Ireland for more than seven hundred years has been part of the British
territory, and has been with slight exceptions held by English arms, or
governed in the last resort from this side the water. Scotland was a
foreign country until 1603, and possessed absolute independence until
1707. Yet, whether it was due to the standing barrier of the sea, or
whatever may have been the cause, much less was known by Englishmen of
Ireland than of Scotland. Witness the works of Shakespeare, whose mind,
unless as to book-knowledge, was encyclopædic, and yet who, while he
seems at home in Scotland, may be said to tell us nothing of Ireland,
unless it is that--
"The uncivil kerns of Ireland are in arms."[73]
During more recent times, the knowledge of Scotland on this side the
border, which before was greatly in advance, has again increased in afar
greater degree than the knowledge of Ireland.
It is to Mr. Lecky that we owe the first serious effort, both in his
_Leaders of Public Opinion_ and in his _History of England in the
Eighteenth Century_, to produce a better state of things. He carefully
and completely dovetailed the affairs of Ireland into English History,
and the debt is one to be gratefully acknowledged. But such remedies,
addressing themselves in the first instance to the lettered mind of the
country, require much time to operate upon the mass, and upon the organs
of superficial and transitory opinion, before the final stage, when they
enter into our settled and familiar traditions. Meantime, since Ireland
threatens to absorb into herself our Parliamentary life, there is a
greatly enhanced necessity for becoming acquainted with the true state
of the account between the islands that make up the United Kingdom, and
with the likelihoods of the future in Ireland, so far as they are to be
gathered from her past history.
That history, until the eighteenth century begins, has a dismal
simplicity about it. Murder, persecution, confiscation too truly
describe its general strain; and policy is on the whole subordinated to
violence as the standing instrument of government. But after, say, the
reign of William III., the element of representation begins to assert
itself. Simplicity is by degrees exchanged for complexity; the play of
human motives, singularly diversified, now becomes visible in the
currents of a real public life. It has for a very long time been my
habit, when consulted by young political students, to recommend them
carefully to study the characters and events of the American
Independence. Quite apart from the special and temporary reasons bearing
upon the case, I would now add a twin recommendation to examine and
ponder the lessons of Irish history during the eighteenth century. The
task may not be easy, but the reward will be ample.
The mainspring of public life had, from a venerable antiquity, lain _de
jure_ within Ireland herself. The heaviest fetter upon this life was the
Law of Poynings; the most ingenious device upon record for hamstringing
legislative independence, because it cut off the means of resumption
inherent in the nature of Parliaments such as were those of the three
countries. But the Law of Poynings was an Irish Law. Its operation
effectually aided on the civil side those ruder causes, under the action
of which Ireland had lain for four centuries usually passive, and
bleeding at every pore. The main factors of her destiny worked, in
practice, from this side the water. But from the reign of Anne, or
perhaps from the Revolution onwards,
"Novus sæcorum nascitur ordo."
Of the three great nostrums so liberally applied by England, extirpation
and persecution had entirely failed, but confiscation had done its work.
The great Protestant landlordism of Ireland[74] had been strongly and
effectually built up. But, like other human contrivances, while it held
Ireland fast, it had also undesigned results. The repressed principle of
national life, the struggles of which had theretofore been extinguished
in blood, slowly sprang up anew in a form which, though extremely
narrow, and extravagantly imperfect, was armed with constitutional
guarantees; and, the regimen of violence once displaced, these
guarantees were sure to operate. What had been transacted in England
under Plantagenets and Stuarts was, to a large extent, transacted anew
by the Parliament of Ireland in the eighteenth century. That Parliament,
indeed, deserves almost every imaginable epithet of censure. It was
corrupt, servile, selfish, cruel. But when we have said all this, and
said it truly, there is more to tell. It was alive, and it was national.
Even absenteeism, that obstinately clinging curse, though it enfeebled
and distracted, could not, and did not, annihilate nationality. The
Irish Legislation was, moreover, compressed and thwarted by a foreign
executive; but even to this tremendous agent the vital principle was
too strong eventually to succumb.
