THE COMING QUESTIONS.
ITO TIDI EDITOR OR TSB " SPIlerATOR.1
SIE,—Yon have a good deal on your hands. We have bad cabled to us at once the policy of government for Ireland, and Lord Newton's plan for the reconstruction of the House of Lords.
The Government policy for Ireland Emma to be a conces- sion of a National Assembly with limited powers, leaving the door still open for Home-rule. Limit the powers of the National Assembly legally as you may, will it not be always working for an enlargement of those powers with a view to independence, and will not its allies in the British Parliament be always playing on the balance of parties there and filling British councils with distraction ? The end apparently will
be Home-rule, and that Home-rule means separation plainly appeared when it was tried even with an Ascendency Parlia- ment in Ireland. But could Great Britain live with a divorced Ireland, sure to be unfriendly, and prone from its weakness to intrigue with foreign Powers, on her flank ? Would not the end be forcible reannexation P Is it not strange to see you aspiring to dominion all over the globe, and unable to maintain unity at home ? Had Parliament at the outset laid faction aside, and dealt firmly with the attempt of Irish agitators to master it by obstruction, there would probably have been an end. Have the people of Ireland ever shown a spontaneous desire of political change ? Has not the motive power with them always been desire of the land ? What became of the Repeal movement of O'Connell, though he had the Church fully behind him ? What became of the Repeal movement of Smith O'Brien ? Did political agitation ever show real force till Parnell combined it with agitation for the land ? Mr. T. P. O'Connor tells us that even among the politicians there was a good deal of hollowness, and I believe his witness is true. The Irish, warm-hearted, are easily impressed, and with them watchwords have power. Ireland, we are told, wants to be governed according to her own ideas. What are the ideas ? Are they anything but the traces of a sad history ? What did the Irish of America, left to their own tendencies, do ? They became the rank-and-file of Tammany in New York, and the partisans of the slaveowner in the Union. Into this situation you were led by a man great and admirable in his way, but fired, it is idle to deny, with the struggle for power ; ignorant of Ireland, with which he dealt as an abstraction, ignorant even of her annals, capable of comparing the passing of the Union to the worst crimes of history, in guiltiness to the massacre of St. Bartholomew. He did not know that of the three leading opponents of Union in the Irish Parliament, Plunket had formally avowed his conversion ; Foster, reconciled to Pitt, had become Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer ; and Grattan had sat acquiescent in the united Parliament and denounced O'Connell's agitation ; all of them knowing that owing to the prejudice of the King Catholic emancipation had been postponed. As a practical demonstration of the success of duality Gladstone pointed to the happy union of Norway with Sweden. When the Liberal Party voted for so monstrous a measure as Gladstone'e second Home-rule Bill, its bearings were lost, and lost, there is too much reason to fear, on this Irish question they remain.
Lord Newton's plan for the reconstruction of the House of Lords retains the hereditary principle, but with a qualification in addition to that of birth for taking the seat. But legisla- tion by hereditary privilege all the world over has gone, or is rapidly going, to the grave of the feudal era it can no longer command the respect and confidence of nations. The retention of it in the Upper House will surely, as often as it interferes with the will of the Commons, bring on a renewal of strife. By extensions of the franchise the House of Commons is visibly passing under the influence of a class which, now awakened to a sense of its power, aims at social change and a redistribution of wealth, not unnaturally, since education has led it to brood over the terrible inequalities of the human lot, and the hope of compensation in another world has grown dim. Women's suffrage would increase the Labour vote. To control the impulses of a class in the interest of the whole commonwealth there seems to be need of a House commanding in character and ability, free from the taint of privilege or class interest, such as would form a thoroughly presentable organ for the rational conservatism of the nation.
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