THE RAVAGES OF UNIONISM (2)
If the reader cares to push forward the line of thought suggested in the
preceding pages and to submit it to a concrete test he can do so without
difficulty. He has but to compare the post-Union history of linen with
that of cotton. Linen in Ireland had been a perfect type of the
State-created, spoon-fed industry characteristic of the period of
mercantilism. Within certain limits--such as the steady resolve to
confine it, in point of religion, to Protestants, and, in point of
geography, to Ulster--it had behind it at the Union a century of
encouragement. It is calculated that between 1700 and 1800 it had
received bounties, English and Irish, totalling more than,£2,500,000. In
other words it had a chance to accumulate capital. Even linen declined
after the Union partly from the direct effects of that measure, partly
from the growing intensity of the Industrial Revolution. But the
capital accumulated, the commercial good name established under native
government carried the manufacturers through. These were able towards
1830 to introduce the new machinery and the new processes, and to
weather the tempest of competition. Cotton, on the other hand, was a
very recent arrival. It had developed very rapidly, and in 1800 gave
promise of supplanting linen. But the weight of capital told more and
more as changes in the technique of transportation and production
ushered in our modern world. Lacking the solid reserves of its rival,
involved in all the exactions that fall on a tributary nation, the
cotton manufacture of Ireland lost ground, lost heart, and disappeared.
But let us resume the parable. If the "business man" responds to
capital, he will certainly not be obtuse to the appeal of coal. In this
feeder of industry Ireland was geologically at a disadvantage, and it
was promised that the free trade with Great Britain inaugurated by the
Union would "blend" with her the resources of the latter country. Did
she obtain free trade in coal? Miss Murray, a Unionist, in her
"Commercial Relations between England and Ireland" tells the story in
part:
"Coals again had hitherto been exported from Great Britain at a
duty of gd. per ton; this duty was to cease but the Irish import
duty on coal was to be made perpetual, and that at a time when all
coasting duties in England and Scotland had been abolished. Dublin
especially would suffer from this arrangement, for the duty there
on coals imported was is. 8-4/5d. per ton, while that in the rest
of Ireland was only 9-1/2d. This was because a local duty of 1s.
per ton existed in Dublin for the internal improvement of the city;
this local duty was blended by the Union arrangements with the
general duty on the article, and its perpetual continuance was thus
enforced. All this shows how little Irish affairs were understood
in England."
But was it a failure of the English intellect or a lapse of the English
will? Except through the Platonic intuition which reduces all sin to
terms of ignorance I cannot accept the former explanation. What is
certain is that there was no lack of contemporary protest. There existed
in Dublin in 1828 a Society for the Improvement of Ireland, an active
body which included in its membership the Lord Mayor (a high Tory, of
course), Lord Cloncurry, and a long list of notable names such as
Latouche, Sinclair, Houghton, Leader, Grattan, Smith O'Brien, George
Moore, and Daniel O'Connell. In the year mentioned the Society appointed
a number of committees to report on the state of Irish agriculture,
commerce, and industry. One of these reports is full of information
touching the drain of capital from the country, and its consequent
decay, as registered by contemporaries; we shall learn from another how
things stood with regard to coal. At the time of the Union the Irish
Parliament granted a bounty of 2s. per ton on Irish coal carried
coastwise to Dublin, and levied a duty of 10-1/2d. per ton on coal
imported from Great Britain. The effect of the Union was to abolish the
bounty and double the levy on imports. Writing twenty-eight years later
the Committee summarise in a brief passage the disastrous effects of a
policy, so foolish and so unjust. The last sentence opens up sombre
vistas to any student of economic history:
"Severe, however, as the operation of the coal duty in arresting
the progress of manufacture may have been in other parts of
Ireland, in Dublin, under the circumstances to which your Committee
are about to call the attention of the Society, it has produced all
the effects of actual prohibition, all the mischiefs of the most
rigorous exclusion. It is a singular circumstance that, in the
metropolis of the country, possessing local advantages in respect
to manufactures and facilities for trade with the interior,
superior, probably, to any other city or town in this portion of
the empire, with a population excessive as to the means of
employment, in a degree which probably has not a parallel in
Europe, _there is not a factory for the production of either silk,
linen, cotton, or woollen manufactures which is worked or propelled
by a steam engine_."
The writers go on to ask for the repeal of the local duty on coal in
Dublin, and to suggest that the necessary revenue should be raised by a
duty on spirits. This course Belfast had been permitted to follow--one
of the numberless make-weights thrown into the scale so steadily on the
side of the Protestant North. In my part of the country the people used
to say of any very expert thief: "Why, he'd steal the fire out of your
grate." Under the Union arrangements Great Britain stole the fire out of
the grate of Ireland. And having so dealt with capital and coal the
predominant partner next proceeded by a logical development to muddle
transportation.
