IRELAND AND GREAT BRITAIN
"In reason all government without the consent of the governed
is the very definition of slavery; but in fact eleven men well
armed will certainly subdue one single man in his shirt....
Those who have used to cramp liberty have gone so far as to
resent even the liberty of complaining, although a man upon
the rack was never known to be refused the liberty of roaring
as loud as he thought fit."--JONATHAN SWIFT.
The loss of her language by Ireland was, politically, the worst calamity
which could have befallen her, for it lent colour to the otherwise
unsupported assertion that she was a mere geographical expression in no
way differing from the adjoining island. The manner in which the revival
of the Irish tongue has been taken up by the whole country with,
literally, the support of peasant and peer is one of the most remarkable
phenomena of modern Irish life. That it has any direct political
significance is untrue, for the aim of its pioneers in the Gaelic League
has been fulfilled, and it remains strictly non-sectarian and
non-political. From the purely utilitarian point of view, no doubt a
polytechnic could provide a dozen subjects in which a more profitable
return could be made for the money and time invested than does the study
of Gaelic, but book-keeping or shorthand would not have roused the
enthusiasm which this revival of a half dead language has evoked and
which is incidentally an educative movement in that the learning of a
new language is of a direct value as a mental training, while as a
social organisation it has done more in inculcating a public spirit and
a proper pride than could otherwise possibly have been achieved. The
revival of the Czech language when almost dead, at the beginning of the
nineteenth century, and the eminent success of bi-lingualism in
Flanders, are hopeful signs for the preservation of a National
characteristic, the disappearance of which would have been welcomed only
by those who hold that Ireland as a nationality has no existence apart
from Great Britain, and the preservation of which will produce the
mental alertness characteristic of a bi-lingual people.
The temperance work done by the Gaelic League in providing occupation of
a pleasant nature and social intercourse of a harmless kind is one of
its chief titles to distinction, for in this aspect it has encouraged
the preservation of Irish songs, music, dances, and games. One other
thing it, and it alone, can do. One-half of the emigrants from Ireland
go on tickets or money sent from friends in the United States, and in my
opinion one of the most powerful influences in staying the present
lamentable tide in that direction will be to foster in the branches in
America the notion that the time has come when every Irishman and woman
who can by any possible means do so should be persuaded to remain in
Ireland, and not to emigrate.
The ridiculous situation which was allowed by successive Governments to
persist in the Gaelic-speaking districts of the West until a few years
ago, in which teachers were appointed to the schools without any
knowledge of the only language spoken by the children whom they
purported to educate, is well illustrated by the statement on the part
of one of their number to the effect that it took two years to
extirpate, to "wring" the Irish speech out of the children and replace
it, one must suppose, by English, and this process, it must be
remembered, was gone through with the children of a peasantry whom a
distinguished French publicist--M.L. Paul-Dubois--has described as
perhaps the most intellectual in Europe.
It is characteristic of English government that, whereas from 1878
onwards Irish figured in the programme of the National Board, and
Government grants were made for proficiency therein as in other
subjects, one of the last acts of the late Government was to withdraw
these grants for the teaching of Irish. So long as there was no large
number of people anxious to learn Gaelic in Ireland, Government gave
help towards its study, but the very moment in which, with the rise of
the Gaelic League, the number learning the language began to increase,
Government put its foot down and proceeded to discourage it by a
withdrawal of grants. The order effecting this was withdrawn by Mr.
Bryce. The signal failure of the attempts made to kill the Gaelic
movement with ridicule, on the part of those who saw in it an
evil-disposed attempt to stop the Anglicising of the country, was as
conspicuous as has been the ill success of the petty tyranny of the
Inland Revenue authorities, who took out summonses against those who had
their names engraved on their dogs' collars in Gaelic. Trinity College
has had for half a century two scholarships and a prize in Gaelic
attached to its Divinity School, and the fact that the ultimate trust of
the fund of its Gaelic Professorship on cesser of appointment is to a
Protestant proselytising society shows the interest which has actuated
the study of Gaelic in that foundation, and its attitude towards the
Gaelic League found expression in Dr. Mahaffy, one of its most
distinguished scholars, who, having failed to kill the movement with
ridicule, changed his line and declared that the revival of Gaelic would
be unreasonable and dishonest if it were not impossible.
In spite of this, the success of the League, which was only established
in 1893, is astonishing. In 1900 it consisted of 120 branches; to-day
there are more than 1,000. The circulation of Gaelic books published
under its auspices is over 200,000 a year. In the year 1899 it was
taught in 100 Primary Schools, it is now taught in 3,000.
The number of people, including adults, learning Irish in evening
continuation classes was in 1899 little over 1,000, and is to-day over
100,000.
