LORD HARTINGTON AND MR. GLADSTONE.
LORD HARTINGTON'S remarkable speech at Hud- dersfield on the mode in which, if Ireland were to have Home-rule granted at all, it would have been most right and reasonable that it should have been granted, would have been much strengthened in its personal bearing on Mr. Gladstone, if he had quoted Mr. Gladstone's argu- ment, during the discussion on the extension of household suffrage to Ireland in the summer of 1885, on the probable consequence of over-representing the Irish majority. Mr. Gladstone then urged, in reply to those who pointed out that without a minority representation, the minority in Ireland would be largely under-represented, that the Irish minority would be practically represented by the British majority, and so effectually represented by that majority, that there would be no reason at all to fear the neglect of their true interests, no matter how excessive the proportion of Parnellite Members to Unionist Members, as compared with the real proportion of Irish Parnellites to Irish Unionists, might be. That argument seemed to us at the time a very weighty argument. But we never suspected at the time,—probably Mr. Gladstone himself never sus- pected,—that before a year was over, he would be urging on the people of Great Britain the duty of abandoning that very security for the interests of the minority on the strength of which he had obtained the acceptance for Ireland of a suffrage very unfavourable to the adequate repre- sentation of the Irish Unionist Party. We wish that Lord Hartington had referred expressly to this virtual pledge of Mr. Gladstone's that the majority of the electors of Great Britain should feel that they are essentially trustees for the welfare of the minority in Ireland, for it would have added great force to the extremely forcible argument expounded by Lord Hartington. That argument was as follows. Twenty years ago, when Mr. Gladstone first took up seriously the Irish Question, and placed. it pro- minently before the minds and consciences of the electors of Great Britain, we might have dealt with it in either of two ways. We might have said,—' These Irish questions are too complex and difficult for the united Parliament : the best way to deal with them will be to give back to Ireland her Irish Parliament, only taking care that in giving it back, we provide sufficiently for the unity of the Kingdom.' Or we might have done what, at Mr. Gladstone's instance, we actually did,—namely, proclaimed that it is the duty of the united Parliament to remedy all serious grievances in every part of the Kingdom, and therefore to remedy the deeper grievance of Ireland. Either of these policies would have been a policy for which something might have been said, though, of course, in our opinion, there was a great deal more to be said for the second than for the first. But a course for which, in Lord Hartington's opinion, there is little to be said, is the course actually pursued of proceeding for eighteen years on one policy, and then at the very moment when the Irish minority had by the action of the central power been virtually paralysed and rendered helpless to defend themselves by any mode of procedure less revolutionary than the employment of physical force, proposing to wash our hands of the duties we had undertaken, and to hand over the interests of the minority to a Home-rule Parliament. In such a Parliament, if granted now, the minority would, of course, be placed at a vastly greater disadvantage than they would have been twenty years ago, because they have been already stripped of the resources which twenty years ago they still possessed. for imposing on the majority fair terms of compromise, and for yielding with dignity, and even magnanimity, to the popular demands In the last twenty years we have taken away the Church of the minority,—no doubt a most just achievement,—we have reduced the Irish landlords to comparative poverty and weakness,—again, no doubt, for just cause, so long as we take care that their comparative poverty and weakness is not made the occasion for oppression and plunder,—and we have given the agricultural classes a considerably larger Parliamentary representation than even that to which their numerical strength would entitle them,—so that the minority have no longer the means of obtaining fair terms from their opponents, and are even unduly humiliated by the appearance of greater weakness than their actual numbers would imply. And then, when this process of stripping the minority not only of its undue privileges, but of a part even of its due influence, is just completed, it is proposed that we shall suddenly abdicate the grave position of trustees in which Mr. Glad- stone's argument of 1885 had placed the electoral majority of Great Britain, and say to the Parnellites what would be very nearly equivalent to this :—' We have done all the heavy work of despoiling your opponents for you, and now we leave it to you to complete the business, and make a clean sweep of the remainder.'
Of course, it will be said, and Lord Hartington did not ignore the plea, that Mr. Gladstone took pains in his pro- posal in 1886 to secure for the Irish minority some con- stitutional equivalent for the protection of the electoral majority of the British constituencies which he proposed virtually to withdraw. The proposal of two orders in the Irish Legislature was to be the equivalent for the voice of the English and Scotch representatives. That is very true, but, as Lord Hartington pointed out, it was a kind of provision which nobody really supposed at all likely to endure. It had an air of distrust towards the democracy about it which could never have survived in a democratic atmosphere. Indeed, it substituted a distinctly unpopular guarantee for which it was very difficult to find any excuse, for a thoroughly popular guarantee which nobody could challenge except by challenging the principle of the unity of the United Kingdom. After all, a majority of the United Kingdom has as much right to have its way in Ireland as it has in Cornwall, unless you maintain that Ireland is not a true part of the United Kingdom, which three years ago nobody but the Parnellites did maintain. To rely on the majority of the representatives of the United King- dom for fair-play, was to rely on a thoroughly popular guarantee. To rely on an artificial " Second Order," created in a spirit which no democracy could approve, was to rely on a fantastic guarantee which had assuredly no staying power in it. Therefore, Lord Hartington was absolutely unanswerable when he urged. that, sincerely, no doubt, as his proposal was meant, Mr. Gladstone was really replacing a most substantial and trustworthy safe- guard, by a mere pasteboard bulwark which might play the part of a bulwark on the stage, in any theatrical scene, but would certainly not hold its ground against any eager popular attack. So long as we stick to this great principle,—that nothing shall be done in Ireland which the consciences of the majority of the constituencies of Great Britain do not approve,—that nothing shall be done in Ireland which, if proposed for Wales or Scotland, would be rejected. with scorn by those constituencies,—we are on solid ground, and the Irish minority have really something trustworthy to cling to. Give up that ground, and, as Lord. Hartington says, you not only hand over the minority of the Irish people to their enemies, but you hand them over in the helpless condition to which we have ourselves reduced them, and to which we should never have reduced them had we contemplated that we were going to let their foes complete the work which we had begun, and ruth- lessly take away what we had thought it only just and right that they should retain. Doubtless the Liberals who were so eager for the retention of the Irish contingent at West- minster intended to keep the control of the united Parlia- ment over the statutory Irish Parliament in full force. But first to give independence and then to take it away again is not a practical method of conciliation.
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