Mr. Lecky well observes that the Irish case supplied "one of the most
striking examples upon record"[75] of an unconquerable efficacy in even
the most defective Parliament. I am, however, doubtful whether in this
proposition we have before us the whole case. This efficacy is not
invariably found even in tolerably constructed Parliaments. Why do we
find it in a Parliament of which the constitution and the environment
were alike intolerable? My answer is, because that Parliament found
itself faced by a British influence which was entirely anti-national,
and was thus constrained to seek for strength in the principle of
nationality.
Selfishness is a rooted principle of action in nations not less than in
single persons. It seems to draw a certain perfume from the virtue of
patriotism, which lies upon its borders. It stalks abroad with a
semblance of decency, nay, even of excellence. And under this cover a
paramount community readily embraces the notion, that a dependent
community may be made to exist not for its own sake, but for the sake of
an extraneous society of men. With this idea, the European nations,
utterly benighted in comparison with the ancient Greeks, founded their
transmarine dependencies. But a vast maritime distance, perhaps aided by
some filtration of sound ideas, prevented the application of this theory
in its nakedness and rigour to the American Colonies of England. In
Ireland we had not even the title of founders to allege. Nay, we were,
in point of indigenous civilization, the junior people. But the maritime
severance, sufficient to prevent accurate and familiar knowledge, was
not enough to bar the effective exercise of overmastering power. And
power was exercised, at first from without, to support the Pale, to
enlarge it, to make it include Ireland. When this had been done, power
began, in the seventeenth century, to be exercised from within Ireland,
within the precinct of its government and its institutions. These were
carefully corrupted, from the multiplication of the Boroughs by James I.
onwards, for the purpose. The struggle became civil, instead of martial;
and it was mainly waged by agencies on the spot, not from beyond the
Channel. When the rule of England passed over from the old violence into
legal forms and doctrines, the Irish reaction against it followed the
example. And the legal idea of Irish nationality took its rise in very
humble surroundings; if the expression may be allowed, it was born in
the slums of politics. Ireland reached the nadir of political depression
when, at and after the Boyne, she had been conquered not merely by an
English force, but by continental mercenaries. The ascendant
Protestantism of the island had never stood so low in the aspect it
presented to this country; inasmuch as the Irish Parliament, for the
first time, I believe, declared itself dependent upon England,[76] and
either did not desire, or did not dare, to support its champion
Molyneux, when his work asserting Irish independence was burned in
London. It petitioned for representation in the English Parliament, not
in order to uplift the Irish people, but in order to keep them down. In
its sympathies and in its aims the overwhelming mass of the population
had no share. It was Swift who, by the _Drapier's Letters_, for the
first time called into existence a public opinion flowing from and
representing Ireland as a whole. He reasserted the doctrine of Molyneux,
and denounced Wood's halfpence not only as a foul robbery, but as a
constitutional and as a national insult. The patience of the Irish
Protestants was tried very hard, and they were forced, as Sir Charles
Duffy states in his vivid book, to purchase the power of oppressing
their Roman Catholic fellow-countrymen at a great price.[77] Their
pension list was made to provide the grants too degrading to be
tolerated in England. The Presbyterians had to sit down under the
Episcopal monopoly; but the enjoyment of that monopoly was not left to
the Irish Episcopalians. In the time of Henry VIII. it had been
necessary to import an English Archbishop Browne[78] and an English
Bishop Bale, or there might not have been a single Protestant in
Ireland. It was well to enrich the rolls of the Church of Ireland with
the piety and learning of Ussher, and to give her in Bedell one name, at
least, which carries the double crown of the hero and the saint. But,
after the Restoration, by degrees the practice degenerated, and
Englishmen were appointed in numbers to the Irish Episcopate in order to
fortify and develop by numerical force what came to be familiarly known
as the English interest. So that the Primate Boulter, during his
government of Ireland, complains[79] that Englishmen are still less than
one-half the whole body of Bishops, although the most important sees
were to a large extent in their hands. The same practice was followed in
the higher judicial offices. Fitzgibbon was the first Irishman who
became Lord Chancellor.[80] The Viceroy, commonly absent, was
represented by Lords Justices, who again were commonly English; and
Primate Boulter, a most acute and able man, jealous of an Irish Speaker
in that character, recommends that the commander of the forces should
take his place.[81] When, later on, the Viceroy resided, it was a rule
that the Chief Secretary should be an Englishman. On the occasion when
Lord Castlereagh was by way of exception admitted to that office, an
apology was found for it in his entire devotion to English policy and
purposes. "His appointment," says Lord Cornwallis, "gives me great
satisfaction, as he is so very unlike an Irishman!"[82] Resources were
also found in the military profession, and among the voters for the
Union we find the names of eight[83] English generals.
