;

YALE UNIVERSITY'
LIBRARY

THE
NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
AND ITS
MASTER-BUILDERS

Printed at t7ie Edinburgh University Press,
by T. and A. Constable,
for
DAVID DOUGLAS.
LONDON . HAMILTON, ADAMS, AND CO.
CAMBRIDGE MACMILLAN AND BOWES.
GLASGOW JAMES MACLEHOSE AND SON.

THE NEW BRITISH
CONSTITUTION

AND ITS

MASTER-BUILDERS

BY THE
DUKE OF ARGYLL

EDINBURGH:
DAVID DOUGLAS
1888

b\5SO

CONTENTS.

PART I.
OUR OLD CONSTITUTION : HOW IT STOOD
AND GREW.

PAGE

Dissent and Consent in Politics, . l
Speciality of British Constitution, 2-3
Limits imposed on Leadership, 3
Duties imposed on Followers, . . 4
Fundamental Laws, . 5-6
Old Dangers from Disunion, 6-10
Gladstonian Bills and 'Repeal,' 10-11
Absolute Novelty of Method, . . 11-15
Organic Nature of Change and Novelty
admitted, . . . . 16
Declaration on Irish Union of late Earl Grey,
in 1834, in King's Speech, . 17
Sir Robert Peel's Course, . 17-18
Home Rule only a ( New Formula/ 18

vi CONTENTS
PAGE
Mr. Gladstone's Phrase^ ' Breaking up the
existing Constitution of the Legislature/ 19-20
Connection of Home Rule with Disloyalty
and Crime, .... 20-22
Mr. Gladstone's Speeches in 1871-2, 22-24
His Crimes Acts, 1880-82, . 24-33
His later Explanations, 33
Effect of Crimes Act, . 34
Conduct of Parnellite Party in Parliament
during 1882-4, ... 35
Proposed Substitute for Crimes Act, 1885, . 36
Position of Conservative Government, 1885, 37
Dissentience began with Mr. Gladstone, 37
General Election, .... 38-40
Announcement of Mr. Gladstone's change, . 41
Mr. Parnell's Speech, 1886, . . 42
Change of Government, . . 43
Hatching a New British Constitution, 44
Qualifications for such a Task, . 44-48
The Result, . 48-49
Special Features, . . . 50-51
Alleged Parallels, . . 51-52
Good Reasons for some Parts, 52-55
Retreating Steps, . . . 56-57
Simile of Lord Rosebery, . . 58-59
Destruction of Confidence, . . 59-60

CONTENTS.

PART II.
THE NEW PAPER CONSTITUTION : HOW IT WAS
SCHEMED AND DROPPED. PAGE
Facts and Obligations to be remembered in
judging of New Constitution, . 63
A Great Confession in the Land Bill, 63-65
Treatment of it by its Authors, 65-67
Unjust Threats, .... 67-68
What they implied, . .69
Spirit evinced in Withdrawal, . 69-71
Our Protest, . . . 72-73
Evasive Pleas survive, 73-74
Grounds for Distrust, . 75
Successive Abandonments, . 75-76
Retreat on Phrases, 76
Phrases Analysed, . . . 76-77
Ireland sold to Parnellites, . . 78-79
Ideas of the Land League exemplified, . 79
Mr. Gladstone's Crimes Bill a Protection of
the Poor, .... 80
Their dependence as Voters, . 81
Danger of Plebiscites on Constitutions, 81-82
Special Danger in Ireland, . 82-83

viii CONTENTS. PAGE
Mr. Gladstone on British and Irish Elections, 83-84
Evidences of Terrorism, . . 84-85
Contrasted dealing with British Elections, . 85-86
Parnellite Majority no ground for denying
Facts or Duties, . . 87-89
Mr. Gladstone's Appeals to History, 89
Futility of Argument against Pitt, 90
Our Denials as regards the Irish Union, . 91-93
His Assertions on Early Irish History, 94-95
Erroneous Parallels in Colonial Constitutions, 95-97
Foreign Analogies, .... 97
Counter case of Italian Unity, 98-101
Contrast with Ireland, . 101-104
Case of United States, . . 104-105
Passion and Levity of our Master-Builders, 105
Their Reply to our first Demands, . . 106-107
Restore the Heptarchy ! . . 108
Case of Scotland, . . . 108-109
Our Protest against such Methods, . 109-110
New Forms of Bribery, . . . 110-111
Facts on the Conditions of Ireland relevant
to New Constitution, . . 112-113
Evidence given by Mr. Trevelyan in Parlia
ment during three years, . 113-114
One Example — Case of Loughrea, . .. 114-116
Another — Case of Hallissey, . . 117-119

CONTENTS.

IX

Conduct and Language of Irish Members :
Mr. Gladstone's rebuke,
Mr. Trevelyan's Pride of Martyrdom, and
fall, .
Evidence of Anarchical Forces,
Presumption of New Builders,
They have no Plan, .
Their Retreat on Empty Phrases,
Things that cannot be Unsaid — Facts and
Duties, ....
Mr. Gladstone on Guilt of Silence, .
Our Consentience,
Mr. Gladstone's Prophecy on Elections,
His own Fulfilment of it,
With whom we are still Consentient,
Arrogance of Demand made upon us,
Our Demand,
The Duty and Justification of it,

119-121122-123 123124
124-125 125
125-126 126
126-127 127
128-129 129
129 130130

APPENDIX.
The New Education: Letter to the Times, . 133-140

PART I.

OUR OLD CONSTITUTION:
HOW IT STOOD AND GREW.

The name Dissentient Liberals was, I believe,
selected by Mr. Gladstone, in a moment of com
parative moderation, as the simplest name for
those former associates who have refused to follow
him in his new Irish policy. Simple it certainly
is, and perhaps comparatively inoffensive. But
it is by no means colourless. Like many other
names it has a good deal in it. It savours of
authority, and of some established teaching. It
assumes a standard of assent and consent from
which the Dissentients have dissented. What
the standard is from which they have departed
is a question well worth the asking. I desire
to push this question here — and the further
question — what those doctrines are by which we

2 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
continue to abide. Disclaiming any right to
speak for others, I recognise the present as a
supreme moment in which we are all bound to
speak, and to speak freely.
The grammar of our assent has been a grammar
of intelligible rules. Like other sound rules of
conduct and of belief, they rest, to a large ex
tent, not on opinion but on fact. And foremost
among these facts is this — that we live under a
Constitution which, as a whole, has never been
reduced to writing. Its marches and its out
lines are elastic — in some places hardly visible,
because they have never been absolutely fixed.
No walls of stone enclose it. No circuit of en
trenched posts confine it. So far as mere
mechanical contrivances are concerned it is an
undefended city. It is a Constitution, neverthe
less,, on which everything depends — all the more
for the very reason that it is not a document,
nor a statute, nor even a code. It is far more
than any of these — it is a vast body of accepted
doctrines, accumulated, sifted, selected, and trans
mitted through more than a thousand years. Its
teachings are our universal preconceptions, the
background of all our conduct and opinions. In

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 3
every sphere of public duty, whether it be large
or small — in the discharge of every public func
tion, however local and comparatively unimportant,
we are governed from one imperial centre of
tradition and of law. We are often unconscious
how much we owe to it. In the light of it our
very ideas of liberty have been formed. It re
strains and guides us in the exercise of power
where power has been intrusted to us. It de
fends and guards us where we are ourselves sub-
iect to authority. Yet, except for the hold its
precepts have over our instincts and affections, it
is wholly unprotected. Every part of it is at
the mercy of ordinary legislation. The process
which passes a road act, or delegates to some
parochial authority the power of making sewers,
is the same process exactly which is competent
to subvert the Monarchy, to break up the .con
stitution of Parliament, to confer arbitrary powers
upon local majorities, and to prostrate all per
sonal liberties under the feet of the village tyrant.
We take note of these facts, and we deduce
from them an important lesson. They bring
home to us what political leadership under such
a system is, or ought to be. It is the function

4 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
of leaders to represent and to interpret better
than other men such opinions, and tendencies of
opinion, as commend themselves to the intellect
and conscience of those who follow. Authority,
properly so called, they have none. That is to
say, it is not their function to declare — it is not
our duty to accept — anything to be wise and
true simply because it may suddenly be con
venient to them to say it is so. It is our duty
to be jealous of any claim of this kind, and to
watch every departure from doctrines of estab
lished value or of immemorial acceptance. Especi
ally is it our duty to bring to the test of our
own old political instincts — of our own rich in
heritance of political thought — every marked or
unexpected change of policy, and every new dex
terous stroke of tactics. It should never be for
gotten that, more than most men, perhaps most
of all men, party leaders in the game of politics
are exposed to violent temptation — from passions
which in themselves are natural, and from the
abundant covering of conscious motives which may
be good. Above all, we must bear constantly in
mind the tremendous issues which may be at
stake on the cards they play.

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 5
We affirm that such is our position now. We
see with certainty that the questions involved in
the new Irish policy are questions which go to
the very centres of our political life. The curious
fact that Mr. Gladstone on a late memorable
occasion cavilled at the words which reckoned
the Act of Union among our ' fundamental laws,1
was an ominous fact in our eyes, and full of
warning. If the contention be that there is no
Act which cannot be altered or repealed by the
same authority which passed it, we admit the
fact, and we know all the significance of the ad
mission. But if it means, or if it even hints,
that in our constitutional system there are no
laws which can be called fundamental in the
truest sense, then we not only deny it, but we
regard it with just suspicion. It must be a most
attractive doctrine to a great party leader, that
there is nothing which he may not touch and
handle as freely as he may think expedient or
may find convenient, no settlement which he may
not unsettle, no inheritance which he may not
put up to auction. It is not any mechanical
contrivance of any kind — it is not any mere out
ward fortification of method and of process —

6 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
which makes one law fundamental and another
not. The difference lies in the nature of things.
History may determine it, in so far as historical
events are the index of causes deeper than them
selves. In all human structures there are parts
on which the whole depends — parts for resisting
pressure, for supporting weight, for dividing strain,
for concentrating and directing force. And so it
is with political constitutions. In the growth
and development of our own there have been
memorable epochs when the strain has been tre
mendous, and when the nation has laboured under
a sense of immediate danger. The outgrowths of
those times have been, and are, amongst our most
fundamental laws. They are like the special
buttress-roots which healthy trees throw out in
special situations of exposure, or like the strong
adapted structures which many higher organisms
have developed in response to needs, for the
maintenance of their stability and for the con
tinuance of their life.
We are consentient with all those former genera-
tions which have lived in the critical epochs of
our national life, and have stood the brunt of its
heavy storms. As we look back upon its history

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 7
we can feel almost with a shudder what the danger
sometimes was ; and we can appreciate the rest,
and peace, and progress, which followed on the
noble work that was done to meet it.
In particular we recognise the fact that one of
the greatest dangers of all has been the danger of
disunion from separate races diverging into separate
nationalities, with separate passions and separate
ambitions. The struggles and efforts through
which this danger has been averted have strained
to the very utmost the powers of our greatest
men. They have tested in an equal degree the
highest political instincts of our people. In Scot
land the best of our early Kings had to deal with,
and formally to address, some four or five separate
races, each, more or less, with a local habitation
and a name — each jealous of the other — each
differing in origin, in laws, in language, and in
religion, and all of them for a long period jealous
of the central power. Some natural causes of
gradual interfusion assisted in our escape ; but in
the main it was effected under the fire of war,
and by the spirit evoked under one heroic leader.
The Monarchy — the Nation which was restored
at Bannockburn was restored by union. All our

8 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
tribes — all our races were represented in the army
of Bruce — French, Normans and Angles, Scots and
Galwegians, Celts and Saxons. Yet for 300 years
the tendency to division, the ambition of petty
clans, and the pride of petty islands, kept up a
perpetual revolt against the national standard of
civilisation and of law.
When the western Celts were finally subdued
under the central government, a large area of
country was redeemed from a local barbarism of
the most desolating kind. And when providenti
ally the two Crowns of England and Scotland
were united, the twin blessings of peace and of
the expansion of industry were felt for the first
time for centuries over the whole country south
of the Clyde and Forth, and north of the Solway
and the Tyne. But a still more signal proof of
the danger involved in separating institutions was
yet to come. Perhaps there never were two popu
lations so bound together in natural affinities, in
common geographical relations, and in mutual
interests, as the people of England and of Scotland.
Yet the mere union of the Crowns was powerless
to make them feel it. In some ways it even
aggravated jealousies and antagonisms. These

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 9
were embodied and exasperated by the inevitable
working of two separate Parliaments, until at last
jealousy and rivalry were hardening into antipathy,
and the two nations were actually arming for a
desperate civil war. It is not improbable that a
plebiscite would have rejected Union, on both sides
the border. Most fortunately the voice of the
cultivated classes was then powerful enough to be
predominant ; and we owe to a comparatively small
group of wise and enlightened men that union
which opened to Scotland those wide horizons of
enterprise and prosperity on which her sons were
not slow to enter, and in which they have done so
much. Dangers exactly the same in kind were developed
in Ireland out of the same causes. And the result
was all the more remarkable in this case, because
Ireland never possessed the separate elements of
nationality which Scotland had possessed for cen
turies. Ireland as a whole never had a Sovereign,
nor a Capital, nor a central Government of its
own. Yet in a very few years after the concession
of independent powers had been made in favour of
its separate Parliament, the centrifugal forces
which such Institutions must always tend to gene-

10 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
rate, had led to differences on vital questions.
The sense of imminent danger in Great Britain
was instinctive and almost universal. The mem
bers of a professional opposition of course opposed.
But they were a mere handful of men, and when
in the course of years these very men survived
the great Minister who carried the Union, and
themselves came into office and into power, no
sound ever came from them that was not in har
mony with that universal acquiescence which is
the sign and seal of all our fundamental laws. It
is a signal homage to this national acquiescence
that the leader in the new policy deprecates and
denies the accusation that it would repeal the
Union. I do not stop now even for a moment to
bring this denial to a test. It has at any rate a
high value for our present purpose as a witness to
the national memory of the dangers which arose
from a separate Parliament in Ireland. It bows
before that memory and assumes to share it.
But the denial that Mr. Gladstone"^ scheme was
a repeal of the Union, valuable as it is for this
purpose, is still more valuable for another.
Whether his bills were more or less than a repeal
of the Union, it is at least certain that they were

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 11
not repeal pure and simple. That is to say, they
would not have left us where we were before the
Act of Union. They would neither have restored
the Grattan Parliament as it was, nor the consti
tution of Ireland as it was regulated before the
transactions of 1782. If the denial that his Bills
would have been any repeal of the Union, means
only that they would not have restored anything
ever known before, then indeed the denial is a just
one. It is quite true that the scheme of those
Bills was novel — absolutely novel. The Constitu
tion it would have set up was not like anything
ever heard of before either in this country or in
any other.
Consentient as we are with all the experience
and all the traditions of our country on the risks
involved in separate Parliaments, and on the im
minent dangers which we know that we escaped
by Union, we are not less consentient with our
former colleagues in recognising the fact that they
have presented us with something new — something
on which they have doubtless spent much of what
is called thought, ability, and ingenuity.
But this is one of the very facts upon which
we take at least a preliminary stand. We say

12 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
that this is not the method by which the British
Constitution has been elaborated. Never since
our earliest history has any group of men seated
themselves round a green table, and drawn up out
of their inner consciousness for the English, or for
the British people, a new political constitution.
From first to last our political system, all our
ideas touching it, and even the very channels in
which they run, have been inherited. Our very
Revolutions have been effected in the name of
well-known and ancient rights. From the meeting
of the Barons on the famous meadow in the valley
of the Thames — through the Reformation — through
the Revolution and the change of Dynasty, down
to the Union of the Parliaments, everything has
been done on old and familiar lines. If there be
any exception, perhaps the nearest approach to it
is in that Act of the Irish Parliament which
claimed and set up in Ireland an independent
Legislature. The Statute of Geo. i. which in
1719 asserted the supremacy of the Parliament of
Great Britain was strictly a Declaratory Act. It
asserted the British supremacy as one that had
been, that was, and that ought to be — one that
the British Parliament 'had, hath, and of right

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 13
ought to have.' These are the words employed.1
And although the Irish Parliament in 1782 based
its proceedings on a Declaration of Right, it did
not seek to extract from the British Parliament
any retractation of its former historical claim or
of its historical assertion.2 The Constitution set
up by Grattan's Parliament was unquestionably
more nearly an absolute novelty than any other of
the changes through which we have passed. The
evils and dangers to which it led, in spite of the
limited and well-affected classes who were alone
intrusted with its powers, are a great lesson on
the difficulty of foreseeing or controlling the in
herent forces which underlie political organisation.
These forces, unless they have cut their own course,
and found their own bed, are not easily restrained.
They are quite sure to burst and break through all
restrictions that are purely forensic and artificial.
When, therefore, Mr. Gladstone denies that his
scheme repeals the Union, we ask whether it does
less or whether it does a great deal more. The
first answer must be, at any rate, that it does some
thing entirely different — something wholly beyond
1 6 Geo. I. cap. v.
2 Lecky's History of England, vol. iv. p. 553.

14 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
and beside its effect upon the Act of 1800. It is
not a matter of opinion but a matter of fact that
it abolishes the United Parliament. It is not a
matter of opinion but of fact that it creates not
only a separate Irish Parliament but a separate
Irish Executive, which has never before existed.
Nor is it open to dispute that the scheme raises by
inevitable consequence the most difficult abstract
questions on the definition of matters which are to
be subject, or not subject, to legislation by one
Parliament or the other — on the relations of the
new Executive to an Imperial authority — on the
guarantees which must, or which need not, be
required for the protection of life, of personal
liberty, and of property.
On all these most difficult and complicated
questions everything is to depend on the wide
vision and the practical skill of the framers of
one great organic law. No such work as this has
ever before been undertaken by the statesmen of
the United Kingdom or of any part of it. Those
who devised the Acts of Union with Scotland in
1707 and with Ireland in 1800, did not attempt
and had no need to attempt any such ambitious
undertaking. All they had to do was to provide

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 15
for the complete amalgamation of two legisla
tures into one. Equal participation in common
rights and privileges — immemorially known, and
needing no definitions — was the basis and the
essence of their plan. No new Constitution was
required. The two legislatures of the two king
doms were added to the legislature of the third,
each acquiring its own full share of power in a
long-established political system, and over an
United Empire. Both these Unions were great
acts, both were in their nature and effects funda
mental laws. But both of them were perfectly
simple in their nature. They got rid of complica
tions, most dangerous and intricate complications.
But they invented none. Not the slightest change
was contemplated or effected in the principles of
the Constitution. No new organic statute was
even dreamed of, no evoking of new forces and
new ambitions, with weapons placed in new hands
for ready use, and then, with elaborate and ingeni
ous contrivances, on paper, which pretend to
regulate and control them.
We take note again of these differences, amount
ing to antitheses, between the new Irish policy
and everything of which we or our ancestors have

16 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
had experience. We observe, too, that the pro-
pounder of this policy has admitted both its
character of organic change, and its character of
absolute novelty, as regards the mind and intellect
of the people. He declares it as a subject 'which
goes down to the very roots and foundations of our
whole civil and political constitution,1 1 and, again,
as ' a subject which twelve months ago was almost
as foreign to the British mind as the differential
calculus.1 2
This is true in one sense ; but in another sense
it is most erroneous. It is perfectly true that the
subject is one going down to the very roots of
all we have known and loved in our Political Insti
tutions. It is perfectly true also that there is no
precedent for our present position respecting it.
But the absolute novelty in our situation does not
lie in the subject, but in the method of dealing
with it proposed by Mr. Gladstone. The pro
posal to revive a separate Parliament in Ireland
is not new. It has been before our people — at one
time as a very burning question — far more than
half-a-century. It is now fifty-five years since it
1 History of an Idea, p. 20.
a Ibid.; Lessons of the Elections, p. 38.

