Ireland, and brought political and religious issues in its train. A year
after the Plantation Act, but before Mary Tudor’s death, Sussex wrote that
the native Irish were denying England’s right to Ireland, and preparing to
assist the French and Scots. The events of Elizabeth’s reign taught them
to look rather to Spain and to the Papacy, and by degrees Philip II.,
after whom King’s County and its capital, Philipstown, had been named,
became the patron of the Irish who suffered from the plantation. Religion,
too, came into play. The first Jesuit missionaries had returned in despair
from their labours on the unresponsive Irish soil. But expropriation left
the peasants with little solace save religion, and their religion would
not be that of their oppressor; to them Protestantism meant plantation.
The links between English Government and Roman Catholic hierarchy had been
broken; and Catholicism, which has no natural affinities with nationalism,
became the adventitious ally of the Irish people in their resistance to
the intruding imperialism of their English foes.
This coalition of hostile forces supplied the English Government with what
it considered convincing arguments for persisting in its course; fresh
Jesuit missions to Ireland, and intrigues between Irish chiefs and Spanish
ambassadors sped the policy of plantation by provoking rebellion in
Munster. The way seemed to have been prepared by the death of 30,000 Irish
from starvation in that province within six months, and the pick of
England’s aristocracy, Raleigh, Grenville, Herbert, Spenser, and Norris,
undertook the work of civilisation. They performed it mostly by bailiffs,
who let the land at rack-rents to its former proprietors; and the whole
fabric vanished in the rebellion which flamed out in 1598 on the news of
Tyrone’s victories in Ulster. With the assistance of Spain, Tyrone shook
English rule in Ireland almost to its foundations; but they remained firm,
embedded in the sea. The Spanish squadrons were annihilated in Kinsale and
Castlehaven Harbours, and Tyrone was granted terms of peace. Ireland was
conquered as it never had been before, but England had not yet learnt how
to pacify a conquered country. Four years later Tyrone and Tyrconnell fled
to Spain; the claims of their natural successors were set aside; and their
lands were divided among the Scottish and English founders of modern
Ulster. Thousands of natives, however, remained as tenants on the land of
which they had been robbed, “hoping,” wrote the Lord-Deputy, “at one time
or other to find an opportunity of cutting their landlords’ throats.” The
unique character and the success of the Ulster plantation were due less to
the original planters than to the Calvinistic Scots who found there a
refuge from Laud and the Stuarts, and like the Pilgrim Fathers regarded
themselves as a people chosen to root out the Amalekite and Philistine
natives. Like the founders of New England, too, their relations with the
natives were far worse than those of the southern planters in Ireland, and
the southern planters in North America.
Thirty years later the natives of Ulster found their opportunity, and
wreaked on their landlords, in the massacre of 1641, vengeance for a
generation of robbery and oppression. There ensued a decade of
indescribable confusion, in which native Irish, Anglo-Irish, Ulster Scots,
English parliamentarians, and Royalists fought one another, until Cromwell
repaid the massacre of 1641 by those of Drogheda and Wexford, and by a
further process of expropriation called the Cromwellian Settlement. More
than two-thirds of Irish land had now passed into the hands of Englishmen;
and although the Cromwellians had to disgorge a part of their spoil at the
Restoration, it was estimated by Sir William Petty in 1664 that not more
than one-third of the land belonged to the native Irish, including in that
category the descendants of Anglo-Norman families; of the remainder, about
half belonged to Elizabethan and Jacobean planters, and half to the
Cromwellians. Nor was the process yet complete: the new expropriation was
followed in 1689-90 by yet another attempt on the part of the Irish to
recover their inheritance, and the failure of that attempt by further
confiscation. At the beginning of the eighteenth century three-quarters of
the land was owned by the English garrison, and the progress of the
century was marked by fresh evictions. Political reasons had ceased, but
economic causes supplied their place; and wide stretches of pasture were
needed in order that the landlords might turn _their_ property to the most
profitable grazing purposes. Only land that would not do for cattle was
left to the Irish peasants; from the bogs there looked up, from the barren
hills there looked down, the Roman Catholic disinherited upon the smiling
meadows of their Protestant supplanters.
Upon this broadening basis of plantation was developed the Irish
Parliament, a Parliament doomed from the first by the very conditions of
its being to a sterile and troubled existence. Here and there from the
days of Elizabeth a native name may be traced in the lists of its members,
but it was almost exclusively the Parliament of a caste, the instrument of
oppression. Ten counties only sent representatives to Elizabeth’s
Parliament of 1560; plantation increased the number to twenty-seven in
1585; and the tale was fairly complete when, after the plantation of
Ulster, James I. next summoned a Parliament in 1613. But the “Irish
interest” which struggled therein against the “English interest”
represented only the Anglo-Irish families, who had struck some roots in
the soil and resented the dictation of English officials. The “native
interest” had no voice in Parliament until O’Connell’s triumph in 1828.
Hence the pitiful impotence of this Parliament, the emptiness of the sound
and fury of its constitutional debates. The beneficiaries of conquest
could not in logic use the armoury of consent. The dependence of the
colonists upon England placed their Parliament at the mercy of the English
Government. They relied upon English force to expropriate the native Irish
and to proscribe the Roman Catholic religion; and this reliance deprived
them of moral and material grounds of resistance to the political,
commercial, and industrial tyranny of their masters. The power which gave
the planters their land could laugh at their constitutional pretensions.
So the Dublin Parliament idly strove to emulate its exemplar at
Westminster, and clamoured in vain for responsible government, for control
of the Irish Executive. In spite of its Irish Parliament, Ireland has
never been given the chance of governing itself.
But nothing could eradicate the “protest of the sea” against union with
England, or the tendency of dwellers on Irish soil to become Irishmen. The
Anglo-Normans had grown _Hibernis ipsis Hiberniores_ in the middle ages,
and nothing short of the Tudor Conquest would have perpetuated English
dominion; for even the gentry of the Pale rebelled in Elizabeth’s reign
against “cess,” a form of arbitrary taxation compared in its
constitutional bearings with ship-money. In their turn the Tudor planters
were gripped by the Irish soil, and resisted the rule of Strafford; and a
fresh immigration of Cromwellian settlers alone enabled William of Orange
to hold Ireland against Tyrconnell and James II. Even their descendants,
too, became part of the “Irish interest” in the eighteenth century; and
Pitt’s Act of Union was England’s final effort to circumvent the
insinuating strength of Irish nature.
The more Ireland’s Parliament succumbed to Irish ideas, the more it was
flouted by England, and the greater the efforts made to secure in it the
predominance of the English interest. England, in spite of itself, was
creating an Irish nation. It had destroyed the system of septs which it
could divide and play off against one another; by imposing on all a
grinding tyranny it had crushed out local distinctions and family feuds,
and had evoked a national spirit which could not be corrupted by bribes or
disarmed by division. Poynings’ Laws were the first attempt at the new
methods of control which led to the Act of Union. They were soon found
insufficient. Not only must Irish legislation be curbed by the English
Privy Council; the English Parliament must also have the power of
initiating and passing laws for Ireland; and this practice grew up against
which Molyneux vainly protested in 1694. In 1719 the practice was
confirmed by an English statute, which transferred to the British House of
Lords the appellate jurisdiction claimed by the Irish peers, and expressly
asserted the right of the British Parliament to legislate for Ireland and
override Irish laws. Similarly the Irish electorate was more and more
rigidly restricted to the English interest; members of both houses were,
by an English statute of William and Mary, required to be Protestants, and
in 1727, by an English statute of George II., Catholics, who numbered
four-fifths of the Irish people, were excluded from the franchise.
The same fear of a nascent Irish nationalism was the real motive for the
Irish penal code, which assumed its worst features under Anne, and was
largely extended under George I. and George II., although no Jacobite
rebellion in Ireland threatened those sovereigns, and the only provocation
was the silent growth of Irish national feeling. That its cause was not
religious is clear, for there was little religious persecution, and the
penal code in Ireland was at its worst in the heyday of English
latitudinarianism. The design was really to shut out the Irish by means of
their religion from political and social influence. Hence their exclusion
from the legal and teaching professions, from the university, from the
army and the navy, from corporations, grand juries and vestries; hence the
barbarous laws by which a son converted to Protestantism could reduce his
Catholic father to a mere life-tenant, by which no Catholic could buy or
bequeath land or inherit or receive it as a gift from Protestants, by
which he could not act as a guardian, a constable, or a gamekeeper,
possess a horse worth more than £5, or keep more than two apprentices. A
Protestant husband who married a Catholic wife fell under this penal code;
a Protestant wife who married a Catholic husband was deprived of her
inheritance; and an Act of George II. declared that mixed marriages should
be null, and that the priests who made them should be hanged. Some
knowledge of Irish history is required in order to appreciate the virtuous
indignation roused by the Pope’s _Ne Temere_ decree. In the eighteenth
century, wives were bribed by the law to turn against Catholic husbands,
and children against their Catholic fathers; the fractious wife, the
unnatural son had only to feign conversion in order to secure immunity and
reward for undutiful conduct, and to deprive those whom they had injured
of the management and disposal of their estates. Such was the system
begotten by force and fraud through the breach of the Treaty of Limerick,
when William III.’s generals, in order to pacify Ireland, guaranteed to
the Irish people the enjoyment of their religious liberties. The arts
which earlier English Governments had used to set chief against chief and
clan against clan, were now employed on a more generous scale to set a
dominant caste against the people they ruled, and to place at the absolute
disposal of an alien garrison the lives, the liberties, the conscience,
the property, and the domestic happiness of the nation it had robbed,
maltreated, and betrayed.
Dominion, however, was not in the eighteenth century an end in itself, but
a means for securing wealth. The age of commercial rivalry had set in
during the latter half of the seventeenth century, and English traders,
who had clamoured for the destruction of the Protestant Dutch, valued
their hold over Catholic Ireland as a means for exploiting its markets and
crushing its competition. One after another of Ireland’s infant industries
was massacred to satisfy English jealousy. Strafford’s boasted
encouragement of Irish linen was a blind to cover his campaign against
Irish woollens. In the reign of Charles II. the importation of Irish
cattle into England was prohibited because it lowered English rents, and
Ireland’s magnificent harbours were kept empty by its exclusion from the
Navigation Acts, lest its incipient colonial trade should compete with
England’s. Deprived of their market for cattle, the Irish developed
sheep-rearing and woollen manufactures; in 1699 the English Parliament
accordingly prohibited the export of Irish manufactured wool to any
country whatever. The hypocritical plea was anxiety to stimulate Irish
linen, which the English Parliament thereupon practically excluded by a
duty of 30 per cent. Having thus impoverished Ireland, Englishmen based
their case against Irish claims to self-government on the thriftlessness
of its people.
