Evening Memories

New Zealand Tablet, 13 April 1922, Page 7

Evening Memories

(By William O'Brien.)

A BRAVE EXPERIMENT.—(Continued) The Leeds speech attracted little notice in England, but, coming from Gladstone's favorite son, was rightly divined by Parnell and his inner counsellors as a first Pythian suggestion that the late Liberal Prime Minister was preparing to soar into heights of Home Rule legislation far above the reach of Chamberlain's municipal imagination, or of the Tory young men's devices to steady the trembling knees of the new Government. Parneil noted the flight of the dove from Hawarden, as of the dove from Birmingham, with interest, but in silence. He was the last to be melted out of his adamantine strength in negotiation the moment Englishmen spoke him fair. He had, besides, a rooted conviction that, so long as the House of Lords survived, it'was a Tory Government alone that could bring a Home Rule Bill to fruition. The danger for Ireland was not that the Tory Government could upon any plausible hypothesis come back impregnable, but that the General Election might return a Liberal majority sufficiently sweeping to condemn Ireland for the duration of another Parliament to a renewal of her sickening experiences of the theories of Liberal self-righteousness and the realities of Liberal coercive rule.

Parnell threw for the greatest stake of his life—a semi-attractive, semi-compulsive agglomeration of the turn Imperial parties to effect an Irish settlement. The pace was not to be forced with the Tory country gentlemen. Theii first timid relations with their Irish supporters were those of prim maiden ladies with wild young men. But before the Tories were seated in power at all, Randolph Churchill had pinned them to the abandonment of Coercion in Ireland, and had, in full view of the House of Commons, kicked Sir Stafford Northcote into the Upper House, and it was a secret of Policinello that as sound a kicking was in store for whoever else should air any antique objections to “the Maamtrasna Alliance.” Sir Michael Hicks Beach, the leader of the House of Commons, if he was less daring, was known to be little less adaptable. The astuter politicians chose for their intermediary with Parnell, in the new Lord Lieutenant, the Earl of Carnarvon, a man of much elevation of principle, whose gentleness of temper and breadth of sympathy, if it exposed him to the slings and arrows of more double-dealing colleagues, gave him the distinction of being the first Tory statesman to rise to the conception of a frank recognition of Irish Nationality in its plenitude as the highest glory of Tory policy and a sure bulwark of the Empire in the one vital spot where it w-as vulnerable. The famous meetings between the new Viceroy and the Irish leader in an unoccupied house in the West End may imply their own rebuke for the clandestine Tory diplomacy which was infantile enough or rongish enough to resort to them, but, by the sacred verdict of time, will live to the honor of the two men who took part m them. There was no substantial difference between Lord Carnarvon’s and Parnell’s reports of the interviews between them. They were agreed that no formal bargain had been made, but Lord Carnarvon never disputed Parnell’s own conclusion that they parted “in complete accord regarding the main outlines of a settlement conferring upon Ireland a Parliament in name and in fact.” Still more significantly the interview was sought by the new Viceroy with the full knowledge of Lord Salisbury, and the particulars of their conversation were'communicated by him to the Prime Minister a day or two afterwards without a word of disapproval by the latter. So little scandalised were Lord Carnarvon’s craftier colleagues in the Ministry that several months afterwards they dispatched tdliis assistance in Dublin Colonel Howard Vincent, M.P., but lately the head of the Metropolitan Police, to continue the conversations in the minutest details with Harrington at the headquarters of the National League, and with myself in that tabernacle of treasons, the editorial room of United Ireland, and by this time the high designs imparted to Parnell by the Viceroy were evolving into a marked preference for “the King, Lords and Commons of Ireland” plan of Grattan’s Parliament, with certain modern adjustments, as contrasted with the prosier system of Federal subordination proposed by Butt. Finally, after these kites had been flying for several months between the

Irish Government and the Nationalist leaders, Parnell brought matters to an issue in a speech in which he suggested the Dual Monarchy arrangements- of Austria-Hun-gary as offering the best available model for the future relations of the two islands. Lord Salisbury himself responded to the challenge in his famous speech at Newport in October, 1885, in which, while helprofessed "not to have seen any plan which gave him, at present," any' ground for anticipating a solution "in that direction," the Tory Prime Minister unmistakeably left an open door for the Grattan Parliament arrangement foreshadowed by his Viceroy and his envoy, and expressed his own very decided conviction that the loyalist minority would find a truer

protection under a broad National Legislature than under any paltry scheme of County Government.

It was as far as a Conservative Party, weak in the country and torn with the internal wars of “the old gang,” and the new, could be expected to go — further indeed than Gladstone had yet gone or was ever to go—and Parnell flung the full weight of his sword into the Tory battle at the polls. He issued an address to the Irish of Great Britain, pressing upon them the immeasurable advantages that must accrue to the Irish Cause from a united vote for the Tories. Had his exhortation been generally obeyed, a Tory majority, however narrow, must have been insured by the turning over of dozens of the great manufacturing towns in the North of England and the Clyde Valley, and a Tory majority once elected —all the more desirable by reason of its modesty—with an Irish Party trebled in strength to support (and watch) them, a complaisant House of Lords, and a Liberal Party constrained by every obligation of honor and decency to second a great Irish policy of appeasement, might have been in a position God knoweth ! — to turn into the joyous resurrection of a nation a quarter of a century spent in exasperating the quarrel with new legacies of duplicity on the one side and on the other a too ready trust in English promises for ever betrayed.

