the three F's: Fixity of tenure; Fair rent; Freedom of sale. A land war
presently broke out and became combined with a struggle nominally for Home
Rule, really for separation from Great Britain. The political part of this
agitation, rebellion as it really was, had its main source and support,
not in Ireland, but in the Irish population of the United States. Even
before the famine there had been an emigration of Irish to America, so
large as by its political effects to alarm American patriotism and give
birth to the great Know-nothing Movement in defence of American
nationality. The Irish, being highly gregarious and unused to large
farming, settled in cities. When they went out to work on railways or
canals, it was in large gangs. They were drawn into the vortex of politics
and became the retainers of crafty politicians, who, in secret, smiled at
their simplicity. They fell almost invariably into the Democratic party.
The name may have attracted them; but the Democratic party was that of the
Southern slave-owner, who was glad to enlist the Irishman as his humble
ally at the North and to pay him out of the treasury of political
corruption. The rank and file of Tammany were largely Irish. O'Connell had
been nobly hostile to slavery. His kinsmen and admirers on the other side
of the Atlantic were, on the contrary, vehement supporters of slavery, and
jealous assertors of their superiority over the enslaved race. Such is the
tendency of the newly enfranchised. In the war between the North and the
South the Irish in New York rose against the draft and committed great
outrages, especially against the negro, among other things setting fire to
a negro orphan asylum. They were ruthlessly put down. After the famine,
emigration greatly increased. Family affection among the Irish is
beautifully strong, and the members of a family who had gone before sent
home their earnings to pay for the passage of those whom they had left
behind. It has been reckoned that the Irish have expended twenty millions
sterling in this way. With a passionate love of Ireland the American Irish
combined a still more passionate hatred of England as Ireland's tyrant and
oppressor. Invasion and destruction of England were their dream. Always
addicted to secret fraternities and natural adepts in conspiracy, they
formed associations for war on England; that of the Fenians and that of
the still more rabid and bloodthirsty Clan-na-Gael, whose utterances were
frenzies of hatred. Large sums were subscribed; Irish servant-girls, with
a patriotism which in any case was honourable to them, giving freely of
their wages. American politicians flattered the mania, and harvested the
Irish vote. The war bequeathed to the Fenians some regular soldiers, among
others, Mitchel, who had been conspicuous in the ranks of slavery. The
Fenians invaded Canada and overthrew a corps of Canadian volunteers, but
retired on the approach of regulars; a bad omen for their conquest of
England. Conquest of England the Fenians did not attempt, beyond a
farcical essay at Chester. But they helped greatly to kindle rebellion in
Ireland, to provide it with money, and to supply it with assassins. The
National League, the form which, in Ireland, political combined with
agrarian rebellion assumed, almost ousted the law and the queen's
government. It resisted the payment of rents. Those who opposed its will
were "boycotted," a term of which this is the origin. Sometimes they were
murdered. A stripling was murdered for having served a master who had come
under the ban of the League. A wife was mobbed on her way home from
viewing the body of her murdered husband. Lord Frederick Cavendish, the
Irish secretary, going to Ireland with the kindest intentions, and the
permanent secretary, Mr. Burke, were stabbed to death in the Phoenix
Park. Mr. W. E. Forster, distinguished by his humane efforts at the time
of the famine, was marked for assassination. At the outbreak of the
rebellion a policeman escorting Fenian prisoners had been murdered at
Manchester, and an attempt made to blow up Clerkenwell Prison, where a
Fenian was confined, had caused the deaths of twelve people and the
maiming of one hundred and twenty. Gladstone had made the mistake of
treating the alarm caused by those outrages as a motive for doing justice
to Ireland. The motive for doing justice to Ireland was justice.
The assassination of Cavendish and Burke, it is right to say, was the act,
not of the Land League or of any conspiracy in Ireland itself, but of the
Invincibles, a club of frenzied Irish in the United States. By the Irish
leaders it was heartily condemned. That it was regarded with utter
abhorrence in the Irish quarters of English cities was denied by observers
at the time. Fierce and blind were the passions of those days.
To repress what was in fact a rebellion fed by foreign aid, to uphold the
law, and rescue life and industry in Ireland from the lawless tyranny of
the National League, as it was called, the government, as was its plain
duty, sought and obtained extraordinary powers, and threw a number of the
leaders of the rebellion into prison. It was time, when loyal citizens
were joining the League for protection in their callings, which the
queen's government could no longer afford. When the Irish rose against the
draft in New York, the Americans shot down several hundreds of them
without process of law.
