Estate 
 
 of 
 
 William P. Sheffield. 
 
4^ 
 
 4 
 
 >y 
 
^nyO 
 
 THE IRISH QUESTION: 
 
 ITS ESSENCE, COURSE, SOLUTION, 
 
 AND THE 
 
 ISSUES 
 
 IT INVOLVES 
 
 FOR IRELAND and FOR ENGLAND 
 
 A MONOGRAPH 
 
 IN THE FORM OF 
 
 A LETTER TO THE PRIME MINISTER 
 
 W. HART WESTCOMBE. 
 
 —Till truth and right from violence be freed, 
 And public faith cleared from the shameful brand 
 Of public fraud ; in vain doth Valour bleed — 
 While avarice and rapine share the land. — Milton. 
 
 LONDON : 
 KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH & CO., I, PATERNOSTER SQUARE. 
 
 1886. 
 
 BOSTON COLLEGE LIBRARY 
 CHMSTNUT HILL, MASS. 
 
God for His Mercy ! What a Tide of Woes 
 
 Comes Rushing on this Woful Land at once! 
 
 * * * * 
 
 That England that was wont to Conquer Others, 
 Hath made a Shameful Conquest of Itself. 
 
 * * * * 
 
 Now Lean-Looked Prophets Whisper Fearful Change ; 
 
 Rich Men look Sad, and Ruffians Dance and Leap, — 
 
 The One in Fear to Lose what they Enjoy, 
 
 The Other, to Enjoy by Rage and War : 
 
 These Signs forerun the Death or Fall of Kings. 
 
 Kin? Richard II. 
 

 PREFATORY NOTE. 
 
 Though the present Monograph appears in the form of a 
 Letter to the Prime Minister, nothing is farther from the mind 
 of the writer than to convey the impression that the matter 
 contained in it is to be regarded as of merely temporary, 
 fleeting, interest and importance, — and therefore to be for- 
 gotten or neglected when we possess full knowledge of the 
 " measures " now impending. On the contrary, the object of the 
 Author has been — to bring into small compass the leading 
 phenomena which must be studied, now and in future, by every- 
 one interested in the solution of the Irish Problem. And 
 although the Prime Minister of the hour is addressed, and his 
 activity specially criticized, — yet the reader is requested to regard 
 him as only one of a class of political nostrum-mongers with 
 which these islands are likely to be afflicted for many a long year. 
 May this little book tend to efface that pernicious class, and so 
 shorten the days wherein we are to suffer adversity ! 
 
 288£ 
 
To 
 The Right Honourable W. E. GLADSTONE, M.P. 
 Sir, 
 
 In common with many thousands of Her Majesty's X ou r ^ nest 
 
 aitthentic 
 
 subjects I have read your extraordinary letter addressed to Lord knowledge." 
 de Vesci, inviting "free communication of views from the various 
 sections most likely to supply full and authentic knowledge of the 
 wants and wishes of the Irish people " ; — and in common with 
 some hundreds of them I have undertaken to comply with your 
 request. 
 
 A most astounding request it is. In the first place, it 
 seems to imply an abdication on your part of the elementary 
 functions of statesmanship. The business of a steersman is — to 
 steer, — of a responsible politician — to devise and carry out a 
 policy. Again, I should have thought that the proper, the 
 constitutional source of " full and authentic knowledge of the wants 
 and wishes of the Irish people " would have been the hundred-and- 
 odd representatives of the Irish constituencies " duly " elected a 
 few weeks ago to serve in the Commons' House of Parliament, and 
 elected on a plan designed and arranged by yourself. But once 
 more, the passage I have quoted contains an ambiguity from 
 which few of your public utterances on the Irish Question are 
 wholly free. The ambiguity lies in the term " Irish people." 
 What do you mean by the " Irish people " ? Again, when you 
 have got this knowledge, "What will you do with it?" How 
 will you test it ? What would you do, suppose the weight of 
 evidence furnished by these " various sections " should lead you to 
 make proposals (when you come one of these days to " settle " 
 the Irish Difficulty) that would not commend themselves to a 
 majority of the Irish members ? If, for example, you should be 
 convinced by the arguments of the Irish Defence Union, would 
 you hold your hand, abandon office, abandon public life altogether 
 — rather than march in step with the party which you once 
 
 B 
 
2 You are again about to " settle " the Question ; but you will fail — 
 
 described as bent on " stalking through rapine to disintegration and 
 dismemberment " ? That you are in a difficulty is manifest. Do 
 what you will, turn where you may, — hemmed in— nay, more, 
 surrounded — you see, I should imagine, difficulty — and ever 
 difficulty. The Irish Question you have made the question of 
 the hour; it may hereafter be pronounced to have been, for 
 England, the question of the century. 
 I can give But y ou ma y fairly ask what "section" I represent. I will 
 knowledge/' te ^ vou - I represent by distinct and formal delegation the views 
 and i give it. Q f a sma ll body of persons who are (i) professed students of 
 the History of Nations, and of Politics, in the widest sense of 
 the term ; who (2) have lived each of them for at least a quarter 
 of a century in Ireland; who (3) have lived many years in England 
 (some, indeed, having been born on this side of the Irish Sea), 
 and who (4) have material interests at stake in this business. 
 The last consideration, however, weighs with them so little that 
 it would not of itself have induced them to trouble you at present. 
 But they are moved to do so because they are sincere well- 
 wishers of all Her Majesty's subjects, whether English or Irish. 
 These, then, are my sailing orders. — 
 
 First, then, The first statement I am instructed to make is — and I may 
 ~ y faii, iU add, what is absolutely certain in this crisis of the history of (not 
 only Ireland but) England is — what can admit of no manner of 
 debate, is — that you, sir, are not destined to initiate now or 
 at any future time a policy bearing ever so remotely even in the 
 direction of a solution of the Irish Question. We have examined 
 your habit of mind and character, we have examined your professed 
 principles, 1 we have examined your record — and we have pro- 
 nounced this conclusion to be irresistible. 
 
 Passing over, for the present, the psychological aspects of the 
 matter, and confining ourselves to facts that are past recall, I 
 (speaking now and to the end in my own person) affirm that you 
 have already — with the best intentions in the world — rendered the 
 Irish Problem — on this side Revolution — absolutely insoluble. 
 
 1 The difficulty we have encountered being not to examine your principles— 
 that we are perfectly willing and competent to do— though we say it,— but to 
 find them. 
 
Dismally, despite your mastery of details, 3 
 
 First, by a series of measures you steadily lessened the possibility 
 of a solution of the problem; and then by a final measure you have 
 scored a " lost ball " ; you have hit the problem, if I may so 
 speak, clean away out of the region of things soluble by ordinary 
 processes. And now, having rendered by the labours of many 
 " days and nights " this momentous problem absolutely insoluble, 
 you propose to solve it by a further and more complete application 
 of the principles and methods that have rendered it insoluble ! 
 Sir, your present activity will end in disastrous, dismal Failure. 
 It can have no other issue. 
 
 In support of this thesis, and with the view of enlightening as 1 win now 
 posterity, and also of bringing as many Englishmen as possible back, P prove— to 
 by God's grace, to a better mind than they have shown in making ^nSJ-l— S 
 you Dictator and Saviour of Society, I will enlarge a little on this 
 Irish Problem and on your relation to it. Before doing so, 
 however, I premise three things : — 
 
 1. I will not be seduced into discussing any part of the sub- (i)thati 
 ject in detail. My remarks shall, as far as possible, be general, myself to 
 That does not imply, as many people might imagine, that they * rincip i 
 will be vague. They will not be vague : they will be comprehensive. 
 Mastery of detail is, we are told, your strong point; and mastery of 
 detail is admirable when the subject of discussion is, say, the 
 Greek verbs in /u. But mastery of detail may become in a states- 
 man a very dangerous quality : it tends to obscure even to himself 
 the possible weakness of principle underlying his measures; and it 
 tends to bewilder a stupid people like the English into acquies- 
 cence, when acquiescence means wrong and danger and disgrace. 
 — At the present time, for example, we read of nothing in the 
 papers but a proposal— started by a distinguished Figure-man, 
 and supposed to be one of those proposals that will be 
 made by you one of these days— a proposal to expropriate the 
 Irish landlords at the cost of adding ^"200,000,000 x to our 
 National Debt. Now, many intelligent Englishmen, Able Editors 
 and others, are aghast — but at what ? At the all-round profligacy 
 and folly of the proposal? Not at all: only at the prospect of 
 our having to find this enormous amount ! A side issue altogether. 
 And some seem to think that the whole difficulty is settled when 
 
 1 More or less, and it makes no matter how much more, or how much less. 
 
 E 2 
 
4 And your good intentions. 
 
 they are able to explain that certain Customs and Excise duties 
 to be levied in Ireland will be ample guarantee for the interest ; 
 and many would be easy in their minds, could they but see 
 introduced such blessed words as a " sinking fund," and "termin- 
 able annuities." Now the fact is (but you get at this by looking 
 at the principle of the thing — not by fogging yourself at the out- 
 set in details): It would be better for England, suppose she 
 wishes to exist as a nation, to pay ^200,000,000 and fight 
 campaign after campaign in order to avoid, — prevent the state 
 of things that will immediately ensue on the disgraceful surrender 
 implied in buying out the Irish landlords. The measure literally 
 reeks of villany ; but the difficulty with Englishmen is — to find the 
 money! If the thing could be compassed for a million, they 
 would not hesitate. 1 Well, the statesman who could propose and 
 the community that could carry out such a measure are face to 
 face with well-deserved disaster. — I will avoid details, then ; my 
 present object will be more completely attained by discussing prin- 
 ciples and by sticking to general truth ; it were easy in every case 
 to give chapter and verse. 
 (H) that my 2. I (personally and representatively) have not the slightest 
 interest is wish that you should fail in your present undertaking. AH my 
 Question wishes, all my interests, as I have already intimated, point in the 
 Devolved; opposite direction. I am not a journalist; I am not a professional 
 politician of any faction or school ; I set small store by that greatest 
 of earthly blessings — the franchise. But I am a loyal subject of 
 Queen Victoria — though the profession of loyalty, it seems, is to 
 you quite unmeaning : at least you decline to consider any differ- 
 ence as existing between two Irishmen of whom one asserts 
 
 1 And some of them are beginning to swear roundly that we English won't 
 find the money, — or rather (for we are first and foremost a moral people) that 
 we oughtn't to find the money. For, don't you see (so argues a certain Earnest 
 man,) the landlords have been getting rack-rents for centuries (especially, I sup- 
 pose, those who bought property in the Encumbered Estates' Court in, say, the 
 year 1879)— so that from financial and moral (especially moral) considerations 
 we must refuse any indemnity on their being forcibly expropriated and banished. 
 And that Ireland was rack-rented is proved by the enormous reductions in rent 
 made by the Land-Commission. — That is, the fact that a man hasheen robbed 
 proves that he ought to have been robbed ; and his having been robbed once 
 is ample proof that he ought to be robbed again ! — Truly we are a moral 
 people ! 
 
So says " authentic knowledge " of: — 
 
 that he is loyal and the other boasts that he is disloyal. (By 
 the way, are both loyal or both disloyal ?) Anyhow, to English- 
 men and Irishmen alike I wish well — <x<£iv ei}</>poveW. But 
 neither my wishes nor interests, nor prayers nor vows will serve 
 to avert this signal, this final Failure ! 
 
 ■z. I have always refused, I refuse now, and, no matter what (m) that 
 
 raise no 
 
 happens, I will to the bitter end, refuse to discuss the question, question as 
 
 to your 
 
 wholly irrelevant as it is, whether you are actuated in what you intentions, 
 do, by the purest motives, the best, noblest, most virtuous inten- 
 tions. I freely admit that there is not a man in England to 
 whom, from his own sta?idpoint, the "General Confession" in the 
 Church Service approaches so nearly to a mere form of words 
 as it does to you. Nay, I will affirm that if you could use the 
 formula of the Pharisee, you would be justified, Te judice, in 
 " thanking God that you are not as other men." Your motives 
 may be of the purest. — But I must remark that Nature takes 
 no account of our motives, of our intentions, but of our acts 
 per se. A doctor lately gave to two several women strychnine 
 instead of some innocuous drug they asked for. He made a 
 mistake : he did not intend to do any harm ; — but the women 
 died. One of the saddest signs of our times is this deification 
 of good intentions ; it leads directly to presumption — recklessness 
 — for the blunderer ( — his blunders made visible, palpable, by 
 events,) points loftily to the purity of his motives, and in doing 
 so is supposed to have done something to the purpose ! Up- 
 rightness of intentions alone does not bring back the dead, does 
 not comfort the fatherless and widow in their affliction ; again, 
 it does not restore confidence, revive trade — does not make 
 contract a sacred thing and property secure. I have said so 
 much on this point because you are a signal instance of a 
 statesman whose activity has been, on the whole, purely mis- 
 chievous — notwithstanding, nay, in and through his " good inten- 
 tions " ! You are now, I have no doubt, elated (such your good- 
 ness of intention !) at the prospect of " settling " the Irish Question ; 
 but be assured you will fail?- — And your good intentions will not 
 save others from the results of your pernicious activity. 
 
 1 A startling bit of self-portraiture is that contained in your letter addressed 
 a few days ago to the Editor of the Tuam Herald— which, copied into a 
 
So says " authentic knowledge " of. 
 
 Now in I pass on now, after these indications of my spirit and my 
 you^m fait method, to the main considerations that I wish to lay before you. 
 consider— I proceed to support the statement I have made — that you will fail 
 in your attempt to settle the Irish Question, to solve the Irish Prob- 
 lem, to remove the Irish Difficulty ; and I will do so by examining 
 your past record, your present position, and the leading qualities 
 of your mind and character. And I will show that the present 
 insoluble condition of the problem is due exclusively to your activity. 
 I cannot hope, sir, to convince you of the soundness of my 
 views; but, on the other hand, I cannot forget that I owe it to myself 
 and to many men in the three kingdoms, not to let those who come 
 after suppose that the moral Laws of the Universe, which you 
 have in your previous activity consistently violated, were unknown 
 — not yet ascertained — when you violated them ; or that we are 
 now helplessly looking forward to your declaration of policy on 
 this Question as for words spoken by "the voice of a god and 
 not of a man." I am not ambitious of posthumous fame : I 
 address a very near posterity. I want the people who will live 
 in this kingdom five, ten years hence to understand that your 
 assumption of the role of Final Disposer of this Difficulty never 
 deceived us — a few of your contemporaries, — that we know, not 
 only that you must fail, but why you must fail. And it will be only 
 fair to you, to them, to contemporary Englishmen and to ourselves, 
 to explain why, in this matter, we are not, and cannot be, taken in. 
 To this duty I now address myself; and I will from a multitude of 
 topics make a selection of four or five for our special study. Our 
 inquiry will thus be kept within reasonable bounds. 
 00 the I. First, then, I will state in the simplest formula I can 
 
 M *the* ° construct, the essentia of the Difficulty, which manifestly you do 
 
 Difficulty; 
 
 not as yet rightly apprehend. Incidentally you will perceive 
 the futility of all your measures, "generous " and other, to grapple 
 with it. You have in fact been, at best, beating the air. 
 
 London paper, comes to my hand as I correct the proof of the above para- 
 graph. You bring out clearly your "good intentions." Right ! Lord Salis- 
 bury, being a man of infamous intentions, wouldn't solve the Irish Problem if 
 he could. — Since writing this note, I find that somebody has been denying the 
 authenticity of that letter. If it is not genuine, it is ben trovato [see p. 37]. 
 We live in the days of pilot balloons. 
 
Tlie Essence of the Difficulty ; 7 
 
 II. I will glance at the History of the Difficulty down to the (ii.)the 
 time when you made your first attempt to settle it. toryofu 
 
 III. I will discuss your various attempts to settle the Difficulty ; (ui.)your 
 and I will show that your early exertions rendered the solution T f£i?? 
 of the Problem — before difficult, but every day becoming easier 
 
 — prodigiously more difficult ; and that then — at one blow — 
 you rendered solution impossible on this side Revolution. [Do 
 you now, I may ask in passing, meditate Revolution ? Are 
 you prepared to stand in a white sheet for your past acts ? I am 
 sure you do not meditate Revolution ; and that you have ( — such 
 the determination of Destiny !) as yet found no place of 
 repentance. Very well then : you will fail.] 
 
 IV. As I desire not only to criticize y but to teach positive doc- (iv.)the 
 trine, I will describe the sort of statesman required at the present "equkSi 1 
 juncture: a man who, properly supported, could even now make ^andlis' 
 the Irish Difficulty in a very short time " ancient history." And solutlon - 
 I will indicate in the most general terms his policy. You will 
 
 thus have an opportunity of measuring the distance between you 
 and a solution of this problem ; for, by how much you differ in 
 mind, character, ways of thinking from the statesman hereinafter 
 described, and by, how much your policy will be found to differ 
 from his policy, — by so much you will fall short of success in your 
 present undertaking. 
 
 I. 
 
 The Essentia of the Difficulty. 
 I will now explain the essential elements of the Irish Difficulty. r .._ TI « . 
 
 1 J Difficulty in 
 
 In doing so, I beg you will understand that I know perfectly its essence 
 well what you and other people have by word or act asserted institutions, 
 that the Difficulty consists in. But first, it will interest you as the 
 statesman who has given so many days and nights to the study 
 of this Difficulty, to be informed what the Difficulty — in essence — 
 is not. 
 
 The Difficulty, then, was not and is not connected with a 
 Protestant Establishment, nor with Education of the primary, 
 secondary, or university sort ; it has nothing to do with the land 
 question, with landlords, land agents rack-rents, evictions, or 
 
8 The Essence of the Difficulty ; 
 
 Dublin Castle. It does not exist because of "past misgovern- 
 ment," pitch-caps, penal laws. It is not a result of the Union. 
 All these things have been and are mentioned by Irish orators — 
 whom I (in a sense) respect, and by their English dupes — for whom 
 I feel nothing but contempt — mentioned, I say, and emphasized — 
 one or other of them, from time to time. They are — some of them 
 pure accidents, others, only symptoms of the Difficulty. They are 
 not of the essence of the Difficulty ; for if you could at this 
 moment blot out the reality and the remembrance of them, the 
 Difficulty in all its essentials would still remain. Well then, sir, 
 if this be so (and it is so) — you have been in this business as in 
 other things, fighting, wrestling, debating, retorting, scolding, 
 speechifying, rhetorizing — in vain, — you have been giving your 
 days and nights to what has been simply a series of costly, disas- 
 trous, bloody — irrelevancies. For you have addressed yourself 
 exclusively to accidents, to symptoms : you have never — never once 
 — touched, or even approached, the essence of the Difficulty. 
 All that you have ever done, all that you are doing now, all 
 that you will ever do, or can ever do — in the region you have 
 chosen for activity — amounts merely to solemn, wicked, and 
 pernicious trifling ! 
 
 but in Now listen : The essential elements of the Irish Difficulty (which 
 
 the character means, I take it, the Difficulty that England has in ruling the 
 
 Saxon; Irishry) lie in the fact, that between the typical Englishman and 
 the typical Irishman there exists a set of race-antagonisms almost 
 unparalleled in number and intensity. Observe, I do not say race- 
 antagonism. It is not that the Irish Celt hates the English Saxon 
 because the English Saxon is of a different race • but it is that if 
 you take the type-characters of the Celt, sift them, invoice them, 
 then do the like with the type-characters of the Saxon, and then 
 compare the two sets, you find antagonism upon antagonism. I 
 may say here that there exists a like series of antagonisms between 
 the Welsh Celt and the English Saxon ; and under your fostering 
 care the Welsh antagonisms will very soon be manifest. In the 
 general smash you will hear of the Welshman. 
 
 Now, many of the antagonisms which separate the Saxon from 
 the Celt (I confine my attention to the Irish Celt) do not concern 
 
The Essence of the Difficulty ; 9 
 
 us at present. But some of them do ; let us look to those that do. 
 They are of course those which bear on Society, Politics, Govern- 
 ment. Now it happens that in this region the antagonism is 
 rather more strongly marked than in any other ! The Celt (I speak 
 now of the Saxon and Celt of History), left to himself, ever 
 tends to relapse into barbarism, and when he gets there he stays 
 there; in the Saxon there is a slight, but very slight, upward 
 tendency towards civilization. The Celt tends to squat and breed 
 and idle : the Saxon squats and breeds and moils — a foredoomed 
 hewer of wood and drawer of water. The Celt has no idea of 
 liberty ; " license " he "means when he cries liberty"; he is by nature 
 turbulent, unruly, ungovernable — save by a strong, steady, consis- 
 tent external pressure. 1 But when the right man comes along, the 
 Celt is easily governed. The Saxon, on the other hand, as long as 
 he can fill his belly, and in general be physically "comfortable," 
 is very easily governed, and, left to himself, would even tend to 
 evolve a rudimentary sort of government. The Celt is sensitive, 
 sentimental, clever, "cute," ferocious, — an unscrupulous liar; the 
 Saxon is, by comparison, truthful, — " practical," i.e. material, — 
 stupid, distrustful of mind, brutal. The Celt is a born fine gentle- 
 man ; the Saxon a born vulgarian. The Celt is, in a sense, logical— 
 particularly, when the conclusion suits him ; he argues like an 
 attorney : the Saxon, on the other hand, is almost wholly below 
 reasoning ; and when he has evolved connected speech, explains 
 that the world isn't governed by syllogisms. The Celt is, as 
 regards religion, a superstitious devotee or an infidel ; the Saxon 
 is a fanatic or a pagan. — Such, then, are the elements of the 
 Difficulty. — But the Difficulty would never have come into and yet, as 1 
 existence if the two peoples had not been placed in direct show! iTwas 
 contact— were they not connected at all, or connected only as ^ddent" 
 subjects under a common empire. But let the Saxon be sub- 
 ordinated to the Celt, or the Celt to the Saxon : and lo, the 
 Difficulty is born ! 
 
 1 " Social order" is a plant not indigenous to Ireland. 
 
The History of the Difficulty ; 
 
 II. 
 
 The History of the Difficulty. 
 
 The Saxon And now for a few remarks on the History of the Difficulty, 
 pitchforked 1'he very form of words which I have just used implies that the 
 mastership; subordination mentioned above has been effected. And the 
 special form it took was — that the Celt became subordinated to the 
 Saxon. Now please glance at the antagonisms I have noted in 
 the previous section, and say whether it was possible in the nature 
 of things that a " Difficulty " could be avoided. It is plain, in fact, 
 that a Difficulty was inevitable. Let us see how it came about 
 that the Saxon was pitchforked into the position of Master — a 
 position for which his abilities nowise fitted him. 
 
 Towards the beginning of the eleventh century the polity that 
 the Saxon, with everything in his favour, had been able to form — 
 all that he was able to construct in the way of settled government, 
 fell to pieces, — first and temporarily, under the repeated attacks of 
 men of pure Scandinavian race, 1 secondly and permanently, under 
 one blow — delivered by a Franco-Scandinavian people, the Normans. 
 
 1 The Scandinavians (usually called Danes, but, in fact, Norzaegians) were 
 the first to introduce civilization into Ireland. What they did for the island 
 may be gathered from a perusal of the third Section of Worsaae's great work : 
 Minder om de Danske og Nordmcendene i England, Skotland og Irland: 
 Kjbbcnhavn, 1 85 1. — The men who leavened with true manliness the dwindling 
 Saxon England of ^Ethelred "the resourceless " {Unready), who at the same 
 time pushing on into the unknown North and planting their colonies in Iceland, 
 thence passed on to Greenland, — thence to the continent of North America, 
 establishing a settlement on the site of New York before Columbus was born 
 or thought of — who introduced civilization into Ireland, and there had towns 
 and churches and bishops of their own, — who wrested Neustria from the 
 Frankish kings, and formed the Varangian body-guard of the Emperor at 
 Constantinople — these men, I say, have not as yet had justice done them by 
 the Muse of History. That same Muse of History, I may remark in passing, 
 if she inspires certain writers of English and Irish history, is a lying baggage. — 
 I quote from Worsaae a remarkable passage describing what the "Danes/' did 
 for civilization in Ireland. See Appendix, Note A. 
 
The History of the Difficulty ; 1 1 
 
 The conquest by the Normans conferred on the Saxon the totally 
 irrelevant gift of Imperialism — that is, of becoming the arbiter of the 
 destinies of other peoples. Before the Conquest, the Saxon knew 
 Ireland only as the place to which he sold his children into slavery 
 — Bristol being the head-quarters of the slave trade. 1 Under one 
 Norman king (Courtmantle) the Saxon became master of Ireland. ^ 
 Under another Norman king (Longshanks) Scotland and Wales 
 were annexed. From a Frenchman, pur sang, he received the 
 dangerous boon of Parliamentary Government. — Thus Gurth the 
 swineherd, the prototype of " Hodge " in powers and destiny, had 
 " greatness thrust upon him " ; and thus the Difficulty was born. 
 For the Norman element— the noblest that these islands have 
 seen — began to dwindle, 2 partly through wars abroad and at home 
 (the Hundred Years' War, and the Wars of the Roses) ; but 
 principally through the sheer proletarian vigour of the Saxon. 
 Thus was Hastings avenged 7 But thus, too, was the Saxon left to 
 grapple with the Difficulty by his own unaided and absolutely 
 inadequate powers. 
 
 How he succeeded let History tell. His attempts to govern and, whilst 
 Ireland, have been, in sum, simply one long-continued dotter- in himself, 
 ing ineptitude. And now, to crown his ineptitude, he wants to 
 sneak out of the responsibility — responsibility, which he has come 
 to regard as the heaviest of burdens ! You see he had greatness 
 thrust upon him. He failed in the government of his rebellious 
 dependency through sheer native incapacity. He would for a long- 
 period be wholly unconcerned as to what went on in Ireland, — for 
 had he not to tackle his less distant and more palatable cakes and 
 ale? Then, when matters became intolerable even for him, he 
 would rouse himself — meddle and muddle, try to mend, try to 
 end, — or, perhaps, getting violent, he would hit out — and of 
 course strike the wrong man. Then the cold fit would come on 
 again, and Disorder would have a free foot (as it has now) in 
 Ireland. 
 
 1 Some members of the family, e.g., of Mr. John Morley (in the collateral 
 branches) may, for anything I know, have been handed over as slaves to ances- 
 tors of Mr. Tim Healy in the direct line. — History repeats itself. 
 
 2 It was never very large : there is never very much of the best — a fact which 
 it behoves all French-Revolution Majority-mongers to bear in mind. 
 
1 2 The History of the Difficulty } 
 
 had his But the fumbling incapacity of the Saxon — his alternate fits of 
 
 enormously apathy and violence — did not constitute the -whole of the evil. 
 The stars in their courses fought against him. By a strange 
 fatality all that he valued in what he now calls his "progress" 
 lessened his power of coping with the " Irish enemy," — for so he 
 had the sense to call the Celt in the fifteenth century. — I will 
 mention three steps in his " progress " which have made — either 
 the Difficulty greater, or his power to cope with it prodigiously less. 
 (i) by being i. In obedience to his Tudor master the Saxon became, 
 change his in the sixteenth century, a "Protestant," — but a Protestant in 
 name only. He is a born papist. You are, for the present, 
 his political pope. "I cry ditto to Mr. Burke." — Thus the 
 tension between the Celt (who did not become a Protestant, 
 being in development not up to Protestantism, and being 
 too sturdy to accept what he was not up to) and the Saxon 
 (who had Protestantism thrust upon him through his native 
 " nabbiness ", and where thinking was required) — was enor- 
 mously increased; insomuch that the ineradicable hatred of 
 Irish Catholics to Protestantism has led even able observers 
 into the mistake of supposing the Difficulty to have a religious and 
 not a racial origin. 1 There is no question that the difference of 
 religion has enormously increased, though history shows that it did 
 not originate, the Difficulty. But in Catholicism as a religion there 
 is nothing revolutionary — rather the reverse. The Catholic Church 
 
 ^has, as a rule, been on the side of order, property, civilization. 
 And yet, in this case, racial hatred has actually, under our eyes, 
 pressed the sanctions of religion into its service against the 
 detested Saxon, — and the Catholic Church in Ireland is the tool 
 of Irish- American Jacobinism ! 
 CO by losing 2. During many centuries the noble, manly, independent, 
 
 his master — 
 
 man ; * And then they go on — these able observers — to attribute the dislike of the 
 
 Celt to Protestantism — to the "tyranny" of the Established Church! lam 
 not concerned to deny the "tyranny ;" there was very little, or rather none of 
 it — but that is not the point : the Celt does not object to tyranny, but he 
 objects to the Saxon — and if the Saxon is a Protestant, then he hates 
 Protestantism. — In later times presumptuous ignorance finds the Irish 
 Establishment to be something that it — presumptuous ignorance — calls a 
 Upas tree, — I have more to say on this very interesting vegetable — see pp. 
 66—71. 
 
The History of the Difficulty ; 13 
 
 masterful Normans laboured to attain "constitutional freedom" — 
 a great blessing when a community feels the want of it, and fairly 
 wins and wears it. This the Norman community did. But, in 
 fairness, 'it shared the blessing with the Saxon, who demanded it 
 no more than our friend Hodge demanded " this yer wote " when 
 you "thrust" it upon him. Now, every step in the Saxon's 
 " constitutional progress " has been marked by an ever-increasing 
 inability to grapple with the Difficulty. For, as he would never 
 of himself have won the blessings of constitutional government, 
 — having had, in fact, in this case also, greatness thrust upon him, 
 — so he abused the gift. And he abused it in the two ways that 
 were natural — in his case, inevitable (1) Like the son of a rich 
 upstart, he was debilitated, debauched, — being put in possession of 
 advantages which he had not by his own exertions acquired ; and 
 a stern, consistent, manly course — such a course as would compel 
 the respect at least of his enemies— has become every day more 
 and more an impossibility. Our Saxon, having in our own 
 time obtained complete " constitutionalism," — being master of the 
 situation, all enemies being put — but not by himself — under 
 his feet, — attains his maximum of incapacity to grapple with 
 the Irish Question ! Look at him ; he is absolutely unequal 
 to the discharge of the elementary functions of government 
 in Ireland ! 1 He will not protect property, he will not enforce 
 contract, he will not evict, for an eviction is equal to " a sentence 
 of death" (you perceive he has learned some fine-sounding 
 
 1 That thei-e is no necessary connection between constitutional freedom and 
 ' ' flabbiness " is proved by the noble struggle the Northern States of America 
 carried on for years against the states that wished to " repeal the Union." The 
 Southern States, whether they liked it or not, were compelled by force to STAY IN. 
 Right ! No fine talk here about " Southern ideas." This splendid persistency 
 of the Northern States is a spectacle that will cheer the real politician and the 
 friend of true progress as long as History is studied. And yet, I regret to say, 
 the struggle of the North against the South was sullied by the introduction of 
 the question of negro slavery. Government has nothing to do with such 
 " institutions." The North, in attempting to force "abolition" on the South, 
 was guilty of tyranny. — Very well : America has to -face in the near future the 
 "Nigger Question", also — and for analogous reasons — the Socialist Question 
 and the Irish Question. The United States have more than one crisis ahead, 
 but their past action justifies the hope that they will get through all their 
 trials triumphantly. 
 
