On the second stage of the transaction, Mr. Smith, in answer to various

questions in the early part of the sitting, made a singular declaration.

The bill, he said, of which he had given notice, was a bill to be

introduced in accordance with the offer already made. “I do not desire to

debate the proposal; and I have put it in this position on the Order Book,

in order that it may be rejected or accepted by the honourable member in

the form in which it stands.” Then in the next sentence, he said, “If the

motion is received and accepted by the House, the bill will be printed and

circulated, and I will then name a day for the second reading. But I may

say frankly that I do not anticipate being able to make provision for a

debate on the second reading of a measure of this kind. It was an offer

made by the government to the honourable gentleman and his friends, to be

either accepted or rejected.”(248) The minister treated his bill as

lightly as if it were some small proposal of ordinary form and of even

less than ordinary importance. It is not inconceivable that there was

design in this, for Mr. Smith concealed under a surface of plain and

homely worth a very full share of parliamentary craft, and he knew well

enough that the more extraordinary the measure, the more politic it always

is to open with an air of humdrum.

The bill came on at midnight July 16, in a House stirred with intense

excitement, closely suppressed. The leader of the House made the motion

for leave to introduce the most curious innovation of the century, in a

speech of half-a-minute. It might have been a formal bill for a

provisional order, to be taken as of course. Mr. Parnell, his ordinary

pallor made deeper by anger, and with unusual though very natural

vehemence of demeanour, at once hit the absurdity of asking him whether he

accepted or rejected the bill, not only before it was printed but without

explanation of its contents. He then pressed in two or three weighty

sentences the deeper absurdity of leaving him any option at all. The

attorney general had said of the story of the fac-simile letter, that if

it was not genuine, it was the worst libel ever launched on a public man.

If the first lord believed his attorney, said Mr. Parnell, instead of

talking about making a bargain with me, he ought to have come down and

said, “The government are determined to have this investigation, whether

the honourable member, this alleged criminal, likes it or not.”(249)

That was in fact precisely what the government had determined. The

profession that the bill was a benevolent device for enabling the alleged

criminals to extricate themselves was very soon dropped. The offer of a

boon to be accepted or declined at discretion was transformed into a grand

compulsory investigation into the connection of the national and land

leagues with agrarian crime, and the members of parliament were virtually

put into the dock along with all sorts of other persons who chanced to be

members of those associations. The effect was certain. Any facts showing

criminality in this or that member of the league would be taken to show

criminality in the organisation as a whole, and especially in the

political leaders. And the proceeding could only be vindicated by the

truly outrageous principle that where a counsel in a suit finds it his

duty as advocate to make grave charges against members of parliament in

court, then it becomes an obligation on the government to ask for an Act

to appoint a judicial commission to examine those charges, if only they

are grave enough.

The best chance of frustrating the device was lost when the bill was

allowed to pass its first reading unopposed. Three of the leaders of the

liberal opposition—two in the Commons, one in the Lords—were for making a

bold stand against the bill from the first. Mr. Gladstone, on the

contrary, with his lively instinct for popular feeling out of doors,

disliked any action indicative of reluctance to face inquiry; and though

holding a strong view that no case had been made out for putting aside the

constitutional and convenient organ of a committee, yet he thought that an

(M142) inquiry under thoroughly competent and impartial judges, after the

right and true method of proceeding had been refused, was still better

than no proceeding at all. This much of assent, however, was qualified. “I

think,” he said, “that an inquiry under thoroughly competent and impartial

judges is better than none. But that inquiry must, I think, be put into

such a shape as shall correspond with the general law and principles of

justice.” As he believed, the first and most indispensable conditions of

an effective inquiry were wanting, and without them he “certainly would

have no responsibility whatever.”(250)

For the first few days politicians were much adrift. They had moments of

compunction. Whether friends or foes of the Irish, they were perplexed by

the curious double aspect of the measure. Mr. Parnell himself began to

feel misgivings, as he came to realise the magnitude of the inquiry, its

vast expense, its interminable length, its unfathomable uncertainties. On

the day appointed for the second reading of the bill appointing the

commission (July 23), some other subject kept the business back until

seven o’clock. Towards six, Mr. Parnell who was to open the debate on his

own side, came to an English friend, to ask whether there would be time

for him to go away for an hour; he wished to examine some new furnace for

assaying purposes, the existence of gold in Wicklow being one of his fixed

ideas. So steady was the composure of this extraordinary man. The English

friend grimly remarked to him that it would perhaps be rather safer not to

lose sight of the furnace in which at any moment his own assaying might

begin. His speech on this critical occasion was not one of his best.

Indifference to his audience often made him meagre, though he was scarcely

ever other than clear, and in this debate there was only one effective

point which it was necessary for him to press. The real issue was whether

the reference to the judges should be limited or unlimited; should be a

fishing inquiry at large into the history of an agrarian agitation ten

years old, or an examination into definite and specified charges against

named members of parliament. The minister, in moving the second reading,

no longer left it to the Irish members to accept or reject; it now rested,

he said, with the House to decide. It became evident that the acuter

members of the majority, fully awakened to the opportunities for

destroying the Irishmen which an unlimited inquisition might furnish, had

made up their minds that no limit should be set to the scope of the

inquisition. Boldly they tramped through a thick jungle of fallacy and

inconsistency. They had never ceased to insist, and they insisted now,

that Mr. Parnell ought to have gone into a court of law. Yet they fought

as hard as they could against every proposal for making the procedure of

the commission like the procedure of a law court. In a court there would

have been a specific indictment. Here a specific indictment was what they

most positively refused, and for it they substituted a roving inquiry,

which is exactly what a court never undertakes. They first argued that

nothing but a commission was available to test the charges against members

of parliament. Then, when they had bethought themselves of further

objects, they argued round that it was unheard of and inconceivable to

institute a royal commission for members of parliament alone.

All arguments, however unanswerable, were at this stage idle, because Mr.

Parnell had reverted to his original resolution to accept the bill, and at

his request the radicals sitting below him abandoned their opposition. The

bill passed the second reading without a division. This circumstance

permitted the convenient assertion, made so freely afterwards, that the

bill, irregular, unconstitutional, violent, as it might be, at any rate

received the unanimous assent of the House of Commons.

Stormy scenes marked the progress of the bill through committee. Seeing

the exasperation produced by their shifting of the ground, and the delay

which it would naturally entail, ministers resolved on a bold step. It was

now August. Government remembered the process by which they had carried

the Coercion bill, and they improved upon it. After three days of

committee, they moved that at one o’clock in the morning on the fourth

sitting the (M143) chairman should break off discussion, put forthwith the

question already proposed from the chair, then successively put forthwith

all the remaining clauses, and so report the bill to the House. This

process shut out all amendments not reached at the fatal hour, and is the

most drastic and sweeping of all forms of closure. In the case of the

Coercion bill, resort to the guillotine was declared to be warranted by

the urgency of social order in Ireland. That plea was at least plausible.

No such plea of urgency could be invoked for a measure, which only a few

days before the government had considered to be of such secondary

importance, that the simple rejection of it by Mr. Parnell was to be

enough to induce them to withdraw it. The bill that had been proffered as

a generous concession to Irish members, was now violently forced upon them

without debate. Well might Mr. Gladstone speak of the most extraordinary

series of proceedings that he had ever known.(251)

III

The three judges first met on September 17, 1888, to settle their

procedure. They sat for one hundred and twenty-eight days, and rose for

the last time on November 22, 1889. More than four hundred and fifty

witnesses were examined. One counsel spoke for five days, another for

seven, and a third for nearly twelve. The mammoth record of the

proceedings fills eleven folio volumes, making between seven and eight

thousand pages. The questions put to witnesses numbered ninety-eight

thousand.

It was a strange and fantastic scene. Three judges were trying a social

and political revolution. The leading actors in it were virtually in the

dock. The tribunal had been specially set up by their political opponents,

without giving them any effective voice either in its composition or upon

the character and scope of its powers. For the first time in England since

the Great Rebellion, men were practically put upon their trial on a

political charge, without giving them the protection of a jury. For the

first time in that period judges were to find a verdict upon the facts of

crime. The charge placed in the forefront was a charge of conspiracy. But

to call a combination a conspiracy does not make it a conspiracy or a

guilty combination, unless the verdict of a jury pronounces it to be one.

A jury would have taken all the large attendant circumstances into

account. The three judges felt themselves bound expressly to shut out

those circumstances. In words of vital importance, they said, “We must

leave it for politicians to discuss, and for statesmen to determine, in

what respects the present laws affecting land in Ireland are capable of

improvement. _We have no commission to consider whether the conduct of

which they are accused can be palliated by the circumstances of the time,

or whether it should be condoned in consideration of benefits alleged to

have resulted from their action._”(252) When the proceedings were over,

Lord Salisbury applauded the report as “giving a very complete view of a

very curious episode of our internal history.”(253) A very complete view

of an agrarian rising—though it left out all palliating circumstances and

the whole state of agrarian law!

Instead of opening with the letters, as the country expected, the accusers

began by rearing a prodigious accumulation of material, first for the

Irish or agrarian branch of their case, and then for the American branch.

The government helped them to find their witnesses, and so varied a host

was never seen in London before. There was the peasant from Kerry in his

frieze swallow-tail and knee-breeches, and the woman in her scarlet

petticoat who runs barefoot over the bog in Galway. The convicted member

of a murder club was brought up in custody from Mountjoy prison or

Maryborough. One of the most popular of the Irish representatives had been

fetched from his dungeon, and was to be seen wandering through the lobbies

in search of his warders. Men who had been shot by moonlighters limped

into the box, and poor women in their blue-hooded cloaks told pitiful

tales of midnight horror. The sharp spy was there, who disclosed sinister

secrets from cities across the Atlantic, and the uncouth informer who

betrayed or invented the history of rude and ferocious plots hatched at

the country cross-roads (M144) or over the peat fire in desolate cabins in

western Ireland. Divisional commissioners with their ledgers of agrarian

offences, agents with bags full of figures and documents, landlords,

priests, prelates, magistrates, detectives, smart members of that famous

constabulary force which is the arm, eye, and ear of the Irish

government—all the characters of the Irish melodrama were crowded into the

corridors, and in their turn brought out upon the stage of this surprising

theatre.

The proceedings speedily settled down into the most wearisome drone that

was ever heard in a court of law. The object of the accusers was to show

the complicity of the accused with crime by tracing crime to the league,

and making every member of the league constructively liable for every act

of which the league was constructively guilty. Witnesses were produced in

a series that seemed interminable, to tell the story of five-and-twenty

outrages in Mayo, of as many in Cork, of forty-two in Galway, of

sixty-five in Kerry, one after another, and all with immeasurable detail.

Some of the witnesses spoke no English, and the English of others was

hardly more intelligible than Erse. Long extracts were read out from four

hundred and forty speeches. The counsel on one side produced a passage

that made against the speaker, and then the counsel on the other side

found and read some qualifying passage that made as strongly for him. The

three judges groaned. They had already, they said plaintively, ploughed

through the speeches in the solitude of their own rooms. Could they not be

taken as read? No, said the prosecuting counsel; we are building up an

argument, and it cannot be built up in a silent manner. In truth it was

designed for the public outside the court,(254) and not a touch could be

spared that might deepen the odium. Week after week the ugly tale went

on—a squalid ogre let loose among a population demoralised by ages of

wicked neglect, misery, and oppression. One side strove to show that the

ogre had been wantonly raised by the land league for political objects of

their own; the other, that it was the progeny of distress and wrong, that

the league had rather controlled than kindled its ferocity, and that crime

and outrage were due to local animosities for which neither league nor

parliamentary leaders were answerable.

On the forty-fourth day (February 5) came a lurid glimpse from across the

Atlantic. The Irish emigration had carried with it to America the deadly

passion for the secret society. A spy was produced, not an Irishman this

time for a wonder, but an Englishman. He had been for eight-and-twenty

years in the United States, and for more than twenty of them he had been

in the pay of Scotland Yard, a military spy, as he put it, in the service

of his country. There is no charge against him that he belonged to that

foul species who provoke others to crime and then for a bribe betray them.

He swore an oath of secrecy to his confederates in the camps of the

Clan-na-Gael, and then he broke his oath by nearly every post that went

from New York to London. It is not a nice trade, but then the dynamiter’s

is not a nice trade either.(255) The man had risen high in the secret

brotherhood. Such an existence demanded nerves of steel; a moment of

forgetfulness, an accident with a letter, the slip of a phrase in the two

parts that he was playing, would have doomed him in the twinkling of an

eye. He now stood a rigorous cross-examination like iron. There is no

reason to think that he told lies. He was perhaps a good deal less trusted

than he thought, for he does not appear on any occasion to have forewarned

the police at home of any of the dynamite attempts that four or five years

earlier had startled the English capital. The pith of his week’s evidence

was his account of an interview between himself and Mr. Parnell in the

corridors of the House of Commons in April 1881. In this interview, Mr.

Parnell, he said, expressed his desire to bring the Fenians in Ireland

into line with his own constitutional movement, and to that end requested

the spy to invite a notorious leader of the physical force party in

America to come over to Ireland, to arrange a harmonious understanding.

