At the present moment no county or borough in the three southern
provinces of Ireland returns a Unionist member. There are substantial
minorities in many places, but very few in which there would be any
chance of a successful contest. The University of Dublin sends two
conspicuous Unionists to Parliament, who represent not only a
constituency of graduates, but the vast majority of educated and
thinking people. The bearing of the question on religious interests will
be dealt with by others, but it may be said here that the Protestant
community is Unionist. The exceptions are few, and are much more than
counter-balanced by the Roman Catholic opponents of Home Rule, who for
obvious reasons are less outspoken, but are quite as anxious to avert
the threatened revolution.
The great bone of contention has always been the land, the cause of
various wars and of ceaseless civil disputes. Parnell saw and said that
purely political Nationalism was weak by itself, and he took up the land
question to get leverage. For many years it has been evident that the
only feasible solution was to convert occupiers into owners, and a very
long step was made by the Purchase Act of 1903. Progress has now been
arrested, for the Act of 1909 does not work. The vendors or expropriated
owners, whichever is the more correct term, are expected to take a lower
price and to be paid in depreciated paper. The minorities to be most
immediately affected by legislation consist of landlords who are unable,
though willing, to sell, and of tenants who are unable but very anxious
to buy. The present deadlock is disastrous, for many tenants think they
ought not to pay more than their neighbours, and demand reductions of
rent without considering that the owner has received no part of his
capital and dares not destroy the basis on which he hopes to be
ultimately paid. It has been an essential part of the purchase policy
that the instalment due by the occupier to recoup the State advance
should be less than the rent. This has been made possible by the magic
of British credit, and if that is withheld the confusion in Ireland will
be worse than ever. The Exchequer has lost little or nothing, and even
at much greater cost it would be the cheapest money that England ever
spent. More than half the tenanted land has now passed to the occupiers,
and it would be the most cruel injustice to leave the remaining
landlords without power either to sell their property or to collect
rents judicially fixed and refixed. They would fare badly with an Irish
legislature and an Irish executive. They are, for the most part, poor
but loyal men, and have exercised a great civilising influence. Are they
to be deserted and ruined to keep an English party in place by the votes
of men who have never pretended to be anything but England's enemies?
Irish Unionists laugh at the idea of a local Parliament being kept
subordinate. It will have the power of making laws for everything Irish,
that is, for everything that immediately concerns those that live in
Ireland. There will be ceaseless efforts to enlarge its sphere of
action, and if Irish members continue to sit at Westminster they will be
as troublesome as ever there. If there are to be no Irish members
Ireland will be a separate nation. Even candid Home Rulers confess that
statutory safeguards would be of none effect. Hedged in by British
bayonets the Lord Lieutenant may exercise his veto, but upon whose
advice will he do it? If on that of an Irish Ministry the minority will
have no protection at all, and does any one suppose it possible to go
back to the practice of the seventeenth century, when all Irish Bills
were settled in the English Privy Council, and could not be altered in a
Dublin Parliament? Orators declaim about our lost legislature, but they
take good care not to say what it was. In the penultimate decade of the
eighteenth century the trammels were taken off, and a Union was soon
found necessary. During the short interval of Independence there were
two French invasions and a bloody rebellion. Protestant ascendency,
though used as a catchword, is a thing long past. Roman Catholic
ascendency would be a very real thing under Home Rule. The supremacy of
the Imperial Parliament alone makes both the one and the other
impossible.
If a legislature is established it must be given the means of enforcing
its laws. We do not know what the present Government propose to do with
the Irish police, but whatever the law says in practice, they will be
under the local executive. Unpopular people will not be protected, and
many of them will be driven out of the country. Parliamentary Home
Rulers draw rosy pictures of the future Arcadia; but they will not be
able to fulfil their own prophecies. Apart from the agrarian question,
there is the party of revolutionists in Ireland whose headquarters are
in America. They have furnished the means for agitation, and will look
for their reward. The Fenian party has less power in the United States
than it used to have, but there will be congenial work to do in Ireland.
A violent faction can be kept in order where there is a strong
government, but in a Home Rule Ireland it would not be strong for any
such purpose. Appeals to cupidity and envy would find hearers, and there
could be no effective resistance. The French Jacobins were a minority
but they swept all before them. In the end better counsels might
prevail, but the mischief done would be great, and much of it
irreparable.
The justice dealt out by the superior courts in Ireland is as good as it
is anywhere. A judge in the last resort has the whole force of the State
behind him, and no one dreams of resistance. With an Irish Parliament
and an Irish Executive this would hardly be the case. The judges would
still be lawyers, but their power would be greatly impaired. In Ireland
popular feeling is always against creditors, and it would be very hard
indeed either to execute a writ of ejectment or a seizure of goods. If
the sanction of the law is weakened, public respect for it is lessened,
and the result will be a general relaxation of the bonds which draw
society together. There is nothing in the antecedents of the Home Rule
Party to make one suppose that it contains the materials of a good and
impartial government.
