MR. HERBERT GLADSTONE ON IRELAND.
THE value of Mr. Herbert Gladstone's very striking speech at Manchester—a speech scarcely reported in London—. consists mainly in its tone. Politicians have naturally studied it, in the hope of obtaining some information as to the ideas of the Government, and especially its half-formed ideas ; but
as naturally they obtain little. The Cabinet does not announce its plans through Mr. Herbert Gladstone, any more than any other young Member ; and he is not the kind of man, freely as he speaks to his audiences, to reveal anything he was not intended to disclose. Nevertheless, there is a tone running through all his speech which is worth attention, for it is sure to reflect more or less accurately the tone of the most in- fluential members of the Government, and especially of the Government in Ireland. Mr. Herbert Gladstone is not only his father's son, but a man of exceptional quickness of mind, who " picks up" rapidly and accurately the general meaning of what he sees, and who is exempted by a certain sweetness of temper, curiously manifest throughout this speech, from that first cause of all political illusions, rancour. He has been studying both the Castle and the agitators, Dublin and the most disturbed districts, he has read all official infor- mation and seen many occurrences, especially some heat t-break- ing evictions, with his own eyes; and his object in speaking, as be declared, was to tell Manchester the result of his ob- servations. That result may be very briefly stated. The con- dition of part of Ireland is very bad, but that of another part is very good, while that of the whole justifies the Govern- ment in calmly pursuing its fixed policy of steadily using and enforcing the existing law,—a policy revealed also in some sen- tences of Lord Hartington's speech at Nelson. More coercion is not required, and "to talk of martial law is absurd," a blunt state- ment received in Manchester, we are glad to say, with bursts of cheering. Mr. Herbert Gladstone makes no secret of the con- dition of certain districts, or of the existence of great anar- chical forces. He says there are "disturbed districts where shopkeepers will complain of slack trade, tillers are slow to till the ground, labour is scarce, there is much suffering, many connected with the land travel about the country in fear of their lives. Every night, almost without exception, some out- rage of more or less badness occurs, and there seems to be a general regime of suspicion and No one comes forward to take a lead in bringing about a better state of things. There seems to be everywhere a lack of energy, hopefulness, and resolution." He admits the great circulation of the Irish World, an American-Irish paper, which, he says, "openly and unhesitat- ingly preaches assassination." He admits the existence of terrorism intended to support the " No-rent" cry, a terrorism kept up by " dissolute ruffians," acting under orders. He admits that from the way in which terror is applied to lonely farmhouses and isolated men, the police can hardly cope with it, any more than they can cope with Boycotting when it takes the form of a passive refusal to hold intercourse with disliked persons, or than they can secure payment of rent before the landlords have invoked the agency of the law. But, seeing all these facts, he still maintains that in England there has been, and is " generally, a loss of nerve, a hysterical out- burst of fear and passion, an utter want of appreciation of the difficulties which are at the bottom of the troubles in Ireland."
There are counties in Ireland which are in a good state, as well as counties in a bad state, and in the worst of them all persons unconnected with the immediate issue are "safer than in England." Mr. Herbert Gladstone himself, though he bears the name of all others most detested by the Land Leaguers, and though he was, present in some of the " worst " places in Ireland, "received no incivility from man or woman during the four weeks he was in Ireland,"—a curious confirmation of that little-noticed incident, the turning-out of the Irish of Chester, an old Fenian centre, to cheer Mr. Gladstone, as he passed through, as author of the Land Act. Juries are be- ginning again to do their duty ; and even as regards the out- rages, there is, though much truth, much exaggeration. The tenantry of Ireland have always grasped at any pretext for delaying rent, and they now see that intimidation is by no means a bad plea. The landlord usually believes it, and even
the agent has very little to say. The plea is true very often, but still," I was the other day in Kerry, which is supposed to be one of the most disturbed counties in Ireland, and a most intelligent sub-inspector of Constabulary gave me two instances which, as I thought, were instructive. On a certain Friday night, when a certain landlord on the succeeding day was about to collect his rents, the sub-inspector was astonished by receiving reports of no less than twenty-two cases of firing into houses in one small district. He inquired carefully into it, and ho satis- fied himself that nearly all, if not all, of the cases were shams. The tenants themselves had fired into their own houses or each other's houses, in order to have an excuse for not paying rent. That is a thing which I can assure you is by no means un- common at the present day. I will give you another instance.. This sub-inspector received reports one morning of six cases of firing into houses. He again made a most careful examination- into the facts, and he found that beyond doubt mischief was- meant in one case. He also found beyond a doubt that shots had been fired into the other houses by the men who haul committed the outrage, in order to avert suspicion from themselves." These are half-comic cases, but still even such cases swell the general volume of reports to Eng- land, which are now so exclusively devoted to them that thousands of well-informed persons believe that in Ireland there is no order, that no occupation except murder goes on tranquilly, that no debt is recoverable, and that it would be safer to reside in any half-civilised country,—say, for choice, Tunis or Afghanistan. The truth is, all the while, that although in parts of Ireland disorder exists of a kind which severely tries a Government, and which renders the position of a class almost unbearable, general life in the country goes on almost as usual ; while the whole island is, in many ways, quite unusually prosperous. The revenue is paid, the Banks are filling, and the harvest has been abundant.
