In 1902 he was once more a party to a continued effort made by Irishmen outside of party lines to solve a part of the national difficulty. The policy of land purchase had proved its immense superiority over that of dual ownership and had even been introduced on a considerable scale. But its very success led to trouble, because on one side of a boundary fence there would be farmers who had purchased and whose annual instalments of purchase money were lower than the rents paid by their neighbours on the other side of the mearing. Renewed struggle against rent led to new eviction scenes on the grand scale; and by this time landlord opinion was half converted to the purchase policy, as a necessary solution. The persistency of one young Galway man, Captain John Shawe Taylor, brought about the famous Land Conference of 1902, in which Mr. O"Brien, Mr.
Healy, Mr. Redmond and Mr. T.W. Russell on behalf of the tenants met Lord Dunraven, Lord Mayo, Colonel Hutcheson Poe and Colonel Nugent Everard representing (though not officially) the landlord interest: and the result of the agreement reached by this body was seen in Mr.
Wyndham"s Land Purchase Act of 1903. This great and drastic measure altered fundamentally the character of the Irish problem. Directly by its own effect, and indirectly by the example of new methods, it changed opinion alike in Ireland and Great Britain. In Ireland hitherto, as has been already seen, resistance to Home Rule had come primarily from the landlord cla.s.s, by whom the Nationalist desire for self-government was construed as a cloak for the wish to revive or reverse the ancient confiscations. Now, the land question was by general consent settled, at least in principle; in proportion as landlords were bought out the leading economic argument against Home Rule disappeared. The opposition reduced itself strictly to political grounds; and it began to be plain that the true heart of resistance lay in Ulster.
Also, lines of cleavage in the Unionist camp began to appear. Already, landlords in the South and West had found a common ground of action with representatives of the tenants. It was felt, alike in Ireland and England, that this precedent might be developed further.
In England political opinion was much affected by the apparent success of an attempt to deal with the Irish problem piecemeal. The Congested Districts Board had done much to relieve those regions where famine was always a possibility; Local Government had given satisfactory results; and now Land Purchase was hailed as the beginning of a new era. The idea of seeing how much farther the principle of tentative approach could be carried took strong hold of many minds, and the word "devolution" came into fashion.
When it became known that Sir Antony MacDonnell, then Under-Secretary at Dublin Castle, had, in consultation with Lord Dunraven, drafted a scheme for transferring parts of Irish administration to a purely Irish authority, a situation rapidly defined itself in which Ulster broke away from the more liberal elements in Irish Unionism. The Ulster group demanded and obtained the resignation of Mr. George Wyndham; they demanded also the dismissal of the Under-Secretary. But Sir Antony MacDonnell was not of a resigning temper; he had not acted without authority, and he was defended zealously by the Irish members. The section of Liberal opinion which adhered rather to Lord Rosebery than to Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman probably drew the conclusion that the Irish party were prepared at least to tolerate the policy of approaching Home Rule step by step; and beyond doubt they were impressed by the prestige of Sir Antony MacDonnell"s record and personality. The son of a small Irish Catholic landlord, educated at the Galway College of the Queen"s University, he had entered the Indian Civil Service and in it risen to the highest point of power. The recommendation that he should be brought home to a.s.sist in the Government of Ireland had come from Lord Lansdowne, then Governor-General of India, who knew that the famous administrator of the Punjab was a Catholic Irishman of Nationalist sympathies. He had been accepted by Mr. Wyndham, his official chief, "rather as a colleague than as a subordinate." Officially and publicly, the credit for the Land Act of 1903 went to the Chief Secretary, and Mr.
Wyndham deserves much of it. But no one who knew the two men could have doubted that in the shaping of a measure involving so wide a range of detail, the leading part must have been taken by the Irish Civil Servant who in India had acquired most of his fame from a sweeping measure of land reform.
Proposals to alter the method and conduct of Irish administration before touching the parliamentary power to legislate and to tax came with extraordinary weight in coming from such a man; and the history of the previous Home Rule Bills was not encouraging to anyone, especially to those who had been members of Mr. Gladstone"s two last administrations.
From the time of the Parnell divorce case onwards, the Irish question had brought to Liberals nothing but embarra.s.sment and embitterment. The enthusiasm for Home Rule which grew steadily from 1886 up to the severance between Gladstone and Parnell had vanished in the squalid controversies of the "split." Moreover, now, by the action of Mr.
Chamberlain, a new dividing line had been brought into British politics.
