Such a sketch, though mainly retrospective, is pertinent to the issues which now divide the country. It will indicate the origin and the strength of the chief reasons by which Liberals are now governed. And, if executed with proper fairness and truth, it may, as a study in contemporary history, be of some little interest to those who in future will attempt to understand our present conflict. The causes which underlie changes of opinion are among the most obscure phenomena in history, because those who undergo, these changes are often only half conscious of them, and do not think of recording that which is imperceptible in its growth, and whose importance is not realized till it already belongs to the past.
The account which follows is based primarily on my own recollection of the phases of opinion and feeling through which I myself, and the friends whom I knew most intimately in the House of Commons, pa.s.sed during the Parliament which sat from 1880 till 1885. But I should not think of giving it to the public if I did not believe that what happened to our minds happened to many others also, and that the record of our own slow movement from the position of 1880 to that of 1886 is substantially a record of the movement of the Liberal party at large. We were fairly typical members of that party, loyal to our leaders, but placing the principles for which the Liberal party exists above the success of the party itself; with our share of prepossessions and prejudices, yet with reasonably open minds, and (as we believed) inferior to no other section of the House of Commons in patriotism and in attachment to the Const.i.tution. I admit frankly that when we entered Parliament we knew less about the Irish question than we ought to have known, and that even after knowledge had been forced upon us, we were more deferential to our leaders than was good either for us or for them.
But these are faults always chargeable on the great majority of members.
It is because those of whom I speak were in these respects fairly typical, that it seems worth while to trace the history of their opinions. If any one should accuse me of attributing to an earlier year sentiments which began to appear in a later one, I can only reply that I am aware of this danger, as one which always besets those who recall their past states of mind, and that I have done my utmost to avoid it.
The change I have to describe was slow and gradual. It was reluctant--that is to say, it seemed rather forced upon us by the teaching of events than the work of our own minds. Each session marked a further stage in it; and I therefore propose to examine its progress session by session.
Session of 1880.--The General Election of 1880 turned mainly on the foreign policy of Lord Beaconsfield"s Government. Few Liberal candidates said much about Ireland. Absorbed in the Eastern and Afghan questions, they had not watched the progress of events in Ireland with the requisite care, nor realized the gravity of the crisis which was approaching. They were anxious to do justice to Ireland, in the way of amending both the land laws and local government, but saw no reason for going further. Nearly all of them refused, even when pressed by Irish electors in their const.i.tuencies, to promise to vote for that "parliamentary inquiry into the demand for Home Rule," which was then propounded by those electors as a sort of test question. We (_i.e._ the Liberal candidates of 1880) then declared that we thought an Irish Parliament would involve serious const.i.tutional difficulties, and that we saw no reason why the Imperial Parliament should not do full justice to Ireland. Little was said about Coercion. Hopes were expressed that it would not be resorted to, but very few (if any) pledged themselves against it.
When Mr. Forster was appointed Irish Secretary in Mr. Gladstone"s Government which the General Election brought into power, we (by which I mean throughout the new Liberal members) were delighted. We knew him to be conscientious, industrious, kind-hearted. We believed him to be penetrating and judicious. We applauded his conduct in not renewing the Coercion Act which Lord Beaconsfield"s Government had failed to renew before dissolving Parliament, and which indeed there was scarcely time left after the election to renew, a fact which did not save Mr. Forster from severe censure on the part of the Tories.
The chief business of the session was the Compensation for Disturbance Bill, which Mr. Forster brought in for the sake of saving from immediate eviction tenants whom a succession of bad seasons had rendered utterly unable to pay their rents. This Bill was pressed through the House of Commons with the utmost difficulty, and at an expenditure of time which damaged the other work of the session, though the House continued to sit into September. The Executive Government declared it to be necessary, in order not only to relieve the misery of the people, but to secure the tranquillity of the country. Nevertheless, the whole Tory party, and a considerable section of the Liberal party, opposed it in the interests of the Irish landlords, and of economic principles in general, principles which (as commonly understood in England) it certainly trenched on. When it reached the House of Lords it was contemptuously rejected, and the unhappy Irish Secretary left to face as he best might the cries of a wretched peasantry and the rising tide of outrage. What was even more remarkable, was the coolness with which the Liberal party took the defeat of a Bill their leaders had p.r.o.nounced absolutely needed. Had it been an English Bill of the same consequence to England as it was to Ireland, the country would have been up in arms against the House of Lords, demanding the reform or the abolition of a Chamber which dared to disregard the will of the people. But nothing of the kind happened. It was only an Irish measure. We relieved ourselves by a few strong words, and the matter dropped.
