Things are quiet outside an ant-hill
until the stick has been thrust into it. Mr.
Gladstone’s Bill for helping to the wiser government
of Ireland has brought forth our busy citizens on the
top-rubble in traversing counterswarms, and whatever
may be said against a Bill that deals roughly with
many sensitive interests, one asks whether anything
less violently impressive would have roused industrious
England to take this question at last into the mind,
as a matter for settlement. The Liberal leader
has driven it home; and wantonly, in the way of a
pedestrian demagogue, some think; certainly to the
discomposure of the comfortable and the myopely busy,
who prefer to live on with a disease in the frame
rather than at all be stirred. They can, we see,
pronounce a positive electoral negative; yet even
they, after the eighty and odd years of our domestic
perplexity, in the presence of the eighty and odd
members pledged for Home Rule, have been moved to excited
inquiries regarding measures short of the
obnoxious Bill. How much we suffer from sniffing
the vain incense of that word practical, is contempt
of prevision! Many of the measures now being
proposed responsively to the fretful cry for them,
as a better alternative to correction by force of
arms, are sound and just. Ten years back, or at
a more recent period before Mr. Parnell’s triumph
in the number of his followers, they would have formed
a basis for the appeasement of the troubled land.
The institution of county boards, the abolition of
the detested Castle, something like the establishment
of a Royal residence in Dublin, would have begun the
work well. Materially and sentimentally, they
were the right steps to take. They are now proposed
too late. They are regarded as petty concessions,
insufficient and vexatious. The lower and the
higher elements in the population are fused by the
enthusiasm of men who find themselves marching in
full body on a road, under a flag, at the heels of
a trusted leader; and they will no longer be fed with
sops. Petty concessions are signs of weakness
to the unsatisfied; they prick an appetite, they do
not close breaches. If our object is, as we hear
it said, to appease the Irish, we shall have to give
them the Parliament their leader demands. It
might once have been much less; it may be worried
into a raving, perhaps a desperate wrestling, for still
more. Nations pay Sibylline prices for want of
forethought. Mr. Parnell’s terms are embodied
in Mr. Gladstone’s Bill, to which he and his
band have subscribed. The one point for him is
the statutory Parliament, so that Ireland may civilly
govern herself; and standing before the world as representative
of his country, he addresses an applausive audience
when he cites the total failure of England to do that
business of government, as at least a logical reason
for the claim. England has confessedly failed;
the world says it, the country admits it. We
have failed, and not because the so-called Saxon is
incapable of understanding the Celt, but owing to
our system, suitable enough to us, of rule by Party,
which puts perpetually a shifting hand upon the reins,
and invites the clamour it has to allay. The Irish the
English too in some degree have been taught
that roaring; in its various forms, is the trick to
open the ears of Ministers. We have encouraged
by irritating them to practise it, until it has become
a habit, an hereditary profession with them.
Ministers in turn have defensively adopted the arts
of beguilement, varied by an exercise of the police.
We grew accustomed to periods of Irish fever.
The exhaustion ensuing we named tranquillity, and
hoped that it would bear fruit. But we did not
plant. The Party in office directed its attention
to what was uppermost and urgent to that
which kicked them. Although we were living, by
common consent; with a disease in the frame, eruptive
at intervals, a national disfigurement always a danger,
the Ministerial idea of arresting it for the purpose
of healing was confined, before the passing of Mr.
Gladstone’s well-meant Land Bill, to the occasional
despatch of commissions; and, in fine, we behold through
History the Irish malady treated as a form of British
constitutional gout. Parliament touched on the
Irish only when the Irish were active as a virus.
Our later alternations of cajolery and repression
bear painful resemblance to the nervous fit of rickety
riders compounding with their destinations that they
may keep their seats. The cajolery was foolish,
if an end was in view; the repression inefficient.
To repress efficiently we have to stifle a conscience
accusing us of old injustice, and forget that we are
sworn to freedom. The cries that we have been
hearing for Cromwell or for Bismarck prove the existence
of an impatient faction in our midst fitter to wear
the collars of those masters whom they invoke than
to drop a vote into the ballot-box. As for the
prominent politicians who have displaced their rivals
partly on the strength of an implied approbation of
those cries, we shall see how they illumine the councils
of a governing people. They are wiser than the
barking dogs. Cromwell and Bismarck are great
names; but the harrying of Ireland did not settle
it, and to Germanize a Posen and call it peace will
find echo only in the German tongue. Posen is
the error of a master-mind too much given to hammer
at obstacles. He has, however, the hammer.
Can it be imagined in English hands? The braver
exemplar for grappling with monstrous political tasks
is Cavour, and he would not have hinted at the iron
method or the bayonet for a pacification. Cavour
challenged debate; he had faith in the active intellect,
and that is the thing to be prayed for by statesmen
who would register permanent successes. The Irish,
it is true, do not conduct an argument coolly.