The arrangements under Poynings's Law, and the commercial proscription,
drove the iron ever deeper and deeper into the souls of Irishmen. It is
but small merit in the Irish Parliament of George I. and George II., if
under these circumstances a temper was gradually formed in, and
transmitted by, them, which might one day achieve the honours of
patriotism. It was in dread of this most healthful process, that the
English Government set sedulously to work for its repression. The odious
policy was maintained by a variety of agencies; by the misuse of Irish
revenue, a large portion of which was unhappily under their control; by
maintaining the duration of the Irish House of Commons for the life of
the Sovereign; and, worst of all, by extending the range of corruption
within the walls, through the constant multiplication of paid offices
tenable by members of Parliament without even the check of re-election
on acceptance.
Thus by degrees those who sat in the Irish Houses came to feel both that
they had a country, and that their country had claims upon them. The
growth of a commercial interest in the Roman Catholic body must have
accelerated the growth of this idea, as that interest naturally fell
into line with the resistance to the English prescriptive laws. But the
rate of progress was fearfully slow. It was hemmed in on every side by
the obstinate unyielding pressure of selfish interests: the interest of
the Established Church against the Presbyterians; the interest of the
Protestant laity, or tithe-payers, against the clergy; the bold
unscrupulous interest of a landlords' Parliament against the occupier of
the soil; which, together with the grievance of the system of
tithe-proctors, established in Ireland through the Whiteboys the fatal
alliance between resistance to wrong and resistance to law, and supplied
there the yet more disastrous facility of sustaining and enforcing wrong
under the name of giving support to public tranquillity. Yet, forcing on
its way amidst all these difficulties by a natural law, in a strange
haphazard and disjointed method, and by a zigzag movement, there came
into existence, and by degrees into steady operation, a sentiment native
to Ireland and having Ireland for its vital basis, and yet not deserving
the name of Irish patriotism, because its care was not for a nation, but
for a sect. For a sect, in a stricter sense than may at first sight be
supposed. The battle was not between Popery and a generalized
Protestantism, though, even if it had been so, it would have been
between a small minority and the vast majority of the Irish people. It
was not a party of ascendency, but a party of monopoly, that ruled. It
must always be borne in mind that the Roman Catholic aristocracy had
been emasculated, and reduced to the lowest point of numerical and moral
force by the odious action of the penal laws, and that the mass of the
Roman Catholic population, clerical and lay, remained under the grinding
force of many-sided oppression, and until long after the accession of
George III. had scarcely a consciousness of political existence. As long
as the great bulk of the nation could be equated to zero, the Episcopal
monopolists had no motive for cultivating the good-will of the
Presbyterians, who like the Roman Catholics maintained their religion,
with the trivial exception of the _Regium Donum_, by their own
resources, and who differed from them in being not persecuted, but only
disabled. And this monopoly, which drew from the sacred name of religion
its title to exist, offered through centuries an example of religious
sterility to which a parallel can hardly be found among the communions
of the Christian world. The sentiment, then, which animated the earlier
efforts of the Parliament might be _Iricism_, but did not become
patriotism until it had outgrown, and had learned to forswear or to
forget, the conditions of its infancy. Neither did it for a long time
acquire the courage of its opinions; for, when Lucas, in the middle of
the century, reasserted the doctrine of Molyneux and of Swift, the Grand
Jury of Dublin took part against him, and burned his book.[84] And the
Parliament,[85] prompted by the Government, drove him into exile. And
yet the smoke showed that there was fire. The infant, that confronted
the British Government in the Parliament House, had something of the
young Hercules about him. In the first exercises of strength he acquired
more strength, and in acquiring more strength he burst the bonds that
had confined him.
