TOPICS OF THE DAY.
" FILLING UP THE CUP." ACCORDING to perhaps the ablest of the Ministerial journals, the great task of this Session has been, and the great task of next Session should be, the " filling up of the cup " against the Lords. But the Arange thing is that this able journal should have advanced that doctrine on the very day when what every one was remarking upon was the singular and almost pathetic retribution which Sir William Harcourt had brought upon himself by his great success in " filling up the cup " against the present House of Commons. On Friday week, the Irish Home-rulers came very near defeating the Govern- ment by refusing their salaries to the clerks of the House of Lords,—one of the most grotesque of Parliamentary endeavours to " fill up the cup " against the Lords, by a motion which Sir William Harcourt himself criticised in words quoted from Shakespeare's Henry V.,—namely, Captain Fluellen's remonstrance with the King for making war by killing the baggage-men. Nor was that the whole absurdity of the burlesque proposal which so nearly defeated the Government. Sir William Harcourt's expostulation with " his learned friend,"—Mr. Healy,— was a protest against what was in the first instance an energetic endeavour of that learned gentleman to do an extremely Irish kind of subtraction sum,—namely, to take £40,000 away from £22,000, an endeavour which naturally scandalised poor Mr. Mellor, who occupied the chair. When it was pointed out to Mr. Healy that this endeavour was impossible, unless the Committee rushed into algebraic finance, and adopted the whole principle of negative quantities, the learned gentleman reforiadshis- proposal by suggesting, in the most happy- go-lucky sort of way, that perhaps it might as well be £20,000, which should be deducted from the salaries of the official staff of the House of Lords. All he desired was to avenge on these innocent gentlemen the affront which the House of Lords had put on the Irish policy of the Government, by rejecting the Evicted Tenants Bill. He thought it a dignified proceeding to establish whipping-boys for the House of Lords, and to promote the permanent officials of the House to that office. And not only did Sir William Harcourt's " learned friend" seriously urge this advice upon the House of Commons, but Mr. Sexton, in tones of indignant eloquence, urged the same generous and just proceeding ; while the chivalric Mr. Dillon supported it with all the passion with which he recently advocated the cause of the evicted tenants. The Government officials of the House of Lords were to be evicted, without huts on the roadside, in order to avenge the evicted tenants of the " Plan of Campaign." All this happened yesterday week. But on Monday night and Tuesday morning, the very day on which the Westminster Gazette endeavoured to persuade the Irish- men that they ought to be patient in the process of "filling up the cup" against the House of Lords, Sir William Harcourt was kept through an all-night sitting to resist a renewal of the same monstrous proposal by Mr. Sexton, and other motions to report progress by the vindictive Irish and their English and Welsh allies, which ended at last in Sir William Harcourt's surrender at 4 o'clock in the morning, in his complete submission to march under the Caudine Forks, and in his meek assurance to the Irreconcilables that he had meant no offence to the Irish Members. Was this really a " filling up of the cup" against the House of Lords, or against Sir William Harcourt himself, who for two nights had been simmering quietly in that Parnellite juice which he himself so blindly and unforeseeingly had predicted for the Tories as their probable destiny ? We should have thought that the perspicuity of the Westminster Gazette might have fixed on a more appropriate day than Tuesday last to expound the wisdom of "filling up the cup" against tilts House of Lords.
For consider the difficulty which attends this policy. It is argued with great cogency that, at present at least, the cup against the House of Lords is not full. For our own parts we should say that in Sir William Harcourt's private meditations he must regard it as appallingly empty, and as having been more or less emptied of the very little it did contain on Friday week and the all-night sitting of Mon- day. There was no " filling up of the cup,"—in England at least,—on the rejection of the Home-rule Bill or the Evicted Tenants Bill, though there may have been a tea- spoonful or so poured into it by the amendment which defeated the Employers' Liability Bill. Therefore, as the Westminster Gazette argues very acutely, the Government. must secure the defeat by the Lords of measures popular in this island, such as the Registration Bill, " One man, one vote," Welsh Disestablishment, and perhaps the new Irish Land Bill, before the cup can be full. But how is this policy to be carried out with the Irish party storming with senseless vindictiveness at the per- manent officials of the House of Lords, and vocifera- ting with Mr. Sweetwan, " This Parliament cannot legislate for Ireland, therefore I say dissolve this Par- liament and give us one that can" ? Dissolving this Parliament may, as the Westminster Gazette clearly sees, result in giving a Parliament which can legislate for Ireland only in Mr. Balfour's sense. It would require the utmost patience and self-control to abolish the veto of the House of Lords, and would be impossible while Sir William Harcourt has to stew in the very juice which is; brewed out of blind passions and furious irritability. The. present Session has added, as we said, but one sorry teaspoon- ful to that cup which is supposed to be the fatal hemlock for the House of Lords; and even that teaspoonful has been probably more than cast away in the Irish burlesque of the end of the Session, Will not the constituencies sav, " Better by far a little overcaution in the House of Lords, than all this undignified and almost idiotic resentment against irresponsible officials of that House, and this violent haste to put our rulers under the heels of a party which cannot even do a subtraction sum, though it rages- frantically against a Senate which does its duty by referring back to the people a policy for which only eleven out of every twenty-one of even the present Rouse of Commons vote, while ten out of every twenty-one are- bitterly opposed to it "? Would any Second Chamber in the world act differently ? Could any Revising Chamber that ever existed refuse to give an appeal to the people on a great constitutional revolution so ambiguously supported ? What is the use of a Second House at all unless its essential function is to prevent a narrow majority from carrying a, revolution about which it is perfectly clear that the country has not made up its mind ? What can be more certain than that the Irish party are in a frenzy of im- patience to do what the whole country looks forward to with the utmost apprehension, and what the "predominant partner" is absolutely determined not to do in a hurry, if it ever does it at all. If such a body as the House of Lords is not to veto that sort of revolution, there should evidently be no such body as the House of Lords at all. For any Council appointed to delay and revise, would have, and must have, actedjust as the House of Lords acted. Indeed, this is the whole meaning of the cry that the cup. of wrath against the House of Lords should be allowed to fill. What is desired is to get rid of its veto altogether, and with it of that appeal to the country, which it is now its sole great function to secure. Fortunately, the Irish party can be well trusted to inspire a strong sympathy for the House of Lords. It is filling up a cup, indeed, but not a cup against the House of Lords, rather a cup against Irish arrogance and rashness. Next Session will begin just as this Session is ending, with outbursts of wrath and impatience against the delay which the uncer- tainty of the whole country, and the fixed determina- tion of England not to be hurried down the noisy rapids of Irish fretfulness, have rightly and properly interposed. And then who will be the objects of popular resentment ? We have no doubt it will be the party which wants to ride roughshod over the people of Great Britain, and does ride roughshod over those un- fortunate allies who are now compelled by their want of English support to rely on the Irish for their lease of power. We believe that the singular want of 'temper and reason- ableness in the Irish party,—arising partly, no doubt, from their own painful sense of comparative political weakness, and partly from their total incapacity for frank deliberation and discussion with men of different views,— will fill the cup of popular indignation to the brim, but it will not be with wrath against the House of Lords, but with wrath against the weak and heady turbulence of the, Irish majority.
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