Liberal majority to Parliament so powerful as to make the Liberal policy of conciliation and justice to Ireland independent of the Irish vote. He may once more repudiate Irish assistance if he finds he can do without it. Mr. Gladstone, strong in the pride of his own unbroken consistency, is fond of speaking of the two Mr. Pitts (not including Lord Chatham) and the two Mr. Goldwin Smiths. There are, at least, half-a-dozen Mr. Gladstones, and there may be a seventh. But if there is a seventh, who shall guarantee us against an eighth? The retractation may be followed by a re-retractation. Who shall bind Proteus? It may be doubted, however, whether even Mr. Gladstone's ingenuity in providing himself with loopholes of retreat, in another sense than the innocent one which the poet meant, will enable him to slip the knots with which he has bound himself to Mr. Parnell, and through Mr. Parnell to those IrishAmerican conspirators who accept his scheme of Home Rule simply as offering the thin end of the wedge, which they may drive up to the head, for the disruption of the United Kingdom. We fear that they hold him fast, and that they will drag him further; that, like another chief of dear old Scotland,' he has waded so far in his doubtful enterprise that he will find that returning is less easy than going on. Indeed, Mr. Gladstone has more than once intimated that the alternative of his scheme is not a smaller measure but a larger one, that it is not local self-government in the sense of Lord Hartington and Lord Salisbury, nor Home Rule in Mr. Chamberlain's sense, but repeal out-andout. He seems to imply that, rather than accept less, he would insist on more. What Mr. Gladstone describes as the alternative of his scheme would, we believe, be simply the first of its consequences, to be followed by the total separation of the two countries, the design of which, as a matter of Parliamentary accommodation, Mr. Parnell has suspended, but which there is no reason to think that he has abandoned, or will be allowed by his allies to abandon.

We are not surprised that Lord Hartington should be reluctant to admit that the Liberal party as it has existed since its re-constitution after the Reform Act of 1832 has disappeared. He hopes against hope that it may be restored to its old integrity and efficiency; and he is unwilling to shut the door against any possible chance of this consummation. Lord Hartington states that on the greater number of questions he is still in agreement with many of his old colleagues. If it may be permitted to invert the statement,

and to say that on the greater number of questions many of his old colleagues in office are still in agreement with him, we should be prepared not only to accept it, but to enlarge it, and to include the Home Rule question also. The converts to Mr. Gladstone's scheme of Home Rule are converts to it as Mr. Gladstone's scheme, and not as a scheme of Home Rule. If he were to abandon or modify his views, they would abandon or modify their views. If he were to retire from political life, as during the last twenty years and more he has at intervals talked of doing, the great majority of Gladstonians with various excuses, according to their several natures, would revert to the convictions and traditions of Liberalism, as they were understood until after the General Election of 1885. But we can scarcely hope for such a return on Mr. Gladstone's part to a sounder mind, and it is impossible for him to stand still. If he does not go back he must advance. Not only does his own temperament marshal him the way that he must go, but the associates by whom he is surrounded-the Laboucheres, Conybeares, and Parnells-urge him forward and close every path upon him other than that in which they are resolved that he shall walk. Mr. Gladstone has committed himself in express words, or by implication, to doctrines absolutely incompatible with the supremacy of the law and with the faithful observance of contracts, with the rights of property and with freedom of personal action, with the title of the Parliamentary majority to rule, and with the duty of the Parliamentary minority to obey. Gladstonism, which on the one side has become Parnellism, is on the other side fast converting itself into Laboucherism. It is Mr. Gladstone's habit to formulate a principle for every contingency, and the repudiation of contracts, the right of violent numbers to set at nought the law and to intimidate men from doing what they have a legal right to do, and into doing what they have a legal right not to do, have been erected by him into a sort of moral code, a kind of higher law to be enforced by illegal associations against Parliamentary statutes and the decisions of courts of justice. Mr. Gladstone is a convert to the principles of terrorism. It is impossible to confine to Ireland the application of doctrines framed, perhaps, for exclusive use there. Mr. Gladstone, during his visit to Wales, by significant silence, still more than by express words, showed that he has become aware of this. He had no word to say in rebuke of the Welsh tithe outrages. How could he after justifying in Ireland the only available remedy

of a poor and disheartened people against the tyranny of those who desire to pursue peaceably their own trades, and to retain or regain possession of what he has left to them of their own property? He did not explain to the Welsh farmers that in refusing to pay tithes, of which the amount was deducted from their rent, they were making that deduction over again. How could he after sanctioning as a legitimate combination, analogous to a strike in England, the concerted refusal of Irish tenants to pay to their landlords the full rent due to them, by contract or under judicial decision, for the past use of their lands? The action of the Irish and Welsh farmers may be excused by ignorance and passion; Mr. Gladstone's encouragement and silence are offences deliberately committed against the light, and deserve a far severer condemnation. The saying of the French moralist that a bad maxim is more pernicious than a bad action, inasmuch as a bad action is single, and may terminate in itself, while a bad maxim may be, and almost certainly will be, the parent of innumerable bad actions, measures the moral difference between Mr. Gladstone and the ignorant peasants whose lawlessness he justifies and abets.

