HOW TO FIGHT A WINNING BATTLE.
THE division in the House of Commons has exceeded our highest expectations. When such a House as that gives a majority of thirty against Home-rule, it will at least be impossible for the country to believe that it was the crypto- Tory feeling which defeated Mr. Gladstone's measure. What we have now to do is to see that the battle is carried on in the spirit in which it is begun, or even in a higher spirit still,—to make the country feel that this revolt against the great leader, whom none have honoured more profoundly than ourselves, is not caused either by anti-Irish prejudice or by narrow British prepossession, but by a clear conviction that Mr. Gladstone, in his genuine and ardent desire to conciliate Ireland, has risked the principles of civil government itself; has proposed what, in the interests of the most elementary social morality, no statesman with his experience of the predominant Irish party ought to have proposed ; and, further, has thrown upon an untrained and untried democracy the heavy responsibility of taking to pieces a Constitution which, once taken to pieces, may never be effectually put together again. But we shall not fight a winning battle, if we attempt to fight it in that spirit of scorn for Mr. Gladstone's aims and hopes which some of his antagonists assume. No man in his senses ought to believe that the selfish love of power has actuated Mr. Gladstone and his colleagues in the step they have taken. Doubtless they won by it the adherence of Mr. Parnell's band of eighty-six. But that gain was itself, in many respects, a heavy loss, and we, for our part, do not doubt for a moment that the Government are perfectly sincere in believing that this is the only way out of the terrible dilemma which has embarrassed us so long, and in their sanguine hope that this is a way. We have a right to say that in choosing this way, they have shown want of faith in the primary duty of a Government to guard the liberty of those of whose civil rights they are the trustees, and an undue, we might almost say a superstitious, faith in the principle of local self-government, even where they have every evidence that the local leaders have poisoned the political springs of which their followers drink. But we have no right to say,—what, indeed, seems to us con- spicuously untrue,—that the Government do not believe in the magic of the principle they have invoked ; that they are not fully possessed with the conviction that Mr. Parnell and his followers are about to be transformed by the pride of legislative independence into stern enemies of the methods of boycotting and threatening and persecuting they have so long and successfully pursued, and to become, if not exactly political saints, at all events embodiments of average political virtue, as well as hearty colleagues in upholding the British Empire. We do entirely believe that this is what Mr. Gladstone and his colleagues have persuaded themselves that they may reasonably hope for ; and we do entirely believe that they see no other way out of the quarrel with Ireland, or at least no other way that the democracy will sanction. Let us fight our battle, then, with due respect to our great antagonist. Mr. Gladstone is enthusiastically in earnest, and if all his colleagues are not equally in earnest, some at least of them have caught the infection of his sanguine nature, and of his singular power of transmuting hope into conviction. No one can doubt the genuineness either of Mr. Gladstone's or of Mr. John Morley's belief that there is no other practicable way, though we should be very far from saying that Mr. John Morley has half as much confidence that this is a practicable way, as his great leader. We must not belittle this great controversy by trying to persuade the people that Mr. Gladstone is un- worthy of their reverence. He has made a huge mistake,— the mistake of a statesman whose hatred of the harder aspects of government has always been in excess, and whose belief in popular methods of solving every political difficulty amounts almost to a fanaticism,—but he has made that mistake without the smallest mixture of that base love of power for its own sake, with which it is the habit of his more malignant and less discriminating opponents so liberally to credit him. Let us fight our battle with him in all reverence, and yet with no loss of courage. The victory of Tuesday morning shows that even against such an antagonist the battle may be won ; and certainly it will be won all the more completely for not under- rating the strength and the earnestness of the enemy.