Mr. Parnell had no recollection of the interview, (M145) though he thought

it very possible that an interview might have taken place. It was

undoubtedly odd that the spy having once got his line over so big a fish,

should never afterwards have made any attempt to draw him on. The judges,

however, found upon a review of “the probabilities of the case,” that the

conversation in the corridor really took place, that the spy’s account was

correct, and that it was not impossible that in conversation with a

supposed revolutionist, Mr. Parnell may have used such language as to

leave the impression that he agreed with his interlocutor. Perhaps a more

exact way of putting it would be that the spy talked the Fenian doctrine

of physical force, and that Mr. Parnell listened.

IV

At last, on the fiftieth day (February 14, 1889), and not before, the

court reached the business that had led to its own creation. Three batches

of letters had been produced by the newspaper. The manager of the

newspaper told his story, and then the immediate purveyor of the letters

told his. Marvellous stories they were.

The manager was convinced from the beginning, as he ingenuously said,

quite independently of handwriting, that the letters were genuine. Why? he

was asked. Because he felt they were the sort of letters that Mr. Parnell

would be likely to write. He counted, not wholly without some reason, on

the public sharing this inspiration of his own indwelling light. The day

was approaching for the division on the Coercion bill. Every journalist,

said the manager, must choose his moment. He now thought the moment

suitable for making the public acquainted with the character of the

Irishmen. So, with no better evidence of authority than his firm faith

that it was the sort of letter that Mr. Parnell would be likely to write,

on the morning of the second reading of the Coercion bill, he launched the

fac-simile letter. In the early part of 1888 he received from the same

hand a second batch of letters, and a third batch a few days later. His

total payments amounted to over two thousand five hundred pounds. He still

asked no questions as to the source of these expensive documents. On the

contrary he particularly avoided the subject. So much for the cautious and

experienced man of business.

The natural course would have been now to carry the inquiry on to the

source of the letters. Instead of that, the prosecutors called an expert

in handwriting. The court expostulated. Why should they not hear at once

where the letters came from; and then it might be proper enough to hear

what an expert had to say? After a final struggle the prolonged tactics of

deferring the evil day, and prejudicing the case up to the eleventh hour,

were at last put to shame. The second of the two marvellous stories was

now to be told.

The personage who had handed the three batches of letters to the

newspaper, told the Court how he had in 1885 compiled a pamphlet called

_Parnellism Unmasked_, partly from materials communicated to him by a

certain broken-down Irish journalist. To this unfortunate sinner, then in

a state of penury little short of destitution, he betook himself one

winter night in Dublin at the end of 1885. Long after, when the game was

up and the whole sordid tragi-comedy laid bare, the poor wretch wrote: “I

have been in difficulties and great distress for want of money for the

last twenty years, and in order to find means of support for myself and my

large family, I have been guilty of many acts which must for ever disgrace

me.”(256) He had now within reach a guinea a day, and much besides, if he

would endeavour to find any documents that might be available to sustain

the charges made in the pamphlet. After some hesitation the bargain was

struck, a guinea a day, hotel and travelling expenses, and a round price

for documents. Within a few months the needy man in clover pocketed many

hundreds of pounds. Only the author of the history of _Jonathan Wild the

Great_ could do justice to such a story of the Vagabond in Luck—a jaunt to

Lausanne, a trip across the Atlantic, incessant journeys backward and

forward to Paris, the jingling of guineas, the rustle of hundred-pound

notes, and now and then perhaps a humorous thought of simple and solemn

people in newspaper offices in London, or a moment’s meditation on that

perplexing law of human affairs by which the weak things (M146) of the

world are chosen to confound the things that are mighty.

The moment came for delivering the documents in Paris, and delivered they

were with details more grotesque than anything since the foolish baronet

in Scott’s novel was taken by Dousterswivel to find the buried treasure in

Saint Ruth’s. From first to last not a test or check was applied by

anybody to hinder the fabrication from running its course without a hitch

or a crease. When men have the demon of a fixed idea in their cerebral

convolutions, they easily fall victims to a devastating credulity, and the

victims were now radiant as, with microscope and calligraphic expert by

their side, they fondly gazed upon their prize. About the time when the

judges were getting to work, clouds arose on this smiling horizon. It is

good, says the old Greek, that men should carry a threatening shadow in

their hearts even under the full sunshine. Before this, the manager

learned for the first time, what was the source of the letters. The

blessed doctrine of intrinsic certainty, however, which has before now

done duty in far graver controversy, prevented him from inquiring as to

the purity of the source.

The toils were rapidly enclosing both the impostor and the dupes. He was

put into the box at last (Feb. 21). By the end of the second day, the

torture had become more than he could endure. Some miscalled the scene

dramatic. That is hardly the right name for the merciless hunt of an

abject fellow-creature through the doublings and windings of a thousand

lies. The breath of the hounds was on him, and he could bear the chase no

longer. After proceedings not worth narrating, except that he made a

confession and then committed his last perjury, he disappeared. The police

traced him to Madrid. When they entered his room with their warrant (March

1), he shot himself dead. They found on his corpse the scapulary worn by

devout catholics as a visible badge and token of allegiance to the

heavenly powers. So in the ghastliest wreck of life, men still hope and

seek for some mysterious cleansing of the soul that shall repair all.

This damning experience was a sharp mortification to the government, who

had been throughout energetic confederates in the attack. Though it did

not come at once formally into debate, it exhilarated the opposition, and

Mr. Gladstone himself was in great spirits, mingled with intense

indignation and genuine sympathy for Mr. Parnell as a man who had suffered

an odious wrong.

VI

The report of the commission was made to the crown on February 13, 1890.

It reached the House of Commons about ten o’clock the same evening. The

scene was curious,—the various speakers droning away in a House otherwise

profoundly silent, and every member on every bench, including high

ministers of state, plunged deep and eager into the blue-book. The general

impression was that the findings amounted to acquittal, and everybody went

home in considerable excitement at this final explosion of the damaged

blunderbuss. The next day Mr. Gladstone had a meeting with the lawyers in

the case, and was keen for action in one form or another; but on the whole

it was agreed that the government should be left to take the initiative.

The report was discussed in both Houses, and strong speeches were made on

both sides. The government (Mar. 3) proposed a motion that the House

adopted the report, thanked the judges for their just and impartial

conduct, and ordered the report to be entered on the journals. Mr.

Gladstone followed with an amendment, that the House deemed it to be a

duty to record its reprobation of the false charges of the gravest and

most odious description, based on calumny and on forgery, that had been

brought against members of the House; and, while declaring its

satisfaction at the exposure of these calumnies, the House expressed its

regret at the wrong inflicted and the suffering and loss endured through a

protracted period by reason of these acts of flagrant iniquity. After a

handsome tribute to the honour and good faith of the judges, he took the

point that some of the opinions in the report were in no sense and no

degree judicial. How, for instance, could three judges, sitting ten years

after the fact (1879-80), determine better than anybody (M147) else that

distress and extravagant rents had nothing to do with crime? Why should

the House of Commons declare its adoption of this finding without question

or correction? Or of this, that the rejection of the Disturbance bill by

the Lords in 1880 had nothing to do with the increase of crime? Mr.

Forster had denounced the action of the Lords with indignation, and was

not he, the responsible minister, a better witness than the three judges

in no contact with contemporary fact? How were the judges authorised to

affirm that the Land bill of 1881 had not been a great cause in mitigating

the condition of Ireland? Another conclusive objection was that—on the

declaration of the judges themselves, rightly made by them—what we know to

be essential portions of the evidence were entirely excluded from their

view.

He next turned to the findings, first of censure, then of acquittal. The

findings of censure were in substance three. First, seven of the

respondents had joined the league with a view of separating Ireland from

England. The idea was dead, but Mr. Gladstone was compelled to say that in

his opinion to deny the moral authority of the Act of Union was for an

Irishman no moral offence whatever. Here the law-officer sitting opposite

to him busily took down a note. “Yes, yes,” Mr. Gladstone exclaimed, “you

may take my words down. I heard you examine your witness from a pedestal,

as you felt, of the greatest elevation, endeavouring to press home the

monstrous guilt of an Irishman who did not allow moral authority to the

Act of Union. In my opinion the Englishman has far more cause to blush for

the means by which that Act was obtained.” As it happened, on the only

occasion on which Mr. Gladstone paid the Commission a visit, he had found

the attorney general cross-examining a leading Irish member, and this

passage of arms on the Act of Union between counsel and witness then

occurred.

The second finding of censure was that the Irish members incited to

intimidation by speeches, knowing that intimidation led to crime. The

third was that they never placed themselves on the side of law and order;

they did not assist the administration, and did not denounce the party of

physical force. As if this, said Mr. Gladstone, had not been the subject

of incessant discussion and denunciation in parliament at the time ten

years ago, and yet no vote of condemnation was passed upon the Irish

members then. On the contrary, the tory party, knowing all these charges,

associated with them for purposes of votes and divisions; climbed into

office on Mr. Parnell’s shoulders; and through the viceroy with the

concurrence of the prime minister, took Mr. Parnell into counsel upon the

devising of a plan for Irish government. Was parliament now to affirm and

record a finding that it had scrupulously abstained from ever making its

own, and without regard to the counter-allegation that more crime and

worse crime was prevented by agitation? It was the duty of parliament to

look at the whole of the facts of the great crisis of 1880-1—to the

distress, to the rejection of the Compensation bill, to the growth of

evictions, to the prevalence of excessive rents. The judges expressly shut

out this comprehensive survey. But the House was not a body with a limited

commission; it was a body of statesmen, legislators, politicians, bound to

look at the whole range of circumstances, and guilty of misprision of

justice if they failed so to do. “Suppose I am told,” he said in notable

and mournful words, “that without the agitation Ireland would never have

had the Land Act of 1881, are you prepared to deny that? I hear no

challenges upon that statement, for I think it is generally and deeply

felt that without the agitation the Land Act would not have been passed.

As the man responsible more than any other for the Act of 1881—as the man

whose duty it was to consider that question day and night during nearly

the whole of that session—I must record my firm opinion that it would not

have become the law of the land, if it had not been for the agitation with

which Irish society was convulsed.”(257)

This bare table of his leading points does nothing to convey the

impression made by an extraordinarily fine performance. When the speaker

came to the findings of acquittal, to the dismissal of the infamous

charges of the forged letters, of intimacy with the Invincibles, of being

(M148) accessory to the assassinations in the Park, glowing passion in

voice and gesture reached its most powerful pitch, and the moral appeal at

its close was long remembered among the most searching words that he had

ever spoken. It was not forensic argument, it was not literature; it had

every note of true oratory—a fervid, direct and pressing call to his

hearers as “individuals, man by man, not with a responsibility diffused

and severed until it became inoperative and worthless, to place himself in

the position of the victim of this frightful outrage; to give such a

judgment as would bear the scrutiny of the heart and of the conscience of

every man when he betook himself to his chamber and was still.”

The awe that impressed the House from this exhortation to repair an

enormous wrong soon passed away, and debate in both Houses went on the

regular lines of party. Everything that was found not to be proved against

the Irishmen, was assumed against them. Not proven was treated as only an

evasive form of guilty. Though the three judges found that there was no

evidence that the accused had done this thing or that, yet it was held

legitimate to argue that evidence must exist—if only it could be found.

The public were to nurse a sort of twilight conviction and keep their

minds in a limbo of beliefs that were substantial and alive—only the light

was bad.

In truth, the public did what the judges declined to do. They took

circumstances into account. The general effect of this transaction was to

promote the progress of the great unsettled controversy in Mr. Gladstone’s

sense. The abstract merits of home rule were no doubt untouched, but it

made a difference to the concrete argument, whether the future leader of

an Irish parliament was a proved accomplice of the Park murderers or not.

It presented moreover the chameleon Irish case in a new and singular

colour. A squalid insurrection awoke parliament to the mischiefs and

wrongs of the Irish cultivators. Reluctantly it provided a remedy. Then in

the fulness of time, ten years after, it dealt with the men who had roused

it to its duty. And how? It brought them to trial before a special

tribunal, invented for the purpose, and with no jury; it allowed them no

voice in the constitution of the tribunal; it exposed them to long and

harassing proceedings; and it thereby levied upon them a tremendous

pecuniary fine. The report produced a strong recoil against the flagrant

violence, passion, and calumny, that had given it birth; and it affected

that margin of men, on the edge of either of the two great parties by whom

electoral decisions are finally settled.

Chapter IV. An Interim. (1889-1891)

The nobler a soul is, the more objects of compassion it hath.

—BACON.

I

At the end of 1888 Mr. Gladstone with his wife and others of his house was

carried off by Mr. Rendel’s friendly care to Naples. Hereto, he told Lord

Acton, “we have been induced by three circumstances. First, a warm

invitation from the Dufferins to Rome; as to which, however, there are

_cons_ as well as _pros_, for a man who like me is neither Italian nor

Curial in the view of present policies. Secondly, our kind friend Mr.

Stuart Rendel has actually offered to be our conductor thither and back,

to perform for us the great service which you rendered us in the trip to

Munich and Saint-Martin. Thirdly, I have the hope that the stimulating

climate of Naples, together with an abstention from speech greater than

any I have before enjoyed, might act upon my ‘vocal cord,’ and partially

at least restore it.”

At Naples he was much concerned with Italian policy.

_To Lord Granville._

_Jan. 13, 1889._—My stay here where the people really seem to

regard me as not a foreigner, has brought Italian affairs and

policy very much home to me, and given additional force and

vividness to the belief I have always had, that it was sadly

impolitic for Italy to make enemies for herself beyond the Alps.

