TRUTH-BLINDNESS. I N spite of "jesting Pilate" and all his followers
"in ancient and in modern books enrolled," there is such a thing as the truth. Plain people know that there is such a thing as red or green or blue or black or white, in spite of all the sophistry and all the casuistry that has been spun about these being merely relative terms, and about what is red to one man possibly looking blue to another. in ?he 'game- way 7w. v..tentsl, a/tun/2311g' isowitraePatas- thin gs cannot be, and not be, at the same time. But just as there is the complaint of colour-blindness, so there is the defect of truth-blindness. There are a certain number of people who, without being liars or intentional bearers of false-witness, suffer from truth-blindness. It is as unfair to attack them for not being able clearly to distinguish truth from falsehood, as it is to impute wickedness to those born with an inability to note the difference between green and red. But though we ought not to treat the truth-blind as if they were personally guilty of wrong- doing when they fail to distinguish between the true and the false, we ought to be as careful not to trust them in public affairs, as the railway companies are careful not to trust their trains to colour-blind engine-drivers and signalmen.
Unfortunately, just now there seems a marked tendency among many of our public men to go truth-blind, and to talk as if there were practically no difference between a thing and its opposite. They remind one of the story of the schoolmaster who was so anxious to have no difference with his class, that when a boy construed niger " white," he replied, "Yes, quite right, you mean a sort of greyish- white, a neutral tint, that is, in other words, a dark-grey, in fact, black." One is never surprised now to find sonic politician of eminence and intelligence explaining that when seven years ago he said something or other was white, he meant all the time "a sort of greyish-white, a neutral tint, that is, in other words, a dark-grey, in fact, black." The past week has witnessed a particularly painful exhibition of this tendency to treat "north" and "south" as interchangeable terms. Mr. Gladstone has publicly told us, in his letter to the Duke of Devonshire, that when he said a certain thing in Midlothian in 1885 he meant just the reverse. In 1886, Mr. Gladstone, in a famous passage in one of his Midlothian speeches, supposed the case of a Liberal Government kept in office by means of the Irish vote. "Now, gentlemen," he continued, "I tell you seriously and solemnly that, although I believe the Liberal Party itself to be honourable, patriotic, sound, and trust- worthy, in such a position as that it would not be safe for it to enter upon the consideration of the principle of a measure with respect to which at every step of its progress it would be in the power of a party coming from Ireland to say : 'Unless you do this and unless you do that we will turn you out to-morrow.'" If, he went ron, the Liberal Party did not get a majority in Parliament over both the Tories and the Irish, the consequences would be most serious, " I tell you, gentlemen, that not only the Tory Party, and not only the Liberal Party, but the Empire will be in danger, because questions of the gravest moment and most Imperial weight and of vast consequences may come forward, and will in all likelihood come forward, and there will be no party qualified to deal with diem in that independence of position which alone can secure a satisfactory and an honourable issue." Now, assuredly the truth about these words is what was spoken by the Duke of Devonshire, and nothing else,— namely, that Mr. Gladstone said that the Liberal Party could not be trusted to settle the Home-rule question if they were dependent on the Irish Party. Mr. Glad- stone is clearly not of that opinion now ; and we do not see that there is any reason for his being ashamed of having changed his mind. Curiously enough, however, he does not say that he was mistaken then, or that he has changed his mind since, but instead, absolutely denies that i he said n 1886 that it would not be safe for the Liberal Party to deal with the Irish question if they were de- pendent on the Irish vote. When he is confronted with his very words, he explains himself in a manner which clearly shows that he has been overtaken by the truth-blindness of which we are . speaking. There is no other possible explanation, for if we are sure of anything, we are sure that Mr. Gladstone is not a hypocrite, and is not cynically trying to pass off an untrue explanation of his words on a too credulous public. The hopelessness of the attempt, if nothing else would, utterly precludes that idea. No cynically-minded statesman would dream of writing as Mr. Gladstone writes in his letter to the Duke of Devonshire. His words can be nothing but the outcome of truth-blindness,—the inability to see and dis- tinguish the truth. We must quote them as they stand, for it is impossible to give the sense of words conceived on a totally different plane of thought from that accessible to ordinary men :— ri• lair sorry vu---06-4k-vOrrtsipuntren.cd-wico.