Present Irish Questions
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Title: Present Irish Questions
Author: William O'Connor Morris
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Present Irish Questions
Publisher's Announcement
_By the Same Author_
The Campaign of 1815: Ligny, Quatre Bras, Waterloo.
Demy 8vo, cloth, with Maps, 12_s._ 6_d._ net.
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_The Times_: "We can recommend this book as a painstaking and instructive
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_Pall Mail Gazette_: "Will fill a high place in the all too scanty library
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LONDON: GRANT RICHARDS
9 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, W.C.
Present Irish Questions
BY WILLIAM O'CONNOR MORRIS
COUNTY COURT JUDGE AND CHAIRMAN OF
QUARTER SESSIONS OF ROSCOMMON AND
SLIGO, AND SOMETIME SCHOLAR OF
ORIEL COLLEGE, OXFORD
[Greek: Nosei de moi propas stolos, oud' eni
phrontidos egchos ho tis alexetai.]--SOPHOCLES.
'Blessed is the Amending Hand.'--_Old Proverb._
London
Grant Richards
New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.
1901
I DEDICATE THIS BOOK
A TRIBUTE OF ADMIRATION AND ESTEEM
TO THE MARQUIS OF DUFFERIN AND AVA, K.P.
THE MOST DISTINGUISHED IRISHMAN OF HIS TIME
LONDON: PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.
Preface
I have written much on Ireland from early youth, especially in the
_Edinburgh Review_ and the _Times_; and two works of mine, 'Ireland,
1494-1868' published in 'The Cambridge Historical Series,' and 'Ireland,
1798-1898,' have been received with more than ordinary favour. I have
ventured to think that the opinions of a veteran inquirer into Irish
affairs, with respect to 'Present Irish Questions' just now of much
importance, and certain to be ere long fully discussed in Parliament and
elsewhere, may be of some use to a younger generation, that will have to
examine and must be affected by them. I am not unaware of the cynical
remarks of Swift on the disregard shown to authors who may be said to have
had their day; and I do not pretend that, in the instance of myself, 'old
experience' has given something of a 'prophetic strain' to what is
contained in this volume. But I can say, with truth, that few living men
have had such opportunities as have fallen to my lot, during a long series
of years, to understand Ireland in its different parts, and the feelings
and sentiments of the Irish community; to form sound and moderate views on
the many and perplexing phenomena called 'Irish Questions;' to deal
reasonably with Irish political and social problems, free from the
influences of party prejudice and passion; in short, to do my subject
complete and impartial justice. How the accidents and associations of a
life already protracted beyond the ordinary span, have, as I hope, given
me these qualifications, I have explained at some length in my 'Ireland,
1798-1898;' I shall not repeat what I have already written. But Ireland
has constantly been uppermost in my thoughts; and as regards the
conclusions I have come to in these pages, I may say, with the Roman
historian, 'haec senectuti seposui.'
The examination of 'Present Irish Questions,' in this work, shows the
views I entertain with regard to the actual condition of Ireland in its
various aspects, and to her probable future destinies. These views may be
censured as too gloomy, and even paradoxical; but Ireland remains, as she
was when Macaulay wrote of her, 'A member indeed of the Empire, but a
withered and distorted member;' the revolution which has passed, nay, is
still passing, over her, has destroyed a great deal that ought to have
been preserved, and has put little that is solid and stable in its place;
there is much that is threatening and even dangerous in her political and
social order, and in the sentiments of the mass of her community. In the
case of Ireland, indeed, as in that of any other people, I have faith in
the effect of salutary legislation on wise and just principles, and of
consistent good government steadily carried out, of both of which there
has been but too little evidence, during the last twenty years, in Irish
affairs; above all, my trust is large in the healing influences of Time.
But I have not forgotten that the vision of 'Pacata Hibernia,' which
flitted even before the majestic understanding of Bacon, three centuries
ago, has not been realised; the thoughtless optimism, which, during the
last two generations, has represented Ireland to be in a state of
continual 'progress,' nay, as 'contented and happy,' whenever she has not
been convulsed by disorder and trouble, or racked by poverty and distress,
has been completely falsified; and with nations, as with individuals, the
profound remark of Butler is true; a life of repentance often fails to
redeem the errors of the past. I proceed to indicate some at least of the
authorities which relate to the different parts of my subject. The
material condition of Ireland of late years may, perhaps, be best
ascertained by studying, over some length of time, the large body of
statistics compiled by the Government, and contained in that valuable
publication, 'Thom's Directory,' and by a perusal of the Irish debates in
Hansard. Reference, too, should be made to the important papers of Mr.
Childers, of Lord Farrer, and of Mr. Sexton in the Report of the Childers
Commission, and especially to the evidence of Sir Robert Giffen, and even
of Sir Edward Hamilton, in the Blue Books appended to that inquiry.
'England's Wealth, Ireland's Poverty,' by Thomas Lough, M.P., though a
one-sided book, also deserves attention; and useful information may be
obtained from 'The Five Years in Ireland, 1895-1900,' of Mr. Michael J. F.
McCarthy, too much a eulogy, however, of things as they are, and marked by
a spirit of aversion to, and distrust of, the Irish priesthood, which are
a characteristic of a small section of the Irish Catholics.
The sources of our knowledge respecting the moral, social, and political
state of Ireland are numerous and ample; I shall confine myself, as much
as I can, to those which relate to what may be called her recent
revolutionary period, though Irish history in the past, even in the
distant past, is anything but an 'old almanack.' This mass of evidence
faithfully represents the disturbances and the troubles that have
prevailed in Ireland, with intervals of time between, during the last
twenty years and upwards, and the fierce animosities and conflicts which
have been the consequence. Here a reader should again consult Hansard,
notably the debates on Ireland, during the agitated period from 1880 to
1889; of course he should only study the great speeches. The publications
on this subject are very many, and some of real importance; as regards
the policy and conduct of the Land, and even of the National Leagues, and
the frightful outbreak of disorder and crime which was the result, nothing
is equal in value to the Report of the Judges of the 'Special Commission,'
and to the immense body of evidence brought before them; 'The Verdict,' by
Professor Dicey, sums up well the conclusions at which they arrived. The
utterances of the so-called Irish 'Nationalist' Press, throughout these
years, fully verify the facts disclosed in the Report, and its findings;
they have, indeed, been continued in a less ferocious and violent, but in
a significant, strain ever since; a collection of them will be found in
the volumes published by the Irish Unionist Alliance. On this subject, and
also on the state of opinion existing among a large majority, probably, of
the Irish people, see 'The Continuity of the Irish Revolutionary
Movement,' by Professor Brougham Leech; 'The Truth about the Land League,'
by Mr. Arnold Foster, M.P.; 'Parnellism and Crime,' republished from the
_Times_; 'Incipient Irish Revolution,' anonymous but able; some valuable
articles on Ireland by the late Lord Grey that appeared in the _Nineteenth
Century_; 'Disturbed Ireland,' by Mr. T. W. Russell, M.P.; 'The Plan of
Campaign Illustrated;' and 'About Ireland,' by Mrs. E. Lynn Lynton. The
recent revolutionary and agrarian movements in Ireland have not found many
to vindicate them, or even fully to explain their causes; but reference
may be made to 'The Parnell Movement,' by T. P. O'Connor, M.P.; to the
'New Ireland' of Mr. A. M. Sullivan; to Mr. Barry O'Brien's 'Irish Wrongs
and English Remedies;' and to a series of articles called 'Ungrateful
Ireland,' in the _Nineteenth Century_, from the pen of Sir G. Duffy. A
host of papers in quarterly, monthly, and other reviews and magazines on
the political and social condition of Ireland of late years has, also,
been published from time to time. Attempts have been made, quite recently,
to show that the troubles of Ireland have become things of the past, and
that she is a prosperous and happy land; but though real improvement has
certainly taken place, these are mere repetitions of the optimistic
fancies that have so often proved delusions.
The great question of Home Rule, 'present' if for a time postponed, was
first put forward formally by the late Isaac Butt. His 'Irish Federalism'
is a thoughtful and able treatise that ought to be studied. The speeches
in Parliament, from 1874 to 1885, on this subject, collected in Hansard,
deserve attention; notably the violent attacks on this policy made during
many years by Mr. Gladstone. Hansard, too, should be perused, after that
statesman became a convert to Home Rule, for the speeches on both sides,
on the Home Rule Bills of 1886 and 1893; some are of marked power and
insight, though few rise to the heights of great constitutional
principles. Mr. Gladstone's defence of his sudden change of front will be
found in his 'History of an Idea,' a tract published soon after his defeat
at the polls in 1886; he has endeavoured to vindicate his later Irish
policy, in many pamphlets and speeches, in volumes collected by himself.
For a masterly examination of his public conduct on matters relating to
Ireland, and in some other passages in his career, I would especially
direct the reader to the 'Memoirs of the late Lord Selborne,' part ii.
vol. ii. pp. 339-360; Mr. Lecky's brilliant sketch in his 'Democracy and
Liberty,' Cabinet Edition, Introduction, pp. 19-56, is a composition of
rare excellence. Nothing is to be compared to Professor Dicey's 'England's
Case against Home Rule,' and his 'Leap in the Dark,' for a thorough
investigation, from the Unionist point of view, of the natural and the
probable consequences of the Gladstonian Irish policy, and for an analysis
of the two Home Rule Bills; few political works have attracted equal
attention. There have also been many publications, on the side of the
Union, of more or less merit; see 'Home Rule,' reprinted from the _Times_,
containing several very able letters and papers; 'The Truth about Home
Rule;' 'A Sketch of Unionist Policy;' and a number of articles in the
_Edinburgh_ and the _Quarterly Review_, and in other reviews and
magazines. The publications which advocate Home Rule have not been
numerous; a reader may consult the 'Hand Book of Home Rule,' edited by Mr.
Bryce, M.P.; 'Irish Members and English Gaolers,' and 'Combination and
Coercion,' by Mr. Shaw-Lefevre; and some contributions to a few reviews
and other serials.
The 'Present Question' of the Irish land, and of Irish landed relations,
goes back to even remote antiquity, and is connected with the whole course
of Irish history. The characteristics and peculiarities of tribal land
tenure in Ireland, before the Anglo-Norman Conquest, have been admirably
explained in Sir Henry Maine's 'Early History of Institutions,' a very
valuable work. I may refer to an article on this book, from my pen, in the
_Edinburgh Review_ of July, 1875. See, also, the 'Senchus Mor,' and the
'Book of Aicile,' fragments of the Brehon Laws, well annotated by the late
Professor Richey. The state of the Irish land, from the Anglo-Norman
Conquest to the beginning of the Tudor period, has been fully illustrated
in the 'Statute of Kilkenny,' edited by James Hardiman, whose learned
commentary is useful and important; in the 'Discovery' of Sir John Davies;
in Spenser's 'View of the State of Ireland;' in the 'O'Conors of
Connaught,' by the O'Conor Don; in Hallam's 'Constitutional History,' vol.
iii. chapter on Ireland; and in Professor Richey's 'Lectures.' I have
glanced at the state of Irish land tenure during the tribal and the feudal
ages, in the introductory chapters to my 'Ireland, 1494-1868,' in the
'Cambridge Historical Series.' The most complete account, perhaps, of the
confiscations of the Irish land, from the reign of Henry VIII. to that of
Charles I., will be found in the 'Carew Papers,' edited by J. S. Brewer
and William Bullen; valuable information abounds in the 'State Papers
relating to the reign of Henry VIII.,' edited by Hans Claude Hamilton; in
'The Life of Sir John Perrott and his Letters;' in the 'Earls of Kildare,'
edited by the Marquis of Kildare; in the 'State Papers,' edited by
Hamilton, _ante_, 'relating to the reigns of Edward VI., Mary, and
Elizabeth;' in the 'Annals of the Four Masters;' and see Davies and
Spenser, _ante_. Several modern writers have treated this subject in their
narratives of Irish history; Froude's 'History of England,' vol. ii. ch.
viii.; vol. iv. ch. xix.; vol. v. ch. xxviii.; vol. viii. chs. vii.-xi.;
vol. x. ch. xxiv.; vol. xi. ch. xxvii., may be consulted; but a reader
should be put on his guard against the brilliant but partisan historian.
There is a valuable chapter also, in a very different work, Mr. Lecky's
'History of England in the Eighteenth Century,' vol. ii. ch. vi. pp. 92
_seqq._; and a great deal may be learned from the 'O'Conors of Connaught,'
and Richey's 'Lectures,' _ante_; and especially from an 'Historical
Account of the Plantation of Ulster,' by the Rev. George Hill, and from
Sigerson's 'History of Irish Land Tenure.' In the momentous period of
confiscation, from the beginning of the reign of Charles I. to that of
William III., a reader should study 'Strafford's Letters;' Carte's 'Life
of Ormond;' Lord Clanricarde's 'Memoirs;' the 'Letters of Cromwell,'
edited by Carlyle; the 'Acts of Settlement and Explanation;' the 'Articles
of the Treaty of Limerick;' Sir William Petty's 'Political Anatomy of
Ireland;' 'Macariae Excidium;' and the Abbe MacGeoghegan's 'History of
Ireland.' The modern authorities on this period are numerous and some of
great value; see Gardiner's 'History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate'
(the Irish chapters), notably vol. iii. ch. xliv.; 'The Cromwellian
Settlement of Ireland,' by John P. Prendergast; 'The Life of Sir William
Petty,' by Lord Edmund Fitzmaurice, with an article by me in the
_Edinburgh Review_ of July, 1895; 'The Patriot Parliament,' by Thomas
Davis; Macaulay's 'History of England' (the Irish chapters), vol. iv. ch.
xxii.; vol. v. ch. xiv.-xvi.; vol. vi. ch. xvii.; and Mr. Lecky's
'History,' _ante_, vol. ii. ch. ix. Many instructive and philosophic
passages on all these confiscations and their results, will be found
scattered among the writings of Burke; they are admirable.
The era of violent confiscation closed with the reign of William III.; the
modern history of the Irish land system begins from this period. For an
account of the penal code, as it affected Irish landed relations,
reference may be made to Vincent Scully, 'On the Penal Laws;' to Howard's
'Popery Cases;' and especially to Burke's 'Tracts on the Popery Laws.'
Much, too, can be gathered from Curry's 'State of the Irish Catholics;'
from Primate Boulter's and Archbishop Synge's 'Letters;' from the writings
on Ireland of Swift and Berkeley; and from various passages in the 'Works
and Correspondence of Burke.' For the state of the Irish land from the
beginning of the reign of George III. to the Rebellion of 1798, study the
celebrated 'Tour' of Arthur Young, written in 1776-78; Crumpe's 'Essay;'
an admirable sketch by Mr. Lecky in his 'History,' _ante_, vol. vii. ch.
xxvii.; and Sir George Lewis on 'Irish Disturbances,' a book which gives
an account of the rise and progress of the Whiteboy movement, and carries
the narrative down to 1836. Froude has illustrated this subject very
skilfully in his 'Two Chiefs of Dunboy;' but his account, in his 'The
English in Ireland,' is very inaccurate and one-sided. The nature of Irish
landed relations during the troubled period before the Union is fully
explained in many passages of Mr. Lecky's 'History,' _ante_, vols. vii.
and viii.; and the reader should peruse Lord Clare's speech in the Irish
House of Lords during the debates on the Union. From the Union to the
present time, the authorities on the Irish land system are very numerous;
it is not easy to make compendious selection. For the period of the Great
War, Edward Wakefield's 'Account of Ireland' is valuable, and so is, for
the immediately subsequent period, the evidence on the state of Ireland
taken by a Committee of the House of Commons in 1825. The nature and the
characteristics of the Irish land system, in 1843-44, are fully explained
and commented upon in the well-known Report of the Devon Commission, and
the voluminous evidence; and for the revolution wrought in the Irish land
by the Famine of 1845-47, see the 'Irish Crisis,' by Sir Charles
Trevelyan, republished from the _Edinburgh Review_; and a 'History of the
Great Irish Famine,' by the Rev. John O'Rorke. Much information, too, on
the subject, as a whole, may be obtained from 'L'Irlande, Sociale,
Politique, et Religieuse,' of Gustave de Beaumont; from 'Ireland from the
Treaty of Limerick to 1851,' by John Mitchell; from parts of 'Two
Centuries of Irish History,' edited by James Bryce, M.P.; from several
'Reports' of the Loyal National Repeal Association; and from parts of Mr.
Barry O'Brien's 'Fifty Years of Concessions to Ireland,' and 'Irish Wrongs
and English Remedies.'
The Irish land question has given birth to a literature of its own in the
last half-century; legislation on the Irish land system has been
extraordinarily active. With respect to the first, reference may be made
to 'Two Centuries of Irish History,' _ante_, and to Mr. Barry O'Brien's
works, _ante_; to 'Emigration and the Tenure of Irish Land,' by Lord
Dufferin; to John Stuart Mill's 'The Irish Land Question;' to 'The Irish
People and the Irish Land,' by Butt; to Sir George Campbell's 'The Irish
Land,' a very good little book; to Judge Longfield's essay on the Irish
land in 'Systems of Land Tenure;' and to my own 'Letters on the Land
Question of Ireland,' republished from the _Times_. I am happy to think
that, on this subject, I have always 'pitched my Whiggery low;' my first
essay was on the Encumbered Estates Act; when fresh from Oxford I
condemned that scheme of confiscation as unequivocally as, in the present
and other works, I have condemned Irish agrarian legislation since
1880-81. Other books contain passages on the Irish land system that may be
read with profit; see the 'Recollections and Suggestions' of Earl Russell;
'Ireland in 1868,' by Gerald Fitzgibbon; 'Ireland,' by Lord Grey;
'Journals, Conversations, and Essays relating to Ireland,' by Nassau
Senior; and 'New Views on Ireland,' by Lord Russell of Killowen. As
regards recent legislation on the Irish Land, from 1870 to 1896, the Acts
passed by Parliament must of course be studied, and also the important
debates reported in Hansard. Butt wrote a very able volume on the Land Act
of 1870; I contributed a short treatise; an exhaustive and technical work
of great value, on all the Irish Land Acts, has been produced by Messrs.
Cherry and Wakely; this, with the Irish Reports, supplies ample
professional, and even general, information. With respect to the
administration of the Irish Land Acts, see the Report of the Committee of
the House of Lords, and the evidence published in 1872; the Report of, and
the evidence collected by, the Bessborough Commission of 1880-81; the
Report of a Committee of the House of Lords on the working of the Land Act
of 1881, published, with the evidence, in 1882; the Report, with the
evidence, of the Cowper Commission, 1888-89; the Report, with the
evidence, of the Morley Commission, 1894-1895; and, especially, the Report
of Sir Edward Fry's Commission of 1897, with the important evidence it has
put together. Mr. Lecky, in his 'Democracy and Liberty,' vol. i. ch. ii.,
has criticised, almost as severely as I have done, recent Irish agrarian
legislation; no serious defence of it has ever been made or attempted.
To understand the real state of the financial relations between Great
Britain and Ireland, it is necessary to go back to the times of the Union;
those who resist the Irish demand avoid an appeal to history. The debates
in the Irish Parliament in 1800 should be carefully studied, especially
the speeches of Castlereagh, Grattan, and Foster. The Seventh Article of
the Treaty of Union, set forth in this work, should also be diligently
scanned and perused. See, too, the debates in the Imperial Parliament in
1816; the resolutions passed by the House of Commons in that year; and the
Act abolishing the separate Exchequer of Ireland. Reference, moreover,
should be made to the evidence taken before General Dunne's Committee in
1864, in which sophistry triumphed for the moment over truth. All these
sources of information, however, are scanty and imperfect compared to the
celebrated Report of the Childers Commission, with the valuable evidence
annexed to it; this for the first time completely brings out the whole
facts on the subject. The debates in Hansard on the financial claims of
Ireland may also be looked at; but they are not of peculiar importance;
the same remark applies to nearly all the articles in reviews, magazines,
and journals, in which endeavours have been made to answer the Report. I
may be allowed to say that I have some claim to have a distinct opinion in
this matter; when still quite a boy I often heard my grand-uncle, the late
Sir John Newport, one of the ablest and last of the Chancellors of the
Irish Exchequer, condemn the financial treatment of Ireland from 1800
onwards; many years afterwards I was intimately acquainted with several of
the independent Irish gentlemen, survivors of the great school of Grattan,
who protested against Mr. Gladstone's fiscal Irish measures from 1853 to a
later date; Butt and Judge Longfield, both very able economists, fully
concurred. With respect to local government and administration in Ireland,
see Mr. Barry O'Brien's 'Fifty Years of Concessions to Ireland,' vol. i.
books iv. and v.; the Report of the Commissioners on Irish Corporate
Reform issued in 1833-34, and the Irish Municipal Corporation Reform Act
of 1840; the Irish Towns Commissioners Acts; a report made by Mr. W. P.
