JUSTIN MCCARTHY ON MR. BUTT.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume VII, Issue 332, 29 August 1879, Page 17

JUSTIN M'CARTHY ON MR. BUTT.

Mr. Butt was undoubtedly a great political leader. He might have been a great orator-that is, if any one might have been anything ™l£ JT tJ® Waa - ?e? c bad P assion and he had argumentative power ; he had imagination ; he had humour ; he had in his stronger days a splendid voice. Whatever was in Butt was genuine. He used to be compared with the late Chief Justice Whiteside when Whiteside tftfa he T^ ere *°getber defending the State prisoners in Olonmel in W4B. 1 heard all their speeches then, and I remember them well. Butt a was, at its best, genuine eloquence ; Whiteside's, at its best, carefully-burnished commonplace. The difference was that which U ysses speaks of in « Trodus and Cressida," between " dust a little gilt and "gdt ocr dusted." For even in Butt's best days there was wanting some of that capacity for order and arrangement without which genius itself can seldom accomplish really great things. I do not know whether he was one of the men who cannot take pains in preparation, and have to do all they can on the spur of the "*;, T . here are many such men. All that is in them they can give forth at once ; and admirers think and say that if they took more time and thought they would be incomparable ; but they themselves know better Mr. Butt may have been one of that class ; or he may have neglected careful preparation. Whatever the cause, ho T^J v° Wed> T en 1? v his best da y 8 ' a lack o* order and selfcontrol in his speeches which sometimes sadly marred the effect of his natural eloquence. In the midst of some passages of sustained oml^rp .l arg - Umen vi Or ap P eal Borne new Wea would suddenly fa! nn^ 11 ? * mind - 1 + lke an unexpected bird from some unlookedfor quarter, distracting the sportsman's aim-and he would go off after the new idea, and never get back to the point he had left. This was well enough at the bar, where powerful reasoning, humorous illustration, and an occasional burst of genuine eloquence were all the audience wanted; but when Butt came to speak to listeners accustomed to hear Bright and Gladstone and the late Lord Derby it ZnlTn P Z^ c that f th « lack of complete self-control and order should not tell against him. lam now speaking of his great days. Those who only heard Mr. Butt in the House of Commons, Ind during Mr {?,! 17^ yea^ S ' may be a f sured that they never heard real ?*?J ? SUS U • h » e 7 m £ at take him on trußfc > as modern audiences had to take Mario. Mr. Butt had lately come to be only a debater, a debater marvellously plausible and persuasive, with unfailing resource and readiness ; but he had ceased even to attempt to be an orator. His strength and his voice had failed him, and his ambition to be more than a debater had apparently faded with them. Bat lam not certain whether the House of Commons now holds so good a debater Sh^T^w *st have been marvellous; his reading was extensive and varied. He was a lawyer, a political economist, and an historian! itZf e f™ ml1 * w ell-read in the constitutional and parliamentary history of these countries ; he was a master of all the forms and rules of the House of Commons, and his conservative instincts made him to the last a reverential admirer of all those forms and rules. There was a very important question of what I may call political law raised some few years ago with regard to an election to the House of Commons. The lavr-officers of the Crown advised one way ; Mr. Butt s opinion was the other way. Mr. Butt proved to be in the right {?"£ g T°u c.e .* Of movements a London daily paper with which I had something tv do published an argument in favour of a policy of leniency to certain Fenian prisoners. The paper had argued for leniency and liberality in many other cases on the broad ground, of political wisdom and justice. In the cases to which I now especially refer the argument was put on the narrower ground, that the aw on which the Crown relied was not correctly interpreted by the law officers. I well remember how pleasant one or two of the evening papers became over the legal arguments o£ the obnoxioua VTk^X lll^ 1 ref< ?' Th( * were merr 7! they playfully 'chaffed the editor on hia affectation of legal kaowledge and hi. absurd mistakes. The argument was the wort of Mr. Butt : and of course it proved to be right in the end.— :Z»t»*. f