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 17
formed the subject of an emphatic paragraph in the
Speech from the Throne, and the Minister who wrote
that speech was the very man who had been one
of the chief critics of Mr. Pitt in his Act of Union.
Earl Grey was a firm opponent of CConneirs agita
tion. He put into the mouth of the Sovereign, on a
very solemn occasion, in 1834, a declaration that
the Legislative Union with Ireland was the ' bond
of our national strength and safety,1 and a repeated
assurance to the United Parliament that ' it was his
fixed and unalterable resolution, under the blessing
of Divine Providence, to maintain it inviolate by
all means in his power.1 1
The Ministry in which Mr. Gladstone began his
public life, the great Ministry of Sir Robert Peel,
met that agitation by most unusual exertions of
executive authority. Ever since, the demand for a
separate Parliament in Ireland has been treated by
every responsible statesman in Britain as absolutely
inadmissible. The subject, therefore, in its essen
tial character, was not foreign to the British mind.
Several times it had been urgently pressed upon the
attention of the public, and it was never absent
from the mind of instructed men.
1 Mirror of Parliament, vol. i. p. 2.
J!

18 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
They knew, all of them, by instinct as well as by
reasoning, that the re-erection of a separate Parlia
ment in Ireland would and must involve the most
complicated novelties of political organisation.
The analogue, in respect to novelty, of the differen
tial calculus, is to be found not in the policy in
which all British Statesmen have been consentient
since 1800 — for that has been thoroughly thought
out, and was perfectly familiar — but in the new
fangled schemes for deserting that policy which have
been suddenly devised by Mr. Gladstone. I do not
say that we are consentient with Mr. Gladstone in
this national instinct, for we did not look to any
leader in such a matter. He was consentient with
us — meaning by ' us 7 not only the Liberal party,
but all parties in the British Parliament.
We are consentient with our former leader
even now, when he gives the name of a ' new
formula1 to the revised proposal for a separate
Irish Parliament, which arose about 1871, under
the new name of Home Rule, and under the
auspices of Mr. Butt.1 This is exactly what it
was — a new formula and nothing more. It was
regarded by us all as simply our old enemy with
1 History of an Idea, pp. 12, 13.

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 19
a new face. It was Repeal under a new name.
We knew, as Mr. Gladstone also did, that it
involved, and must of necessity involve, ' either un
doing or modifying the present Constitution of
the Imperial Parliament.11 We knew, as he did,
that it was a demand for the ' breaking up of the
existing constitution of the Legislature.1 2 When
our then leader paid the compliment to Mr. Butt
of acknowledging that he did not demand a sever
ance from the Crown of the United Kingdom, —
' that the Union of these kingdoms under her
Majesty was to be maintained,'1 — we never for a
moment supected the interpretation now put upon
it, that he was ' admitting that the idea of
Home Rule was not in its essence destructive of
the unity of the Empire.1 3 We had not the
smallest reason to suspect anything of the sort.
We knew that the old agitators for Repeal had
never openly avowed a desire to throw off the
mere supremacy of the Crown. Mr. Butt was
not shifting his ground one inch from the old
basis of Repeal in giving the same assurance.
Neither could we suspect that our leader, in 'accept
ing1 it, was abating one jot of the argument on
1 History of an Idea, pp. 12, 13. s Ibid. p. 13. 3 Ibid. pp. 13, 14.

20 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
which Repeal had always been resisted as inadmis
sible. I mean that so far as our knowledge went,
or as his words naturally went, he was making no
such abatement. We have nothing to do with
what he intended at the time, or with any ex post
facto interpretation he may now put on his own
words. The context made their natural meaning
plain enough, because the essence of that context
was to point out the profound distinction between
a union depending only on the link of a common
Crown, and the existing Union depending on the
whole constitution of the Legislature. He put this
antithesis emphatically, and most formidably, when
he described Mr. Buffs proposal as involving a
demand ' that Parliament was to be broken up.1 1
But our consentience since 1871 has not been
confined to this formidable and just description of
what the ' new formula ' really meant. The break
ing up of a great Parliamentary Constitution never
can be otherwise than a tremendous experiment.
But there are conditions under which, at least, the
most extreme forms of danger might not be immi
nent. If the parts of a united nation which are
to be re-sundered into separate parliaments, are
1 History of an Idea, p. 14.

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 21
agreed upon the fundamental laws of human
Society concerning the security of life, of property,
and of personal freedom, then the work of fram
ing a new constitution for keeping them together,
however arduous, or even perilous, would not be
hopeless. But this is exactly the condition which, as
a matter of fact, has been wanting in the case of
Ireland. There has always been an obscure, but
constant and close, connection between Irish politi
cal agitation and Irish lawlessness and crime. Irish
agitators had been always more or less disloyal, not
merely to the political connection with Great
Britain, but to the moral and physical connection
between law and the enforcement of all social rights,
duties, and obligations. Jacobinism had been one
main element in the Rebellion of 1798. The French
Directory had been invited to send its revolutionary
army into Ireland ; and when it landed, an Irish
man had issued assignats for the Province of Con-
naught. It was the object of all the wise men
who promoted the Union, to resist more effectually
both foreign enemies and domestic anarchy.
The memory of this connection had never died out
among us. It had been kept alive from time to time,
down to what Mr. Gladstone calls the ' merging ' of

22 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
Repeal into the ' dangerous conspiracy 1 of Fenian-
ism,1 by recurring outbursts of crime, euphoniously
described as ' partial and lawless action.1 2 It had
all the force and effect of an inseparable association.
Nothing had occurred in 1871 to give any of us a
new impression. On the contrary the ' new formula1
was heralded by the old accompaniments. It was
the conviction of us all that the new Irish Party
desired a separate Parliament, in order to effect
through it measures of oppression and injustice,
which no Imperial Parliament, with its imperial
traditions of justice and of law, could be easily got
to sanction.
Now it is undeniable that often during the fifteen
years between 1871 and the general election of
1885 Mr. Gladstone was consentient with us,
and we were consentient with him, both in lan
guage and in action, which had no other justifica
tion than in our continued belief that the 'new
formula1 contemplated not only the breaking up
the machinery of Parliament, but also the break
ing up of the accepted doctrines of civilised
society on the securities to be provided for life,
liberty, and property. This was a separate fact
1 History of an Idea, p. lo. 2 Ibid. p. 9.

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 23
which did far more than merely aggravate and
intensify the objection to the breaking up of
Parliament. It gave to that objection a very
special force and character. It obviously im
ported into the work of forming a new legislative
system, dangers, complications, and difficulties of
the most formidable nature.
Now it is very remarkable that during the
fifteen years referred to we were all consentient
in doings and in sayings which dwelt more and
more emphatically on this feature of the case. In
Mr. Gladstone's speech at Aberdeen in September
1871, he was content with setting forth in the
strongest language the formidable magnitude of
the proposals necessarily involved in the 'new
formula,1 without any allusion to the specially
aggravating conditions in the case of Ireland.
This part of the work he did well. He called it
a demand that ' Ireland should close her relations
with the Parliament of this country.11 He asked
' why Parliament was to be broken up ? 1 He
demanded indignantly — ' Can any sensible man,
can any rational man, suppose that at this time
of day, in this condition of the world, we are
1 Times, September 27, 1871.

24 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
going to disintegrate the great capital institu
tions of this country for the purpose of making
ourselves ridiculous in the sight of all mankind,
and crippling any power we possess for bestowing
benefits on the country to which we belong ? 1 1
On one occasion in 1877, and on another in 1880,
we were consentient with our leader in repudiat
ing as ' an impudent fiction ' any connection be
tween the Liberal party and the Home Rule
agitation,2 and in repudiating any 'disposition to
break down the authority of Parliament by foster
ing the Home Rule movement.1 3
So far our leader and spokesman had confined
himself to the political or constitutional objec
tions founded on the magnitude of the changes
involved in the breaking up of Parliament. But
the moment his own new Government was formed
in 1880, we were confronted by the facts which
raised those moral objections that rest upon the
lawless methods and the lawless aims of the Irish
party. We began with the most virtuous inten
tions of governing Ireland without any exceptional
executive powers. As I had the honour of being
1 Times, September 27, 1871. 2 Times, April 21, 1877.
3 Speech, Juniper Green, March 21, 1880.

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 25
a member of that Government during the first
twelve months of its existence, I share the right
of others to insist upon it as a vital matter in
the history of our time, that we were driven to
ask for the coercive powers which Parliament gave
to us, on clear proof and on the distinct allegation
that they were absolutely needed to protect per
sonal liberty, to repress crime, and violence, and
anarchical designs, and not because we disapproved,
however strongly, of Repeal or of Home Rule, or
of any other measure, however mischievous, which
might be promoted by Constitutional agitation.
Our then leader was compelled to adopt this
view of the situation, and he threw himself with
all the energy of our common conviction into a
corresponding attitude. He told Parliament in
the solemn utterances of the Queen's Speech that
' an extended system of terror had been estab
lished in various parts of Ireland which had
paralysed almost alike the exercise of private
rights and the performance of civil duties.1
Nothing short of such facts and convictions could
have justified us in the measures we proposed.
We asked and obtained the suspension of the
Habeas Corpus Act, and an Arms Act. Mr.

26 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
Gladstone called them 'Protective measures.1 He
said in the Queen's Speech that these Acts were
needed, 'not only for the vindication of order
and public law, but likewise to secure on behalf
of the Queen's subjects protection for life and
property, and personal liberty of action.1
This is the period of the famous speeches at
Leeds,1 and at Knowsley,2 which have been quoted
usque ad nauseam, but which can never lose their
value as witnesses of our unanimous consentience
at the time, touching at least the facts with which
we had to deal. I am not now speaking of any
mere matter of opinion on the particular kind of
executive weapon which we asked Parliament to
place in our hands — the weapon, namely, of arbi
trary arrest, or in other words, of imprisonment
without trial. We all knew that the success of
this weapon was open to doubt. We all knew
that it was more or less experimental. But this
has nothing to do with the facts, or with our
estimate of the facts, touching the state of Ire
land on which we were all consentient. Our
leader was nothing but our common spokesman
when he said at Knowsley that it was 'a contest
1 Times, October 26, 1881. 2 Times, October 28, 1881.

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 27
for the first and elementary principles upon which
society is constituted,1 that 'it was idle to talk
of either law, or order, or liberty, or religion, or
civilisation, if these gentlemen were to carry
through the reckless and chaotic schemes that
they had devised,1 when he denounced 'these
gentlemen 1 as ' wishing to march through rapine
to disintegration and dismemberment of the
Empire;1 when finally, he declared that we were
endeavouring 'to relieve the people of Ireland
from the weight of a tyrannical yoke.1
I lay no stress on the extensive use made by Mr.
Gladstone^ Government of the powers confided to
them. In this they were necessarily guided in the
main by the local administration, represented in the
Cabinet by the late Mr. Forster. Neither do I lay
any stress on the capital made by our leader when,
in the Guildhall, amidst the cheers of the ' classes,1
and the ringing of the glasses, he announced the
arrest of Mr. Parnell. Neither, on the other hand,
do I lay any stress on the release of Mr. Parnell,
and of others, after they had been incarcerated for
six months, although Mr. Forster objected on the
ground that they were released too unconditionally.
There may have been excellent reasons for letting

28 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
' those gentlemen 1 out, without the least belief in
any change or repentance in them. The prolonged
detention of men in prison without any trial,
and by the purely arbitrary act of the Executive,
might well be considered impolitic, especially if a
better and stronger substitute could be found. No
body was responsible for the personal belief into
which Mr. Gladstone was easily persuaded, that
' From information voluntarily tendered, these
gentlemen would find themselves in a condition
to range themselves on the side of what he should
call law and order and individual freedom in Ire
land.1 2 We shall probably never know the full
history of what was called — inaccurately no doubt,
and perhaps unjustly — the Kilmainham Treaty.
There was unquestionably some understanding,
although no definite bargain, about the passing
of an Act dealing with arrears of rent. What is
certainly known, and what is fundamentally impor
tant, was that the Government of Mr. Gladstone
did not contemplate allowing the power of arbi
trary arrest to expire without providing some new
and better weapon to take its place. His own
belief in the reform of Mr. Parnell was purely per-
1 Hansard, vol. 269, p. 124.

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 29
sonal. His resolution to ask Parliament for new
legislation of another kind was not personal. In
this he simply represented the common sense, not
only of his own party, but of the country. His
obscure language in the House of Commons on the
release of Mr. Parnell and others, about his hopes
of a change in their disposition, was instantly
repudiated with anger by ' those gentlemen ' them
selves. They defied him to assert that they had
done or said anything which could possibly imply
the smallest pledge, direct or indirect, that they
would change their course.
Then came the crash. Mr. Parnell was liberated
on the 4th of May 1882. The Phcenix Park assas
sinations were perpetrated on the 6th. Mr. Glad
stone's new Bill, which was to replace the power
of arbitrary arrest, was introduced on the 11th.
Yet the Minister took special pains to delare that
his new Bill was ' not founded on the recent out
rages.1 1 The measure had been determined on
before, as one demanded by the general condition of
Ireland. Previous murders, he said, such as those
of Mr. Herbert and Mrs. Smythe, had produced a
great effect on the public mind. But he declared
1 Hansard, vol. 269, p. 1 119.

30 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
that not even these, nor any other outrages against
the wealthier classes, had determined the Govern
ment in favour of the new Bill. What had deter
mined them was mainly, and above all, ' the misery
that had been carried far and wide among the body
of the population.11 'Outrage,1 he insisted, 'had
been committed in every form, even the most cruel
and extreme.1 In a country almost wholly agri
cultural, the ordinary transactions of life must, in
a corresponding degree, be connected with agricul
ture, and between all the various classes dependent
on it. Yet these were the very transactions in which
the Minister declared that the administration of
justice had become impossible. He asked indig
nantly ' whether the Government were to look with
tolerance and indulgence upon the failure of the
Jury system.1
Nothing short of continued proof of the anar
chical methods and designs of the Irish party could
have justified any Ministry in asking for such a
measure as they proposed. It was indeed less
purely arbitrary than the suspension of the Habeas
Corpus Act. But for this very reason it was infin
itely stronger. The object aimed at was not to
1 Hansard, vol. 269, p. 11 15.

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 31
suspend the ordinary law, but to strengthen it. It
was to lift the administration of justice above the
power of lawless terrorism. It gave power to try
certain offences without the intervention of any
jury — or rather it constituted a new jury out of
the highest judges of the land- — a proposition
which assumed and implied a wide-spread demo
ralisation of the people, and a state of imminent
danger to the foundations of Society. Such a
measure as this, proposed by a responsible Govern
ment, is more eloquent than a hundred speeches.
In all other parts of the Bill it was of a corre
sponding character. It gave powers for the suppres
sion of public meetings at the discretion of the
Executive.1 It gave powers equally stringent over
the press.2 It was the most extensive Coercion Act
ever passed. Yet the Minister declared it to be
merely a Bill of substitution for the arbitrary
power of arrest. It was indeed this, but it was
immensely more. A reform of the judicial appara
tus was immeasurably better, because in its aim
and object it was not arbitrary at all. Its aim
and object was thoroughly constitutional. It was
directed to reinforce the rights and liberties of the
' 45 and 46 Vict. ch. 25, sec. 10. 2 Ibid. sec. B.

32 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
subject against lawless organisation — to redeem the
administration of justice from the paralysis which
these organisations had succeeded in effecting ; and
to strengthen the Executive in its primary duty of
enforcing law for the defence of the innocent, and
for punishment of the guilty.
We were consentient with our leader, not only
in these measures, but in the language and argu
ments which he used in their defence. He repudi
ated, as we now do, any attempt to claim toleration
or lenity for lawlessness as any part of the true
policy of conciliation. In reply to an Irish member
who had called for this policy as identical with a
policy of justice, Mr. Gladstone said — ' The
article of justice satisfies me perfectly ; but I must
remind the hon. member that it means justice to
all and to every one. Unfortunately this includes
the use of force for the punishment of evil-doers
and the praise of all who do well.11
Parliament gave to Mr. Gladstone's administra
tion the great powers they asked, because it
believed the facts which were alleged on the state
of Ireland, and because it acknowledged those
maxims of duty in respect to human government,
1 Hansard, vol. 269, p. 11 16.

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 33
which are of eternal truth and of universal obli
gation. We had nothing to do then, and we have
nothing to do now, with incidental passages in
which our then leader, amongst other methods of
opposing the Irish party, challenged them to pro
duce their plan. There is no more effective way
of resisting fundamental changes than by such
challenges as these. He now dwells upon them
as having had another meaning. It is just
possible that they may have had some effect in
encouraging the Irish party to persevere, in causing
them to feel that the other words they heard
were only bluster, and that the resisting substance
in their front, despite its proud aspect, was, after
all, only a wall of putty. It may be so : but we
had nothing to do with that. Our consentience
was with both sayings and doings which repre
sented indisputable facts, and equally indisputable
precepts, inseparably connected. One indisputable
fact was that the Irish party was aiming at
anarchical objects, and the other was that they
were working for these objects by lawlessness and
tyranny. Both of these facts precluded discussion,
and compelled our action. c

34 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
Our former leader, in his History of an Idea,
leaps from January 1882 to the fall of his Govern
ment in 1885. Three notable years are thus
dexterously left out of the account. We need not
wonder. For his purposes they were indeed a
blank. But they are full of instruction for ours.
They began with a boast on the part of the Prime
Minister that 'this great conspiracy which, had
it succeeded, would indeed have brought society to
the very last of its resources, had been not only
confronted but beaten.11 Then had followed the
release — then the murders — then the new Coercion
Act — then three years of its firm administration
by Lord Spencer. In proportion as the powers
given were duly exercised peace began to return
in Ireland. Men could breathe more freely. The
tyranny of conspirators was checked. But there
was no evidence of any change of temper or of
designs on the part of Mr. Parnell and his party.
Wherever they could speak freely, as always in
America, or occasionally through the press in
Ireland, and continually in the House of Commons,
the same hostility was evinced towards the British
Empire and towards the laws of civilisation. Well
1 Hansard, vol. 266, p. 182.

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 35
indeed did the Parnellite party in Parliament
vindicate there, both in speech and in conduct, their
angry disavowal of any promise, express or implied,
that on their release they would be in a condition
' to range themselves on the side of law and order.1
It is most instructive to follow the speeches
and the replies to questions made by the new
Irish Secretary, Mr. Trevelyan, during the Sessions
of 1882, 1883, and 1884. It was one long
repeated task of contradicting falsehoods put in
the form of interpellations, and of exposing direct
incitements to disloyalty, or veiled — sometimes
very thinly veiled — incitements to crime.1 It is
a sickening record ; and no change of tactics on
the part of any Minister can in the slightest degree
affect the evidence it affords of the conviction
which was forced upon the mind of the Irish
Secretary by personal knowledge, and by daily
observation, of the elements we have to deal with
in Irish disaffection.
During all this time our consentience was un
broken. It did not rest on mere opinions. It
rested on the open and repeated acknowledgments
1 See two remarkable speeches, February 22 and March 9,
1883. Hansard, vol. 276, pp. 726 and 1975.

36 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
of fundamental facts, and of primary duties and
obligations. Accordingly, when in 1885, the expiry of the
Prevention of Crimes Act came to be close at
hand, Mr. Gladstone's Government determined to
renew all those parts of it which had been found
to be most practically useful in securing the great
object indicated in its title. Some of its pro
visions had never been used at all, such as the
trial of criminals by a court of judges. But the
means it allowed of strengthening juries, and of
securing them and all witnesses from intimidation,
which had been found to be efficient, were to be
retained. Moreover, the Prime Minister had em
phatically repudiated the name of coercion as
justly applicable to such provisions.
There was nothing to affect our consentience
from this date to the General Election of 1885.
The interlude of a Conservative Government so
weak in Parliamentary support that it could do
nothing, and called to office at a moment when
nothing could be done, was an interlude which
could throw no new light upon the facts or upon
our duty. The facts and the duty remained the
same, whether, in trying to protect the Irish people

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 37
from crime by trust in the ordinary law, the Con
servative Cabinet were acting from sheer weakness
and necessity ; whether they were simply over-
sanguine ; or whether they were resorting to a
political manoeuvre to secure the Irish vote.
There was nothing necessarily dishonest in the
attempt. At least it did not become us to treat
it in this light. We had ourselves tried the same
experiment when we came into office in 1879. On
its failure we had confessed that failure, and had
given up our experiment. It did not occur to
any of us at the dissolution in 1885 that it would
be consistent with our obligations to our country,
and to its highest interests, that we should ascribe
to the Conservative Government on this matter
the worst motive, and that we should meet them
in the spirit of the gamester who inwardly ex
claims, ' Two can play at that trick. If you go
in for an alliance with Mr. Parnell, so shall we,
and we shall outbid you in that market.1
Dissentience did begin at this time. But it
began underground, in the mind of our leader
and not in ours. From the pages of his History
of an Idea it is clear that he intended to educate
the public mind, and prepare it for some great

38 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
change, by words grave, serious, and perhaps even
ominous, but carefully avoiding any definite in
dication of form or outline. Nothing was said
which could be construed with even tolerable fair
ness into a foreshadowing of a separate Parlia
ment and separate Executive for Ireland. The
whole of the paragraphs which he quotes, as we
read them now, in the light of subsequent events,
were constructed on the plan of being susceptible
of defensive quotation, afterwards, for anything
he might do, and of not being susceptible of any
definite interpretation, at the time, for anything
he might intend. The reason for this was very
frankly indicated in one of his Midlothian
speeches. Mr. Parnell was at that moment hold
ing himself up to auction between the two parties.
He had invited Mr. Gladstone to show his hand,
and to produce his plan. Mr. Gladstone ridiculed
this demand, throwing the duty of proposing plans
back upon the Irish members, and adding that by
complying with such a challenge, 'I should seri
ously damage any proposal which might have
been hatched in my mind.11 This no doubt was
perfectly true. But it means a great deal. 'It
1 Speech at Midcalder, November 17, 1885.

