UNIONISM AND THE EMPIRE.
IT has always been to us a subject of some surprise that the English people, with its long history of victory and its amazing present Empire, has been so little struck with the injurious bearing of the Home-rule proposal upon its external position. This would have been the fin4 thought of any Continental people, would have been the theme not only of oratory but of song, and would have been the first argument which the advocates of disruption would have sought, by all the arts of persuasion, to dis- prove. The English, supposed to be so selfishly patriotic, have apparently never thought about it. Blinded either by want of knowledge, or by that inner haughtiness which never ceases to influence their minds, they have treated this either as a subordinate question, or one which could never seriously affect the destiny of Great Britain. Even the Unionists have been moved principally by arguments as to the impossibility of working a Federal Government; or as to the ruin which a separate Government must bring on Ireland, or as to the moral wrong of committing any country to such rulers as her present representatives ; or as to the treachery involved in abandoning a third of the population of the island to their secular foes. Not only have they never taken their stand, as French- men or Germans would have done, on the simple pro- position that they would never until conquered cede a province to men who avowed themselves their enemies— and in this they are right, for Ireland and Scotland are not provinces, but integral portions of a united Kingdom,— but they have never raised the counter-cry of " England for the English," and have hardly seemed to think of the difficulties in all Imperial matters which submission to Home-rule would entail. They have considered and pleaded for everything but the Empire, which, in Continental belief, it is their one preoccupation to extend. It was certain that, strange as English methods of discussion often are, this re- fusal to deal with one chief aspect of the controversy could not last, and we see signs abroad that it is rapidly coming to an end. Even Mr. Morley acknowledges in his speech of Tuesday that the control of the Executive in Ireland as to questions of defence is his one perplexity ; and both Lord Derby and Mr. Chamberlain have this week placed the same difficulty in the forefront of discussion. Lord Derby, after pointing out that the instinct of rising nations like Germany, Italy, and the United States, is towards greater unity, and that even Switzerland was compelled to sup- press a Home-rule movement by force of arms, asks how the foreign policies of the two countries are to be kept to- gether. " Is it certain or probable that English and Irish ideas will be the same on these questions," more especially when foreign events involve the great ultramontane dis- pute ? " Suppose we had had an Irish Parliament thirty years ago, when Garibaldi was the hero of the hour, and all English Liberals talked enthusiastically about Italian liberation, do you think the Irish Parliament would not have tried to make its influence felt in an opposite direction, and to save the temporal power of the Pope ? It is as certain as anything in politics can be that the Irish ideas, which we Liberals are censured for not accepting, will include, in commerce, Protection ; in education and social questions, clericalism pushed to the utmost ; in foreign affairs, an ultramontane policy." We might easily have an Irish expedition starting for Rome to defend the Pope, for which the British Govern- ment would be diplomatically answerable ; or still more easily, a war with France in which, because Italy was our ally, the Irish Parliament declared Ireland to be neutral, and called on all Irish soldiers to quit the British service. Nor would the veto of the Irish Parliament be a powerless one. The Liberals may reserve foreign policy and the control of the Army to Westminster as strictly as they like, but soldiers must be fed and transported, fleets must be victualled as well as armed ; and the Irish Parliament could, without in the least straining its civil power, stop the supply of food and forage to the barracks, or of water to the fleet, and the transport of soldiers, except on foot, from place to place. To say that they would not do it is beside the question, which is as to their power to do it, which would be unquestionable. Why, moreover, should they not do it? Out of friendship? The Parnellites say in every news- paper that they wish us to be defeated even by black men. Out of gratitude ? Nations, as Lord Derby pointed out, never feel gratitude--witness the conduct of Italy to France, and of Portugal to England—and in many cases ought not to feel it, a national Government being a trustee to guard the future of the people which maintains it in power. If that future is threatened, gratitude must be reserved to some future occasion, for a nation cannot out of grati- tude suffer itself to be invaded. Every extradition treaty might be impaired or broken by the disregard of Irish officials, or rules might be enforced in Irish harbours against unpopular Powers which were forbidden by the comity of nations, but permitted by the majority in Dublin. There would be no legal remedy, for the officials would only be responsible to their local