For half a century or more no question of English domestic politics has
excited so much interest outside England as that question of resettling
her relations with Ireland, which was fought over in the last
Parliament, and still confronts the Parliament that has lately been
elected. Apart from its dramatic interest, apart from its influence on
the fortune of parties, and its effect on the imperial position of Great
Britain, it involves so many large principles of statesmanship, and
raises so many delicate points of constitutional law, as to deserve the
study of philosophical thinkers no less than of practical politicians in
every free country.
The circumstances which led to the introduction of the Government of
Ireland Bill, in April, 1886, are familiar to Americans as well as
Englishmen. Ever since the crowns and parliaments of Great Britain and
Ireland were united, in A.D. 1800, there has been in Ireland a party
which protested against that union as fraudulently obtained and
inexpedient in itself. For many years this party, led by Daniel
O'Connell, maintained an agitation for Repeal. After his death a more
extreme section, which sought the complete independence of Ireland,
raised the insurrection of 1848, and subsequently, under the guidance of
other hands, formed the Fenian conspiracy, whose projected insurrection
was nipped in the bud in 1867, though the conspiracy continued to menace
the Government and the tranquillity of the island. In 1872 the Home Rule
party was formed, demanding, not the Repeal of the Union, but the
creation of an Irish Legislature, and the agitation, conducted in
Parliament in a more systematic and persistent way than heretofore, took
also a legitimate constitutional form. To this demand English and Scotch
opinion was at first almost unanimously opposed. At the General Election
of 1880, which, however, turned mainly on the foreign policy of Lord
Beaconsfield's Government, not more than three or four members were
returned by constituencies in Great Britain who professed to consider
Home Rule as even an open question. All through the Parliament, which
sat from 1880 till 1885, the Nationalist party, led by Mr. Parnell, and
including at first less than half, ultimately about half, of the Irish
members, was in constant and generally bitter opposition to the
Government of Mr. Gladstone. But during these five years a steady,
although silent and often unconscious, process of change was passing in
the minds of English and Scotch members, especially Liberal members, due
to their growing sense of the mistakes which Parliament committed in
handling Irish questions, and of the hopelessness of the efforts which
the Executive was making to pacify the country on the old methods. The
adoption of a Home Rule policy by one of the great English parties was,
therefore, not so sudden a change as it seemed. The process had been
going on for years, though in its earlier stages it was so gradual and
so unwelcome as to be faintly felt and reluctantly admitted by the minds
that were undergoing it. In the spring of 1886 the question could be no
longer evaded or postponed. It was necessary to choose between one of
two courses; the refusal of the demand for self-government, coupled with
the introduction of a severe Coercion Bill, or the concession of it by
the introduction of a Home Rule Bill. There were some few who suggested,
as a third course, the granting of a limited measure of local
institutions, such as county boards; but most people felt, as did Mr.
Gladstone's Ministry, that this plan would have had most of the dangers
and few of the advantages of either of the two others.
How the Government of Ireland Bill was brought into the House of Commons
on April 8th, amid circumstances of curiosity and excitement
unparalleled since 1832; how, after debates of almost unprecedented
length, it was defeated in June, by a majority of thirty; how the policy
it embodied was brought before the country at the General Election, and
failed to win approval--all this is too well known to need
recapitulation here. But the causes of the disaster have not been well
understood, for it is only now--now, when the smoke of the battle has
cleared away from the field--that these causes have begun to stand
revealed in their true proportions.
Besides some circumstances attending the production of the Bill, to
which I shall refer presently, and which told heavily against it, there
were three feelings which worked upon men's minds, disposing them to
reject it.
The first of these was dislike and fear of the Irish Nationalist
members. In the previous House of Commons this party had been uniformly
and bitterly hostile to the Liberal Government. Measures intended for
the good of Ireland, like the Land Act of 1881, had been ungraciously
received, treated as concessions extorted, for which no thanks were
due--inadequate concessions, which must be made the starting-point for
fresh demands. Obstruction had been freely practised to defeat not only
bills restraining the liberty of the subject in Ireland, but many other
measures. Some few members of the Irish party had systematically sought
to delay all English and Scotch legislation, and, in fact, to bring the
work of Parliament to a dead stop. Much violent language had been used,
even where the provocation was slight. The outbreaks of crime which had
repeatedly occurred in Ireland had been, not, indeed, defended, but so
often passed over in silence by Nationalist speakers, that English
opinion was inclined to hold them practically responsible for disorders
which, so it was thought, they had neither wished nor tried to prevent.
(I am, of course, expressing no opinion as to the justice of this view,
nor as to the excuses to be made for the Parliamentary tactics of the
Irish party, but merely stating how their conduct struck many
Englishmen.) There could be no doubt as to the hostility which they,
still less as to that which their fellow-countrymen in the United
States, had expressed toward England, for they had openly wished success
to Russia while war seemed impending with her, and the so-called Mahdi
of the Soudan was vociferously cheered at many a Nationalist meeting. At
the Election of 1885 they had done their utmost to defeat Liberal
candidates in every English and Scotch constituency where there existed
a body of Irish voters, and had thrown some twenty seats or more into
the hands of the Tories. Now, to many Englishmen, the proposal to create
an Irish Parliament seemed nothing more or less than a proposal to hand
over to these Irish members the government of Ireland, with all the
opportunities thence arising to oppress the opposite party in Ireland
and to worry England herself. It was all very well to urge that the
tactics which the Nationalists had pursued when their object was to
extort Home Rule would be dropped, because superfluous, when Home Rule
had been granted; or to point out that an Irish Parliament would contain
different men from those who had been sent to Westminster as Mr.
