24 George Wyndham on Home Rule [1902 



and the publicity was already obtained. Moreover, before the Foreign 

 Office Vote came on for discussion the King's illness had occurred, 

 and nobody had any attention to pay elsewhere. The case was of 

 importance, not so much in itself as from the demonstration it gave 

 of the unscrupulous methods resorted to by our diplomacy at Cairo 

 to hide its tampering with the Law Courts and whitewash the mis- 

 deeds of the Army of Occupation ; the publicity made it possible for 

 me later to fix on Cromer the responsibility of the scandalous Den- 

 shawai case. 



" 2()th May. — An early luncheon with George Wyndham and sat 

 talking with him for a couple of hours, mostly on his Irish policy. 

 I am amused to find him more and more of a Home Ruler, though 

 he does not quite avow it. He seems to have found out that it is a 

 choice between that and Government as a Crown Colony. _ I asked him 

 whether he did not think the Local Self Government Bill in Ireland 

 had played entirely into the Nationalists' hands, and he admitted that 

 perhaps it had, but it had been a necessary part of the general 

 Unionist policy of treating Ireland precisely on the same lines as 

 England. It might lead indirectly to a sort of Home Rule, that is 

 to say it might come to a union of the local councils under one 

 general council at Dublin which would practically settle all Irish 

 affairs. In the meanwhile the law had to be carried out. There was 

 hardly any real crime in Ireland ; but where the law was very clearly 

 broken the Crimes Act must be put in force. He believed the Irish 

 leaders would secretly quite approve of this, for they did not want 

 crime any more than the Government did. What had always been 

 resented was the blundering in the choice of cases to be dealt with. 

 On the whole, the thing as far as he was concerned was to get his 

 Land Bill passed and his Catholic University Bill, both of which he 

 meant to carry through, and get through his term of office as peace- 

 ably as was possible. He did not expect the Government to last out 

 longer than October 1903. 



" We talked also on the larger aspects of Imperialism, and he 

 agreed with me that the violences done in connection with South 

 Africa, necessary as perhaps they were, had had an ill effect on 

 our national character, and that it might well happen that personal 

 freedom and strict legality would both suffer here in England in 

 consequence. I have been reading Stowe's Chronicle of the reign 

 of Henry VIII, and I reminded George of the destruction in a very 

 few years of both freedom and legality, and how it had ruined the 

 character of Englishmen to the extent that at the close of the reign 

 each nobleman was ready to betray his fellow-conspirator, and each 

 Bishop to recant his heresies, and each gentleman condemned to death 



