The agitation of the Irish land league strikes at the roots of all
contract, and therefore at the very foundations of modern society;
but if we would effectually withstand it, we must cease to insist
on maintaining the forms of free contract where the reality is
impossible.—T. H. GREEN.(32)
I
On the day in 1880 when Lord Beaconsfield was finally quitting the
official house in Downing Street, one who had been the ablest and most
zealous supporter of his policy in the press, called to bid him good-bye.
The visitor talked gloomily of the national prospect; of difficulties with
Austria, with Russia, with the Turk; of the confusions to come upon Europe
from the doctrines of Midlothian. The fallen minister listened. Then
looking at his friend, he uttered in deep tones a single word.
“_Ireland!_” he said.
In a speech made in 1882 Mr. Gladstone put the case to the House of
Commons:—
The government had to deal with a state of things in Ireland
entirely different from any that had been known there for fifty
years.... With a political revolution we have ample strength to
cope. There is no reason why our cheeks should grow pale, or why
our hearts should sink, at the idea of grappling with a political
revolution. The strength of this country is tenfold what is
required for such a purpose. But a social revolution is a very
different matter.... The seat and source of the movement was not
to be found during the time the government was in power. It is to
be looked for in the foundation of the land league.(33)
Two years later he said at Edinburgh:—
I frankly admit I had had much upon my hands connected with the
doings of the Beaconsfield government in almost every quarter of
the world, and I did not know, no one knew, the severity of the
crisis that was already swelling upon the horizon, and that
shortly after rushed upon us like a flood.(34)
So came upon them by degrees the predominance of Irish affairs and Irish
activity in the parliament of 1880, which had been chosen without much
reference to Ireland.
II
A social revolution with the land league for its organ in Ireland, and Mr.
Parnell and his party for its organ in parliament, now, in Mr. Gladstone’s
words, rushed upon him and his government like a flood. The mind of the
country was violently drawn from Dulcigno and Thessaly, from Batoum and
Erzeroum, from the wild squalor of Macedonia and Armenia to squalor not
less wild in Connaught and Munster, in Mayo, Galway, Sligo, Kerry.
Agrarian agitation on the one hand, parliamentary violence on the other,
were the two potent weapons by which the Irish revolutionary leader
assailed the misrule of the British garrison as the agents of the British
parliament in his country. This formidable movement slowly unmasked
itself. The Irish government, represented by Mr. Forster in the cabinet,
began by allowing the law conferring exceptional powers upon the executive
to lapse. The main reason was want of time to pass a fresh Act. In view of
the undoubted distress in some parts of Ireland, and of the harshness of
certain evictions, the government further persuaded the House of Commons
to pass a bill for compensating an evicted tenant on certain conditions,
if the landlord turned him out of his holding. The bill was no easy dose
either for the cabinet or its friends. Lord Lansdowne stirred much
commotion by retiring from the government, and landowners and capitalists
were full of consternation. At least one member of the cabinet was
profoundly uneasy. It is impossible to read the letters of the Duke of
Argyll to Mr. Gladstone on land, church establishment, the Zulu war,
without wondering on what theory a cabinet was formed that included him,
able and (M21) upright as he was, along with radicals like Mr.
Chamberlain. Before the cabinet was six months old the duke was plucking
Mr. Gladstone’s sleeve with some vivacity at the Birmingham language on
Irish land. Mr. Parnell in the committee stage abstained from supporting
the measure, sixteen liberals voted against the third reading, and the
House of Lords, in which nationalist Ireland had not a single
representative, threw out the bill by a majority of 282 against 51. It was
said that if all the opposition peers had stayed away, still ministers
would have been beaten by their own supporters.
Looking back upon these events, Mr. Gladstone set out in a memorandum of
later years, that during the session of 1880 the details of the budget
gave him a good deal to do, while the absorbing nature of foreign
questions before and after his accession to office had withdrawn his
attention from his own Land Act of 1870:(35)—
Late in the session came the decisive and disastrous rejection by
the House of Lords of the bill by means of which the government
had hoped to arrest the progress of disorder, and avert the
necessity for measures in the direction of coercion. The rapid and
vast extension of agrarian disturbance followed, as was to be
expected, this wild excess of landlordism, and the Irish
government proceeded to warn the cabinet that coercive legislation
would be necessary.
Forster allowed himself to be persuaded by the governmental agents
in Ireland that the root of the evil lay within small compass;
that there were in the several parishes a certain limited number
of unreasonable and mischievous men, that these men were known to
the police, and that if summary powers were confided to the Irish
government, by the exercise of which these objectionable persons
might be removed, the evil would die out of itself. I must say I
never fell into this extraordinary illusion of Forster’s about his
’village ruffian.’ But he was a very impracticable man placed in a
position of great responsibility. He was set upon a method of
legislation adapted to the erroneous belief that the mischief lay
only with a very limited number of well-known individuals, that is
to say, the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act.... Two points of
difference arose: first, as to the nature of the coercion to be
used; secondly, as to its time. I insisted that we were bound to
try what we could do against Parnell under the existing law,
before asking for extraordinary powers. Both Bright and
Chamberlain, if I remember right, did very good service in
protesting against haste, and resisting Forster’s desire to
anticipate the ordinary session for the purpose of obtaining
coercive powers. When, however, the argument of time was exhausted
by the Parnell trial(36) and otherwise, I obtained no support from
them in regard to the kind of coercion we were to ask. I
considered it should be done by giving stringency to the existing
law, but not by abolishing the right to be tried before being
imprisoned. I felt the pulse of various members of the cabinet,
among whom I seem to recollect Kimberley and Carlingford, but I
could obtain no sympathy, and to my dismay both Chamberlain and
Bright arrived at the conclusion that if there was to be coercion
at all, which they lamented, there was something simple and
effective in the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act which made
such a method preferable to others.(37) I finally acquiesced. It
may be asked why? My resistance would have broken up the
government or involved my own retirement. My reason for
acquiescence was that I bore in mind the special commission under
which the government had taken office. It related to the foreign
policy of the country, the whole spirit and effect of which we
were to reconstruct. This work had not yet been fully
accomplished, and it seemed to me that the effective prosecution
of it was our first and highest duty. I therefore submitted.