"Es machte mir zu eng, ich mussie fort."[86]
The reign of George IV. began with resolute efforts of the Parliament
not to lengthen, as in England under his grandfather, but to shorten its
own commission, and to become septennial. Surely this was a noble
effort. It meant the greatness of their country, and it meant also
personal self-sacrifice. The Parliament which then existed, elected
under a youth of twenty-two, had every likelihood of giving to the bulk
of its members a seat for life. This they asked to change for a
_maximum_ term of seven years. This from session to session, in spite of
rejection after rejection in England, they resolutely fought to obtain.
It was an English amendment which, on a doubtful pretext; changed seven
years to eight. Without question some acted under the pressure of
constituents; but only a minority of the members had constituents, and
popular exigencies from such a quarter might have been bought off by an
occasional vote, and could not have induced a war with the Executive and
with England so steadily continued, unless a higher principle had been
at work.
The triumph came at last; and from 1768 onwards the Commons never wholly
relapsed into their former quiescence. True, this was for a Protestant
House, constituency, and nation; but ere long they began to enlarge
their definition of nationality. Flood and Lucas, the commanders in the
real battle, did not dream of giving the Roman Catholics a political
existence, but to their own constituents they performed an honourable
service and gave a great boon. Those, who had insincerely supported the
measure, became the dupes of their own insincerity. In the very year of
this victory, a Bill for a slight relaxation of the penal laws was
passed, but met its death in England.[87] Other Bills followed, and one
of them became an Act in 1771. A beginning had thus been made on behalf
of religious liberty, as a corollary to political emancipation. It was
like a little ray of light piercing its way through the rocks into a
cavern and supplying the prisoner at once with guidance and with hope.
Resolute action, in withholding or shortening supply, convinced the
Executive in Dublin, and the Ministry in London, that serious business
was intended. And it appeared, even in this early stage, how necessary
it was for a fruitful campaign on their own behalf to enlarge their
basis, and enlist the sympathies of hitherto excluded fellow-subjects.
It may seem strange that the first beginnings of successful endeavour
should have been made on behalf not of the "common Protestantism," but
of Roman Catholics. But, as Mr. Lecky has shown, the Presbyterians had
been greatly depressed and distracted, while the Roman Catholics had now
a strong position in the commerce of the country, and in Dublin
knocked, as it were, at the very doors of the Parliament. There may also
have been an apprehension of republican sentiments among the Protestants
of the north, from which the Roman Catholics were known to be free. Not
many years, however, passed before the softening and harmonizing
effects, which naturally flow from a struggle for liberty, warmed the
sentiment of the House in favour of the Presbyterians.
A Bill was passed by the Irish Parliament in 1778, which greatly
mitigated the stringency of the penal laws. Moreover, in its preamble
was recited, as a ground for this legislation, that for "a long series
of years" the Roman Catholics had exhibited an "uniform peaceable
behaviour." In doing and saying so much, the Irish Parliament virtually
bound itself to do more.[88] In this Bill was contained a clause which
repealed the Sacramental Test, and thereby liberated the Presbyterians
from disqualification. But the Bill had to pass the ordeal of a review
in England, and there the clause was struck out. The Bill itself, though
mutilated, was wisely passed by a majority of 127 to 89. Even in this
form it excited the enthusiastic admiration of Burke.[89] Nor were the
Presbyterians forgotten at the epoch when, in 1779-80, England, under
the pressure of her growing difficulties, made large commercial
concessions to Ireland. The Dublin Parliament renewed the Bill for the
removal of the Sacramental Test. And it was carried by the Irish
Parliament in the very year which witnessed in London the disgraceful
riots of Lord George Gordon, and forty-eight years before the Imperial
Parliament conceded, on this side the Channel, any similar relief. Other
contemporary signs bore witness to the growth of toleration; for the
Volunteers, founded in 1778, and originally a Protestant body, after a
time received Roman Catholics into their ranks. These impartial
proceedings are all the more honourable to Irish sentiment in general,
because Lord Charlemont, its champion out of doors, and Flood, long the
leader of the Independent party in the Parliament, were neither of them
prepared to surrender the system of Protestant ascendency.
