It is a favourite line of argument to show that we have no choice
between the maintenance of the Union and the concession to Ireland of
national independence. The evils of Irish independence are universally
reckoned by Englishmen to be so intolerable that we shall never agree to
it. The evils of Home Rule are even more intolerable still. Therefore,
it is said, if we shall never willingly bring the latter upon our heads,
_à fortiori_ we ought on no account to invite the former. The business
in hand, however, is not a theorem, but a problem; it is not a thesis to
be proved, but a malady to be cured; and the world will thank only the
reasoner who winds up, not with Q.E.D., but with Q.E.F. To reason that a
patient ought not to take a given medicine because it may possibly cause
him more pain than some other medicine which he has no intention of
taking, is curiously oblique logic. The question is not oblique; it is
direct. Will the operation do more harm to his constitution than the
slow corrosions of a disorder grown inveterate? Are the conditions of
the connection between England and Ireland, as laid down in the Act of
Union, incapable of improvement? Is the present working of these
conditions more prosperous and hopeful, or happier for Irish order and
for English institutions, than any practicable proposal that it is
within the compass of statesmanship to devise, and of civic sense to
accept and to work? That is the question.
Some people contend that the burden of making out a case rests on the
advocate of change, and not on those who support things as they are. But
who supports things as they are? Things as they are have become
insupportable. If you make any of the constitutional changes that have
been proposed, we are told, parliamentary government, as Englishmen now
know it, is at an end; and our critic stands amazed at those "who deem
it a slighter danger to innovate on the Act of Union than to remodel the
procedure of the House of Commons." As if that were the alternative.
Great changes in the rules may do other good things, but no single
competent authority believes that in this particular they will do the
thing that we want. We cannot avoid constitutional changes. It is made
matter of crushing rebuke that the Irish proposals of the late
Government were an innovation on the old constitution of the realm. But
everybody knows that, while ancient forms have survived, the last
hundred years have witnessed a long succession of silent but most
profound innovations. It was shortsighted to assume that the
redistribution of political power that took place in 1884-5 was the last
chapter of the history of constitutional change. It ought to have been
foreseen that new possessors of power, both Irish and British, would
press for objects the pursuit of which would certainly involve further
novelties in the methods and machinery of government. Every given
innovation must be rigorously scrutinized, but in the mere change or in
the fact of innovation there is no valid reproach. When one of the
plans for the better government of Ireland is described as depriving
parliamentary institutions of their elasticity and strength, as
weakening the Executive at home, and lessening the power of the country
to resist foreign attack, no careful observer of the events of the last
seven years can fail to see that all this evil has already got its grip
upon us. Mr. Dicey himself admits it. "Great Britain," he says, "if left
to herself, could act with all the force, consistency, and energy given
by unity of sentiment and community of interests. The obstruction and
the uncertainty of our political aims, the feebleness and inconsistency
with which they are pursued, arise in part at least from the connection
with Ireland." So then, after all, it is feebleness and inconsistency,
not elasticity and strength, that mark our institutions as they stand;
feebleness and inconsistency, distraction and uncertainty. The supporter
of things as they are is decidedly as much concerned in making out a
case as the advocate of change.
The strength of the argument from Nationality is great, and full of
significance; but Nationality is not the whole essence of either the
argument from History or the argument from Self-government. Their force
lies in considerations of political expediency as tested by practical
experience.
The point of the argument from the lessons of History is that for some
reason or another the international concern, whose unlucky affairs we
are now trying to unravel, has always been carried on at a loss: the
point of the argument from Self-government is that the loss would have
been avoided if the Irish shareholders had for a certain number of the
transactions been more influentially represented on the Board. That is
quite apart from the sentiment of pure nationality. The failure has come
about, not simply because the laws were not made by Irishmen as such,
but because they were not made by the men who knew most about Ireland.
The vice of the connection between the two countries has been the
stupidity of governing a country without regard to the interests or
customs, the peculiar objects and peculiar experiences, of the great
majority of the people who live in it. It is not enough to say that the
failures of England in Ireland have to a great extent flowed from causes
too general to be identified with the intentional wrong-doing either of
rulers or of subjects. We readily admit that, but it is not the point.