By the end of November Mr. Gladstone explained to the Queen that the state
of Ireland was menacing; its distinctive character was not so much that of
general insecurity of life, as that of a widespread conspiracy against
property. The worst of it was, he said, that the leaders, unlike
O’Connell, failed to denounce crime. The outbreak was not comparable to
that of 1832. In 1879 homicides were 64 against 242 for the earlier year
of disturbance. But things were bad enough. (M22) In Galway they had a
policeman for every forty-seven adult males, and a soldier for every
ninety-seven. Yet dangerous terrorism was rampant. “During more than
thirty-seven years since I first entered a cabinet,” Mr. Gladstone told
the Speaker (November 25), “I have hardly known so difficult a question of
administration, as that of the immediate duty of the government in the
present state of Ireland. The multitude of circumstances to be taken into
account must strike every observer. Among these stand the novelty of the
suspension of Habeas Corpus in a case of agrarian crime stimulated by a
public society, and the rather serious difficulty of obtaining it; but
more important than these is the grave doubt whether it would really reach
the great characteristic evil of the time, namely, the paralysis of most
important civil and proprietary rights, and whether the immediate proposal
of a remedy, probably ineffective and even in a coercive sense partial,
would not seriously damage the prospects of that arduous and comprehensive
task which without doubt we must undertake when parliament is summoned.”
In view of considerations of this kind, the awkwardness of directing an
Act of parliament virtually against leaders who were at the moment the
object of indictment in the Irish law courts; difficulties of time; doubts
as to the case being really made out; doubts as to the efficacy of the
proposed remedy, Mr. Forster did not carry the cabinet, but agreed to
continue the experiment of the ordinary law. The experiment was no
success, and coercion accompanied by land reform became the urgent policy.
III
The opening of the session of 1881 at once brought obstruction into full
view. The Irish took up their position as a party of action. They spoke
incessantly; as Mr. Gladstone put it, “sometimes rising to the level of
mediocrity, and more often grovelling amidst mere trash in unbounded
profusion.” Obstruction is obstruction all the world over. It was not
quite new at Westminster, but it was new on this scale. Closure proposals
sprang up like mushrooms. Liberal members with a historical bent ran
privately to the Speaker with ancient precedents of dictatorial powers
asserted by his official ancestors, and they exhorted him to revive them.
Mr. Forster brought in his bill. Its scope may be described in a sentence.
It practically enabled the viceroy to lock up anybody he pleased, and to
detain him as long as he pleased, while the Act remained in force.(38) The
debate for leave to introduce the bill lasted several days, without any
sign of coming to an end. Here is the Speaker’s account of his own
memorable act in forcing a close:—
_Monday, Jan. 31._—The House was boiling over with indignation at
the apparent triumph of obstruction, and Mr. _G_., yielding to the
pressure of his friends, committed himself unwisely, as I thought,
to a continuous sitting on this day in order to force the bill
through its first stage.
On Tuesday, after a sitting of twenty-four hours, I saw plainly
that this attempt to carry the bill by continuous sitting would
fail, the Parnell party being strong in numbers, discipline, and
organisation, and with great gifts of speech. I reflected on the
situation, and came to the conclusion that it was my duty to
extricate the House from the difficulty by closing the debate of
my own authority, and so asserting the undoubted will of the House
against a rebellious minority. I sent for Mr. G. on Tuesday (Feb.
1), about noon, and told him that I should be prepared to put the
question in spite of obstruction on the following conditions: 1.
That the debate should be carried on until the following morning,
my object in this delay being to mark distinctly to the outside
world the extreme gravity of the situation, and the necessity of
the step which I was about to take. 2. That he should reconsider
the regulation of business, either by giving more authority to the
House, or by conferring authority on the Speaker.
He agreed to these conditions, and summoned a meeting of the
cabinet, which assembled in my library at four P.M. on Tuesday
while the House was sitting, and I was in the chair. At that
meeting the resolution as to business assumed the shape in which
it finally appeared on the following Thursday, it having been
previously considered at former meetings of the cabinet. I
arranged with Playfair to take the chair on Tuesday night about
midnight, engaging to resume it on Wednesday morning at nine.
Accordingly at nine I took the chair, Biggar being in possession
of the House. I rose, and he resumed his seat. I proceeded with my
address as concerted with May, and when I had concluded I put the
question. The scene was most dramatic; but all passed off without
disturbance, the Irish party on the second division retiring under
protest.
I had communicated, with Mr. G.’s approval, my intention to close
the debate to Northcote, but to no one else, except May, from whom
I received much assistance. Northcote was startled, but expressed
no disapproval of the course proposed.
