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 failure--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.
That local government in Ireland should still be a 'Present Irish
Question,' may appear strange to persons only versed in the mere routine
of politics. The subject has been before Parliament for nearly thirty
years; it has engaged the attention of more than one of its Committees;
Butt endeavoured, to no purpose, to legislate on it. In 1892 Lord
Salisbury's Government brought in a measure which aimed at transforming
the whole system of administering local affairs in Ireland; but it had
unquestionable defects and was vehemently opposed; unfortunately, as I
believe, it was permitted to drop. Six years afterwards, that is, in 1898,
the greater part of a parliamentary session was employed in dealing with
the question again; a Bill became law which placed Irish local government,
in all its departments, upon a new basis, and completely changed the
characteristics it had had for centuries. The measure was to be a _ne plus
ultra_; it was extolled by applauding partisans as a magnificent scheme of
popular reform; these have since, over and over again, declared that its
success has been more than manifest. It is too soon to pronounce, with
anything like confidence, on what its ultimate results may be, or even to
say, with certainty, how it will practically work; but enough has already
been made apparent to cause thoughtful and fair-minded Irishmen to regard
the changes it has effected with grave misgivings; to question the
principles on which it rests, or at least the wisdom of applying them to
Ireland as she now is; and to ask whether it must not be amended if the
social structure of Ireland is not to be still more violently disturbed,
than it has been by the experiments that have been made on it. Besides,
the local government and administration of every community, especially if
formed on a popular type, affect its existence in many ways; strongly
indicate what its opinions are, what its qualities, what its evident
tendencies; in a word, largely represent its essential nature. It was not
for nothing that in his survey of the Revolution in France, Burke did not
confine himself to the sovereign assembly at Versailles, but turned his
penetrating glance on the petty assemblies which had been set up in the
new-made departments, for the conduct of their local affairs; these, he
insisted, formed the truest expression of the mind of the people and of
the leaders at its head. For these reasons, therefore, if we would
understand Ireland, her local government is a 'Present Irish Question;' it
is a question, moreover, which, whatever may be said, in all probability
has not been finally settled.
In order to understand the subject, I must glance at the system of Irish
local government, as this existed until, as it were, yesterday; I turn, in
the first instance, to Irish county government. The beginnings of this
scheme have been traced back to the time of Strafford; but it was not
finally established until the reign of William III., when the subjugation
of Ireland had been made complete. The Irish grand juries always had
criminal jurisdiction in their countries like their English fellows; but
unlike these they were now entrusted with almost absolute control over
Irish county government. This was partly because they were representatives
of the conquering race, by this time the owners of nine-tenths of the
lands of the country; and partly because there was no local organisation
in Ireland, like the English parish, which could give local influence to
the conquered race. The grand juries were always composed of the leading
landed gentry of their respective counties; they were nominated by the
sheriffs, that is, by officials of the Central Government; they were
wholly devoid of a popular element; and as no Catholic could have a share
in their councils, until nearly the end of the eighteenth century, they
embodied, in the fullest sense, the Protestant ascendency of the day,
supreme in every sphere of authority in the State. The grand juries had
almost the exclusive power of administering the local affairs of their
counties, of managing their roads, public buildings, and police; and they
levied the charges for these by a local rate, known as the county cess to
this hour, and imposed almost wholly on the occupiers of the soil, that
is, in five cases out of six on the Catholic peasantry, a striking
instance of taxation without representation to check it. These assemblies
of local magnates met twice a year at the assizes which were held in their
counties. Miss Edgeworth has given us graphic accounts of them: how a seat
on a grand jury was deemed a prize to be sometimes fought for; how the
grand juries entertained the judges in state, and vied with these sages in
their mighty potations; and how, while wretches were hanged and jurymen
dined, the assize towns were scenes of not fastidious revelry. There was
much jobbing, corruption, and waste in the administration of the counties
in those days; much of the 'scratch me, and I will scratch you;' much
'give and take' at the cost of the ratepayers. But there was another and
better side to the picture: the Irish gentry of the time had the faculty
of command; they ruled their districts efficiently with their police; the
public works for which they were responsible were usually good. Arthur
Young has especially noticed that the roads they constructed were almost
always well laid out and kept up.
Catholics were not admitted on grand juries until the great Relief Act of
1793, the first general relaxation of the execrable penal code. But the
Catholic members of these bodies have always been few; the large majority
of the Irish landlords remains still Protestant. The bureaucracy of the
Castle, after the Union, began to encroach on the domain of the grand
juries; at the same time the growing needs of the country made the
expenditure on local affairs much larger. The grand juries lost much of
their authority by degrees; they were more and more controlled by the
Central Government, which supplanted them in a variety of ways; and they
were ere long compelled to vote sums for public works of different kinds
for the behoof of their counties. This change effectually checked
corruption and jobbing; but as the requirements of the counties
increased, and the 'imperative presentments,' as they were called, were
augmented, the charge of the local rate or county cess became more
onerous--it has advanced enormously in the last sixty years; and this was
still mainly imposed on the Catholic peasantry. The civil or fiscal
administration, which the grand juries possessed until 1898, was finally
arranged by an Act of Parliament passed in 1836,[179] supplemented, from
time to time, by subsequent statutes. These bodies were composed of the
same elements, and nominated by the sheriffs as before; and they had a
general supervision over all the public works, roads, bridges, and
buildings for public purposes, comprised within their different counties,
including within these areas nearly all villages, and the large majority
of the lesser towns. But they were made strictly dependent on the Central
Government; this had the appointment of their chief officers; their
accounts were subjected to a regular audit; and their 'imperative
presentments' were largely extended. They acquired, too, an additional
jurisdiction in some respects, especially as regards inquiries into
criminal injuries and compensating persons who had been sufferers, and as
regards voting an extra police force in disturbed districts; but their old
local police had disappeared, and had been replaced by the great central
constabulary force. A change, too, was effected in the modes through which
local rates were voted in the counties for public purposes. These sums
were 'presented' in the first instance at 'baronial' and 'county at large'
sessions, held by county justices and ratepayers of substance; but these
bodies were subordinate to the grand juries, and to a considerable extent
drawn from the same classes; no popular element was infused in county
government, and the grand juries were, in the last resort, supreme, within
the limits which had been assigned to them. The local expenditure voted
and assessed in this way was subject to examination by a judge of assize,
who 'fiated' it, as a general rule; and ratepayers had a right to
challenge it, by a procedure called 'a traverse,' which, however, was
seldom turned to account.
The Irish grand juries were thus oligarchic bodies, survivals of the
Protestant ascendency of a bygone age, and with a tendency, in their later
history, to become subordinate boards of the Castle. I pass on to the
Irish poor law system, another considerable department of Irish local
government. As we have seen, unlike what had been the case in England, no
poor law existed in Ireland until 1838; the want of such a measure was one
of the causes of the pressure of a huge mass of indigence on the soil
before the catastrophe of 1845-47. The Irish poor law, with some marked
distinctions, was analogous to the new English poor law, as it has long
been called; it has now been in operation for about sixty years. The
country was divided into a series of unions, which have varied from 130 to
163 in number; at present there are 159 of these; these were the principal
units for carrying the poor law system into effect. The unions were again
subdivided into lesser districts, electoral divisions for the county,
wards for the larger towns; the persons chosen to administer the poor law
were taken from these areas; and the unions and all that pertained to them
were placed under the control of the Central Government, represented by
the Local Government Board of Ireland. The persons returned from the
electoral divisions and the wards were selected by the votes of the
ratepayers, and were known as the elected guardians; a popular element was
thus introduced into the administration of the law, which had never been
introduced into Irish county government. The vote of the ratepayers,
however, was cumulative, not single; the largest ratepayers had the most
votes, a safeguard, it has been assumed, for property; and the elected
guardians, in theory at least, were balanced by an equal number of
_ex-officio_ guardians, composed of magistrates within the unions. The
chief duties of the elected and the _ex-officio_ guardians, collectively
known as Boards of Guardians, were to provide for the wants of the poor,
and to assess and levy poor rates for that purpose; but many other duties
were gradually imposed on them, the principal of these being the care of
the sanitary state of the lesser towns within their districts. There was a
marked difference between the incidence of the poor rate and of the county
rate, or cess, of the grand juries. The county cess, we have seen, was
mainly a charge on the Catholic occupiers of the soil, the poor rate was,
to a very considerable extent, a charge on the owners, for the most part
Protestants; for the landlord was bound to pay the whole poor rate in the
case of the pettiest holdings, and to allow his tenants half the poor rate
in the case of other holdings; by these means the burden of at least half
the poor rate, it is believed, was borne by the Irish landed gentry. It
should be added that the elected guardians have practically had the
administration of the poor law in their hands; the _ex-officio_ guardians,
especially of late years, took little part in it.[180]
I turn from the administration of local rural affairs in Ireland to that
of its chief cities and its towns. The Irish towns, conquered and settled
by the Danes, had, perhaps, a kind of municipal government; the
Plantagenet kings conferred municipal rights as freely in Ireland as they
did in England. Thus Dublin received a charter from John, modelled on that
of his 'liegemen of Bristol;' Limerick, Waterford, Kilkenny, and several
other towns were incorporated and given powers of self-government at
different periods of the Middle Ages. But the municipal life and the
municipal spirit which grew up and gained strength in the thriving towns
of England, and secured for them a large measure of local liberty, had
hardly any existence in a land like Ireland, distracted by feudal and
tribal anarchy; the corporate cities and towns of Ireland fell into the
hands of great Anglo-Norman nobles and Celtic chiefs, and seem to have all
but lost their local franchises. During the long agony of the sixteenth
century, when Ireland was devastated by a horrible strife of race and
faith, these privileges were still further effaced; at the death of
Elizabeth the Irish municipal centres, with the exception of the capital,
were mere names and shadows. A great change took place when the subjugated
land passed under the domination of the first Stuarts. English law was now
extended over the whole of Ireland; a colonial caste of settlers was
becoming lords of the soil; the Government was conducted by the men at the
Castle, ruling through a Parliament largely composed of the new settlers.
James I. created forty-six Irish boroughs with a stroke of the pen, and
gave them a representation in the Parliament and municipal rights; but
these, for the most part, were mere villages; they obtained their large
privileges solely in order to support 'the English interest,' as it was
called, in the Irish House of Commons. This system was continued by the
later Stuarts; besides Dublin and the larger towns of Ireland, there were
about a hundred of these petty municipalities and parliamentary boroughs
in the eighteenth century. These places, however, could have no municipal
freedom, and were wholly devoid of municipal feeling; they became nearly
all the mere appanages of the neighbouring leading families; and, with
hardly an exception, they were extreme types of the Protestant ascendency
which prevailed everywhere. Something of the same kind was witnessed in
England, under the aristocratic rule of that age, but there was the
difference between a sorry caricature and a picture; the great cities and
the better towns of England still retained an ample measure of municipal
liberty, and, especially, did not lose the municipal spirit; the exact
contrary was the case in Ireland.
A large majority of the little Irish boroughs were deprived of their
parliamentary representation at the Union, but they retained their nominal
municipal rights. They still remained under the control of the chief
landed gentry; and they became, as indeed they had always been, centres of
maladministration, corruption, and peculation of all kinds. When, after
the passing of the great Reform Act of 1832, statesmen directed their
minds to the questions of corporate and municipal reform in England, they
naturally turned their minds to Ireland also, where this reform was
notoriously still more imperative. After the publication of a masterly
report in 1834-35, which thoroughly illustrated the whole subject, the
abuses in the Irish corporations were shown to be such--they were enormous
even in the cities and larger towns--that Peel, the leader of the
Opposition, actually gave them up; he proposed to deprive the corporate
towns of all municipal rights and franchises, and to place them under the
authority of Commissioners appointed by the Crown. This plan, however, was
rejected by the Melbourne Government, and was not sanctioned by the House
of Commons; after a long and angry controversy, which continued for years,
a measure became law as late as 1840; and by this, with the exception of
ten, all the corporate towns of Ireland lost their municipal rights, and
were thus left without any power of self-government. With respect even to
the ten still enfranchised towns, their old privileges were greatly
curtailed and were transferred to the Central Government; and their
municipal liberties were restricted and narrowed. They retained, indeed,
many rights of self-government; but the municipal franchise was placed at
a high level; the great body of the townsmen did not possess it; and they
were subject to the supervision of the Local Government Board, that is, of
the Central Government, to a considerable extent at least. True municipal
life, and the municipal sentiment, could not, therefore, become well
developed, in the case of towns under such conditions; they showed but few
symptoms of the wonderful growth of prosperity and power which has been
such a marked feature in the history of the great corporate towns of
England, in what may be called the Victorian age, though, no doubt, the
cases were widely different--poor Ireland could not, in this respect,
compete with wealthy and progressive England. The deficiency of corporate
towns in Ireland was felt ere long to be such, that, in 1854, and
subsequent years, municipal rights were, in some measure, extended to
nearly a hundred of these towns. These places were governed by bodies
called Town Commissioners elected by a kind of popular vote; but the
authority of these bodies has never been large; the municipal franchise
was very high; and these towns were also under the Irish Local Government
Board.