The Drummond Commission, appointed in 1836 to consider the question of
railway construction in Ireland, issued a report in 1838 which
practically recommended public and not private enterprise as appropriate
"to accomplish so important a national object." What came after is best
related in the official terminology of the Scotter Commission of
1906-10:
"This report was presented in July 1838, and early in the
following year a great public meeting, held in Dublin, passed a
resolution that inasmuch as an adequate system of railways could
not be constructed by private capital, the Government should be
urged to take the work into its own hands, thereby saving the cost
of Private Bill legislation. Promises were also made that the lands
necessary for railway construction would be given free of cost.
Similar resolutions were adopted at another meeting held about the
same time in the north of Ireland. In addition, an address to the
Queen was presented by a number of Irish Peers, headed by the Duke
of Leinster, praying that action might be taken on the Drummond
Commission Report."
The government saw the light, and proceeded to sin against it. They
embodied the Dublin programme in resolutions which were adopted by the
House of Commons in March 1839, and they then abruptly abandoned the
whole business. The last chance was not yet lost. During the Great
Famine of 1847 the Opposition proposed to raise, £16,000,000 by State
loans for the construction of railways as relief works. A suggestion so
sane could not hope to pass. It was in fact rejected; the starving
peasants were set to dig large holes and fill them up again, and to
build bad roads leading nowhere. And instead of a national railway
system Ireland was given private enterprise with all its waste and all
its clash of interests.
The two most conspicuous gifts of Unionism to Ireland have been, as all
the world knows, poverty and police. Soon after 1830, that is to say
when the first harvest of government from Westminster was ripe to the
sickle, Irish destitution had assumed what politicians call men-acing
proportions. One person in every three of the population never had any
other alimentary experience than the difference between hunger and
starvation. In these circumstances a Royal Commission was appointed to
consider the advisability of extending the English Poor Law to Ireland.
Their report is a pioneer document in the development of economic
thought. Just as the Railway Commission a few years later was to give
the watchword of the future, nationalisation, so the Poor Law Commission
gave within its province the watchword of the future, prevention before
relief. They pointed the contrast between the two countries. I quote the
words of the later Irish Poor Law Commission of 1903-6:
"Having regard to the destitution and poverty that were prevalent
in Ireland owing to want of employment, the Royal Commissioners in
their Report of 1836 came to the conclusion that the English
workhouse system would be unsuitable for Ireland, because after
unchecked demoralisation by profuse out-door relief _in England,
the Work-house system was devised in order to make the lazy and
idle seek ordinary employment which could be got. The situation in
Ireland was, on the contrary, one in which the able-bodied and
healthy were willing and anxious to work for any wages, even for
twopence a day, but were unable to obtain such or any employment_."
Ireland at the end of a generation of Unionism was suffering, as the
commissioners proceed to point out, not from over-population, but from
under-development. They tabled two sets of recommendations. The relief
programme advised compulsory provision for the sick, aged, infirm,
lunatics, and others incapable of work; in all essential matters it
anticipated in 1836 that Minority Report which to the England of 1912
still seems extravagantly humane. The prevention programme outlined a
scheme for the development of Irish resources. Including, as it did,
demands for County Fiscal Boards, agricultural education, better
cottages for the labourers, drainage, reclamation, and changes in the
land system, it has been a sort of lucky bag into which British
ministers have been dipping without acknowledgment ever since. But the
report itself was, like the Railway Report, too sane and too Irish to
stand a chance. There was sent over from England a Mr Nicholls, who,
after a six weeks flutter through the country, devised the Poor Law
System under which we still labour. Mr Nicholls afterwards became Sir
George, and when he died it is probable that a statue was erected to
him. If that is so the inscription must always remain inadequate until
this is added: "Having understood all about Ireland in six weeks he gave
her, as the one thing needful to redeem her, the workhouse."
But, of course, the capital exploit of the Economics of Unionism was its
dealing with the problem of land tenure. I shrink from inviting the
reader into the desert of selfishness and stupidity which constitutes
English policy, in this regard, from the Union to the triumph of the
Land League. Let him study it at large in Davitt's "Fall of Feudalism."
