The Life of William Ewart Gladstone Volume III Part 31

A letter of Mr. Gladstone's to me puts some of his views on the situation created by the retirement of Lord Randolph:-

_Hawarden, Christmas Day, 1886._-Between Christmas services, a flood of cards and congratulations for the season, and many interesting letters, I am drowned in work to-day, having just at 1- P.M. ascertained what my letters _are_. So forgive me if, first thanking you very much for yours, I deal with some points rather abruptly.

1. Churchill has committed an outrage as against the Queen, and also the prime minister, in the method of resigning and making known his resignation. This, of course, they will work against him. 2. He is also entirely wrong in supposing that the finance minister has any ruling authority on the great estimates of defence. If he had, he would be the master of the country. But although he has no right to demand the concurrence of his colleagues in his view of the estimates, he has a rather special right, because these do so much towards determining budget and taxation, to indicate his own views by resignation. I have repeatedly fought estimates to the extremity, with an intention of resigning in _case_. But to send in a resignation makes it impossible for his colleagues as men of honour to recede. 3. I think one of his best points is that he had made before taking office recent and formal declarations on behalf of economy, of which his colleagues must be taken to have been cognisant, and Salisbury in particular. He may plead that he could not reduce these all at once to zero. 4. Cannot something be done, without reference to the holes that may be picked, to give him some support as a champion of economy? This talk about the continental war, I for one regard as pure nonsense when aimed at magnifying our estimates.

5. With regard to Hartington. What he will do I know not, and our wishes could have no weight with him.... The position is one of such difficulty for H. that I am very sorry for him, though it was never more true that he who makes his own bed in a certain way must lie in it. Chamberlain's speech hits him very hard in case of acceptance. I take it for granted that he will not accept to sit among thirteen tories, but will have to demand an entry by force, _i.e._ with three or four friends. To accept upon that footing would, I think, be the logical consequence of all he has said and done since April. In logic, he ought to go forward, _or_, as Chamberlain has done, backward. The Queen will, I have no doubt, be brought to bear upon him, and the nine-tenths of his order. If the Irish question rules all others, all he has to consider is whether he (properly flanked) can serve his view of the Irish question. But with this logic we have nothing to do. The question for us also is (I think), what is best for our view of the Irish question? I am tempted to wish that he should accept; it would clear the ground. But I do not yet see my way with certainty.

6. With regard to Chamberlain. From what has already pa.s.sed between us you know that, apart from the new situation and from his declaration, I was very desirous that everything honourable should be done to conciliate and soothe. Unquestionably his speech is a new fact of great weight. He is again a liberal, _quand meme_, and will not on all points (as good old Joe Hume used to say) swear black is white for the sake of his views on Ireland. We ought not to waste this new fact, but take careful account of it.

On the other hand, I think he will see that the moment for taking account of it has not come. Clearly the first thing is to see who are the government. When we see this, we shall also know something of its colour and intentions. I do not think Randolph can go back.

He would go back at a heavy discount. If he wants to minimise, the only way I see is that he should isolate his vote on the estimates, form no _clique_, and proclaim strong support in Irish matters and general policy. Thus he might pave a roundabout road of return.... In _many_ things Goschen is more of a liberal than Hartington, and he would carry with him next to n.o.body.

7. On the whole, I rejoice to think that, come what may, this affair will really effect progress in the Irish question.

A happy Christmas to you. It will be happier than that of the ministers.

Mr. Gladstone gave the Round Table his blessing, his "general idea being that he had better meddle as little as possible with the conference, and retain a free hand." Lord Hartington would neither join the conference, nor deny that he thought it premature. While negotiation was going on, he said, somebody must stay at home, guard the position, and keep a watch on the movements of the enemy, and this duty was his. In truth, after encouraging or pressing Mr. (M130) Goschen to join the government, it was obviously impossible to do anything that would look like desertion either of him or of them. On the other side, both English liberals and Irish nationalists were equally uneasy lest the unity of the party should be bought by the sacrifice of fundamentals. The conference was denounced from this quarter as an attempt to find a compromise that would help a few men sitting on the fence to salve "their consciences at the expense of a nation's rights." Such remarks are worth quoting, to ill.u.s.trate the temper of the rank and file. Mr. Parnell, though alive to the truth that when people go into a conference it usually means that they are ready to give up something, was thoroughly awake to the satisfactory significance of the Birmingham overtures.