All classes in Ireland, Catholics and Protestants, landlords and tenants,
traders and farmers, were, however, involved in this common misfortune,
which in its helpless position the Irish Parliament was powerless to
avert; and in spite of the discord sown with malignant ingenuity between
the English, the Irish, and the native interests, in spite of the
perverted skill of viceroys and primates in maintaining the English
faction by purchasing boroughs and corrupting parliaments, a common
impulse began to pervade the carefully dislocated members of the Irish
body politic. Scandals like “Wood’s Halfpence” provoked a national protest
in Swift’s “Drapier’s Letters”; a common feeling began to mitigate the
ferocity of the penal code, and to inspire a united demand for Irish
freedom from English oppression. The opportunity came with the War of
American Independence. Formed to provide a defence which England could not
afford, the Irish Volunteers demanded the price for their services, and
England had to pay it in Grattan’s Parliament. The history of Ireland’s
packed and bribed and muzzled Parliament affords no proof of Ireland’s
incapacity to rule itself; rather it shows the lengths of cruelty and
violence to which English Parliaments, in spite of their political genius,
of their “glorious Revolution” of 1688, of their vaunted love of civil and
religious liberty, have been driven by fruitless efforts to govern a
gifted people against its will. England sought, and inevitably failed, to
rule Ireland on principles the reverse of those on which were based its
own proud liberties and democratic Empire.
X.—Ireland, 1782 And 1912(123) BY LORD FITZMAURICE
The events of 1782 will always loom large in history, and the views of the
members of the Rockingham Ministry on the proper relations to be
established between Great Britain and Ireland, and the possible course of
events had they met with a negotiator less intractable than Grattan, are
subjects of more than merely historical interest.
In that ministry the Duke of Portland was Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, and
he took with him Colonel Fitzpatrick as Chief Secretary; Mr. Fox was
Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs; Lord Shelburne was Secretary of
State for the Home and Colonial Departments, and as such was responsible
for the government of Ireland.
The recognition of the claim of Ireland to be a distinct Kingdom, with a
right to a separate Legislature of her own for all purposes, was the
object of the movement of which Grattan was the leader. That this claim
was founded on historic right, and had also on grounds of expediency to be
accepted, was admitted by the Whig statesmen of the time in England. But
they also saw that there were subjects which the geographical position of
the two countries, their past history, and their industrial interests,
rendered it desirable and indeed necessary should be recognized as common
property. Ireland, in their opinion, was too near to be a separate State
with safety to the external relations of Great Britain; she was too
distant to be altogether incorporated with due regard to the efficient
management of her own internal affairs.
The Ministry of Lord Rockingham came into office on March 27th, 1782. The
moment was one of the gloomiest in English history. The nation had just
been stunned by the news of the great surrender at York Town; it was an
open question whether the intelligence of the surrender of Gibraltar might
not be expected to follow; the power of the fleet to cope successfully
with the combined navies of France, Spain, and Holland, was doubtful; an
invasion was discussed in every household in the land as a serious
possibility, and the resources of the country to meet it were disputed by
competent judges. The new Prime Minister was himself a dying man, though
the dangerous character of his illness was concealed; the two Secretaries
of State were separated by mutual suspicions which were rapidly ripening
into estrangement. Ireland was in the hands of the armed Volunteers, and
England’s difficulty was, as usual, Ireland’s opportunity. “The liberties
of America were inseparable from ours,” Grattan said in 1799, referring to
this period; “they were the only hope of Ireland, and the only refuge of
the liberties of mankind.”(124) The satisfaction of Ireland was therefore,
in 1782, the first condition of the safety of England, and imposed itself
on the Ministers as their most imperious duty.
The four grievances of Ireland were, in the words of Grattan, “a foreign
legislature, a foreign judicature, a legislative Privy Council, and a
perpetual army,”(125) and they were set forth in the Amendment to the
Address carried by him in the Irish Parliament on April 17th.(126)
“My opinion,” Fox wrote to Fitzpatrick, on April 28th, “is clear
for giving them all they ask; but for giving it them so as to
secure us from further demands, and at the same time to have some
clear understanding with respect to what we are to expect from
Ireland in return for the protection and assistance which she
receives from those fleets which cost us such enormous sums and
her nothing. If they mean really well to their country, they must
wish some final adjustment which may preclude further disputes; if
they mean nothing but consequence to themselves, they will insist
upon these points being given up simply, without any reciprocal
engagement; and as soon as this is done, begin to attack whatever
is left, in order to continue the ferment of the country. In one
word, what I want to guard against is Jonathan Wild’s plan of
seizing one part in order to dispute afterwards about the
remainder.”(127)
Lord Rockingham, writing in an exactly similar strain, said: “that the
essential points of the Irish demands having first been conceded, it would
be the duty of both countries to consider how finally to arrange, settle,
and adjust all matters, whereby the union of power and strength, and
mutual and reciprocal advantage, might be best permanently fixed;” and he
spoke favourably of the appointment of “Commissioners” on both sides, to
draw up the heads of an agreement between the two countries.(128) Of a
similar character was the language of Lord Shelburne.
“If,” he said, writing to the Duke of Portland, on the day
following that on which Fox had addressed the Chief Secretary,
“the ties by which the two kingdoms have been hitherto so closely
united are to be loosened or cut asunder, is your Grace yet
prepared to advise whether any, and if so what, substitutions are
thought of for the preservation of the remaining connection
between us? If by the proposed modification of Poynings’ Law, so
much power is taken from the two Privy Councils as they are now
constituted, are we to look for any agreement in any new
institution of Council, which may answer the purpose of keeping up
the appendancy and connection of Ireland to the Crown of Great
Britain, and of preventing that confusion which must arise in all
cases of common concern from two Parliaments with distinct and
equal powers, and without any operating centre.”(129)
On May 11th, Fox, in another letter to Fitzpatrick, explained his views;
what he intended, he said, was to grant the “concession of ‘internal
legislation’ as a preliminary, accompanied with a modification of
Poyning’s Law and a temporary Mutiny Bill;” and he hoped that, having made
these concessions, “they might be able to treat of ’other matters’ so
amicably as to produce an arrangement that would preserve the connection
between the two countries.”(130) The other matters were the Final
Judicature and the question of the contribution of Ireland to Imperial
expenses. Shelburne suggested the formal negotiation of “the articles of a
treaty,” for as such, he said, he regarded his proposals;(131) and he
urged a little judicious temporizing in the hope that the situation abroad
might in the interval improve. But Grattan, recognizing the immense
advantage which this situation gave him in negotiating with Great Britain,
refused to entertain any idea of compromise. There was not only, he said,
to be no “foreign legislature, but there were to be no commissioners” to
negotiate a treaty,(132) and there was, above all, to be no delay in
granting all the demands of Ireland. With this information before him, the
Duke of Portland, who from the time of his arrival in Dublin had up till
this moment encouraged both the Secretaries of State to believe that
Grattan would come into their views, and might even make concessions(133)
in regard to the final appeal in judicial matters, now informed them that
the claims of Ireland on all the four principal demands must be conceded,
and conceded at once, as the whole country was in a state of the wildest
excitement, and was rapidly escaping control.(134) The concession of all
the Irish demands was accordingly decided upon. The preliminary steps were
taken on May 17th, by a resolution in both Houses of the British
Parliament, for effecting the repeal of the 6th of Geo. I., c. 5, the Act
by which the right of the British Parliament to legislate for Ireland was
declared; and the necessary Bill was then introduced and rapidly passed
into law.
At the same time, however, another resolution was adopted in the following
terms:
“That it is the opinion of this House that it is indispensable to
the interest and happiness of both kingdoms that the connection
between them should be established by mutual consent upon a solid
and permanent footing; and that an humble address be presented to
His Majesty, that His Majesty will be graciously pleased to take
such measures as His Majesty in his royal wisdom shall think most
conducive to that end.”
On these resolutions Fox commented as follows:
“Ireland,” he said, “would have no reason to complain; the terms
acceded to by England were proposed by herself, and all her wishes
would now be gratified in the way which she herself liked best.
But as it was possible that if nothing more was to be done than
what he had stated to be his intention, Ireland might, perhaps,
think of fresh grievances and rise yearly in her demands, it was
fit and proper that something should be done towards establishing
on a firm and solid basis the future connection of the two
kingdoms. But that was not to be proposed by him here in
Parliament: it would be the duty of the Crown to look to that; the
business might be first begun by His Majesty’s servants in
Ireland, and if afterwards it should be necessary to enter into a
treaty, Commissioners might be sent from the British Parliament or
from the Crown, to enter upon it and bring the negotiation to a
happy issue, by giving mutual satisfaction to both countries, and
establishing a treaty which should be sanctified by the most
solemn forms of the Constitution of both countries.”(135)
For the moment, however, the hope of commencing negotiations with these
objects had to be abandoned, and when, on May 27th, the Royal Message
conveying the intention of His Majesty to concede all the demands of the
Irish Parliament was delivered in Dublin, the Secretary to the
Lord-Lieutenant announced that no measures were then intended to be
grounded on the second English resolution of May 17th. For a time,
however, the Duke of Portland continued to hope against hope, and to
nourish the vain expectations with which from the beginning he had buoyed
himself up, and had misled his colleagues. During the month of June he
allowed himself to be persuaded by Mr. Ogilvy, the husband of the Duchess
of Leinster, and stepfather to Lord Edward Fitzgerald, that Grattan was
not really so intractable as he seemed to be, and in a secret and
confidential despatch, written on June 6th, he urged that the Irish
Parliament should not be at once prorogued, in order to give time for a
possible arrangement in regard to common affairs. But on June 22nd he was
reluctantly compelled to express his disappointment and mortification at
finding that his hopes had proved entirely fallacious, and that Mr. Ogilvy
was a person not to be relied upon. The prorogation of the Irish
Parliament was accordingly suffered to take place on July 27th, and here
the matter ended.(136) “Thus,” exclaimed Grattan to his applauding
audience—“thus have you sealed a treaty with Great Britain; on her side
the restoration of the final judicature; the extinction of her legislative
claim; of her Privy Council; of her perpetual Mutiny Bill; the repeal of
the Act of legislative supremacy; on your side satisfaction! And thus are
the two nations compacted for ever in freedom and peace.”(137)
Subsequently at the time of the Union a controversy arose in regard to
these events. Mr. Pitt asserted that the adjustment of 1782 was not
considered by the British Ministers by whom it was effected as final in
its character; but that, on the contrary, they were fully convinced of the
necessity of adopting some further measures to strengthen the connection
between the two countries, and he produced the correspondence which had
passed in 1782—extracts from which have been given above—as a reply to the
lame attempt of General Fitzpatrick, who was still in Parliament, to deny
that any such negotiation had been desired by the members of Lord
Rockingham’s Ministry. General Fitzpatrick had declined to admit more than
that the Duke of Portland, during his residence in Ireland, might have
entertained a vague idea of some farther arrangement for consolidating the
connection with Ireland, but had soon given it up; and Grattan in the
Irish Parliament openly accused Lord Shelburne and the Duke of having
concealed their views from their colleagues, and said that, above all, Mr.
Fox knew nothing of the project contained in the despatch of June
6th.(138) The truth is, that the Rockingham Ministry was in June a house
divided against itself, owing to differences of opinion as to the peace
negotiation with France and the United States, and was almost in the
actual throes of dissolution. From a letter written by Fox in 1799 to
Fitzpatrick, it certainly appears that the so-called “Ogilvy” negotiation
never was communicated to him.(139) But the assertion of Mr. Pitt went far
beyond the Ogilvy negotiation—if negotiation it can be called. What Mr.
