iv. The Policy of Trust.  ’I believe myself that suspicion is the besetting vice of politicians and that trust is often the truest wisdom.’[122]

This sentiment is followed by curious and ambiguous qualifications.  It is not cited for the sake of fixing Mr. Gladstone with any doctrine whatever; it is quoted because it neatly expresses the sentiment which, in one form or another, underlies most of the arguments in favour of Home Rule or of our new constitution.  The right attitude for a politician, it is urged, is trust; he should trust the Irish leaders and their assurances or professions; he should trust in the training conferred upon men by the exercise of power; he should trust in the healing effects of a policy of conciliation, or, to put the matter shortly, he should trust in the goodness and reasonableness of human nature.  Exercise only a little trustfulness and the policy of Home Rule, it is suggested, may be seen to be a wise and prudent policy.[123]

How far, then, is trust in any of the three forms, which it may on this occasion take, a reasonable sentiment?

We are told to trust the Irish leaders.

My answer to this advice is plain and decided.  Confidence is not a matter of choice.  You cannot give your trust simply because you wish to give it.  Men are trusted because they are trustworthy.  The Irish Home Rule leaders as a body cannot inspire trust, for the simple reason that their whole policy and conduct prove them untrustworthy.  Politicians, strange as the fact may appear to them, cannot get quit of their past.

Look for a moment at the history—­the patent, acknowledged history—­of the agitators or the patriots (and I doubt not that many of them are, from their own point of view, patriotic) in whom we are asked to confide, and whose assurances are to form the basis on which to rest a dubious policy.  They have been till recently the foes of England.  This in itself is not much; many a rebel has been the enemy of England, and yet has been entitled to the respect of Englishmen.  But there are deeds which neither hatred to England nor love of Ireland can justify.  Even sedition has its moral code, and like war itself is subject to obligations which no man can neglect without infamy.  The conspirators condemned by the Special Commission—­and among them are to be found the most prominent of the Irish leaders[124]—­have been guilty of conduct which no wise man ought to forget and no good man ought to palliate.  They have for years excited Irish ignorance against England and against English officials by a system of gross incessant slander; witness the pages of United Ireland when Lord Spencer and Sir George Trevelyan were in power at Dublin.  The men whom we are told to trust are men who did enter into a criminal conspiracy by a system of coercion and intimidation to promote an agrarian agitation against the payment of agricultural rents, for the purpose of impoverishing and expelling from the country