Lieut.-Colonel 1,300 1,794 3,094
_______ ______ _______
£4,500 £5,975 £10,475
It appears from this statement that the average over-regulation price
paid in the cavalry is more than double the present regulation price.
In the infantry of the line the over-regulation price is not so high
as this, but it is nevertheless considerable; and the upshot of the
whole matter is that, according to the estimate furnished from Messrs.
Cox's office, the sum of £3,577,325 is at this moment invested by
officers in their commissions over and above the regulation price. In
other words, the army, as we have already observed, is mortgaged to
the officers by a long-established system of illegal traffic; and no
reform was possible till that system was destroyed root and branch.
But our immediate object is to show that the system really puts a
premium on cowardice, or, at least, on a dereliction of patriotism.
Let us take the case of the colonel who has paid upwards of £10,000
for his commission, and let us suppose him to have a family, but to
have no private fortune. A war breaks out, and he is ordered on
foreign service. He dies from one of the numerous causes--other than
wounds which are incident to a soldier's life in a campaign--and the
consequence is that his investment of £10,475 is lost for ever to his
family. The only exception to this hard fate is the case of an officer
killed in action, or dying within six months of wounds received in the
face of the enemy. And even in that case the hardship is only
mitigated, not redressed; for the families of such officers are not
allowed to receive more than the value of the regulation price of the
commission. We thus see that at the very moment when the officer's
mind ought to be most free from all disturbing influences, it is, in
reality, likely to be distracted between two conflicting duties: the
duty of making provision for his family on the one hand, and the duty
of sacrificing his life, if need be, for his Queen and country on the
other.
Nor is death in the fulfilment of his duty the only event which
involves the forfeiture of the money paid by an officer in excess of
the over-regulation price. He may be dismissed from the service or may
receive a hint to retire quietly on condition of being permitted to
sell his commission. In either case he loses the value of his
over-regulation investment. The same thing happens in the case of an
officer promoted to the rank of a major-general on the fixed
establishment. He cannot recover any portion of what he has paid for
his commissions.
Other illustrations might be given, such as the case of officers
placed on temporary half-pay in consequence of a reduction in the
establishment; but enough has surely been said to show the utterly
indefensible character of the purchase system, and to prove that no
efficient scheme of army reorganization was possible till the system
was swept clean away. Our main purpose, however, has not been to
demonstrate the irretrievable badness of the purchase system, but to
draw the attention of our readers to the astounding fact that, for the
sake of perpetuating this rotten system, an organized attempt, almost
unparalleled in the annals of Parliament, was made by an Opposition in
a hopeless minority, to defeat by factious means the declared wishes
of the majority, and so to waste the best part of the session. The
scheme of the Government, on the motion for its second reading, was
submitted to a prolonged and exhaustive debate, and on the last night
of the debate, when it was evident that it would be carried by an
overwhelming majority, the leader of the Opposition made a speech for
the purpose of persuading his followers that, however imperfect the
bill might be in details, its _animus_ was so good as to entitle it to
a favourable consideration in committee. 'The _animus_ of the measure
is purely good,' he said, 'and the proposal of the Government is the
first attempt to weld the three great arms of the country--the
regulars, the militia, and the volunteers--into one force.' The
amendment was accordingly negatived without a division.
But by-and-bye Mr. Lowe produced his unpopular and unstatesmanlike
budget, and Mr. Disraeli saw his opportunity. In the middle of March
he ventured to ridicule the purchase system as
'Very much belonging to the same class of questions as a
marriage with a deceased wife's sister. Each side is
convinced that their solution is the only one absolutely
necessary for the welfare of society; while calmer minds,
who do not take so extreme an interest in the subject, are
of opinion that, whatever way it may be decided, it is
possible that affairs may go on much the same.'
Two or three weeks later, when Mr. Disraeli wanted to rally the
colonels around him in his attack on the Government, he suddenly
turned round and defended purchase with the zeal of a fanatic. And
then began, under the sanction of the Opposition leader, that series
of Fabian tactics which wasted so much of the session, and which, if
not opposed to the letter of parliamentary usage, were certainly at
variance with its spirit. It has hitherto been understood that the
principle of a bill is affirmed on its second reading. Now the
cardinal principle of Mr. Cardwell's bill was the abolition of
purchase in the army, and it was affirmed by the House of Commons
without a division. Yet the question of purchase was fought again,
fiercely, over every clause, almost over every word of the bill in its
passage through committee. When one amendment was disposed of, it
suddenly appeared again in another shape by some ingenious abuse of
the forms of the House.