Pitt asserted was, not that the correspondence proved that in June, 1782,
the Ministers were actually intending to enter on any such negotiation,
but that the Prime Minister, the Lord-Lieutenant, and both Secretaries of
State, from the very commencement of the correspondence in April,
considered the arrangement insisted on by Grattan deficient, and lacking
in finality, and were only prevented by the stress of adverse
circumstances and the impracticable character of the Irish leaders, from
trying to negotiate an agreement, by which Ireland should acknowledge that
“the superintending power and supremacy were where Nature had placed
them”—viz., in the Government of Great Britain.
What, then, was the view which the British Ministers in 1782 took of the
relations which it was desirable to establish between Great Britain and
Ireland—the relations which, had events been more favourable, they would
have established? Evidently it was not a legislative union, though they
wished to retain the final judicial appeal in London. The object of the
Duke of Portland, as he explained in the secret despatch of June 6th, was
that an Act of Parliament should be passed by the Legislatures of the
respective kingdoms, by which “the superintending power and supremacy” of
Great Britain in all matters of State and general commerce would be
virtually and effectively acknowledged; by which also a share of the
expense in carrying on a defensive or offensive war, either in support of
our dominions or those of our allies, should be borne by Ireland in
proportion to the state of her abilities; and that she should adopt every
such regulation as might be judged necessary by Great Britain for the
better ordering and securing her trade and commerce with foreign nations,
or her own colonies and dependencies; consideration being duly had to the
circumstances of Great Britain. “This plan,” Lord Shelburne explained
during the debates of 1799, “had nothing to do with a legislative
union.”(140) “It related,” he said, “to what might be called the expense
of the system which was carried on under the two Parliaments, in Army,
Navy, commerce and finance, and in the great establishments of Church and
State; and it did not imply ‘bringing the two Parliaments
together.’ ”(141)
From these passages it appears that what the Whig statesmen aimed at in
1782 was to obtain, in the first place, a clear acknowledgment of the
Imperial supremacy, or, as they would have said in the language of the
time, of the power of Great Britain in “external” as distinct from
“internal” legislation; and, in the next place, a contribution from
Ireland to the expenses of external administration and policy: the Fleet,
the Army, and the diplomatic and commercial establishments. “I humbly
conceive,” said Burke, who was a member of the Rockingham Government, and
the trusted adviser of his official chief, “that the whole of the
superior, and what I should call Imperial politics, ought to have its
residence here [in London]; and that Ireland, locally, civilly and
commercially independent, ought politically to look up to Great Britain in
all matters of peace or war, and, in a word, with her to live and die. At
bottom, Ireland has no other choice—I mean no other national choice.”(142)
Very different were the views of the Irish Parliamentary leaders: not of
Grattan only, but of his rival, Flood, as can be gathered from the perusal
of the debates in the Irish Parliament, which culminated in the famous
struggle between Flood and Grattan on October 28th, 1782, when Flood,
having denounced Grattan as a “mendicant patriot,” and Grattan having
retorted by likening his rival “to a bird of prey with an evil aspect and
a sepulchral note,” the two leaders left the House in order to solve their
differences by a duel, and were only prevented meeting in deadly combat by
the interposition of the Speaker, who wisely issued his warrant to
apprehend them both.
The contention of Flood was that the mere repeal of the Act of George I.
was insufficient, and did not prevent its revival at any future period;
that it really left the matter where it stood, and that it was therefore
necessary to bring in a Bill for declaring the sole and exclusive right of
the Irish Parliament to make laws in all cases whatsoever, internal and
external, for the kingdom of Ireland. His desire was to trump Grattan’s
cards, and destroy his popularity, which in the following year he all but
succeeded in doing, when a decision of Lord Mansfield in the Court of
King’s Bench enabled him to raise a cry that the independence of the Irish
Courts of Judicature was in danger; and a further Act was forced on the
British Government renouncing any claim to legislate and confirming the
independence of the Irish Courts of Justice.(143) The contention of
Grattan was that the relations between Great Britain and Ireland were to
be ascertained from the record of the whole of the recent transactions,
which were transactions between two independent nations having a common
Sovereign; and this being so, he said it was no more possible for Great
Britain to reassert her legislative supremacy over Ireland than it would
be for her to do so over the American colonies, if the pending
negotiations resulted, as they evidently were about to do, in a
recognition of the independence of those colonies. Grattan, indeed, went
so far as to say that the relations between Great Britain and Ireland were
in future to be sought in the law of nations and not in the municipal
legislation of either country, which he said was no longer applicable. But
both the Irish leaders agreed that in one way or another the legislative,
financial, and judicial links between the two countries were to be
severed, however much they differed as to the legal formulas which were to
impress and carry out these ideas.(144)
The following propositions can, then, be based on the events of 1782:
(1) That the Irish leaders insisted on the freedom of Ireland from
interference by the British Parliament both in internal and
external affairs, or, as would now be said, both on Home and
Imperial questions.
(2) That the British Ministers were ready to concede the former,
and were not ready to yield the latter; but conceded both, owing
to the circumstances of the time, and considered the concession
final.
(3) That the British Ministers wished to obtain a contribution
from Ireland for Imperial purposes, and the maintenance of a final
appeal to an Imperial Court of Judicature.
(4) That the British Ministers do not appear to have proposed the
representation of Ireland in the British Legislature.
In substance the plan proposed by Mr. Gladstone in 1886 was the plan which
Grattan rejected in 1782. The objection to any such plan is the
probability that if Ireland were to be asked, and were even to consent for
the moment to make an appreciable contribution to the common expenses of
the Empire, without being given through her representatives any share in
the Parliamentary control of the funds so voted, and in the discussion of
Imperial affairs—if, in other words, she was made a tribute-paying colony,
instead of being treated as a member of a Federal system having an
undiminished area of taxation for National purposes—a fresh and formidable
grievance would arise in a few years, on the ground that taxation without
representation was an intolerable thing, and contrary to the first
principles of the Constitution. It was with these considerations present
to his mind that Mr. Butt, when leader of the Irish Home Rule Party, in
order to get over the difficulty, had proposed that a Federal arrangement
should be instituted between Great Britain and Ireland—_i.e._, an
arrangement under which Great Britain and Ireland should agree to vest
certain powers in a purely Irish Legislature and certain others in the
Imperial Parliament. The late Mr. Sharman Crawford, who like Mr. Butt was
an Ulsterman and a Protestant, held similar views at an earlier epoch, and
put them prominently forward during the period which elapsed between the
imprisonment of O’Connell and the collapse of the first Tenant-right
movement. With their opinion before us, it may be asked—why was no such
plan proposed in 1782 by the English statesmen of the day? The answer is
not far to seek.
The eighteenth century knew little or nothing about Federal Government.
The Constitution of the United States, the parent of all the numerous
later schemes of Federalism, was still in the limbo of the future; and it
would be as idle to blame the Government of 1782 for not entering on a
journey into the region of the unknown, especially at a moment of
unexampled public difficulty, as it would be to blame the statesmen of the
present day for not anticipating the political discoveries of the next
generation, whatever they may prove to be. It was owing no doubt to the
idea of Federal Government being practically unknown to the men of 1782,
and to the unwillingness of the English mind to strike out on a new and as
yet untrodden path in the art of Government, that in all the discussions
of that time there is little or no suggestion of instituting a Federal
link between Great Britain and Ireland. Some such suggestion was made
during the negotiations on the Scotch Union, but it was decisively
rejected by England, and only weakly urged by Scotland. The period was, in
fact, one when Europe was still under the influence of a set of ideas
which worked in an exactly opposite direction to the ideas of nationality
and Federalism. The period was indeed drawing to a close; but the whole
tendency of history had for two centuries previously been in the direction
of large agglomerations of territory and centralization of government,
quite irrespective of questions of nationality and race, and that tendency
was still potent in 1782. The idea that the advantages of a national
Government, extending over a large territory, might be combined with those
of a decentralization of authority by a division of jurisdictions, was not
one which the statesmen of the day in Europe had begun seriously to
consider. Separation they understood, or an incorporate union: the
possibility of an intermediate arrangement they ignored.
And yet an experiment in Federal Government is not to be approached with a
light heart, and perhaps one thing only can be said about it with any
certainty, that whatever success has attended it, wherever in fact it has
worked smoothly, it has been when the powers reserved to the Federal or
National Government have been those only which were strictly necessary,
and in regard to which differences of opinion would presumably not arise
amongst the States forming the Union.
It is the more important to bear these considerations in mind, because of
the existence of a widely spread but erroneous idea in regard to the
United States Constitution, to the effect that the Federal Government has
very numerous and extensive powers in internal affairs assured to it by
the jurisdiction of the Federal Court. This Court, it is said, can
intervene, under the terms of the Constitution, to arrest the action of
the State Governments, and therefore, once given a Federal Court, the
success of the Federal experiment is assured.
But it is necessary to realize that it is only because the powers of the
Federal Government are very strictly limited, and that the Federal Court
is not overweighted with the assertion of rights, the exercise of which
the public opinion of the States might not support, that its jurisdiction,
when asserted, is as a rule respected, while over the State Legislatures
as such it has no power at all, by way of injunction or prohibition. Nor
have cases been wanting from which the precarious character of its powers,
and its occasional lack of any sufficient sanction to enforce its decrees,
may be gathered, when it has happened that those decrees have not been in
accord with the prevailing opinion of the State within which execution has
had to be carried out. In 1812, when a state of war existed with Great
Britain, the States of Massachusetts and Connecticut refused obedience to
the orders of the Federal Government for the concentration of the militias
of all the Northern States on the frontier, giving as their reason that
the Constitution only empowered the Federal Government to call out the
militia in the case of “insurrection or actual invasion,” and that neither
of these two eventualities had arisen. These doctrines met with general
approval in the two States in question, and were endorsed by their
Governors, their Legislatures, and their tribunals, nor were the Federal
Courts able to enforce obedience to the commands of the Government at
Washington. By a strict limitation of the powers of the National
Government to what is absolutely necessary in order to secure the
existence of the United States as a nation, the framers of the
Constitution of 1787 did as much as it was possible to do, in order to
render their work permanent; but they were not able, as De Tocqueville
pointed out, even before the war of Secession had come to confirm the
foresight of his views, altogether to avoid the dangers which are the
natural inheritance of all Federal forms of Government.
The possibility, then, of establishing a Federal connection of any kind
between Great Britain and Ireland—that is to say, an arrangement under
which certain powers would be vested in an Irish Legislature and
Executive, and certain others in a Parliament and Executive common to both
countries—depends entirely on whether it is believed not only that such a
division of power can be successfully made upon paper—a feat which any
constitution-monger can accomplish—but also that public opinion in Ireland
will not interpose hopeless obstacles to the assertion of the reserved
rights and powers of the Imperial Legislature and Executive.
