MY POLITICAL OPINIONS
Though I have been engaged in politics all my life, I have deliberately
left my political views, aspirations, and actions to almost the last
chapter in my autobiography. That will seem strange to all except my
most intimate friends, for I know well that the majority of people who
know anything of me regard me as altogether given over to politics.
My reason for assigning so small a place in my memoirs to what has
occupied so much of my life is a double one. In the first place, I was
most anxious not be polemical. Politics are synonymous with strife, and
if I had written a political biography, it would have become the record
of a battle, or rather, of many battles, in which I could hardly have
avoided saying hard things both of living and dead people. But that was
what I most wanted to avoid. The veteran who tells of his old fights is
always apt to become a bore. People who disagree with the view put forth
think him prejudiced and unforgiving, while those who are with him yawn
over a twice-told tale. Further, though I confess to being as deeply
interested and as deeply concerned in politics as ever, I have greatly
enjoyed a rest from strife. To suffer my mind to turn upon the poles of
literature and the humanities is a pure delight. No doubt Marcus
Aurelius in his autobiography says that life is more like a wrestling-
match than a dance. That was like a Stoic. Instead, I can say _ex
animo_ with Mrs. Gamp, "Them that has other natures may think
different! They was born so and can please themselves." Therefore, I have
chosen the point of view of the dance rather than the dust, the oil, and
the sweat of the athlete.
[Illustration: J St Loe Strachey at Newlands Corner Ætat 45]
But though I do not want to fight my political battles over again,
either in regard to Home Rule or the fiscal controversy, I realise that
my readers will, at any rate, expect me to say something about my
political views. Further than that, there are one or two things which,
if unsaid, would undoubtedly give a false impression of the writer of
this book.
The pivot of my politics is a whole-hearted belief in the principles of
Democracy. I mean by this, not devotion to certain abstract principles
or views of communal life which have had placed upon them the label
"Democratic," but a belief in the justice, the convenience, and the
necessity of ascertaining and loyally abiding by the lawfully-expressed
Will of the Majority of the People. By using the phrase "lawfully
expressed" I do not mean to suggest any pretext for evasion. On the
contrary, I use the words in order to prevent and avoid evasion. A good
many people who call themselves Democrats, or believers in the Popular
Will, such, for example, as the leaders of the French Revolution, the
apologists for the Russian Soviet, and the men from whose lips the words
"Proletariat" and "Proletarian" are constantly falling, do not, when it
comes to the point, want to obey the Will of the Majority of the whole
People, but only the majority of a certain arbitrarily selected section
of the people. They are, in fact, willing to recognise the Will of the
People only when this accords with their own will--that is, with what
they believe ought to be the Will of the People. When I use the
expression "the Will of the People lawfully and constitutionally
expressed," I use it to avoid this false democracy.
To put it quite frankly, I am willing to bow to the maxim, "Vox populi,
vox Dei" as long as the "vox populi" is the genuine thing and not
obtained by falsity or fraud, by corruption or coercion.
Though I am prepared to bow loyally to the Will of the People, whether I
personally agree with it or not, I, of course, have a right, nay, a
duty, to do my best to bring the Will of the People in accord with what
I hold to be right, just, and likely to promote the welfare of the
nation. I retain, that is, the right to convert, if I can, a minority
view into a majority view. If any section of the people try to prevent
me from exercising this right of conversion, then I believe that the
sacred right of insurrection arises.
It is possible that it arises also in the attempt to prevent me from
exercising the rights of conscience, that is, the right to think and to
express my views. The rights of conscience are not, in my opinion,
pooled and placed at the command of the majority, as are the
_actions_ and _behaviour_ of the units that make up the State.
The Will of the People even cannot command the minds of men and women.
That region is under an eternal taboo, which even the majority must not
attempt to violate. If they do make the attempt, they must expect
resistance. Christ taught us to "render unto Caesar the things that are
Caesar's," but a man's conscience is not one of Caesar's perquisites.
So much for the abstract basis of Democracy. Of the convenience of
following out and obeying the Democratic principle I have as little
doubt as I have of the moral obligation involved. What, in my view, is
wanted in the State is homogeneity. Such homogeneity, or, shall I call
it completeness of the admixture of the elements which constitute the
State, is essential. The fullest and strongest sanction for the laws is
the security of a State, and where can you get a sanction fuller and
stronger than the Will of the Majority?