At last, however, the Bill left the House of Commons, and was
presented to the House of Lords in the middle of July. There it was
met, on the part of the Opposition, by the following amendment:--
'That this House is unwilling to assent to a second reading
of this bill until it has laid before it, either by her
Majesty's Government, or through the medium of an inquiry
and report of a Royal Commission, a complete and
comprehensive scheme for the first appointment, promotion,
and retirement of officers; for the amalgamation of the
regular and auxiliary land forces; and for securing the
other changes necessary to place the military system of the
country on a sound and efficient basis.'[67]
Either the amendment was insincere on the face of it, or it betrayed
the most culpable ignorance. Lord Northbrook had, in fact, anticipated
it in a speech of remarkable ability, in which he showed that the Duke
of Richmond's amendment was simply inept. For the scheme of the
Government fulfilled all the conditions required by the amendment,
except in the matter of retirement; and that was one of those details
which could not have been put into a bill beforehand, but must be
dealt with in the light and under the guidance of experience. The bill
was supposed to have been so mutilated in its passage through the
House of Commons, that nothing remained of it except the naked
proposal to abolish purchase. But the plain fact was, as Lord
Northbrook pointed out, that the provisions which had been dropped did
not affect the bill vitally, or even materially. One was an extension
of the Enlistment Act--a matter of no importance; another related to
the ballot for the militia--also of no immediate importance; and the
third of the abandoned provisions was that which empowered counties to
raise money for supplying militia barracks. In all other respects the
bill reached the House of Lords in the shape in which it had been
introduced in the House of Commons, and the proposal to postpone the
consideration of it till more information was furnished was obviously
nothing more than a device for saving the purchase system, with all
its evil and all its scandal, for at least another year. The amendment
was carried, however, by a majority of twenty-five.
The Government was thus placed in a most awkward dilemma. They had the
choice, on the one hand, of accepting the practical rejection of the
bill for a year; and the consequence of doing so would have been as
follows:--The exhaustive discussion of the subject in the House of
Commons would have been thrown away; all the plans of the Government
for the reorganization of the army must have remained in abeyance for
at least another year; and the interests of the officers would in the
meantime have been needlessly sacrificed, for in such a state of
uncertainty the value of over-regulation prices would probably have
fallen to zero. Moreover, we should have had such an agitation
throughout the country as would, almost to a certainty, have made it
impossible for any Government to offer a second time the very liberal
terms which officers are now enabled to secure. The Opposition
denounced the compensation which the Government offered to the
officers as wasteful expenditure, and if the short-sighted vote of the
House of Lords had not been set aside, the country would have taken
the Opposition at its word, and have refused to sanction so much of
the increased expenditure as was caused by the payment of
over-regulation prices. Purchase would have gone inevitably; but the
officers would have lost more than half the compensation which is now
secured to them. And for this they would have had to thank their
injudicious champions in both Houses of Parliament. The Government has
literally 'saved them from their friends.' Earl Russell and the
Marquis of Salisbury fired up with indignation when this warning was
whispered in their ears during the debate on the second reading of the
Army Bill. 'It had been suggested,' said the former, 'that if the
amendment were carried the proposal of the Government to compensate
officers for what was called the over-regulation price would be
withdrawn; but he must say that that seemed to him to be an incredible
supposition.... If compensation for over-regulation prices was just in
March, 1871, it could not be unjust twelve months later.' With all due
deference to Lord Russell, we think that time _is_ an element in the
case, and that an offer which was just this year might be unjust next
year. It would have been the duty of the Government to consider the
will of the country as well as the interests of the officers, and to
take care that the former did not suffer by any undue consideration
for the latter. A man who refuses a more than equitable offer by way
of compensation for a loss incurred in an illegal manner, has no right
to complain if the offer is not repeated, more especially if he has
received fair warning of what is likely to be the consequence of his
refusal.
But, whether just or not, the plain truth is that the House of
Commons would not have sanctioned a second time the payment of
over-regulation prices. In the interest of the officers themselves,
therefore, in the interest of the House of Lords also, but, most of
all, in the interest of the army and of the nation, the Government was
bound to avail itself of any legal means which might enable it to
prevent the mischief that could not fail to follow from the rash vote
of the House of Lords. Ministers accordingly advised the Queen to
abolish purchase by royal warrant, which was at once done. This has
been called a _coup d'état_, and a display of 'high-handed despotism.'