That under a Federal arrangement there would be any real possibility of
frequent interference from London in Irish internal affairs is not
probable, even were such interference legal. The attempt could only end in
failure. Much has been said about the supremacy of the British or Imperial
Parliament; and some of those who have used this expression apparently
mean that every Act of the Irish Legislature and Executive is in some way
or another to be reviewed by the British Parliament and Executive; or that
in defiance of the plain teaching of history there is to be no responsible
Irish Executive. The certain result of this would be to destroy the sense
of responsibility in the Irish Legislature, to create endless differences
of opinion between the two countries, and to make Great Britain the
“whipping-boy” of Ireland, whenever Ireland had done anything foolish, and
the British Parliament had not stepped in to prevent it. Reasonable men
will continue to differ about the grant of Home Rule; but whatever is
granted to Ireland in the way of legislative or executive right must be
given fully and frankly, without looking backward. We must allow ourselves
in this matter to listen to the voice of the statesmen of 1782. On the
other hand, whatever is reserved must be clearly reserved, with ample
guarantees for the arm of the Imperial Executive being long enough and
strong enough to put down resistance. But that the power of the Imperial
Parliament and Executive could, under any circumstances, be exerted
frequently and in many matters, is a dangerous and impotent delusion. That
power can only be maintained by carefully selecting and limiting the
objects to which it is to relate; and by admitting Irish representatives
to their full share—neither more nor less—of the control of Imperial
questions in the Imperial Parliament, and securing adequate machinery for
the execution of the decrees of the Imperial Government in Ireland when
necessary. The arguments against any petty and irritating interference
with the internal affairs of Ireland would be just as strong now as those
which Lord Chatham used in 1774 against the proposed interference of the
British House of Commons with the Absentee tax which the Irish Parliament
was in that year supposed to be about to pass:
“The justice or policy of the tax,” he said, “is not the question;
and on these two, endless arguments may be maintained _pro_ and
_con_. The simple question is, have the Commons of Ireland
exceeded the powers lodged with them by the essential constitution
of Parliament? I answer, they have not, and the interference of
the British Parliament would in this case be unjust, and the
measure destructive of all fair correspondence between England and
Ireland for ever.”(145)
In what way would the British Parliament be more able to interfere in such
a case than it was in 1774?
That Great Britain, if she chooses, is strong enough to govern Ireland for
a prolonged period against the wishes of the majority of the people of
Ireland, is indeed true; and under a strong and consistent Administration,
strict and even justice might no doubt produce quiet and a considerable
degree of material prosperity, without the constitutional question being
touched. But the existence of outward calm and material prosperity has
always been a favourite plea with the opponents of political reform. And
it is the most subtle and dangerous of all possible pleas, so soothing in
character, and making apparently so winning an appeal to plain common
sense and to self-evident facts. “Now, after all this,” says Lord
Clarendon, when describing the period in which England was administered,
judged, and legislated for by the Privy Council, “I must be so just as to
say that during the whole time that these measures were exercised, and
these new and extraordinary ways were run, this kingdom enjoyed the
greatest calm and the fullest measure of felicity that any people in any
age for so long a time together (for the above-mentioned eleven or twelve
years) have been blessed with, to the wonder and envy of all the other
parts of Christendom.” But a few years after the happy period described in
such glowing terms by the great historian the Civil War broke out.
If the necessity for a political change exists, sooner or later it forces
its way to the front, notwithstanding outward calm. It has been so before,
and there is no reason to doubt that it will be so again, because the
claim made by Ireland depends on permanent facts which statesmen cannot
alter notwithstanding occasional periods of material prosperity and
outward calm. As the ultimate solution of existing difficulties it is
indicated by the geography and by the history of the island; and these are
the two conditions of every political problem, which it is difficult to
surmount or evade. Time may indeed slowly soften the asperities produced
by past errors and the crimes of bygone generations; but the geographical
conditions of a problem remain fixed and unalterable, and in the long run
will be found to be the permanent factor which governs the situation. Not
by empty formulas, such as “governing Ireland according to Irish ideas,”
or, “extending all the liberties enjoyed by the subjects of Great Britain
to those of the sister island,” shall we advance one yard on our way, or
indeed do aught but make it clear to friend and foe alike, that we are
cultivating contradictory ideas without even being apparently aware that
we are doing so. What we have to do is to resolve to take our stand on the
few firm bits of fact which emerge like stepping-stones traversing a
quaking bog; and then we may get over, and some day perhaps climb the
distant hills which are on the other side. Otherwise we shall go on
“filling our belly with the east wind” to the end of time; we shall fish
all night and take nothing. These few firm bits of fact are those provided
by history and geography. Open the map and look at the situation of Great
Britain and of Ireland relatively to each other; observe how they lie
near, yet apart; how they are separated by intervening seas, but seas so
narrow as to be a bond quite as much as a bar; how they are inhabited by
races speaking the same language but professing different religions; and
bear in mind that these are the features of the picture which cannot be
altered. This being so, let us next suppose that some stranger ignorant of
all the trivial details of the Irish question, on his arrival amongst us,
were asked to state what, in his opinion, with the above conditions placed
before him, the institutions of two such islands relatively to one another
were likely to be, judging from his experience of other countries. Would
he not probably reply that the wise statesmen of Great Britain, of whose
fame he had heard in foreign lands, had doubtless long ago come to the
conclusion that their separation for some purposes, and their union for
others, was stamped on the map as the certain and inevitable condition of
any satisfactory settlement of their mutual relations, and that, alike to
their complete separation and to their complete union, there was one and
the same answer: _Opposuit natura_.
But, further, let us suppose him in his turn to inquire what the
experience of the past had been in this particular case; and whether the
two countries at the present time were entirely united or entirely
separate, or were linked by some intermediate arrangement adapted to their
relative needs and springing out of them; and suppose that the answer was,
as it would have to be, that after several centuries of aggravated strife,
they had first tried entire legislative separation, and had then abandoned
it for an absolute incorporate union. Would he in that case be astonished
if he was informed that history had vindicated geography, and that under
neither of these two relations had peace, goodwill, and amity, been the
distinguishing characteristics of the relations of Great Britain and
Ireland?
To such a traveller it might perhaps be explained as an unexampled
portent, that although constitutional liberty, limited only by the right
of every Government to suppress crime and repress disorder, had been
extended by the larger to the smaller country; that although an equal
representation, a wide suffrage and vote by ballot had also been given,
and no alien Church any longer vexed the conscientious scruples of the
majority, and the land system of the country had also been reformed, yet
so unreasonable were the minds of the Irish people that they refused to be
contented, and were now asking for a modification of the fundamental
articles of the existing incorporate union, and that a constant agitation
in consequence prevailed.
Might he not reply that he had heard it said by them of old time, that it
was a mistake to be too much alarmed by the existence of political
agitation; that absolute quiet is not a necessary sign of political health
even in a constitutional State; that what is called union within a
political system may be a very equivocal expression; that the true union
is a harmony, the result of which is that all parties, however opposed in
appearance, co-operate towards the common good; that union may even exist
in a State where the eye at first seems only to recognize a busy
confusion; and that the contentment of the population with the
institutions under which they live is the only solid guarantee of their
permanence.(146) Englishmen, he might add, in conclusion, had themselves
been occupied for two centuries in proclaiming these and similar liberal
sentiments from one end of Europe to the other, and the time had now
perhaps arrived for applying them nearer home.
XI.—Grattan’s Parliament. BY G. P. GOOCH
Grattan’s Parliament was born of the American War of Independence and was
slain by the French Revolution. Brief as was its life, it forms the most
brilliant and interesting episode in Irish history. Never has the ancient
and unconquerable spirit of nationality spoken in more eloquent accents
than during the years when Grattan, loyal alike to the British connection
and to Irish ideals, had won for his countrymen a measure of
self-government. Representing only the Protestant minority, clogged with
corruption, and containing its full share of selfish and reactionary
influences, it was none the less the focus and the mouthpiece of national
feeling. Fairly to judge the Grattan Parliament we must not only recall
its limitations and errors but contrast its throbbing vitality with the
servitude that preceded its foundation and the creeping paralysis which
followed its dissolution.
A long sleep had succeeded the final expulsion of James II. from Ireland.
The penal code was perfected into a system accurately described by Burke
as most perfectly fitted to degrade and brutalise the human spirit.
Catholic Ireland was voiceless and wholly lacking in political
consciousness; and the silence of Protestants was only broken by a rare
protest from Molyneux, Swift, or Lucas. If any doubt remained under
Poynings’ Laws as to the complete dependence on Great Britain, it was set
at rest by the Declaratory Act passed at Westminster in 1719. The Viceroys
before Townshend only spent a few weeks in Dublin every second year for
the biennial sessions of Parliament. The Lords Justices governed the
country for its English masters by influence and corruption, and the Irish
pension list provided grants too degrading to be charged on English
revenues. A new era opened when Flood took his seat in 1759 and organised
an Opposition, the programme of which included the limitation of
parliaments, the revision of the pension list, the creation of a militia
and the independence of the Irish Legislature. The first object was
secured in 1768 by the Octennial Act; but at the height of his power and
popularity he was captured by the Government, which naturally desired to
disarm its most formidable foe. After an interval of independent support,
the great orator accepted a salaried office and a seat in the Privy
Council in 1775. In the same year Grattan entered Parliament at the age of
twenty-nine, and quickly asserted his title to the leadership of the
national party which Flood, in an evil moment for himself and his country,
had abdicated.
The new leader was favoured by circumstances. While Flood clamoured for
the suppression of the American revolt, the Presbyterians of the north
loudly applauded the colonists, many thousands of whom had recently
emigrated from Ulster. The community of interest was fully realised on
both sides of the Atlantic; but Ireland asked for political and commercial
autonomy, not for independence. With the demand there rapidly emerged the
instrument of its realisation. Ireland was almost without troops when
France declared war in 1778. When it became clear that the Government were
unable to defend the island, the Protestant gentry came forward, and in a
few weeks a disciplined and enthusiastic force of 40,000 men was under
arms. Though organised for defence, the Volunteers, inspired by Charlemont
and Grattan, determined to employ their strength in exacting concessions
from the British Government. To use the words of Fox, the American war was
the Irish harvest. The larger part of the damage inflicted on Irish
commerce and manufactures by the legislation of the prominent partner was
irreparable; but something might be saved from the wreck. The menacing
aspect of the Volunteers and the panic-stricken despatches from Dublin
Castle convinced the North Ministry that there was no alternative but to
yield. Foreign and colonial trade was thrown open, the embargo on exports
was removed, and Ireland was at last free to make use of her resources.
The easy overthrow of commercial restrictions encouraged Grattan to a
bolder flight. In 1780 he moved his historic resolution “That no person on
earth, save the King, Lords, and Commons of Ireland, has a right to make
laws for Ireland.” The motion was withdrawn after an impressive debate;
but when the Volunteer Convention, which met shortly after, unanimously
adopted the demand for self-government, the British Ministry surrendered.
In April, 1782, the declaration of legislative independence was brought
forward by Grattan in one of his noblest orations. “I found Ireland on her
knees. She is now a nation. In that character I hail her, and, bowing in
her august presence, I say, _Esto perpetua_!” A new and happier era seemed
at last to be opening in the fortunes of Ireland and in her relations with
Great Britain. “I am convinced,” wrote Burke to Charlemont in words of
gold, “that no reluctant tie can be a strong one, and that a natural,
cheerful alliance will be a far more secure link of connection than any
principle of subordination borne with grudging and discontent.” Grattan
was fully satisfied with the repeal of the Declaratory Act of 1719; but
when the demand arose for an express renunciation of the authority of the
British Parliament, the Coalition Ministry of Fox and North passed an Act
unconditionally recognising the right of the Irish people to be bound only
by laws enacted by the King and the Irish Parliament.
