THE ANIMOSITY AGAINST THE LIBERAL UNIONISTS.
Q IR HENRY JAMES'S account of the dead-set made L by the Gladstonians against his seat in Bury, reminds us of the strong invective of Mr. Gladstone and Sir William Harcourt against the Liberal Unionists, and their vows that at the General Election Liberal Unionists should be exter- minated. They have not been exterminated. They have returned to Parliament about half as strong as they were at the opening of the last Parliament; but the fury of the Glad- stonians against them would certainly have exterminated the party if political hate ever had that effect. Anyhow, the singular intensity of this fury is noteworthy, and it is deserving of some consideration. Why should Mr. Glad- stone pick out the most singularly inapplicable terms of contempt for the Liberal Unionists,—he called the party an " abortion," for instance, just when it was doing most effective work,—and Sir William Harcourt lash himself into a sort of frenzy which is more like that of a Mahammedan dervish against the " dogs of unbelievers," than that of an English statesman against old colleagues and allies P The charges hurled by the Gladstonian dervishes against Sir Henry James's seat at Bury were almost worthy of the Mandi himself. What is the explanation of all this rapture of hate ?
To our mind, it is due mainly to this principal cause, that the Gladstonians cannot help recognising the funda- mentally illiberal character of the campaign in which they are engaged, and cannot endure, therefore, that term " Liberal," which stings them with a secret remorse. They see that they are the advocates for a policy in Ireland which will exterminate or greatly curtail personal freedom, economical enterprise, intellectual energy, and religious liberty. It is a policy which, in one sense, no doubt, is democratic ; but it is democratic in a land where the de- mocracy is as ignorant and narrow-minded as it is in- tolerant and unscrupulous. It is a democracy which boycotts and sends flights of threatening letters; which hamstrings the cattle of persons who are thought un- favourable to the popular cause ; which fires into the windows of those who are the objects of popular odium ; and which plots against the landlords instead of struggling with them for justice. It is a democracy which willingly uses the sacerdotal class as its instrument, and which unfortunately makes that class less true to its own ecclesiastical traditions than to the ideals of the ill-taught peasants, from whose ranks the greater number of the priests are necessarily recruited. Yet this is the democracy which is to be set at liberty from almost all the normal re- straints of contemporary English thought, and even to be accorded a double influence over the affairs of the United Kingdom. Think only of the history of the last thirteen years, and note how completely the interests of the peasantry have over- ridden the whole course of the agitation which those thirteen years beheld ; how Mr. Parnell gained his first great hold of the Irish people by subordinating the political hide- pendence which he desired for Ireland, to that land policy which, as it was said, Michael Devitt persuaded him to adopt ; how the Land-League became the real kernel of the Nationalist movement, and absorbed practically all its life and vivacity ; how the Irish conspiracy and violence, which were only at their ease in the United States, then for the first time spread to Ireland, and made deadly progress among the proselytes of the Land-League; how the murderers of Mr. Burke and Lord Frederick Cavendish obtained a sort of patriotic absolution among the Irish people, and the man who avenged himself on Carey, the informer, became a sort of hero among the people ; how the cowardly and cruel spirit of the order to treat any land- grabber as a moral leper spread like an epidemic, till the priests themselves were deeply affected by it, and ignored every effort even of the Roman Catholic theologians to convince them that Mr. Parnell was no proper object of a Catholic's hero-worship ; how, in spite of the Roman Catholic veto on the testimonial to lhim, Mr. Parnell's glory grew in Ireland till the " Plan of Campaign," in- vented by Mr. Dillon and Mr. O'Brien, but timidly dis- couraged by Mr. Parnell, began to overshadow it and to supersede the idolatry even of the author of the " Boy- cotting " policy in favour of the heroes of the " Campaign" policy ; how the Papal condemnation of both these immoral expedients of the land agitation utterly failed to under- mine it, till at length the reputation which had survived the moral scruples which the law of charity and the law of honesty had in vain attempted to sow, fell -before the scruples of the Nonconformist conscience when the Divorce Court revealed that a vice which the Irish peasantry had never winked at was added to failings at which that peasantry had loved to wink ; and how then, for the first time, the Irish priesthood, pricked in their consciences by the Nonconformists of England, recovered their special eccle- siastical influence at a bound, and were able to achieve the iconoclastic feat which the theologians had attempted in vain. Let us recall all this history, and the singular vehemence and exaggeration of the Anti-Parnellite agita- tion when at length it arose,—even the confessional getting itself desecrated as the instrument by which the secrets of the ballot-box were to be unsealed,—and we shall see how singularly illiberal has been the whole course of the Irish agitation, alike when it was worst and when it was best,—and how utterly opposite was its policy to the policy of our traditional Liberalism, which has always been manly and courageous, even when it has been violent, and always enlightened and generous, even when tainted with wildness and irregularities of life. The whole genius first of the Parnellite, and then of the Anti-Parnellite, move- ment has been, on the contrary, illiberal ; a genius which was underhanded from the beginning and jealous of liberal education throughout ; a genius bred, no doubt, of oppres- sion and injustice, but none the less on that account fatal. to true freedom either of thought or of political action.
Yet to this illiberal democracy,—the most illiberal democracy to be found anywhere in Europe,—it is Mr. Gladstone's policy not only to commit the fate of Ireland ; not only, as we greatly fear, the fate of Ulster, the one Irish province which is too Protestant by far to yield any sort of willing, or even unwilling, obedience to the Roman priesthood; not only the commercial fate of an island which has gained more by the energy of its North-Eastern counties than by all the rest of its indus- tries put together: but to give a casting vote also in the Constitution of the United Kingdom, which, under the provisions for retaining the Irish representatives at Westminster, will accord a double political weight to the least advanced section of the whole group of peoples. What wonder is there that, with such a policy in their hands, the Gladstonians shrink from the adjective Liberal" before the word Unionist, as they shrink from the reproaches of their own political conscience ? Mr. Asquith claims to be a true Unionist. No doubt he really thinks himself so ; but, Unionist or not, at least he is an Illiberal, and not a Liberal Unionist, when he proposes to invest the most backward portion of the United Kingdom,— the portion which has been most thoroughly honeycombed with illiberal combinations, illiberal conspiracies, illiterate subserviency to a half-educated priesthood, and illiterate personalities which give a sort of hideousness to the mere daily routine of political strife,---with a double share of in- fluence over the peoples and policy of the United Kingdom The Liberal Unionists are hated because they are a re- proach, a rankling reproach, to the consciences of those illiberal Unionists who, in their zeal for the principles of a literal democracy, are preparing to override all the most characteristic instincts which have governed the Liberal Party from the first rise of the Whigs to the calamitous con- version of Mr. Gladstone by Charles Stuart Parnell in 1885.