The result of the consultation was the decisive letter addressed to me by Mr. Gladstone, its purport to be by me communicated to Mr. Parnell. As any one may see, its language was courteous and considerate. Not an accent was left that could touch the pride of one who was known to be as proud a man as ever lived. It did no more than state an unquestionable fact, with an inevitable inference. It was not written in view of publication, for that it was hoped would be unnecessary. It was written with the expectation of finding the personage concerned in his usual rational frame of mind, and with the intention of informing him of what it was right that he should know. The same evening Mr. McCarthy was placed in possession of Mr.

Gladstone's views, to be laid before Mr. Parnell at the earliest moment.

_1 Carlton Gardens, Nov. 24, 1890._-MY DEAR MORLEY.-Having arrived at a certain conclusion with regard to the continuance, at the present moment, of Mr. Parnell's leadership of the Irish party, I have seen Mr. McCarthy on my arrival in town, and have inquired from him whether I was likely to receive from Mr. Parnell himself any communication on the subject. Mr. McCarthy replied that he was unable to give me any information on the subject. I mentioned to him that in 1882, after the terrible murder in the Phnix Park, Mr. Parnell, although totally removed from any idea of responsibility, had spontaneously written to me, and offered to take the Chiltern Hundreds, an offer much to his honour but one which I thought it my duty to decline.

While clinging to the hope of a communication from Mr. Parnell, to whomsoever addressed, I thought it necessary, viewing the arrangements for the commencement of the session to-morrow, to acquaint Mr. McCarthy with the conclusion at which, after using all the means of observation and reflection in my power, I had myself arrived. It was that notwithstanding the splendid services rendered by Mr. Parnell to his country, his continuance at the present moment in the leadership would be productive of consequences disastrous in the highest degree to the cause of Ireland. I think I may be warranted in asking you so far to expand the conclusion I have given above, as to add that the continuance I speak of would not only place many hearty and effective friends of the Irish cause in a position of great embarra.s.sment, but would render my retention of the leadership of the liberal party, based as it has been mainly upon the prosecution of the Irish cause, almost a nullity. This explanation of my views I begged Mr.

McCarthy to regard as confidential, and not intended for his colleagues generally, if he found that Mr. Parnell contemplated spontaneous action; but I also begged that he would make known to the Irish party, at their meeting to-morrow afternoon, that such was my conclusion, if he should find that Mr. Parnell had not in contemplation any step of the nature indicated. I now write to you, in case Mr. McCarthy should be unable to communicate with Mr.

Parnell, as I understand you may possibly have an opening to-morrow through another channel. Should you have such an opening, I beg you to make known to Mr. Parnell the conclusion itself, which I have stated in the earlier part of this letter. I have thought it best to put it in terms simple and direct, much as I should have desired had it lain within my power, to alleviate the painful nature of the situation. As respects the manner of conveying what my public duty has made it an obligation to say, I rely entirely on your good feeling, tact, and judgment.-Believe me sincerely yours, W. E. GLADSTONE.

No direct communication had been possible, though every effort to open it was made. Indirect information had been received. Mr. Parnell's purpose was reported to have shifted during the week since the decree. On the Wednesday he had been at his stiffest, proudest, and coldest, bent on holding on at all cost. He thought he saw a way of getting something done for Ireland; the Irish people had given him a commission; he should stand to it, so long as ever they asked him. On the Friday, however (Nov. 21), he appeared, so I had been told, to be shaken in his resolution. He had bethought him that the government might possibly seize the moment for a dissolution; that if there were an immediate election, the government would under the circ.u.mstances be not unlikely to win; if so, Mr. Gladstone might be thrown for four or five years into opposition; in other words, that powerful man's part in the great international transaction would be at an end. In this mood he declared himself alive to the peril and the grave responsibility of taking any course that could lead to consequences so formidable. That was the last authentic news that reached us. His Irish colleagues had no news at all. After this glimpse the curtain had fallen, and all oracles fell dumb.

If Mr. Gladstone's decision was to have the antic.i.p.ated effect, Mr.