The cry of Protection seemed in the opinion of all Liberals to menace ruin to British prosperity; the banner of Free Trade offered a splendid rallying-point for a party which had known fifteen years of dissension and division. Prudent men thought it would be unsafe, unwise and unpatriotic to compromise this great national interest by retaining the old watch-word on which Gladstone had twice fought and twice been beaten.
It was clear, too, that a Home Rule Bill would provoke a direct conflict with the House of Lords and would raise that great struggle on not the most favourable issue. Statesmen like Sir Edward Grey and Mr. Asquith probably believed that a partial measure, an instalment of self-government, to which some influential sections of the Tory party would not be unfriendly, might have strong hopes of pa.s.sing into law.
So it came to pa.s.s that in the election of 1906 the Liberal Party came into power with a majority of unexampled magnitude, but with a Government pledged, negatively, not to introduce a Home Rule Bill in that Parliament, but, positively, to attempt an Irish settlement by the policy of instalments.
In all this lay the seeds of trouble for the Irish leader. Liberals have never understood that Ireland will not take from them what it would take from the Tories. It will accept, as a palliative, from the party opposed to Home Rule what it will not accept from those who have admitted the justice of the national demand.
II
"For myself," said Redmond in his speech to the Irish Convention in May 1907, "I have always expressed in public and in private my opinion that no half-way house on this question is possible; but at the same time I am, or at any rate I try to be, a practical politician. In the lodgment this idea of instalments had got in the minds of English statesmen I recognized the fact--and after all in politics the first essential is to recognize facts--I recognized the fact that in this Parliament we were not going to get a pure Home Rule Bill offered, and I consented, and I was absolutely right in consenting, that whatever scheme short of that was put forward would be considered calmly on its merits."
This meant that during the whole of the year 1906 and a part of 1907 the proposal of the new Irish Bill was under discussion with the Irish leaders. The course of these deliberations was undoubtedly a disappointment. Mr. Bryce was replaced by Mr. Birrell as Chief Secretary, but the scheme still fell short of what Redmond had hoped to attain. Unfortunately, and it was a characteristic error, his sanguine temperament had led him to encourage in Ireland hopes as high as his own. The production of the Irish Council Bill and its reception in Ireland was the first real shock to his power.
Mr. Birrell in introducing the measure spoke with his eye on the Tories and the House of Lords. He represented it as only the most trifling concession; he emphasized not the powers which it conveyed but the limitations to them. Redmond in following him was in a difficult position. He stressed the point that to accept a scheme which by reason of its partial nature would break down in its working would be ruinous, because failure would be attributed to natural incapacity in the Irish people. Acceptance, therefore, he said, could not be unconditional and undoubtedly to his mind it was conditioned by his hope of securing certain important amendments, which he outlined. None the less, the tone of his speech was one of acceptance, and he concluded:
"I have never in all the long years that I have been in this House spoken under such a heavy sense of responsibility as I am speaking on this measure this afternoon. Ever since Mr. Gladstone"s Bill of 1886 Ireland has been waiting for some scheme to settle the problem--waiting sometimes in hope, sometimes almost in despair; but the horrible thing is this, that all the time that Ireland has been so waiting there has been a gaping wound in her side, and her sons have had to stand by helpless while they saw her very life-blood flowing out. Who can say that is an exaggeration? Twenty years of resolute government by the party above the gangway have diminished the population of Ireland by a million. No man in any position of influence can take upon himself the awful responsibility of despising and putting upon one side any device that may arrest that hemorrhage, even although he believed, as I do, that far different remedies must be applied before Ireland can stand upon her feet in vigorous strength. We are determined, as far as we are concerned, that these other remedies shall be applied; but in the meantime we should shrink from the responsibility of rejecting anything which, after that full consideration which the Bill will receive, seems to our deliberate judgment calculated to relieve the sufferings of Ireland and hasten the day of her full national convalescence."
There is no doubt that the element in him which urged him to welcome anything that could set Irishmen working together on Irish problems made it almost impossible for him to throw aside this chance. It was clear to me also that by long months of work in secret deliberation the proposals originally set out had been greatly altered, so much so that in surveying the Bill he was conscious mainly of the improvements in it; and that in this process his mind had lost perception of how the measure was likely to affect Irish opinion--especially in view of his own hopeful prognostications. At all events, the reception of Mr. Birrell"s speech, even by Redmond"s own colleagues, marked a sudden change in the atmosphere. Some desired to vote at once against the measure; many were with difficulty brought into the lobby to support even the formal stage of first reading. In Ireland there was fierce denunciation. A Convention was called for May 21st. The crowd was so great that many of us could not make our way into the Mansion House; and Redmond opened the proceedings by moving the rejection of the Bill. In the interval since the debate he had been confronted with a definite refusal to concede the amendments for which he asked.