O'Brien in 1878; a good treatise by Mr. Bailey published in 1888; and the
recent Irish Local Government Act of 1898, with the debates in Hansard on
this measure, should be perused. The authorities on Irish education of all
kinds are numerous, and some valuable. Froude has glanced at the subject,
with characteristic unfairness, in his 'The English in Ireland;' the
refutation of Mr. Lecky, in his 'England in the Eighteenth Century,' is
complete. A good description of education in Ireland, in all its branches,
as it existed in 1812, will be found in Edward Wakefield's 'Account of
Ireland,' vol. ii. ch. xxiv.; another in Mr. Barry O'Brien's 'Fifty Years
of Concessions to Ireland,' vol. i. book i.; vol ii. book x.; the author
brings the narrative down to 1881. As regards high education in Ireland,
reference may be made to 'The History of the University of Dublin,' by the
Rev. W. Stubbs; to 'The Constitutional History of the University of
Dublin,' by D. C. Heron; to the Report of Archbishop Whateley's
Commission, in 1853, on the University of Dublin; to Mr. Gladstone's Irish
University Bill of 1873, and the able debates on the subject in Trinity
College and the House of Commons; to Mr. Fawcett's Act of 1873; to a
masterly pamphlet by Butt, on the whole question, published in 1875; and
to the 'Irish University Question,' by Archbishop Walsh, with recent
debates in Parliament on Irish University reform. For the nature,
constitution, and working of the Queen's Colleges and the Queen's
University, see the debates in Parliament when Peel introduced this
policy; many Reports; the work of Archbishop Walsh, _ante_; and the Act
creating the Royal University in Ireland may be examined. As regards
primary and secondary education in Ireland, see the Reports of the
Education Commissioners from 1810 to 1825; the Reports of the National
Education Board; the Reports of the Kildare, Rosse, and Powis
Commissions, noticed in this work; and Mr. Godkin's 'Education in
Ireland.' An excellent synopsis of the subject, as a whole, will be found
in 'The Educational Systems of Great Britain and Ireland,' by Mr. Graham
Balfour.
WILLIAM O'CONNOR MORRIS.
GARTNAMONA, TULLAMORE,
_14th May, 1901_.
Contents
PAGES
CHAPTER I
IRELAND IN 1901
Ireland has passed through a revolution in the Victorian
age--Material progress--Dublin--Belfast--Improvement in
Catholic places of worship and in the habitations of the
people--State of the Irish community--Symptoms of
retrogression--Decline of agriculture--The progress of Ireland
Ireland much less than that of England and Scotland, and
why--State of the Irish land system--Recent legislation has
done some good, but it has been unjust, and has had pernicious
effects--Ireland divided into three peoples--Notwithstanding
great reforms Catholic Ireland is still, in the main,
disaffected--Presbyterian Ireland--Cry for the confiscation of
the Irish land--Protestant Ireland--Fall of its old
ascendency--Discontent among the landed gentry--Nature of the
government of Ireland by the Imperial Parliament--Its merits
and defects--Attitude of the greater part of Ireland towards
it--The administration of Irish affairs--The bureaucracy of
the Castle--The Anglican, Presbyterian, and Catholic Irish
Churches--The administration of justice in Ireland--Irish
literature and public opinion--General survey of the present
state of Ireland--Irish policy of Lord Salisbury's
Ministry--'Present Irish Questions' to be discussed in this
work 1-38
CHAPTER II
THE QUESTION OF HOME RULE
The question of Home Rule not extinct--The reasons--Butt's
scheme of Home Rule--It is denounced and ridiculed by Mr.
Gladstone, and defeated in the House of Commons--Death of
Butt--The Home Rule movement becomes allied with a foreign
conspiracy--Davitt and Parnell--The Land League--Mr.
Gladstone's surrender to it--The movement makes no progress
in the Parliament of 1880-85--The General Election of
1885--Mr. Gladstone suddenly adopts the policy of Home
Rule--The probable reasons--The Home Rule Bill of 1886--Its
nature and tendencies--Decisive objections to the
measure--It is rejected at the General Election of 1886,
having been previously rejected in the House of Commons--
Policy and conduct of Mr. Gladstone--The Home Rule movement
makes some progress in England, and why--The Home Rule Bill
of 1893--It is much worse than that of 1886--The reasons--It
is rejected by the House of Lords--Home Rule under different
forms--The Union must be maintained--Proposal that Parliament
should occasionally sit in Dublin--The over-representation
of Ireland should be redressed 39-83
CHAPTER III
THE QUESTION OF THE IRISH LAND--SKETCH OF THE HISTORY OF THE
LAND SYSTEM OF IRELAND TO THE YEAR 1870
Great importance in the history of Ireland of the conditions
of land tenure--The ancient Celtic land system and its
characteristics--The Norman conquest of Ireland--Norman
feudalism in the Irish land--The policy of Henry VII., and
especially of Henry VIII.--The era of the conquest and
confiscation of the Irish land--The possessions of the
O'Connors of Offaly wrested from them--Forfeiture of the
domains of Shane O'Neill, and of the Earl of Desmond--Attempts
at colonisation--All Ireland made shire land--The extinction
of the old Celtic land system--The Plantation of Ulster--
Progress of confiscation during the reigns of the two first
Stuarts--The Civil War--Immense confiscations made by
Cromwell--His scheme of colonisation a failure--The era of
confiscation closes after the battle of the Boyne and the fall
of Limerick--The Penal Code of Ireland--Its fatal effects on
the Irish land--Dismal period in Irish landed relations--
Gradual improvement--The period described by Arthur Young--
Evil traces of the past remain--Whiteboyism and agrarian
disorder--State of Irish landed relations up to the rebellion
of 1798, and after the Union--Over-population and the
results--Distress after the Peace--State of Irish landed
relations up to 1844--The Report of the Devon Commission--The
Famine and its effects on the Irish land--The Encumbered
Estates Acts--State of Irish landed relations from 1848 to
1868 84-129
CHAPTER IV
THE QUESTION OF THE IRISH LAND (_continued_)--THE IRISH LAND
ACT OF 1870--THE LAND LEAGUE AND THE NATIONAL LEAGUE--THE LAND
ACT OF 1881--SUBSEQUENT LEGISLATION AS REGARDS THE LAND SYSTEM
OF IRELAND
State of landed relations in Ireland in 1869-70--Mr. Gladstone
Prime Minister--The Land Act of 1870--Its merits and defects--
A short period of prosperity in Ireland--Ominous symptoms--
Michael Davitt--The teaching of John Finton Lalor in 1848--The
'New Departure' in Fenianism arranged in America--Foundation
of the Land League--It was a foreign rebellious conspiracy,
with an agrarian side, under a constitutional mask--Parnell
the master spirit of the League--His visit to America and the
results--A short period of distress in Ireland--Conduct of the
Irish landlords--Progress of the Land League--Mr. Gladstone
again Prime Minister in 1880--The Compensation for Disturbance
Bill rejected by the House of Lords--Outburst of agrarian
crime, as the Land League increases in power--Rents at
Griffith's valuation--Boycotting--Frightful state of Ireland
in 1881--After a short attempt to repress it, Mr. Gladstone
surrenders to the Land League--The Land Act of 1881--Mr.
Gladstone breaks the pledges he had made in 1870--His promise
of compensating the Irish landlords--The Land Act of 1881 a
bad and unjust measure directly inconsistent with that of
1870--The 'No Rent Manifesto'--The Kilmainham Treaty--The
Phoenix Park tragedy--Coercion--Parnell founds the National
League, the successor of the Land League--Renewal of agitation
in 1886--Struggle with law and the Government--Subsequent
agrarian legislation for Ireland--This is really a concession
to agitation, for the benefit of Irish tenants, and to the
injury of Irish landlords 130-187
CHAPTER V
THE QUESTION OF THE IRISH LAND (_continued_)--THE ADMINISTRATION
OF THE IRISH LAND ACTS
The administration of the Land Act of 1870 in the main
good--Difficulty about claims for tenants' improvements--The
administration of the Land Act of 1881, and of its
supplements--The Land Commission and its Sub-Commissions--
Allowances to be made for these tribunals--Principles which
the Land Commission should have adopted in fixing 'fair
rents'--The procedure and practice it ought to have
established--It made mistakes as to both--The nature of the
Sub-Commission Courts--This was objectionable in the highest
degree--These Courts have, however unconsciously, done grave
wrong to Irish landlords--Causes of this--Characteristics of
their proceedings--They disregarded the principles they
ought to have followed, and adopted faulty and erroneous
methods--Different illustrations of these grave mistakes--
The Land Commission and appeals as to 'fair rent'--Importance
of this subject--Faulty procedure of the Land Commission in
appeals--Valuers--The second Land Commission--Its procedure
worse than that of the first--Theory of occupation right--
This another wrong done to landlords--The Fry Commission and
its report--Confiscation of the property of Irish
landlords--The proofs of this--Apologies made for the Land
Commission--The administration of the Land Purchase Acts 188-229
CHAPTER VI
THE QUESTION OF THE IRISH LAND (_continued_)--PROPOSED REFORM
OF THE IRISH LAND SYSTEM
Retrospect of the present Irish land system--Position of the
Irish landlords--Position of the Irish tenant class--This
not as advantageous as might be supposed--The effects of the
land code on Irish agriculture injurious--The effects on the
general Irish community--Confiscation, violation of
contracts, shock given to credit, increased alienation of
classes, and demoralisation--The land system considered on
the side of ownership--'Voluntary purchase'--Mischief of
this policy--It sets up a false standard against rent, and
creates unjust distinctions between different classes of
tenants--The results it has produced already--An instance of
the system--The demand for the compulsory purchase of the
Irish land caused by 'voluntary purchase'--Compulsory
purchase has some hold on opinion, but is an impossible, and
would be a disgraceful and ruinous policy--It would ruin
Irish landlords as a class--Instances--It would ultimately
bring Ireland into the state in which she was before the
Great Famine--Proposed plan for the reform of Irish land
tenure--Questions as to the means of compensating Irish
landlords, a deeply wronged order of men 230-270
CHAPTER VII
THE QUESTION OF THE FINANCIAL RELATIONS BETWEEN GREAT BRITAIN
AND IRELAND
The subject briefly considered--Financial position of
Ireland before 1782, and under Grattan's Parliament--Her
taxation and debt small before 1798--Ireland financially a
distinct country--At the Union, Pitt wished to 'assimilate
her in finance' with Great Britain, but this impossible, and
why--Ireland's contribution after the Union--This was
unjust, but it left her financially a distinct country--
Ireland made nearly bankrupt--The compromise of 1816--The
Irish Exchequer closed, and the Irish and British debts
consolidated--The object of the compromise was rather to
relieve Ireland from her burdens than to assimilate her in
finance with Great Britain--She still remained for many
years financially distinct from Great Britain, and is so
still to some extent--The conduct of Peel a striking proof
of this--Mr. Gladstone imposes the income tax on Ireland,
and her spirit duties are largely raised--Injustice of this
policy--The Committee of 1863-64--Ireland does not obtain
financial justice--The Report of the Childers Commission
made upon a reference by Mr. Gladstone following Mr.
Goschen--The Commission declares that Ireland has been
greatly overtaxed for many years--Evidence on which it has
founded this conclusion--Examination of arguments to the
contrary--Another Commission promised, but the promise not
fulfilled--Importance of settling this question 271-308
CHAPTER VIII
THE QUESTIONS OF IRISH LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND EDUCATION--OTHER
QUESTIONS--CONCLUSION
Irish county government--The grand jury system in the
eighteenth century--Its merits and defects--The grand jury
system in the nineteenth century, and especially since
1836--The Irish poor law system--Elected and _ex-officio_
guardians--The local government of cities and towns in
Ireland--Municipal institutions founded in Ireland by the
Norman kings--Why they did not prosper--Boroughs and
municipalities founded by James I. and the Stuarts--Their
condition in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries--The
Municipal Reform Act of 1840--The Towns Commissioners
Acts--Attempts to reform the municipal system of local
government in Ireland--The Local Government of Ireland Act,
1898--Complete change in Irish local government--The County
Councils--The County Borough Councils--The District, Rural,
and the Urban District Councils--Their functions, rights,
and duties--All these bodies placed on a democratic basis--
Attitude of the County Councils in the southern provinces--
Education in Ireland--History of primary education--The
National system of education--The principles on which it is
founded--How it has worked, and what its results have
been--Secondary education in Ireland--Its history--Its
present condition very imperfect--The Intermediate
Education Act--University education in Ireland--Its
history--Trinity College--The Queen's Colleges and the
Queen's University founded by Peel--Their comparative
failure--Mr. Gladstone's Bill to reform University education
in Ireland--Its glaring errors and failures--Trinity College
thrown open in 1873--The Royal University founded in 1879--
Present state of University education in Ireland--The true
principles of reform--Other Irish questions--Conclusion 309-360
APPENDIX 361-428
INDEX 429
Present Irish Questions
CHAPTER I
IRELAND IN 1901
Ireland has passed through a revolution in the Victorian age--Material
progress--Dublin--Belfast--Improvement in Catholic places of worship
and in the habitations of the people--State of the Irish
community--Symptoms of retrogression--Decline of agriculture--The
progress of Ireland much less than that of England and Scotland, and
why--State of the Irish land system--Recent legislation has done some
good, but it has been unjust, and has had pernicious effects--Ireland
divided into three peoples--Notwithstanding great reforms Catholic
Ireland is still, in the main, disaffected--Presbyterian Ireland--Cry
for the confiscation of the Irish land--Protestant Ireland--Fall of
its old ascendency--Discontent among the landed gentry--Nature of the
government of Ireland by the Imperial Parliament--Its merits and
defects--Attitude of the greater part of Ireland towards it--The
administration of Irish affairs--The bureaucracy of the Castle--The
Anglican, Presbyterian, and Catholic Irish Churches--The
administration of justice in Ireland--Irish literature and public
opinion--General survey of the present state of Ireland--Irish policy
of Lord Salisbury's ministry--'Present Irish Questions' to be
discussed in this work.
To understand thoroughly the Ireland of the present day, it is necessary
to have studied her history in the past. Nevertheless, if we go back to a
comparatively recent period, say to the beginning of the reign of
Victoria, we can obtain a reasonably clear idea of her existing
condition. A revolution has passed over her in this space of time almost
as complete as the revolution which has transformed France; the results
have not yet been fully developed, but in nearly all respects they have
been immense. The community has, for the most part, made material
progress; but this has been far from great or decisive; it has been
interrupted by seasons of distress, one culminating in a dire catastrophe,
and has been retarded by many causes of trouble. Taking the external
aspect of Ireland first, Dublin has certainly advanced in the last sixty
years; the capital has been surrounded by fine and increasing suburbs; the
squares, the streets, the shops have improved; above all, though much
remains yet to be done, the contrast between the dwellings of the rich and
the poor is much less painful than it was within living memory. No city,
however, has made such progress as Belfast: its population, which, in
1841, was not more than 75,000 souls, was, in 1891, upwards of 255,000;[1]
its opulence has probably grown tenfold; it is the centre of the great
manufacture of Ulster; its building-yards are renowned for its magnificent
ships; its estuary is crowded with the thronging fleets of commerce. The
towns dependent on it, too, and the whole adjoining region, are
flourishing from the great trade in linen, which has been aggregated
within a comparatively small space; indeed, this prosperity has extended
over all the north-east of Ireland, and Londonderry has long been a
thriving seaport. Few of the towns of the rest of Ulster and of the
southern provinces have improved; but signs of augmented wealth appear in
other directions; in this respect they are striking in the extreme. The
places of worship and the religious houses of the Catholic Church of
Ireland have been transformed; the mean 'chapels' of the past have largely
disappeared; most parishes have a suitable church; fine cathedrals
dominate many towns; we often admire monasteries and convents in
architectural splendour. The most remarkable phenomenon, however, of this
description is the great and fortunate change which has taken place in the
habitations of the community throughout the country. The dense and
wretched hovels which, sixty years ago, barely sheltered the millions of
Irish indigence, if still too frequent, have been, for the most part,
effaced; the houses of the better class have greatly increased in numbers,
though the population has enormously declined.[2] And the face of the
landscape in most counties bears witness, on the whole, to a still
perceptible progress. The chief industry of Ireland, indeed, as I shall
show afterwards, has certainly retrograded within the last twenty years;
her agricultural area and resources have much diminished. The advance,
too, which, from about 1853 to 1876, was manifest and rapid in most of her
rural districts, has been, to a considerable extent, checked; capital has,
for some time, been avoiding her soil. But if the process was stern, nay,
appalling, the land has, within the last half century, been thrown open to
husbandry, infinitely better and more fruitful than had existed before;
the exertions which were made, for a long space of time, to improve
cultivation have left far-spreading traces; we still behold the beneficent
results. The land over the greater part of its surface is not 'puckered
up' in thousands of squalid patches, the holdings of masses of cottar
paupers; it has been made more available for real farming; and it has been
largely drained, enclosed, and covered with woodland--at least, up to a
recent period.
The material condition of the Irish community has, also, improved since
the late Queen ascended the throne. This, no doubt, is to be largely
ascribed to the effects of the great Famine of 1845-47, and of the immense
emigration that followed in its train. The resources of Ireland, before
that calamity, were unable to support, in anything like comfort, the
teeming multitudes crowded on her soil; an official report, made in 1838,
proved that two millions and a half of the poor in Ireland were for months
in the year on the brink of starvation; this huge mass of indigence, which
forced up rent, beat down wages, and was most injurious to good husbandry,
was almost incompatible with real social progress. The great and
continuing exodus of the Irish race, which has gone on for more than half
a century, has not been without untoward results; but it has relieved the
country from a destructive incubus; and this has certainly wrought a
beneficent change, though the population has declined from about eight
millions in 1837 to about four and a half millions in 1895.[3] Ireland,
indeed, is still, mainly, a poor country--in some districts she is
exceedingly poor; but the disappearance of overwhelmingly redundant
millions has enabled her to maintain the millions that have remained much
better than of old, and has distinctly raised the standard of living among
all the humbler classes. The wages of agricultural labour, seldom more
than six or seven shillings a week before the Famine, and then paid in
potatoes by a vile truck system, have risen to ten and even twelve
shillings, usually paid in cash; and they have not fallen, though Irish
agriculture is very far from prosperous. The wages of the higher kinds of
labour have also greatly increased; this is apparent in nearly all trades,
and is especially apparent in the trades of Ulster. At the same time, the
potato has long ceased to be the sole food of the poor; their dwellings,
though still too often mean and bad, are infinitely better than they once
were; their attire, and even their appearance, has greatly improved. I do
not think, indeed, that O'Connell's description of the peasantry of
Munster in 1825 could now be fairly applied to even the worst parts of
Ireland, the impoverished tracts on the seacoast of Connaught: 'They have
no clothes to change, they have none but what they wear at the moment....