Municipal institutions, like others of English origin, had thus, from a
variety of causes, when transferred to Ireland, only a stunted, imperfect,
and maimed existence. We may briefly glance at the operation of the system
of rural and urban local government, of which we have endeavoured to
sketch the outlines. Except, perhaps, in the instance of criminal
injuries, and of the compensation to be adjudged by them, where they did
not always give proof of a judicial spirit, the grand juries, for upwards
of two generations, administered county affairs very well; they were
economical, prudent, and jealous of expense, if the public buildings they
sanctioned were, occasionally, too costly; but the system was an
anachronism, and had had its day. In ordinary times the Irish poor law was
reasonably well administered by the Boards of Guardians, as well,
probably, as was the case in England; they were rather parsimonious in
assessing rates, and gave little attention to the sanitary state of their
towns, but, on the whole, there was not much cause to complain of them;
and the Irish people, it must be recollected, have never liked the poor
law. The local administration of the cities and the larger towns of
Ireland was worse--a notable exception was seen in Belfast; but these, as
a rule, gave proof of the restricted system on which their government had
been formed; the results appeared in a high death rate, in bad supplies of
water, in crowds of squalid and deserted dwellings--in a word, in
stagnation and a want of progress, if other and powerful causes concurred.
When the movement conducted by Parnell acquired strength, almost a
revolution passed over the seats of Irish local government, where these,
except in Ulster, possessed a popular element. Parnell called on the
Boards of Guardians, the Corporations, and the Town Commissioners, in
places where the 'people' had any effective voice, to rally round the Land
and the National Leagues; he achieved remarkable success in the three
provinces of the south. This was especially made manifest in the Boards of
Guardians, composed largely of farmers of substance, and in which the
_ex-officio_ guardians had little real power; these bodies set a crusade
against the landed gentry on foot; marked them out for plunder in many
ways; encouraged 'boycotting' and defiance of the law; gave a free rein to
rebellious utterances of many kinds; and denounced Irish 'landlordism' and
British rule in Ireland, as fiercely as they had been denounced at Land
and National League gatherings.[181] The same phenomena appeared in many
of the corporate and inferior towns: the Corporation of Dublin indulged in
anti-British threats and speeches; the Corporation of Limerick refused to
pay a lawful tax; the Corporation of Cork proclaimed itself supreme in a
'rebel' city; the example was generally followed in the lesser towns of
the south; in short, these bodies became centres of sedition, socialism,
and resistance to the law, and widely disseminated their pernicious
teaching. In fact, they made themselves agencies of the Land and the
National Leagues; at the same time, in numerous instances, they set the
authority of the Local Government Board at naught.[182]
The system of Irish local government was obviously so defective, so
antiquated, so contrary to the spirit of the age, that several attempts,
we have seen, were made, long ago, to reform it. It has now been
completely transformed on the principles applied to England and Scotland;
the occasion of this transformation was somewhat singular. In 1896
considerable relief was given, in England and Scotland, to the landed
interest by a subvention made by the State, which defrayed half the charge
of the local county rates, the depression of agriculture being so
grievous; the justice of this measure was hardly disputed. But the Report
of the Childers Commission, declaring that Ireland was greatly overtaxed,
and had been for a long series of years, was published about the same
time; the Government, probably because it had made up its mind not to
countenance the report in any way, refused to extend the same relief to
Ireland, although it was as much required--a decision that simply nothing
could warrant. The indignation, however, expressed in Ireland, and the
remonstrances even of the Ministerial Press, angrily as it had challenged
the findings of the report, before long changed the Government's purpose;
it was formally announced, in 1897, that Ireland would obtain the same
boon as Great Britain, and, apparently, as a condition of this, that Irish
local government was to be reformed. The measure of 1898 was the result of
this compromise; the interdependence of two subjects, which have nothing
in common, has made it not easy to interpret; but, as we shall see, its
authors have provided, with skill, against one of the dangers the change
involved, that is, the probability that it might expose the Irish landed
gentry to predatory attacks. Before examining the recent law, I venture to
make a single remark. The question of the alleviation of the charge of
rates, a concession made to Ireland with bad grace, and made to England
and Scotland as a matter of course, has nothing to do with the infinitely
larger question of the excessive taxation imposed on Ireland; relief in
the one case does not imply relief in the other; the two subjects are
altogether distinct. It is essential carefully to keep this in mind, for
attempts are being made to confuse the two questions, and
characteristically to argue that Ireland ought to rest and be thankful,
and not to say a word about her overtaxation, because, forsooth, in common
with England and Scotland, she has received assistance as regards her
local rates.
The transformation which has been effected in Irish local government has
completely changed the old order of things, and is of an extremely
democratic character. County government has been taken from the grand
juries, and has been extended to bodies known by the name of County
Councils, recently formed in Great Britain. The County Councils proper are
thirty-two in number, corresponding to the number of the Irish counties;
they are popular assemblies in the fullest sense of the word. They are
elected by the ratepayers of their districts, who possess the present
extravagantly low suffrage; the right of election is also bestowed on
women; and the protection of the cumulative vote has been removed; a
cottar has the same voting power as a man of forty thousand a year. Any of
these voters may have a seat in a County Council; the body, therefore, may
be crowded with petty ratepayers; and women also may have seats. Three
members of the grand jury, in each county, are entitled to sit in a County
Council, but for a short time only--a provision intended to reconcile the
old with the new; the County Councils are given a right to 'co-opt' a few
members; and the heads of bodies subordinate to them have the privilege of
taking part in their counsels. The rights and the responsibilities of the
grand juries have, as a rule, been transferred to the County Councils,
except in the instance of criminal injuries, and of determining
compensation for these; this jurisdiction, subject to an appeal to a judge
of assize, has been properly conferred on the County Court judges, for it
is essentially of a judicial nature. The powers of the County Councils
thus extend to the management and the supervision of the roads, bridges,
and buildings for public purposes comprised within their counties, and
also to the regulation of villages and petty towns; but, like the grand
juries, they are subject to the same control of the Central Government;
they must make 'imperative presentments' like the grand juries; and, as in
the instance of the grand juries, subordinate bodies have the initiative
in part of their duties. Their powers, however, have been made larger and
wider than those of the grand juries; they have been given the right to
assess and levy the poor rate in rural districts, the management of the
asylums of the lunatic poor, an authority, in cases of exceptional
distress, subject to the permission of the Local Government Board, to
sanction relief to poor people out-of-doors, and several other powers of
not much importance. It should be added that the County Councils are not
restricted in any way by judge's 'fiats' and by 'traverses' as the grand
juries were; these securities, such as they were, have disappeared; but
their conduct may be controlled to a certain extent by the Superior Courts
of Ireland, as that of most public bodies may be, if only through a
tedious and costly procedure, and they are more or less under the
authority of the Local Government Board.
Six of the principal cities and towns of Ireland, Dublin, Belfast, Cork,
Limerick, Londonderry, and Waterford, have been made distinct counties,
with the appellation of County Boroughs. The scheme of County Councils has
been applied to these also; the townsmen and townswomen have the same
power of voting, and the same democratic suffrage as the counties proper;
the borough assemblies may have the same kinds of members; but the titles
of mayors, aldermen, and burgesses have been preserved, in recognition, so
to speak, of strictly urban government. These bodies, which, it will be
observed, are popular in the widest sense of the word, have the powers of
grand juries within their respective spheres; but they retain besides
their former administrative powers subject to the control of the Local
Government Board; they have thus been changed from narrow and close
oligarchies into democracies on the very broadest basis. The County
Councils have under them two minor bodies, the Rural District Councils and
the Urban District Councils, the characteristics of which may be briefly
noticed. The sphere of the authority of the Rural District Council
corresponds, for the most part, to the Poor Law Union; these councils are
elected and constituted under the same conditions as the larger councils
already described; they are, therefore, mere democracies in considerable
numbers. The Rural District Councils are given the powers of the Baronial
Presentment Sessions of the Grand Juries, that is, they may initiate
proceedings as their predecessors did; they are made the sole guardians of
the poor within their districts, the _ex-officio_ guardians having been
abolished; their chairmen are members of the County Councils; it may be
added here that rating for the poor has been extended generally over the
union, not as hitherto confined to the electoral division and the ward, a
questionable provision which will certainly increase the expenditure for
the relief of poverty. The sphere of the authority of the Urban District
Councils has been made that of the larger towns of Ireland, being sanitary
areas within themselves; but power has been taken to increase the number
of these towns, and this increase will be probably witnessed. The Urban
District Councils resemble, in their mode of election and their
constitution, the other assemblies, that is, they are democracies to the
fullest extent; but they retain the names of Corporate or Town
Commissioners towns, and of mayors, aldermen, and burgesses where they
possessed these before. The powers of the Urban District Councils are
those of the grand juries within the towns, except as respects the larger
public buildings, which were formerly charged on 'the county at large;'
these councils levy and assess the poor rate within their districts; and
they retain the powers of urban government they formerly possessed. The
Local Government Board has authority, also, over the Rural District and
the Urban District Councils.
The entire system of Irish local government has thus been placed on an
extremely democratic basis, subject, however, to partial control by the
Central Government. This revolution, for it has been nothing less, was
obviously liable to be attended by the many mischiefs inseparable from a
sudden transfer of enormous powers to local assemblies of the most popular
type, to maladministration, waste, and extravagance, and, as especially
would be the case in Ireland, to violent or insidious attacks on the
landed gentry. The late measure has provided against these evils, if not
completely or adequately, with ingenuity and skill. The relief of Irish
agriculture was its first financial object; to effect this the county cess
and the poor rate have been consolidated into a single charge; and half of
this is to be defrayed by the State and appropriated to the relief of
agricultural lands, towns and lands, within municipal limits, being
excepted. The subvention is not to extend to sums payable in respect of
criminal injuries, nor to sums payable in respect of extra police in
disturbed districts; these charges are properly to be borne by local areas
as before. The relief afforded is an annual sum of about £700,000; it is
divided in tolerably equal shares between the owners and the occupiers of
the soil, that is, between the landlords and tenants of Ireland; it is
characteristic of Radical clamour, that a boon, the justice of which could
not be disputed, was denounced as an 'infamous job' for the behoof of the
Irish landed gentry. A powerful check has been placed on extravagance and
waste, and on attempts to injure property in land, exposed, we have seen,
to undoubted dangers. The relief afforded was calculated on the local
expenditure for 1897, in the words of the law, 'the standard year;' it was
regularly to be one-half of this sum. Should the local expenditure,
therefore, in subsequent years, be in excess of that of the standard year,
the proportionate value of the relief would fall; should it be a lesser
amount, the value would rise. A strong restraint was thus imposed on
attempts recklessly to job and waste local funds, and notably to plunder
Irish landlords; but this restriction only applies to agricultural lands;
it does not extend to property in towns; and it is difficult to say that
it will always prove effective against democratic sentiment, passion, and
greed. The extent of the relief afforded to Irish landlords differs widely
as between landlords of different classes of tenants; landlords of mere
cottars will get very little; landlords of farmers of substance will get
much more; but it is unnecessary here to enlarge on this special
subject.[183]
This sweeping measure, in my judgment at least, might have been better
framed to carry out its policy. Like much of the legislation of the
Imperial Parliament, it has been fashioned too closely on the English
model; it gives to a poor and backward country, not trained in
self-government, local institutions naturally adapted only to an opulent
and well-ordered country accustomed for centuries to local liberties.