Things at the round table for some time went smoothly enough. Mr.

Chamberlain gradually advanced the whole length. He publicly committed himself to the expediency of establis.h.i.+ng some kind of legislative authority in Dublin in accordance with Mr. Gladstone's principle, with a preference in his own mind for a plan on the lines of Canada. This he followed up, also in public, by the admission that of course the Irish legislature must be allowed to organise their own form of executive government, either by an imitation on a small scale of all that goes on at Westminster and Whitehall, or in whatever other shape they might think proper.(221) To a.s.sent to an Irish legislature for such affairs as parliament might determine to be distinctively Irish, with an executive responsible to it, was to accept the party credo on the subject. Then the surface became mysteriously ruffled. Language was used by some of the plenipotentiaries in public, of which each side in turn complained as inconsistent with conciliatory negotiation in private. At last on the very day on which the provisional result of the conference was laid before Mr.

Gladstone, there appeared in a print called the _Baptist_(222) an article from Mr. Chamberlain, containing an ardent plea for the disestablishment of the Welsh church, but warning the Welshmen that they and the Scotch crofters and the English labourers, thirty-two millions of people, must all go without much-needed, legislation because three millions were disloyal, while nearly six hundred members of parliament would be reduced to forced inactivity, because some eighty delegates, representing the policy and receiving the pay of the Chicago convention, were determined to obstruct all business until their demands had been conceded. Men naturally asked what was the use of continuing a discussion, when one party to it was attacking in this peremptory fas.h.i.+on the very persons and the policy that in private he was supposed to accept. Mr. Gladstone showed no implacability. Viewing the actual character of the _Baptist_ letter, he said to Sir W. Harcourt, "I am inclined to think we can hardly do more now, than to say we fear it has interposed an unexpected obstacle in the way of any attempt at this moment to sum up the result of your communications, which we should otherwise hopefully have done; but on the other hand we are unwilling that so much ground apparently gained should be lost, that a little time may soften or remove the present ruffling of the surface, and that we are quite willing that the subject should stand over for resumption at a convenient season."

The resumption never happened. Two or three weeks later, Mr. Chamberlain announced that he did not intend to return to the round table.(223) No other serious and formal attempt was ever made on either side to prevent the liberal unionists from hardening into a separate species. When they became accomplices in coercion, they cut off the chances of re-union.

Coercion was the key to the new situation. Just as at the beginning of 1886, the announcement of it by the tory government marked the parting of the ways, so was it now.

II

We must now with reasonable cheerfulness turn our faces back towards Ireland. On the day of his return from (M131) Ireland (August 17, 1886) Mr. Parnell told me that he was quite sure that rents could not be paid in the coming winter, and if the country was to be kept quiet, the government would have to do something. He hoped that they would do something; otherwise there would be disturbance, and that he did not want. He had made up his mind that his interests would be best served by a quiet winter. For one thing he knew that disturbance would be followed by coercion, and he knew and often said that of course strong coercion must always in the long run win the day, little as the victory might be worth.

For another thing he apprehended that disturbance might frighten away his new political allies in Great Britain, and destroy the combination which he had so dexterously built up. This was now a dominant element with him.

He desired definitely that the next stage of his movement should be in the largest sense political and not agrarian. He brought two or three sets of proposals in this sense before the House, and finally produced a Tenants Relief bill. It was not brilliantly framed. For in truth it is not in human nature, either Irish or any other, to labour the framing of a bill which has no chance of being seriously considered.

The golden secret of Irish government was always to begin by trying to find all possible points for disagreement with anything that Mr. Parnell said or proposed, instead of seeking whether what he said or proposed might not furnish a basis for agreement. The conciliatory tone was soon over, and the Parnell bill was thrown out. The Irish secretary denounced it as permanently upsetting the settlement of 1881, as giving a death-blow to purchase, and as produced without the proof of any real grounds for a general reduction in judicial rents. Whatever else he did, said Sir Michael Hicks Beach, he would never agree to govern Ireland by a policy of blackmail.(224)

A serious movement followed the failure of the government to grapple with arrears of rent. The policy known as the plan of campaign was launched.