Parnell's nominees. Neither of these arguments could overcome the
suspicious antipathy which many Englishmen felt, nor dissolve the
association in their minds between the Nationalist leaders and the
forces of disorder. The Parnellites (thus they reasoned) are bad men;
what they seek is therefore likely to be bad, and whether bad in itself
or not, they will make a bad use of it. In such reasonings there was
more of sentiment and prejudice than of reason, but sentiment and
prejudice are proverbially harder than arguments to expel from minds
where they have made a lodgment.
The internal condition of Ireland supplied more substantial grounds for
alarm. As everybody knows, she is not, either in religion or in blood,
or in feelings and ideas, a homogeneous country. Three-fourths of the
people are Roman Catholics, one-fourth Protestants, and this Protestant
fourth subdivided into bodies not fond of one another, who have little
community of sentiment. Besides the Scottish colony in Ulster, many
English families have settled here and there through the country. They
have been regarded as intruders by the aboriginal Celtic population, and
many of them, although hundreds of years may have passed since they
came, still look on themselves as rather English than Irish. The last
fifty years, whose wonderful changes have in most parts of the world
tended to unite and weld into one compact body the inhabitants of each
part of the earth's surface, connecting them by the ties of commerce,
and of a far easier and swifter intercourse than was formerly possible,
have in Ireland worked in the opposite direction. It has become more and
more the habit of the richer class in Ireland to go to England for its
enjoyment, and to feel itself socially rather English than Irish. Thus
the chasm between the immigrants and the aborigines has grown deeper.
The upper class has not that Irish patriotism which it showed in the
days of the National Irish Parliament (1782-1800), and while there is
thus less of a common national feeling to draw rich and poor together,
the strife of landlords and tenants has continued, irritating the minds
of both parties, and gathering them into two hostile camps. As everybody
knows, the Nationalist agitation has been intimately associated with the
Land agitation--has, in fact, found a strong motive-force in the desire
of the tenants to have their rents reduced, and themselves secured
against eviction. Now, many people in England assumed that an Irish
Parliament would be under the control of the tenants and the humbler
class generally, and would therefore be hostile to the landlords. They
went farther, and made the much bolder assumption that as such a
Parliament would be chosen by electors, most of whom were Roman
Catholics, it would be under the control of the Catholic priesthood, and
hostile to Protestants. Thus they supposed that the grant of
self-government to Ireland would mean the abandonment of the upper and
wealthier class, the landlords and the Protestants, to the tender
mercies of their enemies. Such abandonment, it was proclaimed on a
thousand platforms, would be disgraceful in itself, dishonouring to
England, a betrayal of the very men who had stood by her in the past,
and were prepared to stand by her in the future, if only she would stand
by them. It was, of course, replied by the defenders of the Home Rule
Bill, that what the so-called English party in Ireland really stood by
was their own ascendency over the Irish masses--an oppressive
ascendency, which had caused most of the disorders of the country. As to
religion, there were many Protestants besides Mr. Parnell himself among
the Nationalist leaders. There was no ill-feeling (except in Ulster)
between Protestants and Roman Catholics in Ireland. There was no reason
to expect that either the Catholic hierarchy or the priesthood generally
would be supreme in an Irish Parliament, and much reason to expect the
contrary. As regards Ulster, where, no doubt, there were special
difficulties, due to the bitter antagonism of the Orangemen (not of the
Protestants generally) and Catholics, Mr. Gladstone had undertaken to
consider any special provisions which could be suggested as proper to
meet those difficulties. These replies, however, made little impression.
They were pronounced, and pronounced all the more confidently the more
ignorant of Ireland the speaker was, to be too hypothetical. To many
Englishmen the case seemed to be one of two hostile factions contending
in Ireland for the last sixty years, and that the gift of
self-government might enable one of them to tyrannize over the other.
True, that party was the majority, and, according to the principles of
democratic government, therefore entitled to prevail. But it is one
thing to admit a principle and another to consent to its application.
The minority had the sympathy of the upper classes in England, because
the minority contained the landlords. It had the sympathy of a part of
the middle class, because it contained the Protestants. And of those
Englishmen who were impartial as between the Irish factions, there were
some who held that England must in any case remain responsible for the
internal peace and the just government of Ireland, and could not grant
powers whose possession might tempt the one party to injustice, and the
other to resist injustice by violence.
There was another anticipation, another forecast of evils to follow,
which told most of all upon English opinion. This was the notion that
Home Rule was only a stage in the road to the complete separation of the
two islands. The argument was conceived as follows: "The motive passions
of the Irish agitation have all along been hatred toward England and a
desire to make Ireland a nation, holding her independent place among the
nations of the world. This design was proclaimed by the Young Irelanders
of 1848 and by the Fenian rebels of 1866; it has been avowed, in
intervals of candour, by the present Nationalists themselves. The grant
of an Irish Parliament will stimulate rather than appease this thirst
for separate national existence. The nearer complete independence seems,
the more will it be desired. Hatred to England will still be an active
force, because the amount of control which England retains will irritate
Irish pride, as well as limit Irish action; while all the misfortunes
which may befall the new Irish Government will be blamed, not on its own
imprudence, but on the English connection. And as the motives for
seeking separation will remain, so the prospect of obtaining it will
seem better. Agitation will have a better vantage-ground in an Irish
Parliament than it formerly had among the Irish members of a British
Legislature; and if actual resistance to the Queen's authority should be
attempted, it will be attempted under conditions more favourable than
the present, because the rebels will have in their hands the machinery
of Irish Government, large financial resources, and a _prima facie_
title to represent the will of the Irish people. As against a rebellious
party in Ireland, England has now two advantages--an advantage of
theory, an advantage of fact. The advantage of theory is that she does
not admit Ireland to be a distinct nation, but maintains that in the
United Kingdom there is but one nation, whereof some inhabit Great
Britain and some Ireland. The advantage of fact is that, through her
control of the constabulary, the magistrates, the courts of justice,
and, in fine, the whole administrative system of Ireland, she can easily
quell insurrectionary movements. By creating an Irish Parliament and
Government she would strip herself of both these advantages."