Their food consists of potatoes and water during the greater part of the
year; potatoes and sour milk during another portion; they use some salt
with their potatoes when they have nothing but water.'[4] There is
evidence, also, that, even of late years, the wealth of Ireland has, in
some measure, increased, especially in the middle and lower middle
classes. The landed gentry, indeed, owing partly to the effects of Free
Trade, and partly to those of legislation I shall describe afterwards,
have been impoverished in many instances, and in many ruined; and the
Irish tenant farmer, if gorged by the spoil of his landlord, has not
gained all that an agrarian revolution was expected to give him. But the
commerce of Ireland has made progress, within the last two decades, if
this has not been by any means great; and though the capital she holds in
the best securities has perceptibly diminished of late years, there has
been a very large increase in most kinds of other investments.[5]
This picture of Ireland, however, has dark features; her welfare has been,
at best, partial; considerable deductions must be made from it. The
progress of the capital, as has been the case in London, is largely to be
ascribed to the depletion of many country districts, a change that has
been going on for a long period, and has been accelerated by the decline
of the landed gentry in wealth. The enormous advance of Belfast, and of
the adjoining neighbourhood, has been, to a great extent, caused by the
concentration of the linen manufacture within a small area; the hand-loom
has disappeared from Ireland; this has been injurious to many petty towns
and villages. The population and the trade of nearly all the chief towns
in the southern provinces have diminished; Cork, with its immense natural
advantages, has not prospered; Limerick and, notably, Galway are in decay;
most of the inland towns show few signs of improvement; the outskirts of
almost all are defaced by lines of ruined hovels, the wrecks of abodes a
dwindling tale of indwellers has left. Many of these urban centres were,
sixty years ago, seats of manufactures and of other industries, which, to
a certain extent, were flourishing; but these sources of wealth have, for
the most part, been dried up; they have been blotted out by the gigantic
manufactures of England and Scotland poured into Ireland, everywhere,
within a few hours, by steam. The collapse, indeed, of Irish manufactures
in the last half century has been striking and mournful; 696,000 persons
were employed in textile and dyeing industries in 1841; in 1881 there were
only 130,000; and though the growth of machinery may in part account for
this difference, it assuredly cannot fully explain it.[6] The same remark
applies to Irish fishing industry; the small craft which once swarmed
along the coast, and, rearing a breed of hardy mariners, gathered in the
prolific harvests of the sea, have been vanishing year after year; in
1867, 9332 boats, and 38,444 men and boys were engaged in this calling;
the numbers were 5646 and 21,940 in 1891.[7] Turning to the face of the
country, agriculture, we have seen, has improved, if we look back to the
period before the Famine; but it is still centuries behind that of England
and Scotland, and of late years it has markedly declined. It is not only
that the prices of agricultural produce are much less than they were, in
the last generation, and that its total value has fallen from L97,885,000
in 1851-55, to L88,955,000 in 1889-93.[8] The agricultural area of Ireland
has diminished from 1879 to 1899 by rather more than 400,000 acres;[9] and
it is absolutely certain that within these decreasing limits, as I shall
point out in subsequent chapters, agriculture has made little or no
progress, and in some districts has distinctly become worse; we see the
results of the vicious legislation of the last twenty years in
deteriorated farms, in hundreds of cases, in a most injurious neglect of
arterial drainage, and in the destruction of thousands of acres of
woodland. And the ruin which has overtaken many of the landed gentry has
been made only too manifest in the desolate aspect of scores of country
seats, once happy homes, that now know their owners no more.
It must be borne in mind, too, as we examine the present state of Ireland,
that if, on the whole, she has made some progress, she is still, as I have
said, a poor country, and that a considerable part of Connaught, her
western province, has, for years, been in so poor a condition, that the
Government of late has laudably made a great effort to raise it out of the
depths of indigence. Other considerations, moreover, must be taken into
account, if we would form a just conclusion as to the material position
of Ireland, and, especially, as to her material prospects. The reduction
of her population, up to a certain point, was an essential condition of
her social progress; but that limit appears to have been far surpassed;
this continuous decline, during more than half a century, has become an
ominous symptom. More than 3,700,000 of souls have emigrated from Ireland
since 1851;[10] and this number does not include the masses which fled
from the catastrophe of 1845-47. This immense drain on the life of a
nation has, for years, had a pernicious effect; in large parts of the
country labourers have become so scarce that it is often difficult to save
the harvest, which should be quickly gathered in, in a wet climate; and
hands are wanting to industry in many places. Emigration, too, has taken
away the best part of the people, men and women in the flower of
existence; the reproductive power of the community has, accordingly,
declined; the birth-rate of Ireland is less than it was; infirmity,
disease, and, notably, insanity have increased; the population of the
towns is seldom active and thriving.[11] At the same time, the taxation of
Ireland has become many degrees more excessive in the last sixty years;
the local rates have advanced from about L1,000,000 to nearly L4,000,000;
the general taxation has been well-nigh doubled; and a tribunal of the
very highest authority has recently declared that Ireland is immensely
overtaxed, and has been for upwards of forty years. Nor can there be a
real question but that large interests connected with the land have
suffered greatly in the period that has now extended from 1878-79. It is
unnecessary to refer to the condition of the landed gentry; I shall notice
it at some length afterwards; but, much as the Irish people dislike the
Poor-law, pauperism has distinctly increased during the last ten years,
though the population has fallen off in numbers, and the charge of
pauperism shows a corresponding increase.[12] The Income Tax returns, too,
as regards the land, are of sinister omen; those under Schedule A have
greatly diminished since 1890; and there is a considerable decline of
property in the Funds.[13] As to the argument that the Tenant Right of the
Irish farmer has risen in value, and that this proves Irish agriculture to
be in a prosperous state, this is a complete, nay, a grotesque, fallacy.
The rise in the value of Tenant Right is simply one of the many signs that
a huge confiscation has taken place in the Irish land.
If Ireland, therefore, has made material progress, this has been slow,
partial, and with large drawbacks; such as it is, it must be mainly
ascribed to the results of the Famine, which liberated the soil from a
destructive burden. The whole country, it has truly been said, has still
too much the look of a 'great neglected estate,' requiring development in
most of its parts; large sections of the population are poor, feeble in
health, and backward. Any advance, moreover, which Ireland has made in
well being, since 1837-38, is as nothing compared with the extraordinary
growth of the prosperity of England and Scotland, within the same period.
True-hearted Irishmen grieve as they pass from the lesser to the greater
island, and contrast the husbandry of Galway and Mayo with that of the
Lothians and Kent; as they gaze on the Shannon, with scarcely a sail on
its waters, and the Clyde teeming with its fleets of commerce; above all,
as they turn from the decaying towns of their own country to such centres
of wealth and of gigantic trade, as some even of the provincial cities of
Britain, not to speak of the mighty world of London. The causes, indeed,
of this contrast may be easily found; the mineral resources of Ireland are
scanty; her commerce and manufactures are small; she is essentially an
agricultural land, which has lost much from the effects of Free Trade; she
has suffered greatly from misgovernment, agitation, and social disorder;
all this has kept her back in the national race. The mineral products, on
the other hand, of England and Scotland are immense, and of the first
importance in an age of invention; they have decisively contributed to the
huge development of the opulence and the trade of Great Britain; the
policy of Free Trade, carried out for years, has had marvellous results in
the same direction; if British agriculture is not progressing, British
commerce and manufactures are still supreme; and Great Britain has been
for ages a law-abiding land, in which order has been happily combined with
liberty. These considerations fully explain the wide and ever-increasing
distinction between Ireland and England and Scotland, only too manifest;
they have been amply verified by unerring statistics. Two figures may
suffice for a general reader; the resources of Ireland were estimated, a
few years ago, at a sum of about four hundred millions sterling, that of
Great Britain at not less than ten thousand millions.[14]
The social structure of Ireland springs from the soil; it is most apparent
in the relations that have been formed in the land. I shall dwell, at some
length, in other chapters of this work, on the history and the
characteristics of the Irish land system, and on the revolution through
which it has passed; I can here only briefly glance at the subject. That
system, at the beginning of the late reign, still represented, in many
respects, the features it had borne in the eighteenth century, though
these had been, in a great degree, modified. The land, over four-fifths of
its surface, was still in the ownership of a small class of men, divided
in race and faith from its occupants; the conquests and confiscations
which had drawn deep lines of distinction between the Anglo-Protestant
landlord and the Catholic and even the Presbyterian peasant, had still
left their indelible traces, if these had been, to a considerable extent,
effaced. Absenteeism had increased since the Union, though absentee
estates were showing signs of improvement; middleman tenures, with their
manifold and complex mischiefs, were disappearing, but were still
numerous; various causes, to operate for many years, were diminishing the
security of the peasants' tenure. The power of the dominant landlord class
was declining; it was being weakened by the Castle bureaucracy, and by the
emancipation of Catholic Ireland; but it was still nearly supreme in
landed relations; this class was all but the absolute lords of the tillers
of the soil. It is untrue that it was oppressive and unjust as a rule; but
some of its members abused their excessive power; it had too much in
common with an exclusive caste; and a whole train of economic causes were
aggravating the evils of a land system from its origin placed on unsound
foundations. Agriculture was advancing in not a few counties; many of the
landed gentry were improving men, who were making a beginning in the
scientific farming, which, before long, was to be more fully developed.
But the population, we have seen, had increased by millions Ireland could
not support; over whole districts, especially in Munster and Connaught,
the land had been split up into petty holdings, the seats of a huge
multitude of human misery. Rents, therefore, were being unnaturally forced
up, and the wages of labour unnaturally cut down; the land system was
disorganised, and filled with dangerous elements. The worst vice of the
system, however, has yet to be noticed; from different causes which I
shall point out afterwards, the occupiers of the soil in Ireland had, as a
general rule, made even the permanent improvements on their farms, and
large sums had repeatedly been paid on the transfer of these; they had
thus gradually acquired concurrent rights in the land, in tens of
thousands of instances; and yet these were outside the pale of the law,
and could be annihilated by eviction, or even the raising of rent. These
rights had the support, in parts of Ulster, of a long-established custom,
and were usually respected in the southern provinces; but they ought long
before to have had full legal protection; and they were sometimes violated
or disregarded by unscrupulous landlords. The results were seen in the
White Boy and the agrarian disorders which had disturbed Ireland for more
than a century, and even ran back to the confiscations of the past.
This land system, essentially bad as it was, marked by evil distinctions
and pregnant with wrong, scarcely attracted the attention of British
statesmen, until nearly the middle of the nineteenth century. Peel was the
first minister who, even dimly, perceived its vices; he appointed a
Commission to report on the subject. The labours of this body were, in
part, laudable; but the Commissioners, filled with prejudice as to the
excellence of British land tenure, and without experience of that of
Ireland, made a capital mistake in the suggestions they offered. Instead
of recommending that the concurrent rights of the Irish tenant in the
land, often equivalent to a real joint ownership, should receive, as was
but just, the sanction of law, they proposed to restrict these in many
ways; they put forward a plan of 'compensation,' as they called it, that
was worse than useless. Legislation to this effect was withdrawn from
Parliament; the terrible visitation of 1845-47 had ere long shattered the
Irish land system, bringing ruin on hundreds of the landed gentry, making
thousands of farmers of the better classes bankrupt, forcing the petty
holders of the land--the cottar population, as it was named--to fly from
the country in despairing multitudes. The land was largely set free from a
dense mass of wretchedness; it was the general belief of the public men of
the day, that what was most required, at this conjuncture, was to attract
men of capital to it to do it justice, and to get rid, as quickly as
possible, of the large body of Irish landlords, who, even before deeply
involved in debt, had been made hopelessly insolvent by recent events. The
Encumbered Estates Act became law, with scarcely an opposing protest; it
was to 'regenerate Ireland,' its authors proclaimed; its results were to
develop a bad class of landlords, to annihilate the rights of the Irish
peasant wholesale, and to cause an iniquitous confiscation on an enormous
scale. The Irish Land Question, as was the phrase, was now raised once
more; in 1852 the occupiers of the Irish soil set on foot an agitation to
vindicate their rights, destroyed or endangered by what had lately
occurred; the Government of Lord Derby lent a favourable ear; but it was
defeated in the House of Commons by intrigue; the land system remained in
the state in which it had been left; no real attempt to improve it was
made. A series of years followed in which Ireland made distinct progress,
and her agriculture advanced; it became a fixed idea with British
statesmen, that there was nothing radically bad in Irish land tenure, and
that its defects would gradually disappear; the grievances of the Irish
peasant were ignored; his claims to what was now known as his Tenant
Right, urged feebly by his advocates, were voted down in Parliament; and a
general belief prevailed that what Ireland most needed was a still further
and steady removal of what was deemed 'her surplus population' from her
soil.
As has so often happened in the affairs of Ireland, her real condition at
this period was not understood; and the reform in her land system, which
had become essential, was indefinitely delayed with disastrous results.
Meanwhile, though things were serene on the surface, the inherent vices in
Irish landed relations were not really changed, and, in some respects,
were made worse. The Fenian troubles and outbreak of 1865-67 showed how
much there was still peccant in the state of Ireland; Mr. Gladstone
addressed himself, in 1870, to the task of effecting a reform in her land
system. The measure he carried through Parliament was bold, and, in the
main, statesmanlike; but it was injured by the predilection for English
land tenure its author avowed, a general misconception of British
statesmen; it was not without marked and even grave defects; and though
unquestionably it did real good, it did not satisfy the tenant class--at
least, the men who had become its leaders. In a few years the frightful
period of the Land League had begun; a Reign of Terror prevailed in about
a third part of Ireland, accompanied by far-spreading and atrocious crime.
The movement was really a huge conspiracy, formed in America to overthrow
British rule in Ireland; but Mr. Gladstone, now minister for the second
time, resolved to deal with it only on its agrarian side; he wrought a
complete revolution in the Irish land system, on principles wholly
different from those of his measure of 1870. This legislation was prepared
without reflection; it passed through Parliament when that assembly was
almost in a state of panic; its author professed that his only object was
to secure the occupier of the Irish soil in his legitimate rights; but the
methods he adopted to attain this end have never been heard of in modern
times, and have never been employed before in civilised lands. The
principle of the mediaeval statutes, which endeavoured to fix the price of
bread, and the rate of wages, was extended to the Irish land system; rents
were to be adjusted through the agency of the State, by tribunals to which
no parallel can be found; tenants' improvements were declared exempted
from rent; and a mode of land tenure, hitherto condemned by Mr. Gladstone,
and known as the 'theory of the Three F's,' was applied to the great
majority of Irish tenancies, in an exaggerated, crude, and dangerous form.
This legislation, revolutionary and socialistic alike, has been given more
ample scope in the last twenty years; it probably affects four-fifths of
the rented lands in Ireland; it has fashioned the type of land tenure over
nearly all the country. The successors of Mr. Gladstone, who, indeed, had
boasted that it set the doctrines of Adam Smith at nought, were not blind
to the evils it soon developed; but it is questionable if their attempts
to mitigate these, and to place the Irish land system on a better basis,
have not been at least as open to censure. With the ignorance of Irish
land tenure common in British statesmen, they proclaimed, what assuredly
was not the fact, that Mr. Gladstone had 'created a dual ownership' in the
Irish land, and that, in order to get rid of this intolerable thing, it
was necessary, in accord with English ideas, to bring Ireland, as far as
possible, under 'single ownership,' and to make the occupiers of the Irish
soil, to a large extent, its owners. The system of 'Land Purchase' in
Ireland, begun in 1870, was freed from the limitations which made it safe
and just, and widely enlarged under new conditions; Irish tenants were
encouraged to acquire the fee in their holdings, by a process never
contemplated before; instead of having to pay any part of the price, the
State advanced them the whole purchase moneys, repayable by an annual
charge much less than any true rent. About a tenth part of the tenant
class of Ireland have become owners of their farms by these means; the
transaction has been in no sense a 'purchase;' though given the name, it
is really the exact opposite.
I shall describe all this legislation, in detail, afterwards, and shall
indicate its far-reaching effects; here I can only take a cursory survey.
The attempts that have been made to reform the Irish land system, in the
last sixty years, have been, with scarcely an exception, failures; the
Irish land, it has truly been said, is strewn with the wrecks of repeated
errors. The Land Act of 1870 was, on the whole, a well-conceived measure;
but the recommendations made by the Devon Commission, the iniquitous and
destructive Encumbered Estates Act, the agrarian revolution wrought by Mr.
Gladstone, and the 'Land Purchase' Acts, as they are falsely called, have
been monuments of want of insight and knowledge. And, what is even worse,
legislation on the Irish land has, over and over again, been too long
delayed, and has been inconsistent, fitful, founded on no principle; the
results have been in a high degree disastrous. Reforms that would have
been gladly welcomed if made years before, have been treated with contempt
when made too late; and reforms have more than once been hasty
experiments, carried out under the stress of menacing troubles. The fable
of the Sibylline books has been realised in this matter; and not a few of
the efforts to improve Irish land tenures have been little better than
sudden leaps in the dark. As to recent legislation in this province, its
consequences and tendencies have become manifest. That it has effected
some good may be admitted; it has removed grievances that no doubt
existed; it has made the government of Ireland more easy for the time; it
has allayed discontent for a moment; but the good is far outweighed by
the evil. It is not only that the nostrum of the 'Three F's,' and the
adjustment of rent by the intervention of the State, have cut down the
rental of Ireland to an extent that cannot be justified, and have
transferred to the occupier of the Irish soil a large part of what was the
owner's property by a process of confiscation concealed, but certain. It
is not only that the status of the Irish landlord has been iniquitously
transformed to his extreme injury, and that the status of the Irish tenant
has been changed to his extreme advantage, in both instances without a
pretence to right. The Irish land system has been reduced to an almost
hopeless state; it presents some of the worst features of the past; its
conditions discourage the improvement of the land, promote its
deterioration in many ways, and banish capital away from it; and its plain
tendency has been to make agriculture decline. And the revolution, which
has been thus accomplished, has aggravated the divisions of classes in
Ireland, and has been attended with ruinous litigation on a huge scale;
and it has produced demoralisation far-reaching and profound, a sense of
insecurity in all landed relations, and a far too general disregard of the
respect due to contract. The policy, too, of so-called 'Land Purchase' has
been accompanied with a train of evils on the increase. It is not
creating, as its authors fondly hoped, a class of loyal and thriving
freeholders; it is not even creating a body of industrious and improving
farmers. It is, on the contrary, developing, in some of its parts, the bad
land system of the eighteenth century; it has proved injurious to
agriculture in one important respect. Above all, from the very nature of
the case, it has drawn harsh, nay, unjust, distinctions between the landed
classes, which necessarily have been a cause of much discontent; and it
has inevitably provoked a demand for a universal confiscation of the Irish
land even worse than any of those which have been the curse of Ireland.
I pass from the material and general state of Ireland to that of the Irish
community, in its different parts. That community is still divided, as it
has been for ages, into three separate and distinct peoples, marked off
from each other in race and faith; whatever 'Nationalist' leaders may
assert, it is not, and has never been, in a real sense, a nation. The
lines of demarcation between Catholic, Presbyterian, and Protestant
Ireland are at least as clearly defined as they have always been; they
have probably been widened by the troubles of late years, and by the
legislation which has been a consequence. Catholic Ireland has a
population of some three millions and a half of souls; it is in the main a
Celtic race, but with a considerable admixture of other elements; it has
passed through a revolution remarkable and immense. Sixty years ago, the
worst parts of the Penal Code had long been things of the past; but the
Irish Catholics had only recently thrown off the last remains of that
thraldom, under O'Connell's guidance; and their emancipation had only been
effected by a great and very threatening movement. They were still
comparatively an alien and a subject people; they had not many owners of
land; they were not numerous in the upper trading and the professional
classes; education was greatly wanting among them; they were for the most
part a backward and poor peasantry, almost serfs of landlords distinct in
creed and in blood; and they formed the bulk of the teeming millions that
vegetated on the soil in indigent misery. The Irish Catholics, too, had
still many and real grievances; the tithe of the Established Church had
long been an unjust burden on the petty husbandman; it had recently given
rise to a frightful war of classes, and had only been commuted a short
time; the Established Church itself was a moral wrong, felt acutely by the
Irish priesthood at least. Catholic Ireland, besides, was deeply sunk in
ignorance; the system of national education had only begun to flourish;
and the Irish Catholic was still all but wholly excluded from county
administration and municipal government. The worst of these grievances,
however, was the state of the tenure of the land; this was especially
harsh on the Catholic peasant; if oppression was not general or even
common, he was too often subjected to excessive rent and unfair eviction.