These were mainly two, of principle: for the objection taken to the finance of the Bill was a detail, though of the first importance. The Bill proposed to hand over the five great departments of Irish administration to the control of an Irish Council. The decisions of that Council were to be subject to the veto of the Lord-Lieutenant, as are the decisions of Parliament to the veto of the Crown. But the Bill proposed not merely to give to the Viceroy the power of vetoing proposed action but of inst.i.tuting other action on his own initiative. Secondly, the Council was to exercise its control through Committees, each of which was to have a paid chairman, nominated by the Crown.
"It would be far better," Redmond had said in the House of Commons, "to have one man selected as the chairmen of these committees are to be selected, to have charge, so far as the Council is concerned, of the working of the Department, and then all these chairmen acting together could form a sort of organic body which would give cohesion, would co-ordinate and give stability to the whole of the work. I am afraid that the Government seem to have shrunk from that for fear the argument would be used against them that they were really creating a Ministry."
That was the real difficulty. A Council subject only to a veto on its acts, even though it could neither pa.s.s a by-law nor strike a rate, would undoubtedly be said by the Unionist opposition to be a rudimentary parliament. A group of chairmen possessing administrative powers like those of Ministers would be labelled a Ministry; and the Liberals who had pledged themselves not to give effect to their Home Rule principles were sensitive to charges of breach of faith.
It is a curious fact in politics that the public promise conveyed in the adoption of certain principles is generally taken to be on the level of ordinary commercial obligation. Failure to keep it jeopardizes a man"s reputation for political stability, just as failure to pay a tailor"s bill imperils a man"s financial character. But a promise to political opponents that you will not give effect to your principles stands on the level of a card debt: it is a matter of honour to make good; and on this point Mr. Asquith in particular has always shown an adamantine resolution.
From 1907 onwards it was with Mr. Asquith that Redmond had chiefly to count. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, who, personally, had given no such limiting pledges, and who during his two years of leadership commanded a respect, an affectionate allegiance, from his followers in the House without parallel at all events since Mr. Gladstone"s day, was fast weakening in health. He lived long enough to give freedom to South Africa, the one outstanding achievement of that Parliament; and by the success of that great measure he did more to remove British distrust of Home Rule than even Gladstone ever accomplished. It was no fault of his if Liberalism failed to settle the Irish question at the moment when Liberal power reached its highest point.
The failure of the Council Bill had one good result, and one only. It cleared the way for a definite propaganda on Home Rule. But before this could be undertaken it was necessary to pull Nationalist Ireland together, for it was once more rent with division and distrust. Mr.
Healy, who in 1901 had been expelled from the Irish party and its organization on the motion of Mr. O"Brien and against Redmond"s advice, and Mr. O"Brien, who had subsequently retired from the party against Redmond"s wish, were both of them formidable antagonists; and each was vehement in attack on the main body of Nationalists and their leader. It was some time before Redmond braced himself to the struggle; but from the opening of the autumn recess in 1907 he undertook a campaign throughout Ireland which it would be difficult to overpraise. In a series of speeches at chosen centres, delivered before great audiences, he laid down once more the national demand as he conceived it; and in each speech he dealt with a different aspect of the case for Home Rule.
A formal outcome of this campaign was the re-establishment of national unity. Mr. O"Brien and Mr. Healy returned to the Irish party for a brief period. But the more important result was the re-establishment of Redmond"s personal position. He had made an effort which would have been great for any man, but for him was a victory over his own temperament.
That temperament had in it, negatively, a great lack of personal ambition and, positively, a strong love for a quiet life. He did his work in Parliament regularly and conscientiously, always there day in and day out; and it was work of a very exacting kind. This had become the routine of his existence and he did it without strain. But to go outside it was for him always an effort. He hated town life; but more than this, he hated ceremonies, presentations, receptions in hotels, and all the promiscuous contact of political gatherings. Nevertheless, when he came to such an occasion no living man acquitted himself better.
