1886.
To the Electors of South Paddington.

Gentlemen,—A ‘people’s dissolution’ has come upon us. Such is the title given by Mr. Gladstone to the most wanton political convulsion which has, in our time, afflicted our country. The caprice of an individual is elevated to the dignity of an act of the people by the boundless egoism of the Prime Minister. The United Kingdom is to be disunited for the purpose of securing in office, if only for a little while, by the aid of a disloyal faction subsisting on foreign gold, a Government deserted by all who could confer upon it character or reputation.

Mr. Gladstone has reserved for his closing days a conspiracy against the honour of Britain and the welfare of Ireland more startlingly base and nefarious than any of those other numerous designs and plots which, during the last quarter of a century, have occupied his imagination. Nor are the results of the repeal of the Union, whatever they may be, a matter of moment to him. No practical responsibility for those results will fall upon his shoulders. He regards with the utmost unconcern, or with inconceivable frivolity, the fact that upon those who come after him will devolve the impossible labour of rebuilding a shattered empire, of re-uniting a divided kingdom. Let a credulous electorate give him, for the third time, a Parliamentary majority by the aid of which another Irish revolution may be consummated, and this most moderate of Ministers will be satisfied, will complacently retire to that repose for which he tells us ‘nature cries aloud.’ Nature, to whose cries he has for so long turned a stone-deaf ear.

This design for the separation of Ireland from Britain, this insane recurrence to heptarchical arrangements, this trafficking with treason, this condonation of crime, this exaltation of the disloyal, this abasement of the loyal, this desertion of our Protestant co-religionists, this monstrous mixture of imbecility, extravagance and political hysterics, better known as ‘the Bill for the future Government of Ireland,’ is furnished by its author with the most splendid attributes and clothed in the loftiest language. (1) Under its operation a nation of slaves paying tribute is to be filled with exuberant love for Britain which it now hates, but with which it is now on a footing of perfect political equality. (2) Persons who have subsisted and flourished on the effects of crime and outrage are to be immediately transformed into governors wise, moral and humane. (3) A peasantry which has for years exhibited a marked disinclination to pay contract rents to many landlords will instantly commence and for the next fifty years continue with cheerful alacrity and fidelity to pay rent to one single landlord; that landlord, moreover, assuming the garb of a foreign and alien Government. (4) A people without manufactures, longing for protection by which to create and foster manufactures, are to become in a moment ardent converts to the blessings of free trade. (5) A Parliament, in which any and every legislative project or deliberative proceeding or executive act, may be vetoed for three years, is to abound in rapid legislation, and to surpass our ancient historic Parliament in efficiency of procedure. (6) A financial system, under which by no possibility can revenue be adequate to expenditure, is to perform prodigies of economy and ‘to scatter plenty o’er a smiling land.’ (7) A pauper population is to roll in riches. (8) Law and order and rights of property are immediately to take their place as the most sacred and cherished institutions of a country a great portion of whose people hitherto, from time immemorial, have regarded them only to deride them and violate them, &c. &c.

The united and concentrated genius of Bedlam and Colney Hatch would strive in vain to produce a more striking tissue of absurdities.

Yet this is the policy, the last specific for Ireland, which is gravely recommended by senile vanity to the favourable consideration of a people renowned for common sense, the possessors of an Empire erected and preserved by the constant flow of common sense and, I doubt not, the progenitors of a posterity equally powerful, equally courageous and equally wise.

For the sake of this fifth message of peace to Ireland, this farrago of superlative nonsense, the vexatious and costly machinery of a general election is to be put in motion, all business other than what may be connected with political agitation, is to be impeded and suspended; trade and commercial enterprise, now suffering sadly from protracted bad times, and which political stability can alone re-invigorate, are to be further harassed and handicapped; all useful and desired reforms are to be indefinitely postponed, the British Constitution is to be torn up, the Liberal party shivered into fragments.

And why? For this reason and no other: To gratify the ambition of an old man in a hurry.

How long, gentlemen, will you and your brother electors tolerate this one-man power?

Since 1868, when this one-man power began to show itself in an acute form, have you enjoyed domestic security or foreign credit?