The point is best seen in a simple illustration. Suppose that among
seven people in a railway carriage the question arises as to whether the
window is to be put up or down. As it must be settled one way or the
other, if order is to be preserved, the only just way is to go by the
Will of the Majority. If five people want it shut and only two want it
open, the will of the five must prevail. That, of course, does not prove
that the five have given a sound decision from the hygienic point of
view. They have, however, come to a settlement, and it is obvious that
the maximum of convenience rests in respecting that settlement. It has
the superior physical power behind it. If, however, any gentleman or
lady in the carriage can give a discourse upon the advantage of fresh
air, which will bring over three of those who originally voted in the
majority, then the policy can be changed.
With these views, it is no wonder that I have always found it impossible
to feel much sympathy with the people who say that Democracy is on its
trial and must be judged, like any other form of government, by its
results. This either means too much or too little. No doubt it may be
argued that, if the Will of the People properly expressed was to elect a
single man as dictator and invest him with the power of deciding in all
matters of detail, you might still have a Democracy, though it looked
like a Monarchy. But these are abstract points. For practical purposes
in a European community there can, in my opinion, be no doubt as to the
convenience of basing, in the last resort, your system of government
upon the Will of the People, as it is based, in theory, at any rate, in
England and in America.
I admit, however, that when you come to apply your principles in
practice the problem alters. Nothing is more obvious in our great modern
communities than the fact that the people cannot rule themselves
directly. Though they could meet in the Agora of Athens and decide the
fate of the Athenian Republic, or in the meadow of the Gemeinde at
Appenzell, or any of the other small Swiss cantons, in a country with
even only a couple of million of people, you must rely on the
Representative System. In other words, though the many must will the
direction in which the State shall move, it is only the few who can make
that will executive.
Now comes the difficulty. As the advocates of Proportional
Representation have been telling us for so many years, the
Representative System may actually place the control of the Government
in the hands of a minority. Again, though men may be elected to do one
thing, they may in practice do another. Representative assemblies are
often swayed, not merely by the voice of the orator, but, what is even a
more serious matter, by the voice of the minority. Also, as Mill pointed
out, under the party system applied to the Representative System, you
are liable to be ruled not by a majority, but by a majority of a
majority. Your Parliament is split up into two parties--the lefts and
the rights. The lefts are not completely homogeneous. Therefore they
have to decide on their course of action by a vote within their party.
But if the party is nearly divided, it may well be that the majority of
the majority is a small minority of the whole. But things are even worse
than that when party loyalty is maintained, as is usually the case.
Then, a minority within the lefts may be so powerful through its
persistency, or, again, through its fanatical obsession on a particular
point, that it is able to force a majority within the party to act in
the particular way the minority wants. In short, there are a dozen
different ways, under a Representative System, of making operative, not
the Will of the Majority of the People, but the Will of a Minority.
It is because of this that since the Anglo-Saxon peoples have had
representative institutions they have sought some system under which the
people as a whole could exercise a veto on the legislative vagaries of
their "deputies" or "select men." The people, in moments of tension,
have yearned for the right to veto the work of their representatives
when such work is obviously based upon the decision of a minority. The
only substantial result of that yearning in Great Britain up till now
has been the _ad hoc_ General Election.
At the time of the destruction of the Monarchy of Charles I, the Army of
the Commonwealth, a very democratic body, actually demanded the
Referendum, or Poll of the People, for all important changes in the
Constitution. Their descendants in the United States, though they did
not insert the Popular Veto in the Federal Constitution, have in each
State decreed that all fundamental legislation, _i.e._, all changes
in the Constitution, shall be passed subject to the veto of the whole
mass of the electors. Switzerland is generally regarded as the home of
the Referendum, though in reality that honour belongs to the individual
States of the American Union. In Switzerland every Federal Act is either
submitted _automatically_ or else is submittable "on demand," to
the veto of the People.
Favouring, as I do, real Democracy, and so believing that the Will of
the People alone should prevail, and that we should get complete and
unchallengeable sanction for the laws, I have always regarded the
Referendum, or Poll of the People, as an essential corrective to the
inconveniences and anomalies of the Representative System. The Popular
Veto is, in my view, the essential antiseptic of the Constitutional
Pharmacopeia.
