THE STABLE FORCES IN IRELAND.
LOYALTY to the Queen in Ireland is not, of course, neces sarily loyalty to the English connection. If the modern theory of the Home-rulers that their old Parliament was, in its later years, a true Parliament is sound—we confess it appears to us an extraordinary bit of make-believe—the Queen's tide there is just as good as her title here, and this from the Irish point of view. She is the heiress of monarchs recognised by a free and sovereign Parliament sitting in Dublin. Moreover, many of the older and more sensible Separatists look forward to a. relation between the countries resembling that which exists between Norway and Sweden, and see no reason why secession should involve either Republicanism or the choibe of a new dynasty. Such men, even if they hate England, can have no detestation for the Earl of Dublin, heir apparent of the Irish throne. We may, however, we think, fairly assume that those classes which received the Prince of Wales with cordiality are at least as much contented as an English party out of power, —are disinclined, that is, to violent revolution, are desirous that law should reign, and are permanently fearful lest great change should usher-in a period of anarchy. If that is true, and few will deny that it is a moderate theory, the visit of the Prince of Wales will do at least this good,—it will remind not only Englishmen, but Irishmen, that the party of order in Ireland is still very numerous and powerful. We are all too apt to assume that it is substantially extinct, the popular imagination being, in fact, so impressed by noise that we habitually call the violent third of the Irish representation " the Irish Members." Terrorism is checked for a moment by the Irish pleasure at a Royal visit ; and we are all enabled to see that great classes are, as might have been expected, on the side, in the main, of existing institutions. Ireland is not a separate planet, and everywhere else a large portion of the community is sure to be at heart more or less conservative, in the broader sense of the word. In Ireland it is admitted that the descendants of English and Scotch who have taken-up their quarters there are, as a body, anti-revolutionary ; and there must be many more like them. Differences of religion, however acute, do not influence men in politics as they did ; and it is difficult to imagine a middle-class of any kind sincerely anxious for an insurrection, open or veiled. They may be sincerely patriotic, and desire a certain separateness and visible illustration for their country even with ardour ; but material interests weigh with them, and material interests tell heavily on the other side. All holders of Irish securities would, in the event of violent or sudden separation, be, as far as those securities are concerned, comparatively paupers ; yet so great is commercial confidence, that shares in the Bank of Ireland are held like shares in the Bank of England. The Irish have not had quite the luck of the Scotch, for whom, owing to specialties of national character, the Union " terminated at once the independence and the poverty of Scotland ;" but still, there is a middle-class rapidly increasing, and with much more money than it is supposed to have, and it does not want a general overturn. Many may hope much from a national Administration, and some heartily believe in the possibility of its making the country richer by great material works, like the improvement of the Shannon • but the majority must dread disorder, the loss of perfect Free-t;nde with England, and the great revenue Ireland derives from the positions held by Irishmen abroad. That one can dislike a country, yet serve her faithfully, is, happily, true ; but that dislike can hardly, in a servant of the State, go so far as a wish for a violent disruption. It is not easy to conceive that men who are prosperous in any part of the Empire, either as officials, as soldiers, or as merchants, because of an imputed Englishrv, can want to become foreigners all in a moment, and as the result of a volcanic upheaval. Then there are three and a half millions of Catholics in Ireland; and, curiously separate as Irish Catholicism has always been, partly from the oppression it has suffered, and. partly from the method of recruiting its priesthood, there must remain a certain mass of Catholic feeling of the true Romisb, type, the type which distrusts revolution and looks askance at secrecy, and asks, often it is true in a whisper, whether any aspiration, however good or noble in itself, can excuse a. direct breach of the moral law, or even a direct resistance to the laws of the land ? We are not saying this mass is large. A creed is often powerless against a tendency ; and unless all travellers alike lie, Spanish-Americans are convinced Catholics, but are given, nevertheless, in an exceptional degree, at. once to revolution and to violence. Still some Catholic feeling must remain, binding men strongly to order, and to an aversion from a kind of Republicanism which in Ireland, as in France and in Spanish-America, is not shown by experience to be favourable to the Church. Then, even in Ireland, there must be sections of working-men who aro, like their body nearly everywhere, unable to believe in great changes, disposed to seek only immediate advantage, and, like the labourers who on Wednesday followed Mr. Villiers Stuart, quite willing to cheer the representative of that which exists. At heart they acquiesce, it may be from ignorance, but they acquiesce. We are wholly indisposed by nature and experience to believe much in the kind of effusion produced by any attractive spectacle, or to doubt that a reception may look grand, though the true population hold sullenly aloof ; but we think the balance of evidence shows that the people in Ireland who are not utter Revolutionaries, who are not carried by incurable bitterness of feeling beyond the possibility of an acquiescence in established order with a hope of legislative improvement, are nearer half than a third of the total population.