But while we recognise, as all who read Mr. Gladstone's and Mr. Morley's speeches candidly, must recognise, the sincerity and generosity of the convictions of the Cabinet, we must keep in the most vivid form before the people of Great Britain our reasons for thinking those convictions baseless. We do not hesitate to say that the whole strength of their case consists not
in the reasonableness of what they propose, but in the difficulty of suggesting any other course that looks hopeful to anybody. But it is no reason for doing what is plainly wrong, that it is extremely hard to see how you are to do right. Now, the strength of our case is, in the first place, that it is plainly wrong to hand over Ireland to the very men who have up to the very last moment shown that they have absolutely no scruples in their policy at all, that per fas ant nefas, by breaking the law or circumventing the law, moral and civil, by permeating Ireland with a bitter tyranny, by announcing to the world at large principles which they do not hold, and which are hardly out of their mouths before they are recanted, they in- tend to have their way. Doubtless in this last debate the Irish leaders' speeches have been soothing beyond measure to the ears of the Government. They have substituted the most dulcet music for the discords of the last seven years. They have denounced crime for the first time, and denounced it with something like vehemence. And why ? Because it was telling against themselves. But who is to trust the earnestness which is the mere manufacture of political opportunity ? What seems to us clear beyond the possibility of doubt is this,—that Mr. Gladstone's measure can only be defended on the plea that this death-bed repentance of the Irish agitators is to be trusted as death-bed repentances have never been trusted yet. It is on what they hope to find their death-bed as agitators,—their &but as statesmen,—that they express all this horror of the tyranny and crime which, without their connivance, would never have run riot as it has done. Can we for a moment trust such self- interested repentances ? Have we any right to trust them ? Do we not know that if they redeemed their fair promises they would have to throw over the great mass of the political supporters whom they would be found to have misled and deceived ? We have as much right to trust them as we have to trust the sincerity of that solemn manifesto in November which, before December was out, they were treating as an obsolete document which it was almost an impertinence to refer to. We say that the people of Great Britain would be absolutely deserting their most sacred trust if they chose to let Mr. Glad- stone's sanguine nature persuade them into believing that politicians who were the bane of Ireland six months ago may- be trusted to be the salvation of Ireland six months hence.
But that is only the Irish side of the question. The British side of the question remains. Every one has noted the arti- ficial desire to find openings and excuses for a crop of local Legislatures in Great Britain, which the Irish difficulty has brought into existence, just as a crop of fungi will spring up under favourable circumstances in a single night. We are not for a moment doubting that the cry for a popular system of county government was a real and honest cry long before the duty of granting Home-rule to Ireland was advocated by any leading statesman. But countygovernment is one thing, and large provincial or national Legislatures are another thing. We cannot
imagine that any clear-sighted politician can ignore the tendency to manufacture fancy Legislatures, simply and solely for the pur- pose of countenancing the Irish experiment, which the broaching of that experiment has caused. How can we for a moment believe that British Legislatures, trumped-up, we may almost say, to balance the Irish Legislature, could by any possibility do us anything but the most grievous harm? Are we to break up in haste the Constitution of Great Britain solely that we may find a better excuse for granting to Ireland what, under present circumstances, it would be the greateit breach of trust to grant to Ireland ? If Ireland needs, as she does, separate considera- tion and separate treatment, let her have that separate con- sideration and separate treatment, even though, if the worst came to the worst, it came to Separation itself. But all this talk of an Imperial Parliament, and a British Parliament, and an Irish Parliament,—nay, even of a Welsh Parliament and a Scotch Parliament,-3f a Parliament to which the world will look, and a Parliament to which Irishmen will look, and Heaven knows how many Parliaments to which England, Scot- land, and Wales will look,—all created for the sake of solving the Irish difficulty,—does seem to us the nearest approach which we have ever seen in political life, to the legend which Charles Lamb invented, that village after village in China was burnt down only in order to obtain roast pork. We ought to reject this measure, first and foremost because it promises to throw Ireland into hands which are demonstrably and monstrously unfit for the government of Ireland ; and next, because it threatens to decompose in the most dangerous way the British Constitution, and to decompose it only in order that we may have something in Great Britain to match the con- stitutional blunder to be committed in Ireland.
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