How the Government of Ireland Bill was brought into the House of Commons on April 8th, amid circumstances of curiosity and excitement unparalleled since 1832; how, after debates of almost unprecedented length, it was defeated in June, by a majority of thirty; how the policy it embodied was brought before the country at the General Election, and failed to win approval--all this is too well known to need recapitulation here. But the causes of the disaster have not been well understood, for it is only now--now, when the smoke of the battle has cleared away from the field--that these causes have begun to stand revealed in their true proportions.
Besides some circumstances attending the production of the Bill, to which I shall refer presently, and which told heavily against it, there were three feelings which worked upon men's minds, disposing them to reject it.
The first of these was dislike and fear of the Irish Nationalist members. In the previous House of Commons this party had been uniformly and bitterly hostile to the Liberal Government. Measures intended for the good of Ireland, like the Land Act of 1881, had been ungraciously received, treated as concessions extorted, for which no thanks were due--inadequate concessions, which must be made the starting-point for fresh demands. Obstruction had been freely practised to defeat not only bills restraining the liberty of the subject in Ireland, but many other measures. Some few members of the Irish party had systematically sought to delay all English and Scotch legislation, and, in fact, to bring the work of Parliament to a dead stop. Much violent language had been used, even where the provocation was slight. The outbreaks of crime which had repeatedly occurred in Ireland had been, not, indeed, defended, but so often passed over in silence by Nationalist speakers, that English opinion was inclined to hold them practically responsible for disorders which, so it was thought, they had neither wished nor tried to prevent. (I am, of course, expressing no opinion as to the justice of this view, nor as to the excuses to be made for the Parliamentary tactics of the Irish party, but merely stating how their conduct struck many Englishmen.) There could be no doubt as to the hostility which they, still less as to that which their fellow-countrymen in the United States, had expressed toward England, for they had openly wished success to Russia while war seemed impending with her, and the so-called Mahdi of the Soudan was vociferously cheered at many a Nationalist meeting. At the Election of 1885 they had done their utmost to defeat Liberal candidates in every English and Scotch constituency where there existed a body of Irish voters, and had thrown some twenty seats or more into the hands of the Tories. Now, to many Englishmen, the proposal to create an Irish Parliament seemed nothing more or less than a proposal to hand over to these Irish members the government of Ireland, with all the opportunities thence arising to oppress the opposite party in Ireland and to worry England herself. It was all very well to urge that the tactics which the Nationalists had pursued when their object was to extort Home Rule would be dropped, because superfluous, when Home Rule had been granted; or to point out that an Irish Parliament would contain different men from those who had been sent to Westminster as Mr. Parnell's nominees. Neither of these arguments could overcome the suspicious antipathy which many Englishmen felt, nor dissolve the association in their minds between the Nationalist leaders and the forces of disorder. The Parnellites (thus they reasoned) are bad men; what they seek is therefore likely to be bad, and whether bad in itself or not, they will make a bad use of it. In such reasonings there was more of sentiment and prejudice than of reason, but sentiment and prejudice are proverbially harder than arguments to expel from minds where they have made a lodgment.