From that time to the present day, Ireland has been a struggling victim in Mr. Gladstone’s hands. The Irish Church, a great agency for moral, social, and religious order, has been swept away; two special confiscations of landed property were confidently recommended to, and accepted by, Parliament as certain to produce peace; six coercion Acts of the most stringent character Mr. Gladstone has obtained; and all to no purpose. Confusion has become worse confounded; the fabric of Government in Ireland has been shattered; lawlessness and disorder have been triumphant and supreme; the present state of Ireland is one of ‘grave disease,’ says Mr. John Morley; and the blame is cast by Mr. Gladstone on the system, on the Constitution, on the Union.

It would be as reasonable to cast the blame upon the Equator.

The blame for this disgrace cannot be cast upon the system or upon the Constitution or upon the Union.

The blame must be borne by the man who has been Minister and who is Minister now.

Under the baneful insecurity which is inseparably connected with his name, your trade has gone from bad to worse, your Parliament has become demoralised, your foreign credit shaken, your colonies alienated, your Indian Empire imperilled.

Naturally enough, Ireland has suffered most of all, for Ireland, of all the Queen’s dominions, was least able to stand a strain.

What frightful and irreparable Imperial catastrophe is necessary to tear the British people from the influence of this fetish, this idol, this superstition, which has brought upon them and upon the Irish unnumbered woes?

The negotiator of the ‘Alabama’ arbitration, the hero of the Transvaal surrender, the perpetrator of the bombardment of Alexandria, the decimator of the struggling Soudan tribes, the betrayer of Khartoum, the person guilty of the death of Gordon, the patentee of the Penjdeh shame, now stands before the country all alone, rejected by a democratic House of Commons.

No longer can he conceal his personality under the shelter of the Liberal party. One hundred members of that party in Parliament, representing thousands of electors, refused, in spite of all manner of blandishments, deceits and menaces, to support his Irish measure. All his colleagues have abandoned him. From the Duke of Argyll to Mr. Bright, from Lord Hartington to Mr. Chamberlain, one by one he has shed them all; none is near him of his former colleagues save certain placemen unworthy of notice. Last, but not least, the leading lights of Nonconformity, such as Dr. Dale and Mr. Spurgeon, hitherto the pillars of the Liberal party, stand aloof in utter dismay.

Known to the country under various ‘aliases’—‘the People’s William,’ ‘the Grand Old Man,’ ‘the old Parliamentary hand,’ now, in the part of ‘the Grand electioneering agent,’ he demands a vote of confidence from the constituencies.

Confidence in what?

In the Liberal party? No! The Liberal party, as we knew it, exists no longer. In his Irish project? No! It is dead; to be resuscitated or not, either wholly or in part, just as may suit the personal convenience of the author. In his Government? No! They are a mere collection of ‘items,’ whom he does not condescend to consult. In himself? Yes!

This is the latest and most perilous innovation into our constitutional practices. A pure unadulterated personal plÉbiscite, that is the demand; a political expedient borrowed from the last and worst days of the Second Empire.

Gentlemen, it is time that some one should speak out. I have written to you plainly, some may think strongly; but whatever the English vocabulary may contain of plainness and strength is inadequate to describe truly and to paint realistically the present political situation.

At this moment, so critical, we have not got to deal with a Government, or a party, or a policy. We have to deal with a man; with a man who makes the most unparalleled claim for dictatorial power which can be conceived by free men. It is for that reason that I deliberately addressed myself to the personal aspects of the question, and that I have drawn the character of the claimant from recent history, and from facts well within the recollection of all.

Mr. Gladstone in his speech in Edinburgh on Friday recommended himself to the country in the name of Almighty God.

Others cannot and will not emulate such audacious profanity; but I do dare, in soliciting a renewal of your confidence, to recommend the policy of the Unionist party to you in the name of our common country, our great Empire, upon whose unity and effective maintenance so largely depend the freedom, the happiness and the progress of mankind.

I am, Gentlemen, yours obediently,
Randolph S. Churchill.

Committee Room, 26 London Street, Paddington, June 19, 1886.

1892.
To the Electors of South Paddington.

Gentlemen,—A General Election is immediately before us. I desire again to solicit the honour of representing South Paddington in the House of Commons. It is pleasant to me to record my strong appreciation of, and my abiding gratitude for, the kindness and indulgence which you have consistently shown me and for the large measure of confidence which during six years you have accorded me. I most earnestly trust that as long as I have the good fortune to take part in public life the connection between us may remain as close and strong as it has ever been at any former time.