The Grattan Parliament appeared to enter on its career with a fair capital
of good will. Irishmen began to feel that they had a country; and though
autonomy had been wrested in an hour of weakness by a show of force, there
was no trace of resentment in the debates at St. Stephen’s which
accompanied the renunciation of power. The new constitution seemed to
enable Ireland to work out her own salvation without let or hindrance. But
the powers which appeared so ample were in reality strictly limited. In
the first place, while the Irish Legislature became in theory the peer of
the British Legislature, the Irish Executive—the Lord-Lieutenant and the
Chief Secretary—continued to be appointed by and responsible to the
British Ministry. Secondly, Irish Bills did not become law till they were
sanctioned by the King and sealed by the Great Seal on the advice of
British Ministers. Finally, a majority of the Irish Parliament rested not
on the free choice of the people or even of the Protestant population, but
on the owners of nomination boroughs, most of whom were bound to the
Executive by the possession or prospect of titles, pensions or sinecures.
Government by patronage survived the Renunciation Act, and reduced the
authority of the Grattan Parliament to a shadow. The power of withholding
supplies was an empty privilege; for the greater part of the income of the
country came from the hereditary revenue, which was independent of
Parliament.
The difficulties inherent in the novel situation were speedily revealed.
It was Grattan’s fervent wish that the Volunteers, their emancipating task
accomplished, should dissolve and leave the parliament to carry out its
work. Flood, on the other hand, who had rejoined the ranks of the
Opposition, had less confidence in the sincerity of the British
Government, and desired to retain the weapon that had proved so effective,
at any rate till a Reform Bill had placed the Legislature in a position to
withstand the insidious assaults of the Executive. Parliamentary reform
was the natural corollary of the Renunciation Act. Flood laid his
proposals before the Volunteer Convention, and, armed with its approval,
carried them to College Green. His object was to emancipate parliament
from the control of placemen and pensioners and to break the power of the
borough-owners by the extension of the franchise. The fault of the measure
was that, contrary to the wishes of Grattan, it perpetuated the exclusion
of Catholics from political rights. The Executive opposed the Bill on the
ground that it emanated from Prætorian bands, though the Volunteers
themselves were held in check by British troops. The whole open and secret
influence of the Government was exerted, and the proposals were defeated.
Reform was the condition of genuine autonomy. Without it the Legislature
was clay in the hands of the potter. Though a share of the blame falls to
the members who saw their influence endangered, the main responsibility
for its defeat lies with the agents of the British Government. Having
granted legislative equality, England took care to secure that the Grattan
Parliament should possess the shadow but not the substance of power.
The next disappointment arose in the sphere not of politics but of
commerce. It was the wish both of Pitt, the disciple of Adam Smith, and of
Grattan that commercial intercourse between the two countries should be
facilitated. But the offer to open the English market was accompanied by a
proposal that Ireland should make a definite contribution to Imperial
expenditure. She already maintained an army of 15,000 men, a fifth of whom
were at the disposal of the British Government while the rest could be
employed outside Ireland with the consent of the Dublin Parliament. But
Pitt, convinced that free trade with England would stimulate Irish
prosperity, felt justified in demanding a share of the increased revenue
for the Imperial navy. Grattan disliked the suggestion of anything which
could be represented as a tribute, and would have preferred voluntary
grants; but he waived his objection, and Pitt’s scheme, in the form of
resolutions, was approved by the Irish Parliament. At this stage the
jealousy of the British commercial classes flamed out, and the scheme, on
emerging from the debates at Westminster, was found to have been radically
altered. As in its final form it curtailed the independence of the Irish
Parliament, Grattan strongly opposed it. A scheme which failed to satisfy
England and had lost its friends in Ireland was not worth further effort.
Pitt had done his best, but had been overborne by the commercial
interests. When the Irish Parliament later declared its readiness to
discuss a commercial treaty, it met with no response.
Pitt was bitterly disappointed by his failure, and lost a good deal of his
interest in Ireland. He adopted the view of successive Lords-Lieutenant
that genuine parliamentary reform was incompatible with the supremacy of
the Executive. “There can, I think, be little doubt,” pronounces Lecky,
“that the prospect of a legislative union was already in his mind, and it
was probably the real key to much of his subsequent policy.” Dr. Holland
Rose quotes a significant letter of Pitt to the Viceroy, Lord Westmorland,
in the autumn of 1792. “The idea of the present fermentation gradually
bringing both parties to think of an Union with this country has long been
in my mind. I hardly dare flatter myself with the hope of its taking
place; but I believe it, though itself not easy to be accomplished, to be
the only solution for other and greater difficulties.” Thus the Grattan
Parliament never had a fair chance. The dual system could only be worked
by mutual good will, and if one of the partners withheld her aid, the
experiment was doomed. Pitt was not yet openly hostile; but he allowed his
agents in Dublin to shape their own course. He recognised that the root of
Irish crime was to be found in the tithe system, and suggested in 1786
that tithes should be commuted; yet when Grattan brought forward proposals
with this object he allowed the Executive to defeat them.
Pitt’s growing dislike of the system of 1782 was reinforced by the action
of the Irish Parliament in the Regency crisis. When the King became insane
in 1788, the Whigs contended that their patron, the Prince of Wales,
should automatically exercise the power of the Crown, while Pitt retorted
that it was for Parliament to appoint him Regent, and to define his
powers. The Irish Parliament sided with the Whigs, Grattan and the
Nationalists on the constitutional ground that Pitt’s proposed safeguards
were unnecessary in Ireland, the camp-followers in view of the probable
change in the source of patronage. The controversy terminated with the
King’s restoration to health; but the Prime Minister never forgot nor
forgave the encouragement rendered to his enemies at the crisis of his
fate.
Pitt had attempted nothing for Ireland since the failure of his commercial
proposals; but the ferment created by the seductive doctrines of the
French Revolution determined him to conciliate the Catholics, to whom he
had always been friendly and whom he agreed with Burke in regarding as
naturally conservative. On being informed of his wishes in 1791 the Irish
Government did its utmost to dissuade him, and succeeded in whittling down
the concessions till they were scarcely worth granting. Though Flood and
Charlemont were immovably opposed to the extension of any kind of
political rights to Catholics, and though Grattan always explicitly
reserved Protestant ascendency, there was a large body of opinion prepared
for a fairly liberal policy; and the new organisation of United Irishmen,
founded in 1791 by Wolfe Tone, rested on the recognition of a common
effective citizenship. In view of these circumstances, Pitt for the first
and last time determined to overrule his agents. The Relief Bill of 1793
enfranchised Catholics on the same terms as Protestants, admitted them to
juries, to the magistracy, and to commissions in the Army and Navy,
allowed them to receive degrees in Dublin University and to carry arms.
This generous measure, which the Executive hated but dared not oppose,
passed without difficulty. Though the main merit belongs to Pitt, the
acceptance of such far-reaching concessions by a Protestant body is a
proof that, left to itself, it was not unwilling to concede substantial
instalments of justice to the Catholic majority. Recent attempts to
minimise the importance of the Act, on the ground that the franchise
without eligibility to Parliament was worthless, misjudge the situation.
The measure was hailed by Catholic opinion as a decisive breach with the
intolerant traditions of a century; and its easy passage to the
Statute-book suggests how different might have been the record and the
fate of the Grattan Parliament had Pitt throughout encouraged its more
generous intuitions and compelled his agents to support the policy which
he knew to be right.
The union of the Portland Whigs with Pitt in 1794 seemed to bring further
reforms within sight. Grattan travelled to London to discuss the
situation, and met Fitzwilliam, who was designed for the Viceroyalty.
Fitzwilliam was known to favour Parliamentary Reform and Catholic
Emancipation, and the liveliest hopes and fears were entertained of a
decisive change of system. On learning from Dublin that there was already
open talk of the dismissal of the Chancellor and other members of the
Ascendency party, Pitt was deeply annoyed. It would be best, he declared,
that Fitzwilliam should not go to Ireland; and, in any case, he must
understand that no idea of a new system could be entertained, and that no
supporters of the Government should be displaced. Shortly before his
departure Pitt and Grenville met Portland, Spencer, Windham and
Fitzwilliam to determine the policy to be pursued. No notes were made of
the conversation, and the Viceroy left England on January 4th, 1795,
without written instructions, though well aware of Pitt’s general views
and wishes. Three days after landing he dismissed Beresford, the head of
the Revenue and an inveterate enemy of Catholic claims, who possessed
enormous borough influence and was often described as the King of Ireland.
Fitzwilliam afterwards stated that he told Pitt the step might be
necessary and that he had acquiesced by his silence. Pitt rejoined that he
had no recollection of the incident. In any case a man of such importance
should not have been removed without communicating with the Home
Government. A few days later the Viceroy informed Portland, the Home
Secretary, of the unanimity of Catholics and the readiness of Protestants
for a measure of emancipation. Despite pressing and repeated
communications, Portland delayed his reply and finally urged him not to
commit himself. Next day Pitt wrote censuring the removal of Beresford,
but without mentioning the Catholic question. Fitzwilliam replied that
Pitt must choose between him and Beresford, and informed Portland that he
would not risk a rebellion by deferring the measure. A week later Portland
wrote in peremptory terms that Grattan’s Bill, which enjoyed the Viceroy’s
support, must go no further, and on the following day Fitzwilliam was
recalled.
The Viceroyalty had lasted six weeks; but Fitzwilliam is remembered while
the phantom rulers who preceded and followed him are forgotten. The
episode has a narrower and a wider aspect. That his dismissals were in
contravention of the understanding on which his appointment rested was
admitted by his personal and political friends in the Cabinet. But though
the Viceroy was guilty of disloyalty to his instructions, a strong case
can be made out for his policy. He knew that the prevailing system was
thoroughly vicious, and he realised that if a policy of conciliation and
reform was to be undertaken it could not be effectively carried out by men
who were opposed to it. As Pitt had explicitly vetoed a change of system,
it would have been wiser to have refused the post. The aims of the two men
were fundamentally different. Though in favour of admitting Catholics to
Parliament, Pitt thought it safer to defer emancipation till a Union was
accomplished, and therefore determined to preserve Government patronage
and control for future emergencies. Fitzwilliam desired to govern Ireland
in accordance with Irish ideas, in the spirit of the Constitution of 1782
and with the help of men who were loyal to it. In his recent work, “The
End of the Irish Parliament,” Mr. Fisher, who finds nothing to admire in
the Grattan Parliament and little in its founder, suggests that the
Fitzwilliam crisis was a storm in a tea-cup, and that the main issue
involved was the substitution of the Ponsonbys for the Beresfords as the
dispensers of patronage. But Irish tradition is in this case a safe guide
as to the character and importance of the incident. Ireland instinctively
felt, as India was to feel nearly a century later in regard to Ripon, that
Fitzwilliam was a friend. The news of his recall was received with delight
in Ascendency circles, and elsewhere with consternation. It was taken as a
definite rejection of the Catholic claims, and increasing numbers
despaired of achieving any real reform by peaceful means. It revealed in a
flash that the autonomy of Ireland was a sham. From this point the
rebellion of 1798 and the Union were in sight.