I need hardly say that I do not admit the fairness of this statement of
the case, because some of the premises are untrue, and because it
misrepresents the nature of the Irish Government which Mr. Gladstone's
Bill would have created. But I am trying to state the case as it was
sedulously and skilfully presented to Englishmen. And it told all the
more upon English waverers, because the considerations above mentioned
seemed, if well founded, to destroy and cut away the chief ground on
which Home Rule had been advocated, viz. that it would relieve England
from the constant pressure of Irish discontent and agitation, and bring
about a time of tranquillity, permitting good feeling to grow up between
the peoples. If Home Rule was, after all, to be nothing more than a
half-way house to independence, an Irish Parliament only a means of
extorting a more complete emancipation from imperial control, was it not
much better to keep things as they were, and go on enduring evils, the
worst of which were known already? Hence the advocates of the Bill
denied not the weight of the argument, but its applicability.
Separation, they urged, is impossible, for it is contrary to the nature
of things, which indicates that the two islands must go together. It is
not desired by the Irish people, for it would injure them far more than
it could possibly injure England, since Ireland finds in England the
only market for her produce, the only source whence capital flows to
her. A small revolutionary party has, no doubt, conspired to obtain it.
But the only sympathy they received was due to the fact that the
legitimate demand of Ireland for a recognition of her national feeling
and for the management of her own local affairs was contemptuously
ignored by England. The concession of that demand will banish the notion
even from those minds which now entertain it, whereas its continued
refusal may perpetuate that alienation of feeling which is at the bottom
of all the mischief, the one force that makes for separation.
It is no part of my present purpose to examine these arguments and
counter arguments, but only to show what were the grounds on which a
majority of the English voters refused to pronounce in favour of the
Home Rule Bill. The reader will have observed that the issues raised
were not only numerous, but full of difficulty. They were issues of
fact, involving a knowledge both of the past history of Ireland and of
her present state. They were also issues of inference, for even
supposing the broad facts to be ascertained, these facts were
susceptible of different interpretations, and men might, and did,
honestly draw opposite conclusions from them. A more obscure and
complicated problem, or rather group of problems, has seldom been
presented to a nation for its decision. But the nation did not possess
the requisite knowledge. Closely connected as Ireland seems to be with
England, long as the Irish question has been a main trouble in English
politics, the English and Scottish people know amazingly little about
Ireland. Even in the upper class, you meet with comparatively few
persons who have set foot on Irish soil, and, of course, far fewer who
have ever examined the condition of the island and the sources of her
discontent. Irish history, which is, no doubt, dismal reading, is a
blank page to the English. In January, 1886, one found scarce any
politicians who had ever heard of the Irish Parliament of 1782. And in
that year, 1886, an Englishman anxious to discover the real state of the
country did not know where to go for information. What appeared in the
English newspapers, or, rather, in the one English newspaper which keeps
a standing "own correspondent" in Dublin, was (as it still is) a grossly
and almost avowedly partisan report, in which opinions are skilfully
mixed with so-called facts, selected, consciously or unconsciously, to
support the writer's view. The Nationalist press is, of course, not less
strongly partisan on its own side, so that not merely an average
Englishman, but even the editor of an English newspaper, who desires to
ascertain the true state of matters and place it before his English
readers, has had, until within the last few months, when events in
Ireland began to be fully reported in Great Britain, no better means at
his disposal for understanding Ireland than for understanding Bulgaria.
I do not dwell upon this ignorance as an argument for Home Rule, though,
of course, it is often so used. I merely wish to explain the
bewilderment in which Englishmen found themselves when required to
settle by their votes a question of immense difficulty. Many, on both
sides, simply followed their party banners. Tories voted for Lord
Salisbury; thorough-going admirers of Mr. Gladstone voted for Mr.
Gladstone. But there was on the Liberal side a great mass who were
utterly perplexed by the position. Contradictory statements of fact, as
well as contradictory arguments, were flung at their heads in
distracting profusion. They felt themselves unable to determine what was
true and who was right. But one thing seemed clear to them. The policy
of Home Rule was a new policy. They had been accustomed to censure and
oppose it. Only nine months before, the Irish Nationalists had
emphasized their hostility to the Liberal party by doing their utmost to
defeat Liberal candidates in English constituencies. Hence, when it was
proclaimed that Home Rule was the true remedy which the Liberal party
must accept, they were startled and discomposed.
Now, the English are not a nimble-minded people. They cannot, to use a
familiar metaphor, turn round in their own length. Their momentum is
such as to carry them on for some distance in the direction wherein they
have been moving, even after the order to stop has been given. They need
time to appreciate, digest, and comprehend a new proposition. Timid they
are not, nor, perhaps, exceptionally cautious, but they do not like to
be hurried, and insist on looking at a proposition for a good while
before they come to a decision regarding it. It is one of the qualities
which make them a great people. As has been observed, this proposition
was novel, was most serious, and raised questions which they felt that
their knowledge was insufficient to determine. Accordingly, a certain
section of the Liberal party refused to accept it. A great number,
probably the majority, of these doubtful men abstained from voting.
Others voted against the Home Rule Liberal candidates, not necessarily
because they condemned the policy, but because, as they were not
satisfied that it was right, they deemed delay a less evil than the
committal of the nation to a new departure, which might prove
irrevocable.
