Monday, March 29th.—During a brief sitting the Lords got through a good deal of business. The Silver Coinage Bill awakened Lord Chaplin's reminiscences of his bimetallic days, when he was accused by Sir William Harcourt of trying to stir up mutiny in India. Undeterred by this warning, however, the Peers gave a Second Reading to the measure and also to the Coal Mines Emergency Bill, which is less up-to-date than it sounds, and deals not with the present emergency but with the last emergency but one. They also passed the Importation of Plumage Bill, at the instance of Lord Aberdeen, who pleaded that beautiful birds, "the result of myriads of years of evolution," should not be exterminated to make a British matron's picture-hat.
Mr. Macpherson. "With all these cherubs going for my kite full blast it looks as if I might keep the thing flying."
LORD ROBERT CECIL. CAPTAIN REDMOND.
MESSRS. CLYNES AND ASQUITH.
A few noble lords tore themselves away from these entrancing topics to attend the opening of the debate in the Commons on the Government of Ireland Bill. They were ill-rewarded for their pains, for never has a Home Rule debate produced fewer interesting moments. The Chief Secretary was so studiously restrained in explaining the merits of the Bill that the "yawning chasm" which, according to its opponents, the measure is going to create between Southern and Northern Ireland was to be observed in advance on the countenances of many of his listeners. Years ago Mr. Balfour told the Irish Nationalists that Great Britain was not to be bored into acceptance of Home Rule; but I am beginning to doubt now whether he was right. If the Government get the Bill through it will be due more to John Bull's weariness of the eternal Irish Question than to any enthusiastic belief in the merits of this particular scheme. Hardly anyone off the Treasury Bench had a good word to say for it, but fortunately for its chances their criticisms were often mutually destructive.
Mr. Clynes moved its rejection. From his remark that Irish respect for the law was destroyed in 1913, and that the present Administration was regarded as "the most abominable form of government that had ever ruled in Ireland," I should gather that he has only recently begun his researches into Irish history and Irish character, and is working backwards. His prescription was to cease governing Ireland by force and leave her to frame her own constitution.
Lord Robert Cecil agreed with Mr. Clynes in regarding it as a very bad Bill, but there parted company with him. In his view the deterioration of Ireland began in 1906, when the era of "firm government" came to an end. Drop coercion by all means, but "let the murderers begin." As for forcing self-government on a country that rejected it, that was nonsense.
As "a citizen of the world," and not merely an Irishman, Mr. T. P. O'Connor denounced the Bill urbi et orbi. Nobody in Ireland wanted it unless it was the place-hunters of the Bar and the Press, for whom it would provide rich pickings.
The House was brought back from rhetoric to plain fact by the Chancellor of the Exchequer's reminder that if the Bill were not passed the Home Rule Act of 1914 would come into force. He hoped that Southern Ireland would recover its sanity, accept the Bill and set itself to persuade Ulster into an All-Ireland Parliament vi the golden bridge of the Irish Council.
Captain Craig could not imagine that happening in his lifetime. To his mind the only merit of the Bill was that it safeguarded Ulster against Dublin domination.
Tuesday, March 30th.—Someone—I suspect a midshipman—has been telling Mr. Bromfield that five British Admirals have been sent to Vienna to supervise the breaking up of the Austrian Fleet, and that the said Fleet now consists of three motor-boats. He was much relieved to hear from Mr. Harmsworth that only one Admiral had been sent, and that the disposal of a Dreadnought, several pre-Dreadnoughts and sundry smaller craft will give him plenty to do.
There appears to be a shortage of ice in Hull. It is supposed that the Member for the Central Division (Lieut.-Commander Kenworthy) has not cut so much as he expected.
The debate on the Home Rule Bill was resumed in a much higher temperature than that of yesterday. Mr. Asquith, as he thundered in carefully-polished phrases against the "cumbrous, costly, unworkable scheme," earned many cheers from his followers, and the even greater tribute of interruptions from his opponents. For a moment he was pulled up, when to his rhetorical question, "What has Home Rule meant to us?" some graceless Coalitionist promptly answered, "Votes!" but he soon got going again. Ireland, he declared, was a unit. The Bill gave her dualism "with a shadowy background of remote and potential unity." The vaunted Council was "a fleshless and bloodless skeleton." He remarked upon "the sombre acquiescence of the Ulstermen," and wondered why they had accepted the Bill at all. "Because we don't trust you," came the swift reply from Sir Edward Carson.
Mr. Asquith's own remedy for Irish unrest was to take the Act of 1914 and transform it into something like Dominion Home Rule. Any county—Ulster or Sinn Fein—that voted against coming under the Dublin Parliament should be left under the present administration.Mr. Bonar Law did not fail to point out the inconsistency of condemning the Government scheme for its complexity and then immediately proposing another which would involve not one but a dozen partitions and make the political map of Ireland look like a crazy quilt. He advised the House to reject Mr. Asquith's advice and pass the Bill, even though it should have the paradoxical result, for the moment, of leaving Nationalist Ireland under British administration while providing Unionist Ulster with a Home Rule Parliament for which it has never asked.
I suppose Mr. Devlin is not like the Sinn Feiners, who, according to "T. P.," are so contemptuous of the Bill that they have never read a line of it. Parts of his speech, and particularly his peroration, seemed far more suitable to a Coercion Bill than to a measure which is designed, however imperfectly, to grant Home Rule to Ireland. The Nationalist leader may be forgiven a great deal, however, for his inimitable description of Lord Robert Cecil as "painfully struggling into the light with one foot in the Middle Ages."
Wednesday, March 31st.—The third and last Act of the Home Rule drama was the best. Nothing in the previous two days' debate—not even Mr. Bonar Law's ruthless analysis of the Paisley policy for Ireland—gripped the audience so intensely as Sir Edward Carson's explanation of the Ulster attitude. He declared that the Union had not failed in Ulster, and would not have failed anywhere if British politicians could have refrained from bidding for Irish votes. There was no alternative to it but complete separation, and that was what Home Rule would lead to. Ulster did not want the Bill, and would not vote for it; but, as the only alternative was the Act of 1914, she was prepared to accept it as a pis aller, and to work her new Parliament for all it was worth. At least it would enable her to find schools for the thirty thousand Belfast children now debarred from education. More than that, he was prepared to co-operate with any men from Southern Ireland who were willing to work their Parliament in a similar spirit; and he paid a personal tribute to Mr. Devlin, whose courage he admired though he detested his politics.
Thus there were gleams of hope even in his otherwise gloomy outlook, as the Prime Minister gladly acknowledged in winding up the debate; and they probably had some influence in swelling the majority for the Bill, the figures being 348 for the Second Reading, 94 against.
"Please, Mister, can I have a pennorth of camel?"