Parnell must be made aware of it before the meeting of the Irish party (Nov. 25). This according to custom was to be held at two o'clock in the afternoon, to choose their chairman for the session. Before the choice was made, both the leader and his political friends should know the view and the purpose that prevailed in the camp of their allies. Mr. Parnell kept himself invisible and inaccessible alike to English and Irish friends until a few minutes before the meeting. The Irish member who had seen Mr.

Gladstone the previous evening, at the last moment was able to deliver the message that had been confided to him. Mr. Parnell replied that he should stand to his guns. The other members of the Irish party came together, and, wholly ignorant of the att.i.tude taken by Mr. Gladstone, promptly and with hardly a word of discussion re-elected their leader to his usual post. The gravity of the unfortunate error (M155) committed in the failure to communicate the private message to the whole of the nationalist members, with or without Mr. Parnell's leave, lay in the fact that it magnified and distorted Mr. Gladstone's later intervention into a humiliating public ultimatum. The following note, made at the time, describes the fortunes of Mr. Gladstone's letter:-

_Nov. 25._-I had taken the usual means of sending a message to Mr.

Parnell, to the effect that Mr. Gladstone was coming to town on the following day, and that I should almost certainly have a communication to make to Mr. Parnell on Tuesday morning. It was agreed at my interview with his emissary on Sunday night (November 23) that I should be informed by eleven on Tuesday forenoon where I should see him. I laid special stress on my seeing him before the party met. At half-past eleven, or a little later, on that day I received a telegram from the emissary that he could not reach his friend.(275) I had no difficulty in interpreting this. It meant that Mr. Parnell had made up his mind to fight it out, whatever line we might adopt; that he guessed that my wish to see him must from his point of view mean mischief; and that he would secure his re-election as chairman before the secret was out. Mr.

McCarthy was at this hour also entirely in the dark, and so were all the other members of the Irish party supposed to be much in Mr. Parnell's confidence. When I reached the House a little after three, the lobby was alive with the bustle and animation usual at the opening of a session, and Mr. Parnell was in the thick of it, talking to a group of his friends. He came forward with much cordiality. "I am very sorry," he said, "that I could not make an appointment, but the truth is I did not get your message until I came down to the House, and then it was too late." I asked him to come round with me to Mr. Gladstone's room. As we went along the corridor he informed me in a casual way that the party had again elected him chairman. When we reached the sunless little room, I told him I was sorry to hear that the election was over, for I had a communication to make to him which might, as I hoped, still make a difference. I then read out to him Mr. Gladstone's letter. As he listened, I knew the look on his face quite well enough to see that he was obdurate. The conversation did not last long. He said the feeling against him was a storm in a teacup, and would soon pa.s.s. I replied that he might know Ireland, but he did not half know England; that it was much more than a storm in a teacup; that if he set British feeling at defiance and brazened it out, it would be ruin to home rule at the election; that if he did not withdraw for a time, the storm would not pa.s.s; that if he withdrew from the actual leadership now as a concession due to public feeling in this country, this need not prevent him from again taking the helm when new circ.u.mstances might demand his presence; that he could very well treat his re-election as a public vote of confidence by his party; that, having secured this, he would suffer no loss of dignity or authority by a longer or shorter period of retirement. I reminded him that for two years he had been practically absent from active leadership. He answered, in his slow dry way, that he must look to the future; that he had made up his mind to stick to the House of Commons and to his present position in his party, until he was convinced, and he would not soon be convinced, that it was impossible to obtain home rule from a British parliament; that if he gave up the leadership for a time, he should never return to it; that if he once let go, it was all over. There was the usual iteration on both sides in a conversation of the kind, but this is the substance of what pa.s.sed. His manner throughout was perfectly cool and quiet, and his unresonant voice was unshaken. He was paler than usual, and now and then a wintry smile pa.s.sed over his face. I saw that nothing would be gained by further parley, so I rose and he somewhat slowly did the same. "Of course," he said, as I held the door open for him to leave, "Mr. Gladstone will have to attack me.

I shall expect that. He will have a right to do that." So we parted.

