The Life of William Ewart Gladstone Volume III Part 34

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 pa.s.sage 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 a.s.sist 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 pa.s.sed upon the Irish members then. On the contrary, the tory party, knowing all these charges, a.s.sociated 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 pa.s.sed.

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 a.s.sa.s.sinations in the Park, glowing pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sumed 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 circ.u.mstances 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 const.i.tution of the tribunal; it exposed them to long and hara.s.sing proceedings; and it thereby levied upon them a tremendous pecuniary fine. The report produced a strong recoil against the flagrant violence, pa.s.sion, 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 n.o.bler a soul is, the more objects of compa.s.sion 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 circ.u.mstances. 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 a.s.sured 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 const.i.tutes 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 circ.u.mstances 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 authors.h.i.+p, 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 authors.h.i.+p 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 wors.h.i.+p 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 wis.h.i.+ng 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. Dollinger; 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 friends.h.i.+p as one of the great privileges of his life.

And Dollinger:-

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 wors.h.i.+pped, by a whole grateful nation.