We are not concerned here to revive that calamitous pageant. Our
interest is of another kind, namely to signalise the malign influence
introduced into the agrarian struggle by government from Westminster as
against government from Dublin. Even had Grattan's Parliament remained,
the battle for the land would have had to go forward; for that
Parliament was an assembly controlled by landlords who, for the most
part, believed as strongly in the sacredness of rent as they did in the
sacredness of nationality. But by the Union the conflict was embittered
and befouled. The landlords invented their famous doctrine of
conditional loyalty. They bargained with Great Britain to the effect
that, if they were permitted to pillage their tenantry, they would in
return uphold and maintain British rule in Ireland.
It was the old picture with which M. Paul-Dubois has acquainted us, that
of the "Garrison" kneeling to England on the necks of the Irish poor. In
this perversion, which under autonomy would have been impossible, we
find the explanation of the extreme savagery of Union land policy in
Ireland. Its extreme, its bat-eyed obtuseness is to be explained in
another way. Souchon in his introduction to the French edition of
Philippovich, the great Austrian economist, observes with great truth
that England has not even yet developed any sort of _Agrarpolitik_, that
is to say any systematic Economics of Agriculture. In the early
nineteenth century her own land problems were neglected, and her
political leaders were increasingly dominated by an economic gospel of
shopkeepers and urban manufacturers. Forced into the context of
agrarian life such a gospel was bound to manifest itself as one of folly
and disaster.
If we put these two elements together we are enabled to understand why
the Union land policy in Ireland was such a portentous muddle and
scandal. In 1829 the question assumed a fresh urgency, in consequence of
the eviction campaign which followed the disfranchisement of the small
holders under Catholic Emancipation. That Irish opinion, which in an
Irish Parliament would have had its way, began to grapple with the
situation.
Between 1829 and 1858 twenty-three Irish Land Reform Bills were
introduced in the House of Commons; every one was rejected. In the same
period thirty-five Coercion Bills were introduced; every one was passed.
So it began, so it continued, until at last Irish opinion did in some
measure prevail. The Westminster Parliament clapped the "agitators" into
prison, and while they were at work breaking stones stole their
programme.... But I have promised to spare the reader the detailed
hideousness of this Inferno, and this section must close without a word
said about that miserable triad, famine, eviction, and emigration. What
may be called the centre of relevancy lies elsewhere. We have been
concerned to show how Unionism, having wrecked the whole manufacturing
economy of Ireland, went on, at its worst, to wreck, at its best, to
refuse to save, its whole agricultural economy.
But why recall all this "dead history"? For two reasons: first, because
it illustrates the fundamental wrongness of Unionism; secondly, because
it is not dead.
On the first point no better authority can be found than Mr W.A.S.
Hewins, the intellect of Tariff Reform. The differences between England
and Ireland, he writes in his introduction to Miss Murray's book, are of
"an organic character." In that phrase is concentrated the whole biology
of Home Rule. Every organism must suffer and perish unless its external
circumstances echo its inner law of development. The sin of the Union
was that it imposed on Ireland from without a sort of spiked
strait-jacket which could have no effect but to squeeze the blood and
breath out of every interest in the country. What was meat to England
was poison to Ireland, and even honest Englishmen, hypnotised by the
economists of the day, were unable to perceive this plain truth. Let me
give another illustration. The capital exploit of Union Economics was,
as has been said, its dealing with the land question, but perhaps its
most pathetic fallacy was the policy with which it met the Great Famine.
Now the singular thing about this famine is that during it there was no
scarcity of food in Ireland; there was only a shortage of potatoes.
"In 1847 alone," writes Mr Michael Davitt in his "Fall of
Feudalism," "food to the value of £44,958,000 sterling was grown in
Ireland according to the statistical returns for that year. But a
million of people died for want of food all the same."
The explanation is obvious: the peasants grew potatoes to feed
themselves, they raised corn to pay their rents. A temporary suspension
of rent-payments and the closing of the ports would have saved the great
body of the people. But the logic of Unionism worked on other lines. The
government opened the ports, cheapened corn, and made rents harder to
pay. At the same time they passed a new Coercion Act, and reorganised
the police on its present basis to ensure that rents should be paid. To
the wisdom of this policy, history is able to call witnesses by the
million--unhappily however it has to call them from famine graveyards,
and the waste womb of the Atlantic.
This essential wrongness of Unionism, so amply illustrated in every
year of its working, continues. But at least, our bluff Englishman
urges, the dead past can be suffered to bury those crimes and blunders
of Unionism which you have enumerated. Let us start with a clean slate.
