TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE MEANING OF MR. MORLEY'S DEMAND.
MR. MORLEY, in his speech at Bristol on Tuesday, made a demand which we are by no means disposed to treat with contempt, that the Home-rulers should not be required to explain the exact nature of their proposed constitutional plan for reconciling a separate Irish Parlia- ment and Administration with the safety and unity of the United Kingdom as a whole, until they hadhad plenty of time to arrange in private council what will certainly have to run the gauntlet of public criticism. Speaking of the men who deliberated on the United States Constitution, he said :—" Did they come upon a platform, and produce their scheme bit by bit ? No ; they fastened themselves up for five months in 1789, just a hundred years ago. They did not let the public know at all what they were doing. They said : ' We will have no piecemeal criticism ; we will not have the evening papers pulling to pieces all that we have done in the day. We are not going to have the web that has been woven in the day un- ravelled in the night.' They kept their own counsel. Our task is slight compared with that which Washington and Franklin had to face. But I think, gentlemen, that we may at least learn from them that it is not well to go into complex and difficult constitutional arrangements under the fire of a set of men who, while they pretend to be asking you of good faith to say what you are going to do, are not of good faith at all." Excepting only the last imputation,—which is perfectly unworthy of Mr. Morley, and which he knows, as well as we know, to be as monstrous in regard to Mr. Balfour or Lord Harlington as a similar imputation from our side would be in regard to himself or Mr. Gladstone,—we recognise a truly statesman- like spirit in that remark. It is absurd to construct new Constitutions under the running fire of a double stream of daily criticism ; and we can well allow for Mr. Morley's special dread of the evening papers, though it may seem a little unkind to his own immediate successor to express it so emphatically. But while we cordially agree that statesmen should be accorded plenty of time to consider "complex and difficult constitutional arrangements" such as Mr. Gladstone has undertaken to plan out, the Unionist contention is that no such arrangement is possible at all consistently with the safety and constitutional order of the United Kingdom. And we have a right to contend that till the Home-rulers produce the scheme, which they have not as yet, it seems, worked out even to their own satisfaction, they have not only not answered our principal argument, but have even confessed the great prima'-facie difficulty of answering it. They are like General Trochu, who kept saying, when the Germans had shut in Paris on every side : " J'ai mon plan." If he had a, plan for breaking the ranks of the besiegers, he was very loth to produce it, and he never did produce one that would work. General Trochu did not defeat the Germans by repeating that he had a plan. Still less will Mr. Morley defeat the Unionists by admitting that he has not yet got one, but that, if he is given time enough, he will find a good one. That is precisely what we defy him to find, and, at all events till he has found one, it would become him to speak somewhat more modestly of the promise to solve a difficulty which he admits to be great, though he maintains that it is not insuperable. He can only prove it to be not insuperable by actually overcoming it, and he frankly tells us that as yet he has not overcome it. That is candid in him. But it is clearly an admission from which the Unionists must take no small advantage. Our position is very simple. Mr. Gladstone himself rejected the pure Colonial Constitution for Ireland as too perilous. In the case of an island so close to us, and with so little predisposition,— perhaps we may say, also, with so little historic reason,—to be friendly to us, Mr. Gladstone thought, perhaps, that complete colonial independence would lead to panics, if not to absolute conflict, is the event of any struggle in which English and Irish sympathies were greatly divided. At all events, he declined to recommend that Ireland should be placed in the position of a self-governing Colony ; but he did recommend that the Irish representatives should be entirely removed from the Parliament at Westminster. Neverthe- less this recommendation was rejected with something like unanimity by his own English followers. They saw plainly that this meant a complete surrender of all legislative authority over Ireland, since it would be impossible to do justice in any Parliamentary sense to the grievances and remonstrances of an unrepresented country. Mr. Gladstone: accordingly gave way, and promised to retain the Irish Members at Westminster ; but how to retain them at West- minster and yet exclude in general Irish affairs from the purview of the Westminster Parliament, without either some absurd and monstrous injustice to Englishmen and Scotch- men on the one hand, or some fundamental recast of the Con- stitution in a federal sense on the other hand, has seemed to ordinary mortals as nearly impossible of solution as a human problem could be. Mr. Morley himself is wise enough to protest in the strongest way against the federal revolution which Mr. Asquith and others have advocated ; but he gives us no glimmer at all of any way out of the impasse, unless. he means to suggest,—and. that is incredible,—that it would_ be no hardship to have 103 Irishmen voting on the general policy, the internal government, and the taxation of Great Britain, though Britons are to have no vote on the general policy, internal government, and taxation of Ireland. We- say, therefore, that there is no way out of the puzzl %that is not so monstrously absurd or so unjust that even theHome- rulers themselves cannot agree upon it. And Mr. Morley, instead of explaining what the way is, only says that if he and his colleagues are given time enough, they will find it. Very good. Let them find the way, and they will answer us. But till they do, they leave us in possession of a very strong presumptive case.