So ended the memorable sitting of January 31. At noon, on February 2, the
House assembled in much excitement. The question was put challenging the
Speaker’s conduct. “I answered,” he says, “on the spur of the moment that
I had acted on my own responsibility, and from a sense of duty to the
House. I never heard such loud and protracted cheering, none cheering more
loudly than Gladstone.” “The Speaker’s firmness in mind,” Mr. Gladstone
reported to the Queen, “his suavity in manner, his unwearied patience, his
incomparable temper, under a thousand provocations, have rendered possible
a really important result.”
IV
After coercion came a land bill, and here Mr. Gladstone once more
displayed his unequalled mastery of legislative skill and power. He had to
explain and be ready to explain again and again, what he told Lord
Selborne was “the most difficult measure he had ever known to come under
the detailed consideration of a cabinet.” It was no affair this time of
speeches out of a railway carriage, or addressed to excited multitudes in
vast halls. That might be, if you so pleased, “the empty verbosity of
exuberant rhetoric”; but nobody could say that of the contest over the
complexities of Irish tenure, against the clever and indomitable Irish
experts who fought under the banner of Mr. Parnell. Northcote was not far
wrong when he said that though the bill was carried by two to one, there
was hardly a man in the House beyond the Irish ranks who cared a straw
about it. Another critic said that if the prime minister had asked the
House to pass the _Koran_ or the _Nautical Almanac_ as a land bill, he
would have met no difficulty.
The history of the session was described as the carriage of a single
measure by a single man. Few British members understood it, none mastered
it. The whigs were disaffected about it, the radicals doubted it, the
tories thought that property as a principle was ruined by it, the
Irishmen, when the humour seized them, bade him send the bill to line
trunks. Mr. Gladstone, as one observer truly says, “faced difficulties
such as no other bill of this country has ever encountered, difficulties
of politics and difficulties of law, difficulties of principle and
difficulties of detail, difficulties of party and difficulties of
personnel, difficulties of race and difficulties of class, and he has
never once failed, or even seemed to fail, in his clear command of the
question, in his dignity and authority of demeanour, in his impartiality
in accepting amending suggestions, in his firmness in resisting
destructive suggestions, in his clear perception of his aim, and his
strong grasp of the fitting means. And yet it is hardly possible to
appreciate adequately the embarrassments of the situation.”
Enough has already been said of the legislation of 1870, and its
establishment of the principle that Irish land is not the subject of an
undivided ownership, but a partnership.(39) The act of 1870 failed because
it had too many exceptions and limitations; because in administration the
compensation to the tenant for disturbance was inadequate; and because it
did not fix the cultivator in his holding. Things had now ripened. The
Richmond Commission shortly before had pointed to a court for fixing
rents; that is, for settling the terms of the partnership. A commission
nominated by Mr. Gladstone and presided over by Lord Bessborough had
reported early in 1881 in favour not only of fair rents to be settled by a
tribunal, but of fixity of tenure or the right of (M23) the tenant to
remain in his holding if he paid his rent, and of free sale; that is, his
right to part with his interest. These “three F’s” were the substance of
the legislation of 1881.
Rents could not be paid, and landlords either would not or could not
reduce them. In the deepest interests of social order, and in confirmation
of the tenant’s equitable and customary ownership, the only course open to
the imperial legislature was to erect machinery for fixing fair rents. The
alternative to what became matter of much objurgation as dual ownership,
was a single ownership that was only a short name for allowing the
landlord to deal as he liked with the equitable interest of the tenant.
Without the machinery set up by Mr. Gladstone, there could be no security
for the protection of the cultivator’s interest. What is more, even in
view of a wide and general extension of the policy of buying out the
landlord and turning the tenant into single owner, still a process of
valuation for purposes of fair price would have been just as
indispensable, as under the existing system was the tiresome and costly
process of valuation for purposes of fair rent. It is true that if the
policy of purchase had been adopted, this process would have been
performed once for all. But opinion was not nearly ready either in England
or Ireland for general purchase. And as Mr. Gladstone had put it to Bright
in 1870, to turn a little handful of occupiers into owners would not have
touched the fringe of the case of the bulk of the Irish cultivators, then
undergoing acute mischief and urgently crying for prompt relief. Mr.
Bright’s idea of purchase, moreover, assumed that the buyer would come
with at least a quarter of the price in his hand,—an assumption not
consistent with the practical possibilities of the case.
The legislation of 1881 no doubt encountered angry criticism from the
English conservative, and little more than frigid approval from the Irish
nationalist. It offended the fundamental principle of the landlords; its
administration and the construction of some of its leading provisions by
the courts disappointed and irritated the tenant party. Nevertheless any
attempt in later times to impair the authority of the Land Act of 1881
brought the fact instantly to light, that the tenant knew it to be the
fundamental charter of his redemption from worse than Egyptian bondage. In
measuring this great agrarian law, not only by parliamentary force and
legislative skill and power, but by the vast and abiding depth of its
social results, both direct and still more indirect, many will be disposed
to give it the highest place among Mr. Gladstone’s achievements as
lawmaker.
Fault has sometimes been found with Mr. Gladstone for not introducing his
bill in the session of 1880. If this had been done, it is argued, Ireland
would have been appeased, no coercion would have been necessary, and we
should have been spared disastrous parliamentary exasperations and all the
other mischiefs and perils of the quarrel between England and Ireland that
followed. Criticism of this kind overlooks three facts. Neither Mr.
