The Daily Telegraph WEDNESDAY, MARCH 2, 1881.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3021, 2 March 1881, Page 2

The Daily Telegraph WEDNESDAY, MARCH 2, 1881.

It has been said—it is, indeed, tbe only apology Mr Gladstone's Government and its supporters have to make for the wretched bungling of the Liberal Ministry—that the disasters which have attended the British arms in Afghanistan and in Africa are the fruits of the Jingo policy of Lord Beaconsfield. It is said that England is now reaping the harvest grown from the seed which was sown by the Conservatives. In like manner the troubles in Ireland are attributed to the long past actions of the same party. Everything that is sorrowful; everything that has gone wrong ; every piece of bungling, is; put down, not to tbe debit of the careless mismanagement of the present, but as tbe direct result of something that went before the advent of the never-too-much-to-be-belauded William Ewart Gladstone. There is a wretched cowardice in this attempted shuffling off of responsibility upon the shoulders of political opponents. But it was ever the policy of the leaders of the Liberals of England to blame others for their own sins. It was upon that " cry " that they got into office. And it is astonishing how the large masses of population are so easily led by the claptrap of men who can talk, and how tbey are so little moved by the steady perseverance of men who work. Just prior to the general elections, Mr Gladstone, who, it was supposed, had finally retired to the comfort of family prayers and ireepruning, stumped the country like a blatant Yankee candidate for Presidential honors, and in his innumerable speeches stirred the British empire to its foundations. But the effect of this stirring of dry bones was vastly different in different portions of the empire. Mr Gladstone, assured of an overwhelming majority in Parliament, picked up the reins of Government, end then the effect of his electioneering orations became immediately apparent. The Afghans looked for the evacuation of their country by tbe British troops; Ireland regarded the Liberal ascendency as an earnest of such reforms as would annihilate the landlord and make the tenant the freeholder ; Greece expected a gift of half of the remnant of Turkey -in-Europe; tbeßritish taxpayer made sure of a reduction of the army and navy, and a corresponding reduction of taxes; and last, but unfortunately not least, the Boers of Transvaal made sure of their independence. These expectations, not having been fulfilled in the twinkling of an eye, led to disappointment, and disappointment produced those agitations which, instead of receiviog assistance from Mr Gladstone's Government, sent the fleet to Dubigno, placed Turkey and Greece at the dagger's point, produced Boycotting in Ireland, disasters in Afghanistan, and defeat in Africa. Nor, says tbe St. Jamen's Budget, can there be any reasonable, doubt that this is what Mr Gladstone has actually done. At the time when he was making it his boast to devote his whole energies to " counterworking the designs" of Lord Beaconsfield—at the time when he was every day passionately adjuring his countrymen to replace his party in power for the express purpose of reversing a " wicked " policy, he repeatedly made the annexation of the Transvaal do duty as a count in tbe long indictment against the Ministry then in power. He denounced them for having forcibly brought a " free European Christian community " against the wishes of more than three-fourths of their number " within the limits of a monarchy ; " be declared that " there was no strength to be added to this country by governing the Transvaal; " he inveighed against the useless expenditure of the national money " in establishing the supremacy of the Queen over a vigorous, obstinate, and tenacious community of Protestants—the Dutchmen of the Transvaal." Without recalling any other of his utterances, we may say that by these declamations alone he virtually pledged himself to a restoration of the territory ; for the whole point of his exhortations to the country to replace his party in power lay in the oftenrepeated promise to undo whatever in his opponent's policy could be undone, to retreat whenever retreat was possible, to make reparation for the wrongs committed by them wherever the means of reparation could be found. And, whatis more, he showed in the case of Afghanistan at any rate that be had the fatal courage to redeem his reckless promises. But besides the encouragement of sympathy, Mr Gladstone's Government has further given the Boers the encouragement of weakness. Sentimental statesmen at home may justify the toleration of anarchy by such rhetorical commonplaces as that " force is no remedy," but they would greatly delude themselves by imagining that their rhetoric will in any degree correct the mischievous effect of the spectacle upon the minds of_ other races. There are certain points in the Irish situation which can be discerned

from a distance and by the eye of a foreigner, and there are other details of it which he is not ir? iho leatt likely to apprehend. Un-

fortunately A is onl}' the worse and most discreditable anpf-i-.a of the picture which

belong iv tbi3 instance to the former categor7. The Boers of the Transvaal are hardly in a position to appreciate those n.agiranirnous arguments % which liauicais upline the reluctance of the

Government to coerce the " wronged " peasantry of Ireland. Still less apt would they bo to understand the nature or believe in the potent effect of those sectional discussions which have paralyzed the Cabinet. But what they can perceive is that the Queen's authority has been and is being openly defied by her on ejects over a large part of an island within a day's journey of the English capital; and that the Queen's Ministers either dare not or will not take actitin to vindicate that authority. A single hard fact of this kind is likely to weigh more with a rude race like the Boers than a dozen fine-spun theories put forward to account for it. And when they note the further fact that this Government, which dares not, as a Boer would put it, assume tbe offensive against tbe rebellious tenant farmers of Ireland, and apparently compelled to collect an army of 30,000 men in the country to protect even its now nominal authority against deposition by open insurrectionary violence, it would be no wonder if they thought that the time had come to strike a blow for their independence. They may well think tbat they might have to wait long before meeting with such a concurrence of conditions : and tbat they might never again have to deal with an English Government at once so sympathetic, so irresolute, and with their hands so full at home.