REMINISCENCES OF MR T. P. O’CONNOR. M.P.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20707, 3 May 1929, Page 3

REMINISCENCES OF MR T. P. O’CONNOR. M.P.

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MEMORIES OF "THE FATHER.OF ; THE HOUSE OF COMMONS.” i Hights of Publication Secured by the Otago Daily Times. VOLUME I. CHAPTER VIII. Over everything that occurred in the first cession and in subsequent .sessions of the Parliament of 1880 there spread the large, gaunt, inevitable spectre of the Irish Revolution. I hope my readers ■will keep that point constantly, in their mind; it is the key to this strange enigma to which I have already alluded, of a powerful Ministry with a great majority and the greatest of leaders being gradually worn down, and with little but follies or mistakes to mark its history. And the Government was, between Scylla and Charybdis. On the one hand they and the majority of their party were convinced that the* failure of the potato crop, the innumerand cruel evictions, and the impossible conditions of the land laws in Ireland compelled a Liberal Government to bring in Liberal land legislation. On the hand, they were confronted with a civil vjar, with some terrible crimes and the subversion of all the authorities and laws of the country; with men preaching—rightly from their point of view—lawlessness, and the law paralysed in Its attempts to deal with the situation. The one side of the pro-, blem required great land reform; the other, iu the view of the Government,required a rifew application of the old remedy of coercion. There was neither, of these policies that did not necessarily elicit Violent hostility. Land Reform was violently opposed by the landlord party in b6th Houses of Parliament, and if that party were. powerful in the Commons, the House of Lords, where it was omnipotent, showed throughout a defiant and arrogant determination to use to the utmost its powers against the Government. To toe landlord party at that stage of their political mentality, Land Reform, except the purchasing out of the landlords, was sheer brigandage. To this opinion forcible expression was given not merely by Lord Randolph Churchill and his guerilla'warriors, but also,by such notable men as the Marquess of Salisbury and Sir Stafford Jtforthcote. There were not a few, even among the supposed supporters of Mr Gladstone, and especially the small section still left of the old Whig Party, who did not view land reform with a favourable eye. On the other, hand, when the Government ■ proposed Coercion, they were already warned of the fierce hostility arid of the angry passions and the prolonged resistance they would meet from the Irish, people and their representatives in the House of Commons. Even in the Ministry itself there were cross-currents. Mv Chamberlain, and still more his chief spokesman at that period, Mr John Morley—who Lad become the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette in 1880—were warmly for Land Reform, and very tepidly for Coercion; and John Bright had the same point of view. Two other eloments'added to the confusion of this. confused . situation. First, the constant intrusion of the impossible Bradlangh situation. Mr Bradlaugh went on being elected and re-elected for his Northampton constituency; ho burst in on the House of in one form or another, at regular intervals; and the confused state of parties which broke up the Government majority by the enemies of Bradlaugb in the Liberal Party, made legislation or compromise impossible. It cas a cul-de-sac; it came again and again, and again and again remained a cul-dc-sc.

And, finally, there were, in the .then rules of the House of Commons, inexhaustible opportunities for obstruction to delay and even to defeat the proposals cf the Government It was really the antiquated machinery of- the House of Commons that made obstruction possible, and that gave to a small band of able and alert men the opportunity of holding up the, Parliament—it might indeed be said, of holding up the Empire. The great Imperial Parliament, with all its centuries, of tradition and authority, backed, of course, if needs be, by all tho military and naval resources and the wealth of the great Empife, held up for week after week by twenty young men, would bo an incredible phenomenon, it we did not know that it had existed. And on this question of the rules of the House, again the course of the Government was not clear. Much as they hated the Irish members, anxious as they were to put them down with a strong hand—some of them, indeed, would have had them ranged against the railings of Old Palace Yard and shot down, or taken to Newgate and hanged—this did not diminish their dread of any rules that facilitated and sped up the course of legislation in the House of Commons. ■

Opposed in principle to nearly all change, they detected in the improvement of the rules of the House of Commons and the curtailment of its disorderly debates a subtle conspiracy to enable House to rush legislation through, which they dreaded and. condemned as confiscatory and revolutionary. The Irish members were quick to see these flaws in the - armour of-their powerful enemies, and they could always be certain that, whenever they were embarrassing and obstructing the Government on everything but coercion, they could rely on the open or partial support of the Opposition, and, above all, they could rely on Lord Randolph Churchill.

These were the conditions when the House met in January, 1881. It met, too, after a very disturbed recess, A futile attempt was. being made under the existing law to send the leaders of the Land League movement, from Parnell onwards, to a conviction in the law courts apd a sentence of imprisonment. But everybody knew that these proceedings were bound to end, as most State trials- in Ireland had ended, in futility and further contempt for the Government. The Ministry had also tried to gain some time, and perhaps some support, by a Land Commission to make an inquiry into a subject that had been inquired into by commission after commission for generations—an inquiry which the Irish Party, with the omnipotent revolution behind it, regarded ns only an additional excuse for small projects and further delay. The House had soon an opportunity of coming to grips with this extraordinary situation. On its very first night the benches •were already crowded, and it was on the first few nights of the session that an important reform in the procedure of the House was first carried from precept into practice. For centuries it had“ been the unbroken law of the House that every member who had a question on the Order Paper should read it aloud. There the question was in print for everybody to see, and yet if a member attempted to ask the question without reading its terms, he was howled down by that strange and almost incredible love for ancient forms which is one of the characteristics of the House Mr Joseph Cowen was the first to suggest that a member should be allowed simply to ask his question by referring to its number on the paper. There was some objection, and the Irish members Were almost certain to oppose anything that facilitated business; but for once they felt gracious enough to fall in with the reform, and questions from this time forward were not read,' but simply