1 4 The History of the Difficulty ; 
 
 phrases), he will not face the fact, that not to carry out an eviction 
 means the break-up of civil society. And yet he thinks he is a 
 statesman — and, perhaps, a saint — at any rate, a friend of humanity ; 
 whereas he is, in matter of fact, a mere dottering coward, and a 
 hypocrite to boot. — So much for the debility produced by privilege 
 conferred on a creature ^who would, of and for himself, never have 
 won it, nor cared to win it. (2) Again, the result of this saxon's 
 being dowered with the priceless gift of constitutionalism is — 
 that he, in sheer wantonness, dashes it to pieces ! And that in- 
 troduces tyranny ; and tyra?iny is powerless to grapple with any 
 "question." The English Constitution, thanks in a large measure 
 to you, is in our time, to all intents and purposes, as obsolete as 
 the Heptarchy. And when that doctrinaire-litterateur, your new 
 Secretary for Ireland — the queerest fish, surely, that ever swam 
 in such waters ! 1 — jauntily told the House of Commons a few 
 weeks ago that he would exercise his discretion in consenting to- 
 the e?nploynient of Her Majesty's forces in carrying out evictions in 
 Ireland, that is, in determining whether the judgments of the 
 Courts of Justice were to be carried out or set aside, — there was 
 proclaimed, but not for the first time during your regime, the sad 
 truth that the English Constitution is dead. In its place we 
 have tyranny and anarchy ; and they never " settled " anything. 
 Thus, sir, the development of the Constitution and its extinc- 
 tion have been equally unfavourable to the solution of the Irish 
 problem. 
 (iii) by an 3. But I must notice one other historical event which has rendered 
 prodigiously more difficult any settlement of this question. In 
 the last decennium of the eighteenth century, a very remarkable 
 event occurred in France. There was a sudden back-rush of society 
 towards barbarism — an insurrection, namely, of the many against 
 the few, — the many — filled, not with love of liberty (the idea is 
 absurd !), but lust of material, sensual gratification. Through the 
 abject cowardice of the few who had (and in this respect they 
 were justly served) the many who had not were successful. — This 
 insurrection of the canaille (they called themselves the people) is 
 known in history as the French Revolution. I have nothing 
 
 1 If this were an appreciation of Mr. Morley as a literary man, I would give 
 a very different account of him. But as a politician — ! 
 
 outburst of 
 lies abroad, 
 
The History of the Difficulty ; 15 
 
 further to do with it except to observe that it set in motion a 
 fetid stream of lies, which has, in one or other of its ramifications, 
 affected every community in Europe, and no community more 
 banefully than our own. We expended some ^400,000,000 in the which lies he 
 struggle with the lies (in concrete form, of course) flung abroad in against, but 
 
 , , . , nowprofess-es 
 
 that upheaval of the worst. And yet we are now, as a nation, the to believe— 
 slaves, either of the original lies, or of others, their direct offspring. thenKo 
 Should you like to know what I mean by these lies ? I will make SU as— ™ 
 a list of a few, which have a particular bearing on the Irish 
 question. I have only to remind you of some of them ; you have 
 heard them before : — 
 
 1. Force is no remedy. 
 
 2. Ireland must be governed by Irish ideas. 
 
 3. Is not he (a certain person) a man and a brother ? 
 
 4. Is he (a certain person) not our own flesh and blood ? 
 
 5. An eviction is equivalent to a sentence of death. 
 
 6. Property has its duties as well as its rights. 1 
 
 7. Every man born in a country has a right to be able to live in 
 that country ; and one man has as good a right to live as another. 
 
 8. The soil of a country belongs to the people {i.e., the canaille) 
 of that country. 
 
 9. The state is bound to provide labour (or rather the product 
 of capital and labour, i.e. wealth) for certain citizens. 
 
 10. Violence and crime are evidences of political discontent, 
 ( — not of social rottenness^) and their remedy is — "concession." 
 
 11. All members of the upper classes are devils incarnate; all 
 members of the lower classes are suffering angels. 
 
 12. One nation governs another solely for the benefit of the 
 people of that other. 
 
 Now, sir, these statements (for the questions [3 and 4] are only 
 rhetorical questions — questions equivalent, that is, to strong affirm- 
 ative statements — ) are either mainly or wholly lies. When I say 
 lies, I speak of the statements in themselves ; I am not think- 
 ing of those who make, repeat or love them. 2 By whomsoever 
 
 1 This is usually cited by those who are preparing to pounce on other people's 
 property. 
 
 2 I desire to insist on this. But I cannot use any other word than the ugly 
 
1 6 The History of the Difficulty ; 
 
 made, repeated, or loved they are flagrant violations of the truth 
 of things — of the facts of the Universe. Some are pure, down- 
 right, stark-naked lies. Some contain the half-truth which, as a 
 vehicle, carries down the lie — hidden, unperceived, unsuspected — 
 with all its pernicious consequences. I will spend a few words 
 in explanation of this statement. I will analyse two or three of 
 these propositions, and will bring to light the lurking, specious, 
 hypocritical lie " held in solution " in each. 
 Take proposition 2. It concerns Ireland, 
 (a) "Ireland " Ireland must be governed by Irish ideas." 
 
 must be & J 
 
 governed by Now, by whomsoever made, were it " Hilarion or holy Paul," this 
 
 Irish ideas;" . . . . . , 
 
 proposition contains, first and foremost, an ambiguity. " Ireland 
 - — that is clear ; " Irish " — there comes in the ambiguity. What 
 did the framer of this proposition mean by " Irish" ? There are 
 two wholly antagonistic communities that call themselves Irish. 
 The Ulsterman, and the capitalist everywhere, do still, and the 
 landed gentry all over Ireland did — up to the epoch of your 
 " healing measures," which beggared and banished them, — call 
 themselves Irish. But also, the bitterest enemies of the British 
 Empire and the English race, and of the " Irish " classes just 
 mentioned, called themselves then, and call themselves now, Irish. 
 Which class, I wonder, was before the intellectual consciousness 
 of the man who framed this famous proposition ? I cannot tell ; 
 I only know that I have heard it again and again quoted by the 
 men whom I have in this paper called the Irishry, the men who 
 hate England first and the devil afterwards— quoted as zjustifi- 
 
 one — lie, because the statements above have exactly the effect on society 
 which deliberate violations of the truth would have. It is better in public 
 affairs to do the right thing with a wrong motive — than to do the wrong thing 
 with the best of motives. Nature looks to our acts, not to our motives. Religion 
 considers both. And here we are face to face with Nature,— and break her laws 
 at our peril! Nature doesn't care a bawbee whether we are "steeped to the 
 lips " in piety, or are as impious as the " Hermokopids." If we fling ourselves 
 over Beechy Head, we shall not be saved from instant destruction though the 
 odour of our sanctity should assail the nostrils of the crew and passengers of 
 the German Lloyd's steamer Habsburg — or other suitable vessel — passing up 
 Channel at the time. And if we keep well in from the edge of the cliff, we 
 may believe — and there maintain (with Gibbon) — that ''all forms of religion are 
 — to the peasant equally true, to the philosopher equally false, and to the 
 magistrate equally useful " ! 
 
The History of the Difficulty ; 1 7 
 
 cation of their relentless hostility to England. Now, which of 
 these populations are indicated in the adjective Irish here ? Did 
 the speaker mean the Irishry — or the English and Scotch in 
 Ireland? The phrase is hopelessly ambiguous. 
 
 Well, but having ascertained by our own knowledge all that 
 could have been in the mind of the framer of this proposition, 
 we next proceed to examine the statement in the light of truth 
 — of facts. 
 
 i. Suppose the framer of it (he was a great "speaker") didn't 
 know, or didn't realise the truth in regard to the two different and 
 conflicting populations in Ireland : in that case there is of course 
 nothing further to be said — except, indeed, that he uttered words 
 of most mischievous consequence. 
 
 2. But suppose he knew Ireland as we know it. The phrase 
 is still open to serious objection : — 
 
 (a) Did he mean by Irish in the phrase — " Irish ideas " — the 
 Ulsterman, or, in general, the England-loving, England-repre- 
 senting, Protestant element in Ireland ? If he did — which is not 
 likely — I object to the phrase unless with most vital qualification. 
 I object to any "ascendency" in Ireland or anywhere else, other 
 than ascendency such as strict conformity to the laws of Nature 
 confers. Let an industrious, sober, thrifty man live ; let an idle, 
 good-for-nothing, thriftless creature get out of the way as soon as 
 he can ! 1 That's the true doctrine. But — pardon me — I object to 
 "ascendency" derived from accident of race or religion. That 
 a man is a Protestant, is, in so far as the State is concerned, 
 — nothing ; that he loves or hates England is nothing ; but that he 
 pays his way ; that he is obedient to the laws of society ; that 
 he- owes no man anything; all this is very much. But all this 
 is, or was, fulfilled by many men who write their names with 
 a Mac or an O, and go to " chapel " on the Sunday. — I object to 
 Ulster ascendency, or any ascendency, that is not based on the 
 punctual, honourable payment of debts, the stern, stringent dis- 
 charge of all obligations that have been voluntarily undertaken. 
 Honest men — and no other — of whatever race or religion, make 
 
 1 And, in fact, the industrious and sober will live, and the idle and drunken 
 will die, whether you like it or not. All things will in the end be well. — But 
 what an amount of needless misery is caused in the meantime ! 
 
 C 
 
^ 
 
 1 8 The History of the Difficulty ; 
 
 a nation truly great. And, let me tell you, these qualities will ulti- 
 mately give the individual or the community that possesses them 
 " ascendency," though all the brute force in the world should be 
 thrown into the scale against thern. 
 
 (b) Again, did the speaker mean by " Irish ideas " the ideas 
 of the Irishry ? If so, it was a most astounding utterance. The 
 only distinct idea of the Irishry — the idea, that is, on which all are 
 at one — is the idea — of turning the English out of Ireland. Well, 
 Englishmen may be so "liberal," so " generous," as to look with 
 equanimity on their being kicked out of Ireland (especially when 
 the kicking is suffered vicariously by "their own flesh and blood " 
 — by men who in sentiment are more English than the English) ; 
 but if they do, their liberality — their generosity — mean, in truth, 
 only staggering senility — the immediate precursor of dissolution, 
 the herald of the tomb. 
 
 No, Sir : the true doctrine is ( — unfortunately there is no public 
 man in England courageous enough to proclaim it ; if there were, 
 he woujd say) — Ireland is part of an Empire which our forefathers 
 built up. We mean to preserve that Empire intact, not only from 
 a feeling of duty, but from the stronger pressure of the feeling of 
 self-interest. Life is a struggle for nations as for individuals ; 
 and we must fight our corner. Ireland with its four millions 
 shall be governed by the " ideas " that make for the welfare of 
 some three hundred millions of the human race, for whom we 
 are responsible — and are proud to be responsible. And the position 
 of Ireland — so near the heart of the Empire, and therefore, by 
 possibility, so dangerous, shall be taken into account in our every 
 act, in our every utterance ; and if Ireland contains four million 
 rebels — supported by the dollars of as many as "seventeen nationali- 
 ties " on the other side of the Atlantic, those four million rebels, and 
 those " seventeen nationalities'''' must be made to feel that they have 
 met their match?- — Ireland to be governed by Irish {i.e. rebel) ideas! 
 Yet, I fear the statesman who uttered these words meant, in a 
 hazy -way of course, the ideas of the Irishry. At any rate, the per- 
 nicious doctrine involved has been, to some extent, followed (to 
 
 1 For the conclusions of sound statesmanship on the Irish Question, see 
 Section TV. 
 
The History of the Difficulty ; 19 
 
 some extent, as compared with what it will be in the near future) 
 — and the result ? — Why, that, at this moment, not only Ireland, 
 but the whole Empire is governed by Irish ideas I — So much on 
 this famous proposition, — which involves, first, an absurd ambiguity, 
 — then, translated into act, either an injustice — a real injustice — 
 to Ireland, or an act of treason against the English people. 
 
 I promised to deal with two of the lies. I will now take the (b)"ishe 
 
 r . — 7 not a man 
 
 second he, but I must despatch it in few words — "Is he not a anda ]; 
 man and a brother V The question (let us suppose) is, whether 
 we shall confer a certain privilege (say the suffrage : but that is now 
 called a right I) on a certain person who is, by many, held to be 
 not qualified to receive it. Against this conviction of many persons, 
 and by way of annihilating it, a certain Jacobin orator projects the 
 query (as the Polyphemus might project a torpedo) — "Is he not a 
 man and a brother V That is, he, of course, is "a man and a 
 brother." — Now, let us examine this proposition. " He is a man'' 
 True : I never questioned his sex. And I never supposed him to 
 be an oyster, or even a gorilla. He is a man — vir and homo. "A 
 b?'other" That depends. As a matter of fact, the man in question 
 is not, and could not be, the son of my (personal) father and 
 mother. But he that is an orator must show himself oratorical ; 
 and what the orator here means is— that the person in question 
 ought to be treated as if he were a brother, with Christian kind- 
 liness, &c, &c. Now, I am quite ready to treat him with Christian 
 kindliness and charity. I am quite willing, as far as possible, to 
 satisfy the high standard of ayairr) set forth in that famous q 
 scripture, 1 Cor. xiii. But am I in Christian charity bound to make 
 this man arbiter of my destiny ? — Not so. There is not a word in ^ 
 1 Cor. xiii. recommending such a course. I meet the orator 
 fairly. I do treat this man as a brother. The orator asks me 
 to do so, and I have done so. But give him the suffrage ? That 
 is quite another matter. The conviction that he is "a man and 
 a brother " may lead me, in pure charity, — not to say, in mere self- 
 defence — to deny him a privilege which his ignojance would in all 
 probability lead him to abuse. 1 But again, if this man is my 
 
 1 I am here arguing as if I granted postulates which I by no means grant. 
 Of course, the right doctrine is, that no man has a claim to the franchise who 
 
 ~^~-> C 2 
 
2 o The History of the Difficulty ; 
 
 brother, surely I am his brother? And surely he ought, in his 
 treatment of me, to follow i Cor. xiii. ? Brotherhood is all very 
 well, — but, for my part, I don't see the brotherhood — in any sense 
 — of the man who smashes my shop-windows, or who in public 
 proclaims or applauds the desire to hang me on the nearest lamp- 
 post, because (as it happens) I have been very self-denying, in 
 order (let us say) that I may support an invalid "brother" — not 
 of the oratorical, but of the actual " flesh-and-blood " sort. And 
 — as to placing my destiny in the hands of such "brothers " — 
 though it has been done, I would as soon think of selecting a tiger 
 to be my guide through a jungle. 
 (c) " Force is So much in regard to the two leading lies in the list which I 
 no remedy. } iave ma( j e out. — But the politics of the hour compel me to notice 
 one other lie in the list — a third lie — because it confronts us just 
 now in every " Liberal " newspaper we take up. The lie I refer to 
 is the lie I have indicated in the formula — " Force is no remedy." 
 One word on this lie. The form it takes at present in regard to 
 Ireland is :- — " We cannot return to the odious practice of Coercion." 
 And you will be fortunate if you are not informed how many " Coer- 
 cion " measures have been introduced since the Union — the in- 
 ference, expressed or understood, being that the Union was a 
 mistake, and that " Coercion " has been a failure. Now, leaving 
 the Union out of account, let us examine the meaning of this cry 
 against Coercion. Let us in the first place look at facts. — I lived 
 in Ireland during that reign of terror — the reign of Coercion. 
 Well, the sun was not darkened nor the moon turned to blood ; in 
 short, I didn't know — otherwise than through the newspapers — 
 that Coercion, that odious thing which England "cannot again 
 resort to," existed ! But, on second thoughts, why should I — how 
 could I — perceive its existence ? Your own measure of Coercion 
 (passed when, apparently, you fell into panic terror the moment the 
 
 does not by his own unaided exertions win it. For, look you, it is not a right 
 but a privilege : ebe why not give it to everybody — to all the men, women, — 
 and curates, as Sydney Smith would add, — in England ? And nothing is more 
 fatal to manliness in an individual or a state than a privilege won by this 
 man, and by him conferred on that. Finally, the man who fairly wins for 
 himself a privilege is the man who will worthily wear it. Of course, therefore, 
 the main question is, not whether this man will abuse the privilege, but whether 
 he can xvin it. 
 
The History of the Difficulty ; 2 1 
 
 murderer's knife cut high-official throats — a result you owe, believe 
 me, to the fumbling incompetence of your government, — to your 
 months of previous trifling with murders at least a score — to selfish 
 profligacy — or to all three) — your own pet measure of coercion, I 
 insist, and I knozv what I am talking about — troubled no Irishman 
 who was not either a criminal, a rebel, or (as was very frequently the 
 case) both. As I was neither ; I never knocked my nose against 
 your " Coercion." 
 
 But now, coming to the general question : Is force no remedy ? 
 If it be no remedy, why have you ever engaged in war — I beg 
 pardon, in military operations ? Why did an English admiral 
 commit what, if force is no remedy, was the senseless crime of 
 bombarding Alexandria ? What is the meaning of the " opera- 
 tions" by which thousands of brave Arabs, "rightly struggling to 
 be free," were mercilessly shot down by men who (not being 
 superior persons, but simply frank Englishmen of the best type) 
 were disgusted — soldiers by profession though they were— and 
 rendered all but mutinous by the repulsive duty which you thrust 
 upon them as troops of the Queen ? You, I presume, saw that 
 Force here was a remedy — though I didn't. If force is no remedy, 
 then open to-morrow all the prison doors in England. And in 
 respect of " Coercion," lay your hand on your heart, and say — 
 have you abandoned it ? — abandoned it at home, abandoned it 
 abroad? If you have, your public activity must, in the very 
 nature of things, tend to bring about the Decline and Fall of 
 the British Empire. 1 No community, since the world began, ever 
 existed — much less attained or preserved ascendency over other 
 nations — under such conditions. 
 
 1 I must not be supposed to argue that Coercion — indeed, that exceptional 
 legislation in any shape or form has been necessary — in the nature of things — 
 during the thirty-odd years that I have known Ireland. The very reverse is the 
 case. The institutions which our unenlightened forefathers left us were amply 
 sufficient " to carry on the Queen's Government," had our " statesmen " (what 
 a ludicrous misnomer !) been men of the right sort. They, in fact, have 
 been themselves the living necessity for Coercion ; and, therefore, are no more 
 justified in applying it than would be a foolish father who should thrash his son 
 for being sick from an over- dose of sweetmeats, which sweetmeats the father 
 forced him to eat ! — I can well understand the Irishman's hatred of Coercion. 
 As applied by the saxon " Government " he can see no sense in it. He knows 
 that he is always consistently disloyal. Why this inconsistency in punishment ? 
 
2 2 The History cf the Difficulty ; 
 
 But really, events are moving so fast, this drama of dissolution 
 is developing its catastrophe with such startling rapidity, that I find 
 on writing a paragraph on what is at the time debatable matter, 
 that the actual state of affairs about us sets aside all my argument 
 by proving it up to the hilt — by giving all the corroboration that I 
 could reasonably expect in ten years. I have been denying the 
 statement that " force is no remedy," and I have been asserting 
 that force is a remedy — and the only remedy in many cases. And 
 I assert that it is, in the present case, the sole and only remedy. 
 Now tip comes this week's number of that very able journal, 
 U7iiled Ireland. And remember, United Ireland always means 
 what it says : — 
 
 "One portion of their programme the Irish people could realise at once. 
 Before another winter was over landlords would be paupers. The rest would 
 come in the vicissitudes that are ever lowering over a great flabby empire, with 
 an overgrown population, decaying trade, and millions of deadly enemies in its 
 bosom. 1 The most stupendous parliamentaiy scandal ever witnessed would be 
 followed by the most horrible suppressed civil war beheld in a country where 
 every peasant has learnt to laugh at the terrors of the gaol and the plank-bed, and 
 to treat his rulers to all the inconveniences of armed insurrection without handling 
 a gun. And all the while Liberal progress in England would be at a stand- 
 still, and the Liberal party split into fractions : one part watching the terrorisation 
 of Ireland in an agony of helpless shame ; and the other dragged at the chariot' 
 wheels of a Brummagem Cromwell," 
 
 Now, what do you think of that ? Ireland can conduct a 
 rebellion "without handling a gun." Exactly: but since the 
 world began no human being could conduct a rebellion without 
 " handling a gun " — or what stood for a gun. What a commentary 
 on the completeness — absoluteness, of the surrender which you 
 have made to the Irish party ! Suppose you had the duty laid 
 upon you of making the Ireland— so graphically described — once 
 more a part of the Queen's dominions, what would you do ? 
 Observe, United Ireland, always frank, speaks of the " incon- 
 veniences of armed insurrection " — that is force. How are you 
 going to meet it? — -But in truth the statement is a sheer hypocrisy ; 
 and that is the reason why United Ireland is so jubilant. Force is 
 a remedy ; and the man who says it is not will be found the next 
 minute using it as a remedy! 1 
 
 1 Quite true ! This writer knows what he is talking about. 
 
 2 But force must be distinguished from (what England usually employs) 
 uncertain, senseless, inconsistent, irritating, exasperating violence. 
 
The History of the Difficulty ; 23 
 
 In closing this section I must make a few remarks on the saxon Look at him 
 in Modem England, and I ask your particular attention to them. now— 
 Don't lose time carping at my ethnological theories ; let Professor 
 Freeman, if he is so minded, do that. I don't care a straw 
 whether, for example, the characteristics I am about to describe 
 go with saxon blood or not. 1 Rather I am concerned that they 
 are here — here in the England that we have to live and work in — ■ 
 here in force, here a menace and a danger because by you made 
 supreme. The greasy, hypocritical philanthropism of the time 
 has done much to breed, to nurse, and to perpetuate them ; but 
 you have made them supreme in the state. Understand, then, 
 that although I speak of the saxon in concrete form, I have 
 my eye rather on well-marked tendencies — a clearly manifested 
 spirit — in us as a people. The saxon, then, is still among us. 
 Behold him ! 
 
 Inept, resourceless, brutal, self-indulgent, selfish, cowardly, cruel, ° n the lower 
 — the grand cause, I insist, of weakness and danger to this com- society; 
 munity, — you have him in all ranks ; you meet him at every turn ; 
 but the lower you go, you find him in ever-increasing numbers. 
 He it is who 'eaves 'arf a brick at a " stranger." He comes to your 
 hall-door when you are absent, and won't go away till he is paid 
 for so doing ; the brute takes the chance that you are not present 
 to give him a kicking ; — or perhaps he believes you hold the (to 
 him) comfortable doctrine that ''force is no remedy." If, in the 
 guise of a "working man," he comes to your house and gets a job, 
 he has not the ability — or the will — to do good work : he has just 
 cunning enough to make two days' work out of one, and leave 
 something to do at another time. Then, if he can get " no work 
 to do " ( — a lie in nine cases out of ten ; if he exerted himself to get 
 employment as he exerts himself to tell all the world he can't get 
 it, — and if he kept it when he got it, — he would seldom be idle), he 
 marches in procession about the suburbs of London levying black- 
 mail on the silly (saxon) inhabitants. Or he goes (with his pipe in 
 
 1 In fact, I want an epithet. Will my non-saxon readers suggest one ? 
 If they are non-saxon, they know what I mean by saxon. What I mean hy 
 "saxon" is almost what Mr. Matthew Arnold means by Philistine— not 
 quite, however ; for I find he lately addressed, at some church blow-out in the 
 East End, remarks (and sad stuff they were) to an audience which 1 should 
 have pronounced saxon to the core, but which he, clearly, would not have 
 
2 4 The History of the Difficulty ; 
 
 his mouth) 1 to the Mansion House (where a lot of "philanthropical" 
 busybodies are just now distributing to knaves and blackguards the 
 contributions of cowards and of fools), and having received, as his 
 share of the "ransom," the sum of three shillings, he rushes off to 
 his mates, transported with indignation, and damns the eyes of "this 
 yer bloomirC Mansion "Ouse Fund, — only three bloody bob, and beef 
 at elevenpence a pound ! Blowed if the working man ought to stand 
 it! " — A truly imperial creature, you perceive ! Who could have 
 the face to deny the franchise to such a man and a brother ? — He 
 expects to be tipped if you bid him good-day. At the ports 
 (Liverpool, Sunderland, &c.) he — calling himself a British sailor — 
 raises an agitation against the employment of foreign sailors by 
 British shipowners, though foreign sailors are cheaper, steadier, 
 more obedient and orderly — in short, more efficient and valuable 
 — than he. And in the East End of London he just now desires 
 mightily that a Judenhetze could be got up against foreign Jews 
 who, coming to London, are glad to do the work he refuses to do 
 — who are thrifty, industrious, temperate ; and who, as he com- 
 plains in one of the newspapers, beginning on nothing, soon 
 contrive to possess and occupy the best houses in the street S 
 What free-born Englishman could stand that ? 2 
 
 Placed in a higher social position he goes to school to play 
 
 kfeff; football, and (a vulgarian in the grain) to get into a nice set ; and 
 
 his idea of university life is — moiling at books for an academic 
 
 bribe, or training for a boat race. His " sport " usually involves 
 
 pronounced Philistine. By the way, considering the matter of that speech, I 
 am constrained to pronounce him (Mr. Arnold !) to be a very Goliath of Gath, 
 — on each hand six fingers and on each foot six toes — four-and-twenty in number 
 —and the staff of his spear like a weaver's beam ! 
 
 1 You and I never get tobacco for nothing. 
 
 2 For him, idlers of his own type but in the " higher " ranks, get up societies, 
 associations, tea-parties, what not— with the object of making his life bright 
 
 f making his surroundings "a little less unlovely " — of relieving " the dreadful 
 
 monotony of toil." True ! toil grudgingly given— given as our saxon gives it- 
 is to him, thank Heaven, a dreadful monotony. But the relief he wants is not 
 such as a parcel of dilettanti patrons are willing to afford. The pub. is more 
 to his "mind." Even the Church (God help us!) is making her services 
 "shorter and brighter" for the special benefit of our saxott. For him, too, 
 the sanseulotte-ssixon State invades the rights of property in order that he may 
 be comfortably "housed." 
 
 —on the 
 
The History of the Difficulty ; 25 
 
 the death of the so-called-" lower " animals. Entrusted with 
 public duties, he, in sheer stupidity, or from low, profligate, 
 murderous greed, furnishes our army in the field with rifles 
 that jam, bayonets that bend like nail-rod, tinned meat that is 
 rotten, and hay containing a tidy make-weight of brickbats. 
 Promoted to having a hand in public policy, he sends out an 
 immense quantity of railway plant to a certain port on the Red Sea, 
 and "in the interests of civilization" (for at this stage he is articulate, 
 and is, moreover, inoculated with the virus of French Revolu- 
 tionism) he begins to lay down a railway from this obscure Red 
 Sea port to — nowhere in particular. Then he is seized with panic, 
 and fear of what he calls "blood-guiltiness," and thinks he will 
 leave the railway to be worked by the Arabs. It will tend, don't 
 you see ? to civilize them. 1 But unfortunately the Arabs don't 
 "see" it, nay, they have the bad taste (or good sense) to burn 
 the railway line punctually as it is made from day to day ! Then, 
 as all the world knows that railway plant is like a consumptive, 
 and benefits by a sea voyage, he gives all the railway plant left by 
 the Arabs another fortnight at sea on the way back to England, 
 and finally deposits it in Woolwich marshes. 2 
 
 He it is who (being, of course, utterly ignorant of history) wants 
 to know what the House of Lords ever did for the people (meaning 
 the ca?iaille) ? 3 And every time that assembly shakes itself free 
 from the influence of saxon proletarianism, and gives a straight, 
 
 1 A cargo of moral pockethandkerchiefs will operate powerfully in the same 
 direction. 
 
 2 And talking of Woolwich — he (a true saxon, but one of the baser-official 
 sort) has to load a steamer, bound for Egypt, with military stores of various 
 kinds. Well, he is careful (this is a. fact) to stow away all the light material as 
 near to the keel as possible, and the heavy ammunition (a thing that a man 
 likes to have handy, of course : one can't tell the minute one will require a live 
 shell) — high up towards the hurricane deck. However, the captain (happen- 
 ing not to be in my sense of the word, a saxon) refused to go to sea till 
 the centre of gravity got a little nearer the keel and a little farther from the 
 main yard ; and so the vessel didn't founder in the Bay. I can't tell what the 
 whole transaction cost. 
 
 By the way — How about the cargoeing of the steamer Elephant which some 
 time ago left the Thames, having on board the machinery of the Imperiense 
 (building, I think, at Plymouth), and was never heard 0/ ? 
 
 3 To which I would reply : The less the better. 
 
2 6 The History of the Difficulty ; 
 
 manly vote, he raises the cry : — " Down with the House of 
 Lords ! " — But his peculiar delight is to speak insultingly of 
 the Royal Family — even of the August Lady who so worthily 
 occupies (and long may she occupy!) the throne of Monmouth, 
 . Longshanks, Court-mantle, and (a greater than any one of the 
 three) Guilielmus Conquestor. He will even ( — when pitchforked 
 into the position of legislator by the same mysterious — and, in this 
 case, most mysterious — Providence that has at the present juncture 
 placed you in the position of chief Minister of the Crown, 1 and 
 committed to you the destinies of England), he will, I say, be guilty 
 of the brutal and senseless, the merely disgusting (but truly "saxon") 
 social crime of keeping his seat and hissing when the health of his 
 Sovereign is proposed. This betise is his way of showing that he 
 is an independent, downright Englishman : no dam-nonsense about 
 him, you know. And his pals in office are suddenly struck blind 
 and deaf, — as well they might be, at so scandalous, so abominable, 
 a spectacle. 2 Again, he trips up your Government, by refusing to 
 pass a vote of money to maintain the Royal Parks — a vote as 
 routine in its character as any possible vote of money towards 
 upholstering the seats in the House of Commons. But the word 
 Royal he couldn't stand. — Now it is a muddle in the Admiralty 
 accounts ; now it is a scandal at the War Office ; now it is 
 abuses in the Civil Service ; now it is the condition of Scotland 
 Yard ; anon it is the condition of the Navy. If he is not 
 meddling here, it is because he is muddling there. If he is not 
 plundering in Ireland, it is because he is blundering in Egypt. And 
 occasionally, when the fit is on him, he meddles and muddles, 
 plunders and blunders, in the same place and at the same time ! 
 But woe to the man who is nearest to John Bull's horn when he 
 rouses himself and "goes for" somebody — it may occasionally 
 happen that he goes for the guilty party ; but his attack is due 
 merely to the fact that he is irritated. He does not try to find 
 
 1 On second thoughts — there is no mystery about it. Mr. Parnell is the 
 Providence, and, to do him justice, there is (save in his occasional disappear- 
 ances) nothing mysterious about him. His policy is as clear as the day, though 
 you don't see it. — But perhaps you do ? 
 
 2 By the way, I never heard that Charles Russell was thought either blind 
 or deaf by poor clever John Rea in the old Belfast days. Of course, " many 
 things have happened " since then. 
 
The History of the Difficulty ; 27 
 
 the causes of his irritation. In short, he has a go at something, 
 and then — the hot fit over — he will sink into slumber, and 
 abuses will have " a high old time " once more. But whatever he 
 does or fails to do, the trail of the saxon is over it all. 
 
 I have already indicated your relation to the saxon. You, sir, again-as 
 have made him supreme in the kingdom, and with fatal results y ° urs 
 to the kingdom — and to him. He is to be found in the highest 
 class ; but he swarms in the lowest class. And you have made 
 the lower (or lowest) class supreme. It is " par excellerice" the 
 class of the saxon. You have, therefore, achieved his apotheosis. 
 He is now a god, and you are his prophet, his Flamen Dialis. 
 And in this point of view you are to me a very pathetic figure. 
 With a look on your face of ascetic, devotional, reproving 
 gravity (so admirably depicted by John Tenniel in his immortal 
 Pimch cartoon of "The Augurs") you stand before the idol 
 you have set up — a monster with many hands, many heads, 
 no brains ; its most prominent feature, the stomach ! — And you 
 " Cry aloud, for it is a god ! " Now, sir, you have made this 
 thing the ruler of the destinies of the British Empire. And 
 yet, its godship does little but produce creatures — (in this sense 
 it is, indeed, a creator)— mouths that must be filled, backs 
 that must be clothed, not by the providence of this god (pro- 
 vidence not being among the number of its divine attributes), but 
 by me and people like me. We find the money ; this thing 
 spends it. That is your arrangement. — 
 
 But w r ait a while. That I shall be taxed to the point at which and— as a 
 taxation becomes intolerable; that I shall feed and "educate" 
 people with whom I have no connection, — whom I have never 
 seen, and for whom I have no more responsibility than I have for 
 the existence of any individual rabbit in any conceivable rabbit- 
 warren on the surface of the planet— that I shall be called upon, 
 nay, forced by all the " resources of civilization " at the disposal 
 of a brutal government (truly saxon) to undertake these factitious 
 duties,— in plain English to submit to these nefarious impositions, 
 ■ — while if I am an Irish subject of a certain class, the same 
 organization will decline to discharge the real duties — even the 
 most elementary — of all government in regard to me : I say this 
 sort of thing may flourish for a time, but it hastens to its end. 
 
 multiplying 
 parasite. 
 