I waited for Mr. Gladstone, who arrived in a few minutes. It was now four o'clock. "Well?" he asked eagerly the moment the door was closed, and without taking off cape or hat. "Have you seen him?"

"He is obdurate," said I. I told him shortly what had pa.s.sed. He stood at the table, dumb for some instants, looking at me as if he could not believe what I had said. Then he burst out that we must at once publish his letter to me; at once, that very afternoon. I said, "'Tis too late now." "Oh, no," said he, "the _Pall Mall_ will bring it out in a special edition." "Well, but," I persisted, "we ought really to consider it a little." Reluctantly he yielded, and we went into the House. Harcourt presently joined us on the bench, and we told him the news. It was by and by decided that the letter should be immediately published. Mr. Gladstone thought that I should at once inform Mr. Parnell of this. There he was at that moment, pleasant and smiling, in his usual place on the Irish bench. I went into our lobby, and sent somebody to bring him out.

Out he came, and we took three or four turns in the lobby. I told him that it was thought right, under the new circ.u.mstances, to send the letter to the press. "Yes," he said amicably, as if it were no particular concern of his, "I think Mr. Gladstone will be quite right to do that; it will put him straight with his party."

The debate on the address had meanwhile been running its course. Mr.

Gladstone had made his speech. One of the newspapers afterwards described the liberals as wearing pre-occupied countenances. "We were pre-occupied with a vengeance," said Mr. Gladstone, "and even while I was speaking I could not help thinking to myself, Here am I talking about Portugal and about Armenia, while every single creature in the House is absorbed in one thing only, and that is an uncommonly long distance from either Armenia or Portugal." News of the letter, which had been sent to the reporters about eight o'clock, swiftly spread. Members hurried to ex-ministers in the dining-room to ask if the story of the letter were true. The lobbies were seized by one of those strange and violent fevers to which on such occasions the House of Commons is liable. Unlike the clamour of the Stock Exchange or a continental Chamber, there is little noise, but the perturbation is profound. Men pace the corridors in couples and trios, or flit from one knot to another, listening to an oracle of the moment modestly retailing a rumour false on the face of it, or evolving monstrous hypotheses to explain incredible occurrences. This, however, was no common crisis of lobby or gallery.

One party quickly felt that, for them at least, it was an affair of life or death. It was no wonder that the Irish members were stirred to the very depths. For five years they had worked on English platforms, made active friendships with English and Scottish liberals in parliament and out of it, been taught to expect from their aid and alliance that deliverance which without allies must remain out of reach and out of sight; above all, for nearly five years they had been taught to count on the puissant voice and strong right arm of the leader of all the forces of British liberalism.

They suddenly learned that if they took a certain step in respect of the leadership of their own party, the alliance was broken off, the most powerful of Englishmen could help them no more, and that all the dreary and desperate marches since 1880 were to be faced once again in a blind and endless campaign, against the very party to whose friendship they had been taught to look for strength, encouragement, and victory. Well might they recoil. More astounded still, they learned at the same time that they had already taken the momentous step in the dark, and that the knowledge of what they were doing, the pregnant meanings and the tremendous consequences of it, had been carefully concealed from them. Never were consternation, panic, distraction, and resentment better justified.

The Irishmen were anxious to meet at once. Their leader sat moodily in the smoking-room downstairs. His faculty of concentrated vision had by this time revealed to him the certainty of a struggle, and its intensity. He knew in minute detail every element of peril both at Westminster and in Ireland. A few days before, he mentioned to the present writer his suspicion of designs on foot in ecclesiastical quarters, though he declared that he had no fear of them. He may have surmised that the demonstration at the Leinster Hall was superficial and impulsive. On the other hand, his confidence in the foundations of his dictatorship was unshaken. This being so, if deliberate calculation were the universal mainspring of every statesman's action-as it a.s.suredly is not nor can ever be-he would have spontaneously withdrawn for a season, in the (M156) a.s.surance that if signs of disorganisation were to appear among his followers, his prompt return from Elba would be instantly demanded in Ireland, whether or no it were acquiesced in by the leaders and main army of liberals in England. That would have been both politic and decent, even if we conceive his mind to have been working in another direction. He may, for instance, have believed that the scandal had destroyed the chances of a liberal victory at the election, whether he stayed or withdrew. Why should he surrender his position in Ireland and over contending factions in America, in reliance upon an English party to which, as he was well aware, he had just dealt a smashing blow? These speculations, however, upon the thoughts that may have been slowly moving through his mind, are hardly worth pursuing. Unluckily, the stubborn impulses of defiance that came naturally to his temperament were aroused to their most violent pitch and swept all calculations of policy aside. He now proceeded pa.s.sionately to dash into the dust the whole fabric of policy which he had with such infinite sagacity, patience, skill, and energy devised and reared.