The plan of campaign was this. The tenants of a given estate agreed with one another what abatement they thought just in the current half-year's rent. This in a body they proffered to landlord or agent. If it was refused as payment in full, they handed the money to a managing committee, and the committee deposited it with some person in whom they had confidence, to be used for the purpose of the struggle.(225) That such proceeding const.i.tuted an unlawful conspiracy n.o.body doubts, any more than it can be doubted that before the Act of 1875 every trade combination of a like kind in this island was a conspiracy.

At an early stage the Irish leader gave his opinion to the present writer:-

_Dec. 7, 1886._-Mr. Parnell called, looking very ill and worn. He wished to know what I thought of the effect of the plan of campaign upon public opinion. "If you mean in Ireland," I said, "of course I have no view, and it would be worth nothing if I had.

In England, the effect is wholly bad; it offends almost more even than outrages." He said he had been very ill and had taken no part, so that he stands free and uncommitted. He was anxious to have it fully understood that the fixed point in his tactics is to maintain the alliance with the English liberals. He referred with much bitterness, and very justifiable too, to the fact that when Ireland seemed to be quiet some short time back, the government had at once begun to draw away from all their promises of remedial legislation. If now rents were paid, meetings abandoned, and newspapers moderated, the same thing would happen over again as usual. However, he would send for a certain one of his lieutenants, and would press for an immediate cessation of the violent speeches.

_December 12._-Mr. Parnell came, and we had a prolonged conversation. The lieutenant had come over, and had defended the plan of campaign. Mr. Parnell persevered in his dissent and disapproval, and they parted with the understanding that the meetings should be dropped, and the movement calmed as much as could be. I told him that I had heard from Mr. Gladstone, and that he could not possibly show any tolerance for illegalities.

That his opponents should call upon Mr. Gladstone to denounce the plan of campaign and cut himself off from its authors, was to be expected. They made the most of it. (M132) But he was the last man to be turned aside from the prosecution of a policy that he deemed of overwhelming moment, by any minor currents. Immediately after the election, Mr. Parnell had been informed of his view that it would be a mistake for English and Irish to aim at uniform action in parliament. Motives could not be at all points the same. Liberals were bound to keep in view (next to what the Irish question might require) the reunion of the liberal party. The Irish were bound to have special regard to the opinion and circ.u.mstances of Ireland.

Common action up to a certain degree would arise from the necessities of the position. Such was Mr. Gladstone's view. He was bent on bringing a revolutionary movement to what he confidently antic.i.p.ated would be a good end; to allow a pa.s.sing phase of that movement to divert him, would be to abandon his own foundations. No reformer is fit for his task who suffers himself to be frightened off by the excesses of an extreme wing.

In reply to my account of the conversation with Mr. Parnell, he wrote to me:-

_Hawarden, December 8, 1886._-I have received your very clear statement and reply in much haste for the post-making the same request as yours for a return. I am glad to find the -- speech is likely to be neutralised, I hope effectually. It was really very bad. I am glad you write to --. 2. As to the campaign in Ireland, I do not at present feel the force of Hartington's appeal to me to speak out. I do not recollect that he ever spoke out about Churchill, of whom he is for the time the enthusiastic follower.(226) 3. But all I say and do must be kept apart from the slightest countenance direct or indirect to illegality. We too suffer under the power of the landlord, but we cannot adopt this as a method of breaking it. 4. I am glad you opened the question of intermediate measures.... 5. Upon the whole I suppose he sees he cannot have countenance from us in the plan of campaign. The question rather is how much disavowal. I have contradicted a tory figment in Glasgow that I had approved.

At a later date (September 16, 1887) he wrote to me as to an intended speech at Newcastle: "You will, I have no doubt, press even more earnestly than before on the Irish people the duty and policy of maintaining order, and in these instances I shall be very glad if you will a.s.sociate me with yourself."

"The plan of campaign," said Mr. Gladstone, "was one of those devices that cannot be reconciled with the principles of law and order in a civilised country. Yet we all know that such devices are the certain result of misgovernment. With respect to this particular instance, if the plan be blameable (I cannot deny that I feel it difficult to acquit any such plan) I feel its authors are not one-tenth part so blameable as the government whose contemptuous refusal of what they have now granted, was the parent and source of the mischief."(227) This is worth looking at.

