MR. HEALY ON THE IRISH SITUATION.
MR. HEALY is much the cleverest man in the Irish Nationalist party, and on the whole we are inclined to think him the most frankly outspoken. What, then, is the impression which he produces on the mind of a neutral observer ? It is that he cares a good deal about the concessions which he can win from the United Kingdom on the subject of the Irish Land-laws ; that the mere process of winning them from a great nation like this gives him a good deal of honest satisfaction ; that he cares a good deal also for the pleasure of defying England and liberating his soul on the subject of her blundering government of Ireland ; but that he cares little or nothing for practical success in the Home-rule policy which he advocates. Consider carefully the speech which he made in Dublin on Tuesday in relation first to the great achievement of the Session, the new Irish Land Act, and next to the Irish Nationalist Conference which has been summoned to meet in Dublin from all parts of the world. On both subjects he was very explicit and, so far as we can judge, very straightforward. He really believed the Irish Land Act of last Session to be an important Act as well as a good Act so far as it goes. He really thought Mr. Gerald Balfour a sincere and wise Irish statesman. He certainly desired to convince those who heard him that Mr. Dillon is a perfectly incompetent Irish leader. He desired to see him removed from the head of the Irish party. And so far as we can judge, he .cared very little who should be put in his place, unless, after all, to acquiesce in acceptiag the Parliament of perhaps, he had a fancy for occupying that conspicuous but very helpless position himself ; and of such an ambi- tion we doubt extremely whether he is not too shrewd a man to be really desirous, so long as he can occupy the still more satisfactory position of the man who makes the nominal leader's position a burden to him and who paralyses his hand. That is the attitude, so far as any impartial critic can understand it, which Mr. Healy takes up. He exhibits not a trace of the feeling that it is ruinous for the Irish party to show how deeply and hopelessly divided it is. He quite enjoys checkmating the bulk of the Anti-Parnellite faction. He is indifferent to the prospect that a number of hot-headed Irishmen will flock to Dublin from the United States and Canada and Australia, and will wrangle about Irish policy, and will make confusion worse confounded, and will go home, having accomplished nothing beyond convincing us all that the Irish never agree with each other, to their various pursuits in those distant regions. It does not even occur to him that this ostentatious display of the incoherence of Irish policy, will have the worst effect on the demand for a separate Irish Parliament. Why should he care a brass farthing about that when he hardly ever seems to realise the practical meaning of the rending of the bond with England at which he nominally aims ? What can be more signifi- cant than this Mr. Dillon had said that if any gentle- man talked over the disputes between Dillon and Healy at the Convention, he would be coughed down and run out of the room. If he [Mr. Healy] were to be coughed down, he would prefer to be coughed down at West- minster rather than at Dublin ; and he would prefer, if he were to be run out of the room, to be expelled from the House of Commons. He could not attend the Convention without avowing his solemn belief that as long as Mr. Dillon remained at the head of the Irish party, it would never achieve success." And, in effect, Mr. Healy formerly held much the same attitude towards the strongest of the Irish leaders, Mr. Parnell himself. He did all he could tc foil his policy in many of the Irish crises of Mr. Parnell's time. And when Mr. Gladstone vetoed Mr. Parnell's leadership in compliance with the demands of "the Non- conformist conscience," Mr. Healy cheerfully joined the Anti-Parnellites whom he is now effectually breaking in two. The last consideration which seriously affects that shrewd and penetrating mind of his, is the consideration that Englishmen in millions will argue from all these interminable quarrels among Irish politicians that a separate Irish Parliament would not only be mischievous in the highest degree, but that it is not so much as seriously desired by the most acute of the Irish leaders. Indeed, it is not in relation to Mr. Healy alone that this impression is produced on Englishmen. Is it not much the same with Mr. Sexton, who has retired from political life rather than undertake the hopeless task of trying to transmute a rope of sand into an organic bond that will really bind Irishmen together ? And was it not just the same with Mr. Parnell himself ? So long as he had the prospect of governing Ireland in case he succeeded in wringing Home-rule from Mr. Gladstone, he fought steadily and gallantly for Home-rule. But no sooner did he see the chance for his own personal success vanishing from him, than he cast all patriotic considerations to the winds, and threw himself into one last desperate struggle for his own personal ascendency. One Irishman does one thing, and another another. One goes into retirement, a second oonfines himself to doing at Westminster what can be done at Westminster, and letting Dublin hear all the empty aspirations of his speculative mind, while a third dies fighting passionately and recklessly for his own hand. But so far as we can judge, the last thing any of them really cares about is the disinterested consolidation of a separate Irish party. Where they see a chance of wringing a substantial conces- sion for the tenant-farmer, they do not neglect it, but when they are asked to sacrifice their personal ambitions to the object of summoning an Irish Parliament in Dublin, they grow cold at once, and declare plainly enough, that they might think such a sacrifice worth while for the purpose of gaining practical ends at Westminster, but not at all for breathing out idle hopes in Dublin. Now what does that phenomenon imply ? It implies to our mind a latent (and perhaps unconscious) conviction on the part of the ablest Irish politicians that perhaps the United Kingdom is, to say the least, the next best course to the achievement of their own personal ascendency in a separate Irish party. "If I am to be coughed down, let mp be coughed down at Westminster rather than at Dublin. I should prefer, if I am to be run out of the room, to be ex- pelled from the House of Commons." And surely that is not an unreasonable state of mind. An Irish politician can bear to be beaten in a great Assembly like the House of Commons, and feels it a genuine triumph if he can wring from that great Assembly concessions which show how considerable is his knowledge and, how sagacious is his policy. But he cannot bear to be beaten by his own Irish competitors, for he does not really believe that they are in any respect his equals, still less his superiors. Even Satan, who preferred reigning in hell to submitting in heaven, would probably have greatly preferred submitting in heaven to accepting the authority of Moloch or Mammon in the inferior world. But we are far from meaning to suggest that the motives of the Irish politicians who betray this dislike to admitting each other's authority, are motives of a purely evil kind. We believe they do really feel, if they are hardly willing to acknowledge to themselves, that the impartiality of the Imperial Parliament, though it is often blundering, and often slow, is a real safeguard in Irish politics. It is well-intentioned, however blundering and slow, and that is what cannot always be said of the Irish factions which struggle with each other for victory rather than for the pure good of Ireland, except, indeed, when they are drawn together and solidified by the superincumbent mass of the other representatives of the United Kingdom. The Irish- men do not proclaim, but they clearly feel the advantage of, a tie which thus overcomes the mutual repulsion amongst themselves of which they are seldom unconscious. They are perfectly aware, too, that in losing an object of common attack they would lose a great stimulus and pleasure, as well as a very convenient antidote to their own centrifugal tendencies. It is hardly possible for them to attack England and yet in the same breath acknowledge how useful England is in presenting so conspicuous a motive for acting together when they would otherwise inevitably fly asunder. But the last fifteen years must at least have taught them this, that if even they ever obtained an inde- pendent Parliament of their own they would much more than lose, by the waste involved in mutual animosities, all that they might have gained by getting rid of the Saxon foreigner, whose ignorance of their country they have been in the habit of denouncing and affecting to despise. We very much doubt, however, whether the shrewdest of them,— Mr. Healy himself, for instance,—do really despise the impartial Englishman quite as much as they would wish to do, and endeavour to persuade themselves and others that they really do. Mr. Gerald Balfour, for example, probably seems to the cleverest of them, at least the next best ideal after a brilliant Irishman,—especially as they would never agree upon the insoluble problem as to who the brilliant Irishman should be.
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