nothing, and which shall not tion, wholly unwarranted by be referred to the arbitrament facts. And if for "religious intolerance" you read "racial intolerance," you have but to look at South Africa, which Mr Churchill always quotes with enthusiasm, to understand that all modern Parliaments are not the true and faithful repositories of freedom and equality. But despite the purity of free Parliaments, Mr Churchill still thinks that safeguards are necessary for the comfort of Ulster, and he provides half a dozen. "The Crown will be able to refuse assent to an unjust Bill," he says, and "the Imperial Parliament will be able to repeal such a Bill or enact another Bill." On paper, no doubt, the Crown and the Imperial Parliament will be thus empowered. Mr Churchill must know perfectly well that in practice interference will be impossible. We can easily imagine the specious arguments which will be used to defend the tyranny of a Nationalist Parliament. Can you not trust the people of Ireland? That is what we shall be asked, and, partly from policy and partly from lack of energy, the worst persecutions will be made light of and condoned. The truth is that the only interference possible will be the interference of arms. "It is an easy thing to call a Parliament into being," said John Bright, "but a very hard thing to set limits to its usurpations without resort to force." of a General Election. Secrecy is its essence, for that which is secret has the best chance of escaping criticism. Ministers have gone up and down the country, they have talked in the same speech of devolution and national aspirations, they have prated of wrongs repaired, of safeguards, of financial burdens, and they have left the country in a state of complete ignorance. Is it possible that they do not know themselves what sort of a measure they intend to introduce? Mr Winston Churchill, for instance, has been to Belfast, regardless of expense. With the help of British soldiers, and by the gracious permission of Lord Londonderry and the Ulster Unionists, he has made a speech and said nothing. The exploit has cost a patient country £2700, and we may doubt whether the money was profitably invested. It is easy to pay too high a price for such rhetoric as Mr Churchill gave to the Ulster Radicals. Of course he was moderate, of course he was amiable. "Why cannot we all be friends?" he asked. Mr Redmond was on the platform to tell us why. He did his best to allay the fears of Ulster, and assured his audience that "any Parliament which may be set up in Ireland will be found in Ireland, as in every other part of the modern world, to be a natural and inveterate enemy of religious intolerance in every form." This is a wide assump That is per fectly true, and its truth makes it clear that the only efficient safeguard for Ulster will be Mr Churchill's "sixthly.” him, and has proved that, save "Sixthly," says he, "the power in one particular, there is no of the Imperial Parliament to link of political sympathy beinterfere is unquestioned in tween father and son. The law, and equally unquestioned point in which they agree is in fact, for all military forces the necessity of capturing the will be under the Imperial party machine. That was the control." That, if it means one achievement of Lord Rananything, means that the dolph's life. He worked for logical result of Home Rule that and that alone. When he is civil war. had captured the machine and obtained the office which its capture conferred, he threw the office from him, as a child discards a broken toy. Mr Churchill followed another policy. He went over to the other side at the right moment, and found the machine ready to his hand. "Discriminations between wholesome and unwholesome victories," once said Lord Randolph, "are idle and impracticable. Obtain the victory, know how to follow it up, and leave the wholesomeness or the unwholesomeness to critics." In this respect, at least, Mr Churchill has proved an apt pupil. The question of finance is still unanswered, but we gather from Mr Churchill that a little goodwill is all that is required to solve all difficulties. In other words, England will pay and Ireland shall spend, an equitable division of labour which should please everybody. But there was nothing in a sophistical speech more wilfully sophistical than Mr Churchill's perversion of Lord Randolph's famous call to arms: "Ulster will fight, and Ulster will be right." What those words meant and mean every one knows. Mr Churchill has no more right than another to "adopt and repeat them." His sentimental parody of Lord Randolph's words has neither sense nor excuse. "Let Ulster fight for the dignity and honour of Ireland; let her fight for the reconciliation of races." We should like to hear Lord Randolph's comment upon this rodomontade. The battle to which Lord Randolph urged Ulster was the battle which one day must be fought for Ulster's freedom and Ulster's independence. The truth is, that Mr Churchill would be wise to leave Lord Randolph out of the question. He has written an excellent book about Mr Churchill believes that Ulster will suffer no injustice either in its pocket or in its religion. Dr Horton, a wellknown Nonconformist minister, thinks otherwise. Speaking for the Nonconformists of England and Wales, this worthy divine admits that the worst sufferings are in store for his brethren in Ulster. His heart goes out to them, he says; and his heart is all that his loyalty to Radical principles will permit to go out. He has no illusions. The worst that can happen is ever before his hopeless eyes. "The history of a thousand years," he says, "has taught us that when the Roman Church can control a Government, it employs the Government to repress or to crush heretics, and the Protestants are the worst of heretics." In other words, his brethren, as he kindly calls them, are to be crushed or repressed, and he and his friends will not lift a finger to help them. The reason of this indifference is more monstrous than the indifference itself. "Fiat justitia, ruat cœlum," says the eminent divine. Let the worst injustice be done to honourable men that a political superstition be satisfied. In other words, "We, the Nonconformists of England and Wales, feel compelled by political principle to support Home Rule for Ireland." They know perfectly well, they say, what a Roman Catholic Parliament means. If they were in Ulster, they would speak and feel as Ulster does; but, being safe in England and Wales, they will gladly throw Ulster to the wolves of Home Rule. Dr Horton, indeed, echoes with perfect accuracy the creed of Lowell's Pious Editor "I du believe in Freedom's cause, Ez fur away ez Paris is; I love to see her stick her claws There, expressed in another form, is Dr Horton's brutal cynicism-a cynicism, we are sure, which he ascribes without warrant to the Nonconformists of England and Wales. The Jesuits of old were charged with doing evil that Dr Horton good might come. reverses the process. He aims at what he thinks is justice, in the full knowledge that its first results will be injustice and persecution. Give us the worst Government possible, says he, and all will be well. And then, as if to prove his complete ignorance of political necessities, he suggests that a certain shifting of population may take place." Does he see no difficulty in the transplanting of farms and families, of workshops and churches, of the habits and traditions of many generations? 