It must not, however, be supposed that it was only hesitation which
drove many Liberals into the host arrayed against the Irish Government
Bill. I have already said that among the leaders there were some, and
those men of great influence, who condemned its principles. This was
true also of a considerable, though a relatively smaller, section of the
rank and file. And it was only what might have been expected. The
proposal to undo much of the work done in 1800, to alter fundamentally
the system which had for eighty-six years regulated the relations of the
two islands, by setting up a Parliament in Ireland, was a proposal which
not only had not formed a part of the accepted creed of the Liberal
party, but fell outside party lines altogether. It might, no doubt, be
argued, as was actually done, and as those who understand the history of
the Liberal party have more and more come to see, that Liberal
principles recommended it, since they involve faith in the people, and
faith in the curative tendency of local self-government. But this was by
no means axiomatic. Taking the whole complicated facts of the case, and
taking Liberalism as it had been practically understood in England, a
man might in July, 1886, deem himself a good Liberal and yet think that
the true interests of both peoples would be best served by maintaining
the existing Parliamentary system. Similarly, there was nothing in
Toryism or Tory principles to prevent a fair-minded and patriotic Tory
from approving the Home Rule scheme. It was a return to the older
institutions of the monarchy, and not inconsistent with any of the
doctrines which the Tory party had been accustomed to uphold. The
question, in short, was one of those which cut across ordinary party
lines, creating new divisions among politicians; and there might have
been and ought to have been Liberal Home Rulers and Tory Home Rulers,
Liberal opponents of Home Rule and Tory opponents of Home Rule.
But here comes in a feature, a natural but none the less a regrettable
feature, of the English party system. As the object of the party in
opposition is to turn out the party in power and seat itself in their
place, every Opposition regards with the strongest prejudice the
measures proposed by a ruling Ministry. Cases sometimes occur where
these measures are so obviously necessary, or so evidently approved by
the nation, that the Opposition accepts them. But in general it scans
them with a hostile eye. Human nature is human nature; and when the
defeat of Government can be secured by defeating a Government Bill, the
temptation to the Opposition to secure it is irresistible. Now, the Tory
party is far more cohesive than the Liberal party, far more obedient to
its leaders, far less disposed to break into sections, each of which
thinks and acts for itself. Accordingly, that division of opinion in the
Tory party which might have been expected, and which would have occurred
if those who composed the Tory party had been merely so many reflecting
men, and not members of a closely compacted political organization, did
not occur. Liberals were divided, as such a question would naturally
divide them. Tories were not divided; they threw their whole strength
against the Bill. I am far from suggesting that they did so against
their consciences. Whatever may be said as to two or three of the
leaders, whose previous language and conduct seemed to indicate that
they would themselves, had the election of 1885 gone differently, have
been inclined to a Home Rule policy, many of the Tory chiefs, as well
as the great mass of the party, honestly disapproved Mr. Gladstone's
measure. But their party motives and party affiliations gave it no
chance of an impartial verdict at their hands. They went into the
jury-box with an invincible prepossession against the scheme of their
opponents. When all these difficulties are duly considered, and
especially when regard is had to those which I have last enumerated, the
suddenness with which the new policy was launched, and the fact that as
coming from one party it was sure beforehand of the hostility of the
other, no surprise can be felt at its fate. Those who, in England, now
look back over the spring and summer of 1886 are rather surprised that
it should come so near succeeding. To have been rejected by a majority
of only thirty in Parliament, and of little over ten per cent. of the
total number of electors who voted at the general election, is a defeat
far less severe than any one who knew England would have predicted.
That the decision of the country is regarded by nobody as a final
decision goes without saying. It was not regarded as final, even in the
first weeks after it was given. This was not because the majority was
comparatively small, for a smaller majority the other way would have
been conclusive. It is because the country had not time enough for full
consideration and deliberate judgment. The Bill was brought in on April
14th, the elections began on July 1st; no one can say what might have
been the result of a long discussion, during which the first feelings of
alarm (for alarm there was) might have worn off. And the decision is
without finality, also, because the decision of the country was merely
against the particular plan proposed by Mr. Gladstone, and not in favour
of any alternative plan for dealing with Ireland, most certainly not for
the coercive method which has since been adopted. One particular
solution of the Irish problem was refused. The problem still stands
confronting us, and when other modes of solving it have been in turn
rejected, the country may come back to this mode.
We may now turn from the past to the future. Yet the account which has
been given of the feelings and ideas arrayed against the Bill does not
wholly belong to the past. They are the feelings to which the opponents
of any plan of self-government for Ireland still appeal, and which will
have to be removed or softened down before it can be accepted by the
English. In particular, the probability of separation, and the supposed
dangers to the Protestants and the landlords from an Irish Parliament,
will continue to form the themes of controversy so long as the question
remains unsettled.
What are the prospects of its settlement? What is the position which it
now occupies? How has it affected the current politics of England?
It broke up the Liberal party in Parliament. The vast numerical majority
of that party in the country supported, and still supports, Mr.
Gladstone and the policy of Irish self-government. But the dissentient
minority includes many men of influence, and constitutes in the House of
Commons a body of about seventy members, who hold the balance between
parties. For the present they are leagued with the Tory Ministry to
resist Home Rule, and their support insures a parliamentary majority to
that Ministry. But it is, of course, necessary for them to rally to Lord
Salisbury, not only on Irish questions, but on all questions; for, under
our English system, a Ministry defeated on any serious issue is bound to
resign, or dissolve Parliament. Now, to maintain an alliance for a
special purpose, between members of opposite parties, is a hard matter.