2 3 The History of the Difficulty ; 
 
 Wait till your saxon god — your Jupiter Sator—h&s exercised his 
 darling, his peculiar, his characteristic god-function up to a certain 
 point, and the tension on me and my like will come not to the 
 " sticki?ig" but the breaking place. In short, I shall be unable to 
 support those that are (as if it were of right) quartered upon me. 
 I sink, and nobody cares about me. I have been a " selfish " 
 landlord or a "grinding" capitalist : but what becomes of those 
 whom my exertions find in food, clothing, and "education"? 
 What becomes of the (so-called) " working man " who makes me 
 work for him — who does not work for me, but yet claims — and 
 receives — wages (at least money) which I must furnish ? In other 
 words, what becomes of the parasite when the organism on which 
 it feeds ceases to live? A flea or bug may live merrily, enjoy 
 life hugely, — think it in fact decidedly " worth living" when it lives 
 on me or on you — as long as ive too are alive. The bug, the flea, 
 must have blood — a commodity we can't supply for ever; we may 
 desire to do so, it is true, — especially as a high authority assures 
 us that they (the bug and flea) are " our own flesh and blood " — 
 as they are only too truly ! When we can't feed our parasites any 
 longer, please say what becomes of — the parasites? 
 what is to When ( — flea and bug aside — and I wish they were very much 
 Mm ; aside) I cease to be able to pay my share of the imperial and 
 local taxes, what becomes of the children of other people, 
 whom I, by legislative mandate, and no thanks to me, feed, 
 clothe, and "educate"? But once more: what if I, foreseeing 
 the inevitable transition from the state of tension to the state 
 of breaking, — measuring accurately all that is foreshadowed by 
 the declamations of the gentry who talk of ransom, &c, remove 
 myself and all the property that is left me — to another hemi- 
 sphere ? What will become of the ruler of our destinies, the 
 "working man"? — I will tell you what will become of him : he 
 will be brought face to face with Famine ; and if at the same 
 time he have War forced upon him, he and those about him will 
 see a state of things such as I, for my part, don't care to contem- 
 plate. God forbid that we should come to this pass ; but mark 
 me, we are, as a people, doing all we can to bring about the state 
 of things I have sketched. Put in a nutshell, the question is 
 simply this: What will you do when the wealth-finder (the sources 
 
The History of the Difficulty ; 29 
 
 of his wealth drying up day by day) ceases, of necessity, to be able 
 to bear the ever-increasing horde that live upon him ? — And coming 
 back to our argument, how can you expect that a people in the 
 economical condition I have just described will ever "settle" 
 any political or social question whatever? The sole problem with 
 them will soon be — to get enough to eat. Yet they — these starving 
 firoletaires — elect our legislators, and occupy exclusively the legisla- 
 tive activity of our " legislators " when these are elected. But 
 again (I will presently return to this consideration), suppose we 
 didn't get to the point of actual starvation, do you really imagine 
 that the sort of person I have described above — the sort of person 
 you have made supreme — will help you to settle the Irish, or any 
 other question ? Never believe it. He has neither the mental 
 nor the moral power that would fit him to help you. You 
 have gone down to the gutter for your supporters ; and there 
 are those who say (/ don't) that you went to the gutter because 
 you knew that there alone you would get supporters. You have 
 smashed the Constitution in order to double a constituency which 
 before was, God knows, many times too large. 1 
 
 Well, you got your " capable citizens " ; and now with what —the Irish 
 result ? Why, that you thereby made the Irish Question insoluble. 
 Nemesis, you see, has followed pretty swiftly. You have a House 
 of Commons (I don't now refer to the Irish party) so ludicrously 
 incapable of any sound and manly legislative work that — we 
 need say no more about it. 2 The legislative instrument at 
 your disposal, could you even now bring forward anything to the 
 purpose on this Irish Question, would be unequal to the task of 
 giving it a fair and full discussion. Yet you have had the making 
 
 1 The desire of every Englishman who loves his country ought to be an all- 
 round disfranchising statute. That is what Edmund Burke, the Quinbus 
 FieUrin of English statesmen, so ardently desired. And T cry — ''Ditto to 
 Mr. Burke ! " But such a statute — since the French Revolution, and till we 
 come to the crash that will mend us or end us, has been and will be impossible. 
 Truth is truth, however, all the same. — There is only one all-round dis- 
 franchising statute, that I know of, in English History (8 Hen. VI. c. 7, A.D. 
 1430). What a lesson for legislators ! 
 
 2 In fact, political questions have as good as ceased to be referred to in the 
 House of Commons, which is becoming a sort of Social Science (or rather Social 
 Ignorance) Congress. It discussed the other day a Crofters' Bill — which will 
 of course be as mischievous in result as the Irish Land Bill of 18S1. [See 
 
30 The History of the Difficulty ; 
 
 of that instrument ! And just destiny drives you to apply an 
 instrument, artificially weakened by yourself (and, some would say, 
 in your own interest), to a bit of work which, at its strongest, it 
 failed to do ! 
 —and the Lastly, under this head, I ask : Is the term saxon inter- 
 mpire? changeable with Englishman ? God forbid ! If so, we are indeed 
 undone. But I believe there are still in England thousands of 
 men of all ranks, creeds, and parties, who exhibit none of the 
 characteristics I have ascribed to the "saxon." Upon these 
 upright, honest, thrifty, clear-sighted, patriotic men the fate of 
 the Empire will ultimately depend. By such men it was built up, 
 to whatever stock they belonged, and by such, and such alone, 
 can it be preserved. But it must first go into the fire of Revolu- 
 tion, and it may never come out again. 1 Unfortunately, /<?////<ft7/ 
 power (which in a healthy state would always lie alongside mo?'al 
 power) has been cut adrift, and now rests, not with the best, but 
 with those who must necessarily be the worst. Our body politic, 
 grievous sick, — tottering under the ever-hardening and ever- 
 spreading leprosy of Socialism, — is summoned to confront what 
 would have taxed all the energies it possessed in its best days. — ■ 
 The Irish Question, sir, will not be solved by you. But there is 
 no intrinsic insolubility in it. The " Difficulty " is, in truth, solely 
 and absolutely on this side of the Irish Sea. England, engaged in 
 strangling what are the best elements within her own borders — the 
 
 Appendix, Note B.] Loud cries of dissent greeted Mr. Goschens * truism 
 (but truisms must now be stated as if they were paradoxes) that the right of free 
 sale "meant a higher rent to the next tenant." And one Mr. Barclay retorted 
 that the choice was between free sale and rack-rents ! I don't suppose it ever 
 occurred to this Mr. Barclay to inquire whether there is or could be such a 
 thing as a rack-rent. 
 
 1 But let us be just. That England must (and she certainly must, or all 
 history is a lie) go through "cleansing fires " — in which she may be consumed — 
 is due to the fact that the good elements in her were dormant — when they ought 
 to have been alive and active. And in so far as they ivere dormant, they, of 
 course, were not good, but bad elements. 
 
 * Mr. Goschen — a most singular and ever perplexing phenomenon ! A man 
 with (apparently) eyes to see, but without the heart to dare — a man who 
 reaches out towards, and all but touches, yet is destined never to touch— great- 
 ness ! I wouldn't, for a good deal, stand in his shoes. His will be the sentence 
 pronounced on the Church at Laodicea. 
 
The History of the Difficulty ; 3 1 
 
 elements which alone could " settle " the Irish Question — is not 
 very likely to settle the question by the aid of the worst elements, 
 however triumphant these may be ; however loud their brayings on 
 grasping (Te duce, Caesar /) the helm of the state. 
 
 I have now described the " saxon " element — the element (call 
 it by whatever name you please) that makes for our destruction ; 
 and I have shown that you have given it such prominence and 
 influence — (principally by your recent legislation, though your 
 Ballot Act favoured it powerfully), 1 that it is now supreme in Parlia- 
 ment. I have shown — and I don't think you could successfully 
 traverse my assertion — that this element is powerless to grapple 
 with any great question, and least of all with a question bristling 
 with difficulties like the Irish Question. The present Parliament, 
 and any Parliament elected on your own special Gladstonian 
 franchise, can only cry "Ditto to Mr. Gladstone," or — turn you 
 out. 2 Debate, discussion, is obsolete. Suppose, then, you should 
 bring in a really healthy measure^ you couldn't be certain (and 
 this you have brought upon yourself) that the House would 
 appreciate it, and follow you and pass your Bill. It might take 
 its head at an ugly turn and unseat you. So much for our 
 " saxon " Parliament. — But is it likely that you will introduce a 
 healthy measure ? That is the next question. And that can be 
 answered only by looking at your record, and the leading quality 
 of your mind. And when all is said and done, what you will 
 propose we can only infer ; we cannot prophesy. — 
 
 Our inferences are contained in the next section. 
 
 1 You may be interested, though "surprised," to learn that I consistently 
 refuse to avail myself of the right to vote — for two or three reasons, of which 
 one is — that I would never, even by appearance, countenance the making of 
 Englishmen cowards. The saxons among us are only too prone to be cowardly ; 
 a healthy community would make short work of the statesman who could, 
 propose that in order to exercise their political functions, men should first and 
 foremost show themselves unworthy of the name of men. (You remember 
 the pother at the Crewe Railway Works, before the last election.) No honour- 
 able, fearless man ought to vote otherwise than ope?ily. 
 
 2 And that it will, on any measure which you propose (even you), which it 
 understands, and which is distasteful to it. How significant that you, an aged 
 statesman, — "or hear'st thou rather" an old parliamentary hand — blundered 
 on the subject of the beer of the working man, and received prompt chastisement 
 for your blunder ! 
 
3 2 Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 
 
 III. 
 
 Your Relation to the Difficulty. 
 
 why is it that When I go back in thought to the Ireland of 1850-60, it 
 before— from presents itself to my mind as a very heaven compared with the 
 isfunder^S,' Ireland of the present time. Whence the change ? How comes it 
 from Ulto 2 tnat an England becoming, by this or that " great measure," every 
 worse? ^y more an( j mo re "free," — following with ever-increasing devotion 
 "Liberal" principles, — championing the "rights of man " all the 
 world over, — "sympathizing" with oppressed nationalities, — ner- 
 vously alive to its " duties," — above all, profoundly convinced of 
 the necessity of "healing," "just," "generous" measures towards 
 Ireland, has had such a sorry record of success ? What has made 
 Ireland what it is now— a very hell to live in, a country in three- 
 fourths of which life, liberty, property, are of no account ; where 
 credit no longer exists, where a compact is broken with a jeer at 
 the fool who believed in it ; and where to be a friend of England 
 brings a man more danger and loss than if he committed the 
 foulest murder in open day? I wonder what your explanation of 
 this phenomenon would be. The chatter about past misgovern- 
 ment, penal laws, rack-rents, landlordism, Protestant ascendency, 
 will not serve. In i860, say, the Upas tree still nourished and 
 the landowner was a burden ; " sentences of death " in the shape 
 of eviction-warrants (or whatever they are called) were passed and 
 rigidly carried out, to the great advantage, I may remark, not only 
 of the community at large, but (and necessarily) of the evicted 
 themselves. Contracts were fulfilled, credit was good, stocks 
 were rising in value, wealth among the well-doing was accumu- 
 lating on every hand, resources were being developed. To say 
 that the wolf was lying down with the lamb, that the two races 
 and the two religions were on very cordial terms with each other, 
 would be untrue. And no man who knew Ireland, who saw 
 how closely the line of cleavage in respect of race coincided with 
 the line of cleavage in respect of religion, and who understood the 
 Celtic tendency to certain forms of crime (which forms may be 
 
Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 33 
 
 studied in Giraldus Camorensis, who wrote before the English 
 Conquest), could or would expect a perfectly smooth working of 
 the political and social machinery, — especially in a case in which 
 the Government was (as it was to some extent even then) com- 
 mitted to sansculotfe-humamtanan principles and methods. And 
 there was, no doubt, the danger that arose from what people 
 called "progress," — I mean political "progress" in England— a 
 process which, beginning in healthy constitutionalism, degenerated 
 (as it must always do, save in a very robust community) into mere 
 party wrestling for power. But when all is said that can be 
 said, the truth remains, that the Ireland of i860 was an Ireland 
 which seemed to be on the upward path of civilization ; and that 
 the idea of separation from England would have been thought 
 the offspring of a disordered imagination. And all this after past 
 misgovernment, nay, — if we will believe our present "leaders," — 
 when " high-sighted tyranny still ranged on." Now, sir, this 
 was, in brief, the state of things in the Ireland of i860; you 
 have got to say why the Ireland of our day cannot be retained 
 on this side of Revolution as an integral portion of the British 
 Empire. What your explanation would be I cannot divine — I can- 
 not imagine. But pending your explanation I give my explanation. 
 And with my explanation you will have to reckon when you come 
 to give yours. I affirm, then (and I want the future historian 
 to hear me), that the difference between the Ireland of to-day 
 and the Ireland of i860 is due solely and absolutely to your 
 activity, which, of course, the English Parliament and people 
 participated in and are therefore responsible for. 
 
 That is my assertion — disprove it if you can. And I further 
 affirm that the agitation to which you are about to sacrifice the 
 well-being, nay, the very existence, of your country, is in origin 
 a bogus agitation — without force or substance, save what has been 
 given to it by the petty party exigencies and the craven fears of a 
 set of fools, cowards, and hypocrites — who, under one name or 
 another, have of late years administered the government of 
 degenerate England. But though the agitation was in origin a 
 bogus, a sham agitation, and is at the present moment, intrinsically, 
 a sham of shams, yet England — because she has been content to 
 consult her own ease, to be ignorant, cowardly, wicked, hypo- 
 
 D 
 
3 4 Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 
 
 critical, — because she has spurned her real duties, because she 
 has acted with insolent injustice 1 in order to quiet this sham 
 agitation — will pay down (and herein lies the bitterest part of 
 her punishment) will pay down — to a sham — her treasure, her 
 blood, her prestige, her Empire — as if this sham, this sorry 
 phantom, were an irresistible reality ! It has seemed, indeed, 
 for some years, as if "Christ and his Saints slept," as they were 
 supposed to have done in the reign of Stephen ; but Christ and 
 his Saints — in nineteenth-century phrase, the Equities of the 
 Universe — neither slumber nor sleep. Retribution is upon us ! — 
 
 For these Passing on now to discuss your special activity in this matter, I 
 a re£Ton?:- r wi 11 ftrst cal1 attention to a few points in which your mental and 
 yoU firIt the mora -l attitude towards the question — and therefore, of course, your 
 k'Fsktefor actions— your policy — have differed from those of your predeces- 
 her— sors, — the points of difference being such as to pile up obstacle 
 upon obstacle, not only in your own way, but in the way of every 
 English statesman who touches this question, now or hereafter. 
 The wrong has been done, and will not disappear with the 
 wrongdoer, 
 in deliberate i. You are the first responsible Minister of the Crown who, since 
 N d a e turai C Lal the adamantine laws of Political Economy were ascertained and 
 (..)economic; es tablished, has deliberately set aside — spurned — those laws. 2 It 
 is the fashion just now to speak slightingly of the ("so-called") 
 laws of Political Economy. Very well : believe me, the laws of 
 Political Economy are quite able to take care of themselves. And 
 the community which for any reason — I do not say, despises them 
 • — but fails rigidly to follow them through thick and thin — against 
 all temptation, — that community may safely be left to the inevit- 
 able consequences of its action. You — and England through 
 you— perpetrated a gross offence against these laws in 1881 : and 
 now, in 1886, you and England are face to face with the Irish 
 
 1 vfrpis — that is the word which best describes the attitude of saxon England 
 to the well-affected in Ireland. She has done her best to annihilate them. 
 Very well ; their annihilation will involve hers also — 5o|a t$ ©e<£ ! 
 
 2 I wonder how many members of this parliament (surely the most ridiculous, 
 and also the most mischievous, body of men that ever assembled for the purpose 
 of legislating \) could explain the meaning of the word "law " in the text. 
 
Your Relation to the Difficulty : 35 
 
 Difficulty intensified a hundredfold by your own act. 1 Do you 
 share the contempt which many of your followers profess for the 
 laws of Political Economy ? Apparently you do. In your acts 
 you do. Anyhow, you have sinned against them, as with a cart- 
 rope ; and now you are face to face with (what every sinner meets 
 with sooner or later) — punishment ! 
 
 2. As you have been the first to legislate in the teeth of (u.) social 
 economic principles, so you have been the first to sin openly 
 against the general laws of Nature — as these manifest themselves 
 in human society. This offence is closely connected with the 
 former — the sin against economic principle. Either offence 
 
 1 Your Irish Secretary of those days, poor Mr. Forster (for whom I have a 
 sincere regard), whose career as statesman was so suddenly cut short, defended 
 your 1 88 1 iniquity by explaining that the Irish landlords had the "pull of the 
 market." Very well: in 1886 you are found attempting to "square" the 
 landlords with a bribe of many, many millions, and in doing so and by doing 
 so — to smash the Empire. Yes: the "Laws" of Political Economy can 
 take care of themselves. — Alas, sir, since I wrote the foregoing note, that 
 excellent man, W. E. Forster, has passed away. He was the last of the Irish 
 Secretaries who worthily represented England. All his successors in the 
 Secretaryship have been the sorriest set of administrative curs that the world 
 has seen. (Please observe, in calling the Irish Secretaries curs — I am not 
 vituperative — I write in cool blood. What I mean is — that all the Secretaries 
 since Mr. Forster have been nominally the representatives of English power, 
 but really the slaves of Irish rebellion. For so far, they are cross-breeds. But 
 if you go on to add a strain of (mistaken) Christianity and of French Revolu- 
 tionism — surely we are within "measurable distance" of the cur?) — Poor 
 Mr. Forster ! a most pathetic figure ! — a man who, like Mr. Goschen {he is, 
 happily, spared to us) all but touched greatness. His vice in politics was — 
 that he did not think widely, — that he mistook symptoms for essentials. His 
 pernicious "Education Act" will be severely handled by the historian of our 
 time. But I plead with the historian to mitigate his sentence as regards the 
 man. His activity was, I acknowledge, mischievous in the highest degree. He 
 ruined Education in England. But he was very ignorant of politics and of 
 the laws of society — even of those laws which have been long since ascertained. 
 On the other hand, he was a man of grand simplicity of character, of candour, 
 of indomitable courage ! By the way, sir, you would have consulted your own 
 interest had you on that sad day of Mr. Forster 's death — sad to me, and sad 
 to thousands of Englishmen, made some reference — no matter how short — to 
 what was, in fact, a national calamity. In neglecting such things you give the 
 eujaay occasion to blaspheme. And surely, on hearing of Mr. Forster's death 
 you must have remembered Burke's noble words on a similar occasion, — have 
 seen the hollowness of party triumphs, and felt "what shadows we are and 
 what shadows we pursue ! " 
 
 D 2 
 
Your Relation to tJic Difficulty ; 
 
 denotes a certain " flabby " type of mind and character. It 
 usually shows itself in the form of a desire to enlarge the functions 
 of government, by laying on the State the duty of making the 
 citizens comfortable. If citizens have " grievances " — even of the 
 needy-knife-grinder sort— they are to be "redressed." In short, 
 sentiment invades a region as far removed from it, in the nature of 
 things, as is the region of the Calculus. Government is no longer 
 a machine — (it is at best, indeed, a very clumsy and inefficient 
 machine) — for the protection of property : Government now, all 
 aglow with philanthropy, will arrange a happy family party ! The 
 poor must be "raised," "educated," fed; the peasant must be 
 "rooted in the soil," &c. [You see we are here within touching 
 distance of the man-and-brother fallacy.] In matter of fact, the 
 assumption by the State of such duties amounts to the grossest 
 tyranny ; and we live under such a tyranny. Well, but when we, 
 the State, take on these additional and utterly irrelevant functions, 
 what happens ? We only make things worse ! for every step we 
 take is in flat opposition to Natural Law, and as such, must 
 be attended with danger, loss, disaster. But many (especially the 
 flabby Rights-of-man philanthropists) deny that such Law exists. 
 Excellent ! " The fool hath said in his heart — there is no God." 
 When we go about to break a law, nothing like denying the ex- 
 istence of that law ! But if there is no law, let us look Sit fact. — 
 You presided over an organisation whose sole function, I am 
 prepared to prove, is to protect property all over the British Empire. 
 You took on the additional function of making the Irish tenants 
 comfortable, happy} Now let us see how you set about making 
 the Irish tenants comfortable, happy — and the result of your efforts. 
 
 1 I protest it is enough to make a saint swear to see the blundering gauche 
 attempts of the brutal, dull, pudding-headed saxons to make happy — as 
 superior persons, the bright, sensitive Celt ! — the Celt, who enjoys life in one 
 year — living as he often does on a dinner (and I ought to know, for I have 
 shared it with him !) of potatoes and salt — more than the saxon Sir Gorgias Midas 
 in his whole dull-as-dishwater existence ! But the courses of the last twenty 
 years have soured the Celt. He is now dour, ungracious, suspicious ; even 
 the English accent puts his back up. — Yet we live in the era of "generous " 
 measures, — of "enlightened" statesmanship ! But when I think of the Celt 
 of to-day and the Celt of thirty years ago, I am constrained to wish enlightened 
 statesmanship — at the devil. 
 
Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 37 
 
 In order to compass this object you were compelled at once to 
 engage in a course of plunder : that is, to violate deliberately the 
 primary law of your being ! You existed to protect property, and 
 you were allowed to use "force as a remedy" against those 
 degenerate members of the community who would rob others of 
 their property. But you turned aside from — nay, abjured alto- 
 gether — your obligation to protect the plundered man, and — 
 yourself, the English Government — became his chief plunderer ! 
 And the end of this fine sentimental way of governing is at hand. 
 You would make the Irish tenants happy: you would "root the 
 peasant in the soil." 1 To make the peasant happy you plundered 
 his landlord. And yet the peasant is not happy. Now you are 
 going to square the landlord, and to do so you must plunder the 
 people of England — to wrest from them as much as was expended 
 in building up the British Empire. Do you think the landlord 
 will, "after all," be as happy as if you had contented yourself, in 
 the government of Ireland, with such a non-sentimental course as 
 the mere enforcing of- contract? That was all you could do 
 healthily — all you were permitted by the Laws of Nature to do. 
 And had you done that y Kerry would now be as peaceable as 
 Kent. There is an equity, you see, in the nature of things. We 
 English passed and applauded your grand " healing " measure, 
 and we stood by while your bandit-commissioners were bog- 
 trotting all over Ireland, " fixing fair rents"! The curse has 
 come home to us. It is just that it should ; we must pay somehow ; 
 but do you think we are happy ? — And lastly, -axe you happy? 
 
 3. You were, I think, the first to regard Crime as a thing andlnen - 
 
 ° & couragement 
 
 demanding any treatment other than Punishment. Irish Crime ,... ot— 
 (which is usually of a peculiarly hellish type 2 ) you regarded as an 
 
 1 As to the wisdom of this policy see Section IV. 
 
 2 I say advisedly Irish crime. The Celt does not take to certain sorts of 
 crime which are to the saxon as the breath of his nostrils. For example, you 
 find no wife-kicking among the Celts. In short the Celt is sensitive — in some 
 respects morbidly so— to the extent of pepperiness ; the saxon is not. But the 
 Celt has a very undeveloped conscience, say, rather an embryonic conscience, 
 even if that ; therefore his criminal acts, while they shock us by their devilish 
 wickedness, seem unaccountable on any grounds other than the supposition that 
 the perpetrators were mad. Take the case of the Joyce murders, the Phoenix 
 Park murders, the Sheehan murders, the murder of Finlay the process-server, 
 then the treatment of the Curtins, — of the widow of Finlay, &c, &c. 
 
3S Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 
 
 evidence of political discontent, — to be met by " Concessions " 
 [see Lie 10, p. 15], as if a man who, under any circumstances, could 
 commit a crime could, under any circumstances, or by any " con- 
 cessions," be made a good citizen. Give one of the men who 
 murdered Lord Muuntmorres, or who danced in his blood, sixpence 
 a week (the amount of reduction effected by your grand Land Act 
 of 1881), 1 and he at once becomes weil-afTected towards England, 
 and a worthy member of society ! Such, in effect, is your theory. 
 Of course this tolerance towards crime is a "note" of the 
 " flabbiness " of modern England. Criminals are spoken of as 
 the " victims " of our social condition ! But if crime — crime of a 
 purely political character, and committed to further political ends 
 — is to be taken as evidence that political "concessions" are re- 
 quired (—and again, if "force is no remedy") — why did you hang 
 Joe Brady 2 No, sir, crime is crime. And it would have been far 
 healthier, and in every way better, if Ireland had, after the murder 
 of Lord Frederick Cavendish, been governed as a Penal Settle- 
 ment for ten years ! — -a sentiment, of course, which does not com- 
 mend itself to modern sausculotte-huma.mta.Y\3Lmsm ; but then, that 
 same humanitarianism is a " note " of our national decay. 
 and (iv.) sep- 4- You have been the first to carry " concession " to the point 
 of absolute surrender, to weaken vitally the tie binding Ireland to 
 England, and to expect, 2 or, at least, to affirm, that the connection 
 would be closer and more cordial ! But here again you are incon- 
 sistent. How comes it that your " concessions " were not made 
 once for all ? What it is right to concede now, it was surely right to 
 concede in 1870 ? And if Ireland is to be governed by Irish ideas, 
 and you go in for "concession," why don't you ''concede "all that the 
 vast majority of the accredited representatives of Ireland demand ? 
 Why don't you settle this business out of hand by following 
 absolutely the directions of Mr. Parnell ? Why come to me or any 
 " other discreet and learned " outsider, "and open your grief"? 
 Behold your master ! But now, has it ever occurred to you that 
 
 1 Sixpence a week — that is the average to the agricultural population per head 
 — secured by your Land Act. 
 
 2 At least rhetorically. I am utterly unable to follow your logic. But perhaps 
 you don't intend that there should be any logic to follow ? Perhaps it is all 
 rhetoric ? I fear this is the view of the case taken by the Fates. Qui vivra 
 verra. I have no doubt on the subject. 
 
 aration. 
 
Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 39 
 
 this word " concession " — though it looks kind, and Christian, and 
 "'all that sort of thing " — is in reality a very dangerous word ? Ask 
 yourself what exactly it stands for in your mind. My account 
 of it is this : — I owe a man money. I pay him. That is not 
 concession. I don't owe him any money, and in spite of his 
 threats and howls I refuse to pay him. That is not concession. 
 I don't owe him, yet I pay him: that is "concession." But for 
 my part, I can't for the life of me see where or how this " con- 
 cession " comes in properly in connection with public affairs. — You 
 and I find ourselves among a body of selfish brutes fighting for 
 their tickets at a railway ticket-office window. I, being first on 
 the ground, have the right to get my ticket before you ; but you 
 are an old man, and I "concede"' to you the privilege which I 
 possess : I allow you to get your ticket before me, and I take my 
 chance of finding a comfortable seat in a crowded train. I under- 
 stand concession here. But I don't understand "concession" in 
 a case, say, in which I am the guardian of an orphan, and that 
 orphan's patrimony is threatened with serious diminution or actual 
 extinction by the exorbitant charges of a scoundrel-lawyer who 
 has been employed to protect it. I must fight that scoundrel. It 
 is a sacred duty. And if he resists, I must show him that Force 
 is a remedy. Now this latter case presents, I hold, the analogue 
 to the position of the statesman. I regret, sir, to have to say 
 that in your public policy you always seem to be the champion, 
 advocate, and friend of every country but your own. 1 Yet I 
 
 1 And it is therefore in no wise to be wondered at that your accession to 
 power is always hailed with delight in quarters in which praise of an English 
 statesman ought to give that statesman pause — ought to lead that statesman to 
 ask whether he has always consulted the true interests of his country. You 
 are in high favour in the offices of the Novo: Vreniya and the Vedomosii : for 
 my part, I should feel my earnings much safer and my income-tax more of a 
 stationary, (certainly not an increasing), quantity, if you had the good word 
 of the Berlin Post, of the No?\i-deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, or of the Vienna 
 Fi'tie Presse and Fremdenblatt. It is amusing to observe that the journals of 
 your "party" in this country reproduce the acclaims of the A T ovoe Vremva 
 Vedomosti and Brussels Nord, as if they were solid testimonials to your merit ! 
 Is this naivete> or do your able editors accurately gauge their public? — Since 
 writing this note, and on the very day — big with fate ! — on which you are to 
 make your proposals — at least ihejirst of them — the Daily Afews, which I read 
 regularly, prints a paragraph from its Odessa correspondent, containing 
 
40 Your Relatio7i to the Difficulty ; 
 
 think you will — in theory — admit that your duty when you are 
 Prime Minister of England is, first and foremost, to England. 1 
 Very well — in that case, what is the meaning of " concession * ? 
 You may concede — ruin, burn, sink, and destroy what is your own 
 — as I can concede to you my right of being served before you 
 with a railway-ticket. But I don't see how you, as first Minister 
 of the Crown, can "concede" to any other country that which 
 belongs of right to England — to England, and not to you. — You 
 made a final " concession " to Ireland in carrying through your 
 "great" Land Bill of 1S81. A concession you called it. But 
 wherein did the "concession " consist? You beggared the land- 
 owners in Ireland by form of law, in order to conciliate the Irishry. 
 And you did so under pressure from this same Irishry. You 
 called that " concession " : I called it then, and I call it now, rank 
 injustice, villany, — and hypocrisy into the bargain. You — England 
 — conceded nothing — sacrificed nothing that was yours — England's. 
 You deliberately ruined one class that was loyal, law-abiding, and 
 England-loving, in order to please, and (as you hoped— -such is 
 your ignorance of the Irish character — ) to satisfy and pacify 
 
 " Russian views on Mr. Gladstone's Irish Policy." And among these " views " 
 are some very impudent anticipations as to what will happen, should " the 
 Sovereign exercise a prerogative inimical to a dissolution by Mr. Gladstone." 
 Public opinion {i.e. " saxon " opinion) would, it seems, triumphantly "sup- 
 port and carry the great Liberal leader and reformer (meaning you, though the 
 word reformer is a strange word in this connection) over all obstacles," &c. 
 Could anything surpass this in the quality of naivete — or something else ? — 
 But the feature of this issue of the Daily News is a copy of verses under the 
 heading "At Last." — They prove conclusively that the art of writing the 
 rhyming pentameter is not yet a lost art. Of course, one does not expect a 
 poet to be a politician. The substance of this poem is sad stuff. But what 
 of that? If "glorious John " is once more amongst us — that is something 
 to be thankful for. The verses are evidently by the same hand that lately 
 offered some very severe " poetical " strictures on you, sir, to the editor of the 
 St. James's Gazette. That gentleman rejected them. I hope he now sees his 
 mistake. 
 
 1 Perhaps you wouldn't. Perhaps you would say you must act as the Friend - 
 of-humanity. In that case my argument, of course, falls to the ground. But 
 I can tell you that the statesman who avails himself of his position to play the 
 role of Friend-of humanity, will very soon be cast by Fate as Enemy-of-his- 
 country. For my part, I contribute to support the public burdens only on the 
 understanding that public men will look after my interests, and not the interests 
 of Afghan, Turk, or Russian. 
 
Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 41 
 
 those who live only to hate England. And now, you are once 
 more on the war- trail (pardon the figure) : you are for the third 
 time face to face with the " final settlement " of the Irish 
 Difficulty. And " the way and means thereto is " — concession ! 
 You are going to concede a "large and generous" measure of 
 county government, or, it may be ( — and at present writing your 
 followers are all abroad as to what they will have to vote for), a 
 Parliament in Dublin. Either measure is fraught, and equally 
 fraught, with (virtual) death to England. Here, indeed, England 
 does sacrifice something solid — her hegemony, namely, in these 
 islands and her Empire abroad. There is here no hypocrisy 
 (unless you should maintain that you are, by your measure, 
 strengthening the Union) ; but is not this too much to pay for any 
 possible, any conceivable advantage you would reap from concession ? 
 — Now, perhaps, you understand why I am not very much taken 
 with "concession," — word or thing. 
 
 5. You were the first — so far as I know — to employ a certain You are the 
 peculiar phraseology — language — mode of expression — in Eng- practised? 
 lish politics. The proverb tells us that " hard words break no ( v e )on the 
 bones," but words count for something when they are addressed pe^Son^of 
 to the "saxon " in the House of Commons or out of doors. For lan s ua s e ; 
 the saxon among us, in Parliament or out of it, is only at " that- 
 blessed-word-Mesopotamia " stage of intellectual development. 
 He does not distinguish between the real and the rhetorical. He 
 does not weigh — very often he does not understand — the words 
 addressed to him. Hence the solid danger to the saxon, to 
 you, to me, to all of us. — -This peculiar mode of expression may 
 be described thus : You perform, or are about to perform (or 
 commit), a certain act. That act would be in the Queen's 
 English designated by a certain term : now, select the contrary 
 — or, indeed, take anything as if it were the contrary (with 
 the saxon it matters not) of that term — and the trick is done. — 
 Propose a measure of robbery — of spoliation : but say not a word 
 about robbery, about spoliation ! Call it an act of justice. If a 
 devoted servant of England (of whom the England of our time 
 was not worthy) is in sore straits — -beholding with his physical 
 eyes, nothing but enemies only too physical, with rifles in their 
 hands, on all sides of him, — rebuke with Christian warmth the 
 
 iTON COLLEGE LIBRARY 
 ESTflUT HILL, MASS. 
 
