The Speeches (In Full) of the Rt. Hon. W. E. Gladstone, M.P., and William O'Brien, M.P., on Home Rule, Delivered in Parliament, Feb. 16 and 17, 1888.

I have before me a list of six people prosecuted, not for publishing reports of suppressed branches, but for selling them. Their names are: Macnamara, at Tralee; Mahony, Tralee; Molloy, Tralee; Brosman, Killarney; Green, at Killarney, also; and at Ennis, another Macnamara. (Irish honorable members: "This same man twice.") Two of the cases were dismissed, but four of them were sent to prison, – one for a month with hard labor, another for a month with hard labor, another for two months with hard labor, and another released on a promise not to do it again. Again this method of interfering with private freedom by arbitrary restriction, governed by no law, justified by no usage, devised by this spirit of Irish administration (cheers), and with respect to which I want to know how far this importation into the law and jurisprudence of the country is to be carried under the auspices of her Majesty's Government. Well, now, sir, I want to know from the Chancellor of the Exchequer, if he is to speak to-night, does he see nobleness in the prosecution of these men? ("Hear, hear.") Does he think it rational to prosecute these men? (Cheers.) Does he think it right to require of the vender of a newspaper that he should read its contents? Does he think it right to require that he should have formed his judgment of those contents, that he should have made up his mind whether the proceedings described in the newspaper were legal or illegal? and is that the responsibility which he thinks ought to be imposed on the vender of a newspaper under pain of being condemned to one month or two months' imprisonment? This administration of the Crimes Act, to which I must advisedly apply, until I am better instructed, the term "meanness," has yet, at any rate, had no defence offered in the course of this debate. (Cheers.) The remaining point of the administration of the law on which I will comment is of a different character. It is with respect to exclusive dealing.

It will be remembered that we, in our charges against the bill last year, did not say that it justified the proceedings of exclusive dealing. I do not believe the act does justify them; but this I am bound to say, that the interpretation of the act appears to be deliberately applied in a variety of instances for the punishment of simple exclusive dealing. The right honorable gentleman ought to know, if he does not, for I delivered the speech in his hearing, that when I spoke of the dismissal of curates by rectors and the deprivation of their daily bread, that men with wives and children were to be turned out upon the world, I was not, as the right honorable gentlemen charged me, comparing them with cases of conspiracy, but I was comparing them with cases of exclusive dealing, which, while they are practised freely both in Ireland by the opponents of the Nationalists, and in England by the party of the right honorable gentleman (Opposition cheers), unpunished by the law, I believe it is stretching and straining even the deplorable and shameful act of last session to make it include such cases. Now, sir, I wish to mention eight cases, but first I find I was quite wrong in saying that two of the cases for selling newspapers had been dismissed. They were not. The defendants were released upon promise, and the other four punished. I have now before me eight cases of exclusive dealing, two of which were dismissed, but in all of which the Government proceeded. In one of these cases a man was punished with a month's hard labor for refusing to shoe a horse for a boycotted person; another, for refusing to sell groceries to a boycotted person; a third, for refusing to shoe a horse; and a fourth, for declining to deal with emergency men. Those are all cases of exclusive dealing. They are not cases of conspiracy. In fact, these men have been punished for doing in Ireland that which would be perfectly lawful in England, and which, I believe, is perfectly lawful even in Ireland, under any fair interpretation of the act. Now, has the act succeeded, or it has failed? I do not think gentlemen will object to the proposition that its real object was to put down the National League and the Plan of Campaign.

Now I come again to the speech of the honorable member for East Cork (Mr. W. O'Brien) which, I venture to say, was a memorable speech. (Cheers). To him, as I have never had the privilege of private or personal communication, I will say publicly in this House that though, as he says, imprisonment under the condition he describes is a hard and severe thing, which drives the iron into the soul of a man and leaves him such that he hardly can be again what he was before, yet I trust that the right honorable gentleman has derived some consolation and encouragement to persevere, at least, in lawful and patriotic efforts for setting right the wrongs of his country. I hope he has derived it from the enthusiastic reception that he encountered in this House and out of it, and, I will add, for the credit of honorable gentlemen opposite, from the respectful, and, to some extent, I think, the symathetic silence with which they also accorded him a kindly reception. (Cheers.) The speech of the honorable member was of an importance which has not in the smallest degree been appreciated by the Chief Secretary. The right honorable gentleman has argued the case in his old manner; and whereas the honorable gentleman charged him with having said that he pleaded ill-health against the prison dress, what appears is that the Chief Secretary says that the honorable member had sheltered himself by ill-health against the demand to wear prison dress. For that statement of the right honorable gentleman, as amended and admitted, there is not a shadow of foundation. (Irish cheers.) That you cannot contradict, although you have plenty of myrmidons, and, perhaps, some minions. You cannot show that either by word or act, the honorable member entered this ignominious plea. Why has the right honorable gentleman passed by in silence another personal statement of the honorable member, which I tell him he had no right to pass by, and with respect to which I will now put it to him and the House, that after he has had an opportunity of making Lord Salisbury's defence, he has utterly failed to tender any defence at all? (Cheers.)