This order of things has all but completely passed away; the position of
Catholic Ireland in the State has almost wholly been changed. Catholic
emancipation has long been an accomplished fact; Irish Catholics and
Protestants are equal before the law; and have really equal chances in
fighting the battle of life. Though still not numerous, the Catholic
owners of land have multiplied; the Irish Catholic middle classes have
made a marked advance; they have grown in knowledge and increased in
wealth; they have risen to a higher plane of existence. At the same time,
the grievances of the past have nearly all been removed by law, often
indeed very late, and by questionable means; but the Established Church
has fallen from its high estate; education has been diffused through the
Catholic masses; the Irish Catholics have obtained more than a just share
in local government and administration of all kinds; their ascendency in
this province is well-nigh assured. The most important, however, of these
changes is that which has taken place in the state of the Irish Catholic
peasantry. The process which lifted up millions of these from the land and
sent them into exile was, no doubt, terrible; but it was the condition of
the welfare and the progress of the population which remained. A great
deal of the legislation, besides, which has revolutionised the tenure of
land in Ireland, and has had a special effect on the Catholic occupiers of
the soil, has been essentially ill designed and unjust; above all, it has
been much too long delayed. But the Irish Catholic peasantry have long ago
ceased to be serfs; they are more the owners of their own holdings than
their former landlords; their rights in the land have been more than
protected; they have acquired the fee in their farms in thousands of
instances; the days of rack rents and harsh evictions have passed away for
ever. If the lines of the old Irish land system may still be traced, they
rather resemble, it has truly been said, the lineaments of a phantom than
of a living being.
The attitude, however, of Catholic Ireland, and the sentiments of the
immense majority of the Irish Catholics, must cause painful misgivings in
reflecting minds. Their aristocracy, indeed, and their landed gentry have
always been loyal and true subjects; they can scarcely be distinguished
from their Protestant fellows. The Irish Catholics, too, of the upper
middle classes are generally attached to the institutions under which they
live; and Catholic Ireland has produced many eminent public servants, and
has given splendid ornaments to the Bench and the Bar. But the spirit that
prevails among the Irish Catholic lower middle classes, and notably among
the masses of the peasantry, and the opinions and feelings they
ostentatiously avow, are deeply to be regretted in many respects.
Notwithstanding all that has been done for it, and the immense reforms
made in its interest, this part of Catholic Ireland is, beyond question,
more disaffected and disloyal to the State than it was when O'Connell was
its master spirit; it is more hostile to government, law, and the existing
order of things. The teaching of the Land and the National Leagues, and of
the successor which has taken their place, has penetrated into the
Corporations and Local Boards, in which the Catholic Irish are supreme;
these assemblies echo with revolutionary and socialistic cries, and
denounce the whole system of British rule in Ireland, aiming especially at
the Sovereign and those in the highest places. The Irish Catholics, too,
in the three provinces of the south, have gained a complete ascendency in
county and municipal affairs; their first object has been to exclude the
landed gentry from them, and to destroy the influence which belongs to
property; and they have exhibited tendencies absolutely opposed to the
Constitution to which they owe their authority. The worst symptoms,
however, appear in the state of the peasantry; they have obtained
advantages of which their fathers never even dreamed; the land system has
been turned upside down for their behoof; they have no grievance in landed
relations; and yet they remain unfriendly to the State, and show no sign
of gratitude. This class contains the multitudes, who for more than twenty
years, have allied themselves with a conspiracy against our power in
Ireland, and who, at the bidding of designing men, shout treasonable
utterances at mob gatherings, and denounce the 'Saxon' and 'landlordism'
with one voice; and though they are a timid and somewhat inert mass, and
they would not rise like their fathers in 1798, they would not lift a hand
to support our rule were foreign invaders to descend on our shores. This
state of opinion, no doubt, is intelligible to the real student of Irish
history; the Irish Catholics are a people who have been cruelly wronged;
they have only slowly risen out of serf-like thraldom; above all, they
have only attained the position they hold in the State after long years of
trials, and by giving trouble; they treasure the Celtic traditions of the
past; we may regret that they are what they are, but can hardly feel
surprise. In other respects, the Irish Catholic masses, especially in a
democratic age, must arouse the solicitude of thinkers worthy of the name.
Many thousands of them are still illiterate; they are too generally the
mere followers of priests and demagogues, tossed hither and thither as
their masters direct; they are animated by crude and wild ideas, like the
peasantry of France before the Revolution; they have scarcely anything in
common with the corresponding class in England, trained for centuries in
habits of well-ordered liberty. They form, in a word, a dangerous and
easily led democracy; and yet, owing to recent legislation, ever to be
deplored, they possess almost a monopoly of political power in Ireland,
and have sent representatives to Parliament whose acts are a byword.
Conciliation, therefore, as the phrase is, has failed in the case of the
greatest part of Catholic Ireland; this remains an alien, even a perilous,
element in the State; it is worse than useless to shut our eyes to the
truth; the time is still apparently distant when it will become contented
and loyal. Presbyterian Ireland is a people of rather more than half a
million of souls, almost concentrated within a nook of Ulster; it was
rebellious in sentiment a hundred years ago; it is now devotedly attached
to the British connection, and has firmly supported the Union during a
period of trouble. This community, nevertheless, of artisans and farmers
is rather widely separated from the aristocracy in their midst, for the
most part English in blood, and of the Anglican faith; and though the
Presbyterian farmer has obtained the benefit of the late reforms of land
tenure, and has received advantages far in excess of justice, he declares
himself to be discontented with his lot, and is clamouring for a vast
confiscation of the Irish land in his selfish interest. The Irish
Protestants are a population rather larger than the Presbyterians; but
they are scattered over all parts of the country; they do not possess the
political influence of their distant kinsmen in Ulster. They comprise at
least three-fourths of the leading landed gentry, and a considerable
number of the better class of farmers; they predominate in the learned
professions, and in the higher walks of commerce. But their lower orders
feel the loss of the ascendency which was once their birthright; they have
been thrust out from corporate and local government; they are isolated
amidst a population not in sympathy with them; as a people they can hardly
be described as prosperous. As to the Protestant landed gentry, they have
for centuries been the most loyal of subjects; it is significant that they
have been called the British garrison by the conspirators who seek to
overthrow our rule in Ireland; they have given many eminent worthies to
the State, and proved their devotion to it at the gravest crises; what
they are has been shown in the war in South Africa. At present, however,
profound and just discontent has sunk deep into the hearts of this order
of men. They are the heirs of conquest and confiscation, it is said; but
they were placed in the position they hold by English kings and
Parliaments; is that any reason that, within the last half-century, the
Nemesis of conquest and confiscation should have been invoked against
them, in the Encumbered Estates Act and predatory agrarian laws? They were
too much of an exclusive caste, separated from their dependents, and
possessing powers over the occupiers of the soil, which were sometimes
abused; is that any reason that they should have been deprived of
political influence, supplanted by the bureaucratic Castle, changed from
owners of their estates into mere pensioners, shut out by the force of law
from local and county government? What, however, the Irish landed gentry
most deeply feel is that, in the course of the last sixty years, they have
been deceived, nay, betrayed, by British statesmen, who, having repeatedly
assured them that their position was secure, have sacrificed them when it
seemed to suit their purpose.
The Imperial Parliament has, during the last century, had absolute control
over the affairs of Ireland. No impartial student of history will deny
that it has governed Ireland very much better than her old Parliament
could possibly have done, after the dreadful rising of 1798 had literally
torn the country to pieces. The large majority of thinking persons have
long ago been convinced that the policy of Home Rule, that is, the
substitution for the Houses at Westminster of a statutory legislature
seated in Dublin, would be disastrous to the Empire and Ireland alike; and
that the evils attendant on the present system would be aggravated a
hundred-fold by the revolution Mr. Gladstone tried to effect. Nor can it
be questioned that the Imperial Parliament has, for a long period,
sincerely desired to legislate and rule for the good of Ireland, and has
accomplished important Irish reforms, whatever legitimate exceptions may
be taken to them. Protestant ascendency and the Established Church have
fallen; the law has long been indifferent to Irishmen of all classes;
education has been brought home to the mass of the people; the tenure of
land has been transformed, unwisely no doubt, but wholly in the interest
of the occupiers of the soil. Nevertheless, much that the Imperial
Parliament has done, and left undone, in the Victorian era, remains matter
of censure and regret; and its Irish administration has been in many
respects unfortunate. The neglect to make a provision for the Irish
Catholic priesthood, a main object of Pitt and of our best statesmen, when
the Anglican Church was disestablished in 1869, was a grave and a
calamitous mistake; the attempts that have been made to reform the Irish
land system have, with scarcely an exception, been sorry failures; the
results have been, in no doubtful sense, deplorable. Few, too, will
justify such measures as the establishment in Ireland of household
suffrage, that is, giving a monopoly of political power to an ignorant and
priest-ridden democracy,[15] and depriving property and intelligence of
all influence, or as the handing over county and city government, in
three-fourths of Ireland, to much the same classes. Nor are even positive
errors such as these the worst, perhaps, that can be laid to the charge of
the Imperial Parliament in the conduct of Irish affairs. With rare
exceptions, the reforms it has made have been, unhappily, too late, and
have been obtained only through menacing popular movements; it has over
and over again made Irish questions the mere subjects of the selfish
strife of party, with evil consequences for Irish interests; it has
occasionally, and even for large spaces of time, shown a marked
indifference to reasonable Irish demands; and its administration of
Ireland has repeatedly been inconsistent, even contradictory,
shortsighted, and feeble. It must be acknowledged, indeed, that the rule
of the Imperial Parliament, in the circumstances in which Ireland has been
placed, is, from the nature of the case, faulty in many respects; it is
that of a dominant assembly practically controlling a subject dependency;
and, as we see in the striking instances of Athens and Rome, this kind of
government has never been free from great and real objections. This, no
doubt, is no reason that we should fly from less to unbearable evils, and
adopt the fatal scheme of Home Rule; and the causes that have made our
Parliamentary _regime_ in Ireland as defective as it is are evident, and,
as I shall point out afterwards, may probably be removed, to some extent
at least, without subverting the constitution of these realms. But the
broad fact remains, and cannot be concealed; the Imperial Parliament, much
as it has done, has not reached the hearts or gained, in any degree, the
sympathy of an immense majority of the Irish people.
This conclusion, indeed, has been made only too manifest, if we look back
at the history of Ireland within living memory. The Catholic Association
defied the Imperial Parliament, and was supreme in four-fifths of Ireland,
from 1824 to 1829; O'Connell, in 1843, rallied the Irish Catholic millions
to the cause of the Repeal of the Union, that is, to the subversion of
British rule from the Giant's Causeway to Cape Clear. Home Rule became a
popular cry when proclaimed by Butt; Parnell soon rose to the head of an
Irish faction, which deliberately tried to paralyse and cross Parliament,
and to make its sway in Ireland of no avail and contemptible. The Land
League and the National League were essentially conspiracies of foreign
origin, and they appealed to socialistic greed in a season of distress;
but their chief object was to annihilate British power in Ireland; they
had the support of huge Catholic masses; they returned to Parliament a
band of more than eighty men, one of whose purposes was to checkmate its
authority. Too much is not to be made of these movements; three-fourths at
least of the Irish community have repeatedly been led away by able but
unscrupulous leaders, and rush into courses to which they are not
earnestly inclined; but these unquestionable facts assuredly prove that
the institutions under which they exist are not acceptable to the great
body of the people of Ireland. This attitude has been displayed with
marked and too plain significance, within a period, as it were, of
yesterday. The United Irish League fills the place of the Land and the
National Leagues; it is a conspiracy against the State, like its
forerunners; it aims ultimately at the same objects; its organisation and
machinery are the same; it seeks to establish its domination by similar
methods. It is, no doubt, less formidable than the Land and the National
Leagues; it has received little support from America, and has no one to
compare with Parnell at its head; but it has sent more than three-fourths
of the representatives of Ireland into the House of Commons; and these
have combined to put in force the arts of obstruction with an audacity, a
perseverance, and a measure of success, perhaps never so conspicuous
before. Its authority is less far-reaching than that of its predecessors;
but it has established a reign of tyranny in not a few counties; it is
largely backed by the Irish priesthood and by much the greatest part of
Catholic Ireland; and its leaders boast, not without truth, that, disloyal
as many of their utterances are, they are completely in accord with
popular sympathies. The acts and the speeches, indeed, of these men have
never been more unequivocal than within the last two or three years;[16]
yet almost everywhere they obtain the applause and the support of the
multitude. An Irish contingent was sent to fight for the Boers; the war in
South Africa was yelled at, at huge public meetings, as an odious instance
of English tyranny and crime; every reverse that befell our arms was
welcomed; the Irish masses, especially of late, have made a display of
their antipathy to, and hatred of, the State. There was an outbreak of
disloyal rioting in Dublin at the Diamond Jubilee; but for the accident of
the Spanish War there would have been a great commemoration of the
rebellion of 1798; even the visit of the late Queen to Ireland was made an
occasion for seditious speeches; if her death was very generally mourned,
public bodies were found to refuse an expression of regret.
Irish administration, I have remarked, is in many respects faulty; this is
mainly because it is dependent on British parties; it fluctuates as one or
the other prevails in Parliament. It sometimes represents completely
opposite principles; besides, as Lord-Lieutenants and Chief Secretaries
usually hold office for a short time only, they are tempted to adopt a
hand-to-mouth policy, and to govern with little thought of the morrow. A
marked change, however, has, in the course of time, passed over the
ordinary system of administration carried on at the Castle. The
aristocracy and the leading Irish gentry had still, even at the beginning
of the Victorian age, much influence in directing local affairs; their
authority was not nearly as great as it had been; but they were still
looked up to and consulted by the central government. This state of things
has long ago ceased to exist; this order of men has long ago lost all
political, and nearly all social, power; it has been superseded by a
bureaucratic _regime_, depending mainly on paid officials and police,
which rules Ireland from the Castle, with little external support. This
mode of government is imposing and apparently strong; but it is
essentially weak, and has little real hold on the country; the
information, with which it is amply supplied, is often false, and
occasionally causes grave mistakes; it forms an administrative system
resembling that of the old centralised monarchy of France, of which
Tocqueville has exposed the defects and the vices. Under this _regime_,
however, the law of the land has certainly been vindicated more
successfully than had been the case before; the Government has acquired
decidedly increased power in dealing with disorders dangerous to the
State, and perhaps in holding the scales of justice even between divided
classes; it has not diminished the strife of hostile Irish factions, but
it has maintained order more completely than of old; and this
unquestionably is a great advantage, and a real set-off against some
mischiefs and failures. It would be untrue to assert that this system of
rule has been the paramount and even a main cause of the great decline in
agrarian crime and trouble which Ireland has happily witnessed of late
years; other and far more potent causes have concurred; but it may fairly
be said that it has contributed to it. It would, however, be a complete
mistake to suppose that agrarian disorder, even in its worst aspects, has
become permanently a thing of the past in Ireland, or that this
destructive curse of Irish social life has not immense influence even at
this moment, though its outward manifestations have been greatly changed.
It was, so to speak, only yesterday that, under the auspices of the Land
and the National Leagues, there was the most frightful outbreak of
agrarian crime that had been seen since the great tithe conflict; it
assumed the proportions, in fact, of a horrible servile war; and shallow,
indeed, the understanding must be which imagines that this state of things
can never recur. If open agrarian disorder, too, has been largely
diminished, the spirit of agrarian disorder is still strong; and it is
doing infinite mischief in many parts of Ireland. Steadily adhering to the
precepts laid down by Parnell, the United Irish League has brought the
detestable system of 'boycotting' to a hideous perfection in several
counties; whole districts are subject to this secret but villainous
tyranny; the results are seen in numbers of derelict farms, in hundreds of
victims writhing under ever-present terror, in an infamous interference
with trade and industry. This malignant influence is more or less felt
through nearly the whole of the southern provinces, and even to a
considerable extent in Ulster; it should be added that the United Irish
League, for the present, discourages active agrarian crime, though its
agents hold this force in reserve; it believes it can compass its ends
without making use of this weapon.[17]
A few words must be said, in this short survey, on the organisations that
uphold the Christian faith in Ireland. The disestablished Anglican Church
has certainly made progress in spiritual life; it has more moral and even,
perhaps, social influence than when it was an appurtenance of the Erastian
Castle. It has been admirably administered and ruled; the uses of
adversity have been sweet to it, and it has been successfully launched on
its new career; this is a strong proof of the inherent energy and capacity
of the Anglo-Protestant Irish people. Very different, too, from what had
been expected, moderation and wisdom prevail in its councils; its clergy
are sincerely pious, but not given to extreme doctrines; its members are
for the most part free from the narrow sectarian views which had formerly,
not without reason, been laid to their charge. Its funds, amassed by good
management, are, for the present, ample; but the rapid impoverishment of
the landed gentry, the class from which it chiefly obtains support, and
the confiscation with which they are threatened, no doubt expose it to
future dangers; and it must always be the Church of a small minority,
surrounded by influences hostile to it, but a Church which the State is
bound to protect. The Presbyterian Church of Ireland has but little
changed; it has felt the effect of the great religious movement, which has
stirred the Three Kingdoms in the last half-century, and it is less
rationalistic than it once was; but it is still what it always was, a
powerful centre of the faith of John Knox, with a communion of strong
democratic sympathies. The Catholic Church of Ireland still rests on the
old foundations; but it is hardly the unshaken structure it was in the
last generation. Its material resources have enormously increased; its
fine edifices spread over the land; it still exercises immense influence
over probably nine-tenths of Catholic Ireland. But a party has been
growing up within it which resents, and has even defied, its pretensions;
and though the power it possesses is, in the main, beneficent in the
extreme, this has too often been abused in the domain of politics, and
especially of late in Irish landed relations. The priesthood still largely
direct their flocks, but they are more dependent on them than they once
were; had it been otherwise, they would have hardly conformed to the
bidding of the Land and the National Leagues, as unhappily they did in too
many instances. Their leading men perceived from the first that these
conspiracies were destructive of their moral influence; and had the whole
body of the clergy received a just provision from the State, it would all
but certainly have condemned the methods of the Leagues as these were
decisively condemned by Rome. For the rest, the Catholic Church of Ireland
is no friend of Protestant England, and of many of the institutions that
exist in Ireland; but this has been inevitable from the events of Irish
history; and whatever may be said, it has been essentially an ally of the
State, by reason of its great religious authority. And if properly
understood, it is a mighty conservative power, which ought if possible to
be won over to the side of order and law; this is an ample, if there were
no other, reason that statesmen should comply with its most reasonable
demand, and remove the grievance, in high Catholic education, that only
blind bigotry can deny.
The administration of justice in Ireland is better, on the whole, than it
was in the early Victorian era. It is not only that the law's delay has
been to a considerable extent, remedied, as it has been, in England, by an
improved procedure. Traces of Protestant ascendency were to be seen on
the Irish Bench sixty years ago, though these were evanescent and few;
such a trial as that of O'Connell in 1844, marked by partiality and even
by wrong, would be simply impossible at the present time. Trial by jury,
however, in Ireland too often reflects the animosities and prejudices of
class, and is liable to grave perversion and errors; it is sometimes
necessary, in causes where religious or political feeling is engaged, to
make a careful selection in forming juries, in order that common right
should be done; this inevitable, but invidious, process, held up to
execration by the name of 'packing,' is certainly a matter that causes
regret. The fairness seen in the administration of the law in Ireland has
been strikingly illustrated of late years; leaders and agents of the Land
and the National Leagues have had to answer for their offences in the
inferior courts; but despite rabid clamour against what is called
'coercion,' the conduct of these inquiries has not been really impugned. A
laudable attempt, however, to make the magisterial bench more popular, has
lately placed on it an order of men, of whom some have abused their power;
these instances, nevertheless, have not been frequent; the experiment
cannot be pronounced a failure. The intellect of Ireland is not so
fruitful as it was in the generation before the union; she has no
political thinkers to be named with Burke, no writer of fiction equal to
Maria Edgeworth, no dramatist to be compared to Sheridan, no orators who
have reached the heights of eloquence reached by Grattan, Curran, Plunket,
and other glories of her defunct Parliament. But there has been progress
in this respect within the last sixty years; Ireland cannot boast of such
public men as O'Connell, Sheil, and even Spring Rice; but she possesses
Dufferin in the diplomatic sphere, and Lecky, and one or two others of
repute in that of letters; she has only recently lost Lord Cairns and Lord
Russell. The improvement of primary education in Ireland has been
immense; the land is full of elementary schools, which, in the last
generation, were, comparatively, very few, and though a considerable part
of the population is still illiterate, the greater part, whose fathers
were sunk in ignorance, has felt the good influence of the light of
knowledge. High education, too, has advanced in Ireland; Trinity College
is greater than before as a place of learning; if two of the Queen's
Colleges have certainly failed, the Royal University has been, in a sense,
successful. But, as I shall point out, in subsequent pages, University
education in Ireland remains defective; a University for the Irish
Catholic upper middle class is a requirement rightly demanded from
Parliament. As for Irish secondary education, it is still backward, but
there is hope of improvement in this respect; the general standard of
Irish education, it should be added, is, except at Trinity College, low,
though this has been inevitable if we look back at the events of history.
