remains a full counterpoise to the manufacturing and commercial element.
Agricultural England is not what Pericles called Attica, a mere suburban
garden, the embellishment of a queenly city. It is a substantive
interest and a political power. In the time of Charles I. it happened
that, owing to the great quantity of land thrown into the market in
consequence of the confiscation of the monastic estates, which had
slipped through the fingers of the spendthrift courtiers to whom they
were at first granted, small freeholders were very numerous in the
South, and these men like the middle class in the towns, being strong
Protestants, went with the Parliament against the Laudian reaction in
religion. But land in the hands of great proprietors is Conservative,
especially when it is held under entails and connected with hereditary
nobility; and into the hands of great proprietors the land of England
has now entirely passed. The last remnant of the old yeomen freeholders
departed in the Cumberland Statesmen, and the yeoman freeholder in
England is now about as rare as the other. Commerce has itself assisted
the process by giving birth to great fortunes, the owners of which are
led by social ambition to buy landed estates, because to land the odour
of feudal superiority still clings, and it is almost the necessary
qualification for a title. The land has also actually absorbed a large
portion of the wealth produced by manufactures, and by the general
development of industry; the estates of Northern landowners especially
have enormously increased in value, through the increase of population,
not to mention the not inconsiderable appropriation of commercial wealth
by marriage. Thus the Conservative element retains its predominance, and
it even seems as though the land of Milton, Vane, Cromwell, and the
Reformers of 1832, might after all become, politically as well as
territorially, the domain of a vast aristocracy of landowners, and the
most reactionary instead of the most progressive country in Europe.
Before the repeal of the Corn Laws there was a strong antagonism of
interest between the landowning aristocracy and the manufacturers of the
North, but that antagonism is now at an end; the sympathy of wealth has
taken its place; the old aristocracy has veiled its social pride and
learned to conciliate the new men, who on their part are more than
willing to enter the privileged circle. This junction is at present the
great fact of English politics, and was the main cause of the overthrow
of the Liberal Government in 1874. The growth of the great cities itself
seems likely, as the number of poor householders increases, to furnish
Reaction with auxiliaries in the shape of political Lazzaroni capable of
being organized by wealth in opposition to the higher order of workmen
and the middle class. In Harrington's "Oceana," there is much nonsense,
but it rises at least to the level of Montesquieu in tracing the
intimate connection of political power, even under elective
institutions, with wealth in land.
Hitherto, the result of the balance between the landowning and
commercial elements has been steadiness of political progress, in
contrast on the one hand to the commercial republics of Italy, whose
political progress was precocious and rapid but shortlived, and on the
other hand to great feudal kingdoms where commerce was comparatively
weak. England, as yet, has taken but few steps backwards. It remains to
be seen what the future may bring under the changed conditions which we
have just described. English commerce, moreover, may have passed its
acme. Her insular position gave Great Britain during the Napoleonic
wars, with immunity from invasion, a monopoly of manufactures and of the
carrying trade. This element of her commercial supremacy is transitory,
though others, such as the possession of coal, are not.
Let us now consider the effects of the division between the two islands
and of those between different parts of the larger island. The most
obvious effect of these is tardy consolidation, which is still indicated
by the absence of a collective name for the people of the three
kingdoms. The writer was once rebuked by a Scotchman for saying
"England" and "English," instead of saying "Great Britain" and
"British." He replied that the rebuke was just, but that we must say
"British and Irish." The Scot had overlooked his poor connections.
