Miscellaneous Prose | Page 3

of Egypt not ineffectively levelled against
him a second time. Nevertheless he does read his English; he has, too,
the fatal tendency to the bringing forth of Bills in the manner of Jove
big with Minerva. He perceived the necessity, and the issue of the
necessity; clearly defined what must come, and, with a higher motive
than the vanity with which his enemies charge him, though not with
such high counsel as Wisdom at his ear, fell to work on it alone,
produced the whole Bill alone, and then handed it to his Cabinet to
digest, too much in love with the thing he had laid and incubated to

permit of any serious dismemberment of its frame. Hence the
disruption. He worked for the future, produced a Bill for the future, and
is wrecked in the present. Probably he can work in no other way than
from the impulse of his enthusiasm, solitarily. It is a way of making
men overweeningly in love with their creations. The consequence is
likely to be that Ireland will get her full measure of justice to appease
her cravings earlier than she would have had as much from the United
Liberal Cabinet, but at a cost both to her and to England. Meanwhile
we are to have a House of Commons incapable of conducting public
business; the tradesmen to whom the Times addressed pathetic
condolences on the loss of their season will lose more than one; and we
shall be made sensible that we have an enemy in our midst, until a
people, slow to think, have taken counsel of their native generosity to
put trust in the most generous race on earth.

CONCESSION TO THE CELT--1886
Things are quiet outside an ant-hill until the stick has been thrust into it.
Mr. Gladstone's Bill for helping to the wiser government of Ireland has
brought forth our busy citizens on the top-rubble in traversing
counterswarms, and whatever may be said against a Bill that deals
roughly with many sensitive interests, one asks whether anything less
violently impressive would have roused industrious England to take
this question at last into the mind, as a matter for settlement. The
Liberal leader has driven it home; and wantonly, in the way of a
pedestrian demagogue, some think; certainly to the discomposure of the
comfortable and the myopely busy, who prefer to live on with a disease
in the frame rather than at all be stirred. They can, we see, pronounce a
positive electoral negative; yet even they, after the eighty and odd years
of our domestic perplexity, in the presence of the eighty and odd
members pledged for Home Rule, have been moved to excited inquiries
regarding measures--short of the obnoxious Bill. How much we suffer
from sniffing the vain incense of that word practical, is contempt of
prevision! Many of the measures now being proposed responsively to
the fretful cry for them, as a better alternative to correction by force of
arms, are sound and just. Ten years back, or at a more recent period
before Mr. Parnell's triumph in the number of his followers, they would
have formed a basis for the appeasement of the troubled land. The

institution of county boards, the abolition of the detested Castle,
something like the establishment of a Royal residence in Dublin, would
have begun the work well. Materially and sentimentally, they were the
right steps to take. They are now proposed too late. They are regarded
as petty concessions, insufficient and vexatious. The lower and the
higher elements in the population are fused by the enthusiasm of men
who find themselves marching in full body on a road, under a flag, at
the heels of a trusted leader; and they will no longer be fed with sops.
Petty concessions are signs of weakness to the unsatisfied; they prick
an appetite, they do not close breaches. If our object is, as we hear it
said, to appease the Irish, we shall have to give them the Parliament
their leader demands. It might once have been much less; it may be
worried into a raving, perhaps a desperate wrestling, for still more.
Nations pay Sibylline prices for want of forethought. Mr. Parnell's
terms are embodied in Mr. Gladstone's Bill, to which he and his band
have subscribed. The one point for him is the statutory Parliament, so
that Ireland may civilly govern herself; and standing before the world
as representative of his country, he addresses an applausive audience
when he cites the total failure of England to do that business of
government, as at least a logical reason for the claim. England has
confessedly failed; the world says it, the country admits it. We have
failed, and not because the so-called Saxon is incapable of
understanding the Celt, but owing to our