The Cowper Commission, in February 1887, reported that refusal by some landlords explained much that had occurred in the way of combination, and that the growth of these combinations had been facilitated by the fall in prices, restriction of credit by the banks, and other circ.u.mstances making the payment of rent impossible.(228) Remarkable evidence was given by Sir Redvers Buller. He thought there should be some means of modifying and redressing the grievance of rents being still higher than the people can pay. "You have got a very ignorant poor people, and the law should look after them, instead of which it has only looked after the rich."(229) This was exactly what Mr. Parnell had said. In the House the government did not believe him; in Ireland they admitted his case to be true. In one instance General Buller wrote to the agents of the estate that he believed it was impossible for the tenants to pay the rent that was demanded; there might be five or six rogues among them, but in his opinion the greater number of them were nearer famine than paying rent.(230) In this very case ruthless evictions followed. The same scenes were enacted elsewhere. The landlords were within their rights, the courts were bound by the law, the police had no choice but to back (M133) the courts. The legal ease was complete. The moral case remained, and it was through these barbarous scenes that in a rough and non-logical way the realities of the Irish land system for the first time gained access to the minds of the electors of Great Britain.

Such devices as the plan of campaign came to be regarded in England and Scotland as what they were, incidents in a great social struggle. In a vast majority of cases the mutineers succeeded in extorting a reduction of rent, not any more immoderate than the reduction voluntarily made by good landlords, or decreed in the land-courts. No agrarian movement in Ireland was ever so unstained by crime.

Some who took part in these affairs made no secret of political motives.

Unlike Mr. Parnell, they deliberately desired to make government difficult. Others feared that complete inaction would give an opening to the Fenian extremists. This section had already shown some signs both of their temper and their influence in certain proceedings of the Gaelic a.s.sociation at Thurles. But the main spring was undoubtedly agrarian, and the force of the spring came from mischiefs that ministers had refused to face in time. "What they call a conspiracy now," said one of the insurgent leaders, "they will call an Act of parliament next year." So it turned out.

The Commission felt themselves "constrained to recommend an earlier revision of judicial rents, on account of the straitened circ.u.mstances of Irish farmers." What the commissioners thus told ministers in the spring was exactly what the Irish leader had told them in the previous autumn.

They found that there were "real grounds" for some legislation of the kind that the chief secretary, unconscious of what his cabinet was so rapidly to come to, had stigmatised as the policy of blackmail.

On the last day of March 1887, the government felt the necessity of introducing a measure based on facts that they had disputed, and on principles that they had repudiated. Leaseholders were admitted, some hundred thousand of them. That is, the more solemn of the forms of agrarian contract were set aside. Other provisions we may pa.s.s over. But this was not the bill to which the report of the Commission pointed. The pith of that report was the revision and abatement of judicial rents, and from the new bill this vital point was omitted. It could hardly have been otherwise after a curt declaration made by the prime minister in the previous August. "We do not contemplate any revision of judicial rents,"

he said-immediately, by the way, after appointing a commission to find out what it was that they ought to contemplate. "We do not think it would be honest in the first place, and we think it would be exceedingly inexpedient."(231) He now repeated that to interfere with judicial rents because prices had fallen, would be to "lay your axe to the root of the fabric of civilised society."(232) Before the bill was introduced, Mr.

Balfour, who had gone to the Irish office on the retirement of Sir M. H.

Beach in the month of March, proclaimed in language even more fervid, that it would be folly and madness to break these solemn contracts.(233)

For that matter, the bill even as it first stood was in direct contravention to all such high doctrine as this, inasmuch as it clothed a court with power to vary solemn contracts by fixing a composition for outstanding debt, and spreading the payment of it over such a time as the judge might think fit. That, however, was the least part of what finally overtook the haughty language of the month of April. In May the government accepted a proposal that the court should not only settle the sum due by an applicant for relief for outstanding debt, but should fix a reasonable rent for the rest of the term. This was the very power of variation that ministers had, as it were only the day before, so roundly denounced. But then the tenants in Ulster were beginning to growl. In June ministers withdrew the power of variation, for now it was the landlords who were growling. Then at last in July the prime minister called his party together, and told them that if the bill were not altered, Ulster would be lost to the unionist cause, and that after all he must put into the bill a general revision of judicial rents for three years. So finally, as it was put by a speaker of that time, (M134) you have the prime minister rejecting in April the policy which in May he accepts; rejecting in June the policy which he had accepted in May; and then in July accepting the policy which he had rejected in June, and which had been within a few weeks declared by himself and his colleagues to be inexpedient and dishonest, to be madness and folly, and to be a laying of the axe to the very root of the fabric of civilised society. The simplest recapitulation made the bitterest satire.