Having regard to the peculiar state of Ireland, it might have made the
powers of local government it conferred larger, but it ought not to have
been as purely democratic as it is; and it ought to have been accompanied
by safeguards it does not possess. I would have been disposed to give the
Irish County Councils a right to take evidence for private Bills on the
spot; this, if transmitted to the Irish Privy Council, and considered by
it, might be made the basis of reports by that body, which could be turned
into Acts of Parliament, by a summary process, thus getting rid of great
and useless expense, and silencing one of the few real arguments in favour
of Home Rule. I would also have allowed the County Councils of different
counties, in matters in which they had a common interest, say, in the
drainage of some of the great Irish rivers, to carry out together public
works of this kind, and to assess and levy rates for the purpose if, on
consideration, this was deemed expedient; at present they have no
authority like this; and such a power would, I think, be for the general
good of Ireland. The County Councils, too, I believe, might be given a
deliberative voice, in cases they have not at present; for example, should
the rate-payers of any county make a demand for sectarian education,
within its area, and declare themselves ready to pay a rate for it, the
County Council should have a right to entertain the project, and to report
on it to the Central Government. And I am convinced that members of the
County Councils ought to have some seats on the Local Government Board,
and on other boards now filled by the Castle bureaucracy; this would
introduce a popular element into these bodies, and, in many ways, would be
of real advantage. On the other hand, in the election and the constitution
of the County and other Councils, democracy has simply been let run riot;
and the resulting evils have already been made manifest. Illiterate
persons ought not to have been qualified to be electors; the single should
not have replaced the cumulative vote, property being thus deprived of its
legitimate weight; above all, as is evident, security should have been
taken that the landed gentry should have a proper representation on the
County Councils. The authority, too, of the Superior Courts over all these
assemblies should have been made more effective and less costly than it is
at present; and that of the Local Government Board should have been better
defined and increased. In all this province the checks possessed by the
Central Government over these local democracies are not, I think,
sufficient.
It is impossible, I have remarked, to say with certainty what the end of
this social revolution will be; but some of the results are, even now,
apparent. There has, as yet, been little tendency in the local boards to
waste, or to attempts to despoil the landed gentry; the check in this
respect is of great force; but no one, I repeat, can predict what may be
done under the influence of democratic sympathies, especially should the
existing agitation acquire increased strength in Ireland. Some of the
councils have been very fairly managed; a few others have been badly
administered; as a rule, much time has been misspent in irrelevant talk;
there has been a good deal of squabbling with the Local Government Board;
but, on the whole, the local business of the counties and towns has been
conducted as reasonably well as could be expected in the case of a new and
immense experiment. But the consequences of giving raw democracies great
and sudden power have already been made but too manifest, as persons, who
knew Ireland, foresaw would happen. In parts of Ulster representatives of
the landed gentry have been elected to the County Councils; property in
these has still legitimate influence. But in Leinster, Munster, and
Connaught, this order of men has been all but completely shut out from
these boards; the land is not represented at all; this is an absolutely
unnatural position of affairs, pregnant with many ills to the community as
a whole. It is not only that the landed gentry have been deprived of an
influence they ought to possess, in a society in any degree well ordered;
this change has a tendency to make them more and more, what they have
largely been made already, a privileged class without duties, akin to the
old seigneurie of France, a state of things of which Tocqueville has
powerfully described the evils. In the southern provinces, too, the new
democracies, composed of Catholic 'Nationalists,' by large majorities,
have driven loyal, and especially Protestant, men and women from local
offices they had filled with credit, and this too at a considerable charge
on the rates, a clear proof how no restraints can be wholly effective. But
the main feature in the conduct of the County and other Councils is that
in most parts of Ireland they have followed the advice given by Parnell to
their weaker forerunners; they have made themselves agencies of the United
Irish League, as boards before them were agencies of the Land and the
National Leagues, and they have given but too ample proof of disaffection,
disloyalty, and hatred of British rule. In some counties, the councils
seized the court houses, and refused light and fire to the Superior and
the County Court judges. Throughout the South of Ireland most of the
boards vied with each other in wild expressions of sympathy with the
Boers, and of hopes that disaster would befall the British army; many gave
free voice to frankly rebellious language; many denounced Irishmen being
recruited for the British army. Nor did these sinister exhibitions end
here; some of these bodies went out of their way to sneer at their aged
sovereign, when she paid last year her last visit to the Irish shores, to
question her motives, to speak all kinds of evil; a few even refused to
say a word of regret for her death, nay, indulged in language of scarcely
veiled insult. These councils, in a word, in a number of instances, have
shown a marked resemblance to the Assemblies of the Communes of Jacobin
France, indignantly held up to execration by Burke; they have been petty
nests of seditious agitation and clamour. It is at least well that this
manner of men has not succeeded, in the great statesman's language, in
'ascending from parochial tyranny to federal anarchy' and have warned us
what would be the nature of a Home Rule Parliament.
This scheme of local government must be given a trial; but ultimately it
will have to be reformed, in a Conservative sense, if things in Ireland
are not to be left upside down.[184] I turn to the subject of Irish
education, which has been lately attracting much public attention.
University education is the most prominent part of this question; but, in
order to understand it, we must briefly consider the history of Irish
education in all its branches. The first scheme of primary education in
Ireland, of which we have a record--I pass over the traditions of the
Middle Ages--was due to the policy of Henry VIII.; he procured an Act
from the Irish Parliament, to the effect that elementary schools should be
set up in different Irish parishes; but, true to the ideal of Tudor
statesmen--an ideal, however, which he did not always pursue--he required
that these should be 'English schools,' to teach the Irish poor 'the
English language.' Many years passed before these schools were found
beyond the borders of the Pale; but, as the march of conquest advanced,
they existed in many Irish parishes; there were more than five hundred of
them in 1810, the largest number probably they ever attained. These
schools were originally intended to be open without distinction of creed;
but, under the conditions of Irish history, they necessarily became
confined to the lower Protestant classes; they were under the control of
the clergy of the Established Church, and Catholic children were kept away
from them. Elizabeth founded another class of schools, in part elementary,
in part of a higher type; these were known as the Diocesan Irish Schools;
but there seem never to have been more than sixteen of these; and they,
too, became exclusively Protestant. To these schools should be added 'the
English Erasmus Smith Schools,' as they were called, foundations grafted,
so to speak, on grammar schools established by a wealthy Cromwellian
settler; at one time they were more than one hundred in number; and if not
wholly, they were nearly confined to Protestant children. A series of
Reports of Commissions and other records show that the education afforded
in all these schools was not what it ought to have been; but this was to
be expected in the case of a country where Protestant ascendency was
supreme, where all administration was selfish and corrupt, and where the
schools were the monopoly of a fraction of the people only. As to the
education of the Irish Catholic poor in these centuries, it was
discouraged, and ultimately prohibited by the penal code; the Catholic
child could not learn the rudiments in his own land; but in spite of
this, 'hedge schools,' a significant name, grew up, in hundreds,
throughout the country, in which, to adopt the words of Davis, a man of
genius--
'Still crouching 'neath the sheltering hedge, or stretched on mountain
fern,
The teacher and his pupils met feloniously to learn.'
As may, however, be supposed the instruction afforded in these schools was
usually bad; throughout the eighteenth century and a part of the
nineteenth, the young of Catholic Ireland were brought up in ignorance. In
1733 an odious experiment was made, and continued for a long period, to
cause education to wean the Catholic child from his faith. An institution,
called the Charter School, was established; the object of its founders was
to make 'the young of the Papists' Protestant, by attracting them to
seminaries where they were kept apart from their parents and priests,
boarded, lodged, and handed over to Protestant tradesmen; millions were
spent in furthering a detestable policy, which literally set up Mammon
against God. The Charter Schools, however, completely failed; they never
had more than fourteen hundred pupils, and they became wretched Dotheboys
Halls where cruel and pampered Squeerses, eating up funds set apart for
education such as it was, starved and ill-treated children victims of
every kind of disease.
When the partial relaxation of the penal laws allowed the children of the
Irish Catholics to be taught the rudiments, the 'Christian Brothers' began
to found their schools, under the sanction of a Bull of Pius VI.; these
schools, sectarian, like the genius of the Irish people, have, though
receiving no endowment from the State, grown from small beginnings into a
number of excellent Catholic schools. The Quakers in Ireland had
established a few elementary schools before the Union; and so had the
Presbyterians of Ulster. The Charter Schools lingered down to the year
1832; they disappeared when their subsidies ceased; but the 'Incorporated
Irish Society' is in possession of the lands they once held, and it
supports a number of good Protestant schools. Primary education, however,
in Ireland remained very backward; the Protestant schools did not
flourish; the Catholic 'hedge schools' continued until the nineteenth
century had far advanced. Attempts were made to promote Irish primary
education, in different ways, after the Union; a Board of Commissioners of
Education was appointed, and made valuable reports; but these efforts were
of little avail for the benefit at least of the Catholic young; the
schools thus established were all Protestant; and the evangelical
movement, which was then powerful, made them proselytising with scarcely a
single exception, a danger which the example of the Charter Schools had
especially made the Catholic Irish priesthood dread. An institution,
however, called the 'Kildare Place Schools' had, for a time, considerable
success; these schools were thrown open to children of all creeds, and had
the high approval of O'Connell himself; but it was one of the rules that
the Bible should be read in the schools; they became proselytising in no
doubtful sense, and ultimately they were tabooed by the Catholic
priesthood. Primary education in Ireland was in this state, when the
subject was taken up by Mr. Stanley, the Chief Secretary for Ireland of
Lord Grey, and, in after years, the 'Rupert of Debate.' He founded in
1831-34 what has ever since been known as the 'National System of
Education' of an elementary kind in Ireland. The principles on which he
proceeded were in accord with the somewhat shallow Liberalism of the day,
but, it must be added, with the ideas of many enlightened Irishmen.
Primary education was to be endowed by the State, but it was to be divided
into two parts: secular instruction was to be given in the new schools to
children assembled together to learn, and that without distinction of
creed; but religious instruction was to be given to children kept apart,
Protestants and Catholics being completely separate, by the pastors of
their respective communions. By these means it was hoped that a sound
system of primary education would be formed; that proselytising would be
made impossible; and that the youth of the warring races and faiths of
Ireland, under the influence of a common teaching, would be made gradually
to forget the animosities of the past. The National Schools were to be the
Lethe of Irish discords.