It was in this session that the Liberal party first learnt what sort of a spirit was burning in the hearts of Irish members. There had been obstruction in the last years of the previous Parliament, but, as the Tories were in power, they had to bear the brunt of it. Now that a Liberal Ministry reigned, it fell on the Liberals. At first it incensed us. Full of our own good intentions towards Ireland, we thought it contrary to nature that Irish members should worry us, their friends, as they had worried Tories, their hereditary enemies. Presently we came to understand how matters stood. The Irish members made little difference between the two great English parties. Both represented to them a hostile domination. Both were ignorant of the condition of their country. Both cared so little about Irish questions that nothing less than deeds of violence out of doors or obstruction within doors could secure their attention. Concessions had to be extorted from both by the same devices; Coercion might be feared at the hands of both. Hence the Irish party was resolved to treat both parties alike, and play off the one against the other in the interests of Ireland alone, using the questions which divide Englishmen and Scotchmen merely as levers whereby to effect their own purposes, because themselves quite indifferent to the substantial merits of those questions. To us new members this was an alarming revelation. We found that the House of Commons consisted of two distinct and dissimilar bodies: a large British body (including some few Tories and Liberals from Ireland), which, though it was distracted by party quarrels, really cared for the welfare of the country and the dignity of the House, and would set aside its quarrels in the presence of a great emergency; and a small Irish body, which, though it spoke the English language, was practically foreign, felt no interest in, no responsibility for, the business of Britain or the Empire, and valued its place in the House only as a means of making itself so disagreeable as to obtain its release. When we had grasped this fact, we began to reflect on its causes and conjecture its effects.
We had read of the same things in the newspapers, but what a difference there is between reading a drama in your study and seeing it acted on the stage! We realized what Irish feeling was when we heard these angry cries, and noted how appeals that would have affected English partisans fell on deaf ears. I remember how one night in the summer of 1880, when the Irish members kept us up very late over some trivial Bill of theirs, refusing to adjourn till they had extorted terms, a friend, sitting beside me, said, "See how things come round. They keep us out of bed till five o"clock in the morning because our ancestors bullied theirs for six centuries." And we saw that the natural relations of an Executive, even a Liberal Executive, to the Irish members were those of strife. Whose fault it was we were unable to decide. Perhaps the Government was too stiff; perhaps the members were vexatious. Anyhow, this strife was evidently the normal state of things, wholly unlike that which existed between Scotch members, to whichever party they belonged, and the executive authorities of Scotland.
Thus the session of 1880, though it did not bring us consciously nearer to Home Rule, impressed three facts upon us: first, that the House of Lords regarded Ireland solely from the point of view of English landlords, sympathizing with Irish landlords; secondly, that the House of Commons knew so little or cared so little about Ireland that when the Executive declared a measure essential to the peace of Ireland, it scarcely resented the rejection of that measure by the House of Lords; thirdly, that the Irish Nationalists in the House of Commons were a foreign body, foreign in the sense in which a needle which a man swallows is foreign, not helping the organism to discharge its functions, but impeding them, and setting up irritation. We did not yet draw from these facts all the conclusions we should now draw. But the facts were there, and they began to tell upon our minds.
SESSION OF 1881.--The winter of 1880-81 was a terrible one in Ireland.
The rejection of the Compensation for Disturbance Bill had borne the fruit which Mr. Forster had predicted, and which the House of Lords had ignored. Outrages were numerous and serious. The cry in England for repressive measures had gone on rising from November, when it occasioned a demonstration at the Guildhall banquet. Several Liberal members (of whom I was one) went to Ireland at Christmas, to see with our own eyes how things stood. We were struck by the difficulty of obtaining trustworthy information in Dublin, where the richer cla.s.ses, with whom we chiefly came in contact, merely abused the Land League, while the Land Leaguers declared that the accounts of outrages were grossly exaggerated. The most prominent, Mr. Michael Davitt, a.s.sured me, and I believe with perfect truth, that he had exerted himself to discountenance outrage, and that if, as he expected, he was locked up by the Government, outrages would increase. When one reached the disturbed districts, where, of course, one talked to members as well of the landlord cla.s.s as of the peasantry, the general conclusion which emerged from the medley of contradictions was that, though there was much agrarian crime, and a pervading sense of insecurity, the disorders were not so bad as people in England believed, and might have been dealt with by a vigorous administration of the existing law. Unfortunately, the so-called "better cla.s.ses," full of bitterness against the Liberal Ministry and Mr. Forster (whom they did not praise till it was too late), had not a.s.sisted the Executive, and had allowed things to reach a pa.s.s at which it found the work of governing very difficult.
