THE O'CONNOR MEMOIRS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20259, 20 May 1929, Page 8

THE O'CONNOR MEMOIRS.

EEMINISCENCES OF " T.P." NEW IRISH LAND BILL, DYNAMITE OUTRAGE IN LONDON. JHE TROUBLES IN EGYPT. (Copyright.) No. XXX. The tremendous attack by Mr. Forster On Parnell took placo on Febi'uary 22, 1883. A short time afterward—March 16— there was another attack by Mr. Forster; this was on the South African policy of the Government. It showed something of the growing bitterness of the relations between the two men that, immediately after Mr. 1' orster had spoken, Gladstone got up to describe him as " a man of peace" who. notwithstanding, in the most unequivocal terms, has taught us to-day the doctrine of war." It also shows that extraordinary power of the House of soon forgetting even great Scenes in the onrush of other interests, that on March 14—that is to say, three 4 -weeks after Mr. Forster pronounced his tremendous indictment against lnm—Pariiell was quietly moving a new Laud Bill, and he was able to make out, so good a case that he had sixty-three members in his lobby against 250 of the united Liberal and Conservative vote. Bub again the quiet course of Irish Land Reform, which Parnell was thus advancing steadily, was threatened by an outburst of the revolutionaries. An- attempt was made to blow tip by dynamite the Local Government Board and the Times ollice, and the police force had to be increased, the principal public buildings placed under military control, and Cabinet Ministers accompanied in their goings to and fro by detectives and constables. These outrages, and the prospect of others to follow, led to tho Explosives Act, a very strong measure which Sir William Harcourt moved, and passed through all its stages in tho House of Commons in an hour and a-half. Mr. John Morley Enters Parliament. Egypt came up again with greater nrgency, in consequence of a bombardment of Alexandria and the other military measures which had followed; and the ranks of the non-interventionists by this time had received a very powerful recruit by the election of Mr. John Morlev as member for Newcastle-on-Tyne. I had known Mr. Morley pretty intimately since 1880 when I had been given by him the heavy but interesting duty of writing—anonymously —the daily chronicle of Parliamentary life for the Pall Mall Gazette. Our relations had been of the friendliest; I do not think there were ever more than a few sentences extracted or modified in the articles I wrote. With the active and sometimes vehement part I was then taking in the stormy discussions of the times, it was always "a little difficult for me to observe an'impartial tone, especially when writing for a Liberal paper, for I was then a fierce opponent of the Liberal Party. Anyhow, I succeeded in this respect so far that I kept the job for a year and a- j half, and might have kept it probably j for many years more if it had not been for two events. The first was that I undertook my first mission to America to raise money for the Irish Party, and that kept me away until some months after the beginning of the next session of Parliament. The second was the disappearance of Mr. Morley from'the editorship of the Pall Mall and the succession of Mr. W. T. Stead to the editorial chair. I proposed to Mr. Stead on my return to England to renew my old work, but he refused the suggestion, giving as his reason that he did not want anything like a fixed programme of articles in his paper. He wanted variety every day. The Imbroglio in Egypt.

I have read again the long account of * the Egyptian imbroglio which ultimately, more than anything else, brought the Gladstone Government to its doom. Tt would be outside the purpose of pages like mine to go into the full details of this long, involved, and, to a certain extent, out-of-date controversy. It is evident that from the start Sir. Gladstone was doubtful about the whole policy of intervention in Egypt, and had to be dragged through by the pressure of his colleagues and bv those unforeseen catastrophies which lie in wait on every Government and embarrass nearly every great political decision. I remember the day when Gladstone came- into the House of Commons looking very flushed, very excited, vei-y disturbed, and when, after he had got up to speak, one could see the signs of great embarrassment and grave anxiety in his somewhat halting words. It was one of the occasions on which he had found it impossible to come to any accord as to the policy in Egypt between France and England. It was this disaccord, and the rise of what was then considered the rebel militarist movement under the leadership of Arab) Pasha, that precipitated Gladstone and his colleagues into the first and, as it proved after, the fatal step of armed intervention in Egypt. Arabi had established the supremacy of the soldiers over the Khedive and the civil authorities in Egypt. Bombardment of Alexandria. There was a distinct threat to the lives and property, as well as the political position, of the English at Alexandria particularly, and things \yere precipitated there by ■the massacre of about two hundred Europeans and by the preparation as for a siege around Alexandria. The Government resolved that the necessary protection against this menace was the bombardment of Alexandria, a bombardment which had the suspicious beginning of the disappearance, and disapproval of (lie French Fleet. The next step led to the expedition under General WolseJey and the victorious battle of Tel-el-Kebir, and these things led to the outbreak of a passionate and, as I think now and as most people think, blind and insensate Jingoism. This fever spread to a large number of the English people; from them it spread (o the Houses of Parliament, and for_ some years there were violent and passionate debates. And then came the most fatal etep of all. To anybody with the mind of an Anatole France there could be no more interesting or instructive episode in confirmation of his theory of the incurable folly of mankind than the story of the Gordon mission to Khartoum. W. T. Stead and Gordon Mission. I think I am correct in saying that but for W. T. Stead there would have been no Gordon mission. Stead was honest and histrionic, pugnacious and sensitive, narrow and intolerant in religion, what in America they would call a ( Fundamentalist; in temperament half-crusader, and not altogether without a touch of the mountebank. Stead looked what he was. He was fairly slight, but with suppleness and spring in all his movements, with a beard all round his face, rough features, and of a certain commonness of expression, increased by shabby and ill-cut tweed suits; but the eyes—large, blue, and brilliant — revealed the ardent and restless soul beneath. He looked as if he might have been a Revivalist preacher who dragged multitudes of people in adoration and loyalty behind him. It was, perhaps, a little unfortunate for Stead arid for his country that he found bis congregations in the readers of his papers. lla deserved to have many readers; be was a truly great journalist; no man could make up a caso so thoroughly and ardently, no man could state R , case more vehemently and more eprivincingly. If he had been in another age * and belonged to another creed, ho might i have*;been Peter the Hermit. [Mr. Stead lost his life in the wreck of the Titanic in 1912.] ,(To be continued daily.).