Two short private memoranda from his own hand on this transaction, I find among Mr. Gladstone's papers. He read them to me at the time, and they ill.u.s.trate his habitual practice of shaping and clearing his thought and recollection by committal to black and white:-

_Nov. 26, 1890._-Since the month of December 1885 my whole political life has been governed by a supreme regard to the Irish question. For every day, I may say, of these five, we have been engaged in laboriously rolling up hill the stone of Sisyphus. Mr.

Parnell's decision of yesterday means that the stone is to break away from us and roll down again to the bottom of the hill. I cannot recall the years which have elapsed. It was daring, perhaps, to begin, at the age I had then attained, a process which it was obvious must be a prolonged one.

Simply to recommence it now, when I am within a very few weeks of the age at which Lord Palmerston, the marvel of parliamentary longevity, succ.u.mbed, and to contemplate my accompanying the cause of home rule to its probable triumph a rather long course of years hence, would be more than daring; it would be presumptuous. My views must be guided by rational probabilities, and they exclude any such antic.i.p.ation. My statement, therefore, that my leadership would, under the contemplated decision of Mr. Parnell, be almost a nullity, is a moderate statement of the case. I have been endeavouring during all these years to reason with the voters of the kingdom, and when the voter now tells me that he cannot give a vote for making the Mr. Parnell of to-day the ruler of Irish affairs under British sanction, I do not know how to answer him, and I have yet to ask myself formally the question what under those circ.u.mstances is to be done. I must claim entire and absolute liberty to answer that question as I may think right.

_Nov. 28, 1890._-The few following words afford a key to my proceedings in the painful business of the Irish leadership.

It was at first my expectation, and afterwards my desire, that Mr.

Parnell would retire by a perfectly spontaneous act. As the likelihood of such a course became less and less, while time ran on, and the evidences of coming disaster were acc.u.mulated, I thought it would be best that he should be impelled to withdraw, but by an influence conveyed to him, at least, from within the limits of his own party. I therefore begged Mr. Justin McCarthy to acquaint Mr. Parnell of what I thought as to the consequences of his continuance; I also gave explanations of my meaning, including a reference to myself; and I begged that my message to Mr. Parnell might be made known to the Irish party, in the absence of a spontaneous retirement.

This was on Monday afternoon. But there was no certainty either of finding Mr. Parnell, or of an impression on him through one of his own followers. I therefore wrote the letter to Mr. Morley, as a more delicate form of proceeding than a direct communication from myself, but also as a stronger measure than that taken through Mr.

McCarthy, because it was more full, and because, as it was in writing, it admitted of the ulterior step of immediate publication. Mr. Morley could not find Mr. Parnell until after the first meeting of the Irish party on Monday. When we found that Mr.

McCarthy's representation had had no effect, that the Irish party had not been informed, and that Mr. Morley's making known the material parts of my letter was likewise without result, it at once was decided to publish the letter; just too late for the _Pall Mall Gazette_, it was given for publication to the morning papers, and during the evening it became known in the lobbies of the House.

V

Mr. Parnell took up his new ground in a long manifesto to the Irish people (November 29). It was free of rhetoric and ornament, but the draught was skilfully brewed. He charged Mr. Gladstone with having revealed to him during his visit at Hawarden in the previous December, that in a future scheme of home rule the Irish members would be cut down from 103 to 32, land was to be withdrawn from the competency of the Irish legislature, and the control of the constabulary would be reserved to the Imperial authority for an indefinite period, though Ireland would have to find the money all the time. This perfidious truncation of self-government by Mr.

