TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE NEW DEPARTURE IN RADICAL POLITICS. THE new departure which we have anticipated from the moment when Mr. Gladstone consented to retain the Irish representatives in the Parliament of Westminster, has at length been taken. Mr. Asquith on Saturday invited a declaration in favour of Federalism, and Mr. Gladstone on Wednesday, at St. Austell, made the de- claration that had been invited. If the Home-rulers succeed, the retrogression towards the Heptarchy will have begun. It is formally given out that England must con- sist at least of four States, and of four States of such unequal size and power, that they will, if yoked together in this Imperial yoke, resemble, so far as regards their relative force, a team consisting of a mighty elephant, two ponies (one Irish and one Shetland), and a goat. The principal State would from the first contain three times the population of the other three, and would soon rise to four times that population ; Ireland would come next, with less than a fifth of the people of England ; Scotland next, with about three-fourths of the people of Ireland ; and Wales last, with about half the people of Scotland. That would be a team that could never pull together. The logic as well as the convenience of the case would render it necessary to subdivide England, and in all probability the centrifugal process would go on till we had a heptarchy at least, if not an octarchy. With Home-rule, the decline and fall of the British Empire would commence. If anything could add to the importance of the momentous resolve which Mr. Gladstone and his lieu- tenants have taken, it would be the particular connection in which the great downward step towards cantonal govern- ment has been announced. True to his conception of the Nonconformists as his chief allies, Mr. Gladstone makes Disestablishment the immediate excuse, and shadows it forth even as the most important goal, of his new policy. He has disestablished the Church of Ireland. He announces his conversion to the policy of disestablishing the Church of Scotland and the Church in Wales. And he indicates in no ambiguous form, though with great caution and great insistance on the necessity of delay, that the Disestablishment of the Church of England will follow as soon as a generation had grown up pre- pared for that mighty change. When we consider that in the country which most Home-rulers take as their model of Federal Government, the -United States, the marriage law is made by the State and not by the Union, this association of the policy of disintegration with the policy of Church Disestablishment is very significant of the end which we may expect,—namely, that the law of marriage will follow the law of the atomic constituent, and not the law of the Federal Union. Indeed, when we consider that the Scotch law of marriage is already different from the Eng- lish, and that the Roman Catholic feeling in Ireland will un- doubtedly be favourable to a stronger civil law on the subject than prevails here, there can be little doubt that this must be so, and that we should soon have laws of divorce for Wales, and perhaps for different divisions of England, which would be as capricious and disintegrating as the chaos of marriage and divorce laws which disfigure the civil polity of the -United States. To think of the author of "Church Principles Considered in their Results,"—as Mr. Glad- stone termed his first book,—having by his policy reduced his country to such consequences as these, would indeed be strange and sad. Yet it seems to us one of the most probable results of the policy in which he is now embarked, if in the pathetic irony which sometimes threads the purposes of Providence, that policy should ever reach its natural consummation. Mr. Gladstone as the originator of the spiritual disintegration of the -United Kingdom, would indeed be a curious figure in history, especially after that long and passionate resistance to the Divorce Act which distinguished the close of the earlier portion of his career. If he should succeed in this Home-rule-cum-Disestablish- ment programme, he would, we believe, have done far more to reduce England to a medley of divergent pur- poses and ill-controlled civil impulses, than any of those secular-minded statesmen with whom during the first part of his career he was so vividly and justly contrasted. But Mr. Gladstone appeals to the obvious interests and sympathies of Scotland and Wales as a guarantee that by the Federalism which he proposes, he cannot mean anything which would threaten the unity of the United Kingdom. Scotland and Wales, he says, "do not mean anything adverse to the unity of the Empire. No one would dare to bring such an accusation, so preposterous, against our Welsh or Scotch fellow-subjects." No; but it is not conscious purpose, but the logic of unconscious actions, which determines the consequences of a fatal step. The guard who uncoupled the Armagh train the other day did not intend to destroy some seventy of his fellow- creatures. He only intended, like Mr. Gladstone, to get one-half of his train more easily up an incline up which he knew that he had not steam enough to drag the whole. But the logic of his action was too strong for his conscious purpose. The half of the train which had no longer an engine attached to it fell back on the train behind, and a great disaster was the result. So it will be in this case. Mr. Gladstone asks to be allowed to uncouple the long train of British interests for no evil purpose of his own,—solely in order to get local liberties better organised, and to relieve the central power of a dangerous and oppressive strain. But he cannot antici- pate the tremendous consequences of what he proposes, any more than Wales and Scotland can anticipate what this rash step in the direction of individual independence may lead them to. Of course, they are entirely guiltless now of any mischievous meaning in taking up that arti- ficial cry for Home-rule with which the Irish contagion has infected them. But the "logic of facts," as the late Emperor of the French used to call it, is far stronger than the logic of conscious purpose. "Ye know not what ye ask," was said on one occasion to men who thought that they were asking for glory, and were really asking for martyrdom. And Mr. Gladstone, if he were as prudent now as he was when he wrote that singularly cautious and difficult book, "Church Principles Considered in their Results," would tell those claimants for Home-rule that they know not what they ask. They ask to break with history, to get themselves put under the control of a totally new class of forces of which they cannot anticipate the working, to have all the jealousies of independent States forced into life by a hot-house culture for which there is no genuine demand in any part of the United Kingdom except Ireland (where it should be steadily controlled), and they think that they are asking for nothing but a new kind of parochial administration. Why, you might just as well say that when you ask to have a train of gunpowder fired, you only ask to have the gaseous elements in it released from the control of the solid elements,—which is perfectly true ; but then, what a mighty force that generates ! And so it will be in this modest request to break up the United Kingdom into four unequal States for the purpose of enlarging local liberties. Local liberties indeed ! Why, the very connection in which Mr. Gladstone with artless art (artless politically and morally, artful, though not in the bad sense, oratorically) makes the demand, shows suffi- ciently what these local liberties will mean. It is to a certain spiritual impatience of unity that he appeals when he utters the word Disestablishment ; and when a new set of States are to be brought into being with a spiritual im- patience of unity as the chief generating force for bringing them into being, it does not take any very remarkable prescience to predict the result. The weary Titan will be a Titan no longer, if this programme is to be carried out. In place of him there will arise a number of pigmies, all the more jealous of each other because they will be con- scious how enormous is the preponderance of England in the political scales. If that preponderance is to be steadily used, Home-rule will be a mere nonentity. If it is not to be used, the United Kingdom will be paralysed. Put it which way you will, the new demand is a demand for the artificial manu- facture of three States which would never have come into existence, or wished to come into existence, had not the exigencies of the Irish situation called for the invention of a mischievous and redundant federation of which no one even dreamed five years ago, and which, if it comes into existence,—and it never will,—will breed scores of quarrels for the one which it is intended to cure. Spiritual im- patience is the one force to which Mr. Gladstone appeals in order to give a show of reason to his strange demand for Scotch and Welsh independence. Spiritual disintegration as a consequence of political disintegration will be the offspring of the new policy, if the good sense of the nation does not, as we believe it will, promptly repudiate this most mischievous work of political supererogation.
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