REASONS FOR CALMNESS.
THE greatest of all difficulties for Englishmen in this Irish crisis, and also the most imperative of all obligations, is to keep quite cool ; and while insisting on obedience to law, to avoid all violence, and even try to understand the impulses of the law-breakers. We quite appreciate the mental annoyance that advice will occasion in our readers. There is a sort of per- versity about Irishmen, when excited, of downright unreason- ableness and frowardness, which, to a race like ours, so often fierce, so seldom off its head, is unendurably irritating. An Irishman sometimes worries like a child who screams when he is not slapped. The English grow weary as well as angry, and angry folk, once wearied out, are sure, as the experience of all nurseries proves, to try anything, however futile and violent, which will rid them even momently of their troubles. Cool- ness, however, is the first necessity ; and we wish, in the midst of all that is going on, and in presence of the admitted necessity for repression, once more to state the reasons for keeping cool. One—the strongest in words, though, we fear, the weakest now in its operation—is that much of all that most irritates us in Ireland is our own fault ; we do not mean our own moral fault, though that was once true, but our own intellectual fault. Whatever we have done in Ireland—and we have done much good, as well as much evil, and perhaps forget the good too easily—we have totally failed on one essential point, that of inducing, or compelling, or enabling the Irish to understand us. After centuries of English rule in Ireland, Irishmen never know when or at what point, or on what subject the English will stand firm. Formerly, when we were oppressors, and now, when we want to be benefactors, they have invariably made the blunder of the Hindoo Rajah in the Mutiny who, when sentenced to death for rebellion and massacre by a Special Commission, cried out, " I appeal to the Supreme Court," and thought himself safe. Nothing is so wonderful as the Irish conviction that the English, whom they denounce as violent oppressors, will always adhere to their Parliamentary rules and legal pro- cesses and written laws, whatever their results. They con- sider us, with a contempt for logic almost Oriental in its extent, at one and the same time slaves to legality and despots. That ignorance, which is the source of half the present evil, and is shown by every Irish mob in its disposition to see how far resist- ance may safely go, must be in the main our fault,—must be the result of excessive inconsistency, vacillation, and spasmodic kindliness and fury, on the English side. If we had been con- sistent, the Irish might have rebelled, but they could never have played at rebellion. Everybody knows that this is so, and we are bound to allow for it, and to recollect that we have never taught the rough classes in Ireland to understand when a proclamation, or a law, or a police order must be unhesitatingly obeyed, and when it is a mere counsel for the guidance of sensible men. That is not a moral failure, but it is a failure in the art of government of the most disastrous kind. Then we ought to think more deeply than we do, before we allow the natural in- dignation at ingratitude to carry us too far. Nothing exaspe- rates the English friends of Ireland like the feeling that the Irish, or, rather, the unmanageable section of them, have be- come most violent just when their grievances were removed. There seems such hopeless unfairness as well as ingratitude in the fact that it is necessary to guard Mr. Gladstone, while it was not necessary to guard Mr. Lowther. But it must not be forgotten that the American Irish who guide this movement never asked for the Land Act, and instead of regarding it as a boon, regard it as a sop intended to thwart their object, which is the independence of Ireland ; while the Irish Irish who
asked for it, and who ought to be grateful for it, attribute the grant, not to Mr. Gladstone, but to the Land League. They think Mr. Parnell extorted the reform, and, absurd as the thought may be, we are bound, when fretting under ingrati- tude, to remember their point of view. The Irish are not ungrateful ; they are grateful, but to the wrong persons ; and that is a reason for pained regret, much more than for furious anger.