Gladstone was matched by an attempt on my part as his lieutenant only a few days before, to seduce the Irish party into accepting places in a liberal government, and this gross bribe of mine was accompanied by a despairing avowal that the hapless evicted tenants must be flung overboard. In other words, the English leaders intended to play Ireland false, and Mr. Parnell stood between his country and betrayal. Such a story was unluckily no new one in Irish history since the union. On that theme Mr. Parnell played many adroit variations during the eventful days that followed. Throw me to the English wolves if you like, he said, but at any rate make sure that real home rule and not its shadow is to be your price, and that they mean to pay it. This was to awaken the spectre of old suspicions, and to bring to life again those forces of violence and desperation which it had been the very crown of his policy to exorcise.

The reply on the Hawarden episode was prompt. Mr. Gladstone a.s.serted that the whole discussion was one of those informal exchanges of view which go to all political action, and in which men feel the ground and discover the leanings of one another's minds. No single proposal was made, no proposition was mentioned to which a binding a.s.sent was sought. Points of possible improvement in the bill of 1886 were named as having arisen in Mr. Gladstone's mind, or been suggested by others, but no positive conclusions were asked for or were expected or were possible. Mr. Parnell quite agreed that the real difficulty lay in finding the best form in which Irish representation should be retained at Westminster, but both saw the wisdom and necessity of leaving deliberation free until the time should come for taking practical steps. He offered no serious objection on any point; much less did he say that they augured any disappointment of Irish aspirations. Apart from this denial, men asked themselves how it was that if Mr. Parnell knew that the cause was already betrayed, he yet for a year kept the black secret to himself, and blew Mr. Gladstone's praise with as loud a trumpet as before?(276) As for my own guilty attempt at corruption in proposing an absorption of the Irish party in English politics by means of office and emolument, I denied it with reasonable emphasis at the time, and it does not concern us here, nor in fact anywhere else.

VI

We now come to what was in its day the famous story of Committee Room Fifteen, so called from the chamber in which the next act of this dismal play went on.(277) The proceedings between the leader and his party were watched with an eagerness that has never been surpa.s.sed in this kingdom or in America. They were protracted, intense, dramatic, and the issue for a time hung in poignant doubt. The party interest of the scene was supreme, for if the Irishmen should rally to their chief, then the English alliance was at an end, Mr. Gladstone would virtually close (M157) his ill.u.s.trious career, the rent in the liberal ranks might be repaired, and leading men and important sections would all group themselves afresh. "Let us all keep quiet," said one important unionist, "we may now have to revise our positions." Either way, the serpent of faction would raise its head in Ireland, and the strong life of organised and concentrated nationalism would perish in its coils. The personal interest was as vivid as the political,-the spectacle of a man of infinite boldness, determination, astuteness, and resource, with the will and pride of Lucifer, at bay with fortune and challenging a malignant star. Some talked of the famous Ninth Thermidor, when Robespierre fought inch by inch the fierce struggle that ended in his ruin. Others talked of the old mad discord of Zealot and Herodian in face of the Roman before the walls of Jerusalem. The great veteran of English politics looked on, wrathful and astounded at a preternatural perversity for which sixty years of public life could furnish him no parallel. The sage public looked on, some with the same interest that would in ancient days have made them relish a combat of gladiators; others with glee at the mortification of political opponents; others again with honest disgust at what threatened to be the ign.o.ble rout of a beneficent policy.

It was the fashion for the moment in fastidious reactionary quarters to speak of the actors in this ordeal as "a hustling group of yelling rowdies." Seldom have terms so censorious been more misplaced. All depends upon the point of view. Men on a raft in a boiling sea have something to think of besides deportment and the graces of serenity. As a matter of fact, even hostile judges then and since agreed that no case was ever better opened within the walls of Westminster than in the three speeches made on the first day by Mr. s.e.xton and Mr. Healy on the one side, and Mr.