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 39
had then become morally certain,1 as he tells us,
' that Ireland would, through a vast majority of
her representatives, present a demand on the
national sense,1 1 and most ' serious damage ' indeed
would have been done to the Liberal party if
we had known that on this 'moral certainty1
becoming a fact, he was prepared to 'break up
the Imperial Parliament.1
It was not our business as public men, it was
not the business of any subject of the Queen, to
forecast the meaning of dark utterances like those,
and to hold ourselves in readiness to accept any
proposal that might be in the course of 'hatch
ing.1 Not one single sentence does our former
leader quote as having been addressed to our
reason on the merits of the Irish Question, with
a view to show us that no such danger could arise
from the breaking up of Parliament as had been
impressed upon us by all the sayings and doings
of our own and of former generations. Not one
sentence does he quote as having been intended
to show us that the Irish party had ceased, or
would cease, to attack property and personal
liberty. There was an absolute silence on this
1 History of an Idea, p. 19.

40 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
matter which had been the very foundation of all
our language and of all our measures. But this
was not all. Two considerations were put before
us with much emphasis — one was a warning that
the demands of the Irish party went down to the
' roots of our civil and political constitution ? ;
the other was that in order to deal with them it
was above all things important that we should
have a Liberal majority large enough to make us
independent of the Irish vote.
This was a most natural doctrine to impress on
the constituencies if — but only if — the Irish party
contained dangerous elements against which it was
necessary to guard. But the doctrine was not
quite so natural if the Irish party were to be
treated as altogether angelic — to be flattered,
leant upon, cheered, and followed. Our education,
therefore, was most imperfectly conducted when
this was the lesson most urgently impressed upon
us. It was quite according to the opinions to
which we had been all consentient to be told
that ' such a question could never be dealt with
in a Parliament to the satisfaction of the country,
unless there were present in it some party power
ful enough to be independent of the Irish vote.1 J
1 Speech at Edinburgh, November n, 1885.

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 41
Then followed events which will be memorable
in the history of this country. The elections
were completed. A Parliament was returned
precisely of that character which Mr. Gladstone
had indicated as incapable of dealing satisfactorily
with the Irish problem. Mr. Parnell received
that accession of strength which had been fully
expected. On the other hand the Conservatives
were not so swept off the board as to leave to
the Liberals any large majority independent of
the Irish vote. Independence being impossible,
alliance might be tried. Accordingly, within a
few weeks, an announcement was made through
the National Press Agency, on December 16, 1885,
that our leader had ' definitely adopted the policy
of Home Rule for Ireland,' and that Lord Spencer
would follow in his wake. On the 17th a similar
intimation was published in the Standard, and at
the same time was contradicted by Mr. Gladstone
in terms so carefully limited and guarded that no
doubt remained in the minds of any of us as to
its substantial truth.
From this moment our consentience as to facts
which we had all recognised as true, and in duties
which we had all admitted to be binding, became

42 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
of necessity dissentience with a leader who was
evidently slipping away from both. This dissen
tience was his, not ours. We were running true.
He was doubling on his own steps as well as on
ours. He was, as we thought, in obvious alliance
with those against whom we had fought in
common. Every succeeding incident confirmed us
in our old consentience by showing us what the
new policy and the new alliance must involve.
When Parliament met in 1886, Mr. Parnell
acted his part admirably. Mr. Gladstone now
says1 that the one new feature in the case which
nobody could have foreseen was the speech on the
first night of the Session of his former prisoner,
and his new ally. If Mr. Parnell did not know
the game he had to play he is not the man he
is supposed to be. No direct communication was
required. The situation was patent on the face
of it. He had only to make a speech carefully
modulated and restrained. He had been let out
of prison without one word of promise or of com
promise. He was now sure of welcome into a
better lodging on even better terms. And so, if
we read Mr. Parneli's speech in January 1886, on
1 History of an Idea, p. 6-7.

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 43
which so much stress is now laid, we shall see
that just enough is said, both in tone and sub
stance, to smooth the approaches of his former
opponent, without saying one word that pledged
him to any abandonment of his old aims or of
his old methods.
Then came still more astonishing events. The
Conservative Government was turned out by the
use of Mr. Jesse Collings as a pawn. A new
Cabinet was formed, and our former leader was
compelled to open his mind a little wider to his
old associates. Enough had been said to necessi
tate explicit questions, and some approach at least
to explicit answers. These seem to have been
postponed as long as possible. But the proposal
which had been ' hatching ' broke the shell at last.
The result was an immediate revolt on the part
of every one of the more independent minds which
had formerly served under the same leader. Lord
Hartington, Mr. Bright, Mr. Chamberlain, Mr.
Goschen, Sir George Trevelyan, were a group of
men representing Liberal opinion as typically, in
some respects more typically, than Mr. Gladstone
himself. One new man of undoubtedly independ
ent mind, and of considerable literary eminence,

44 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
Mr. John Morley, was included in the group which
seceded with Mr. Gladstone into the alliance with
Mr. Parnell.
Then followed the most wonderful phenomenon
of all. This group of men — all of them highly
respectable, and one of them illustrious — sat down
to evolve out of their own inner consciousness,
and in a few weeks, a brand-new British Con
stitution. A Conservative Cabinet had once been
compelled, under great pressure, to devise a Reform
Bill in ten minutes. It was called the 'Ten
Minutes Bill.1 But this was child's play to the
undertaking of that cluster of politicians who
met in Downing Street in February 1886, and
promised that early in April they would produce
a scheme, 'going down to the very roots and
foundations of our whole civil and political con
stitution,1 which would provide an adequate sub
stitute for a broken Parliament and a disunited
kingdom. On this subject it is our duty to speak freely.
There are some things in this world which are
greater even than the greatest man — more binding
on us than loyalty to the oldest leader — and which
ought to be dearer to us than even the dearest

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 45
friend. One of these things is that which we call
the Constitution of our country. This is not —
let it be emphatically repeated — any mere law.
It is not even any code. Still less is it any mere
organic statute. Neither is it any system of
mechanical devices for checking and counter
balancing the different tendencies of different
classes of men. ' The roots and foundations of
our whole civil and political constitution1 are the
roots and foundations of all our rights, of all our
duties and obligations, and of all our understand
ings both of public and of private virtue. In our
country these have been shaped and formed and
sanctioned by the work of centuries, and have
been embodied in institutions which have grown,
and have never been invented. It is no dis
paragement to any man to say that we deny his
competence to go down to these roots, and to cut,
prune, and relay them as he pleases, without danger
to our dearest interests. A man may be very
illustrious indeed without being fit for this. Prob
ably the most brilliant achievement of Mr. Glad
stone was his great Budget, or scheme of financial
adjustment, in 1853. I had the honour of being
one of his colleagues in that Cabinet, and I know,

46 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
as few perhaps know or recollect now, the diffi
culties he had to overcome. I shall never forget
the impression made upon us all by the originality
of conception, the courage, resource, knowledge,
dexterity of treatment, and breadth of view,
through which alone that scheme secured its
splendid success in Parliament. But no scheme
of readjusted taxation is in the least degree com
parable in magnitude, or in kind, to a scheme
which is to break up the Imperial Parliament,
and reconstitute the British Constitution. Again,
Mr. Gladstone's measure disestablishing the Irish
Church was justly admired as an excellent bit of
work. But here, also, the difficulty was essentially
financial — the system of commutation and the
principle on which property was to be divided.
There was no society to be pulled to pieces, and
to be set up again on a new plan, and inspired
with new ideas. The society to be dealt with was
the Christian Church. He had nothing to do but
to let it alone. There was nothing to be done
in the way of reconstruction there.
So far, then, as skill or experience are concerned
in the duty of devising a new pohtical constitution,
Mr. Gladstone was as purely a ' "prentice hand '

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 47
as any other Englishman, or Scotchman, or Irish
man, in any of the three kingdoms.
But there is more to be said than this against
any facile acquiescence in such a work as was
actually undertaken. Our Parliamentary Govern
ment, especially as developed in recent times, puts
an enormous premium on the powers of speech.
Mr. Gladstone, more perhaps than any public man
who has ever occupied a like position, uses, and
depends upon this power. Constantly, and as by
a natural instinct, he declines to allow any opinion
he has ever expressed to be quoted or described
in words other than his own. His great parlia
mentary expositions bristle with ingenuities of
statement. Subtle distinctions, and sometimes
equally subtle confoundings of distinction, are
continually involved when they are entirely un-
perceived by those who hear him. Dexterous
appeals to different sentiments and to sections of
opinion, equally refined and effective, are parts of
his apparatus in the handling of the great popular
assembly in which he has been so long predominant.
Now this is, perhaps, of all training the most
dangerous in the making of Constitutions. It
leads men to be the victims of their own eloquence

48 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
— firm believers in the power and virtue of mere
words and phrases. For the purpose of swaying
popular assemblies at the moment, these are indeed
invaluable ; and of course they may be yoked to
service in a good cause as well as in a bad one.
But of all the sources of danger and of fatal error
which can beset a statesman who assumes to frame
an organic statute for the government of mankind,
perhaps this volubility in phrases, and this trust in
them, is the most pestilent, because the most prolific.
Accordingly, the new British Constitution, which
he now expressly declares he meant to be in prin
ciple equally applicable, not only to Ireland, but
to Scotland and to Wales,1 and which he ' hatched '
with his little ring and residuum of colleagues in
the course of sixty-six days, was perhaps the most
extraordinary proposal ever submitted to an assem
bly of men who had been brought up in, and
were familiar with, an ancient and time-honoured
political system. It was ingenious ; but its in
genuity was largely verbal. It had a principle
and an aim underlying it ; but that principle and
aim was not only unavowed, but much clever
phraseology was employed to disguise or conceal
1 History of an Idea, p. 5 ; Lessons of the Elections, p. 36, etc.

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 49
it. The aim was to get rid of an obstructive
element in the House of Commons by the elimi
nation of the Irish members. In this view, and
on this principle, a very great deal can be said in
its favour. It was a proposal infinitely better
than any mere mendings of it which have been
since demanded, and since apparently allowed.
The so-called ' concessions ^ have been all for the
worse, because they were elements wholly alien to
its original conception, inconsistent with its prin
ciple, and inconsistent with common sense. The
granting of them, if indeed this was really in
tended, was the final and most conclusive proof
of the levity and the rashness with which the
very nerve-centres and ganglions of our political
organisation cut, and hacked, and handled, by- the
quack doctors who assume to mend it.
It has sometimes amused me to speculate on
the reception with which Mr. Gladstone would
have greeted his own proposals of the 8th of April
1886, if they had been made by another man and
in the interests of another party ! How he would
have rushed at them, stamped upon them, and
torn them into shreds and tatters ! It does in
deed seem like a joke or a dream when we re-
D

50 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
member what some of the salient features of those
proposals were, the manner of their proposal, and
the manner in which they have been since handled
by their own parents. One great characteristic
stares us in the face. Ireland was encouraged and
stimulated to think of herself as a separate
nationality in the most exaggerated terms — terms
wholly at variance with history, whether it be the
history of race or of institutions. And all this
inflated language ended in the proposal to reduce
Ireland to the condition of a tributary province,
with no share whatever in Imperial concerns.
The leader of the Liberal party was exhibited
devising a new Constitution on the complete and
systematic severance of representation and taxa
tion. Nor were the Irish to get in exchange any
thing approaching to those powers of Home Rule
which are naturally associated with the idea of
a separate nationality such as they were not only
allowed, but were incited, to assert. The garrison
of Ireland was to be of those who were stigmatised
as foreigners. She was not even to be allowed to
regulate her own taxation in the great items of
Customs and Excise. Her tribute to the Imperial
Exchequer was to be fixed for a long period of

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 51
years. Further contributions might be asked in
the case of foreign war — war in the policy of
which the Irish people could have no voice, but
still war which might be intimated to the
separate Irish Parliament by a gracious communi
cation from the Throne.
All this was recommended or defended on the
alleged success of foreign and colonial institutions
— not one of which bears the faintest likeness to
the new constitution proposed for Ireland. There
is not one of our Colonies which would not re
pudiate such a constitution as worthy only of the
days of George Grenville and of Charles Towns-
hend. There is not one of the provinces of which
the great colony of Canada is composed, for ex
ample, which, in its relations even with the Central
Legislature or Dominion Parliament, would tolerate
such a constitution for a moment. The whole
device was essentially incapable of solving the
problem, if it was imperative to attempt such a
problem at all. It showed no appreciation of the
forces which must be evoked by the setting up
of a separate Parliament, with loud -mouthed en
couragements to think and to boast of itself as
representing a separate nationality. It was like a

52 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
new form of steam-engine, built up in all its tubes,
boilers, cylinders, and condensers, of some such
material as papier - mache, coloured, glazed, and
painted with the flowers of rhetoric, but without
any estimate of the tremendous pressures exerted
by the expansive powers of steam.
In saying this I am not saying that Mr. Glad
stone had no good reason for his proposal to
eliminate the Irish members from the Imperial
Parliament. He had two most excellent reasons,
one of which he gave, and on the other of which
he was silent. He was silent on the fact that
the Irish members had succeeded in making them
selves intolerable. They were not only disloyal
to the Empire, but they were specially and imme
diately disloyal to the great assembly in which
they sat. They had lowered its character, impeded
its business, and were shaking its authority. If
such conduct and dispositions were really to be
permanent, there could be no resource except to
do without them. Irishmen have been, and ought
to be again, an ornament to that House. The
natural genius of the people eminently adapts
them to shine in popular assemblies. But no
assembly can live or work with a whole group

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 53
of members who are disloyal to it, who use its
forms to discredit it, and who convert its ancient
privileges, which were intended to secure its liberty,
into weapons directed to the destruction of its
life. This was the real cause of, although not the
avowed reason for, the proposal of Mr. Gladstone.
But the reason which he did assign was an excel
lent reason too, because closely connected with the
other. If Ireland was to have a separate Parlia
ment, her members could not be allowed to rule
Great Britain as well as their own country. This
would be intolerable indeed. In objecting to this
our former leader was consentient with us and
with himself. This was the very objection upon
which for ten years he had challenged his oppon
ents to produce an intelligible plan. So early as
1874 he had denounced with ridicule 'the pro
posal of the Irish leader,' by defining it thus : —
'That plan is this — that exclusively Irish affairs
are to be judged in Ireland, and then that the
Irish members are to come to the Imperial Par
liament and to judge as they may think fit of
the general affairs of the Empire, and also of
affairs exclusively English and Scotch.'1 On the
1 History of an Idea, pp. 14-15-

54 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
Irish leader shouting ' No ! ' Mr. Gladstone turned
upon him — 'It is all very well for gentlemen to
cry "No11 when the blot has been hit.' And he
now admits that his own special objection ever
since has been to any 'proposal that Irishmen
should deal exclusively with their own affairs, and
also jointly with ours.1 1
So far Mr. Gladstone was perfectly right. But
he was right only on one assumption, namely,
that the breaking up of our Imperial Parliament
is a work that must be done. To those
who do not admit that assumption, the proposal
to eliminate the Irish members, and to reduce
Ireland to a tributary province, whilst simultan
eously her people are incited to claim a separate
nationality, is a proposal which only confirms our
insuperable objections to the whole scheme as
incongruous and impossible. And so, again, we
do not deny the force of another subsidiary argu
ment of Mr. Gladstone, namely this, that it passes
the wit of man so to separate between Irish and
Imperial affairs as to keep the Irish members in
the Parliament at Westminster, and yet prevent
them from that undue interference with our affairs
1 History of an Idea, p. 15.

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 55
which would be intolerable when they have a
separate Parliament of their own. We admit the
force of this argument, and we are glad that in
this matter at least our little group of political
architects did feel, at least for a time, some
fraction of the difficulties to be encountered in
rebuilding the British Constitution. But our
admission of this argument only confirms again,
by a most effective illustration, the chaotic results
of the presumptuous attempt which we are re
sisting. We are confirmed, too, in the stand we have
made, and in the resistance which we continue to
offer, by the exhibition which these architects
have made of themselves on this very matter in
the later stages of our contest. Mr. Gladstone
himself began, almost at once, the exhibition of
instability and irresolution which are the sure
symptoms of rash and heedless counsels. Nothing
could be more emphatic than his language on the
famous 8th of April in the unfolding of his scheme.
' There cannot,' he said, ' be a domestic Legislature
in Ireland dealing with Irish affairs, and Irish
peers and Irish representatives sitting in Parlia
ment at Westminster to take part in English and

56 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
Scotch affairs.' He was inclined to believe that
this 'would be universally admitted.1 Neither
could we draw a distinction between affairs which
are Imperial and affairs which are not Imperial
so as to make it ' practicable for Irish representa
tives to come here for the settlement, not of
English and Scotch, but of Imperial affairs.' He
had 'thought much, reasoned much, and inquired
much, with regard to that distinction.' We had
hoped it might be possible to draw it. But he
'had arrived at the conclusion that it cannot be
drawn.1 He 'believed it passes the wit of man
to do so.1
Five days later the sails of this good ship
were seen to be shaking in the wind. The
helmsman was unsteady. On April 13 Mr. Glad
stone referred to the problem as ' one which British
statesmanship might be found adequate to solve.'
He would not 'close the door against any con
siderations of this kind.' On the 1st of May
he told the Midlothian electors that this was
a mere detail. By the 10th of May the vessel
of our state was fairly on the tack. The Prime
Minister would provide in Committee that 'when
a proposal is made to alter the taxation in respect

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 57
of customs and excise, Irish members shall have
an opportunity of appearing in this House to
take a share in the transaction of that business.'1
Nor was this all. The subject involved no vital
principle, 'nor had the Government aimed at
any binding decision.'
This has been the cue ever since. The whole
Anglo-Parnellite alliance has been cautious, be
cause disunited, on the subject. They have pre
tended to treat this question of the inclusion or
exclusion of the Irish Members in the Imperial
Parliament as a question of detail. Yet nothing
can be more clear than that almost everything
turns and depends upon it. If the Irish Mem
bers are to be kept as, and where, they are,
then their so-called separate Parliament can be
nothing but some provincial body possessing little
more than the powers of a great Town Council or
a great County Board. This is absolutely incon
sistent with the whole tone and language of the
demand made by the Parnellite party, and seconded
with fervour by their new Anglican ally. If, on the
other hand, the Irish Members, being kept as they
are in numbers, are to be restrained and limited as
1 Speeches on the Irish Question, 1886, p. 131.