In order to measure the space which had at this period been covered by
the forward movement of liberality and patriotism, it is necessary to
look back to the early years of the Georgian period, when Whiggism had
acquired a decisive ascendency, and the spirits of the great deep were
let loose against Popery. But the temper of proscription in the two
countries exhibited specific differences. Extravagant in both, it became
in Ireland vulgar and indecent. In England, it was Tilburina,[90] gone
mad in white satin; in Ireland it was Tilburina's maid, gone mad in
white linen. The Lords Justices of Ireland, in 1715, recommended the
Parliament to put an end to all other distinctions in Ireland "but that
of Protestant and Papist."[91] And the years that followed seem to mark
the lowest point of constitutional depression for the Roman Catholic
population in particular, as well as for Ireland at large. The Commons,
in 1715, prayed for measures to discover any Papist enlisting in the
King's service, in order that he might be expelled "and punished with
the utmost severity of the law."[92] When an oath of abjuration had been
imposed which prevented nearly all priests from registering, a Bill was
passed by the Commons in 1719 for branding the letter P on the cheek of
all priests, who were unregistered, with a red-hot iron. The Privy
Council "disliked" this punishment, and substituted for it the loathsome
measure by which safe guardians are secured for Eastern harems. The
English Government could not stomach this beastly proposal; and, says
Mr. Lecky,[93] unanimously restored the punishment of branding. The
Bill was finally lost in Ireland, but only owing to a clause concerning
leases. It had gone to England winged with a prayer from the Commons
that it might be recommended "in the most effectual manner to his
Majesty," and by the assurance of the Viceroy in reply that they might
depend on his due regard to what was desired.[94] In the same year
passed the Act which declared the title of the British Parliament to
make laws for the government of Ireland. On the accession of George II.,
a considerable body of Roman Catholics offered an address of
congratulation. It was received by the Lords Justices with silent
contempt, and no one knows whether it ever reached its destination.
Finally, the acute state-craft of Primate Boulter resisted habitually
the creation of an "Irish interest," and above all any capacity of the
Roman Catholics to contribute to its formation; and in the first year of
George II. a clause was introduced in committee into a harmless Bill[95]
for the regulation of elections, which disfranchised at a single stroke
all the Roman Catholic voters in Ireland who up to that period had
always enjoyed the franchise.
It is painful to record the fact that the remarkable progress gradually
achieved was in no way due to British influence. For nearly forty years
from the arrival of Archbishop Boulter in Ireland, the government of
Ireland was in the hands of the Primates. The harshness of
administration was gradually tempered, especially in the brief
viceroyalty of Lord Chesterfield; but the British policy was steadily
opposed to the enlargement of Parliamentary privilege, or the creation
of any Irish interest, however narrow its basis, while the political
extinction of the mass of the people was complete. The pecuniary wants,
however, of the Government, extending beyond the hereditary revenue,
required a resort to the national purse. The demands which were
accordingly made, and these alone, supplied the Parliament with a
vantage-ground, and a principle of life. The action of this principle
brought with it civilizing and humanizing influences, which had become
clearly visible in the early years of George III., and which were
cherished by the war of American Independence, as by a strong current of
fresh air in a close and murky dungeon.