Though I might try and keep back this sentiment in Rome, even my

silence might betray it and I could not promise to keep silence

altogether. I think the impolicy amounts almost to madness

especially for a country which carries with her, nestling in her

bosom, the “standing menace” of the popedom....

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

_To J. Morley._

_Jan. 10._—I hope you have had faith enough not to be troubled

about my supposed utterances on the temporal power.... I will not

trouble you with details, but you may rest assured I have never

said the question of the temporal power was anything except an

Italian question. I have a much greater anxiety than this about

the Italian alliance with Germany. It is in my opinion an awful

error and constitutes the great danger of the country. It may be

asked, “What have you to do with it?” More than people might

suppose. I find myself hardly regarded here as a foreigner. They

look upon me as having had a real though insignificant part in the

Liberation. It will hardly be possible for me to get through the

affair of this visit without making my mind known. On this account

mainly I am verging towards the conclusion that it will be best

for me not to visit Rome, and my wife as it happens is not anxious

to go there. If you happen to see Granville or Rosebery please let

them know this.

We have had on the whole a good season here thus far. Many of the

days delicious. We have been subjected here as well as in London

to a course of social kindnesses as abundant as the waters which

the visitor has to drink at a watering place, and so enervating

from the abstraction of cares that I am continually thinking of

the historical Capuan writer. I am in fact totally demoralised,

and cannot wish not to continue so. Under the circumstances

Fortune has administered a slight, a very slight physical

correction. A land-slip, or rather a Tufo rock-slip of 50,000

tons, has come down and blocked the proper road between us and

Naples.

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

_To Lord Acton._

_Jan. 23, 1889._—Rome is I think definitely given up. I shall be

curious to know your reasons for approving this _gran rifiuto_.

Meantime I will just glance at mine. I am not so much afraid of

the Pope as of the Italian government and court. My sentiments are

so very strong about the present foreign policy. The foreign

policy of the government but not I fear of the government only. If

I went to Rome, and saw the King and the minister, as I must, I

should be treading upon eggs all the time with them. I could not

speak out uninvited; and it is not satisfactory to be silent in

the presence of those interested, when the feelings are very

strong....

These feelings broke out in time in at least one anonymous article.(258)

He told Lord Granville how anxious he was that no acknowledgment of

authorship, direct or indirect, should come from any of his friends. “Such

an article of necessity lectures the European states. As one of a public

of three hundred and more millions, I have a right to do this, but not in

my own person.” This strange simplicity rather provoked his friends, for

it ignored two things—first, the certainty that the secret of authorship

would get out; second, if it did not get out, the certainty that the

European states would pay no attention to such a lecture backed by no name

of weight—perhaps even whether it were so backed or not. Faith in

lectures, sermons, articles, even books, is one of the things most easily

overdone.

Most of my reading, he went on to Acton, has been about the Jews

and the Old Testament. I have not looked at the books you kindly

sent me, except a little before leaving Hawarden; but I want to

get a hold on the broader side of the Mosaic dispensation and the

Jewish history. The great historic features seem to me in a large

degree independent of the critical questions which have been

raised about the _redaction_ of the Mosaic books. Setting aside

Genesis, and the Exodus proper, it seems difficult to understand

how either Moses or any one else could have advisedly published

them in their present form; and most of all difficult to believe

that men going to work deliberately after the captivity would not

have managed a more orderly execution. My thoughts are always

running back to the parallel question about Homer. In that case,

those who hold that Peisistratos or some one of his date was the

compiler, have at least this to say, that the poems in their

present form are such as a compiler, having liberty of action,

might have aimed at putting out from his workshop. Can that be

said of the Mosaic books? Again, are we not to believe in the

second and third Temples as centres of worship because there was a

temple at Leontopolis, as we are told? Out of the frying-pan, into

the fire.

When he left Amalfi (Feb. 14) for the north, he found himself, he says, in

a public procession, with great crowds at the stations, including Crispi

at Rome, who had once been his guest at Hawarden.

After his return home, he wrote again to Lord Acton:—

_April 28, 1889._—I have long been wishing to write to you. But as

a rule I never can write any letters that I wish to write. My

volition of that kind is from day to day exhausted by the worrying

demand of letters that I do not wish to write. Every year brings

me, as I reckon, from three to five thousand new correspondents,

of whom I could gladly dispense with 99 per cent. May you never be

in a like plight.

Mary showed me a letter of recent date from you, which referred to

the idea of my writing on the Old Testament. The matter stands

thus: An appeal was made to me to write something on the general

position and claims of the holy scriptures for the working men. I

gave no pledge but read (what was for me) a good deal on the laws

and history of the Jews with only two results: first, deepened

impressions of the vast interest and importance attaching to them,

and of their fitness to be made the subject of a telling popular

account; secondly, a discovery of the necessity of reading much

more. But I have never in this connection thought much about what

is called the criticism of the Old Testament, only seeking to

learn how far it impinged upon the matters that I really was

thinking of. It seems to me that it does not impinge much.... It

is the fact that among other things I wish to make some sort of

record of my life. You say truly it has been very full. I add

fearfully full. But it has been in a most remarkable degree the

reverse of self-guided and self-suggested, with reference I mean

to all its best known aims. Under this surface, and in its daily

habit no doubt it has been selfish enough. Whether anything of

this kind will ever come off is most doubtful. Until I am released

from politics by the solution of the Irish problem, I cannot even

survey the field.

I turn to the world of action. It has long been in my mind to

found something of which a library would be the nucleus. I incline

to begin with a temporary building here. Can you, who have built a

library, give me any advice? On account of fire I have half a mind

to corrugated iron, with felt sheets to regulate the temperature.

Have you read any of the works of Dr. Salmon? I have just finished

his volume on Infallibility, which fills me with admiration of its

easy movement, command of knowledge, singular faculty of

disentanglement, and great skill and point in argument; though he

does not quite make one love him. He touches much ground trodden

by Dr. Döllinger; almost invariably agreeing with him.

II

July 25, 1889, was the fiftieth anniversary of his marriage. The Prince

and Princess of Wales sent him what he calls a beautiful and splendid

gift. The humblest were as ready as the highest with their tributes, and

comparative strangers as ready as the nearest. Among countless others who

wrote was Bishop Lightfoot, great master of so much learning:—

I hope you will receive this tribute from one who regards your

private friendship as one of the great privileges of his life.

And Döllinger:—

If I were fifteen years younger than I am, how happy I would be to

come over to my beloved England once more, and see you surrounded

by your sons and daughters, loved, admired, I would almost say

worshipped, by a whole grateful nation.

On the other side, a clever lady having suggested to Browning that he

should write an inscription for her to some gift for Mr. Gladstone,

received an answer that has interest, both by the genius and fame of its

writer, and as a sign of widespread feeling in certain circles in those

days:—

Surely your kindness, even your sympathy, will be extended to me

when I say, with sorrow indeed, that I am unable now

conscientiously to do what, but a few years ago, I would have at

least attempted with such pleasure and pride as might almost

promise success. I have received much kindness from that

extraordinary personage, and what my admiration for his

transcendent abilities was and ever will be, there is no need to

speak of. But I am forced to altogether deplore his present

attitude with respect to the liberal party, of which I, the

humblest unit, am still a member, and as such grieved to the heart

by every fresh utterance of his which comes to my knowledge. Were

I in a position to explain publicly how much the personal feeling

is independent of the political aversion, all would be easy; but I

am a mere man of letters, and by the simple inscription which

would truly testify to what is enduring, unalterable in my esteem,

I should lead people—as well those who know me as those who do

not—to believe my approbation extended far beyond the bounds which

unfortunately circumscribe it now. All this—even more—was on my

mind as I sat, last evening, at the same table with the

brilliantly-gifted man whom once—but that “once” is too sad to

remember.

At a gathering at Spencer House in the summer of 1888, when this year of

felicitation opened, Lord Granville, on behalf of a number of subscribers,

presented Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone with two portraits, and in his address

spoke of the long span of years through, which, they had enjoyed “the

unclouded blessings of the home.” The expression was a just one. The

extraordinary splendour and exalted joys of an outer life so illustrious

were matched in the inner circle of the hearth by a happy order,

affectionate reciprocal attachments, a genial round of kindliness and

duty, that from year to year went on untarnished, unstrained, unbroken.

Visitors at Hawarden noticed that, though the two heads of the house were

now old, the whole atmosphere seemed somehow to be alive with the

freshness and vigour of youth; it was one of the youngest of households in

its interests and activities. The constant tension of his mind never

impaired his tenderness and wise solicitude for family and kinsfolk, and

for all about him; and no man ever had such observance of decorum with

such entire freedom from pharisaism.

Nor did the order and moral prosperity of his own home (M149) leave him

complacently forgetful of fellow-creatures to whom life’s cup had been

dealt in another measure. On his first entry upon the field of responsible

life, he had formed a serious and solemn engagement with a friend—I

suppose it was Hope-Scott—that each would devote himself to active service

in some branch of religious work.(259) He could not, without treason to

his gifts, go forth like Selwyn or Patteson to Melanesia to convert the

savages. He sought a missionary field at home, and he found it among the

unfortunate ministers to “the great sin of great cities.” In these humane

efforts at reclamation he persevered all through his life, fearless of

misconstruction, fearless of the levity or baseness of men’s tongues,

regardless almost of the possible mischiefs to the public policies that

depended on him. Greville(260) tells the story how in 1853 a man made an

attempt one night to extort money from Mr. Gladstone, then in office as

chancellor of the exchequer, by threats of exposure; and how he instantly

gave the offender into custody, and met the case at the police office.

Greville could not complete the story. The man was committed for trial.

Mr. Gladstone directed his solicitors to see that the accused was properly

defended. He was convicted and sent to prison. By and by Mr. Gladstone

inquired from the governor of the prison how the delinquent was conducting

himself. The report being satisfactory, he next wrote to Lord Palmerston,

then at the home office, asking that the prisoner should be let out. There

was no worldly wisdom in it, we all know. But then what are people

Christians for?

We have already seen(261) his admonition to a son, and how much importance

he attached to the dedication of a certain portion of our means to

purposes of charity and religion. His example backed his precept. He kept

detailed accounts under these heads from 1831 to 1897, and from these it

appears that from 1831 to the end of 1890 he had devoted to objects of

charity and religion upwards of seventy thousand pounds, and in the

remaining years of his life the figure in this account stands at thirteen

thousand five hundred—this besides thirty thousand pounds for his

cherished object of founding the hostel and library at Saint Deiniol’s.

His friend of early days, Henry Taylor, says in one of his notes on life

that if you know how a man deals with money, how he gets it, spends it,

keeps it, shares it, you know some of the most important things about him.

His old chief at the colonial office in 1846 stands the test most nobly.

III

Near the end of 1889 among the visitors to Hawarden was Mr. Parnell. His

air of good breeding and easy composure pleased everybody. Mr. Gladstone’s

own record is simple enough, and contains the substance of the affair as

he told me of it later:—

_Dec. 18, 1889._—Reviewed and threw into form all the points of

possible amendment or change in the plan of Irish government,

etc., for my meeting with Mr. Parnell. He arrived at 5.30, and we

had two hours of satisfactory conversation; but he put off the

_gros_ of it. 19.—Two hours more with Mr. P. on points in Irish

government plans. He is certainly one of the very best people to

deal with that I have ever known. Took him to the old castle. He

seems to notice and appreciate everything.

Thinking of all that had gone before, and all that was so soon to come

after, anybody with a turn for imaginary dialogue might easily upon this

theme compose a striking piece.

In the spring of 1890 Mr. Gladstone spent a week at Oxford of which he

spoke with immense enthusiasm. He was an honorary fellow of All Souls, and

here he went into residence in his own right with all the zest of a

virtuous freshman bent upon a first class. Though, I daresay, pretty

nearly unanimous against his recent policies, they were all fascinated by

his simplicity, his freedom from assumption or parade, his eagerness to

know how leading branches of Oxford study fared, his naturalness and

pleasant manners. He wrote to Mrs. Gladstone (Feb. 1):—

Here I am safe and sound, and launched anew on my university

career, all my days laid out and occupied until the morning of

this day week, when I am to return to London. They press me to

stay over the Sunday, but this cannot be thought of. I am received

with infinite kindness, and the rooms they have given me are

delightful. Weather dull, and light a medium between London and

Hawarden. I have seen many already, including Liddon and Acland,

who goes up to-morrow for a funeral early on Monday. Actually I

have engaged to give a kind of Homeric lecture on Wednesday to the

members of the union. The warden and his sisters are courteous and

hospitable to the last degree. He is a unionist. The living here

is very good, perhaps some put on for a guest, but I like the tone

of the college; the fellows are men of a high class, and their

conversation is that of men with work to do. I had a most special

purpose in coming here which will be more than answered. It was to

make myself safe so far as might be, in the articles(262) which

eighteen months ago I undertook to write about the Old Testament.

This, as you know perhaps, is now far more than the New, the

battle-ground of belief. There are here most able and instructed

men, and I am already deriving great benefit.

Something that fell from him one morning at breakfast in the common room

led in due time to the election of Lord Acton to be also an honorary

member of this distinguished society. “If my suggestion,” Mr. Gladstone

wrote to one of the fellows, “really contributed to this election, then I

feel that in the dregs of my life I have at least rendered one service to

the college. My ambition is to visit it and Oxford in company with him.”

IV

In 1890 both Newman and Döllinger died.