4 2 Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 
 
 presumptuous person who dares to say that this devoted servant 
 of England is surrounded ; and when you have mastered your 
 indignation ( — you do well to be angry), condescend to explain 
 that this devoted servant of England is not surrounded, he is 
 only hemmed in. When, again, you disgrace an able and cour- 
 ageous officer,— another devoted servant and representative of 
 England — by recalling him at a most critical moment ( — and, let 
 me tell you, the Central Asian Question is not yet " settled "), 
 repel with indignation the charge that you recalled this distin- 
 guished public servant, and affirm that he was only requested 
 " to repair to the metropolis" And in regard to this Irish Question 
 — if your policy manifestly should be to grant all-round " conces- 
 sion " to the Irishry — all that you think will satisfy them, — and 
 to abase, rob, annihilate " your own flesh and blood " in Ireland — 
 you must disarm all opposition by assuring Parliament that your 
 policy was a policy of strict impartiality, and launching into 
 nautical figure, you must exclaim that you were determined, as 
 between one Irishman and another, to " steer an even keel" — 
 an even keel ! — when, in fact, you were carrying on with three 
 planks under to leeward. — I declare I am here in the pre- 
 sence of a mystery ; and I am not good at solving mysteries. 
 I cannot — no, I cannot, after long trying — see how you could, 
 for example, call your Land Bill of 1881, an act of justice — an 
 act of justice ! — but I give it up. Davus sum, non CEdipus. Your 
 political opponents have an off-hand way of explaining such 
 mysteries. They travel into the region of the moral, and affirm 
 that there the explanation of the mystery lies. I don't follow 
 them into that region. But I don't say they are wrong. I only 
 say that it is an additional mystery if a round dozen of English 
 statesmen and many others, not statesmen, but — ■" all, all, honour- 
 able men," 1 could conspire to affirm the thing that is not. Perhaps 
 
 1 When your Land Bill was going through the Houses, a distinguished 
 Churchman preached a sermon, in which ( — so the Daily News reported) 
 he quoted a celebrated peroration of yours beginning "Justice must be our 
 guide.'''' An act of gigantic breach of faith is committed, and Dux Justitia 
 facti! — the virtue of Justice personified guides you to measures which ten years 
 before you denounced as " spoliation." Spoliation, 1870 — Justice, 1S81 ! 
 Mystery on mystery ! 
 
Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 4 3 
 
 Ihey looked only to their motives ? But I won't attempt to fathom 
 this mystery either. 1 I am of that u uncultured " class of persons 
 who have not the " insight " to call a spade anything but — a spade ; 
 and who (such our Beschrdndheit — our narrowness of view) could 
 never see in a spade a, pound of sugar or a railway locomotive ! 
 This, by the way, must be my apology for many expressions you 
 will find in this paper. " I am a plain man, I can not gloze." 
 
 6. Lastly, you have been the first English statesman to succumb -and(vi)on 
 to an agitation that was absolutely of his own creation. I have sham gnev- 
 called this Irish agitation a sham agitation ; intrinsically it is a sham a s hSi^gtta- y 
 of shams. I now affirm that you ( — "with the best intentions") tl upi e n n the S 
 called it into being, and have nurtured and coddled it till it is, ^absolmdy 
 this day, fit to strangle both you and the British Empire " without -master. 
 handling a gun." A sham in inception, it may be bracketed 
 with the " saxon " in the midst of us, as far and away the most 
 dangerous enemy we have to face. For one thing, we could not, 
 as a people, even set about meeting it without resorting to violent 
 reactionary measures ; and every wise statesman abhors violence 
 and abhors reaction. And then we must ask, Have we, as a 
 people, courage to resort to violence and to adopt reactionary 
 courses, even where our very existence is at stake ? The saxon 
 is our master. Anyhow, this state of things, sir, we owe ab- 
 solutely to you — always admitting (which I do ungrudgingly) 
 the fell complicity of England ; — England which has permitted 
 you to blunder on this Irish Question, to blunder even when 
 your former blunders, gross and palpable, were being visited with 
 their natural consequences, and when you (one would have thought) 
 were found out — and which has again and again called you in 
 
 1 That a large body of men, all reputed upright, and some of them by 
 profession pious — and paid handsome salaries for merely doing their best or 
 going through a decent and for the greater part prescribed form of doing their 
 best to make other people pious — should contrive to select within a certain 
 region words which I do not say mvde^cribe the things they are supposed to 
 stand for, but accurately describe their oppcsites — this is a fact that must be 
 taken into account by every student of our social and political condition. 
 This inversion of terms is strange — startling, — but not unprecedented. Isaiah 
 (v. 20, 21, 23) notices the same phenomenon in his time. " Woe unto them 
 that call evil good, and good evil ; that put darkness for light, and light Jor 
 darkness ; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter," &.C., &c. 
 
44 Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 
 
 to put still further from right what you had already disastrously 
 put wrong — //W England will not fail of her deserts: retribution will 
 be upon her soon — as I have already said, — is, in fact, upon her 
 now. But you, sir, were the cause of the evil — in the sense that 
 if a statesman of the right stamp ( — I can name no such public 
 man in England : for the good reason that modern England 
 would not allow the right man to become a public man) had held 
 the reins of power during the last twenty years, the evil would not 
 now exist : there would be no Irish party threatening you within 
 an inch of your life, if you don't make your, i.e. England's, 
 approaching surrender humiliating enough, absolute enough ; and 
 the Irish Question would be every day tending of itself towards 
 a peaceful solution. While, if this right man in the right place 
 had had, during the same time, a worthy England at his back, 
 an England worthy to possess that glorious island, with its 
 easily-governed Celtic population — easily governed, I say, but only 
 by the right man — why, sir, in that case ( — and how much every 
 lover of Ireland and of England must regret that this is but a 
 vision, and that he must " put the vision by " !) — the Irish 
 Difficulty would now be hastening to make itself a bit of real 
 "ancient history." 
 You are thus Of the " Irish party " — brought into existence by you, spoonfed 
 the Irish by you, educated, supported by you, and now about to receive 
 from you — " the Governor," the share of goods that falleth to 
 them and to go their way, — of this party — as a party — I must 
 speak in terms of admiration — in so far as I must admire 
 magnificent discipline, shining intellectual ability, no matter 
 how or in what cause displayed. That is all that I can in 
 conscience say of a party whose activity is, and must be, fraught 
 with nothing but evil to Ireland. Anyhow, they certainly form 
 a striking contrast to the parcel of Gurths 1 sent up by the new 
 
 1 And Gurth, we know, was the son of Beowulph, the born thrall of Cedric 
 of Rotherwood, and a born thrall he is of somebody to the present hour. But 
 Gurth was a very dull fellow. For my part, since Parliamentary proceedings 
 have now taken on so much of the chai-acter of a farce, I want the piece to 
 be consistently played as stick I — and could well have spared our chaw-bacon 
 Gurths if we had in their room and stead the descendants of " Wamba, the son 
 of Witless, the son of Weatherbrain, the son of an alderman " ! The piece 
 would then go. For example, I read every word of Mr. Labouchere's speeches, 
 
Your Relation to the Difficulty : 45 
 
 constituencies. These must, I should think, remind members 
 of the Irish party who served in former Parliaments of the 
 twenty-nine Ulster " dead-heads " whereof so few have had 
 an opportunity of revisiting the glimpses of the electric light on 
 the Clock Tower at Westminster. — The present Irish Parliamen- 
 tary party is unquestionably a magnificent machine ! I am 
 inclined to think, sir, that it is the finest thing you have ever 
 done in the way of "constructive statesmanship." Behold 
 the phalanx of the enemies you have reared ; young they are, 
 lusty, vigorous — masters of Parliamentary tactics, though many of 
 them have not been in Parliament for as many weeks as you 
 have been years — silent as the grave when the word is passed 
 that silence is the lay — again, solemnly persuasive, discursive, 
 talkative, tedious — exasperating ■ — when the mot-aV ordre is — ■ 
 "Occupy time." But in every case, the saxon line, bulging ever more 
 and more inwards, attests the strategical and tactical ability of 
 the leaders, and the brilliant soldiership of the rank and file. 
 
 Yet they too hasten to their Sedan ; and their fall will come in —a party 
 the moment of their triumph. Their offence is rank. I admit doings, like 
 that what constituted their offence has placed them in the ^hosesu<> 
 position they now occupy — that of the real arbiters of the destiny d?reNemeS, 
 of the British Empire. I admit that the temptation to win this awaits - 
 position was great : but they fell, and no mere intellectual gifts can 
 atone for moral delinquency. Be that as it may (I will discuss 
 their offence presently), they now have their grip on the throat of 
 England, and can choke her off Ireland when they please. And 
 
 also of those of the Irish members ; and it is to me, sir, somewhat of a 
 trial that you are not a bit funny. — Pray don't call me flippant. Don't 
 reprove me as you reprove your colleague in the cartoon of the Augurs. I 
 jest, because I am very muck in earnest. And what makes me very much in 
 earnest is this : that Parliamentary Government, by your insanity in the matter 
 of the Franchise, has broken down in England, and become discredited all 
 the world over ! Prince Bismarck (the only great statesman of our time) points 
 — and justly- — to England as the temperance lecturer pointed to his "awful 
 era m pit.'''' — Do you relish that? I don't. I am ashamed, confounded, ex- 
 asperated. — Now, which is the more serious — the man who deliberately with 
 a light heart — gaily — makes a certain form of government — the most civilised 
 yet evolved — ridiculous — contemptible, or the man who in sheer bitterness of 
 spirit does his best to laugh the ridiculous thing off the stage ? 
 
4^ Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 
 
 choke her off they will. — By the by, I hope you are not mis- 
 led in this matter by a certain quality in your mind which has 
 often led you astray, a sort of vague, hazy, dreamy optimism ; — 
 1 hope you have not argued yourself into believing that you can 
 have Home Rule in any shape or form consistent with the 
 " integrity of the Empire." Home Rule means Separation — that, 
 and nothing else. The more timid, feeble members of your 
 following, when they presume to canvass your divine plans, hope 
 you will introduce a " large and generous " measure of local self- 
 government in the shape of County Boards, &x. ; 1 that is then- 
 way of saying that they hope you won't propose an Irish Parlia- 
 ment in Dublin. But the one measure is for them, for you, for 
 England, as fatal as the other ; either means Separation. And 
 the Irish party " go for " that, and nothing short of that. 
 
 But then will come their Nemesis. In what form ?■ — -Well, hard 
 and stupid things are said of them. They will, however, survive 
 all mere malignity and all mere stupidity. Their fate does not 
 depend on what is said of them. — They are described, for example, 
 as a set of "low fellows " who live upon the contributions of their 
 congeners (often called their " dupes ") on the other side of the 
 Atlantic, and of as many as "seventeen nationalities" besides. 
 And a noble Duke lately affirmed that what they receive as salary, 
 they spend in drunkenness and debauchery in London. It is true 
 this last statement was afterwards withdrawn handsomely enough, 
 — but it is one of those statements which ought never to have 
 been made. It was a libel. But it was also an irrelevancy. Is 
 
 1 And one would think, to hear these Gladstonian conies discuss the question, 
 that a "generous measure of local self-government" is what they have been 
 pining for all their lives — the truth being that this County Board scheme denotes 
 a mere bulging of the line : it is a thing they would never have thought of but 
 for United Ireland's demand for a Parliament in Dublin. But County Boards 
 with an Irish party in Westminster, or a Parliament in Dublin, with no re- 
 presentatives in Westminster — which would United Ireland prefer? The 
 County Board scheme (with your, the Gladstonian, franchise) will deliver up 
 to the Irishry the few capitalists left (the landowners need not be taken into 
 account), and they will still be able to put their hands into the pockets of the 
 English taxpayer and make him pay " ransom " — for nothing. (And serve him 
 right.) On the other hand, a Parliament in Dublin would satisfy " national" 
 sentiment. This arrangement would cost money ; and where could the money 
 be found ? 
 
Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 47 
 
 it insinuated that the Irish party don't do their duty ? Well 1 
 anybody who knows the House of Commons knows that there is 
 not, and never has been, a party more assiduous, more hard- 
 working, than the Irish party under the magnificent leadership of 
 Mr. Parnell. 1 And those who know the party as individuals know 
 how absurd is the imputation of drunkenness and debauchery. 2 
 — But I take other ground. In regard to the Irish party's de- 
 pendence on money contributed by the American-Irish and their 
 friends of " seventeen nationalities " in America, I wish to remark, 
 and my reason is plain, that where there is smoke there is fire ; 
 and that if the American-Irish (even " servant girls ") give their 
 dollars to support the Irish party in the English Parliament, 3 this 
 shows that we have got a very earnest foe to contend with. 4 
 But I affirm, that never was money expended ( — I don't sympa- 
 thize with the Irish party, but truth is truth) more effectually than 
 that which the American-Irish have expended on the " Irish 
 party." The American-Irish have desired a certain article : I 
 don't say they were wise in desiring it ; but that is not the 
 question. Well, the " Irish party" have got it for them. Que 
 leur faut-il de plus ? 
 
 Then, as to drunkenness and debauchery. Even if the " Irish " 
 members are drunken and debauched — that is none of our business. 
 I have nothing to do with the morals of public men any more than 
 I have with their shirt-collars. 5 I never inquire whether you, for 
 example, are in private life a monster of asceticism, an angel of sweet- 
 ness and light, — or a very very wicked old gentleman. I regard you 
 exactly as I regard the steersman at the wheel on board a steamer in 
 which I may happen to be a passenger. I don't want to " speak " 
 
 1 Mr. Parnell will of course very soon have to get out of the way. The 
 pace will become too fast even for him. 
 
 2 I can't quote the Duke of Westminster's exact words, for I write at a 
 distance from books, newspapers, &c. , and have, besides, no time to consult 
 them. But if I misreport what the Duke said I hope somebody will correct 
 me. 
 
 3 Mr. T. P. O'Connor affirms the Irish party can get ,£5,000 a week if they 
 want it. I think that is the sum he mentioned. 
 
 4 When would our saxon knock off his 'backy and his beer, were it to chain 
 Satan for a thousand years ? 
 
 5 Your shirt-collars, sir, I leave to Harry Furniss and your washerwoman. 
 I have, and take, as little to do with vour morals. 
 
48 Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 
 
 to the man at the wheel. 1 I don't care what his views on the 
 Liquor Question are. I don't want to know whether he is married 
 or single. I have nothing to do with his theology, his politics, 
 his morals, or his opinion on the question whether life is worth 
 living. He is at the wheel : very well, I want him to steer 
 efficiently, so that I shall get soon and safe to the end of the 
 voyage. He may drink his fill in his watch below, and, for the 
 matter of that, even when he is on duty, provided the liquor will 
 make him steer better. For my part, I could be well content to see 
 at the present juncture the helm of the State in the hand of such a 
 man as Lucius Cornelius Sulla — and there certainly was no strait- 
 lacedness about him. But he could steer? — This prying, nudging- 
 and- winking, eyebrow-raising curiosity is, in fact, another mark of 
 the " flabbiness " of our time, as it was a mark of the Athenian in his 
 decay. And the people who talk about the Irish members in this 
 fashion resemble nothing so much as a blackguard corner-boy, who, 
 when you box his ears for some offence against public decency, calls 
 you all sorts of quite irrelevant bad names because he can do nothing 
 else. — Then we hear reports of divisions in the Irish party — reports 
 circulated and greedily listened to by those to whom such intel- 
 ligence would be very welcome. The Irish party won't split up 
 to please these people. The split will come, but it will be only 
 after the Irish party have very effectually " split " the Empire. No : 
 the Irish party will survive mere envy, calumny, and irrelevant 
 chatter. No man and no body of men are ever permanently 
 affected by such things. The only way the Irish party can be put 
 down is — by all English parties being as efficient and as deter- 
 mined to frustrate their designs as they are to carry them out. 
 
 1 I don ; t want even to see him. And I certainly would never attend Hawarden 
 Church when you read the Lessons, for I might be confounded with the gaping 
 herd of vulgarians (saxons, every man of them) who trouble your peace on 
 the Sabbath. 
 
 2 From the man-and-brother point of view, I might wish the steersman 
 didn't indulge quite so freely. But I hope you begin to perceive that states- 
 mans hip has got nothing to do with man-and-brother theories. Our main 
 concern in statesmanship is — our national safety. From this point of view, and 
 given the conditions (suppose, e.g., the ship in danger- — this the only steersman, 
 and alcohol with him an hourly necessity), I can picture Sir Wilfrid himself 
 busily engaged in preparing the steersman's dram — " neat " — " cold without" 
 
 ■ — or "'ot with" — as he might desire. Oh — we are such hypocrites ! 
 
Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 49 
 
 The advantage of numbers is all against them ; and we surely live 
 under the blessed dispensation of the rule of the Majority. 
 
 But I have said that the Irish party, as representing the lrishry 
 — will one day meet with a terrible reverse. Now, it is curious 
 that the reverse will be complete only when they obtain the very 
 summit of their ambition, which is, of course, Separation. 1 And 
 by how much they fall short of attaining that object of their 
 dreams and labours, by so much will they be able in a certain 
 set of ciratmstances to mitigate the evils attendant on that shatter- 
 ing defeat. Absolute success and absolute ruin go, for them, hand 
 in hand. Assuming that they will obtain Separation — which is 
 what they want — the reverse will then present itself to them at 
 once, and in two forms. They may avoid defeat in the case of 
 the first, though there is not one chance in a thousand that they 
 will ; — before the second they must go down. I will explain this 
 to you. 
 
 I. The very moment they attain Separation, — when the hated »•— in an 
 flag of England has been hauled down for the last time from win have 
 the staff on the great tower of Dublin Castle — when Ireland is Celtic role .• 
 going to be in very deed " for the Irish," when " Irish ideas " 
 are to have free play, — the victorious lrishry will have the " Ulster 
 question " to face. How will the lrishry " settle " that question ? 
 What if Ulster rebels against the hated domination of the Celt ? 
 " Then the bird that can sing and won't sing must be made to 
 sing. We will call in the Queen's troops to coerce the rebels : we 
 will force them to their knees." [Ominous words, Coercion ! and 
 Force ! Force is, it seems, a remedy " after all."] 
 
 But, steady, Mr. Harrington ! Ex hypothesis you are " free." 
 Ireland is yours. A British regiment will, in the new order of 
 things, be as much of an irrelevancy in Ireland as would be a 
 battalion of the Prussian Imperial Guard. " But we will not be 
 wholly separate from England." Very well, but, in that case, what 
 
 1 I don't say this is Mr. Parnell's ambition. But he knows very well that 
 the frenzy of hatred towards England w hich possesses the Irish Celts will have 
 Separation and nothing but Separation. He hates England : but his hatred 
 doesn't send him into a fit every time he hears the word England mentioned. He 
 is cool and cautious, and will jump off the engine in time to save himself 
 from the inevitable collision. 
 
 E 
 
5 o Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 
 
 becomes of your grand idea of severing " every link " that binds 
 you to your oppressor ? And do you really think that you will 
 establish just such a connection as shall enable you to call in 
 British troops when you want to " coerce " people who are, in 
 spirit and grip, more English than the English ever were — even 
 in their best days ; and that England will have nothing farther 
 to do with Ireland ? British troops will, I suppose, go over dis- 
 guised — in order not to hurt the susceptibilities of the Celt — and 
 having '* coerced "their own congeners in the North, will be smuggled 
 out of Ireland by a considerate Irish Government (!) as soon as pos- 
 sible. Well, even suppose that were the case. England has of late 
 been party to so many irrelevant villanies that I wouldn't put that 
 one " past her." But will she be able to send troops to reduce the 
 "■rebel" element in the North? If her saxon has his way, she 
 will require all her resources to enable her to rub on among the 
 states of Europe. But even suppose she were able to send 
 troops, and did send troops, to put down the Northern " rebels " 
 — rebels not to the English flag but to the anti-English flag, if 
 there could be such a thing in the Universe — suppose her troops 
 entering Ulster, and that they meet there, as, please God, they will, 
 100,000 men well-armed, disciplined, and determined? "What 
 do you think of that, my cat ? " Late events have taught us 
 that our troops can be beaten, and though I am no prophet, 
 I assert that if ever England tries by force to put down the 
 Ulstermen when they are thoroughly roused — to put them 
 under the feet of the bitterest enemies alike of them and of 
 England too — not to mention the abominable spectacle of the 
 Queen's troops shooting down the Queen's most loyal subjects 
 — England may find in Ulster another Majuba Hill or a Sara- 
 t0CTa . — But suppose the Ulsterman beaten. 1 Then he will put 
 
 1 By the way, should things come to this pass, we may live to see the day 
 when Ulster, "coerced" by the saxon Government of Engla .d (force being 
 here a remedy) will be supported in men and material by the. people of England. 
 (They will not want men though : the home-made article couldn't be improved 
 in quality, and up to 100,000 in numbers Ulster may be relied upon.) — Will 
 not this look very like Civil War in England? Mr. Joseph Arch, First Lord 
 of the Admiralty (many things having happened since he was bothered by 
 English synonyms) will order Admiral Lord (or ex- Lord) Charles Beresford 
 to keep a strict watch on all vessels between " the Mull " and Innishowen Head 
 
Your Retatio?i to the Difficulty ; 51 
 
 Ulster under the protection of the United States. And suppose 
 they won't have him — then he will piecemeal clear out, and bring 
 his intelligence, thrift, uprightness, to a better market under the 
 Stars and Stripes than he ever found under the " Union "-Jack. 1 
 But what he will never do is — to submit to a Celtic Parliament 
 in any shape or form. 2 
 
 I beg your pardon, sir ; the exigencies of my argument have 
 compelled me to address Mr. Harrington, an able lieutenant of 
 Mr. Parnell. If all I have written in regard to Ulster is not in- 
 telligible to you, I regret it very much. But if it is not, you ought 
 at once to make yourself acquainted with the spirit of that part 
 of the Queen's dominions. And it may be a contribution worth 
 making towards your study of Ulster and of the Irish Question to 
 inform you of some leading facts. The Ulster population is quiet, 
 orderly, law-abiding, industrious and wealth-producing. Further, 
 the backbone of it is, in religion Presbyterian, and in politics 
 "Liberal" — far more truly and intelligently Liberal than anybody 
 of English Liberals that I have ever come across. 3 The North-of- 
 Irelanders are " Liberals " — not Radicals. And strange to say, 
 sir, they have even now a profound belief in you* The Franchise 
 
 — it having come to the knowledge of " My Lords " that military stores in large 
 quantities were being sent from England and Scotland to the ports of Deny 
 and Portrush, for the use of the "rebels" against the Irish Government — or 
 it might be against " Her Majesty's " Government ! 
 
 1 Which, by the way, must now be modified. The Irish will surely never 
 allow the Cross of St. Patrick to appear on an "alien " ensign. 
 
 2 The only truly "Irish" Parliament was the Parliament of May, 1690— 
 which passed attainders on Irish landowners to the number of 2,000. You 
 see the Irish landowner has always had a bad time of it. 
 
 3 There is a narrowness, a bigotry, a "wicked-Tory" smack about modern 
 English "Liberalism" which is very offensive. Rather, I ought to call this 
 "Liberalism" Latter-Pay Radicalism. We see it exemplified, e.g., in the 
 gracious utterances of the sometime Rev. Thorold Rogers. Such utterances 
 would not "take" with North-of-Ireland Liberals. South wark is the right 
 shop for them. This Radicalism, by the way, is almost the polar opposite of 
 the original Radicalism — that of Burdett, Cochrane, Grote, Roebuck, &c. 
 
 4 I have laboured, during recent visits among them, to detach them from two 
 beliefs— their belief in England, and their belief in you. They are stern, loyal 
 Calvinists, and cannot be moved like the saxon herd that follow you on this 
 side. — I learn, with great satisfaction, as I pass these pages out of my hand, 
 that they are intensely disgusted with your late manceuvrings. This is good 
 news. Puritan Ulster is not dead, but sleepeth ! And when she awakes^jou 
 
 E 2 
 
5 2 Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 
 
 Act of last year consigned them to political extinction ; but even 
 after you clubbed your rifle and "went for" them, they continued 
 to believe in the soundness of your statesmanship — which did not 
 say much, I freely admit, for the soundness of their judgment. At 
 the same time, I think it will be granted that devotion to a 
 political, or any other leader, even after he has taken a course 
 that would not justify such devotion — a wrong course — a wicked 
 course — is (most would say,) a venial fault. I must add that 
 their being a very religious community, and your being a very 
 religious man, has materially strengthened their feeling of regard 
 for you. Piety is very beautiful. 
 
 But you will probably take a course one of these days which 
 will disillusionize them. 1 You have robbed them of political 
 weight though, in fact, they are the weightiest element in the 
 population of Ireland ; and they were told with brutal cyni- 
 cism, when you were passing your Franchise Bill, that the 
 English and Scotch members would represent them ! Very 
 well : but now you will rob them of their liberty by commit- 
 ting the blackest bit of treachery known to history : you will 
 deliver them up, bound hand and foot by your new franchise, to 
 their bitter enemies. That Franchise Act, which deprived them, 
 at one blow, of political existence in so far as England is 
 concerned, would deprive them of representation in an " Irish " 
 Parliament if they would condescend to acknowledge such an 
 assembly. 2 You went to the gutter for your constituency in 
 Ireland, and you found your swarms of Celts ; just as you went 
 to the gutter in England and got your swarms of saxons. But 
 
 and your ferocious crew of Celtic thieves will hear of it ! N.B. — I am not a 
 Presbyterian North-of-Irelander. I speak of these things with the coolness of 
 a zooogist. But / know what I am talking about. 
 
 1 While writing the above sentence I have been told that your opening speech 
 on Thursday, the 8th inst. , on the Irish question, will occupy about two hours 
 and a half. Most rhetorical sir I that speech will be two hours too long ! Cut 
 it down, why should it cumber the pages of Hansard? And if it be anything 
 more than rhetoric, why should it remain to rise in judgment against you at 
 a future day? All that you will need to say can be said in the margin of half- 
 an-hour. See Section IV. 
 
 2 The way the Northerners would recognise it would be — if it interfered 
 with them — to march on Dublin and break, in the strict sense of the term, 
 that Parliament. 
 
Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 
 
 there are men in these islands who are neither Celts nor saxons, 
 and who could, if the pinch came, turn all the Celts and saxons 
 out of them. And no men would be more efficient at such a bit 
 of work than the hardy Presbyterians of the North of Ireland. If 
 they are now what they were twenty years ago, you could find 
 among them many a Joubert, many a Pretorius. 1 I warn you, 
 sir, to take care of rousing this population by any crying injustice 
 such as that which you may even now have decided to inflict 
 upon it. You have deprived them of what you call the " right " 
 of the Franchise. What Hodge, with no opinions, and little 
 capacity to form opinions, has had thrust upon him, that the 
 intelligent North-of-Ireland farmer, with very decidedly Liberal 
 opinions, has been deprived of. Don't go farther and try to 
 annihilate these Ulstermen, for they won't be annihilated. Their 
 devotion does not extend so far. And you will never see them 
 for your sake, for your comfort, for your glory — putting their necks 
 meekly under the heel of a hated tyrant of alien blood and 
 religion, with an "Ave, Cozsar Imperator, morituri Te salutant." 
 The Celt may have you and the saxon by the throat, but, by 
 heaven, sir, he has not yet tried, and if he is wise, will never try 
 that trick on the Northern Presbyterian ; 2 for the moment 
 the Celt, made triumphant by the brutal saxon Parliament of 
 England through mere count of heads, comes within hitting 
 distance of the Northerner, he will get what, in North-of-Ireland 
 
 1 They succumbed, I am sorry to say, to the temptations held out to them 
 by your Land Bill of 1881. And of late I have observed with concern a falling 
 off in religious earnestness and a corresponding demoralisation of view in regard 
 to the rights of property. They listened to " Liberal " orators, who told them 
 they had rights in the land along with the landlord, and who went back for 
 proofs to the terms of the arrangements made at the Plantation of Ulster from 
 1607 onwards. But this did not alter the fact that A, who rented a farm from 
 B in, say, 1879, owed all the rent that he had agreed to pay. It was a contract. 
 The North-of-Ireland farmer may now reflect that the statesman who taught 
 him how a contract may be broken, and yet has "good intentions " as his motto 
 and "Justice" as his guide, can go farther in faithlessness, and break his 
 contract to protect that farmer. Then perhaps the farmer will see things in 
 another light. — Anyhow, he will soon be "exercised" by something very 
 different from the " Kist-d-whustles" controversy. 
 
 2 Always provided that the Northern Presbyterian population is anything 
 like what it was when I lived in the midst of it. 
 
54 Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 
 
 phrase, he did?iU make bargain for ; l and he and you will learn 
 that there are other forces in this Universe besides those lodged 
 in your great god— The Majority. 
 
 Then, sir, the Irish party will have to reckon with the Orange 
 Society. Those excellent young fellows who write for United 
 Ireland (and they have no more "constant" and admiring 
 reader than they have in me) speak of the Orangemen as the 
 Orange rowdies ; and they have — I give them all credit for 
 the feat as an intellectual feat, though it doesn't come to much 
 — possessed the silly, stupid saxon public with the notion that 
 the Orangeman is own brother to a Mollymaguire. Well — when 
 the United Ireland people achieve ( — and they have contributed 
 more than any other body of men towards achieving) " Irish " 
 independence in any sense hostile to the being and the well-being 
 of Ulster, the world will know the Orangeman for something very 
 different from the cowardly moonlighters whom we used long ago 
 in the West of Ireland to call Mollymaguires. — Nor are the 
 Orangemen of the same kidney with the members of the Ribbon 
 Society. The truth is — secret association, conspiracy of every 
 sort, is as repugnant to the mind and character of the North-of- 
 Irelander as it is congenial to — nay, characteristic of — the mind 
 and character of the Celt. The Orange Society is a secret society 
 in no other sense than as any man's own family is a secret society, 
 as your Cabinet is a secret society, as the London-and-North- 
 Western Railway Company is a secret society. — Test the Orange 
 Society by its fruits. Did you ever hear of a murder or other out" 
 rage committed by Orangemen on Catholics in the North of 
 Ireland? Did you ever hear of Catholics being boycotted at 
 the instigation of the local Orange lodge ? The idea is ridiculous ! 
 No ; the Orange Society is — and it is well that you, sir, should 
 know this — the Orange Society is an army that awaits but the 
 order /or mobilization — and when it is mobilized, you will see — not 
 
 1 What misleads you and saxon statesmen in general is — that you don't hear 
 of this North^of-Irelander. But that is because he doesn't talk. Yes ; and 
 the Boers didn't talk either. The only sound one heard was the s ound — of 
 their rifles ! But the rhetoric of a rifle, well aimed, beats your rhetoric all to 
 sticks — "Stone dead has no fellow." — Now the Presbyterian- Scotch-North - 
 of-Irelander is, as I knew him, the nearest approach to the Transvaal Boer 
 between here and Fotschefstroom. 
 
Your Rdatio?i to the Difficulty ; <5 5 
 
 a set of ferocious, yet cowardly devils, whose most daring feat, 
 concocted and contrived in secret, is to shoot unarmed and inoffen- 
 sive men and women — many of these of their own blood and 
 religion, — to maim cattle and destroy property, — but you will see 
 a body of very solid and substantial men, who will, in carrying 
 out their views of ihings, stand up in the open field to be shot at 
 ■ — asking for themselves only the right to have some shooting in 
 return ! 
 
 Now, what think you was the origin of this "dangerous" 
 organization — but dangerous only to all those who would go about 
 to smash the Empire — a source of comfort and hope to all who 
 wish England well ? It was simply the outcome of saxon profligacy 
 during the eighteenth century, as your activity has evolved the Irish 
 party in the nineteenth. " Government " would not protect men's 
 lives in the North of Ireland, in districts where the Celtic popula- 
 tion preponderated; these men associated for self-defence, and 
 became — the Orange Society. It is, by origin, a defensive, not an 
 offensive Society; but it can soon be turned to very "offensive" 
 purposes ! — Such is the origin and character of the Orange Society. 
 The bulk of Englishmen, and I fear, sir, you among them, don't 
 know anything of these matters. Judged by your acts you don't. 
 « — Now I will instruct you a little farther. 
 
