Evening Memories

New Zealand Tablet, 30 March 1922, Page 7

Evening Memories

(By William O’Brien.)

CHAPTER IV.(Continued.) Mr. T. P. O’Connor was another Parliamentary wrestler of the first rank, whenever he could tear himself from those daring newspaper enterprises of his own —always beginning with exiguous ways and means and nearly always breeding capital and influence of startling amountwhich were his principal occupation. He sacrificed his House of Commons reputation cheerfully in the common cause, speaking without a minute for preparation and from bottomless depths of ignorance. He would drop in while we were locked in conflict with Trevelyan upon some complicated Irish controversy, and, leaning over from his bench, would question Harrington or myself, who were supposed to be arsenals of the facts in Irish matters, for some inkling of what it was all about, and then as soon as the painstaking Chief Secretary sat down would spring up to club him with ready-made passion and with the assurance of one who had burnt the midnight hour in studying the facts in all their ramifications. John Redmond could seldom be induced to interfere in this rough-and-tumble war en petits paquets, but whenever he did so, interfered with grace. His comparative uselessness where the blows were flying was partly due to the fact that the weapons wanted in such a warfare were not orations, but what were prosily called “a few words,” (though hot ones), and may also, I think, be attributed partly to a diffidence which genuinely led him to the belief that his brother Willie was the greater orator of the two. Biggar, also, was still in the prime of his riotous enjoyment of Obstruction. He knew not fear, and within that quaint Covenanting brain of his possessed incredible resources for the torture of the enemy; but he was himself the last person he desired to listen to, and so long as there was anybody else to play the toreador he looked on with utter selfeffacement and clucked out his content with the benevolence of a matronly hen watching the performances of her chicks. Such men were, take them for all in all, a merry company in field or camp they were long abominated by Englishmen, but neither they nor the race that produced them were ever despised. Parnell towered amongst his marshals, an undisputed and beloved First Consul. But the most modest of potentates; a strong hand certainly, but a gentle and cordial one. Although it was by a happy chance, rather than by any deliberate choice of his own his chief officers came together, his was the magnetism that held them together, and his the generous encouragement of initiatives that multiplied the activities at his command. The least noisy member of the orchestra himself, he was the Maestro with-

out whose eye the fiddles and reeds would soon end in discords. Ho never by choice took the beau role of rising on advertised occasions to move sensational amendments before an expectant House. His most impressive speeches were made in some quiet corner of a debate when his hearers were few, but were of those who counted. It took the House several years to understand the secret of why they listened to him at all. He never catered to their taste cither for amusement or for a thrill.. His thoughts were turned over a hundred times in his mind, before in some unexpected moment they escaped his lips; but for the words he had no care and no preparation. I never saw him use a written note. All was without color or pretension. He seldom used an adjective, and seldomer still a superlative. The general body of his discourse was as passionless as readings from the Liturgy, yet without a trace of preconcerted solemnity. Only there was ever in the midst of the sober self-restraint some flash of burning passion which lighted up all the rest as the lightning does a starless night. Some phrase, commonplace enough in form, but with a soul of fire in itlike his celebrated trumpet-note to the famine-stricken Western peasants: “Keep a firm grip of your homesteads!” —was of the kind that makes history, in Parliament and in nations, after the most irridescent fireworks of Parliamentary repartee have lost their glow even in the next morning’s newspapers.

Parnell had no fads, and scarcely any preferences, as to methods. So long as the old mad Rules or rulessness made it still possible for Joe Biggar to turn the Prince of Wales out of his seat over the clock to entertain some Irish lady friends of his, Parnell devoted himself to the Plutonic mysteries of Obstruction with the fanaticism of a man of one idea. But no sooner was that diamond mine worked out, and Joe Biggar forced to look for other entertainment, his great master or (as some thought at the time) pupil in Obstruction turned with no less complacency to the utilisation of the stupendous popular forces precipitated, as the chemists say, by the Land League of Devoy and Davitt. When the Land League’s sentence of . death came, he turned to the No Rent Manifesto. When that in turn had run its day, he calmly addressed himself to negotiations with his jailors and by his “Kilmainham Treaty” emerged with the most amazing paper of concessions ever wrung from an Imperial Government by its —concessions which, but for the tragedy in the Phoenix Park, must have blossomed into Home Rule a generation ago. Those who found in “the Kilmainham Treaty” a capitulation rather than a triumph would have repented in sackcloth and ashes had they only been aware of the state of facts in which Parnell had to work his miracle. When the' Phoenix Park tragedy hurled him from the heights Sisyphus set himself doggedly, although with a heavy heart, to roll up the stone again from the bottom. The field of active conflict with the law in Ireland, he had the candor to own, was closed to him, as had been the field of conflict with the rules of Parliament. He satisfied himself that the work of prolonging in Ireland the deathless war with the oppressor— the moment the most urgent', indeed the indispensable— safely be left to younger or more fire-eyed enthusiasts. He himself soared placidly away to his eyrie on the cedar-top at Westminster to await his luck, and it soon came in the Household Suffrage Bill of 1884, which had only to be extended to the “mud cabin vote” in Ireland, as he speedily made sure it must, to revolutionise the - situation from top to bottom and deprive England of any pretence of an alternative between governing Ireland as a Crown Colony or yielding to the all but unanimous claim' of her representatives. Opportunism all, the purists who refuse to let their foot rest on this too, too solid earth will say; but the opportunism not of the knavish politician, but of the patriot of genius who seizes the propitious hour for an advance for his disarmed nation, making quite sure it is an advance in the direction of further advances, whenever the next propitious moment arrives. The old Gaelic proverb —“lf you are weak, it is no harm to be cunning”— of the essence of wisdom for a nation that cannot choose its weapons, and Parnell never offered any excuses for practising it.