But no one whose opinion is worth anything has ventured to question
the legality of the act. Sir Roundell Palmer, whose absence from the
House of Commons at the time was supposed to indicate his disapproval,
has given the high sanction of his authority, not only to the
legality, but to the advisability, under the circumstances, of what
the Ministry had done. But though the legality of the act has not been
disputed, a chorus of voices in and out of Parliament have pronounced
it 'unconstitutional.' It is not easy to see the distinction. An
unconstitutional act we take to mean an act perpetrated in violation
of the constitution. But what part of the constitution has been
infringed, either in letter or in spirit, by the exercise of the royal
warrant in the abolition of purchase in the army? The purchase system
was created by royal warrant, nor has it ever rested on any other
sanction. Constitutionally and legally, therefore, all that was
required for its abolition was merely the withdrawal of the warrant
which gave it existence; and that is precisely what has been done.
Constitutional or legal objection there is none that can bear a
moment's examination, and the whole matter resolves itself into a
question of expediency. Those who consider the purchase system the
mainstay of the British army will, of course, be of opinion that it
was highly inexpedient to abolish it. Others, however, who prefer to
look at the question in the light of facts rather than of theory and
sentiment, will say that it was expedient to abolish at the earliest
moment in which it could legally be done, a system whose history is
such as we have described, and the continuance of which for another
year, after all that had taken place, would have been fraught with
evil to public morality, and have effectually prevented in the
interval all possibility of reorganizing the army.
But the sting of the royal warrant abolishing purchase in the army lay
doubtless in the fact that it was only exercised after the consent of
Parliament had been previously asked, and (by the Lords) refused. And
if this humiliation had been put upon the House of Lords wantonly, and
without sufficient cause, the Government would have merited very
severe censure. But was there not a sufficient cause? In the first
place, the abolition of purchase was part of a large scheme, which
embraced, _inter alia_, a very liberal offer of compensation for the
extinction of the vested interests which the officers of the army had
illegally contracted. It seemed, therefore, more respectful to the
House of Commons, which was asked to vote the money, that the scheme
of the Government should be submitted to it in its integrity; and
there is no doubt, we apprehend, that if the House of Commons had met
the second reading of the bill by a vote similar to that which was
carried in the House of Lords, the Government would have bowed to the
decision. But the question assumed quite a different aspect after the
bill had been affirmed, in all its essential features, by decisive
majorities in the House of Commons. It was then in the power of the
Government to abolish purchase by royal warrant, and to send the bill,
thus disencumbered of its bone of contention, up to the House of
Lords. But the Lords would certainly have resented such treatment even
more indignantly than they did the subsequent rescinding of their
vote. So the bill was presented to them as it left the lower House;
and they met it, not by a direct negative, not even by an amendment
affirming the expediency of retaining the purchase system, but by a
motion for delay. The debate which followed, however, clearly showed
that the majority in the upper House were in reality fighting, not for
more information, but for the retention of the purchase system. The
consequence of yielding to their injudicious vote would therefore have
been simply the waste of a precious twelvemonth; for everybody
admitted that the purchase system was doomed, and could not survive
another year. But it would have been much more satisfactory if it
could have been abolished by Act of Parliament, for its resurrection
would have been a moral impossibility; whereas, as matters now stand,
it may be revived any moment by the same process which has for the
time destroyed it. This consideration alone seems to us to be a
sufficient justification for the course which the Government took. The
abolition of purchase by Act of Parliament was the more excellent way,
and the Government was right in trying it before availing itself of
its last resource in the royal warrant. And certainly the officers
are the last persons who ought to complain of what has been done; for
there can be little doubt that if the Government had begun by
abolishing purchase it would have found it hard, in the absence of a
_quid pro quo_, to persuade the House of Commons to sanction the
swollen estimates which compensation for over-regulation prices
necessitated. The Lords, too, if they would only consider the matter
calmly, would see reason to be grateful to a Government which has
rescued them from much obloquy and from a most dangerous agitation. It
is hardly an exaggeration to say that the rejection of the Ballot Bill
and of the Army Bill in one session would have gravely imperilled the
existence of the House of Lords, at least in its present form. But the
unavoidable mortification which the Government was compelled to
inflict upon it served to appease the public resentment, and even to
create a certain degree of sympathy in favour of our hereditary
legislators.