Home Rule politicians are talkative and pertinacious. As members of
Parliament they are of course listened to, while Unionists outside
Ulster make little noise; it is, therefore, constantly said that they
acquiesce in the inevitable change. Unrepresented men cannot easily make
themselves heard, but they have done what they could. An enormous
meeting has been held in Dublin, and the building, which contains some
7000, was filled in a quarter of an hour. There has since been a large
gathering of young men who wish to remain full citizens of the Empire in
which they were born, and others are to follow. In rural districts it is
almost impossible to collect people in winter. Days are short and
distances are long. Unionist farmers cannot forget the outrages that
prevailed some years ago, and are not yet unknown. In the native land of
boycotting and cattle-driving it is not surprising that they do not wish
to be conspicuous. The difficulty extends to the towns, in many of which
it would be almost impossible to hire a room for Unionist purposes.
Hotel keepers object to risking their business and their windows, for a
mob is easily excited to riot on patriotic grounds. Shopkeepers also
have to be cautious in a country which has been wittily described as a
land of liberty where no one can do as he likes, but where every one
must do exactly what everybody else likes. In the summer people can meet
in the open air, and there will, no doubt, be abundant protests from
Southern Unionists. There will then be something definite to talk about.
It is often said that the County Councils have done well, and that
therefore there is no danger in an Irish Parliament, but the two things
are different in kind. County or District Councils, or Boards of
Guardians, are constituted by Acts of the Imperial Parliament to
administer Acts of the same, and are subject to constant supervision by
the Local Government Board, and to the peremptory action of the King's
Bench. A Parliament is by nature supreme within its sphere of action,
and its constant effort would be to enlarge that field. The men who aim
at independence would have the easy part to play, for no one in or out
of Ulster, former Unionist or confirmed Nationalist, would have any
interest in opposing them. In the meantime local councils have taught us
what is likely to happen. Minorities are virtually excluded from them
and from paid places in their gift. Of Protestants holding local office
the great majority are survivals from the old Grand Jury system.
Political discussions are frequent, but they are all among Nationalists.
Intolerance of independent opinion and impatience of criticism are
everywhere noticeable, and the Corporation of Dublin does not show a
good example. It is intolerance of this kind rather than any approach to
religious persecution that Protestants suffer from in the present and
fear for the future.
Men who have something to lose dread the idea of Home Rule, including
farmers who have bought their holdings, but as yet this has not been
allowed time to work. There is a long way between not caring to support
a Nationalist and voting for a Unionist. The chief employers of labour
are mostly for the Union, but few are in a position to help the Unionist
cause effectively, for they have to deal with strike makers and possible
boycotters. When Labour troubles come, Nationalist politicians try to
make out that they are caused by English agitators, and that there would
be none under Home Rule. The probability is all the other way. There
could be nothing in the existence of an Irish Parliament to prevent
English Socialists from crossing the Channel, and some Labour leaders in
England are Irish. We have heard a great deal lately about the union of
the two democracies, and that is the point where they would unite.
Passing from labour to land, which is after all the great interest of
Southern and Western Ireland, the danger is even greater. With the loss
of British credit it would be almost impossible to carry out the plan of
occupying ownership without the grossest injustice, and the mischief
would not stop there. An Irish Government would be poor, but would be
expected to do all and more than all that the united government has
done. At first the gap might be stopped by extravagant super-income tax,
by half-compensated seizures of demesne land, and by penalising the
owners of ground rents and town property. Confiscation is not a
permanent source of wealth, for it soon kills the goose that laid the
golden egg. Then the turn of the large farmer would come.
Most Unionists, and many who call themselves Home Rulers, are satisfied
with the form of government they now have. The country has prospered
wonderfully, and it will continue to prosper if the land purchase system
is carried out to the end in a liberal spirit. The worst danger comes
from the check given to the process by the present Ministry. But the
national feelings of Ireland must not be ignored. Her far-back history,
bad in itself, but represented worse by unscrupulous writers, makes it
necessary to maintain an impartial power above the warring elements. In
a pastoral country people have much time on their hands, and are apt to
spend it in brooding over bygone wrongs. But over the past not Jove
himself hath power, and it is for the future that we are responsible.
From Wellington onwards Ireland has given many great soldiers to the
British Army, and it is the classes from which they spring that it is
now proposed to abandon. Under Home Rule the flag would be a foreign
emblem, useless to protect the weak in Ireland, and perhaps available to
oppress them. England would have cast off her friends and gained none in
exchange. Nothing will conciliate the revolutionary faction in Ireland,
and there is every reason to think that it would become the strongest.
Modern Ireland is the creation of English policy, and many wrong things
were formerly done, but for a long time amends have been making. If
England, from weariness or for the sake of Party advantage, abandons her
supporters, they will have no successors. Ireland will be more
troublesome than ever, and the crime will receive its fitting
punishment.
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