 The Orange Society has little or no connection with that other 
 body of North-lrelanders I have described — namely, the Presby- 
 terian community. That body is of the farming class, whereas the 
 Orangemen are, for the greater part, artisans in the towns. 1 The 
 Presbyterian community is " Liberal " — or, till lately, it was ; it will 
 now perforce vote Tory; because you have left no standing-room 
 
 1 A battalion of Orangemen could be instantly raised from among the 
 "ship -carpenters" of Messrs. Harland and Wolff in Belfast, with which, sir, 
 if you were a man of war, and force were a remedy, you could " go anywhere 
 and do anything." — By the way, the riveters on the Queen's Island tried lately 
 to imitate the saxon " working man " on this side, and got up a strike. They 
 would put in only so many (far too few) rivets a day. Idiots ! Do they know 
 the history of ship-building on the Thames ? Do they know the state of the 
 shipping trade at present ? Let them go on in their folly, and the, will see the 
 day when the Belfast ship-building firms will place their capital elsewhere ; 
 and the ship-builder's hammer will be heard on the Queen's Island or on 
 Thomson's Bank — no more than at the " Gobbin Snout" 
 
5 6 Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 
 
 in the North of Ireland for any but the Celts, and those that won't 
 be put down by the Celts. You have cleared the "flure" for a 
 fine shindy. — The Orangeman, on the other hand, is a Tory. 
 He doesn't like you. He believes you are a very mischievous 
 person. He is inaccessible to the winning quality of " good 
 intentions " and " piety." Now, if the Presbyterian farmer and the 
 Orange artisan are not by circumstances forced to combine, Ulster 
 may unwittingly allow the yoke to be placed on its neck. But 
 when Ulster feels the yoke, in other words, when the Ulster 
 Presbyterian and the Orangeman combine under manifest, ac- 
 knowledged pressure from without — people of the Celtic and of 
 the saxon " persuasion " would do well to clear off. " I state but 
 the facts." 
 
 I have gone into all this explanation because of the impene- 
 trable ignorance of the saxon on all subjects save those which he 
 conceives to have a direct, immediate effect on his bodily comfort. 
 But my line of argument was this: I was showing that, once the Irishry 
 have got all they clamour for, they will find themselves forthwith 
 face to face with, facts — with two facts, which will — one or both — - 
 work their ruin. The first is summed up in the words " The Ulster 
 Question?' That I have now despatched. Let the Irish party 
 when they sit again in the " Old House " in College Green ( — the 
 landlords gone — to Holyhead or to the bottom of the Irish Sea 
 — ) and Ireland their own — ask themselves the question — " But 
 Ulster — what shall we do with UV There is one chance in ten 
 thousand (though I cannot see it) that they will " solve " the 
 Ulster question and stave off reverse from that quarter. 
 ii.— in an But they have another enemy who will not be denied ; the blow 
 dSr of that power will equal the blow of the Presbyterian farmer and 
 governable- ^ Orangeman many times combined ! What is that power ? I 
 answer — the Moral Law of the Universe. " No such Law " — you 
 reply. — Very well. Let us look at facts. The " Irish " party in 
 order to put pressure on your Government, resorted to means, or 
 availed itself of means, which, carrying the appearance of success, 
 are only the sure and certain tokens of failure. And now, when 
 the same party think they touch success, they will in reality 
 have to face the consequences that invariably follow the use of 
 unjust means. I admit that they were sorely tempted to stoop 
 
Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 
 
 57 
 
 to, or at least adopt, these means, because you showed them that 
 by such means you were to be bent and moulded to do what 
 you would never otherwise have done. You and England 
 will have your own punishment to bear, and the Irish party can 
 certainly plead that nothing but the means employed would have 
 got them "justice." But to get justice they became unjust — and 
 now they will suffer. The means employed by the Irish party 
 were : — 
 
 (a) To use, or avail themselves of, crime as a lever to work on («) from pre- 
 your mind, and gain what they knew they could by this lever make bg of crime, 
 you grant — concessions. I have already shown that it has been a 
 peculiar feature of your statecraft to consider, to cater for, crime 
 
 when your object is to arrive at " true policy " — nay, even when your 
 object is to perform an act of justice. Well, you will suffer; but 
 so will the Irish party. Do they think the crimes they have — I 
 don't say instigated, I don't say approved, but made a lever of — 
 availed themselves of — profited by — do they think these crimes 
 will cease the moment the last shred of English authority dis- 
 appears in Ireland ? I suppose they do — I suppose it is part of 
 their punishment that they do. Very well, we shall see. But 
 the history of mankind proves that any party which will under- 
 take, whether in consideration of value received (as in this case 
 from you), or for any other reason — that "the same organization 
 which was employed to get up crime shall now be used in sup- 
 pressing it" — the party that passes, now the word " ?io outrages, 11 
 and anon changes that order to " outrages, 11 — that party, I say, 
 as well as the statesman or government that profits by the mot- 
 el. 1 ordre, " no outrage " to carry through its policy of " concession," 
 and makes up its mind to still bigger " concessions " when the 
 word " outrages 11 is passed along the line — that party and that 
 government are near to richly-deserved destruction. 
 
 (b) The " Irish " party availed itself of the land-grabbing (3) from pre . 
 instinct, so strongly-marked a character in the Irishry, to ruin the verefoiTof 
 landowners. Till this vein was worked the Irish agitation was a „§5J2[^f 
 hollow affair, — it hung fire miserably. Michael Davitt, a man P r °P ert y» 
 of genius (in his way) saw what was required ; and Mr. Parnell, 
 though he affirmed that he would not have taken off his coat for 
 anything short of Irish independence — was compelled to join the 
 
5 8 Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 
 
 crusade against the' class to which he himself belonged. I don't 
 know, and I don't care whether Mr. Parnell was sincere in his 
 landowner-/2<?fc<?. I cannot, from all that I know of him personally, 
 say whether he perceived that (from the logical and economic 
 point of view) the principle to which he committed himself was 
 absolutely rotten, and that landownership in one form or other 
 must exist wherever civilization exists. I cannot tell whether he 
 does not curse his hypocrisy every time he holds up landowners 
 (essentially England-loving and order-loving) to the ferocious, 
 devilish insults of his disorderly horde of Celtic followers, who, 
 if he flinched, mark me, would assassinate him to-morrow with as 
 little compunction as Joe Brady (that " grand man," as he was 
 described by one of his fellow criminals,) 1 drew his knife across 
 the throat of Lord Frederick Cavendish. In a word, whatever 
 Mr. Parnell's opinions may be, and however soon his leader- 
 ship of the " Irish party " may come to an end, — this much is 
 certain — that under him, and following his guidance, the Irishry 
 crossed the boundary line that separates legitimate, even laud- 
 able agitation, from agitation that is an offence against the moral 
 order of the Universe. Nay, never smile, Parliamentary sir, I 
 am stating a fact. And I will prove that what I have stated 
 is a fact, by looking at results. — You succumbed to the pressure 
 put upon you by the doctrine of Michael Davitt as approved and 
 adopted (I do not attempt to say how sincerely) by Mr. Parnell. 
 — And the result ?— Well, to the Irish party, ultimately ruin, and 
 to you, ruin. Does the " Irish party " — do you, sir, really main- 
 tain, — have you the face to maintain, that in whatever region you 
 admit the existence of private property, you are not compelled to 
 admit the existence — nay, the necessary existence, of la?idowner- 
 ship? 2 
 
 1 What a revelation of the Celtic character at its worst ! A man is described 
 as grand ; and his claim to the epithet rests, it seems, solely on the evidence 
 he furnishes by his acts, that he is a fiend in human shape. The Catholic 
 Church has its work cut out for it when it seeks to restrain such devilry. Alas, 
 that Catholicism in Ireland should be made the apologist for, or vindicator of, 
 such hellish deeds as that of " Skin-the-goat " ! 
 
 2 Michael Davitt holds that the State ought to let the land. Very well * 
 this is a very silly notion ; however, the holder of it isn't bothered with the 
 eternal personal landlord \ He has got rid of him. But Mr. Parnell and 
 
Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 59 
 
 Meantime, I have only to chronicle the results of this theory. 
 To yourself (though that is not my main point) your acquies- 
 cence in Mr. ParnelFs views means "indelible disgrace." In 
 1 88 1, in obedience to the pressure brought to bear by the 
 Davitt-Parneli evangel, you violated contract, broke faith, and 
 in the name of England robbed and beggared thousands of 
 the subjects of Her Majesty. And the end of that trans- 
 action will be the abstraction of millions a year from the 
 pocket of the British taxpayer. Is that a result to be desired 
 by a British statesman ? There niay be no moral laws " of the 
 Universe loafing around" — but you have "got your fair in '" ,l 
 at any rate. You are, somehow, by accident perhaps, — I say 
 by design, —by design of the Almighty, in a cleft stick, and 
 there I leave you. As to the Irish party, for they are in truth 
 my theme at present, they, when they attain separation, will 
 find a landlordless Ireland. Good ! But they will find also an 
 Ireland on the brink of famine. They have banished the land- 
 owners, through your agency. Good ! But what becomes of those 
 who were employed, fed, and clothed by the banished landlords? 
 They have, you answer, the land. But you are to levy a land-tax 
 (for you are "landlord now, not king," 2 of Ireland)- — a land-tax 
 equivalent to the interest on the money you expend in buying out 
 the landowners. Well, in Irish phrase, I remark : " Don't you 
 wish you may get it ? " You will never see a sixpence of the 
 hundred-and-odd millions (more or less) that you expend on 
 expropriating the Irish landowners. Again, you don't seem to 
 see that the destruction of landownership tended to destroy all 
 commerce, all confidence. To understand this let us look at the 
 Irish party sitting in the Old House, and let us ask : what will 
 be their plight ? 
 
 those who think with him have in fact only substituted one landlord for 
 another — with what result we shall see ! — By the way, Michael Davitt's view is 
 in direct opposition to the tendency of the Celt — who desires above all things 
 to own "a bit of /and." 
 
 1 u Ah, Tam, ah, Tarn, you'll get your fairin' ; 
 
 In hell they'll roast you like a herrin'." 
 
 2 Which seemed to Shakespeare the last extreme of degradation. (See 
 Richard II, \\. I.) 
 
6o Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 
 
 The landlords have been brought to their knees. Good. They 
 have been banished. Still better. True : the sitting tenant has the 
 land ; but the sitting tenant alone has it, and the would-be occupier 
 is as far as ever from the realization of his hopes. Ireland has 
 not been made as big as France through the banishment of the 
 landowners ; x and if it had been made as big, the Celt would 
 soon squat the whole of it and cry for more — ultimately, perhaps, 
 cry for the moon, 2 — no matter ; Irish independence is achieved. 
 Hurrah ! — But have the landlords gone alone ? No ; they have 
 taken with them some things that did not require even a 
 third-class ticket for the journey to Holyhead. At the same 
 time with the landlords, or rather before them (the process is 
 going on now) public faith, 3 — Confidence — has fled, and with 
 confidence Capital ; and with capital and confidence Contract, and 
 the possibility of contract. In a word, sir, while you are arranging 
 terms of surrender in hours-long screeds of English composition, 
 and while the body of clever journalists, lawyers, shopkeepers, 
 adventurers-in-general, and others are applauding you to the echo, 
 while all who, I do not say love England, but who love justice, 
 equity, fair dealing, who recognise roguery when they meet 
 it, and who know what the end of all roguery is, — while these 
 are amazed and confounded — Ireland, the subject of all this 
 composition and these cheers, Ireland, through your activity and 
 the activity of those who cheer, is bleeding to death.* And when 
 
 1 Of course I here speak of the landowners who were, in fact, the English in 
 Ireland. Landlordism is in the nature of things. To talk of destroying 
 that, is to talk of destroying the air. We do not commit such folly. 
 
 2 And his Gladdy, according to Mr. Sambourne's clever sketch, would, I 
 suppose, do her best to get it for him. 
 
 3 How sarcastic seems the legend on the Bank-of-Ireland notes in the light 
 of recent and current transactions : " Bond fides reipublicce stabilitas " ! 
 
 4 I wonder if you are aware that nearly ,£4,250,000 has been removed from 
 Ireland within the last year or so — and that sum from only ten leading securities ? 
 If you know this, I wonder whether you think your measures will attract it 
 back again ? I wonder also how you would explain the fact that on the day 
 you were sent for by Her Majesty, Bank-of-Ireland stock fell £7 P er share. I 
 could, from personal knowledge, give startling proofs of the assertion con- 
 tained in the text— that Ireland is " bleeding to death." But in regard to my 
 oivn experience— " satius est silere quam parents dicere." The proofs would cover 
 the space occupied by this entire discourse. 
 
Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 61 
 
 the Irish party becomes the Irish parliament (■ — or gets itself some- 
 how transmogrified into County Boards, 1 with power to add to its 
 mischief at Westminster — whatever happens it), the Irish party — 
 and you, sir, will have on your hands a corpse. And all this has 
 been brought about by attempting to thrust aside the moral laws 
 of the Universe which proclaim that " to find out right with 
 wrong — it may not be." No, sir, no State since the world began, 
 has been built securely on the pillars — the only pillars which the 
 Irish party, with your assistance, have set up, namely, Folly, 
 Fraud, and Force. 2 The landowners are avenged. 
 
 (c) The Irish party, in order to compass its object of attaining (c) from the 
 liberty — has established a tyranny within the limits of the island destruction of 
 which they hope by this means to set free I Once more, brilliant sirs, conditions of 
 you " find out right with wrong — it may not be." Why, your grand socialorder - 
 National League proves your weakness. It is a huge bubble. It 
 is like one of those monster faces one sees at a pantomime — fright- 
 some enough, but not really formidable. It can't do any harm, for 
 behind it is only a poor little gutter-boy. I admit this " League " 
 frightens the saxon. But the Irish party ought to have known 
 that the saxon is very easily frightened — in fact that he is subject 
 to periodical fits of fright — at nothing in particular, just as he is 
 subject to periodical and wholly unaccountable and unpredictable 
 fits of the morals. To achieve the poor result of frightening him 
 into compliance, the Irish party crossed the boundary -line which 
 
 1 But you won't go in for County Boards, even to please the conies among 
 your following. You dare not. The Irish party wouldn't stand it. And you 
 may always be trusted to make the most complete surrender possible. 
 
 2 Here force is no remedy, for the good reason that it is exerted in violatioji 
 of the moral laws of the Universe. — Force is, in fact, not the word, rather we 
 ought to call it violence. Any statesman may judge of the wisdom or folly — 
 the "justice or injustice" — of a measure by asking : Is there in it the element 
 of violence ? Shall any honest man in the kingdom hnd himself by this measure 
 less fit to maintain the struggle for existence? Shall any honest man be 
 deprived of one penny ? Then if the answer be — No, — that will not prove that 
 the measure is a wise one, for there may be other objections ; but if the answer 
 be — Yes, then it must not be so much as named. It is pernicious and must 
 fail: for it introduces violence — which is in statesmanship what, according to 
 Carlyle, hypocrisy is in human character — "the one undeniably bad thing.'' 1 
 Tried by this elementary test of sound statesmanship, what are we to say of 
 your " great " — "just" — "generous" — "healing measures"? But does not 
 the fate of your " measures " prove the truth of the principle? 
 
62 . Your Relation to t/ie Difficulty ; 
 
 separates right from wrong, an offence against the moral order of 
 the Universe that will recoil with crushing force upon the Irish 
 party itself For what have they done ? To frighten — to " coerce " 
 England, they have demoralized Ireland. They have paid too much, 
 or rather something far too precious, for their whistle. To terrorize 
 England they have availed themselves of the only too well- 
 marked tendency in the Celt towards secret, cowardly combina- 
 tion ; they have also, having got a nucleus of willing conspirators, 
 acted on the feeble amount of self-reliance in the Celtic character, 
 and compelled thousands to come in, who would never otherwise 
 have so much as thought of discontent. — Thus the " League " in- 
 creases in numbers, and presents a most formidable appearance 
 with its hundreds of branches — its reports, resolutions, tribunals, 
 trials, sentences — what not. As towards a strong, worthy England, 
 it would never be more than the ridiculous monster of the panto- 
 mime with a little gutter-boy behind it — it would never develop 
 anything more formidable than some cowardly offence which could 
 be dealt with at petty sessions. But the saxon is terrified ! And 
 the monster becomes more gruesome, for the gutter-boy— astounded 
 and delighted at his success — makes every possible effort to put 
 the clown to flight. He works with might and main all the facial 
 machinery the monster possesses, — he raises and lowers its eye- 
 brows, he goggles its eyes, he opens its mouth, he lolls its tongue. 
 At last the saxon takes to his heels ! Which is all very well. 
 But there are right ways and wrong ways of attaining an object 
 which may in itself be quite laudable. There is no earthly 
 reason why the Irish should not desire to attain independ- 
 ence. And God knows there is no great honour in being con- 
 nected with the England of our time. 1 But to attain this object, 
 the Irish party have killed out any little manliness, indepen- 
 dence, liberty of thought and action, that existed among their 
 brethren. They will attain their object, but then will come their 
 punishment. They will have a community to manage which has 
 ?iever — never in all its history — given the slightest proof that it could 
 conduct a rational, just government for one month ; whilst their 
 way of preparing for governing it has been to degrade the members 
 
 1 A fact which (he Colonies will very soon perceive. 
 
Your Relatio?i to the Difficulty ; 63 
 
 of it to the level of helots. 1 The assumption is — that such 
 helots will one of these days be suddenly transformed into grave, 
 orderly, independent citizens ! and that a parcel of adventurers, 
 the majority of whom would never have been heaid of outside 
 their own village, and whose sole activity has been devoted to 
 tripping up a body of legislators consisting, for the greater part, 
 of blundering saxon clods, that they shall become statesmen, 
 and statesmen fit to cope with a case in which the finest 
 statesmanship — with its hands clea?i — would find all statesman- 
 ship useless. You see the Irish party have committed gross 
 tactical blunders as well as gross moral wrongs. The act of the 
 Chinaman who burnt down his house in order to get roast pig 
 was a mere flea-bite in absurdity compared with the act of the 
 Irish party. Their act is the act of a man who, wishing to " evict " 
 or at least drive a tenant out of a house and occupy the house 
 himself, should very effectually set fire to the house. The tenant 
 would certainly prefer a mere " sentence of death " to the reality 
 impending every moment. But where would be the advantage in 
 ejecting him if, owing to the means that were employed, the house 
 were burnt to the ground ? The Chinaman had at any rate his 
 roast pig. Our ejectors have the charred site of the house. In a 
 word, the Irish party, in order to set up a government in Ireland, 
 have resorted to methods which make government impossible. 2 
 
 Summing up then on the Irish party, — when they get Separation 
 they will be face to face with two grand difficulties, from either, 
 or both of which, they will receive a crushing blow. And it 
 is instructive to note that the evil which they have not them- 
 
 1 And that they could be degraded to the extent of making absolute surrender 
 of their individual independence proves that they will never attain national 
 independence " as long as wood grows or water runs." 
 
 2 The Home Rule project was never very sound, in all conscience. In the 
 the days of Butt, if it seemed chimerical enough, it was at least respectable. And 
 the movement in the hands of men like the O'Donoghue and Colonel King- 
 Harman, the O'Connor Don, Mr. Mitchell Henry, and the Rev. Isaac Nelson 
 of Belfast, was only to a slight degree mischievous. But as time has gone on, / 
 and England has become more and more hopelessly inmeshed in the lies of ' — s 
 the Revolution, this movement has taken on several new phases. " Advance " 
 
 has been the watchword. At last the lowered franchise has evoked the most 
 extraordinary body of men the world has ever seen — I mean the present Irish 
 party — not elected by the electors, but elected by the despot of the moment. 
 
•i 
 
 64 Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 
 
 selves caused is the one evil of the two that can be avoided. 1 But 
 if they elude or forestall or parry the blow of the one enemy, they 
 are sure to go down before the blow of the other. The quarter 
 from which the first reverse may come is Ulster. When 100,000 
 Ulstermen (I am now postulating complete Separation) dictate 
 terms of peace in Dublin Castle, that building will, for the beaten 
 Celt, 2 assume a significance far more sinister than it possessed in 
 the days of the dottering saxon regime, — when calumnies about its 
 officials — their inefficiency, tyranny — what not — set afloat by the 
 enemies of England, were listened to and acted on by the 
 organization which called itself the Government of England. — 
 But the Ulsterman may be squared somehow. The French may 
 be called in to put him down. If he is on his day, if he is what 
 he was not so long ago, he will send the French back sadder, if 
 not wiser men. But he may be overpowered by sheer physical 
 weight of numbers as the 24th was at Isandula. He then steps 
 down and out — as Ulsterman. He goes to England, to America 
 more probably, and the Ulster question is "settled." I need not 
 work out the answer any farther. 
 
 But the hope of the Irish party that it will ever be able to 
 construct a government in Ireland will be found as baseless as 
 the fabric of a vision. The Celt was never good 3 material to 
 work upon in establishing civil society, for, as I have said, he ever 
 tends to barbarism. But the Irish party have made the problem 
 absolutely insoluble, for they have availed themselves of the worst 
 
 1 They will not avoid it, though. The hatred of the Celt to the "black 
 North " is such that union between the two sections of Irishmen is, in fact, an 
 impossibility. Set free to act, the one must exterminate the other. At present 
 the Celt has the advantage of the Jacobinism in English government being on 
 his side. But the Ulsterman, if he be true to himself and his traditions, need 
 not fear. Let him' work for the independence of Ulster. That is an object 
 worth his fighting for ! 
 
 2 Is it not enough to make any man who loves Ireland curse the brutal 
 stupidity and profligacy of a Government which, proclaiming " good intentions," 
 yet contrives to make possible, nay, to bring us " within measurable distance " 
 of, the realization of such a thought as this ! And by the way this phrase, 
 "within measurable distance of civil war" was used in a description of 
 Ireland when Ireland was an Arcadia to what it is now. 
 
 3 I yield too much here. The Celt is not, even now, up to the level of 
 constitutional government — any more than our saxon. 
 
Your Relatio?i to the Difficulty ; 65 
 
 qualities of the Celt to produce settled government — which 
 can be produced in any community only by the best qualities of 
 the best members. He has made murder, outrage, robbery, and 
 tyranny the means of attaining that condition of things which 
 exists but to put down those abominations. He has employed 
 Satan to preach Christ. He has attempted to find out right 
 with wrong — and that may not be. He has an Ireland given to 
 him as a punishment — an Ireland where right and the freedom 
 and the very elements of civil government are simply unknown, 
 and where Famine will be a constant guest. Liberty is a fine 
 thing ; but in certain contingencies, even high-spirited Irishmen 
 would prefer food. — These things are matters of demonstration. 
 
 Let us now take our bearings, and then proceed. I was in- 'But it was 
 voicing the particulars to which your activity in this matter of |aveThe 
 dealing with the Irish question differed from that of your pre- ail its hideous 
 decessors. And my last remark was, that you created the party at mg ' 
 whose bidding you have brought England to the present pass. 
 This Irish party has in it nothing intrinsically formidable. It is 
 in itself a sorry sham. But if an ignorant clown runs away from a 
 bogey, he may fall down a precipice and break his absurd neck 
 as effectually as if he fled from the very devil himself. The fear 
 is groundless, but the result of the fear is very real. That is your 
 position. And when you stand up to make your proposals, you 
 will do so, not induced thereto by any spontaneous conviction 
 arising in your own mind from knowledge and experience of the 
 subject you are about to legislate upon — but in panic terror at the 
 all-frightsome contortions produced on that monster face by that 
 poor little gutter-boy ! This is God's truth. And when one reflects 
 that that face is of your own devising — the eyes that goggle, the 
 mouth that opens, and the tongue that lolls — and that the gutter boy 
 is of your own rearing, that you are the nurse in whose arms he did 
 his mewling and his puking, the whole thing is perilously near the 
 region of the ridiculous — and would instantly lead all persons who 
 know the matter to explode in laughter were it not that they are re- 
 strained by the thought that there is at stake — the fate of an empire. 
 
 Having now taken our bearings — having examined the 
 peculiarities of your activity, I pass on to glance at your actual 
 measures, those " generous " measures, to which you were moved 
 
 F 
 
66 Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 
 
 by the gutter-boy of your own creation, working a monster visage 
 of your own design. It is true that you might prefer these 
 former measures to pass quietly into the region of " ancient 
 history ; " but I have to do for them what has not yet been done, 
 no, not by all the brilliant leading articles of ever so many able 
 editors. 1 I have to examine them in the light of the moral laws 
 of the Universe. In these laws you may possibly believe, when 
 you are driven back, your choice battalions shattered to atoms, 
 your positions carried, your standards captured, and the only 
 possible command that can pass your lips, that command of 
 despair: — " Sauve qui peut!" — you may in that awful moment 
 perhaps — or when you can collect your thoughts — be given the 
 power to see and acknowledge that in very deed there are Moral 
 Laws in the Universe — Laws which were, I do not say as active, 
 (for that they have been since the evolution of man, nay, long 
 before,) but as well ascertained, as well established, and as clearly 
 recognised by us (though not by you) to be absolute in their sanc- 
 tions, when you first touched the Irish Question as they are now. 2 
 
 it. was you, In order to make the Irish Difficulty ancient history, you 
 
 the guardian 
 
 of society, came forward — late in the Sixties of the century — with a 
 
 who ^clVG 
 
 effect to out- Trinity-in-Unity of " measures " — a Trinity-in-Unity as " incompre- 
 
 ra.ge — the 
 
 cierkenweii hensible," I assure you, to all who understand the Difficulty by 
 
 eX its°t S rain- actual contact with it as that Trinity so definitely and graphically 
 
 th^nemts described in the Creed "called of St. Athanasius." You took in 
 
 y tegSSTve the Irish Difficulty. In the language of Mr. Toole, you " saw it at 
 
 °miSfd^S" a glance." Gla?ice is the word — I don't care how many days and 
 
 passu in 
 
 measures of m ghts you spent on the operation. If you had brought the 
 
 SP agalnst n proper mental and moral faculties to bear on the work, you 
 
 Dciety itself. W ould i on g a g ^ye chucked this wretched, this miserable, 
 
 this contemptible " Question " overboard ; you would have 
 
 1 Vide Appendix, Note C. 
 
 2 Your activity and its result will to all time be cited as proof of the exist- 
 ence of those moral laws. And that is one reason why I wish to discuss your 
 measures — to show, namely, a distant posterity that the laws were ascertained 
 at a time when to all appearance they had not been ascertained, or when the 
 knowledge of them, though ascertained by former investigators, had been 
 lost. For, really, in most of your political activity we have to lament not 
 so much the absence of statesmanship, as of common honesty. 
 
Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 67 
 
 initiated a policy that was in strict conformity with the Moral 
 Laws of the Universe ; — and having done so, you could have 
 possessed your soul in patience, no matter what befell (" im- 
 pavidum ferient ruinae^ !) — and looked forward to the day when 
 the Irish Difficulty — obsolete, not merely as the Heptarchy, but 
 as the trials of Lamech — would decorously date itself at a period 
 if not so distant, yet as irrevocably/^/ as "the years beyond the 
 flood." But you and the saxon would have something sensational. 
 You wanted " heroic " legislation, and the saxon — who admires 
 what he doesn't understand — gave you the chance. Now, let us 
 look at your measures and their results. Let us go back in 
 thought to the later Sixties of the century. Let us look at your 
 Trinity of measures. 
 
 The struggle between the Northern and Southern States of 
 America, which ended in 1864, left stranded a number of Irish 
 adventurers who had taken part in it. The war over, their occu- 
 pation was gone. They then turned their attention to a " settle- 
 ment " of the Irish question. But there was nothing terrible about 
 them. A sergeant's guard at the beginning and the hangman at 
 the end could have " settled " for them. Now, — one bit of their 
 " devilment " was an attempt to blow in the wall of Clerkenwell 
 prison, in which some of their brother " Fenians " were incar- 
 cerated. The only result was "that some persons passing at the 
 time lost their lives. The prisoners were not set free. Now you 
 were ranging well up towards office just then, and wanted a 
 policy. Will it be believed by posterity that the Clerkenwell 
 explosion furnished you with a policy ? I don't profess to see 
 the connection between the outrage and your policy. And I 
 should never have imagined that such a connection existed, had 
 you not yourself given public assurance of the fact. You gave 
 such assurance, — nay, you did more : you even indicated the 
 particular measure which that outrage suggested to your mind 
 and which it thus brought within the region of practical politics. 
 It suggested to you the necessity of ruining the Church Estab- 
 lishment in Ireland. I don't know, and never have been able 
 to imagine how the outrage could suggest the destruction of 
 the Irish Church. I should have thought there was about 
 
 f 2 
 
 X 
 
68 Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 
 
 as much connection between the two things as between the 
 Goodwin Sands and the building of Tenterden steeple. — Were 
 you convinced by the outrage that the Irish Establishment must 
 be very immoral in its teaching and ought to be abated as a 
 nuisance, seeing that its members could be guilty of such a 
 diabolical outrage ? But, sir, the perpetrators of the crime were 
 American- Irish Catholics; and the Irish Establishment was Pro- 
 testant. The miscreants had really very little to do with Ireland, 
 and nothing at all to do with the Established Church. 1 The 
 bishops and clergy of the Province of Canterbury are surely not 
 responsible for polygamy in Utah ? Or, ascertaining that the 
 perpetrators of the outrage were Catholics and having a hazy 
 notion that the Irish Establishment was Catholic (as, e.g., the 
 Scottish Establishment is Presbyterian), did you determine to 
 destroy it for producing such scoundrels as those who committed 
 the Clerkenwell outrage ? But, as I have already told you, the Irish 
 Establishment was Protestant. But even had it been Catholic, 
 you were rather wide of the mark. It is true that the Fenians were 
 Catholics — if anything ; it is true, also, that they were of Irish ex- 
 traction. But it would have been very unjust towards the Catholic 
 Church in Ireland to visit on it the sins of a set of cowardly ruffians 
 whose ancestors were Irish Catholics, but who themselves really 
 acknowledged the authority of no Church, Catholic or Protestant. 2 
 Or, again, did the Clerkenwell explosion suggest " Disestablish- 
 ment " merely in the way of analogy : I mean, did you conceive 
 the idea of blowing sky-high the Irish Establishment as the Fenians 
 thought to blow up Clerkenwell Prison ? " These fellows," you 
 may have cried, " have blown up something, and I want to blow 
 up something — I will blow up the Irish Establishment!" Or, 
 lastly, was it a case of quailing before what is, or even what only 
 seems to be, determination to win on the part of an opponent — a 
 fear to stand up and fight your corner — is it anything like the 
 
 1 The Fenians as a body did not merit the reproach of being righteous 
 over-much. They were not gospel-greedy. 
 
 2 You must surely at an early stage of your progress have been made aware 
 of the fact that the Irish Establishment was Protestant ; but it may have been 
 then too late to hold your hand. However, the way you * ' went for " the Vatican 
 soon afterwards would seem to favour the guess I have ventured in the 
 text. 
 
Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 69 
 
 craven cowardice that makes the saxon Government run away, 
 not merely before the rifle-practice of the Africanders, but also 
 before the gogglings and grimaces of the " National League " ? 1 
 
 Some of these theories may appear very stupid ; but I am once 
 more in the presence of mystery. And I am very stupid at solving 
 riddles of any sort : Davus sum. You have vouchsafed to assert 
 that the Clerkenwell explosion brought the destruction of the 
 Irish Church within the domaiti of practical politics, yet neither 
 you nor any of your " followers " have ever — so far as I know — 
 added a Targum — you have never by gloss, scholium, or ex- 
 planation of any kind shown the connection that existed in your 
 mind between the Clerkenwell explosion and the destruction of 
 the Irish Church. But we have your word for the fact. 
 
 I now proceed to occupy firmer ground. That Clerkenwell 
 explosion and its result furnish a key, an explanation in a nut- 
 shell, of your entire political activity, not only in the Irish ques- 
 tion, but in your foreign policy as well. With your foreign policy, 
 however, I have nothing at present to do. Let us now examine 
 for a short space this Clerkenwell explosion as a suggester of a 
 policy — and in it we shall find the elements of all your political 
 activity. This will materially shorten our labours in examining 
 your other " measures." 
 
 1. The explosion was, in a sense, an accident : if the explosion 
 caused the policy, it is fair to argue that if the accident had not 
 happened you would not have arrived at the policy — unless, of 
 course, some other suitable accident had happened. Now suppose 
 the Irish Church was a real grievance, what are we to think of 
 the statesman whose activity in removing it depended on an 
 accident ? 2 But, as was your policy in that case, so has your policy 
 
 1 And really the Transvaal affair was never very formidable, save to a Govern- 
 ment determined above all things to avoid the sin of " blood-guiltiness." But I 
 should be easier in my mind if Government had some & priori method of 
 learning high humanitarian doctrines — instead of requiring such experience as 
 was afforded by the actions at Laing's Nek, the Ingogo River, and Majuba 
 Hill — to convince them of truths which {if they were truths) might have been 
 attained long before, one would have thought, by the mere ordinary working 
 of the conscience. 
 