Agreement about Ireland does not, of itself, help men to agree about
foreign policy, or bimetallism, or free trade, or changes in land laws,
or ecclesiastical affairs. When these and other grave questions come up
in Parliament, the Tory Ministry and their Liberal allies must, on
every occasion, negotiate a species of concordat, whereby the liberty
of both is fettered. One party may wish to resist innovation, the other
to yield to it, or even to anticipate it. Each is obliged to forego
something in order to humour the other; neither has the pleasure or the
credit of taking a bold line on its own responsibility. There is, no
doubt, less difference between the respective tenets of the great
English parties than there was twenty years ago, when Mr. Disraeli had
not yet completed the education of one party, and economic laws were
still revered by the other. But, besides its tenets, each party has its
tendencies, its sympathies, its moral atmosphere; and these differ so
widely as to make the co-operation of Tories and Liberals constrained
and cumbrous. Moreover, there are the men to be considered, the leaders
on each side, whose jealousies, rivalries, suspicions, personal
incompatibilities, neither old habits of joint action nor corporate
party feeling exist to soften. On the whole, therefore, it is unlikely
that the league of these two parties, united for one question only, and
that a question which will pass into new phases, can be durable. Either
the league will dissolve, or the smaller party will be absorbed into the
larger. In England, as in America, third parties rarely last. The
attraction of the larger mass is irresistible, and when the crisis which
created a split or generated a new group has passed, or the opinion the
new group advocates has been either generally discredited or generally
adopted, the small party melts away, its older members disappearing from
public life, its younger ones finding their career in the ranks of one
of the two great standing armies of politics. If the dissentient, or
anti-Home Rule, Liberal party lives till the next general election, it
cannot live longer, for at that election it will be ground to powder
between the upper and nether millstones of the regular Liberals and the
regular Tories.
The Irish struggle of 1886 has had another momentous consequence. It
has brought the Nationalist or Parnellite party into friendly relations
with the mass of English Liberals. When the Home Rule party was founded
by Mr. Butt, some fifteen years ago, it had more in common with the
Liberal than with the Tory party. But as it demanded what both English
parties were then resolved to refuse, it was forced into antagonism to
both; and from 1877 onward (Mr. Butt being then dead) the antagonism
became bitter, and, of course, specially bitter as toward the statesmen
in power, because it was they who continued to refuse what the
Nationalists sought. Mr. Parnell has always stated, with perfect
candour, that he and his friends must fight for their own hand
unhampered by English alliances, and getting the most they could for
Ireland from the weakness of either English party. This position they
still retain. If the Tory party will give them Home Rule, they will help
the Tory party. However, as the Tory party has gained office by opposing
Home Rule, this contingency may seem not to lie within the immediate
future. On the other hand, the Gladstonian Liberals have lost office for
their advocacy of Home Rule, and now stand pledged to maintain the
policy they have proclaimed. The Nationalists have, therefore, for the
first time since the days immediately following the Union of A.D. 1800
(a measure which the Whigs of those days resisted), a great English
party admitting the justice of their claim, and inviting them to agitate
for it by purely constitutional methods. For such an alliance the
English Liberals are hotly reproached, both by the Tories and by the
dissentients who follow Lord Harrington and Mr. Chamberlain. They are
accused of disloyalty to England. The past acts and words of the
Nationalists are thrown in their teeth, and they are told that in
supporting the Irish claim they condone such acts, they adopt such
words. They reply by denying the adoption, and by pointing out that the
Tories themselves were from 1881 till 1886 in a practical, and often
very close, though unavowed, Parliamentary alliance with the
Nationalists in the House of Commons. The student of history will,
however, conceive that the Liberals have a stronger and higher defence
than any _tu quoque_. Issues that involve the welfare of peoples are far
too serious for us to apply to them the same sentiments of personal
taste and predilection which we follow in inviting a dinner party, or
selecting companions for a vacation tour. If a man has abused your
brother, or got drunk in the street, you do not ask him to go with you
to the Yellowstone Park. But his social offences do not prevent you from
siding with him in a political convention. So, in politics itself, one
must distinguish between characters and opinions. If a man has shown
himself unscrupulous or headstrong, you may properly refuse to vote him
into office, or to sit in the same Cabinet with him, because you think
these faults of his dangerous to the country. But if the cause he pleads
be a just one, you have no more right to be prejudiced against it by his
conduct than a judge has to be swayed by dislike to the counsel who
argues a case. There were moderate men in America, who, in the days of
the anti-slavery movement, cited against it the intemperate language of
many abolitionists. There were aristocrats in England, who, during the
struggle for the freedom and unity of Italy, sought to discredit the
patriotic party by accusing them of tyrannicide. But the sound sense of
both nations refused to be led away by such arguments, because it held
those two causes to be in their essence righteous. In all revolutionary
movements there are elements of excess and violence, which sober men may
regret, but which must not disturb our judgment as to the substantial
merits of an issue. The revolutionist of one generation is, like
Garibaldi or Mazzini, the hero of the next; and the verdict of posterity
applauds those who, even in his own day, were able to discern the
justice of the cause under the errors or faults of its champion. Doubly
is it the duty of a great and far-sighted statesman not to be repelled
by such errors, when he can, by espousing a revolutionary movement,
purify it of its revolutionary character, and turn it into a legitimate
constitutional struggle. This is what Mr. Gladstone has done. If his
policy be in itself dangerous and disloyal to the true interests of the
people of our islands, let it be condemned. But if it be the policy
which has the best promise for the peace, the prosperity, and the mutual
good will of those peoples, he and those who follow him would be
culpable indeed were they to be deterred by the condemnation which they
have so often expressed, and which they still express, for some of the
past acts of a particular party, from declaring that the aims of that
party were substantially right aims, and from now pressing upon the
country what their conscience approves.
