The greater part of the present volume is devoted to showing why this
country should not adopt Home Rule; but it is perhaps worth while for
the ordinary British citizen to ask himself a preliminary question,
namely, why he should be pressed even to consider it. That the
establishment of an Irish Parliament must involve doubtful and
far-reaching consequences is denied by no one. What then is the _primâ
facie_ case which has induced many Englishmen and Scotchmen to think
that it ought to be seriously debated? If we could erase the past and
approach the problem of framing representative institutions in their
most practicable shape for the inhabitants of the United Kingdom, who
would think it wise to crowd into these small Islands two, or, as some
would have it, three, four, or five separate Parliaments, with their
separate elections, their separate sets of ministers and Offices, their
separate party systems, their divergent policies? Distances are, under
modern conditions, so small, our population is so compact, the interests
of its component parts are so intimately fused together, that any device
at all resembling Home Rule would seem at the best cumbersome, costly,
and ineffective; at the worst, perilous to the rights of minorities, the
peace of the country, and the unity of the Kingdom. If, then, these
common-sense considerations are thrust on one side by so many
well-meaning persons, it must surely be because they think that for the
destruction of our existing system there is to be found a compelling
justification in the history of the past:
I am well aware that many of the persons of whom I am thinking profess
to base their approval of Home Rule on purely administrative grounds.
The Parliament of the United Kingdom, they say, is overweighted; it has
more to do than it can manage; we must diminish its excessive burdens;
and we can only do so by throwing them in part upon other and
subordinate assemblies. But this, if it be a reason at all, is certainly
a most insufficient one. Would any human being, anxious merely to give
relief to the House of Commons, adopt so illogical a scheme as one which
involves a provincial Parliament in Ireland, and no provincial
Parliaments anywhere else; which puts Ireland under two Parliaments, and
left the rest of the country under one; which, if Irishmen are to be
admitted to the Imperial Parliament, would give Ireland privileges and
powers denied to England and Scotland, and, if they are to be excluded
from the Imperial Parliament, would deprive Ireland of rights which
surely she ought to possess?
Again, if the "administrative" argument was really more than an ornament
of debate, would any one select Ireland as the administrative district
in which to make trial of the new system? Would any one, in his desire
to relieve the Imperial Parliament of some of its functions, select as
an area of self-government a region where one part is divided against
another by passions, and, if you will, by prejudices, more violent, and
more deeply-rooted than those which afflict any other fraction of the
United Kingdom, choose that other fraction where, and how, you will?
I take it, then, as certain that in the mind of the ordinary British
Home Ruler the justification for Home Rule is not administrative but
historical. He pictures Ireland before the English invasion as an
organised and independent State, happy in the possession of a native
polity which Englishmen have ruthlessly destroyed, now suffering under
laws and institutions forced upon her by the conquerors, suitable it may
be to men of Anglo-Saxon descent, but utterly alien to the genius and
temper of a Celtic population. To him, therefore, Home Rule presents
itself as an act of National restitution.
Personally, I believe this to be a complete misreading of history. It is
not denied--at least I do not deny--that both the English and British
Governments, in their dealings with Ireland have done many things that
were stupid, and some things that were abominable. But among their
follies or their crimes is not to be counted the destruction of any such
State as I have described; for no such State existed. They did not
uproot one type of civilisation in order to plant another. The Ireland
with which England had to deal had not acquired a national organisation,
and when controversialists talk of "restoring" this or that institution
to Ireland, the only institutions that can possibly be "restored" are in
their origin importations from England.
This does not, of course, mean that the English were a superior race
dealing with an inferior one. Indeed, there is, in my view, no sharp
division of race at all. In the veins of the inhabitants of these
Islands runs more than one strain of blood. The English are not simply
Teutonic--still less are the Irish Celtic. We must conceive the
pre-historic inhabitants both of Britain and of Ireland as subject to
repeated waves of invasion from the wandering peoples of the Continent.
The Celt preceded the Teuton; and in certain regions his language still
survives. The Teuton followed him in (as I suppose) far greater numbers,
and his language has become that of a large fraction of the civilised
world. But in no part of the United Kingdom is the Teutonic strain free
from either the Celtic or pre-Celtic strain; nor do I believe that the
Celtic strain has anywhere a predominance such as that which, speaking
very roughly, the Teutonic strain possesses in the East of these
Islands, or the pre-Celtic strain in the West.
