MR. GLADSTONE ON MR. FORSTER.
MR. GLADSTONE'S article on Mr. Forster in the Nine- teenth Century has been made the subject of some very bitter and even malignant comment, which shows nothing except the determination of the writers to construe everything that Mr. Gladstone says in the sense which is most unfavourable to him. We, on the contrary, think the article a very sincere and hearty tribute to Mr. Forster's character and power; nor do we think it either reasonable or just to read Mr. Gladstone's criticism on the Cabinet discussions concerning Mr. Parnell's release from Kilmain- ham in 1882, as if it were intended to produce on its readers any impression whatever unfavourable to Mr. Forster's studious accuracy of mind. That Mr. Gladstone disagrees with him as to the existence of any difference between Mr. Forster and the rest of the Cabinet before Mr. Forster's resignation, is evident ; and it is at least more likely that Mr. Gladstone may now be mistakenly persuading himself that up to the last moment no difference had shown itself between Mr. Forster and the rest of the Cabinet on the subject of the conditions on which Mr. Parnell and his colleagues ought to be released, than it is that Mr. Forster, at a point of time so very much nearer to the issue, mistakenly persuaded himself that there was no such difference. But that Mr. Gladstone intends to insinuate any charge of culpable inaccuracy against Mr. Forster it is monstrous to assert. Of course, it is plain enough that when Mr. O'Shea talked of Mr. Parnell's sending Sheridan to remove the resistance offered to the Government in the West of Ireland, Mr. Forster recoiled in sudden horror, being well aware of Sheridan's connection with the system of criminal outrages, and realising for the first time that Sheridan was Mr. Parnell's chosen political instrument. But while the calm suggestion of the use of this go-between opened Mr. Forster's eyes somewhat abruptly to the kind of machinery he was asked to set in motion for the suppression of outrages, Mr. Forster undoubtedly believed earlier, and can scarcely have believed without grounds, that many members of the Cabinet wished to release Mr. Parnell without any adequate guarantee that Mr. Parnell would not light up again the fires which he was asked to extinguish.
This, however, is not the point of chief interest in Mr. Gladstone's article. The point of chief interest in it is the evidence it gives that while Mr. Forster kept firmly to his resolve that outrages must be put down, and that he must not on any plea whatever leave hold of even an ineffectual instrument which had done something to vindicate the law, before he had grasped a more effectual instrument for the same purpose, Mr. Gladstone's mind vacillated uneasily between his very natural and right disgust for instruments of coercion, and his perhaps hardly so keen disgust for the crimes which rendered coercion necessary ; and that you could not well tell which of the two would, at any particular moment, be uppermost. In November, 1881, he was firmly determined to put down Mr. Parnell's resistance to the Land Act, and he announced Mr. Parnell's arrest at the Guildhall in language which had the ring of true righteous wrath in it. But as the arbitrary arrests went on and agrarian crime did not dwindle,—though, as he himself tells us, the arrests did enable the Government to put the new Land Act in operation, which would not otherwise have been possible,— he evidently hankered more and more after a reversal of the whole policy, and it was only the horrible murders in the Phcenix Park which strung up his nerve again to a more effective policy than the suspension of the Habeas Corpus. For in 1882 before those murders took place, he was evidently gradually getting into the state of mind which dictated his recent denunciations of the extremely mild Crimes Act of 1887. Mr. Gladstone is, indeed, almost indignant with Mr. Forster for putting on the Act for the suspension of Habeas Corpus which was framed in 1881, the meaning which, as we should have thought, every one would have assigned to it,—namely, that the Government were to be authorised to arrest men on " reasonable suspicion " of having incited to lawlessness, and to keep those whom they so arrested under lock and key until their release was unlikely to cause further outrage. He implicitly reproaches Mr. Forster for thinking that their imprisonment ought not to cease till the danger against which it was a safeguard had ceased. Mr. Gladstone holds that the reasonable suspicion referred to in the Act was only reasonable suspicion of future acts of incitement to lawlessness ; and that so soon as there was no ground of reasonable suspicion of any such future acts, the reasonable suspicion that past acts of resistance to the law had been committed would not justify detention any longer. But what the Act Certainly justified was the imprisonment of dangerous men, on " reasonable suspicion ' that they had done dan- gerous acts. And however little reasonable suspicion there might be that they would repeat those dangerous acts, it might be most unsafe to let them go, especially where the knowledge of their reputation for having done those dangerous acts went before them. Mr. Parnell's release, in a very disturbed state of the country, even though the Govern- ment had no reason to think that he would repeat the con- duct of which he had been reasonably suspected, was very likely to be accepted in Ireland as a token of fear, and so to become the signal for a great explosion of lawlessness, as, indeed, it actually became. What Mr. Forster held was that men who had once given the Government ground for reasonable suspicion that they had incited to a stubborn resistance to the law, ought to be kept in prison till some more effective weapon could be substituted for this mere imprisonment on suspicion. And though we think that lir. Forster was not very wise in regarding a public and honourable pledge to refrain from intimidation in future as a sufficient guarantee,—we doubt, indeed, whether he would have even suggested that it might be regarded as a sufficient guarantee, after the Sheridan proposal had withdrawn the veil from his eyes,—we hold that he was very wise, wiser than we ourselves were, in wishing for the passing of an efficient Crimes Act before the release of the suspects. As a matter of fact, Mr. Parnell certainly did not fulfil the pledge which Mr. Gladstone thinks so satisfactory. We suppose that he regarded the passing of the Crimes Act of 1882 as releasing him from his pledge. But it is certain that from the passing of that Act till its expiration, so far from doing all in their power to suppress crime, the Parnellites did all in their power to paralyse Mr. Trevelyan and Lord Spencer and to torment the whole Irish Adminis- tration. Looking to the actual result of the release of the Parnellites from Kilmainham, we must say that it more than justified all Mr. Forster's fears, and more than falsified all Mr. Gladstone's hopes. The outrages were eventually put down by the Crimes Act; but the perpetrators of the out- rages, instead of being branded by Mr. Parnell and his party, were generally treated by them as special protégés whom the Parliamentary party were bound to defend by every means in their power. Never were hopes more bitterly disap- pointed than Mr. Gladstone's that the pledge given by Mr. Parnell would be redeemed,—though we are bound to say that in this article he makes no admission of the sort, and almost speaks as if his hopes had been fulfilled.
We have no doubt that Mr. Forster's first Crimes Act was a failure ; but we think that it was a failure chiefly because it did not really punish crime, but only kept a few dangerous foes out of the way. He was right in wishing to substitute for it something much more effective. He was wrong in hesitating even for a moment whether he would part with the securities he had, till he had gained something more substantial. Mr. Gladstone, on the other hand, was right in disliking the imprisonment on suspicion. But he was much more seriously wrong in inclining to let go the hold he had on those who had resisted the law, before he had made himself master of a better weapon. He vacillated between firmness and weakness in the Govern- ment of Ireland,—showing firmness at one time, weakness at another. Both Mr. Forster and Mr. Gladstone made great mistakes. But Mr. Forster was for correcting, if he had been allowed, the mistakes which he had made ; Mr. Gladstone has shown that he was in favour of repeating them, that his was a policy of vacillation in 1885, as it is a policy of bland kisser faire now. That is not the way in which Ireland can be governed.
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