Redmond on the other. In gravity, dignity, acute perception, and that good faith which is the soul of real as distinct from spurious debate, the parliamentary critic recognises them as all of the first order. So for the most part things continued. It was not until a protracted game had gone beyond limits of reason and patience, that words sometimes flamed high.

Experience of national a.s.semblies gives no reason to suppose that a body of French, German, Spanish, Italian, or even of English, Scotch, Welsh, or American politicians placed in circ.u.mstances of equal excitement, arising from an incident in itself at once so squalid and so provocative, would have borne the strain with any more self-control.

Mr. Parnell presided, frigid, severe, and lofty, "as if," said one present, "it were we who had gone astray, and he were sitting there to judge us." Six members were absent in America, including Mr. Dillon and Mr. O'Brien, two of the most important of all after Mr. Parnell himself.

The att.i.tude of this pair was felt to be a decisive element. At first, under the same impulse as moved the Leinster Hall meeting, they allowed their sense of past achievement to close their eyes; they took for granted the impossible, that religious Britain and religious Ireland would blot what had happened out of their thoughts; and so they stood for Mr.

Parnell's leadership. The grim facts of the case were rapidly borne in upon them. The defiant manifesto convinced them that the leadership could not be continued. Travelling from Cincinnati to Chicago, they read it, made up their minds, and telegraphed to anxious colleagues in London. They spoke with warmth of Mr. Parnell's services, but protested against his unreasonable charges of servility to liberal wirepullers; they described the "endeavours to fasten the responsibility for what had happened upon Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Morley" as reckless and unjust; and they foresaw in the position of isolation, discredit, and international ill-feeling which Mr. Parnell had now created, nothing but ruin for the cause. This deliverance from such a quarter (November 30) showed that either abdication or deposition was inevitable.

The day after Mr. Parnell's manifesto, the bishops came out of their sh.e.l.ls. Cardinal Manning had more than once written most urgently to the Irish prelates the moment the decree was known, that Parnell could not be upheld in London, and that no political expediency could outweigh the moral sense. He knew well enough that the bishops in (M158) Ireland were in a very difficult strait, but insisted "that plain and prompt speech was safest." It was now a case, he said to Mr. Gladstone (November 29), of _res ad triarios_, and it was time for the Irish clergy to speak out from the housetops. He had also written to Rome. "Did I not tell you," said Mr.

Gladstone when he gave me this letter to read, "that the Pope would now have one of the ten commandments on his side?" "We have been slow to act,"

Dr. Walsh telegraphed to one of the Irish members (November 30), "trusting that the party will act manfully. Our considerate silence and reserve are being dishonestly misinterpreted." "All sorry for Parnell," telegraphed Dr. Croke, the Archbishop of Cashel-a manly and patriotic Irishman if ever one was-"but still, in G.o.d's name, let him retire quietly and with good grace from the leadership. If he does so, the Irish party will be kept together, the honourable alliance with Gladstonian liberals maintained, success at general election secured, home rule certain. If he does not retire, alliance will be dissolved, election lost, Irish party seriously damaged if not wholly broken up, home rule indefinitely postponed, coercion perpetuated, evicted tenants hopelessly crushed, and the public conscience outraged. Manifesto flat and otherwise discreditable." This was emphatic enough, but many of the flock had already committed themselves before the pastors spoke. To Dr. Croke, Mr. Gladstone wrote (Dec. 2): "We in England seem to have done our part within our lines, and what remains is for Ireland itself. I am as unwilling as Mr. Parnell himself could be, to offer an interference from without, for no one stands more stoutly than I do for the independence of the Irish national party as well as for its unity."

