THE

LAW MAGAZINE AND REVIEW.

No. CCLXXX.-MAY, 1891.

GR

I. THE IRISH CRISIS.

REAT events run up to far-reaching causes; but they have been precipitated by the most trivial incidents. Half a century prepared our Civil War; the French Revolution grew out of the ills of ages. Yet Cromwell would hardly have ruled in England, had Essex known how to lead an army, and Jacobinism might not have mastered France, had Louis XVI. played the man at Varennes. The Parnellite movement, and all that pertains to it, must have failed, I believe, in the long run; for they were in conflict with the nature of things, and with the moral forces that direct mankind. Nevertheless, this wicked plot against the State has been broken up by a mere private scandal; a common-place of the Divorce Court has done more to quickly extinguish Home Rule than the solemn decision of a High Court of Justice, the utterances of our most sagacious Statesmen, and the warnings of enlightened public opinion. "Recent events"-to adopt the phraseology of the day—have dissipated the alluring mirage through which Irish affairs were falsely seen; and they have brought us face to face with the hard realities of Irish treason, sedition, and socialistic passion. They have torn the film from ulcerous parts of Ireland thrown over them by self-deluding sentiment; they have set before us the putrefying sores eating into the frame of the Irish community; and they have shewn what was the manner of men meant by faction to have a free hand in Ireland, and

to subject her to the most cruel of tyrannies. They have proved that the boasted "Union of Hearts," which was to make England and Ireland one, was, on the one hand, the cant of a party, wilfully blinded to facts, in a struggle for office, and, on the other, a foul conspiracy, trading on falsehood, to compass its base ends, to revel in plunder, and to break up the Empire. They have exhibited, too, the Irish priesthood in an aspect revolting to English nature; and they have warned Nonconformist England to shun an alliance for selfish ends, with a dishonoured enemy. Above all, they have made a widening breach between the hostile monsters of Irish faction, still eyeing each other with deadly hate, which no expedients can really close; and they have convicted Mr. Gladstone and his disheartened followers of a credulity, a short-sightedness, and a want of wisdom which ought to exclude them for years from power in the State. They will make the cause of Home Rule impossible, as a source of misery and wrong to Ireland, and a grave danger to the Three Kingdoms, if Englishmen retain the sound common sense and the political instinct, which have secured them greatness.

The O'Shea divorce case led to the Nonconformist outbreak, to Mr. Gladstone's surrender to it, to the attempt to ostracise Mr. Parnell, to the Parnellite split, and to the breaking up of the Parnellite and Gladstonian alliance, the only solid ground of the Home Rule policy. The first marked result of this series of facts is to exhibit, and bring home to the hearts of men, how absolutely opposed in their conception of Home Rule are the Gladstonian following and the two-fold "Irish Party." Mr. Gladstone's extinct Bill of 1886-based on credulous ignorance of Irish affairs-would have caused civil war and a rupture with England; but it implied the supremacy of the Imperial Parliament; and it cabined and confined the Assembly in College Green, with marked jealousy, within the narrowest

bounds. It would be an insult to Mr. Gladstone to place his word in the balance against Mr. Parnell's assertions; but his denial of what took place at Hawarden is ambiguous, and in general terms; and it is most probable that in 1889, at least, he contemplated that the Home Rule Parliament should be a strictly subordinate body, sending delegates to Westminster, as a sign of this, and under the control of the Imperial Parliament, and, even in some degree, of the British Ministry, as regards questions which, he must have known, could not be solely abandoned to any set of Irishmen. This was the view, too, of his best known lieutenants-of Lords Granville, Spencer, Rosebery, and Herschell, of Sir William Harcourt, and even of Mr. Morley, and the mass of his adherents-nine-tenths of these had certainly not thought out the subject, and were either misled by false analogies, or connected "Home Rule" with "Justice to Ireland," or simply bowed before a political fetish-were content to tread in their leader's footsteps. It may be said, in fact, of the whole Gladstonian Party, that they meant by Home Rule an ample concession of self-government to a mere dependency, with large reservations as to some important matters; they never dreamed that England was to lose her hold on Ireland, and even on Irish affairs, within defined limits; and, ridiculous as the whole policy was, for it presupposed a "Union of Hearts" where there was disunion, it was compatible with loyalty and genuine love of country. Those ideas, born of conceit and self deception, have been scattered to the winds by the open avowals of the Irish "patriots," of either faction, as to the kind of Home Rule they demand and insist on. Agreeing in nothing else, the Hibernian Jacobins and Girondins declare that Ireland must be, practically, an independent State, and specially require that the next Home Rule measure shall contain none of the exceptions.