It is not enough to insist that James I., in his plantations and
transplantations, probably meant well to his Irish subjects. Probably he
did. That is not the question. If it is "absolutely certain that his
policy worked gross wrong," what is the explanation and the defence? We
are quite content with Mr. Dicey's own answer. "Ignorance and want of
sympathy produced all the evils of cruelty and malignity. An intended
reform produced injustice, litigation, misery, and discontent. The case
is noticeable, for it is a type of a thousand subsequent English
attempts to reform and improve Ireland." This description would apply,
with hardly a word altered, to the wrong done by the Encumbered Estates
Act in the reign of Queen Victoria. That memorable measure, as Mr.
Gladstone said, was due not to the action of a party, but to the action
of a Parliament. Sir Robert Peel was hardly less responsible for it than
Lord John Russell. "We produced it," said Mr. Gladstone, "with a
general, lazy, uninformed, and irreflective good intention of taking
capital to Ireland. What did we do? We sold the improvements of the
tenants" (House of Commons, April 16). It is the same story, from the
first chapter to the last, in education, poor law, public works, relief
Acts, even in coercion Acts--lazy, uninformed, and irreflective good
intention. That is the argument from history. When we are asked what
good law an Irish Parliament would make that could not equally well be
made by the Parliament at Westminster, this is the answer. It is not
the will, it is the intelligence, that is wanting. We all know what the
past has been. Why should the future be different?
"It is an inherent condition of human affairs," said Mill in a book
which, in spite of some chimeras, is a wholesome corrective of the
teaching of our new jurists, "that no intention, however sincere, of
protecting the interests of others can make it safe or salutary to tie
up their own hands. Still more obviously true is it, that by their own
hands only can any positive and durable improvement of their
circumstances in life be worked out" (_Repres. Government_, p. 57). It
is these wise lessons from human experience to which the advocate of
Home Rule appeals, and not the wild doctrine that any body of persons
claiming to be united by a sense of nationality possesses _an inherent
and divine right_ to be treated as an independent community. It is quite
true that circumstances sometimes justify a temporary dictatorship. In
that there is nothing at variance with Liberalism. But the Parliamentary
dictatorship in Ireland has lasted a great deal too long to be called
temporary, and its stupid shambling operations are finally and
decisively condemned by their consequences. That is a straightforward
utilitarian argument, and has nothing whatever to do with inherent and
divine rights, or any other form of political moonshine.
There are some who believe that an honest centralized administration of
impartial officials, and not Local Self-Government, would best meet the
real wants of the people. In other words, everything is to be for the
people, nothing by the people--which has not hitherto been a Liberal
principle. Something, however, may be said for this view, provided that
the source of the authority of such an administration be acceptable.
Austrian administration in Lombardy was good rather than bad, yet it was
hated and resisted because it was Austrian and not Italian. No rational
person can hold for an instant that the source of a scheme of
government is immaterial to its prosperity. More than that, when people
look for success in the government of Ireland to "honest centralized
administration," we cannot but wonder what fault they find with the
administration of Ireland to-day in respect of its honesty or its
centralization. What administration ever carried either honesty or
centralization to a higher pitch than the Irish administration of Mr.
Forster? What could be less successful? Those who have been most
directly concerned in the government of Ireland, whether English or
Irish, even while alive to the perils of any other principle, habitually
talk of centralization as the curse of the system. Here, again, why
should we expect success in the future from a principle that has so
failed in the past?
Again, how are we to get a strong centralized administration in the face
of a powerful and hostile parliamentary representation? It is very easy
to talk of the benefits that might have been conferred on Ireland by
such humanity and justice as was practised by Turgot in his
administration of the Generality of Limoges. But Turgot was not
confronted by eighty-six Limousin members of an active sovereign body,
all interested in making his work difficult, and trusted by a large
proportion of the people of the province with that as their express
commission. It is possible to have an honest centralized administration
of great strength and activity in India, but there is no Parliament in
India. If India, or any province of it, ever gets representative
government and our parliamentary system, from that hour, if there be any
considerable section of Indian feeling averse from European rule, the
present administrative system will be paralyzed, as the preliminary to
being revolutionized. It is conceivable, if any one chooses to think so,
that a body of impartial officials could manage the national business in
Ireland much better without the guidance of public opinion and common
sentiment than with it. But if you intend to govern the country as you
think best--and that is the plain and practical English of centralized
administration--why ask the country to send a hundred men to the great
tribunal of supervision to inform you how it would like to be governed?
