TOPICS OF THE DAY.
BAITING THE IRISH SECRETARY.
ONE of the worst results of a Coercion Act is that it opens the way for false patriots to get themselves a patriotic reputation, by personal attacks on all who have to administer such an Act. This was one reason why we were so earnestly opposed to the kind of Act actually passed, and why we still believe it to have been a serious mistake. None the less, the Irish Members who first accuse the Irish Secretary of abusing the powers given him under the Act, and then ignore absolutely the issue they have placed before Parliament, and give the great bulk of long and virulent speeches to such matters as those treated by Mr. O'Donnell in his elaborate invective of last Tuesday, are forfeiting their title to the name of patriots, and counting only on the rhetorical sand they throw into the eyes of the Irish people. Mr. O'Donnell's speech was a very clever speech by a clever man, but any speech more flagrantly confessing to all edu- cated men that he had no case on which to argue the motion of censure, we never heard. First, he took up half an hour, or three-quarters, with an elaborate statement of what English landlords had done for English tenants in a year of distress, and a long invective against the Irish Government for not getting Irish landlords to do as much for Irish tenants,— just as if what English landlords had done for English tenants had been due to the intervention of the Government, and just as if their supposed intervention against Irish tenants, of which Mr. O'Donnell complained, had been due only to the backwardness of Irish tenants in paying their rents, and not to their violent attacks, both secret and open, on the ordinary rights of their fellow-men and the ordinary agents of the law. After inviting the House to condemn the Irish Government for unjust arrests, he founded his plea for that condemnation on the fact that it had not compelled Irish landlords to act like English landlords, but had, instead, tried to protect Irish landlords and agents and the servants of the law from the atones and rifles, the open assaults, and the secret torture, of mobs and ruffians. Nearly or quite a half of Mr. O'Donnell's speech was consumed in reproaching the Irish Government for not making Irish landlords as generous as Eng- lish landlords. Of course, no man knew better than he that the question whether Irish landlords are more or less generous than English landlords had no more to do with the motion before the House, than the question whether they are more or less generous than Dutch landlords. What he said on the subject was not at all more relevant to his motion, than if he had attacked the Government for not managing that Irish landlords should be as rich, and as well able to go without their rents, as English landlords.
The very little which either Mr. Justin M'Carthy or Mr. O'Donnell said by way of justifying the motion was so feeble, as hardly to need Mr. Forster's crushing and un- answerable reply. That little consisted in attributing Mr. Dillon's arrest to the wish to get rid of him as a Parlia- mentary adversary,—a weak bit of hypothesis, without the vestige of support ; in taunting Mr. Forster with not arrest- ing Archbishop Croke, instead of Father Sheehy ; and in attributing the recent Police Circular to an absurd desire for the trumping-up of false accusations against innocent Irish- men,—an object which could by no possible means have answered any conceivable purpose which either Mr. Forster or the Government could entertain. That was, seriously speaking, the whole case of the so-called Irish patriots against the abuse of the Protection Act, except that Mr. O'Donnell did show some sort of colourable case against the arrest of a Land Leaguer in Donegal, not personally mentioned in the resolu- tion, and with whose case Mr. Forster in his reply did not deal. But on the main charges, Mr. Forster not only answered what was said—which was easy enough, as it was so little—but made out for Mr. Dillon's and Father Sheehy's arrest such a justifi- cation as left no impartial Member of the House of Commons in .the smallest doubt that if the Irish Secretary had failed to arrest either of them, he wouldhave been guilty of a gross dereliction of duty. Mr. Dillon had not only openly countenanced violent resist- ance to the law, but had grounded his illustration of the value of such resistance on a case which was not a case of eviction at all, bat one in which any conceivable Government of Ire- land, even one established by the most advanced of the Home- rulers themselves, would have been absolutely compelled to support the process of law with a high hand. With regard to Father Sheehy, Mr. Forster showed not only that he had used violent and exciting language, but that that violent and exciting language had been followed by serious consequences in action ; and further be asserted that, in the belief of the Government, Father Sheehy had gone beyond violent and exciting language into complicity with an act of outrage, the evidence of which he could not make public without endangering the lives of peaceable people. But what he did prove was more than enough to show that Father Sheehy was both influential in causing outrage, and in stimulating less able and influential priests than himself to nse language even more directly dan- gerous,—like Father Clery's advocacy of the course of break- ing open a jail. To have hesitated, after the evidence obtained; in the arrest of Father Sheehy, would have been to promise imr punity to every Catholic priest, however openly he might insti- gate the people to lawless and violent acts. And after that, the' Protection of Person and Property Act would have been vir- tually repealed. As for the secret Circular, there really was no particular cause for secrecy, and nothing to apologise for. The police had failed to do the very work for which they are organised and paid. They could not or would not find out the perpetrators of acts of violence, and whether it was inability or unwillingness, they clearly wanted spurring on to their duty, to keener efforts or more willing efforts, or both. To' assume that the Government could possibly be any the better for seizing on the wrong persons and making victims of people who had done no harm, is simply absurd. Of course, nothing could set the Irish people more vehemently against the Govern- ment than such mistakes. But the outrages were multi- plying monthly, and the success of the police in finding those• who committed them was dwindling. Not only would it have- been absurd not to exhort them to greater vigilance, but it was obvious enough, as Mr. Forster showed, that what was wanted was greater vigilance in finding the real perpetrators, not in accusing imaginary perpetrators. Out of every four men accused of complicity in these offences, Mr. Forster showed that he had declined to arrest at least three ; so that the' taunt that he wants innocent victims rather than none was almost as silly as it was malicious.
The truth is, that the Parnellites dread the Irish Land Bill, as one which will cut the ground from under them as agitators,---Mr. O'Donnell's letter to Thursday's Times is a very striking proof of this, and of the unmeaning vituperation to which they descend in order to persuade the Irish people that the Irish Land Bill can do them no manner of good ;--and in their violent efforts to delay and obstruct that Bill, they can think of nothing better than baiting the Irish Secretary, whom, as the representative of an un- popular Act, it probably always seems to the Irish people,- at large a patriotic thing to assail. If there were more Irish patriots like Mr. Litton, there would be fewer Irish
patriots like Mr. O'Donnell. It is a sad thing that, even among the party who wish with all their hearts to see justice done to the Irish tenant, there should be so few• willing to brave misunderstanding, by openly denouncing men like Mr. Dillon and Father Sheehy as the worst enemies of Ireland. What the Irish Liberals want is courage, that true. courage which can venture on strong support of the lawful authority essential to the good of Ireland, no less than of popular reforms equally essential to that good. As a rule, even the best of the Liberals shrink from the side of authority, even though they believe it to be in the right and to be doing what it would be disgraceful to leave undone. A few representatives like Mr. Litton—in the Southern, Eastern, and Western provinces—would be the salvation of Ireland.
Previous page