I have been asked from many quarters, Mr. Gladstone said to Acton,

to write about the Cardinal. But I dare not. First, I do not know

enough. Secondly, I should be puzzled to use the little knowledge

that I have. I was not a friend of his, but only an acquaintance

treated with extraordinary kindness whom it would ill become to

note what he thinks defects, while the great powers and qualities

have been and will be described far better by others. Ever since

he published his University Sermons in 1843, I have thought him

unsafe in philosophy, and no Butlerian though a warm admirer of

Butler. No; it was before 1843, in 1841 when he published Tract

XC. The _general_ argument of that tract was unquestionable; but

he put in sophistical matter without the smallest necessity. What

I recollect is about General Councils: where in treating the

declaration that they may err he virtually says, “No doubt they

may—unless the Holy Ghost prevents them.” But he was a wonderful

man, a holy man, a very refined man, and (to me) a most kindly

man.

Of Dr. Döllinger he contributed a charming account to a weekly print,(263)

and to Acton he wrote:—

I have the fear that my Döllinger letters will disappoint you.

When I was with him, he spoke to me with the utmost freedom; and

so I think he wrote, but our correspondence was only occasional. I

think nine-tenths of my intercourse with him was oral; with

Cardinal Newman nothing like one-tenth. But with neither was the

mere _corpus_ of my intercourse great, though in D.’s case it was

very precious, most of all the very first of it in 1845.... With

my inferior faculty and means of observation, I have long adopted

your main proposition. His attitude of mind was more historical

than theological. When I first knew him in 1845, and he honoured

me with very long and interesting conversations, they turned very

much upon theology, and I derived from him what I thought very

valuable and steadying knowledge. Again in 1874 during a long

walk, when we spoke of the shocks and agitation of our time, he

told me how the Vatican decrees had required him to reperuse and

retry the whole circle of his thought. He did not make known to me

any general result; but he had by that time found himself wholly

detached from the Council of Trent, which was indeed a logical

necessity from his preceding action. The Bonn Conference appeared

to show him nearly at the standing-point of anglican theology. I

thought him more liberal as a theologian than as a politician. On

the point of church establishment he was as impenetrable as if he

had been a Newdegate. He would not see that there were two sides

to the question. I long earnestly to know what progress he had

made at the last towards redeeming the pledge given in one of his

letters to me, that the evening of his life was to be devoted to a

great theological construction.... I should have called him an

anti-Jesuit, but in _no_ other sense, that is in no sense, a

Jansenist. I never saw the least sign of leaning in that

direction.

V

Here the reader may care to have a note or two of talk with him in these

days:—

_At Dollis Hill, Sunday, Feb. 22, 1891_.... A few minutes after

eight Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone came in from church, and we three sat

down to dinner. A delightful talk, he was in full force, plenty of

energy without vehemence. The range of topics was pretty wide, yet

marvellous to say, we had not a single word about Ireland.

Certainly no harm in that.

_J. M._—A friend set me on a hunt this morning through Wordsworth

for the words about France standing on the top of golden hours. I

did not find them, but I came across a good line of Hartley

Coleridge’s about the Thames:—

“And the thronged river toiling to the main.”

_Mr. G._—Yes, a good line. Toiling to the main recalls Dante:—

“Su la marina, dove’l Po discende,

Per aver pace co’ seguaci sui.”(264)

_J. M._—Have you seen Symonds’s re-issued volume on Dante? ’Tis

very good. Shall I lend it to you?

_Mr. G._—Sure to be good, but not in the session. I never look at

Dante unless I can have a great continuous draught of him. He’s

too big, he seizes and masters you.

_J. M._—Oh, I like the picturesque bits, if it’s only for

half-an-hour before dinner; the bird looking out of its nest for

the dawn, the afternoon bell, the trembling of the water in the

morning light, and the rest that everybody knows.

_Mr. G._—No, I cannot do it. By the way, ladies nowadays keep

question books, and among other things ask their friends for the

finest line in poetry. I think I’m divided between three, perhaps

the most glorious is Milton’s—[_Somehow this line slipped from

memory, but the reader might possibly do worse than turn over

Milton in search for his finest line._] Or else Wordsworth’s—“Or

hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.” Yet what so splendid as

Penelope’s about not rejoicing the heart of anybody less than

Odysseus?

μηδέ τι χείρονος ἀνδρὸς εὐφραίνοιμι νόημα.(265)

He talked a great deal to-night about Homer; very confident that

he had done something to drive away the idea that Homer was an

Asiatic Greek. Then we turned to Scott, whom he held to be by far

the greatest of his countrymen. I suggested John Knox. No, the

line must be drawn firm between the writer and the man of action;

no comparisons there.

_J. M._—Well, then, though I love Scott so much that if any man

chooses to put him first, I won’t put him second, yet is there not

a vein of pure gold in Burns that gives you pause?

_Mr. G._—Burns very fine and true, no doubt; but to imagine a

whole group of characters, to marshal them, to set them to work,

to sustain the action—I must count that the test of highest and

most diversified quality.

We spoke of the new Shakespeare coming out. I said I had been

taking the opportunity of reading vol. i., and should go over it

all in successive volumes. _Mr. G._—“Falstaff is wonderful—one of

the most wonderful things in literature.”

Full of interest in _Hamlet_, and enthusiasm for it—comes closer

than any other play to some of the strangest secrets of human

nature—what _is_ the key to the mysterious hold of this play on

the world’s mind? I produced my favourite proposition that

_Measure for Measure_ is one of the most modern of all the plays;

the profound analysis of Angelo and his moral catastrophe, the

strange figure of the duke, the deep irony of our modern time in

it all. But I do not think he cared at all for this sort of

criticism. He is too healthy, too objective, too simple, for all

the complexities of modern morbid analysis.

Talked of historians; Lecky’s two last volumes he had not yet

read, but—had told him that, save for one or two blots due to

contemporary passion, they were perfectly honourable to Lecky in

every way. Lecky, said Mr. G., “has real insight into the motives

of statesmen. Now Carlyle, so mighty as he is in flash and

penetration, has no eye for motives. Macaulay, too, is so caught

by a picture, by colour, by surface, that he is seldom to be

counted on for just account of motive.”

He had been reading with immense interest and satisfaction

Sainte-Beuve’s _History of Port Royal_, which for that matter

deserves all his praise and more, though different parts of it are

written from antagonistic points of view. Vastly struck by

Saint-Cyran. When did the notion of the spiritual director make

its appearance in Europe? Had asked both Döllinger and Acton on

this curious point. For his own part, he doubted whether the

office existed before the Reformation.

_J. M._—Whom do you reckon the greatest Pope?

_Mr. G._—I think on the whole, Innocent III. But his greatness was

not for good. What did he do? He imposed the dogma of

transubstantiation; he is responsible for the Albigensian

persecutions; he is responsible for the crusade which ended in the

conquest of Byzantium. Have you ever realised what a deadly blow

was the ruin of Byzantium by the Latins, how wonderful a fabric

the Eastern Empire was?

_J. M._—Oh, yes, I used to know my Finlay better than most books.

Mill used to say a page of Finlay was worth a chapter of Gibbon:

he explains how decline and fall came about.

_Mr. G._—Of course. Finlay has it all.

He tried then to make out that the eastern empire was more

wonderful than anything done by the Romans; it stood out for

eleven centuries, while Rome fell in three. I pointed out to him

that the whole solid framework of the eastern empire was after all

built up by the Romans. But he is philhellene all through past and

present.

Chapter V. Breach With Mr. Parnell. (1890-1891)

Fortuna vitrea est,—tum quum splendet frangitur.—PUBLIL. SYRUS.

Brittle like glass is fortune,—bright as light, and then the

crash.

I

It would have been a miracle if the sight of all the methods of coercion,

along with the ignominy of the forged letters, had not worked with strong

effect upon the public mind. Distrust began to creep at a very rapid pace

even into the ministerial ranks. The tory member for a large northern

borough rose to resent “the inexpedient treatment of the Irishmen from a

party point of view,” to protest against the ’straining and stretching of

the law’ by the resident magistrates, to declare his opinion that these

gentlemen were not qualified to exercise the jurisdiction entrusted to

them, “and to denounce the folly of making English law unpopular in

Ireland, and provoking the leaders of the Irish people by illegal and

unconstitutional acts.”(266) These sentiments were notoriously shared to

the full by many who sat around him. Nobody in those days, discredited as

he was with his party, had a keener scent for the drift of popular feeling

than Lord Randolph Churchill, and he publicly proclaimed that this sending

of Irish members of parliament to prison in such numbers was a feature

which he did not like. Further, he said that the fact of the government

not thinking it safe for public meetings of any sort to be held, excited

painful feelings in English minds.(267) All this was after the system had

been in operation for two years. Even strong unionist organs in the Irish

press could not stand it.(268) They declared that if (M150) the Irish,

government wished to make the coercive system appear as odious as

possible, they would act just as they were acting. They could only explain

all these doings, not by “wrong-headedness or imbecility,” but by a

strange theory that there must be deliberate treachery among the

government agents.

Before the end of the year 1889 the electoral signs were unmistakable.

Fifty-three bye-elections had been contested since the beginning of the

parliament. The net result was the gain of one seat for ministers and of

nine to the opposition. The Irish secretary with characteristic candour

never denied the formidable extent of these victories, though he mourned

over the evils that such temporary successes might entail, and was

convinced that they would prove to be dearly bought.(269) A year later the

tide still flowed on; the net gain of the opposition rose to eleven. In

1886 seventy-seven constituencies were represented by forty-seven

unionists and thirty liberals. By the beginning of October in 1890 the

unionist members in the same constituencies had sunk to thirty-six, and

the liberals had risen to forty-one. Then came the most significant

election of all.

There had been for some months a lull in Ireland. Government claimed the

credit of it for coercion; their adversaries set it down partly to the

operation of the Land Act, partly to the natural tendency in such

agitations to fluctuate or to wear themselves out, and most of all to the

strengthened reliance on the sincerity of the English liberals. Suddenly

the country was amazed towards the middle of September by news that

proceedings under the Coercion Act had been instituted against two

nationalist leaders, and others. Even strong adherents of the government

and their policy were deeply dismayed, when they saw that after three

years of it, the dreary work was to begin over again. The proceedings

seemed to be stamped in every aspect as impolitic. In a few days the two

leaders would have been on their way to America, leaving a half-empty war

chest behind them and the flame of agitation burning low. As the offences

charged had been going on for six months, there was clearly no pressing

emergency.

A critical bye-election was close at hand at the moment in the Eccles

division of Lancashire. The polling took place four days after a vehement

defence of his policy by Mr. Balfour at Newcastle. The liberal candidate

at Eccles expressly declared from his election address onwards, that the

great issue on which he fought was the alternative between conciliation

and coercion. Each candidate increased the party vote, the tory by rather

more than one hundred, the liberal by nearly six hundred. For the first

time the seat was wrested from the tories, and the liberal triumphed by a

substantial majority.(270) This was the latest gauge of the failure of the

Irish policy to conquer public approval, the last indication of the

direction in which the currents of public opinion were steadily

moving.(271) Then all at once a blinding sandstorm swept the ground.

II

One of those events now occurred that with their stern irony so mock the

statesman’s foresight, and shatter political designs in their most

prosperous hour. As a mightier figure than Mr. Parnell remorsefully said

on a grander stage, a hundred years before, cases sometimes befall in the

history of nations where private fault is public disaster.

At the end of 1889, the Irish leader had been made a party in a suit for

divorce. He betrayed no trace in his demeanour, either to his friends or

to the House, of embarrassment at the position. His earliest appearance

after the evil news, was in the debate on the first night of the session

(February 11, ’90), upon a motion about the publication of the forged

letter. Some twenty of (M151) his followers being absent, he wished the

discussion to be prolonged into another sitting. Closely as it might be

supposed to concern him, he listened to none of the debate. He had a

sincere contempt for speeches in themselves, and was wont to set down most

of them to vanity. A message was sent that he should come upstairs and

speak. After some indolent remonstrance, he came. His speech was

admirable; firm without emphasis, penetrating, dignified, freezing, and

unanswerable. Neither now nor on any later occasion did his air of

composure in public or in private give way.

Mr. Gladstone was at Hawarden, wide awake to the possibility of peril. To

Mr. Arnold Morley he wrote on November 4:—“I fear a thundercloud is about

to burst over Parnell’s head, and I suppose it will end the career of a

man in many respects invaluable.” On the 13th he was told by the present

writer that there were grounds for an impression that Mr. Parnell would

emerge as triumphantly from the new charge, as he had emerged from the

obloquy of the forged letters. The case was opened two days later, and

enough came out upon the first day of the proceedings to point to an

adverse result. A Sunday intervened, and Mr. Gladstone’s self-command

under storm-clouds may be seen in a letter written on that day to me:—

_Nov. 16, 1890._—1. It is, after all, a thunder-clap about

Parnell. Will he ask for the Chiltern Hundreds? He cannot continue

to lead? What could he mean by his language to you? The Pope has

now clearly got a commandment under which to pull him up. It

surely cannot have been always thus; for he represented his

diocese in the church synod. 2. I thank you for your kind scruple,

but in the country my Sundays are habitually and largely invaded.

