The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1887-10-22 00:00:00

MR. COURTNEY ON IRISH AFFAIRS.

Mr. Leonard Courtney addressed a meeting of his
constituents at Torpoint on Saturday evening. He
was now, and always had been, he said, in favour of
a development of local self-government in Ireland,
subject to the supremacy of the control of the Impe-
rial Parliament. But local self-government and
Home Rule, as he understood them, were totally
different things. By Home Rule he understood the
establishment of a Parliament for Ireland in Ire-
land. To that he had always been opposed. If
they set up a Parliament in Ireland, with an execu-
tive responsible to that Parliament, it must be prac-
tically independent of the Legislature of Great
Britain. That was an essential attribute of Home
Rule. On the other hand, if they set up free town
councils, boards of guardians, and county government
boards, the whole force exercisable through the
Island could be directed so as to control and keep in
its proper sphere the action of each local body, and
the supremacy of the Imperial Parliament would be
maintained unchecked. There would then be a pro-
spect of developing local freedom, and satisfying the
legitimate demands of localities for the control of
their own affairs without imperilling the Imperial
interest they desired to uphold. The weakness of
the present system was that the Irish Secretary was
responsible to Parliament for too many departments,
and that the heads of departments were practically
too independent of his coatrol. Something might
well be done to secure a more real representation of
the permanent department in:the House of Commons,
and so bring Parliament more into touch with the
local administration of Ireland. (Hear.) One way
of doing this would be to tally each branch of
the Irish Administration with its corresponding
branches in England—just as the Post Office, Customs
and Excise were at present. Another would be to
create two or three Irish secretaries, making one re-
sponsible to the House, say, for local government and
fisheries, another for law and police, and a third for
the administration of the Land Acts. (A Voice:
"Who's to pay all the salaries 1") A very proper
question. The money could be provided very easily
by cutting the present Irish Secretary's salary in two,
and getting rid of the Lord Lieutenant and things of
that kind. On a vote of confidence being proposed,
Mr. Down the president of the local Liberal Associa•
tion, moved an amendment in favour of Home Rule
The voting was close, but the chairman declared the
original resolution carried.

MR. GLADSTONE ON IRISH HTSTORY.
Mr. Bryce, M.P., has edited a "Handbook of Home
Rule," just published, to which the most noticeable
contributions are by Earl Spencer and Mr. Gladstone.
The ex-Premier entitles his article " Lessons of Irish
History in the Eighteenth Century." Ireland, says
Mr. Gladstone, /or more than 700 years has been part
of the British territory, and has been, with slight
exceptions, held by English arms, or governed in the
last resort from this side the water. Since Ireland
threatens to absorb into herself our parliamentary life
there is a greatly enhanced necessity for becoming
acquainted with the true state of the account between
the islands that make up the United Kingdom, and
with the likelihoods of the futtne in Ireland, so far
as they are to be gathered from her past history.
That history, until the eighteenth century begins,
has a dismal simplicity about.] it. Murder, perse-
cution, confiscation too truly describe its general
strain; and policy is, on the whole, subordinated
to violence as the standing instrument of Govern-
ment. But after, say, the reign of William 111. the
element of representation begins to assort itself.
Simplicity is by degrees exchanged for complexity;
the play of human motives, singularly diversified,
now becomes visible in the currents 01 a real public
life. It has long been Mr. Gladstone's habit to
recommend young political students to carefully study
the characters and events of the American Indepen-
dence. He now adds a recommendation to examine
and ponder the lessons of Irish history during the
eighteenth century. The mainspring of public life
had from a venerable antiquity lain de jure within
Ireland herself. The heaviest fetter upon this life
was the Law of Poynings ; the most ingenious device
upon record for ham- stringing legislative independence
But the Law of Poynings was an Irish law. Its opera-
tion effectually aided on the civil side those ruder caases
under the action of which Ireland had lain for four
centuries usually passive and bleeding at every pore. The
main factors of her destiny worked in practice from
this side of the water. Of the three great nostrums
so liberally applied by England, extirption and per-
secution had entirely failed, but confiscation had done
Its work. The great Protestant landlordism of
Ireland had been strongly and effectually built up.
But, like other human contrivances, while it held
Ireland fast, it had alto undesigned results. The
repressed princirle of national life, the struggles
of which had theretofore been extinguished in blood,
slowly sprung up anew in a form which, though
extremely narrow and extravagantly imperfect,
was armed with constitutional guarantees; and,
the regimen of violence once displaced, these
guarantees were sure to operate. What had been
transacted in England under Plantaganets and
Stuarts was to a large extent, transacted anew
by the Parliament of Ireland in the eighteenth
century. That Parliament was indeed corrupt, servile,
selfish, cruel. It was, however, alive and national.
Even absenteeism, though it enfeebled and distracted,
did not annihilate nationality. The Irish Legislature
was, moreover, compressed and thwarted by a
foreign Executive; but even to this tremendous
agent the vital principle was too strong eventually
to succumb. Mr. Lecky well observes that the
Irish case supplied " one of the most striking
examples upon record " of an unconquerable efficacy
in even the most defective Parliament. Why do
we find that efficacy in a Parliament of which
the constitution and the environment were alike
intolerable? Because that Parliament found itself
faced by a British influence which was entirely
anti-national, and was thus constrained to seek for
strength in the principle of nationality. Tracing
the growth of this 'principle, Mr. Gladstone points
out how Englishmen had been appointed to eccle-
siastical and other offices in Ireland. The Chief
Secretary was, as a rule, an Englishmlid.— On the oc-
casion when Lord Castlereagh was, by way of excep-
tion, admitted to that office, an apology was found for
it in his entire devotion to English policy and pur-
poses. "His appointment," says Lord Cornwallis,
"gives me great satisfaction, as he is so very unl he
an Irishman ! " The progress brought about, add 4
Mr. Gladstone, in the Irish Parliament is among the
Most remarkable on record, because it was effected
against the joint-resistance of a hostile executive and
of an intolerable constitution. He is not aware of a
single case in which a measure on behalf of freedom
was proposed by British agency and rejected by the