 2 Suppose the Fenians, even though "trusting in God," had neglected to 
 "keep their powder dry" and that the explosion had not come off, — then, 
 
70 Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 
 
 been in every case ; it depends on the wind, or a jogging of your 
 elbow. Every " measure " is the result of what is essentially 
 an accident. 
 
 2. The Clerkenwell explosion was an outrage. And every step 
 you have taken in your Irish policy has been taken at the 
 bidding of outrage — and again outrage, and ever outrage. 
 
 3. The Clerkenwell explosion and your policy had no rational 
 connection. Pardon me for saying so : you have asserted that 
 there was a connection — the connection of cause and effect. 
 But I speak here of rational connection — such a. connection 
 did not exist. If you had been moved by the explosion to 
 wear Shakespeare collars, and said so, we should have taken 
 your word ; but you surely don't maintain that the logical faculties 
 of mankind would enable anybody to follow and acquiesce in your 
 reasoning, and say, " Of course ; when an explosion of this sort 
 takes place, what is to be done ? One must, of course, wear Shake- 
 speare collars." 1 In other words, your policy was — as towards 
 the Clerkenwell explosion — an irrelevancy. So has every bit of 
 policy been which you have adopted on this Irish question. 
 
 4. Lastly, a policy of irrelevancy, suggested by an accident, and 
 enforced by outrage, naturally failed. — And the destruction of the 
 Irish Church — so far from settling the Irish question— rendered the 
 solution of it for ever more difficult. 
 
 Such was Let us now glance at your measures. They were three in 
 trinit fir of num t>er. I have called them a Trinity-in-Unity, because you 
 measures:— insisted they must all go together. 
 
 (i.) your Irish *■ The Establishment was to be destroyed — the Upas-tree cut 
 Church Act, ^own. You cut it down. Were you aware, I wonder (I am sure 
 
 failing some other "suitable " accident (we have had lately three or four first- 
 class explosions in London : and there was, to be sure, the earthquake in 
 j aV a)— the Irish Establishment might be in existence at the present moment. 
 But in that case, what becomes of the Upas-tree theory ? If the Irish Church 
 was a Upas-tree, it ought to have been removed, even without the (to you) 
 very directly suggestive force of the Clerkenwell explosion. 
 
 1 I hope you don't think me tedious. You see I pay you the compliment of 
 weighing your words (as I hope you— in your position of responsible states- 
 man—weighed them). If I have found them " wanting," is that wholly my 
 fault? 
 
Bill. 
 
 Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 71 
 
 your saxon following were not aware), that not one penny 1 went 
 into the pockets of the Catholic Irish from your operations on the 
 Upas-tree ? You plundered the Church, but the Irishry got none 
 of the swag. True, a system of intermediate " education " was 
 afterwards established out of part of the plunder ; and that system 
 is rapidly making true education a bit of " ancient history " in 
 Ireland. 
 
 2. You plundered the landowners by giving to the tenants the (U.)your 
 u right" of sale, that is to sell to anybody they pleased, that which L q? >o," 
 by contract belonged to the landowners ( — save in a certain part of 
 Ireland where the tenants and landowners had come to an under- 
 standing on the point — where, in other words, the right of sale 
 
 did not involve breach of contract). 
 
 3. You introduced a University Education Bill — which involved (iii.)your 
 spoliation — but I needn't dwell upon it : the Irish party — even at Education' 
 this early period formidable — turned you out of office because 
 your measure did not go far enough. I think you learned then 
 that you ought always to ascertain what will satisfy the Irish party, 
 and to offer no less ; for they will take no less. 
 
 Such then, in short, was your policy in the early Seventies, — and 
 the result? Failure. But how could it be otherwise? You 
 were what is called in French politics an Opportunist — a mere 
 political Micawber, " waiting for something to turn up." You 
 were — in the presence of, let us say, glaring injustice, abominable 
 wrong-doing — as immovable as the Rock of Cashel. But when 
 you were driven to action by the enemies of England, then — you 
 acted. " After all, " why dwell on your first set of measures ? There 
 is no reason for doing so, save, indeed, this : — that all your after- 
 policies were more stark-nakedly absurd, and were therefore more 
 transient in their (apparently) good effects, and more permanently 
 disastrous in their bad effects. In these evil respects they leave 
 all other measures known to history far behind. 
 
 1 Before 1833 the tenants would have got back a small portion of their tithe : 
 that was all. As the case stood — the tithes having been paid by the landlords 
 — the tenants got literally nothing. If the ferocious Catholic Celts could have 
 seen the Protestant Churches demolished, could have danced on their ruins, 
 that would have been something ! But then the Protestant Churches stand to 
 the present hour ! 
 
7 2 Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 
 
 were :- 
 
 Such, too, Pass on over ten years, ten years in which these " beneficent " 
 measures had time to show their beneficence, and what do we find? 
 That the Irish Question has moved towards solution one inch? 
 Not so. The Irish Question is once more a blazing topic — for 
 you have once more come up into office — come up smiling — to settle 
 the Irish Question. 1 Premising that during the '70 period and this 
 
 1 Your political opponents say that your sole desire is — not priniarily to settle 
 any question — though, of course, you don't wish to fail — but to get and keep 
 office — in the sense that for instance at the present time you would be ready to 
 modify your proposals if, by doing so, you could "keep the Cabinet together," 
 — which means, of course, hold office. But if this be so, how can you talk 
 of introducing "just," "generous" measures for Ireland? Why take the 
 name of Justice in vain ? If any proposal is modified in the slightest jot or 
 tittle to keep the Cabinet together — then the whole policy is a bit of. damnable 
 hypocrisy. It is a very long time since the light of nature enabled men to 
 arrive at the formula — based on their observation of acts and their conse- 
 quences : " Fiatjustitia, rualcceluni.'''' The Christian-philanthropical-French- 
 Revolution version of the maxim seems to be : — When, led by desire to obtain 
 or hold office, you introduce, at the bidding of victorious Rebellion (victorious 
 through former acts of your own), a measure of farther surrender, — exercise 
 your ingenuity to find out a policy that will satisfy Rebellion and yet not offend 
 the consciences of colleagues. It does not look well to see the leading men in 
 the Government dropping off. But if they will resign, you can put a set of 
 figure-dummies in their place, and the saxons in Parliament and out of doors 
 will never know the difference ! You must above all things avoid offending 
 the party of Rebellion, for they are your masters, and can inflict upon you 
 the only punishment you acknowledge, namely, loss of office. Having 
 now got a "workable measure" — i.e. one that will satisfy Rebellion and 
 not explode the Cabinet (all explodable material having, indeed, removed 
 itself), you appoint a day for your statement — for the opening of one of the 
 seals in your Revelation. What excitement ! What expectation ! Several 
 saxons have been from early morning in their places ; and their object ? to hear 
 the Orator make" his most brilliant effort'''' (English composition of a certain 
 sort has a fascination for the saxon) — and several "working men" have knocked 
 off for the half-day (a very congenial operation : but how about their families ?) 
 to cheer the Orator as he goes down to the House. Well, at last he rises and 
 goes through his composition. And the substance of it all is — the "workable 
 measure " I have just described, — the origin of the whole wretched thing being a 
 determination — come what may — to retain power ! Yet this ' ' workable measure " 
 would be called by the Orator and his faithful and high-souled saxon 
 myrmidons -an act of justice. But, good God, sir, what has Justice to do with 
 this matter ? Why should this particular virtue be mentioned any more than 
 Faith, Hope, Charity, or early rising? " Astrcea " is not " Redux" when such 
 a measure passes. Nay, as respects all concerned in the transaction— (save, 
 indeed, those who retired from the Cabinet) Justice is as far from them and 
 
Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 73 
 
 second spell of activity the " idea " was daily gaining ground (a 
 natural result of your first Land Act) that the land belongs to the 
 Tena?it [a form of Lie 8, p. 15] — I go on with my cataloguing. 
 
 (i.) your 
 
 i. You introduced a Bill to compel the landowner to give 
 " compensation " to a tenant whom he removed under the terms ^S" bui 
 of the contract made between them. He might require the land 
 for the purpose of letting it out in building-sites — for, in short, a 
 hundred beneficial objects — but see how injustice here tends to 
 force the community back to barbarism. The sitting tenant, though 
 such a thing was excluded by the very terms of the contract, could 
 claim from the landowner compensation for disturbance / The very 
 word disturbance carries with it the suggestion that the landowner, 
 in putting an end to a contract, in accordance with its terms, a 
 contract which the tenant entered into with his eyes open, and 
 which he could end on the same terms — inflicts a wrong on 
 the tenant ! It seems as if we were become judicially blind as to 
 what is justice and what is injustice. We call an act unjust that 
 has not a particle of injustice about it : on the other hand, acts 
 that reek of injustice we call acts of justice I as if justice were 
 the very quintessence of them ! 
 
 This measure was rejected by the Lords. And quite character- 
 istically its rejection by the Lords was made the occasion of a 
 cry against their House — some liars going so far as to trace all 
 the outrages, &c. (which grow in Ireland as naturally as the sham- 
 rock), to its rejection ! Of course, this was a very fair point for 
 
 their act as if she inhabited the great nebula in Orion. There is, indeed, 
 a thing called Justice — and in public or private life you act contrary to her 
 behests at your peril. But she has nothing to do with this galley. — Since 
 writing this note I hear that the amount of compensation to be given to the 
 landlords on their violent expropriation and banishment will be only half the 
 sum mentioned at first. It is thus hoped that the "great measure" will have 
 a better chance of becoming " law." Very well. But why talk of Justice in 
 such a connection ? The claims of Justice don't shift with the interests of one 
 certain statesman. Justice to the Irish landowners is unchangeable as the 
 foundations of the Universe, and Justice will — in the end — be amply vindi- 
 cated. The truth is — Government in this country is a predatory organization. 
 Now if, in any nefarious project of plunder, " Ministers' " only anxiety is to 
 keep together, how, I want to know, can they take into their mouths the 
 sacred name of Justice ? , 
 
74 Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 
 
 the Irish party : it was their game. As a matter of fact the Lords 
 could have been got to swallow the measure — as is proved by 
 their swallowing, after making the decent number of wry faces, 
 a much more pernicious measure — if there be any degrees in what 
 is in itself, first midst and last, rank injustice and tyranny. 1 
 
 (ii.)your 2 . Then in 1881, came the last, positively the last, "great 
 
 Land Act of J ° 
 
 '81, " healing " measure for Ireland. And why the last? Because it 
 was — don't you see ? — to " settle " the Irish question. There 
 was to be no more trouble in Ireland. St. Patrick resurgent in 
 you, sir, was to banish from Erin the toads and serpents of anarchy, 
 crime, and poverty. Look at the leading articles of the time, 
 columns on columns — in fact, whole parasangs — of newspaper 
 matter all in this sense. See the cartoons in the " comic " journals, 
 &c. The Saturnian age was to return to Ireland — having never, by 
 the way, existed in that island; "Astrsea" was to be "Redux" 
 this time, and no mistake, and why ? "Justice was to be our guide ! " 
 — and she couldn't be our guide without having been brought 
 back. Now here again comes up mystery, and we will avoid 
 it, merely observing that no human being removed by one degree 
 from the flint-implement stage of moral development ( — of course 
 the majority among us are only at that stage, if so far advanced,) 
 but would be by that " measure " offended against the wind a 
 mile. — But this talk of injustice grows monotonous ; every 
 one of the measures introduced by your successive Govern- 
 ments 2 for the solution of the Irish question is, I do not say 
 
 1 If the Lords had allowed their House to be smashed to pieces rather than 
 pass your Land Bill of 1881, what a strong position they would now occupy in 
 the opinion of the non-saxon portion of the people of England ! They would, 
 in fact, have saved Ireland to the Empire and prevented an incalculable amount 
 of personal loss and misery. But the saxon element was too strong in their 
 House and out of it. 
 
 2 Or rather by you. Your Governments have very little to say in devising 
 any of your great measures. You are the Achilles, whose wrath (rather, whose 
 activity) is to cause numberless woes to his countrymen. A more contemptible 
 set of ciphers than your present Myrmidons never sat on the Ministerial 
 bench. Extinct volcanoes forsooth ! These never in their whole lives could 
 rise to the dignity of a visible eruption ! Mere sham volcanoes. Your 
 Chancellor of the Exchequer is indeed a volcano of a sort. — He is a 
 "mud-volcano." With all his violence of manner, how weak he is ! Always 
 
Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 75 
 
 unjust in some of its provisions, but compact of injustice — 
 injustice in warp and woof — injustice in the body and soul of it 
 — its essence injustice. — I now pass on to glance at your grand Land 
 Act from the point of view of practical economics (saxons will 
 please observe that I use the>word practical here 1 ) and intellectual 
 consistency. 
 
 The Irishry were not yet happy. They had started a Land 
 League, the object of which was to abolish rack-rents, that is, all 
 rents. I have before intimated that rack-rents are a theoretical and 
 " practical " absurdity. Any rent is a rack-rent — that I don't 
 want to pay. And I can live in such a style as to make a rent of 
 five shillings a year for Chatsworth a rack-rent. — But I don't now 
 wish to dwell on such points. You, sir, believe (though it is hard 
 to say what you believe — or rather, what you will believe this day 
 week, — some outrage in Ireland may bring you up with a " great 
 measure " condemning us all to Christy-Minstrel collars), I say, 
 you believe there are such things as rack-rents — or did in 1881. 
 /say you "went for " a phantom. If you went for a reality, let 
 us see exactly what you did, and what the result was. 
 
 Ireland being rack-rented, you were determined to " put down " 
 rack-rents. To do this, you introduced a measure which, like all 
 your great measures, was simply such a mass of involved and com- 
 plicated details (see p. 3) that your audience received from your 
 speech what Mr. Goschen would probably call a staggerer ; 2 your 
 great effort had thrown people into the condition of not knowing 
 whether they stood on their heads or their heels : the bearings 
 of things had got all awry. Men like Mr. Gibson and Mr. 
 Plunket, who know something about part of Ireland, discussed the 
 
 the advocate of a policy designed by somebody else — a mere elephantine 
 Scholiast. 
 
 1 Saxons will not " observe " this nor very much else in the present mono- 
 graph. To begin at the beginning and read on to the end — to weigh and con- 
 sider (as Bacon recommends) — what is here set down, to agree or disagree, but 
 always with a reason — this would prove you to be, in my sense, no saxon, 
 though you could trace your strain on both sides of the house to the loins of 
 Aethelwulf. 
 
 2 I beg pardon. I think that this admirable word is confined — in classical 
 usage — to moral delinquencies of a particularly heinous and startling character 
 — as, e.g., certain statements in the Financial Reform Almanac—Mr. Goschen 
 will correct me if I am wrong. 
 
7 6 Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 
 
 Bill as a Bill (if I remember right — but I may be wrong), — the 
 poor craven saxon said never a word. And reason good. The 
 saxon, in the presence of any complicated problem or com- 
 plicated statement (and he may trust you, sir, to make, by a 
 complicated statement, a complicated problem infinitely more 
 complicated) — I say the saxon is as incapable of keeping his 
 small wits in such a presence — as Sir Pertinax Macsycophant 
 was unable " to keep his back straight in the presence d a great 
 won." 1 
 
 The "great " Land Bill of 1881 was a good specimen of your 
 matured manner Detail, fogging detail, bewildering detail 2 — 
 which deceived not only the saxons, but would have deceived 
 " the very elect," if any such persons had been found on either 
 side of the House"; this was the feature of the measure. It 
 fogged the intellect, but it didn't fog the moral sense. The very 
 first clause of your measure implied robbery ; why, then, didn't 
 somebody get up after your speech and move 3 — and take a division 
 on the motion — that the Bill should be read a second time that 
 day six months ? — This may not be Parliamentary form, I know. 
 But this is what ought to have been done. — I must add that the 
 essential elements of your 1881 Bill were (as I have before 
 observed) those which you pronounced at the era of your first 
 Land Act to involve spoliation. But " many things had hap- 
 pened " since 1870. Well, as liars ought to have long memories, 
 so he that proposes a measure founded on dishonesty would 
 
 1 Sir Pertinax seems to have given up the attempt very early in life ; our 
 saxon seems to have been always incapable of making it. 
 
 2 It was said at the time that only three men in the House ever really mastered 
 the details of that Bill. I know Mr. Healy was one, and I think you were, 
 yourself, one of the two others. I forget the third. I hope History has her 
 eye upon him. 
 
 3 The mistake made by those who ought, one would think, to see the 
 wickedness of your "just," &c, measures is — that they, for one moment, 
 entertain them — discuss them. When you introduce your new measures — some- 
 body ought, at once, to propose their rejection. What justice, if she were our 
 guide, would demand is — that some properly authorised officials should take 
 your impending Bills (after your speeches on them) and, together or severally, 
 kick them from the table to the door of the House. When the wretched mis- 
 begettings were fairly outside, Justice would smile — a thing she has not, to my 
 certain knowledge, done for these many years — in connection with English 
 legislation. 
 
Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 77 
 
 need to be very ingenious in arranging the structure so as not to 
 demonstrate its weakness before the eyes of even a saxon 
 Parliament; and you are very ingenious. You went for the 
 three F's — that is, you went for a project which you had, by 
 anticipation, criticized as spoliation. Fair Rents and the general 
 working of the Act were to be shunted on to a Commission. I 
 wonder what blundering and profligate statesmanship would do 
 without Commissions ! So, a set of adventurers — farmers, shop- 
 keepers, briefless barristers, with a sprinkling of men of some 
 standing to give the appearance of respectability 1 — these, 
 I say, went roaming over Ireland " fixing fair rents." Of course, 
 the whole activity of these landloupers was directed towards 
 robbing with the appearance of justice ! In any healthy com- 
 munity, where the notions of property were what they ought to be 
 — but where police and settled government were not as yet intro- 
 duced (as, e.g., on the banks of the Stanislow), the landowner — 
 when these *' Commissioners " came loafing around, spying his land, 
 smelling the end of their walking sticks, and then affixing the 
 "fair" rent 2 — would probably get excited, — shooting might be 
 the word, — in which case the intruders would be lucky if they 
 were allowed to sheer off without carrying each a brace of bullets 
 in his hull. And the landowner would be quite within his right. 
 There being no settled government, he must protect himself. 
 Under a settled and just government the police would protect 
 
 1 And a sprinkling of Conservatives to give the appearance of impartiality. 
 But the best record for any man who aspired to become a Land-Commis- 
 sioner was — to have stumped the country for "Mr. Gladstone" before the 
 elections of 1880. By the way, you don't seem to have insisted on your 
 ^^-Commissioners (at any rate) being able to speak, write, and spell the 
 English language "with propriety." — When one is robbed, one likes to be 
 robbed by a man who has, by his manner, &c, " robbed " thievery of half 
 its — objectionableness. 
 
 2 A Fair Rent, good sir, is what a man can get for the use of land or 
 house in open market. The rent couldn't be more than that sum, and it 
 oughtn't to be less. This principle you act upon every day of your life. Yet 
 you have used all the brute force of the ever-hateful saxon Government to set 
 aside the principle — or rather to trample it underfoot, in one whole division 
 of the triple Kingdom. That is, only within a litnited area, do you say? 
 But you cannot limit the area ; and you will soon (for the demoralization is 
 spreading rapidly) have to give your days and nights to a Land Bill for 
 England, Can it be that there is a God, after all ? 
 
78 Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 
 
 him ; under your government the police held him down while 
 your Commissioners robbed him. 
 
 The Land Act, then, was a big iniquity ; but it was also a big 
 insanity, a big humbug, and a costly humbug. It cost about 
 ^100,000 a year; and its results were — I don't say nil, — we 
 might all be thankful if it had been merely a dead letter — but 
 such as to abolish peace and progress in Ireland for our time. 1 
 
 Let us look at the folly of the measure. You give, it seems, 
 days and nights to devising schemes for your country's welfare. 2 
 Now, will you permit me to ask you whether the following obvious 
 deductions did not occur to your mind when, for the sake of peace 
 and order — or office, you thought of going for the three F's : — 
 
 1. That as your bogus-tribunals lowered rents, the tenant-right 
 ( — a "right" which you had before created in the greater part 
 of Ireland by robbery of the landowners) would become pari 
 passu more valuable. 
 
 2. That the land-hunger, which not even the terrors of the 
 Land League and the National League have succeeded in 
 restraining, 3 must drive the would-be tenant to the money-lender 
 — bank — what not, — and in the South and West, to the gombeen- 
 man. 
 
 3. That, therefore, your grand legislation could — in the very 
 
 1 Now, sir, this is not rhetoric ; this is fact. And peace and progress 
 will never return to Ireland till such measures as your great Land Act are 
 regarded as the result of devilish, traitorous malice, or stark-naked lunacy. 
 When they are so regarded, and therefore avoided, peace and progress will be 
 at least possible. But that won't be in your day or mine. The fires lighted by 
 the French Revolution — cleansing fires they will prove themselves in the end — 
 have yet much offal to burn up in ' ' civilized " society. Those fires may con- 
 sume our whole "Christian" civilization, but all will be well in the end. The 
 community which could receive with applause, and help you to carry out, this 
 nefarious scheme of robbery — that community, I say, is fit fuel for those 
 cleansing fires, and, at any risk, it must have them. 
 
 2 I wish you would take Dr. Johnson's advice and " give your days and nights 
 to the volumes of Addison." You might, by so doing, attain, even at your time 
 of life, " a style familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious" — and 
 (I may add with true Johnsonian antithesis) clear but not nebulous, and terse 
 though not wordy ; besides (which is more to the point), all honest men in 
 the three kingdoms would breathe freely. 
 
 3 Witness their constant {and they must be constant) denunciations of "land- 
 grabbing." 
 
Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 79 
 
 nature of things — benefit only the actual (or " sitting ") tenant ; 
 for if the actual tenant chose to sell his farm after having secured 
 a judicial rent (risum teneatis, amici ?), the incoming tenant would 
 have to pay for the land in inte? est on the money borrowed from 
 the bank or gombeen-man, and in "fixed, fair" rent to the land- 
 owner a yearly sum equal to or even higher than the original 
 rent — that is, the rent as it stood before your bog-trotters began 
 their operations. This was the obvious truth which Mr. 
 Goschen called (and did well to call) attention to, when he was 
 met by a saxon howl of denial ! — and by that immortal Barclay's 
 "staggering" rejoinder that the choice was between this arrange- 
 ment and rack-rents ! To which I reply, that what this vir 
 ornatissimus et honestissimus— this Barclay, to wit— calls " rack- 
 rents " are infinitely preferable to the arrangement in the Crofters' 
 Bill (another insane iniquity) which enjoyed the privilege of his 
 championship. 
 
 4. That the assumption by the State of the function of settling 
 tariffs — a thing long since abandoned as impossible — would lead 
 to ugly complications, — in fact, to economic and social anarchy. 
 
 5. That these considerations proved the (imagined) measure 
 to be, in every sense, a rotten measure — rotten, as judged by 
 the intellect ; rotten, as judged by the moral sense ; and 
 therefore — 
 
 6. That in God's name you must abandon it — must never think 
 of it again, must leave the Question insoluble were you to live a 
 thousand years, rather than try to solve it by such a measure. 
 
 Well, unfortunately for yourself and for England, you did not 
 knock against these considerations in preparing your "great 
 measure " ; and you did not abandon it. You launched it, and 
 (this is almost inconceivable !) you must have at least hoped that 
 it would succeed. That it did not succeed is proved by the 
 fact that — notwithstanding your assurances to the contrary — it 
 has made Ireland a wilderness? — and also, — a thing that will 
 
 1 You somehow brought yourself to affirm that by your Land Act the land- 
 owners would really lose nothing ! And that mischievously feeble personality, 
 Lord Carlingford, explained that the landlords, when they had their rents 
 fixed by the Land Courts, would be certain of getting them, because they 
 would in demanding them be supported by Government ! Really, the English 
 
80 Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 
 
 come home to you — that you are again on the war-trail after the 
 Irish Difficulty ! And so you will be, sir, as long as you breathe 
 the vital air, and occupy the position of Prime Minister. Your 
 efforts in 1881 were futile — save in making the Difficulty all 
 but insurmountable now to the ablest statesman in the universe 
 — and quite insurmountable to you. 
 
 (iii.)your 3. Following up your great Land Act as a sort of appendix 
 came the Arrears Act, whereby, e.g., a scoundrel-tenant could — by 
 swearing a few lies — the easiest thing in life on the other side of 
 St. George's Channel — -fine his landlord for being so tolerant 
 and patient as to let him run into arrears in his rent — through 
 bad seasons or any other cause ; while the honest tenant who, 
 under the same circumstances, made an effort and paid his rent, 
 had an opportunity to curse his folly, when he saw his dishonest 
 neighbour, with his tongue in his cheek, lodge his money in the 
 bank, and yet get his arrears paid for him ! Comment is needless. 1 
 (iv.)your 4. Then came the Labourers' Act, by which, if you, down at 
 a Act r , ers Hawarden, for example, were surrounded by a population that 
 was artificially — by governmental agency in fact — incensed against 
 you, made to believe that you were an intruder and a robber (and 
 so, indeed, even you — you, the " great " humanitarian statesman 
 — would have been regarded, had you lived in Ireland any time 
 these last five years as a landowner) — that population, under 
 your Labourers' Act, would be able to conduct an exterminating 
 war against you," without handling a gun" The "local authority" — 
 
 language, strong as it is in denunciatory expressions, altogether fails one in 
 the presence of such villany ! Is, then, an eviction not a sentence of death 
 when the tenant refuses to pay the "judicial" rent without forty per cent, 
 abatement ? And would Mr. Morley of the carpet-bag always approve of 
 Her Majesty's forces being employed to evict tenants who had got their rents 
 "fixed''" — and then "could" not pay without forty per cent, abatement? By the 
 by, a Professorial person on the Land Commission (one Baldwin, if I remember 
 rightly) obliged the world with a definition of fair rent. A fair rent was 
 a rent such as the actual individual tenant — the tenant in court — could pay, 
 "and still live comfortably " / / 
 
 1 I will only ask whether any expressions I have used or can use in regard 
 to the doings of your Government in Ireland are, or could be, too strongly 
 denunciatory. Stupidity, injustice, insolence, hypocrisy— these are its ever- 
 present hall-marks. — And yet you 2x0. again selected to "settle" the Difficulty ! 
 
Your Relation to the Difficulty ; Si 
 
 consisting of the bitter foes of your race and religion — would inform 
 you that a certain plot of ground was required by the said " local 
 authority " for the purpose of erecting on it labourers' cottages. You 
 might protest that you did not want any additional labourers on your 
 farm (I am now speaking of an actual case within my own know- 
 ledge) — that you had labourers' cottages — all that you wanted — 
 elsewhere on your property. In vain. The "local authority" 
 would take the land, make a beginning by erecting one cottage ; 
 and then two labourers would contend, in your presence, as to 
 which should be accepted as your tenant, and one would threaten 
 point-blank that if you didn't take him, he would do for you ! This 
 is the sort of government that you have established in Ireland ; and 
 by this and such acts you have made Ireland what I have already 
 called it — a very hell to live in. — I need not add that the sole 
 object of erecting the cottages was to lay siege to the unfortunate 
 gentleman who holds the land, and to force him to clear out. 1 — 
 Such, sir, is the legislation by which you hope — or say you hope — 
 to settle the Irish Question. 
 
 5. But your legislative activity was not yet at an end. You (v.) your 
 had constituted yourself the champion of the being I have called Act. 
 the " saxon " in our English community — of the element within our 
 own borders that makes for our destruction — of the parasite which, 
 in ever-increasing numbers and power, threatens England with 
 bankruptcy, famine, extinction. Him — this saxon — you nursed 
 into dangerous life by many measures — notably by your Ballot 
 Act and your " Education " Act. In short, you placed him in 
 the fair way of reducing England to the condition of a corpse. 
 What you did for the Celt — our greatest danger outside our own 
 borders — I have already recounted. But this drama of degrada- 
 tion was not yet complete. Your artistic sense perceived that 
 something was wanting. The saxon and the Celt must be made 
 to join hand in hand for our destruction ! This consummation of 
 
 1 There was no sort of objection to him personally — nor in the case of 
 99 per cent, of the landowners that have been banished. They represented 
 England : that was enough. And because the Celt raises a howl against them 
 — egged on to do so by the caitiff saxon government — that government next 
 proceeds — having first robbed them— to banish them ! And all in the name 
 of Justice I 
 
8 2 Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 
 
 all your activity you brought about by your Franchise Act of 
 1885. 
 
 By this Act the destinies of the British Empire were committed 
 to the keeping of the lowest of the people ; and that arrange- 
 ment has never succeeded since the world began. Mark : that 
 Act might with more propriety be called a disfranchising Act, for 
 its main effect was to deprive of the franchise the classes who had 
 hitherto possessed it, and who, from the very nature of the case, 
 had divers interests, and to hand it over to the class which, on 
 points affecting its interests, as it understands them, will always vote 
 solid ; for its interests are limited to considerations regarding its own 
 back and its own stomach. In other words, you committed the 
 government of England and the Empire to the " saxon " — to the 
 class which swarms with saxons. To effect this, you knocked to 
 pieces the English Constitution — that Constitution, the foundation 
 of which was laid by those men — noble in nature and act, as they 
 were noble in station — who won tfre~Great Charter of 121 5. — Of 
 course, you would not have been allowed to commit such an offence 
 against the rights of Englishmen (for the Constitution means, or 
 meant, nothing more nor less than a set of well-ascertained rights), 
 had those from whom you wrested the power (rather, I would say, 
 whom you deprived of power : wrested implies conflict, and con- 
 flict there was none) understood and valued those rights. 1 Any- 
 how, the bourgeois class which, amid much braying (principally on 
 
 1 But, indeed, in our upper and middle classes there are many (perhaps they 
 form the majority) who are, to the eye that can see, but saxons " writ large " — 
 persons that differ in no respect from 'Any (whose notion of" fun " is to have a 
 shy at a street lamp when the policeman is out of the way — which he very often 
 is) — save, indeed, that they have money in their pockets, and nothing in par- 
 ticular to do. — I declare this to be the most disgusting variety of the saxon 
 — yet he is a being whom you may meet even in the "upper circles" by 
 the score — brainless, ignorant, self-indulgent — his day's work some ' ' sport " or 
 some game ; — give me, in preference, 'Any of the third-class carriage on Bank 
 holiday, whose inarticulate yells — from dnmkenness or mere good spirits — make 
 life for the time a torture to all who are near him. Yes, the languid, lolling, 
 ignorant lout, the Gurth of the ball-room and the Row ; again, the moiling 
 and toiling ignorant Gurth of the counting-house (who will explain to you that he 
 takes no interest in politics) ; lastly, the ignorant Gurth of the country mansion, 
 who differs from Gurth his huntsman only by the accident of an accident — 
 these all must, in the nature of things, pass away. 
 
 ^ 
 
Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 83 
 
 the part of those who conferred the " boon ") received preponder- 
 ating power in 1832, seems to have by 1884 become — through 
 attaining physical comfort, money, leisure — so debilitated that it 
 did not even know the value of that which you last year re- 
 moved from its nerveless hand. 1 But although this is the case, 
 you were not justified in removing power from this bourgeois- 
 Gurth. You are not justified in robbing a miser. In other words, 
 you ought to have gone to the constituencies' 1 before you intro- 
 duced your franchise measure. In mere decency, and not to set 
 the precedent to aftertimes of a representative body snapping its 
 fingers at its creator and going on to " disestablish " that creator, 
 you ought to have taken the "opinion of the country." 3 By 
 your act representative government, for all time, has received a 
 knock-down blow. 
 
 And now, when you have got your new Parliament, what can 
 you do with it ? Do you find it an efficient legislative machine ? 
 Did you ever see, or read of, such a body of men professing to be 
 legislators ? No ! I should think you didn't. I can tell you that 
 Praise-God-Barebones' Parliament was an "assembly of kings" com- 
 pared to it; and to find its fellow, you must go back to that grand 
 legislative body, the Senate of Rome, which made Caligula's horse 
 a consul. Where is the intellectual power — to go no further — in that 
 "horcle of saxons, that would ever enable them to differ with you as 
 to any measure which you regarded — for any reason — as necessary ? 
 On the other hand, you would be bound to follow them absolutely 
 within the region of their " mental " activity. Do what you please 
 
 1 But even that cowardly, ignorant, bourgeois-saxon class (which, when things 
 seemed going smoothly, took some weeks, I should think, to subscribe £3, 000 
 to the Mansion House Fund, and when the looting of Regent Street waked 
 it a bit — sent the score to ",£70,000 up" literally off the reel) — this class 
 will — when it is pillaged and plundered by form of law, as it was lately by 
 the "working man," helping himself without form of law — open its stupid eyes 
 to what it lost in 1885. 
 
