‘I remain, with great respect, my dear Lord Bishop,
‘Yours most faithfully, ‘W. E. GLADSTONE.
‘The Right Rev. the Lord Bishop of St. Asaph.’
During the subsequent proceedings the letter was frequently referred to as a magnificent letter, and as one worthy of the Premier’s transcendent abilities.
Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord E. Fitzmaurice, complimenting him upon a speech which he delivered at Old Cumnock, in Ayrshire. ‘It was pre-eminently,’ said the ex-Premier, ‘the speech that was wanted, made by one who was “in all respects peculiarly the man to make it.” In my view,’ proceeded Mr. Gladstone, ‘Ireland is the heading of a bright chapter in the history, not only of the Liberals, but especially of the Whigs. It was a noble thing on the part of Burke and Fitzwilliam and the other seceders from Fox that not all their horror of France could make them untrue to Ireland. The Whig party after the schism remained for Irish purposes unbroken, and were right in each one of the various stages through which the question had to pass—right in the endeavour, frustrated by Pitt and the ascendency men, to work the Grattan Parliament; right in the opposition to the Union when it was shamelessly forced on Ireland; right in saying, by the mouth of Fox, that so huge a measure must have an unprejudiced and a full trial when it had once been effected, and when no man could undertake to say positively that Ireland might not come, as Scotland had come, to make it her own by adoption; right, probably, when Grattan gave his provisional sanction to coercion as the necessary sequel to the Union; right certainly when Lord Grey and Lord Althorp proposed further coercion in 1834, when they had done, and were doing, for Ireland in so many ways all which at the time they could, and when no Minister was in a condition to say constitutionally that the sense of the Irish people demanded self-government; and, finally, right was a cruelly crippled remnant of their leading class, enthusiastically supported from first to last by a large portion of the nation, in listening to the constitutional demand of Ireland by their representatives in 1885, and in recognising after three generations had passed away that union with coercion—in other words, government by force—had been tried all but too fully, and had entirely failed. We want,’ continued Mr. Gladstone, ‘a little Whig treatment of Ireland.’ Dealing with another aspect of the argument, which he characterized as ‘not less unacceptable and important,’ he expressed the fear that the action of the chief part of the Whig peers and aristocracy in severing themselves from the bulk of the Liberal party might be to narrow the Liberal party, which had hitherto been so broad. This he attributed ‘entirely to the so-called Liberal Unionists.’ ‘Liberal Unionism has,’ he said, ‘tended to break up the old and invaluable habit of Liberal England, which looked to a Liberal aristocracy and a Liberal leisured class as the natural, and therefore the best, leaders of the Liberal movement. Thus it was that classes and masses were united.’ This controversy, and the recollection, will do away with the certain triumph of Home Rule. But will the ranks which have been divided easily close up? ‘I, for one,’ repeated Mr. Gladstone, ‘think that the narrowing of the party by the severance or reduction of one wing is also the crippling of the party.’