However, as the Home Rule Liberals and Nationalists, taken together, are
in a minority (although a minority which obtains recruits at many
bye-elections) in the present Parliament, it is not from them that fresh
proposals are expected. They will, of course, continue to speak, write,
and agitate on behalf of the views they hold. But practical attempt to
deal with Irish troubles must for the present come from the Tory
Ministry; for in the English system of government those who command a
Parliamentary majority are responsible for legislation as well as
administration, and are censured not merely if their legislation is bad,
but if it is not forthcoming when events call for it.
Why, it may be asked, should Lord Salisbury's Government burn its
fingers over Ireland, as so many governments have burnt their fingers
before? Why not let Ireland alone, giving to foreign affairs and to
English and Scottish reforms all the attention which these too much
neglected matters need?
Well would it be for England, as well as for English Ministries, if
Ireland could be simply let alone, her maladies left to be healed by the
soft, slow hand of nature. But Irish troubles call aloud to be dealt
with, and that promptly. They stand in the way of all other reforms,
indeed of all other business. Letting alone has been tried, and it has
succeeded no better, even in times less urgent than the present, than
the usual policy of coercion followed by concession, or concession
followed by coercion.
There are three aspects of the Irish question, three channels by which
the troubles of the "distressful island" stream down upon us, forcing
whoever now rules or may come to rule in England to attempt some plan
for dealing with them. I will take them in succession.
The first is the Parliamentary difficulty. In the British House of
Commons, with its six hundred and seventy members, there are nearly
ninety Irish Nationalists. They are a well-disciplined body, voting as
one man, though capable of speaking enough for a thousand. They have no
interest in English or Scotch or colonial or Indian affairs, but only in
Irish, and look upon the vote which they have the right of giving upon
the former solely as a means of furthering their own Irish aims. They
are, therefore, in the British Parliament not merely a foreign body,
indifferent to the great British and imperial issues confided to it, but
a hostile body, opposed to its present constitution, seeking to
discredit it in its authority over Ireland, and to make more and more
palpable and incurable the incompetence for Irish business whereof they
accuse it. Several modes of doing this are open to them. They may, as
some of the more actively bitter among them did in the Parliaments of
1874 and 1880, obstruct business by long and frequent speeches, dilatory
motions, and all those devices which in America are called
filibustering. The House of Commons may, no doubt, try to check these
tactics by more stringent rules of procedure, but the attempts already
made in this direction have had but slight success, and every
restriction of debate, since it trenches on the freedom of English and
Scotch no less than of Irish members, injures Parliament as a whole.
They may disgust the British people with the House of Commons by keeping
it (as they have done in former years) so constantly occupied with Irish
business as to leave it little time for English and Scotch measures.
They may throw the weight of their collective vote into the scale of one
or other British party, according to the amount of concession it will
make to them, or, by always voting against the Ministry of the day, they
may cause frequent and sudden changes of Government. This plan also they
have followed in time past; for the moment it is not so applicable,
because the Tories and dissentient Liberals, taken together, possess a
majority in the House of Commons. But at any moment the alliance of
those two sections may vanish, or another General Election may leave
Tories and Liberals so nearly balanced that the Irish vote could turn
the scale. Whoever reflects on the nature of Parliamentary Government
will perceive that it is based on the assumption that the members of the
ruling assembly, however much they may differ on other subjects, agree
in desiring the strength, dignity, and welfare of the assembly itself,
and in caring for the main national interests which it controls. He will
therefore be prepared to expect countless and multiform difficulties in
working such a Government, where a large section of the assembly seeks
not to use, but to make useless, its forms and rules--not to preserve,
but to lower and destroy, its honour, its credit, its efficiency. In
vain are Irish members blamed for these tactics, for they answer that
the interests of their own country require them to seek first her
welfare, which can in their view be secured only by removing her from
the direct control of what they deem a foreign assembly. Now that the
demand for Irish self-government has obtained the sympathy of the bulk
of English Liberals, they are unlikely forthwith to resume the
systematic obstruction of past years. But they will be able, without
alienating their English friends, to render the conduct of Parliamentary
business so difficult that every English Ministry will be forced either
to crush them, if it can, or to appease them by a series of concessions.
The second difficulty is that of maintaining social order in Ireland.
What that difficulty is, and whence it arises, every one knows. It is
chronic, but every second or third winter, when there has been a wet
season, or the price of live stock declines, it becomes specially acute.
The tenants refuse to pay rents which they declare to be impossible. The
landlords, or the harsher among them, try to enforce rents by evictions;
evictions are resisted by outrages and boycotting. Popular sentiment
supports those who commit outrages, because it considers the tenantry to
be engaged in a species of war, a righteous war, against the landlord.
Evidence can seldom be obtained, and juries acquit in the teeth of
evidence. Thus the enforcement of the law strains all the resources of
authority, while a habit of lawlessness and discontent is transmitted
from generation to generation. Of the remedies proposed for this chronic
evil the most obvious is the strengthening of the criminal law. We have
been trying this for more than one hundred years, since Whiteboyism
appeared, and trying it in vain. Since the Union, Coercion Acts, of more
or less severity, have been almost always in force in Ireland, passed
for two or three years, then dropped for a year or two, then renewed in
a form slightly varying, but always with the same result of driving the
disease in for a time, but not curing it. Mr. Gladstone proposed to buy
out the landlords and then leave an Irish Parliament to restore social
order, with that authority which it would derive from having the will of
the people behind it; because he held that when the people felt the law
to be of their own making, and not imposed from without, their sentiment
would be enlisted on its side, and the necessity for a firm Government
recognized. This plan, has, however, been rejected, so the choice was
left of a fresh Coercion Act, or of some scheme, necessarily a costly
scheme, for getting rid of the source of trouble by transferring the
land of Ireland to the peasantry. The present Government, while guided
by Sir M. Hicks-Beach, who had some knowledge of Ireland, did its best
to persuade the landlords to accept reduced rents, while the Nationalist
leaders, on their side, sought to restrain the people from outrages. But
the armistice did not last. The Ministry yielded to the foolish counsels
of its more violent supporters, and entrusted Irish affairs to the hands
of a Chief Secretary without previous knowledge of the island. An
unusually severe Coercion Act has been brought in and passed by the aid
of the dissentient Liberals. And we now see this Act administered with a
mixture of virulence and incompetence to which even the dreary annals of
Irish misgovernment present few parallels. The feeling of the English
people is rising against the policy carried out in their name. So far
from being solved, the problem of social order becomes every day more
acute.