In the British Parliament the "rebel" party, as Bright justly called it,
had found a leader of mark in Parnell, a man of great ability and force of
character, incisive and forcible, if not eloquent, as a speaker. He had
supplanted in the leadership Mr. Butt, a man of social sensibility and
refinement, unfitted for an aggressive part. The agitation under Parnell
combined agrarianism with repeal, thus giving the political part of the
movement a hold upon the people and a force and a formidable extension in
Ireland which by itself it had never had. The Land League, becoming the
National League, almost supplanted the queen's government in Ireland.
Parnell's avowed aim was the foundation of a peasant proprietorship.
Neither he nor any of his party seem to have cared to study
dispassionately the natural aptitudes of the country, and to satisfy
themselves whether it was capable of supporting the population which
disastrous events and sinister influences had accumulated upon it. Their
main object was political. It was, under the guise of repealing the union,
to sever Ireland from Great Britain. As an inducement to the peasantry to
support them in that attempt, they offered to transfer the property in the
land from the landlord to the tenant, though with a decorous promise of
indemnity. Mr. Parnell's name was English, and he had been educated at
Cambridge. It was understood that his bearing towards his Celtic
associates was high and that he was peremptory as well as absolute in
command. At his side was Mr. Biggar, whose great gift was unparalleled
effrontery. The two undertook to coerce the British Parliament by
obstruction. Had the British Parliament been itself, it would quickly have
asserted its dignity. But it was split into factions, upon the balance of
which Parnell and Biggar were able to play. Gladstone succumbed so far as
by an equivocal agreement, nicknamed the Kilmainham Treaty, to release
Parnell and his associates from prison. On the other hand, the
Conservatives coming into power struck the flag of the law by refusing to
renew the Crimes Act for the protection of loyalty in Ireland, while they
angled for the Parnellite vote by casting reproach on the conduct of a
lord-lieutenant who had done his duty.
At the general election which followed, Gladstone went to the country,
appealing for a majority which should enable him to settle the Irish
question independently of Parnell. Parnell passed the word to all his
partisans, both in Ireland and in the Irish quarters of English towns, to
vote against the Liberals. They obeyed. Gladstone was defeated. Then he
who had denounced Parnell as wading through rapine to dismemberment; who
had proclaimed his arrest as a rebel to an applauding multitude at
Guildhall; who had thrown him and scores of his followers into prison; who
had never given to the nation a hint of his sympathy with Parnell's
agitation, suddenly turned round and coalesced with Parnell. He put forth
an apology for his conversion founded on the hidden workings of his own
mind. But what availed the workings of his own mind if all the time he was
carrying on the policy of repression, misleading the nation thereby? It is
true he might have pointed to the coquetting of the other party, or its
leaders, with the Parnellites. He might perhaps with more force have
appealed to his own unquestionably sincere sympathy with all who were
struggling for independence. His retrospective imagination was strong, and
having changed so much he had always present to his mind the possibility
of further change. It made his language sometimes capable of unforeseen
interpretation.
The Liberal party was filled with astonishment, confusion, and dismay. But
the _Times_ stood fast and rallied the adherents of the union. To the
steadfastness and power of this great journal the defeat of Gladstone's
policy and the salvation of the union were largely due. Bright's refusal
to cast in his lot with the "rebel" party was also a heavy blow to
Gladstone. The political connection between the two men had been growing
close, and Bright might almost be said to personify justice to Ireland, as
to all the weak and oppressed. If there was a man who would have protested
against the sacrifice of Ireland to English interests it was John Bright.
Lord Hartington presented himself with unexpected vigour as a Unionist
leader. Gladstone was defeated in the House of Commons and still more
signally in the general election which followed, Conservative and Unionist
Liberals voting together on the special issue. In the contest Gladstone
lashed himself into fury, appealed to Separatist sentiment, not in Ireland
only, but in Scotland and Wales, to the prejudice of the masses against
the classes, of the uneducated against the educated and the learned
professions. He was fired with enthusiasm for the right. His instincts
were always high. But this did not make him a cool-headed statesman warily
dealing with a question which touched the life of the commonwealth.