When the Coercion Bill of 1881 was introduced, many English Liberals were inclined to resist it. The great majority voted for it, but within two years they bitterly repented their votes. Our motives, which I mention by way of extenuation, not of defence, were these. The Executive Government declared that it could not deal with crime by the ordinary law. If its followers refused exceptional powers, they must displace the Ministry, and let in the Tories, who would doubtless obtain such powers, and probably use them worse. We had still confidence in Mr. Forster"s judgment, and a deference to Irish Executive Governments generally which Parliamentary experience is well fitted to dissipate. The violence with which the Nationalist members resisted the introduction of the Bill had roused our blood, and the foolish attempts which the Radical and Irish electors in some const.i.tuencies had made to deter their members from supporting it had told the other way, and disposed these members to vote for it, in order to show that they were not to be cowed by threats.
Finally, we were a.s.sured that votes given for the Coercion Bill would purchase a thorough-going Land Bill, and our anxiety for the latter induced us, naturally, but erringly, to acquiesce in the former.
When that Land Bill went into Committee we perceived how much harm the Coercion Bill had done in intensifying the bitterness of Irish members.
Although the Ministry was fighting for their interests against the Tory party and the so-called Whiggish section of its own supporters, who were seeking to cut down the benefits which the measure offered to Irish tenants, the Nationalist members regarded it, and in particular Mr.
Forster, as their foe. They resented what they deemed the insult put upon their country. They saw those who had been fighting, often, no doubt, by unlawful methods, for the national cause, thrown into prison and kept there without trial. They antic.i.p.ated (not without reason) the same fortune for themselves. Hence the friendliness which the Liberal party sought to show them met with no response, and Mr. Forster was worried with undiminished vehemence. In the discussions on the Bill we found the Ministry generally resisting all amendments which came from Irish members. When these amendments seemed to us right, we voted for them, but they were almost always defeated by the union of the Tories with the steady Ministerialists. Subsequent events have proved that many were right, but, whether they were right or wrong, the fact which impressed us was that in matters which concerned Ireland only, and lay within the exclusive knowledge of Irishmen, Irish members were constantly outvoted by English and Scotch members, who knew nothing at all of the merits of the case, but simply obeyed the party whip. This happened even when the Irish members who sat on the Liberal side (such as Mr. d.i.c.kson and his Liberal colleagues from Ulster) joined the Nationalist section in demanding some extension of the Bill which the Ministry refused. And we perceived that nothing incensed the Irish members more than the feeling that their arguments were addressed to deaf ears; that they were overborne, not by reason, but by sheer weight of numbers. Even if they convinced the Ministry, they could seldom hope to obtain its a.s.sent, because the Ministry had to consider the House of Lords, sure to reject amendments which favoured the tenant, while to detach a number of Ministerialists sufficient to carry an amendment against the Treasury Bench, the Moderate Liberals, and the Tories, was evidently hopeless.
At the end of the session the House of Lords came again upon the scene.
It seriously damaged the Bill by its amendments, and would have destroyed it but for the skill with which the head of the Government handled these amendments, accepting the least pernicious, so as to enable the Upper House without loss of dignity to recede from those which were wholly inadmissible. Several times it seemed as if the conflict would have to pa.s.s from Westminster to the country, and, in contemplating the chances of a popular agitation or a dissolution, we were regretfully obliged to own that the English people cared too little and knew too little about Irish questions to give us much hope of defeating the House of Lords and the Tories upon these issues.