There remains the question of a reform of local government. For many
years past, every English Ministry has undertaken to frame a measure
creating a new system of popular rural self-government in England. It is
the first large task of domestic legislation which we ask from
Parliament. When such a scheme is proposed, can Ireland be left out of
it? Should she be left out, the argument that she is being treated
unequally and unfairly, as compared with England, would gain immense
force; because the present local government of Ireland is admittedly
less popular, less efficient, altogether less defensible, than even that
of England which we are going to reform. If, therefore, the theory that
the Imperial Parliament is both anxious and able to do its duty by
Ireland is to be maintained, Ireland, too, must have her scheme of local
government. And a scheme of local government is a large project, the
discussion of which must pass into a discussion of the government of the
island as a whole.
Since, then, we may conclude that whatever Ministry is in power will be
bound to take up the state of Ireland--since Parliament and the nation
will be occupied with the subject during the coming sessions fully as
much as they have been during those that have recently passed--the next
inquiry is, What will the tendency of opinion and legislation be? Will
the reasons and forces described above bring us to Home Rule? and if so,
when, how, and why?
There are grounds for answering these questions in the negative. A
majority of the House of Commons, including the present Ministry and
such influential Liberals as Mr. Bright, Lord Hartington, Mr.
Chamberlain, stand pledged to resist it, and seem--such is the passion
which controversy engenders--more disposed to resist it than they were
in 1885. But this ground is less strong than it may appear. We have had
too many changes of opinion--ay, and of action too--upon Irish affairs
not to be prepared for further changes. A Ministry in power learns much
which an Opposition fails to learn. Home Rule is an elastic expression,
and some of those who were loudest in denouncing Mr. Gladstone's Bill
will find it easy to explain, should they bring in a Bill of their own
for giving self-government to Ireland, that their measure is a different
thing, and free from the objections brought against his. Nor, if such a
conversion should come, need it be deemed a dishonest one, for events
are potent teachers, and governments now seek rather to follow than to
form opinion. Although a decent interval must be allowed, no one will be
astonished if the Tory leaders should move ere long in the direction
indicated. Toryism itself, as has been remarked already, contains
nothing opposed to the idea.
Far greater obstacles exist in the aversion which (as already observed)
so many Englishmen of both parties have entertained for any scheme which
should seem to leave the Protestant minority at the mercy of the peasant
and Roman Catholic majority, and to carry us some way toward the
ultimate separation of the islands. These alarms are genuine and
deep-seated. One who (like the present writer) thinks them, if not
baseless, yet immensely overstrained, is, of course, convinced that they
may be allayed. But time must first pass, and the plan that is to allay
them may have to be framed on somewhat different lines from those of Mr.
Gladstone's measure. It is even possible that a conflict more sharp and
painful than any of recent years may intervene before a settlement is
reached.
Nevertheless, great as are the obstacles in the way, bitter as are the
reproaches with which Mr. Gladstone is pursued by the richer classes in
England, there is good reason to believe that the current is setting
toward his policy. In proceeding to state the grounds for this view, I
must frankly own that I am no longer (as in most of the preceding pages)
merely setting forth facts on which impartial men in England would
agree. The forecast which I seek to give may be tinged by my own belief
that the grant of self-government is the best, if not the only method,
now open to us of establishing peace between the islands, relieving the
English Parliament of work it is ill fitted to discharge, allowing
Ireland opportunities to learn those lessons in politics which her
people so much need. The future, even the near future, is more than
usually dim. Yet, if we examine those three branches of the Irish
question which have been enumerated above, we shall see how naturally,
in each of them, the concession of self-government seems to open, I will
not say the most direct, but the least dangerous way, out of our
troubles.
The Parliamentary difficulty arises from the fact that the
representatives of Ireland have the feelings of foreigners sitting in a
foreign assembly, whose honour and usefulness they do not desire. While
these are their feelings they cannot work properly in it, and it cannot
work properly with them. The inconvenience may be endured, but the
English will grow tired of it, and be disposed to rid themselves of it,
if they see their way to do so without greater mischief. There are but
two ways out of the difficulty. One is to get rid of the Irish members
altogether; the other is to make them, by the concession of their just
demands, contented and loyal members of a truly united Parliament. The
experience of the Parliament of 1880, which was mainly occupied with
Irish business, and began, being a strongly Liberal Parliament, with a
bias toward the Irish popular party, showed how difficult it is for a
House of Commons which is ignorant of Ireland to legislate wisely for
it. In the House of Lords there is not a single Nationalist; indeed, up
till 1886, that exalted chamber contained only one peer, Lord Dalhousie
(formerly member for Liverpool), who had ever said a word in favour of
Home Rule. The more that England becomes sensible, as she must become
sensible, of the deficiencies of the present machinery for appreciating
the needs and giving effect to the wishes of Irishmen, the more disposed
will she be to grant them some machinery of their own.