The new Viceroy, Camden, was an anæmic personality, and with the
establishment of Maynooth the tale of reforms came to an end. The
uncrowned king of Ireland and the brain of Dublin Castle was Fitzgibbon,
who as Attorney-General stood by Pitt in the Regency crisis and had been
rewarded by the Chancellorship and the earldom of Clare. In his
discriminating study of Clare, the late Litton Falkiner has advanced all
that can be said for the ablest and most ruthless of the opponents of the
Grattan Parliament, pointing out that he remained on friendly terms with
the Opposition till 1789. Wholly destitute of national feeling, Clare
openly scoffed at the Catholic Relief Act of 1793, which the Government
was compelled to support. It was from him that emanated in 1795 the fatal
suggestion that the King could not assent to the repeal of laws affecting
Irish Catholics without violating his Coronation oath. “In forcefulness
and narrowness, in bravery and bigotry,” writes Dr. Holland Rose with
entire truth, “he was a fit spokesman of the British garrison, which was
resolved to hold every outwork of the citadel.” With Pitt’s glance fixed
on Union and Clare in virtual command of the machine, there was no place
for Grattan in his own Parliament. He disapproved the revolutionary
republicanism of the United Irishmen and the ascendency principles of
Dublin Castle, and refused to encourage the one by attacking the other.
After a final attempt in 1797 to procure the admission of Catholics to
Parliament and to introduce household franchise, he retired into private
life, his Letter to the Citizens of Dublin firing a parting shot at the
Government.
The rebellion of 1798 and the French invasions form no integral part of
the history of the Grattan Parliament; but they none the less sealed its
doom. In his speech on the Union, Clare frankly confessed that he had been
working for the Union since 1793, and he began to urge the policy on Pitt
in the same year. Pitt, who had long regarded a Union followed by Catholic
Emancipation as the ultimate solution of the Irish problem, was now
convinced that further delay was dangerous. In the early part of the
eighteenth century the idea of Union was by no means unpopular; but the
American war had shaken Ireland from her slumbers, and the debates on the
Commercial Propositions and the Regency showed that the Grattan Parliament
was jealous of the slightest infringement of the settlement of 1782. But
the matter was not to be settled by argument, and no dissolution was
allowed. The high-minded Cornwallis, who had succeeded Camden, groaned
over his hateful task. “My occupation is most unpleasant, negotiating and
jobbing with the most corrupt people under heaven. How I long to kick
those whom my public duty obliges me to court! I despise and hate myself
every hour for engaging in such dirty work, and am supported only by the
reflection that without an Union the British Empire must be dissolved.”
There was no national opposition to the measure. The Catholics were won by
the promises of Emancipation, though they were not informed that the King
had already declared his objections to it insuperable. The main fight was
waged by the Ulster Protestants from whom had sprung the Volunteers. When
the Irish Parliament met for the last time in January, 1800, a majority
had been secured by Cornwallis, Castlereagh, and Clare. Grattan had sought
re-election and returned to utter an eloquent protest against the
destruction of the body that for ever bears his name. He predicted that
the Union would be one of Parliaments, not of peoples. To destroy the
Parliament was to destroy an organ of national intelligence, a source and
symbol of national life. “The thing it is proposed to buy is what cannot
be sold—liberty.” He reiterated his conviction that nature was on the side
of autonomy. “Ireland hears the ocean protesting against separation, but
she hears the sea likewise protesting against Union.” The warnings of the
most spotless of Irish patriots were of no avail. The Grattan Parliament
was swallowed up. In his touching words, he watched by its cradle and
followed its hearse.
There is a good deal to be said for the assertion that after the rebellion
of 1798 the continuance of the experiment of 1782 was a source of danger
to Great Britain in her life and death struggle with France. But there is
no ground for the contention that the constitution itself was
intrinsically unworkable. Its congenital weakness was that the Executive
was responsible not to the Irish but to the British Parliament. Friction
between the Legislature and the Executive was thus inevitable; but with
tact and goodwill even this anomaly need not have stopped the working of
the machine. What would have happened had the British Ministry unselfishly
co-operated with Grattan and the moderate Nationalists to secure urgent
political and economic reforms we can but conjecture. But we know only too
well the effect of withholding such co-operation. There is scarcely a
trace in the voluminous correspondence of the Viceroys, except perhaps the
Duke of Rutland, of any consideration for the good of the country over
which they ruled. Their mandate was to watch the interest of England. When
Cornwallis proposed in 1798 that Castlereagh should become Chief
Secretary, the King objected that the post ought to be held by a Briton;
but his scruples were allayed by the Viceroy’s assurance that his
candidate was “so very unlike an Irishman” that the appointment would be
perfectly safe. There is no ground whatever for the notion that the
Parliament was a wholly corrupt and reactionary body. That Grattan was not
prepared to endanger the Protestant Ascendency is true but irrelevant; for
he was ready to champion such measures of Parliamentary Reform and
Catholic Emancipation as would have transformed Parliament into a
tolerable mirror of Irish opinion. There can be little doubt that if the
Executive had lent its aid, such measures could have been carried as
easily as the Relief Bill of 1793.
In his thoughtful and eloquent volume, “The Framework of Home Rule,” Mr.
Erskine Childers gently chides Home Rulers for wasting vain regrets on the
Grattan Parliament, in which he loses interest after the rejection of
Flood’s Reform Bill of 1783. No instructed Home Ruler would dream of
setting that celebrated body on a pedestal. We know too well that, in the
words of Litton Falkiner, it was a parliament of landlords, of placemen,
and of Protestants. It was fundamentally conservative and aristocratic. It
was ever ready to pass Coercion Acts. It was no more a council of
disinterested patriots than the sister assembly at Westminster. On the
other hand a large and influential section of its members was eager to
purge it of its baser elements. “With every inducement to religious
bigotry, it carried the policy of toleration in many respects further than
the Parliament of England. With many inducements to disloyalty, it was
steadily faithful to the connection. Nor should it be forgotten that it
was on the whole a vigilant and intelligent guardian of the material
interests of the country.”(147) Though cabin’d, cribbed, confined, it was
at least in some degree an organ of public opinion and a symbol of
nationality, as the Third Duma, tame though it be, has stood for the
principle of representation in autocratic Russia. The duty of British
statesmen was to mend it, not to end it. If Grattan’s Parliament was a
failure, the Union was a greater failure. For the one experiment
recognised, however imperfectly, the separateness of Ireland, while the
other started from its denial. To use the jargon of the Ascendency party,
Ireland was “loyal” before the Union and “disloyal” after it. The clear
moral of those chequered years for latter-day statesmen is that a
responsible Executive is of more importance than a co-equal legislature,
and that having granted autonomy the British Parliament and British
Ministers must strive to render it a success. Pitt’s Union was not
partnership but subjection. The only true Union between countries so
different is to be found in loyal comradeship. Against such a relationship
history cannot bear witness, for it has never been tried.
XII.—“The Government Of Ireland In The Nineteenth Century”. BY R. BARRY
O’BRIEN
I
When you speak to Englishmen about English rule in Ireland they say: “Oh!
you Irish are always looking back. You always want to talk about the past.
You read nothing but ancient history. You never think of all we have done
for you in recent years. Come to modern times; forget the past.”
Well, the point is, what are modern times? What date are we to fix for the
beginning of good government in Ireland—1800? Scarcely. I do not think
that the rankest Tory that ever lived will now attempt to defend English
rule in Ireland between 1800 and 1828. In fact, this is what they call
ancient history. They will say to you: “Well, of course, we know that the
Catholics ought to have been emancipated at the Union, and a great many
other things ought to have been done! But what is the good of talking
about that now?” The good is, that the lessons of the past are the
safeguards of the future. Hence they must be learned.
“Progress,” says Lamennais, “is in a straight line. To find it we must go
back to the past.” Let us take the line of “progress” in Ireland
throughout the nineteenth century. In 1800 the Irish Parliament was
destroyed; the English Parliament took Ireland in hand. A new era was to
dawn upon the country. The Catholics were to be emancipated, measures of
social and political amelioration were to be passed, peace and prosperity
were to reign in the land. Such was the promise of the Union. How was it
fulfilled? The Catholics were not emancipated; measures of social
amelioration were not carried; but the Statute book was filled with
Coercion Acts passed to crush the efforts of the people in their struggle
for justice and freedom.
A chronology of Ireland lies before me. Such entries as these meet the eye
at every turn.
1800-1801. Insurrection Act, Habeas Corpus Suspension Act, and Martial
Law.
1803. Insurrection Act.
1804. Habeas Corpus Suspension Act.
1807-1810. Insurrection Act, Martial Law and Habeas Corpus Suspension Act.
1814. Habeas Corpus Suspension Act.
1814-1818. Insurrection Act.
1822-1824. Habeas Corpus Suspension Act, Insurrection Act.
1825-1828. Act for Suppression of Catholic Association.
Nothing can give a better idea of the character of English Government in
Ireland during the first quarter of the century than the mere recital of
these Acts. And then when we look at the Statute book for the measures
passed to ameliorate the condition of the people, to reconcile them to the
loss of their Parliament, and to give them confidence in the English
Legislature, what do we find? At the General Election of 1910, a pamphlet
was published in the county——. It bore the title—“What Mr. M—— has done
for the people of ——” You then turned over the leaves and found every page
a blank. So is it with the English Statute book, during the years
1800-1829, as far as measures of justice for Ireland are concerned. Out of
a total population of 5,000,000 people at the time of the Union, 4,000,000
were Catholics. These Catholics, representing the old Irish race, were
treated as outlanders in their own country. Ireland was governed through
the Protestant minority who, (themselves the descendants of English
settlers), were, under England, the masters of the land. In 1798,
Cornwallis had written to Pitt:
“It has always appeared to me a desperate measure for the British
Government to make an irrevocable alliance with a small party in
Ireland (which party has derived all its consequence from, and is,
in fact, entirely dependent upon the British Government), and to
wage eternal war against the Papists.”
The “desperate measure” which Cornwallis deplored, the British Government
adopted. In 1802, Lord Redesdale, the Irish Lord Chancellor of the day,
wrote: “The Catholics must have no more political power”; and he added: “I
have said that this country must be kept for some time as a garrison
country—I meant a Protestant garrison.” The policy enunciated by Lord
Redesdale was the policy enforced by the English statesmen of the Union. I
think it is Lord Acton who says somewhere that nothing stimulates the
sentiment of nationality so much as the presence of a foreign ruler. The
Irish people saw the hand of the foreign ruler everywhere, and national
hatred was naturally intensified and perpetuated.
Besides the question of Catholic emancipation—the question of political
freedom—there were many other questions calling for the immediate
attention of Parliament. There was the church question, the tithe
question, the question of the education of the people, and the eternal
land question. The very existence of these questions was ignored by
English statesmen. Land was the staple industry of Ireland; yet it was
worked under conditions which were fatal to the peace and prosperity of
the country. What were the conditions? The landlord let the land—perhaps a
strip of bog, barren, wild, dreary. The tenant reclaimed the bog; built,
fenced, drained, did all that had to be done. When the tenant had done
these things, had made the land tenantable, the rent was raised. He could
not pay the increased rental—he had spent himself on the land; he needed
time to recoup himself for his outlay and labour. He got no time: when he
failed to pay, he was evicted—flung on the roadside, to starve, to die. He
took refuge in an Agrarian Secret Society, told the story of his wrong,
and prayed for vengeance on the man whom he called a tyrant, and an
oppressor. Too often his prayer was heard, and vengeance was wreaked on
the landlord, or agent, and sometimes on both.