The limits of our space forbid us to do more than notice very
cursorily the remaining Ministerial achievements of the session. We do
not know what others may think, but our own opinion is that the
University Tests Bill is at least as important a measure as the
Divorce Bill, which was about the sole legislative triumph of the
session of 1857. To the readers of the _British Quarterly_, at all
events, that session will not appear a barren one which has thrown
open to Nonconformists the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Nor
will the working classes quarrel seriously with a session which has
given them the Trades' Unions Bill. The repeal of the Ecclesiastical
Titles Bill may be considered a small matter. But the passage of it
through Parliament consumed the best part of a session, and disturbed
the peace of the three kingdoms. It was, moreover, a stride backward
in civilization, for it was one of those attempts, against which
Nonconformists have always protested, to defend the truth by the
carnal weapons of penal legislation. It was also the commencement of a
retrograde policy towards Ireland. When the Queen visited that
country, and on several other occasions, the territorial titles of the
Irish Roman Catholic bishops were freely recognised in official
documents. The Ecclesiastical Titles Bill made them penal, and the
result was what men of sense predicted at the the time. The bill
became a dead letter; for it was systematically violated, because it
was too absurd and too antagonistic to the principles of religious
liberty to be enforced. There was a moral fitness in its repeal, under
the Premiership of Mr. Gladstone, for his was the great speech which
exposed its mischief and its incongruities when it was passing through
the House of Commons.
The Ballot Bill can hardly be reckoned among the achievements of the
session, since it has failed to become law; but it is certainly one of
the achievements of the Government. It was carried through the House
of Commons by overwhelming majorities, and it is not the fault of the
Government that it is not now on the statute book. The Ministry was
blamed for pressing it on, knowing that the Lords would reject it; but
the Ministry had no such knowledge. On the contrary, there was some
reason to believe that the Peers would have been satisfied with
thwarting one of the capital measures of the session. But even if the
Government had felt morally certain that the Lords would reject the
Ballot Bill, we still insist that they were bound to go on with it.
Nothing did so much to damage the prestige of Parliamentary
Government, and to exasperate the working classes against the old
Parliament as the _dolce far niente_ policy of the Palmerstonian
_régime_. Lord Palmerston's adroitness consisted mainly in combining
the maximum of liberal promises with the minimum of liberal
fulfilment. He took up measures to conciliate the more Liberal of the
electors, and dropped them to conciliate the majority of the House of
Commons. More valuable, therefore, even than the passage of the Ballot
Bill into law, is the assurance which the conduct of the Government
has given that it was thoroughly in earnest. But it was contended in
influential quarters that the sincerity of the Government was
sufficiently evinced by the second reading of the bill, and ministers
were accordingly advised to suspend all further progress of the bill,
and resume it again at that stage next session. Besides other
objections to that proposal, it is enough to say of it that it is
founded on a misconception of the powers of the Government. It is the
simple fact that the Government had no power to do what it was so
persistently advised to do. A proposal was made in 1861 that some
power of that kind should be given by statute to either House of
Parliament. But the House of Commons rejected the proposal on account
of 'the grave and numerous objections' to it, and particularly because
'this suspending power in either House of Parliament, if exercised at
its own discretion, would be at variance with the prerogative of the
Crown.'
Mr. Bruce's Licensing Bill has been considered one of the chief
failures of the session; and we do not wish to conceal our opinion
that there were some tactical blunders in the management of it; but
they were blunders which are in a great degree excusable by the
peculiar circumstances of the session. It was, in our humble judgment,
a blunder to introduce such a bill without a determination to deliver
a decisive battle upon it; for the introduction of the bill roused the
opposition of a powerful and thoroughly organized class interest,
while the withdrawal of it alienated those to whom the Government
looked for support. Mr. Bruce's excuse, and it is so far valid, is
that the unexpected tactics of the Opposition in respect to the Army
Bill wasted so much of the session that there was no opportunity to
fight the battle of the Licensing Bill as he had intended to have
fought it. The bill itself appears to us to be a fair compromise, and
we have no doubt that it was calculated to do much good. The brewers
and publicans have gained a victory for the moment, and they have the
satisfaction of having beaten the Government candidate in East Surrey;
but their victory is likely to prove a Pyrrhic one. It has opened the
eyes of the public to the ruin which the excessive indulgence in
intoxicating drinks is causing, and the more the question is
discussed, the less reason will the publicans have for rejoicing over
the defeat of Mr. Bruce's bill. The yearly sum spent on intoxicating
liquors in the United Kingdom has now reached the enormous and
portentous figure of £110,000,000, and the annual committals for
drunkenness amounted in the year 1869 to 122,310. These are frightful
facts; and if the interests of the publicans stand in the way of a
thorough remedy, so much the worse for the interests of the publicans.