Gladstone nor Forster nor the new House of Commons was at all ready in
1880 to accept the Three F’s. Second, the Bessborough commission had not
taken its evidence, and made its momentous report. Third, this argument
assumes motives in Mr. Parnell, that probably do not at all cover the
whole ground of his policy. As it happened, I called on Mr. Gladstone one
morning early in 1881. “You have heard,” I asked, “that the Bessborough
commission are to report for the Three F’s?” “I have not heard,” he said;
“it is incredible!” As so often comes to pass in politics, it was only a
step from the incredible to the indispensable. But in 1880 the
indispensable was also the impossible. It was the cruel winter of 1880-1
that made much difference.
In point of endurance the session was one of the most remarkable on
record. The House of Commons sat 154 days and for 1400 hours; some 240 of
these hours were after midnight. Only three times since the Reform bill
had the House sat for more days; only once, in 1847, had the total number
of hours been exceeded and that only by seven, and never before had the
House sat so many hours after midnight. On the Coercion bill the House sat
continuously once for 22 hours, and once for 41. The debates on the Land
bill took up 58 sittings, and the Coercion bill 22. No such length of
discussion, Mr. Gladstone told the Queen, (M24) was recorded on any
measure since the committee on the first Reform bill. The Reform bill of
1867 was the only measure since 1843 that took as many as 35 days of
debate. The Irish Church bill took 21 days and the Land bill of 1870 took
25. Of the 14,836 speeches delivered, 6315 were made by Irish members. The
Speaker and chairman of committees interposed on points of order nearly
2000 times during the session. Mr. Parnell, the Speaker notes, “with his
minority of 24 dominates the House. When will the House take courage and
reform its procedure?” After all, the suspension of _habeas corpus_ is a
thing that men may well think it worth while to fight about, and a
revolution in a country’s land-system might be expected to take up a good
deal of time.
V
It soon appeared that no miracle had been wrought by either Coercion Act
or Land Act. Mr. Parnell drew up test cases for submission to the new land
court. His advice to the army of tenants would depend, he said, on the
fate of these cases. In September Mr. Forster visited Hawarden, and gave a
bad account of the real meaning of Mr. Parnell’s plausible propositions
for sending test cases to the newly established land commission, as well
as of other ugly circumstances. “It is quite clear as you said,” wrote Mr.
Gladstone to Forster in Ireland, “that Parnell means to present cases
which the commission must refuse, and then to treat their refusal as
showing that they cannot be trusted, and that the bill has failed.” As he
interpreted it afterwards, there was no doubt that in one sense the Land
Act tended to accelerate a crisis in Ireland, for it brought to a head the
affairs of the party connected with the land league. It made it almost a
necessity for that party either to advance or to recede. They chose the
desperate course. At the same date, he wrote in a letter to Lord
Granville:—
With respect to Parnellism, I should not propose to do more than a
severe and strong denunciation of it by severing him altogether
from the Irish people and the mass of the Irish members, and by
saying that home rule has for one of its aims local government—an
excellent thing to which I would affix no limits except the
supremacy of the imperial parliament, and the rights of all parts
of the country to claim whatever might be accorded to Ireland.
This is only a repetition of what I have often said before, and I
have nothing to add or enlarge. But I have the fear that when the
occasion for action comes, which will not be in my time, many
liberals may perhaps hang back and may cause further trouble.
In view of what was to come four years later, one of his letters to
Forster is interesting (April 12, 1882), among other reasons as
illustrating the depth to which the essence of political liberalism had
now penetrated Mr. Gladstone’s mind:—
1. About local government for Ireland, the ideas which more and
more establish themselves in my mind are such as these.
(1.) Until we have seriously responsible bodies to deal with us in
Ireland, every plan we frame comes to Irishmen, say what we may,
as an English plan. As such it is probably condemned. At best it
is a one-sided bargain, which binds us, not them.
(2.) If your excellent plans for obtaining local aid towards the
execution of the law break down, it will be on account of this
miserable and almost total want of the sense of responsibility for
the public good and public peace in Ireland; and this
responsibility we cannot create except through local
self-government.
(3.) If we say we must postpone the question till the state of the
country is more fit for it, I should answer that the least danger
is in going forward at once. It is liberty alone which fits men
for liberty. This proposition, like every other in politics, has
its bounds; but it is far safer than the counter doctrine, wait
till they are fit.
(4.) In truth I should say (differing perhaps from many), that for
the Ireland of to-day, the first question is the rectification of
the relations between landlord and tenant, which happily is going
on; the next is to relieve Great Britain from the enormous weight
of the government of Ireland unaided by the people, and from the
hopeless contradiction in which we stand while we give a
parliamentary representation, hardly effective for anything but
mischief without the local institutions of self-government which
it presupposes, and on which alone it can have a sound and healthy
basis.
We have before us in administration, he wrote to Forster in September—
a problem not less delicate and arduous than the problem of
legislation with which we have lately had to deal in parliament.
Of the leaders, the officials, the skeleton of the land league I
have no hope whatever. The better the prospects of the Land Act
with their adherents outside the circle of wire-pullers, and with
the Irish people, the more bitter will be their hatred, and the
more sure they will be to go as far as fear of the people will
allow them in keeping up the agitation, which they cannot afford
to part with on account of their ulterior ends. All we can do is
to turn more and more the masses of their followers, to fine them
down by good laws and good government, and it is in this view that
the question of judicious releases from prison, should improving
statistics of crime encourage it, may become one of early
importance.
VI
It was in the autumn of 1881 that Mr. Gladstone visited Leeds, in payment
of the debt of gratitude due for his triumphant return in the general
election of the year before. This progress extended over four days, and
almost surpassed in magnitude and fervour any of his experiences in other
parts of the kingdom. We have an interesting glimpse of the physical
effort of such experiences in a couple of his letters written to Mr.