Now, as will have been gathered from a previous chapter, we recognise in
this invitation an accent of soundness. We modern Home Rulers desire
above all to be loyal to the century in which we live. We are sick of
that caricature which depicts Ireland as the mad heroine of a sort of
perpetual suttee, in which all the interests of the present are
immolated on the funeral-pyre of the past. But let us come closer to
things. How do you clean a slate except by liquidating the debts of
which it keeps the record? The late Vicomte de Voguë wrote an admirable
novel, "Les Morts qui Parlent." The dead are always speaking; you cannot
stop their strong eloquence with a mouthful of clay. The "business man"
thinks no doubt that the Napoleonic War is no more than Hecuba to him,
or he to Hecuba. But he pays annual tribute to it, for he has to make
annual provision for the £600,000,000 which it added to the National
Debt. And just as Mr Pitt's foreign policy is in that respect a living
reality of our own time, so also, but in a much graver form, are the
past depredations and ineptitudes of Unionism living realities in the
present economy of Ireland.
The ruling fallacy of the English mind on these matters consists in the
assumption that the mere repeal of an old oppression restores a people
to the _status quo ante_. In the case of Ireland the old oppressions
have not been repealed except in two or three points, but even if they
had been wholly cancelled it would be absurd to expect immediate
recovery from their effects. If you have been beating a man on the head
with a bludgeon for half an hour, and then leave off, there is no sense
in saying to him: "There, I have given over bludgeoning you. Why on
earth don't you get up, and skip about like me?" If you have been
robbing a man's till for ten years, and then decide--by the way you have
not yet decided--to leave off, there is no sense in saying to him: "Why
the devil are you always hard up? Look at me doing the same sort of
business as you on absolutely equal terms, and I'm able to keep two
motor-cars and six servants." But that is precisely what is said to us.
You are eternally expecting from Ireland new miracles of renaissance.
But although she does possess recuperative powers, hardly to be
paralleled, even she must have time to slough the corruptions of the
past. You cannot, as some Englishmen imagine, cancel six centuries
before breakfast. Your Penal Laws, for instance, have been long since
struck out of the Statute Book, but they have not yet been eliminated
from social habitudes or from certain areas of commercial life.
You began to tax Ireland beyond her capacity in 1801, and you are still
overtaxing her. In the interval you withdraw from her economic life a
tribute of not less than £325,000,000. You broke her industrial
tradition, injured her credit, depressed her confidence. You forced upon
her a fiscal system devised to suit your needs in utter contempt of
hers. To clean that slate you must first, by some measure of
restitution, clean your conscience. And when that has been done you will
have to wait for the curative effects of time to undo the Economics of
Unionism.
You suffered landlordism to devastate Ireland unchecked. The capital
that should have gone to enrich and develop the soil was squeezed out of
it in rack-rents, largely absentee. The whole agricultural economy of
the country was stricken with a sort of artificial anæmia. Then very
late in the day you enact in shreds and fragments a programme of reform
proposed half a century before by the leaders of the Irish people.
To-day rural Ireland is convalescent, but it is absurd to rate her if
she does not at once manifest all the activities of robust health. It is
even more absurd to expect her to glow with gratitude.
You muddled our whole system of transportation; your muddle stands
to-day in all its ruinous largeness unamended, and, it may be, beyond
amendment. You muddled the Poor Law; and, in the workhouses which you
thrust upon us, 8000 children are year by year receiving on their lives
the brand of degradation. You marred education, perverting it into a
discipline of denationalisation, and that virus has not yet been
expelled.
What economic, what intellectual problem in Ireland have you not marred
and muddled, England, my England (as the late Mr W.E. Henley used to
say)? You have worsened the maledictions of the Bible. The sins of
_your_ fathers will lie as a _damnosa hæreditas_, a damnable heritage,
upon the mortgaged shoulders of _our_ children. It is better, as Plato
taught, to suffer injustice than to inflict it. In the light of that
ethical principle you are long since judged and condemned. But with the
customary luck of England you are allowed what others were not allowed,
the opportunity of penitence and reform. The messengers of the new
gospel are at your doors, offering you in return for the plain rudiments
of justice not only forgiveness but friendship. It is for you to accept
or reject. We, the Irish, whom you have wronged, look to your decision
with interest rather than with concern. Why should we be concerned? Our
flag has been an Aaron's serpent to swallow yours. Your policies, your
ambitions, your administrations have passed by us like the transient and
embarrassed phantoms that they were. We remain. All the roads lead to
Rome, and all the years to retribution. This is your year; you have met
the messengers on your threshold. Your soul is in your own wardship. But
yet we cannot wholly separate your destiny from ours. Dedicated as we
are to the general progress of humanity and to all the generosities of
life, we await expectantly your election between the good and the evil
side.