The force of principles, and the significance of political achievements,
is to be estimated in no small degree by the slenderness of the means
available to those who promote them. And the progress brought about in
the Irish Parliament is among the most remarkable on record, because it
was effected against the joint resistance of a hostile Executive and of
an intolerable constitution. Of the three hundred members, about
two-thirds were nominated by individual patrons and by close
corporations. What was still worse, the action of the Executive was
increasingly directed, as the pulse of the national life came to beat
more vigorously, to the systematic corruption of the Parliament borough
pensions and paid offices. In the latter part of the century, more than
one-third of the members of Parliament were dismissible at pleasure from
public emoluments. If the base influence of the Executive allied itself
with the patriotic party, everything might be hoped. For we must bear in
mind not only the direct influence of this expenditure on those who were
in possession, but the enormous power of expectancy on those who were
not. Conversely, when the Government were determined to do wrong, there
were no means commonly available of forcing it to do right, in any
matter that touched either religious bigotry or selfish interest. With
so miserable an apparatus, and in the face of the ever-wakeful Executive
sustained by British power, it is rather wonderful how much than how
little was effected. I am not aware of a single case in which a measure
on behalf of freedom was proposed by British agency, and rejected by
the Irish Parliament. On the other hand, we have a long list of the
achievements of that Parliament due to a courage and perseverance which
faced and overcame a persistent English opposition. Among other
exploits, it established periodical elections, obtained the writ of
Habeas Corpus, carried the independence of the judges, repealed the Test
Act, limited the abominable expenditure on pensions, subjected the
acceptance of office from the crown to the condition of re-election, and
achieved, doubtless with the powerful aid of the volunteers, freedom of
trade with England, and the repeal of Poynings's Act, and of the British
Act of 1719.[96]
All this it did without the manifestation, either within the walls or
among the Roman Catholic population, of any disposition to weaken the
ties which bound Ireland to the empire. All this it did; and what had
the British Parliament been about during the same period, with its
vastly greater means both of self-defence and of action? It had been
building up the atrocious criminal code, tampering in the case of Wilkes
with liberty of election, and tampering with many other liberties;
driving, too, the American Colonies into rebellion, while, as to good
legislation, the century is almost absolutely blank, until between 1782
and 1793 we have the establishment of Irish freedom, the economical
reform of Mr. Burke, the financial reforms of Mr. Pitt, the new libel
law of Mr. Fox, and the legislative constitution of Canada, in which
both these great statesmen concurred.
But we have not yet reached the climax of Irish advancement. When, in
1782 and 1783, the legislative relations of the two countries were
fundamentally rectified by the formal acknowledgment of Irish
nationality, the beginning of a great work was accomplished; but its
final consummation, though rendered practicable and even easy, depended
wholly on the continuing good intention of the British Cabinet. The
Acts of 1782 and 1783 required a supplemental arrangement, to obviate
those secondary difficulties in the working of the two Legislatures,
which supplied Mr. Pitt with his main parliamentary plea for the Union.
What was yet more important was the completion of the scheme in Ireland
itself. And this under three great heads: (1) The purification of
Parliament by a large measure of reform; (2) the abolition of all Roman
Catholic disabilities; (3) the establishment of a proper relation
between the Legislative and the Executive powers. It is often urged,
with cynical disregard to justice and reason, that with the Grattan
Parliament we had corruption, coercion, discontent, and finally
rebellion. But the political mischiefs, which disfigure the brief life
of the Grattan Parliament, and the failure to obtain the two first of
the three great purposes I have named, were all in the main due to the
third grand flaw in the Irish case after 1782. I mean the false
position, and usually mischievous character, of the Irish Executive,
which, with its army of placemen and expectants in Parliament, was
commonly absolute master of the situation. Well does Mr. Swift
MacNeill,[97] in his very useful work, quote the words of Mr. Fox in
1797: "The advantages, which the form of a free Government seemed to
promise, have been counteracted by the influence of the Executive
Government, and of the British Cabinet."
There were five Viceroys between 1782 and 1790. Then came a sixth, Lord
Westmoreland, the worst of them all, whose political judgment was on a
par with his knowledge of the English language.[98] The great settlement
of 1782-3 was in the main worked by men who were radically adverse to
its spirit and intention. But they were omnipotent in their control of
the unreformed. Parliament of Ireland, more and more drenched, under
their unceasing and pestilent activity, with fresh doses of corruption.
Westmoreland and his myrmidons actually persuaded Pitt, in 1792, that
Irish Protestantism and its Parliament were unconquerably adverse to the
admission of Roman Catholics to the franchise; but when the proposal was
made from the Throne in 1793, notwithstanding the latent hostility of
the Castle, the Parliament passed the Bill with little delay, and
"without any serious opposition."[99] The votes against it were one and
three on two divisions[100] respectively. A minority of sixty-nine
supported, against the Government, a clause for extending the measure to
seats in Parliament. That clause, lost by a majority of ninety-four,
might apparently have been carried, but for "Dublin Castle," by an even
larger majority.
I shall not here examine the interesting question, whether the mission
of Lord Fitzwilliam was wholly due to the action of those Whig statesmen
who were friendly to the war, but disinclined to a junction with Mr.