_To put it with brutal plainness, I desire the Referendum in order to
free us from the evils of log-rolling and other exigencies of the kind
which Walt Whitman grouped under the general formula of "the insolence
of elected persons."_
I am told by my horrified Radical friends that my proposal is
politically odious--a Tory device that would stop all reforms. This I
doubt. But if it is really the Will of the People that we should not
have reforms, then we must do without them. Till we can convert the Will
of the People, we must abide by it. Anyway, I have always thought this
objection (which, by the way, is not, as Artemus Ward would say, "writ
sarkastic") an exceedingly illuminating fact. It shows how skin-deep is
the democratic principle in the minds of many men who think themselves
strong Radicals. They do not really believe in submitting to the Will of
the People. They want to do what they think is good for the People, but
they have no true sense of freedom. They do not realise that if you are
to give a man true freedom, you must inevitably give him the right to do
wrong as well as the right to do right. If you do not do that, he is no
freeman, but merely a virtuous slave--a creature, as Dryden said, "tied
up from doing ill." For such compulsory freedom I have no use. I want to
convert people, not to force them, or cajole them. Of course, I cannot
banish force altogether, because if the Will of the Majority is not
obeyed, we shall never arrive anywhere. We shall spend our time in
fruitless and so futile discussions. What we can avoid by the Poll of
the People is coercion by the minority. Curiously enough, the minority,
_teste_ Lenin, seem to have no sentimental objection to coercion.
They fly to it at once. As a rule, however, the show of power is quite
enough when the will of the majority is expressed. So great is the
impact of its declaration that men will not fight against it.
Having got so far, a great many of my readers will, no doubt, rub their
eyes and say, "Why on earth is this man letting forth this torrent of
rather obvious, well-known, elementary, political stuff? It might do for
a Fourth Form in a public school, or for a lecture on the duties of
persons on the new Register of Electors, but one really thought that the
adult citizen had got beyond this sort of thing."
I apologise humbly for being so elementary; but, after all, I have an
excuse. It seems to me that the real danger of the moment is minority
rule. Therefore, though all I have said may be condemned as unoriginal,
I hold it worthwhile to bring people's minds back to the fact that they
are in danger of minority rule, in spite of the fact that they have the
very strongest moral reasons for refusing to be ruled by a minority.
Perhaps some of us have not yet observed that in almost all countries
the so-called Labour Parties are copying the brutal frankness of Lenin
and Trotsky and saying openly that it is only the Proletariat, or, as
the wiser of them put it, the manual workers who have the right to
decide in what direction the Ship of State shall be steered, and how she
shall be worked on the voyage. Now, though I have no desire to
substitute any other section of the community for the manual workers,
and hold most strongly that such workers have as great a right as
University professors, or members of the Stock Exchange, or even members
of the bureaucracy, to say how we are to be governed, I will never admit
that they have a prerogative right to rule, and that I and other non-
manual workers have only the right to obey. That is, however, the
Proletarian claim. The so-called capitalist or bourgeois is, in effect,
to be outlawed.
In such a context I cannot help thinking of the carman and Uncle Joseph
in _The Wrong Box_. Uncle Joseph makes a remark about the lower
classes, to which the carman replies, "Who are the lower classes? You
are the lower classes yourself!" I claim an inalienable right to be
regarded as one of the people, and I do not mean, if I can help it, to
have that right taken away from me, either by a Cæsarian Dictator, an
Oligarchy of manual workers, a Federation of Trade Unions, Combined
Guild Socialists, or a Soviet of Proletarians.
I will yield anything to the members of these Societies in their
capacity of citizens possessing each the same rights as mine, but I will
yield nothing to them as the possessors of privilege. I hope I shall not
be considered arrogant when I say that I am sure that in the maintenance
of this view I shall find myself with the majority both in England and
in America. But, of course, the rub is, shall we be able to awaken the
Will of the Majority? May not a group of subtle and skilful demagogues,
acting with the manual workers' Oligarchy or the Soviet of Proletarians,
contrive to prevent me and my fellows in the majority coming together?
That, I admit, is a real danger, and that is why I want to amend our
Constitution in such a way as to place in the hands of the People
themselves a right of veto over the work of the House of Commons. I want
legislation of a vital description referred to a Poll of the People.
Needless to say, I do not want to see every petty Bill referred to the
people, but I do want all laws affecting great issues to obtain the
popular sanction. Let Bills be discussed and threshed out in Parliament,
and then put to the people with this question, "Do you or do you not
desire that this Act shall come into operation? Those in favour of the
Act will mark their papers 'Yes'; those against it will mark their
papers 'No.'" In my opinion, we shall not be safe from minority rule
until we get this acknowledgment of the right of the people to say the
final word. Let us loyally obey the will of the majority, but let us be
sure that it is the majority.