We are anxious that the point to which Mr. Herbert Glad- stone addressed his speech should be pressed, not only for the sake of Ireland, but of Great Britain. Great Britain will ulti- mately decide the fate of Ireland, let agitators do or say whatever they may please ; and it is of the last importance that Great Britain should in deciding lose neither its temper nor its judgment, both of which are seriously affected by the general exaggeration, much of it unconscious, of all that occurs in Ireland. Nothing can be worse or more heartbreaking to the friends of Ireland than much that occurs in the bad districts, and especially much which marks the demoralisation of the peo- ple ; but it is an utter mistake to confound those districts with Ireland, and an equal one to mix up the suffering of a class with that of the State. Land-owners and their agents are suffering, often shamefully; but the suffering of the State is distinctly less than in any previous Irish crisis. There never was in any such crisis so little danger of armed rebellion, and never a moment when such rebellion was so little formidable. So deep is the new pity for Ireland, so settled the English convic- tion that disorder anywhere in the United Kingdom is something monstrous and unbearable, so skilled are Irish extremists in en- veloping agitation in a sort of thunderous cloud, that it is nearly impossible even for the coolest to retain their grasp of the facts,—to recollect that the United Kingdom came out of the Napoleonic war with only 16,000,000 of people, of whom 7,000,000 were Irish ; and that to-day she has more than 34,000.000 people, of whom only 5,200,000 are Irish, while in Ireland, Ulster contains 1,800,000, and Ulster, although not "Protestant," as most Englishmen fancy, the Catholics slightly outnumbering their rivals, is almost as quiet as Wales ; where also occasionally, as in the turnpike riots and the riots about fishing, English laws have been forcibly and successfully resisted. It is but a part of one of the Three Kingdoms that is in " veiled insurrection," and' that insurrection is directed not against the State, so much as a section of a single class. No one can feel more than we do that that class is entitled to sympathy, that on it has fallen —as usual, throughout history—the penalty of ages of misrule and extravagance. The innocent are being crushed, in many cases, because their fathers oppressed. The class bears the punishment of sins often not its own, and where, as in the case of exorbitant rents, its sins are its own, it is entitled to all the excuse we make for men bred like slaveowners, under a regime which they did not set up. But even as regards this class, the unconscious exaggeration is endless. The Irish
landlords are bearing nothing from the Commissions which English landlords are not bearing from unformulated agrarian changes, and bearing with, we are bound to say, less outcry than we can even explain. Those among the Irish land-
lords, again, who are " ruined," though they deserve all the kindness and help Sir S. Northcote asked for them in his speech of Tuesday, must be actually few. There are but 12,000 landlords or so, a mere fraction of these are ruined, and we question very greatly if their entire number equals that of the victims of the Glasgow Bank disaster, and it cer- tainly cannot approach that of those ruined by the "Black Friday" of 1866, when entire classes—as, for example, hun- dreds of jobmasters—were suddenly, by no fault of their own whatever, made insolvent. No doubt, the misery of Irish landlords and their friends is deeply aggravated by their sense, quite a just sense when judicial rent is refused, that they are the victims of violent robbery, and also by their own inability to turn suddenly to other careers ; but to the State the calamity is less than the failure of Overend Gurney's, and the resulting panic. That is no reason whatever for stop- ping subscriptions—which, as regards the Distressed Ladies' Fund, are still quite unworthy of that regal charity with which England often comforts the affficted—and still less is it a rea- son for failing to enforce order through the heaviest pressure of the law. But it is a reason why Englishmen should retain their heads, and not, as Mr. Herbert Gladstone says, raise " a scream for more coercion." Coercion is necessary, but to cure the social disease of Ireland, we need the steady action of the law continued for years, and an entire abstinence from these drams of emotion about Irish affairs which the English upper classes are just now drinking. A people possessed of irresistible material power can put down anarchy in a corner of their dominions, without staining themselves with blood, or breaking with every tradition of freedom. All that is necessary is that they should make just laws effective, keep on undismayed by momentary failures, and recollect, as Mr. Herbert Gladstone said pointedly, that a people, like an individual, may be, as one-third of Ireland is just now, too much out of temper to hear reason. We do not shoot even a lunatic, and the excited Irishman is no lunatic, but a man of Southern temperament, furious with unreasonable rage. Time is on the side of Great Britain, if she will only wait.
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