He never broke off what we would now call wireless communication with the front in Ireland. He wrote a sage public letter on the occasion of the Prince’s visit,

and another when the Orange fire-eaters undertook to keep the Household Suffrage Act out of Ulster with their revolvers. It was a striking instance of his loyalty as a leader that he publicly championed United Ireland in the House of Commons, at a moment when its fortunes might well have seemed desperate, and when, as we now know, he must have felt uneasy twitches lest the denunciations of Dublin Castle might have their repercussion. His only appearance in person in Ireland was a singular one. In his Speech at the Dublin Banquet where he was presented with the National Tribute of £40,000, what smaller souls regarded almost as an insult characteristic of the man was the odd circumstance that Parnell forgot to make any reference, direct or even remote, to the cheque for £40,000 he had just been handed. Critics who looked deeper might find a noble significance in the fact that the subject had been jostled out of his mind by his absorption in the superior exigencies of a speech intended to brace the country up for a long ordeal of suffering to be tranquilly borne in his absense, and, to his far-seeing gaze, to be magnificently rewarded.

That reward had now come in Sir Henry James’ Household Suffrage Act, and he bent all his Parliamentary skill and energy to defeating any attempt to exclude Ireland from the totality of its enfranchisement. Thenceforth he lay in wait with the patience of an Indian chief on the warpath for the fall of the Government, and with it the end of the suppression of public liberty by a Crimes Act, which was itself the worst of crimes, to be followed by a General Election and the establishment of Home Rule as an impregnable constitutional demand. The fall, by a usual experience in the House of Commons, came when next to nobody except Parnell himself expected it. The division was upon an increased Whiskey and Beer Duty. Some of our unfortunate colleagues who had been routed out of their beds in Ireland by imperative telegrams from Parnell found it hard to stifle their temptation to strong language when they arrived in a House in a state of boredom bordering upon coma. Even while members were passing through the voting lobbies, it was with the torpid air of men who had been passing through dozens of similar divisions ending in flatulence and futility. It was not until it began to be seen that the Tories and the Irishmen were still coming through the turnstiles, after the Ministerial lobby was exhausted, that the first signs of incredulity changed to a hush of awe, and then the House which a few minutes before was a collection of bores and bored became a mass of screaming, gesticulating, raving lunatics, as the Clerk at the Table placed the winning numbers in the hands of the Opposition tellers. Lord Randolph Churchill, who sat in front of us at the corner below the gangway, as usual, with the faithful Balfour, Wolff and Gorst, sprang on the green bench and from that elevation waved his silk hat around his head with the yells of a wild animal fastening his teeth upon his prey. If he had turned around to kiss us, or had stood upon his head on the floor, his Irish allies would scarcely have found the demonstration an extravgant one. For, if to this ambitious English youngster it was the cry of “Checkmate!” in a royal game for the mastery of an Empire, it was for us the end of an all but insufferable agony, the reward of three years of vigils, risks, and seemingly hopeless resistances without a break, the downfall of our torturers, the bliss of a first entry into Heaven for our nation.

Parnell s way of enjoying the victory as contrasted with Churchill is worth recording. In an interview he gave me the next morning for United Ireland, there was no jumping on benches or hat-waving, but in reply to the question: “What advantage do you hope to reap from last night vote?” this sober answer: Well, in the first place, the pleasure and advantage of that vote to us is increased by the fact that we have saved almost the only remaining Irish industry from a permanent burden of £500,000 a year.” It was not, we may be sure, that the Irish leader was more stupid than the rest of the world who were all agog that morning at the fall of a great Ministry, the dismissal of Spencer, the deathblow of Coercion, the opening up of epoch-making possibilities for Irish' Nationality. It was that, in the first place, it was not in his way to boast, and that, in the next place, he was

possessed of a financial realism —an almost humorous passkm for a small saving which would have made him an incomparable Irish Chancellor of the Exchequer. The National Tribute was repaid fourteen times over at a stroke and was to be repaid again every succeeding year, and this was but the hors d J oeuvre of a Gargantuan feast of victory for his people.

(To be continued.)