An incident which occurred towards the end of the session seems, though trifling in itself, so ill.u.s.trative of the illogical position in which we stood towards Ireland, as to deserve mention. Mr. Forster, still Chief Secretary, had brought in a Bill for extinguishing the Queen"s University in Ireland, and creating in place of it a body to be called the Royal University, which, however, was not to be a real university at all, but only a set of examiners plus some salaried fellowships, to be held at various places of instruction. Regarding this as a gross educational blunder, which would destroy a useful existing body, and create a sham university in its place, and finding several Parliamentary friends on whose judgment I could rely to be of the same opinion, I gave notice of opposition to the Bill. Mr. Forster came to me, and pressed with great warmth that the opposition should be withdrawn. The Bill, he said, would satisfy the Roman Catholic hierarchy, and complete the work of the Land Bill in pacifying Ireland. The Irish members wanted it: what business had an English member to interfere to defeat their wishes, and thwart the Executive? The reply was obvious. Not to speak of the simplicity of expecting the hierarchy to be satisfied by this small concession, what were such arguments but the admission of Home Rule in its worst form? "You resist the demand of the Irish members to legislate for Ireland; you have just been demanding, and obtaining, the support of English members against those amendments of the Land Bill which Irish members declare to be necessary. Now you bid us surrender our own judgment, ignore our own responsibility, and blindly pa.s.s a Bill which we, who have studied these university questions as they affect both Ireland and England, believe to be thoroughly mischievous to the prospects of higher education in Ireland, only because the Irish members, as you say, desire it. Do one thing or the other. Either give them the power and the responsibility, or leave both with the Imperial Parliament. You are now asking us to surrender the power, but to remain still subject to the responsibility. We will not bear the latter without the former. We shall prefer Home Rule." Needless to add that this device--a sample of the petty sops by which successive generations of English statesmen, Whigs and Tories alike, have sought to win over a priesthood which uses and laughs at them--failed as completely as its predecessors to settle the University question or to range the bishops on the side of the Government.
The autumn and winter of 1881 revealed the magnitude of the mischief done by making a Coercion Bill precede a Relief Bill. The Land Bill was the largest concession made to the demands of the people since Catholic Emanc.i.p.ation. It was a departure, justified by necessity, but still a departure from our established principles of legislation. It ought to have brought satisfaction and confidence, if not grat.i.tude, with it; ought to have led Ireland to believe in the sincere friendliness of England, and produced a new cordiality between the islands. It did nothing of the kind. It was held to have been extorted from our fears; its grace and sweetness were destroyed by the concomitant severities which the Coercion Act had brought into force, as wholesome food becomes distasteful when some bitter compound has been sprinkled over it. We were deeply mortified at this result of our efforts. What was the malign power which made the boons we had conferred shrivel up, "like fairy gifts fading away"? We still believed the Coercion Act to have been justified, but lamented the fate which baffled the main object of our efforts, the winning over Ireland to trust the justice and the capacity of the Imperial Parliament. And thus the two facts which stood out from the history of this eventful session were, first, that even in legislating for the good of Ireland we were legislating against the wishes of Ireland, imposing on her enactments which her representatives opposed, and which we supported only at the bidding of the Ministry; and, secondly, that at the end of a long session, entirely devoted to her needs, we found her more hostile and not less disturbed than she had been at its beginning. We began to wonder whether we should ever succeed better on our present lines. But we still mostly regarded Home Rule as a disagreeable solution.
SESSION OF 1882.--Still graver were the lessons of the first four months of this year. Mr. Forster went on filling the prisons of Ireland with persons whom he arrested under the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act, and never brought to trial. But the country grew no more quiet. At last he had nine hundred and forty men under lock and key, many of them not "village ruffians," whose power a few weeks" detention was to break, but political offenders, and even popular leaders. How long could this go on? Where was it to stop? It became plain that the Act was a failure, and that the people, trained to combination by a century and a half"s practice, were too strong for the Executive. Either the scheme and plan of the Act had been wrong, or its administration had been incompetent.
Whichever was the source of the failure (most people will now blame both), the fault must be laid at the door of the Irish Executive; not of Mr. Forster himself, but of those on whom he relied. It had been a Dublin Castle Bill, conceived and carried out by the incompetent bureaucracy which has so long pretended to govern Ireland. Such a proof of incompetence destroyed whatever confidence in that bureaucracy then remained to us, and the disclosures which the Phoenix Park murders and the subsequent proceedings against the Invincibles brought out, proved beyond question that the Irish Executive had only succeeded in giving a more dark and dangerous form, the form of ruthless conspiracy, to the agitation it was combating.
When therefore the Prevention of Crime Bill of 1882 was brought in, some of us felt unable to support it, and specially bound to resist those of its provisions which related to trials without a jury, and to boycotting. It was impossible, on the morrow of the Phoenix Park murders, to deny that some coercive measure might be needed; but we had so far lost faith in repression, and in the officials who were to administer it, as to desire to limit it to what was absolutely necessary, and we protested against enacting for Ireland a criminal code which was not to be applied to Great Britain. Our resistance might have been more successful but for the manner in which the Nationalist members conducted their opposition. When they began to obstruct--not that under the circ.u.mstances we felt ent.i.tled to censure them for obstructing a Bill dealing so harshly with their countrymen--we were obliged to desist, and our experience of the stormy scenes of the summer of 1882 deepened our sense of the pa.s.sionate bitterness with which they regarded English members, scarcely making an exception in favour of those who were most disposed to sympathize with them. Many and many a time when we listened to their fierce cries, we seemed to hear in them the battle-cries of the centuries of strife between Celt and Englishman from Athenry to Vinegar Hill; many a time we felt that this rage and mistrust were chiefly of England"s making; and yet not of England"s, but rather of the overmastering fate which had prolonged to our own days the hatreds and the methods of barbarous times:
hemeis d" ouk aitioi esmen Alla Zeus kai Moira kai eerophoitis Herinus.