Irish Parliament. On the other hand, there is a
long list of bhe achievements of that Parliament due
to a courage and perseverance which faced and
overcame a persistent English opposition. All this
it did without the manifestation either within
the walls or among the Roman Catholic popula-
tion of any disposition to weaken tho ties which
bound Ireland to the Empire. Bringing down his
sketch of the progress made to the recall of Lord
Fitzwilliam from the position of Viceroy, Mr. Glad-
stone concludes his article by saying: "Here there
opened a new and disastrous drama of disgrace to
England and misery to Ireland. This is the point at
which we may best learn the greatest lesson taught by
the history of Ireland in the eighteenth century. It
is this, that awful as is the force of bigotry, hidden
under the mask of religion, but fighting for plunder
and power, with all the advantages of possession, of
prescription, and of extraneous support, there is a
David that can kill this Goliath. That conquering
force lies in the principle of nationality. It was the
growing sense of nationality that prompted the
Irish Parliament to develope its earlier struggles for
privilege on the narrow ground into a genuine contest
for freedom, civil and religious, on a ground as broad
as Ireland—nay, of humanity at large. If there be
such things as contradictions in the world of politics,
they are to be found in nationality on the one side
and bigotry of all kinds on the other, but especially
religious bigotry, which is of all the most baneful.
Whatever is given to the first of these two is lost to
the second. I speak of a reasonable and reasoning,
not of a blind and headstrong nationality; of a
nationality which has regard to circumstances and to
tradition, and which only requires that all relations of
incorporation or of independence shall be adjubted to
them according to the laws of nature's own enact ment.
Such a nationality was the growth of the last century
in Ireland . . . Within the last twelve months we
have seen, in the streets of Belfast, the painful proof
that the work of Bereaford and Castlereagh has been
found capable for the moment of revival. To aggra-
vate or sustain Irish disunion religious bigotry has
been again evoked in Ireland. If the curse be an old
one, there is also an old cure recorded in the pharina.
copceia of history; and if the abstract force of policy
and prudence are insufficient for the work, we may
yet find that the evil spirit will be effectually laid by
the gentle influence of a living and working Irish
nationality. Quod faxit .Deus."

LORD BRABOURNE ON FAIR TRADE,
An influential gathering in support of the Fair
Trade movement was held on Saturday afternoon at
Canterbury, under the presidency of Mr. Alured
Denne (Underhill, Hythe). Lord Brabourne wrote
regretting his inabitity to be present. The following
is a portion of his lordship's letter: I think we have
arrived at a seriouu crisis. The natural price of
any article is the cost of its production, plus suf-
ficient profit to someone to induce him to under-
take to produce it; but in the case of the
British farmer, the price of his produce is not deter-
mined in this natural manner, but is regulated by the
figure at which the foreign produce can bring them
the same things into the market, having produced
them under different and favourable conditions. The
question is rapidly narrowing itself into this:
Whether the land of Great Britain is to remain under
cultivation or not. Farmers are converting their
arable land into pasture to a great extent, and this
means, of course, the diminution of employment, and
the driving of the agricultural population into the towns,
to their gradual physical deterioration and ultimately
to the great loss of the nation. lam as much as
ever for cheap food for the people—but you may buy
gold too dear. Cheapness is a relative term, and you do
not benefit a man much if, whilst with one hand you
offer him cheap food, with the other you take out of
his pocket the money with which he could have paid
for it. The one lesson, however, which we all have
to learn, is that we depend on each other—those who
try to persuade the public that agricultural distress is
all a question of rent lose sight of this truth. A reso-
lution pledging the meeting to support the East Kent
branch of the National Fair Trade League, and to use
every endeavour to extend its influence las carried
with only one dissentient.