58 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
regards the subjects on which they are to be allowed
to vote, then the whole scheme must be recon
structed from top to bottom, and a task must be
undertaken which Mr. Gladstone had declared to
be beyond the wit of man. If, again, as a third
alternative, Ireland is to be represented at West
minster by a limited number of representatives sent
as a delegation from its own separate Parliament, or
from its separate constituencies — then we are landed
in a Federal Constitution which is absolutely dif
ferent in its nature from the proposal actually made,
and as widely different from the ancient Constitution
of the United Kingdoms.
Is it possible to retain any respect for the politi
cal judgment and knowledge of a group of men who
play fast and loose with us upon such a subject as
this — and who, manifestly, are not agreed among
themselves on the fundamental principles on which
the new British Constitution is to be framed ? One
prominent member of the party has lately spoken
with ridicule and contempt of the very notion that
the Irish Members can be retained in the Imperial
Parliament after they have been established in a
separate Parliament of their own, and asks whether
they are to be summoned like waiters by the ringing

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 59
of a bell when some question arises on which they
are allowed to vote.1 Another member of the
party, again, treats this kind of difficulty as a mere
invention of the enemy, and intimates that the
problem which passes the wit of Mr. Gladstone is
quite easily to be solved by the genius of Mr.
Childers. Such exhibitions as these cut deeply into any trace
of confidence which might have been left in the know
ledge and capacity of those who assume to guide us
through a tremendous experiment. But there are
other facts affecting quite as deeply our trust in
them touching matters which, to us, are matters of
honour and of conscience. For many years we have
been consentient with them in recognising as a fact
that the Irish party did not seem to be bound by
the accepted doctrines of civilised societies in respect
to property and personal freedom in the transactions
of ordinary hfe. This was the only meaning and
the only defence of such speeches as those delivered
by our then Leader in 1882. It was the only
meaning and the only justification of the Bills he
then brought in for the repression of crime and the
protection of liberty — of the repeated testimony he
1 Earl of Rosebery.

60 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION.
bore to the urgent necessity which demanded them
— and of the strong action which, during three
years, he took in the exercise of their powers. It
was in continuous support and illustration of this
fact, and of the terrible evidence which proved its
truth, that Sir George Trevelyan and his successor
in the Irish Office, were engaged night after night
in the House of Commons, down to the very close
of Mr. Gladstone's Government in 1885, in expos
ing the tyrannies and crimes of the Irish Land
League, and in exposing also the close connection
between the political action of Irish Members
and the more conspicuous outbursts of crime.

PART II.

THE NEW PAPER CONSTITUTION
HOW IT WAS SCHEMED
AND DROPPED.

It was our absolute duty to remember all the
preceding facts when the same Ministers came to
present us with a new Constitution breaking up
the Imperial Parliament, and setting up a separate
Parliament and Executive for Ireland. It is
always open to all men to change their opinions.
But it is not open to any man to suppress
facts when he undertakes a public duty on which
these facts have a direct and immediate bearing.
We looked, therefore, for some features in the
new Constitution which might recognise the special
facts so long acknowledged and so long proved
by indisputable evidence.
We found one such feature of it in the Land
Bill. The danger to property was acknowledged
there. Nothing else could justify or account for

64 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
so formidable a proposal. The owners of land
in Ireland — ranging from those who had bought
property quite recently, under the direct guarantee
and authority of Courts appointed for the pur
pose, up to families which have been settled in
Ireland for seven hundred years, and have been
' more Irish than the Irish ' — all these were offered
the option of selling their property and clearing
out of their native country if they were afraid
to live in it under the new Constitution. I
am not undervaluing this offer. It was at least
an honest one to make ; but it involved a tre
mendous confession. It was absolutely demanded
by honour if — but only if — all property in Ireland
was to be handed over to a Government which
could not be trusted to respect it. There are
some political proposals which speak for them
selves. Their meaning cannot be misunderstood.
No forms of language, more ingenious than in
genuous, on the part of a Minister in proposing
them can affect their significance. And this pro
posal was one of these. I fully admit that it was
hardly and even unjustly treated; but the man
who treated it most unjustly was the Minister
himself. Nothing could carry such a measure

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 65
except the strongest sentiment of duty and of
honour, and nothing could establish a case of duty
and of honour except a frank confession that the
new British Constitution was to hand over all the
holders of property in Ireland to a Government
animated by the morality of the Land League.
But this was exactly what it did not suit the
rest of the Minister's plan that he should ac
knowledge too distinctly.
To this, and to another circumstance, we
doubtless owed the extraordinary speech which
ushered in the proposal. There was an interval
of eight days between the introduction of the
new Irish Government Bill and that of the
Irish Land Purchase Bill.1 This interval had
been long enough to show that Irish land
owners generally were not disposed to be ' bought
out' — to desert their country, or to live on in
their old houses reduced to villas, and connected
with nothing but some covers, some pleasure-
grounds, and a garden. They could not be
brought to believe so suddenly that this was really
the only alternative left to their choice. The
homes they loved and had lived in for genera-
1 April 8th to April i6th.
E

66 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
tions, the property they had inherited, and all the
associations connected with them, they clung to
still. Every consideration of justice and of gene
rosity demanded that this feeling should be recog
nised and respected. It was at least natural, if
indeed not actually meritorious. The obvious
policy of any Minister, too, if he had a single
eye to the success of his proposal, was to argue
in the same spirit — to point out how much had
been done to deprive ownership of land in Ireland
of all that could operate hardly on the tenant
class, and what a high and honourable obligation lay
on Parliament to protect owners in the enjoyment
of what remained. Instead of this, the speech
of the Minister was little more than one long
raking up of all old sores against Irish land
owners, just as if every alleged grievance were
still as operative as ever — just as if he himself
had never introduced and carried any Land Bill,
completely removing them, whatever else it did.
Formally indeed, and in words, the proposal was
founded on ' serious convictions both of honour and
of duty ; u but no argument was used to make clear
wherein that obligation consisted, or whence it
1 Speeches on the Irish Question, l886, p. 108.

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 67
flowed — except, indeed, the offensive argument that
the Imperial Legislature was particeps crfoninis in
all the alleged evils of Irish landed property, and
that Irish landowners were to be regarded as our
' garrison ' in a foreign country.1 Yet some better
argument than this was imperatively demanded
to overcome the natural and inevitable objections
which rose up from many sides against a proposal
so large in itself and so revolutionary in the con
fessions it involved. If the speech had been
speciaUy directed to rouse a spirit hostile to
the measure, instead of favourable to it, no argu
ments more ingenious could have been devised.
And in addition to this tendency of the speech
as regards its whole texture and direction, Irish
members connected with property could not help
feeling that the speech was delivered in a tone of
great bitterness against those who refused to sacri
fice their country and their homes.
Then there was another feature in the hand
ling of this matter, against which we protest firmly,
as involving assumptions of power and of right on
the part of political leaders, in which it would be
absolutely inconsistent with our honour to have any
1 Speeches on the Irish Question, 1886, p. 83.

68 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
share. I refer to the passage in an address to the
electors of Midlothian, issued May 1, 1886, in
which the owners of property in Ireland were
warned that ' the sands were running in the hour
glass.11 Prophecy may be legitimate to political
leaders, but not prophecy of the kind which in
volves a threat. A mountaineer may warn a traveller
in the valley beneath him that rocks or avalanches
are on the move. But if that mountaineer is a man
who stands with cartridges and levers in his hands
to loosen the stones and bring down the snow, then
his prophecy becomes a threat. This is and must
be the position of a political leader who tells the
owners of property that unless they do something
that he bids them they will be ruined and despoiled.
Some of us were consentient with Mr. Gladstone
in proposing, and we are all now in the position
of having acquiesced with him in carrying, the most
fundamental changes in landed property of Ireland.
He did, indeed, just passingly allude to these
measures in his speech ; 2 but he alluded to them
as a subject on which he would not dwell, as ' it
was beside his argument.' That indeed was true.
It was beside his particular argument. But it was
1 Speeches on the Irish Question, 1886, p. 173. 2 Ibid. p. 88.

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 69
not beside the question to which that argument
applied. It was strictly relevant to that question,
and it condemned the relevancy of the arguments
he did employ, and the justice of the reproaches
he levelled at the victims of his new policy.
Nothing could induce us to be parties to the use
of language implying such threats under the guise
of prophecies. We don't assume the right to
accuse others of any conscious violation of justice or
of duty. But we are firm in declaring that for our
selves, and in our own consciences, we never could be
parties to the use of such language, or to the policy
which it implies. We deem it contrary to our
duty to propose or to vote for any constitution
which exposes private persons to plunder and the
loss of all individual freedom, with no other escape
than the acceptance of exile and of commutation
in money. All the dexterities of language by which
the nakedness of such a proposal was disguised are
devices with which we could not be associated even
in the smallest measure.
But if we protest against the manner in which
this proposal was made, we protest, if possible,
even more strongly against the manner in which
it was withdrawn. If it was a proposal once,

70 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
or ever, made ' under serious convictions both of
honour and of " duty," ' J it must remain an obli
gation in spite of any amount of reluctance
or opposition on the part either of those to
whom the offer was made, or on the part of
Parliament. There is always one simple and ob
vious alternative open to a leader and to a party
who make a proposal of this acknowledged char
acter and find themselves unable to carry it. They
may relinquish a scheme which is thus deprived of
a condition essential to its justice and to its hon
ourable character ; or they may themselves cease to
strive for office, or for the retention of office, when
it can no longer be held except on the terms of
abandoning such an obligation. But neither of
these courses was the one actually taken. In mak
ing the proposal words were used which seemed to
proclaim that it was an inseparable part of the
whole scheme. But this meaning was hedged by
other words which reserved an outlet of retreat.
The inseparability was cautiously declared to be
' in our own minds, and for the existing juncture.' 2
Such, at least, is the account given of it since.
1 Speeches on the Irish Question, p. 108.
Lessons of the Elections, p. 44.

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 71
But this is no inseparability at all. Such words
conveyed no pledge whatever ; and accordingly
the moment it became clear that Irishmen such as
the Fitzgeralds, and the Butlers, and the Hamil-
tons, and a thousand others, were loyal to the
Union, and were not prepared to abandon their
ancient position in their native country, the pro
posal of purchase was ostentatiously withdrawn, as
if with the exultation of men to whom an oppor
tunity has been happily opened of shaking them
selves free from an acknowledged but inconvenient
obligation. It is now declared to have been ' swept
ruthlessly off the field of present action.' ' The
twinship ' of the two Bills is denounced as 'having
been for the time disastrous to the hopes of Ire
land,' which means disastrous to the hopes of the
ParneUite alliance. Therefore it is added emphati
cally that this twinship ' exists no longer.1
But a new bargain is advertised. The twinship
of the two Bills being dissolved the author of them
is free to make another twinship, more close and
intimate — the twinship, namely, between his own
party and the party of Mr. Parnell. Let Home Rule
be granted without any such clog on its operations.
Let the owners of property who have opposed

72 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
the Purchase Bill look out in future for themselves.
It will, Mr. Gladstone confesses, need all their
vigilance for the purpose of preventing the adop
tion of schemes of Land Purchase founded on prin
ciples very different from, and indeed opposite to,
those of the Bill lately consigned to the limbo of
abortions.1 What can this mean ? Who are the men from
whom this danger is to come ? Is it from the
proposed separate Parliament in Ireland? Then
are we to understand it to be now confessed that
property in Ireland is to be left to the doctrine
of spoliation ? And how is this warning threat
to be reconciled with the declaration that the safe
guards for minorities which had been proposed were
not provided in consequence of any mistrust enter
tained by Mr. Gladstone, but only ' in consequence
of mistrust entertained by others 1 ? What are we
to believe ? Is there, or is there not, just cause for
apprehension to the owners of property if they be
left to be dealt with by a separate Irish Parliament ?
Is it true, or is it not true, that danger to them
would be so real that our honour and our obliga
tion demanded the most onerous, the most unusual,
1 Lessons of the Elections, p. 46.

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 73
precautions ? Or is it true, on the contrary, that
all such precautions were merely ' contributions to
disarm honest, though unfounded jealousies ' ? Or,
lastly, is it true that one at least of these unfor
tunate minorities is only too probably to be exposed
to the obscurely worded but darkly foreboded dan
gers shadowed forth in this angry passage ?
We dare not follow any leader who leads us
thus. We dare not dissever the duty of devising
special measures for protecting individual freedom
and property, and all the privileges of British
subjects, when we are devising other measures
which, as we know and confess, will expose them
to special dangers. We have a right to know
what is meant by all this language of menace
against men whom, along with all other men, it
is the absolute duty of responsible statesmen to
protect in all their just and legal interests ; and
we ask whether it has indeed become part of the
creed of the reorganised Liberal party, that when
any class of men exercises its right to judge and
act freely on great constitutional proposals they
are to be thus threatened, and, if possible, bullied
into acquiescence?
Then there is another feature of the conduct

74 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
and language of the new Parnellite alliance on
this subject, which is indeed less offensive, but is
very little more worthy of respect. They do not
openly deny, or pretend to deny, that an Irish
Home Rule Parliament would so act, or would
probably so act, as to endanger property and
attack the fundamental principles on which it
rests. Yet they don't like — it does not suit their
game to say so openly. They fall back upon the
device of representing the whole land question as
one too heavy to be thrown upon the shoulders
of the new Irish Parliament. In pure charity and
kindness we ought to take it off their hands
before we start them on their way. This is one
of the methods of expression adopted in Mr.
Gladstone's first speeches on the subject, and it
is one by which Lord Spencer has been frequently
of late escaping from inconvenient avowals. But
here again we cannot ourselves consent to employ
these evasions. If the new Irish Parliament can
not be trusted to deal with this subject, it must
be because they are not expected to be bound by
the ordinary laws of civilised society. And if this
be true of this particular subject, what confidence
can we have that it may not be equally true of

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 75
their probable attitude on many other subjects ?
Moreover, as agrarian questions are the main
questions affecting Irish society in all its phases,
what guarantee can be given — what reasonable
hope can be held out to us — that the new Irish
nationality, with its new Parliament and its new
Executive, will acquiesce — except for some purpose
of their own, and for the moment — in its exclusion
from powers of ' Home Rule ' over that very
branch of legislation which interests and excites
them most ?
Not only, therefore, the proposal of the Land
Purchase Bill, but all the circumstances attending
it, and especially the language attending its with
drawal, prove to demonstration that our former
leaders who undertook to draw up a new British
Constitution in sixty-six days have not only com
pletely broken down in the attempt, but that
they have exhibited a character in respect to the
most solemn public obligations, which must inspire
us with profound distrust.
Before the division on the second reading had
been taken, and still more before the subsequent
appeal to the constituencies, more and more of
the lumber of the new constitution had to be

76 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
thrown overboard. Not even the great personal
influence of our former leader could have secured
even a tolerable minority unless he had given it
to be clearly understood that the whole scheme
was open to a complete recast. In spite of this
practical abandonment of everything definite in
the proposal, he was defeated by a considerable
majority, and when he and his supporters went to
the country there seemed to be a positive com
petition which of them should repudiate most
loudly being bound to either of the two Bills, or
to any part of them.
Such a scene has never before been presented
in our political history. The Liberal party was
reduced to a set of men who were to follow a
leader with nothing in his mouth but an empty
phrase — ' The Irish people were to have the man
agement of exclusively Irish affairs.1 Nothing
more definite was vouchsafed. The formula had
certain variations — some of them ingenious — but
most of them purely verbal, and none of them
throwing the least light on the practical measures
to which they pointed. In the History of an Idea
we may count some twelve or fourteen editions or
variations of this phrase. We were expected not

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 77
to ask the simplest questions — not to test the
meaning of the words dinned into our ears, or re
peated by our lips. Is safety to life, liberty, and
property in Ireland an ' exclusively Irish affair ' ?
Is the right of every Irishman — labourer or trades
man — to work for whom he likes, an ' exclusively
Irish affair ' ? Is the right of every Irish shop
keeper to sell to all who will give him custom an
exclusively Irish affair? Is the right of every
Irishman to be honest if he pleases in paying his
just debts an 'exclusively Irish affair'? May a
poor Irishman hire a little farm if he likes for
the support of his family without fear of being
cruelly murdered — is this also an affair ' ex
clusively Irish ' ? Is all Imperial duty and re
sponsibility in the enforcement of human rights
and obligations in Ireland to be considered an
' exclusively Irish affair ' ?
These are a few, and a . few only, of the ques
tions which must be answered before we can put
any intelligible meaning on the windy phrases under
which we are summoned to consent to the breaking
up of our Parliamentary Constitution, and to the
unknown and undefined inventions by which it is
to be replaced.

78 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
Moreover, in seeking to probe these questions to
the bottom — as it is our absolute duty to do — there
is one consideration which we cannot forget. The
Irish members of the Parnellite party had agreed
to the plan by which they were to be excluded
from the Imperial Parliament and all its concerns,
and were to be relegated to a subordinate Parlia-
liament in Ireland, limited to affairs ' exclusively
Irish.' They had thus ' sold their country,' in a
sense which can never be applied even by the most
rabid opponent of Mr. Pitt's Union — to the Irish
members who voted for that measure in 1800. It
cannot be asserted that they divorced their country
from Imperial concerns. On the contrary, for them
at least, it must be owned that if they gave up
something for Ireland as regarded a separate Legis
lature, they gained for Ireland, on the other hand,
and for the first time, the splendid privilege of
an equal proportionate share in the government
and legislation of the noblest Empire in the world.
But these Parnellite members were sacrificing that
position after it had been attained ; they were
sinking their country again to a position distinctly
lower, subordinate, and tributary. And for what ?
What was the price they were to get for this

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 79
great surrender ? Nothing was said, but much
might be suspected. Was it the opportunity for
that which Mr. Gladstone had himself denounced
as plunder ? What proof had he given, or even
suggested, that there was any fundamental change
in the aims and objects of the Irish party ? Did
he not himself point out, in the very speech in
which he expounded his new plan, that crime was
rife in Ireland, and the law was not maintained ?
The pretext that this arose from the 'foreign
character' of the law, was a pretext which sug
gested changes in that law to suit the ideas which,
by contrast, might be native. And what were
these ? The ideas of the Land League ? Let the
ghastly spectacle reply of that old man in the
wilds of Kerry, who was lately nursing a small
farm for his daughter's husband, and who for this
crime has been murdered in the most cruel and
brutal manner — his limb shattered by repeated
shots, left in agony where neither doctor could
reach him to relieve his body, nor priest have
access to soothe his soul, until death put an
end to his misery with his life. Such deeds
as these are deeds that have a significance far
beyond what is called 'ordinary crime.' Irishmen

80 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
are accustomed to boast sometimes that in Ireland
'ordinary crime' is small. But the crime which
is common is precisely that which affects the char
acter of large portions of the people, because of
its indicating either a wide prevalence of popular
sympathy, or else a wide submission to tyranny
and terror. But both of these are precisely the
conditions which sound the most warning of all
notes against the safety of intrusting to the rulers
in such a community the lives, liberty, and property
of their fellow-subjects.
And this brings me to one feature in Mr. Glad
stone's course which may well inspire us with
special distrust. We have seen that when he
proposed his own Prevention of Crimes Bill he
emphatically declared that it was less the murders
and outrages perpetrated on the wealthier classes
than the sufferings of the humble and the poor
under the tyranny of the Land League, which had
induced him and his colleagues to apply for special
legislation. This description of the facts was true,
whatever we may think of the value and the virtue
of the distinction drawn. And this fact continued
to be true in 1886, as it continues to be true at
the present moment. Nothing in the conduct and

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 81
language of the Anglo-Parnellites is more un
justifiable than the new pretence that Irish crime
is chiefly connected with exorbitant rents and un
just evictions. They know perfectly well that
crime is most rife against and amongst the poor,
as a means of enforcing the tryanny of the League
upon thousands who would gladly escape from it
if they could or dared. They know perfectly well
that in a large part of Ireland the organisation
is so complete that there is no sort of independence
among the mass of the people. They know that
this tyranny enters into the field of politics, and
is specially directed to securing an exclusive sup
port to the leader of the organisation. Yet it is
under these conditions that our former leader has
called on us to break up the Parliament of the
United Kingdom, on the plea that Ireland as a
nation has finally and unequivocally declared that
she seeks Home Rule by an overwhelming majority
of her representatives.
On general grounds, and without circumstances
very special, we might fairly demur to accepting
such a necessity as that of rebuilding the British
Constitution on the strength of sudden general
elections on a new franchise, and the result of which

82 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
is, after all, far from unanimous. Fundamental
changes going, by admission, down to the very roots
of the Constitution, both civil and political, are not
changes which can be safely determined by plebi
scites. Probably the worst Government which has
ever been set up in modern Europe — that of
Napoleon in. — was founded on a plebiscite which
I believe was perfectly genuine, and quite as in
dependent as any such vote can be said to be. The
impulses under which the masses may be got to vote
away the liberties of others, and their own, are
impulses as numerous as they are unsafe. But in
this particular case of Ireland there are a multitude
of very special circumstances which detract from the
value and significance of the popular vote. In the
first place, a very large part of the voters are ex
tremely ignorant, and had only just been admitted
to the franchise. The exercise of such a power for
the first time by a people wholly unaccustomed to,
and unfitted for, deliberate thought upon the deepest
questions affecting Society, must be an exercise
peculiarly liable to error. In no country in the
world, perhaps, certainly in none of the old countries
of Europe, would it be reasonably safe to be
guided by such a vote in such matters. But in