I can barely glance at the chequered history of the institution which was
thus established. The 'National System,' the name long in common use, was
angrily condemned by the clergy of the Established Church of Ireland, and
by a majority, perhaps, of the laity; this opposition was partly due to
the spirit of an ascendency that would not brook equality; but it was
largely to be ascribed to a higher motive. The new system, it was argued,
cut education in two; the separation of what is secular from what is
religious practically postpones what is divine to the human; and this is
especially the case under the arrangements in force, for religious
instruction in the schools may be a mere accident. The Irish Protestant
clergy, and many other Protestants, have never taken to the National
Schools; their sincerity is proved by the fact that a 'Church Education
Society' exists, which, though depending on voluntary subscriptions alone,
supports nearly two hundred exclusively Protestant schools. As for the
Presbyterians of Ireland, the National system of education fell in with
their views; its 'Liberalism' was congenial to them; but though schools of
this type have flourished in Ulster, the Presbyterians have given a great
deal of trouble to the Commissioners charged to carry out the law, and
have shown much animosity to the Catholic Irish. The Irish Catholic
priesthood at first accepted the National system almost with gratitude; it
gave their flocks a rudimentary instruction they were much in need of; it
seemed to provide against the proselytising they feared above all things;
and during some years the heads of their Church in Ireland, for the most
part not of the Ultramontane faith, were not indisposed to welcome a
compromise. By degrees, however, opposition grew up in Catholic Ireland
against the system; and, it must be allowed, not without reason. The
Catholic element on the Commission was much too weak; the purely secular
instruction in the schools was made partly religious, for books of a
Protestant complexion found their way into them; a cry of Protestant
proselytising was raised; and the National system was solemnly condemned
in 1850, at the great Catholic Synod of Thurles, a sentence, however,
which had no effect on the Government. But the real grievances of the
Irish Catholics, in this matter, have nearly all been removed; the
Catholic Commissioners have been made equal in number with the
Presbyterian and Protestant; secular instruction in the schools has again
been made strictly secular; attempts at proselytising have long been
rendered impossible; it should be added--and this is very important--the
Catholic priesthood have become the managers of a large majority of the
schools. The system has certainly struck deep roots in Ireland; there are
now nearly 9000 National Schools, endowed with about £1,300,000 by the
State, and teaching nearly 800,000 pupils; they are supported by model and
training schools, and have a large staff of competent teachers; the
instruction they afford, if not remarkable, is, on the whole, sufficiently
good. It may fairly be said that the National system has been a beneficent
influence of the greatest value; light has shone on a people that once
sate in darkness. The system, however, has become, insensibly, but
greatly, changed; the National Schools have long been, for the most part,
sectarian, that is, composed of Protestant or of Catholic children; the
'mixed' schools, as they are called, are comparatively few. But the main
principle of the system still is in force; the instruction given in the
schools, when the pupils sit together, is strictly secular; and this is
secured by a conscience clause; the Bible cannot be read, in school hours,
even in a Protestant school; no Catholic school can have a Catholic
emblem. The religious instruction given in the schools is hardly what it
ought to be, especially in the case of the Protestant schools; it must be
added that the hope of their founders that they would bridge over the gulf
of discords in Ireland has not been, in the slightest degree, realised.
The Irish are, naturally, a religious people; their history, a long
conflict of races and faiths, has, necessarily, made them intensely
sectarian. The system of education, of which I have traced the outlines,
was certainly not well designed for them; it would have been severely
condemned by Burke, the deepest of thinkers on the affairs of Ireland. And
though the National system has had a real measure of success, it owes
this, in the main, to the immense subvention it receives from the State;
it has little or no support from voluntary aid; an attempt to impose an
education rate on Ireland would be a failure, would not improbably wreck
the system. Nor is this in harmony with genuine Irish sentiment; one of
the most conclusive proofs is that National education has become, to a
great extent, sectarian; the 'Christian Brothers' and the 'Church
Education Society' schools, sustained by voluntary effort alone, and
overweighted in the race by the endowed schools of the State, show how
strong is Irish sectarian feeling. The clergy, too, of the late
Established Church, and a considerable body of their communion, remain
hostile to the National Schools; and though the Catholic priesthood have
made them, to a great extent, their own, and avail themselves of the
advantages they afford, they are hardly in heartfelt sympathy with them.
Nor can it be denied that the conscientious objections to the National
system have real weight; the system, if not irreligious, is, we may say,
neutral; it does not make religion an essential part of school life. It
would, nevertheless, I believe, be exceedingly unwise to disturb a system
which, on the whole, has for many years had excellent results in Ireland.
The opposition to it is not strong; the children of the humbler classes
freely avail themselves of it, and that with the full consent of their
parents. Nor is the conscientious objection of much force in the case of
schools which are only day schools, and in which the rudiments alone are
taught; this is not the case of education of the higher kind, in which
this objection is perhaps decisive; and it cannot be said that the
National Schools have, in any sense, impaired the religion of the Irish
people.[185]
I pass from elementary to schools of a secondary kind in Ireland. The
Diocesan Schools of Elizabeth were nearly all secondary schools; but they
were never numerous, and have all but disappeared. The two first Stuarts
made an attempt to establish secondary education in Ireland on a larger
scale. They founded the 'Free Royal Schools,' as they have been called,
now seen at Armagh, Cavan, Dungannon, Portora, and Raphoe; they endowed
them with lands perhaps worth in our day, £6000 a year; they looked
forward to a time when they might rival Eton, Winchester, and the great
public schools of England. Erasmus Smith established three considerable
'grammar schools,' and granted valuable estates for their support; a
tolerably large number of secondary schools was also founded, from time to
time, by benefactors of the dominant race in Ireland: of these Kilkenny
College, a seminary created by the House of Ormond, which reared Swift and
Berkeley, was the most conspicuous. These schools, though often nominally
open to different creeds, became, nevertheless, in the eighteenth century,
under the Protestant ascendency, supreme in the land, restricted to the
young of the Protestant caste; they felt the effects of monopoly, and of
the corruption prevailing in the State; the education they afforded was,
for the most part, bad; their governing bodies and masters were often
grasping and selfish. After the relaxation of the penal code, the Irish
Catholics began to found secondary schools; their exertions were, in a
high degree, praiseworthy; and though these schools received no support
from the State, some of them have done really excellent work. A number,
too, of secondary schools were established in Ulster, for the most part
for Presbyterian uses; some of these are sectarian, some open to all
faiths; some have, others have not, received assistance from the State; in
several the education given has been, on the whole, good. A few secondary
schools--St. Columba is much the best--have also been founded within the
last century, usually for the benefit of the late Established Church of
Ireland.
The progress made by secondary schools in Ireland, even in the nineteenth
century, has not been rapid. It is not to be named with the immense
development of public schools in England, within the same period, caused,
in some measure, by the genius of Arnold; secondary Irish schools, in
fact, have been largely a failure, like other institutions of British
origin. This is mainly to be attributed to three reasons: the higher upper
classes in Ireland usually send their sons to be educated in the great
English public schools; the Irish secondary schools are seldom well
endowed; above all, the upper middle class in Ireland is small and has
little influence. Two Commissions, appointed in 1854 and in 1878, examined
secondary education in Ireland as it then existed; their reports give a
far from favourable account of the system. The secondary Irish schools
have not been much affected by an Act of Parliament passed in 1885, which
provided for making better schemes for their management; but certainly
they have derived very great benefit from the Intermediate Education Act
of Lord Cairns, which established a system of competition between them,
and secured prizes for successful competitors. In these honourable trials
the Catholic schools have done well; but even now the secondary schools
are decidedly inferior to what they ought to be, and do not exhibit many
signs of improvement. An impartial inquirer thus described them in
1871:[186] 'Upon the whole, secondary instruction, throughout the country,
was as some one--I believe Lord Cairns--said, "bad in quality and
deficient in quantity." The fact seems incredible, but there can be no
doubt of its authenticity, viz. that out of a total population of
5,500,000, there were only 10,814 boys in Ireland learning Latin, Greek,
or modern languages in 1871. Or, to put the matter in another way, while
in England about ten or fifteen in every 1000 were instructed in these
languages, only two in every 1000 were instructed in them in
Ireland.'[187]
I pass on to University life in Ireland, the question, I have said, most
prominent at this time. Ireland had no Oxford or Cambridge in the Middle
Ages; an attempt to establish a University in Dublin failed; science and
literature could not grow up in a land distracted by feudal and tribal
strife, and in which two Churches were continually at war with each other.
Elizabeth founded Trinity College towards the close of her reign, on the
site of a monastery that had been suppressed; it was the intention of the
queen, and of her two first successors, that this seminary should expand
into a University in the true sense, containing a number of colleges
within its sphere, and probably open to all students whatever their race
or their faith. This happy consummation, however, was made impossible
during the long period of civil war and trouble, which only came to an end
with that of the seventeenth century. Trinity College remained a single
foundation; and, in the era of Protestant ascendency that ensued, when
Catholic Ireland lay under the ban of the penal code, it necessarily
became an exclusively Protestant place of learning, its dignities, its
honours, nay, admission to it, being reserved to members of the
Established Church. It had, however, been amply endowed; and, from an
early period, it possessed many distinguished worthies, the names of
Ussher, of King, of Browne, and of others, being still remembered. Trinity
College, strange to say, was very High Church during the reigns of the two
last Stuarts and of Anne; its leading divines preached the creed of
passive obedience; and it was remarkable for its aversion to Presbyterian
Ireland, as was clearly shown in the diatribes of Swift. The college,
however, became Whiggish and Low Church during the reign of Walpole--its
Provost was appointed by the Crown; and until nearly the close of the
eighteenth century, its professorships, its fellowships, its scholarships,
its degrees, even entrance to its walls, were strictly confined to the
dominant communion of the Anglican Church. But a liberal spirit grew up,
and gained strength within it; this appears in many of the admirable
writings of Berkeley, breathing the ideas that afterwards inspired
Grattan, and in the histories of Leland and Warner, on the whole just to
the vanquished Catholic people; and after the almost National movement
which produced the Revolution of 1782, Trinity College took a remarkable
step, which proved that it was in advance of the politics of that age. In
1793, when the Irish Parliament passed a great measure of Catholic relief,
the college made Catholics eligible for its degrees and its minor prizes;
and, but that its statutes made this impossible, it would, perhaps, have
allowed Catholics to become professors, fellows, and scholars--in short,
to have a share in its dignities and its government. Nothing like this was
done at Oxford and Cambridge until the nineteenth century had run far its
course.
From this time onwards Trinity College, accessible to Presbyterians some
years before, received Catholics honourably within its precincts. A few
distinguished Catholic Irishmen have obtained the excellent education it
has always afforded; and these have been treated with scrupulous fairness;
no attempt at proselytising has ever been made or thought of. Their
numbers, however, have never been large; and they were necessarily placed
in an inferior position, for they could not become professors, fellows, or
scholars; the college remained an institution essentially Protestant, even
anti-Catholic, in much of its teaching, for example, in the predilection
it long showed for Locke. The college continued to thrive and to make
progress; the reproach cast on it that she was the 'silent sister,' was
rather due to the want of publishing enterprise in the Irish capital, than
to any deficiency in literary power; at all events, it has long ago been
removed; Trinity College has stood for a century in the foremost rank of
places of learning famed for scientific eminence. In 1843-44 an attempt
was made to introduce Catholics on the foundation, as scholars; but this
was prohibited by the statutes; some 'non-foundation' scholarships were
then endowed; and Catholics were enabled to compete for them. This was the
position of the college, when, in 1844-45, after the agitation for Repeal
had shown how disaffected Catholic Ireland still was, Peel turned his mind
to Irish remedial measures, and among these to a reform of high education
in Ireland. His policy was to maintain the Union intact, and all the
institutions closely connected with it, but to create institutions, so to
speak, alongside of these, to which Irish Presbyterians, and Catholics
especially, might freely resort, in complete equality with all Irishmen;
he therefore left Trinity College exactly as it was, but resolved to
establish and endow places of learning, which he hoped would be popular
supplements to it, and would give a University training to students who,
as affairs stood, were not on the same level as the favoured Protestants
in it. He founded the Queen's Colleges of Belfast, of Cork, and of Galway;
these were supplied with an ample staff of professors, endowed, and given
the means to bestow many prizes; and they were affiliated to the Queen's
University, empowered to confer degrees. The principle on which these
institutions were formed was, following the so-called liberalism of the
time, almost exactly the same as that on which the Irish National Schools
had been based. Secular education in them was to be united, religious
education was to be kept apart; their students were to learn the things
that belonged to this world together; but as to what belonged to another
world, this teaching was to be provided by their pastors outside their
colleges, and they were not to have it in common. The colleges, and the
University, therefore, were essentially seats of non-religious knowledge;
religious equality, it was said, could be only thus secured; and residence
in the colleges was not required.
The principle pervading the Irish National education system was certainly
open to grave objections; these became infinitely stronger, when it was
applied to a system of high education in Ireland. Secular instruction
could be really combined, and given to children together, when limited to
the first rudiments: how could it be combined when it should embrace such
subjects as moral philosophy, metaphysics, modern history, nay, physical
science, and when taught to young men of the University age? Besides,
religious instruction, without a great shock to conscience, could be made
a subordinate consideration in mere day schools: how could it,
consistently with Christian duty, be practically excluded from a
University course, and left to undergraduates to be dealt with as they
might think fit, and that at the most critical time of their life?