We always speak of Anglo-Saxons and identify the extension of the
Colonial Empire with that of the Anglo-Saxon race. But even if we assume
that the Celts of England and of the Scotch Lowlands were exterminated
by the Saxons, taking all the elements of Celtic population in the two
islands together, they must bear a very considerable proportion to the
Teutonic element. That large Irish settlements are being formed in the
cities of Northern England is proved by election addresses coquetting
with Home Rule. In the competition of the races on the American
Continent the Irish more than holds its own. In the age of the steam-
engine the Scotch Highlands, the mountains of Cumberland and
Westmoreland, of Wales, of Devonshire, and Cornwall, are the asylum of
natural beauty, of poetry and hearts which seek repose from the din and
turmoil of commercial life. In the primaeval age of conquest they, with
seagirt Ireland, were the asylum of the weaker race. There the Celt
found refuge when Saxon invasion swept him from the open country of
England and from the Scotch Lowlands. There he was preserved with his
own language, indicating by its variety of dialects the rapid flux and
change of unwritten speech; with his own Christianity, which was that of
Apostolic Britain; with his un-Teutonic gifts and weaknesses, his
lively, social, sympathetic nature, his religious enthusiasm,
essentially the same in its Calvinistic as in its Catholic guise, his
superstition, his clannishness, his devotion to chiefs and leaders, his
comparative indifference to institutions, and lack of natural aptitude
for self-government.
The further we go in these inquiries the more reason there seems to be
for believing that the peculiarities of races are not congenital, but
impressed by primaeval circumstance. Not only the same moral and
intellectual nature, but the same primitive institutions, are found in
all the races that come under our view; they appear alike in Teuton,
Celt, and Semite. That which is not congenital is probably not
indelible, so that the less favoured races, placed under happier
circumstances, may in time be brought to the level of the more favoured,
and nothing warrants inhuman pride of race. But it is surely absurd to
deny that peculiarities of race, when formed, are important factors in
history. Mr. Buckle, who is most severe upon the extravagances of the
race theory, himself runs into extravagances not less manifest in a
different direction. He connects the religious character of the
Spaniards with the influence of apocryphal volcanoes and earthquakes,
whereas it palpably had its origin in the long struggle with the Moors.
He, in like manner, connects the theological tendencies of the Scotch
with the thunderstorms which he imagines (wrongly, if we may judge by
our own experience) to be very frequent in the Highlands, whereas Scotch
theology and the religious habits of the Scotch generally were formed in
the Lowlands and among the Teutons, not among the Celts.
The remnant of the Celtic race in Cornwall and West Devon was small, and
was subdued and half incorporated by the Teutons at a comparatively
early period; yet it played a distinct and a decidedly Celtic part in
the Civil War of the seventeenth century. It played a more important
part towards the close of the following century by giving itself almost
in a mass to John Wesley. No doubt the neglect of the remote districts
by the Bishops of Exeter and their clergy left Wesley a clear field; but
the temperament of the people was also in his favour. Anything fervent
takes with the Celt, while he cannot abide the religious compromise
which commends itself to the practical Saxon.
In the Great Charter there is a provision in favour of the Welsh, who
were allied with the Barons in insurrection against the Crown. The
Barons were fighting for the Charter, the Welshmen only for their
barbarous and predatory independence. But the struggle for Welsh
independence helped those who were struggling for the Charter; and the
remark may be extended in substance to the general influence of Wales on
the political contest between the Crown and the Barons. Even under the
House of Lancaster, Llewellyn was faintly reproduced in Owen Glendower.
The powerful monarchy of the Tudors finally completed the annexation.
But isolation survived independence. The Welshman remained a Celt and
preserved his language and his clannish spirit, though local magnates,
such as the family of Wynn, filled the place in his heart once occupied
by the chief. Ecclesiastically he was annexed, but refused to be
incorporated, never seeing the advantage of walking in the middle path
which the State Church of England had traced between the extremes of
Popery and Dissent. He took Methodism in a Calvinistic and almost wildly
enthusiastic form. In this respect his isolation is likely to prove far
more important than anything which Welsh patriotism strives to
resuscitate by Eisteddfodds. In the struggle, apparently imminent,
between the system of Church Establishments and religious equality,
Wales furnishes a most favourable battle-ground to the party of
Disestablishment.
