ONE SOCIAL EFFECT OF HOME-RULE.
NO one ever discusses the social changes which must follow the concession of Home-rule to Ireland, pro- bably because no one can exactly foretell the direction which the changes will take. There will be two forces in full operation,—the natural, almost instinctive feeling of Irishmen for an aristocratic caste, based upon pedigree, distinction in service, or continuous wealth, and the strong desire for place with emoluments attached to it. This latter impulse will make the dispensers of patronage great men in their own circles, and may possibly arrest the severance, otherwise inevitable, between rank in the State and rank in the community. We should, however, on the whole, expect that with universal suffrage sure to be conceded, with paid Members, and with legislation more or less Jacobin, demagogues and professing devotees of the Church would carry the Irish constituencies ; that great places would fall to men who were useful or important in the Dublin Parliament, but in no sense gentlemen ; and that " society " would continue that abstinence from political life which, except in Ulster, has marked it during the Home-rule agitation. Ireland will be governed, like New York and France, by very " plain men," the men of social standing declining a, contest full, to them, of annoying or disgraceful incidents, and rendering them liable to per- sonalities which, even in America and during the contest for the Presidency, are felt to be intolerable. There will be a fissure between society and politics, and the country will be fortunate if she escapes, as the new men arise and acquire power without acquiring property, many a repetition in miniature of the great Panama Scandal. The Irish are not as bribable as the French, for they are less sordid, and less desirous of " podded " luxury ; but they are at least as eager for social success, and as sensitive to the necessity for that keeping up of social appearances which demands expenditure. The prevalence of pecuniary corruption is, however, often arrested by little-noticed causes—witness the extraordinary differences in this respect between one State of the Union and another—and it is rather from the tempest of obloquy, and the consequent retirement of decent men from public life, that we should apprehend mischief in Ireland. What possesses Irishmen to tolerate and even enjoy the practice of pouring out personal insult, is to us, we confess, still unintelligible. They hate each other hard, no doubt ; but they are not a stupid people, who must, if angry, black- guard their foes because they can neither invent nor understand more civilised ways of expressing their con- tempt. They have, as a rule, a curious felicity of expres- sion, and catch epigram with a quickness that is admirable ; and why they should condescend to raving personalities, attacks on an adversary's face, or on his mother, or on his wife, is absolutely inexplicable. Even if the orator or the journalist is assumed to be half-frantic with excitement, and actually to cool himself by such brutal deliverances, his audience or his readers are not, and yet they are pre- sumably pleased. The Spaniards are said to have the same habit ; and the French certainly have it, with this remarkable distinction, that a Frenchman if he means to denounce, goes mad with _fury, and talks like a blas- phemous bargee ; but if he means to insult and be- little a, personal opponent, he grows artificially polite and looks round carefully for a stone with some polish to put in his deadly sling. The Irishman, however, who is by nature much more courteous than the English- man, feels, when furious, a delight in insult, and, we fancy, has always felt it. It was not Mr. Healy, but an Irish Parliamentarian of a hundred years ago, who spoke in the House of Commons of an opponent's wife or sister as " the painted hag now grinning in the gallery." The priesthood in Ireland certainly do not believe that courtesy is part of Christianity, and the laity will always surpass the clergy—who are, at least, trained to self-sup- pression—in coarseness and virulence of abuse. Political contests in Ireland, bitter enough already, will be savage when success in them leads to place and power ; and things will be habitually said which, we should greatly fear, will induce the refined to retire finally from a struggle in which mud is the only effective weapon. It may be said that in the end the evil will be mitigated, for the duel will be reintroduced ; but though we have no doubt of the fact, we disbelieve in its assumed consequence. That the duel will be re-established within a year of the concession of an Irish Parliament, we have no doubt whatever. All the causes which have main- tained it on the Continent will exist in their full force. The Irish, while they use insult readily, feel it themselves most keenly, as witness the Ma,hony-Kenny incident of this week, and would kill one another, in expiation for abuse, with the utmost readiness. They were once the most duelling people in the world, and with equal liberty of private war, may easily become so again. They will be able to take such liberty if they please, making death in fair duel justifiable homicide ; and, indeed, they need not do anything so very raw and definite. The juries will sympathise with the candidates' notion of honour, just as they do with the faction-fighters'; and if jurymen persistently acquit, and it becomes bad form for relatives to prosecute, the law soon falls into disuse. The law is stroll enough in France and Italy already ; but except in certain cases to recover pecuniary damages arising from a death, it cannot be put in force. We do not expect to see the life that Lever depicted, and possibly exaggerated, renewed in Dublin to its full extent, to hear of a dean who proposed a challenge, or a son who sends seconds to his father ; but we do expect to see the utterance of open insult followed by the duel, and therefore to see insult become twice as respectable and ten times as common as it is. Personal bravery charms Irish electors, and as they think duelling proof of bravery, the reluctance of prominent candidates to appear to shirk a challenge, or to avoid flinging insults because of their per- sonal consequences, will be extreme. Besides, to speak the full truth, Thackeray's biting criticism has in it at least a measure of reality. The Irishman is brave as the French- man is brave, and like the Frenchman, is proud of his bravery, as if it were some excellence he had acquired,— likes to air it, and to know that the world recognises its existence in him. He has that form of vanity, as the Englishman has others ; and it tends to make him think of the duel as an admirable function in which he shows well, and wins that instinctive commenda- tion which is so much more precious than considered praise. We have no feeling for Mr. Healy, except wonder that Irishmen, of all mankind, should make him a leader ; but we are quite sure that if a challenge had been the certain consequence of his repeated attacks on Mrs. Parnell, those attacks would only have become fouler and more frequent. There is no hope even in the bad remedy of the duel ; and one of our gravest fears for Ireland— supposing the impossible to arrive—is that the cultivated and refined and self-respecting will be driven from political life, even more than they have been in France and in America. That is a terrible loss to any country, and it will be a special loss to Ireland, because there the danger of incurable blundering arises mainly from the absence of self- restraint. The American is patient, or he could not bear his Constitution with its maddening delays ; and the French- man, alone among Celts, has a mathematical element in his brain, a compulsion towards reality and logic ; but the Irishman rushes to his conclusion, and wants to keep thought and act as close together as they are in children or Slays. Brighter-witted people never will be, but no country needs a thoughtful and reserved caste so much, and in no country, as we fear, will that caste be reduced to such political impotence. Compare the influence of Cardinal Logue upon his people with that of Archbishop Walsh, and you may foresee much of the immediate future both in Irish society and Irish polities.
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