“The landlord,” says Mr. Froude, “may become a direct oppressor.
He may care nothing for the people, and have no object but to
squeeze the most that he can out of them fairly or unfairly. The
Russian Government has been called despotism, tempered by
assassination. In Ireland landlordism was tempered by
assassination.... Every circumstance combined in that country to
exasperate the relations between landlord and tenant. The
landlords were, for the most part, aliens in blood and in
religion. They represented conquest and confiscation, and they had
gone on from generation to generation with an indifference for the
welfare of the people which would not have been tolerated in
England or Scotland.”
English statesmen did not understand—did not try to understand—the Irish
land question. They believed that force was the best—the only—remedy for
agrarian disorders. They did not grasp the essential fact that rack-rents,
insecurity of tenure, and the confiscation of the tenants’ improvements by
the landlords, lay at the root of the trouble, and that legislation to
protect the tenant from injustice and oppression was the cure. The result
was that the staple industry of the country was paralysed, and periodical
famines, and constant outbursts of lawlessness and crime, almost
threatened the very existence of society. No stronger argument can be used
to prove the incompetence of Englishmen to rule Ireland, than the
ignorance and incapacity shown by English statesmen throughout the
nineteenth century, in dealing, or rather in refusing to deal, with this
vital question of the land.
English statesmen saw nothing wrong in the exclusive establishment and
endowment of the Church of the Protestant minority in a Catholic country,
nor did they see just cause for complaint because Catholic peasants were
forced, at the point of the bayonet, to pay tithes to Protestant parsons.
Protestant education was assisted by the State. Nothing was done by the
Government for the education of Catholics. Thus for the first twenty-eight
years of the century the policy of the English in Ireland was calculated
to embitter religious feelings, and to inflame national animosities. When
Catholic emancipation (granted under the pressure of a great revolutionary
agitation) came in 1829 it did not improve the situation because the
people saw in it, not the measure of England’s justice, but the measure of
her fears.
II
All, then, that happened, between 1800 and 1829, served only to make the
chasm which separated the two countries, deeper and wider. What happened
between 1829 and 1835? I turn once more to my chronology:
1830. Arms Act.
1831-1832. Stanley’s Arms Act.
1833-1834. Grey’s Coercion Act.
1834-1835. Grey’s Coercion (Continuance) Act amended.
Ireland remained as disaffected and disturbed as ever. Why? Because
Catholic Emancipation (delayed for twenty-nine years), was, when carried,
practically made a dead letter; the country was still governed, through
the Protestant minority, in opposition to the opinions and feelings of the
masses of the people; while the incompetence of Parliament to deal with
the tithe question, and the land question, led to an agrarian and tithe
war, which the Coercion Acts were powerless to stop. In 1831, indeed,
Parliament had established the “national” schools, but the scheme was not
what the people wanted. Protestants and Catholics alike desired
denominational education, but the Government gave them a mixed system. For
many years the system was worked (by a board consisting of five
Protestants and two Catholics in a country where Catholics were to
Protestants as four to one) in an anti-Irish spirit, and it failed,
accordingly, to win popular support or confidence. In truth, the people
saw in the “national” schools only institutions for anglicising the
country. A Scotch Presbyterian practically managed the system. The books,
with one exception, were prepared by Englishmen or Scotchmen. Irish
history and national poetry were boycotted. Patriotic songs were
suppressed. The limit of folly and absurdity was reached when Scott’s
“Breathes there a man” was replaced in one of the books by these lines:
“I thank the goodness and the grace
That on my birth have smiled,
And made me in these Christian days
A happy English Child.”(148)
In 1832 a worthless Irish Reform Act, under which the representation of
the country became “virtually extinguished,”(149) was passed against the
protest of the Irish members, all of whose amendments, aiming at making it
a genuine measure for the extension of the franchise, were contemptuously
rejected. Ignorance and prejudice, the absence of all sense of justice, an
utter inability to understand the Irish case, a determination to trample
on popular rights and to disregard public opinion—these were the
characteristics of English statesmanship in Ireland between 1829 and 1835.
Mr. Lecky’s account of the manner in which Catholic Emancipation was
carried out is worth quoting:
“In 1833—four years after Emancipation—there was not in Ireland a
single Catholic judge or stipendiary magistrate. All the high
sheriffs, the overwhelming majority of the unpaid magistrates and
of the grand jurors, the five inspectors-general, and the
thirty-two sub-inspectors of the police, were Protestants. The
chief towns were in the hands of narrow, corrupt, and for the most
part, intensely bigoted, corporations. For many years promotion
had been steadily withheld from those who advocated Catholic
Emancipation, and the majority of the people thus found their
bitterest enemies in the foremost places.”
No wonder that, Lord Melbourne, in coming into office thirty-five years
after the Union, should have found Ireland still a centre of disaffection
and disturbance.
III
The Melbourne Ministry was kept in office from 1835 to 1841 by the Irish
Vote. O’Connell made a compact—the historic Lichfield House compact—with
Ministers. It came to this: They were to introduce remedial measures for
Ireland, and he was, meanwhile, to suspend the demand for repeal of the
Union. He said to the Irish people:
“I am trying an experiment, I want to see if an English Parliament
can do justice to Ireland. I do not think it can, but I mean to
give the present Government a chance, and see what they can do.
And I will suspend the demand for repeal to give them a fair
trial.”
What came of that “fair trial” we shall now see.
The tithe question was the question of the hour. A tithe war had been
raging, between 1830 and 1835, distracting the country, and forcing the
attention of Parliament to Irish affairs. On March 20th, 1835, the
Government of Sir Robert Peel took up the question, and Sir Henry
Hardinge, the English Chief Secretary in Ireland, moved a resolution to
convert tithes into a rent charge at 75 per cent. of the tithe. O’Connell,
in dealing with Hardinge’s resolution, said that no measure relating to
tithes would be satisfactory which did not contain a clause appropriating
the surplus revenues of the established church to purposes of general
utility. Subsequently (on April 7th), Lord John Russell moved:
“That it is the opinion of this House that no measure upon the
subject of tithes in Ireland can lead to a satisfactory adjustment
which does not embody the principle of appropriation.”
This resolution was carried by a majority of twenty-seven. Whereupon the
Government of Sir Robert Peel resigned, and Lord Melbourne became Prime
Minister, with Lord John Russell as leader of the House of Commons. What
was the upshot of the Parliamentary struggle, lasting for three years,
over the tithe question? Simply this. In 1838 an Act was passed,
converting tithe into a rent charge of 75 per cent. of the tithe, and
containing no appropriation clause. Peel had proposed a Bill of the very
same kind in 1835. Russell objected to it, insisting on the necessity of
an appropriation clause, and proposing the conversion of tithes into a
rent charge of 68% of the tithe. Successful (by the Irish vote) in the
Commons, but defeated in the Lords, he ultimately abandoned his conversion
scheme, flung the appropriation clause to the winds, and passed what was
really Peel’s measure of 1835. Of course tithes were not abolished. The
payment of them was, in the first instance, transferred from the tenants
to the landlords, then the landlords added the tithes to the rent, so that
the unfortunate tenants were still mulcted in one way, if not in the
other.
In 1838, also, the Irish Poor Law was introduced under circumstances
thoroughly characteristic of English methods in Ireland: In 1833, a Royal
Commission was appointed to consider the subject of Irish destitution in
reference to the advisability of establishing “workhouses” to alleviate
Irish distress. The Commission consisted chiefly of Irishmen, though the
Chairman, Archbishop Whateley, was an Englishman. The Commissioners took
three years to consider the subject submitted to them; and, at the end of
that time, made a report which, in the light of subsequent events, must be
pronounced a statesmanlike document. They said, in effect, that the cure
for Irish distress was work, not workhouses. The labouring poor were
able-bodied men who only needed employment, and scope for their energies;
and should be provided with work which would develop the resources of the
country, and remove the causes of poverty. A Vice-regal Poor Law Reform
Commission, which reported in 1906, refers to the Report of the
Commissioners of 1833, in the following language:
“It will probably surprise most of those who study the condition
of Ireland, and who have considered how to improve it, to find
that a Commission that sat seventy years ago recommended land
drainage and reclamation on modern lines, the provision of
labourers’ cottages and allotments, the bringing of agricultural
instruction to the doors of the peasant, the improvement of land
tenure, the transfer of fixed powers from grand juries to county
boards, the employment of direct labour on roads by such county
boards, the sending of vagrants to colonies to be employed there
or to penitentiaries in this country; the closing of public-houses
on Sundays, and the prevention of the sale of groceries and
intoxicating drink in the same house for consumption on the
premises. Such were the recommendations of the Royal Commission of
Inquiry into the Condition of the Poorer Classes.”(150)
For the sick and impotent poor the Royal Commission reported practically
that relief ought to be afforded by voluntary associations, controlled by
State Commissioners, and whose revenues might be strengthened by the
imposition of a contributory parochial rate. Emigration, as a temporary
expedient, was also recommended in certain cases.
The Report of the Royal Commissioners was laid before Lord John Russell.
Lord John Russell flung the Report into the ministerial waste paper
basket, and despatched a young Englishman named Nicholls, a member of the
English Poor Law Commission, to report afresh on the subject. Mr. Nicholls
paid a roving visit to Ireland. The Royal Commission had taken three years
to consider the question. Mr. Nicholls disposed of it in six weeks. He, of
course, made the report that was expected of him. He recommended the
establishment of workhouses. The Government brought in a Workhouse Bill,
which was opposed by the Irish Members in committee, and on the third
reading, but was carried, nevertheless, by overwhelming majorities.(151)
In concluding this story let me quote the following brief extracts from
the Vice-regal Commission of 1903-6:
“I. The poverty of Ireland cannot be adequately dealt with by any
Poor Relief Law, such as that of 1838, but by the development of
the country’s resources, which is, therefore, most strongly urged.
‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
“III. The present workhouse system should be abolished.”
Thus, after the lapse of three-quarters of a century, has the policy of
the Irish Commission of 1833 been vindicated, and the policy of the
English Parliament condemned.
The Government also took up the question of municipal reform. There were
at the time sixty-eight municipalities in Ireland, all in the hands of the
Protestant ascendency. It was the policy of O’Connell to preserve all
these municipalities and to reform them. The Government tried to carry out
his policy, but in vain. Then, in 1836, they carried through the House of
Commons, a Bill creating a £10 household suffrage in seven of the largest
cities, and a £5 one in the others, but the measure was rejected in the
House of Lords which desired the abolition of the Irish municipalities
altogether. In 1837 the Bill was again passed through the Commons, and
again rejected by the Lords. Peel then proposed, as a compromise—a £10
rating franchise in twelve of the largest towns, and a similar franchise
in the smaller, provided the Lord Lieutenant allowed them to be
re-incorporated. Lord John Russell consented to this proposal on
conditions that the franchise in the small towns—corporations _in
posse_—should be reduced to £5. For two years longer a struggle was
carried on between the two parties, mainly over the question of the
franchise in the smaller towns (in the event of their being incorporated).