My opinions on the policy of Home Rule for Ireland are unaltered and unalterable. The impracticability and futility of such a policy become more apparent and glaring as discussion and argument proceed. The insanity of a scheme to create an independent Parliament in an island inhabited by two races controlled by two religious creeds separated from each other by an impassable abyss; the insoluble problem raised by such a scheme as to the representation or non-representation of Ireland in the British Parliament; the impossibility of guaranteeing effectually, under any such scheme, justice to the Protestant minority, mainly residing in Ulster; the endless and bitter conflicts which must arise again, as they arose before, between the Irish and British Parliaments, in addition to those which must surely arise between Irish and British Administrations; the constitutional impossibility of establishing any tribunal to pronounce authoritatively on the validity of laws passed by either Parliament; the certain divergence of commercial and financial policy to be followed by Ireland and Great Britain respectively; all this Himalayan range of obstacles appears more utterly insuperable the closer it is looked at, the more attentively it is studied. A conclusive proof of the truth of these propositions is afforded by the impenetrable reserve maintained by Mr. Gladstone and by all his colleagues even as to the general form and outline of their Home Rule legislative project. The formula which I have more than once expressed, that it is impossible to put Home Rule into a Bill, is more rooted than ever in my mind; and even if the Party of Repeal were to be furnished with ever so great a majority at the coming General Election, that party is, I am convinced, condemned to political impotence and sterility so long as they continue to exhaust their energies in solving the insoluble, in accomplishing the impossible.

After six years of trial and labour the Unionist Party return to the country with a record of work and action cleaner and less open to serious attack than any other political party which I have known or read of in modern times. Ireland, on which country the last General Election turned, which was pronounced by our opponents to be ungovernable by the Parliament of the United Kingdom, is now simply and easily governed. Ireland was agitated in 1886; it is calm in 1892. Ireland was distressed in 1886; it is prosperous in 1892. No real grievance now oppresses and irritates the Irish peasant, nor can persons possessing reason and experience doubt that the energies and sense of a new Parliament, if this Parliament is swayed by a Unionist majority, will be employed in constructing a scheme of Local Government for the Irish people so broad and generous that the last vestiges of difference, inequality, inferiority (if such there still be), between Ireland and Great Britain will be swept away.

Facts like these, written so largely on the history of the past six years, cannot fail to strike and to arouse the common sense of the British people as a whole; they must serve to dissipate the factious fury of baffled opponents, to neutralise the allurements of innumerable reckless and irredeemable promises. British electors at the present moment are in duty bound to draw largely on their memories and to make a very practical use of their experience. They cannot afford to forget or to neglect the lessons they learnt from the anxious and even terrible times which Ireland passed through during Mr. Gladstone’s former administration. Remembering how gloomy and hopeless was the outlook, how frantic were the popular rage and passion which during all those years distracted and paralysed Ireland, how impotent were the measures of Mr. Gladstone’s Government either to pacify or control; looking at Ireland now, tranquil, materially prosperous, crime (ordinary and extraordinary) reduced to an unprecedented minimum, the British electors must be compelled to realise that an invaluable period, rarely in history brighter, more full of justified hope and confidence, has at length, after infinite difficulty, been attained, and that even to run the risk of recurrence to former evils and perils would be an act of national folly difficult to characterise, ominous of Imperial ruin. I do not doubt but that South Paddington, in common with all other constituencies where knowledge and political study extensively prevail, will pronounce without hesitation in favour of the wisdom of the Unionist policy, of the continuance in power of the Unionist Party.

My views as to the reforms in the public service which public safety and economy alike urgently call for, are, I think, well known to you; they have undergone no change, save that I hold them more strongly than ever. You are also, I imagine, not unaware of my desire to meet with all legitimate sympathy and good-will the newly-formed but very articulate and well-defined demands of the labouring classes.

Thus recording my political faith, I trust that you may be willing and satisfied to dispose of your political confidence as you have done in former years since South Paddington became a separate borough, and that I may be enabled again to serve in Parliament our constituency and the country.

I have the honour to be
Your obedient servant,
Randolph S. Churchill.

2 Connaught Place, W.: June 21, 1892.