At all events, they are numerous enough to deepen our fear that in Ireland either separation or Home-rule in the completer sense might be the signal for anarchy ; that is, for a civil war, which would be at once a war of Provinces, a war of creeds, and a war of classes, the latter diffusing the two former, as it were, through every village of the kingdom. The division of opinion is known to be radical ; and if we allow for the strength which appertains to the higher classes merely from their wealth—all soldiers of fortune and mercenaries would be on the unpopular side—the disproportion of force is clearly not sufficient to produce an enforced, however reluctant, peace. A revived conviction of this fact will, we are certain, deepen the English aversion to any idea of Homerule ; and will, we have some faint hope, increase the efforts, both in Ireland and England, to educate the body of the people in wiser political ideas. After all, supposing the more reasonable . Parnellites correct in their affirmation that " the Irish masses " are incurably hostile to the present regime, even if modified in detail to suit their ideas, can anything be more extraordinary than that in a country to which its inhabitants of all classes are devoted, the " directing classes," Catholic as well as Protestant, mercantile as well as land-owning, professional as well as trading, should have so utterly lost their leadership that their opinion upon a vital question should have no weight I Can such a situation be natural ; and how have the ordinary !awe of political gravitation been suspended? That a privileged class should be hated is, among races of a certain temper and under untoward circumstances, natural enough. A foreign class, placed at the top, is disliked in perhaps a third of the countries in the world, the most marked case being Bohemia, where a struggle, in some respects singularly like the struggle in Ireland, is always going on. But that a community identical in language, laws, and civilisation should be divided horizontally, so that men of all creeds and descent should be found on either side of a well-marked line—and recollect the Irish leader of the masses is certainly Protestant, and probably strongly anti-" Catholic " in the religious sense of the word—is, to say the least, a most unusual phenomenon. There must have been some great failure on the part of the upper-class in Ireland itself, and we can see clearly one failure on the part of Englishmen. We cannot understand merely as historians the failure of the friends of England in Ireland to produce a Parnell of their own opinions, just as the Magyars, who are immersed among Slays, as Englishmen among Irishmen, produced a Deak. We are driven to the conclusion that, since the idea of conquest ended, there has been a want of courage to perform the educating task, as well as an unreasonable want of hope. As for the English here, we are ashamed of them. They do literally nothing to persuade the people of the sister-island of the accuracy of their own views. It is years since English statesmen have spoken in South Ireland, as they speak habitually in England and Scotland, as pleasant visitors tender of local feelings, yet with a political message to deliver. Yet, why should an orator be received worse than a Prince ; or when did we learn that the best reason for an argumentative speech was that the audience was already on the speaker's side ? The Channel has arrested wise political effort as well as political sympathy. If Ireland had touched England, visits, not only from Royalty, but from statesmen, orators, and demagogues, must have been perpetual ; and why do we allow the sea to be such a barrier? It has not been one when there was anything to be got. It is useless ever to calculate from Irish promises to Irish results, for there is a perversity in the destiny of the Island which baffles the shrewdest Englishmen ; but the Prince's reception revives in us a hope previously growing faint, that Englishmen and Irishmen may yet understand each other, and a conviction, also growing faint, that effort to ensure the understanding may yield more than patient but unhopeful resignation. There is a passiveness in the English mind about Ireland, an unexpressed resolution to see if Chat Moss will fill itself, which, as it is never the natural condition of that mind, we regard with a certain alarm. Nothing would rearouse us like a conviction that, when all was said, one Irishman in two was open alike to argument and to compromise.
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