Now fortune played a strange trick. Parnell, the leader and mainstay of
the League, Gladstone's ally, was convicted of adultery. Adultery is not
political, but it was too much both for the Irish hierarchy and for the
nonconformist conscience. Parnell had to be dragged from the helm of the
Irish party, to which he clung with a frantic tenacity, such as proved him
after all to be, though a very remarkable, hardly a very great, man.
Raised once more by another turn of fortune's wheel in the party game to
power, Gladstone again brought forward a Home Rule Bill. This time he,
with the help of the Irish members, pushed the bill through the House,
partly by closure, in a form already condemned by himself, giving Ireland
a separate Parliament for her own affairs, and at the same time retaining
her representation in the British Parliament, with power there to vote
upon all questions. The Irish delegation would have played, as in fact it
does now, for its own purposes, on the balance of British parties, and
baffled any attempt to enforce restrictions on the doings of its own
Parliament which the Home Rule Act might have imposed. The majority for
the bill in the Commons was forty-three, including eighty Irish members.
British members of the House of Commons who voted for the bill probably
reckoned on its being killed in the Lords. Killed it was there with a
vengeance. Gladstone appealed to the people against the Lords, but in
vain. Thus ended in disaster his wonderful career. His speeches on Home
Rule showed, like all his speeches, vast oratoric power, mastery of
details, clearness and liveliness in exposition. But weak points are also
apparent. The Irish Parliament cannot have been at once a sink of
corruption and an institution with which it was sacrilege to interfere.
The comparison of the union in criminality to the massacre of St.
Bartholomew must surely have made all hearers but the Irish smile. Upon
this subject the speaker raves, and generally he forgets that the mission
of reconciliation which he had undertaken would not be furthered by
opening old sores. The examples of Austria-Hungary and the connection of
Norway with Sweden, cited by him as proofs that a conjunction of two
Parliaments worked well, would be generally taken not as encouragements
but as warnings. The case of Norway and Sweden has since become a warning
indeed. The intricate machinery by which the speaker proposes to regulate
the action of his two Parliaments has too much the look of a speculative
structure elaborated without reference to the peculiar state of Ireland
and the forces to be encountered there. Of the force of the Catholic
priesthood, nothing is said. In fact, the political architect knew little
of the country with which he was dealing, having been in it only for three
weeks, and then not at a good point of view.
Thus the Irish question, which the greatest among the public men of his
time had failed to settle, was once more thrown into the cauldron of party
strife.
XV
Looking back on these most melancholy annals, we shall find that for their
general sadness Nature is as much to be blamed as man. She did well in
placing at the side of a country rich in coal and minerals, destined to be
manufacturing, one of pasture to supply food. She made a fatal mistake in
peopling them with different and uncongenial races. War, in the age of
war, and conquest of the weaker by the stronger were sure to be the
result. For the form in which conquest came, the Papacy has partly to
answer. It used the sword of the Norman adventurer in this case, as it had
in the case of England, to crush religious independence and force all
churches to bow to its own dominion, while, as the wails of its own
partisans in the Becket controversy show, it was itself unworthy of the
sovereignty of Christendom. Of this Catholics are bound to take note, as
they are of the fact that the Papacy at a later day, by inciting the Irish
to rebellion on its own account, brought upon them no small portion of
their woes. The Norman conquest of England had incidentally the bad
effect of connecting the English monarchy with dominion in France, and
thus turning the forces of the English kings from Ireland, where they
might have ended the agony, to a field where they were much worse than
wasted. Things could not have taken a more unfortunate course than that of
a colony of half-civilized conquerors carrying on war with barbarous
tribes of a different race and tongue, yet without force to effect the
conquest. The invasion of Edward Bruce, with which England had nothing to
do, probably did further harm by breaking up whatever there was of
Anglo-Norman order and turning barons into chiefs of Irish Septs. Then the
Reformation, a European convulsion involving Ireland, and in the most
unfortunate way, since it identified Protestantism with conquest,
Catholicism with the struggle for independence, introduced another deadly
source of strife, and made Ireland the point of danger to England in her
desperate struggle for her own existence and the salvation of the
Protestant cause. Otherwise it seems not impossible that the Tudor
statesmen, with such a man as Burleigh at their head, might, as they
desired, have effected a peaceful settlement. Civilization, not
extermination, was their aim. The great Celtic rebellions of Shane
O'Neil, Desmond, and Tyrone, the last two Catholic as well as Celtic,
forced upon them the policy of extermination with all its horrors. The
rising and massacre of 1641 were the sequel. The vengeance of the victor
and the transplantation of the vanquished to Connaught were in their turn
the sequel of the rising and massacre of 1641. Of these again the rebound
was the Catholic rising of 1688, which, had it been successful, would have
ended certainly in the dispossession, probably in the expulsion, possibly
in the extermination, of the Protestants. English liberty and religion
were at the same time threatened by an Irish Catholic force encamped at
Hounslow. The Penal law was execrable; yet hardly more execrable than the
Great Act of Attainder. In later days Castle government by corruption was
vile; but it was the inevitable accompaniment of the constitution of 1782,
the work of Grattan and the Volunteers. Of the master evil of all, the
state of the masses of the Irish people, English protectionism must share
the blame with the penal laws. But protectionism was then the delusion of
the commercial world. Irish patriots were not free from it. To deal with
peasant distress was the immediate duty of the Irish Parliament, which
refused even to turn its eyes that way. Peasant distress, organized for
rebellion by a revolutionary party at Belfast, itself deriving its
inspiration from the American and French revolutions, produced the rising,
ever to be accursed and deplored, of 1798.