And finally, the position of Ireland at this moment, which seems to most Englishmen so abnormal and monstrous, is not unexampled. The Irish want, say the English, to be rid of us, though we have made unexampled concessions, and the state- ment is true; but the South seceded, after the North also had made unexampled concessions. The Fugitive Slave Act hurt Northern feeling much more than the Land Act hurts English feeling ; while the North granted to the South far more power than ever England has granted to Ireland. The South had ruled the Union for the thirty years before Abraham Lincoln was elected, and still it broke away, waged a great war against its comrade, and still maintains that it was altogether in the right. It may be urged that the South fought in the field and maintained the rules of war, and that the Irish do not, but make riots and support anarchy, and that is true ; but, on the other hand, the Irish say—not quite truly, we admit—that their course is dictated by their want of power ; that they would fight battles if they could, and only refrain from war because they have not the means. We are not, as our readers know, ex- tenuating, far less defending, the course either of the South or of the hostile section of Ireland, but we want our countrymen to see that the Irish at their wildest are not a one-legged race,—a separate kind of human beings, but very like other people when swept away by passion, or hatred, or self-interest ; that what they are doing other peoples have done, on as little provocation. The Irish, some journalists say, pour insults on us, and how wicked that is ! but the insults are not worse or harder to bear than the South poured out, when every Southern journalist described the Northerners as a pack of huckstering cowards,,who would do anything but fight. Indeed, the insults are more toler- able, for the Southern fire-eaters believed their own case, and thought the North demoralized by money-getting, while in Irish vituperation there is always a trace of the histrionic, and even sometimes of a half-comic acknowledgment that the big words are efforts to move the English out of that impassive attitude of expectation which is so galling. All nations except the English grow insulting as they grow hot, and the English calm, with its inner suggestion that "cabby must be expected to swear, and it does not matter," is at least as aggravating as any insult.
And finally, there is no reason of panic to excuse fear. All Englishmen unconsciously exaggerate all Irish movements. They watch Ireland, to begin with, a great deal too closely, much more closely, for instance, than they watch Wales, and they do it with a prepossession which seriously disturbs their judgments. If Merthyr Tydvil were in the condition that Dublin is in, Englishmen would understand that Merthyr Tydvil, besides being in a rage, contains a great many idle lads, and a great many adults who hate the police, and a great many people of all classes who are sick to death of the mono- tony of provincial life, and who, till the bullets begin to fly, find a serious riot, with the chance of giving or receiving a broken head, very nearly enjoyable. The riot would be put down, but Merthyr Tydvil and its misdeeds would be forgotten and forgiven next week, or quoted only to give point to a lecture on education, or a speech by some earnest teetotal orator. Nobody makes those excuses for Irish rioters, or remembers how slight the comparative importance of the cities in Ireland is, power belonging almost wholly to the peasantry. The Times pours out every morning a quantity of telegrams all about rioting from all parts of the land, till Englishmen begin to think that in that unhappy Island nobody has any breakfast, or writes his letters, or goes about his accustomed work without a dynamite cartridge in his pocket. There is plenty of rioting in Ireland and plenty of danger, and the rioting must be suppressed and the danger averted ; but if the worst comes to the worst, we shall not have to bear what the Ameri- cans bore, and overcame without taking one life on the scaffold. Let the very worst come to the very worst, and Irish Secession cannot be to Great Britain what the Secession of the South was to the American Union. The Southerners were 12,000,000 to 18,000,000,—for the Blacks, though expected to rebel, did not rebel, but fed by their enforced labour the Southern armies. The British are f9,000,000 to 5,000,000 of Irish, of whom only 4,000,000 could secede with any heart. The Irish orators talk of 20,000,000 of Irish Americans, but there are really only 4,000,000 ; and if they were 20.000,000, they could not be more formidable than the English and French who ran the blockade, threatened every week to interfere, and supplied the South with every kind of necessary, from cartridges and revolvers to strap-buckles. The Irish in England are numerous, but those of them who ap- prove a policy of separation or of rioting are not more -numerous than the " Copperheads," or sympathisers with the South residing in the North. Nevertheless, the North kept its temper, fought coolly, but persistently, and ultimately, when it won, shed less blood than any nation so provoked ever yet had done. It is that conduct that we ought to imitate, even if the worst arrives, and the worst is by no means yet before us. .The Iitiala men natural* in a fury at.the seizureof popular
leaders, but they have not forgotten how to count, nor do they desire to wreck everything rather than remain associated with England. Let us speak the whole truth, though it will annoy so many of our readers. It is the special misfortune of the situation that a large part of all.that is unendurable in Ireland just now comes from the goodness, and not the badness, of her lower people. They are faithful to their leaders, just as they were to the chiefs of septa, and afterwards to the Norman invaders, whom they served, and worshipped, and protected, till Geraldines, and Butlers, and Courcy's became Hiberniores ipsis Hibernicis. It is a sad and ironic commentary on the English failure in Ireland, that Catholic roughs in Dublin are risking grapeshot to express their anger that a Protestant Anglo-American, no more Irish than Mr. Gladstone, has been arrested.
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