66 Though Home Rule stands first in importance upon the list of revolutionary measures, it does not stand first in point of time. They will flesh their swords, these brave Radicals, in the body of the Welsh Church. There is a task fit for their ardent quixotism! If they cannot redeem their plighted words, at least they can take from the poor incumbents of the Welsh hills the miserable stipends they receive for doing an ungrudged, ungrudging duty. The outrage will be committed because it is one of the prices of Home Rule, and Home Rule is the price of the continuance in office of our Radical rulers. But not even the Radicals can take much pride in this game of petty spoliation. If pilfering is profitable, it is not dignified. The Church in Wales costs no more to support than the sum which the House of Commons voted its members for pocket - money. But, as Dr Horton would say, "fiat justitia, ruat coelum." Let us rob a Church which is not our own, and upon whose endowments we have no right to lay a finger, in the sacred name of justice! And as if these projects were not enough for a session all too short for redeeming a pledge which brooks no delay, the Cabinet is resolved to introduce a measure of universal suffrage. Men and women alike are to be admitted to the vote. As Sir E. Grey said the other day, we want two voters in every family. The more the merrier, and the greater the ignorance the nobler the democracy! There is to be no cant in future concerning the intelligence of the elector. Every man and every woman are fit to vote if they can make their mark when they have been carried to the poll; and each addition, male or female, criminal, pauper, or illiterate, is another feather in the Radicals' cap. Masters for life, they said after 1832. After the next General Election they will hope to suspend the quinquennial clause of the last Parliament Bill, and make themselves happily independent of the newly-created electors. And if we choose to do this, they will say, who shall stop us? It is their favourite maxim that minorities have no rights, -a maxim upon which it is dangerous to rely. At present, it is true, not a minority but a large majority of England is voiceless and oppressed. But if Mr Asquith and his fellowconspirators carry their lawlessness too far, and attempt to VOL, CXCL-NO. MCLVII. force three gigantic measures upon an unconsulted electorate, they will find that the British minority and the English majority, which are against them, have not yet lost their voices. If Mr Asquith's coalition may boast a numerical majority, the Unionist minority has a better cause, wiser leaders, clearer purpose. Victory seems assured, then, in the near future. "I have often asked my Radical friends," wrote Froude in his 'English Seamen,' "what is to be done if out of every hundred enlightened voters two-thirds will give their votes one way but are afraid to fight, and the remaining third will not only vote but will fight too if the poll goes against them. Which has then the right to rule? I can tell them which will rule. The brave and resolute minority will rule. Plato says that if one man was stronger than all the rest of mankind he would rule all the rest of mankind. It must be so, because there is no appeal. The majority must be prepared to assert their Divine right with their right hands, or it will go the way that other Divine rights have gone before." That is perfectly true, and it would be well if the tyrants who are preparing to put Ulster and England under their heel should remember it. Democracies are notoriously shortlived, and there is a limit fixed to the endurance of free men. Meanwhile our leaders are resolute, united, and of a clear policy. Mr Bonar Law has 2 G proved already that he is as vigilant in criticism as fearless in attack. With such loyal lieutenants as Mr Austen Chamberlain and Mr F. E. Smith to aid him, he will have little difficulty in exposing the recklessness, the self-interest, and the lack of patriotism which distinguish the Cabinet, strong only in the number of its supporters. Meanwhile, it is interesting to watch the demeanour of the Radical Government. It has long since lost all hold of facts. Not one of its members is able to reply to the arguments of the Opposition. You did not bring forward Home Rule at the General Election, say the Tories. But you said we should try to pass it, and therefore we have a right to pass it, reply the Radicals. Which is precisely the same as if a burglar justified his depredation by saying to his victim, "Well, you said I would do it." The Insurance Bill is still, on the lips of the Radicals, the most beneficent measure of modern times. Yet the doctors have insisted upon wholly unacceptable terms, and the Government is compelled to spend its own and the public money in making it intelligible to its beneficiaries. And as the Government has lost hold of facts, it is fast losing all sense of words. We have quoted Mr Churchill's ridiculous travesty of Lord Randolph's war - cry. Still more absurd is Mr Asquith's assertion that it is the Unionist party which relies upon the Irish vote. Thus might A say, "I have got illegal possession of £80. Now B would rather like £80. Therefore it is B, not I, who is in illegal possession." And then, as if to cap all follies, we have seen the spectacle of that purist, Mr Lloyd George, the hero of Newcastle, the adored of Limehouse, reproaching Mr Bonar Law with the violence of his speech! There is but one explanation: vanity has undone them all. They wander about, we are sure, mumbling to one another as they pass, "Saviour of the country." They have all saved their country, in their own esteem. They wear the solemn look of heroes. Their faces shine with self-satisfaction, and they have arrived at that height of complacency where they think that they are above words and above deeds. What they do matters not; what they say matters not. They are there, noble and supreme, the greatest Englishmen that ever held the reins of office, the saviours of their country, every one of them, from Lord Haldane, the austere, down to the gushing Mr Masterman. And in their vanity lies the sure hope of England. Those whom the gods mean to destroy they first send mad with pride. Printed by William Blackwood and Sons. |