TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE LIBERALS AND THE GOVERNMENT.
THE moat hopeless feature in the situation of the Land Bill—indeed, the only hopeless one—is the inability of Liberal Members to understand that self-effacement has become a duty. The passing of the Land Bill in good time has become a matter of most pressing urgency. The condition of Ireland is weekly becoming worse. The agitators, who are seeking separation, and not improvements, are well aware that with agrarian reconciliation their leverage would be gone, and are moving heaven and earth to deepen
the agrarian quarrel. Fresh outrages are reported day by day, and whole classes are stirring up the Castle to de- mand new repressive action, of which the enemies of the Union would instantly take advantage to denounce, not the Land Bill, but the English connection. The American Irish, in- dignant with the effect of the Land Bill in baffling their hope of a Republican explosion, are, it is reported on authority, threatening that if the Bill passes, their remittances, which exceed eight-tenths of the entire collection, shall be suspended. The Irish Extremists in the House, though not opposing the Bill openly, are delaying it by every practicable device ; and it is believed there are men among them who have planned delay in the hope that the Lords, if they receive the Bill too late in the Session, may throw it out, and thus give Ireland just ground for asserting that under the Union Irishmen are not governed either by the common Sovereign or the common Representation, but by a group of irresponsible English landlords, and for threatening insurrection against them. It is under these cir- cumstances, which in any other country would be held to justify and to demand an almost revolutionary speed of action, that English Members elected as Liberals, and on all other ques- tions sincere in their Liberalism, are found to waste night after night on amendments which the Government cannot accept, and which would impair, or even in some cases transform, the Government Bill, On Monday, for example, Mr. Brand moved an amendment avowedly intended to remove one of the " three F's "—Free Sale—from the Bill. It was simply impossible, as Mr. Brand must have known, that the Government should excise such a vital point from its measure, or consent to such a limitation of its benefits ; and he did not venture; after Mr. Gladstone's declaration to that effect, to go to a division ; yet he caused a waste of hours, in- deed, of the whole time disposable for the Bill on Monday night. Next day, Mr. Ramsay, Member for Falkirk, did the same thing, in a worse way, actually proposing that Free Sale should be confined to tenancies under the annual value of £30. Tho direct effect of that amendment would have been to offer a heavy premium to landlords in favour of consolidating farms—that is, to increase one of the Irish grievances, and make the agrarian struggle more bitter than ever—and it was defeated, by a majority of 213 to 140. This result, in itself beneficial, as showing that the majority were in earnest in their support of " the whole Bill," was not, however, reached until another entire debate had been sacrificed to a discussion which in principle had been settled on the night before, when Free Sale was affirmed. If every other amendment is pressed in the same way, the Bill will not reach the Lords on this side Christmas. Originally, there wore 1,000 amendments, seventy of them proposed by Mr. 0. Russell, as sincere a friend of the new tenure as there is in the House, and their framers, if they only occupied ten minutes each, would have talked out the Bill. Dr. Play fair, it is said, by dint of patient care and reto- lute endeavour, has reduced the amendments on the first clause to those which are all considered material ; but these alone, if they are discussed at this length, will defeat the Bill, We are not living in the days before the Flood, and the Government can no more find seventy nights for a single Bill, than it can find seven hundred days in a year. The framers of amendments will urge that their amendments are sound, and it is their duty to press them, but they have no reason on their side. They know perfectly well
that no amendment which the Government decidedly rejects
can possibly be carried. Their duty, therefore, is to submit their amendments privately to Government as serious amend.
ments, and, if they are rejected, withdraw them, without further waste of time, now becoming as invaluable as it would be if civil war were raging. They are sure of patient attention, for they are serving the Government by waiving their right to publicity ; and if they succeed, will then, in the short public discussion, stopped by the official acceptance of the amendment, obtain all the much-desired credit of success. They will have improved the Bill in the eyes of all men, whereas by the present method' they accomplish nothing, and run the risk of standing con- demned before their constituents as no better than cunning obstructionists.