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 83
Ireland we know as a fact that this class is now
widely under terror — dominated by secret societies
which visit all who are honest and independent with
violence, outrage, and persecution. We know that
a very large percentage were so ignorant that they
even belong to the class formally declaring them
selves to be 'illiterate,' and unable to sign their
names. We know that the votes of all these men
were under the direct control of agents of the Land
League, who attended at the polls to keep them in
obedience. Under such conditions, even if the vote had been
much larger and much more unanimous than it was,
it would be absurd in any rational statesman to
quote it or describe it as a deliberate decision of the
people of Ireland, on the strength of which we are
to unsay all that we have been saying touching
questions of duty and morality, or to enter into a
conspiracy of silence on facts which we had all been
quoting as equally indisputable and important.
Yet this is the course taken by the Anglo-Parnell
ites. There is something specially suspicious in the
vehemence with which Mr. Gladstone, from the first
moment that the elections were over, began to
reiterate that Ireland had declared its mind in a

84 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
manner that could not and ought not to be even for
for a moment questioned. Politicians are very apt
to be thus specially dogmatic and enthusiastic on
some point which their inner conscience tells them
is dangerously weak. It is instructive to observe
the very different spirit in which Mr. Gladstone has
treated the verdict of the people of Great Britain
at the polls. He falls upon that verdict fiercely
with all the resources of his arithmetical faculty,
and absolutely refuses to accept it as justifying even
a momentary suspension of his efforts to reverse it.
There is nothing even tolerable — far less anything
so sacred as to be above criticism — in the verdict of
the people of Great Britain. But the Irish populace
— to a large extent poor, ignorant, league-ridden,
cowed, and systematically intimidated — are to be
taken at their first word, and without a murmur.
Setting aside altogether the notorious fact that the
commercial and generally the educated classes in
Ireland are on the side of the Union — setting aside
the argument that in such questions as the framing
of a new constitution for a whole people those classes
ought to have special weight, we cannot admit
such an overwhelming preponderance, even of the
ignorant, as has been assumed. The facts and

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 85
figures connected with the Irish elections in 1885
are in glaring contradiction to this assumption.
There were 78 contested constituencies. The total
number of electors in these was 585,715. Of this
total only 295,269 voted for the Parnellite candi
dates, which is a very small majority indeed on such
a total. The remaining number is made up of more
than 145,000 votes given for the Unionist candi
dates, and the enormous number of 145,361 votes
not given at all— owing to the intimidation exer
cised on the voters. The total majority over the
Unionists, and over those who did not dare to vote,
has been stated on good authority at the quite
trifling amount of 4,82s.1 Nothing but the most
reckless passion and fanaticism could represent such
a vote as this — given under such conditions — and
amongst such a population, as one which we must
instantly accept as expressing the deliberate decision
of the whole Irish people, and as compelling us to
break up our Parliament and to rebuild our Consti
tution. This wilful and passionate determination not to
look even for a moment behind the polls in the
Irish elections, when it is notorious that undue
1 Irish Election Returns, 1885, L.L.P.U. Offices, Dublin.

86 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
influences were powerfully exerted there, stands out
in marked contrast with the equally passionate
determination to analyse in the most hostile spirit
the electoral returns from Great Britain, which
were at least immeasurably more honest and more
independent. And this is all the more significant
for us when we note the purpose or intention with
which these contrasted modes of dealing stand in
very clear connection. The return of some forty-
five Parnellite members more than had been re
turned before is the ostensible ground, and the only
one, upon which our invertebrate leaders defend
their great change in the recognition both of duties
and of facts. We do not deny that the existence
of such a large party in the House of Commons
which is bent on breaking up our Imperial Parlia
ment, is a serious and a dangerous evil. But we do
deny that it throws any new light whatever on the
ultimate aims of that party, or on the methods
which it employs. On the contrary, all the circum
stances connected with its operations confirm our
former estimates of that character and of those
methods. Superior force or insuperable difficulties
may compel us to change a policy, but it cannot
justify us in following men who, without one

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 87
particle of evidence, retract all that they and we
have been saying for years on matters of fact and
on principles of moral obligation. It is quite
intolerable alike to our perceptions of truth and to
our sense of duty, that on the mere fact of some
forty-five men being returned by a very ignorant
population, under the most violent pressure and the
most immoral guidance, we should not only cease
to fight, as we have long done, against the breaking
up of Parliament, but that we should pretend to
absolute conversion, and become the close associ
ates and intimate allies of those whom we have so
justly and so constantly denounced.
Nor is this feeling founded only on that revolt,
which is right and natural, against the humiliation
of conscious insincerity in ourselves and against the
exhibition of irrational inconsistency in others.
It is founded also on mental instincts which are
inseparable from all true political faculty. In
drawing up new political constitutions everything
depends on our discernment of the forces operating
in the Society with which we deal. Forms of
government, and contrivances for the control of
men, which may be quite adequate to their purpose
if applied to communities in which the fundamental

88 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
doctrines of civilisation have never been called in
question, will be as the green withes on the limbs
of Samson if these political contrivances are
applied to communities honeycombed by the doc
trines of anarchy. When we resist, therefore, and
protest against changes of language and of opinion
so violent, so sudden, and so purely external in
their causes and occasion, as the changes of our old
friends in the Irish question, we are not merely
revolting against these changes because they are
changes, but because they betray a dangerous insta
bility of mind on the cardinal conditions of the
problem to be solved. If the conditions of Irish
Society were like the conditions of our own early
colonies and plantations, in which the people ac
cepted simply and instinctively all the traditions of
personal freedom, and of respect for property and
for law in which they had been born, then, indeed,
we might try with a light heart even the danger
ous work of dividing what had been united, and of
devising new ties to keep together in some degree
parts which we deliberately dissever. But at least
up to a recent moment we were consentient in
declaring that we knew this not to be the case in
Ireland. The allegations of a complete and favour-

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 89
able change in this respect are allegations founded
on no evidence whatever. On the contrary, we see
that in despite of special legislation to make life
artificially easier to the Irish people than to all
other men, the agitators have become more and
more violent, and have exhibited more and more
clearly the determination ' to march through plun
der to disintegration.'
We note another circumstance fatal to our confi
dence in the soberness of mind and judgment which
can alone fit men for such a task as that which they
have undertaken. Not only do they grievously
misinterpret the symptoms of the present time, but
their language is marked by the most passionate
misrepresentations of the past. Mr. Gladstone
speaks with contumely of our knowledge of history,
and of our reluctance to enter upon that field with
him. Not only do we repel this accusation, but,
with the fullest conviction, we assert that his
speeches have teemed with the most erroneous
conceptions and representations on matters of his
torical fact. We deny altogether the justice of
the picture he has drawn of the methods by which
the Union was effected. On the most lenient
view, it is one-sided to the most deplorable degree.

90 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
Even if it were nearer the truth than it is, it could
not and ought not to affect our course. He him
self professes to admit that the Union ought not
to be repealed. Such great transactions as the
Irish Union cannot be treated or dealt with upon
the opinion we may form on the mere personal
incidents or agencies which marked the conduct
of them. Roman Catholics reproach the Anglican
Reformation with circumstances of violence and
corruption which cannot be disputed, and which
we can never look back upon without condemna
tion and remorse. But no sudden awakening on
our part to the brutalities of Henry vni. could
afford any reason at all for recalling the Reforma
tion. The great revolution of 1688 was effected
under such circumstances of personal conduct on
the part of many men and of many parties that
the calm and judicial spirit of Mr. Lecky has con
demned it thus — 'It was effected by a foreign prince
with a foreign army. It was rendered possible,
or at least bloodless, by an amount of aggravated
treachery, duplicity, and ingratitude seldom sur
passed in history.'1 This has all the ring of Mr.
Gladstone's attack upon the Union ; yet no man
1 Lecky's History of England, vol. i. p. 16.

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 91
in his senses would propose that on such grounds as
these we should undo anything that was then done.
We hold, therefore, that the violent and most
exaggerated language in which Mr. Gladstone
continually speaks of the conduct of the Irish
Union, is as irrelevant as it is one-sided and
unjust. It is impossible to read the Cornwallis
correspondence without seeing that the aims of
Mr. Pitt and of his agents were at least high
and noble aims ; that the influences and motives
amongst Irishmen which were opposed to the
Union were infinitely more corrupt than those
which were in its favour ; and that in so
far as the means Mr. Pitt and Lord Cornwallis
did employ deserved the name of corruption at
all, they were used to buy up, and to buy off, the
vested interests of corruption, and to close accounts
with it for ever. The evidence of men as pure-
minded as any amongst us now, is conclusive against
the truth and justice of Mr. Gladstone's passionate
declamation against the greatest of his prede
cessors. One such evidence comes from a man
with whom Mr. Gladstone must have many sym
pathies — a man of such singularly independent
mind that his influence on thought in England

92 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
has been universally acknowledged — the once well-
known Mr. Alexander Knox. No man had better
opportunities of observing Irish society, and the
following passage in a letter from him, dated
February 14, 1800, shows the general result of his
observations on the comparative morality of the
two Irish parties — ' I am sure Government will
proceed, let the defections be ever so numerous ;
for a majority they will still have, in spite of both
corruption and cowardice ; and let that majority
be ever so small, having truth and reason with
them, so many of the most sensible and disin
terested men in Ireland on their side, and the
strength of the British Empire at their back, they
would deserve to be hung up as monuments of
folly and weakness if they were deterred from
their purpose by the clamour of narrow-minded,
interested lawyers, or the rude roar of a frantic
populace. I have the pleasure of thinking that
neither Lord Cornwallis nor Lord Castlereagh are
very subject either to trepidation or versatility ;
and their friend Mr. Pitt will be as little disposed
as either of them to give up Ireland to the
government of selfishness and prejudice.11
1 Remains of Alexander Knox, vol. iv. p. 6l.

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 93
It would be unreasonable to deny that a separate
Parliament, which in one form or another had
existed so long in Ireland, must have gathered
round itself some most natural and most legiti
mate prepossessions. But the evidence of a most
upright man, with a wide experience, and a keen
and close observation of human character, is given
to us in the following words of Lord Cornwallis
to Mr. Pitt : — ' That every man in this most
corrupt country should consider the important
question before us in no other point of view than
as it may be likely to promote his own private
objects of ambition or avarice will not surprise
you.'1 This, no doubt, is the unrestrained lan
guage of private and confidential correspondence,
and may probably require some qualifying words
to represent facts as a whole; but there is abun
dant evidence that substantially it was true.
At all events, we can see that Mr. Pitt's object
and his measure was directed to raise Ireland to
• a full share in the glories of a common empire ;
whilst, on the contrary, Mr. Gladstone^ scheme
was to degrade Ireland into a subject and a
tributary province.
1 Cornwallis Correspondence, vol. iii. p. 8.

94 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
Then, again, when our former leader goes further
back into history, his language has been often even
more glaringly and indisputably at variance with
historical facts. His speech at a luncheon of Non
conformists in London, early in June 1887, was
a signal proof of an excitement which seems to
leave no room for the due appreciation of the
facts of Irish history. That Ireland was a
peaceful or happy country in any of its relations
before the English invasion, and that the many
troubles and difficulties of Ireland have arisen
from that invasion, is in the teeth of all his
torical evidence. The direct contrary is the fact.
Ireland was a scene of hideous barbarism before
the English invasion. The best and most pros
perous parts of Ireland always have been, and
now are, those parts of it which have had the
largest share of the invading blood, and the closest
participation in its institutions and its laws.1 But,
indeed, the whole assumptions on which alone such
an assertion could be made are essentially unhis-
toric. There is no continuous or surviving separa
tion between the invading and the invaded races.
1 I republish in the Appendix a letter on this subject which
I addressed to the Times on June 3, 1884.

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 95
The Celtic, Saxon, Anglo-Norman, Welsh, and
Scottish bloods are all inextricably mixed and
blended in the present population of Ireland ; and
the attempt to revive now the animosities of van
ished centuries, as a weapon of party warfare, is
an attempt with which we can have no fellowship.
Then there is another ground of argument on
which our judgment condemns altogether the
analogies asserted between the new British Con
stitution invented by Mr. Gladstone to meet the
case of Ireland, and any existing constitution in
the world. Our own relations with our colonies
have become a relation of sentiment alone, and
much as we may cherish it, yet if it were to be
changed, in any instance, there is not a man prob
ably in the United Kingdom who would dream
of maintaining that connection by force, or who
would regard a formal separation as involving any
danger to our national life. Our relations with
our large self-governing colonies are, after all, as
they now stand, a thing of yesterday. There are
not wanting symptoms of danger even now, where-
ever any obvious motive of self-interest comes into
play. The adoption by some of them of fiscal
systems which are certainly more or less injurious

96 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
to the mother country, is already regarded with
strong disapprobation by large parties here, and
men are beginning to ask whether the responsi
bilities of defence, which in certain cases might
be most onerous, are to lie heavily upon us whilst
our people are shut out from the markets of those
for whom they may be called to fight. Even,
therefore, if the Gladstonian constitution devised
for Ireland had been really analogous to that
which governs our relations with Canada or
Australia, the application of it to one of the
three kingdoms would have involved wholly dif
ferent kinds and degrees of danger and of risk.
But after all there is no such analogy between
the two systems of political adjustment. Not
one of our colonies would listen for a moment to
the Gladstonian constitution as applicable to them
selves. Nor can much encouragement be derived from
the only case in which we have attempted to draw
up a Federal Constitution for the juvenile com
munities which have sprung from us. The
Dominion of Canada is still only just cutting its
teeth, and even already there are symptoms that
on the slightest temptations those teeth will be,

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 97
or may be, used in severing the ties which have
been laboriously devised to bind the Provinces
together. In a recent conference of the Pro
vincial Prime Ministers a pronounced tendency
has. been shown to protest against the very
moderate amount of power which has been as
signed to the central or Dominion Ministry.
That any British statesman should even talk of
these new and faltering experiments in North
America as affording any lesson or example to
us in the United Kingdom, is a signal illustration
of the depth to which our Separatists have fallen
in the elements of political knowledge.
When we turn to foreign countries such analogies
as really exist are wholly condemnatory of such a
scheme. The Austro-Hungarian Constitution is
also a thing of yesterday, and no man can tell
how it will work when certain kinds of strain
are brought to bear upon it. It is impossible to
read the interesting volume lately published by
Mr. de Lavelaye on the condition of south-eastern
Europe, without seeing that the fanaticism of
separate petty nationalities is introducing ele
ments capable of the most dangerous develop
ment. But in that case there is one element of

98 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
strength with which we have nothing to compare.
The Hungarian portions of the Austrian Empire
are still to a large extent in a very primitive
condition. The loyal attachment of these people
to the line and lineage of their ancient Kings is
perhaps less strong than when the famous 'Mori-
amur1 was shouted in the ears of Maria Theresa.
But it is still a tie of enormous value. Is there
anything to represent it among the Irish people?
But the great Continental case which really does
teach an important lesson is the case of Italy. I
have seen with astonishment lately that one of the
group of men who have been building a shanty-
constitution for us to replace the spacious palaces
of our ancient laws, has quoted the case of Italy as
a case proving the value of nationality. This is
thoroughly in the spirit of the leader who describes
the laws of Britain as laws ' foreign 1 to the people of
Ireland. The whole force of any illustration drawn
from Italian nationality depends on the idea that
we stand in the same relation to Ireland that the
hated ' Tedeschi 1 stood to Italy. Can any misre
presentation of facts be more glaring ? Setting
aside, on the one hand, the well-marked and sharply-
defined separation of race and language between

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 99
the German and the Italian people ; setting aside,
on the other hand, the complete amalgamation of
races which exists between us and Ireland, we must
ask was Italy ever represented freely and fully in a
German or Imperial Parliament ? Was that a case
of ' Union,' however halting or imperfect ? And is
it not an insult, then, to our understandings to
compare the relations between Germany and Italy
with the relations between Great Britain and
Ireland as having the slightest bearing on each
other ?
But there is another aspect in which the case of
Italy does bear, and bears most impressively, on the
Irish question, because it bears on the nobler senses
in which nationality may be understood, and the
nobler purposes to which a really national sentiment
may be turned. Until our own days Italy was,
what Prince Metternich called it, a ' geographical
expression.1 It was an agglomeration of small dis
tinct states with separate governments. Many of
these had a very ancient, and in some respects a
very noble history. They had produced great men,
and had each taken some distinctive part in the
revived glories of Literature and of Art. They had
taken captive their fierce conquerors by the spells

100 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
of beauty and of genius. Italy is full of towns and
cities which, ever since the decline and fall of the
Roman Empire, have had a more or less separate
existence, sometimes as republics, sometimes as
principalities, with a separate and seldom an inglo
rious history. Down to the present day they have
cherished the memory of all who ' at sundry times
and in divers manners ' have rendered their names
illustrious, even of those who, despite some special
favours, may have been the oppressors of their
race. It is thus that Pisa keeps in her Campo
Santo, amidst the tombs of her own most fair
Italian names, the simple but impressive image of
the sleeping Barbarossa. Yet these are the very
towns, and cities, and states, which have sacrificed
all their separate and proud traditions, and have
laid them down as a splendid sacrifice of true
patriotism at the feet of one United Kingdom.
Mr. Gladstone himself, as an individual rather
than as a statesman — but perhaps not on that ac
count less effectively — has taken an honourable and
unforgotten part in the accomplishment of Italian
Unity. On this account alone every Italian knows
and loves his name. No one can know better than
he what would be the attitude of Italian statesmen

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 101
if he were to incite the now united provinces and
states of that country to set up separate parlia
ments and separate executive governments in Milan,
in Turin, in Venice, in Florence, and in Palermo.
And yet few men think or consider enough, how
much — how very much — many of these famous
places have sacrificed to the cause of Italian Unity.
Their grass-grown streets, their mouldering palaces,
their empty theatres, their silent halls once filled
with the proud councillors of splendid municipali
ties, testify to the sad changes which are sometimes
inseparable from the progress or consolidation of
great nations.
No such sacrifice has Ireland, or any part of it,
been ever called to make. In Ireland there have
been no ancient, free, and famous towns — no great
centres of civilisation or of achievement — either in
arts or arms — since the glow-worm lamps of her early
Celtic Church were merged, more than a thousand
years ago, in the common altar flame of Latin Chris
tianity. Let us hear what an enthusiastic Irishman
confesses respecting the nationality of Ireland, when
his eyes are opened to see, and his mouth is opened
to speak, the truth, by the desire to condemn a
passionate and injurious phrase long since happily

102 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
forgotten : ' Now the " Irish Enemy 11 was no nation
in the modern sense of the word, but a race divided
into many nations or tribes, separately defending
their lands from English Barons in their immediate
neighbourhood. There had been no ancient
national government displaced, no national dynasty
overthrown ; the Irish had no national flag, nor any
capital city as the metropolis of their common
country, nor any common administration of law ;
nor did they ever give a combined opposition to the
English. The English coming in the name of the
Pope, with the aid of the Irish Bishops, and with a
superior national organisation, which the Irish easily
recognised, were accepted by the Irish. Neither
King Henry n. nor King John ever fought a battle
in Ireland.' x
All this, and a great deal more than this, is
true, and establishes the great modifications of
meaning in which alone we can apply the word
' nation ' to Ireland as a whole. So far as race and
predominant language are concerned, there has been
a complete amalgamation. The descendants of the
conquerors and the conquered have been inextricably
mixed. If the Italian states and provinces, with
1 Prendergast's Cromwellian Settlement, p. 28.