Indifference to the Divine, masked in specious 'liberal' phrases, was, in
truth, the cardinal feature of this scheme; it would have been severely
reprobated by Burke; it was repugnant to the ideas of five-sixths of
Irishmen; its tendency was to form minds in superior men, like those of
Hume and Gibbon, in inferior men, to produce infidel, even atheistic,
sentiments. It was denounced as 'godless' in the House of Commons by the
High Church party; it was condemned by O'Connell, from the outset, though
the men of 'Young Ireland' were not adverse; after some hesitation, it was
rejected unequivocally by the Irish Catholic bishops,[188] and finally was
held up to anathema at the Synod of Thurles. That the bishops were sincere
is proved by the fact, that they established the Irish Catholic University
a few years afterwards--the first head of this creation was Newman; and
the foundation has been maintained ever since, though it could not give a
degree, and it received nothing from the State, and its only funds were
the contributions of a poor communion, a noble example of self-sacrifice
and of a true sense of duty. Meanwhile, the Queen's Colleges and
University were kept up and endowed, at the rate of about £30,000 a year;
the College of Belfast has done well, for it falls in with Presbyterian
ideas; but the Colleges of Cork and of Galway, notably the last, have been
sorry, nay, almost useless, failures; and Peel's hope that his project
would secure a good University training to Irish Catholics of the better
class has not been, to any real extent, fulfilled. Trinity College
remained for many years unchanged, that is, it gave an admirable education
to a very few Catholics; but it continued to be a Protestant institution
in its essential nature; its governing body and its hierarchy were all
Protestant; its teaching was Protestant in some of its parts; its higher
honours were a monopoly of the favoured communion.
The extreme unfairness of this University system, the ascendency secured
to Trinity College, which, admirable institution as it was, was
practically nearly confined to Protestants of the upper class; the
failure, with respect to Catholic Ireland, of the Queen's Colleges and the
Queen's University, and the large and useless expenditure this involved;
above all, the denial to the Catholic University of any share in the
bounty of the State, though its claim to it could be hardly
doubtful,--attracted the attention of several statesmen, from 1850 to
1870; but nothing was done, or even attempted. The subject was taken up by
Mr. Gladstone, with characteristic earnestness, during his first Ministry;
he declared that University education in Ireland was 'a scandal;' indeed,
Irish education of the higher kind was the third branch of the upas tree
which threw its baleful shade over the land. He brought in a measure of
reform in the session of 1873; it was an ambitious and a comprehensive
scheme; but it was much the worst of his Irish reforms of this period; and
it ended in complete and disastrous failure. With the historical instinct
occasionally seen in his legislation, Mr. Gladstone proposed to revive the
idea of Elizabeth and the first Stuarts, and to found a great National
University, which was to have the management and control of the higher
education throughout Ireland. The governing body of this new institution
was to be composed partly of men chosen by the Lord-Lieutenant, and partly
of the heads of the colleges to be connected with it; and it was to have
the sole power of conferring degrees in Ireland. Trinity College was to
hand over to the National University a sum of £12,000 a year, that is,
more than a fourth of its endowments from the State; its professorships,
its fellowships, its scholarships, in a word, all its prizes, were to be
thrown open to all its students whatever their faith; but in most other
respects it was not to be essentially changed, except as to the power of
granting degrees. Trinity College was to be affiliated to the National
University as a dependent college, and so were a number of minor colleges;
but this remarkable distinction was made in homage to the 'liberalism' of
the day: the Queen's Colleges, that of Galway being suppressed as useless,
were to retain the endowments they received from the State, on the ground
that they were free to all comers; but the Catholic University was not to
obtain a shilling, nor yet other colleges of a sectarian type, on the
ground that they were 'close and exclusive,' this being the case of all
the Catholic colleges that could be affiliated to the new foundation. The
Queen's University was to be abolished, for the National University was to
be sole and supreme; and then came provisions, which, strange as they may
appear at first sight, were perhaps inevitable under the conditions on
which the project was formed. Moral philosophy, metaphysics, and modern
history were shut out from the National University course; they might be
taught in the colleges, but were to be no part of University learning. And
the National University, like the Queen's Colleges, was to be
'non-religious;' its system of education was to be secular and united,
that is its students were to be examined together in secular learning, but
in religious matters they were to stand apart; religion, indeed, might be
a subject of college teaching, but it was not to be heard of within the
University walls; in fact, it was probably to be left to the students and
their clergy.
This complicated measure, not easy thoroughly to understand, was
sustained, for a few days, by the glamour of Mr. Gladstone's rhetoric. But
ere long it arrayed against it an immense preponderance of opinion in
Ireland, and was assailed with fatal effect in the House of Commons. The
Heads of Trinity College took the initiative in declaring against it; in
debates, wise, patriotic, and just alike, they recognised the claims of
Catholic Ireland; but they protested against the wrong being done to the
great and ancient foundation they represented, and especially against the
degradation to which it was subjected by the Bill. Trinity College was to
be deprived for no reason of a large part of its revenue; it was to be
placed under a governing body, in which nominees of the Castle would be
all-powerful--an influence pernicious to its independence and
self-government; above all, the National University was to supplant it,
and was to exclude from its teaching the noblest studies of the intellect
of man. The Platonism which had inspired Berkeley, the records which had
animated the genius of Burke, and had been fostered in the Alma mater of
these great worthies, were to be banished from a foundation which was to
be made the head of University life in Ireland. These sentiments were
fully shared by enlightened Irishmen: that moral and metaphysical science
and modern history should be virtually proscribed in the University about
to be set up, was, as it were, putting out one of the eyes of the
intellect, effacing what was best in the map of knowledge. But the most
decisive condemnation of the scheme was that pronounced by the Irish
Catholic bishops. Like their predecessors of nearly thirty years before,
and the Anglican High Church party of that day, they asserted that the
project was really 'godless;' it was irreligion in the mask of
non-religion; its liberalism was in the highest degree illiberal, for it
offered their flocks a system of education it was known they would reject;
and it was flagrantly, nay, basely, unjust, for while Trinity College, and
the Queen's Colleges, and the Queen's University, were to remain endowed,
the Catholic University and all Catholic colleges were to get nothing from
the State. These arguments made their way into the House of Commons, and
were vindicated in speeches of great ability. Disraeli dwelt especially on
the poverty and the imperfection of a University scheme, in which the
finest branches of knowledge were not to enter; he frankly denounced the
Bill as 'atheistic,' an epithet which Burke assuredly would have fastened
on it. Other speakers, notably Ball, a very brilliant Irishman, enlarged
on the wrong done to Trinity College, and earnestly advocated the Catholic
claims; not only was the minister offering a stone for bread, he was
virtually trying to bribe the Irish Catholic into accepting institutions
he disliked, and in the attempt was deeply offending his conscience.
Notwithstanding the efforts of a powerful Government, the Bill was
rejected by the House of Commons; nearly all the Irish members voted
against it, and so did the best men of the Liberal party.
The year that witnessed the collapse of Mr. Gladstone's measure,
witnessed, also, a reform of Trinity College conceived in the spirit of
the 'liberalism' of the hour, and hailed as an illustration of what is
called progress. The government, the dignities, and the prizes of the
college were thrown open to all without regard to their creed; this was
welcomed as 'University equality' in the most perfect sense. It is a
mistake to suppose that a corresponding change was ever made at Oxford and
Cambridge; the extension of their privileges to persons whatever their
faith, has, thanks to the exertions of the late Lord Selborne, been
strictly confined to lay offices; the religious character and teaching of
the Universities have been carefully preserved.[189] Though Trinity
College has been made 'non-religious' by this measure, and that to such a
degree that its governing body might conceivably be composed of avowed
atheists, it has, nevertheless, to this day remained a Protestant
institution in all essential respects. Its professors, fellows, and
scholars have, since 1873, been nearly all Protestants; its Catholic
students are not eight in a hundred of the number as a whole; and the
chief practical result of the late reform has been to make the heads of
the Irish Catholic Church more opposed than before to seeing Catholics
enter its precincts. In 1879, Lord Beaconsfield's Ministry made an attempt
to diminish the injustice done to Irish Catholics by the system of
University education still in force in Ireland. The Queen's University was
abolished; a Royal University was established, which was enabled to confer
degrees on, and to give prizes to, the students of the Catholic University
and other colleges; but the Royal University is a mere Examining Board; it
is not a University properly so called. One incident connected with this
institution deserves attention; the success of the students of Catholic
colleges at the Royal University examinations has been so great, that it
ought to silence jeers at the 'superstition' which keeps them back, the
vulgar cant of ignorant prejudice or worse.[190] Meanwhile the iniquities
and anomalies of the Irish University system have continued but very
little changed.[191] Trinity College remains a Protestant institution
well endowed, almost a monopoly of the Protestant upper class in Ireland,
practically little resorted to by Irish Catholics; the Queen's Colleges
are avoided by the Irish Catholics, as being 'irreligious' if called
'non-religious,' though the College of Belfast suits Presbyterian views;
they, too, receive a large bounty from the State; but the Catholic
University, the true seminary for the upper middle Catholic classes, and
now divided into different colleges, is still, as such, left out in the
cold. Its students, no doubt, can obtain Royal University degrees, and
some of its professors have been placed as examiners on that foundation;
but it is the veriest mockery to call this justice when we look at Trinity
College and the Queen's Colleges. 'The words of scripture are reversed,'
in Macaulay's language; 'the rich are filled with good things and the
hungry are sent empty away.'
I do not envy those who, whatever their reasons, refuse to acknowledge the
wrong done by these arrangements. It will hardly be denied, in the
twentieth century, that Protestant ascendency ought not to exist in any
sphere of Irish affairs, and that in University life, as in all matters,
Irish Catholics ought to have civil equality, and that without a violation
of the rights of conscience. It has been triumphantly maintained that, in
high education, these conditions are actually fulfilled in Ireland;
Trinity College and the Queen's Colleges are accessible to all students,
without regard to their religion or no religion; these have a perfectly
equal right to share in the government and the honours of institutions
thrown completely open. But those who argue in this way either shut their
eyes to facts, or will not perceive that this fine 'liberalism' in Ireland
works sheer injustice. Catholics are but a handful of students in Trinity
College and the Queen's Colleges compared to what their natural proportion
ought to be; Trinity College, if nominally open, is in all essential
respects Protestant; the Queen's Colleges as being 'non-religious,' that
is, in the view of their Church 'irreligious,' are practically avoided by
Irish Catholics; yet the State endows Trinity College and the Queen's
Colleges; it starves the Catholic University and other Catholic colleges,
which are thus unfairly handicapped by their rivals. If this is not
furthering Protestant ascendency in Irish high education, and denying
civil equality to Irish Catholics who, in this matter, will not forego the
rights of conscience, I do not know what else it can be; it seems to me to
be iniquity in no doubtful sense. And are the objections of the Irish
Catholics, in this province, as 'irrational' and 'superstitious' as has
been scoffingly said? Reverse the case of Trinity College: suppose that
England was a Catholic Power, and that she kept up a great Catholic
University in the Irish capital, discountenancing Protestant institutions
in many ways, how many Protestants would enter its walls, how soon would
the cry of Catholic ascendency be raised? Or suppose that Oxford and
Cambridge were made 'non-religious,' as the Queen's Colleges in Ireland
are, would not an immense majority of English parents declare that these
seats of learning were 'godless,' and persistently keep their sons away
from them? The simple truth is that the Catholic objections to Trinity
College and the Queen's Colleges are really those which, in this matter,
have been entertained by the deepest thinkers; to my mind, at least, they
seem perfectly well-founded. As to the statement that these objections are
those of the Irish Catholic bishops alone, and are mere 'superstitious
fancies,' it is enough to reply that, on two occasions, the Irish
Catholic laity have distinctly pronounced on this subject, and have
declared that they agree with the heads of their Church. And as to the
argument that Catholic States do not endow sectarian institutions like the
Catholic University and other Irish Catholic colleges, it will be quite
time enough to examine this when anything like such a state of things can
be found as that which at present exists in Ireland.