3. Query, whether if a bye-seat were open and chanced to have a

large Irish vote W—— might not be a good man there. 4. I do not

think my Mem. is worth circulating but perhaps you would send it

to Spencer. I sent a copy to Harcourt. 5. [A small parliamentary

point, not related to the Parnell affair, nor otherwise

significant.] 6. Most warmly do I agree with you about the Scott

_Journal_. How one loves him. 7. Some day I hope to inflict on you

a talk about Homer and Homerology (as I call it).

The court pronounced a condemnatory decree on Monday, November 17th.

Parliament was appointed to meet on Tuesday, the 25th. There was only a

week for Irish and English to resolve what effect this condemnation should

have upon Mr. Parnell’s position as leader of one and ally of the other.

Mr. Parnell wrote the ordinary letter to his parliamentary followers. The

first impulses of Mr. Gladstone are indicated in a letter to me on the day

after the decree:—

_Nov. 18, 1890._—Many thanks for your letter. I had noticed the

Parnell circular, not without misgiving. I read in the _P. M. G._

this morning a noteworthy article in the _Daily Telegraph_,(272)

or rather from it, with which I very much agree. But I think it

plain that we have nothing to say and nothing to do in the matter.

The party is as distinct from us as that of Smith or Hartington. I

own to some surprise at the apparent facility with which the R. C.

bishops and clergy appear to take the continued leadership, but

they may have tried the ground and found it would not _bear_. It

is the Irish parliamentary party, and that alone to which we have

to look....

Such were Mr. Gladstone’s thoughts when the stroke first fell.

III

In England and Scotland loud voices were speedily lifted up. Some treated

the offence itself as an inexpiable disqualification. Others argued that,

even if the offence could be passed over as lying outside of politics, it

(M152) had been surrounded by incidents of squalor and deceit that

betrayed a character in which no trust could ever be placed again. In some

English quarters all this was expressed with a strident arrogance that set

Irishmen on fire. It is ridiculous, if we remember what space Mr. Parnell

filled in Irish imagination and feeling, how popular, how mysterious, how

invincible he had been, to blame them because in the first moment of shock

and bewilderment they did not instantly plant themselves in the judgment

seat, always so easily ascended by Englishmen with little at stake. The

politicians in Dublin did not hesitate. A great meeting was held at

Leinster Hall in Dublin on the Thursday (November 20th). The result was

easy to foresee. Not a whisper of revolt was heard. The chief nationalist

newspaper stood firm for Mr. Parnell’s continuance. At least one

ecclesiastic of commanding influence was supposed to be among the

journal’s most ardent prompters. It has since been stated that the bishops

were in fact forging bolts of commination. No lurid premonitory fork or

sheet flashed on the horizon, no rumble of the coming thunders reached the

public ear.

Three days after the decree in the court, the great English liberal

organization chanced to hold its annual meeting at Sheffield (November

20-21). In reply to a request of mine as to his views upon our position,

Mr. Gladstone wrote to me as follows:—

_Nov. 19, 1890._—Your appeal as to your meeting of to-morrow gives

matter for thought. I feel (1) that the Irish have abstractedly a

right to decide the question; (2) that on account of Parnell’s

enormous services—he has done for home rule something like what

Cobden did for free trade, set the argument on its legs—they are

in a position of immense difficulty; (3) that we, the liberal

party as a whole, and especially we its leaders, have for the

moment nothing to say to it, that we must be passive, must wait

and watch. But I again and again say to myself, I say I mean in

the interior and silent forum, “It’ll na dee.” I should not be

surprised if there were to be rather painful manifestations in the

House on Tuesday. It is yet to be seen what our Nonconformist

friends, such a man as ——, for example, or such a man as —— will

say.... If I recollect right, Southey’s _Life of Nelson_ was in my

early days published and circulated by the Society for Promoting

Christian Knowledge. It would be curious to look back upon it and

see how the biographer treats his narrative at the tender points.

What I have said under figure 3 applies to me beyond all others,

and notwithstanding my prognostications I shall maintain an

extreme reserve in a position where I can do no good (in the

present tense), and might by indiscretion do much harm. You will

doubtless communicate with Harcourt and confidential friends only

as to anything in this letter. The thing, one can see, is not a

_res judicata_. It may ripen fast. Thus far, there is a total want

of moral support from this side to the Irish judgment.

A fierce current was soon perceived to be running. All the elements so

powerful for high enthusiasm, but hazardous where an occasion demands

circumspection, were in full blast. The deep instinct for domestic order

was awake. Many were even violently and irrationally impatient that Mr.

Gladstone had not peremptorily renounced the alliance on the very morrow

of the decree. As if, Mr. Gladstone himself used to say, it could be the

duty of any party leader to take into his hands the intolerable burden of

exercising the rigours of inquisition and private censorship over every

man with whom what he judged the highest public expediency might draw him

to co-operate. As if, moreover, it could be the duty of Mr. Gladstone to

hurry headlong into action, without giving Mr. Parnell time or chance of

taking such action of his own as might make intervention unnecessary. Why

was it to be assumed that Mr. Parnell would not recognise the facts of the

situation? “I determined,” said Mr. Gladstone “to watch the state of

feeling in this country. I made no public declaration, but the country

made up its mind. I was in some degree like the soothsayer Shakespeare

introduces into one of his plays. He says, ‘I do not make the facts; I

only foresee them.’ I did not foresee the facts even; they were present

before me.”(273)

(M153) The facts were plain, and Mr. Gladstone was keenly alive to the

full purport of every one of them. Men, in whose hearts religion and

morals held the first place, were strongly joined by men accustomed to

settle political action by political considerations. Platform-men united

with pulpit-men in swelling the whirlwind. Electoral calculation and moral

faithfulness were held for once to point the same way. The report from

every quarter, every letter to a member from a constituent, all was in one

sense. Some, as I have said, pressed the point that the misconduct itself

made co-operation impossible; others urged the impossibility of relying

upon political understandings with one to whom habitual duplicity was

believed to have been brought home. We may set what value we choose upon

such arguments. Undoubtedly they would have proscribed some of the most

important and admired figures in the supreme doings of modern Europe.

Undoubtedly some who have fallen into shift and deceit in this particular

relation, have yet been true as steel in all else. For a man’s character

is a strangely fitted mosaic, and it is unsafe to assume that all his

traits are of one piece, or inseparable in fact because they ought to be

inseparable by logic. But people were in no humour for casuistry, and

whether all this be sophistry or sense, the volume of hostile judgment and

obstinate intention could neither be mistaken, nor be wisely breasted if

home rule was to be saved in Great Britain.

Mr. Gladstone remained at Hawarden during the week. To Mr. Arnold Morley

he wrote (Nov. 23): “I have a bundle of letters every morning on the

Parnell business, and the bundles increase. My own opinion has been the

same from the first, and I conceive that the time for action has now come.

All my correspondents are in unison.” Every post-bag was heavy with

admonitions, of greater cogency than such epistles sometimes possess; and

a voluminous bundle of letters still at Hawarden bears witness to the

emotions of the time. Sir William Harcourt and I, who had taken part in

the proceedings at Sheffield, made our reports. The acute manager of the

liberal party came to announce that three of our candidates had bolted

already, that more were sure to follow, and that this indispensable

commodity in elections would become scarcer than ever. Of the general

party opinion, there could be no shadow of doubt. It was no application of

special rigour because Mr. Parnell was an Irishman. Any English politician

of his rank would have fared the same or worse, and retirement, temporary

or for ever, would have been inevitable. Temporary withdrawal, said some;

permanent withdrawal, said others; but for withdrawal of some sort, almost

all were inexorable.

IV

Mr. Gladstone did not reach London until the afternoon of Monday, November

24. Parliament was to assemble on the next day. Three members of the

cabinet of 1886, and the chief whip of the party,(274) met him in the

library of Lord Rendel’s house at Carlton Gardens. The issue before the

liberal leaders was a plain one. It was no question of the right of the

nationalists to choose their own chief. It was no question of inflicting

political ostracism on a particular kind of moral delinquency. The

question was whether the present continuance of the Irish leadership with

the silent assent of the British leaders, did not involve decisive

abstention at the polls on the day when Irish policy could once more be

submitted to the electors of Great Britain? At the best the standing

difficulties even to sanguine eyes, and under circumstances that had

seemed so promising, were still formidable. What chance was there if this

new burden were superadded? Only one conclusion was possible upon the

state of facts, and even those among persons responsible for this decision

who were most earnestly concerned in the success of the Irish policy,

reviewing all the circumstances of the dilemma, deliberately hold to this

day that though a catastrophe followed, a worse catastrophe was avoided.

It is one of the commonest of all secrets of cheap misjudgment in human

affairs, to start by assuming that there is always some good way out of a

bad case. Alas for us all, this is not so. Situations arise alike (M154)

for individuals, for parties, and for states, from which no good way out

exists, but only choice between bad way and worse. Here was one of those

situations. The mischiefs that followed the course actually taken, we see;

then, as is the wont of human kind, we ignore the mischiefs that as surely

awaited any other.

Mr. Gladstone always steadfastly resisted every call to express an opinion

of his own that the delinquency itself had made Mr. Parnell unfit and

impossible. It was vain to tell him that the party would expect such a

declaration, or that his reputation required that he should found his

action on moral censure all his own. “What!” he cried, “because a man is

what is called leader of a party, does that constitute him a censor and a

judge of faith and morals? I will not accept it. It would make life

intolerable.” He adhered tenaciously to political ground. “I have been for

four years,” Mr. Gladstone justly argued, “endeavouring to persuade voters

to support Irish autonomy. Now the voter says to me, ‘If a certain thing

happens—namely, the retention of the Irish leadership in its present

hands—I will not support Irish autonomy.’ How can I go on with the work?

We laboriously rolled the great stone up to the top of the hill, and now

it topples down to the bottom again, unless Mr. Parnell sees fit to go.”

From the point of view of Irish policy this was absolutely unanswerable.

It would have been just as unanswerable, even if all the dire confusion

that afterwards came to pass had then been actually in sight. Its force

was wholly independent, and necessarily so, of any intention that might be

formed by Mr. Parnell.

As for that intention, let us turn to him for a moment. Who could dream

that a man so resolute in facing facts as Mr. Parnell, would expect all to

go on as before? Substantial people in Ireland who were preparing to come

round to home rule at the prospect of a liberal victory in Great Britain,

would assuredly be frightened back. Belfast would be more resolute than

ever. A man might estimate as he pleased either the nonconformist

conscience in England, or the catholic conscience in Ireland. But the most

cynical of mere calculators,—and I should be slow to say that this was Mr.

Parnell,—could not fall a prey to such a hallucination as to suppose that

a scandal so frightfully public, so impossible for even the most mild-eyed

charity to pretend not to see, and which political passion was so

interested in keeping in full blaze, would instantly drop out of the mind

of two of the most religious communities in the world; or that either of

these communities could tolerate without effective protest so impenitent

an affront as the unruffled continuity of the stained leadership. All this

was independent of anything that Mr. Gladstone might do or might not do.

The liberal leaders had a right to assume that the case must be as obvious

to Mr. Parnell as it was to everybody else, and unless loyalty and good

faith have no place in political alliances, they had a right to look for

his spontaneous action. Was unlimited consideration due from them to him

and none from him to them?

The result of the consultation was the decisive letter addressed to me by

Mr. Gladstone, its purport to be by me communicated to Mr. Parnell. As any

one may see, its language was courteous and considerate. Not an accent was

left that could touch the pride of one who was known to be as proud a man

as ever lived. It did no more than state an unquestionable fact, with an

inevitable inference. It was not written in view of publication, for that

it was hoped would be unnecessary. It was written with the expectation of

finding the personage concerned in his usual rational frame of mind, and

with the intention of informing him of what it was right that he should

know. The same evening Mr. McCarthy was placed in possession of Mr.

Gladstone’s views, to be laid before Mr. Parnell at the earliest moment.

_1 Carlton Gardens, Nov. 24, 1890._—MY DEAR MORLEY.—Having arrived

at a certain conclusion with regard to the continuance, at the

present moment, of Mr. Parnell’s leadership of the Irish party, I

have seen Mr. McCarthy on my arrival in town, and have inquired

from him whether I was likely to receive from Mr. Parnell himself

any communication on the subject. Mr. McCarthy replied that he was

unable to give me any information on the subject. I mentioned to

him that in 1882, after the terrible murder in the Phœnix Park,

Mr. Parnell, although totally removed from any idea of

responsibility, had spontaneously written to me, and offered to

take the Chiltern Hundreds, an offer much to his honour but one

which I thought it my duty to decline.

While clinging to the hope of a communication from Mr. Parnell, to

whomsoever addressed, I thought it necessary, viewing the

arrangements for the commencement of the session to-morrow, to

acquaint Mr. McCarthy with the conclusion at which, after using

all the means of observation and reflection in my power, I had

myself arrived. It was that notwithstanding the splendid services

rendered by Mr. Parnell to his country, his continuance at the

present moment in the leadership would be productive of

consequences disastrous in the highest degree to the cause of

Ireland. I think I may be warranted in asking you so far to expand

the conclusion I have given above, as to add that the continuance

I speak of would not only place many hearty and effective friends

of the Irish cause in a position of great embarrassment, but would

render my retention of the leadership of the liberal party, based

as it has been mainly upon the prosecution of the Irish cause,

almost a nullity. This explanation of my views I begged Mr.

