Miscellaneous Prose | Page 4

system, suitable enough to us,
of rule by Party, which puts perpetually a shifting hand upon the reins,
and invites the clamour it has to allay. The Irish--the English too in
some degree--have been taught that roaring; in its various forms, is the
trick to open the ears of Ministers. We have encouraged by irritating
them to practise it, until it has become a habit, an hereditary profession
with them. Ministers in turn have defensively adopted the arts of
beguilement, varied by an exercise of the police. We grew accustomed
to periods of Irish fever. The exhaustion ensuing we named tranquillity,
and hoped that it would bear fruit. But we did not plant. The Party in
office directed its attention to what was uppermost and urgent--to that
which kicked them. Although we were living, by common consent;
with a disease in the frame, eruptive at intervals, a national
disfigurement always a danger, the Ministerial idea of arresting it for
the purpose of healing was confined, before the passing of Mr.

Gladstone's well-meant Land Bill, to the occasional despatch of
commissions; and, in fine, we behold through History the Irish malady
treated as a form of British constitutional gout. Parliament touched on
the Irish only when the Irish were active as a virus. Our later
alternations of cajolery and repression bear painful resemblance to the
nervous fit of rickety riders compounding with their destinations that
they may keep their seats. The cajolery was foolish, if an end was in
view; the repression inefficient. To repress efficiently we have to stifle
a conscience accusing us of old injustice, and forget that we are sworn
to freedom. The cries that we have been hearing for Cromwell or for
Bismarck prove the existence of an impatient faction in our midst fitter
to wear the collars of those masters whom they invoke than to drop a
vote into the ballot-box. As for the prominent politicians who have
displaced their rivals partly on the strength of an implied approbation
of those cries, we shall see how they illumine the councils of a
governing people. They are wiser than the barking dogs. Cromwell and
Bismarck are great names; but the harrying of Ireland did not settle it,
and to Germanize a Posen and call it peace will find echo only in the
German tongue. Posen is the error of a master-mind too much given to
hammer at obstacles. He has, however, the hammer. Can it be imagined
in English hands? The braver exemplar for grappling with monstrous
political tasks is Cavour, and he would not have hinted at the iron
method or the bayonet for a pacification. Cavour challenged debate; he
had faith in the active intellect, and that is the thing to be prayed for by
statesmen who would register permanent successes. The Irish, it is true,
do not conduct an argument coolly. Mr. Parnell and his eighty-five
have not met the Conservative leader and his following in the
Commons with the gravity of platonic disputants. But they have a
logical position, equivalent to the best of arguments. They are
representatives, they would say, of a country admittedly ill-governed
by us; and they have accepted the Bill of the defeated Minister as final.
Its provisions are their terms of peace. They offer in return for that
boon to take the burden we have groaned under off our hands. If we
answer that we think them insincere, we accuse these thrice accredited
representatives of the Irish people of being hypocrites and crafty
conspirators; and numbers in England, affected by the weapons they
have used to get to their present strength, do think it; forgetful that our

obtuseness to their constant appeals forced them into the extremer
shifts of agitation. Yet it will hardly be denied that these men love
Ireland; and they have not shown themselves by their acts to be insane.
To suppose them conspiring for separation indicates a suspicion that
they have neither hearts nor heads. For Ireland, separation is immediate
ruin. It would prove a very short sail for these conspirators before the
ship went down. The vital necessity of the Union for both, countries,
obviously for the weaker of the two, is known to them; and unless we
resume our exasperation of the wild fellow the Celt can be made by
such a process, we have not rational grounds for treating him, or
treating with him, as a Bedlamite. He has besides his passions shrewd
sense; and his passions may be rightly directed by benevolent attraction.
This is language derided by the victorious enemy; it speaks
nevertheless what the world, and even troubled America, thinks of the
Irish Celt. More of it now on our side of the Channel would be
serviceable. The notion that he hates the English comes of his fevered
chafing against