Irish opinion generally still embodies the deep-seated animosities and
strife of race and faith, at least as fully as it ever did; with few
exceptions this appears in the tone of the newspaper press. The utterances
of many of the self-styled 'Nationalist' journals have been far more
hostile to the State, and are conceived in a much worse spirit, than those
of the same class of journals in O'Connell's day.
If we examine the condition of Ireland, as a whole, we see that there has
been some material progress, but with retrogression in important respects;
and if a certain measure of good has been done, great wrong and evil have
been accomplished, in the principal and the most far-reaching of her
social relations. Her moral and political progress has been at least
doubtful; notwithstanding immense and searching reforms, the mass of the
population is more disaffected than of old; discontent largely pervades
the classes most loyal to the State; if the mere power of government has
increased, its beneficent influence is but little recognised; the great
body of the community maintains a hostile attitude. The crooked has not
been made straight in Ireland, nor the rough places plain; a state of
society exists, in which, as the Greek poet said, 'the fountains flow
backwards, and things are out of joint.' An old order has nearly passed
away; but the new order that is replacing it is but of little promise; a
type of society has been well-nigh broken up, but a strong and solid type
is not being formed in its stead; at all events, in the phrase of Bacon,
the time is still distant 'when the strings of the Irish harp will all be
in tune;' many respond to the player's hand in discord. 'The Constitution
in Ireland,' Peel once exclaimed, 'is not the British Constitution, but
its ghastly image;' let us see what it is in Ireland at the present time.
The Sovereign is, in England, a main pillar of the State; he is a great
political and social force; the Monarchy is enthroned in the heart of the
nation. In Ireland he is almost an unknown name, associated with not a few
evil memories; his influence, which ought to be immense over a Celtic
race, has never made itself sensibly felt. In England Parliament responds
to the national will, and has gathered the reverence of ages around it; in
Ireland it is a foreign and alien assembly, with which the mass of the
people has no sympathy. In England the aristocracy is at the head of
public affairs, leads society, commands universal respect; in Ireland it
has lost all authority; has no weight in the National Councils; has no
popular support, is even disliked at the Castle. In England the middle
class is enormously strong, and is the best bulwark of order and law; in
England the democracy is almost wholly free from revolutionary ideas, as
regards property, and seeks reforms by constitutional methods. In Ireland,
it is unhappily quite otherwise; the middle class is comparatively weak,
and, in its lower strata, is opposed to the existing order of things; the
democracy is an easily led multitude, ready at its leaders' bidding to
rush into socialistic courses. In England, too, the Commonwealth is
completely secure; in Ireland there is literally no Commonwealth; and such
organisations as the Land, the National, and the United Irish Leagues, are
dangerous symptoms of a kind of Jacobin antipathy to the State. The words
of Peel are still unhappily true; but painful as the contrast he pointed
out is, even this is not the worst circumstance in the present condition
of Irish affairs. What, I think, most alarms a reflecting mind, is the
restlessness that pervades the mass of the people, an eagerness for some
undefined change, a demand for the universal spoliation of a class, a
sense of insecurity spreading far and wide, a neglect of the pursuits of
calm industry in the hope of what a revolution may effect, an instability
in the social fabric from top to bottom. The agitation, the disorder, and,
I will add, the vicious legislation of late years, will, however, largely
explain these phenomena.
Lord Salisbury's Ministry came into office, six years ago, at the head of
the most powerful majority that had been returned to the House of Commons
since the great Reform era. The time was singularly opportune to consider
the state of Ireland, and to deal with the Irish questions that required
sound and wise treatment. The Opposition was paralysed by a rout at the
polls; the National League conspiracy showed few signs of life; the
'Nationalist' party was rent asunder; the community was more quiescent
than it had been for years. It would be unfair to deny that, since it
acquired power, the Government has been beset by many and grave obstacles
in legislating on domestic subjects; it has been encompassed by a sea of
foreign troubles; it has had to conduct the protracted war in South
Africa. It would be absurd, too, to expect that it could, once for all,
have placed Irish affairs permanently on a secure basis; this can only be
the result of the wisdom of years aided by the healing influence of time.
But it has disappointed enlightened Irish opinion; it has not done, or
even tried to do, what it might have accomplished. Undoubtedly parts of
its policy have been good; it has effected something, if not much, in
developing the material resources of the west of Ireland, and in
mitigating the danger and the stress of Irish poverty; it has carried on
the excellent work of Mr. Arthur Balfour in this respect; the Department
of Agriculture it has lately formed will, not improbably, be of real use
in promoting industry and self-reliance among the peasantry, on the
principles advocated, a century and a half ago, by Berkeley. But
commendation, I think, must here end; the Government, I believe, has made
grave mistakes; it has assuredly not successfully dealt with the great
'Case of Ireland,' greater now than in the days of Molyneux and Swift. It
has not reduced the excessive representation of Ireland in the House of
Commons; until this is done the Union will not be secure. It has
disregarded the verdict of the important Commission which has declared
that Ireland has been immensely overtaxed for years; here it defies
universal Irish opinion; and having pledged itself to make a further
inquiry, it has not hitherto taken a step to redeem its pledge. It is
divided on the question of high education in Ireland, and professes that
this must be an 'open question,' as if this was not unwise and perilous;
and though it has appointed a Commission to report on the subject,
Catholic Ireland very possibly may not obtain the place of learning which
it is entitled to demand. Above all, on the capital question of the Irish
land, the Government has certainly all but ignored the recommendations of
a Commission chosen by itself, and has refused to lessen the injustice
proved to have been done wholesale; like its predecessors, in the case of
the Encumbered Estates Act, it is still bent on agrarian legislation that
has done infinite mischief. Its administration, too, up to this has not
been successful; it has allowed the United Irish League to grow up and to
gain strength, with far-spreading evil results; its conduct of Irish
affairs has been weak and empirical, and notably marked by false
optimistic fancies. Of late there has been improvement in this respect; we
can only hope it will not be abortive.
'In this gigantic body,' Macaulay exclaimed fifty-seven years ago, 'there
is one vulnerable part near the heart.'[18] The Empire has expanded into
ampler proportions than those described by the orator; its subject kings,
dominations, princedoms, powers, above all, its myriads of many races and
tongues, are united by far more durable ties than those which held it
together in a generation that has passed away. Four years ago, Canada sent
messengers from her great lakes, Hindustan representatives of her ancient
dynasties, the great island continent envoys from her free nations, to do
homage to Queen Victoria; the pageant, gathered 'within London's streaming
roar,' was a magnificent spectacle of world-wide loyalty. England has seen
another and a still more wonderful sight; the martial sons of our great
self-governing colonies have flocked in thousands to do battle in her
cause, in the distant and ill-known wastes of South Africa; in a long,
bloody, and sometimes disastrous conflict, they have proved themselves to
be worthy companions in arms of the offspring of the soldiery of Blenheim
and Waterloo; they have fought and bled for England as if she was their
common country. But Ireland, as regards the mass of the people, has, on
both occasions, stood sullenly aloof; her heart has gone out in sympathy
with the Boers; she remains, for the most part, hostile to our rule and
disloyal. It is mere foolishness to shut our eyes to plain facts; still
more so to join in the false paeans of interested partisans, and ignorant
scribblers, who announce that because Ireland is, on the surface,
comparatively at peace, she is in every sense a contented or a happy land,
free from grave elements of political and social danger. She is still the
'vulnerable part at the heart of the Empire;' the spectre at the great
national festival; the warning token, as in the case of the Oriental
despot, that human grandeur and power are, in the nature of things,
mortal. She is still, as she was in the day of Spenser, a malign influence
across the path of our greatness, a riddle difficult to understand and
interpret; the many problems she still presents to the statesman are
perplexing in the extreme, and await solution. That any policy will
suddenly remove the many evils apparent in her organic structure is a
delusion a rational mind rejects; the deep-seated ills in that distempered
frame may never be completely and finally cured. Something effectual,
nevertheless, may, I think, be done; I proceed to examine, in the
following chapters, the 'Present Irish Questions' that confront our
rulers; and to consider what the amending hand may accomplish.
CHAPTER II
THE QUESTION OF HOME RULE
The question of Home Rule not extinct--The reasons--Butt's scheme of
Home Rule--It is denounced and ridiculed by Mr. Gladstone, and
defeated in the House of Commons--Death of Butt--The Home Rule
movement becomes allied with a foreign conspiracy--Davitt and
Parnell--The Land League--Mr. Gladstone's surrender to it--The
movement makes no progress in the Parliament of 1880-85--The General
Election of 1885--Mr. Gladstone suddenly adopts the policy of Home
Rule--The probable reasons--The Home Rule Bill of 1886--Its nature and
tendencies--Decisive objections to the measure--It is rejected at the
General Election of 1886, having been previously rejected in the House
of Commons--Policy and conduct of Mr. Gladstone--The Home Rule
movement makes some progress in England, and why--The Home Rule Bill
of 1893--It is much worse than that of 1886--The reasons--It is
rejected by the House of Lords--Home Rule under different forms--The
Union must be maintained--Proposal that Parliament should occasionally
sit in Dublin--The over-representation of Ireland should be redressed.
Home Rule, it is very generally assumed, has vanished into the domain of
extinct politics. Unlike what had been the case from 1886 to 1895, when
this was the main of our domestic questions, Home Rule was scarcely
referred to at the late election; it will receive little countenance at
the hands of the present House of Commons, however Irish Nationalists may
persist in urging their demand. It would, nevertheless, be imprudent to
believe that this policy, as has been said, 'is as dead as Queen Anne,' as
impossible as a return to Protection or to an unreformed Parliament.
Isaac Butt's scheme of Home Rule was treated with scorn and ridicule by
Mr. Gladstone during many years; Mr. Gladstone was the author of the Bills
of 1886 and 1893, embodying Home Rule in forms few will now approve of;
and he left nothing undone to convert them into law. At the General
Election of 1880, Home Rule was regarded as a mere Irish craze, and hardly
a candidate could be found, in England and Scotland, to consent to an
inquiry upon the subject; within six years Home Rule was a Ministerial
measure; and though the House of Commons pronounced against it, and its
decision was emphatically ratified at the General Election of 1886, still,
on this occasion, the votes in favour of Home Rule were not much less
numerous than those cast against it.[19] In 1892 England condemned Home
Rule, if not as decisively as six years before; but Ireland, Scotland, and
Wales declared for it; and a Home Rule Bill received the sanction of the
House of Commons, which, but for the resistance made by the House of
Lords, would now be a fundamental law of these realms. It deserves notice,
too, that not one of the Liberal leaders, although, as a rule, they
avoided the subject, repudiated this policy at the late election; two or
three, indeed, gave it a qualified support; and it is evident that they
keep the question in reserve, in the hope of turning it to account at a
more convenient season. Nor can it be denied, as long as Ireland can send
more than eighty Nationalists into the House of Commons, pledged to insist
on Home Rule as their country's right, that the subject must command more
or less attention; for many reasons it is impossible to ignore the claims
of a representation so large in numbers. It must be added that, under our
system of party government, especially as this has existed of late years,
a considerable group of politicians, with a fixed purpose, can effect much
by throwing its weight indifferently into the Ministerial or the
Opposition scale, and giving its support to either side, in order to
compass its own ends; it has, sometimes with successful results, swayed
majorities by these means, and not in vain. This is the hope of the Irish
Nationalist leaders; 'let parties in the House of Commons,' they cynically
argue, 'be equally divided, as must at some time happen,' and 'we shall
gain Home Rule from either Tories or Whigs, if we assist either by our
votes to keep them in office.' It cannot be said, if we look back at some
political events within the last twenty years, that this expectation is
wholly groundless; and though I am convinced it will not be realised, its
existence alone suffices to prove that Home Rule cannot yet be dismissed
as outside the sphere of practical politics.
Home Rule, therefore, is a 'Present Irish Question,' and if not at this
moment urgent, it remains the most important of Irish questions, for it
directly affects the fortunes of the Three Kingdoms. It is necessary,
accordingly, to examine it, in its principles at least; and an inquiry is
opportune, at this juncture, for the subject can be fairly discussed in
its different bearings, apart from the obscuring influences of national
and party prejudice, and especially of political passion. Isaac Butt was
the true author of the conception of Home Rule; for though a movement in
favour of a Repeal of the Union had become dangerously active in 1843-44,
and had been feebly intermittent since that period, this peculiar
modification of the arrangements made at the Union, in fixing the
relations between Great Britain and Ireland, was wholly an idea of that
distinguished lawyer. The occasion, on which this scheme was put forward,
was not a little remarkable for various reasons. Mr. Gladstone had just
disestablished the Anglican Church in Ireland, and had disendowed it, to a
considerable extent; this policy was angrily resented by a party of Irish
Protestants; for the maintenance of the Established Irish Church had been
made an essential condition of the Treaty of Union. These men, who were
not without energy and parts, declared that a great international compact
had been broken; and they gradually obtained the support of leaders of the
'Young Ireland' following, of survivors of the 'Tail' of O'Connell, and
even of adherents of the Fenian cause, all, in different degrees, opposed
to the Union. Butt became the head and spokesman of this curiously
assorted band, composed of essentially discordant elements; but he
endeavoured to combine it into a strong Parliamentary force, by
propounding a plan of Home Rule for Ireland, which he had thought out with
patience and care, his hope being that this would unite his followers, and
that his project would at least be entertained in Parliament, and would
not be as hopeless as an attempt to repeal the Union. His views are set
forth in his 'Irish Federalism,' a long-forgotten work, but which, even
now, may be read with profit. Butt professed, and I have no doubt
sincerely, that he did not seek to disturb the Union, and that the
Imperial Parliament was to remain as it was; but he proposed to give
Ireland a Parliament of her own, with full powers of legislation on Irish
affairs, and an Executive practically appointed by this, which would have
the government of Ireland in its hands. Having thus called into existence
an Irish State, possessing State rights of supreme importance, he sought
to connect Ireland with Great Britain by a Federal tie; representatives
from Ireland were to repair to the Imperial Parliament, and to vote in
that assembly on Imperial questions, but not, as I believe Butt meant, on
those which belonged to England and Scotland.[20]
The cry of Home Rule was welcomed in Ireland by her Catholic masses; at
the General Election of 1874, sixty men were returned to the House of
Commons to support this policy, a party formidable in numbers, if not in
essential strength. Butt brought forward his plan, in outline, on three or
four occasions; but the question was not discussed with the fulness of
knowledge and the breadth of view it certainly required; on the whole, it
was superficially treated. Neither Butt nor his opponents thoroughly
perceived that his proposals virtually repealed the Union, for if the
Imperial Parliament was, nominally, to be left intact, a real Parliament
was to be placed in its stead, in Ireland, which would practically annul
its effective authority, from the Giant's Causeway to Cape Clear; and they
seem not to have understood that 'Irish Federalism' implied Federalism for
Great Britain to a great extent, and introduced into the Constitution the
Federal principle with its far-reaching and dangerous effects. Butt's
scheme, however, was powerfully attacked in its details; by no one so
powerfully as by Mr. Gladstone, who had lately announced, to an approving
multitude, that Home Rule was sheer folly or worse, and had exultingly
asked, 'Can any sensible man, can any rational man, suppose that, at this
time of day, in this condition of the world, we are going to disintegrate
the great capital institutions of the country for the purpose of making
ourselves ridiculous in the sight of all mankind, and crippling any power
we possess for bestowing benefits, through legislation, on the country to
which we belong?'[21] Little knowing what the future was to bring forth,
Mr. Gladstone declared that Home Rule was not to be even thought of, until
it could be proved that the Irish affairs, to which the Irish Parliament
was to be confined, could be separated from Imperial and British affairs,
a partition he evidently deemed impossible; and he insisted that the
introduction of Irish members into the Imperial Parliament, which,
according to this plan, was to have nothing to do with Ireland, was not
only essentially unjust, but involved the absurdity that these men 'were
to judge as they might think fit of the general affairs of the Empire, and
also of exclusively English and Scotch questions,' an interpretation not,
I believe, correct. Home Rule was rejected by overwhelming majorities in
the Parliament of 1874-80; and at the General Election of the last-named
year, it found no countenance, I have said, in England or Scotland. The
subject was scarcely referred to by Mr. Gladstone, wholly preoccupied by
his Midlothian campaign, and by his persistent efforts to deprive Lord
Beaconsfield of power.
Butt had sincere reverence for the Constitution and the Law; the Home Rule
movement, as long as he was at its head, was a constitutional and a lawful
movement. But this eminent man had been supplanted, by degrees, by a
politician of a very different nature; and when he had passed away in the
spring of 1879, Parnell, and what was called the 'active Irish party,'
which had baffled and incensed the House of Commons, became the directors
of the Home Rule policy. The character of the movement was almost wholly
changed; it became associated with a conspiracy hatched in the Far West,
which aimed at the separation of Ireland from Great Britain; Butt's
moderate followers fell away from it, especially the band of Protestants
who had first set it on foot. Meanwhile, American Fenianism, which had in
vain attempted open rebellion in Ireland in 1865-67, had, at the
instigation perhaps of Michael Davitt, made another effort to compass its
ends; the 'New Departure' in treason was made; the Land League was formed
with the avowed purpose of overthrowing 'Irish Landlordism,' as it was
called, as being the mainstay of British power in Ireland, and then of
wresting Ireland by force from her British rulers. But Davitt was not well
fitted for his work; Parnell became the leader of the Home Rule and the
Land League movements; and during a short visit to the United States, he
openly professed that his ultimate aim was 'to break the last link between
Great Britain and Ireland,' though he was still the chief of an apparently
constitutional cause. Ere long the Land League, availing itself of a
season of distress, and subsidised by Fenians across the Atlantic, had
taken root in different parts of Ireland; and gradually a reign of terror,
marked by detestable crime, and essentially of the Jacobin type, had
acquired a frightful ascendency in ten or eleven counties. By this time,
Mr. Gladstone had become Minister: how he denounced the League in
passionate language; endeavoured, for a few months, to hold it in check;
succumbed to it, when he made the 'Kilmainham Treaty;' and, finally, how,
after declaring that Parnell and his adherents were 'aiming at
dismemberment through rapine,' he became the author of the Land Act of
1881, and threw the Irish landed gentry as a sop to Cerberus,--is
sufficiently known, but I shall recur to the subject. During these years,
Parnell, artfully playing the double game, which this born conspirator
especially made his boast, and linking what he called 'a constitutional
with an illegal movement,' had more than once spoken on behalf of Home
Rule in the House of Commons, his moderate and even statesmanlike language
being in marked contrast with his treasonable harangues in Ireland. But
Parliament had been otherwise engaged with Irish affairs; it had become
more averse to Home Rule than ever; it had learned what the movement had
begun to involve, veiled, if not open, rebellion against the State, and it
voted down the question by immense majorities. Statesmen of all parties,
Tory, Whig, and Radical, without exception, concurred in this view; Lord
Salisbury, Lord Spencer, and John Bright alike condemned the very idea of
Home Rule. Mr. Gladstone indeed asserted afterwards that he had a policy
of this kind in his thoughts; but if he had, he kept it to himself; it
cannot be gathered from his speeches of the time; he never breathed to
his colleagues a word about it; he allowed them to pronounce against Home
Rule with his full apparent sanction.[22]
Mr. Gladstone's Ministry fell in 1885; Majuba, Gordon, and his Irish
policy had set the best sense of the country against him. Lord Salisbury's
Government came in his place; for a short time the tendency, too often
seen in British parties, to temporise with sedition and even crime in
Ireland was exhibited with untoward results; the negotiations between
Parnell and Lord Carnarvon have not yet been explained. At the General
Election of 1885, Parnell openly took the Conservative side, denounced the
Liberals in the bitterest language, and perhaps, through the influence of
the Irish vote, deprived them of a few seats in England. His principal
object certainly was to increase his own power and that of his band by
weakening the strongest of British parties; but this association with the
Conservatives probably lessened the antipathy of their opponents to Home
Rule, and was not without effect on the events that followed. Ireland,
however, was by no means a prominent question in this electoral contest;
the Tory, Whig, and Radical leaders dealt, for the most part, with
different topics; and though Mr. Gladstone dropped ambiguous phrases,
which, he ere long contended, indicated his conversion to Home Rule, his
lieutenants continued to declare against this policy, their chief
remaining openly in accord with them; indeed, all that could be collected,
from what he wrote and said, was that he called upon the country to give
him such decisive support as would make him independent of all Irish
factions. The result of this General Election, taken as a whole, was to
gain for the Liberals a majority of some eighty seats in Great Britain;
but in Ireland it effected a notable change in politics. By a recent,
and, for Ireland, a most unwise statute, the electoral franchise had been
assimilated in the Three Kingdoms; political ascendency had, for the first
time, been secured for the masses of Catholic Ireland, largely an ignorant
and superstitious multitude; property and intelligence were overwhelmed at
the polls; and Parnell and his satellites, now called Nationalists, won
more than eighty seats out of a total of one hundred and three. The
Liberal majority, therefore, would be effaced should the Irish leader and
his men give the Conservatives their votes; a weak Government would be the
inevitable result; Mr. Gladstone, now in his seventy-sixth year, could
hardly expect to return to office. In these circumstances, it became
gradually known that Mr. Gladstone had accepted Home Rule in principle,
and was even prepared to legislate upon the subject. It would be unfair to
assert that personal motives alone determined this sudden resolve; though
obviously should the Liberal chief retain the allegiance of his party, and
draw Parnell and the Nationalists to his side, by inaugurating Home Rule
as a practical measure, he would inevitably be restored to power with a
great majority. Mr. Gladstone, ever ready to yield to a popular cry, may
have believed that five-sixths of Ireland were passionately eager for Home
Rule; he may have been convinced himself that, as affairs now stood,
Parliament would well-nigh be reduced to a deadlock should nothing be done
to redress the balanced state of parties, and that Home Rule was the
condition of a stable Government; he may have thought that since the
Conservative dalliance with Parnell, it had become impossible permanently
to resist this policy; yet these considerations form no apology for the
conduct of the aged, but most impulsive, statesman. Only a few years
before large parts of Ireland had been in a state of frightful anarchy; a
rebellious and socialistic movement against British rule and Irish landed
property had acquired great force; even at the present time, the National
League, replacing the Land League, kept disorder prevalent in many
counties. Was this the moment to effect a revolution in Ireland, to tamper
with, and to impair, the Union, to hand over the loyalty, the property,
and the worth of the island to the classes and the men against whom but,
as yesterday, it had been necessary to put the severest coercion in force?