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 103
their illustrious, and in some cases their glorious,
history, have been proud to give up all their separate
Governments in order to make one powerful nation,
we ask absolutely nothing in the way of sacrifice
when we ask the Irish to forget the anarchy of their
clans — their fierce and ceaseless intertribal wars —
their long centuries of mutual devastation and
bloodshed — and to join with pride and thankfulness
in the work of Government under a Constitution
which respects all the just rights, and all the true
liberties of men. In denying to them, on the
ground of historical fact and of political develop
ment, the character of a separate Nationality, we
are not at all denying any of those peculiarities of
mind, or of disposition, or of character, which may
often become well marked and distinct in societies
of men who are separated from others by nothing
but a river, or a hill, or a narrow channel of the sea.
We recognise in this sense, and in this degree, some
well-marked characteristics distinguishing, not so
much Ireland as a whole, as different parts of Ire
land, and we desire to retain these characteristics as
valuable elements in the service of our common
Empire. We point to the indisputable fact that
among the Irishmen who have been illustrious in

104 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
any of the walks of life, there has been a happy and
indiscriminate mingling of Celtic and of Saxon
names. So far as any distinctions of mere race or
of origin are concerned, there is not a shadow of
excuse for the breaking-up of our United Parlia
ment. But whilst the splendid case of Italian unity,
which our separatist politicians have so audaciously
referred to, is a case which tells so conclusively
against them, there is another case in some respects
more cognate, which is not less valuable in point
ing our moral against the disruptive policy. It is
the case of the United States. Immense and
innumerable as are the differences between the
long historical development of the United King
dom, and the sudden clustering of separate colonies,
which were fused and welded into one great nation
under the heat and pressure of a common war for
a common independence, there is one difference
which is above and before all others. The Colonies
were communities of men who had not then even
begun to question the fundamental doctrines of
civilisation. They were in full possession and in
the full enjoyment of all the traditions of English
liberty — of English independence. They respected

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 105
individual freedom ; they respected property ; they
upheld good faith in the deliberate agreements
between man and man ; they protected life from
violence, whether of the few or of the many ; they
maintained, above all things, as the foundation of
all liberty, the sanctity and authority of law.
Therefore it was that in first framing a common
federation among themselves, it did not even occur
to them, at the moment, that special provisions
could be required to provide against any depar
ture from the primary obligations of all civilised
societies. But when this duty was forced upon
them by the necessity of framing a more complete
and systematic constitution, then, indeed, they set
themselves to the work with a dignity, sobriety,
and wisdom, which are all in striking contrast
with the hurry, passion, shallowness, and levity
that have marked the birth of our new British
Constitution, and the language and conduct of
its master-builders. These men knew, and had
repeatedly declared, that the Irish Parnellite party
did not hold to the accepted duties and obliga
tions of civilised society ; yet they did not provide
in the new Constitution any adequate securities
for life, liberty, or property. As regards the most

106 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
salient points of all political organisations — such
as whether it was to be federal or not, whether
there was to be a full or a partial representation
of Ireland in Imperial councils, or none at all —
these wonderful architects proposed one thing one
day, and intimated that they withdrew it the next.
Even now they are stumping the country with a
cynical refusal to tell us what they mean. The
obvious truth is that they have not the remotest
idea themselves of anything, except trust in a few
empty phrases, and a servile confidence in one man.
The wonderful mastery of the subject which they
have already shown is pleaded as the ground of
an implicit and perfect confidence in themselves.
Our demand that before we pull down the old
palaces of our Constitution we should know at
least the main lines of the new buildings which
are to hold us in their stead, is treated as a trap
into which they will not walk. Or if, by extreme
condescension on their part, they tell us what their
principle is, that principle is expressed in some
one or more of those vague phrases which Mr.
Gladstone himself denounced not long ago as
phrases which may mean anything or nothing.
All this represents a condition of things which

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 107
seems almost incredible. It is not — with us who
see the position of affairs in this light — a question
of mere expedience or policy, whether we should
support the Separatists or not. It is a question
involving moral obligations of the most binding
character. We cannot follow where duties con
fessed yesterday are repudiated to-day. We can
not assent to proposals involving the fate of our
fellow-subjects in all the dearest interests of their
life, and which are yet studiously concealed in a
cloud of words not susceptible of any definite
interpretation. And if anything could be added to intensify
our revolt against the sacrifice of duty which is
thus demanded of us — if anything could deepen
our distrust of those who make it, this aggrava
tion would be found in their gratuitous attempt
to rouse up Scotland, and also Wales, to ask for
separation as if it were a boon — as something of
advantage which, if Ireland gets it, they also ought
to ask. Our former leader, in the days when he
was opposing Home Rule, used the argument
which had often been used before, and has often
been used since — the argument summed up in
Canning's famous exclamation, ' Repeal the Union !

108 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
Restore the Heptarchy ! ' Mr. Gladstone used it,
or appeared to use it, as regards Scotland and
Wales, precisely as others had used it as a reductio
ad absurdum. But that argument, as used by him,
is now interpreted as having been intended to lay
it down as a principle that, under like conditions
of popular demand, the same provisions for Home
Rule which may be applicable to Ireland might
be equally applicable to all the four ' well-marked
nationalities' into which, in imagination, he dis
integrates the United Kingdom.
As a Scotchman whose ancestors did something
towards bringing about the Union, and who, with
the great body of the Scottish people, has been
accustomed to rejoice in, and to be proud of, its
results, I cannot express in the ordinary language
of political discussion the feelings with which we
have regarded the very idea of a change which
would remove our members from the Imperial
Legislature, either altogether or at all times except
when called in to vote upon customs and excise.
We have not so learned our privileges and our
duty. We are an integral party of the Empire —
loyal to it, proud of it, and determined not to be
bribed, by any mean desire, to sacrifice our full

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 109
share in its glories or its responsibilities. We
regard the very thought of such a surrender as
due to some form of madness. It is indeed just
possible that even a wise and dispassionate mind
might conceive or evolve such a project as this
if the experiment had been well elaborated, and
if it had been tried and crowned with unquestion
able success in Ireland. But we regard with feel
ings little short of reprobation the fact that any
responsible statesman should talk in this loose
way of the most profound organic changes affect
ing the three kingdoms, when his own plan for
one of them had hopelessly broken down, both in
Parliament and at the polls of a General Elec
tion — when it had broken down not merely in
the sense of having been defeated, but in the
sense of having been abandoned and disclaimed
by its own authors, who shouted loudly to all
concerned that they did not and could not ask
it to he sanctioned.
Such methods of proceeding are alien to the
whole nature and history of our pohtical Institu
tions. Nor is it made better by the spirit which is,
we think, distinctly perceptible in the language
employed. That language has had a taint of

110 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
menace and of vindictiveness in it which closely
resembles the spirit in which Irish landowners were
warned and threatened for not accepting the partial
or total expropriation which was offered as a boon.
In like manner we have been warned that if we do
not allow the separate Parliament for Ireland, a
larger and wider demand will be made upon us, and
that when men's minds are roused by prolonged
controversy upon proposals which ought to have
been accepted meekly, we shall find them pressed
further and further, to our discomfiture and dismay.
We protest against this method of political con
troversy anywhere, but especially in an old Consti
tutional country, where free debate has been wont
to be held, and where high questions of human
Government have hitherto been dealt with safe
from revolutionary menace. At all events we
declare that we are not to be intimidated by
threats. We must do our duty in contending
against proposals which we think most injurious,
and we shall rely on the intelligence of our fellow-
subjects to withhold their confidence from men
who adopt such methods of political action.
And, further, as we protest against menace, so
also do we protest against cajolery, merging into a

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. Ill
new and most insidious form of political corruption.
It is absolutely new in our honoured history that
party leaders should put up to the auction of votes
on some one political question, the fate of other laws
and other institutions on which, at the same time,
they decline to commit themselves to any definite
policy. The grosser forms of bribery, of which
Mr. Pitt is accused in carrying the Union (even if
the accusation were true, which it is not) are inno
cence itself compared with the demoralisation
involved in hiring men to vote for the breaking
up of our United Parliament by holding out to
them vague hopes and expectations that if they do
so they will, or at least may, get disestablisment of
the Church, or some other equally irrelevant object
of political agitation or desire. Yet this is the
kind of bribery which has been systematically pur
sued. Every fraction of a party, anywhere, which
has some object to gain, some theory to push, some
advantage to secure, is stimulated and encouraged
to keep its own fad in view, and in the running,
by the one grand panacea for all ills, namely,
by bringing back the Anglo-Parnellites into office.
Again I say, that without judging the morals of
other men, or how far excuses, which we think

112 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
delusions, may hide from them the real character of
such tactics, we declare emphatically that to us, and
for us, any fellowship with it would be dishonest.
But the moral, or rather the immoral, elements
which revolt us in the conduct of the new scheme
for breaking up the Imperial Parliament, might
not of themselves be conclusive arguments against
it. Such elements have appeared, and may appear
again, in connection with great changes which have
been on the whole reforms. We dwell, therefore,
with more emphasis on those other elements of
objection resting purely upon evidence and upon
reasoning, — which appear to us to be of over
whelming force. The first demand we make, not
only upon others but on ourselves, is that the facts
with which we have to deal should be acknowledged
and looked at in the face. Before giving up to the
rule of a separate Parliament and a separate Execu
tive the whole people of one of our three United
Kingdoms, we insist that the conditions of Society
as now existing there should be taken into account.
These conditions represent the forces to which the
new Constitution must be adapted, so that they
may be yoked to service in the interests of right
eousness and of justice — of truth and honesty, and

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 113
of that personal liberty without which life would
be intolerable.
Most fortunately we find that respecting those
conditions of Society the evidence is abundant and
conclusive. Moreover, we find the best summary
of that evidence in the witness borne by the
very men who are now our chief opponents. We
don't care the least to convict them of any mere
personal inconsistency in matters of opinion, or of
sentiment. We might as well reproach chameleons
with inconsistency, because of changes in the colour
of their skins, as reproach our former friends and
colleagues of the Parnellite Alliance because of the
metamorphoses through which they have lately
passed. But we are determined to weigh, and to
examine with the closest attention, those facts of
Irish Society on which the testimony of these very
men has been the most recent and the most
authentic. In a previous page I have spoken of that testi
mony as we have it in the conduct and language
of the Irish Secretary during the three years be
tween the passing of the Prevention of Crimes Act in
1882 and the fall of the Gladstone Administration
in June 1885. There is no evidence so responsible
H

114 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
and authentic as that of men charged with the
actual administration of such a law, having such
an object, and called upon, night after night, to
answer in the face of our Parliament, which is in
the face of the world, the questioning of the Irish
Nationalist party. Platform speeches may be good
for nothing, or good for very little. But here we
have from a responsible minister and an honour
able man, the doings, the sayings, the admissions,
the declarations on matters of fact, which present
us with a vivid picture of the condition of
Ireland, and of the temper and spirit of those
whose chief business it was to thwart the Govern
ment in working any Act for the prevention of
crime. Let us take out of this wide and dreadful
canvas, almost at random, some portions of the
scene which is depicted on it. Let one be a sketch
of the condition of a considerable district and com
munity ; let another be an illustration of the daily
life of individual men as it is led under the tyranny
of village tyrants ; and let the last bring home to
us the animus and language of those to whose rule,
constituted into a separate Parliament, we are
asked to deliver Ireland.
On the 19th of April 1883 Mr. Trevelyan,

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 115
fiercely questioned in the House of Commons by
an Irish member, had to tell the House that in the
district of Loughrea, in Galway, no less than eight
deliberate murders had been committed within the
period of one year ; that a movement had lately
been started there — by persons strongly suspected of
being members of a secret society for purposes of
murder, and who had actually been in prison on
that suspicion — with the object of collecting funds
for the baffling of justice, but nominally for the
defence of all who might be arrested and charged
with crime ; that these persons had resolved to
make a house-to-house visitation over the country ;
that the terror exercised by them was such that
the farmers dared not refuse, although unwilling
to give them money ; that the mere fact of such
men demanding money was of itself intimidation
when made to defenceless farmers ; that the unfor
tunate peasants had appealed to the Government
for protection ; and that the measures taken by the
Executive were the very minimum of what were
required for preserving the peace of the district.1
Just let us conceive, if we can, the condition of
honest men living in such a district as this, — com-
1 Hansard, vol. 278, pp. 617-18.

116 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
pelled to subsidise their tyrants : their relations,
or their servants, or their friends, murdered in
numbers, and in cold blood, in the fields and lanes
and cottages around them, the perpetrators prob
ably perfectly well known, but unpunished, and
enjoying not only absolute impunity, but the exer
cise of supreme power through the terror they
inspired. Just let us think what all this implies —
of the wickedness of some, of the tame submission
of others, of the complete disorganisation of Society,
of the fitness of such a community for the exercise
of the highest administrative authority, and of the
animus of those members of the House of Commons
who attacked the Government for protecting the
people from a most cruel and a most criminal
organisation. And now, passing from the description of wide
districts such as this in Galway, let us look at
the details of individual life — if life it can be called,
when it is passed under the cruel tyrannies of
the Nationalist party. Four months later, in the
same session, on the 23d of August 1883, Mr. Tre
velyan was, in pursuance of an almost daily practice,
savagely attacked for the endeavours of the Irish
Government to secure the ' Prevention of Crime.'

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 117
On this occasion he had a most typical and
a most pathetic tale to tell. At a place with
the characteristic name of Aughabullogue there
lived a tradesman, a blacksmith, of the name of
Hallissey. He was an honest and industrious man,
earning about 35s. a week in the. exercise of his
calling. That calling of necessity brought him into
relations of custom with all classes and conditions
of society around him. All of these he served
faithfully and honestly without distinction, as it
was his duty to do. But that which was his duty
to the community was a crime against the League.
He shod the horses, he mended the ploughs, of
all who came to him, and amongst others, of those
who were persecuted by the local tyrants. He
was warned not to do his duty, but he had the
virtue and the courage to continue doing it. For
this crime he was, by the processes of boycotting,
reduced to penury. Two neighbours, kinder than
the rest, had done him some little service, and
for this offence their implements were broken and
destroyed. Even the doctor was afraid to visit
him when he was ill. Still holding out, he be
came the victim of still more active measures.
Standing at his own door he was struck senseless

118 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
by a stone. Actively or passively, the whole
population round him were implicated in one
great conspiracy to ruin one good and brave man.
The case was brought to the knowledge of the
Irish Government. ' It became necessary,' said
Mr. Trevelyan in the House of Commons, 'to
show that, as in England and in Scotland, a
citizen who did his duty by the community had
a right to live.1 1 A body of police was stationed
in, and charged upon, the district, for the pro
tection of this man's life, and as an expression of
the opinion of the Queen's Government on his
loyalty to law and order, and on its own duty in
upholding him. At last the parish priest, power
less apparently to do anything better, opened a
subscription to get this brave man removed from
the parish altogether. The local authorities, after
some twelve months had elapsed, and no improve
ment had been effected, were willing to accept
this solution of the difficulty. Nothing but exile
from his home, nothing but the removal from out
of their very sight of such a man, could appease
or satisfy the vindictive hatred of the League.
ut the most memorable fact is that the feeling
1 Hansard, vol. 283, p. 1783.

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 119
of this conspiracy was fully shared and openly
expressed by the Irish party in the House of
Commons. Everything that the Government had
done for the protection of this brave man was an
offence to them. One of them called poor Hallissey
a ' ruffian,' and another said that something might
be said for the migration scheme if it was used
for the purpose of ridding the country of citizens
like Hallissey. Mr. Trevelyan was roused by this.
His language was temperate, and carefully re
strained. But it was significant. He exclaimed,
' What a really terrible sentiment that was !
What was Hallissey's fault ? Why, that he had
done his duty as an honest tradesman, and as a
fearless citizen.1 1
Here then we have two cases, out of hundreds
more, affording most convincing and far-reaching
evidence on the condition not only of Galway —
not only of ' AughabuUogue ' — but of a great
part of Ireland. The Nationalist members in the
Parliament of 1885 evinced by every sign of
speech and gesture, by shouts and interruptions,
complete sympathy with the agencies which coerced
the farmers of Loughrea and persecuted the brave
1 Hansard, vol. 283, p. 1784.

120 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
blacksmith of AughabuUogue. These members
have since been reinforced by some forty or more
additional members with the same sympathies
and the same antipathies. Can it be affirmed
with any confidence that the return of these
men has been independent of the same agencies
of intimidation under which we thus see that
whole districts tremble, and brave men who
dare to resist can only be saved by exile ? Is
it not worse than a farce to talk to us of the
' rooted desires ^ of the Irish people being repre
sented by elections conducted under such con
ditions of society? Is it possible for us who
have been brought up in the traditions of British
liberty and law to change by one hairVbreadth
our opinion on the duty of upholding those
traditions because some forty more men have
been elected, under such influences, to claim
through a separate government the power of en
forcing upon our fellow-subjects in Ireland those
sentiments which Mr. Trevelyan was constrained,
most justly, to denounce as ' terrible1 ?
But we turn from mere local evidence to the
evidence supplied of the same spirit in the House
of Commons, as testified by the Irish Secretary.

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 121
On another occasion — in August 1883 — that
Minister declared that, after watching for fifteen
months the condition of mind evinced by the
Irish party, he could only conclude that they
objected to everything done for the preven
tion of crime. Their remarks, he said, had been
one long palliation of every one who had been
convicted of crime, with accusations couched in
very severe and unjust terms against every one who
had been concerned in bringing criminals to justice,
from the judge to the jurymen in the box, and
against all the counsel and witnesses who had been
concerned. On another occasion, in October 1884, Mr.
Gladstone himself was obliged to intervene in de
fence of Lord Spencer, and in rebuke of the Irish
Members who reprobated his action in the case of
the atrocious murders in the ' Joyce Country.' So
utterly alien were the tone and words of the Irish
Members to all that in Great Britain we have been
accustomed to revere, that the Prime Minister told
them that in such words 'they speak to us in a
foreign language.' 1
Perhaps even more significant, as bearing upon
1 Hansard, vol. 293, p. 365.

122 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
the character of the Nationalist party in Parlia
ment, and upon the impression it produced upon
honourable men who were brought into contact
with them, was another passage in one of the
replies of Mr. Trevelyan. This was in the same
month, August 1883. He spoke of the odious-
ness of the duty thrown upon him day after day in
having to repel attacks upon every effort of the
Government to repress or to punish crime. But
he expressed at the same time almost a sense of
pride and gratitude that the honour of such a work
had fallen to his lot. Yes ! But the measure of
this honour was the measure of the immorality
of those against whom it had to be endured.
We agree with Mr. Trevelyan that it was a duty
and that it was an honour. But we disagree with
him in holding that it has ceased to be a duty and
an honour now. That the Ministers who held this
language up to Midsummer 1885 should now be in
close alliance with the men of whom they spoke in
such terms, is a fact fortunately without parallel
in our political history.
But this is not the consideration which dwells
most upon our minds. We are not swayed by
any opinion on the conduct of individual men.