Apart from his oratory, he had an admirable manner, a dignified yet friendly courtesy which gained attachment. In the course of the autumn and winter following the Irish Council Bill he must have met and been seen by a hundred times more of his adherents than in any similar period of his leadership. People all over Ireland heard him not only on the public platform but in small addresses to deputations, in impromptu speeches at semi-public dinners, and all of this strengthened him where an Irish leader most needs to be strengthened--in the hearts of the people. The hold which he gained then stood to him during the years which followed and up to the outbreak of the war. But it could have been still further strengthened, and if ambition had been a motive force in him, he would have strengthened it. More than that, if he had realized his full value to Ireland, he would have felt it his duty to do so. Modesty, combined with a certain degree of indolence, made him leave all that contact with the ma.s.s of his followers which is necessary to leadership to be effected through his chief colleagues, Mr. Dillon and Mr. Devlin--who, through no will of theirs, became rather joint leaders than lieutenants, so far as Ireland was concerned.
Circ.u.mstances helped to emphasize this tendency. His work lay very greatly in London, Parliament occupied every year a longer and longer s.p.a.ce. The task of platform advocacy all over England was urgent, and in England Redmond stood out alone. It was little to be wondered at that when each long deferred recess came he made it a vacation and not a change of work. The seclusion from direct intercourse with the ma.s.s of his followers which conditions imposed upon him was further accentuated by his personal tastes and his choice of a dwelling.
In the early years of the nineteenth century the mountain range which runs along the east coast from outside Dublin through Wicklow into county Wexford was a country difficult of access and unsubdued. Here in 1803 Emmet found a refuge, and after Emmet"s death here Michael Dwyer still held out: Connemara itself was hardly wilder or less accessible, till the "military road" was run, little more than a hundred years ago, from Dublin over the western slopes of Featherbed, past Glencree, and through Callary Bog, skirting Glendalough and traversing the wild recesses of Glenmalure, so that it cuts across the headwaters of those beautiful streams which meet in the Vale of Ovoca. From Glenmalure the road climbs a steep ridge and then travels in wide downward curves across the seaward side of Lugnaquilla--fifth in height among Irish mountains. Here, at the head of a long valley which runs down to the Meeting of the Waters, was built one of the barracks which billeted the original garrison of the road. Later, these buildings had been used for constabulary; but with peaceful times this grew needless, for there was little disturbance among these Wicklow folk, tenants of little farms, each with a sheep-run on the vast hills. Nothing could be less like the flat sea-bordering lands of the Barony of Forth in which the Redmonds spent their boyhood than these wild, sweeping, torrent-seamed folds of hill and valley; but the place came to him as part of his inheritance from "the Chief." Parnell"s home at Avondale was some ten miles from here, lying in woods beside the Ovoca River; but the Parnell property stretched up to the slopes of Lugnaquilla, and the dismantled barrack was used by him as a shooting lodge. Here, in the early days before his life became absorbed in the masterful attachment which led finally to his overthrow, he spent good hours; and here the two Redmonds and those others of his followers who were his companions came to camp roughly in this strange, gaunt survival of military rule. After Parnell"s death Redmond bought the barrack and a small plot of land about it, and it became increasingly and exclusively his home in Ireland. It was, indeed, Ireland itself for him. In it and through it he knew Ireland intimately, felt Ireland intensely and intensively, not only as a place, but as a way of being. Ireland to him meant Aughavanagh.
Partly, no doubt, the almost unbroken wildness of his surroundings appealed to an element of romance in his character, which was strongly emotional though extremely reticent. Only an artist would have recognized beauty in those scenes, for in all Ireland it would be difficult to find a landscape with less amenity; the hill shapes are featureless, without boldness or intricacy of line. Redmond, a born artist in words, possessing strongly the sense of form, was sensitive to beauty in all kinds--yet rather to the beauty that is symmetrical, graceful and well-planned. A sailor does not love the sea for its beauty, and Redmond loved Ireland as a sailor loves the sea--yet with a difference. Ireland to him in a great measure was Aughavanagh, and Aughavanagh was a place of rest. Ireland is a good country to rest in.
But it would have been far better for Redmond and for Ireland if Ireland had been the place not of his rest, but of his work.
His work was essentially that of an agent of Ireland carrying on Ireland"s affairs in a strange capital. He spent more of his time in London than in Ireland, but he was never part of the life of London, never in any sense a Londoner. He was part of the life of the House of Commons, for that was his place of work; and when he left it he went to Aughavanagh as a man returns from the City to his home. This home of his was in no sense connected with his active occupations. He was no lover of gardening or of farming; he had none of the Irishman"s taste for the overseeing of stock or land; he enjoyed shooting, but he was not a pa.s.sionate sportsman. What was a pa.s.sion with him--- for he sacrificed much to it--was rest in the place of his choice.