Mr. Morley is very candid indeed in his confession that his chief hope in conceding Home-rule to Ireland is to rid the British Parliament of the fash of Irish affairs. The logic of his speech goes rather to the defence of Mr. Gladstone's abandoned measure, which would have- cleared Parliament of the Irish Members no less than of Irish affairs, than to the foreshadowing of any other measure, though, of course, he, like Mr. Gladstone, has- accepted the inevitable, and is not yearning after the re- introduction of a condemned measure. " Our opponents. talk," he said, " as if the delegation of Irish affairs to the inhabitants of Ireland were a magnanimous surrender on our part of an invaluable privilege, and the stripping our- selves of a priceless blessing. I demur to that as a. Member of Parliament past, present, and to come. I say that the number of hours and days that we have given up in the last Session to those two great remedial measures,. the drainage of the River Bann and the River Suck,—I say they are not a blessing, I say they are not a privilege, but a sheer and unmitigated nuisance. It is no blessing- and no privilege for us to be led and forced by our duty to spend hours and days about Irish lunatic asylums, Irish• certificated teachers, and I know not what else. This obliga- tion to attend to Irish affairs, this putting Ireland always under the microscope, blinds your House of Commons to all sense of political proportion Members of Parlia- ment are elected to serve the realm. I admit it, and glory in it, but I say to you, as a tolerably careful observer of what goes on in the House of Commons, that this-. immersion, this absorption in small Irish affairs,—aye, and I will even say in big Irish affairs,—is fatal to the power and efficiency of the House of Commons as the great supervising- body of the Empire." Doubtless ; and precisely the same might be said of the House of Commons when it is absorbed in Bills for the Drainage of the Thames Valley or for promoting Technical Education. But what price are we pre- pared to pay for ridding the House of Commons of such dis- cussions ? Not surely the price of withdrawing from it the duty of seeing that equal justice is done as between one class. and another of her Majesty's subjects, nor the duty of providing that efficient safeguards shall be adopted against treason and conspiracy such as -might threaten the very existence of the United Kingdom. To pay such a price as. that for relieving us of discussions concerning the draining of the Thames Valley or the promotion of Technical Schools, would be to purchase leisure for the greater questions of policy by determining beforehand these greater questions in a wrong sense. Indeed, you might as well purchase immunity from taxation by surrendering all taxable property, as purchase for Parliament immunity from petty discussions at the cost of its right to intervene in discussions which are of the deepest concern to the happiness, safety, and content of the United Kingdom. Yet what Mr. Morley proposes to do is precisely this, to set Parliament free from the necessity of discussing the drainage of the Bann and the Suck at the cost of under- taking not to protect the most sacred rights of Irish citizens, and not to guard Great Britain from one of the most serious of her dangers.
In one word, Mr. Morley's speech contains a virtual admis- sion that till the Home-rulers do produce the plan which as yet, by his own confession, they are not ready to produce, the constituencies have the strongest prima-facie reason for assuming that in all probability no such plan can be devised ; and also an assertion that it would be wise to procure the abatement of a serious but minor political nuisance by the concession of principles which would bring down upon us evils so gigantic as to preclude the possibility of our ever profiting by the small advantage which we had sacrificed so much to gain. The motto of the Home- rulers should ' surely be,—Propter vitam vivendi perdere camas.
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