Irish patriots are apt to talk of England as a single person or, rather,
fiend, actuated in her dealings with Ireland by hatred and contempt.
England is a nation divided into parties and swayed by varying influences
from time to time. The England of Peel and Gladstone is not the England of
the Georges, the Stuarts, the Tudors, the Plantagenets, or responsible for
the doings of those dynasties. In the evil days of her political history,
England, if she oppressed Ireland, also suffered herself. The Liberal
party in England did its best for Ireland, and if the Irish members had
been what they ought to have been and done what they ought to have done,
more rapid progress might have been made. As it was, Ireland shared the
great measures of Parliamentary and municipal reform which there had been
little prospect of her achieving by herself. She received the boon of
national and undenominational education about a generation before England,
and but for the reactionary influence of her own priesthood would have
received it in full measure. The same influence maimed as far as it could
the undenominational colleges. Nothing could be more deplorable than the
long series of coercion acts. But it was hardly to be expected that the
English government should strike its flag to assassination and boycotting,
or that the British nation would be moved to concession by the inroads of
American conspirators combined with domestic rebellion. It was about 1866
that Guizot, talking of Ireland as he walked with an English guest,
stopped in his walk and said with an emphatic gesture, "The conduct of
England to Ireland for the last thirty years has been admirable." This,
before disestablishment, was too strong, as the English guest remarked at
the time; but as the judgment of a cool-headed foreign statesman, whose
course had not been one of unbroken harmony with England, it was likely to
be more just at least to the motives of England than the invectives of
O'Connell.
Since the Union there has been no 1641, no 1688, no 1798. The two races
and religions have lived generally at peace if not in concord with each
other. The religious riots at Belfast are a very mitigated relic of the
religious wars of former days. Reform, though its advance has been slow
and fitful, has advanced. Within a generation from the date of the Union,
Catholic Emancipation was carried. The tithe-proctor did not very long
survive. Presently the State Church itself was abolished. Ireland shared
with Great Britain Parliamentary reform, to which the Irish oligarchy
could never have consented without political and social convulsion. Not
long afterwards came national education, bestowed on Ireland before it was
bestowed on England. None of these improvements would directly touch the
agrarian sore, the malignity of which was increased by the growth of the
Irish population under the reign of order, far beyond the power of the
land to maintain it. But relief has been given to famine, and strenuous
efforts have been made and are still being made to effect a radical cure.
Ireland has enjoyed free trade with Great Britain and with the whole
British Empire. Everything has been open to Irish merit and industry.
Millions of Irish and their children have found homes in Britain and the
colonies. To sever Ireland from Great Britain is still possible. To divide
the Irish from the British is not possible. In both islands and in all the
colonies the two races are now joined and cannot be put asunder.
Besides, as has already been said, we must always bear it in mind that we
do not see the other side of Destiny's cards. Suppose Ireland had remained
the land of the Septs, would her lot certainly have been more happy?