So much of the session as the Crime Bill had spared was consumed by the Arrears Bill, over which we had again a "crisis" with the House of Lords. This was the third session that had been practically given up to Irishmen. The freshness and force of the Parliament of 1880--a Parliament full of zeal and ability--had now been almost spent, yet few of the plans of domestic legislation spread before the const.i.tuencies of 1880 had been realized. The Government had been anxious to legislate, their majority had been ready to support them, but Ireland had blocked the way; and now the only expedient for improving the procedure of the House was to summon Parliament in an extra autumn session. Here was another cause for reflection. England and Scotland were calling for measures promised years ago, but no time could be found to discuss them.
Nothing was done to reorganize local government, to reform the liquor laws, to improve secondary education, to deal with the housing of the poor, or a dozen other urgent questions, because we were busy with Ireland; and yet how little more loyal or contented did Ireland seem to be for all we had done. We began to ask whether Home Rule might not be as much an English and Scotch question as an Irish question. It was, at any rate, clear that to allow Ireland to manage her own affairs would open a prospect for England and Scotland to obtain time to attend to theirs.[3]
This feeling was strengthened by the result of the attempts made in the autumn session of 1882, to improve the procedure of the House of Commons. We had cherished the hope that more drastic remedies against obstruction and better arrangements for the conduct of business, might relieve much of the pressure Irish members had made us suffer. The pa.s.sing of the New Rules shattered this hope, for it was plain they would not accomplish what was needed. Some blamed the Government for not framing a more stringent code. Some blamed the Tory and the Irish Oppositions (now beginning to work in concert) for cutting down the proposals of the Government. But most of us saw, and came to see still more clearly in the three succeeding sessions, that the evil was too deep-rooted to be cured by any changes of procedure, unless they went so far as to destroy freedom of debate for English members also. The presence in a deliberative a.s.sembly of a section numbering (or likely soon to number) one-seventh of the whole--a section seeking to lower the character of the a.s.sembly, and to derange its mechanism, with no further interest in the greater part of its business except that of preventing it from conducting that business--this was the phenomenon which confronted us, and we felt that no rules of debate would overcome the dangers it threatened.
It is from this year 1882 that I date the impression which we formed, that Home Rule was sure to come. "It may be a bold experiment," we said to one another in the lobbies; "there are serious difficulties in the way, though the case for it is stronger than we thought two years ago.
But if the Irishmen persist as they are doing now, they will get it. It is only a question of their tenacity."
It was impossible not to be struck during the conflicts of 1881 and 1882 with the small amount of real bitterness which the conduct of the Irish members, irritating as it often was, provoked among the Liberals, who of course bore the brunt of the conflict. The Nationalists did their best to injure a Government which was at the same time being denounced by the Tories as too favourable to Irish claims; they lowered the character of Parliament by scenes far more painful than those of the session of 1887, on which so much indignation has been lately expended; they said the hardest things they could think of against us in the House; they attacked us in our const.i.tuencies. Their partisans (for I do not charge this on the leaders) interrupted and broke up our meetings.
Nevertheless, all this did not provoke responsive hatred from the Liberals. There could not be a greater contrast than that between the way in which the great bulk of the Liberal members all through the Parliament of 1880 behaved towards their Irish antagonists, and the violence with which the Tory members, under much slighter provocation, conduct themselves towards those antagonists now. I say this not to the credit of our temper, which was no better than that of other men heated by the struggles of a crowded a.s.sembly. It was due entirely to our feeling that there was a great balance of wrong standing to the debit of England; that if the Irish were turbulent, it was the ill-treatment of former days that had made them so; and that, whatever might be their methods, they were fighting for their country. Although, therefore, there was little social intercourse between us and them, there was always a hope and a wish that the day might come when the Liberal party should resume its natural position of joining the representatives of the Irish people in obtaining radical reforms in Irish government. And the remarkable speech of February 9, 1882, in which Mr. Gladstone declared his mind to be open on the subject, and invited the Nationalists to propound a practicable scheme of self-government, had encouraged us to hope that this day might soon arrive.