Let the Government take away the licensing power from the magistrates,
and commit the question to the management of local boards elected by
the ratepayers, and we will undertake to say that the publicans will
be checkmated politically in the first place, and that we shall
witness, in the second place, a rapid decrease in their unholy
traffic. Before dismissing the subject, however, it is right to remind
our readers that Mr. Bruce's bill did not perish utterly. A portion,
and a very valuable portion, of it is now law, and will effectually
check the increase of public houses, and at the same time help to
diminish the number of those already existing.
We have now glanced through the principal measures of the session, and
we confidently ask whether it is not true that both in respect to the
quantity and the quality of the work done it will bear a favourable
comparison with the large majority of Parliamentary sessions during
the last forty years. And yet it cannot be denied that the Government
has incurred a certain amount of unpopularity. How is this to be
explained? A general answer may be given, to the effect that a Liberal
Government which is in earnest is sure to incur some degree of
unpopularity; for its _raison d'être_ is to attack abuses wherever it
may find them. Its business is to do what is best for the nation at
large in the first place, and to consider the interests of particular
sections of the nation in the second place. But the interests
concerned, as was natural, view the matter in a different light. They
object to be relegated to the second place, for they prefer their own
welfare to that of the nation, and, like the brewers the other day,
are ready, whenever their pockets are menaced, to subordinate the
interest of their party to that of their trade. The Government, to use
a common expression, has 'trodden on the corns' of several powerful
interests, and has thereby incurred their resentment. But it must be
owned that it was from Mr. Lowe's budget that the Government received
its first serious blow. Our own opinion is that incompetent as it was
the budget attracted to itself a good deal of unmerited obloquy. But
we feel bound, at the same time, to express our conviction that if Mr.
Lowe knew human nature better, or took less pains to exasperate it, he
might have produced a budget which would have strengthened instead of
weakened the Government. As it was, the Government never quite
recovered the prestige which Mr. Lowe's financial blunders had lost
them. Then came a series of naval disasters, for which the Government
was somehow considered responsible, though it really had no more to do
with them than it had with the eruption of Vesuvius.[68] Then the
persistent cry of extravagant expenditure, raised by the
Conservatives, and echoed by their small band of allies among the
Radicals, had some effect. Yet there never was a more dishonest cry.
Though the present Government came into office in the end of the year
1868, the naval and military estimates for the ensuing year were
prepared by their predecessors, and they reached the respectable
figure of twenty-six millions sterling. And this, be it remembered,
was in a period of profound peace. Mr. Gladstone's Government had to
prepare the estimates for 1870, and the result showed a reduction from
£26,000,000 to £21,000,000, with a marked improvement, at the same
time, in the efficiency both of the army and navy. It is true, that in
consequence of the complications arising out of the Franco-German war,
two millions more were added to the estimates in the course of the
summer. But no Government can be held responsible for expenditure
caused by unforeseen emergencies: and, moreover, the expenditure in
question was demanded by the country generally, and cannot in fairness
be laid at the door of the Government. The upshot of the whole matter,
however, is that the Government now in office reduced, on the first
opportunity, the estimates of their predecessors by upwards of
£4,000,000, and that, in spite of the expenditure occasioned by a
gigantic Continental war, and a thorough reorganization of the army,
the estimates are still considerably below the figure which the Tory
Government reached in the midst of an universal peace abroad, and in
the absence of any extraordinary expenditure at home. And yet Tory
politicians, in and out of Parliament, have rent the air with their
cries against the 'wasteful and extravagant expenditure' of the
Government. Were it not for the war on the Continent, and the cost of
abolishing the purchase system, and putting the army on a new basis,
it is not too much to say that the navy and army estimates of this
year would have been £7,000,000 lower than those which the
Conservative Government bequeathed to Mr. Gladstone. We believe,
however, that the exceptional expenditure of this session is neither
'wasteful' nor 'extravagant.' It is like the wise outlay of a skilful
husbandman who drains and manures his barren land, in the sure
confidence that it will repay him tenfold. The new basis on which the
Government is reorganizing the army will give us in a few years a
force which will free us from the recurrence of those periodical
panics which make us the laughing-stock of other nations, and which
always involve for the time being a large, but perfectly useless,
expenditure. Already our navy is admitted, even by the political
opponents of the Government, to be more than a match for all the
navies of the world put together; and, under the wise administration
of our present rulers, the army also will soon be in a condition to
maintain our just influence abroad, and make the invasion of these
isles a practical impossibility.