Kitson, who with immense labour and spirit had organized this severe if
glorious enterprise:—
_Hawarden Castle, Sept. 28, 1881._—I thank you for the very clear
and careful account of the proposed proceedings at Leeds. It lacks
as yet that _rough_ statement of numbers at each meeting, which is
requisite to enable me to understand what I shall have to do. This
will be fixed by the scale of the meeting. I see no difficulty but
one—a procession through the principal thoroughfares is one of the
most exhausting processes I know as a _preliminary_ to addressing
a mass meeting. A mass meeting requires the physical powers to be
in their best and freshest state, as far as anything can be fresh
in a man near seventy-two; and I have on one or more former
occasions felt them wofully contracted. In Midlothian I never had
anything of the kind before a great physical effort in speaking;
and the lapse even of a couple of years is something. It would
certainly be most desirable to have the mass meeting first, and
then I have not any fear at all of the procession through whatever
thoroughfares you think fit.
_Oct. 2, 1881._—I should be very sorry to put aside any of the
opportunities of vision at Leeds which the public may care to use;
but what I had hoped was that these might come _after_ any
speeches of considerable effort and not _before_ them. To
understand what a physical drain, and what a reaction from tension
of the senses is caused by a “progress” before addressing a great
audience, a person must probably have gone through it, and gone
through it at my time of life. When I went to Midlothian, I begged
that this might never happen; and it was avoided throughout. Since
that time I have myself been sensible for the first time of a
diminished power of voice in the House of Commons, and others also
for the first time have remarked it.
Vast torchlight processions, addresses from the corporation, four score
addresses from political bodies, a giant banquet in the Cloth Hall Yard
covered in for the purpose, on one day; on another, more addresses, a
public luncheon followed by a mass meeting of over five-and-twenty
thousand persons, then a long journey through dense throngs vociferous
with an exultation that knew no limits, a large dinner party, and at the
end of all a night train. The only concessions that the veteran asked to
weakness of the flesh, were that at the banquet he should not appear until
the eating and drinking were over, and that at the mass meeting some
preliminary speakers should intervene to give him time to take breath
after his long and serious exercises of the morning. When the time came
his voice was heard like the note of a clear and deep-toned bell. So much
had vital energy, hardly less rare than his mental power, to do with the
varied exploits of this spacious career.
The topics of his Leeds speeches I need not travel over. (M25) What
attracted most attention and perhaps drew most applause was his warning to
Mr. Parnell. “He desires,” said the minister, “to arrest the operation of
the Land Act; to stand as Moses stood between the living and the dead; to
stand there not as Moses stood, to arrest, but to spread the plague.” The
menace that followed became a catchword of the day: “If it shall appear
that there is still to be fought a final conflict in Ireland between law
on the one side and sheer lawlessness upon the other, if the law purged
from defect and from any taint of injustice is still to be repelled and
refused, and the first conditions of political society to remain
unfulfilled, then I say, gentlemen, without hesitation, the resources of
civilisation against its enemies are not yet exhausted.”(40)
Nor was the pageant all excitement. The long speech, which by way of
prelusion to the great mass meeting he addressed to the chamber of
commerce, was devoted to the destruction of the economic sophisters who
tried to persuade us that “the vampire of free-trade was insidiously
sucking the life-blood of the country.” In large survey of broad social
facts, exposition of diligently assorted figures, power of scientific
analysis, sustained chain of reasoning, he was never better. The
consummate mastery of this argumentative performance did not slay a heresy
that has nine lives, but it drove the thing out of sight in Yorkshire for
some time to come.(41)
VII
On Wednesday October 12, the cabinet met, and after five hours of
deliberation decided that Mr. Parnell should be sent to prison under the
Coercion Act. The Irish leader was arrested at his hotel the next morning,
and carried off to Kilmainham, where he remained for some six months. The
same day Mr. Gladstone was presented with an address from the Common
Council of London, and in his speech at the Guildhall gave them the news:—
Our determination has been that to the best of our power, our
words should be carried into acts [referring to what he had said
at Leeds], and even within these few moments I have been informed
that towards the vindication of law and order, of the rights of
property, of the freedom of the land, of the first elements of
political life and civilisation, the first step has been taken in
the arrest of the man who unhappily from motives which I do not
challenge, which I cannot examine and with which I have nothing to
do, has made himself beyond all others prominent in the attempt to
destroy the authority of the law, and to substitute what would end
in being nothing more or less than anarchical oppression exercised
upon the people of Ireland.
The arrest of Mr. Parnell was no doubt a pretty considerable strain upon
powers conferred by parliament to put down village ruffians; but times
were revolutionary, and though the Act of parliament was not a wise one,
but altogether the reverse of wise, it was no wonder that having got the
instrument, ministers thought they might as well use it. Still executive
violence did not seem to work, and Mr. Gladstone looked in a natural
direction for help in the milder way of persuasion. He wrote (December
17th) to Cardinal Newman:—
I will begin with defining strictly the limits of this appeal. I
ask you to read the inclosed papers; and to consider whether you
will write anything to Rome upon them. I do not ask you to write,
nor to tell me whether you write, nor to make any reply to this
letter, beyond returning the inclosures in an envelope to me in
Downing Street. I will state briefly the grounds of my request,
thus limited. In 1844, when I was young as a cabinet minister, and
the government of Sir R. Peel was troubled with the O’Connell
manifestations, they made what I think was an appeal to Pope
Gregory XVI. for his intervention to discourage agitation in
Ireland. I should be very loath now to tender such a request at
Rome. But now a different case arises. Some members of the Roman
catholic priesthood in Ireland deliver certain sermons and
otherwise express themselves in the way which my inclosures
exhibit. I doubt whether if they were laymen we should not have
settled their cases by putting them into gaol. I need not describe
the sentiments uttered. Your eminence will feel them and judge
them as strongly as I do. But now as to the Supreme Pontiff. You
will hardly be surprised when I say that I regard him, if apprised
of the facts, as responsible for the conduct of these priests. For
I know perfectly well that he has the means of silencing them; and
that, if any one of them were in public to dispute the decrees of
the council of 1870 as plainly as he has denounced law and order,
he would be silenced.