SESSION OF 1883.--Three facts stood out in the history of this comparatively quiet session, each of which brought us further along the road we had entered.
One was the omission of Parliament to complete the work begun by the Land Bill of 1881, of improving the condition of the Irish peasantry and reorganizing Irish administration. The Nationalist members brought in Bills for these purposes, including one for amending the Land Act by admitting leaseholders to its benefits and securing tenants against having their improvements reckoned against them in the fixing of rents.
Though we could not approve all the contents of these Bills, we desired to see the Government either take them up and amend them, or introduce Bills of its own to do what was needed. Some of us spoke strongly in this sense, nor will any one now deny that we were right. Sound policy called aloud for the completion of the undertaking of 1881. The Government however refused, alleging, no doubt with some truth, that Ireland could not have all the time of Parliament, but must let England and Scotland have their turn. Nor was anything done towards the creation of new local inst.i.tutions in Ireland, or the reform of the Castle bureaucracy. We were profoundly disheartened. We saw golden opportunities slipping away, and doubted more than ever whether Westminster was the place in which to legislate for Irish grievances.
Another momentous fact was the steady increase in the number of Nationalist members. Every seat that fell vacant in Ireland was filled by them. The moderate Irish party, most of whom had by this time crossed the floor of the House, and were sitting among us, had evidently no future. They were estimable, and, in some cases, able men, from whom we had hoped much, as a link between the Liberal party and the Irish people. But they seemed to have lost their hold on the people, nor were they able to give us much practical counsel as to Irish problems. It was clear that they would vanish at the next General Election, and Parliament be left to settle accounts with the extreme men, whose spirits rose as those of our friends steadily sank.
Lastly: it was in this session that the alliance of the Nationalists and the Tory Opposition became a potent factor in politics. Its first conspicuous manifestation was in the defeat of the Government by the allied forces on the Affirmation Bill, when the least respectable privates in both armies vied with one another in boisterous rejoicings over the announcement of numbers in the division. I do not refer to this as ground for complaint. It was in the course of our usual political warfare that two groups, each hating and fearing the Ministry, should unite to displace it. But we now saw what power the Irish section must exert when it came to hold the balance of numbers in the House. Till this division, the Government had commanded a majority of the whole House. This would probably not outlast a dissolution. What then? Could the two English parties, differing so profoundly from one another, combine against the third party? Evidently not. We must, therefore, look forward to unstable Governments, if not to a total dislocation of our Parliamentary system.
Session of 1884.--I pa.s.s over the minor incidents of this year, including the continued neglect of remedial legislation for Ireland to dwell on its dominant and most impressive lesson. It was the year of the Franchise Bill, which, as regards Ireland, worked an extension, not merely of the county but also of the borough franchise, and produced, owing to the economic condition of the humbler cla.s.ses in that country, a far more extensive change than in England or Scotland. When the Bill was introduced the question at once arose--Should Ireland be included?
There were two ways of treating Ireland between which Parliament had to choose.
One was to leave her out of the Bill, on the ground that the ma.s.ses of her population could not be trusted with the franchise, as being ignorant, sympathetic to crime, hostile to the English Government. This course was the logical concomitant of exceptional coercive legislation, such as had been pa.s.sed in 1881 and 1882. It was quite compatible with generous remedial legislation. But it placed Ireland in an unequal and lower position, treating her, as the Coercion Acts did, as a dependent country, inhabited by a population unfit for the same measure of power which the inhabitants of Britain might receive.
The other course was to bestow on Ireland the same extended franchise which the English county occupiers were to receive, applying the principle of equality, and disregarding the obvious consequences. These consequences were both practical and logical. The practical consequence was the increase in numbers and weight of the Irish party in Parliament hostile to Parliament itself. The logical consequence was the duty of complying with the wishes of the enfranchised nation. Whatever reasons were good for giving this enlarged suffrage to the Irish ma.s.ses, were good for respecting the will which they might use to express it. If the Irish were deemed fit to exercise the same full const.i.tutional rights in legislation as the English, must they not be fit for the same rights of trial by jury, a free press, and all the privileges of personal freedom?