I have been at pains to make my position clear on the point of
Democracy, but being a whole-hearted believer in the Democratic
principle does not, of course, prevent one having strong views on
specific and particular points of policy, or having affinities with
particular schools of political thought. By inclination and conviction I
belong to the Moderates. Whether they are called Independents, or Whigs,
or men of the Left Centre, or Anti-revolutionaries, does not greatly
matter. I prefer the Whig variety when the Whigs were at their best,
that is, in the days of the Revolution of 1688, the days of Halifax and
Somers. No doubt the Whigs, like every other party, became corrupted by
too easy and too prolonged possession of power, for power, when it is
too easily attained and too securely held, is a great corrupter. Lord
Halifax gives a description of The Trimmer, by which term he meant, of
course, not a man of vacillation or timidity, but the man who
deliberately "trims" the boat of State and endeavours to keep her on an
even keel. When he sees that there are too many people, or too much
cargo, on one side, with the result that the boat is heeling over, he
trims her by throwing his weight, or his portmanteaus, to the other
side. The trimmer does not want to stop the progress of the boat, but he
wants her progress to be safe and not risky. He does not object to
things being done, but he does object to them being done in a wrong way,
or in an ineffective way. But, though the true Whig is a man of
compromise, he is not afraid of working for specific objects of which he
approves, in company with people who perhaps disagree with him on
fundamentals. He makes no lepers in politics, except of those who favour
corruption and demoralisation; but will work honestly for a good cause
with any honest man, no matter what his abstract opinions. For example,
I have always loved the old saying about the Whigs and the Republicans.
The Whig leader says to the Radical extremist, "You want to go the whole
way to Windsor. We want to go only half-way; but, at any rate, we can
keep together as far as Hounslow."
The mention of Monarchy suggests a word or two about my own personal
position on a point which, though not now of practical importance, may
conceivably become so in the near future. I am one of those people who
might without error be described as a theoretical Republican and a
practical Constitutional Monarchist. I feel that in theory nobody could
in these days set up an hereditary Constitutional Monarchy. At the same
time, there are a great number of practical advantages in a limited and
Constitutional Monarchy, and when it exists only fools and pedants would
get rid of it. We possess, in fact, all the advantages of a Republic and
also all the advantages of a Monarchy, and these are by no means small.
In a word, I have always agreed with Burke on this matter. Burke,
quoting from Bolingbroke, says somewhere--I forget where for the
moment, but I think in one of his Speeches in the House of Commons--that
he prefers a Monarchy to a Republic for the following reason: "It is
much easier to engraft the advantages of a Republic upon a Monarchy than
it is to engraft the advantages of a Monarchy upon a Republic." That is
obviously true, though I admit that the drafters of the American
Constitution made an attempt--in some ways very successful--to implant
some of the advantages of a Monarchy upon their Republic. The reason
behind the aphorism of "Burke out of Bolingbroke" is obvious. The stock
on which the graft is made is not the thing which you wish to fructify.
It is the inactive base. Constitutional Monarchy is just the stock you
want. In the first place, it is permanent--that is, its roots are in the
ground. But though the stock does not need to be changed, you can change
and renew your graft as much and as often as you like. You get through
the Monarchy stability and continuity, and you can make as much or as
little of your Monarch as occasion requires. If he is a specially
vicious or untrustworthy man, you can get rid of him. If he is an
imbecile, you can, have a Regency. If he is a nonentity, you can,
through the Constitutional principle that the King reigns but does not
govern, see that your system is not interfered with. If, on the other
hand, the King is a sensible man with a high sense of public duty and of
fine personal character, as, for example, the present occupant of the
Throne, there gradually grows up a power and influence in the State
which is of the very greatest use. The King gets for the whole nation a
position analogous to that which the permanent official gets in a great
Department of State. He has not the power of the Secretary of State, but
his knowledge and experience give him immense weight. In a word, a
monarch, after fifteen or twenty years of experience, in which he had
seen Ministries go up and down, parties blossom and wither, develops an
instinct for government which is very valuable. He becomes an ideal
adviser for his advisers.