-Ybli usr-4-purboua-r—' matter, but I considered my statement to Mr. Wilkins to be re- quired, because I conceive that in your speech you converted a statement growing out of a particular position of parties and affairs, under my view at the time, into a general principle applicable to all positions of parties and affairs. At that period the anticipations of Home-rule held out by the Tory Government had, naturally enough, placed them in alliance with the Irish party, while they were in sharp hostility to us. I therefore thought that, in the event of the disappear- ance of that Government, and of our being called to deal with the Irish question, we should have no security against combinations strong enough to carry inadmissible amendments, and that it would be perilous to place ourselves in such a position. But now the Tories, held fast in their position by the Liberal Unionists, are in the strongest opposition to Irish claims, while four-fifths of the representatives of the Irish people seven and a half years ago publicly and formally accepted what we consider the fundamental principles of a safe and Constitutional plan, and have ever since that time, almost to a man, steadily co- operated with us for the advancement of such a plan, it would be strange, indeed, after such proofs of loyalty and moderation, were we now to admit of any of those arguments for mistrust which they themselves, I think, would admit to have been natural on our part when we had no assurances as to their views, and when they were in co-operation with our opponents. I think, therefore, that your application to the present situation of an opinion based upon circumstances directly opposite could not be described by me more fairly or more mildly than as an inaccurate representation, while I harboured no idea of imputing to you any- thing more than a casual inadvertence."
Again, we can only say that no man not overtaken by truth-blindness could have written in this way. Mr. Gladstone's indignation at the Duke of Devonshire's inaccuracy reminds one of Lord Shelbourne in the " Rolliad" :— " The noble Lord says I approve his plan. My Lords, I never did, I never can.
Plain words, thank Heaven, are always understood ;
I said I could approve, and not I would."
Archbishop Walsh seems almost as truth-blind as Mr. Gladstone. He infers, for example, that Mr. Plunket entirely misrepresented the facts when declaring that "the most natural construction" that can be put upon the language used by the Archbishop in his Thurles speech is that "Trinity College must either be handed over for purposes of Catholic education or must cease to exist." Yet in this speech (Thurles, 1886), Archbishop Walsh said :— " For so long as that central fortress of the education that is not Catholic [that is, Trinity College, Dublin] is allowed to stand, as it has now long stood, in the very foremost position, and to occupy the most glorious site in our Catholic city of Dublin, so long will it be impossible for any statesman, be he English or Irish, to deal with this great question on the only ground upon which University reform in Ireland can be regarded as satis- factory or even as entitled to acquiescence—the open and level ground of full and absolute equality for the Catholics of Ireland."
Surely, a man must be truth-blind who cannot see that Mr. Plunket's construction of this language is fair and reasonable. If Archbishop Walsh did not mean anything hostile to Trinity College, what did he mean ? A still more signal instance of truth-blindness was displayed by Mr. Dillon on Monday night. He cannot apparently see that the speech made by him and quoted by Mr. Chamber- lain, showed any desire to take revenge on the Irish police for the protection afforded by them to the landlords, and for their coercion of the Land-Leaguers. Nothing but inveterate truth-blindness could produce this state of mind. The position taken up by Mr. Sexton in view of the charges made against him by Mr. Arnold-Forster showed indications of the same defect. He ran his head, as it were, against a brick-wall of fact because he suffers from truth-blindness.
As we have said above, it would be most unfair to treat the victims of truth-blindness as if they were intentional perverters of truth. They are not that, any more than Coleridge wat: a liar because he was utterly incapable of distinguishing truth from falsehood. At the same time, we must be careful how we trust those who suffer from this de- fect, and must guard against its spread, for the disease is as catching as ophthalmia. When once, too, it takes hold upon the mind's-eye its spread is very rapid. A man who begins by using vague terms which will suit two sets of circumstances, will soon come to believe that "he meant that and its opposite," and to consider that when he said it would not be safe to trust A under certain circum- stances, what he really meant was that it would be safe to trust B under a. different condition of affairs. After all, in politics and elsewhere, the only safe plan is to follow the dictum of the Hermit of Prague, and to remember that "what is, is." It is far better to recognise an unpleasant truth than to pretend that black and white are much the same, and that the only difference is that white is a little the darker of the two.
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