The Executive cannot set them aside as if they were a hundred dummies;
in refusing to be guided, it cannot escape being harassed, by them. You
may amend procedure, but that is no answer, unless you amend the Irish
members out of voice and vote. They will still count. You cannot gag and
muzzle them effectually, and if you could, they would still be there,
and their presence would still make itself incessantly felt. Partly from
a natural desire to lessen the common difficulties of government, and
partly from a consciousness, due to the prevailing state of the modern
political atmosphere, that there is something wrong in this total
alienation of an Executive from the possessors of parliamentary power,
the officials will incessantly be tempted to make tacks out of their own
course; and thus they lose the coherency and continuity of absolutism
without gaining the pliant strength of popular government. This is not a
presumption of what would be likely to happen, but an account of what
does happen, and what justified Mr. Disraeli in adding a weak Executive
to the alien Church and the absentee aristocracy, as the three great
curses of Ireland. Nothing has occurred since 1844 to render the
Executive stronger, but much to the contrary. There is, and there can
be, no weaker or less effective Government in the world than a highly
centralized system working alongside of a bitterly inimical popular
representation. I say nothing of the effect of the fluctuations of
English parties on Irish administration. I say nothing of the tendency
in an Irish government, awkwardly alternating with that to which I have
just adverted, to look over the heads of the people of Ireland, and to
consider mainly what will be thought by the ignorant public in England.
But these sources of incessant perturbation must not be left out. The
fault of Irish centralization is not that it is strong, but that it is
weak. Weak it must remain until Parliament either approves of the
permanent suspension of the Irish writs, or else devises constitutional
means for making Irish administration responsible to Irish
representatives.
If experience is decisive against the policy of the past, experience
too, all over the modern world, indicates the better direction for the
future. I will not use my too scanty space in repeating any of the great
wise commonplaces in praise of self-government. Here they are
superfluous. In the case of Ireland they have all been abundantly
admitted in a long series of measures, from Catholic Emancipation down
to Lord O'Hagan's Jury Law and the Franchise and Redistribution Acts of
a couple of years ago. The principle of self-government has been
accepted, ratified, and extended in a hundred ways. It is only a
question of the form that self-government shall take. Against the form
proposed by the late Ministry a case is built up that rests on a series
of prophetic assumptions. These assumptions, from the nature of the
case, can only be met by a counter-statement of fair and reasonable
probabilities. Let us enumerate some of them.
1. It is inferred that, because the Irish leaders have used violent
language and resorted to objectionable expedients against England during
the last six years, they would continue in the same frame of mind after
the reasons for it had disappeared. In other words, because they have
been the enemies of a Government which refused to listen to a
constitutional demand, therefore they would continue to be its enemies
after the demand had been listened to. On this reasoning, the effect is
to last indefinitely and perpetually, notwithstanding the cessation of
the cause. Our position is that all the reasonable probabilities of
human conduct point the other way. The surest way of justifying violent
language and fostering treasonable designs, is to refuse to listen to
the constitutional demand.
2. The Irish, we are told, hate the English with an irreconcilable
hatred, and would unquestionably use any Constitution as an instrument
for satisfying their master passion. Irrational hatred, they say, can be
treated by rational men with composure. The Czechs of Bohemia are said
to be irreconcilable, yet the South Germans bear with their hatred; and
if we cannot cure we might endure the antipathy of Ireland. Now, as for
the illustration, I may remark that the hatred of the Czechs would be
much too formidable for German composure, if the Czechs did not happen
to possess a provincial charter and a special constitution of their own.
If the Irish had the same, their national dislike--so far as it
exists--might be expected to become as bearable as the Germans have
found the feeling of the Czechs. But how deep does Irish dislike go? Is
it directed against Englishmen, or against an English official system?
The answers of every impartial observer to the whole group of such
questions as these favour the conclusion that the imputed hatred of
England in Ireland has been enormously exaggerated and overcoloured by
Ascendency politicians for good reasons of their own; that with the
great majority of Irishmen it has no deep roots; that it is not one of
those passionate international animosities that blind men to their own
interests, or lead them to sacrifice themselves for the sake of injuring
their foe; and, finally, that it would not survive the amendment of the
system that has given it birth.[72]
3. It is assumed that there is a universal desire for Separation. That
there is a strong sentiment of nationality we of course admit; it is
part of the case, and not the worst part. But the sentiment of
nationality is a totally different thing from a desire for Separation.