 2 But why talk to you of what you ought to have done as a Constitutional 
 administrator ? 
 
 3 The ' ' opinion of the country " is, / hold, not worth much ! But that 
 ought not to be your view. I resent your act. You have no business to pose 
 as the Minister of the People, while you commit acts which Strafford would 
 have been ashamed of. But — you know your public ! 
 
 G 2 
 
84 Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 
 
 in Ireland or the Soudan ; but take care how you meddle with the 
 " working man's " beer. In other regions of political activity, 
 they would never dare to oppose you * — and as to their assist- 
 ance, wouldn't you be infinitely better without it? In short, 
 your grand Franchise Act made Parliamentary government a farce, 
 and introduced the government of one — that is, for the present, 
 yourself. 
 
 Thus you made the saxon supreme in Parliament in so far as 
 the government of England is concerned. But you did more. 
 Ordinary common sense would have demonstrated that this was no 
 time to raise the question of the franchise — with Ireland in a state 
 of factitious, government-produced, but (to all law-abiding, loyal 
 people) dangerous ferment. One would have thought it wise to 
 postpone the question for a century, rather than take it up at that 
 particular time. But you — whom one of your admirers lately 
 described, in pleonastic phrase, as " quite the most intelligent 7nan 
 in England "—thought otherwise ; you would raise at this juncture 
 the question of the franchise ! Well, looking at the matter without 
 reference to actual results, for the results are purely disastrous — 
 I am rather glad to say that your quite the most greatest amount 
 of intelligence /#//^. You and I have read of a statesman who — 
 
 " Steered too nigh the sands to boast his wit." 
 
 That may have been your case ; at any rate, I humbly thank 
 Providence that, so far as you are concerned, your statesmanship is 
 hopelessly aground ; the seas are breaking over it, and the rotten 
 thing (with all its Plimsoll's marks) will presently go to pieces. — 
 It was bad enough to deprive me of the English franchise and 
 " thrust it upon" Gurth, my gatekeeper. Your act was uncon- 
 
 1 Of course, they sometimes embarrass you, but always under leadership ; as 
 in the case of the vote for the " Royal " Parks above mentioned. When your 
 Franchise Bill was about to become law, one of your supporters met my 
 objection that the new electors would not understand anything about the 
 duties thrust upon them — by explaining that " they would be well led" — that is, 
 by the local caucus or wire-pullers. In other words, you put powers of 
 mischief into a man's hand, and yet he is not to be anything but a tool in the 
 hands of a few I See how near triumphant democracy is to tyranny ! — I think 
 it well to record such "reasonings" here ; for we shall presently be face to 
 face with their like in this Irish business. 
 
Your delation to the Difficulty ; 85 
 
 stitutional, tyrannical, high-handed, unjust. But you gave it to the 
 Celt in Ireland, — that was insane. Gurth is no doubt our master ; 
 but he is a stupid master ; he is like an ox ; he doesn't know his 
 power. And besides, the idea that he can't annihilate us and 
 live himself might ultimately get into his thick head. Anyhow, 
 he is, in a sense, one of ourselves, and has got to rule or be 
 ruled here. 
 
 But be this as it may, and with no wish to extenuate the folly of 
 making our home-grown, artificially-manured barbarian the master 
 of our destinies, I affirm that the act of extending the privilege 
 of the franchise to the Celt transcended a hundred-fold, in wicked- 
 ness and folly, the act of ^franchising me and ^franchising my 
 gatekeeper. But French Revolutionism would have it so. The 
 man-and-brother Lie had to take another step in its mischievous 
 career, — it had to be magnified and glorified ; and a being who — 
 as towards my existence, the existence of my gatekeeper, and the 
 existence of our entire community — might be more fitly termed a 
 sleepless, unscrupulous fiend — he is intrusted with our national 
 destiny ! 1 If we had no connection whatever with him, if he lived 
 in some islands of the Pacific Archipelago, if we had no civil 
 relation with him, all would be well. 2 — But he is at our doors — 
 he is in the midst of us — a foreign body. Well, in the hand of an 
 enemy such, and so advantageously stationed to work our ruin, 
 you placed a loaded pistol — •which, of course — naturally — necessarily 
 and as anybody but "quite the most intelligentest man in England " 
 might have foreseen — he immediately pointed at the head of the 
 idiot — (marked down for destruction !) who gave him the chance. 
 
 " When sin hath conceived, it bringeth forth death" That 
 man-and-brother lie and perhaps the desire to retain office (which, 
 in a statesman, works all the evil effects of a lie, for to retain office 
 is no primary wish of a true statesman) induced you, against 
 
 1 The Celt is not, I repeat, in and by himself formidable, — but formidable 
 only because of the ever-contemptible cowardice of the saxon-sansculotte 
 government. 
 
 2 Some people have benevolently wished that Ireland could be submerged 
 for twenty-four hours. But they don't know how much we should lose in losing 
 the Celt. As leaven in the lump of dull saxonism, he is invaluable. The real 
 evil is that the saxon can't manage the Celt ; and will in the future be ever less 
 and less able to manage him. 
 
86 Your Relatioji to the Difficulty ; 
 
 the warnings and forebodings of the more sober and sensible 
 of your own followers, to invite (virtually) the bitterest enemy 
 England has ever had, has now, or can ever have — to enter the 
 citadel of the Empire and there to work his will. 1 
 
 He has already worked his will ; and with what result ? Why, 
 that you are now face to face with the Irish Difficulty in a form 
 
 TOTALLY INSOLUBLE ON THIS SIDE REVOLUTION ! You going tO 
 
 propose a series of measures for the " settlement " of the Irish 
 question ! No, sir ; nothing of the kind. You surely cannot be 
 so infatuated as to suppose that you (or any successor of yours in 
 "power") will now be anything but a tool of the Irish party in 
 the House of Commons — to be used for the destruction of the 
 Empire ? I don't profess to understand the way your mind works : 
 considerations which to me and, I should think, to all mankind, 2 
 
 1 Some of the more fatuous or profligate among your followers (and perhaps 
 even you yourself) argued, in order to get your Franchise Bill passed, that it 
 would ruin Mr. ParnelV s power in Ireland! ! And they argued, too, that in the 
 "great" Land Bill of 1881 you would, by giving the tenant more than the 
 Land League could promise him, "dish" the Land League! !! Sir, there 
 are lies which are very significant— significant, ominous, of fate ; and these 
 are of them. The lovers and makers of these lies — lies which denote such 
 idiocy and such villany — and the community that swallows them, are alike 
 bound for the pit of destruction. — It does not require the event to enable one 
 to ask : Did your Land Act dish the Parnellifes ? — the Land Act which, these 
 LIARS must have known, or ought to have known, was the creation of the 
 Parnellites. And did the Franchise Act "dish" the Parnellites? How 
 effectually the Franchise Act dished (not the Parnellites but) the Gladstonian 
 "Liberals " — let poor T. Dickson tell. — While the Franchise Bill was looming 
 up, I had a talk with a well-known Liberal near Gweedore (the region that 
 owns the mild sway of the Rev. Father James McFadden, whom God preserve !)• 
 I expressed my conviction that a Franchise Act, extended to Ireland, would 
 place the whole game in the hands of the Parnellites. "Ah, but," replied 
 my 'Liberal' Mentor, "don't you see" — and then he went on to affirm 
 that by a Redistribution measure, the Parnellites would be completely 
 "dished" — positively this time. In fact, he gave the impression that the 
 Franchise and Redistribution measures were two traps — fatal to the Par- 
 nellites, — set and baited by what we have since been instructed to call " an 
 old parliamentary hand " ! — The " dishing " of the Parnellites is like the rain- 
 bow — always in the next field. 
 
 2 Except to some of your own following, who apparently "follow " your logic 
 — or perhaps only ' ' swallow " your ' ' conclusions " ? Some of these people ex- 
 plained to me, when the Franchise Bill was going through the Houses, that no- 
 body could say whether it would give Mr. Parnell a majority — " No, not so sure 
 
Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 87 
 
 seem obvious — so obvious that we should not think of mentioning 
 them— things, in short, that go without saying, — these consider- 
 ations, opinions, anticipations, forebodings, are met by your 
 henchmen with a smile — and they go on to deny what is as 
 clear as the conclusion of a syllogism in Barbara. — How you 
 can now conceit yourself a free agent is more than I can make out. 
 I suppose, too, you would deny that you are the author — the sole 
 author — of this state of things ! Very well. — Now let us make a 
 few deductions based on this Franchise Act of yours ; your denial 
 will go in each case along with our affirmation, and the event will 
 decide which of us is right. 
 
 1. You bring in a measure which will not please the Irishry. 
 Conclusion : You will be roaming — officeless — among the few 
 
 trees still " spared " at Hawarden in one month, — your premiership 
 " ancient history," and your influence as dead as Chelsea. 1 You 
 deny that ? — Good. 
 
 2. Every future Government — of whatever class or party — will 
 hold office under precisely the same conditions — that is, it will, if 
 it would retain power securely for one week, have to be ready to do 
 its level best to get the Irishry the moon if they cry for it — even 
 though they should raise the cry in pure "devilment." 
 
 You deny the validity of this deduction ? — Very good. 
 
 3. You bring in a measure which will please the Irishry. 
 Conclusion : You smash the Empire. 
 
 You deny that conclusion also ? — Excellent-good. 
 
 about that " ! ! — But even if it did, the two English parties in the House 
 would, don't you know, if either gained a majority by the Pamellite vote, agree 
 to act precisely as if that vote had not been given. Well, though this is a 
 strange view of government by majorities, we know that the compact has 
 been carried out ! Of course, Lord Salisbury is still Prime Minister, and you 
 are sitting on the Opposition side of the House. Of course you refused office, 
 because you zuoidd have been placed in office by the Pamellite vote, — not to 
 mention your determination never to owe power to such a criminal lunacy as 
 Mr. Jesse Collings's Amendment. And of course, when Lord Salisbury now 
 says something about his party being out of office, significant looks are 
 exchanged between the members of his family, and a paragraph will, I 
 suppose, get into the newspapers to the effect that Lord S.'s health is such as to 
 cause considerable anxiety to his friends ! 
 
 1 For the very good reason that the only influence you now can wield 
 depends upon the favour or toleration of the Irish party. 
 
Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 
 
 These, then, are my affirmations, with your denials tacked on. I 
 willingly abide the decision of events, because, in arguing as to 
 your former activity — in pointing out the rottenness of the initial 
 principle, and then the inevitably disastrous result, I was open to 
 the retort (a very silly one, but if there were not many thousands 
 of silly — and therefore mischievous — people in these islands, we 
 should not be in our present plight) — that it was " the wisdom 
 that comes after the event." It was not that sort of wisdom ; but 
 no matter. Here we are face to face with a new bit of your 
 activity, and our relation to it is this : we know the cause — your 
 Franchise Act, — but we don't know the effect — in the sense that it 
 is not palpably before our eyes as a. fait accompli. Now, summing 
 up, I affirm generally, that — 
 
 i. Your Franchise Act, by extending the right of voting to the 
 class in England which you " enfranchised," has ruined the British 
 Parliament as a body qualified to administer efficiently the affairs 
 of the British Empire. 
 
 2 . Your Franchise Act, by extending the right of voting to the 
 class in Ireland which you enfranchised, has made Parliamentary 
 Government in England impossible, and has presented you with 
 only two possible issues : — Revolution or Dismemberment. 
 
 3. Your Franchise Act, by extending the right of voting to 
 these two classes in Ireland and England, will be as fatal in its 
 effects, though you, the author of it, should cease this very hour to 
 discharge the functions of a responsible statesman. 
 
 Since, then, your Franchise Act is such and so mischievous, I 
 look forward to your proposals to be presently made with absolute 
 indifference. You vaulted into office on the Parnellite vote, 
 you are maintained there by the same agency, — and all your suc- 
 cessors will hold office on the same terms — " durante bene placito" 
 and " quamdiu se bene gesserint " — the autocratic body to be 
 pleased, and who will graciously, if it should be so minded, 
 pronounce the approving word " bene" in regard to the actions 
 of English statesmen being — the Irish party. In short, you "carry 
 on the Queen's government " in obedience to every whim of the 
 Queen's enemies. Under these circumstances, why talk of 
 " measures " — " proposals " — as if you were any longer a free 
 agent ? You are bound to surrender. Thus the Empire at once 
 
Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 89 
 
 touches the point which you, on a memorable occasion, indicated 
 by the words " disintegration and dismemberment." Les void 1 1 
 
 So much, then, as to your activities in the past, and their results ; 
 — so much as to your late activity and its results — which are yet 
 to come. I humbly think that the ground I took up at the outset 
 I have maintained ; and that my assertion, that your present at- 
 tempt to settle the Irish Difficulty will result in disastrous failure, 
 has been proved to a demonstration. 
 
 I have now, sir, said my say on your record in regard to the 
 Irish question ; and / find it impossible to believe that you will 
 propose any measures bearing ever so remotely " even in the 
 direction " of a solution of it. 2 I will next try to formulate the 
 phenomena of mind and character revealed in the several acts 
 that make up your record, in order to ascertain whether your „ , 
 
 J Look now, 
 
 failures have been necessary or only accidental. Our conclusions lastl y- . at the 
 under this head will either confirm, or lead us to modify, the mind and 
 conclusions derived from your record looked at by itself, and with- in you, this 
 out reference to the mind and character of the agent. By way yours re - 
 of illustration : Take that grand figure— one of the grandest in V snowThat y 
 all history — the great Semitic strategist and tactician — Hannibal, of e the Diffi- 
 He was a man of war from his youth. But he had not such You^im- 
 a run of good fortune as, say, our Marlborough or Wellington. uEkabie. 
 
 1 Now mark — when the inevitable crash comes, it won't do for your followers 
 to look very innocent, or, if they speak, to point out that such a result could not 
 have been anticipated by any human foresight, or argued to by any.human power 
 of reasoning. Litlera scripta manet : this plain tale will be there to put them 
 down ! 
 
 2 And in statesmanship few actions are indifferent — neither good nor bad. 
 Usually, actions in themselves indifferent, or only at worst silly, become in 
 statesmanship grave wrongs. That " Suakim- Berber Railway " project was 
 in itself 'a bit of mere objectless foolery, — decided upon, for anything we know, 
 as the Crimean expedition was "decided upon" — when the majority of the 
 Cabinet were dozing after dinner — at which dinner some had, doubtless, dined 
 " not wisely but too well." Anyhow, the expedition to the Crimea cost about 
 /80, 000, 000, I have been told. And this single item of the " Suakim-Berber 
 Railway " cost somewhere about ^"1,000,000. That is, the British taxpayer will 
 be burdened for ever with a yearly impost of ,£30,000, and all for a silly fiasco. 
 But it's grand to feel that in England the People rule ! — that we have no 
 Prince Bismarck over us,— though when he expends a million sterling for a 
 certain article, he first of all considers whether the article is worth the money, 
 and having decided that it is — he sees that he pels it. 
 
90 Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 
 
 He was the victor at Cannae ; he was defeated at Zama. Alas, 
 he ended his military career in defeat. Very well ; then he showed 
 some weakness at Zama ? 1 Not a bit of it. He showed as 
 superb generalship at Zama as he had shown at Cannae and Trasi- 
 menus. In defeat and in victory he was the world's greatest 
 general. Now, how can I make this assertion ? On what 
 grounds do I base it ? On an examination of his record? I 
 find running through it all, in defeat as in victory, the mani- 
 festations of a certain set of powers — and this phenomenon is 
 ever present. So that I could almost predict what Hannibal 
 would be likely to do. At any rate, I could tell what he would 
 ?iot do : he would not do anything stupid. I could predict that 
 if there was the slightest weakness in the generalship of his 
 opponent, the Carthaginian would have his finger on the weak 
 spot in an instant ! On the other hand, if his unfortunate {neces- 
 sarily unfortunate) opponent should try " forward play " with 
 Hannibal, I could be absolutely certain that he would be very 
 soon knocked out of time. His forward play would probably 
 
 1 This is the amount of perception that the saxon shows in dealing with 
 those who serve him. Nothing succeeds like success. Govern Scotland Yard 
 for seventeen years in such a manner that no man can raise a finger against 
 you. Then, let a totally irrelevant accident occur, a block, say, on the High- 
 land Railway, — an accident, however, which the saxon "mind" somehow 
 connects — be it ever so remotely — with you, and official saxondom will dance 
 in terror for its own skin till it fingers your resignation. How much 
 more noble the early Roman, who received home with acclamations a beaten 
 oeneral : and why ? Because, in all his defeats, he had shown that he had 
 never once "despaired of the republic"! I make no doubt there were 
 " Romans" so "saxon" in their feelings that they would have measured worth 
 — military ability — solely by success. But they were not official persons, nor 
 regarded as very "capable citizens." 
 
 2 It is a strange fact that the glorious generalship of this &va£ avSpwv — if 
 ever such existed — that his great exploits — should be reported solely by his 
 enemies. His own community— which was as unworthy of him as the Saxon 
 community in the ninth century was unworthy of glorious Alfred — left no record 
 of him or anybody else. It passed away and made no sign. What would 
 become of the reputation of an English general who had over and over again 
 defeated the French — if the French were the sole chroniclers of his deeds ? — But 
 it is unfair to the truthful Romans to mention them in connection with such 
 abandoned liars as the modern French— and especially the official French. 
 Think of the tale of the Vengeur, of Cambronne's mot at Waterloo, of the 
 French account of the battle of the Alma, &c. 
 
Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 91 
 
 develope his overthrow, even though Hannibal had been, before 
 this folly, hard put to it to see how he was to act. 1 — Then, again, 
 in regard to Nicias, you could be as certain from his previous 
 record — his record before he sailed on that fatal Sicilian Expedi- 
 tion — that nothing but disaster could come of it. You would, from 
 the study of his previous record, have arrived at conclusions as 
 to his mind and character which would have compelled you — with 
 the best will in the world towards him as an individual — to 
 believe that the Expedition was doomed. 
 
 What quality of mind and character appears, as a sort of 
 common factor, at every step in your record ? I answer : a total 
 absence of principle. Don't misunderstand me. I have told you 
 before that I don't care a tra?iee?i what your morals, principles, 
 or acts are — in private life. If I had been an Athenian at the 
 epoch of the Sicilian Expedition, I should have preferred Alcibiades 
 to Nicias if I had thought he would capture Syracuse. I have 
 said already that the business of a steersman is — not to show 
 piety, nor philanthropy, nor to lecture me on Temperance, nor to 
 solve the problem of the Universe, nor to ascertain where all the 
 pins go, — but — to steer. If he steers well, that is all I want ; if 
 he doesn't steer well, it makes no matter what else he does well ; 
 and if I see a steady, consistent vice in his steering — I must tell 
 him so. And if the vessel, under his guidance, behaves as the new 
 Agamemnon did on her first run down Channel — in which she was 
 prevented from ramming the Admiralty pier at Dover, only by 
 risking a smash against Cape Gris-Nez, — I am bound to do all I 
 can to remove that steersman, and take chance of putting a better 
 in his place. — Your weakness, as I have said, is — want of prin- 
 ciple. That is the quality which runs through your whole record. 
 What I mean is — that there does not seem to be any line of policy 
 which — I do not say on proper reason shown, but on sufficient 
 pressure brought — you are not prepared to adopt or to abandon ! 
 Well, sir, if this observation of your character represent the 
 
 1 Compare Cromwell's exclamation as he saw Leslie's troops (though against 
 Leslie's will) try "forward play" at Dunbar: — "The Lord hath delivered 
 them into my hand ! " — Oh, sir, that we had, as a people, such a record in 
 statesmanship as we have, if not in generalship, at least in soldiership and 
 seamanship ! 
 
9 2 Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 
 
 actual fact (and there is not a man in England who desires to 
 find it less a fact than I do) — your statesmanship must be one 
 consistent failure. A heathen poet who lived two thousand years 
 ago — before the French Revolution and before the promulgation 
 of Christianity — marked out the "Justum ac tenacem propositi 
 virum " as the man, and the only man, fitted to do great things. 
 You are the antithet of that character ; your public actions on 
 this question, and in many other regions of political activity, 
 have been consistently unjust, 1 and your tenacity is exactly 
 measured by the amount of pressure you have received from with- 
 out. Being such, your activity must, I repeat, prove one consistent 
 failure. From the era of that Clerkenwell explosion which led 
 you to ruin the Irish Church — through the time when you waved 
 the telegram in the air at the Lord Mayor's banquet, and an- 
 nounced that "the resources of civilisation" were sufficient to 
 cope with the evils in Ireland — when he who was, by the 
 testimony of your own Attorney-General, "steeped to the lips 
 in treason," walked out of prison a free man, his powers of 
 mischief enormously increased — when, again, you asked — " what 
 was meant by Uo?ne Rule? — you were willing to entertain the 
 question " — down to the day when you entered office, to hold office 
 on condition that you should tell what Home Rule means, 
 and that Mr. Parnell should " entertain " your view or not, 
 as he liked, — through all this period — in your every act, you are 
 seen, not looking to any principle of public policy — but yielding, 
 now here, now there, to shifting phenomena of external pressure. 2 
 
 1 Not, observe, that you are consistently anything. But it happens that the 
 pressure applied to you in our degenerate times has been "consistent" in 
 always driving you towards injustice. You have simply yielded to the force 
 Majeure. Circumstances drove you to measures which originated and developed 
 the party of American- Irish Jacobinism; circumstances forced you to make 
 that party supreme in the State ; and circumstances now compel you to 
 "govern " the State at their bidding. 
 
 2 One of the most extraordinary defences ever set up was that by which 
 your followers explained and excused your bloody and absolutely pointless 
 and irrelevant " policy " in the Soudan, by saying that you had yielded to the 
 clamour of the Tory party ! ! The Tory party are naturally bloodthirsty— and 
 they forced you to engage in "military operations" ! But how is it that the 
 "greatest statesman of the age" carries out the policy of his "wicked" 
 opponents ? 
 
X 
 
 Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 93 
 
 And if you have, at the present moment, yielded all to Rebellion, 
 — you have done so because Rebellion has known how to keep 
 a steady pressure upon you — while the wretched saxons, squab- 
 bling among themselves, and thinking (!) — thinking " there must 
 be something in " this cry for Home Rule, are really the allies 
 of those who, in carrying out a sham, can smash an empire. — 
 As at home so abroad. Komaroff and Joubert, Austria after your 
 "hands off" indiscretion — these played the same steady, forward 
 game which Mr. Parnell is such a master of, — and they won and 
 were bound to win. 
 
 Now, I need not say that " total absence of principle " would 
 never announce itself in plain terms as such. If it did, 
 even the being I have called the saxon would be able to see 
 that something was wrong ! No : your failure to seize, and 
 stick to a principle, appears in forms very well calculated to 
 deceive your Caliban following. You are inconsistent, — but to 
 conclude that a man is inconsistent, one must ascertain, recollect, 
 compare the successive phenomena of his record — a series of 
 activities out and beyond any powers possessed by our poor 
 saxon to compass. Therefore, you can be — as towards your 
 followers — safely inconsistent, — but not to us. 
 
 Again, being totally destitute of political principle, you must, 
 having nothing to which you can cling, — cling through good and evil 
 report, through thick and thin — cling hard and fast, cling as the 
 limpet to the rock — cling, no matter what befalls, — you must, I say, 
 be driven from pillar to post, in sheer, desperate desire to find out 
 something that will make for your safety ! But this will seem, what- 
 ever you may call it, to outsiders mere timidity. And, looking 
 to your record, nothing is so striking a feature in it as this same 
 timidity. It really seems as if any hare in the kingdom possessed 
 more pluck, more force, than you ! 
 
 Coupled with this hare-like timidity in the presence of pressure 
 consistently applied, — which timidity arises, I insist, from in- 
 capacity to seize a principle, and hold it against all opposi- 
 tion, hold it, cling to it, were it but with the finger-nails — 
 from the mature conviction that it is sound, and must, there- 
 fore, bring a man peace at the last — coupled, I say, with this 
 essential and fatal weakness of character is the most absolute 
 
94 Your Relation to the Difficulty ; 
 
 apparent l belief in yourself, and in the efficacy of your successive 
 " measures." You seem to think that what you propose will, in each 
 case, prove a remedy ! Such a power of self-deception is without 
 parallel. But more ; your " remedy " having necessarily failed, failed 
 before all men and before the sun — what becomes of you ? Do 
 you retire into private life ? Do you retire even from official life ? 
 No ! you are again to the fore with another — this positively the 
 last — "remedy." And when this, too, necessarily fails — you are 
 again ready — and so on, to n times ! 2 — Now, such astounding 
 self-confidence in proposing " measures " is really equivalent to 
 sheer insanity when the measures have reference to the Irish 
 question. — But this quality of self-confidence is dangerous not only 
 to yourself, but to the saxon herd that looks up to you for 
 guidance. The saxon, utterly indisposed to master — or in- 
 capable of mastering — the elements of the Irish problem (I 
 have called him a papist and you his political pope), is con- 
 strained to fall back on you ; and thus, for so far, we have 
 — as the constituent elements of all the " solvent " England 
 can produce : — Rudderless want of principle, hare-like timidity, 
 measureless audacity, these in the leading agent, — and in the 
 body that is to give effect to the proposals that are the re- 
 sultant of all these forces — stupid, swine-like ignorance ! Really, 
 now, if the Irish Problem submitted to solution in the presence 
 of such " solvents " — all I can say is, it ought to be ashamed of itself . 
 Another quality, clearly discernible in all your activity, is a power 
 
 1 I say apparent, because I cannot see how it can be real. I cannot take in the 
 idea. But human character is full of such (apparent) contradictions, that 
 a man who now flings another into gaol for a certain "offence," and 
 now humbly accepts office from the same man and constitutes himself the agent 
 in carrying out the policy for proclaiming which, in much milder terms, that 
 man was said to be "steeped to the lips in treason " and thrown into prison 
 with flaunts of telegram and saxon cheering — may possibly to himself be 
 steady, consistent — nay, the just and tenacious man of Horace's encomium ! 
 
 2 I hope you don't suppose that in this, or in any other of your acts, I blame 
 you. Blame is out of the question. If, after repeated failures, the " country " 
 calls you to fail again, — that is the country's affair. And if you are willing to 
 come forward and fail again, that is your affair. And the mistake of the 
 "country " and your own mistake will be duly visited by a Power that forgives 
 a failure as little as it forgives a sin. Where is blame then ? — // is excluded. 
 
Your Relatio7i to the Difficulty ; 95 
 
 of calling any thing by a?iy name that suits the exigency of the 
 moment. I have noticed this characteristic before ; but I am now 
 formally examining your whole mind as evidenced in your actions, 
 with the view of arriving at a conclusion as to the likelihood of 
 your proposing anything to the purpose at the present juncture. I 
 suppose this quality is connected with that other, which is also very 
 manifest in your record — of attaining, in public speech, with due, 
 though very involved, syntax, an absolute unintelligibility in 
 respect of matter. Macaulay noticed this quality in his Review 
 of your book on " Church and State." You seem to be the 
 victim of your own sentence-making, and are an example of 
 Bacon's assertion that, whereas we believe we are masters of the 
 language we employ, the language we employ, in reality, often 
 masters us. But that vague, cloudy, hazy, fogging, bewildering, 
 chloroforming style — be its origin what it may 1 — is not the style 
 that would characterize the man who could tackle the Irish Diffi- 
 culty with any hope of success. — Incapacity to call a spade a spade 
 may arise from one of three sources — a mental, a moral, or a lin- 
 guistic source, — and the man who labours under this incapacity from 
 any source must be, so far forth, weak — perhaps ridiculous, perhaps 
 mischievous. He may not know that a certain thing is called a 
 spade, though he may know the word " spade." Then that word 
 is a bit of mere lumber in his mind ; and it may become mis- 
 chievous : he may, on occasion, apply it to a spade, a banjo, or a 
 chest of drawers. Or he may know that the thing ought to be 
 called a spade, — but it may not suit him to call it a spade. This 
 is worse. Or he may not know the word spade. In any view of 
 the matter he is distinctly weak. And a weak man, even in the 
 matter of using words, is not the man to settle the Irish question. 
 If his incapacity arises from mental feebleness, he is in bad case ; 
 
 1 Many people hold that this peculiarity in your utterances arises from a 
 deliberate intention to mystify, delude,— just as they hold that the central 
 quality of your character is egoism, and your one consistent and persistent 
 wish — in your capacity of statesman — to obtain and retain power ! If their 
 theories be correct, there is no mystery about the matter. But I don't accept 
 their theories ; I prefer to let the phenomenon be, for me, inexplicable. As 
 for this nebulous sentence-making — Macaulay noticed it at a period in your 
 career when you can scarcely be supposed to have deliberately determined to 
 fog the public. 
 
/ 
 
 9 6 Your Relation to the Difficulty , 
 
 if from moral obliquity, he is done for. He must here speak 
 plainly, as well as act squarely. 
 
 Another, possibly dangerous, characteristic is — your piety, con- 
 scientiousness, " good intentions," and — "all that sort of thing." 
 Don't misunderstand me. Piety and conscientiousness are, on 
 the whole, very good things in themselves ; but, as I have before 
 intimated, they may become dangerous qualities in a statesman. 
 Does anybody doubt the piety, conscientiousness and good inten- 
 tions of the heads of the Inquisition ? — The truth is, there is no 
 /more helpless victim of self-deception than the pious man — who 
 sees in all his notions, whims, caprices, the leading of Providence, 
 and who can, relying on the arrogant assumption that Providence 
 (as well as justice) "has been his guide," behold with unmoved 
 countenance the ravages, for example, that your measures — the 
 direct outcome of piety and good intention — have wrought in 
 ever-miserable Ireland. — Then, there is the danger that arises 
 from the effect that conspicuous piety produces on silly minds. 
 A pious man is, to me, a man who is likely to go to heaven ; but 
 his mere piety gives me no assurance that he will conduct with 
 success any business I may entrust to him in this vale of tears. 
 I might have many occasions to wish him fairly with Christ, which, 
 for me as well as for him, would perhaps be " far better." States- 
 manship and " other-worldliness " are not incompatible, but 
 statesmanship is essentially a thing of this world. On the other 
 hand, silly people — the people (unfortunately) forming the bulk 
 of " the population of these islands " — if we may trust Carlyle — 
 are mightily taken with piety, or even the semblance of piety. 
 If a man is pious (so they "argue"), he must be right. Strange 
 to say, I argue that if he is aggressively pious, he is very likely to 
 be wrong. Remember Nicias. Remember what the Athenians 
 suffered through trusting to his piety. — Piety, then, is a quality 
 which is, at best, irrelevant, and may be dangerous, in a 
 statesman. 
 
 Well, summing up under this head, in which I have been ascer- 
 taining the mental and moral qualities revealed in the several 
 acts of your record I find — That now, when for the third time you 
 stand up to this Irish problem, your mental and moral apparatus 
 for solving it are : — a total absence of principle, showing itself in 
 
The Right Man — and the Solution. 97 
 
 hare-like timidity, and utter inconsistency, which yet puts on the 
 guise of absolute certainty and self-confidence ; these qualities — united 
 with a power of glamouring and fogging, perhaps yourself, certainly 
 your followers, through a peculiar use of language — united, also, 
 with manifested piety and conscientiousness and oft-proclaimed^^ 
 intentions. 
 
 Sir, that a man with these qualities — these " gifts and graces " 
 should now " settle " that Irish question which, by the very ex- 
 ercise of these qualities, gifts, and graces, he has made insoluble 
 on this side Revolution — is absolutely unthinkable. 
 
 IV. 
 The Right Man — and the Solution. 
 It is now high time to bring these remarks to a close. The last 1 proceed to 
 
 ...,,,. r . , , , indicate, 
 
 object of our inquiry is — What sort of man is needed at the then, in con- 
 present crisis ; and what would he do in order to solve the difficulty ? 
 
 1. The man who would solve the difficulty, in so far as it could (i.) the sort 
 be solved by an individual, must be a man of clear mental insight, quiTe^fbr" 
 inflexible resolution, patience, persistence, courage and unswerving e of the™ 1 
 honesty. Now, that looks, I admit, very like one of the platitudes Dlfficult >' • 
 that we are so familiar with in journals that support your various 
 policies. But let us go on : let us see what this man's mental 
 insight will enable him to perceive, and his unsiuerving honesty 1 
 enable him to carry out, — and whether his policy is like yours. 
 