On the whole, then, we believe that the unpopularity which has
overtaken the Government this session, is for the most part,
undeserved; and we believe in the next place that the unpopularity is
mainly confined to certain political cliques and class interests,
which the Government, in the prosecution of its plain duty, has
unavoidably offended. Through a combination of these causes, a general
election at this moment might lose the Government a score of seats all
over the country; but it would not seriously shake its position. The
nation has not lost its confidence in Mr. Gladstone, and it will think
twice before it makes up its mind to exchange him for Mr. Disraeli.
The journal 'written by gentlemen for gentlemen' has recently told us
in one of its oracular manifestoes, that 'the whole London press has
become thoroughly suspicious of Mr. Gladstone's strength and fitness
for the place which, for the want of any tolerable competitor, he
holds at his own discretion.' We have heard and read this sort of
language before. 'The whole London press,' or rather that portion of
it which is fortunate enough to receive the _imprimatur_ of the
_Pall-Mall Gazette_, pronounced the same verdict on Mr. Gladstone five
years ago. And the result was, that those confiding politicians who
trusted in the sagacity of 'the whole London press' either lost their
seats in Parliament, or had to sit on the stool of repentance and vow
eternal allegiance to Mr. Gladstone. Let those, therefore, who mayhap
are contemplating a repetition of the same experiment meditate on the
history of the Adullamites, and be wise in time. The country has its
eye on that knot of atrabilious Liberals whose voice is that of Jacob,
but whose hands are the hands of Esau. They may declare, _ore
rotundo_, that they have no confidence in Mr. Gladstone. Let them have
a care lest the next general election prove that the country has no
confidence in them.
To sum up, then, the claims of the Government during the past year on
the continued confidence of the nation. It succeeded in limiting the
area of the war between France and Germany, and, while upholding the
dignity of the country, preserved to us the blessings of peace. By
the treaty of Washington it has laid the foundation of a cordial
understanding and a lasting friendship with the great American
Republic. It has passed several measures for the benefit of Ireland
which will surely help, as they become thoroughly understood, to lay
the demon of disaffection in that impulsive, but not ungenerous
people. Then what shall we say of the Army Bill? Its importance is
gauged by the unparalleled resistance which it encountered in
Parliament, and in times less exacting than the present its success
would have made the fortune of an ordinary administration. On the
other hand, the Trades' Unions Bill, the University Tests Bill, the
Repeal of the Ecclesiastical Titles Act, and the Local Government
Board Bill, (a most valuable piece of legislation) are the quality of
bills which ordinarily constitute the work of a session. And, in
addition to these outward and visible signs of ministerial toil, the
separate departments of the Government have, each in its place, done
an immense amount of that kind of work which makes no appeal to public
notice, but which is none the less valuable because it works in
silence. The Poor-law Board, the Admiralty, and Mr. Cardwell's
department have all laboured incessantly, and the fruit of their
labour is already becoming visible in the better management of our
workhouses, and in the increased efficiency of our army and navy. Nor
must we forget the excellent reforms which Mr. Monsell has already
made in the Post Office, and which entitle him at no distant day to a
seat in the Cabinet. We maintain, therefore, that the Government may,
without any remorse, sit down with a good conscience to frame the
programme of the coming session. The only serious danger which they
have ahead of them is the question of Irish education; and that is a
question which can well wait awhile. But if it must be tackled next
session, we see no reason why the genius which solved the church and
land questions should not be equal to solving that of education also.
The danger of the Government lies in the inconsistent conduct of the
Opposition, who advocate the application to Ireland of principles
which are totally opposed to those for which they contend in the case
of England. Still, it does not appear to us that the question of Irish
education presents any insurmountable difficulty, provided the same
statesmanlike principles are brought to bear upon it which have
already solved the vexed problems of land tenure and religious
equality. In short, a good budget and a moderate programme will enable
the Government to make the next session--we will not say more
fruitful, but--more popular than the last.