I well remember being immensely struck by the emergence of this point of
view in the speech which Lord Salisbury made in the House of Lords on
the death of Queen Victoria. Without exactly using the phrase, he
described how the Queen advised her advisers. He spoke of the occasions
on which the Queen had tendered her admonitions to the Cabinet, and went
on to say that the Queen knew the English people so thoroughly and so
sympathetically, and had such an instinct for interpreting their wishes,
that it was always with grave anxiety and doubt that her Ministers
refrained from taking her advice or finally decided to disregard her
warnings on some specific matter of policy, which involved possibilities
of a clash with public opinion.
No one who has studied the law of the Constitution and the history of
its growth can but feel a kind of instinctive awe for the happy series
of accidents, tempered by human wisdom, which has given us the
Constitution we possess. Under the Act of Settlement and the various
Declaratory Statutes regulating the powers of the Monarch and
promulgated at the time of the Revolution of 1688, for example, "The
Bill of Rights," we have a crowned Republic with a royal and hereditary
President. We talk about the King being Sovereign "by Divine Right" and
"by the Grace of God," but, of course, in fact, the King's title is a
purely Parliamentary one, and is derived from an Act of Parliament--an
Act of Parliament which settles the Throne upon "the heirs of the body
of the Electress Sophia," who shall join in communion with the Church of
England and who shall not be a member of the Roman Catholic Church or
intermarry with a Roman Catholic.
Therefore, when the Sovereign dies and a new Sovereign succeeds, he
succeeds in virtue of an Act of Parliament, and in no other way. He is
the choice of the people. The repeal of the Act of Settlement would put
another man in his place, and, again, an amendment of the Act of
Settlement might secure the selection of some other member of the Royal
Family, instead of the person previously designated to succeed by the
Act of Settlement.
But these, of course, are legal technicalities. The British Monarchy is
an early example of Whiggism. The theory may be pedantic, or, if you
will, ridiculous, but the result is excellent. It is a practical
working-out of the national determination, partly conscious and partly
subconscious, to obtain for our use the best features of a Monarchy and
of a Republic. This, no doubt, would horrify the acute, analytical minds
of the Latin races. Again, the philosophic Teuton would despise it as
incomprehensible. Only those possessed of the Anglo-Saxon temperament by
birth or training--that is, only English-speaking persons, whether
British or American, can appreciate fully the British political and
constitutional system. Indeed, it sometimes has the effect of producing
in foreigners a sense of desperation. Old Mirabeau, surnamed "The Friend
of Man," the father of the great Mirabeau, and a political philosopher
of no mean order, was reduced to a paroxysm of incoherent rage by the
mere contemplation of our Constitution. "Those miserable islanders do
not know, and will not know until their whole wretched system comes to
its inevitable destruction, whether they are living under a Monarchy or
a Republic, a Democracy or an Oligarchy." A wit with a penchant for the
vernacular might well reply, "That's the spirit!" It is this that will
last, while what delights and soothes the well-balanced mind of the
clear-thinking Academicians of the Constitutional Law flaunts and goes
down an unregarded thing. As Sir Thomas Browne said long ago, nations
are not governed by ergotisms (or as we should say syllogisms) but by
instinct and common sense.
Natural parts and good judgments rule the world. States are not governed
by ergotisms. Many have ruled well, who could not, perhaps, define a
commonwealth; and they who understand not the globe of the earth command
a great part of it. Where natural logick prevails not, artificial too
often faileth. Where nature fills the sails, the vessel goes smoothly
on; and when judgment is the pilot, the insurance need not be high.
Though one may be both a Democrat and a Whig, and yet think there is no
better function for the good citizen than to trim the boat, this does
not necessarily mean that one cannot be a party politician. Party, in
spite of all the very obvious objections that can be raised against it,
is, it seems to me, absolutely necessary to representative government.
If you choose out of the body of the population a certain number of men
to rule, those men are sure to have divergent views and aims. As
Stevenson said about our railway system, "Wherever there is competition
there can also be combination." The first instinct of a body of men with
number of divergent opinions is for those who have similar or allied
aims to get together and take combined action. But the moment that has
happened you have got a party system. The party system is, indeed, first
a plain recognition of these facts, and then an organization of the
common will.
As the party system grows and intensifies, it alters its phenomena, but
its essentials are always the same. The main objection to the party
system lies in the closeness and strictness of its organisation. The
best party system is one in which the organisation is not too perfect,
and from which it is comparatively easy to break away. The really bad
party system is that in which a man is caught so tightly and becomes so
deeply involved in party loyalty, or what may be called the freemasonry
side of politics, that he grows into feeling a kind of moral obligation
to stick to his party, right or wrong. Party tends, that is, to become a
kind of horrible parody of patriotism. Oddly enough, the less clear are
the dividing-lines between parties and the less real the distinctions
between the views that they wish to carry out, the more intense the
party spirit seems to become, and the more impossible it is for the
members to break away. Though they disagree at heart with the
proceedings of their leaders and disapprove of the party's action as a
whole, they seem condemned to adhere to the platform.