A couple of days later (Dec. 2) a division was taken in Room Fifteen upon a motion made in Mr. Parnell's interest, to postpone the discussion until they could ascertain the views of their const.i.tuents, and then meet in Dublin. It was past midnight. The large room, dimly lighted by a few lamps and candles placed upon the horse-shoe tables, was more than half in shadow. Mr. Parnell, his features barely discernible in the gloom, held a printed list of the party in his hand, and he put the question in cold, unmoved tones. The numbers were 29 for the motion-that is to say, for him, and 44 against him. Of the majority, many had been put on their trial with him in 1880; had pa.s.sed months in prison with him under the first Coercion Act and suffered many imprisonments besides; they had faced storm, obloquy, and hatred with him in the House of Commons, a place where obloquy stings through tougher than Hibernian skins; they had undergone with him the long ordeal of the three judges; they had stood by his side with unswerving fidelity from the moment when his band was first founded for its mortal struggle down to to-day, when they saw the fruits of the struggle flung recklessly away, and the policy that had given to it all its reason and its only hope, wantonly brought to utter foolishness by a suicidal demonstration that no English party and no English leader could ever be trusted. If we think of even the least imaginative of them as haunted by such memories of the past, such distracting fears for the future, it was little wonder that when they saw Mr. Parnell slowly casting up the figures, and heard his voice through the sombre room announcing the ominous result, they all sat, both ayes and noes, in profound and painful stillness. Not a sound was heard, until the chairman rose and said without an accent of emotion that it would now be well for them to adjourn until the next day.

This was only the beginning. Though the ultimate decision of the party was quite certain, every device of strategy and tactics was meanwhile resolutely employed to avert it. His supple and trenchant blade was still in the hands of a consummate swordsman. It is not necessary to recapitulate all the moves in Mr. Parnell's grand manuvre for turning the eyes of Ireland away from the question of leadership to the question of liberal good faith and the details of home rule. Mr. Gladstone finally announced that only after the question of leadership had been disposed of-one belonging entirely to the competence of the Irish party-could he renew former relations, and once more enter into confidential communications with any of them. There was only one guarantee, he said, that could be of any (M159) value to Ireland, namely the a.s.sured and unalterable fact that no English leader and no party could ever dream of either proposing or carrying any scheme of home rule which had not the full support of Irish representatives. This was obvious to all the world.

Mr. Parnell knew it well enough, and the members knew it, but the members were bound to convince their countrymen that they had exhausted compliance with every hint from their falling leader, while Mr. Parnell's only object was to gain time, to confuse issues, and to carry the battle over from Westminster to the more buoyant and dangerously charged atmosphere of Ireland.

The majority resisted as long as they could the evidence that Mr. Parnell was audaciously trifling with them and openly abusing his position as chairman. On the evening of Friday (December 5) Mr. s.e.xton and Mr. Healy went to Mr. Parnell after the last communication from Mr. Gladstone. They urged him to bend to the plain necessities of the case. He replied that he would take the night to consider. The next morning (December 6) they returned to him. He informed them that his responsibility to Ireland would not allow him to retire. They warned him that the majority would not endure further obstruction beyond that day, and would withdraw. As they left, Mr. Parnell wished to shake hands, "if it is to be the last time."

They all shook hands, and then went once more to the field of action.

It was not until after some twelve days of this excitement and stress that the scene approached such disorder as has often before and since been known in the House of Commons. The tension at last had begun to tell upon the impa.s.sive bronze of Mr. Parnell himself. He no longer made any pretence of the neutrality of the chair. He broke in upon one speaker more than forty times. In a flash of rage he s.n.a.t.c.hed a paper from another speaker's hand. The hours wore away, confusion only became worse confounded, and the conclusion on both sides was foregone. Mr. McCarthy at last rose, and in a few moderate sentences expressed his opinion that there was no use in continuing a discussion that must be barren of anything but reproach, bitterness, and indignity, and he would therefore suggest that those who were of the same mind should withdraw. Then he moved from the table, and his forty-four colleagues stood up and silently followed him out of the room. In silence they were watched by the minority who remained, in number twenty-six.(278)

VII

A vacancy at Ba.s.setlaw gave Mr. Gladstone an opportunity of describing the grounds on which he had acted. His speech was measured and weighty, but the result showed the effect of the disaster. The tide, that a few weeks before had been running so steadily, now turned. The unionist vote remained almost the same as in 1885; the liberal vote showed a falling off of over 400 and the unionist majority was increased from 295 to 728.