Pitt except on condition of a fundamental change in the administration
of Ireland. Nor shall I dwell upon his sudden, swift, and disastrous
recall. But I purpose here to invite attention to the most remarkable
fact in the whole history of the Irish Parliament. When the Viceroy's
doom was known, when the return to the policy and party of ascendency
lay darkly lowering in the immediate future, this diminutive and tainted
Irish Parliament, with a chivalry rare even in the noblest histories,
made what can hardly be called less than a bold attempt to arrest the
policy of retrogression adopted by the Government in London. Lord
Fitzwilliam was the declared friend of Roman Catholic Emancipation,
which was certain to be followed by reform; and he had struck a
death-blow at bigotry and monopoly in the person of their heads, Mr.
Beresford and Mr. Cooke. The Bill of Emancipation was introduced on the
12th of February,[101] with only three dissentient voices. On the 14th,
when the London Cabinet had declared dissent from the proceedings of
their Viceroy without recalling him, Sir L. Parsons at once moved an
address, imploring him to continue among them, and only postponed it at
the friendly request of Mr. Ponsonby.[102] On the 2nd of March, when the
recall was a fact, the House voted that Lord Fitzwilliam merited "the
thanks of that House, and the confidence of the people."[103] On the 5th
the Duke of Leinster moved, and the House of Peers carried, a similar
resolution.[104]
At this epoch I pause. Here there opens a new and disastrous drama of
disgrace to England and misery to Ireland. This is the point at which we
may best learn the second and the greatest lesson taught by the history
of Ireland in the eighteenth century. It is this, that, awful as is the
force of bigotry, hidden under the mask of religion, but fighting for
plunder and for power with all the advantages of possession, of
prescription, and of extraneous support, there is a David that can kill
this Goliath. That conquering force lies in the principle of
nationality.
It was the growing sense of nationality that prompted the Irish
Parliament to develop its earlier struggles for privilege on the narrow
ground into a genuine contest for freedom, civil and religious, on a
ground as broad as Ireland, nay, as humanity at large. If there be such
things as contradictions in the world of politics, they are to be found
in nationality on the one side, and bigotry of all kinds on the other,
but especially religious bigotry, which is of all the most baneful.
Whatever is given to the first of these two is lost to the second. I
speak of a reasonable and reasoning, not of a blind and headstrong
nationality; of a nationality which has regard to circumstances and to
traditions, and which only requires that all relations, of incorporation
or of independence, shall be adjusted to them according to the laws of
Nature's own enactment. Such a nationality was the growth of the last
century in Ireland. As each Irishman began to feel that he had a
country, to which he belonged, and which belonged to him, he was, by a
true process of nature, drawn more and more into brotherhood, and into
the sense of brotherhood, with those who shared the allegiance and the
property, the obligation and the heritage. And this idea of country,
once well conceived, presents itself as a very large idea, and as a
framework for most other ideas, so as to supply the basis of a common
life. Hence it was that, on the coming of Lord Fitzwilliam, the whole
generous emotion of the country leapt up with one consent, and went
forth to meet him. Hence it was that religious bigotry was no longer an
appreciable factor in the public life of Ireland. Hence it was that on
his recall, and in order to induce acquiescence in his recall, it became
necessary to divide again the host that had, welcomed him--to put one
part of it in array as Orangemen, who were to be pampered and inflamed;
and to quicken the self-consciousness of another and larger mass by
repulsion and proscription, by stripping Roman Catholics of arms in the
face of licence and of cruelty, and, finally, by clothing the extreme of
lawlessness with the forms of law.
Within the last twelve months we have seen, in the streets of Belfast,
the painful proof that the work of Beresford and of Castlereagh has been
found capable for the moment of revival. To aggravate or sustain Irish
disunion, religious bigotry has been again evoked in Ireland. If the
curse be an old one, there is also an old cure, recorded in the grand
pharmacopoeia of history; and if the abstract force of policy and
prudence are insufficient for the work, we may yet find that the evil
spirit will be effectually laid by the gentle influence of a living and
working Irish nationality. _Quod faxit Deus._