TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE root of all this trouble in Cork is the root of all other trouble in Ireland, the perverse habit of applying English ideas of government and administration to a people of different tendencies, who, under widely different circumstances, are seeking very different ends. To a country distracted with historical, religious, and agrarian feuds, which, more than any country in the world, requires scientific administration,— administration from above, by men intent only on justice,— we apply a system under which every magistrate is either a partizan, or, what is nearly as bad, is suspected of partizanship, under which he must be either a member of a distrusted class, or one elected by a populace so divided among themselves by impassable chasms of feeling and opinion that the passport to their favour is party violence. In the rural districts, where the grand contest is between peasant and landlord, we confine the bench to landlords ; and in the cities, where the populace live on the verge of civil war, we confide the chief magistracy to their nominees. The passport to civic office is, in an Irish city, to be Orange or Fenian, and then we wonder because the successful candidates display Orange or Fenian proclivities ; do not, in a single year of office, manifest qualities rare even in the best judges, and, above all, freedom from the partizanship through which alone the coveted positions can be made secure. We abuse the Americans for their folly in making the judiciary elective, and then leave a population like that of Cork to elect an officer who is, in their own eyes, at all events, and for the cases they care about, a judge, and improve the position by seating by his side men who, if they were all Hales or Somers, would be considered by a populace which detests their class unjust judges. It is the French, or at all events the Indian, system which Ireland requires, in Ulster as well as in Cork, and we give it the one which of all others is furthest in principle and action from that ideal. Even when ascendancy has been abandoned and the tenure reformed, this great blunder will still remain to be corrected, before we shall have in Ireland a people contented with and confident in the law.
However, there the system is, unchangeable for the present, and the only thing for practical men to do is to make the best of it ; and the way to make the best of it. is surely to supply as far as possible by force from without those qualities which ought to be supplied from within. If we cannot appoint " stipendiaries " ard Prefects in place of squires and mayors, supersede country gentlemen by trained civilians, and borough magistrates by skilled agents of the Crown,—as we do pretty completely in Scotland,—we can at least compel the men we are obliged to employ to keep within certain limits of justice and decorum. The magistrates ought to be beyond local or party feeling ; but as they are not, the next best thing is surely to strengthen the hands of the Home Office, which is. Steady pressure, strongly applied, will make very wild ruffians good soldiers, and so it will make of very wild partizans endurable magistrates and mayors. The local administration being weak, it is most essential that the central administration should be strong ; and so far from thinking that the Government has gone too far in dealing with the Mayor of Cork, our only doubt is whether it ought not to have proposed a more general Bill. It certainly ought, if it were possible to confine such a Bill to Ireland. To put it in the mildest way, Mr. O'Sullivan is an extreme instance of a man not only unfitted for the Bench by partizan feeling, but by a total incapacity to refrain from indulging that feeling in public. The special difficulty of Cork, the special subject of magisterial proceedings, is Fenianism ; and of Fenianism the Mayor publicly announces himself so strong a supporter, that he considers Fenian feeling a palliative for the most extreme breaches of law. The motive, he says, of the assassin O'Farrell was noble. This, be it remembered, is his own view of his own meaning,—not that which other men would take, and it is precisely the view, expressed in an extreme form, which is always undermining the impartiality of the Irish magistracy. Now it is Orangeism, now Fanianism, then Protestantism, and again "just indignation against landlord power ;" but in its essence it is always the same, an assertion that law is not rightfully sovereign, that there are opinions which justify men in defying, evading, or wresting it. No magistrate who holds and expresses that opinion is fit for the Bench, and the Mayor of Cork, unless he can upset apparently overwhelming evidence, has gone further than that, has not only expressed, but applied his opinion in the most offensive way. Assassination is a crime, treason is a crime, yet the Mayor of Cork declares that in his judgment O'Farrell was noble because he attempted an assassination from a wish to commit treason. We are quite aware that the Princes, the Prince of Wales and his little son excepted, are not guarded by any special law, but the sole motive for selecting the Duke of Edinburgh as victim was that his murder would be as much like treason as possible, and would help to shake the Throne. And the Mayor says that motive, which to him, as magistrate, should be the worst of motives, morally extenuates or absolves the crime. To allow such a man to hold office is to sanction directly the very worst evil to which our imperfect magistracy in Ireland is liable, the supersession of legal impartiality by political feeling. He ought to be disqualified ; and if Government does not possess the power to disqualify him, it must ask for the power. And this is precisely what Mr. Gladstone has done in this individual case. To talk about a. bill of pains and penalties, as Mr. Disraeli did in his extraordinary speech,—a speech instantly repudiated by his owl' followers,—is absurd. The Disability Bill only gives the Executive a power it ought long since to have possessed, the power of removing a man from the Bench who has displayed. prejudice so strong as morally to incapacitate him for doing justice. Mr. O'Sullivan is not punished for his speech, his inherent disqualification for judicial office is only formally recognized by Government as it would have been had he been appointed like most of his colleagues on the Bench. The only doubt is whether power to remove all Mayors ought not to have been taken at the same time. As a matter of principle, we think it should, Parliament being the natural judge of the fitness of all officials ; but it may not have been expedient to rouse a municipal opposition in order to meet a momentary difficulty, and the Bill itself is a strong warning to Mayors that Government will not hesitate to punish gross abuses of their official privilege. To let Mr. O'Sullivan escape simply because Disabling Bills are infrequent, would have been to acknowledge that one section of the magistracy is above the law it is sworn to interpret, to increase, that is, the grand evil which in Ireland waits upon local self-government.
We say the action of Government is wise, even if we accept the Mayor of Cork's own explanation of his own meaning, but there is a political as well as a social question in the matter. Do we intend to allow Ireland to be administered by men utterly hostile to the Empire, men who are only restrained by prudence from rebellion I Clearly not. The policy of the Liberal party now in possession of the Government is on this point unmistakable, though so often designedly mistaken. It is to remove every sort of justification for rebellion in Ireland, in order that if rebellion comes, as after grievances have been removed it ought not to come, we may put it down with a clear conscience,—put it down, if necessary, by the sword. It is not to facilitate, but to anticipate treason, that we are superseding an unjust by an impartial system of government, are abolishing ascendancy, and hope to remove whatever is real in the grievances connected with tenure. It is from no secret sympathy with disaffection, but from a resolve that all excuse for disaffection shall be removed, that the Government has entered upon its laborious path, a path which Irish "patriots" seem determined to strew with thorns. Certain classes of Irishmen seem determined to fall into this error, and it is well that they should once for all be disabused, should be convinced, even if it be by an exceptional Bill, that the offer made to them is justice to Ireland under the Imperial Parliament, not justice to Ireland as a separate or hostile State.
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