Mr. Parnell and his eighty-five have not met the Conservative
leader and his following in the Commons with the gravity
of platonic disputants. But they have a logical
position, equivalent to the best of arguments.
They are representatives, they would say, of a country
admittedly ill-governed by us; and they have accepted
the Bill of the defeated Minister as final. Its
provisions are their terms of peace. They offer
in return for that boon to take the burden we have
groaned under off our hands. If we answer that
we think them insincere, we accuse these thrice accredited
representatives of the Irish people of being hypocrites
and crafty conspirators; and numbers in England, affected
by the weapons they have used to get to their present
strength, do think it; forgetful that our obtuseness
to their constant appeals forced them into the extremer
shifts of agitation. Yet it will hardly be denied
that these men love Ireland; and they have not shown
themselves by their acts to be insane. To suppose
them conspiring for separation indicates a suspicion
that they have neither hearts nor heads. For
Ireland, separation is immediate ruin. It would
prove a very short sail for these conspirators before
the ship went down. The vital necessity of the
Union for both, countries, obviously for the weaker
of the two, is known to them; and unless we resume
our exasperation of the wild fellow the Celt can be
made by such a process, we have not rational grounds
for treating him, or treating with him, as a Bedlamite.
He has besides his passions shrewd sense; and his
passions may be rightly directed by benevolent attraction.
This is language derided by the victorious enemy;
it speaks nevertheless what the world, and even troubled
America, thinks of the Irish Celt. More of it
now on our side of the Channel would be serviceable.
The notion that he hates the English comes of his
fevered chafing against the harness of England, and
when subject to his fevers, he is unrestrained in his
cries and deeds. That pertains to the nature
of him. Of course, if we have no belief in the
virtues of friendliness and confidence none
in regard to the Irishman we show him his
footing, and we challenge the issue. For the
sole alternative is distinct antagonism, a form of
war. Mr. Gladstone’s Bill has brought us
to that definite line. Ireland having given her
adhesion to it, swearing that she does so in good faith,
and will not accept a smaller quantity, peace is only
to be had by our placing trust in the Irish; we trust
them or we crush them. Intermediate ways are
but the prosecution of our ugly flounderings in Bogland;
and dubious as we see the choice on either side, a
decisive step to right or left will not show us to
the world so bemired, to ourselves so miserably inefficient,
as we appear in this session of a new Parliament.
With his eighty-five, apart from external operations
lawful or not, Mr. Parnell can act as a sort of lumbricus
in the House. Let journalists watch and chronicle
events: if Mr. Gladstone has humour, they will
yet note a peculiar smile on his closed mouth from
time to time when the alien body within the House,
from which, for the sake of its dignity and ability
to conduct its affairs, he would have relieved it
till the day of a warmer intelligence between Irish
and English, paralyzes our machinery business.
An ably-handled coherent body in the midst of the liquid
groups will make it felt that Ireland is a nation,
naturally dependent though she must be. We have
to do with forces in politics, and the great majority
of the Irish Nationalists in Ireland has made them
a force.
No doubt Mr. Matthew Arnold is correct
in his apprehensions of the dangers we may fear from
a Dublin House of Commons. The declarations and
novel or ultra theories might almost be written down
beforehand. I should, for my part, anticipate
a greater danger in the familiar attitude of the English
metropolitan Press and public toward an experiment
they dislike and incline to dread: the cynical
comments, the quotations between inverted commas,
the commiserating shrug, cold irony, raw banter, growl
of menace, sharp snap, rounds of laughter. Frenchmen
of the Young Republic, not presently appreciated as
offensive, have had some of these careless trifles
translated for them, and have been stung. We
favoured Germany with them now and then, before Germany
became the first power in Europe. Before America
had displayed herself as greatest among the giants
that do not go to pieces, she had, as Americans forgivingly
remember, without mentioning, a series of flicks of
the whip. It is well to learn manners without
having them imposed on us. There are various
ways for tripping the experiment. Nevertheless,
when the experiment is tried, considering that our
welfare is involved in its not failing, as we have
failed, we should prepare to start it cordially, cordially
assist it. Thoughtful political minds regard the
measure as a backward step; yet conceiving but a prospect
that a measure accepted by Home Rulers will possibly
enable the Irish and English to step together, it
seems better worth the venture than to pursue a course
of prospectless discord! Whatever we do or abstain
from doing has now its evident dangers, and this being
imminent may appear the larger of them; but if a weighing
of the conditions dictates it, and conscience approves,
the wiser proceeding is to make trial of the untried.
Our outlook was preternaturally black, with enormous
increase of dangers when the originator of our species
venturesomely arose from the posture of the ‘quatre
pattes’. We consider that we have not
lost by his temerity. In states of dubitation
under impelling elements, the instinct pointing to
courageous action is, besides the manlier, conjecturably
the right one.