TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE FIASCO IN THE LORDS.
Tit, muddle in the Lords is deeper than we had supposed, so deep that it will take a dead heave from the chiefs of both parties to get the Bill out of it. It is one of the misfor- tunes of weekly journalism in England that great divisions are usually fixed for Friday, too late for serious discussion in papers which are not printed by Hoe's machine, and which must be distributed within an hour or two of the close of the debate. When we last wrote, we expected, with the rest of the world, that while the Marquis of Salisbury would carry his amendment restoring the glebes and parsonages to the disestablished Church, his influence would also carry the Duke of Cleveland's, which bestowed the same advantages on the remaining creeds. Had this been done, and the Bill then passed without further alteration, matters would have stood very much in this way. Half or more of the surplus would have been disposed of in such a way as deeply to gratify the majority of Irishmen, yet not to impair the great principle of equality, or to irritate the Commons beyond all bounds. A measure supported in principle by almost every man of note in the Peers except Lord Derby, by Tories like Lord Salis- bury, Whigs like Earl Russell, and Radicals like Lord Halifax ; in the Church by both Archbishops, and nine to five of the Episcopal Bench ; in the Cabinet by men as various as Lord Granville, Lord Kimberley, Mr. Lowe, and Mr. Bright ; and in the Press by journals as opposed as the Times, the Standard, the Saturday Review, and the Spectator, was sure, at all events, of consideration in the Commons, and we still doubt very greatly whether it would have been snuffed out on a division. Argument tells in the long run, and even Nonconformists could not long have maintained that a gift without conditions involved the State control, which, and not gifts, they think injurious to religion. For the rest, all the demands for money might have been compromised in a single amendment, a new and more "liberal" way of calculat- ing the value of the private benefactions, and the Bill would have been passed as an act of imperial justice, performed with the utmost tenderness and respect for the sentenced Establish- ment as well as for the unestablished creeds. Of course, Mr. Gladstone might still have insisted that the conciliatory clause involved concurrent endowment ; but we doubt if, in the face of both Houses, and of so great a mass of opinion, and of his own policy,—which is to govern Ireland as Ireland would govern herself,—he would have withdrawn the Bill.
This, we say, was our hope ; but we overrated both the tolerance and the political ability of the Lords. The Tories voted for Lord Salisbury's amendment, giving parsonages and glebes to the disestablished clergy, readily enough, and many Liberals joined them, in the full belief that the Marquisintended to secure, as he did intend to secure, equality among the creeds. The junction of many parties gave the Tories a majority for half the measure as great as we hoped for the whole, but no sooner had they secured their own object than they re- fused to carry out the bargain, threw over Lord Salisbury for Lord Cairns, and decided by 213 to 69 that Protestant clergy- men should have residences, and by 146 to 113 that Catholic clergymen should have none. Then, as if to make their temper unmistakable, they voted, by 105 to 55, that Royal grants in Ulster should be considered private grants, thus giving to Protestants alone all the land which, in the great "Protestant province," they had ever held ; and finally, as a parting stroke, they decided that Mr. Gladstone's proposal for the disposal of the surplus was, even in the absence of an alternative proposition, too bad to be considered, and ordered that the surplus should be reserved till some wiser man had found out a more useful application of the cash.
We write without knowing the extent to which the Peers on the presentation of the Report may modify their course, but if they do not modify it, the Government have but one policy to pursue. They must reject the amendments en bloc, and at any risk of collision between the two Houses must force the original Bill through Parliament, altered only by the concessions they themselves have made. The stupider section of the Peers have overmastered the statesmen, and have left the Premier no alternative. The Bill, as they have made it, is not only worthless ; it creates a Church worse than the one it was intended to destroy. Every outward and visible mark of the old evil ascendancy has been carefully, we had almost written maliciously, retained. The church in each parish, built with national money, is still to be devoted to the exclusive use of the dominant minority. To the Protestant Episcopaliarr pastor alone does the State assign a decent residence. To hill" alone does it grant out of national property the position of a landlord. He alone will be secured from dependence on his people by a snstentation fund given by the State. His chief alone retains a social precedence, guaran- teed by Act, and he for twenty years to come will alone be represented in the Imperial Legislature by members of hie own caste sitting there in virtue of their official rank. He will be, to all outward seeming, a member of an established. and endowed Church, and the outward seeming will be on almost all points a reality. The Church, for effective purposes, will be richer than before. The Lords endow it with at least twelve millions out of sixteen, while, as an inde- pendent body, the Synod will be able to restrict waste, to. amalgamate parishes, and to pare away useless offices till the Church will stand forward better endowed for work than ever it has been in all its history. Such a conclusion as this to. such a Bill would be not only lame, but actually grotesque. Mr. Gladstone would forfeit, and justly forfeit, the public con- fidence, if he submitted to such a complete bouleversement of his pledge not to use Irish Church funds for the endowment of any creed, while the most tolerant of statesmen would see with alarm a great Church full of traditions of ascendancy, released from the State, and dowered with twelve millions, set free to work its will. The House of Commons, wounded in its pride, pressed by its electors, and excited by oratory, is certain to sustain the Premier's conclusions, and the Lords, therefore, have forced on a collision in which they cannot even hope
for triumph. Their amendments may be the wisest improvements in the world, and some of them are certainly unobjectionable; but the issue laid before the country will not be their merits or demerits, but, "Will you be governed by your Representatives or by the Peers ?" Does any Peer who knows politics doubt what the answer would be i” The Lords must yield in conference nearly all they have taken in Committee, and so surrender precisely the thing for which they were most interested, their own appearance of power as an independent House. Nor can they wrap them- selves up in their dignity, and say that wisdom and states- manship have been defeated by prejudice, for they have brought their defeat entirely upon themselves. Never was there such a muddle as their management of business on Friday se'nnight. The majority changed their leaders half a dozen times in one evening, now voting with Lord Granville, then with Lord Salisbury, then with Lord Cairns ; took half an amendment and rejected the other half ; considered every pro- position on the plan of the simpleton who took about a brick as specimen of his house ; and generally behaved more like a mob than a great party acting at a grave crisis. They would neither say what they wanted, nor let anybody else say it ; would obey no general, and follow no standard ; but kept making undisciplined little rushes whenever they saw a fair chance of plunder, or of flaunting even for a moment the standard of ascendancy. And all this, while they are fighting a leader whom they dread at least as much as they dislike, and who, as they are never tired of saying, has drilled his army into an obedience almost abject. The scene in Committee has destroyed all the moral force the Peers tied obtained from the debate on the second reading. That, no doubt, was a great achievement ; but it was an achievement carried through by the officers, whom the rank and file immediately after refused to obey consistently. The Lords who speak may be able revisers of the Commons' decrees, but the Lords who vote seem incapable of conducting business so. as to secure the results they themselves at heart desire. At the last moment, they would not have the very compromise they wished, and cannot be either surprised or offended if they obtain no other.
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