 1 Let me say, in passing, that we have in those two qualities — the qualities 
 of a man who, and who alone, could solve the Irish problem. The only other 
 element requisite is — Time. — But in our wretched yet self-conceited community 
 — where is the mental insight ? — where the unsiverving honesty ? And even if 
 we were fortunate enough to secure these qualities, how long would the statesman 
 possessing them be permitted to retain power? Lord Salisbury in a few months 
 iaved England from war (I know what I am talking about), yet Lord Salisbury 
 goes out (ostensibly, at least) because he won't submit to Mr. Jesse Collings's 
 criminal-lunatic amendment ! You see our method of Government lacks 
 continuity. Very well : we pay for that with an Irish ( Hicstion now absolutely 
 insoluble. 
 
 11 
 
98 The Right Man — and the Solution. 
 
 He has studied (we must assume) all that in literature bears 
 upon government ; and he has studied, at first hand, human Nature 
 and human History, with the view of finding whether the Reign of 
 Law extends to the phenomena of Human Society, — and if so, what 
 are the Laws, economic, social, political, that are unmistakably 
 manifest. Having done so, he goes on to ascertain and throw 
 into formula the origin and function of the State. He ascertains 
 (I am certain) that the sole function of the State, — that for which 
 the State was called into being, is — to protect property — 
 this and nothing else. He will look at this result of his studies 
 and arguings on all sides. Instead of the function — to protect 
 property, he will substitute other functions, and carefully work out 
 the sum till he arrives at the answer. He will substitute e.g. — to 
 make all — or any — members of the community comfortable. This 
 he will reject at once: it can't be done without resorting to 
 plunder. (See above.) So of such substitutions as — to educate 
 the people, to provide amusement for the people, to make the people 
 sober, moral, religious} &c. &c. — and in every such case he will, 
 working out the problem, arrive at an impossibility or an absurdity. 
 Then, coming back and examining again the conclusion which 
 asserts that the function of the State is to protect property, — trying 
 it by any the most stringent tests that he has employed on the 
 other conclusions, he finds that this conclusion — and this alone 
 — bears all such tests. 2 
 
 Having settled all this after due (and it probably would be long) 
 study and cogitation, he feels that he has taken a step in the 
 direction of " settling " questions of government. He has arrived 
 at a "fundamental law." He need not open that book again. 
 He is not so " excessively candid" as to entertain any questioning in 
 
 1 Poor W. E. Forster, in one of his latest speeches, committed himself to the 
 amusement fallacy ! 
 
 2 And this would be the "note " of his activity to the end. He would grasp 
 principles and apply principles. He would prescribe the particular pattern of 
 every tap in the engine, but he wouldn't lose time turning every tap ; his 
 assistants could do that — but, come what might, he would see that the engine 
 had that in it which would make it %o. — What colleague of yours could have 
 taken charge of any of your " great " measures ? If anything had happened to 
 you during the passage of, e.g., your Land Bill of 1881, — what would have 
 become of that pernicious folly? It would have tumbled to pieces on the floor 
 of the House ! Very well : that shows the measure was rotten. 
 
The Right Man — and the Solution. 99 
 
 regard to a problem he has so carefully worked out, and the truth 
 of which he sees demonstrated by events every day he rises. To 
 open his " book" again would seem to him childish loss of time. 
 
 He then takes a step ahead, and concludes further — that if 
 the sole function of the State is to protect property, the sole function 
 of the Statesman is to fight against,— to burn, sink, and destroy 
 those degenerate elements in the community 1 that would deprive 
 men of their property — the thing for which they make all the 
 exertions of their life, — the thing which not even the robbers of 
 the community, in high or low station, will give up if they can 
 help it. 2 
 
 The conclusion that the State exists for the protection of 
 property involves this other : that the State is subsequent to the 
 individual, and exists for the benefit of the individual — that is, for 
 the benefit of the individual whose property is to be protected, 
 and who contributes his quota of property towards the support 
 of the State 3 — not for the benefit of those who choose to land 
 in the State from another country, or from any quarter what- 
 ever. And this Statesman would observe that the wealth and 
 happiness of the community increase in proportion as the indi- 
 vidual is free to use his special activity. 
 
 This being the case, he would not trouble himself much about 
 forms of government. He would not accept the poet's silly 
 formula : — " Each best administered is best." Rather he would 
 say— Each government which enables every honest citizen to 
 live in the greatest safety alike from foreign and domestic foes — 
 that is the best. But whatever form of polity arose naturally 
 from the circumstances and necessities of the case — whatever 
 
 1 These mu?t exist in larger or smaller amount in all communities, but the 
 action of the community can increase them so as to enable them to bring the 
 community to ruin. 
 
 2 The damnable hypocrisy of the apostles of plunder is manifest when the 
 garotter from Whitechapel or St. Stephen's " puts on the hug " — on them. 
 
 3 A wise government would exert its energies — not in devising schemes to 
 rob the worthy, and to protect (and thereby increase) the unworthy, but in 
 devising and carrying out a "scheme" by which every man living in the 
 community, and reaping the benefits of civilized life, would, according to his 
 power, be made to pay for his advantages ! — The highest effort of modern 
 "statesmanship" results in making A. pay for B. ! — But what will become of 
 B. when A. emigrates — or ceases to be able to pay for B. ? (See above.) 
 
 H 2 
 
The Right Man — and the Solution. 
 
 form had most of nature, and least of artificiality about it. that 
 he would approve. 1 Because, in such a state of things, his 
 primary object, the protection of the property of the individuals 
 who contribute to the burdens of the State would approach nearer 
 to absolute attainment. Any developments in the form of govern- 
 ment of his own country he would accept when they arose slowly, 
 that is, naturally — provided the primary object of government 
 were all the better secured by such changes. But all changes, all 
 " measures," tending to make the primary object more difficult 
 of attainment he would abhor, and as far as possible fight against 
 —to the point of taking up arms and proving that force is a 
 remedy. 
 
 Again, he would hold that it is a good thing in a State to have 
 as little Government as possible — regarding it as in itself an 
 evil, though a necessary evil— necessary because and only because 
 of the existence of certain degenerate organisms in the com- 
 munity. 2 
 
 Lastly, there being in his blood no sewer gas of French Revo- 
 lutionism, he would not be, and could not be, the victim of such 
 pernicious Lies as I have already catalogued. (See page 15.) 
 
 Called to administer the affairs of the Empire, he considers, 
 first and foremost, that his duty is to the Empire, as he finds it. 
 It would be no business of his to inquire, for instance, how we 
 came by India or Gibraltar or Malta or Cyprus or Ireland. The 
 sole consideration which weighs with him is — we possess them. 
 He considers the exclamation, " perish India," as a most traitorous 
 utterance in the mouth of a responsible British statesman. When 
 our material resources and our fighting power failed to hold 
 
 1 For example, he would not commit the absurdity of supposing that our 
 English constitution has in it something saved, and that wherever it is intro- 
 duced it must make everybody happy ! He would {on absolutely rational 
 grounds) sympathise with Prince Bismarck and Count Von Moltke in their 
 endeavours to make Germany formidable. For he would understand (as those 
 really great men do) that Germany, with France on the one side and Russia on 
 the other, must be either formidable or extinct, either a terror or a non- 
 entity ! For my part, may Germany long be a terror in Europe — a terror 
 to all scoundrel-statesmen — at home or abroad ! 
 
 2 Needless to say he would do nothing to multiply such organisms — the sole 
 "function" which our Government seems capable of discharging — and at tlie 
 cost of really " capable citizens" ! 
 
The Rirfit Man— and the Solution. 101 
 
 India — then he would reluctantly give it up. But he would give 
 it up because he couldn't hold it. No treason there. 
 
 Summoned to look after the affairs of Ireland, he would (know- 
 ing the entire history of Ireland— all the big lies 1 and all the small 
 bits of truth in it, knowing the people, moreover, by actual contact 
 with them)- — he would, I say, carry with him his simple prin- 
 ciple— protect property. Any " ascendency" ? None. He knows 
 no ascendency save the " ascendency " of the true man over 
 the idler, the thief. And he knows that if he (which is in- 
 conceivable) sides with the thief — he, but much more the 
 community — would pay for it. He does not, by way of putting 
 an end to this ascendency, by way of " steering an even keel,' 1 
 adopt the saxon method of shifting to the other side cargo, 
 shot and shell, coals, guns, ballast, crew— -everything, in short, 
 that could bring the gunwale under. — He doesn't commit the 
 absurdity of prosecuting members of Parliament and others 
 for " treasonable " speeches. He lets every man in Ireland 
 say what he likes. What, he would ask, has talk to do 
 with the protection of property ? " Well, but (this is the wisdom 
 of your school of politicians — if you belong to any school) 
 they incite — those men who make inflammatory speeches and 
 write inflammatory articles, such as those in United Ireland 
 — they incite to outrage." To which our statesman — being a 
 very direct person — able and inclined to call a spade a spade 
 and only that — would probably reply, in Mr. Burchell's formula 
 — Fudge. — Let me catch any one subject of Her Majesty 
 injuring any other subject of Her Majesty in life, limb or 
 store — and I won't ask who incited him to the crime. But 
 till there is an overt act, I have no business to interfere. 
 'Can't you let things alone?' If you don't ask the criminal, 
 
 1 From the lie that it was ever, in ancient times, called " Insula Sacra " save 
 by a linguistic blunder, down to the latest — which I don't pretend to know ; or 
 that it had any settled government from the day one of its chiefs fled to Julius 
 Agricola to the day when Dermot MacMorragh invited Henry the Second to 
 undertake the conquest of it — always excepting what the " Danes " had done 
 in the direction of civilization. If the Danes had been more numerous, there 
 would be now no Irish question. 
 
 2 Not requiring, like you, to be in office in order to be aware of the state of 
 Ireland ! 
 
102 The Right Man— and the Solution 
 
 who — what orator — what newspaper — "incited" him, and then 
 punish, not the actual criminal, but the orator whom he charges 
 with having incited him, 1 — how can you, in Heaven's name, prose- 
 cute a public speaker, or a journal, for uttering words that are 
 calculated to lead to outrage, &c. ? Let a man utter in public as 
 many " treasonable " speeches as he pleases ; let him incite to any 
 crime he pleases. 2 — " Would you put down the National League ? " 
 Well, had I (and not you) been in power at the time, the National 
 League would never have come into existence, no, nor the Land 
 League either. Therefore, I am not bound to answer your 
 question; but I will answer it, and my answer is — Certainly not. z 
 You don't seem to apprehend the nature and scope of Govern- 
 ment. Listen : — Government cannot institute an inquisition into 
 the minds and consciences, nor even all the acts, of men — it can 
 deal only with such offences as are borne witness to in open day; 
 and its activity is limited to offences connected with property 4 
 (which includes life). It is a very rough and coarse instrument ; 
 
 1 In which case you would have the interesting spectacle of a convicted 
 criminal turned into an untainted witness against (in all probability) a perfectly 
 innocent speaker or journal. Alas for grandmotherly government ! You go 
 but two steps back in order to demonstrate its rottenness ! 
 
 2 That is, provided the persons incited be of full age — not infants in the eye 
 of the law, or lunatics. — "But," you answer — " that's the very thing! These 
 poor Irish peasants are very, very excitable ; and when these Men and these 
 
 iournah rouse their feelings, they, <2rY., &c. You see they are like children" 
 And yet, you have just given those "children" — 300,000 of them — the 
 franchise ! Again, you prosecute Hyndman, Champion and the rest, for talk 
 in Trafalgar Square, instead of giving capable citizens "a whiff of grape-shot " 
 in Regent Street ! 
 
 3 Of course, this is, unfortunately, an imaginary sketch ; our statesman 
 assumes a worthy England behind him. By the way, it does not follow, 
 as matters stand, that Lord Salisbury's Government was wrong in its policy 
 in regard to the National League. 
 
 4 " Still harping on my daughter !' '—No, sir ! Harping on no daughter o r 
 sister, cousin or aunt of yours ! Harping on the sacredness of property, which 
 is the key-stone — the indispensable condition — of civilization, and the cause 
 and chief end of all government ! — When Land-Commissioners invade you (or 
 your descendants) at Hawarden, reduce or abolish your rents ; first build a 
 set of labourers' cottages within biscuit-throw of your drawing-room window, 
 and then forcibly expropriate you, — probably then you, or your representative 
 descendant, will come to understand why I go on harping on Property, 
 Property, Property. 
 
The Right Man — and the Solution. 103 
 
 it often fails — even in its own field of activity ; but you don't 
 improve it by applying it to what it was never intended to do. 1 
 "You cannot vitally affect the National League — as a League. You 
 cannot, in fact, suppress it. "/am glad we agree in that, at a?iy 
 rate ; for we will not suppress the National League." — But we don't 
 agree. You decline to suppress the National League because you 
 are afraid of it ; and because you fear your suppression of it would 
 end in your being turned out of office, which most certainly would 
 be the case. You are afraid of it, and don't suppress it. / see 
 nothing in it to be afraid of, and therefore I don't suppress it. — 
 And besides, you are not consistent : you suppressed — amid much 
 braying — the Land League — why not the National League, which 
 is, of the two, for you, by far the more formidable ? 2 
 
 " But do you not concern yourself with Religion — with Educa- 
 tion, &>c. ? " No. As for the first, Irishmen may go to — heaven 
 their own way. Personally, I hope they will all go to heaven ; / 
 wish I could see certain of them preparing with less assiduity to 
 go to " another place." But as statesman, I have nothing to do 
 with the matter, — nor have I anything to do with Education. Let 
 anybody who wants education pay for it. The fact is — govern- 
 ment with me is — not a pseudo-philosophical-humanitarian-rights- 
 of-man, moral-religious-educational organization, which levies taxes 
 from a brute-community, that does not know its right hand from its 
 left, to support all my fads — but an Insurance Society against thieves, 
 of which Insurance Society I am manager. I avoid two mistakes 
 which you, and all your like, commit— (hence the Ireland which you 
 see, and which, mark me, you have made). (1) Being manager of 
 a Company insuring against thieves, I exact the lowest possible 
 amount from those who insure, and I can afford to ask a very low 
 figure, because I take on no factitious duties ; I decline to feed, 
 clothe, and educate my clients, besides insuring them against 
 thieves — and still more, to feed, clothe, and educate those who 
 don't insure. Your mistake — and you will find it out very soon — 
 
 1 Your Hawarden hatchet does well enough when you confine yourself to 
 cutting down trees, but you don't shave with it. 
 
 2 The reason is manifest : you had not, when you suppressed the Land 
 League, put your neck, and England's neck, under the heel of the "Nation- 
 alist" party. 
 
io4 The Right Man — and the Solution. 
 
 is — that you employ the premium paid by those who bona fide 
 insure — to feed, clothe, and educate those who don't insure, and 
 cannot insure. Besides, you have just now given this latter class 
 a vastly preponderant voice on the Board of Directors ! Can any 
 good come of such an arrangement? — (2) But you have done 
 more. You have given the casting vote in the management to 
 the most formidable body of thieves in the United Kingdom, — 
 and yet, people say you are now going (by the aid of those whom 
 you feed, clothe, and educate, and also by the help of this syndi- 
 cate of thieves) to " settle " all " Difficulties " of the Company ! ! 
 (2) his policy 2. Thus far our statesman. Coming now to the solution of 
 
 of solution, . 
 
 the Irish Problem, to which you have given so many days and 
 nights — I observe that we are promised three measures (another 
 Trinity-in-Unity) which, we are assured, will " settle " once for all 
 this ever-recurrent Irish trouble. Alas for human hopes ! The 
 chances are ten thousand to one against your proposing any 
 measure " bearing, ever so remotely, even in the direction" of a 
 solution of the Irish Problem. I have examined your record ; I 
 have examined the leading qualities of your mind ; I have examined, 
 moreover, the instrument (forged by yourself) which you are 
 compelled to use in this work — this " reformed " Parliament — 
 and here, in my last pages, I am constrained to affirm that you 
 must fail. 
 
 But as I desire to be, in my remarks, perfectly definite, clear, un- 
 mistakable (therefore, if wrong, easily refutable) ; as I wish that you 
 may, if you are so minded, follow my suggestions now, and that I 
 may recall them, if necessary, to your remembrance hereafter, — 
 I will take the programme which you have announced, and say 
 what you ought to propose under each of the three heads : Social 
 Order, Local " Self "-Government, and the Land Question. 
 
 But, first, I must observe that the very idea of your " settling " 
 the Irish Question by any " measures " whatever, is the height of 
 absurdity ! You have an unaccountable belief in machine-made 
 statesmanship. It does not seem ever to have occurred to you 
 that there are certain things which are as far removed from the 
 
 1 The most formidable " Difficulty " arising from the devilish activity of these 
 same thieves — even before you made them autocratic ! 
 
The Right Man— and the Solution. 
 
 region of " constructive statesmanship " as are the movements of 
 Jupiter's satellites. Has the thought never crossed your mind that 
 we mortals possess a dreadful power of destruction, but that our 
 power of reconstruction— -of restitution—^ sadly limited, impressing 
 on us the truth that we ought to be careful how we go about to 
 destroy any natural product? You can build a tower "whose walls 
 may reach to heaven " in a shorter time than you can cause an acorn 
 to grow into an oak tree. On the other hand, how easy to destroy 
 the oak tree ! Now, certain things connected with society are — 
 though you don't see the fact, and I cannot stop to give proof 
 — analogous to the growth of a tree, not to the building of a tower. 
 Can you, I may ask, attract back to Ireland the capital which has 
 left, and is leaving it ? Can you, by any possible " measure," make 
 contract valid all over Ireland ? Can you, by any measure, make one 
 Irishman trust another ? Can you make towns in Ireland pros- 
 perous — towns I could take you to see — towns with shops — but 
 shops without customers — shops in which, twenty years ago, you had 
 to wait a considerable time before you could be served ? To come 
 to a personal matter, can you induce jne by your " measures " to 
 restore to Ireland the capital / have removed from that (artificially) 
 wretched country ? No ! But I will tell you what you can do 
 (nay, have done) by your measures : You can banish capital, an- 
 nihilate contract, put a?i end to all confidence between man and 
 man ; and make the (hitherto) kindly Celtic folk around me, and 
 who live upon the labour I give them — you can make them scowl 
 upon me as if I were their tyrant and enemy, instead of their 
 friend and benefactor ! x That you have done. Confidence, 
 kindliness between man and man, you have put an end to. You 
 have cut down these trees very effectually ; but should you, after 
 your operations on the trees at Hawarden, call together your friends 
 and neighbours and, in their sight and to their ringing cheers, 
 wave your axe and (this — your great " healing " measure !) order the 
 trees you have cut down to wave once more in the breeze — you 
 would not be engaged in a bit of folly more stark than you will 
 
 1 T am happy to say that so far as the writer is concerned, the / here is only 
 rhetorical. But how many worthy men in Ireland could with truth employ 
 the form of words I have used in the text ! 
 
io6 The Right Man — and the Solution. 
 
 be, when you introduce (doubtless amid "loud cheers") your 
 three "great" and "final" measures for "settling" the Irish 
 Question. 
 
 In a word, civilized society is, in the greater part of Ireland, at 
 an end through your activity ; you have occupied about twenty 
 years in the work, and you have performed it very effectually ; 
 now, when things are grown intolerable, you are, as I have before 
 intimated, about to set them right by a more full and fatal 
 application of the " measures " which brought them to this pass ! 
 — and all is to be done as by a wave of a magician's wand ! — 
 whereas, in truth, the soundest measures, were they devised by 
 the very genius of enlightened statesmanship itself, would require 
 many, many years before a bud or blossom of prosperity would 
 attest the wisdom of the means employed ! — But, coming to 
 ' practical " matters, what would sound statesmanship say as to 
 all that can be done in respect of the three measures you have 
 undertaken to propose? — When we have ascertained this, we 
 shall be able to judge of the soundness of your proposals — what- 
 ever they may be — when you come to make them. — 
 in regard to: (i) In regard to Social Order. — Remarking the curious 
 "orderT — the significant — fact that a career of mischief which began by 
 removing the " sentimental " grievance of an Established Church 
 — the " Upas tree " — finds itself, in the end, confronted with 
 Social Disorder — for that is what your measure implies, — I go on 
 to say (speaking in the name of true, sound, scientific statesman- 
 ship) that this — "social order " — is the very point to which you 
 ought to address yourself. You have, at any rate, the right sow by 
 the ear. And all you can do is to set in the right way again — a 
 thing which you have, for years, been exerting yourself to force out 
 of the right way. You must — though you should lay Ireland in 
 ashes (you won't have to do it though) from Fair Head to Kinsale 
 — throw all the weight of English authority into the scale against 
 systematic robbery by form of law — robbery as insolent and 
 unjust as anything known to human history. This legalised 
 robbery you have yourself established by your various acts oj 
 justice. — Then again, you must put down the robbery and violence 
 which, as a necessary consequence, have followed your " acts of 
 
The Right Man — and the Solution. 107 
 
 justice. 1 That is what statesmanship prescribes. Ireland will 
 never see one bright day till Property, Contract, Good Faith 
 come again to have some meaning for her inhabitants. — The 
 abolition of these things and their passing out of the region of 
 the intelligible is due solely to your activity. 
 
 (2) As to Local " Self "-Government: Sound statesmanship <s.) Local 
 affirms that Ireland has no more need of any change in the 
 matter of local "self-government, than a cart has for a third 
 wheel. The cry for Home Rule is a mere sham. It is got up by 
 the Celt, in order that he may achieve his wretched " independ- 
 ence " — which would be fraught with destruction for him, as I have 
 already shown, — but also, which is the only thing sound English 
 statesmanship concerns itself about — for the peaceable law- 
 abiding inhabitants of Ireland— of whatever race or religion, — as 
 also for the very existence of England herself. The thing is 
 not to be mentioned in your approaching Revelation, if you 
 would avoid disaster to yourself and your country. You must not 
 so much as name a Parliament in Dublin, — nor must you propose 
 County Boards ; in short, you must eliminate this proposal from 
 your programme of " measures " altogether. 
 
 3. As to the Land Question : Sound statesmanship would 
 (a) avoid a certain highly-applauded course ; and (b) adopt a 
 certain other course — which would startle most people. 
 
 {a) Sound statesmanship would never be so foolish as to dream 
 of " rooting the peasant in the soil " by any process or means 
 whatever. Apart from the fact that government has nothing to do 
 with such processes, which are, in the very nature of things, totally 
 independent of State control, sound statesmanship, in mere kind- 
 ness to the peasant, would not, if it could — would not attempt to root 
 him in the soil. The thing is, even in conception, a cruelty. Pro- 
 gress — civilization implies the power of the human being to move 
 about over the surface of the planet till he find a suitable habitat. 
 
 1 In Heaven's name, how can you blame, still less, punish moonlighters for 
 committing outrages on those whom your brigand-commissioners have con- 
 demned to lose one-third of their property? Can you not see the argument of 
 the moonlighter ? " The Court has reduced our rent by so much. But we have 
 been paying this rent for twenty— fifty — years. Ought we to keep measures with 
 such a ruffian as our landlord ? And if the Court grants us 0»*-third, why not 
 taw-thirds, *7zra?-thirds ? " 
 
Land. 
 
 toS The Right Man— a?id the Solution, 
 
 Men are not like oysters, which, when once they come to an anchor, 
 (Hi.) the never move again. But who can speak with patience of the pre- 
 sumptuous ignorance of those who would employ the money of 
 the British taxpayer {suppose the thing were feasible) in " rooting the 
 peasant in the soil " — in other words, in making an agricultural 
 community of a people which has no talent, no taste, no gift for 
 agriculture, 1 — and this in a country with an average rainfall of 
 208 days in the year ! 2 I wish sansculotte-christian-humanitarian 
 statesmanship would concern itself a little more with facts, and 
 very much less with fictions, dreams, and doctrinaire theories ! 
 This sort of statesmanship would " root the peasant in the soil " of 
 Ireland ? — Yes, very effectually in the soil — but beneath the surface, 
 (b) Sound statesmanship, in taking up the Irish Problem at its 
 present all but insoluble stage would, as a first step towards solu- 
 tion — would, out of the Imperial Treasury ( not from Irish taxation I) 
 compensate to the full — as far as money compensation could — 
 those landowners whose rents have been reduced by your brigand- 
 commissioners. "Public faith" must be "cleared from the shameful 
 brand of public fraud" if prosperity is ever again to visit an island 
 whose troubles — of late years, at least — are solely the result of 
 presumption, ignorance, cowardice, and shameless profligacy in 
 those who stand forward as the special friends of humanity in 
 general, and of Ireland in particular. 
 
 But, it may be objected, there would be great discontent in 
 Ireland if this were done ; there would be disturbance — perhaps 
 bloodshed. To which I reply : Real statesmanship is not bound 
 to consider what the results of healthy measures following years of 
 sham-statesmanship would be. Bloodshed, outrage, crime of all 
 kinds might follow — they would, however, be the result not of the 
 sound, healthy statesmanship but of the sham statesmanship. 3 
 
 1 This must be insisted upon. The Celt dislikes Agriculture. He has no 
 aptitude for it. Are you aware that he never could be induced to cultivatey&u: 
 which alone — in good seasons — could yield him adequate returns ? What do 
 you think now, good sir, of all your Land Acts ? 
 
 2 In thinking on such facts, of which I have had years and years of experi- 
 ence, I often ask myself, on reading such propo-als as yours have been, " Do 
 we live in Bedlam ? " 
 
 3 I may ask in passing : Have you considered what the results, in respect of 
 outrage, will be, should your "proposals" be rejected by Parliament and the 
 
The Right Man — and the Solution. 109 
 
 '• But Parliament would not sanction such a measure." x Did I 
 say it would? Is not this an ideal sketch? Would such a 
 statesman as I have imagined obtain a score of votes in any 
 constituency in England ? Have I not said that saxon England 
 would not allow such a man to see the light of public life — not to 
 speak of public official legislative life— for one day? And suppose 
 him in your position, have I implied that Parliament would support 
 him in his activity ? Have I not implied — is it not one of the 
 main assertions in this letter — that the Parliament which you 
 have given us is incapable of settling this or any other public 
 question ? Is not the whole head sick, the whole heart faint ? Do 
 your constituencies know the Irish or any other question of public 
 importance? Again, has the herd of candidates who solicited 
 their vote— their newly-thrust-upon-them " right" any opinion — 
 any knowledge — in regard to the Irish or any other question ? 
 What was the burden of their howls before the crowds of " the 
 enfranchised " ? " Down with wicked Tories ! rack-renting land- 
 lords ! grinding capitalists ! Allotments for the agricultural 
 labourer. 1 ' 2 And what do the candidates that were chosen as 
 delegates know about it? Do you think I could for a moment 
 expect that sound statesmanship would be approved of by such 
 a body — representing such a constituency? 
 
 No: " Parliament would not sanction such a measure." And 
 yet what I have stated is all that Parliament, that you, that any- 
 body else, can do. Then, when you have done what I have said — 
 when you have established order (were the process to cost a 
 hundred thousand lives), 3 when you have for ever given up your 
 mad project of tampering with natural arrangements — of rooting 
 the peasant in the soil, and when you have, as far as in you lies, 
 
 country ? Outrage for the present has ceased. Are you aware that Outrage, having 
 hitherto been always successful in shaping your "great measures," but waits 
 to see what the parliamentary fate of your present " measures " will be ? But 
 is not that a strange predicament which the "Imperial" Parliament has got 
 itself into ? It legislates under terror of the ferocious and cowardly moonlighter 
 ■ — his mask on, and his finger playing with the trigger of his revolver. 
 
 1 There it is ! Of course Parliament wouldn't sanction such a measure ! 
 
 - Every cry (observe) breathing the predatory spirit ! Not a vestige of 
 political perception left ! 
 
 :: The process would cost, in presence of a womthy England, very few. if any 
 lives ! 
 
i io The Right Man — and the Solution. 
 
 indemnified the landowners for the losses which you have wantonly 
 inflicted on them, then you may claim Justice as your guide. Were 
 you my ideal statesman you would have to do something else — 
 you would have to wait. But having done the right thing, you 
 would be able then to follow the policy implied in the petulant 
 question of the Whig statesman, " Can't you let things alone?" 
 
 This, however, is not the era of well-weighed activity and judicious 
 repose. This is the era of vulgar sensationalism in politics ; this 
 is the era in which the clamour is heard that " something must 
 be done " — and invariably we then proceed to do the wrong 
 thing — the wrong thing — which necessarily involves loss and 
 suffering to millions. This is the era of " heroic " legislation- 
 This is the era of the extinction of Parliament save as a pre- 
 datory organization — this is the era of one man government. 
 Finally, this is the era in which the destinies of the British Empire 
 have been placed in the hands of the bitterest foes of the British 
 Empire. A?id therefore, this is the era in which the Irish problem 
 passes into the region of things insoluble. 
 
 What we — the English people — have before us, and how we 
 are to manage with a Parliamentary machine that won't go, or 
 go only for purposes of mischief, to our ruin and destruction as 
 a nation and as individuals — these are questions which need not 
 be discussed at preseiit. I merely note that we have arrived at 
 that pass at which we must embrace Revolution if we would 
 stave off Dismemberment. 
 
 You are now, sir, so busily engaged on your great measures 
 that you will in all probability fail to find time to read these 
 remarks. Well, industrious, absorbed though you are, your 
 proposals will one and all fail to settle the Irish Difficulty. And 
 by how much they fail to settle the Irish Difficulty, by so much 
 will they hasten the downfall of the British Empire. 
 I have the honour to be, 
 Sir, 
 Your obedient servant, 
 
 W. HART WESTCOMBE. 
 
 April, 1 88 5. 
 
 P.S. — When I hear your proposals, I may have something more 
 to say. W. H. W. 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 Note A. 
 
 Here are Worsaae's own words. After a masterly handling of facts — he 
 concludes {Minder, p. 435) : — 
 
 Det ersaaledes ved de meest forskjelligartede Kjendsgjerninger fuldstaendig 
 beviist, at Normaendene i Irland i mere, end tre Aarhundreder levede med egne 
 Sseder og Skikke og under egne Bisper og Konger i Irlands vigtigste Byer, 
 Sora de tildeels beherskede lige til den engelske Erobring (1170), at de vare de 
 Forste, som i Irland slog Mynt og drev nogen stonr Handel og Safari, og at 
 endelig deres Efterkommere endog i stort Antal vedbleve at holdesig i Landet, 
 selv efterat dette forlsengst var erobret af Englaenderne. Ingen Upartisk vil 
 derfornu kunne naegte, at Ostmaendenes Bosaettelser i Irland, som begynte med 
 hyppig at odelcegge Kirker og Klostre, endte med i det Vaesentlige at blive 
 sserdeles heldbringende for Landet, idet de ved Handel og Sofart af en tidligere 
 ikke kjent Udstrsekning forst ret aabnede det afsondrede Irland for livlige. 
 Forhindelser med det ovrige Europa saavelsom med den cler stadig frem- 
 skridende Dannelse. De af Ostmsendene meest besatte irske Byer, som ogsaa 
 senere ere vedblevne at vasre Hovedoplagstederne for fremmede Varer og 
 folgelig tillige Midtpunkterne for Samquemmet med fremmede Lande, kunne 
 med Foie siges noget naer at skylde Ostmaendene det egentlige Grundlag for 
 deres nuvaerende Storrelse, Velstand og Magt. 
 
 Note B. 
 
 "Intelligence from Stornoway states that a shooting-lodge in course of 
 erection at Drovnish Bay, island of Lewis, had been totally destroyed by 
 crofters. The building, which was intended for the use of the tenant of the 
 Scalisero shootings, was ready to be roofed. The contractor had occasion 
 to go to Stornoway last week, and on his return he found the house razed 
 to the ground and the materials scattered and rendered useless, all the 
 woodwork being smashed. The crofters' interests were not being prejudiced 
 by the erection of the buildings." 
 
 Note C. 
 
 Of course it is not the business of journalists to go back to first principles. — 
 By the way, I must express my admiration of the articles which have appeared 
 of late in the leading London journals {Times, Standard, Daily Telegraph, 
 Saturday Review, &c), on the Irish Question. Your own thurifer, the 
 Spectator, has given you excellent advice ; and you could not do better than 
 follow the doctrines consistently maintained by the St. James's Gazette, pro- 
 vided you could devise some means whereby the precious balms of the Editor 
 of that journal would be prevented from breaking your head. 
 
Richard Clay & Sons, 
 
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