Mr. Errington, who is at Rome, will I believe have seen these
papers, and will I hope have brought the facts as far as he is
able to the knowledge of his holiness. But I do not know how far
he is able; nor how he may use his discretion. He is not our
official servant, but an independent Roman catholic gentleman and
a volunteer.
My wish is as regards Ireland, in this hour of her peril and her
hope, to leave nothing undone by which to give heart and strength
to the hope and to abate the peril. But my wish as regards the
Pope is that he should have the means of bringing those for whom
he is responsible to fulfil the elementary duties of citizenship.
I say of citizenship; of Christianity, of priesthood, it is not
for me to speak.
The cardinal replied that he would gladly find himself able to be of
service, however slight it might be, in a political crisis which must be
felt as of grave anxiety by all who understand the blessing of national
unity and peace. He thought Mr. Gladstone overrated the pope’s power in
political and social matters. Absolute in questions of theology, it was
not so in political matters. If the contest in Ireland were whether
“rebellion” or whether “robbery” was a sin, we might expect him to
anathematise its denial. But his action in concrete matters, as whether a
political party is censurable or not, was not direct, and only in the long
run effective. Local power and influence was often a match for Roman
right. The pope’s right keeps things together, it checks extravagances,
and at length prevails, but not without a fight. Its exercise is a matter
of great prudence, and depends upon times and circumstances. As for the
intemperate dangerous words of priests and curates, surely such persons
belonged to their respective bishops, and scarcely required the
introduction of the Supreme Authority.
VIII
We have now arrived at April 1882. The reports brought to the cabinet by
Mr. Forster were of the gloomiest. The Land Act had brought no
improvement. In the south-west and many of the midland counties
lawlessness and intimidation were worse than ever. Returns of agrarian
crime were presented in every shape, and comparisons framed by weeks, by
months, by quarters; do what the statisticians would, and in spite of
fluctuations, murders and other serious outrages had increased. The policy
of arbitrary arrest had completely failed, and the officials and crown
lawyers at the Castle were at their wits’ end.
While the cabinet was face to face with this ugly prospect, Mr. Gladstone
received a communication volunteered by an Irish member, as to the new
attitude of Mr. Parnell and the possibility of turning it to good account.
Mr. Gladstone sent this letter on to Forster, replying meanwhile “in the
sense of not shutting the door.” When the thing came before the cabinet,
Mr. Chamberlain—who had previously told Mr. Gladstone that he thought the
time opportune for something like a reconciliation with the Irish
party—with characteristic courage took his life in his hands, as he put
it, and set to work to ascertain through the emissary what use for the
public good could be made of Mr. Parnell’s changed frame of mind. On April
25th, the cabinet heard what Mr. Chamberlain had to tell them, and it came
to this, that Mr. Parnell was desirous to use his influence on behalf of
peace, but his influence for good depended on the settlement of the
question of arrears. Ministers decided that they could enter into no
agreement and would give no pledge. They would act on their own
responsibility in the light of the knowledge they had gained of Mr.
Parnell’s views. Mr. Gladstone was always impatient of any reference to
“reciprocal assurances” or “tacit understanding” in respect of the
dealings with the prisoner in Kilmainham. Still the nature of the
proceedings was plain enough. The object of the communications to which
the government were invited by Mr. Parnell through his emissary, was,
supposing him to be anxious to do what (M26) he could for law and order,
to find out what action on the part of the government would enable him to
adopt this line.
Events then moved rapidly. Rumours that something was going on got abroad,
and questions began to be put in parliament. A stout tory gave notice of a
motion aiming at the release of the suspects. As Mr. Gladstone informed
the Queen, there was no doubt that the general opinion of the public was
moving in a direction adverse to arbitrary imprisonment, though the
question was a nice one for consideration whether the recent surrender by
the no-rent party of its extreme and most subversive contentions, amounted
to anything like a guarantee for their future conduct in respect of peace
and order. The rising excitement was swelled by the retirement of Lord
Cowper from the viceroyalty, and the appointment as his successor of Lord
Spencer, who had filled that post in Mr. Gladstone’s first government. On
May 2nd, Mr. Gladstone read a memorandum to the cabinet to which they
agreed:—
The cabinet are of opinion that the time has now arrived when with
a view to the interests of law and order in Ireland, the three
members of parliament who have been imprisoned on suspicion since
last October, should be immediately released; and that the list of
suspects should be examined with a view to the release of all
persons not believed to be associated with crimes. They propose at
once to announce to parliament their intention to propose, as soon
as necessary business will permit, a bill to strengthen the
ordinary law in Ireland for the security of life and property,
while reserving their discretion with regard to the Life and
Property Protection Act [of 1881], which however they do not at
present think it will be possible to renew, if a favourable state
of affairs shall prevail in Ireland.