masters, who, again, would be responsible only to Irish electors ; and there would be no practical remedy either, except military force. It may be said that this force would be irresistible ; but would it be, with all Ireland secretly drilled and armed, and Britain engaged, perhaps over-pressed, in foreign war ? Or, if it were, are we legislating in order to recom- mence that dreary round of conquest, concession, freedom, ending in conquest again ? How a proud people can even think of placing itself in such a position, is to us in- explicable, as it is also to foreigners who do not know how difficult it is to make that people fear. Mr. Chamberlain puts the argument a little differently, but it is in principle the same. He, too, warns his hearers that an Ireland under Home-rule would soon be an inde- pendent Ireland capable of doing " deadly injury " to Great Britain ; but speedily opens out a broader vista, and tells the country that the spirit in which the Liberals are dealing with Home-rule must shortly be fatal to the Empire as a whole. "There is a radical distinction" between the parties "as to their several conceptions of the duty of a great State and a great Government." " The timorous spirit," he says, "which they have shown in this proposal to abandon Ireland to anarchy finds its counterpart in the feeling which sees only wanton and unwise aggression in the constant growth and expansion of the Empire." In the history of the past, he declares, in a splendid peroration,- " In the history of the past, of its growth and development, Mr. Morley sees nothing to be proud of. He sees only what he calls, with a flourish of tawdry rhetoric, an Empire of swagger.' This great dominion, which has sent forth free nations to every corner of the globe ; which holds now under its temperate and orderly sway myriads of men of hostile race, who owe all their hope of tranquillity and prosperity to the continuance of our rule which has spread civilisation ; which has developed commerce till it is competent to support the crowded millions that inhabit this small island, that otherwise would be altogether insufficient to support them—this great machine of progress, this potent force in the history of the world, is to Mr. Morley's philosophic mind only an Empire of swagger, an Empire whose growth he deplores, but which he cannot restrain. In the seven years during which this great Irish agitation has lasted, and during the latter portion of which Mr. Morley and his friends have been endeavouring to get rid of Ireland, we have added to the dominions of the Queen a population as large as that of Ireland and an area twenty times as great. He cannot prevent the tree from branching, but he would if he could injure the trunk and strike a fatal blow at the root. The issues which you are called upon to decide are momentous. They involve the principles of our national existence. Apply the policy which these men advocate in Ireland to the government of our great Dependency of India. They seem, from signs which have recently been manifest, not disinclined to do so ; and if they succeed, I will venture to predict that in a few years the ordered peace of two hundred and fifty millions of our fellow-subjects will give way to the anarchy of the Empire of the Mogul, or to the gospel of plunder that was preached by the Mahratta, chief- tains. It is not, believe me, a policy of Home-rule alone that we have to resent and to resist ; it is a policy of universal disintegration." That is a side of the truth which even Unionists do not sufficiently regard, and to which we are convinced the people will ultimately wake. At present it is hidden from them by the steady march of external affairs, by that very expansion of which Mr. Chamberlain speaks with a delight we do not wholly share,—though we should share it if we saw the electors better aware that Empires are only maintained by sacrifice,—by the readiness with which Irishmen accept great posts all over the globe, and, as we have said, by that inner haughtiness and con- tempt for obstacles which forbids Englishmen at all times to believe that they can be less than the first. They will wake from their dream some day, should Home-rule be conceded, to find their resources in all but money diminished by a seventh; a new and hostile State planted on their borders, and two millions of its agents seated in every great city and by the side of every arsenal. It is not, as the Liberal electors fancy, a question whether Ireland shall manage her own roads and bridges, and manage her own police at her own discretion ; but whether the foreign policy of Great Britain shall be free or not, whether the Empire shall be broken up or not, whether, in fact, our history shall con- tinue or shall fade away into a melancholy record of perpetual losses, all due to a single cause, the want of the sense that power is a trust which we have no more right to abandon out of self-suspicion than we have to cut off our hands, lest perchance murder might be done by their means. We rejoice to find that there is at least one Radical leader in the Kingdom who recognises the truth, and who does not believe that our responsibility for anarchy will be over because we can say we have only consented to concede the anarchists' own prayer.
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