Lord Salisbury resigned office in the first months of 1886; Mr. Gladstone
became Prime Minister in his stead. Had parties in the House of Commons
remained unchanged, the prospect for the old statesman would have been
auspicious; the Liberals and Nationalists combined would have been
supreme; Home Rule would have been the fruit of the new alliance. But the
most distinguished men of the Liberal party, resenting a coalition far
worse than that of Fox and North, and convinced that Home Rule would be
ruinous to the State, fell off from their leader in large numbers; the
powerful Press of Great Britain, with few exceptions, emphatically
condemned the Minister's conduct. Mr. Gladstone, however, did not pause in
his violent course; he introduced his first Home Rule Bill in April, 1886.
I can only glance at the main features of this famous measure, and devote
to it a passing comment.[23] A Parliament was to be established in the
Irish capital; this, subject to the limitations set forth in the Bill, was
practically to exercise supreme power in Ireland. This Parliament was to
be composed of two Orders, the first containing one hundred and three
members, and formed of a few Irish peers and of men of some substance; the
second comprising two hundred and four or two hundred and six members
elected on the existing democratic franchise. The two Orders were
ordinarily to sit together; but should differences in legislative
measures arise, the first Order was, for a short time, to have a
suspensive veto on the decisions of the second Order, which, however,
possessing an immense majority, would almost necessarily in the long run
completely prevail. The Irish Parliament was precluded from legislating on
many subjects, for the most part Imperial, but partly domestic; it was
notably to have no control over the Customs and Excise of Ireland, which
were to be kept in the hands of the Imperial Parliament; and though it was
permitted to impose any other taxes, the whole revenue of Ireland was to
pass through the hands of a British official, who was to pay into the
Imperial Treasury a sum of about four millions sterling, as a contribution
from Ireland, for Imperial purposes, before the Irish Treasury could
receive a farthing. Bills voted by the Irish Parliament might be annulled
by the veto of the Lord-Lieutenant and perhaps of the British Ministry;
and the Judicial Committee of the English Privy Council, reinforced by a
small body of Irish judges, was to have the power to pronounce Acts of the
Irish Parliament void, if inconsistent with its constitutional rights.
Subject, however, to these restrictions and checks, the Irish Parliament
was to be a sovereign power in Ireland; it could practically appoint or
displace the Irish Executive Government; it could enact, change, or repeal
any laws it should think fit; it could pass any resolutions it pleased; if
an assembly partly subordinate, it would be largely supreme. Ireland was
to have no representatives in the Imperial Parliament, though this could
dispose of the Irish Customs and Excise; no Irish protest could be made at
Westminster against unjust fiscal exaction, by no means impossible. For
the rest, the Union was nominally not disturbed, and the Imperial
Parliament was nominally left intact; but it was declared that the Irish
Parliament was to possess the rights secured to it, unless these were
annulled by an Act of the Imperial Parliament, to which the Irish had
given its consent, or by an Act of the Imperial Parliament, in which
representatives from Ireland should have a voice.
The Bill was debated with great force of argument, but hardly in its high
constitutional aspects. Like the plan of Butt, and every plan of the kind,
it impliedly, if not expressly, repealed the Union, for the very creation
of an Irish Parliament destroyed the real authority of the Imperial
Parliament, the symbol and guarantee of the Union, in one of the main
parts of the Three Kingdoms. It effected a radical change in our polity as
a whole, for practically it gave birth to three Parliaments, the Irish
sitting in College Green in Dublin, the British at Westminster without
Irish members, and the Imperial, properly to be only so-called, when
assembled upon one great occasion; and, even more distinctly than the
scheme of Butt, it let the principle of Federation into the constitution
of the State. And it did all this obscurely, indirectly, and, so to speak,
with reserve; the hand of a veiled prophet appeared in his work; this must
have led to endless controversies dangerous in the extreme. Nor did the
Bill even attempt to mark out the distinction between Irish, British, and
Imperial affairs, which its author had declared was a _sine qua non_; this
distinction, in fact, cannot be drawn, as Mr. Gladstone acknowledged
afterwards; Irish, British, and Imperial affairs so run into each other,
that they cannot be divided into separate heads, to be under the
jurisdiction of different Parliaments. The conditions, too, which Mr.
Gladstone described, as essential to a measure of Home Rule, were, in no
sense, fulfilled. 'The Unity of the Empire,' that is, of Great Britain and
Ireland, as Mr. Gladstone no doubt had in his mind, was not secured, or,
even in name, preserved; the subordinate Irish Parliament and its superior
might, and probably would, come in serious conflict; this was absolutely
inconsistent with the unity to be maintained. The 'political equality of
England, Scotland, and Ireland' was not assured; the Bill placed Ireland
in a degraded position, especially in all that dealt with taxation, and
through the exclusion of Irish members from the British House of Commons.
It did not 'produce an equitable distribution of Imperial burdens,' for
the financial arrangements were thoroughly unjust, and subjected Ireland
arbitrarily to a most galling tribute, without giving her the means of
making a complaint. It did not 'provide safeguards for the minority,' that
is, for the loyal classes of Protestant and Catholic Ireland; it handed
them over to an Irish Parliament, certain to be for years an instrument of
their avowed enemies; and its supplement, a Land Purchase Bill, did not
furnish a third part of the funds required to buy out the Irish landlords,
a class which, Mr. Gladstone declared, it was 'an obligation of duty and
honour' to save harmless, and which he admitted an Irish Parliament would,
probably, plunder and destroy. Lastly, the Bill did not secure 'finality;'
it was in no sense in the nature of a 'permanent settlement,' as
subsequent events have conclusively proved.[24]
It may be urged, however, that even if this measure made a fundamental
change in the constitution of these realms, and did not satisfy the
conditions its author laid down, still the real question was, would it
bring peace to Ireland, and improve the relations in which she stood
towards Great Britain? Mr. Gladstone and his followers assumed that this
would be the case; the 'Union of Hearts' was to accomplish marvels; but
this assumption was without the slightest warrant. The most favourable way
to consider the subject, from the point of view of the Home Rule party, is
to suppose that Great Britain and Ireland were two communities, in no
sense estranged from each other, and that Ireland was not a widely divided
people; and that both were not unwilling to accept the Bill, as a kind of
modification of the partnership made by the Treaty of Union. This
supposition would be obviously contrary to the facts; but, even on this
supposition, the proposed measure would have completely failed to attain
its objects, and, on any ordinary view of human nature, would have
exasperated Great Britain and Ireland alike, and could not have been a
'message of peace' to Ireland. The Parliament at Westminster would soon
have found out that its real sovereignty in Ireland had been practically
destroyed; that the Irish Parliament could, in many ways, interfere with
British and Imperial affairs; that most of the checks on its powers were
of little avail; this would certainly deeply offend the deceived British
nation. The Irish Parliament, on the other hand, would necessarily resent
the harsh limitations by which it had been bound; yet as it had most of
the powers of a real Parliament, it could very effectually evade or impair
these; could, through its Executive, largely annul them; could, at least,
make continual and powerful protests. Discord, and perhaps conflict,
between Great Britain and Ireland, from the nature of the case, would be
the result; and, besides, there were special provisions in the Bill which
would be deemed intolerable by five-sixths of Irishmen. Even loyal Ireland
would not endure the banishment of Irish representatives from the British
House of Commons, which would have power to impose the Irish Customs and
Excise; this would be taxation without representation, in the very worst
sense. It was monstrous that Ireland was to contribute a large sum for the
charge of the Empire and yet was to have no voice in the Empire's affairs;
it was humiliating that a British official was to have absolute control
over the whole Irish revenue. All this was subjecting Ireland to a
degrading tribute; it should be added that the prerogative of the English
Privy Council, to set aside practically Acts of the Irish Parliament,
would have provoked the deepest and most widespread discontent. The Bill,
in a word, revealed strange ignorance of the feelings of mankind; it would
have worked on the assumption only that human beings in Great Britain and
Ireland were without passions and wills of their own; it would have been
blown to the winds, when put to the test.
But 'the circumstances,' to adopt the words of Burke, 'are what render
every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind;'[25]
what were the circumstances in the present instance? England and Catholic
Ireland had been long opposed; the Land and the National Leagues formed a
conspiracy against our rule in Ireland; England had interests in Ireland
of the first importance; she had a large community of her own blood and
faith in Ireland, attached to the Union and the old mother country.
Ireland had been distracted for ages by feuds of race and religion;
Protestant and Catholic Ireland stood apart from each other; the Irish
Parliament, created by the Bill, would certainly be an instrument of the
heads of the Catholic masses, supported by Parnell and his band, and by
Fenians across the Atlantic. Under these conditions, Home Rule would have
been a fatal gift, ruinous to Great Britain and Ireland alike. Suppose,
for example, that an Irish Parliament, established in College Green, since
1886, had ruled Ireland during the war in South Africa. It would
unquestionably have taken the side of the Boers, as the Nationalist
leaders have openly done; and it would have possessed the means of doing
infinite mischief. It could have passed resolutions condemning the war;
have called on Irishmen to keep aloof from the British army; have
discouraged recruiting throughout Ireland; have sent messages of good will
to the Boer Government. But probably it would have gone far beyond these,
its constitutional, rights; it could have winked at the preparation of an
armed force in Ireland to be despatched to the aid of the Boers; it
could have invited Foreign Powers to put a stop to the conflict; nay, it
could have laid hands on the Irish taxes, and refused to 'pay tribute to
an alien Government;' and what, in these cases, would have been England's
means of obtaining redress, save by the power of the sword? In the
instance of other wars, the same course would be followed; we cannot
forget that at Nationalist meetings, the Mahdi, the Dervishes, nay, all
our enemies, were the objects of the applause of shouting Irish
multitudes. And as the Irish Parliament could injure England in war, so it
could embarrass and annoy her, in a hundred ways, in peace. There was
nothing in the Bill to prevent Protection in Ireland, for the Irish
Parliament could vote bounties on Irish exports; there was nothing to
prevent the issue of Irish assignats, to mask confiscation of different
kinds; and recourse would not improbably be had to these very expedients.
It is unnecessary to dwell on what would be the legislation of the Irish
Parliament at home, and the administration of the Executive it would have
a right to set up. Composed as it would be, it would abolish 'landlordism'
by a stroke of the pen, or by merely preventing the recovery of rent; it
would simply turn society upside down, and establish a Catholic ascendency
by many degrees worse than Protestant ascendency ever was; it would, in a
word, let revolution loose in the island. Protestant Ireland would, as a
matter of course, resist; a savage war of race and creed would certainly
follow; the scenes of 1690 and 1798 might well be repeated; and the
struggle would end in general bankruptcy. England, in her own interest,
and in that of her friends in Ireland, would assuredly intervene, under
conditions like these; and the concession of Home Rule would probably lead
to reconquest.
The Home Rule Bill of 1886--apart from the fatal evils it must have
caused--placed Ireland in such an inferior position, that every Irishman
of spirit ought to have treated it with contempt; it was so dangerous to
Great Britain, and, indeed, to the Empire, that John Bright declared that
not twenty English members approved of it at heart. Mr. Gladstone himself,
it should be remarked, regarded it with no doubtful misgivings; he
presented it to the House of Commons as 'but a choice of evils;' his
measure itself, in many passages, revealed the profoundest distrust of the
Parliament he proposed to create. Parnell, imposing his imperious will on
his followers, accepted the Bill with professions of delight; this was
effusively welcomed by the emotional statesman, deceived by an
unscrupulous plotter, over and over again; it is now known this was a mere
pretence; Home Rule, under the conditions of the scheme, would have been
made a stepping-stone only for larger demands; and this, indeed, might
have been easily foreseen. The Bill was rejected by a majority which did
not express the true sense of the House of Commons, and showed how strong
may be the ties of party; the great body of the Liberals, as, doubtless,
they now bitterly regret, threw in their lot with Mr. Gladstone in his
most reckless venture. It is of more importance to observe what the views
on the subject were of the conspirators in America, who had set the Land
and National Leagues on foot, and had supplied almost the whole of their
funds; without their assistance the movement led by Parnell would probably
have never struggled into life. The prospect opened by the Home Rule Bill
was thus welcomed by the Clan na Gael, the most energetic and daring of
the Fenian parties; it will be noted that it was to be a means only to a
very decisive end. 'The achievement of a National Parliament gives us a
footing on Irish soil; it gives us the agencies and instrumentalities of a
government _de facto_, at the very commencement of the Irish struggle. It
places the government of the land in the hands of our friends and
brothers. It removes the Castle's rings, and gives us what we may well
express as the plant of an armed revolution.'[26] And at a great Fenian
meeting held after the rejection of the Bill, one of the leading speakers
dropped these significant words: 'We have no desire to force the hand of
Parnell, or to drive the Irish people into war unprepared. All that we
demand is this, and we will be satisfied with nothing less--that no leader
of the Irish people, who is supposed to speak for them, shall commit
himself, or them, to accepting as a final settlement, bills of relief
unworthy of the dignity of Ireland's national demand. We are perfectly
willing to see them accept such bills as that of Gladstone, as a
settlement on account, but that must not be accepted as closing the
transaction. We see no wisdom in it. It lowers the tone of the national
cause. It lowers the spirit of the true people. To ask them to subside to
a species of mere provincialism is an outrage on their struggle of seven
hundred years for liberty. We admit that it may be good policy on the part
of Mr. Parnell and Mr. Davitt to be what is called moderate in tone; but
for us, who represent the national idea of the Irish people, it would be
worse than folly to conceal our sentiments. We recognise that Ireland is
incapable of fighting at present.'[27]
Mr. Gladstone dissolved Parliament when it had thrown the Bill out; he
appears really to have believed that the nation would give its sanction to
Home Rule. At the General Election of 1886, he exerted himself 'in the
sacred cause of Ireland,' with the energy he had shown in his Midlothian
Campaign; he associated his new Irish policy with appeals to the
multitude; the opposition to him was that 'of the classes against the
masses;' in a word, the enthusiastic, and perhaps sincere, convert played,
with little scruple, the part of a mere demagogue. But England pronounced
against him, with no uncertain voice; 'men of education and property,' as
he sadly acknowledged, resisted him with the steadfastness of the English
nature; a great majority was sent into the House of Commons pledged
against Home Rule; Lord Salisbury's Government came again into office. It
deserves special notice that the rejection of the Bill did not, as was
predicted would be the case, arouse anything like real discontent in
Ireland, or cause her Catholic community to stir; this spectacle, which
has been seen over and over again, proves how little the main body of the
Irish people care for a political revolution of the kind; and how Home
Rule, as Parnell and his band conceived it, was the work of a conspiracy
of foreign origin, seeking, through it, to subvert British rule in
Ireland. The real purpose of these men was very clearly shown at a
Convention assembled at Chicago, in the summer of 1886; speeches of the
most incendiary nature were made; and two of Parnell's envoys, despatched
to collect funds 'for the cause,' announced that, after the failure of Mr.
Gladstone's measure, their 'duty was to make the government of Ireland by
England impossible.' Two or three years of trouble in Ireland followed; it
is unnecessary to refer to these at any length. A season of agricultural
distress and of a fall in prices made the payment of Irish rents
difficult; the occasion was seized by the heads of the National League,
which had gradually been acquiring formidable strength; the 'Plan of
Campaign' was set afoot; and another attack was made on the Irish landed
gentry, with the ultimate object of paralysing the Irish Government, as
had been solemnly proclaimed at Chicago. The social disorder of this
period was not so deeply marked with horrible deeds of blood, as the
Saturnalia of the Land League were; but the movement was, perhaps, not
less dangerous; the cruel practice of 'boycotting' was reduced to a
system, and caused widespread misery and distress; an agrarian war was
carried on in a few counties; judges, magistrates, and juries were
terrorised in the administration of the law; and there were too numerous
instances of atrocious crimes. But a firm hand was at the helm of the
Irish Government; Mr. Balfour did not palter with sedition and treason;
the conspiracy was before long put down; and it should be added that
'boycotting' and 'the Plan of Campaign' were unequivocally condemned at
Rome.
In this struggle between the forces of disorder and law, the Rump of the
Liberal party, which had accepted Home Rule, freely declared itself on the
side of the National League and of anarchy. Mr. Gladstone, however,
towered over his fellows; his vehement and, when aroused, unscrupulous
nature, has never been more unfortunately displayed. He had been three
times at the head of the State, charged with the administration of Irish
affairs; the Government in office was engaged in a conflict with a
conspiracy of no contemptible strength; yet Mr. Gladstone did not shrink
from throwing his full weight into the scale against it, and giving his
sanction to the movement led by Parnell and his creatures. His conduct was
so flagrantly at odds with his former self, that, but for the gravity of
the situation, it would have been ludicrous; it consisted in adoring what
he had burned, and burning what he had adored; nothing like it had been
seen since Fox, breaking away from the traditions of British statesmen,
flung himself into the arms of Jacobin France, and rejoiced at every
reverse that befell England.[28] A remarkable episode in the politics of
the day was not without real effect on events that followed. The acts of
the Land and, in part, of the National Leagues, and of the leaders of the
revolutionary movements which had convulsed Ireland, were investigated by
the judges of the Special Commission appointed by Parliament for the
purpose; the inquiry, which lasted many months, was of supreme importance;
such a damning sentence was never pronounced on a body of public men, as
that pronounced on Parnell and his followers, though the accusation of
treason was not brought into question.[29] This decision was sufficient
for well-informed and sensible men; but Parnell was acquitted on a
personal, but minor, charge, that of having been the author of the
well-known forged letters all but approving of the assassinations in the
Phoenix Park; Mr. Gladstone and his adherents welcomed him as an injured
martyr; the House of Commons rang with their plaudits when he re-entered
its walls. For a few months Parnell became a popular personage in
democratic England; he had negotiations with Mr. Gladstone with respect to
Home Rule, the tenor of which has not transpired; his satellites appeared
at many public meetings, and split the ears of the groundlings with
plausible talk about 'self-government' for Ireland and the 'Union of
Hearts.' This mystification and falsehood were not without effect; the
cause of Home Rule made a kind of progress in England; and, strange to
say, the fall of Parnell which ere long followed--I shall not dwell on its
squalid and grotesque incidents--had an influence in the same direction.