The law that finally emerged from these singular operations dealt, it will be observed in pa.s.sing, with nothing less than the chief object of Irish industry and the chief form of Irish property. No wonder that the landlords lifted up angry voices. True, the minister the year before had laid it down that if rectification of rents should be proved necessary, the landlords ought to be compensated by the state. Of this consolatory balm it is needless to say no more was ever heard; it was only a graceful sentence in a speech, and proved to have little relation to purpose or intention. At the Kildare Street club in Dublin members moodily asked one another whether they might not just as well have had the policy of Mr.

Parnell's bill adopted on College Green, as adopted at Westminster.

III

The moment had by this time once more come for testing the proposition from which Mr. Gladstone's policy had first started. The tory government had been turned out at the beginning of 1886 upon coercion, and Mr.

Gladstone's government had in the summer of that year been beaten upon conciliation. "I ventured to state in 1886," said Mr. Gladstone a year later,(234) "that we had arrived at the point where two roads met, or rather where two roads parted; one of them the road that marked the endeavour to govern Ireland according to its const.i.tutionally expressed wishes; the other the road princ.i.p.ally marked by ultra-const.i.tutional measures, growing more and more p.r.o.nounced in character." Others, he said, with whom we had been in close alliance down to that date, considered that a third course was open, namely liberal concession, stopping short of autonomy, but upon a careful avoidance of coercion. Now it became visible that this was a mistake, and that in default of effective conciliation, coercion was the inevitable alternative. So it happened.

The government again unlocked the ancient armoury, and brought out the well-worn engines. The new Crimes bill in most particulars followed the old Act, but it contained one or two serious extensions, including a clause afterwards dropped, that gave to the crown a choice in cases of murder or certain other aggravated offences of carrying the prisoner out of his own country over to England and trying him before a Middles.e.x jury at the Old Bailey-a puny imitation of the heroic expedient suggested in 1769, of bringing American rebels over for trial in England under a slumbering statute of King Henry VIII. The most startling innovation of all was that the new Act was henceforth to be the permanent law of Ireland, and all its drastic provisions were to be brought into force whenever the executive government pleased.(235) This Act was not restricted as every former law of the kind had been in point of time, to meet an emergency; it was made a standing instrument of government.

Criminal law and procedure is one of the most important of all the branches of civil rule, and certainly is one of the most important of all its elements. This was now in Ireland to s.h.i.+ft up and down, to be one thing to-day and another thing to-morrow at executive discretion. Acts would be innocent or would be crimes, just as it pleased the Irish minister. Parliament did not enact that given things were criminal, but only that they should be criminal when an Irish minister should choose to say so.(236) Persons charged with them would have the benefit of a jury or would be deprived of a jury, as the Irish minister might think proper.

(M135) Mr. Parnell was in bad health and took little part, but he made more than one pulverising attack in that measured and frigid style which, in a man who knows his case at first hand, may be so much more awkward for a minister than more florid onslaughts. He discouraged obstruction, and advised his followers to select vital points and to leave others alone.

This is said to have been the first Coercion bill that a majority of Irish members voting opposed.

It was at this point that the government suddenly introduced their historic proposal for closure by guillotine. They carried (June 10) a resolution that at ten o'clock on that day week the committee stage should be brought compulsorily to an end, and that any clauses remaining undisposed of should be put forthwith without amendment or debate. The most remarkable innovation upon parliamentary rule and practice since Cromwell and Colonel Pride, was introduced by Mr. Smith in a characteristic speech, well larded with phrases about duty, right, responsibility, business of the country, and efficiency of the House.

These solemnising complacencies' did not hide the mortifying fact that if it had really been one of the objects of Irish members for ten years past to work a revolution in the parliament where they were forced against their will to sit, they had at least, be such a revolution good or bad, succeeded in their design.