LORD ROSEBERY ON MR. CHAMBERLAIN. T HERE is a want of
political breadth about Lord Rosebery. In his speech at Birmingham on Wednesday, he said a good deal about Mr. Chamberlain's "agility." But the last thing any candid opponent would deny of Mr. Chamberlain is that his political strength and breadth are at least vastly more con- spicuous than his agility. The very charges with which Lord Rosebery amused his audience (and himself, we imagine, even more than his audience), by bringing against Mr. Chamberlain, prove this instead of disproving it. Is there any great agility in laying yourself open, and eonspicuously open, to innumerable charges of inconsistency ? On the contrary, it may be said to be almost awkward, almost clumsy. But if the political situation changes so materially that unless you are inconsistent with yourself you must sacrifice your country, that is precisely what a strong statesman, a statesman of true breadth and sagacity, will not fail to do, and what an agile politician, who is more concerned to ward off blows from his own person, than to ward them off from his country, will fail to do. Lord Rosebery does not seem to see this. He does not observe that wise practical statesmen like Mr. Bright and Mr. Chamberlain had the right to be alarmed, and, as they looked into the case, to become more and more alarmed, at Mr. Gladstone's sudden conversion to Home-rule in 1885, when it gradually dawned upon them what it really meant. Never before had an English statesman proposed to give Ireland a separate national Adminis- tration. That proposal was quite new to our historical dealings with Ireland. It was the key of Mr. Parnell's policy. Those who had been anxious to give Ireland some kind, of local independence, to give her an opportunity of serving an apprenticeship to those habits of discussion which prepare a people for a cautious and prudent manage- ment of their own affairs, had been prepared to go a good way in the direction of letting local responsibility deal with local problems, and some of them even, like Mr. Cham- berlain, had been disposed to favour large representative Councils for the treatment of such subjects as education, but so soon as it was gravely proposed to dismember the national Government of the United Kingdom by placing the whole policy and resources of Ireland under the pro- visional guidance of an Irish Administration, which, if it went wrong, would have to be overruled and corrected, at great cost of both danger and heartburnings, and even at the probable price of civil war, from England, the whole situation was fundamentally changed, and the strong men saw that they were in for a constitutional controversy of the most serious kind ; and that if they would save their country from political decomposition, they must defy all charges of inconsistency, and apply fresh minds to the totally new situation which had been sprung upon them.
Mr. Chamberlain was one of these strong men, and Lord Hartington (now the Duke of Devonshire) was another. But Lord Rosebery was certainly not one of them. He is very angry with Mr. Chamberlain for asking him whether he is really in favour of Irish Home-rule, and says that as he has for two years belonged to an Administration pledged to it, it is a question that touches his honour. That is rather a needlessly susceptible way of putting it. No one has brought, even by implication, any charge against Lord Rosebery's honour. Of course be is pledged to give some kind of Home-rule to Ireland ; but after his speech in 1893 on Mr. Gladstone's Pill, it is surely open to any statesman to think that he would be quite willing so to attenuate the measure as to make it resemble much more the kind of measure which Mr. Chamberlain was dis- posed to advocate in 1885, than the kind of measure which Mr. Gladstone proposed in 1893. Mr. Chamberlain looks at these large constitutional questions in a much broader and less personal fashion than Lord Rosebery. What concerns him is not the name to be given to a policy, but the total effect of it. Lord Rosebery may, so far as outsiders who watch his attitude can judge, in his secret heart favour a kind of Home-rule which would not greatly alarm Mr. Chamberlain, though it would shock both Mr. Redmond and Mr. Dillon to be told that he was willing to yield so much vantage ground, and such critical vantage ground, to the Unionists. But Mr. Chamberlain knows, as all practical politicians know, that when you have once dangled such a prospect as that of a virtually independent national Administration before the eyes of the Irish party, those who proposed it can no more withdraw it without a great political explosion than you could tantalise a bull-dog with the offer of food which you refuse to give him, without feeling the con- sequences. It is just the merit of Mr. Chamberlain. not his weakness, that he can see plainly how dangerous it was to go negotiating with the Irish party for limited concessions which it was quite certain would not satisfy them, and how inevitably Mr. Gladstone'a fatal offer of a separate national Administration to Ireland, resulted in his fixed determination to give them what would satisfy them. Lord Rosebery, whose eyes are not even now open to the truth, goes on still talking the same sort of tentative conciliation towards both parties. which was at least excusable in 1885, but is pure folly in 1894. He seems wholly unaware that it is he who is nimble, and vain of his nimbleness, and Mr. Chamberlain who is strong and broad.
As for the quotations which Lord Rosebery paraded with such pride from Mr. Chamberlain's speeches on the House of Lords, on Registration, and on Disestablishment, they are just as irrelevant as it would be to taunt a man with inconsistency for declining to cross a stream in flood which he had been perfectly willing, and even desirous, to ford in its ordinary condition. Why don't you help us to do what some years ago you were so desirous to do ?' Lord Rosebery asks. And Mr. Chamberlain will, of course, reply, 'Why, simply because if I do, I shall forfeit all chance of preventing you from doing what I think a vast deal more mischievous than I think what I then desired, beneficial.' And surely no answer could be more wise and pertinent. A. statesman has no choice but to co-operate with those who for the time propose to resist what he thinks it absolutely essential to resist, and he will not be a statesman if, for that purpose, he does not cheer- fully resign the immediate prospect of doing what he might like to see done, but does not care to do half as much as he cares to resist what he thinks ruinous to the State. Lord Rosebery seems to persuade himself that he can combine perfectly incompatible objects, the object of satisfying the Irish party, and the object of givir g guarantees to the Unionist party that the Irish party shall not go too far. But Mr. Chamberlain knows better than that; he is not going to give up the solid advantage of an alliance with the Conservatives to prevent Honae-rnle, for the sake of precipitating a. Reform of the House of Lords, or Disestablishment, or any other of the favourite reforms of his younger days. He is not going to reform away his country in order that he may reform away what he thinks its abuses. The more Lord Rosebery dwells on this kind of inconsistency, the more he will raise Mr. Cham- berlain in the eyes not only of Birmingham and the Midland counties, but in the eyes of all England. It is only nimble statesmen like Lord Rosebery who fancy they can save their country from ruin without paying a substantial price for that great privilege. The Irishman who admitted that you could not be in two places at the same time "barring you were a bird," was more modest than Lord Rosebery, who evidently thinks that he can satisfy the Irish with a sense of national independence at the same time that he satisfies the English with the sense of absolute supremacy. Mr. Chamberlain knows better. He is quite aware that if he is to defeat this preposterous policy, he must give his whole strength to the work, and avail himself frankly of Conservative help in order to achieve it. And achieve it he will. It is to his great credit, not to his discredit, that he has learned with every year of his consideration of this Home-rule policy, how dangerous it was to attempt to buy off these Irish invaders of our Constitution, by offering them futile instalments of a policy which only fascinates them when offered as a whole, and which only satisfies them as a whole because it threatens the United Kingdom with destruction.
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