The Lyttelton Times. FRIDAY, MAY 21, 1986.

Lyttelton Times, Volume LXV, Issue 7865, 21 May 1886, Page 4

The Lyttelton Times. FRIDAY, MAY 21, 1986 .

It looks as though the triple alliance that has been formed in England against Mr Gladstone’s Home Rule proposals were destined to win. What will follow a defeat it is difficult to imagine. Lord Salisbury and the Tories, joined with Lord Hartington and the Whigs, and Mr Chamberlain’s section of . the Radicals, should be strong nvorcume even the magic oi Mr/GlUia fluence. What that influence is may be understood by noting the strong phalanx which even now is ready to follow the Grand Old Man to the very end. What the forces leagued against the Government are may be judged by running the eye down the list of Liberal defections by which the Tory Opposition is for the nonce recruited. Might it not be thought that, putting the Tories aside altogether. Lords Hartington and Derby, and Messrs Chamberlain, Goschen, Trevelyan and Co. ought collectively to be a match for Mr Gladstone? The latter’s marvellous hold on the English people and the House of Commons may be estimated better perhaps by the fight he has manged to make against the combination of old and new foes now leagued against him, than by any success he ever achieved at the head of the unbroken Liberal party. Even Mr Chamberlain’s own National Liberal Association has passed an enthusiastic vote of confidence in the man whom Mr Chamberlain, it seems, is now about to' overthrow. Of course it is out of the question to predict, at this distance, with any confidence, the upshot of the battle of giants now going on. But the probabilities are strong that the split in the Radical camp will turn the scale against the Government—as we thought from the first it would. It is not so much, in all likelihood, the number of members who were ready to follow Mr Chamberlain’s revolted flag, which may bring this about. The number was apparently small. But even a small band of deserters is a nucleus to which the timid and discontented may rally. Mr Chamberlain, hearty for Home Rule, would have been a tower of strength for the Ministry. His defection must have paralysed the Radical organisation outside Parliament. We hear nothing of those crowded and enthusiastic mass meetings in Birmingham and its kindred manufacturing towns, which have often so immensely strengthened Mr Gladstone’s hands when battling in the House for one of his great reforms. With Lord Hartington and Mr Chamberlain , to welcome them, deserters from the Government army have been able to go, and yet escape the odium of joining the Tories, They have only had to transfer their allegiance from a Liberal chief to chiefs whose Liberalism has never been suspected, They have been able to pitch a camp of their own, independent of Home Ruler’s and Tories alike. We hear of a meeting of Liberals, presided over by Lord Hartington and Mr Chamberlain, and attended by no contemptible number of members. Probably the coherence of these Liberals, and their refusal lo_ melt away into the Tory host, has irritated Lord Salisbury, and driven him to fall back in his most recent speech on stump oratory of the rabid stamp. The Marquis evidently not only scorns conciliation, but anything like moderation also, and is bent on going his own way without Lord Hartingtou’s company. This,

it is not unnatural to suppose, is because Lord Hartingtou has refused a seat in the Tory coach, and prefers to act with Mr Chamberlain. So Lord Salisbury can see no good way for Ireland but drastic coercion and wholesale deportation. A million Irishmen are to be shipped away to freeze in Manitoba; the remaining four millions are to stay at home and pay full rent at the point of the bayonet. This, of course, is very vigorous, and quite in the good oldfashioned Tory style. If it does nothing else it stamps Lord Salisbury as utterly unfit to govern the United Kingdom, either at the present or any other juncture. Mr Gladstone’s Bill may not be perfect—we don’t think it is so by any means—but at least it is an honest attempt to meet a great difficulty in a manner suited to a humane, free and civilised land. Lord Salisbury is a hundred years behind his age when he talks such stuff to a nation which recognises now that Homo Buie of a kind must sooner or later be conceded to Ireland, and of coercion. There are certain occasions when even a Democracy must meet difficulties with force, as America has bad to do in the case of the Chicago strikers, as Prance had to do in the case of the Parisian Communards, as America, again, had to meet the seceding Southern States. But modern democracies have got past the stage of prescribing force as the only and final remedy for admitted evils. Englishmen, from Mr Clifford Lloyd to Mr Labouchere, all admit that the want of Home Buie—or, as we call it in this part of the world, local selfgoverntnoiit— a real evil. If, therefore. Lord Salisbury finds Bio policy of repression and deportation have any echo throughout the United Kingdom or the British Empire, we are mistaken. The Marquis will discover that the English race all the world over is a long step ahead of him.

It is, however, one thing to propose concessions to Ireland and another to offer the Parnellite, party all it asks. It is another thing, again, to agree with Mr Gladstone’s proposal to exclude the Irish members from the House of Commons. This not only divides the United Kingdom and increases the difficulty of influencing Ireland directly, should the Home Eulers misuse self-government. It deals a blow at the Federal idea. If the present British Parliament is ever to become a truly Imperial Assembly, it is palpably a step in the wrong direction to begin by making it a degree less representative of the Empire than it already is. Those whose dream is an Empire of British Federal States, all self-governing, and all represented at Westminster, naturally recoil from the exclusion of the Irishmen. It is true that Mr Gladstone wishes to keep Ireland in the Empire, and to give his English and Scotch Parliament a supreme authority over Ireland on Imperial matters. But in the first place it is pretty certain that Irishmen would kick against the exercise of this authority by an senteaT^ana *woulaao so witii some show of reason. In the second place let us suppose that the grant of autonomy to Ireland were followed by a similar concession to Scotland and Wales, and by the narrowing down of the House of Commons to a gathering of Englishmen, pure and simple. This would mean that instead of England, Scotland and Ireland holding Imperial authority over a multitude of unrepresented dependencies, England alone would be the Imperial authority, and would alone have to hold up the whole weight of empire. If it be an evil for the Colonies to have no Parliamentary representatives in London, how much greater will the evil become when Scotland and Ireland are reduced to the condition of colonies? Surely the Federationists have a show of reason with them when they argue that, instead of narrowing the House of Commons, the true remedy is to widen it; to relieve it of the purely local affairs, of England, Scotland and Ireland, and admit within it members elected by all those of England’s Colonies which are peopled by Englishmen.