Scotland might teach our pseudo-Unionists so much as that. Nowhere in
the world is the sentiment of nationality stronger, yet there is not a
whisper of Separation. That there is a section of Irishmen who desire
Separation is notorious, but everything that has happened since the
Government of Ireland Bill was introduced, including the remarkable
declarations of Mr. Parnell in accepting the Bill (June 7), and
including the proceedings at Chicago, shows that the separatist section
is a very small one either in Ireland or in America, and that it has
become sensibly smaller since, and in consequence of, the proposed
concession of a limited statutory constitution. The Irish are quite
shrewd enough to know that Separation, if it were attainable--and they
are well aware that it is not--would do no good to their markets; and to
that knowledge, as well as to many other internal considerations, we may
confidently look for the victory of strong centripetal over very weak
centrifugal tendencies. Even if we suppose these centrifugal tendencies
to be stronger than I would allow them to be, how shall we best resist
them--by strengthening the hands and using the services of the party
which, though nationalist, is also constitutional; or by driving that
party also, in despair of a constitutional solution, to swell the ranks
of Extremists and Irreconcilables?
4. Whatever may be the ill-feeling towards England, it is at least
undeniable that there are bitter internal animosities in Ireland, and a
political constitution, our opponents argue, can neither assuage
religious bigotry nor remove agrarian discontent.
It is true, no doubt, that the old feud between Protestant and Catholic
might, perhaps, not instantly die down to the last smouldering embers of
it all over Ireland. But we may remark that there is no perceptible bad
blood between Protestant and Catholic, outside of one notorious corner.
Second, the real bitterness of the feud arose from the fact that
Protestantism was associated with an exclusive and hostile ascendency,
which would now be brought to an end. Whatever feeling about what is
called Ulster exists in the rest of Ireland, arises not from the fact
that there are Protestants in Ulster, but that the Protestants are
anti-National. Third, the Catholics would no longer be one compact body
for persecuting, obscurantist, or any other evil purposes; the abatement
of the national struggle would allow the Catholics to fall into the two
natural divisions of Clerical and Liberal. What we may be quite sure of
is that the feud will never die so long as sectarian pretensions are
taken as good reasons for continuing bad government.
It is true, again, that a constitution would not necessarily remove
agrarian discontent. But it is just as true that you will never remove
agrarian discontent without a constitution. Mr. Dicey, on consideration,
will easily see why. Here we come to an illustration, and a very
impressive illustration it is, of the impotence of England to do for
Ireland the good which Ireland might do for herself. Nobody just now is
likely to forget the barbarous condition of the broad fringe of
wretchedness on the west coast of Ireland. Of this Lord Dufferin truly
said in 1880 that no legislation could touch it, that no alteration in
the land laws could effectually ameliorate it, and that it must continue
until the world's end unless something be contrived totally to change
the conditions of existence in that desolate region. Parliament lavishly
pours water into the sieve in the shape of Relief Acts. Even in my own
short tenure of office I was responsible for one of these terribly
wasteful and profoundly unsatisfactory measures. Instead of relief, what
a statesman must seek is prevention of this great evil and strong root
of evil; and prevention means a large, though it cannot be a very swift,
displacement of the population. But among the many experts with whom I
have discussed this dolorous and perplexing subject, I never found one
of either political party who did not agree that a removal of the
surplus population was only practicable if carried out by an Irish
authority, backed by the solid weight of Irish opinion. Any exertion of
compulsory power by a British Minister would raise the whole
country-side in squalid insurrection, government would become
impossible, and the work of transplantation would end in ghastly
failure. It is misleading and untrue, then, to say that there is no
possible relation between self-government and agrarian discontent,
misery, and backwardness; and when Mr. Dicey and others tell us that the
British Parliament is able to do all good things for Ireland, I would
respectfully ask them how a British Parliament is to deal with the
Congested Districts.
Nearly as much may be said of the prevention of the mischievous practice
of Subdivision. Some contend that the old disposition to subdivide is
dying out; others, however, assure us that it is making its appearance
even among the excellent class who purchased their holdings under the
Church Act. That Act did not prohibit subdivision, but it is prohibited
in the Act of 1881. Still the prohibition can only be made effective, if
operations take place on anything like a great scale, on condition that
representative, authorities resident on the spot have the power of
enforcing it, and have an interest in enforcing it. Some of the
pseudo-Unionists are even against any extension of local
self-government, and if it be unaccompanied by the creation of a central
native authority they are right. What such people fail to see is that,
in resisting political reconstruction, they are at the same time
resisting the only available remedies for some of the worst of agrarian
maladies.