I remember a luciferous story which was told to me by Colonel John Hay
to illustrate the frenzy of party. A murderer was supposed to have
entered the house of a great Republican politician and, holding a dagger
over him, to have told him that his hour was come and that he must die.
The politician tried every appeal he could think of. "Consider," he
said, "my poor wife and the misery she will feel at my death." "I am
sorry for her, but it cannot be helped. You must die." "But think of my
poor innocent children who will be left helpless orphans." "I am sorry
for them too, but you must die." "Think of the evil effect on the
country at this moment of crisis." "Yes, I know, and I am sorry; but
that cannot move me. You must die." And then came the final appeal, "But
think of the effect on the Republican Party!" Across the would-be
murderer's face came a quiver of irresolution. The dagger dropped from
his hands, and with the cry, "Good heavens! I never thought of that," he
rushed from the room.
But though this is the danger, there is, happily, no need for us to
carry the party system quite so far as that. Party discipline there must
be, but it can be kept well within bounds. Nothing is more wholesome
than for party leaders to know that if they push things too far and too
often ask their followers to condone doubtful acts, their followers will
leave them. Clearly, as the Irishman said of the truth, this spirit of
independence must not be dragged out on every paltry occasion. It must,
however, always remain in the background as a possibility, and, what is
more even those who do not themselves revolt would be well advised to
prevent extreme penal measures being applied within the party to a man
who breaks away on a particular point.
For myself, curiously enough, I never felt any dislike of party, and
was, indeed, I fondly believe, designed by Providence for a good and
loyal party man, with no inconvenient desire to assert my own views. A
perverse fate, however, has forced me twice in my life to break with my
party, or, to put it more correctly, it has twice happened to me that
the party to which I belonged adopted the policy that I had always
deemed it essential to oppose. To begin with, I left the Liberal Party,
to which my family had always belonged ever since the time of the
Commonwealth, over Mr. Gladstone's sudden conversion to Home Rule and
the abandonment of the Legislative Union. Whether I was right or wrong I
am not going to discuss here. At any rate I followed Lord Hartington,
Mr. Chamberlain, Mr. John Bright, the Duke of Argyll, and a host of
other good Liberals and Whigs and became, first a Liberal-Unionist, and
then an unhyphenated Unionist, and a loyal supporter of Lord Salisbury,
Mr. Balfour, and their administration.
In the Unionist Party, which has become quite as thoroughly Democratic
as its opponent, I had hoped to live and die, but unfortunately, there
came the one other question upon which I felt it my duty to take as
strong a line as I did in opposing the very injurious and unjust form of
Home Rule which first Mr. Gladstone, and then Mr. Asquith, advocated.
People who have forgotten, or who are not aware of the actual
conditions, may think it strange that I, who proclaim myself so strongly
in favour of obeying the Will of the Majority, should have become so
strong a Unionist. A little reflection will show, however, that not only
was there nothing contradictory in my attitude, but that it was natural
and inevitable from my democratic premises. I held the Union with
Ireland to be as much an incorporating union as the union between the
several States of the American Republic. I held that the Will of the
Majority must prevail within the United Kingdom. The area in which the
votes were to be counted was, in a word, to be the whole national area,
and not a small portion of it. As I have argued for the last thirty-five
years, in public and in private, and as I still feel, the Home Rule
Question is and always must be a question of area.
The area which I took for the decision, and which I still think was the
right area to give the decision, was the United Kingdom. If any other
were adopted, you might very soon fritter away the whole United Kingdom.
Again, if we are to make a great financial present, as the Irish claim
we must do, from the taxpayer of the centre to the detached fragments of
the circumference, the process becomes a tragedy. If Ireland may go at
the wish of her electors, so, of course, may Scotland, and so may Wales,
each with their subsidy from England. Next, outlying portions of England
may want to break away. The result would be a veritable apotheosis of
political fissiparousness.