Ireland had been brought into a state of comparative repose; the power of
the National League appeared broken; the formidable leader of the
conspiracy had left the stage; his adherents were scattered sheep, which
had not a shepherd. With the ignorance of Irish affairs so common to
Englishmen, and the desire, partly selfish, but partly generous, to 'get
rid of the Irish difficulty,' by any tolerable means, thousands in the
constituencies, even in England, lately bitterly hostile to it, were
gradually won over to the idea of Home Rule.
The General Election of 1892 followed; a number of causes, in addition to
that I have set forth, contributed to favour the Home Rule movement. The
'swing of the pendulum,' seen in British politics, since Democracy has
gained the ascendant, very distinctly appeared; the 'idea that each side
ought to have its innings' was widely spread; many Unionist seats were
lost by these means. The extraordinary energy shown by Mr. Gladstone, at
an age far beyond the ordinary span, had considerable influence on the
masses; and though his real authority had been long on the wane, he was
still the popular figure in England and, above all, in Scotland. He had,
also, carefully kept his Home Rule scheme to himself; it was announced by
his followers that his next measure for securing 'self-government,' as it
was called, for Ireland, would be free from the manifest faults of that of
1886, and would finally, and happily, settle the question. A large part of
the electorate was gained in this way; but the influence that most
effectually assisted Mr. Gladstone was, essentially, of a very different
kind. The Anti-Unionist Liberals had been out of power for many years;
though they had long been split into separate groups, they resolved to
combine against the common enemy, and to drive the Unionist Government
from its seat, by appeals to the ideas they assumed were dominant in
democratic England and Scotland. The Newcastle programme was
ostentatiously published; the question of Home Rule was mixed up with
projects for disestablishing the Church in England and Wales, for the
destruction or the emasculation of the House of Lords, for enforcing
temperance by the tyranny of the Local Veto, for extending the suffrage
and raising the labourer's status; in this way they satisfied themselves
they 'would sweep the country.' They knew, indeed, that Mr. Gladstone had
no heart for much of their policy; but his passionate eagerness to
accomplish Home Rule was notorious; they believed that by giving him a
cordial support on this question, they would secure his powerful aid for
the others, and that by the process known as 'log-rolling,' they would
attain their objects. The Unionist party was weakened at the election; but
the sanguine hopes of its opponents were not fulfilled. Many of the
Radical cries were far from popular; they nearly all combined large
classes against them; England returned a large majority to the House of
Commons pledged against Home Rule, if not so considerable as six years
before; and though Scotland and Wales were, in the main, favourable to Mr.
Gladstone's policy, still the electorate of Great Britain, as a whole,
pronounced against it. The election in Ireland presented features which,
with respect to Home Rule, were of marked significance. In 1886, as in
1885, the educated and upper classes were swamped at the polls, by the
flood of illiterate and indigent multitudes; the Irish Catholic Church
used, nay, abused, its immense authority, to secure votes for Mr.
Gladstone's coming measure. The same spectacle was beheld in 1892; but an
element of confusion and disorder came in; the leaders of the factions,
divided by the fall of Parnell, though Nationalists, ferociously flew at
each other's throats; the election was marked by disgraceful scenes of
lawlessness. These certainly prefigured what would be the character of a
future Irish Parliament sitting in College Green.
This election gave Mr. Gladstone a majority of some forty seats in the
House of Commons, but a majority composed of not well-united elements; and
the best opinion of England was strongly averse to his policy. But the
veteran statesman--he was in his eighty-third year--did not pause for a
moment in his headlong venture, though ominous sounds were being already
heard; after the resignation of Lord Salisbury, through a weak adverse
vote, his rival became Prime Minister for the fourth time. He had staked
everything to obtain the success of the cause to which he had passionately
devoted his declining years; he brought in his second Home Rule Bill in
the first months of 1893. The measure had much in common with that of
1886; but in some respects it was very different, especially in one
feature of supreme importance. An Irish Parliament was again to be set up
in Dublin; but it was to be a much smaller body than that proposed by the
previous Bill; it was to be composed of a Legislative Council of
forty-eight members only, and of a Legislative Assembly of only a hundred
and three; these were analogous to the First and Second Orders of 1886,
but were not to be even half in numbers; and no Irish peers were to have a
place in the new Parliament. The Legislative Council and Assembly,
differing here from the original scheme, were to sit, not together, but
apart; but the Legislative Council, like the First Order, was to have a
temporary suspensive veto on the Assembly's acts; the Assembly, too, like
the Second Order, possessing a majority which would place real power in
its hands; and both bodies, it should be added, being more democratic than
the two which were to have been created in 1886. The new Irish Parliament,
like that to be formed seven years before, was restricted by
limitations--these much the same as those contained in the former Bill--in
a number of Imperial and domestic matters; it was, like its predecessor,
to be subjected to the same kind of veto, and to nearly the same authority
of the English Privy Council. In finance, the 'tribute,' which had been
loudly condemned by all parties in Ireland, was given up; there was to be
no British official to lay his hands on Irish revenue, and to divert it
from its legitimate uses; but the Irish Customs were to be appropriated to
the Imperial charge, which Ireland was declared to be justly liable to
pay; and this was a sum of about two millions and a half, with an addition
for a time of one million, a sum less than the estimate made in 1886. The
Irish Parliament, however, if thus made largely subordinate, was like the
Parliament of the preceding Bill, to be in many, and most important,
respects supreme. It was to rule Ireland as a sovereign power, subject to
the limitations by which it was to be bound; it could make, change, and
repeal laws, as regards the Irish community, almost as it pleased; it
could, in a word, do nearly everything within the province of a real
Parliament. Above all, it could appoint and control the Irish Executive
Government, to which the administration of Irish affairs would belong; and
it would thus have complete power over the most important machinery of the
State.
The Bills of 1886 and of 1893 so far resembled each other, with some
distinctions; but, in other respects, they markedly differed. The
supremacy of the Imperial Parliament, implied but not expressed in the
first scheme, was unequivocally asserted in the second, though this
supremacy could not be effective, as respects Ireland. The Imperial
Parliament was nominally left untouched by both Bills, though this was a
play on words only; but it was to hold a position in the second it was not
to hold in the first; the Union was not in terms repealed by either
measure, though virtually it was repealed by both, through the mere
creation of an Irish Parliament. The Bill of 1886 had, as its complement,
a Land Purchase Bill; in fact, both were made parts of the same policy; a
sum of L50,000,000 was to be an indemnity for Irish landlords who should
think fit to part with their estates; for Mr. Gladstone, we have seen, had
declared that it was 'an obligation of duty and honour' to protect this
order of men; and he asserted that Parliament would, doubtless, vote any
further sums required, a singular exhibition of credulous hope, for these
would have amounted to L150,000,000 at least; and he had himself, in a
speech addressed to Lord George Hamilton, valued the lands of Ireland at
L300,000,000. But what was to be deemed sacred, in 1886, had a very
different aspect in 1893; the settlement of the Irish land was, indeed,
withheld for three years from the Irish Parliament, but, after this brief
space of time, this was to be certainly left to a body, which Mr.
Gladstone had evidently thought would make short work of the Irish landed
gentry, and would drive them, in beggary, out of their own country. These
differences, however, between the two Bills, sank into insignificance
compared to a vital distinction which made them essentially unlike each
other, and made their projects of Home Rule completely dissimilar. The
exclusion of Irish representatives from the House of Commons at
Westminster, under the measure of 1886, was palpably unjust, and had been
condemned with much force of argument. Mr. Gladstone proposed to redress
this wrong by summoning eighty Irish members into the Imperial House of
Commons; these were to have no cognisance of British questions, but were
to have a right to vote on Imperial and even Irish questions, though the
Imperial Parliament was to have little or no power in Ireland, and an
Irish Parliament was practically to fill its place, and to have all but
supreme authority over Irish affairs. This strange expedient obviously
made the Home Rule schemes of 1886 and 1893 altogether different; but Mr.
Gladstone never saw the essential distinction; he maintained that the
inclusion of the Irish members was little more than a detail of the
measure. It would be perhaps unfair to insist that he introduced this
immense change in order only to strengthen his already enfeebled party,
which would be greatly in want of Irish votes at Westminster; more
probably his intellect, yielding to old age, did not thoroughly grasp all
that was involved in his project.[30]
The Bill of 1893, from a purely constitutional point of view, was
infinitely more objectionable than that of 1886. It not only, I have said,
virtually repealed the Union; it created a kind of Federalism in these
realms to which there has never been a parallel. The Irish Parliament was
practically to rule Ireland; no British members were to show their faces
in it; it was to be all but the sovereign of the Irish State. The British
Parliament was nominally to be sovereign of the British State;
representatives from Ireland were not to appear in it, and, in theory,
they were not to deal with British questions. The Imperial Parliament was
to be analogous to a supreme Federal Council; this ought to have
jurisdiction over Imperial affairs alone; but eighty Irish members were to
have seats in it, and they were to have a right to vote on Imperial and
Irish questions, though Ireland was to have a separate Parliament of her
own. This arrangement, in conception, was simply monstrous; it gave
Ireland powers to which she had no pretence to a claim; it really
subjected Great Britain to her; it formed a Federation in which a weak and
small State was to have immense authority over another tenfold as strong;
it might be described as one-sided Federalism run mad. Passing from the
main principles to the details of the Bill, this, like its predecessor,
did not satisfy the conditions Mr. Gladstone had deemed to be essential.
It did not separate British, Irish, and Imperial affairs; its author
admitted at last that this was not possible. It asserted the supremacy of
the Imperial Parliament, and gave it a more imposing position than it had
under the Bill of 1886; but it did not maintain the Unity of the Three
Kingdoms; the mere creation of an Irish Parliament placed this in
jeopardy. It did not provide for the 'political equality' of Great Britain
and Ireland, for, in contradiction to the measure of seven years before,
it practically gave Ireland a kind of ascendency; her representatives were
to possess rights in no sense to be justified. It did not provide an
'equitable distribution of Imperial burdens;' in this province it would
have done wrong to Great Britain; for, while it abandoned the odious Irish
tribute of 1886, and an effective control over Irish revenue, its
expedient of allocating the Irish Customs, and nothing else, as the only
source for the payment of Imperial charges, would, in all probability,
have caused the Imperial Treasury a great loss; the Customs would have
been enormously reduced by smuggling, to which Irishmen have always been
much addicted, which the Irish Parliament would have no interest to
prevent, and which, very likely, it would directly encourage. Again, it
did not create 'safeguards for the minority;' as we have seen, it threw
the Irish landed gentry, after a brief respite, to the wolves, that is, to
the tender mercies of the Irish Parliament; and, like the measure of 1886,
it took no heed of Protestant and loyal Catholic Ireland, as a whole,
though this assuredly was 'a minority' that required protection. Finally,
it could not have effected a 'permanent settlement' of the affairs of
Ireland; a 'lopsided' and iniquitous arrangement like this would certainly
have had a very short existence.
The measure of 1893, in short, would have effected a complete revolution
in the polity of these realms; it would have given the least important of
the Three Kingdoms an iniquitous authority over the most important; it
would unnaturally have placed weakness in superiority to power; it would
have subjected the dominant to the lesser partner; all this, it will be
observed, followed from the inclusion of Irish representatives in the
Imperial Parliament, who, though a Parliament in Dublin was to rule
Ireland, were to have a right to deal with Imperial and Irish questions.
Mr. Gladstone, I repeat, seems never to have understood the strange and
ruinous consequences this would involve; but this can be made manifest by
one or two examples. The Irish members would be excluded from the British
Parliament, and would have no right to vote on purely British questions,
say upon the extension of the British railway system, or the
disfranchisement of an English or Scottish borough. But they would have
eighty seats in the Imperial Parliament; and as it was impossible to
separate a number of British questions from those of an Imperial or Irish
character, they would have a most potent influence over British affairs;
for example, they could legitimately vote upon such subjects as the
confidence to be placed in a British Ministry, the financial relations
between Great Britain and Ireland, or the validity of British incumbrances
affecting Irish estates. The exclusion, however, of Irish members from the
British Parliament, and their introduction into the Imperial Parliament,
would have led to even more disastrous results; it must, in many
instances, have caused a complete paralysis of the State. This in-and-out
plan, as it was derisively called, must have made Parliamentary government
well-nigh impossible; if Irish members were to have a right to vote in the
same House of Commons on Imperial and Irish questions, but were not to
have a right to vote on British questions, to vote, say, upon a war with a
Foreign Power, and upon the domicile and status of Irish subjects, but not
to vote on matters of purely British commerce, there might, and very often
would be, two conflicting majorities in the leading House of Parliament;
Parliamentary affairs would be brought to a stand; the tenure of even the
strongest Ministry would be utterly insecure. It is needless to point out
that the relations between Great Britain and Ireland would almost
certainly have been more strained, under the Bill of 1893, than they would
have been under that of 1886; and that the government of Ireland by the
Irish Parliament, would, under both, have been much of the same character.
The British nation would have been indignant at the humiliation of their
ancient Parliament, which would be sometimes placed at the mercy of Irish
members; it would have condemned the weakening in Ireland of its
authority, through the mere establishment of an Irish Parliament; it would
have been sorely vexed that Irish smuggling would filch away a large part
of British revenue. It should be borne in mind, too, that the Irish
members, who would have been let into the Imperial Parliament, would have
been more difficult to deal with, by many degrees, more openly disloyal,
more obstructive, than Irish Nationalists could be, as affairs stand at
present; they would have the support of the Irish Parliament; the Imperial
Parliament could hardly impose a check on them. As for the rule of the
Irish Parliament, within its proper domain, it would have been the same,
or much the same, under either measure; that is, it would have been a
succession of angry wranglings with England and oppression in Ireland,
leading to anarchy and general ruin.
The Home Rule Bill of 1886, in a word, bad measure as it was, was
innoxious compared to the Home Rule Bill of 1893. The fatal tendency of
the scheme was quickly perceived; the sound mind of England was profoundly
stirred; the Bill was publicly burned in the City of London; innumerable
petitions against it flowed in; an immense assembly, representing loyal
Catholic and Protestant Ireland, met in the capital, and denounced this
whole policy in most determined language. As had happened, too, seven
years before, the Press of Great Britain, all but universally, condemned
the new measure as hopelessly bad; it was significant that the Liberal
Press was well-nigh silent, and that Mr. Gladstone was supported by very
few petitions. The Opposition simply tore the Bill to shreds in the House
of Commons; but the self-deluded Minister desperately held his course; the
Radical groups servilely gave him their votes; the process of
'log-rolling,' never before so recklessly displayed, kept his petty
majority almost intact, a crying disgrace to any party in the State. At
last, whether afraid of the country rising against him or yielding to the
instigation of his Irish allies--his subserviency to their truculence had
been most painful--Mr. Gladstone forced the measure through the House of
Commons by a method never employed before; 'closure by compartments,'
rightly compared to the 'guillotine,' put an end to resistance by
iniquitous means. The Bill passed the Lower House by thirty-four votes
only; not half of it had been examined or discussed; the part that had,
had been so completely transformed, that its parent could hardly have
known his own offspring. The most notable of these changes was that the
in-and-out plan was given up; its ruinous effects had been fully dragged
into the light, but an arrangement, perhaps even worse, had been placed in
its stead. Ireland was to retain her Parliament in College Green; but the
eighty Irish members were to have a right to sit in the Imperial
Parliament, and to vote on all questions, not only Imperial and Irish, but
strictly British alike. A philosophic and calm-minded writer has indicated
what this would involve: 'Irish members may disestablish the Church of
England, though England is to have no voice in the pettiest of Irish
affairs. Irish members are to be allowed to impose taxes on England, say,
to double the income tax, though of these taxes no inhabitant of Ireland
will pay a penny; the Irish delegation, and this is the worst grievance of
all, is to be enabled, in combination with a British minority, to detach
Wales from England, or to vote Home Rule for Scotland, or to federalise
still further the United Kingdom by voting that Man, Jersey, and Guernsey
shall send members to the Imperial Parliament.'[31] To say that this
proposal would be unconstitutional would be to do it too much honour; it
was scandalous in the existing situation of affairs; it implied that heads
of the National League, leaders of a rebellious and socialistic movement,
would have the power, without restriction or check, to rule the Imperial
Parliament, in many instances, with reference to exclusively English and
Scottish questions; it practically bound Great Britain hand and foot in
fetters to Ireland; it was rightly called 'an absurd piece of infamy.' It
is unnecessary to say that the system it would have established could not
have stood a trial of even three months; England, whenever crossed, would
have indignantly swept it away. But Nemesis had commended the poisoned
chalice to Mr. Gladstone's lips; the project, on which he had staked his
fortunes, was that which he had incorrectly ascribed to Butt, and had
declared to be impossible and worse.
The Bill, it was notorious, could not have passed the House of Commons had
not its rejection by the House of Lords been assured beforehand. It
received its quietus, in that assembly, by a majority of about ten to one;
the mind of England felt unquestionable relief; a great national peril had
been averted. Exactly as had happened in 1886, scarcely a sound of
discontent was heard in Ireland; the demand for Home Rule, in fact, is
largely a fictitious cry, with which the great body of Irishmen has little
or no sympathy; the evidence of this can be no longer doubtful. Mr.
Gladstone retired, within a few months, from public life; one of his last
acts was to shoot a Parthian arrow at the House of Lords, which, happily
for these realms, had wrecked his policy; since that time he has
disappeared from the scene; few eminent statesmen have been so soon
forgotten. Home Rule was scattered to the winds at the General Election of
1895; it has not been a prominent question at that of 1900; but if Ireland
has sent more than eighty of its supporters into the House of Commons, the
best elements in her community remain angrily hostile; and the opinion of
Great Britain is distinctly adverse. For many reasons, however, as I have
remarked, it is impossible to ignore the subject; in the strange chances
and changes of British politics, and under our system of party government,
a minister may again become an advocate of Home Rule, though certainly
not in the present Parliament. Mr. Gladstone's Bills, it is likely, will
not be heard of again; but Home Rule may be embodied in other forms; I may
briefly refer to, and comment, on these. The project of restoring the
Parliament of 1782-1800, an ideal of O'Connell during many years of his
life, will hardly be revived in these times; the conditions in Great
Britain and Ireland have so completely changed. The centripetal forces
which, a hundred years ago, held the British and Irish Parliaments, in the
main, together--they differed, however, on important questions--have long
ago been all but completely destroyed; the present Irish Parliament could
not be an assembly identified in race and faith with England; its House of
Commons could not be elected by a small body of Protestants, and latterly
by masses of Catholic peasants, the serfs of their landlords. The
centrifugal forces, on the other hand, those which would keep the two
Parliaments utterly apart, would probably be overwhelmingly strong; the
Irish House of Commons would practically, at least for years, be ruled by
the nominees of the National League and of the Irish Catholic priesthood;
its electorate would, for the most part, be subject to these dominant
powers; and Protestant Ireland would alike be swamped and incensed.
Nevertheless, the restoration of what has been called Grattan's
Parliament, would, in my judgment, be a much better project than either of
Mr. Gladstone's schemes of Home Rule. The Irish Parliament would be bound
by known and fixed precedents, which it would be difficult wholly to
disregard; an Irish House of Lords would exist as a check on the House of
Commons; above all--and this is of the very first importance--the Irish
Executive would not be subject to the Irish Parliament; it would be
appointed from Westminster by British statesmen. A Parliament of this type
could hardly effect the ruinous mischiefs which Mr. Gladstone's Irish
Parliaments could certainly effect.