The ruinous interplay between agrarian and political forces, each using
the other for ends of its own, will never cease so long as the political
demand is in every form resisted. That, we are told, is all the fault of
the politicians. Be it so; then the Government must either suppress the
politicians outright, or else it must interest them in getting the terms
of its land settlement accepted and respected. Home Rule on our scheme
was, among other things, part of an arrangement for "settling the
agrarian feud." It was a means of interposing between the Irish tenant
and the British State an authority interested enough and strong enough
to cause the bargain to be kept. It is said that the Irish authority
would have had neither interest nor strength enough to resist the forces
making for repudiation. Would those forces be any less irresistible if
the whole body of the Irish peasantry stood, as Land Purchase _minus_
Self-Government makes them to stand, directly face to face with the
British State? This is a question that our opponents cannot evade, any
more than they can evade that other question, which lies unnoticed at
the back of all solutions of the problem by way of peasant
ownership--Whether it is possible to imagine the land of Ireland handed
over to Irishmen, and yet the government of Ireland kept exclusively and
directly by Englishmen? Such a divorce is conceivable under a rule like
that of the British in India: with popular institutions it is
inconceivable and impossible.
5. It is argued that Home Rule on Mr. Gladstone's plan would not work,
because it follows in some respects the colonial system, whereas the
conditions at the root of the success of the system in the Colonies do
not exist in Ireland. They are distant, Ireland is near; they are
prosperous, Ireland is poor; they are proud of the connection with
England, Ireland resents it. But the question is not whether the
conditions are identical with those of any colony; it is enough if in
themselves they seem to promise a certain basis for government. It might
justly be contended that proximity is a more favourable condition than
distance; without it there could not be that close and constant
intercommunication which binds the material interests of Ireland to
those of Great Britain, and so provides the surest guarantee for union.
If Ireland were suddenly to find herself as far off as Canada, then
indeed one might be very sorry to answer for the Union. Again, though
Ireland has to bear her share of the prevailing depression in the chief
branch of her production, it is a great mistake to suppose that outside
of the margin of chronic wretchedness in the west and south-west, the
condition not only of the manufacturing industries of the north, but of
the agricultural industry in the richer parts of the middle and south,
is so desperately unprosperous as to endanger a political constitution.
Under our stupidily [Transcriber: sic] centralized system, Irishmen have
no doubt acquired the enervating trick of attributing every misfortune,
great or small, public or private, to the Government. When they learn
the lessons of responsibility, they will unlearn this fatal habit, and
not before.
I do not see, therefore, that the differences in condition between
Ireland and the Colonies make against Home Rule. What I do see is ample
material out of which would arise a strong and predominant party of
order. The bulk of the nation are sons and daughters of a Church which
has been hostile to revolution in every country but Ireland, and which
would be hostile to it there from the day that the cause of revolution
ceased to be the cause of self-government. If the peasantry were made to
realize that at last the land settlement, wisely and equitably made, was
what it must inexorably remain, and what no politicians could help them
to alter, they would be as conservative as the peasantry under a similar
condition in every other spot on the surface of the globe. There is no
reason to expect that the manufacturers, merchants, and shopkeepers of
Ireland would be less willing or less able to play an active and useful
part in the affairs of their country than the same classes in England or
Scotland. It will be said that this is mere optimist prophesying. But
why is that to be flung aside under the odd name of sentimentalism,
while pessimist prophesying is to be taken for gospel?
The only danger is lest we should allot new responsibilities to Irishmen
with a too grudging and restrictive hand. For true responsibility there
must be real power. It is easy to say that this power would be misused,
and that the conditions both of Irish society and of the proposed
Constitution must prevent it from being used for good. It is easy to say
that separation would be a better end. Life is too short to discuss
that. Separation is not the alternative either to Home Rule or to the
_status quo_. If the people of Ireland are not to be trusted with real
power over their own affairs, it would be a hundred times more just to
England, and more merciful to Ireland, to take away from her that
semblance of free government which torments and paralyzes one country,
while it robs the other of national self-respect and of all the
strongest motives and best opportunities of self-help. The _status quo_
is drawing very near to its inevitable end. The two courses then open
will be Home Rule on the one hand, and some shy bungling underhand
imitation of a Crown Colony on the other. We shall have either to listen
to the Irish representatives or to suppress them. Unless we have lost
all nerve and all political faculty we shall, before many months are
over, face these alternatives. Liberals are for the first; Tories at
present incline to the second. It requires very moderate instinct for
the forces at work in modern politics to foresee the path along which we
shall move, in the interests alike of relief to Great Britain and of a
sounder national life for Ireland. The only real question is not Whether
we are to grant Home Rule, but How.