TOPICS OF THE DAY.
MR. MORLEY AT SHEFFIELD.
AVERY few months ago, if any well-informed reader's eye chanced to light on a speech of Mr. Morley's on the Irish Question without knowing who the orator was, he was always able to discern that it was by a man of " detached " mind, who took at least as much interest in realising what his opponents would think on any of the issues raised, as in explaining how he should answer them. That has almost ceased to be the case. Read Mr. Morley's speech at Sheffield, and even after the long triumphant overture in relation to the Glasgow victory is over, you may read on to the end without a trace of any effort on Mr. Morley's part to conceive for a moment the thought in the mind of his adversary. Even when we come to the only apparent exception, we are disappointed. Mr. Morley did make an effort to admit that a statesman might reasonably feel difficulties in putting the whole execu- tive authority in Ireland into the hands of men for whose loyalty to the United Kingdom we could have no sort of guarantee ; but, on examination, it becomes apparent that Mr. Morley was thinking only of the danger of leaving Irish waters open to foreign fleets if the Irish Executive of the day chose to welcome or to wink at the appearance of such fleets. Against such a danger, said Mr. Morley, it would be very easy to devise checks which would make the apprehension of it perfectly chimerical. Perhaps ; but then that is the least of all the dangers involved in giving Ireland over to the administra- tion of such an Executive as would alone command the respect of an Irish Legislature. What check could we devise which would prevent an Executive bent on taking the revenge which Mr. Dillon has more than once threatened on loyal members of the police or constabulary force, and which the Parnellite journals have denounced even against Irish jurymen who took the oath to form their judgment according to the evidence and kept it, from pursuing to their ruin Irishmen, rich or poor, who had loyally served the British Government ? We might attack and destroy a foreign naval expedition in Irish waters, but we could not, without throwing Ireland into pure chaos, check any resolve of the Executive to carry out such threats as these. And it is this danger,—not a naval expedition against us in Irish ports, —against which the Unionists are resolved to take the most absolute precautions. So that the only point in this speech on which Mr. Morley even attempts to understand his opponents' view, is a point on which no statesman at all who cares even for an effective federal Union, could help sharing that view. On all other questions connected with Irish policy, Mr. Morley speaks with hardly more moderation than Mr. O'Brien, and with less show of it than Mr. Parnell.
For example, he devoted a large portion of his harangue to the prosecution of Mr. E. Harrington, and to various incidents reported in a single copy of the Times tending to show that Ireland is irreconcilable, and likely to remain so. His commentary on the prosecution of Mr. E. Har- rington was truly remarkable. The main point of it is this, that the Magistrate who offered to inflict no sentence at all if Mr. Harrington would give his word not to break the law again, was offering to deal so leniently with him as to render it obvious that Mr. Harrington had not committed an ordinary crime, since no Magistrate could think for a moment of offering to inflict no punishment on a burglar, for instance, who should give his word to make no further bur- glarious entries into the houses of his fellow citizens, or on a man who had committed a murderous assault and who should give his word to desist from murderous assaults in future. Mr. Morley need hardly have laboured the point. Every man of sense is perfectly aware that the crime of which Mr. E. Harrington had been guilty, and had intended to be guilty, was not an ordinary crime. It was, however, in the circumstances, a very serious crime, the crime of defying the .law, and setting an example of defiance of the law to the mass of the Irish people ; but the seriousness of the crime depended in a very large degree on the deliberation and resoluteness of purpose with which it was committed. If Mr. Harrington had been willing to show that it was not committed with deliberate purpose, by pro- mising not to repeat it in future, the seriousness of the crime would have been very much diminished. On the contrary, Mr. Harrington flaunted his determination to defy the law,—indeed, his pride in defying the law,—in the face of the Magistrate ; and in the view of everybody who thinks that a fixed determination to defy the law must be treated very seriously, under penalty of bringing the law into con- tempt if it be not so treated, the Magistrate, very properly as we think, inflicted a very serious, though very far indeed from a vindictive sentence. Six months' imprisonment with hard labour for a deliberate avowal of practical scorn for the law, was quite the least penalty likely to produce any effect. A few months ago, Mr. Morley would have been the first to admit that Magistrates who are by their position bound to treat the law as just, wholesome, and righteous, could not afford to treat Mr. E. Harrington's deliberate insult to the law in any other fashion than it was treated. Is it, then, come to this, that because Mr. Morley happens to think that by giving the Irish all they ask for, they may be cajoled into good conduct, he is justified in attack- ing as vindictive a sentence inflicted by a Magistrate who in all probability does not hold Mr. Morley's view, but if he held it ever so much, would have had no right to allow it to influence his judgment one iota in deciding what he ought to do to enforce a law which he is placed there to uphold ? A statesman must have lost all sense of what executive duty is, who deals with the sentence passed upon Mr. Harrington in the fashion in which Mr. Morley dealt with it.
What Mr. Morley said on the subject of the nine incidents reported in one and the same Times, showing the irrecon- cilability of Ireland under present conditions, was not nearly as bad as this gross attack on the Magistrate who sentenced Mr. E. Harrington, for it is, of course, to Mr. Morley, real evidence of the view which he has so long held and set forth, that Ireland will never be at rest till we give power to two-thirds of her people to govern the whole island. But we should have expected to see some trace of Mr. Morley's apparently lost power of appreciating what his opponents would say in reply to his view of the case. To us, his nine incidents of one day, are nothing in the world but not very impressive illus- trations of what we have known for years back,—that so long as the National League hopes to win the battle, and so long as the people hope that if the National League win the battle they will profit substantially by the victory, as well as enjoy the victory for its own sake, Irishmen will always be found to employ themselves in hooting the police, or cheering the partisans of the League, or bully- ing those who have agreed to take farms from which other tenants have been evicted, or triumphantly escorting prisoners to gaol, or doing anything else that marks which side they take in the battle. We have no more notion of denying that this evidence of civil strife is very serious, than Mr. Morley has. Where we differ from him is in thinking that his remedy would restore peace. We believe that it would make things very much worse. It would, of course, instal the majority in power in a great part of Ireland, and put the minority under their feet,—and very heavy feet they would prove to those who were trampled upon. In three quarters of Ireland we should have a cry going up from the victims. In the other quarter we should have something like civil war. Between England and Ireland we should have fiercer feuds than ever,—the bitterest of all feuds as to the treatment of the minority, bitter enough feuds as to the restrictions put upon Irish legislation, constant assertions from the Irish side that we stood in the way of Ireland's prosperity, con- stant assertions on the British side that the Irish did not carry out their compact fairly ; in fact, a far worse brood of quarrels than we have even now. Mr. Morley, of course, thinks this a pessimist view ; but he cannot think it a view for which there is not a great deal to be said, though the time has apparently passed away when he would have been candid enough to make that admission. And still less can he deny thal if once Home-rule were conceded, there would be no going back to the present state of things, which we believe to be comparatively endurable, without a military occupation of Ireland, though that would renew all the worst grievances of the past. If Mr. Morley were the statesman he once was, he would at least re- cognise the very grave character of a concession which might, even in his estimation, end so disastrously, and which could not be taken back again without the most terrible of tragedies. But all his old impartiality has deserted him, and he now seems,—difficult as it is to imagine that he has really come to this,—to keep step with the Parnellites. Mr. Morley keeping step with the Parnellites is indeed a spectacle to make us despair—a warning that no man's " historic conscience " can be peremptory enough to secure him against the eddies of that vast whirlpool towards which party passion sucks us down.
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