There is, therefore, no race frontier to be considered, still less is
there any question of inferiority or superiority. The Irish difficulty,
historically considered, arises in the main from two circumstances. The
first of these, to which I have just referred, is that when England
began to intervene in the welter of Irish inter-tribal warfare, she was
already an organised State, slowly working its way through feudal
monarchy to constitutional freedom. The second is that while the
religious revolution of the sixteenth century profoundly and permanently
affected the larger Island, it left the smaller Island untouched. The
result of the first of these has been that Irish institutions, Irish
laws, Irish forms of local government, and Irish forms of parliamentary
government are necessarily of the English type. The result of the second
has been that while no sharp divisions of race exist, divisions of
religion have too often taken their place; that in the constitutional
struggles of the seventeenth century Ireland was not the partner but the
victim of English factions; and that civil war in its most brutal form,
with the confiscations and penal laws which followed in its train, have
fed, have indeed created, the bitter fiction that Ireland was once a
"nation" whose national life has been destroyed by its more powerful
neighbour.
To all this it will perhaps be replied that even if the general accuracy
of the foregoing statement be admitted (and nothing about Ireland ever
_is_ admitted), it is quite irrelevant to the question of Home Rule;
because what is of importance to practical statesmanship is not what did
actually happen in the past, but what those who live in the present
suppose to have happened. If, therefore, to the imagination of
contemporary Irishmen, Ireland appears a second Poland, statesmen must
act as if the dream were fact.
In such a contention there is some element of truth. But it must be
observed in the first place that dreams, however vivid, are not eternal;
and, in the second place, that while this particular dream endures it
supplies a practical argument against Home Rule, the full force of which
is commonly under-rated. For what are the main constitutional dangers of
creating rival Parliaments in the same State? They are--friction,
collision of jurisdiction, and, in the end, national disintegration. Of
these, friction is scarcely to be avoided. I doubt whether it has been
wholly avoided in any State where the system, either of co-equal or of
subordinate Parliaments, has been thoroughly tried. It certainly was not
avoided in the days past when Ireland had a Parliament of its own. It is
incredible that it should be avoided in the future, however elaborate be
the safeguards which the draughtsman's ingenuity can devise. But
friction, in any case inevitable, becomes a peril to every community
where the rival assemblies can appeal to nationalist sentiment. The sore
gets poisoned. What under happier conditions might be no more than a
passing storm of rhetoric, forgotten as soon as ended, will gather
strength with time. The appetite for self-assertion, inherent in every
assembly, and not likely to be absent from one composed of orators so
brilliantly gifted as the Irish, will take the menacing form of an
international quarrel. The appeal will no longer be to precedents and
statutes, but to patriotism and nationality, and the quarrel of two
Parliaments will become the quarrel of two peoples. What will it avail,
when that time comes, that in 1912 the Irish leaders declared themselves
content with a subordinate legislature? It is their earlier speeches of
a very different tenour that will be remembered; and it will be asked,
with a logic that may well seem irresistible, by what right Irish
"nationality" was ever abandoned by Irish representatives.
On these dangers I do not in this brief note propose to dwell, though it
seems to me insane either to ignore them or to belittle them. The point
on which I desire to insist is that they arise not from the
establishment of a subordinate Parliament alone, nor from the existence
of a "nationalist" sentiment alone, but from the action and reaction of
the sentiment upon the institution, and of the institution upon the
sentiment.
Let me conclude by asking whether Irish history does not support to the
full these gloomy prognostications. The Parliament that came to an end
at the Union was a Parliament utterly antagonistic to anything that now
goes by the name of Irish Nationalism. In every sphere, except the
economic sphere, it represented the forces, political and religious,
which the Irish Nationalist now regards as English and alien, and
against which, for many years, he has been waging bitter warfare. Yet
this Parliament, representing only a small minority of the inhabitants
of Ireland, found its position of subordination intolerable. It chose a
moment of national disaster to assert complete equality, and so used its
powers that at last the Union became inevitable. It is surely no remedy
for the ancient wrongs of Ireland--real, alas! though they were--that we
should compel her again to tread the weary round of constitutional
experiment, and that, in the name of Irish Nationalism, we should again
make her the victim of an outworn English scheme, which has been tried,
which has failed, which has been discarded, and which, in my judgment,
ought never to be revived.