The Teutonic realm of England was powerful enough to subdue, if not to
assimilate, the remnants of the Celtic race in Wales and their other
western hills of refuge. But the Teutonic realm of Scotland was not
large or powerful enough to subdue the Celts of the Highlands, whose
fastnesses constituted in geographical area the greater portion of the
country. It seems that in the case of the Highlands, as in that of
Ireland, Teutonic adventurers found their way into the domain of the
Celts and became chieftains, but in becoming chieftains they became
Celts. Down to the Hanoverian times the chain of the Grampians which
from the Castle of Stirling is seen rising like a wall over the rich
plain, divided from each other two nationalities, differing totally in
ideas, institutions, habits, and costume, as well as in speech, and the
less civilized of which still regarded the more civilized as alien
intruders, while the more civilized regarded the less civilized as
robbers. Internally, the topographical character of the Highlands was
favourable to the continuance of the clan system, because each clan
having its own separate glen, fusion was precluded, and the progress
towards union went no further than the domination of the more powerful
clans over the less powerful. Mountains also preserve the general
equality and brotherhood which are not less essential to the
constitution of the clan than devotion to the chief, by preventing the
use of that great minister of aristocracy, the horse. At Killiecrankie
and Prestonpans the leaders of the clan and the humblest clansman still
charged on foot side by side. Macaulay is undoubtedly right in saying
that the Highland risings against William III. and the first two Georges
were not dynastic but clan movements. They were in fact the last raids
of the Gael upon the country which had been wrested from him by the
Sassenach. Little cared the clansman for the principles of Filmer or
Locke, for the claims of the House of Stuart or for those of the House
of Brunswick. Antipathy to the Clan Campbell was the nearest approach to
a political motive. Chiefs alone, such as the unspeakable Lovat, had
entered as political _condottieri_ into the dynastic intrigues of
the period, and brought the claymores of their clansmen to the standard
of their patron, as Indian chiefs in the American wars brought the
tomahawks of their tribes to the standard of France or England. Celtic
independence greatly contributed to the general perpetuation of anarchy
in Scotland, to the backwardness of Scotch civilization, and to the
abortive weakness of the Parliamentary institutions. Union with the more
powerful kingdom at last supplied the force requisite for the taming of
the Celt. Highlanders, at the bidding of Chatham's genius, became the
soldiers, and are now the pet soldiers, of the British monarchy. A
Hanoverian tailor with improving hand shaped the Highland plaid, which
had originally resembled the simple drapery of the Irish kern, into a
garb of complex beauty, well suited for fancy balls. The power of the
chiefs and the substance of the clan system were finally swept away,
though the sentiment lingers, even in the Transatlantic abodes of the
clansmen, and is prized, like the dress, as a remnant of social
picturesqueness in a prosaic and levelling age. The hills and lakes--at
the thought of which even Gibbon shuddered--are the favourite retreats
of the luxury which seeks in wildness refreshment from civilization.
After Culloden, Presbyterianism effectually made its way into the
Highlands, of which a great part had up to that time been little better
than heathen; but it did not fail to take a strong tinge of Celtic
enthusiasm and superstition.