In spite of this, I admit that you cannot fight a political battle on
the principle of the _reductio ad absurdum_. The people of England
might hold that for special reasons Ireland would have a right to
separate, but that this must not be a precedent to be applied to the
rest of Britain. Assuming, however, that Ireland shall have exceptional
treatment, I saw, as of course, did many other people, for I am not so
foolish as to make any claim to seeing further than my neighbours, that
the question of area again controlled the event. Ireland was not a
homogeneous country. There were two Irelands--the Ireland of the North
and the Ireland of the South, the Ireland of the Celt and of the Teuton,
and, above all, the Ireland in which Roman Catholics formed a large
majority of the population, and the Ireland in which the Protestants
formed the local majority. In a word, the twenty-six counties of the
South and the six counties of the North differed in every respect.
Neither could justly be put in control of the other; though both might
be united through a Union with England, Scotland, and Wales.
From these premises I drew certain inferences, which I believe to be
entirely sound. One was that you could not say that Ireland, as a whole,
might claim to break away from the United Kingdom, and then refuse the
claim of the Six-County Area to break away from the rest of Ireland.
Arguments against the diversion and disruption of Ireland would be
exactly the same as those used by the Unionists to forbid the
destruction of the United Kingdom. Feeling this, as I did, when Mr.
Gladstone introduced his second Home Rule Bill, I took an early
opportunity of going over to Belfast and ascertaining the facts on the
spot. I was confirmed in my view that there could be no solution of the
Irish Question which would be either just, or reasonable, or efficient,
that did not recognise the existence of the two Irelands--which did not,
in effect, say to the Nationalists, "If you insist on your pound of
flesh and break up an arrangement which has done so much for Ireland as
a whole, that is, the Legislative Union, you must also yield the pound
of flesh to the people of North-East Ulster, a community which does not
want the United Kingdom to be partitioned, any more than you want
Ireland to be partitioned." In this faith I have remained. I believe
that the breaking-up of the Legislative Union with Ireland was bad for
England, bad for Ireland, and bad for the Empire; but if it should be
the Will of the People of the United Kingdom, then that Will could only
be equitably applied by a recognition of the existence of the two
Irelands. Yet this simple fact Liberal party politicians like Mr.
Gladstone, Mr. Asquith, and their followers either absolutely ignored,
or else sapiently admitted that it was a serious difficulty and then
passed on to the purchase of the Southern Irish vote for other purposes!
Perhaps it will be said, "But you are getting away from your main
premise--the Will of the Majority. If it should be the will of the
Majority of the United Kingdom not to recognise the existence of the two
Irelands, you are bound, according to your theory, to submit to that
view." I admit that I may be bound, but I do not believe, and never have
believed, that the people of North-East Ulster are bound. You can turn
Northern Ireland out of the Union if you will, but you have no moral
right to place them under the dominance to which they object--the
dominance of a Dublin Parliament. To do that is to call into existence
that rare but inalienable, right, "the sacred right of insurrection"
against intolerable injustice.
As far as I know, no State has ever yet seriously claimed the right to
deprive any portion of itself of the political status belonging to its
inhabitants, except when compelled to do so by foreign conquerors. That
is why I, though a Majority Democrat, have always felt that the people
of Belfast and of North-East Ulster were loyal, and not disloyal,
citizens, when they declared that if they were to be turned out of the
United Kingdom they had an inalienable right to declare that they would
not be placed under a Dublin Parliament. The Parliament of the United
Kingdom, of which their representative formed an integral part, though
it had a right to make laws for them, had no right to hand them over to
the untender mercies of the Southern Irish. _Delegatus non potest
delegare_--the delegate cannot delegate. But the representatives of
the United Kingdom are delegates for the people of the United Kingdom.
They have a right to govern it, but they cannot hand over their power of
government to some other body. My contention is triumphantly supported
by what happened during the attempt, happily unsuccessful, to break up
the United States of America. When Virginia seceded from the Union, the
people of what might be called the Ulster Virginia, a group of counties
in the west of Virginia, declared that the Richmond Legislature had no
right to deprive them of their inalienable right of citizenship in the
American Republic. Therefore they not only refused to secede, but, as
they were physically unable to control Virginia as a whole, they formed
themselves into the Loyal State of West Virginia, just as the Ulster
people were prepared, if they had been forced out of the Union by Mr.
Asquith's Bill, to set up a State for themselves.
