LORD SALISBURY AT DERBY.
LORD SALISBURY'S speech on Monday at Derby will be read with pleasure, if not by all men, at least by all cultivated men in Britain, for this reason. He lifts the great controversy out of the dreary desert of ordinary debating. Orator after orator has risen all through the Recess, has spoken. on Ireland at such length that in the TiPie.4 of next morning he has seemed to monopolise its space, and has sat down having added nothing to the reservoir of thought from which men try to draw the materials of conviction. He has answered another speaker, not without acrimony ; or has given his view of Mr. Gladstone's conduct ; or has discussed the state of Ireland as he understands it ; or has tried to show that all opponents are illogical ; or has convicted somebody of in- consistency ; or, dreariest labour of all, has proved that
what the Gladstonians seek is something that resembles, yet does not resemble, the provisions in Mr. Gladstone's Bill. The flood of talk has been endless, and it has all been Parliamentary. It is all necessary in a way, we suppose, or experienced politicians would not devote their holidays, their energies, and in one single instance their wit, to such melan- choly tasks ; but it all sickens the public, which is tired of reading masses of unfruitful literature upon worn-out matters comparatively of the merest detail. It has made up its mind long ago what to think of Sir George Trevelyan's tergiversa- tions, and Sir W. Harcourt's somersaults, and Mr. Morley's intellectual sword-playing, and longs, if it most hear of Ireland, to hear its relation to Great Britain discussed in a loftier
spirit. Lord Salisbury has gratified that desire. He made, it is true, one false step, and seemed for a moment about to drown himself in the bottomless quag of Sir W. Harcourt's self-contradictions ; but he recovered himself adroitly, and gave his audience a survey of the relation between the islands as it has influenced all their modern history. He looks at both England and Ireland from the Foreign Office point of view, without favour and without rancour, holding England right in some instances, Ireland right in some others, and especially in her devotion to the Stuarts ; and he finds that at every stage of history Ireland has become a basis for operations against England, and that England has been impelled as by an irresistible instinct to avert the danger from herself by drawing Ireland closer and closer within her own political system. It was so in the time of Elizabeth, when Philip II. looked to Ireland as his great base of operations ; it was so in the beginning of the Great Rebellion, when the Stuart found his best centre of power in Ireland, and had he trusted Strafford more completely, might for a time have overcome his Parliament. The Irish then forced on the most brutal reconquest the English have effected,—the Cromwellian devastation and resettlement. It was so in the time of William III., who had again to reconquer Ireland by military action ; and it was so throughout the Great War with France, the earliest incidents of which helped to force on Pitt the conviction that only in the unity of the Kingdoms, desirable on so many other grounds, lay a prospect of lasting safety. For centuries, in fact, to supplement Lord Salisbury, the enemies of England made Ireland their point of attack, partly because there they would be in a friendly country, partly because, by attacking Ireland, they compelled England to fight at a distance from her resources. It is vain to suppose that a course of history so uniform and so trying to the stronger power can have proceeded except from some impulse existing in the very nature of things ; or, to put it in simpler words, from geographical relations which can never be altered, relations which make the destiny of the one island of vital importance to the other. Ireland is to England what Sicily is to Italy, and it is impossible to dissociate them finally, or to imagine that the one can ever be to the other less than an object of the first political interest, or, indeed, political neces- sity. If they are not one, they must be to each other objects of increasing jealousy and watchfulness, producing in the end ceaseless, though it may be sometimes latent, enmity. Imagine Italy with Sicily warmly united with the French Republic. It was precisely the same in Scotland, and in Scotland also the one object of the English, ceaselessly pursued, was to produce that fusion which at last, through the wisdom of the rulers of both countries, and the providence of God in striking the great House of Tudor with sterility, was effected in the most honourable way. Precisely the same process has gone on all over Europe, where the semi-independent provinces of France were at last smelted together in the revolutionary Bre ; in Italy, where States separated for ages have been amalga- mated under a single throne ; in Germany, where within the lifetime of the still vigorous Emperor there were four hundred sovereign States ; and, as Lord Salisbury might have added, in Russia, which is the outcome of the feuds of a whole congeries of States fused into one through the experience and the fear of foreign domination. Why should we fancy that a process so universal is about to stop, or that the United Kingdom, alone of the States of the world, is about to reverse history, abandon the objects of five hundred years, and commence for the first time willingly a work of dis- integration ? Because unity has become impossible? That, replies Lord Salisbury, depends upon the will of the people. They have only to will consolidation steadily, and consolida- tion will come. Is it more hopeless than in France when Brittany was in furious insurrection, than in Italy when it
seemed as if Europe must be changed before her people could reunite, than in Germany when the avowed weight of Austria, and the unavowed weight of France and Russia, was thrown on the side of disintegration, the end of which each of those Powers feared—not unjustly, from their point of view—as a political horror I Is it More impossible even than in Scotland, which for years bore fusion so impatiently, and twice rebelled in hope that it might end ?