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 123
They are, or may be, the mere bubbles on
the surface of a deeper stream. We look simply
at the matter as one of evidence — as proving
what we have the best reason to expect from a
separate Parliament and a separate Executive in
Ireland. We see that the political forces with
which we have to contend in Ireland are im
moral and anarchic. We see that the Nationalist
party do not accept the fundamental doctrines
of civilised societies. We see that they sup
port and defend, or excuse, the most cruel tyranny
— that they denounce as 'ruffians' men who are
brave, and honest, and faithful in the discharge
of duty to all their neighbours, without dis
tinction of party. We see that institutions, and
processes of administration, and forms of Govern
ment which may not only be plausible upon paper,
but which might work fairly well for a people which
is virtuous and law-abiding, and loyal to the
authority of an Imperial Jurisprudence, will be
utterly unsuited to bear the stress and strain of
such conditions of society as those which are thus
proved to exist in Ireland. Presumptuous as —
under any circumstances — we should have deemed
the conduct of men who set themselves in a few

124 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
weeks to go ' down to the very roots ' of an ancient
Constitution — to grub them up, and to lay them
down again cut, and shaped, and pruned at their
will and pleasure — we condemn this presumption
still more severely when we consider the nature of
the problem which they well knew tbey had to solve.
But this is not all that we have to say — because
it is not the only, nor the last, nor the worst offence
which we have to charge against our former associ
ates. If they had a plan by which they themselves
are willing to abide — however weak we might deem
that plan to be — we might understand and excuse
any amount of confidence in it, and any amount of
persistence in their recommendation of it. But
their present position is to patronise and adopt the
whole tone and temper of the Nationahst party in
resisting and denouncing the very measures for the
Prevention of Crime, and for the protection of
innocence, that they were themselves executing
and defending in the loftiest language a few months
ago, whilst at the same time no two of them are
agreed upon the most essential features of any new
Constitution for re-soldering a broken Parliament
and a disunited kingdom. They are united in
nothing but in a series of empty phrases, the whole

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 125
value of which lies in their boundless latitude of
meaning — phrases identical with those which their
Leader used to denounce for years, for this very
reason, that in some senses they might be 'per-
fectably acceptable and even desirable,1 whilst in
others they would be 'mischievous and revolu
tionary.' It seems to be a direct policy and device
for the concealment of this dissentience, and ig
norance, and irresolution amongst themselves, that
they are now uniting in attacks upon the Govern
ment for doing exactly what they acknowledged
to be their own duty when they were in office.
There are in this world some sayings that can
not be unsaid. They were either true or untrue.
If they were ever true, they remain true for all
time, because they are moral truths — truths affect
ing duty and insuperable moral obligations. Most
legitimate, indeed, is that operation of the mind by
which we may be led to drop the use of argu
ments of policy with which we have ourselves ceased
to be wholly satisfied. But most illegitimate, on
the other hand, is that other operation by which
we are tempted to hide, or to gloss over, facts
and obligations which have ceased to be con
venient for some present purpose. Both moral

126 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
and intellectual integrity are thus sacrificed to
tactics. Those assertions of fact which were put
into the mouth of the Sovereign upon a most
momentous issue in January 1881, and the personal
repetitions of them which in later consecutive years
were continued with reiteration and with passion,
were assertions of indisputable truth. It was truth,
moreover, not only relevant, but fundamental in
the subject matter. It concerned the temper, the
purposes, the designs, with which a separate Parlia
ment is sought for Ireland. It concerned, there
fore, the essential conditions, and the special diffi
culties besetting any attempt to limit that demand, or
to control the working of the new machinery which
concession necessarily involves. It was truth in
short that concerned the very possibility of defending
effectually the social interests which must be placed
in direst jeopardy. We were consentient with our
former leader in the emphasis he laid on this truth.
We were consentient with him also, when he added
to many other most just indictments the significant
observation that the Irish leader, in aU his very
copious references to America as the only friend of
Ireland, ' had never found time to utter one word
of disapproval of, or misgiving about, what is

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 127
known as the assassination literature of that
country.'1 This observation has been the germ
of the later and copious literature on the connec
tion between ' Parnellism and Crime.' It involved
and rested on the sound principle that political
leaders are largely responsible for the action and
the language of their followers. It laid down
the doctrine, too — not less important — that they
may be deeply responsible not only for speech,
but for silence. We were consentient with him
in this important teaching, and we are consentient
still. Nor does our consentience with our old leader
end with this. There was a striking passage,
quite prophetic, in one of his Midlothian speeches
during the General Election in November 1885.
It was delivered in the Albert Hall on the
9th of that month. He was referring to the
possibility of the Liberal party being called upon
to deal with this great constitutional question of
the government of Ireland in a position where
it was only a minority dependent on the Irish
vote for converting it into a majority, and he
proceeded thus : — ' Now, gentlemen, I tell you
1 Times, October 8, 1881. Speech at Leeds.

128 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION
seriously and solemnly that although I believe the
Liberal party itself to be honourable, patriotic,
sound, and trustworthy, yet in such a position it
would not be trustworthy. In such a position as
that it would not be safe to enter upon the con
sideration of the principles of a measure with
respect to which at every step of its progress it
would be in the power of a party coming from
Ireland to say "unless you do this, and unless
you do that, we turn you out to-morrow."'1
This is exactly what has happened. The
prophet has had the power to fulfil his own pre
diction. A few leaders of the Liberal party have
fallen with him under this foreseen temptation.
They have not been trustworthy. They have carried
with them — reluctant, helpless, struggling, dis
tracted, protesting, and openly dissentient on points
of primary importance — a large number of old
adherents. The former leader has now to confess
that his following is 'a shattered and disunited
party.'2 It is so, because they have been led
against the impregnable batteries of truth and
duty. Fortunately not a few of our former
\ Fourth Midlothian Campaign, p. 29.
2 Lessons of the Elections, p. 27.

AND ITS MASTER-BUILDERS. 129
leaders, and some of the very best, are our leaders
still. Our former friends have left the great cause
in which we fought together. From that cause
they have been deserters. In so deserting we
think they have been untrue to the great tra
ditions of public virtue without which freedom
and liberty are but empty names. We re
main consentient with those traditions. We
are consentient with all the great men, and with
all the great generations, which have built up the
polity of. one great Empire out of three United
Kingdoms. We shall respond to any, and to every
appeal which may be made to us to consider this
tremendous subject of Irish government in a reve
rent and a reasonable spirit. Nothing should be
refused to Ireland which in itself is just. In Educa
tion, for example, as one great subject of local
government, I think we have failed, and Mr. Glad
stone has failed, conspicuously. But we recognise
no such reasonable spirit in the demand of any man,
or of any party, to be allowed to dig down to the
' very roots of our Constitution both civil and
political,1 upon a claim of purely personal con
fidence. Still less do we recognise any such spirit
in a haughty refusal to tell us what they mean to
i

130 THE NEW BRITISH CONSTITUTION.
do, or to propose, when they have been hoisted into
power. Our demand to know all this beforehand
is a demand upon which it is our duty to insist.
That it should be refused and resisted as a ' trap '
seems to us to be unjustifiable in the highest
degree. If Party leaders have rights, they have
also duties. It is not one of those duties to start
suddenly upon the people of this country a new
paper-constitution, which its author admits to in
volve principles as absolutely novel to them as the
differential calculus. We have now had time to
look at that production, round and round. We
see that it involves proposals which offend our
reason, and which revolt our conscience.

APPENDIX

APPENDIX.

THE NEW EDUCATION.
To the Editor of the ' Times.'
Sir, — Our friends the Parnellite Liberals, under
great Parliamentary discouragement, have gallantly
announced it as their mission to ' educate the
country.1 In the discharge of this mission their
handling of facts deserves attention. I am not sure
that ' the masses ' care much for ancient, or even for
recent, history, but they are under the sway of it
none the less. Obscure memories and hereditary
traditions are the real source of living and powerful
social forces. The Parnellite missionaries know
this well. Belonging themselves generally to ' the
classes,' they do not affect to despise history.
What they do is to re-write it in their own sense ;
and certainly nothing can be more splendid than
the freedom and the dash with which they handle
it. If the * education of our masters ' has become a
public duty, assuredly the watching of our new
professors has risen to the rank of an absolute
necessity. Mr. Gladstone's recent speech at a meeting of
Nonconformists contained two historical assertions,

134 APPENDIX.
or representations of historical fact, which seem to
me to be demonstrably erroneous. The first is that
the miseries of Ireland began with, or were aggra
vated by, the English invasion. The second is that
the Irish Roman Catholics, when they had the
power, have never shown a disposition to religious
persecution, or have shown much less disposition to
it than their Protestant opponents. I do not stop
to discuss how far, or to what extent, these asser
tions are relevant to the great constitutional ques
tions now before us. Be that relevancy great or
small, all I say is that they are without any histori
cal foundation, and are not merely caricatures, but
complete contradictions of the truth.
In the long history of political extravagance, I
doubt if any sentence of any responsible speaker
could be found to match the following : —
' Who made the Irishman ? The Irish in very
old times indeed, if you go back to the earlier
stages of Christianity, were among the leaders of
Christendom. But we went in among them; we
sent among them numbers of our own race. These
were mixed with the Irish, and ever since our blood
has been united with theirs there has been this
endless trouble and difficulty.'
The blessedness of Irish Celtic society before the
taint of Anglo-Saxon blood came in to corrupt it
would be an historical discovery indeed, if only it
could be verified. But, unfortunately for this
theory, it is not only incapable of proof, but it
is susceptible of the completest refutation. It is

APPENDIX. 135
true, indeed, that in a remote age, many centuries
before the English invasion, there was an early
branch of the Christian Church planted in Ireland,
the memory of whose apostles is still preserved in
the old title of the ' Isle of Saints.' It appeals most
naturally to Mr. Gladstone's imagination, and it
has engendered there a mythical development more
wonderful than any of its own legendary miracles.
Far be it from me to deny the interest which
attaches to its history ; but that interest is nothing
to the purpose. Not only had the golden age
of that old Celtic Church passed away centuries
before the English invasion, but we have abun
dant evidence that it never had been of a kind to
justify the suggestions of the orator. The truth is
that the high but very special civilisation of the
early Scoto-Irish Celts is one of the most singular
in the history of the world. It shines across the
ages with a pure and brilliant light. But it shines
only from and upon the altar. It spent itself wholly
in the great work of spreading Christianity among
heathen tribes. Even in this work its fame is
largely founded on the achievements of its Scottish
offshoot at Iona. This, indeed, is glory enough for
any church ; but it did not indicate in the races
among whom that Church arose, nor did it impart
to them, any aptitude for civilised political institu
tions. Beyond the sphere of its spiritual operations
it has left no memorials of itself, except, in a later
age, some fine work in gold and jewels, lavished
upon crosiers, upon the covering of psalters, upon

136 APPENDIX.
missals, upon shrines, and other insignia of Christian
belief. But with all its religious devotion and all
its efflorescence in a peculiar and local art, the clergy
who were its priests and prophets seem to have taken
little heed of the social condition or of the secular
affairs of the people among whom they laboured.
The old Celtic monastic institutions were tribal in
their organisation, and all the customs and habits
of the Irish tribes were barbarous and savage in the
highest degree. The glimpses we get of them in
the very earliest centuries are truly horrible. In
the seventh century an Abbot of Iona interfered to
prevent women from being regularly enlisted in the
fighting hosts, and from stabbing and tearing each
other's breasts with reaping hooks. Between that
date and the English invasion there elapsed some
where about five hundred years. Before that time the
old Celtic Church had been merged in the general
advance of Latin Christianity. But as regards the
condition of the bulk of the people in Ireland no
change could possibly be a change for the worse to
them. They were equally the victims of most op
pressive usages in times of peace, and of the most
barbarous ferocity in times of war. The first foreign
invasion came at the express invitation of one of the
Irish chiefs, Dermot, " King " of Leinster, and this
invitation was addressed to Welshmen — another
branch of the Celtic stock. In the contests which
followed, this same Dermot exhibited an almost in
credible barbarity towards his own countrymen to
whom he had been opposed. It is not a Protestant

APPENDIX. 137
but a Catholic historian who gives the most graphic
account of the conduct of this native Irish chief.
We are told that when the men of Ossory had been
borne to the ground by a charge of the English
cavalry, ' the fallen were immediately despatched by
their compatriot Celts under the banner of Dermot.
A trophy of two hundred heads was erected at the
feet of that fine example of civilisation which flour
ished in Ireland before the Saxon invasion. He
testified his joy over this hideous heap by clapping
his hands, leaping in the air, and pouring out
thanksgiving to the Almighty. As he tossed it
over he discovered the head of a former enemy.
His hatred was rekindled at the sight, and seizing
it by the ears in a paroxysm of fury, he tore off the
nose with his teeth.' (Lingard.)
Among the many delusions which a false senti
ment has promoted there has, perhaps, never been
a delusion more complete than that which imagines
that in early Celtic customs and traditions, as dis
tinguished from the corresponding customs of the
Teutonic nations, there was any element which, if it
had been left alone, would have built up some polity
better for the mass of the people than the polity
which actually arose out of the amalgamation of the
races in England and in Scotland. It is quite true
that the monks and priests of the early Irish Church
had some culture and some letters — in a literature,
moreover, which was purely Celtic — at a time
when other European nations were either
sunk in ignorance, or at least were so little

138 APPENDIX.
advanced as to have nothing of the same kind.
But from this very fact we have an amount
of evidence in respect to the conditions and
habits of those Celts which we do not possess in
respect to any other European race at the same
date. In the Annals of the Four Masters we have
a continuous chronicle, which there is reasonable
ground for believing to be authentic, from the
second century. The result is to show that not
only were the whole conditions of society barbarous
in the sense of being rude, rough, and violent, but
that they were barbarous in the sense of being
exceptionally savage, and without a trace of progress
towards better things. No nobler passions are
exhibited than the mere thirst for blood and the
mere triumphs of revenge. We may turn over
page after page without seeing one solitary symptom
of the crystallising forces which alone can build up
the organic structures of civilisation. There is
nothing but a sickening repetition of intertribal
battles, murders, and devastations. For seven
hundred years before the invasion of Henry, not
one single step can be traced in the path of progress.
On the contrary, the country was getting worse and
worse. There is some poetry, some feeling for
nature, especially in its wilder aspects, but the
animating spirit is almost purely ferocious, with
nothing of the higher sentiment which we under
stand as patriotism. No deeds of massacre, how
ever dreadful, are ever narrated with rebuke, still
less any acts of mere plunder — unless, perchance,

APPENDIX. 139
any of these acts were directed against ecclesiastics.
Then, indeed, the culprit king or chief is denounced
as a monster, and some rival chief is incited in
furious appeals to punish him with death and the
devastation of his country.
Such is the paradise which Mr. Gladstone repre
sents as having been invaded and destroyed by the
intrusion of the Anglo-Saxon. Authentic history
informs us, on the contrary, that the first founda
tions of a civilised condition were laid within ' the
Pale ;' while industry and comfort have advanced
elsewhere always in exact proportion with the
plantation and diffusion of the same mixed races
which constitute the people of Great Britain.
The other assertion of Mr. Gladstone — that the
Irish people has never shown any disposition to
religious persecution against Protestants comparable
with that which has been shown by Protestants
against Irish Catholics — is a representation of his
torical fact which is as absolutely erroneous as the
other. Macaulay's powerful description and denun
ciation of the proceedings of the Irish Parliament
in 1689, when the Catholics were supreme, puts an
end to this pretension. In the excellent little book
just published by Mr. Ingram on the history of the
Irish Union (Macmillan) it is said, and said with
truth, that the odious penal legislation against
Catholics which began some years later was simply
the rebound from the much more atrocious acts of
this purely Irish Assembly. Macaulay tells us how
it was filled with men of native lineage with all its

140 APPENDIX.
characteristic names. The means taken by them, at
once cruel and treacherous, to persecute the rival
creed are also authentically set forth in the same
brilliant narrative.
Let us abominate both persecutions with equal
heartiness, and religious hatred in all its forms. Let
us honour and admire the many elements in Irish
character which, when mixed with others, may make,
and have made, many Irishmen an honour to their
country, to our common Empire, and even to
the world. Let us try to believe, if we can, that
the spirit of pure religious persecution belongs —
and belongs only — to the past ; but do not let
political passion and fanaticism distort history,
and by these distortions deprive it of its terrible
but blessed lessons for us all.
ARGYLL.
June 3, J 887.

Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty,
at the Edinburgh University Press.

15 a Castle Street,
Edinburgh, Jan. 1888.

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The Crime of Henry Vane : a Study with a Moral.
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Gisli the Outlaw. ^ „ T o „ ,.
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A Manual of Chemical Analysis.
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A Chat in the Saddle ; or Patroclus and Penelope.
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Veterinary Medicines ; their Actions and Uses.
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Social Life in Former Days ;
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Letters of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen.
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The Unconditional Freeness of the Gospel.
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The Brazen Serpent:
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The Internal Evidence of Revealed Religion.
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The Doctrine of Election,
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Three Visits to America.
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Ogham Inscriptions in Ireland, Wales, and Scotland.
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Twelve Sketches of Scenery and Antiquities on the
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Guide to the Great North of Scotland Railway.
By W. Ferguson of Kinmundy. Crown 8vo ; in paper cover, Is. • cloth cover
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Robert Ferguson "The Plotter," or, The Secret of the
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The Laird of Lag ; A Life-Sketch of Sir Robert Grierson.
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Autobiography of Mrs. Fletcher
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L'Histoire de France.
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Kalendars of Scottish Saints,
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Fragments of Truth :
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Studies in English History.
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10 LIST OF BOOKS

Works by Margaret Maria Gordon (nee Brewster).
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A Memorial Sketch, and a Selection from the Letters
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Zeph : A Posthumous Story.
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Epitaphs and Inscriptions from Burial-Grounds and
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The History and Traditions of the Land of the Lindsays
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Memorials of Angus and the Mearns : an Account,
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Sermons by the Rev. John Ker, D.D., Glasgow.
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An Echo of Passion.
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PUBLISHED BY DAVID DOUGLAS. 13
On the Philosophy of Ethics. An Analytical Essay.
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Notes on British Theories of Morals.
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Antiquaries of Scotland. With Plans and Illustrations. Folio, 31s. 6d
"We need not enlarge on the few inconsequential speculations which rigid
archaeologists may find in the present volume. We desire rather to commend it to
their careful study, fully assured that not only they, but also the general reader,
will be edified by its perusal." — Scotsman.

The Light of the "World.
By David M'Laren, Minister of Humble. Crown Svo, 6s.

14 LIST OF BOOKS

The Book of Psalms in Metre.
According to the version approved of by the Church of Scotland. Revised by Rev.
David M'Laren. Crown 8vo, 7s. 6d.
Omnipotence belongs only to the Beloved.
By Mrs. Brewster Macpherson. Extra fcap., 3s. 6d.
Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature,
from 1810 to 1886. Edited by Edward T. Mason. Selections are made from the
Works of: Alcott, Alden, Aldrich, Baldwin, Beecher, Bellamy, Broune,
Bunner, Butler, Cable, Cavazza, Clemens, Cone, Cozzens, Crane, Curtis,
Dodge, Dunning, Hale, Harte, Harris, Hawthorne, Holmes, Howe, Howells,
Irving, Johnson, Lanigan, Leland, Lowell, Ludlow, M'Dowell, Matthews,
Ogden, Phelps, Quincey, Roche, Saxe, Seba, Smith, Stofford, Stockton,
Stowe,Thorpe,Throwbridge, Warner, Etc. 3 vols, square 16mo, 3s. 6d. each vol.
In Partnership. Studies in Story-Telling.
By Brander Matthews and H. C. Bunner. Is. in paper, and 2s. in cloth.
Antwerp Delivered in MDLXXVII. :
A Passage from the History of the Netherlands, illustrated with Facsimiles of a
rare series of Designs by Martin de Vos, and of Prints by Hogenberg, the Wiericxes,
etc. By Sir William Stirling-Maxwell, Bart., K.T. and M.P. In lvol. Folio,
5 guineas. "A splendid folio in richly ornamented binding, protected by an almost equally
ornamental slip-cover. . . . Remarkable illustrations of the manner in which the
artists of the time 'pursued their labours in a country ravaged by war, and in
cities ever menaced by siege and sack.'" — Scotsman.
Studies in the Topography of Galloway, being a List
of nearly 4000 Names of Places, with Remarks on their Origin and Meaning. By
Sir Herbert Maxwell, Bart., M.P. I vol. demy Svo, 14s.
The History of Old Dundee, narrated out of the Town
Council Register, with Additions from Contemporary Annals. By Alexander
Maxwell, F.S.A. Scot. 4to. Cloth, 21s. ; Roxburghe, 24s.
Researches and Excavations at Carnac (Morbihan),
The Bossenno, and Mont St. Michel. By James Miln. Royal 8vo, with Maps,
Plans, and numerous Illustrations in Wood-Engraving and Chromolithograph}'.
Excavations at Carnac (Brittany), a Record of Archaeo
logical Researches in the Alignments of Kermario. By James Miln. Royal 8vo,
with Maps, Plans, and numerous Illustrations in Wood-Engraving. 15s.
The Past in the Present— "What is Civilisation ?
Being the Rhind Lectures in Archaeology, delivered in 1876 and 1878. By Arthur
Mitchell, C.B., M.D., LL.D., Secretary to the Society of Antiquaries of Scot
land. In 1 vol. demy Svo, with 14S Woodcuts, 15s.
" Whatever differences of opinion, however, may be held on minor points, there
can be no question that Dr. Mitchell's work is one of the ablest and most original
pieces of archaeological literature which has appeared of late years."— St. James's
Gazette.
In War Time. A Novel. By S. Weir Mitchell, M.D. Crown 8vo, 6s.
Roland Blake. A Novel. By S. Weir Mitchell, M.D. Crown 8vo, 6s.
Our Scotch Banks :
Their Position and their Policy. By Wm. Mitchell, S.S.C. ThirdEdition. Svo, 5s.
On Horse-Breaking.
By Robert Moheton. Second Edition. Fcap. Svo, Is.
Ecclesiological Notes on some of the Islands of Scot
land, with other Papers relating to Ecclesiological Remains on the Scottish Main-
laud and Islands. By Thomas S. Muir, Author of "Characteristics of Church
Architecture," etc. Demy Svo, with numerous Illustrations, 21s.