At the end of the Civil War, the legal pedants of Washington were
inclined to say that, right or wrong on the merits, the people of West
Virginia had not acted legally in setting up their State, and that
therefore, when the Peace came, they must be put back into Virginia and
under the Richmond Government. The self-made State of West Virginia
naturally objected at this intolerable and unjust decision. When the
matter came before Mr. Lincoln and his Cabinet, that great and wise man
acted with a firmness not outdone even in the list of his magnificent
achievements. He would hear nothing of the technical pedantries and
legal sophistries submitted to him. West Virginia, he declared, must
remain detached from Virginia, and it remains to this day a State of the
Union. Here are the concluding words of the memorandum which Mr. Lincoln
circulated to his Cabinet:--
Can this Government stand, if it indulges constitutional constructions
by which men in open rebellion against it are to be accounted, man for
man, the equals of those who maintain their loyalty to it?... If so,
their treason against the Constitution enhances their constitutional
value.... It is said, the devil takes care of his own. Much more should
a good spirit--the spirit of the Constitution and the Union--take care
of its own. I think it cannot do less and live.... We can scarcely
dispense with the aid of West Virginia in this struggle; much less can
we afford to have her against us, in Congress and in the field. Her
brave and good men regard her admission into the Union as a matter of
life and death. They have been true to the Union under very severe
trials. We have so acted as to justify their hopes, and we cannot fully
retain their confidence and co-operation if we seem to break faith with
them. The division of a State is dreaded as a precedent. But a measure
made expedient by a war is no precedent for times of peace. It is said
that the admission of West Virginia is secession, and tolerated only
because it is our secession. Well, if we call it by that name, there is
still difference enough between secession against the Constitution and
secession in favour of the Constitution.
I shall never forget the profound impression made upon me when I first
read those words. They gave what to me was the support of the highest
moral and political authority to the view at which I had arrived
instinctively. I had, as was natural, some doubts about my position, for
I saw that my theories might lead to encouraging resistance to the
apparent Will of the Majority. But after finding a supporter in Lincoln,
I had no more doubts or fears.
I have dwelt so long on this matter because I want to show what, rightly
or wrongly, was my guiding principle:--I objected to Home Rule as bad
for the Empire, bad for the United Kingdom, and bad in an even extremer
degree for Ireland herself. If, however, it should be determined that
some measure of Home Rule must be passed, then the existence of the two
Irelands must be recognised in any action which should be determined
upon. Therefore, when the support which the Unionist Party determined on
giving to Mr. Lloyd George at the end of the War made some form of Home
Rule seem almost inevitable, I strongly advocated the division of
Ireland as the only way of avoiding a civil war in which the merits
would be with Northern Ireland. I would personally have preferred to see
the Six-County Area incorporated with England and become one or two
English counties. As that seemed for various reasons unobtainable, the
setting up of the Northern Legislature and the Northern State became the
inevitable compromise.
That accomplished, I should have preferred to see Southern Ireland
detached from the Empire. I have no desire to be a fellow-citizen with
Mr. de Valera, Mr. Michael Collins, or even Mr. Griffiths, or, again,
with the hierarchy of the Roman Church in Ireland. They have perfectly
different views of the crime of murder from mine. I believe murder to be
the greatest of crimes against the community, and, granted that we
should give up any attempt to teach Ireland better, I would rather
detach her altogether from the Empire. I hold that to be included in the
British Empire is one of the highest and greatest privileges obtainable
by any community, and I am not going down on my knees to beg an
unwilling Southern Ireland to enjoy this privilege.
Further, I hold that if we let the Southern Irish go, we have a duty to
the Protestants and Roman Catholic loyalists, of whom, of course, there
are a very great many in the South. We have no right to force them to
forfeit their citizenship of the British Empire. They must be allowed to
come away from the South with full compensation for their disturbance if
they so desire. If circumstances force you to denationalise a certain
part of your country, you must give the loyal inhabitants an opportunity
to leave, and as far as possible must not allow their material interests
to suffer. It would be perfectly easy to have exempted all persons in
the South who were loyal to Britain and to have put the burden of their
migration where it ought to have fallen--that is, on the Southern
enemies of England and Scotland who, by their policy, had made human
life for the Protestants and Loyalists a veritable hell.
If the South had refused to pay, we should ourselves have taken on the
burden, and imposed a duty on agricultural produce coming from the South
of Ireland into England sufficient to find the interest on a loan raised
to compensate the Southern refugees. That would be a perfectly possible
way, a very easy fiscal transaction.
I am not going to argue further whether these views on the Irish problem
are _per se_ right or wrong. I can only adopt with variation the
party-politician's peroration: "These, gentlemen, are my principles; if
they don't suit, they can't be altered."