One argument, however, seldom frankly set forth, but hinted at in a
variety of ways, has been a real obstacle to a reform of this vicious
system; it strongly appeals to British national prejudice, of all
aberrations of opinion the most difficult to overcome. 'Popery,' it is
said, is a 'detestable thing;' a 'Protestant' State 'must have nothing to
do with it;' to endow a Catholic University in Ireland, therefore, or any
colleges of the same complexion, would be 'sacrificing to Baal,' or
something as wicked. Catholic Ireland must put up with Trinity College and
the Queen's Colleges, which have been made open to all sorts and
conditions of men; its 'conscientious objections' are mere 'bigotry.' This
reasoning, which condemns as impious the religion of the greatest part of
Christendom, would unfortunately overthrow many arrangements by which
provision has been made in our 'Protestant' State for Catholic
institutions of different kinds; if pushed to its consequences, it would
revive the penal code in Ireland, and lead to the confiscation of Catholic
charities. But though it has still indirectly an effect on some
politicians, it is, in its naked simplicity, only the faith of Mr. Kensit
and of those who walk in his footsteps; it is worthy of the philosophy of
Lord George Gordon, of the meekness of Orangeism, of the bray of Exeter
Hall. For some time a turn in British opinion has happily taken place;
'liberalism,' it has been perceived, in Irish University education has
failed; Mr. Arthur Balfour has made himself conspicuous in advocating the
just claims of Catholic Ireland. Even as I write a Commission is being
appointed to consider the whole subject of University life in Ireland;
there can be no reasonable doubt that it will fully bring to light the
anomalies and the unfairness of the existing system, and will recommend
that the Catholic University, and other Catholic colleges perhaps, shall
be endowed. In truth, things have already come to such a pass that Trinity
College, the one institution of which, it is said, 'all Irishmen are
really proud,' will, owing to the exceptional favour it receives from the
State, be placed in grave danger, and the Queen's Colleges also, if a
Catholic University in Ireland be not established and endowed, in order to
secure to the Irish Catholic civil equality, in high education, through
the assistance of the State.[192]
On what principles, then, and by what means, is University education in
Ireland to be so reformed as to do equal justice to all Irishmen, to place
Protestants, Presbyterians, and Catholics on the same level, and,
especially, to vindicate the rightful claims of Catholic Ireland? Two
leading projects have at least been sketched out: the first, the grander
and the more ambitious, but, in my judgment, scarcely possible to carry
into effect; the second, more simple, more in harmony with existing facts,
and, I think, safer and much more easy to realise. The first scheme,
following in some respects the measure of Mr. Gladstone of 1873, but
making a marked improvement on it, would aim at establishing and endowing
a National University for all Irishmen, which should have a power to
confer degrees, in common with the Royal University now existing, and
should have an ample professional staff; it should have its examinations
for degrees and for other honours. The governing body of this University
should be composed of the heads of the colleges affiliated to it--the
element of the Castle being excluded, according at least to the best
authorities--and Trinity College should not be deprived of any part of its
revenues, as it was to be under the Bill of 1873. Two of the Queen's
Colleges probably should be suppressed; but the College of Belfast, which
has been successful, should probably be made a Presbyterian college, at
least in the main; the endowments it would receive should be, doubtless,
increased. High Catholic education should be provided for in this way: The
Catholic University should be established and endowed, and placed
reasonably on a level with Trinity College, and perhaps other Catholic
colleges also; but, in consideration of this assistance from the State, a
lay element should be introduced into the Catholic University governing
body; this should not be composed wholly of Catholic clergymen; and the
teaching body should be composed of men, chosen without regard to
religious distinctions, but so constituted that a majority should be
Catholics, and that Catholic education should be predominant. Other
Catholic colleges might be connected with this institution; and Trinity
College, the Catholic University, and the Belfast and all other colleges,
should be subordinate to the National University in this sense; their
students should be obliged to resort to it, or to the Royal University if
they preferred it, in order to pass examinations, and to obtain degrees or
other honours, there being thus two Universities of different types in
Ireland. Education in all the affiliated colleges should be perfectly
free, that is, left to the arrangements made by their governing bodies;
but a certain standard of proficiency should exist, which, however, the
tests of University examinations would probably secure.
An Irish National University, could it be founded on these lines, would
present many attractive features, would realise, indeed, a noble ideal. It
would preserve Trinity College as a great place of learning, would give
Presbyterian Ireland a college practically its own, and ought to satisfy
the legitimate demands of Catholic Ireland. That its dependent colleges
should compete with each other for its degrees and honours, and be
friendly rivals in the splendid race of learning, would also be an immense
advantage; and the Royal University would, doubtless, suffice for students
too poor to enter the dependent colleges, and yet aspiring to pass
examinations and to obtain degrees. But could a National University of
this type be set up in Ireland with a prospect that it would succeed or
flourish? Its governing body would be formed of the heads of the colleges
connected with it; these would be mainly composed of Catholic and
Protestant divines: could these, in the existing state of Ireland, agree
as to the University course that ought to be adopted? Suppose that
Archbishop Walsh and Dr. Salmon, the venerable provost of Trinity College,
were together members of this supreme board. Would the first approve of
Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding as a subject of examination in
the University schools? Would the second approve of Bellarmine and even of
Bossuet? Dissension, I fear, would be the inevitable result; and in that
case 'the Castle' would certainly try to gain authority over the governing
body, and to place on it nominees of its own, in my judgment, an
exceedingly mischievous thing. Very probably, too, the State, in the long
run, would deprive Trinity College of some of its revenues, on different
pleas that could be plausibly urged; to this there would be the gravest
objections. And how could moral philosophy, metaphysics, and modern
history, nay, even physical science itself, be made parts of University
studies? How could Protestants and Catholics be examined in them in
common? Would it not be necessary to exclude them from University
teaching, as in the case of Mr. Gladstone's ill-starred measure--to close
the University to the best works of the intellect of man, to deprive it of
the most fruitful branches of learning? I fear the idea of a National
University, as affairs now stand in Ireland, is not likely to become a
reality with results that could be deemed hopeful. No doubt the Royal
University does, to some extent, have examinations on these debateable
subjects; but they occupy a very small place in its teaching; and in a
National University this ought not to be the case.
A National University would not be founded in Ireland under the second
project. Trinity College would remain completely intact; it would retain
its present governing body, its privileges, and its power of conferring
degrees. The Queen's Colleges--that of Galway being probably suppressed,
and its funds transferred to the College of Belfast--and the Royal
University would continue unchanged; the students of the Queen's Colleges
would probably seek degrees from the Royal University as they do at
present. But the Catholic University should be established and endowed,
and placed on the same level as Trinity College, as far as this could be
effected by law; the charge of the endowment would not be great--it would
be perhaps £100,000 for buildings, and perhaps £40,000 a year for other
purposes; but the students, and those of other colleges to be connected
with it, would not be numerous, at least for years; it should, of course,
have the power of conferring honours and degrees. In return for these
advantages, the State should have a right to insist that its governing
body should be in part laymen--the Irish Catholic bishops have already
agreed to this; and the State ought, also, to have a right to require
that the secular education it should afford should be good, a security
which could fully, if indirectly, be obtained. The advantages of this
scheme, it is obvious, are that it would get rid of the difficulties
inseparable from a National University in Ireland; it would preserve
Trinity College exactly as it is, an enormous gain for that great place of
learning; it would interfere as little as possible with things as they
are; and it would do all that Catholic Ireland could reasonably demand. It
is understood that a scheme of this description has the approval of the
authorities of Trinity College, and of their distinguished representative,
Mr. Lecky; their opinions are of the very greatest weight. The only real
objection made to this plan is one made by characteristic prejudice: the
education, in the Catholic University, it is said, would be bad, and its
degrees would be of no value. In the face of the success of Catholic
University students at the Royal University examinations, the first
assertion has been proved to be false; and besides, this is the affair of
the students and their parents alone. As to the inferiority of the
Catholic University degrees, there is no reason to believe that this would
exist; these degrees, moreover, would have to compete with those of the
Royal University and of Trinity College; if they were really inferior,
this would soon be found out, and the Catholic University would have to
increase their value. This is the true security the State and the public
would possess.
A few 'Present Irish Questions' remain, on which I may offer passing
remarks. Ireland is essentially a poor country; her middle class is
comparatively very weak; her trade and manufactures are small; the greater
part of the community is a Celtic race. It has long been contended by
well-informed Irishmen that many undertakings, which, in Great Britain,
have properly been left to private enterprise, ought, in Ireland, to be
carried out by the State, as for centuries has been the case in France, a
Celtic land, as was largely the case in Ireland under her extinct
Parliament. This observation especially applies to the Irish railway
system. As long ago as 1836, Thomas Drummond, the Under Secretary of
well-known renown, strongly recommended that Irish railways should be laid
out, managed, and controlled by the Government; but this was inconsistent
with English ideas; the Irish railways were abandoned to private
companies. The results have been very far from fortunate; many of the
lines have been badly designed; the Irish railway fares are a great deal
too high; too numerous boards of directors are a heavy charge; railway
communication, in a word, in Ireland is of an inferior kind, and much too
costly in a backward and poor country. Not indeed that the State has not
made large advances to Irish railway companies, some of these on terms
very unjust to ratepayers; but the system is faulty and ill-developed; a
reform in this direction is greatly wanted.[193] As Drummond insisted, the
State, even now, ought to buy up and direct the Irish railways; but this
is only a part of what it ought to do in this province. The material
condition of Ireland is not prosperous; her main river basins require
drainage; her whole arterial drainage is in a bad state, and has suffered
much from the legislation of 1881, and from the policy of so-called 'land
purchase,' for ordinary Irish tenants will not keep it up, and their
landlords cannot now be expected to do so; these works must be undertaken
by the State, or assuredly they will not be undertaken at all. Mr. Arthur
Balfour has done something in this direction by the encouragement of light
railways in remote parts of Ireland, and by the foundation of the
'Congested Districts Board,' an institution that has had excellent
results. But this is only the fringe of the subject; an enormous amount of
work remains to be done; and this, in the circumstances of Ireland, can
only be done by the Government.
In a book which has attracted some attention--'Ireland, 1798-1898'--I
wrote these words nearly four years ago: 'An Irishman, Wolseley, an
Irishman, Roberts, are the foremost of living British soldiers; but there
are no Irish Guards, and few Irishmen in our artillery; we see here a want
of tact and of sympathy.' Time, in this respect, has suddenly brought its
changes; has again illustrated the genius of the Irishman in war, and, in
some measure, has removed a reproach from England. It is true that the
conspiracy, which still exists in Ireland, did all that it could to
prevent Irishmen from taking part in the contest in South Africa, and that
even a petty Irish contingent appeared in the ranks of the Boers. But Lord
Wolseley had at least a great share in fitting out the largest expedition
which has ever left our shores to fight an enemy at a distance of six
thousand miles--no other power could do anything of the kind; and without
disparaging our other generals, the presence of a superior mind was at
once seen when Lord Roberts was given the supreme command in our army. And
the Irish soldiery who fought in the campaigns of 1899-1900 were true to
the noble traditions of their race; they were in the forefront of many a
bloody conflict; and now that a regiment of Irish Guards has been at last
embodied--a tardy acknowledgment of Irish military worth--England may rest
assured that these men will rival the famous Irish Brigade of another age,
'ever and everywhere true' to the Bourbon lilies, and conspicuous in the
service of France on many a field of renown. I may add a word on another
subject, in which Ireland perhaps has a just claim on England. The
descendants of the chiefs, who, in Scotland, clung to the cause of the
Stuarts, have, for the most part, regained their forfeited lands and
honours; no such reparation has been made to the descendants of Irish
nobles and princes, who supported the Stuarts in the nobler cause of
their country. The representative of the last of the Celtic kings of
Ireland--a man of large possessions and of unquestionable parts--has no
place on the roll of the peerage; the sons of ennobled Cromwellian
troopers and tradesmen have precedence at Court over the sons of the most
illustrious Milesian Houses. This is not a mere trifle as may carelessly
be said; it tends to revive memories that it were better to forget. Can
nothing be done to make a graceful concession, which would touch many an
Irish heart, and would go some way to promote a spirit of loyalty and hope
in Ireland, which it should be a great object of statesmanship to create
and foster?