It was not a lonely habitation. He was no recluse, and when there he was always surrounded by his friends. I do not know precisely how one could const.i.tute a list of them--but half a dozen men at least came and went there as they chose. Mr. Mooney, Mr. Hayden, "Long John" O"Connor, Dr.
Kenny--these, and above all, Paddy O"Brien, the party"s chief acting whip--were constant there. Some came to shoot, and Willie Redmond used to come over from his house at Delgany, where the Glen of the Downs debouches seaward; walking generally, for he was the fastest and most untiring of mountaineers: very few cared to keep beside him on the hills. Others were content to share the daily bathes, morning and afternoon, in a long deep pool where the little stream tumbling down a series of cascades makes a place to dive and swim in. These were the friends of Redmond"s own generation, and they were also his son"s friends; but the two daughters had their allies, and one way or another the party was apt to be a big one--very simply provided for. When I went there first (in 1907) you climbed a narrow stone stair to the first floor; on the left was a dining-room, beyond that a billiard-room; on the right, Redmond"s study, and beyond that his bedroom. Another flight took you to the upper regions, where were two dormitories--the girls to the right, the men to the left. Later, he made some alterations, and the upstair rooms were subdivided off; the garden was developed; it became more of a house and less of a barrack; but the character of the life did not change. It was most simple, most hospitable, most unconventional and most remote.
Certainly a great part of Aughavanagh"s charm for him lay in its remoteness. It was seven Irish miles up a hilly road from the nearest railway station, post office or telegraph station. Aughrim was three hours" train journey from Dublin, on a tiny branch line, and trains were few. Until motors brought him (to his intense resentment) within reach, he was as inaccessible as if he had lived in Clare or Mayo.
So it came to pa.s.s that though he knew to the very core one typical district of Ireland, and was far more closely in touch with a few score of Irish peasants through their daily life than any of his leading a.s.sociates, he was yet cut off by his own choice from much that is Ireland--and perhaps from much that was most important to him. Political opinion is created in the towns, and he knew the Irish townsfolk, so far as he could manage it, only through his correspondence, and through those business visits to Dublin which he made as few as possible.
If his work had lain, where it should by rights have lain, in a ministerial office in Dublin, all would have been well. As it was, the deliberate and extreme seclusion of his life in Ireland weakened his influence. He was far too shrewd not to know this, and far too unambitious to care. Work he never shrank from. But the daily solicitations of people with personal grievances to lay before him, personal interests which they desired him to promote, made a form of trouble which in his periods of rest from work he refused to undergo.
The same qualities in him were responsible for his persistent refusal to accept private hospitality where he went on public business. Whether in Ireland or in Great Britain, he must stay at a hotel, and many were the magnates of Liberalism whose ruffled feelings it was necessary to smooth down on this account. He detested being lionized and wanted always, when the public affair was over, to get away to his own quarters.
The demands on him in England for platform work were portentous. Every const.i.tuency which wanted a meeting on the Home Rule question wanted Redmond and no other speaker. Of course he could not go to one-twentieth of the places where he was asked for; and his objection to going was not the effort involved but the impossibility either of indefinitely repeating himself or of finding something new to say each time. "If it was in America," he would say, "I would speak as often as you asked me"
(it was my misfortune to have to do the asking), "because they never report a speech." The fact is worth noting, for in scores of instances what was adduced by opponents as quotation from his utterances in the United States represented simply some American journalist"s impression, perhaps less of what Redmond said than of what, in the reporter"s opinion, he should have said. Those who represented him as putting one face on the argument in America and another in Great Britain did not know the man. "I have made it a rule," he said to me more than once, "to say the extremest things I had to say in the House of Commons."
However, all the machinery which was employed by the opponents of Home Rule to prejudice Ireland"s case in the British const.i.tuencies proved very ineffectual. For one thing, the lesson of South Africa had gone home. For another, and perhaps a greater, no cause ever had a missionary better adapted to the temperament of the British democracy. The dignity and beauty of Redmond"s eloquence, the weight which he could give to an argument, his extraordinary gift for simplifying an issue and grouping thoughts in large bold ma.s.ses--all these things carried audiences with them.