From this proceeding Mr. Forster dissented, and he resigned his office.
His point seems to have been that no suspect should be released until the
new Coercion Act had been fashioned, whereas the rest of the cabinet held
that there was no excuse for the continued detention under arbitrary
warrant of men as to whom the ground for the “reasonable suspicion”
required by the law had now disappeared. He probably felt that the
appointment of a viceroy of cabinet rank and with successful Irish
experience was in fact his own supersession. “I have received your
letter,” Mr. Gladstone wrote to him (May 2), “with much grief, but on this
it would be selfish to expatiate. I have no choice; followed or not
followed I must go on. There are portions of the subject which touch you
personally, and which seem to me to deserve _much_ attention. But I have
such an interest in the main issue, that I could not be deemed impartial;
so I had better not enter on them. One thing, however, I wish to say. You
wish to minimise in any further statement the cause of your retreat. In my
opinion—_and I speak from experience_—viewing the nature of that course,
you will find this hardly possible. For a justification you, I fear, will
have to found upon the doctrine of ‘a new departure.’ We must protest
against it, and deny it with heart and soul.”
The way in which Mr. Gladstone chose to put things was stated in a letter
to the Queen (May 3): “In his judgment there had been two, and only two,
vital powers of commanding efficacy in Ireland, the Land Act, and the land
league; they had been locked in a combat of life and death; and the
cardinal question was which of the two would win. From the serious effort
to amend the Land Act by the Arrears bill of the nationalists,(42) from
the speeches made in support of it, and from information voluntarily
tendered to the government as to the views of the leaders of the league,
the cabinet believed that those who governed the land league were now
conscious of having been defeated by the Land Act on the main question,
that of paying rent.”
For the office of Irish secretary Mr. Gladstone selected Lord Frederick
Cavendish, who was the husband of a niece of Mrs. Gladstone’s, and one of
the most devoted of his friends and adherents. The special reason for the
choice of this capable and high-minded man, was that Lord Frederick had
framed a plan of finance at the treasury for a new scheme of land
purchase. The two freshly appointed Irish ministers at once crossed over
to a country seething in disorder. The (M27) afternoon of the fatal sixth
of May was passed by the new viceroy and Lord Frederick in that grim
apartment in Dublin Castle, where successive secretaries spend unshining
hours in saying No to impossible demands, and hunting for plausible
answers to insoluble riddles. Never did so dreadful a shadow overhang it
as on that day. The task on which the two ministers were engaged was the
consideration of the new provisions for coping with disorder, which had
been prepared in London. The under-secretary, Mr. Burke, and one of the
lawyers, were present. Lord Spencer rode out to the park about five
o’clock, and Lord Frederick followed him an hour later. He was overtaken
by the under-secretary walking homewards, and as the two strolled on
together, they were both brutally murdered in front of the vice-regal
residence. The assassins did not know who Lord Frederick was. Well has it
been said that Ireland seems the sport of a destiny that is aimless.(43)
The official world of London was on that Saturday night in the full round
of its pleasures. The Gladstones were dining at the Austrian embassy. So,
too, was Sir William Harcourt, and to him as home secretary the black
tidings were sent from Dublin late in the evening. Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone
had already left, she for a party at the admiralty, he walking home to
Downing Street. At the admiralty they told her of bad news from Ireland
and hurried her away. Mr. Gladstone arrived at home a few minutes after
her. When his secretary in the hall told him of the horrible thing that
had been done, it was as if he had been felled to the ground. Then they
hastened to bear what solace they could, to the anguish-stricken home
where solace would be so sorely needed.
The effect of this blind and hideous crime was at once to arrest the
spirit and the policy of conciliation. While the Irish leaders were locked
up, a secret murder club had taken matters in hand in their own way, and
ripened plots within a stone’s throw of the Castle. No worse blow could
have been struck at Mr. Parnell’s policy. It has been said that the
nineteenth century had seen the course of its history twenty-five times
diverted by actual or attempted crime. In that sinister list the murders
in the Phoenix Park have a tragic place.
The voice of party was for the moment hushed. Sir Stafford Northcote wrote
a letter of admirable feeling, saying that if there was any way in which
Mr. Gladstone thought they could serve the government, he would of course
let them know. The Prince of Wales wrote of his own horror and indignation
at the crime, and of his sympathy with Mr. Gladstone in the loss of one
who was not only a colleague of many merits, but a near connection and
devoted friend. With one or two scandalous exceptions, the tone of the
English press was sober, sensible, and self-possessed. “If a nation,” said
a leading journal in Paris, “should be judged by the way in which it acts
on grave occasions, the spectacle offered by England is calculated to
produce a high opinion of the political character and spirit of the
British people.” Things of the baser sort were not quite absent, but they
did not matter. An appeal confronted the electors of the North-West Riding
as they went to the poll at a bye-election a few days later, to “Vote for
——, and avenge the death of Lord Frederick Cavendish!” They responded by
placing ——’s opponent at the head of the poll by a majority of two
thousand.
The scene in the House had all the air of tragedy, and Mr. Gladstone
summoned courage enough to do his part with impressive composure. A
colleague was doing some business with him in his room before the
solemnity began. When it was over, they resumed it, Mr. Gladstone making
no word of reference to the sombre interlude, before or after. “Went
reluctantly to the House,” he says in his diary, “and by the help of God
forced out what was needful on the question of the adjournment.” His words
were not many, when after commemorating the marked qualities of Mr. Burke,
he went on in laboured tones and slow speech and hardly repressed
emotion:—
The hand of the assassin has come nearer home; and though I feel
it difficult to say a word, yet I must say that one of the very
noblest hearts in England has ceased to beat, and has ceased at
the very moment when it was just devoted to the service of
Ireland, full of love for that country, full of hope for her
future, full of capacity to render her service.