If the picture I have drawn of Ireland is correct in outline, there is
much of evil omen in her present condition. The ancient divisions of race
and faith, the most distinctive feature in her social structure, are at
least as deeply marked as they have been for a century; bad legislation
has made them deeper and wider. Catholic Ireland remains disaffected to
British rule, despite efforts of conciliation and concessions that cannot
be justified; no class in the community is completely satisfied;
discontent rankles in the hearts of the landed gentry. The Union, indeed,
has been successfully maintained; the frightful agrarian disorder of
1881-89 no longer exists. But the Union is not permanently assured as long
as the Liberal party and eighty Irish members demand Home Rule, and the
over-representation of Ireland continues; the conspiracy of the Land and
the National Leagues has revived in that of the United Irish League; and
this seeks to compass the ends of its prototypes by obstruction in
Parliament and detestable socialistic tyranny. And the frame of Irish
society has been well-nigh shattered; ruins have been made, nothing solid
has been put in their place. An aristocracy, long waning, has been
practically destroyed, and can no longer be a support of the State; the
bureaucracy of the Castle reigns in its stead; but this is essentially a
weak Government; it can maintain order, but has no hold on the people; the
Irish democracy, to which power has been transferred, regards it with a
dislike and a contempt it does not try to conceal. The country has made
hardly any progress of late years; if some improvement in the state of the
middle classes appears, agriculture, its leading industry, has perceptibly
declined. In by far the most important of Irish social relations, those
connected with the land, a revolution has taken place; a huge if a veiled
confiscation has gone on; the landed gentry have been shamefully wronged;
the occupiers of the soil have been most unduly favoured; yet both classes
declare they have been ill-treated, notably the last. And the Irish land
system has been turned upside down, with consequences disastrous and
far-reaching; the landlord has been cut off from his estate; the tenant
has been encouraged in thriftlessness and waste by law; the land has been
bound in a ruinous mortmain, like that which existed under the penal code,
and subjected to demoralising litigation, breeding a war of class; capital
and fruitful enterprise turn away from it. And, at the same time, in order
to lessen these evils, recourse has been had to remedies that are perhaps
worse; the system of so-called 'land purchase' has been devised; the
result has been to create a class of peasant owners reproducing the nearly
extinct middleman, and, above all, to arouse a cry for the 'compulsory
purchase' of the rented lands of Ireland, an act of wholesale spoliation
unjust and disastrous alike. In the position of affairs we now see in
Ireland, the stability of society has been rudely shaken; the sense of the
security of property has well-nigh disappeared; the sanctity of contracts
has no respect; the pillars on which order and prosperity rest have been
injured; violent revolution has been arrested, indeed, but revolutionary
and socialistic ideas spread far and wide. And will any impartial inquirer
deny that these untoward results may be largely ascribed to the faulty
legislation of late years, and to a system of administration shifty and
feeble? And what judgment is to be passed on the thoughtless optimism too
common in opinion with respect to Ireland? Meanwhile, reforms imperatively
required are not even attempted; they are passed over or postponed to some
more convenient season. The time surely has come to look things in Ireland
straight in the face; to see if statesmanship cannot do something really
effective for her good. This end assuredly will not be attained by
breaking up the Three Kingdoms under the guise of Home Rule, or by
promoting a confiscation the worst Ireland has ever seen; still less will
it be attained by the quackery in legislation and administration too
apparent of late years; nor can trifling and foolish optimism blind the
eyes of intelligent thinkers to facts. Ireland can only expect to make
progress by ruling the community on the just and sound principles to which
long experience has given its sanction; and this consummation can only be
the slow result of time.
APPENDIX
THE IRISH GOVERNMENT BILL, 1886.
ARRANGEMENT OF CLAUSES.
Part I.
_Legislative Authority._
CLAUSE
1. Establishment of Irish Legislature.
2. Powers of Irish Legislature.
3. Exceptions from powers of Irish Legislature.
4. Restrictions on powers of Irish Legislature.
5. Prerogatives of Her Majesty as to Irish Legislative Body.
6. Duration of the Irish Legislative Body.
_Executive Authority._
7. Constitution of the Executive Authority.
8. Use of Crown Lands by Irish Government.
_Constitution of Legislative Body._
9. Constitution of Irish Legislative Body.
10. First order.
11. Second order.
_Finance._
12. Taxes and separate Consolidated Fund.
13. Annual contributions from Ireland to Consolidated Fund of United
Kingdom.
14. Collection and application of Customs and Excise duties in Ireland.
15. Charges on Irish Consolidated Fund.
16. Irish Church Fund.
17. Public loans.
18. Additional aid in case of war.
19. Money bills and votes.
20. Exchequer Division and revenue actions.
_Police._
21. Police.
PART II.
_Supplemental Provisions._
Powers of Her Majesty.
22. Powers over certain lands reserved to Her Majesty.
Legislative Body.
23. Veto by first order of Legislative Body, how overruled.
24. Cesser of power of Ireland to return members of Parliament.
Decision of Constitutional Questions.
25. Constitutional questions to be submitted to Judicial Committee.
Lord-Lieutenant.
26. Office of Lord-Lieutenant.
Judges and Civil Servants.
27. Judges to be removable only on address.
28. Provisions as to Judges and other persons having salaries charged on
the Consolidated Fund.
29. As to persons holding Civil Service appointments.
30. Provision for existing pensions and superannuation allowances.
_Transitory Provisions._
31. Transitory provisions in Schedule.
_Miscellaneous._
32. Post office and savings banks.
33. Audit.
34. Application of parliamentary law.
35. Regulations for carrying Act into effect.
36. Saving of powers of House of Lords.
37. Saving of rights of Parliament.
38. Continuance of existing laws, courts, officers, etc.
39. Mode of alteration of Act.
40. Definitions.
41. Short title of Act.
SCHEDULES.
_A Bill to amend the provision for the future Government of Ireland._
[A.D. 1886.
Be it enacted by the Queen's most excellent Majesty, by and with the
advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in
this present Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same, as
follows:
PART I.
_Legislative Authority._
[Sidenote: Establishment of Irish Legislature.]
=1.= On and after the appointed day there shall be established in Ireland
a Legislature consisting of Her Majesty the Queen and the Irish
Legislative Body.
[Sidenote: Powers of Irish Legislature.]
=2.= With the exceptions and subject to the restrictions in this Act
mentioned, it shall be lawful for Her Majesty the Queen, by and with the
advice of the Irish Legislative Body, to make laws for the peace, order,
and good government of Ireland, and by any such law to alter and repeal
any law in Ireland.
[Sidenote: Exceptions from powers of Irish Legislature.]
=3.= The Legislature of Ireland shall not make laws relating to the
following matters, or any of them:--
(1) The status or dignity of the Crown, or the succession the Crown or
a Regency;
(2) The making of peace or war;
(3) The army, navy, militia, volunteers, or other military or naval
forces, or the defence of the realm;
(4) Treaties and other relations with foreign States, or the
relations between the various parts of Her Majesty's dominions;
(5) Dignities or titles of honour;
(6) Prize or booty of war;
(7) Offences against the law of nations; or offences committed in
violation of any treaty made, or hereafter to be made, between Her
Majesty and any foreign State; or offences committed on the high seas;
(8) Treason, alienage, or naturalisation;
(9) Trade, navigation, or quarantine;
(10) The postal and telegraph service, except as hereafter in this Act
mentioned with respect to the transmission of letters and telegrams in
Ireland;
(11) Beacons, lighthouses, or sea-marks;
(12) The coinage; the value of foreign money; legal tender; or weights
and measures; or
(13) Copyright, patent rights, or other exclusive rights to the use or
profits of any works or inventions.
Any law made in contravention of this section shall be void.
[Sidenote: Restrictions on powers of Irish Legislature.]
=4.= The Irish Legislature shall not make any law--
(1) Respecting the establishment or endowment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or
(2) Imposing any disability, or conferring any privilege, on account
of religious belief; or
(3) Abrogating or derogating from the right to establish or maintain
any place of denominational education or any denominational
institution or charity; or
(4) Prejudicially affecting the right of any child to attend a school
receiving public money without attending the religious instruction at
that school; or
(5) Impairing, without either the leave of Her Majesty in Council
first obtained on an address presented by the Legislative Body of
Ireland, or the consent of the corporation interested, the rights,
property, or privileges of any existing corporation incorporated by
royal charter or local and general Act of Parliament; or
(6) Imposing or relating to duties of customs and duties of excise, as
defined by this Act, or either of such duties, or affecting any Act
relating to such duties or either of them; or
(7) Affecting this Act, except in so far as it is declared to be
alterable by the Irish Legislature.
[Sidenote: Prerogatives of Her Majesty as to Irish Legislative Body.]
=5.=--Her Majesty the Queen shall have the same prerogatives with respect
to summoning, proroguing, and dissolving the Irish Legislative Body as Her
Majesty has with respect to summoning, proroguing, and dissolving the
Imperial Parliament.
[Sidenote: Duration of the Irish Legislative Body.]
=6.=--The Irish Legislative Body whenever summoned may have continuance
for five years and no longer, to be reckoned from the day on which any
such Legislative Body is appointed to meet.
_Executive Authority._
[Sidenote: Constitution of the Executive Authority.]
=7.=--(1) The Executive Government of Ireland shall continue vested in Her
Majesty, and shall be carried on by the Lord-Lieutenant on behalf of Her
Majesty with the aid of such officers and such Council as to Her Majesty
may from time to time seem fit.
(2) Subject to any instructions which may from time to time be given by
Her Majesty, the Lord-Lieutenant shall give or withhold the assent of Her
Majesty to Bills passed by the Irish Legislative Body, and shall exercise
the prerogatives of Her Majesty in respect of the summoning, proroguing,
and dissolving of the Irish Legislative Body, and any prerogatives the
exercise of which may be delegated to him by Her Majesty.
[Sidenote: Use of Crown lands by Irish Government.]
=8.=--Her Majesty may, by Order in Council, from time to time place under
the control of the Irish Government, for the purposes of that Government,
any such lands and buildings in Ireland as may be vested in or held in
trust for Her Majesty.
_Constitution of Legislative Body._
[Sidenote: Constitution of Irish Legislative Body.]
=9.=--(1) The Irish Legislative Body shall consist of a first and second
order.
(2) The two orders shall deliberate together, and shall vote together,
except that, if any question arises in relation to legislation or to the
Standing Orders or Rules of Procedure or to any other matter in that
behalf in this Act specified, and such question is to be determined by
vote, each order shall, if a majority of the members present of either
order demand a separate vote, give their votes in like manner as if they
were separate Legislative Bodies; and if the result of the voting of the
two orders does not agree the question shall be resolved in the negative.
[Sidenote: First order.]
=10.=--(1) The first order of the Irish Legislative Body shall consist of
one hundred and three members, of whom seventy-five shall be elective
members and twenty-eight peerage members.
(2) Each elective member shall at the date of his election and during his
period of membership be _bonâ fide_ possessed of property which--
(_a_) If realty, or partly realty and partly personalty, yields two
hundred pounds a year or upwards, free of all charges; or--
(_b_) If personalty yields the same income, or is of the capital value
of four thousand pounds or upwards, free of all charges.
For the purpose of electing the elective members of the first order of the
Legislative Body, Ireland shall be divided into the electoral districts
specified in the First Schedule to this Act, and each such district shall
return the number of members in that behalf specified in that Schedule.
(3) The elective members shall be elected by the registered electors of
each electoral district, and for that purpose a register of electors shall
be made annually.
(4) An elector in each electoral district shall be qualified as follows,
that is to say, he shall be of full age, and not subject to any legal
incapacity, and shall have been during the twelve months next preceding
the _twentieth day of July_ in any year the owner or occupier of some land
or tenement within the district of a net annual value of twenty-five
pounds or upwards.
(5) The term of office of an elective member shall be _ten years_.