Neither at the time of the Norman Conquest nor afterwards do the Septs
appear to have shown any tendency to a union such as would have given
birth to a national polity and its attendant civilization. For aught we
can see, they might have gone on indefinitely, like the clans of the
Scottish Highlands, in a state of barbarous strife fatal to progress of
every kind. Even their common interest in the struggle against the
Anglo-Norman invader produced no general or permanent union. The Brehon
law, which was their principal bond, had no executive force and was in
itself barbarous, not distinguishing public from private wrong. The Septs
warred upon each other not less savagely than the conqueror warred upon
them all. If anything like union came at last, it was not political but
religious, and brought with it a fatal share in the European war of
religions. Nor were conquests other than Anglo-Norman impossible. From the
Highlands and islands of Scotland came bodies of marauding adventurers
which might have been reenforced, and, in the North at least, have
prevailed. It is not certain that without the aid of John de Bermingham
and his Anglo-Normans, the Septs would have got rid of Edward Bruce.
That the interest of Ireland should be regarded as subordinate to that of
Great Britain was the principle on which British politicians acted in the
days that are past. To the past this principle must now be and indeed has
been decisively consigned. That union, to be good for either party, must
be good for both, is the accepted basis of discussion. On the other hand,
it is not to be assumed that the aspirations of Irish politicians
naturally bent on carving out an independent field of action for
themselves, are entirely free from the bias of personal ambition or
identical with a dispassionate view of the interest of the Irish people.
Nor is it to be forgotten that Ulster is a part of Ireland.
There are two questions, perfectly distinct and calling for separate
consideration, though they have become blended in the course and for the
purposes of the political agitation. One is economical, the other
political.
The economical question is whether Ireland can support her present
population. Patriotic eloquence will not change her skies, or render it
otherwise than cruel to induce her people to stay in a land in which they
cannot make their bread. Instances there may be of barren soil made by
the loving industry of the small owner fruitful and capable of supporting
a large population; but the industry of the small owner, though it can
improve the soil, cannot alter the skies. What is to be desired is a
special report, calm and expert, upon this subject. Is Ireland generally
capable of being turned with advantage into an arable country? Can wheat
or grain of any kind be profitably raised there in face of the competition
of the great grain-growing countries such as that now opened, and bidding
fair to be opened over a much larger area, in the Canadian Northwest? The
small farmer to live must have something to sell. Is there reason to look
in any other direction than farming for a speedy extension of Irish
industries such as would provide bread sufficient for the population? Is
the water-power of Ireland, now that electricity has been developed,
likely to do what has been done for England by coal? Is the shipping
trade, for which the Irishman has had little opportunity of showing a
turn, likely to increase? These are questions which it is for economists,
not for politicians or patriotic orators, to decide. It is said that there
are tracts of land in Ireland still unoccupied and fit for occupation. If
there are, the survey will show the fact. Land purchase by government
subvention is a policy hardly to be pursued unless it is certain that its
results will not presently be reversed by nature.
The worst part of emigration is that it carries away the pith and sinews
of a nation, taking the strong and leaving the weak, the aged, and
unsupported women. It is a pleasant proof, already noticed, of the warmth
of the Irish heart that there has been less of solitary and more of family
emigration in their case than in those of some other emigrating races.
After all, how has the earth been peopled, how have all the nations been
formed but by migration?
To turn to the political question. The danger of insurrection has probably
passed away. Fenianism has been largely deprived of its trans-Atlantic
base, and can no longer look confidently to American sympathy for support
and supplies. The Irish vote has less power. Little at least was heard of
it in the last presidential election. Yet the political question is still
most serious, and presses urgently for settlement; a state of things
largely due to the division of parties in the British government which
showed its influence in the abandonment of the Crimes Act by the Salisbury
administration; in the Maamtrasna debate; and in Mr. Gladstone's sudden
coalition with Parnell; but above all in the votes of British members of
the House of Commons for Mr. Gladstone's second Home Rule Bill, giving
Ireland a Parliament of her own and representation in the British
Parliament at the same time. Parliament still has in it a body of Irish
members not only alien but hostile, avowing that their object is not to
aid in deliberation but to coerce, playing upon the balance of parties for
purposes of their own, degrading the assembly, and distracting the
councils of the nation. Nor is the source of this evil confined to the
constituencies of Ireland. There is in England and Scotland a large Irish
population, which, as was seen in the election of 1885, obeys the voice of
the Irish leaders and at their command votes inimically to the country in
which it lives and earns its bread. In Ireland itself, moreover, the
hell-broth of agitation is kept constantly seething to the inevitable
detriment of recuperative effort, which cannot do its full work without
security for the future.