Mr. Balfour. He did not require any.

Mr. Gladstone. That is just the matter I am going to argue, and we will see how it stands. The statement of the member for Cork was to this effect, that Lord Salisbury in one of his speeches, after some jocose references which exhibit the tase of the Prime Minister (Opposition cheers), and which are a great deal too common in speeches proceeding from such quarters, held up to British indignation the illegality of the conduct of the member for East Cork, and stated that it had led to disturbances, to attacks upon persons which even placed life in danger, and to gross outrages. In reply, the honorable gentleman stated that his intervention at Mitchelstown produced no act of violence whatever, but on the contrary averted it. The Chief Secretary has not been able to controvert that statement. (Cheers.) Not being able to controvert it, he has passed it by. He has neither the courage to prosecute, nor the generosity to withdraw. (Cheers.) Lord Salisbury made an allegation of a gross and grievous character, which his nephew in this House cannot say a word in support of.

Now, however, he says that that allegation of Lord Salisbury, injurious as it is, and remaining without a shadow of defence, needs no apology. (Cheers.) I hold that until Lord Salisbury can show that he was justified in the broad and most important statement that he made, a personal apology from him is due to the member for East Cork. (Opposition cheers.) This is a personal matter, but it is no slight thing that charges of this kind should be made by the Prime Minister, and that then, forsooth, we should have a shuffling and a shrinking from any attempt to deal with them. With regard to the act for which the member for East Cork was put in prison, the honorable gentleman, has pointed out the attendant circumstances and the consequences of his act; but the right honorable gentleman instead of admitting the virtue of those pleas, generalized his charge, and said it was the habitual and settled practice of the Irish members to do these things. Why, then, did they select for prosecution this instance, in which the member for Cork is able to state, without contradiction, that his intervention, whatever judgment may be given on the naked question of its legality, not only saved tenants from distress, but the public peace from disorder and outrage? (Cheers.)

Now I wish to call attention to the most important part of the statement that I am presuming to make. When I heard the address read from the chair, I said that the heart of it was the challenging paragraph; and when I heard the speech of the member for East Cork last night, I said to myself, "Never did I hear so challenging a speech." The assertions of the member for East Cork opened up the whole question, and gave to the Government the opportunity by contradiction, by grappling with those assertions, of establishing their case and of showing that their designs against the National League and the Plan of Campaign were, at least, in process of accomplisment. Here I must say a word about the Plan of Campaign. It is an interference with the law. It has, no doubt, substituted its authority for the law. Far be it from me to assert that necessarily such a plan in the abstract is an evil. But it is something more. It is a sign that the law does not do its work. It is a sign that the conditions of legality do not exist. It is a warning to set about restoring them. This is not the only place where extra legal combinations and anti-legal combinations have been brought into existence for the purpose of mitigating social disorder. Having cited several of such organizations, such as the Swing organization, the Camorra society in Italy, and Lynch law in America, the right honorable gentleman said, these, all of them, are in their nature evils, but such is the imperfection of man and the imperfection of his institutions, that sometimes things that are evils in themselves are the cure of greater evils, and in respect of the Plan of Campaign, what has to be shown, is that without it Ireland would have been happier and more tranquil than it is at present.

Having recapitulated Mr. O'Brien's six statements as to the beneficial effects of the plan, Mr. Gladstone continued: Now, whereas we now appear to know that there are about forty cases settled under the Plan of Campaign, there is no case in which payments made under the plan have been censured as rapacious or unreasonable by a single Land Commission. Now, be it recollected that I am not arguing upon the propriety of the plan. I am arguing upon its success. I have shown that there is not the smallest shred of contradiction against any one of those allegations, and that, taken as they stand, they show that at this moment, notwithstanding the boasts of the administration, the Plan of Campaign stands in Ireland entire, successful, and triumphant. Since it has been under the proscription of the right honorable gentleman for a certain time, it appears, according to the facts before us, to weigh considerably heavier than it did before he had anything to do with it, and well this illustrates the success of the right honorable gentleman's policy. (Home Rule cheers.)

There is one still more important point. The right honorable gentleman made no attempt to connect the National League or the Plan of Campaign with the commission of crime and outrage. The Attorney-General did make an attempt, and what was the narrow basis of that attempt? Why, it was one upon which a tight-rope dancer might perhaps have found a footing, but from which men with only ordinary means of locomotion must have fallen. (Laughter.) He got hold of two crimes, – one of the Plan of Campaign, and one of the National League, and how did he establish the connection? Intuitively, out of his inner consciousness, for as he could not see the causes of the crimes, he thought it reasonable to put them down to these institutions, and, to prevent jealousy, he gave one crime to each. (Laughter.) What course was open to the honorable and learned gentleman? What course remains open to the Government if they intend, as they ought deliberately and seriously, to show a connection between crime and outrage, and these considerable powers which they are laboring to put down? There are two courses they might pursue. If there were grounds for this imputation, the Attorney-General ought to have searched the evidence in all the numerous prosecutions the Government have instituted, and to have shown from that evidence that witnesses testified, and that judicial authority acknowledged, facts which tended to show that a connection existed between crime and the National League, and crime and the Plan of Campaign.