and safeguards which, it was assumed, Mr. Gladstone would make its conditions. The Imperial Parliament is to have no veto in the legislation of the Assembly in Dublin; this is to be "absolutely Sovereign" within its domain. The Irish delegates to Westminster, who, were they twenty only, would be an anomalous nuisance not to be endured, are to be in sufficient strength to protect " Irish Rights," that is, to paralyse and obstruct the National Councils, and to be shifting ballast to upset the vessel of the State. The Irish Parliament is to possess an uncontrolled Executive, to nominate magistrates and judicial officers, and to have the Constabulary force in its hands; in other words, rulers of the Davitt type are to be given weapons to torture every loyal Irishman, to exact a ruthless vengeance from indignant Ulster, and to do intolerable wrongs in the name of the justice approved by Fenian traitors and Clan-na-Gael anarchists. Above all, the Irish land is to be the prey of the Home Rule Parliament; that is to say, the Irish landed gentry are to be driven from their homes, too happy if they can escape with their lives; and their estates are to be divided between fanatical priests, adventurers of the true "patriot" breed, and a horde of peasants, artisans, and labourers, who had furthered the holy cause of agrarian outrage. In theory, therefore, Ireland would be an independent State, linked to the Empire only by the tie of a Viceroy; and all the ills that led to the rising of 1798, and made the Union necessary, would be restored, with this difference, that Grattan's Parliament was a loyal, though a venal Assembly, while a Home Rule Parliament would be a mere rebellious conclave. Fact, however, in this instance, would go far beyond theory; Ireland would be not only an independent, but a hostile State, the deadly foe of England, and all that belongs to her; and her social life would be a scene of confusion and discord, of anarchy, lawlessness, and cruel tyranny, which

Jacobin France alone has equalled. Yet, these are the demands of Mr. Parnell; and those of the Seceders scarcely fall short of them.

A great gulf, therefore, divides the Gladstonians and the Irish factions in the matter of Home Rule; a gap has been broken in the famous "Arch of Peace," brilliant as a rainbow, perhaps, but as airy a structure; and it totters over a waste of destructive waters. The next main result of this strange crisis has been to shew what Mr. Parnell really is, and to place him before Englishmen in his true character. It is ridiculous to say that Home Rule stands apart from the qualities of those to whom it would give power; the two subjects are inseparably linked; and, as a matter of fact, the Gladstonian policy was openly justified on the assumed fitness of Mr. Parnell to be the first Irish Minister. Firm in this monstrous belief, Mr. Gladstone forgot that he had imprisoned his future colleague as an apostle of plunder; Sir William Harcourt swallowed Parnellite juice with delight; and the whole following laughed at Unionist warnings, mocked at the findings of the Special Commission, and announced that the paid satellite of Patrick Ford, and the associate of Egan and like worthies, was a kind of Washington in Irish politics,a "Conservative force"-to keep Home Rule within the bounds of moderation and right. It is disagreeable, no doubt, that this hero-worship should have been proved to be idolatrous folly; the Gladstonians, of course, are not pleased, though false to themselves in a hundred instances, that they have to burn what they adored a few months ago; and though he may cling to them like the old man of the sea, and may possibly even become their master, we cannot wonder that they should have vehemently tried to fling Mr. Parnell off like the moral leper he held up to the hatred of Irish peasants. But Mr. Parnell has laid his own nature bare, and the discovery, painful as it may be to his