Of these two courses the Cabinet chose the latter, those of its members whom we must suppose, from the language they now hold, to have then hesitated, either stifling their fears or not apprehending the consequences of their boldness. It might have been expected, and indeed was generally expected, that the Tory party would refuse to follow. They talked largely about the danger of an extended Irish suffrage, and pointed out that it would be a weapon in the hands of disloyalty. But when the moment for resistance came, they swerved, and never divided in either House against the application of the Bill to Ireland. They might have failed to defeat the measure; but they would have immensely strengthened their position, logically and morally, had they given effect by their votes to the sentiments they were known to entertain, and which not a few Liberals shared.
The effect of this uncontested grant to Ireland of a suffrage practically universal was immense upon our minds, and the longer we reflected on it the more significant did it become. It meant to us that the old methods were abandoned, and, as we supposed, for ever. We had deliberately given the Home Rule party arms against English control far more powerful than they previously possessed. We had deliberately a.s.serted our faith in the Irish people. Impossible after this to fall back on Coercion Bills. Impossible to refuse any request compatible with the general safety of the United Kingdom, which Ireland as a nation might prefer. Impossible to establish that system of Crown Colony Government which we had come to perceive was the only real and solid alternative to self-government. To those of us who had been feeling that the Irish difficulty was much the greatest of all England"s difficulties, this stood out beyond the agitation of the autumn and the compromise of the winter as the great political event of 1884.[4]
Although this sketch is in the main a record of Parliamentary opinion, I ought not to pa.s.s over the influence which the study of their const.i.tuents" ideas exerted upon members for the larger towns. We found the vast bulk of our supporters--English supporters, for after 1882 it was understood that the Irish voters were our enemies--sympathetic with the Irish people. They knew and thought little about Home Rule, believing that their member understood that question better than they did, and willing, so long as he was sound on English issues, to trust him. But they pitied Irish tenants, and condemned Irish landlords.
Though they acquiesced in a Coercion Bill when proposed by a Liberal Cabinet, because they concluded that nothing less than necessity would lead such a Cabinet to propose one, they so much disliked any exceptional or repressive legislation that it was plain they would not long tolerate it. Any popular leader denouncing coercion was certain to have the sentiment of the English ma.s.ses with him, while as to suspending Irish representation or carrying out consistently the policy of treating Ireland as a subject country, there was no chance in the world of their approval. Those of us, therefore, who represented large working-cla.s.s const.i.tuencies became convinced that the solution of the Irish problem must be sought in conciliation and self-government, if only because the other solution, Crown Colony Government, was utterly repugnant to the English ma.s.ses, in whom the Franchise Bill of 1884, completing that of 1867, had vested political supremacy.[5]
Session of 1885.--The allied powers of Toryism and Nationalism gained in this year the victory they had so long striven for. In February they reduced the Ministerial majority to fourteen; in June they overthrew the Ministry. No one supposed that on either occasion the merits of the issue had anything to do with the Nationalist vote: that vote was given simply and solely against the Government, as the Government which had pa.s.sed the Coercion Acts of 1881 and 1882--Acts demanded by the Tory party, and which had not conceded an Irish Parliament. At last the Irish party had attained its position as the arbiter of power and office. Some of us said, as we walked away from the House, under the dawning light of that memorable 9th of June, "This means Home Rule." Our forecast was soon to be confirmed. Lord Salisbury"s Cabinet, formed upon the resignation of Mr. Gladstone"s, announced that it would not propose to renew any part of the Coercion Act of 1882, which was to expire in August. Here was a surrender indeed! But the Tory leaders went further.
They did not excuse themselves on the ground of want of time. They took credit for their benevolence towards Ireland; they discovered excellent reasons why the Act should be dropped. They even turned upon Lord Spencer, whose administration they had hitherto blamed for its leniency, and attacked him in Parliament, among the cheers of his Irish enemies.
From that time till the close of the General Election in December everything was done, short of giving public pledges, to keep the Irish leaders and the Irish voters in good humour. The Tory party in fact posed as the true friends of Ireland, averse from coercion, and with minds perfectly open on the subject of self-government.
This change of front, so sudden, so unblushing, completed the process which had been going on in our minds. By 1882 we had come to feel that Home Rule was inevitable, though probably undesirable. Before long we had asked ourselves whether it was really undesirable, whether it might not be a good thing both for England, whose Parliament and Cabinet system it would relieve from impending dangers, while leaving free scope for domestic legislation, and for Ireland, which could hardly manage her affairs worse than we were managing them for her, and might manage them better. And thus, by the spring of 1885, many of us were prepared for a large scheme of local self-government in Ireland, including a central legislative body in Dublin.[6]
Now when it was plain that the English party which had hitherto called for repression, and had professed itself anxious for a patriotic union of all parties to maintain order and a continuity of policy in Ireland, was ready to bid for Irish help at the polls by throwing over repression and reversing the policy it had advocated, we felt that the sooner Ireland was taken out of English party politics the better. What prospect was there of improving Ireland by the superior wisdom and fairness of the British Parliament, if British leaders were to make their Irish policy turn on interested bargains with Nationalist leaders?