Ireland, it has been urged, would obtain Home Rule, if she were
assimilated to one of our self-governing colonies. These nations, as they
may fitly be called, are by no means, as is commonly supposed, wholly
independent of the Crown and the Imperial Parliament; they have
Parliaments and Executives of their own; but these in theory, and partly
in fact, are subordinate. No Act passed by the Parliament of a
self-governing colony can in any way contravene an Imperial statute; the
governor of a self-governing colony is a real governor; appeals run to the
English Privy Council from colonial Courts of Justice. Nevertheless,
self-governing colonies are practically all but independent; they pay no
contribution to Imperial charges; they maintain their own garrisons,
without a British army in their midst--at least, in a great many cases;
they are hardly ever interfered with by the Imperial Parliament, or by the
men in power at Westminster. Why, it may be argued, should not the same
liberties belong to Ireland, for centuries the peccant part of these
kingdoms; would not the concession make her as loyal as most of our
self-governing colonies? The answer is short, but amply sufficient; the
circumstances of our self-governing colonies and of Ireland are altogether
different. In none of these settlements is there the profound estrangement
which has long divided Great Britain from Ireland; in none is there a
community in which a loyal minority is separated from a disaffected
majority by long-standing discords of race and faith; Ireland is at our
doors, our self-governing colonies distant. Give Ireland a Parliament like
that of Victoria, and Ireland would break off from the British connection;
the Irish Parliament would possess ample power to trample on and oppress
hundreds of thousands of law-abiding men, of whom the protection was
England's duty; the Irish Parliament and Executive, within a few leagues
of our coasts, could, in innumerable ways, do infinite mischief. The
supposed analogy, therefore, completely fails; it would be treason to the
State, and to loyal Irishmen, to make Ireland a self-governing colony; and
no British politician has as yet countenanced this mode of Home Rule. It
has been hinted again, but with bated breath and humbleness, that the
relations of Great Britain and Ireland have been so long unfortunate, such
a dreary record of disputes and miseries, that we should say to our
intractable partner, 'Depart in peace;' in a word, separation is a
conceivable Home Rule policy. This proposal has never been discussed in
Parliament; the interest, the self-respect, the pride of Englishmen almost
forbid the thought. Yet separation, strange as it may appear, would be a
better and more safe expedient than either of Mr. Gladstone's schemes of
Home Rule. The Imperial Parliament would have complete liberty to exercise
its sovereign power in Great Britain; it would have a free hand to prevent
injustice in Ireland, either by the strong arm, or by fiscal and other
expedients, say, by laying an embargo on Irish products; it would not be
subject to the exasperating but often effective checks which Home Rule
would in any form involve; and the Imperial Executive would possess ample
means to protect the interests of England and of her friends in Ireland.
Let it not be forgotten that in perhaps the ablest speech ever made, in
the House of Commons, on this subject, Peel declared that he would
infinitely prefer separation to a repeal of the Union, by no means so evil
a policy as Home Rule.
A few politicians, however, have put the theory forward that 'Home Rule
all round' will meet the 'national demand' of Ireland, and give her what
they are pleased to call 'self-government.' England, Scotland, Ireland,
and perhaps Wales are to have local Parliaments to deal with their own
affairs; Imperial affairs are to be directed by an Imperial Council. I am
willing to admit that a scheme of this kind would be better than Mr.
Gladstone's Home Rule Bill of 1893; it would be less illogical, possibly
not more disastrous. But I must be permitted to doubt whether these sages
understand what their project certainly involves; this, indeed, seems to
be rather in the nature of a device to angle for Nationalist votes,
without scruple, and then to propose a plan which England, Scotland,
Ireland, and Wales have never asked for, and which England and Scotland,
at least, would indignantly reject. This scheme is pure Federalism, in the
proper sense of the word; let us briefly consider what this means from the
very nature of the case. England, Scotland, Ireland, and, I assume, Wales
would form separate States; they would have separate Legislatures and
Executives to manage their local affairs, separate local forces, separate
Courts of Justice; they would be, essentially, separate countries. The
Imperial Parliament and its Executive would be the only link between them;
there would be an Imperial army, and navy, and Imperial tribunals; but the
Imperial Parliament and its Executive would only have jurisdiction over
Imperial affairs, and would be only the head of the separate States as
respects Foreign Powers. But as it would be difficult in the extreme,
under these conditions, to distinguish local from Imperial affairs, an
arbiter of some kind, armed with sufficient powers, would be necessary to
say what affairs were local and what Imperial, and decisively to pronounce
on the subject, on the innumerable occasions when the question would
arise; and it would be necessary, too, that there should be some means,
perhaps a Referendum to a popular vote, to effect any constitutional
change, to reform or to abolish the Constitution itself. This scheme
obviously would be complex, intricate, and difficult to carry into effect;
it would be a huge system of divided, and probably conflicting, powers,
not easy to reconcile with each other; for this, and other reasons, it
would require a formal Constitution reduced to writing, and setting forth,
under distinct heads or articles, the conditions of the Federation that
had been established, the spheres of the authority of the separate
States, and the sphere of the authority of the Imperial Council. Is it
possible to suppose that the Parliament of the United Kingdom would ever
break up this ancient and undivided Monarchy; would tamely surrender its
sovereign rights, and would substitute a new-fangled fabric of this kind
for the venerable and unwritten constitution of these realms--a majestic
temple that has grown up in silence; and that the British people, at all
events, would not rise up in wrath at the very thought of such a change?
For Federalism 'amounts to a proposal for changing the whole constitution
of the United Kingdom. It is, in fact, the most "revolutionary" proposal,
if the word "revolutionary" be used in its strict sense, which has ever
been submitted to an English Parliament. The abolition of the House of
Lords, the disestablishment of the Church, the abolition of the Monarchy,
might leave the English Constitution far less essentially changed than
would the adoption of Federalism.'[32]
It should be observed, too, with respect to this subject, that the
conditions, under which Federalism would have a chance of success, would
be absolutely wanting in the present instance. England, Scotland, Ireland,
and Wales have long been moulded into a single sovereign State, and united
under a supreme Monarchy; no Federation, I venture to assert, has been
formed out of communities that have had a government of this kind.
Federations, in fact, have almost always grown out of an association of
existing States, which desire to remain separate, and yet to be a nation
for some purposes; they have not been evolved out of the fragments of one
State artificially rent asunder. Again, Federalism requires that no single
State should be enormously more powerful than the other partners; there
must be something like equality between the different States;[33] it is
unnecessary to remark that England has tenfold the resources and strength
of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales; and, in truth, would annihilate the
Federation were her will really crossed, and break through the arbitrary
limitations imposed on her. Suppose, for example, that England had set her
heart on a great foreign war, and had the support of her own Parliament;
does any one suppose that, if she were outvoted, by deputies from
Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, in the Imperial Council, even though backed
by their own Parliaments, the people of England would submit to be
thwarted in this way; was Samson bound by the withs of the Philistines?
Something like this, indeed, was seen in the great Civil War; the result
was the subjugation of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, and the complete
ascendency of England, under Cromwell; an attempt to federalise the Three
Kingdoms might lead to a similar issue. Let us assume, however, that,
through some evil stroke of destiny, Federalism were made the constitution
of these realms, and that this strange arrangement could be made to work
even for a few years; the inevitable consequences, from the nature of the
case, would follow. The omnipotence of the Imperial Parliament, the
mainstay of the Empire, would be gone; so would the omnipotence of the
Imperial Executive Government, the best security for justice and for equal
liberties. Their powers would be parcelled out and subdivided; they would
not survive anywhere in their complete fulness; they would be distributed
in fractions between separate States, and would be transformed and
impaired in the process; real Imperial unity and sovereignty could have no
existence. General national weakness would be the probable result,
leading, perhaps, to despotism within a short time; for Federalism is
essentially weak; I have no sympathy with Jacobin France, but the
Committee of Public Safety rightly put Federalism down, when they were
engaged in their death-struggle with Europe; and Napoleon--perhaps the
ablest ruler of the nineteenth century--approved of their conduct. But
weakness would not be the only consequence; the dissemination of different
powers would certainly produce disputes and conflicts between the Federal
and the State authorities; above all, the very existence of separate
States and of a Federal Government would divide allegiance, and powerfully
tend to disruption, as was seen in the great Civil War in America. As
regards Ireland, the establishment of 'Home Rule all round' would
necessarily be attended by all the evils inseparable from Mr. Gladstone's
schemes; but Federalism, having been thus made manifest, would probably
increase, and in some sense justify, the alienation of Ireland from the
other parts of these kingdoms.
Home Rule, therefore, whatever the form it may assume, would be, it is my
firm conviction, incompatible with the welfare of the Three Kingdoms,
injurious to Great Britain, a curse to Ireland. In the peculiar
circumstances which exist in Ireland, and to which I have adverted before,
separation, I believe, would be an expedient less disastrous than Home
Rule of any description, this involving the creation of an Irish
Parliament, and of an Irish Executive, which would be its instrument. Home
Rule, in fact, gloss it over as you please, has been forced to the front
by an Irish faction, hostile to a man to the existence of British rule in
Ireland, and depending on Fenianism in the United States; this party would
be all-powerful in an Irish Parliament; and Home Rule would be made the
means to a ruinous and disgraceful end. Thousands of Irishmen, indeed,
honestly think Home Rule would do their country good, and have little or
nothing to do with this bad conspiracy; this too, doubtless, is the case
with the followers of Mr. Gladstone; but Home Rule is an Irish Nationalist
movement, and Irish Nationalist movements are dangerous to the safety of
the State. The Union, therefore, must be maintained in the interest of
Great Britain and Ireland alike; and the Union is an international
settlement that has endured for a century. But no candid student of Irish
history, no impartial observer of Irish affairs, from 1800 to the present
time, can deny that the Union has been in many respects a failure. It has
been an incident, perhaps a result, of the Union, that Presbyterian
Ireland, rebellious from 1795 to 1798, has, we have seen, become attached
to the British connection, and is now devotedly attached to England. The
power of the Imperial Parliament and of its Executive have kept
lawlessness and disorder down in Ireland, and has restrained the evil
passions of Irish factions more than was ever the case under the rule of
the Irish Parliament. The Imperial Parliament, too, has accomplished
reforms in Ireland, if often unwise, in the main beneficent; and, under
the Imperial Executive, justice in Ireland has been administered, for many
years, in a very different way from that which was seen a century ago; its
tribunals are perfectly free and impartial. But the Union was, in itself,
a bad half measure, tainted with iniquity and false promises; it did gross
wrong to Catholic Ireland; the evil consequences are felt to this hour.
The Union has not fulfilled the sanguine hopes of Pitt; Ireland, as I have
pointed out, is far more behind Great Britain in wealth than she was sixty
years ago; she is perhaps the poorest country in Europe at the door of the
richest. The Union, too, has not reconciled the feuds of religion and race
in Ireland; they are as marked as they were a century ago, if not attended
with such deeds of violence; above all, the Union has not made the chief
part of the Irish community attached to England, as Pitt confidently
predicted would certainly happen. Nor can it be denied that the Irish
reforms of the Imperial Parliament have too often been ill-designed and
faulty, especially, as we shall see, as regards the land; and they have
unfortunately, in many instances, been concessions to agitation and
dangerous social movements, and have been effected too late to do real
good. The administration of Ireland reveals the same defects; it has been
marked by good intentions, which, sometimes, have proved gross mistakes;
and notably it has, over and over again, been shifty, vacillating, without
principle, and showing a curious disregard of sound Irish opinion.
Unquestionably, too, Ireland has, on many occasions, to the indignation of
true-hearted Irishmen, been made the mere plaything of British faction,
with the worst results to her best interests; this has been perhaps the
most pernicious incident that has followed the Union; and in the immense
revolution which has transformed Ireland, within the last hundred years,
the effects that may be traced to the Union have by no means been wholly
on the side of good.
These evil consequences cannot be really questioned; it is very advisable
to consider their causes, and if possible to see how they can be removed
or lessened. They are partly to be ascribed to the fact that Great Britain
and Ireland are countries differing from each other in most important
respects, and standing, so to speak, on different planes of existence;
this alone makes British rule in Ireland difficult, and perplexes and
embarrasses British statesmen. They are partly due to defects in the
English national character, essentially just in intention, and even
generous, but with no sympathy with races of a character unlike its own,
self-asserting, obstinate, sometimes rude and offensive; this has had
marked and evil effects in the affairs of Ireland. They are largely to be
attributed to the nature of Irish administration, seldom consistent, and
changing with party changes: British statesmen appear at the Castle; rule
for a few years; and then depart and give place to successors, who
probably carry out a very different policy. They are largely due to the
nature of the representation of Ireland, notably of late years; the
Nationalist party--and the same remark applies, in some degree, to the
'Tail' of O'Connell--have shown such an aversion to England, have used
such seditious and even criminal language, have been so extravagant and
wild in their demands, and have been such a dangerous element in the House
of Commons, that Englishmen and Scotchmen turn away from Irish questions
with disgust, and Ireland unfortunately has often been the sufferer. But
the most important of these causes, one which may be traced throughout
Irish history, and has been scarcely less evident since the Union, has
been the strange but signal ignorance of Irish affairs--of all, in a word,
that relates to Ireland--which has been but too characteristic of the
British people, and, in a lesser degree, of many British statesmen. This
capital fault aroused the _saeva indignatio_, of Swift; it was exposed by
Grattan, O'Connell, even by Lord Clare; it was condemned in severe but
thoughtful language by Burke; it has been conspicuous during the events of
the last twenty years.[34] The resulting mischiefs have been numerous and
grave in the extreme; can nothing be done to mitigate these and to make
them less, consistently with maintaining the Union in its full
completeness? I, for one, have long thought that much could be effected
were the Imperial Parliament occasionally to hold its sessions in Dublin,
and to govern Ireland directly, so to speak, on the spot. This very
measure was proposed by many distinguished Irishmen, during the agitation
for Repeal in 1843-44; it was made the subject of an eloquent eulogy by
Sheil at O'Connell's trial; it was seriously entertained by the Whig
opposition of the day, as we know from a remarkable letter of Lord
Waveney. This policy unfortunately passed out of sight; but even now, I
believe, it would do the greatest good in Ireland. It would be something
that the proposed change would cause the wealth of England and Scotland
largely to flow into a poor country; that Irish absenteeism would be
diminished; that Ireland would become, more than she is now, an attractive
place of resort to the traveller. But it would be far more that the
presence of the Imperial Parliament in College Green would necessarily
largely remove the ignorance of Irish affairs I have just referred to; it
would make English and Scotch members familiar with the requirements, the
feelings, the wishes of Irishmen; as has happily been said, it would
render our Irish legislation and administration 'racy of the Irish soil.'
And probably more than any other expedient, it would exorcise the weak
phantom of Home Rule by bringing Irishmen in contact with the majesty of
the Sovereign Assembly of the British Empire. I shall not comment on the
petty inconveniences the scheme might cause; really they are not worthy of
serious attention.
The occasional presence of Royalty, too, in Ireland, as was made manifest
during the late Queen's visit, unquestionably would have beneficent
results. It would gratify a sentiment of Celtic nature, always attached to
persons rather than to institutions and laws, and especially attached to
rulers and chiefs, which, in Ireland, has been scarcely gratified before;
it would spread far and wide a happy and good influence; it would
certainly improve the social life of Ireland, and add something to her
scanty material wealth. The maintenance of the Union, however, is the
first requirement of a sound Irish and Imperial policy; one means of
strengthening that fundamental law of these realms, consistently with
strict constitutional justice, nay, if constitutional wrong is not to
continue, has long been apparent to impartial minds. The
over-representation of Ireland, in the House of Commons, is a flagrant
anomaly, acknowledged for years; as I have remarked, it was largely
expected that this important subject would have been taken up before this
by Lord Salisbury's Government, and have been settled in the Parliament of
1895-1900. Taking the test of population alone, Ireland has, compared to
England, Wales, and Scotland, an excess of twenty-three members; taking
the test of population and property combined, she has an excess probably
of from thirty to forty. I am willing to allow that, in this matter, we
ought not to follow arithmetic only; Ireland, a poor country, far away
from Westminster, may have a claim to a representation somewhat more
numerous than mere figures would give her. But can anything be more
unjust, nay, absurd, than that Ireland should have one hundred and three
members, and that the world of London, with a population about the same as
that of Ireland, and probably possessing tenfold wealth, should have
little more than half that number? This excessive representation must be
reduced, and Irish Nationalists cannot here appeal to the Union; the Union
did not save the Established Church of Ireland, secured by the Treaty in
emphatic terms; and the Union must not be wrested to work gross injustice.
The anomaly can be only removed by a large scheme for the redistribution
of seats, founded on sound constitutional principles; and should this
become law, as I confidently hope will be one of the achievements of the
existing Parliament, the Union will acquire a new security, for the
Nationalist vote in the House of Commons would be greatly reduced, and the
Irish Unionist vote would be greatly increased. A very few figures will
prove this: the rural populations of the Unionist counties of Antrim and
Down are upwards of four hundred and thirty thousand souls; the rural
populations of the Home Rule counties of Kildare, Kilkenny, King's,
Longford, Wicklow, and Louth have a population less than three hundred and
ninety-eight thousand;[35] yet Antrim and Down have only eight members,
the other six counties have no less than twelve. The same disparity runs
through all the Irish counties; in the boroughs of Ireland it is even more
visible. Protestant and Unionist Ireland, in a word, has probably fifteen
or sixteen members too few; Catholic and anti-Unionist Ireland fifteen or
sixteen too many; it is high time this plain wrong should be redressed; it
is unnecessary to point out how this would strengthen the Union. And what
probably is not less important, it would make the representation of
Ireland, not, what it is now, an utterly false index of Irish opinion, but
a reasonably fair and trustworthy index; were the Irish representation cut
down to eighty members, the Nationalists would probably command not more
than fifty seats; the Unionists would command about thirty; and this,
taking all things into account, would be a proportion approaching what is
just. The 'doing' of right, in this matter, has been too long deferred;
loyal Ireland feels strongly upon the subject; the reform would be
altogether in the interest of the State.
CHAPTER III
THE QUESTION OF THE IRISH LAND--SKETCH OF THE HISTORY OF THE LAND SYSTEM
OF IRELAND TO THE YEAR 1870
Great importance in the history of Ireland of the conditions of land
tenure--The ancient Celtic land system and its characteristics--The
Norman conquest of Ireland--Norman feudalism in the Irish land--The
policy of Henry VII., and especially of Henry VIII.--The era of the
conquest and confiscation of the Irish land--The possessions of the
O'Connors of Offaly wrested from them--Forfeiture of the domains of
Shane O'Neill, and of the Earl of Desmond--Attempts at
colonisation--All Ireland made shire land--The extinction of the old
Celtic land system--The Plantation of Ulster--Progress of confiscation
during the reigns of the two first Stuarts--The Civil War--Immense
confiscations made by Cromwell--His scheme of colonisation a
failure--The era of confiscation closes after the battle of the Boyne
and the fall of Limerick--The Penal Code of Ireland--Its fatal effects
on the Irish land--Dismal period in Irish landed relations--Gradual
improvement--The period described by Arthur Young--Evil traces of the
past remain--Whiteboyism and agrarian disorder--State of Irish landed
relations up to the rebellion of 1798, and after the
Union--Over-population and the results--Distress after the
Peace--State of Irish landed relations up to 1844--The Report of the
Devon Commission--The Famine and its effects on the Irish land--The
Encumbered Estates Acts--State of Irish landed relations from 1848 to
1868.
The fortunes of many communities, it has truly been said, have been
decisively affected by the conditions of the ownership and the occupation
of the soil. The social, even the political, life of modern Europe has
been, in a great measure, moulded by the land tenures that have grown out
of the feudal system; I need only refer to the history of England, of
France, and of Germany. This remark, however, especially applies to the
events that make up the annals of Ireland; that long and unhappy tale of
misfortunes and errors is intimately associated, all through, with the
land, and with the relations connected with it. Modern research has shown
how grotesque and mischievous was the ignorance of the Tudor lawyers and
statesmen, who described the ancient organisation of the Irish land as a
medley of barbarian and pernicious usages; it was an archaic and imperfect
specimen of the feudal system, with differences indeed, but marked with
its essential features. Norman feu
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