indicated by their number; on the paper. | At last the evening came when Mr | Forster had to bring in that terrible Coercion Bell, the dark spectre of which had hung over Ireland and England for many months. The Bill amounted .to . a suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, and left to the executive of Ireland the power, without trial and without any thing beyond a vague allegation of criminal intentions, to put anybody in gaol —a startling abrogation of all the rights of British citizenhood, especially coming from a Ministry with such veteran Liberals as Gladstone and Bright among its members. Now, the foremost figure in opposition to these Irish leaders on the English side was undoubtedly Mr Forster. It rather amuses me to-day to recall the feelings and th% opinions with regard to Mr. Forster which were then common ih our party and still more among the Irish people. It was necessarily his part to have the main responsibility for the many acts of violence which the English authorities in Ireland had to perform during his administration. As will be seen, hundreds of homes were made hostile by t]ie imprisonment of their relatives. Large bodies of police night and day were necessarily employed in watching and in harrowing every countryside. The other Ministers, though they supported Mr Forster—some enthusiastically, some very tepidly—were as responsible as ■ he, but the Chief Secretary stood , out; as the main and dominating figure! It came really to this: that the policy of coercion which he felt himself bound to propose and to carry out recklessly was embodied in his person; that with him it might well be regarded as standing or falling. There was not an hour in which his life was not in danger. How much it was iu danger was not revealed till later on to a surprised and shocked world. Ho had, in' addition, labours that might have broken down the strongest of men, and ultimately did break him .down.- He had to rush backwards and forwards between Westminster and Dublin Castle—always a fatiguing Journey, and in those times for him a very perilous one. His passions and his opinions were daily incited by the innumerable reports—some of them alarmist, and some of them, as it was proved, ridiculous —which were poured into him by his übiquitous police. These experiences, did not tend to improve a rather fierce temper. So much did we among the Irish members participate in the feeling of hatred towards him that I heard one of our number—no less a person that benignant Justin M‘Carthy—repeat a story that, while game hunting in Greece, Forster had fired a shot which killed —of course, accidentally—some unfortunate being, and' that the hunter had walked off without taking the least notice. Of course the story was untrue—at any other time I would have added palpably untrue —but in the heat, of party controversy everything against a political .enemy is accepted almost in good faith with credulous ears. We regarded Mr Forster as the last word in duplicity, in treachery, in bad faith, and in a love of tyranny for its own sake. It was a gross misunderstanding of liis character, but it was partly justified by certain flaws in the character of the man. He was undoubtedly, to use a common expression, very downy. His adroitness was held, even by members of his own party, to degenerate on occasion into something like trickery. The majority of the stern Nonconformists held for many years that iu the Education Act, which he had carried through a previous Parliament, he had battered the hopes of even the principles with regard to the control of the schools for which they stood, and many of them never trusted him again. His record in Ireland, of which we knew or remembered nothing previous to his Secretaryship, was a very clear proof of the affection • and sympathy he had for the Irish people. He was one of the many Englishmen of the time who were deeply moved by the sufferings of the people in those dreadful years of the Famine, and he was the head of a .mission that went over to Ireland from England to distribute food among the starving people. And -here let me make an interpellation that has its solemn import. While the Irish people were being almost forced into death by hunger on the waysides of Ireland, and into wholesale emigration, • through eviction, amounting to millions to all parts of the world, there was scarcely a pious home in England in which families were not practising self-denial in love and sympathy for Ireland. One of the friends of my early political youth was the laic Henry J. Wilson—his sou is now a member of the Labour Party in the House of Commons. I hoard Mr Henry J. Wilson describe how his parents, who belonged to a stern Puritan home, compelled him and the rest of the children to go without buttter on their bread so as to save tuoney for the relief of the starving Irish. This is a tragic contrast which has gone almost without a break through the relations of England and Ireland. The English people, as a whole, and when they had any knowledge of the facts, showed themselves full of love and_ sympathy for Ireland, while successive Governments remained with blind eyes and deaf ears even to the most poignant appeals of the people of Ireland in their agony and hunger and I oppression. I Mr Forster was a fine though rough ' figure of a man. He, had great height, : splendid shoulders and chest. He : seemed to dress himself in somewhat extravagant fashion. No man had such big pockets to his coat, and it used to , be said you could put a baby inside any of them. His red hair was always 1 somewhat rough and dishevelled. There was a red lock which came down on the middle of his forehead and added to the uncouthness of the appearance. Frank Hill, the then editor of the Daily : News, a sardonic spirit, - used to say of Foister, that he was “ the best-staged lorkshireinan living”—a jibe that received additional point from the fact that, though Forster had spent most of his life in Yorkshire and was a York- , shire member, lie was Dorsetshire by j birth. J