McCarthy to regard as confidential, and not intended for his

colleagues generally, if he found that Mr. Parnell contemplated

spontaneous action; but I also begged that he would make known to

the Irish party, at their meeting to-morrow afternoon, that such

was my conclusion, if he should find that Mr. Parnell had not in

contemplation any step of the nature indicated. I now write to

you, in case Mr. McCarthy should be unable to communicate with Mr.

Parnell, as I understand you may possibly have an opening

to-morrow through another channel. Should you have such an

opening, I beg you to make known to Mr. Parnell the conclusion

itself, which I have stated in the earlier part of this letter. I

have thought it best to put it in terms simple and direct, much as

I should have desired had it lain within my power, to alleviate

the painful nature of the situation. As respects the manner of

conveying what my public duty has made it an obligation to say, I

rely entirely on your good feeling, tact, and judgment.—Believe me

sincerely yours, W. E. GLADSTONE.

No direct communication had been possible, though every effort to open it

was made. Indirect information had been received. Mr. Parnell’s purpose

was reported to have shifted during the week since the decree. On the

Wednesday he had been at his stiffest, proudest, and coldest, bent on

holding on at all cost. He thought he saw a way of getting something done

for Ireland; the Irish people had given him a commission; he should stand

to it, so long as ever they asked him. On the Friday, however (Nov. 21),

he appeared, so I had been told, to be shaken in his resolution. He had

bethought him that the government might possibly seize the moment for a

dissolution; that if there were an immediate election, the government

would under the circumstances be not unlikely to win; if so, Mr. Gladstone

might be thrown for four or five years into opposition; in other words,

that powerful man’s part in the great international transaction would be

at an end. In this mood he declared himself alive to the peril and the

grave responsibility of taking any course that could lead to consequences

so formidable. That was the last authentic news that reached us. His Irish

colleagues had no news at all. After this glimpse the curtain had fallen,

and all oracles fell dumb.

If Mr. Gladstone’s decision was to have the anticipated effect, Mr.

Parnell must be made aware of it before the meeting of the Irish party

(Nov. 25). This according to custom was to be held at two o’clock in the

afternoon, to choose their chairman for the session. Before the choice was

made, both the leader and his political friends should know the view and

the purpose that prevailed in the camp of their allies. Mr. Parnell kept

himself invisible and inaccessible alike to English and Irish friends

until a few minutes before the meeting. The Irish member who had seen Mr.

Gladstone the previous evening, at the last moment was able to deliver the

message that had been confided to him. Mr. Parnell replied that he should

stand to his guns. The other members of the Irish party came together,

and, wholly ignorant of the attitude taken by Mr. Gladstone, promptly and

with hardly a word of discussion re-elected their leader to his usual

post. The gravity of the unfortunate error (M155) committed in the failure

to communicate the private message to the whole of the nationalist

members, with or without Mr. Parnell’s leave, lay in the fact that it

magnified and distorted Mr. Gladstone’s later intervention into a

humiliating public ultimatum. The following note, made at the time,

describes the fortunes of Mr. Gladstone’s letter:—

_Nov. 25._—I had taken the usual means of sending a message to Mr.

Parnell, to the effect that Mr. Gladstone was coming to town on

the following day, and that I should almost certainly have a

communication to make to Mr. Parnell on Tuesday morning. It was

agreed at my interview with his emissary on Sunday night (November

23) that I should be informed by eleven on Tuesday forenoon where

I should see him. I laid special stress on my seeing him before

the party met. At half-past eleven, or a little later, on that day

I received a telegram from the emissary that he could not reach

his friend.(275) I had no difficulty in interpreting this. It

meant that Mr. Parnell had made up his mind to fight it out,

whatever line we might adopt; that he guessed that my wish to see

him must from his point of view mean mischief; and that he would

secure his re-election as chairman before the secret was out. Mr.

McCarthy was at this hour also entirely in the dark, and so were

all the other members of the Irish party supposed to be much in

Mr. Parnell’s confidence. When I reached the House a little after

three, the lobby was alive with the bustle and animation usual at

the opening of a session, and Mr. Parnell was in the thick of it,

talking to a group of his friends. He came forward with much

cordiality. “I am very sorry,” he said, “that I could not make an

appointment, but the truth is I did not get your message until I

came down to the House, and then it was too late.” I asked him to

come round with me to Mr. Gladstone’s room. As we went along the

corridor he informed me in a casual way that the party had again

elected him chairman. When we reached the sunless little room, I

told him I was sorry to hear that the election was over, for I had

a communication to make to him which might, as I hoped, still make

a difference. I then read out to him Mr. Gladstone’s letter. As he

listened, I knew the look on his face quite well enough to see

that he was obdurate. The conversation did not last long. He said

the feeling against him was a storm in a teacup, and would soon

pass. I replied that he might know Ireland, but he did not half

know England; that it was much more than a storm in a teacup; that

if he set British feeling at defiance and brazened it out, it

would be ruin to home rule at the election; that if he did not

withdraw for a time, the storm would not pass; that if he withdrew

from the actual leadership now as a concession due to public

feeling in this country, this need not prevent him from again

taking the helm when new circumstances might demand his presence;

that he could very well treat his re-election as a public vote of

confidence by his party; that, having secured this, he would

suffer no loss of dignity or authority by a longer or shorter

period of retirement. I reminded him that for two years he had

been practically absent from active leadership. He answered, in

his slow dry way, that he must look to the future; that he had

made up his mind to stick to the House of Commons and to his

present position in his party, until he was convinced, and he

would not soon be convinced, that it was impossible to obtain home

rule from a British parliament; that if he gave up the leadership

for a time, he should never return to it; that if he once let go,

it was all over. There was the usual iteration on both sides in a

conversation of the kind, but this is the substance of what

passed. His manner throughout was perfectly cool and quiet, and

his unresonant voice was unshaken. He was paler than usual, and

now and then a wintry smile passed over his face. I saw that

nothing would be gained by further parley, so I rose and he

somewhat slowly did the same. “Of course,” he said, as I held the

door open for him to leave, “Mr. Gladstone will have to attack me.

I shall expect that. He will have a right to do that.” So we

parted.

I waited for Mr. Gladstone, who arrived in a few minutes. It was

now four o’clock. “Well?” he asked eagerly the moment the door was

closed, and without taking off cape or hat. “Have you seen him?”

“He is obdurate,” said I. I told him shortly what had passed. He

stood at the table, dumb for some instants, looking at me as if he

could not believe what I had said. Then he burst out that we must

at once publish his letter to me; at once, that very afternoon. I

said, “’Tis too late now.” “Oh, no,” said he, “the _Pall Mall_

will bring it out in a special edition.” “Well, but,” I persisted,

“we ought really to consider it a little.” Reluctantly he yielded,

and we went into the House. Harcourt presently joined us on the

bench, and we told him the news. It was by and by decided that the

letter should be immediately published. Mr. Gladstone thought that

I should at once inform Mr. Parnell of this. There he was at that

moment, pleasant and smiling, in his usual place on the Irish

bench. I went into our lobby, and sent somebody to bring him out.

Out he came, and we took three or four turns in the lobby. I told

him that it was thought right, under the new circumstances, to

send the letter to the press. “Yes,” he said amicably, as if it

were no particular concern of his, “I think Mr. Gladstone will be

quite right to do that; it will put him straight with his party.”

The debate on the address had meanwhile been running its course. Mr.

Gladstone had made his speech. One of the newspapers afterwards described

the liberals as wearing pre-occupied countenances. “We were pre-occupied

with a vengeance,” said Mr. Gladstone, “and even while I was speaking I

could not help thinking to myself, Here am I talking about Portugal and

about Armenia, while every single creature in the House is absorbed in one

thing only, and that is an uncommonly long distance from either Armenia or

Portugal.” News of the letter, which had been sent to the reporters about

eight o’clock, swiftly spread. Members hurried to ex-ministers in the

dining-room to ask if the story of the letter were true. The lobbies were

seized by one of those strange and violent fevers to which on such

occasions the House of Commons is liable. Unlike the clamour of the Stock

Exchange or a continental Chamber, there is little noise, but the

perturbation is profound. Men pace the corridors in couples and trios, or

flit from one knot to another, listening to an oracle of the moment

modestly retailing a rumour false on the face of it, or evolving monstrous

hypotheses to explain incredible occurrences. This, however, was no common

crisis of lobby or gallery.

One party quickly felt that, for them at least, it was an affair of life

or death. It was no wonder that the Irish members were stirred to the very

depths. For five years they had worked on English platforms, made active

friendships with English and Scottish liberals in parliament and out of

it, been taught to expect from their aid and alliance that deliverance

which without allies must remain out of reach and out of sight; above all,

for nearly five years they had been taught to count on the puissant voice

and strong right arm of the leader of all the forces of British

liberalism.

They suddenly learned that if they took a certain step in respect of the

leadership of their own party, the alliance was broken off, the most

powerful of Englishmen could help them no more, and that all the dreary

and desperate marches since 1880 were to be faced once again in a blind

and endless campaign, against the very party to whose friendship they had

been taught to look for strength, encouragement, and victory. Well might

they recoil. More astounded still, they learned at the same time that they

had already taken the momentous step in the dark, and that the knowledge

of what they were doing, the pregnant meanings and the tremendous

consequences of it, had been carefully concealed from them. Never were

consternation, panic, distraction, and resentment better justified.

The Irishmen were anxious to meet at once. Their leader sat moodily in the

smoking-room downstairs. His faculty of concentrated vision had by this

time revealed to him the certainty of a struggle, and its intensity. He

knew in minute detail every element of peril both at Westminster and in

Ireland. A few days before, he mentioned to the present writer his

suspicion of designs on foot in ecclesiastical quarters, though he

declared that he had no fear of them. He may have surmised that the

demonstration at the Leinster Hall was superficial and impulsive. On the

other hand, his confidence in the foundations of his dictatorship was

unshaken. This being so, if deliberate calculation were the universal

mainspring of every statesman’s action—as it assuredly is not nor can ever

be—he would have spontaneously withdrawn for a season, in the (M156)

assurance that if signs of disorganisation were to appear among his

followers, his prompt return from Elba would be instantly demanded in

Ireland, whether or no it were acquiesced in by the leaders and main army

of liberals in England. That would have been both politic and decent, even

if we conceive his mind to have been working in another direction. He may,

for instance, have believed that the scandal had destroyed the chances of

a liberal victory at the election, whether he stayed or withdrew. Why

should he surrender his position in Ireland and over contending factions

in America, in reliance upon an English party to which, as he was well

aware, he had just dealt a smashing blow? These speculations, however,

upon the thoughts that may have been slowly moving through his mind, are

hardly worth pursuing. Unluckily, the stubborn impulses of defiance that

came naturally to his temperament were aroused to their most violent pitch

and swept all calculations of policy aside. He now proceeded passionately

to dash into the dust the whole fabric of policy which he had with such

infinite sagacity, patience, skill, and energy devised and reared.

Two short private memoranda from his own hand on this transaction, I find

among Mr. Gladstone’s papers. He read them to me at the time, and they

illustrate his habitual practice of shaping and clearing his thought and

recollection by committal to black and white:—

_Nov. 26, 1890._—Since the month of December 1885 my whole

political life has been governed by a supreme regard to the Irish

question. For every day, I may say, of these five, we have been

engaged in laboriously rolling up hill the stone of Sisyphus. Mr.

Parnell’s decision of yesterday means that the stone is to break

away from us and roll down again to the bottom of the hill. I

cannot recall the years which have elapsed. It was daring,

perhaps, to begin, at the age I had then attained, a process which

it was obvious must be a prolonged one.

Simply to recommence it now, when I am within a very few weeks of

the age at which Lord Palmerston, the marvel of parliamentary

longevity, succumbed, and to contemplate my accompanying the cause

of home rule to its probable triumph a rather long course of years

hence, would be more than daring; it would be presumptuous. My

views must be guided by rational probabilities, and they exclude

any such anticipation. My statement, therefore, that my leadership

would, under the contemplated decision of Mr. Parnell, be almost a

nullity, is a moderate statement of the case. I have been

endeavouring during all these years to reason with the voters of

the kingdom, and when the voter now tells me that he cannot give a

vote for making the Mr. Parnell of to-day the ruler of Irish

affairs under British sanction, I do not know how to answer him,

and I have yet to ask myself formally the question what under

those circumstances is to be done. I must claim entire and

absolute liberty to answer that question as I may think right.

_Nov. 28, 1890._—The few following words afford a key to my

proceedings in the painful business of the Irish leadership.

It was at first my expectation, and afterwards my desire, that Mr.

Parnell would retire by a perfectly spontaneous act. As the

likelihood of such a course became less and less, while time ran

on, and the evidences of coming disaster were accumulated, I

thought it would be best that he should be impelled to withdraw,

but by an influence conveyed to him, at least, from within the

limits of his own party. I therefore begged Mr. Justin McCarthy to

acquaint Mr. Parnell of what I thought as to the consequences of

his continuance; I also gave explanations of my meaning, including

a reference to myself; and I begged that my message to Mr. Parnell

might be made known to the Irish party, in the absence of a

spontaneous retirement.

This was on Monday afternoon. But there was no certainty either of

finding Mr. Parnell, or of an impression on him through one of his

own followers. I therefore wrote the letter to Mr. Morley, as a

more delicate form of proceeding than a direct communication from

myself, but also as a stronger measure than that taken through Mr.

McCarthy, because it was more full, and because, as it was in

writing, it admitted of the ulterior step of immediate

publication. Mr. Morley could not find Mr. Parnell until after the

first meeting of the Irish party on Monday. When we found that Mr.