We know quite well what English Home-rulers will reply to this striking argument,—viz., that it involves a confusion of ends with methods; that the way to terminate England's long- continuing danger is to let Ireland govern herself, and so become reconciled. But how has it happened that in five hundred years this way has been tried only once, and then un- successfully ? Many statesmen of widely different tempers have essayed the task, and the end of all has been still closer fusion. Because of English ambition, greed, and pride, the Home-rulers will reply; but have they ever thought out their charges ? These English who are so ambitious and greedy, have they ever, since Mary's reign, sought an acre on the Continent not thirty miles away from them, even when, as in Elizabeth's time, in Queen Anne's time, or after the fall of Napoleon, the acquisition of a dominion there would have been comparatively easy. Did any people ever surrender a possession with the indifference, not to say the pleasure, with which the British saw Hanover pass from the dominion of their Kings, though they lost thereby easy access into the very heart of the Continent ? Does any one in his heart doubt that if unity with Ireland were not, in the general belief, a belief created by the general instinct, essential to the Kingdom, if, for example, Ireland were as far off as Newfoundland, or even Norway, the English people would, but for their pledges to the Ulstermen, readily let her go. So far from believing them moved by pride, or greed, or ambition, we should say that the strangest fact in the history of Englishmen since the Reformation has been their reluctance to seek any territorial dominion in Europe, or, indeed, any dominion whatever over white men. They have never conquered, or tried to conquer, a civilised State. In the Irish case alone they have been un- yielding, because they have perceived, as the Americans did when Secession was attempted, that their own position, their own future, their entire history, inexorably bound them to retain the Irish within their own political system ; to make them, in fact, part of themselves. It was not conquest they sought, but absorption, often, no doubt, through brutal and unwise means. That is a side of the subject which the English, the least selfish of races, always hesitate to put forward ; but it is an essential part, for it involves the future. Even if Home-rule is granted, this danger, on the recurrence of which Lord Salis- bury dwells, will not be over ; will rather be exasperated, and will lead, if history may be trusted, in some hour of danger to a renewed attempt, probably a desperate attempt, to secure the fusion so often striven for, so often all but secured. The two islands are, in fact, tied together, and no foreigner, at all events, can think of either without thinking of the means of aggression upon it which the other one affords. That is the truth Lord Salisbury tries to bring to the front ; and though it will be repudiated by many even of those who uphold the Union as inconsistent with modern gentleness of thought, it remains, nevertheless, true. The " gentleness " of the English people is only a momentary phase of mind generated by half- a-century of peaceful success. In the long-ran, they will do any act necessary to their own protection, and fusion with Ire- land—fusion, of course, on terms of perfect equality, so that an Irish county shall have all the rights of Cornwall, and an Irish city all the privileges of Liverpool—is essential to that protection. They will reclaim the Union, if it ends, in the name of self-defence. We can hardly conceive of an in- dependent Cornwall, and if a strip of sea makes all the differ- ence, why have the English wasted themselves for centuries in an effort which, on the other side of a narrower sea, inhabited by an equally hostile people, they have never made B If ambition is our motive-power in invading Ireland, why has it not carried us elsewhere
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