The plain truth of the matter is that too many Liberals are forgetting the old doctrine of sound Parliamentarians, that with a Constitution like ours, it is necessary, upon first- class questions, to place confidence in the Government. You- cannot make war or secure peace by resolutions, amendments,. and " exhaustive debate." You must either trust or overthrow- the Executive, and leave that unfettered. The Irish Land, Bill is not a mere piece of experimental legislation. It is an immense, if you like, a revolutionary measure, as important as. a great treaty or a reform of the Constitution, by which the Government hope to remove a social evil which for two hundred' years at least has produced popular disaffection throughout one of the Three Kingdoms. They propose a new tenure, which• will be found bad or good according as they are competent statesmen. The proposal has been accepted either as a mes- sage of peace, or as a pledge of an intention to make peace, by 96 out of 103 Irish Members, that is, virtually, by the entire. nation. Whether its results will be as great as is hoped may be doubtful, but of one thing there can be no doubt,—that if the measure is to be cut down to suit landlord views, or re- duced to meet views of any kind, it will have no results at all. It is not a Bill to be licked into shape by a House of Com- mons fidgetting over clauses, but a great offer to Ireland—the largest the British people will make—to be sanctioned or repu- diated like a Treaty, with continued war as the penalty of refusal.. It is entirely within the right of the House to say it disapproves. the Treaty and accepts war, but it is not within its competence- to rewrite the agreement, and order the Government to submit it to the other party to the negotiation in that amended form.. The Government must be trusted to have done the very best that circumstances admitted, or it should be declared untrust- worthy, and turned out. The widest knowledge, the deepest insight, the most exhausting diligence, have all been used in framing the Bill, and a certain symmetry in its details, a car-- taro correction of clause by clause, is of its very essence, if any- success is to be obtained. A Member like Mr. Brand may know, or think he knows, exactly how a clause will work ; but he does not know how the whole Bill will, what dangers the. Government are attacking, or on what support they are relying, for ultimate success. Messrs. Brand and Ramsay, for example, to use a single but conclusive illustration, pro- bably never considered that, of all political symptoms in Ireland, the most dangerous is that Ulster, on this question of tenure, is with the other three Provinces ; and that, for Ulster, the Free-Sale clauses are, of all clauses, the most vital. Without them, the Ulster farmers would deem the Bill a mockery, and declare, as they did after the Bill or 1870, that, under an appearance of benevolence, they were still to be deprived of their purchased rights. The Govern- ment have a hundred questions to think of besides mere im- provement in tenure,—the national disposition, the national history, the effect of character in modifying the working of the clauses, the effect of tradition, habit, prejudice, the effect even of the prestige of the Land Court, which they, and they only, are able to foresee as if it were in existence. To treat such a measure as a mere Bill, which lawyers my rewrite and " experi- enced " agriculturists greatly improve, is almost as absurd as to refer the British Constitution to a committee, or to regulate the permanent relations of England and France by "exhaustive debate." Either the Government, in view of an immense social difficulty, has proposed a statesmanlike expedient, or it has not..
In the latter case, it should be dismissed, in favour of an abler group ; and in the former, the proposal should be sanctioned, the Government itself being left to correct any details that in the general debate have been shown to need correction. The total inability of the House of Commons to get out of its groove, and conceive that there may be occasions when a great thing must be done, and done as a whole, and done by Government to the best of its ability, or left undone, is most i
discouraging, as discouraging as its inability to get ont of its The latter has a good deal to do with the preposterous waste of time. There never was, perhaps, a measure in which it was more necessary to authorise the Speaker or a small Committee to say, " These and these five or six amend- ments are of the essence of the strife, and should be fought out," and suppress all others, a proposal made by Mr. Erring-
• ton, the coolest, if not the ablest, of Irish Members ; but the proposal passes unheard. Everybody who can find a seconder has a right to suggest an amendment on a Small-debt Bill, and he must, therefore, have the same right on a Bill in- tended to arrest a social war, even though the war will ad- vance while he is amending, and though the Bill unamended would bring peace as surely as if improved by amendments. The House has no power, apparently, to meet special cases, however emergent, or, at least, does not meet them ; but plods on wearily, dividing and dividing, not because it hopes to im- prove the Bill, which it knows must stand as it was drawn, or disappear, but because individual Members have a prescrip- tive right to make it divide. It is unable to compel them to give up that right by any influence short of a formal alteration of procedure, which, again, though the House has full power over its own methods, and requires no statute. or assent from the Lords, it is afraid to propose, lest in debating the proposi- tion a whole Session should be wasted. Is not this evidence of a want of power—of actual flabbiness of will—which must sooner or later be fatal to the respect felt for the authority of a House which, with civil war within measurable distance, and terms of peace accepted by a majority of two to one, actually cannot send those terms out till every Member who chooses has gratified his vanity, or obeyed his convictions, by talking about them at any length he pleases ? Suppose, after all the efforts of the Government, some unforeseen occurrence, some eviction which touches the imagination of the Irish people, throws Connaught into insurrection, who will be responsible ? The Government, which called Parliament together in January to consider its proposals to avoid that very contingency ; or the House of Commons, which in June, after accepting the pro- posals by huge majorities, has not the capacity so to control itself as to issue them in legal form ?
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