We cannot hold, therefore, that the Irish Home Rule question alone severs the new Liberalists, to borrow a word from the political nomenclature of Germany, who follow Mr. Gladstone, from the old Liberals, Whig and Radical, who follow Lord Hartington, Mr. Chamberlain, and Mr. Bright. Until the doctrines we have exposed, and the tactics of Parliamentary obstruction called in to their aid, are disavowed and abandoned, there can be no recombination of the divided sections of what was once the Liberal party. The union of Liberals and Conservatives, necessary for the maintenance of the integrity of the United Kingdom, is still more necessary for the maintenance of the authority of the law and of Parliament. In his speech at Blackburn Lord Hartington referred to Mr. Chamberlain's suggestion of a national party of the future which should stand aloof from the principles of a bigoted and reactionary Toryism on the one hand, and from the revolutionary and anarchic theories of certain sections of the Liberal party on the other, and which, while maintaining law and order and firm government in every part of the United Kingdom, should earnestly apply itself to the redress of grievances and the work of social reform. Such a party, though Lord Hartington does not yet know whether to regard it as the shadow of a

dream or as foreshadowing a reality, will be something more than a Unionist party. The maintenance of the Parliamentary Union is simply the occasion of its existence. But even now, without waiting for the formation of such a party, duties as urgent as the defence of the United Kingdom from disruption, and yet more vital, summon all to whom the name and wellbeing of England are dear. Inconvenient to England and disastrous to Ireland as the separation of the two countries would be, Ireland is not necessary to the safety and greatness of England. Its loss would not be fatal to us. But the adoption into legislation, if legislation is compatible with systematised disobedience to the law, of the principles which Mr. Gladstone now avows, is absolutely irreconcileable with orderly social existence. The mere statement of them, the supposition. that they admit of defence or argument, is in itself in some sense a graver danger than any loss of territory. The combination of parties brought together in the first instance to defend the Parliamentary Union from open attack finds that it has a yet more momentous task to discharge. The external disintegration of the Empire, calamitous though it would be, is a less evil than the internal disintegration of society. The great Unionist party must become the great National party-a party comprising Whigs, Radicals of the old school, and Conservatives. Between the furthest of these extremes, the distance is less than that which divides any of them from the Gladstone-Parnell-Labouchere party. Between the Radicalism of Mr. Bright or even of Mr. Chamberlain, sobered and modified as it probably has been by the experience of the past eighteen months, and the Conservatism of Lord Salisbury, enlarged as it has been by a similar experience, there is no difference on urgent topics which does not admit of rational accommodation. The questions of the disestablishment of the Church and of what Mr. Chamberlain calls free education do not separate him from Lord Salisbury more than they separated him from Mr. Gladstone and the majority of his colleagues in Mr. Gladstone's second Administration. With a fair allowance of open questions, there need be no difficulty in the way of the inclusion of the statesmen we have named together with the Duke of Argyll, Lord Derby, Lord Selborne, Sir Henry James, Lord Northbrook, and Mr. Courtney-some or other of them in the same Ministry. The authorised Midlothian programme contained nothing which a rational Conservatism would not be ready to accept, which a rational

Conservatism has not already accepted. But these are early days for Cabinet-making. The new party must be formed before it takes shape in an administration. The dominating fact of the present position of affairs is that, to use Mr. Chamberlain's words, the cleavage in the ranks of the 'Liberal party has become complete and irretrievable.' We ourselves foresaw and foretold in an article published two years ago, and entitled 'The Parting of the Waters,' that a schism was impending and inevitable between those politicians who were ready to ally themselves with a revolutionary faction and those statesmen who adhere to the old traditional principles of the Whig party.

I

This complete and irretrievable cleavage (if such it be) is, it is curious to reflect, the work of the man to whom the Liberal party had entrusted its interests and existence, and who two years ago solemnly declared that he remained in public life simply to guard it from injury. On June 29, 1885, Mr. Gladstone wrote to the Chairman of his Committee that he had not expected to ask re-election from his Midlothian constituents. But he went on to say: ' am not at this moment released from my duties to the 'party which has trusted me, and the first of these duties is to use my strongest and most sedulous efforts to pre'vent anything that may mar the unity and efficiency of 'that great instrument which, under Providence, has chiefly and almost wholly made our history for the last fifty , * years. That great instrument has broken in Mr. Gladstone's hands, because he attempted to use it for a purpose for which it was never framed, and for which it was not suited. He has remained in public life not to prevent anything which might mar the unity and efficiency of the Liberal party, but absolutely to destroy its unity and to paralyse its efficiency, and indeed to put it out of existence altogether. The measure of the responsibility which he felt for its maintenance as the Providential instrument for the national well-being measures the responsibility which will attach to him for its destruction. It is given to few men to destroy great historic works. Mr. Gladstone is the Herostratus of politics. He is an architect of ruin.' Mr. Gladstone will scarcely pretend even now that in 1885 he held that Home Rule, in Mr. Parnell's sense, suggested itself to him as the best means of maintaining the unity and efficiency of the Liberal party. Indeed, it stands on

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* Annual Register for 1885, p. 134.