you speak? My dear fellow, we'd listen to you for as long as you liked—it's only these accursed English Liberals." And upon this mutual understanding the two Irishmen walked down the floor into the Lobby exchanging expressions of mutual goodwill and possibly of mutual comprehension.
This little piece of by-play, so full of Irish nature, struck me at the time as something more than amusing—as having in it a ray of hopeful significance. But the most sanguine imagination would never have foreseen the series of events which brought it to pass, not merely that these two men should wear the same uniform, on a common service, but that the same Gazette should publish both their names as enrolled on the same day in the French Legion of Honour. On that day Mr. Charles Craig was a prisoner in Germany, wounded in a famous fight; and Willie Redmond was in a grave towards which Ulster comrades had been the first to carry him. There is an Irish saying, "Men may meet, but the mountains stand apart." In July 1911 such an association as the Gazette of July 1917 illustrated would have seemed hardly more possible than the meeting of the everlasting hills.
The dramatic crisis of the parliamentary struggle between the two Houses of Parliament did not, and could not, come in the House of Commons. Its place was in the final citadel of privilege, and privilege surrendered on August 10th, when the Bill passed the Lords after the most exciting and uncertain division that is ever likely to be known. But there were elements in the Tory party which did not accept defeat, though they had not yet clearly decided on what battleground to renew their efforts. For the moment, however, men were disposed to pause and take stock of the new situation.
But at such a time events cannot stand still, and almost at the same moment as the Parliament Act was carried, the Government took a step which gravely affected the Irish party. Payment of members was established by a resolution of the House of Commons.
Irish Nationalist members had always been paid from the party fund, that is to say, by their supporters. Payment was conditional, not of right, and it was not made except when the member was in attendance: it amounted only to twenty pounds a month. The new payment came from the British Treasury; it was made irrespective of the desire of constituents, or of any other consideration; and it amounted to a sum which in a country of small incomes sounded very imposing. Unquestionably the receipt of it weakened the position of the party in the eyes of Ireland, and gave a new sting to the charge of a bargain.
All this was clearly discerned in advance, by no one more than by Redmond; and an amendment was moved to strike Irish members out of the application of the resolution. But the situation was hopelessly involved, the Irish party having repeatedly voted for payment of members as part of the Radical programme which they supported as affecting any normally governed country; and Government refused to make the exception.
As a result, Redmond's following lost much of the prestige which had resulted from scrupulous observance of the understanding that no Nationalist member should take office under Government. To join the Irish party had been, in effect, for most men, to make a vow of poverty. Now, on the contrary, it involved acceptance of what was in Ireland's eyes a well-paid and unlaborious office. The Irish are no less prone than any other nation to take a cynical view of these matters.
Yet assuredly no man ever gave more service for less pay than the Nationalist leader, and it was the harder because he was a man who liked comfort and had no ambition. If at the time of the great "split" he had stood down from politics, success would have been assured to him at the Bar in Ireland, or, more surely still, and far more profitably, at Westminster itself. There never was anyone so well-fitted for the work of a parliamentary barrister who has to deal with great interests before a tribunal largely composed of laymen. No one had the House of Commons tone more perfectly than Redmond, and no one that I ever heard equalled his gift for making a complicated issue appear simple. When he was thrown out of Parliament at the Cork election, he thought of retirement, mainly for one reason: it would be better for his children. Yet, first by personal loyalty to Parnell, later by his loyalty to Ireland, he was held firm to his task—always a poor man, always knowing that it lay in his power, without the least sacrifice of principle, to become rich by a way of work less laborious and infinitely less harassing than that which he pursued.
The effect upon the Irish situation produced by the payment of members was slow to develop, and obscure. But an obvious and grave complication was introduced into both British and Irish politics at the moment when the democratic alliance had achieved its first great objective. Parliament had been in session almost continuously since the beginning of 1909, with the added strain of two general elections thrown in. There was a widespread desire to clear the autumn of 1911, so that members might have some breathing space, and, not less important, devote themselves to propagandist work in their constituencies for the new struggle of carrying measures under the hardly won Parliament Act. Each of these measures must involve a fight prolonged over three years.
But this desire ran against the purposes of Mr. Asquith's chief lieutenant, whose power and popularity were now at their height. Mr. Lloyd George in the course of the session had introduced his Insurance Bill, and it was welcomed with astonishing effusion from both sides of the House. As discussion proceeded, however, the complexity and difficulty of its proposals, and the number of oppositions which they provoked, became so apparent that it was not in human nature for politicians at such a crisis to forgo the opportunity. Most of the Liberal party would have preferred to drop the Bill temporarily and refer it to a Committee of Enquiry. Mr. Lloyd George was convinced that this would be fatal to his measure, concerning which he was possessed by a missionary zeal. Probably when his career comes under the study of impartial history it will be perceived that never at any moment was he so passionately and so honestly in earnest as upon this quest. But it is certain that by pursuit of it he created enormous difficulties in the way of those reforms which the democratic alliance at large most desired to achieve. He carried his point; an autumn session followed, in which the mind of the electorate was diverted from the Irish question and all other questions except that of Insurance, and Parliament itself was jaded to the brink of exhaustion.
The matter was difficult for us in Ireland because, owing to the different system of Public Health Administration, many of the most important provisions could not apply, and because the Bill as a whole was framed to meet the needs of a highly industrialized and crowded community. Broadly speaking, it was less desired in Ireland than in Great Britain; and even for Great Britain Mr. Lloyd George was legislating in advance of public opinion rather than in response to it. Mr. O'Brien and his following vehemently opposed the application of the Bill to Ireland; and the Irish Catholic Bishops, by a special resolution, expressed their view to the same effect. The Bill, however, had a powerful advocate in Mr. Devlin, and the Irish party decided to support its extension to Ireland, subject to certain modifications which they obtained.
Apart from the new unsettlement of public opinion which it created both in Great Britain and in Ireland, the Insurance Act added to our difficulties on the Home Rule question. It was clear already that the question of finance lay like a rock ahead. Up to 1908 the proceeds of Irish revenue had always given a margin over the cost of all Irish services, though that margin had dwindled almost to vanishing-point. Old Age Pensions completely turned the beam and left us in the position of costing more than we contributed. Now the outlay on Insurance added half a million a year to the balance against us.
Still, difficulties and perplexities were not limited to one side. The Tory party were much divided since the crisis on the Parliament Act. A section, and the most active section, had been violently opposed to the surrender on the critical division, and these men were profoundly discontented with Mr. Balfour's leadership; so Mr. Balfour, yielding to intimations, suddenly resigned. Somewhat unexpectedly, Mr. Bonar Law was chosen to succeed him, Mr. Long and Mr. Chamberlain waiving their respective claims.
This choice was of sinister augury. Mr. Law did not know Ireland. But, Canadian-born, he came from a country in which the Irish factions and theological enmities had always had their counterpart; his father, a Presbyterian Minister, came of Ulster stock. All the blood in him instinctively responded to the tap of the Orange