As regards social order, I have shown that the choice which lies before
the opponents of Home Rule is either to continue the policy of coercing
the peasantry by severe special legislation, or to remove the source of
friction by buying out the landlords for the benefit of the tenants. The
present Ministry have chosen the former alternative, but they dangle
before the eyes of their supporters some prospect that they may
ultimately revert to the latter. Now, the only way that has yet been
pointed out of buying out the landlords, without imposing tremendous
liabilities of loss upon the British Treasury, is the creation of a
strong Home Rule Government in Dublin. Supposing, however, that some
other plan could be discovered, which would avoid the fatal objections
to which an extension of the plan of the (Salisbury) Land Purchase Act
of 1885 is open, such a plan would remove one of the chief objections to
an Irish Parliament, by leaving no estates for such a Parliament to
confiscate. As for coercion every day, I might say, every bye-election
shows us how it becomes more and more odious to the British democracy.
They dislike severity; they dislike the inequality involved in passing
harsher laws for Ireland than those that apply to England and Scotland.
They find themselves forced to sympathize with acts of violence in
Ireland which they would condemn in Great Britain, because these acts
seem the only way of resisting harsh and unjust laws. When the recoil
comes, it will be more violent than in former days. The wish to discover
some other course will be very strong, and the obvious other course will
be to leave it to an Irish authority to enforce social order in its own
way--probably a more rough-and-ready way than that of British officials.
The notion which has possessed most Englishmen, that Irish
self-government would be another name for anarchy, is curiously
erroneous. Conflicts there may be, but a vigorous rule will emerge.
Lastly, as to local government. If a popular system is established in
Ireland--one similar to that which it is proposed to establish in
England--the control of its assemblies and officials will, over
four-fifths of the island, fall into Nationalist hands. Their power will
be enormously increased, for they will then command the machinery of
administration, and the power of taxing. What with taxing landlords,
aiding recalcitrant tenants, stopping the wheels of any central
authority which may displease or oppose them, they will be in so strong
a position that the creation of an Irish Parliament may appear to be a
comparatively small further step, may even appear (as the wisest
Nationalists now think it would prove) in the light of a check upon the
abuse of local powers. These eventualities will unquestionably, when
English opinion has realized them, make such a Parliament as the present
pause before it commits rural local government to the Irish democracy.
But it could not refuse to do something; and if it tried to restrain
popular representative bodies by the veto of a bureaucracy in Dublin,
there would arise occasions for quarrel and irritation more serious than
now exist.[70] Those who once begin to repair an old and tottering
building are led on, little by little, into changes they did not at
starting contemplate. So it will be if once the task is undertaken of
reforming the confessedly bad and indefensible system of Irish
administration. We may stop at some half-way house on the way, but Home
Rule stands at the end of the road.
Supposing, then, that the Nationalist party, retaining its present
strength and unity, perseveres in its present demands, there is every
prospect that these demands will be granted. But will it persevere?
There are among the English Dissentients those who prophesy that it will
break up, as such parties have broken up before--will lose hope and
wither away. Or the support of the Irish peasantry may be withdrawn--a
result which some English politicians expect from a final settlement of
the land question in the interest of the tenants. Any of these
contingencies is possible, but at present most improbable. The moment
when long-cherished aims begin to seem attainable is not that at which
men are disposed to abandon them.
There are, however, other reasons which suggest the likelihood of a
change in English sentiment on the whole matter. The surprise with
which the Bill of last April was received has worn off. The alarm is
wearing off too. Those who set their teeth at what seemed to them a
surrender to the Parnellites and their Irish-American allies, having
relieved their temper by an emphatic No, have begun to ponder things
more calmly. The English people are listening to the arguments from
Irish history that are now addressed to them. They will be moved by the
solid grounds of policy which that history suggests; will understand
that what they have deemed insensate hatred is the natural result of
long misgovernment, and will disappear with time and the removal of its
causes. Many of the best minds of both nations will be at work to
discover some method of reconciling Irish self-government with imperial
supremacy and union free from the objections brought against the Bills
of 1886. It is reasonable to expect that they may greatly improve upon
these measures, which were prepared under pressure from a clamorous
Opposition. What Mr. Disraeli once called the historical conscience of
the country will appreciate those great underlying principles to which
Mr. Gladstone's policy appeals. It has been accused of being a policy of
despair; and may have commended itself to some who supported it as being
simply a means of ridding England of responsibility. But to others it
seemed, and more truly, a policy of faith; not, indeed, of thoughtless
optimism, but of faith according to the definition which calls it "the
substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Faith,
by which nations as well as men must live, means nothing less than a
conviction that great principles, permanent truths of human nature, lie
at the bottom of all sound politics, and ought to be boldly and
consistently applied, even when temporary difficulties surround their
application. Such a principle is the belief in the power of freedom and
self-government to cure the faults of a nation, in the tendency of
responsibility to teach wisdom, and to make men see that justice and
order are the surest sources of prosperity. Such a principle is the
perception that national hatreds do not live on of themselves, but will
expire when oppression has ceased, as a fire burns out without fuel.
Such a principle is the recognition of the force of national sentiment,
and of the duty of allowing it all the satisfaction that is compatible
with the maintenance of imperial unity. Such, again, is the appreciation
of those natural economic laws which show that nations, when disturbing
passions have ceased, follow their own permanent interests, and that an
island which finds its chief market in England and draws its capital
from England will prefer a connection with England to the poverty and
insignificance of isolation. It is the honour of Mr. Gladstone to have
built his policy of conciliation upon principles like these, as upon a
rock; and already the good effects are seen in the new friendliness
which has arisen between the English masses and the people of Ireland,
and in the better temper with which, despite the acrimony of some
prominent politicians, the relations of the two peoples are discussed.
When one looks round the horizon it is still far from clear; nor can we
say from which quarter fair weather will arrive. But the air is fresher,
and the clouds are breaking overhead.
* * * * *