Of all the lines of division in Great Britain, the most important
politically has been that which is least clearly traced by the hand of
nature. The natural barriers between England and Scotland were not
sufficient to prevent the extension of the Saxon settlements and
kingdoms across the border. In the name of the Scotch capital we have a
monument of a union before that of 1603. That the Norman Conquest did
not include the Saxons of the Scotch Lowlands was due chiefly to the
menacing attitude of Danish pretenders, and the other military dangers
which led the Conqueror to guard himself on the north by a broad belt of
desolation. Edward I., in attempting to extend his feudal supremacy over
Scotland, may well have seemed to himself to have been acting in the
interest of both nations, for a union would have put an end to border
war, and would have delivered the Scotch in the Lowlands from the
extremity of feudal oppression, and the rest of the country from a
savage anarchy, giving them in place of those curses by far the best
government of the time. The resistance came partly from mere barbarism,
partly from Norman adventurers, who were no more Scotch than English,
whose aims were purely selfish, and who would gladly have accepted
Scotland as a vassal kingdom from Edward's hand. But the annexation
would no doubt have formidably increased the power of the Crown, not
only by extending its dominions, but by removing that which was a
support often of aristocratic anarchy in England, but sometimes of
rudimentary freedom. Had the whole island fallen under one victorious
sceptre, the next wielder of that sceptre, under the name of the great
Edward's wittold son, would have been Piers Gaveston. But what no
prescience on the part of any one in the time of Edward I. could
possibly have foreseen was the inestimable benefit which disunion and
even anarchy indirectly conferred on the whole island in the shape of a
separate Scotch Reformation. Divines, when they have exhausted their
reasonings about the rival forms of Church government, will probably
find that the argument which had practically most effect in determining
the question was that of the much decried but in his way sagacious James
I., "No bishop, no king!" In England the Reformation was semi-Catholic;
in Sweden it was Lutheran; but in both countries it was made by the
kings, and in both Episcopacy was retained. Where the Reformation was
the work of the people, more popular forms of Church government
prevailed. In Scotland the monarchy, always weak, was at the time of the
Reformation practically in abeyance, and the master of the movement was
emphatically a man of the people. As to the nobles, they seem to have
thought only of appropriating the Church lands, and to have been willing
to leave to the nation the spiritual gratification of settling its own
religion. Probably they also felt with regard to the disinherited
proprietors of the Church lands that "stone dead had no fellow." The
result was a democratic and thoroughly Protestant Church, which drew
into itself the highest energies, political as well as religious, of a
strong and great-hearted people, and by which Laud and his confederates,
when they had apparently overcome resistance in England, were as Milton
says, "more robustiously handled." If the Scotch auxiliaries did not win
the decisive battle of Marston Moor, they enabled the English
Parliamentarians to fight and win it. During the dark days of the
Restoration, English resistance to tyranny was strongly supported on the
ecclesiastical side by the martyr steadfastness of the Scotch till the
joint effort triumphed in the Revolution. It is singular and sad to find
Scotland afterwards becoming one vast rotten borough managed in the time
of Pitt by Dundas, who paid the borough-mongers by appointments in
India, with calamitous consequences to the poor Hindoo. But the
intensity of the local evil perhaps lent force to the revulsion, and
Scotland has ever since been a distinctly Liberal element in British
politics, and seems now likely to lead the way to a complete measure of
religious freedom.
Nature to a great extent fore-ordained the high destiny of the larger
island, to at least an equal extent she fore-ordained the sad destiny of
the smaller island. Irish history, studied impartially, is a grand
lesson in political charity; so clear is it that in these deplorable
annals the more important part was played by adverse circumstance, the
less important by the malignity of man. That the stronger nation is
entitled by the law of force to conquer its weaker neighbour and to
govern the conquered in its own interest is a doctrine which civilized
morality abhors; but in the days before civilized morality, in the days
when the only law was that of natural selection, to which philosophy, by
a strange counter-revolution seems now inclined to return, the smaller
island was almost sure to be conquered by the possessors of the larger,
more especially as the smaller, cut off from the Continent by the
larger, lay completely within its grasp. The map, in short, tells us
plainly that the destiny of Ireland was subordinated to that of Great
Britain. At the same time, the smaller island being of considerable size
and the channel of considerable breadth, it was likely that the
resistance would be tough and the conquest slow. The unsettled state of
Ireland, and the half-nomad condition in which at a comparatively late
period its tribes remained, would also help to protract the bitter
process of subjugation; and these again were the inevitable results of
the rainy climate, which, while it clothed the island with green and
made pasture abundant, forbade the cultivation of grain. Ireland and
Wales alike appear to have been the scenes of a precocious civilization,
merely intellectual and literary in its character, and closely connected
with the Church, though including also a bardic element derived from the
times before Christianity, the fruits of which were poetry, fantastic
law-making, and probably the germs of scholastic theology, combined, in
the case of Ireland, with missionary enterprise and such ecclesiastical
architecture as the Round Towers. But cities there were none, and it is
evident that the native Church with difficulty sustained her higher life
amidst the influences and encroachments of surrounding barbarism. The
Anglo-Norman conquest of Ireland was a supplement to the Norman conquest
of England; and, like the Norman conquest of England, it was a religious
as well as a political enterprise. As Hildebrand had commissioned
William to bring the national Church of England into complete submission
to the See of Rome, so Adrian, by the Bull which is the stumbling-block
of Irish Catholics, granted Ireland to Henry upon condition of his
reforming, that is, Romanizing, its primitive and schismatic Church.