(6) In every fifth year thirty-seven or thirty-eight of the elective
members, as the case requires, shall retire from office, and their places
shall be filled by election; the members to retire shall be those who have
been members for the longest time without re-election.
(7) The offices of the peerage members shall be filled as follows, that is
to say,--
(_a_) Each of the Irish peers who on the appointed day is one of the
twenty-eight Irish representative peers, shall, on giving his written
assent to the Lord-Lieutenant, become a peerage member of the first
order of the Irish Legislative Body; and if at any time within _thirty
years_ after the appointed day any such peer vacates his office by
death or resignation, the vacancy shall be filled by the election to
that office by the Irish peers of one of their number in manner
heretofore in use respecting the election of Irish representative
peers, subject to adaptation as provided by this Act, and if the
vacancy is not so filled within the proper time, it shall be filled by
the election of an elective member.
(_b_) If any of the twenty-eight peers aforesaid does not within _one
month_ after the appointed day give such assent to be a peerage member
of the first order, the vacancy so created shall be filled up as if he
had assented and vacated his office by resignation.
(8) A peerage member shall be entitled to hold office during his life, or
until the expiration of _thirty years_ from the appointed day, whichever
period is the shortest. At the expiration of such _thirty years_ the
offices of all the peerage members shall be vacated as if they were dead,
and their places shall be filled by elective members qualified and elected
in manner provided by this Act with respect to elective members of the
first order, and such elective members may be distributed by the Irish
Legislature among the electoral districts, so, however, that care shall be
taken to give additional members to the most populous place.
(9) The offices of members of the first order shall not be vacated by the
dissolution of the Legislative Body.
(10) The provisions in the Second Schedule to this Act relating to members
of the first order of the Legislative Body shall be of the same force as
if they were enacted in the body of this Act.
[Sidenote: Second order.]
=11.=--(1) Subject as in this section hereafter mentioned, the second
order of the Legislative Body shall consist of two hundred and four
members.
(2) The members of the second order shall be chosen by the existing
constituencies of Ireland, two by each constituency, with the exception of
the City of Cork, which shall be divided into two divisions in manner set
forth in the Third Schedule to this Act, and two members shall be chosen
by each of such divisions.
(3) Any person who, on the appointed day, is a member representing an
existing Irish constituency in the House of Commons shall, on giving his
written assent to the Lord-Lieutenant, become a member of the second order
of the Irish Legislative Body as if he had been elected by the
constituency which he was representing in the House of Commons. Each of
the members for the City of Cork, on the said day, may elect for which of
the divisions of that city he wishes to be deemed to have been elected.
(4) If any member does not give such written assent within _one month_
after the appointed day, his place shall be filled by election in the same
manner and at the same time as if he had assented and vacated his office
by death.
(5) If the same person is elected to both orders, he shall, within _seven
days_ after the meeting of the Legislative Body, or if the Body is sitting
at the time of the election, within _seven days_ after the election, elect
in which order he will serve, and his membership of the other order shall
be void and be filled by a fresh election.
(6) Notwithstanding anything in this Act, it shall be lawful for the
Legislature of Ireland at any time to pass an Act enabling the Royal
University of Ireland to return not more than two members to the second
order of the Irish Legislative Body in addition to the number of members
above mentioned.
(7) Notwithstanding anything in this Act, it shall be lawful for the Irish
Legislature, after the first dissolution of the Legislative Body which
occurs, to alter the constitution or election of the second order of that
body, due regard being had in the distribution of members to the
population of the constituencies; provided that no alteration shall be
made in the number of such order.
_Finance._
[Sidenote: Taxes and separate Consolidated Fund.]
=12.=--(1) For the purpose of providing for the public service of Ireland,
the Irish Legislature may impose taxes, other than duties of Customs or
Excise as defined by this Act, which duties shall continue to be imposed
and levied by and under the direction of the Imperial Parliament only.
(2) On and after the appointed day there shall be an Irish Consolidated
Fund separate from the Consolidated Fund of the United Kingdom.
(3) All taxes imposed by the Legislature of Ireland and all other public
revenues under the control of the Government of Ireland shall, subject to
any provisions touching the disposal thereof contained in any Act passed
in the present session respecting the sale and purchase of land in
Ireland, be paid into the Irish Consolidated Fund, and be appropriated to
the public service of Ireland according to law.
[Sidenote: Annual contributions from Ireland to Consolidated Fund of
United Kingdom.]
=13.=--(1) Subject to the provisions for the reduction or cesser thereof
in this section mentioned, there shall be made on the part of Ireland to
the Consolidated Fund of the United Kingdom the following annual
contributions in every financial year; that is to say,--
(_a_) The sum of _one million four hundred and sixty-six thousand
pounds_ on account of the interest on and management of the Irish
share of the National Debt:
(_b_) The sum of _one million six hundred and sixty-six thousand
pounds_ on account of the expenditure on the army and navy of the
United Kingdom:
(_c_) The sum of _one hundred and ten thousand pounds_ on account of
the Imperial civil expenditure of the United Kingdom:
(_d_) The sum of _one million pounds_ on account of the Royal Irish
Constabulary and the Dublin Metropolitan Police.
(2) During the period of _thirty years_ from this section taking effect
the said annual contributions shall not be increased, but may be reduced
or cease as hereinafter mentioned. After the expiration of the said
_thirty years_ the said contributions shall, save as otherwise provided by
this section, continue until altered in manner provided with respect to
the alteration of this Act.
(3) The Irish share of the National Debt shall be reckoned at _forty-eight
million pounds_ Bank annuities, and there shall be paid in every financial
year on behalf of Ireland to the Commissioners for the Reduction of the
National Debt an annual sum of _three hundred and sixty thousand pounds_,
and the permanent annual charge for the National Debt on the Consolidated
Fund of the United Kingdom shall be reduced by that amount, and the said
annual sum shall be applied by the said Commissioners as a sinking fund
for the redemption of the National Debt, and the Irish share of the
National Debt shall be reduced by the amount of the National Debt so
redeemed, and the said annual contribution on account of the interest on
and management of the Irish share of the National Debt shall from time to
time be reduced by a sum equal to the interest upon the amount of the
National Debt from time to time so redeemed, but that last-mentioned sum
shall be paid annually to the Commissioners for the Reduction of the
National Debt in addition to the above-mentioned annual sinking fund, and
shall be so paid and be applied as if it were part of that sinking fund.
(4) As soon as an amount of the National Debt equal to the said Irish
share thereof has been redeemed under the provisions of this section, the
said annual contribution on account of the interest on and management of
the Irish share of the National Debt, and the said annual sum for a
sinking fund shall cease.
(5) If it appears to Her Majesty that the expenditure in respect of the
army and navy of the United Kingdom, or in respect of Imperial Civil
expenditure of the United Kingdom, for any financial year has been less
than _fifteen_ times the amount of the contributions above named on
account of the same matter, a sum equal to _one-fifteenth_ part of the
diminution shall be deducted from the current annual contribution for the
same matter.
(6) The sum paid from time to time by the Commissioners of Her Majesty's
Woods, Forests, and Land Revenues to the Consolidated Fund of the United
Kingdom on account of the hereditary revenues of the Crown in Ireland
shall be credited to the Irish Government, and go in reduction of the said
annual contribution payable on account of the Imperial Civil expenditure
of the United Kingdom, but shall not be taken into account in calculating
whether such diminution as above mentioned has or has not taken place in
such expenditure.
(7) If it appears to Her Majesty that the expenditure in respect of the
Royal Irish Constabulary and the Dublin Metropolitan Police for any
financial year has been less than the contribution above-named on account
of such constabulary and police, the current contribution shall be
diminished by the amount of such difference.
(8) This section shall take effect from and after the _thirty-first day of
March, one thousand eight hundred and eighty-seven_.
[Sidenote: Collection and application of Customs and Excise duties in
Ireland.]
=14.=--(1) On and after such day as the Treasury may direct all moneys
from time to time collected in Ireland on account of the duties of Customs
or the duties of Excise as defined by this Act shall, under such
regulations as the Treasury from time to time make, be carried to a
separate account (in this Act referred to as the Customs and Excise
account) and applied in the payment of the following sums in priority as
mentioned in this section; that is to say,--
First, of such sum as is from time to time directed by the Treasury in
respect of the costs, charges, and expenses of and incident to the
collection and management of the said duties in Ireland not exceeding
four per cent. of the amount collected there;
Secondly, of the annual contributions required by this Act to be made
to the Consolidated Fund of the United Kingdom;
Thirdly, of the annual sums required by this Act to be paid to the
Commissioners for the Reduction of the National Debt;
Fourthly, of all sums by this Act declared to be payable out of the
moneys carried to the Customs and Excise account;
Fifthly, of all sums due to the Consolidated Fund of the United
Kingdom for interest or sinking fund, in respect of any loans made by
the issue of bank annuities or otherwise to the Government of Ireland
under any Act passed in the present session relating to the purchase
and sale of land in Ireland, so far as such sums are not defrayed out
of the moneys received under such Act.
(2) So much of the moneys carried to a separate account under this section
as the Treasury consider are not, and are not likely to be, required to
meet the above-mentioned payments, shall from time to time be paid over
and applied as part of the public revenues under the control of the Irish
Government.
[Sidenote: Charges on Irish Consolidated Fund.]
=15.=--(1) There shall be charged on the Irish Consolidated Fund in
priority as mentioned in this section:--
First, such portion of the sums directed by this Act to be paid out of
the moneys carried to the Customs and Excise account in priority to
any payment for the public revenues of Ireland, as those moneys are
insufficient to pay;
Secondly, all sums due in respect of any debt incurred by the
Government of Ireland, whether for interest, management, or sinking
fund;
Thirdly, all sums which at the passing of this Act are charged on the
Consolidated Fund of the United Kingdom in respect of Irish services
other than the salary of the Lord-Lieutenant;
Fourthly, the salaries of all judges of the Supreme Court of
Judicature or other Superior Court in Ireland, or of any County or
other like Court, who are appointed after the passing of this Act, and
the pensions of such judges;
Fifthly, any other sums charged by this Act on the Irish Consolidated
Fund.
(2) It shall be the duty of the Legislature of Ireland to impose all such
taxes, duties, or imposts as will raise a sufficient revenue to meet all
sums charged for the time being on the Irish Consolidated Fund.
[Sidenote: Irish Church Fund.]
=16.=--(1) Until all charges which are payable out of the Church property
in Ireland, and are guaranteed by the Treasury, have been fully paid, the
Irish Land Commission shall continue as heretofore to exist, with such
Commissioners and officers receiving such salaries as the Treasury may
from time to time appoint, and to administer the Church property and apply
the income and other moneys receivable therefrom; and so much of the
salaries of such Commissioners and officers and expenses of the office as
is not paid out of the Church property shall be paid out of moneys carried
to the Customs and Excise account under this Act, and if these moneys are
insufficient, out of the Consolidated Fund of Ireland, and if not so paid,
shall be paid out of the moneys provided by Parliament. Provided as
follows:--
(_a_) All charges on the Church property for which a guarantee has
been given by the Treasury before the passing of this Act shall, so
far as they are not paid out of such property, be paid out of the
moneys carried to the Customs and Excise account under this Act, and
if such moneys are insufficient, the Consolidated Fund of Ireland,
without prejudice nevertheless to the guarantee of the Treasury;
(_b_) All charges on the Church property, for which no guarantee has
been given by the Treasury before the passing of this Act shall be
charged on the Consolidated Fund of Ireland, but shall not be
guaranteed by the Treasury nor charged on the Consolidated Fund of the
United Kingdom.
(2) Subject to any existing charges on the Church property, such property
shall belong to the Irish Government and any portion of the annual revenue
thereof which the Treasury, on the application of the Irish Government,
certify at the end of any financial year not to be required for meeting
charges, shall be paid over and applied as part of the public revenues
under the control of the Irish Government.
(3) As soon as all charges on the Church property guaranteed by the
Treasury have been paid, such property may be managed and administered,
and subject to existing charges thereon disposed of, and the income or
proceeds thereof applied, in such manner as the Irish Legislature may from
time to time direct.
[Sidenote: 32 & 33 Vict. c. 42.]