McCarthy’s representation had had no effect, that the Irish party

had not been informed, and that Mr. Morley’s making known the

material parts of my letter was likewise without result, it at

once was decided to publish the letter; just too late for the

_Pall Mall Gazette_, it was given for publication to the morning

papers, and during the evening it became known in the lobbies of

the House.

V

Mr. Parnell took up his new ground in a long manifesto to the Irish people

(November 29). It was free of rhetoric and ornament, but the draught was

skilfully brewed. He charged Mr. Gladstone with having revealed to him

during his visit at Hawarden in the previous December, that in a future

scheme of home rule the Irish members would be cut down from 103 to 32,

land was to be withdrawn from the competency of the Irish legislature, and

the control of the constabulary would be reserved to the Imperial

authority for an indefinite period, though Ireland would have to find the

money all the time. This perfidious truncation of self-government by Mr.

Gladstone was matched by an attempt on my part as his lieutenant only a

few days before, to seduce the Irish party into accepting places in a

liberal government, and this gross bribe of mine was accompanied by a

despairing avowal that the hapless evicted tenants must be flung

overboard. In other words, the English leaders intended to play Ireland

false, and Mr. Parnell stood between his country and betrayal. Such a

story was unluckily no new one in Irish history since the union. On that

theme Mr. Parnell played many adroit variations during the eventful days

that followed. Throw me to the English wolves if you like, he said, but at

any rate make sure that real home rule and not its shadow is to be your

price, and that they mean to pay it. This was to awaken the spectre of old

suspicions, and to bring to life again those forces of violence and

desperation which it had been the very crown of his policy to exorcise.

The reply on the Hawarden episode was prompt. Mr. Gladstone asserted that

the whole discussion was one of those informal exchanges of view which go

to all political action, and in which men feel the ground and discover the

leanings of one another’s minds. No single proposal was made, no

proposition was mentioned to which a binding assent was sought. Points of

possible improvement in the bill of 1886 were named as having arisen in

Mr. Gladstone’s mind, or been suggested by others, but no positive

conclusions were asked for or were expected or were possible. Mr. Parnell

quite agreed that the real difficulty lay in finding the best form in

which Irish representation should be retained at Westminster, but both saw

the wisdom and necessity of leaving deliberation free until the time

should come for taking practical steps. He offered no serious objection on

any point; much less did he say that they augured any disappointment of

Irish aspirations. Apart from this denial, men asked themselves how it was

that if Mr. Parnell knew that the cause was already betrayed, he yet for a

year kept the black secret to himself, and blew Mr. Gladstone’s praise

with as loud a trumpet as before?(276) As for my own guilty attempt at

corruption in proposing an absorption of the Irish party in English

politics by means of office and emolument, I denied it with reasonable

emphasis at the time, and it does not concern us here, nor in fact

anywhere else.

VI

We now come to what was in its day the famous story of Committee Room

Fifteen, so called from the chamber in which the next act of this dismal

play went on.(277) The proceedings between the leader and his party were

watched with an eagerness that has never been surpassed in this kingdom or

in America. They were protracted, intense, dramatic, and the issue for a

time hung in poignant doubt. The party interest of the scene was supreme,

for if the Irishmen should rally to their chief, then the English alliance

was at an end, Mr. Gladstone would virtually close (M157) his illustrious

career, the rent in the liberal ranks might be repaired, and leading men

and important sections would all group themselves afresh. “Let us all keep

quiet,” said one important unionist, “we may now have to revise our

positions.” Either way, the serpent of faction would raise its head in

Ireland, and the strong life of organised and concentrated nationalism

would perish in its coils. The personal interest was as vivid as the

political,—the spectacle of a man of infinite boldness, determination,

astuteness, and resource, with the will and pride of Lucifer, at bay with

fortune and challenging a malignant star. Some talked of the famous Ninth

Thermidor, when Robespierre fought inch by inch the fierce struggle that

ended in his ruin. Others talked of the old mad discord of Zealot and

Herodian in face of the Roman before the walls of Jerusalem. The great

veteran of English politics looked on, wrathful and astounded at a

preternatural perversity for which sixty years of public life could

furnish him no parallel. The sage public looked on, some with the same

interest that would in ancient days have made them relish a combat of

gladiators; others with glee at the mortification of political opponents;

others again with honest disgust at what threatened to be the ignoble rout

of a beneficent policy.

It was the fashion for the moment in fastidious reactionary quarters to

speak of the actors in this ordeal as “a hustling group of yelling

rowdies.” Seldom have terms so censorious been more misplaced. All depends

upon the point of view. Men on a raft in a boiling sea have something to

think of besides deportment and the graces of serenity. As a matter of

fact, even hostile judges then and since agreed that no case was ever

better opened within the walls of Westminster than in the three speeches

made on the first day by Mr. Sexton and Mr. Healy on the one side, and Mr.

Redmond on the other. In gravity, dignity, acute perception, and that good

faith which is the soul of real as distinct from spurious debate, the

parliamentary critic recognises them as all of the first order. So for the

most part things continued. It was not until a protracted game had gone

beyond limits of reason and patience, that words sometimes flamed high.

Experience of national assemblies gives no reason to suppose that a body

of French, German, Spanish, Italian, or even of English, Scotch, Welsh, or

American politicians placed in circumstances of equal excitement, arising

from an incident in itself at once so squalid and so provocative, would

have borne the strain with any more self-control.

Mr. Parnell presided, frigid, severe, and lofty, “as if,” said one

present, “it were we who had gone astray, and he were sitting there to

judge us.” Six members were absent in America, including Mr. Dillon and

Mr. O’Brien, two of the most important of all after Mr. Parnell himself.

The attitude of this pair was felt to be a decisive element. At first,

under the same impulse as moved the Leinster Hall meeting, they allowed

their sense of past achievement to close their eyes; they took for granted

the impossible, that religious Britain and religious Ireland would blot

what had happened out of their thoughts; and so they stood for Mr.

Parnell’s leadership. The grim facts of the case were rapidly borne in

upon them. The defiant manifesto convinced them that the leadership could

not be continued. Travelling from Cincinnati to Chicago, they read it,

made up their minds, and telegraphed to anxious colleagues in London. They

spoke with warmth of Mr. Parnell’s services, but protested against his

unreasonable charges of servility to liberal wirepullers; they described

the “endeavours to fasten the responsibility for what had happened upon

Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Morley” as reckless and unjust; and they foresaw in

the position of isolation, discredit, and international ill-feeling which

Mr. Parnell had now created, nothing but ruin for the cause. This

deliverance from such a quarter (November 30) showed that either

abdication or deposition was inevitable.

The day after Mr. Parnell’s manifesto, the bishops came out of their

shells. Cardinal Manning had more than once written most urgently to the

Irish prelates the moment the decree was known, that Parnell could not be

upheld in London, and that no political expediency could outweigh the

moral sense. He knew well enough that the bishops in (M158) Ireland were

in a very difficult strait, but insisted “that plain and prompt speech was

safest.” It was now a case, he said to Mr. Gladstone (November 29), of

_res ad triarios_, and it was time for the Irish clergy to speak out from

the housetops. He had also written to Rome. “Did I not tell you,” said Mr.

Gladstone when he gave me this letter to read, “that the Pope would now

have one of the ten commandments on his side?” “We have been slow to act,”

Dr. Walsh telegraphed to one of the Irish members (November 30), “trusting

that the party will act manfully. Our considerate silence and reserve are

being dishonestly misinterpreted.” “All sorry for Parnell,” telegraphed

Dr. Croke, the Archbishop of Cashel—a manly and patriotic Irishman if ever

one was—“but still, in God’s name, let him retire quietly and with good

grace from the leadership. If he does so, the Irish party will be kept

together, the honourable alliance with Gladstonian liberals maintained,

success at general election secured, home rule certain. If he does not

retire, alliance will be dissolved, election lost, Irish party seriously

damaged if not wholly broken up, home rule indefinitely postponed,

coercion perpetuated, evicted tenants hopelessly crushed, and the public

conscience outraged. Manifesto flat and otherwise discreditable.” This was

emphatic enough, but many of the flock had already committed themselves

before the pastors spoke. To Dr. Croke, Mr. Gladstone wrote (Dec. 2): “We

in England seem to have done our part within our lines, and what remains

is for Ireland itself. I am as unwilling as Mr. Parnell himself could be,

to offer an interference from without, for no one stands more stoutly than

I do for the independence of the Irish national party as well as for its

unity.”

A couple of days later (Dec. 2) a division was taken in Room Fifteen upon

a motion made in Mr. Parnell’s interest, to postpone the discussion until

they could ascertain the views of their constituents, and then meet in

Dublin. It was past midnight. The large room, dimly lighted by a few lamps

and candles placed upon the horse-shoe tables, was more than half in

shadow. Mr. Parnell, his features barely discernible in the gloom, held a

printed list of the party in his hand, and he put the question in cold,

unmoved tones. The numbers were 29 for the motion—that is to say, for him,

and 44 against him. Of the majority, many had been put on their trial with

him in 1880; had passed months in prison with him under the first Coercion

Act and suffered many imprisonments besides; they had faced storm,

obloquy, and hatred with him in the House of Commons, a place where

obloquy stings through tougher than Hibernian skins; they had undergone

with him the long ordeal of the three judges; they had stood by his side

with unswerving fidelity from the moment when his band was first founded

for its mortal struggle down to to-day, when they saw the fruits of the

struggle flung recklessly away, and the policy that had given to it all

its reason and its only hope, wantonly brought to utter foolishness by a

suicidal demonstration that no English party and no English leader could

ever be trusted. If we think of even the least imaginative of them as

haunted by such memories of the past, such distracting fears for the

future, it was little wonder that when they saw Mr. Parnell slowly casting

up the figures, and heard his voice through the sombre room announcing the

ominous result, they all sat, both ayes and noes, in profound and painful

stillness. Not a sound was heard, until the chairman rose and said without

an accent of emotion that it would now be well for them to adjourn until

the next day.

This was only the beginning. Though the ultimate decision of the party was

quite certain, every device of strategy and tactics was meanwhile

resolutely employed to avert it. His supple and trenchant blade was still

in the hands of a consummate swordsman. It is not necessary to

recapitulate all the moves in Mr. Parnell’s grand manœuvre for turning the

eyes of Ireland away from the question of leadership to the question of

liberal good faith and the details of home rule. Mr. Gladstone finally

announced that only after the question of leadership had been disposed

of—one belonging entirely to the competence of the Irish party—could he

renew former relations, and once more enter into confidential

communications with any of them. There was only one guarantee, he said,

that could be of any (M159) value to Ireland, namely the assured and

unalterable fact that no English leader and no party could ever dream of

either proposing or carrying any scheme of home rule which had not the

full support of Irish representatives. This was obvious to all the world.

Mr. Parnell knew it well enough, and the members knew it, but the members

were bound to convince their countrymen that they had exhausted compliance

with every hint from their falling leader, while Mr. Parnell’s only object

was to gain time, to confuse issues, and to carry the battle over from

Westminster to the more buoyant and dangerously charged atmosphere of

Ireland.

The majority resisted as long as they could the evidence that Mr. Parnell

was audaciously trifling with them and openly abusing his position as

chairman. On the evening of Friday (December 5) Mr. Sexton and Mr. Healy

went to Mr. Parnell after the last communication from Mr. Gladstone. They

urged him to bend to the plain necessities of the case. He replied that he

would take the night to consider. The next morning (December 6) they

returned to him. He informed them that his responsibility to Ireland would

not allow him to retire. They warned him that the majority would not

endure further obstruction beyond that day, and would withdraw. As they

left, Mr. Parnell wished to shake hands, “if it is to be the last time.”

They all shook hands, and then went once more to the field of action.

It was not until after some twelve days of this excitement and stress that

the scene approached such disorder as has often before and since been

known in the House of Commons. The tension at last had begun to tell upon

the impassive bronze of Mr. Parnell himself. He no longer made any

pretence of the neutrality of the chair. He broke in upon one speaker more

than forty times. In a flash of rage he snatched a paper from another

speaker’s hand. The hours wore away, confusion only became worse

confounded, and the conclusion on both sides was foregone. Mr. McCarthy at

last rose, and in a few moderate sentences expressed his opinion that

there was no use in continuing a discussion that must be barren of

anything but reproach, bitterness, and indignity, and he would therefore

suggest that those who were of the same mind should withdraw. Then he

moved from the table, and his forty-four colleagues stood up and silently

followed him out of the room. In silence they were watched by the minority

who remained, in number twenty-six.(278)

VII

A vacancy at Bassetlaw gave Mr. Gladstone an opportunity of describing the

grounds on which he had acted. His speech was measured and weighty, but

the result showed the effect of the disaster. The tide, that a few weeks

before had been running so steadily, now turned. The unionist vote

remained almost the same as in 1885; the liberal vote showed a falling off

of over 400 and the unionist majority was increased from 295 to 728.

About this time having to go to Ireland, on my way back I stopped at

Hawarden, and the following note gives a glimpse of Mr. Gladstone at this

evil moment (Dec. 17):—

I found him in his old corner in the “temple of peace.” He was

only half recovered from a bad cold, and looked in his worsted

jacket, and dark tippet over his shoulders, and with his white,

deep-furrowed face, like some strange Ancient of Days: so

different from the man whom I had seen off at King’s Cross less

than a week before. He was cordial as always, but evidently in

some perturbation. I sat down and told him what I had heard from

different quarters about the approaching Kilkenny election. I

mentioned X. as a Parnellite authority. “What,” he flamed up with

passionate vehemence, “X. a Parnellite! Are they mad, then? Are

they clean demented?” etc. etc.