Not the smallest attempt was made by the honorable and learned gentleman or by the Government to do anything of the kind. The reason was that they could find no such evidence, and I give no credit to the Plan of Campaign or to the National League for the absence of such evidence, because to encourage crime on the part of either, or to tolerate it, would be suicidal to them. (Cheers.) The right honorable gentleman might have pursued the course which I took in 1881, when arguing the unhappy bill of that year (unhappy as to the nature of its provisions), which was designed to meet what was at the time a most threatening evil. I argued that the Land League, as i operated at that time, was an organization imparting danger to the country. I showed, or tried to show, that wherever you traced the footsteps of the League, you traced the increase of crime. The Attorney-General did not pursue that course, because he knew it would result in total failure. Therefore I think we have evidence before us, so far as it goes, and it goes pretty far, to show that as regards these great objects which the Government have had in view, of putting down the National League and the Plan of Campaign, their efforts have resulted in total failure.

Whether it be the Land Act, with its beneficial or imperfect provisions, or whether it be that dawning of the rays of hope, that beginning of the knitting together of the heart of one nation to the heart of the other, the diminution of crime is a matter of rejoicing, and we wish it were greater, we congratulate the Government, and we heartily hope that in the hands of beneficial and benign causes it may continue to decrease. Well, such is the retrospect. What is the prospect? What is to come? Will the Government continue still to deal with signs, and never to look at the substance, to legislate against symptoms and manifestations and never to touch the disease, to try and prune off from the rankly luxurious vegetation, here a twig and there a leaf, and never to ask themselves whether the proper purpose and design is not to bring it out by the roots? There are many things which are said by the Government in debate, but there is one thing which they and their supporters most rarely say. I think, as far as my recollection and experience goes, I may almost venture to go further, and assert they never say, – I never had heard them express a confidence that they will be able to establish a permanent resistance to the policy of Home Rule. (Opposition cheers.)

I am glad not to be met with adverse challenges when I say this. If this be a question of time at all, then it is most important to consider what is the right time. I don't disguise any more than the honorable member for East Cork the strength of the combinations that are opposed to us. They are very strong indeed; they have nearly the whole wealth of the country; they have nearly the whole of the high station of the country; they have most of the elements of social strength which abound in them; they have with these all the things which belong to wealth, to rank, and to station in this country, which is vast in its amount, they are very strong, and by their strength they may secure delay, but delay in a subject of this kind, a controversy of nations, is not an unmixed good. It has its dangers and its inconveniences. You are happily free at this moment from the slighest shadow of foreign complications. You have at this moment the constitutional assent of Ireland, pledged in the most solemn form, for the efficacy of the policy which I am considering. But the day may come when your condition may not be so happy. I do not expect, any more than I desire, these foreign complications, but still it is not wise wholly to shut them out.

What I fear is rather this, that if resistance to the national voice of Ireland be pushed too far, those who now guide the mind of that nation may gradually lose their power, and may be supplanted and displaced by ruder and more dangerous spirits. These very institutions, the National League and the Plan of Campaign, which would vanish into thin air upon a rational settlement of the Irish difficulty, might with their power drive such deep roots into the soil, they might acquire such a mastery, if not over the understandings, over the passions of the people, for passions in these cases will always be let loose, they might acquire a strength which may enable them hereafter to offer serious hindrances to government which is good. I venture to express a hope that there will be deeper reflection upon these matters. In the present administration of Ireland, it is too plain you are endeavoring to do what the language of Lord Salisbury shows is too clearly your intention, what has long been endeavored, but under circumstances wholly different. For seven hundred years, with Ireland practically unrepresented, with Ireland prostrate, with the forces of this great and powerful island absolutely united, you tried and failed to do that which you are now trying to do with Ireland fully represented in your Parliament, with Ireland herself raised to a position which is erect and strong, and with the mind of the people so devoted that if you look to the elections of the last twelve months you find that the majority of the people have voted in favor of the concession of Home Rule.

If this is to continue, I would venture to ask gentlemen opposite under such circumstances as these, and with the experience you have, is your persistence in this system of administration, I will not say just, but is it wise, is it politic, is it hopeful, is it conservative? (Cheers.) Now, at length, bethink yourselves of a change, and consent to administer, and consent finally to legislate for Ireland and for Scotland in conformity with the constitutionally expressed wishes and the profound and permanent convictions of the people; and ask yourselves whether you will at last consent to present to the world the spectacle of a truly and not a nominally United Empire. (Loud Opposition cheers.)