Finally, in 1840, the Government gave way all along the line, passing an
Act which abolished fifty-eight municipalities, and conferred a £10
franchise on the remaining ten.
The Melbourne Ministry fell in 1841. O’Connell had kept the Government in
office for five years. During that time they had passed useful measures
for England; but in their Irish legislation they failed utterly. The Tithe
Act was a sham, the Poor Law, passed in the teeth of Irish Opposition, was
detested in Ireland, and the Municipal Reform Act has well been described
by Sir Erskine May “as virtually a scheme of municipal disfranchisement.”
When all was over, O’Connell said:
“The experiment which I have tried has proved that an English
Parliament cannot do justice to Ireland, and our only hope now is
in the Repeal of the Union.”
He then unfurled the banner of repeal, and threw himself heart and soul
into the movement.
IV
While the Melbourne Ministry failed utterly in their Irish legislation,
the administration of the country by Thomas Drummond (Under-Secretary at
Dublin Castle, 1835-1840) was eminently successful. Though there were
Coercion Acts on the Statute book they were not enforced. Drummond
governed according to the ordinary law, and, by meting out even-handed
justice to all, won popular support and confidence. However, on the fall
of the Ministry, coercion again soon became the order of the day—thus:
1843-1845. Arms Act.
1847. Crime and Outrage Act.
1848-1849. Habeas Corpus Suspension Act, Crime and Outrage Act, Removal of
Aliens Act.
Between 1842 and 1845 Ireland rang with the demand for repeal. Great
meetings—monster meetings they were called—were held everywhere; and
O’Connell, by a series of the most eloquent and vehement speeches ever
addressed to public audiences, re-awakened the spirit of nationality and
intensified the popular hatred of England. In the days of the Melbourne
Ministry his policy was a policy of peace; but the English people would
not accept the olive branch. His policy now was a policy of war. His case
for repeal rested on two main propositions:
“(1) Ireland was fit for legislative independence in position,
population, and natural advantages. Five independent kingdoms in
Europe possessed less territory or people; and her station in the
Atlantic, between the old world and the new, designed her to be
the _entrepôt_ of both, if the watchful jealousy of England had
not rendered her natural advantages nugatory.
“(2) She was entitled to legislative independence; the Parliament
of Ireland was as ancient as the Parliament of England, and had
not derived its existence from any Charter of the British Crown,
but sprang out of the natural rights of freedom. Its independence,
long claimed, was finally recognised and confirmed by solemn
compact between the two nations in 1782; that compact has since
been shamefully violated, indeed, but no statute of limitation ran
against the right of a nation.”(152)
The Government of Sir Robert Peel put forth its full strength to crush
O’Connell, and the repeal movement. In 1844 O’Connell was tried by a
packed bench and a packed jury for seditious conspiracy, found guilty, and
sent to jail. His trial was one of the most scandalous incidents in the
history of British rule in Ireland, during the nineteenth century.
“The most eminent Catholic in the Empire,” says Sir Charles Gavan
Duffy, “a man whose name was familiar to every Catholic in the
world, was placed upon his trial in the Catholic Metropolis of a
Catholic country before four judges and twelve jurors, among whom
there was not a single Catholic.”
It is well known that the condemnation of O’Connell by this tribunal was
too much even for the House of Lords, which quashed the conviction and set
O’Connell free.
In 1847 O’Connell died, and a terrible famine swept over the land
decimating the people. Before the famine the population of Ireland was
8,175,124, three years afterwards it had sunk to 6,574,278. But that was
not the end. The “Young Ireland” party had sprung out of the repeal
movement. The “Young Irelanders” began as constitutional agitators. Like
O’Connell himself they simply demanded the repeal of the Union. But they
gradually became more extreme, and, ultimately, under the influence of the
wave of revolution, which swept over Europe in 1848, drifted into
insurrection. The rising of 1848 was quickly put down, and the “Young
Ireland” leaders were banished beyond the seas. All seemed lost. Ireland
was in despair. Yet the seed, sown by O’Connell and the “Young
Irelanders,” took root. The fruit was gathered in our own day. Home Rule
sprang out of the one movement, and Fenianism out of the other.
“The spirit of National Independence,” says Mr. Froude, “is like a
fire, so long as a spark remains a conflagration can be kindled.”
The fire of nationality burned low during the Melbourne Administration;
but rekindled by O’Connell in 1842, and fanned into flame by “Young
Ireland,” it was not put out by the misfortunes and disasters in which the
first forty-eight years of the Union closed.
V
I have said that land was the staple industry of Ireland. Yet Government
after Government failed to realize that the enactment of laws for the
protection of the tenant—the protection of his improvements from
confiscation by the landlords, protection of himself from rack-rents and
arbitrary eviction—were necessary for the prosperity and peace of the
country. In 1836 Mr. Sharman Crawford introduced a Bill proposing that the
tenant should be entitled, on eviction, to compensation for improvements
of a permanent nature made with the landlord’s consent; or without his
consent, provided that such improvements were, according to the Chairman
of Quarter Sessions, necessary for the actual wants of the tenant. This
moderate Bill, strongly opposed by the landlords, was read a first time,
but it never reached another stage. Parliament having refused to protect
the tenants—refused indeed to take the slightest heed of their complaints
and grievances—the tenants continued to protect themselves by forming
secret societies whose operations struck terror in the land. In 1838 the
Under-Secretary, Thomas Drummond, boldly told the Tipperary Magistrates,
who cried out for coercion, that landlordism was the cause of agrarian
crime, and that remedial legislation, not coercion, was the remedy. He
said, in memorable words:
“The Government has been at all times ready to afford the utmost
aid in its power to suppress disturbance and crime, and its
efforts have been successful so far as regards open violations of
the law.... But there are certain classes of crime, originating in
other causes which are much more difficult of repression. The
utmost exertion of vigilance and precaution cannot always
effectually guard against them, and it becomes of importance to
consider the causes which have led to a state of society so much
to be deplored, with a view to ascertain whether any corrective
means are in the immediate power of the Government or the
Legislature. When,” he continues, “the character of the great
majority of serious outrages occurring in many parts of Ireland,
though unhappily most frequent in Tipperary, is considered, it is
impossible to doubt that the causes from which they mainly spring
are connected with the tenure and occupation of land.
“Property,” he adds, “has its duties as well as its rights; to the
neglect of those duties in times past is mainly to be ascribed to
that diseased state of society in which such crimes take their
rise; and it is not in the enactment or enforcement of statutes of
extraordinary severity, but chiefly in the better and more
faithful performance of those duties, and the more enlightened and
humane exercise of those rights that a permanent remedy for such
disorders is to be sought.”
Another fierce outburst of agrarianism in 1842 startled English public
opinion, and drew from _The Times_ a memorable condemnation of
landlordism. The great English journal wrote:
“With feelings of mingled pain we have witnessed the reappearance
of that frightful system of murder and outrage which has so long
infested the south of Ireland, and in particular the unhappy
County of Tipperary.... The evil has arisen in the general system
upon which the occupation of land has been based and conducted,
and in the treatment of the occupier by the landlord.... A
landlord is not a tradesman; he stands to his tenantry, or he
ought to do so, in _loco parentis_; he is there as well for their
good as his own; they are not mere contractors with him, to hold
his land as capital, and pay him the full interest, or incur a
forfeiture; they are rather agents placed in his hands, and under
his care and protection, for the purpose of working the land, and
whose _natural_ relation with him cannot be determined except by
negligence or ill-conduct.
“If the land be treated as money, and tenantry as borrowers,
people may be sure that the landlord will be an usurer. This is
_generally_ true, but in Ireland the tenant who is thus treated as
though he had been an unfettered party to the original agreement,
has not the shadow of the character of a voluntary contractor. It
is with him, either to continue in the quarter of an acre which he
occupies, or to starve. There is no other alternative. Rack-rent
may be misery, but ejectment is ruin.”
At length in 1843 Sir Robert Peel appointed the famous Devon Commission to
enquire into the occupation and tenure of land in Ireland. In 1845 the
Commission reported that:
“(1) All the improvements in the soil were made by the tenants.
“(2) That these improvements were subjected to confiscation, and
were confiscated by the landlord.
“(3) That the outrage system sprang from the ejectment system; and
“(4) That it was necessary for Parliament to intervene to compel
the landlord to recoup the tenant on eviction for his outlay on
the land.”
The Report of the Devon Commission proved the case of the tenants up to
the hilt. What was done?
In May, 1845, Lord Devon declared in the House of Lords that if a Bill
were passed giving tenants compensation for improvements made by them in
the land “it would much strengthen the industry of the people of Ireland.”
In the same year Lord Stanley, in behalf of the Government, introduced a
Bill proposing that tenants should be entitled to compensation, on
disturbance, for prospective improvements of a permanent nature, made with
the consent of the landlord; or, without his consent, provided the
improvements had been effected with the authority and approval of a
Commissioner of Improvements, to be specially appointed for the purpose.
The functions of the Commissioners were to inspect the lands, and to
examine and inquire whether they would “bear” improvement; and then, if he
thought well of it, to authorise the works contemplated by the tenant and
to award, in case of eviction, such measure of compensation as was deemed
fair and equitable. This Bill was read a second time, then referred to a
Select Committee, and abandoned. In 1846 substantially the same Bill was
brought forward by the Government, and read a first time. Then the
Government fell and the Bill disappeared. In 1847, Mr. Sharman Crawford
brought forward a Bill to extend the Ulster Custom (practically fixity of
tenure and free sale) to the rest of Ireland. The Government—a Liberal
Government—took no interest in the subject. Crawford spoke to empty
benches and the Bill was defeated on the second reading by an overwhelming
majority. In 1848 Crawford brought forward his Bill again, and it was
again defeated. In the same year the Government brought forward a Bill
which was the same as the Government Bill of 1846. It was read a second
time, then referred to a Select Committee and heard of no more that
session. So far Parliament had done nothing to carry out the
recommendations of the Devon Commission—nothing for the protection of the
tenants. But in 1849 Lord John Russell passed a Bill for the relief of the
landlords—a Bill giving landlords facilities for selling their encumbered
estates. This measure is well known as “The Encumbered Estates Act.” Let
me quote what Lord Russell of Killowen said about it before the Parnell
Commission:
“It is hardly conceivable that a Legislature in which Ireland was
represented—imperfectly, it is true—that a Legislature purporting
to deal with Ireland should have so misconceived the position as
to have passed that Act. For what did it do? It sold the estates
of the bankrupt landlords to men with capital, who were mainly
jobbers in land, with the accumulated improvements and interests
of the tenants, and without the slightest protection against the
forfeiture and confiscation of these improvements and interests,
at the hands of the proprietor newly acquiring the estate. It was
intended, I doubt not, to effect good. It proved a cause of the
gravest evil.”
What a mockery of legislation! The Devon Commission had reported in favour
of the tenant’s claims, and recommended the enactment of laws for his
protection. Parliament passed an Act introducing into Ireland a new set of
landlords who were worse than the old, and leaving the tenant hopelessly
at their mercy.