Writing to Lady Frederick on a later day, he mentions a public reference
to some pathetic words of hers (May 19):—
Sexton just now returned to the subject, with much approval from
the House. You will find it near the middle of a long speech.
Nothing could be better either in feeling or in grace (the man is
little short of a master), and I think it will warm your heart.
You have made a mark deeper than any wound.
To Lord Ripon in India, he wrote (June 1):—
The black act brought indeed a great personal grief to my wife and
me; but we are bound to merge our own sorrow in the larger and
deeper affliction of the widow and the father, in the sense of the
public loss of a life so valuable to the nation, and in the
consideration of the great and varied effects it may have on
immediate and vital interests. Since the death of this dearly
loved son, we have heard much good of the Duke, whom indeed we saw
at Chatsworth after the funeral, and we have seen much of Lady
Frederick, who has been good even beyond what we could have hoped.
I have no doubt you have heard in India the echo of words spoken
by Spencer from a letter of hers, in which she said she could give
up even him if his death were to work good to his fellow-men,
which indeed was the whole object of his life. These words have
had a tender effect, as remarkable as the horror excited by the
slaughter. Spencer wrote to me that a priest in Connemara read
them from the altar; when the whole congregation spontaneously
fell down upon their knees. In England, the national attitude has
been admirable. The general strain of language has been, “Do not
let this terrible and flagitious crime deter you from persevering
with the work of justice.”
Well did Dean Church say that no Roman or Florentine lady ever uttered a
more heroic thing than was said by this English lady when on first seeing
Mr. Gladstone that terrible midnight she said, “You did right to send him
to Ireland.”(44) “The loss of F. Cavendish,” Mr. Gladstone wrote to his
eldest son, “will ever be to us all as an unhealed wound.”
On the day after the murders Mr. Gladstone received a note through the
same channel by which Mr. Chamberlain had carried on his communications:
“I am authorised by Mr. Parnell to state that if Mr. Gladstone considers
it necessary for the maintenance of his [Mr. G.’s] position and for
carrying out his views, that Mr. Parnell should resign his seat, Mr.
Parnell is prepared to do so immediately.” To this Mr. Gladstone replied
(May 7):—
My duty does not permit me for a moment to entertain Mr. Parnell’s
proposal, just conveyed to me by you, that he should if I think it
needful resign his seat; but I am deeply sensible of the
honourable motives by which it has been prompted.
“My opinion is,” said Mr. Gladstone to Lord Granville, “that if Parnell
goes, no restraining influence will remain; the scale of outrages will be
again enlarged; and no repressive bill can avail to put it down.” Those of
the cabinet who had the best chance of knowing, were convinced that Mr.
Parnell was “sincerely anxious for the pacification of Ireland.”
The reaction produced by the murders in the Park made perseverance in a
milder policy impossible in face of English opinion, and parliament
eagerly passed the Coercion Act of 1882. I once asked an Irishman of
consummate experience and equitable mind, with no leanings that I know of
to political nationalism, whether the task of any later ruler of Ireland
was comparable to Lord Spencer’s. “Assuredly not,” he replied: “in 1882
Ireland seemed to be literally a society on the eve of dissolution. The
Invincibles still roved with knives about the streets of Dublin.
Discontent had been stirred in the ranks of the Royal Irish Constabulary,
and a dangerous mutiny broke out in the metropolitan force. Over half of
the country the demoralisation of every class, the terror, the fierce
hatred, the universal distrust, had grown to an incredible pitch. The
moral cowardice of what ought to have been the governing class was
astounding. The landlords would hold meetings and agree not to go beyond a
certain abatement, and then they would go individually and privately offer
to the tenant a greater abatement. Even the agents of the law and the
courts were shaken in their duty. The power of random arrest and detention
under the Coercion Act of 1881 had not improved the _moral_ of magistrates
and police. The sheriff would let the word get out that he was coming to
make a seizure, and profess surprise that the cattle had vanished. The
whole country-side turned out in thousands in half the counties in Ireland
to attend flaming meetings, and if a man did not attend, angry neighbours
trooped up to know the reason why. The clergy hardly stirred a finger to
restrain the wildness of the storm; some did their best to raise it. All
that was what Lord Spencer had to deal with; the very foundations of the
social fabric rocking.”
The new viceroy attacked the formidable task before him with resolution,
minute assiduity, and an inexhaustible store of that steady-eyed patience
which is the sovereign requisite of any man who, whether with coercion or
without, takes in hand the government of Ireland. He was seconded with
high ability and courage by Mr. Trevelyan, the new Irish secretary, whose
fortitude was subjected to a far severer trial than has ever fallen to the
lot of any Irish secretary before or since. The coercion that Lord Spencer
had to administer was at least law. The coercion with which parliament
entrusted Mr. Forster the year before was the negation of the spirit of
law, and the substitution for it of naked and arbitrary control over the
liberty of the subject by executive power—a system as unconstitutional in
theory as it was infatuated in policy and calamitous in result. Even
before the end of the parliament, Mr. Bright frankly told the House of
Commons of this Coercion Act: “I think that the legislation of 1881 was
unfortunately a great mistake, though I was myself a member of the
government concerned in it.”