respect for a once great and sorely-humiliated party leads us to hope that the duty of writing this chapter will fall to less prejudiced and less indiscreet hands than those of Mr. Cobden's biographer. Confessions relating to secret passages of Whig history, such as those which are blurted out in these volumes concerning Mr. Cobden, might create a stir, it is true; but they would scarcely add to the respect which the public may perhaps yet retain for some well-known names in our political history.

Of Mr. Bright we are allowed to know less than of his old ally. We must still go to his speeches for a guide to his opinions, and how great a disadvantage that is, if we desire, as we needs must do, to get a true insight into these opinions, may be judged from the case of Mr. Cobden. Between a Tribune on the platform and a Tribune off it, there is all the difference in the world. If we were taken into Mr. Bright's confidence, we might find him with as poor an opinion of the great public as that which was entertained by Mr. Cobden; but Mr. Bright, being a man of caution, evidently declined to trust his biographer with any of his letters. of his letters. His journal he probably burnt immediately on discovering the use which had been made of Mr. Cobden's. Consequently the unfortunate biographer can only present us with a réchauffé of Mr. Bright's speeches, interspersed with occasional descriptions of the speaker's style. But Mr. G. B. Smith is not so melodramatic as Mr. Morley, and therefore, instead of giving his readers thrilling and 'graphic' pieces of description, he goes to work in this way :

'Nothing could be more effective than the calm, measured sarcasms on Mr. Roebuck in the first part of the speech, which dropped from Mr. Bright's lips slowly, and as if they were undergoing a process of distillation into a strength far above proof. Then he grew impassioned, and next he became genuinely pathetic,' &c. &c.

Twenty volumes filled with stuff of this kind would tell the world nothing that it did not know before; and it is even conceivable that Mr. Bright would have preferred the voice of genuine and honest criticism to the tedious accents of coarse and abject flattery. He is, for the present, his best interpreter, and now that he sees what happens to a man when he comes to have his life written by another, he will probably make up his mind that so far as he can so order it, he will be his own biographer. The world will lose, but Mr. Bright will gain. We shall not, it is to be hoped, be asked to sit in judgment on Mr. Bright's management of his own affairs-a matter with which, pace Mr. Morley, the public has nothing whatever to Vol. 153.-No. 306.

2 Q

do.

582 The Manchester School: Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright.

do. Mr. Cobden has suffered, as we have seen, no slight injury in this respect. Even the working classes, whose goodwill he was anxious to retain, may well feel a doubt about his affection for them, when they glance over the narrative which has been thrust under their eyes. Cobden frequently told them that Parliament could, after all, do very little for them, and that their best course was to depend upon themselves. Let each man save twenty pounds, and he would find that he could do well enough without Parliament. This is very good advice, but when the intelligent working-man lights upon the following passage in one of Mr. Cobden's letters he will be puzzled to decide how far his benefactor was in earnest :-'I am employing an old man nearly seventy, and his son about twenty-two, and his nephew about nineteen, at digging and removing some fences. I pay the two former nine shillings a week, and the last eight shillings, and I am giving a shilling a week more than anybody else is paying.' How did Mr. Cobden suppose that either of these labourers could save the stipulated twenty pounds which alone was requisite to make a man of him? Why did he take advantage of a market rate of labour which according to his own principles was grossly unjust? Most men would have done the same, no doubt, but Mr. Cobden was one of the prophets who went about denouncing landlords, and predicting all sorts of evil because they had ground down the faces of the poor. And yet when we are allowed to catch a glimpse of him in his capacity as a landlord, we find him much the same as all the rest-there is just a penny a day difference between him and the haughty patrician' who starves the workers that he may save his rent. Facts of this kind are not calculated to keep a working-man's idol on the loftiest of pedestals, and, as we have shown, they never would have been disclosed to the public but for the pious care of the biographer. Let Mr. Bright apply the lesson seriously to heart.

ᎪᎡᎢ .

ART. VIII.-1. Report of the Bessborough Commission to Parliament. Dublin, 1881.

2. Speeches of the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, M.P., on the Irish Land Acts, 1870 and 1881.

3. Debates in Parliament on Irish Affairs. 1882.

THE

HE most sanguine and hopeful of Mr. Gladstone's supporters must now find it difficult to look upon Ireland without a feeling of consternation. Every principle which has hitherto been held sacred by public men in England, and defended by constitutional parties in all countries, has been flung to the winds. We have legalized confiscation, consecrated sacrilege, condoned high treason; we have destroyed churches, we have shaken property to its foundation'*-and as the result of these tremendous sacrifices and renunciations, we have a people more hostile to our rule than they were before, a country more lawless and more threatening; and we have the Statesman who asked for and obtained unlimited power to deal with Ireland in his own way, under the solemn pledge of giving peace and tranquillity to that unhappy country, now hinting to us that we must yield more than ever-that, until we give Home Rule, all former concessions will be reckoned not worth a pin's fee. Such is the account which Mr. Gladstone has to give of his stewardship. He has been left with his hands absolutely free to break down old laws or to make new ones, to take property from one man and give it to another, to plunge a large classas he has done-into the depths of poverty and misery, without lightening the burden on any other class; and now he is obliged to come forward and tell us with bated breath, that 'a great and terrible struggle' is going on, and that if we are not actually in imminent danger of being overcome, 'we have no strength to spare,' 'we have nothing to throw away.'† These are the facts before the people, and so manifest are they to the whole world, that the most obsequious partisans of the Government have not the hardihood to question them. The Ministerial papers are no more able than Ministers themselves to dispute the evidence which each day renders only too irresistible. Murders,' says one of these journals, have become more numerous, assaults upon unpopular persons are more savage and deliberate, the bands of Captain Moonlight have acquired strength and confidence.' Another admits the facts, but com

* These words were used by Mr. Disraeli in the House of Commons on the 27th of February, 1871.