Repression, which we clearly saw to be the only alternative to self-government, seemed to be by common consent abandoned. I remember how, at a party of members in the beginning of July, some one said, "Well, there"s an end for ever of coercion at any rate," and every one a.s.sented as to an obvious truth. Accordingly the result of the new departure of the Salisbury Cabinet in 1885 was to convince even doubters that Home Rule must come, and to make those already convinced anxious to see it come quickly, and to find the best form that could be given it.
Many of us expected the Tory Government to propose it. Rumour declared the new Lord Lieutenant to be in favour of it. His government was extremely conciliatory in Ireland, even to the recalcitrant corporation of Limerick. Not to mention less serious and less respected Tory Ministers, Lord Salisbury talked at Newport about the dualism of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy with the air of a man who desired to have a workable scheme, a.n.a.logous, if not similar, suggested for Ireland and Great Britain. The Irish Nationalists appeared to place their hopes in this quarter, for they attacked the Liberal party with unexampled bitterness, and threw all their voting strength into the Tory scale.
As it has lately been attempted to blacken the character of the Irish leaders, it deserves to be remarked that whatever has been charged against them was said or done by them before the spring of 1885, and was, practically, perfectly well known to the Tory leaders when they accepted the alliance of the Irish party in the House of Commons, and courted their support in the election of 1885. To those who remember what went on in the House in the sessions of 1884 and 1885, the horror now professed by the Tory leaders for the conduct and words of the Irish party would be matter for laughter if it were not also matter for just indignation.
Why, it may be asked, if the persuasion that Home Rule was certain, and even desirable, had become general among the Liberals who had sat through the Parliament of 1880, was it not more fully expressed at the election of 1885? This is a fair question, which I shall try to answer.
In the first place, the electors made few inquiries about Ireland. They disliked the subject; they had not realized its supreme importance.
Those of us who felt anxious to explain our views (as was my own case) had to volunteer to do so, for we were not asked about them. The Irish party in the const.i.tuencies was in violent opposition to Liberal candidates; it did not interrogate, but denounced. Further, it was felt that the issue was mainly one to be decided in Ireland itself. The question of Home Rule was being submitted, not, as heretofore, to a limited const.i.tuency, but to the whole Irish people. Till their will had been const.i.tutionally declared at the polls it was not proper that Englishmen or Scotchmen should antic.i.p.ate its tenour. We should even have been accused, had we volunteered our opinions, of seeking to affect the result in Ireland, and, not only of playing for the Irish vote in Great Britain, as we saw the Tories doing, but of prejudicing the chances of those Liberal candidates who, in Irish const.i.tuencies, were competing with extreme Nationalists. A third reason was that most English and Scotch Liberals did not know how far their own dispositions towards Home Rule were shared by their leaders. Mr. Gladstone"s declaration in his Midlothian address was no doubt a decided intimation of his views, and was certainly understood by some (as by myself) to imply the grant to Ireland of a Parliament; but, strong as its words were, its importance does not seem to have been fully appreciated at the moment. And the opinions of a statesman whose unequalled Irish experience and elevated character gave him a weight only second to that of Mr. Gladstone--I mean Lord Spencer--had not been made known. We had consequently no certainty that there were leaders prepared to give prompt effect to the views we entertained. Lastly, we were not prepared with a practical scheme of self-government for Ireland. The Nationalist members had propounded none which we could either adopt or criticize.
Convinced as we were that Home Rule would come and must come, we felt the difficulties surrounding every suggestion that had yet been made, and had not hammered out any plan which we could lay before the electors as approved by Liberal opinion.[7] We were forced to confine ourselves to generalities.
Whether it would have been better for us to have done our thinking and scheme-making in public, and thereby have sooner forced the details of the problem upon the attention of the country, need not now be inquired.
Any one can now see that something was lost by the omission. But those who censure a course that has actually been taken usually fail to estimate the evils that would have followed from the taking of the opposite course. Such evils might in this instance have been as great as those we have encountered.
I have spoken of the importance we attached to the decision of Ireland itself, and of the att.i.tude of expectancy which, while that decision was uncertain, Englishmen were forced to maintain. We had not long to wait.