III
Between 1908 and 1910 we were still, though with rapidly increasing success, trying to get a hearing for the Irish question--trying to push it once more to the front. The change of leadership from Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman to Mr. Asquith had damped Liberal enthusiasm. We got solid work done for Ireland in the University Act of 1908, though Redmond would have preferred a university of the residential type, like that in which he had himself been an undergraduate. A highly contentious measure was also carried in the Land Act of 1909. But a new power was coming to the front, at once a.s.sisting and thwarting our efforts. Mr.
Lloyd George put a new fighting spirit into Liberalism: but the objects which he had at heart could only be achieved by a great expenditure of electoral power, and among those objects Irish self-government found only a secondary place. When Mr. Gladstone spoke of liberty he thought of what he had helped to bring to Greece, Italy, Bulgaria and Montenegro--what he had tried to bring to Ireland. When Mr. Lloyd George spoke of liberty, he thought of what he wanted to bring to England first, and to Ireland by the way; his conviction that Ireland needed self-government was not so deeply rooted as his conviction that the poor throughout the United Kingdom needed help.
Old Age Pensions had been popular, but had not been a fighting issue.
Mr. Lloyd George provided the fighting issue with a vengeance when he set himself to pay for them. Unfortunately, Nationalist Ireland had no enthusiasm for the Budget which English Radicalism made its flag. A country of peasant proprietors was easily scared by the very name of land taxes. But above all the Finance Bill dealt drastically, and many thought unfairly, with the powerful liquor trade, which in its branches of brewing and distilling included the main manufacturing interest of southern Ireland, and on its retail side was incredibly diffused through the whole shopkeeping community.
The dissident Nationalists saw their chance. Mr. O"Brien emerged from one of his periodic retirements to lead a whirlwind campaign against the "robber Budget." Redmond and our party were obliged to oppose a measure which pressed so hard as this undoubtedly did on Ireland. Our opposition to the land taxes was withdrawn when valuable concessions had been made, but no such compromise was considered possible on the liquor taxes. On the other hand, it grew clear that the measure was likely to produce a conflict in which the power of the House of Lords might be challenged on the most favourable ground: and for that reason, when the third reading was reached, the Irish party abstained from voting against it. This course, while it facilitated close co-operation with Liberalism in the general election which followed, weakened us in Ireland; and eleven out of the eighty-three Nationalist members returned in January 1910 ranked themselves as outside the party; though Mr. O"Brien"s actual following was limited to seven Cork members and Mr. Healy.
IV
The action of the Lords in rejecting the Budget of 1909 had an important personal result. It placed Mr. Asquith in a role which no one was ever better qualified to fill--that of a Liberal statesman defending principles of democratic control menaced after a long period of security. The Prime Minister, not the Chancellor of the Exchequer, now became the protagonist; and this was to Redmond"s liking, for he felt that Mr. Asquith was more concerned with the problems which had occupied Gladstone"s closing years and Mr. Lloyd George with those of a later day.
Yet in the first grave encounter after the rejection of the Budget, Redmond and the leader of the Liberal party came to sharp differences.
The general election had amply justified the advice which was urged by him on Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman when the House of Lords rejected the Education Bill in 1906--namely, that the Liberal party should take up at once the inevitable fight before their enormous strength had been frittered away in a series of disappointments. The majority of 1906 was too swollen to be healthy: owing to the ruling out of Home Rule, it included a number of men only partial adherents of the full Liberal programme; and a diminution of its proportions owing to the traditional swing of the pendulum was certain. But in January 1910 the losses were more than even sanguine Tory prophets predicted. Tories came back equal in strength to the Liberals: Labour was only forty, so that the Irish party held the balance in the House.
The election had been fought expressly on the issue of Government"s claim to enable a Liberal Government to deal with certain problems, among which the Irish question occupied the foremost place. It was easy now for the Tories to argue that the Government appealing to the country on that issue had lost two hundred seats. They said: "You have authority to pa.s.s your Budget--but for these vast unconst.i.tutional changes you have no mandate." The temper of their party, which had more than doubled its numbers, was very high: in the Liberal ranks depression reigned and counsels were divided.
At the beginning of the election Mr. Asquith had made a great speech in the Albert Hall in which he outlined the Liberal policy. In it he declared that the pledge against introducing a Home Rule Bill was withdrawn, and that the establishment of self-government for Ireland, subject to the supremacy of the Imperial Parliament, was among the Government"s main purposes. But the House of Lords was in the way.