+ Speech in the House of Commons, February 27th, 1882.

Daily News,' March 29th, 1882.

placently assures us that 'all English statesmen have made blunders about Ireland,' and it adds, by way of further encouragement, the promise that' we are not at the end of them.'* A third informs its readers that the news from Ireland is still very bad,' and that shrewd observers declare 'large classes of Irishmen have caught the revolutionary fever.' We cite this testimony, not because it is by any means complete, but because it comes from representatives of the most bigoted advocates of Mr. Gladstone and his Irish policy. It is as clear as the sun that, if indeed we are to 'pacify Ireland,' the work has, sooner or later, to be begun all over again.

What the people of England will think and do when they fully realize this truth, at present only dimly suspected by a small class, may be divined by all who have seen them pass through one of those outbreaks to which they are occasionally goaded by the discovery that they have been duped and misled. They will awake to the knowledge that the mistakes into which they have been driven are of no light or ordinary character. To say that the work has to be done all over again is only to tell a small part of the truth. It can never be done now as it might have been if Mr. Gladstone had made a wise, or even a prudent, use of his opportunities. Invaluable time has been lost, class hatreds have been embittered, public feeling on both sides the Channel has been greatly excited; and, by a series of gigantic blunders, a condition of affairs has been produced, with which any statesman and any party might well despair of dealing in such a way as to produce peace in Ireland, and to impart a sense of security to the nation at large. Expectations have been aroused in the minds of the Irish people to which no statesman could attempt to give effect, and yet which cannot safely be left altogether unsatisfied. The position from which Mr. Gladstone started in 1869 cannot be brought back again. No one whose lot it may be to take up the work which the present Prime Minister will inevitably have to relinquish, with the stamp of failure and disaster upon it, can possibly command the innumerable advantages which have fallen to his lot. The Irish people were disposed to trust him, and the rest of the nation regarded him with a confidence which nothing in his past life had warranted, and which his public acts or utterances of the last dozen years have been expressly calculated to destroy. Perhaps it is rarely safe for any nation to assume that a statesman, no matter how 'supremely gifted' he may be with eloquence, can do no wrong-that all his measures will be wise

*Pall Mall Gazette,' March 29th, 1882.

† 'Spectator.'

and

and just, and that while he is in power it is only necessary to lie down and go to sleep. But if any such statesman there be, Mr. Gladstone is assuredly not the man, and the periods have been frequent when the English nation has seen that fact very clearly, and acted upon it. They saw it in 1874, although in the course of six years more they had temporarily forgotten the lessons which a disagreeable experience had taught them. Again two years have elapsed, and Mr. Gladstone is demonstrating, in a way which will never be forgotten, that although 'glorious eloquence' and 'magnificent speeches' may be forthcoming from him at any moment, yet for the solution of great national difficulties, and for the execution of any work which imperatively calls for the exercise of foresight and good judgment, he is fitted neither by disposition and training, nor by the peculiar bent of his genius. There is no practical man in all Europe to whose eyes it is not plainly visible that the new Irish policy is a complete and disastrous failure. Some of Mr. Gladstone's devotees ask for more time; but no matter how much more they obtained-even if they were to get till the 'crack of doom'-there would be no hope of turning this failure into a success. And that they perceive this, although shame keeps them from admitting it, is shown by their recent attempts to console the nation by assuring it that all English statesmen have made blunders about Ireland,' and that new legislation will be needed, though of what kind and to what end cannot be known till Mr. Gladstone has had leisure to sound the innermost recesses of his mind.

This is an operation which must necessarily occupy a long period, but so far as the Prime Minister has yet gone, he is apparently disposed to make Home Rule his next point of advance. When he is prepared to move on to it, he can already refer to three or four speeches-to two delivered this very Session-in which he will be able to assert that the germs of a Home Rule policy are to be found. Those speeches were probably delivered in order that he might afterwards triumphantly cite them as proofs that it was no sudden or ill-considered policy which he had to propose to the nation; although his declarations are so fenced about with 'ifs' and 'buts,' and the other endless conditions and qualifications which have been so useful to him on many previous occasions, that his meaning is not yet understood by the people. In fact, they thought that Mr. Gladstone had settled the Irish question, and it is quite true that we ought not to be asking now, 'What shall be done. with Ireland?' and asking the question with even greater anxiety than we had any occasion to feel before Mr. Gladstone intro

duced