Ecclesiastical intrigue had already been working in the same direction,
and had in some measure prepared the way for the conqueror by disposing
the heads of the Irish clergy to receive him as the emancipator of the
Church from the secular oppression and imposts of the chiefs. But in the
case of England, a settled and agricultural country, the conquest was
complete and final; the conquerors formed everywhere a new upper class
which, though at first alien and oppressive, became in time a national
nobility, and ultimately blended with the subject race. In the case of
Ireland, though the Septs were easily defeated by the Norman soldiery,
and the formal submission of their chiefs was easily extorted, the
conquest was neither complete nor final. In their hills and bogs the
wandering Septs easily evaded the Norman arms. The Irish Channel was
wide; the road lay through North Wales, long unsubdued, and, even when
subdued, mutinous, and presenting natural obstacles to the passage of
heavy troops; the centre of Anglo-Norman power was far away in the
south-east of England, and the force of the monarchy was either
attracted to Continental fields or absorbed by struggles with baronial
factions. Richard II., coming to a throne which had been strengthened
and exalted by the achievements of his grandfather, seems in one of his
moods of fitful ambition to have conceived the design of completing the
conquest of Ireland, and he passed over with a great power; but his fate
showed that the arm of the monarchy was still too short to reach the
dependency without losing hold upon the imperial country. As a rule, the
subjugation of Ireland during the period before the Tudors was in effect
left to private enterprise, which of course confined its efforts to
objects of private gain, and never thought of undertaking the systematic
subjugation of native fortresses in the interest of order and
civilization. Instead of a national aristocracy the result was a
military colony or Pale, between the inhabitants of which and the
natives raged a perpetual border war, as savage as that between the
settlers at the Cape and the Kaffirs, or that between the American
frontierman and the Red Indian. The religious quarrel was and has always
been secondary in importance to the struggle of the races for the land.
In the period following the conquest it was the Pale that was
distinctively Romanist; but when at the Reformation the Pale became
Protestant the natives, from antagonism of race, became more intensely
Catholic, and were drawn into the league of Catholic powers on the
Continent, in which they suffered the usual fate of the dwarf who goes
to battle with the giant. By the strong monarchy of the Tudors the
conquest of Ireland was completed with circumstances of cruelty
sufficient to plant undying hatred in the breasts of the people. But the
struggle for the land did not end there, instead of the form of conquest
it took that of confiscation, and was waged by the intruder with the
arms of legal chicane. In the form of eviction it has lasted to the
present hour; and eviction in Ireland is not like eviction in England,
where great manufacturing cities receive and employ the evicted; it is
starvation or exile. Into exile the Irish people have gone by millions,
and thus, though neither maritime nor by nature colonists, they have had
a great share in the peopling of the New World. The cities and railroads
of the United States are to a great extent the monuments of their
labour. In the political sphere they have retained the weakness produced
by ages of political serfage, and are still the _debris_ of broken
clans, with little about them of the genuine republican, apt blindly to
follow the leader who stands to them as a chief, while they are
instinctively hostile to law and government as their immemorial
oppressors in their native land. British statesmen, when they had
conceded Catholic emancipation and afterwards Disestablishment, may have
fancied that they had removed the root of the evil. But the real root
was not touched till Parliament took up the question of the land, and
effected a compromise which may perhaps have to be again revised before
complete pacification is attained.