PUBLISHED BY DAVID DOUGLAS. 1 5
The Birds of Berwickshire.
By Geo. Muirhead. 1 vol. demy Svo, Illustrated. To Subscribers only.
[In the Press.
Ancient Scottish Lake-Dwellings or Crannogs, with a
Supplementary Chapter on Remains of Lake-Dwellings in England. By Robert
Munro, M.D., F.S.A. Scot. 1 vol. demy 8vo, profusely illustrated, 21s.
" A standard authority on the subject of which it treats."— Times.
"... Our readers may be assured that they will find very much to interest
and instruct them in the perusal of the work." — Athenmum.
"The Lanox of Auld:" An Epistolary Review of "The
Lennox, by William Fraser." By Mark Napier. With Woodcuts and Plates.
4to, 15s.
Tenants' Gain not Landlords' Loss, and some other
Economic Aspects of the Land Question. By Joseph Shield Nicholson, M.A.,
Professor of Political Economy in fhe University of Edinburgh. Crown 8vo, 5s.
Verses of a Prose "Writer.
By Jas. Ashcroft Noble. Fcap. 8vo, price 6s.
Camps in the Caribbees : Adventures of a Naturalist
in the Lesser Antilles. By Frederick Ober. Illustrations, demy Svo, 12s.
" Well-written and well-illustrated narrative of camping out among the Carib
bees." — Westminster Review.
" Varied were his experiences, hairbreadth his escapes, and wonderful his glean
ings in the way of securing rare birds."— The Literary World.
Cookery for the Sick and a Guide for the Sick-Room.
By C. H. Ogg, an Edinburgh Nurse. Fcap. Is.
The Lord Advocates of Scotland from the close of the
Fifteenth Century to the passing of the Reform Bill. By G. W. T. Omond,
Advocate. 2 vols, demy 8vo, 2Ss.
The Arniston Memoirs— Three Centuries of a Scottish
House 1571-1838. Edited from Family Papers by Geo. W. T. Omond, Advocate.
1 vol. Svo, 21s., with Etchings, Lithographs, and Woodcuts.
An Irish Garland.
By Mrs. S. M. B. Piatt. Crown 8vo, 3s. 6d.
The Children Out of Doors. A Book of Verses,
By Two in One House. Crown Svo, 3s. 6d.
Phrpbe By the Author of "Rutledge." Reprinted from the Fifth Thousand of the
American Edition. Crown Svo, 6s.
" ' Phoebe' is a woman's novel"— Saturday Review.
Popular Genealogists ;
Or, The Art of Pedigree-making. Crown Svo, 4s.
The Gamekeeper's Manual : being Epitome of the Game
La^s forth! us , of Gamekeepers aud others interested in the Preservation of
Game. By Alexander Porter, Deputy Chief Constable of Roxburghshire.
Fcap. 8vo, Is.
Kuram Kabul and Kandahar : being a Brief Record of
thftonr^sions in Three Campaigns under General Roberts. By Lieutenant
RoberTon , Stn! "The King's," Regiment. Crown Svo, with Maps, 6s.
Scotland under her Early Kings.
A History of the Kingdom to the close of the 13th century. By E. William
Robertson. In 2 vols. 8vo, cloth, 36s.
Historical Essays, „ „,
In connection with the Land and the Church, etc. By E William Robertson,
Author of " Scotland under her Early Kings. 8vo, 10s. 6d.

16 LIST OF BOOKS

A Rectorial Address delivered before the Students of
Aberdeen University, in the Music Hall at Aberdeen, on Nov. 5, 1880. By The
Eael of Rosebery. 6d.
A Rectorial Address delivered before the Students of
the University of Edinburgh, Nov. 4, 1S82. By The Earl of Rosebery. 6d.
Aberdour and Inchcolme. Being Historical Notices of
the Parish and Monastery, in Twelve Lectures. By the Rev. William Ross, LL.D.,
Author of "Burgh Life in Dunfermline in the Olden Time." Crown Svo, 6s.
"If any one would know what Aberdour has been, or, indeed, what to some
extent has been the history of many another parish in Scotland, he cannot do
better than read these Lectures. He will find the task a pleasant one. "—Saturday
Review. " We know no book which within so small a compass contains so varied, so
accurate, and so vivid a description of the past life of the Scottish people,
whether ecclesiastical or social, as Dr. Ross's ' Aberdour and Inchcolme.'" —
Scottish Revieio.
" It seems a pity that so good a thing should have been so long withheld from
a wider audience ; but better late than never." — Scotsman.
Notes and Sketches from the "Wild Coasts of Nipon.
With Chapters on Cruising after Pirates in Chinese Waters. By Henry C. St.
John, Captain R.N. Small demy 8vo, with Maps and Illustrations, 12&.
"One of the most charming books of travel that has been published for some
time." — Scotsman,
"There is a great deal more in the book than Natural History. . . . His
pictures of life and manners are quaint and effective, and the more so from the
writing being natural and free from effort." — Athenceum.
"He writes with a simplicity and directness, and not seldom with a degree of
graphic power, which, even apart from the freshness of the matter, renders his
book delightful reading. Nothing could be better of its kind than the description
of the Inland Sea." — Daily News.
Notes on the Natural History of the Province of Moray.
By the late Charles St. John, Author of "Wild Sports in the Highlands."
Second Edition. In 1 vol. royal Svo, with 40 page Illustrations of Scenery and
Animal Life, engraved by A. Durand after sketches made by George Reid,
R.S.A., and J. W\cliffe Taylor ; also, 30 Pen-and-ink Drawings by the Author
in facsimile. 50s.
"This is a new edition of the work brought out by the friends of the late Mr. St.
John in 1S63 ; but it is so handsomely and nobly printed, and enriched with such
charming illustrations, that we may consider it a new book."— St. James's Gazette.
" Charles St. John was not an artist, but he had the habit of roughly sketching
animals in positions which interested him, and the present reprint is adorned by
a great number of these, facsimiled from the author's original pen and ink. Some
of these, as for instance the studies of the golden eagle swooping on its prey, and
that of the otter swimming with a salmon in its mouth, are very interesting, and
full of that charm that comes from the exact transcription of unusual observa
tion." — Pall Mall Gazette.
A Tour in Sutherlandshire, with Extracts from the
Field-Books of a Sportsman and Naturalist. By the late Charles St. John,
Author of " Wild Sports and Natural History in the Highlands." Second Edition,
with an Appendix on the Fauna of Sutherland, by J. A. Harvie-Brown" and
T. E. Buckley. Illustrated with the original Wood Engravings, and additional
Vignettes from the Author's sketch-books. In 2 vols, small demy Svo, 21s.
"Every page is full of interest."— The Field.
" There is not a wild creature in the Highlands, from the great stag to the tiny
fire-crested wren, of which he has not something pleasant to say." — Pall Mall
Gazette.
Life of James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell.
By Professor Schieun, Copenhagen. Translated from the Danish by the Rev.
David Berry, F.S.A, Scot. Demy 8vo, 10s.

PUBLISHED BY DAVID DOUGLAS. 17

Scotch Folk.
Illustrated. Fourth Edition enlarged. Ex. fcap. 8vo, Is.
" They are stories of the best type, quite equal in the main to the average of
Dean Ramsay's well-known collection." — Aberdeen Free Press.
Studies in Poetry and Philosophy.
By the late J. C. Shairp, LL.D., Principal of the United College of St. Salvator
and St. Leonard, St. Andrews. Fourth Edition, with Portraits of the Author and
Thomas Erskine, by William Hole, A.R.S.A. Crown Svo, 7s. 6d.
"In the 'Moral Dynamic,' Mr. Shairp seeks for something which shall per
suade us of the vital and close bearing on each other of moral thought and spiritual
energy. It is this conviction which has animated Mr. Shairp in every page of the
volume before us. It is because he appreciates so justly and forcibly the powers
of philosophic doctrine over all the field of human life, that he leans with such
strenuous trust upon those ideas which Wordsworth un systematically, and Cole
ridge more systematically, made popular and fertile among us." — Saturday
Review. ' ' The finest essay in the volume, partly because it is upon the greatest and most
definite subject, is the first, on Wordsworth. ... We have said so much upon this
essay that we can only say of the other three that they are fully worthy to stand
beside it." — Spectator.
Culture and Religion.
By the late Principal Shairp. Seventh Edition. Fcap. Svo, 3s." Gd.
"A wise book, and, unlike a great many other wise books, has that carefully
shaded thought and expression which fits Professor Shairp to speak for Culture
no less than for Religion." — Spectator.
" Those who remember a former work of'Principal Shairp's, ( Studies in Poetry
and Philosophy,' will feel secure that all which comes from his pen will bear the
marks of thought, at once careful, liberal, and accurate. Nor will they be dis
appointed in the present work. . . . We can recommend this book to our readers."
— A thenceum.
"We cannot close without earnestly recommending the book to thoughtful
young men. It combines the loftiest intellectual power with a simple and child
like faith in Christ, and exerts an influence which must be stimulating and
healthful." — Freeman.
Sketches in History and Poetry.
By the late Principal Shairp. Edited by John Veitch, Professor of Logic
and Rhetoric in the University of Glasgow. Crown Svo. 7s. 6d.
Kilmahoe, a Highland Pastoral,
And other Poems. By Principal Shairp. Fcap. 8vo, 6s.
Shakespeare on G-olf. With special Reference to St.
Andrews Links. 3d.
The Divine Comedy of Dante Alig-hieri, The Inferno.
A Translation in Terza Rima, with Notes and Introductory Essay. By James
Romanes Sibbald. With an Engraving after Giotto's Portrait. Small demy
Svo, 12s.
" Mr. Sibbald is certainly to be congratulated on having produced a translation
which would probably give an English reader a better conception of the nature of
the original poem, having regard both to its matter and its form in combination,
than any other English translation yet published."— Academy.
The Use of -what is called Evil.
A Discourse by Simplicius. Extracted from his Commentary on the Enchiridion
of Epictetus. Crown 8vo, Is.
The Near and the Far View,
And other Sermons. By Rev. A. L. Simpson, D.D., Derby. Ex. fcap. Svo, 5s.
"Very fresh and thoughtful are these sermons." — Literary World.
."Dr. Simpson's sermons may fairly claim distinctive power. He looks at things
with his own eyes, and often shows us what with ordinary vision we had failed to
perceive. . The sermons are distinctively good."— British Quarterly Review.

LIST OF BOOKS

Archaeological Essays.
By the late Sir James Simpson, Bart. Edited by the late John Stuart, LL.D.
2 vols. 4to, 21s.

6. Leprosy and Leper Hospitals.
7. Greek Medical Vases.
8. Was the Roman Army provided
with Medical Officers ?
9. Roman Medicine Stamps, etc. etc.

1. Archaeology.
2. Inchcolm.
3. TheCatStane.
4. Magical Charm-Stones.
5. Pyramid of Gizeh.
The Art of G-olf.
By Sir W. G. Simpson, Bart., Captain of the Honourable Company of Edinburgh
Golfers. With Twenty Plates from instantaneous photographs of Professional
Players, chiefly by A. F. Macfle, Esq. Demy Svo, Morocco back, price 15s.
The Four Ancient Books of Wales,
Containing the Cymric Poems attributed to the Bards of the sixth century. By
"William F. Skene, D.C.L., Historiographer-Royal for Scotland. "With Maps and
Facsimiles. 2 vols. 8vo, 36s.
Celtic Scotland : A History of Ancient Alban.
By William F. Skene, D.C.L., Historiographer-Royal for Scotland. In 3 vols.
Demy Svo, 45s. Illustrated with Maps.
I. — History and Ethnology. II. — Church and Culture.
III. — Land and People.
" Forty years ago Mr. Skene published a small historical work on the Scottish
Highlands which has ever since been appealed to as an authority, but which has
long been out of print. The promise of this youthful effort is amply fulfilled in
the three weighty volumes of his'maturer years. As a work of historical research
it ought in our opinion to take a very high rank."— Times.
The Gospel History for the Young :
Being lessons on the Life of Christ, Adapted for use in Families and Sunday
Schools. By William F. Skene, D.C.L., Historiographer-Royal for Scotland.
Small crown Svo, 3 vols., with Maps, 5s. each vol., or in cloth box, 15s.
" In a spirit altogether unsectarian provides for the young a simple, interesting,
and thoroughly charming history of our Lord." — Literary World.
"This 'Gospel History for the Young ' is one of the most valuable books of
the kind." — The Churchman.
Shelley : a Critical Biography.
By George Barnett Smith. Ex. fcap. Svo, 6s.
The Sermon on the Mount.
By the Rev. Walter C. Smith, D.D. Crown Svo, 6s.
Life and "Work at the Great Pyramid.
With a Discussion of the Facts ascertained. By C. Piazzi Smyth, F.R.SS.L.
and E., Astronomer-Royal for Scotland. 3 vols. Demy 8vo, 56s.
Madeira Meteorologic :
Being a Paper on the above subject read before the Royal Society, Edinburgh on
the 1st of May 1882. By C. Piazzi Smyth, Astronomer-Royal for Scotland
Small 4to, 6s.
Saskatchewan and the Bocky Mountains.
Diary and Narrative of Travel, Sport, and Adventure, during a Journey through
part of the Hudson's Bay Company's Territories in 1S59 and 1860. By the Earl
of Soothesk, K.T., F.R.G.S. 1 vol. demy Svo, with Illustrations on Wood by
Whymper, 18s. By the same Author.
Hermmius :
A Romance. Fcap. Svo, 6s.
Jonas Fisher :
A Poem in Brown and White. Cheap Edition. Is.

PUBLISHED BY DAVID DOUGLAS. 1 9

The Burial of Isis and other Poems.
Fcap. 8vo, 6s.

Darroll, and other Poems.
By Walter Cook Spens, Advocate. Crown 8vo, 5s.
Rudder Grange.
By Frank R. Stockton. Is. : and cloth, 2s.
" ' Rudder Grange ' is a book that few could produce, and that most would be
proud to sign." — Saturday Review.
" It may be safely recommended as a very amusing little book."— A thenceum.
"Altogether 'Rudder Grange ' is as cheery, as humorous, and as wholesome
a little story as we have read for many a day." — St. James's Gazette.
' ' The minutest incidents are narrated with such genuine humour and gaiety,
that at the close of the volume the reader is sorry to take leave of the merry
innocent party." — Westminster Review.
The Lady or the Tiger? and other Stories.
By Frank R. Stockton. Is. ; and cloth, 2s.
Contents. — The Lady or the Tiger ? — The Transferred Ghosts — The Spectral Mort
gage — That same old 'Coon — His Wife's Deceased Sister — Mr. Tolman — Plain
Fishing — My Bull Calf — Every Man his own Letter Writer — The Remarkable
Wreck of the "Thomas Hyke."
' ' Stands by itself both for originality of plot and freshness of humour."— Century
Magazine.
A Borrowed Month, and other Stories.
By Frank R. Stockton, Author of " Rudder Grange." Is. ; and cloth, 2s.
Contents. — A Borrowed Month — A Tale of Negative Gravity — The Christmas
Wreck — Our Archery Club — A Story of Assisted Fate — The Discourager of
Hesitancy— Our Story.
Christianity Confirmed by Jewish and Heathen Testi
mony, and the Deductions from Physical Science, etc. By Thomas Stevenson,
F.R.S.E., F.G.S., Member of the Institution of Civil Engineers. Second
Edition. Fcap. Svo, 3s. 6d.
What is Play ?
A Physiological Inquiry. Its bearing upon Education and Training. By John
Straohan, M.D. Fcap., Is.
Good Lives : Some Fruits of the Nineteenth Century.
By A. M. Symington, D.D. Small crown 8vo, 3s. 6d.
Sketch of Thermodynamics.
By P. G. Tait, Professor of Natural Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh.
Second Edition, revised and extended. Crown Svo, 5s.
Talks with our Farm-Servants.
By An Old Farm-Servant. Crown Svo ; paper, 6d. ; cloth, Is.
Walden; or, Life in the "Woods.
By H. D. Thoreau. Crown 8vo, 6s.
Tommie Brown and the Queen of the Fairies ; a new
Child's Book, in fcap. 8vo. With Illustrations, 4s. 6d.
Let pain be pleasure, and pleasure be pain.
" There is no wonder that children liked the story. It is told neatly and well,
and is full of great cleverness, while it has that peculiar character the absence of
which from many like stories deprives them of any real interest for children." —
Scotsman.
Our Mission to the Court of Marocco in 1880, under
Sir John Drummond Hay, K.C.B., Minister Plenipotentiary at Tangier, and
Envoy Extraordinary to His Majesty the Sultan of Marooco. By Captain Philip
Durham Trotter, 93d Highlanders. Illustrated from Photographs by the Hon.
D. Lawless, Rifle Brigade. Square Demy 8vo, 24s.
The Upland Tarn : A Village Idyll.
Small Crown, 5s.

20 LIST OF BOOKS PUBLISHED BY DAVID DOUGLAS.
Mr. Washington Adams in England.
By Richard Grant White. Is. ; or in cloth, 2s.
"An impudent book." — Vanity Fair.
"This short, tiresome book."— Saturday Review.
"Brimful of genuine humour." — Montrose Standard.
"Mr. "White is a capital caricaturist, but in portraying the ludicrous eccentri
cities of the patrician Britisher he hardly succeeds so well as in delineating the
peculiar charms of the representative Yankee." — Whitehall Review.
Rosetty Ends, or the Chronicles of a Country Cobhler.
By Job Bradawl (A. Dewar Willock), Author of " She Noddit to me." Fcap.
Svo, Illustrated. 2s.
"The sketches are amusing productions, narrating comical incidents, con
nected by a thread of common character running through them all— a thread
waxed into occasional strength by the 'roset' of a homely, entertaining wit." —
Scotsman.
The Botany of Three Historical Records :
Pharaoh's Dream, the Sower, and the King's Measure. By A. Stephen Wilson.
Crown Svo, with 5 Plates, 3s. 6d.
"A Bushel of Corn."
By A. Stephen Wilson. An investigation by Experiments into all the more
important questions which range themselves round a Bushel of Wheat, a Bushel
of Barley, and a Bushel of Oats. Crown Svo, with Illustrations, 9s.
" It is full of originality and force." — Nature.
J "A monument of painstaking research."— Liverpool Mercury.
"Mr. Wilson's book is interesting not only for agriculturists and millers, but
for all who desire information on the subject of corn, in which every one is so
intimately concerned." — Morning Post.
Songs and Poems.
By A. Stephen Wilson. Crown Svo, 6s.
Reminiscences of Old Edinburgh.
By Daniel Wilson, LL.D., F.R.S.E., Professor of History and English Literature
in University College, Toronto, Author of " Prehistoric Annals of Scotland," etc.
etc. 2 vols, post Svo, -15s.
The India Civil Service as a Career for Scotsmen.
By J. Wilson, M.A. Is.
Christianity and Reason :
Their necessary connection. By R. S. Wyld, LL.D. Extra fcap. Svo, 3s. 6d.
Shakespeare's England.
By William Winter. Is., paper, or 2s., cloth extra.
Contents.— The Voyage— The Beauty of England— Great Historic Places-
Rambles in London— A Visit to Windsor — The Palace of Westminster— Warwick
and Kenilworth— First View of Stratford-on-Avon — London Nooks and Corners —
Relics of Lord Byron— Westminster Abbey— The Home of Shakespeare— Up to
London— Old Chtirches of London— Literary Shrines of London— A Haunt of
Edmund Kean— Stoke -Pogis and Thomas Gray— At the Grave of Coleridge — On
Barnet Battlefield— A Glimpse of Canterbury — The Shrines of Warwickshire— A
Borrower of the Night.
The East Neuk of Fife : its History and Antiquities.
Second Edition, Re-arranged and Enlarged. By the Rev. Walter Wood, M.A.
Elie. Edited, with Preface and Index, by the Rev. J. Wood Brown, M.A.'
Gordon. Crown 8vo. 6s.

EDINBURGH: DAVID DOUGLAS, CASTLE STREET.

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