It was not to be. Michael Davitt, who had already publicly dissented from the policy of refusing Chamberlain a national welcome to Ireland, now traversed the hustings of Great Britain to cry out against the imagined sale of the Irish vote to the Tories. Rejecting every entreaty to enter Parliament himself, his fanatical devotion to the interests of the British Democracy led him to run counter to the plans of his own country's, representatives to turn the Parliamentary situation to the best profit for Ireland. His wayward genius had an easy success with the inflammable population of the Clyde and the Scottish mining regions which have since given to 'British Socialism the crack regiments of its Church Militant. The Irishmen of Manchester stood as true as in the Manchester Martyrs' day, but those of^ other great industrial towns of the North of England, which were once the strong right arm of Fenianism, had either taken Labor for their political god, or were already dominated by the Radical tradition which had come down from O'Connell's Lichfield House Compact with the Whigs, and during the subsequent years of close association with Radical local politics under the tutelage of Mr. T. P. O'Connor had little left except an Irish accent to distinguish them from the official English party organisation.

Parnell's bold cast to build a million Irish voters in Britain into a gigantic machine of war to be thrown on this side or on that, with a supreme disregard for merely English party interests, met with a. comparative defeat. The Tory Government came hack with little more to choose than how they were to die. Nobody more freely than Parnell accepted the fortunes of war. Having fallen short on his own side of the bargain, he was not scandalised at all that the beaten Tories should make no more Newport speeches and should select a. n*w Irish Coercion Bill on which to fall. Political profligacy, however, has bounds which are not to be passed without becoming a crime. Lord Randolph Churchill telling Justin McCarthy when the electoral results were known: "I did my best for you and now 111 do my best against you," and setting forth with the war-song of "Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right," to plunge his firebrand into the gunpowder of an Orange bigotry and ignorance he in his soul detested-and all because twenty or thirty English constituencies had failed to come up to -.the calculations of the Wire-pullers-makes a sufficiently revolting picture in the eye of honest history-

but even the apology of youth and levity could not be pleaded for a more pretentious transgressor when Lord Salisbury, who had dangled Hungarian Independence before Ireland’s eyes when the Irish vote was still to be sought, repaired his political misfortunes by undertaking by means of twenty years of ruthless Coercion to exterminate his ex-Irish allies as a nation of Hottentots. On the eve of the General Election of 1885, all the considerable men of both parties, Liberal and Tory, had declared for Homo Hide, if politicians’ dealings with the most sacred concerns of nations are not to be accounted as false as dicers’ oaths. A generation of men have since lived and died, and Ireland’s trustfulness has been foully betrayed by all English Ministries and parties in turn —by the Chamberlain of his post-Radical days who turned his proposed tour to Ireland as our National Apostle into a felonious raid on Belfast as an organiser of civil war, as well as by the Salisburys and Churchills whose electoral gamble of 1885 miscarried, and —perhaps most inexcusably of all by the imbecility— let us yet not say perfidy —of an irresistible Home Rule Ministry installed specially in power to complete Gladstone’s work, and to the hour of its inglorious death effecting nothing but the transmutation of Ireland’s hopes to ashes.

Prate of the wild unreason of Easter Week insurrections! —to the new generation whose hot eyes peruse the story, the unending trickery, insincerity, incompetence, or downright treachery of English politicians of all parties in bedevilling a national claim of which their chief men were agreed a quarter of a century ago in recognising the justice, might well inspire a more ineradicable hatred of the English name than the worst Elizabethan and Cromwellian atrocities which were the deeds of brutal, but at least of barbarously ignorant, Englishmen. Those of us who have fretted thankless years out in the search for peace with England will find any reproof of the impatience of our young countrymen with . “Parliamentarianism” perish on our lips.

One Abdiel of shining fidelity survived among the faithless. Lord Carnarvon left Ireland as he had entered it, a stainless gentleman, and like the Liberal Lord Lieutenant who preceded him, an unfaltering Home Ruler for all his days. It is curious to observe that the Prime Minister who disowned Lord Carnarvon's offers to the Irish leader, but shabbily postponed the disclaimer until his own "Dual Monarchy" bid for the Irish vote had been snowed under by the electorate, was the same Lord Salisbury who, twenty years later, disowned another great Tory scheme of conciliation in Ireland, and allowed its author, George Wyndham, to devote himself to political selfslaughter rather than quote the secret code message from his unscrupulous chief which would have been his justification. It may well be one of history's revenges to remember the work of Carnarvon and "Wyndham in Ireland to the high honor of the Tory party when Salisbury's own record of gilded insignificance is forgotten. / (To be continued.) __ <k*>