I gave him my general impression as to the future. The bare idea

that Parnell might find no inconsiderable following came upon him

as if it had been a thunder-clap. He listened, and catechised, and

knit his brow.

_Mr. G._—What do you think we should do in case (1) of a divided

Ireland, (2) of a Parnellite Ireland?

_J. M._—It is too soon to settle what to think. But, looking to

Irish interests, I think a Parnellite Ireland infinitely better

than a divided Ireland. Anything better than an Ireland divided,

so far as she is concerned.

_Mr. G._—Bassetlaw looks as if we were going back to 1886. For me

that is notice to quit. Another five years’ agitation at my age

would be impossible—_ludicrous_ (with much emphasis).

_J. M._—I cannot profess to be surprised that in face of these

precious dissensions men should have misgivings, or that even

those who were with us, should now make up their minds to wait a

little.

I said what there was to be said for Parnell’s point of view;

that, in his words to me of Nov. 25, he “must look to the future”;

that he was only five and forty; that he might well fear that

factions would spring up in Ireland if he were to go; that he

might have made up his mind, that whether he went or stayed, we

should lose the general election when it came. The last notion

seemed quite outrageous to Mr. G., and he could not suppose that

it had ever entered Parnell’s head.

_Mr. G._—You have no regrets at the course we took?

_J. M._—None—none. It was inevitable. I have never doubted. That

does not prevent lamentation that it was inevitable. It is the old

story. English interference is always at the root of mischief in

Ireland. But how could we help what we did? We had a right to

count on Parnell’s sanity and his sincerity....

Mr. G. then got up and fished out of a drawer the memorandum of

his talk with Parnell at Hawarden on Dec. 18, 1889, and also a

memorandum written for his own use on the general political

position at the time of the divorce trial. The former contained

not a word as to the constabulary, and in other matters only put a

number of points, alternative courses, etc., without a single

final or definite decision. While he was fishing in his drawer, he

said, as if speaking to himself, “It looks as if I should get my

release even sooner than I had expected.”

“That,” I said, “is a momentous matter which will need immense

deliberation.” So it will, indeed.

_Mr. G._—Do you recall anything in history like the present

distracted scenes in Ireland?

_J. M._—Florence, Pisa, or some other Italian city, with the

French or the Emperor at the gates?

_Mr. G._—I’ll tell you what is the only thing that I can think of

as at all like it. Do you remember how it was at the siege of

Jerusalem—the internecine fury of the Jewish factions, the

Ζηλωταί, and the rest—while Titus and the legions were marching on

the city!

We went in to luncheon. Something was said of our friend ——, and

the new found malady, Renault’s disease.

_J. M._—Joseph de Maistre says that in the innocent primitive ages

men died of diseases without names.

_Mr. G._—Homer never mentions diseases at all.

_J. M._—Not many of them die a natural death in Homer.

_Mr. G._—Do you not recollect where Odysseus meets his mother

among the shades, and she says:—

Οὔτε τις οὖν μοι νοῦσος ἐπήλυθεν ...

ἀλλά με σός τε πόθος σά τε μήδεα, φαίδιμ᾽ Ὀδυσσεῦ,

σή τ᾽ ἀγανοφροσύνη μελιηδέα θυμὸν ἀπηύρα.(279)

_J. M._—Beautiful lines. Πόθος such a tender word, and it is

untranslatable.

_Mr. G._—Oh, _desiderium_.

“Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus

Tam cari capitis.”(280)

_J. M._—The Scotch word “_wearying_” for somebody. And

_Sehnsucht_.

Then Mr. G. went off to his library to hunt up the reference, and

when I followed him, I found the worn old _Odyssey_ open at the

passage in the eleventh book. As he left the room, he looked at me

and said, “Ah, this is very different stuff for talking about,

from all the wretched work we were speaking of just now. Homer’s

fellows would have cut a very different figure, and made short

work in that committee room last week!” We had a few more words on

politics.... So I bade him good-bye.... #/

(M160) In view of the horrors of dissension in Ireland, well-meaning

attempts were made at the beginning of the year to bring about an

understanding. The Irish members, returning from America where the schism

at home had quenched all enthusiasm and killed their operations, made

their way to Boulogne, for the two most important among them were liable

to instant arrest if they were found in the United Kingdom. They thought

that Mr. Parnell was really desirous to withdraw on such terms as would

save his self-respect, and if he could plead hereafter that before giving

way he had secured a genuine scheme of home rule. Some suspicion may well

have arisen in their minds when a strange suggestion came from Mr. Parnell

that the liberal leaders should enter into a secret engagement about

constabulary and the other points. He had hardly given such happy evidence

of his measure of the sanctity of political confidences, as to encourage

further experiments. The proposal was absurd on the face of it. These

suspicions soon became certainties, and the Boulogne negotiations came to

an end. I should conjecture that those days made the severest ordeal

through which Mr. Gladstone, with his extreme sensibility and his

abhorrence of personal contention, ever passed. Yet his facility and

versatility of mood was unimpaired, as a casual note or two of mine may

show:—

... Mr. G.’s confabulation [with an Irish member] proved to have

been sought for the purpose of warning him that Parnell was about

to issue a manifesto in which he would make all manner of

mischief. Mr. G. and I had a few moments in the room at the back

of the chair; he seemed considerably perturbed, pale, and

concentrated. We walked into the House together; he picked up the

points of the matter in hand (a motion for appropriating all the

time) and made one of the gayest, brightest, and most delightful

speeches in the world—the whole House enjoying it consumedly. Who

else could perform these magic transitions?

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

Mr. G. came into the House, looking rather anxious; gave us an

account of his interview with the Irish deputation; and in the

midst of it got up to say his few sentences of condolence with the

Speaker on the death of Mrs. Peel—the closing phrases admirably

chosen, and the tones of his voice grave, sincere, sonorous, and

compassionate. When he sat down, he resumed his talk with H. and

me. He was so touched, he said, by those “poor wretches” on the

deputation, that he would fain, if he could, make some

announcement that would ease their unlucky position.

[A question of a letter in reply to some application prompted by

Mr. Parnell. Mr. Gladstone asked two of us to try our hands at a

draft.] At last we got it ready for him and presently we went to

his room. It was now six o’clock. Mr. G. read aloud in full deep

voice the letter he had prepared on the base of our short draft.

We suggested this and that, and generally argued about phrases for

an hour, winding up with a terrific battle on two prodigious

points: (1) whether he ought to say, “after this statement of my

views,” or “I have now fully stated my views on the points you

raise”; (2) “You will _doubtless_ concur,” or “_probably_ concur.”

Most characteristic, most amazing. It was past seven before the

veteran would let go—and then I must say that he looked his full

years. Think what his day had been, in mere intellectual strain,

apart from what strains him far more than that—his strife with

persons and his compassion for the unlucky Irishmen. I heard

afterwards that when he got home, he was for once in his life done

up, and on the following morning he lay in bed. All the same, in

the evening he went to see _Antony and Cleopatra_, and he had a

little ovation. As he drove away the crowd cheered him with cries

of “Bravo, don’t you mind Parnell!” Plenty of race feeling left,

in spite of union of hearts!

No leader ever set a finer example under reverse than did Mr. Gladstone

during these tedious and desperate proceedings. He was steadfastly loyal,

considerate, and sympathetic towards the Irishmen who had trusted him; his

firm patience was not for a moment worn out; in vain a boisterous wave now

and again beat upon him from one quarter or another. Not for a moment was

he shaken; even under these starless skies his faith never drooped. “The

public mischief,” he wrote to Lord Acton (Dec. 27, 1890), “ought to put

out of view every private thought. But the blow to me is very heavy—the

heaviest I ever have received. It is a great and high call to work by

faith and not by sight.”

Occasion had already offered for testing the feeling of Ireland. There was

a vacancy in the representation of Kilkenny, and the Parnellite candidate

had been defeated.

_To J. Morley._

_Hawarden, Dec. 23, 1890._—Since your letter arrived this morning,

the Kilkenny poll has brightened the sky. It will have a great

effect in Ireland, although it is said not to be a representative

constituency, but one too much for us. It is a great gain; and yet

sad enough to think that even here one-third of the voters should

be either rogues or fools. I suppose the ballot has largely

contributed to save Kilkenny. It will be most interesting to learn

how the tories voted.

I return your enclosure.... I have ventured, without asking your

leave, on keeping a copy of a part. Only in one proposition do I

differ from you. I would rather see Ireland disunited than see it

Parnellite.

I think that as the atmosphere is quiet for the moment we had

better give ourselves the benefit of a little further time for

reflection. Personally, I am hard hit. My course of life was

daring enough as matters stood six weeks ago. How it will shape in

the new situation I cannot tell. But this is the selfish part.

Turning for a moment to the larger outlook, I am extremely

indisposed to any harking back in the matter of home rule; we are

now, I think, freed from the enormous danger of seeing P. master

in Ireland; division and its consequences in diminishing force,

are the worst we have to fear. What my mind leans to in a way

still vague is to rally ourselves by some affirmative legislation

taken up by and on behalf of the party. Something of this kind

would be the best source to look to for reparative strength.

_To Lord Acton._

_Jan. 9, 1891._—To a greybeard in a hard winter the very name of

the south is musical, and the kind letters from you and Lord

Hampden make it harmony as well as melody. But I have been and am

chained to the spot by this Parnell business, and every day have

to consider in one shape or other what ought to be said by myself

or others.... I consider the Parnell chapter of politics finally

closed for us, the British liberals, at least during my time. He

has been even worse since the divorce court than he was in it. The

most astounding revelation of my lifetime.

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

_To J. Morley._

_Hawarden, Dec. 30, 1890._—I must not longer delay thanking you

for your most kind and much valued letter on my birthday—a

birthday more formidable than usual, on account of the recent

disasters, which, however, may all come to good. If I am able to

effect in the world anything useful, be assured I know how much of

it is owed to the counsel and consort of my friends.

It is not indeed the common lot of man to make serious additions

to the friendships which so greatly help us in this pilgrimage,

after seventy-six years old; but I rejoice to think that in your

case it has been accomplished for me.

VIII

A few more sentences will end this chapter in Mr. Gladstone’s life. As we

have seen, an election took place in the closing days of December 1890.

Mr. Parnell flung himself into the contest with frantic activity. A fierce

conflict ended in the defeat of his candidate by nearly two to one.(281)

Three months later a contest occurred in Sligo. Here again, though he had

strained every nerve in the interval as well as in the immediate struggle,

his candidate was beaten.(282) Another three months, then a third election

at Carlow,—with the same result, the rejection of Mr. Parnell’s man by a

majority of much more than two to one.(283) It was in vain that his

adherents denounced those who had left him as mutineers and helots, and

exalted him as “truer than Tone, abler than Grattan, greater than

O’Connell, full of love for Ireland as Thomas Davis himself.” On the other

side, he encountered antagonism in every key, from pathetic remonstrance

or earnest reprobation, down to an unsparing fury that savoured (M161) of

the ruthless factions of the Seine. In America almost every name of

consideration was hostile.

Yet undaunted by repulse upon repulse, he tore over from England to

Ireland and back again, week after week and month after month, hoarse and

haggard, seamed by sombre passions, waving the shreds of a tattered flag.

Ireland must have been a hell on earth to him. To those Englishmen who

could not forget that they had for so long been his fellow-workers, though

they were now the mark of his attack, these were dark and desolating days.

No more lamentable chapter is to be found in all the demented scroll of

aimless and untoward things, that seem as if they made up the history of

Ireland. It was not for very long. The last speech that Mr. Parnell ever

made in England was at Newcastle-on-Tyne in July 1891, when he told the

old story about the liberal leaders, of whom he said that there was but

one whom he trusted. A few weeks later, not much more than ten months

after the miserable act had opened, the Veiled Shadow stole upon the

scene, and the world learned that Parnell was no more.(284)

Chapter VI. Biarritz. (1891-1892)

Omnium autem ineptiarum, quæ sunt innumerabiles, haud sciam an

nulla sit major, quam, ut illi solent, quocunque in loco,

quoscunque inter homines visum est, de rebus aut difficillimis aut

non necessariis argutissime disputare.—CICERO.

Of all the numberless sorts of bad taste and want of tact, perhaps

the worst is to insist, no matter where you are or with whom you

are, on arguing about the hardest subjects to the full pitch of

elaboration and detail.

I

We have seen how in 1889 Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone celebrated the fiftieth

anniversary of one of the most devoted and successful marriages that ever

was made, and the unbroken felicity of their home. In 1891, after the

shadows of approaching calamity had for many months hung doubtfully over

them, a heavy blow fell, and their eldest son died. Not deeply concerned

in ordinary politics, he was a man of many virtues and some admirable

gifts; he was an accomplished musician, and I have seen letters of his to

his father, marked by a rare delicacy of feeling and true power of

expression. “I had known him for nearly thirty years,” one friend wrote,

“and there was no man, until his long illness, who had changed so little,

or retained so long the best qualities of youth, and my first thought was

that the greater the loss to you, the greater would be the consolation.”

To Archbishop Benson, Mr. Gladstone wrote (July 6):—