you have rank, you have station, you have organisation, you have the place of power. What have we? We think that we have the people’s heart; we believe and we know we have the promise of the harvest of the future. As to the people’s heart, you may dispute it, and dispute it with perfect sincerity. Let that matter make its own proof. As to the harvest of the future, I doubt if you have so much confidence, and I believe that there is in the breast of many a man who means to vote against us to-night a profound misgiving, approaching even to a deep conviction, that the end will be as we foresee, and not as you—that the ebbing tide is with you, and the flowing tide is with us. Ireland stands at your bar, expectant, hopeful, almost suppliant. Her words are the words of truth and soberness. She asks a blessed oblivion of the past, and in that oblivion our interest is deeper than even hers. My right hon. friend Mr. Goschen asks us to-night to abide by the traditions of which we are the heirs. What traditions? By the Irish tradition? Go into the length and breadth of the world, ransack the literature of all countries, find, if you can, a single voice, a single book—find, I would almost say, as much as a single newspaper article, unless the product of the day, in which the conduct of England towards Ireland is anywhere treated except with profound and bitter condemnation. Are these the traditions by which we are exhorted to stand? No, they are a sad exception to the glory of our country. They are a broad and black blot upon the pages of its history, and what we want to do is to stand by the traditions in which we are the heirs in all matters except our relations to Ireland, and to make our relations to Ireland conform to the other traditions of our country. So I hail the demand of Ireland for what I call a blessed oblivion of the past. She asks also a boon for the future; and that boon for the future, unless we are much mistaken, will be a boon to us in respect of honour no less than a boon to her in respect of happiness, prosperity and peace. Such, sir, is her prayer. Think, I beseech you—think well, think wisely, think not for a moment but for the years that are to come, before you reject this Bill.’
The House proceeded immediately to the division. A Whig and a Radical were named jointly tellers for the ‘Noes.’ The whole Conservative party with two exceptions—one because of divergence and the other through serious illness—passed into the Lobby. Yet such had been the strain of the conflict, so many the uncertainties, so powerful this last supreme appeal, that—pledges, agreements, careful calculations notwithstanding—the issue seemed to hang in the balance; and Lord Randolph Churchill, staring at the crowd as they shuffled by, thought them so shrunken that he loudly exclaimed: ‘There are not three hundred men with us.’ So great, indeed, was the excitement and apprehension that after they had quitted the Lobby scores of Unionist members, instead of going to their seats in the Chamber, remained massed about the doorway, eagerly counting with the tellers; and when the three hundred and thirty-sixth man was told, and it was certain that the Bill was rejected, such a shout went up as Parliament has seldom heard. The Government was defeated by 341 votes to 311.
Like Sir Robert Peel forty years before, Mr. Gladstone must now face the spectacle, melancholy even to an opponent, of the break-up of a great party. Few were left to him of all that able band who in such good heart had joined his Government of 1880. Bright had parted from him; Forster was dead; Hartington and Goschen and James were gone; Chamberlain was a bitter and formidable foe. The Liberal party was shattered. The Whigs had marched away in a body. The Radicals were torn in twain. The Parliament so lately returned in his support had destroyed itself, almost before it had lived, rather than follow him further. His friends estranged, his enemies united, the faithful in jeopardy, the deserters confident; the wealth, the rank, the intellect of England embattled and arrayed against him; the Bill on which he had set his heart cast out by the House of Commons; what wonder, then, that this proud old man, feeling that the years were drawing to a close, yet remembering his triumphs and conscious of his power, should reach out for the sledge-hammer of democracy, and fiercely welcome the appeal to the people!
Parliament was dissolved on the twenty-seventh of June.
CHAPTER XIV
LEADER OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS
‘Solos imperantium Vespasianus mutatus in melius.’—Tacitus.