The circumstance that in London on the Sunday nearest St. Patrick's Day
a service with Gaelic hymns and a Gaelic sermon is conducted every year,
and has been conducted for the last three years, at the Cathedral at
Westminster, and is attended by 6,000 or 7,000 Irish people, and that
last year Dr. Alexander held a Gaelic service in a Protestant Cathedral
in Dublin, should do much to show the manner in which the movement is
spreading among all classes, and to indicate that it will in time
demolish that false situation by which, for the greater part of the
Continent, Ireland has been looked upon as merely an island on the other
side of England to be seen through English glasses.
That strange recuperative power which the country has evinced at
intervals in her history is, without a doubt, once again asserting
itself, and a new spirit of restlessness and of effort, which in no
sense can be supposed to supplant, or to do more than to supplement,
political aspirations, is making itself felt.
It is doing so in a number of different directions, but the ultimate aim
of all the forces which are at work may be said to be, in a cant phrase,
to make it as much an object to desire to live in the country as
hitherto it has been to die for it.
The inculcation of a spirit of self-reliance, the discouragement among
the poorer classes of the notion that emigration is an object at which
one should aim, the destruction among the richer of that spirit which is
known at "West British," and which implies an apologetic air on the part
of its owner for being Irish at all, these are among the effects of the
new movement.
The desire to see Ireland Irish, and not a burlesque of what is English,
is its _raison d'être_, and that it has made progress along the lines
mapped out, the Gaelic League, from which it gains its driving force,
the literary revival, and the movement for industrial development bear
ample witness.
From the impression made by a few wits, English people have jumped to
the conclusion that as a people we are specially blessed with a sense of
humour, a curious _non sequitur_ which the restraint, consciously or
unconsciously inculcated by the Gaelic League, is likely to make more
apparent, for it is killing that conception of the Irishman as typically
a boisterous buffoon with intervals of maudlin sentimentality which the
stage and the popular song have so long been content to depict without
protest from us, and which left Englishmen with feelings not more
exalted than those of their sixteenth and seventeenth century ancestors,
to whom "mere Irish" was a term of opprobrium.
In their appeals to sentiment, Englishmen have not been more successful.
The appointment of Mr. Wyndham to the Irish Office was hailed by them as
a certain success on the ground of his descent from Lord Edward
Fitzgerald, a traitor, on their own showing, descent from whom one would
have thought should have been rather concealed than advertised. They
waxed sentimental over the bravery of the Irish soldiers in the South
African war, among which the achievements of the Inniskillings at
Pieter's Hill and the Connaught Rangers at Colenso were only surpassed
by the Dublin Fusiliers at Talana Hill, out of a thousand of whom only
three hundred survived. But the strange thing was that while English
people in honour of these men wore shamrock on St. Patrick's Day, just
as in the case of the Crimea, the sympathy of their own country was not
on the side upon which they fought, and the people of their country
looked upon the Irish soldiers as _condottieri_ fighting in an alien
cause. One cannot draw up an indictment against a whole nation, and if
this be treason in the opinion of Englishmen, one can only reply that to
commit the unpardonable sin against the body politic there must be
something more on the part of a people than a continuance of feelings
towards a state of affairs against which they have always protested, and
in which they have never acquiesced.
Historically we have been the home of lost causes, and the fact that so
many of the national heroes of Ireland have ended their lives in failure
has had no small effect in bringing it to pass that there, at any rate,
it is not true to say that nothing succeeds like success. Hugh O'Neill,
Red Hugh O'Donnell, Owen Roe O'Neill, Sarsfield, Wolfe Tone, Grattan,
the Young Irelanders, O'Connell, Butt, Parnell, not one of these ended
his career amid the glamour of achieved success, and the result of this,
I think, is an irresponsibility which looks not so much to the
probability of the fruition of movements as to their inception; and,
after all, a flash in the pan is apt to do more harm than good.
To this fact I attribute the circumstance that there has always been a
small section of the population to which the ordinary methods of
constitutional agitation have appeared feeble and unavailing, but to
understand to the full the reason for it one must realise that if there
have been three insurrections in the history of the United Parliament,
there has twelve times in the same course of time been famine, that
parent of despairing violence, throughout the country.
The ordinary Englishman seeing in the state a polity maintained by a
long tradition, which has undergone change gradually and in measured
progress, in which agitation, when it has been rife as it was before the
first Reform Bill, has died down on redress of grievances, almost as
soon as it has arisen has no conception of the relative, and indeed
absolute, unstable state of equilibrium in the affairs of Ireland.
The fact that one has to go back to the battle of Sedgemoor for the last
occasion when in anything dignified by a higher name than riot, blood
has been shed in England; the fact that when a retiring English
Attorney-General appointed his son to a third-rate position in the legal
profession an outcry arose in which the salient feature was surprise
that so flagrant a job should have been perpetrated, are indications of
what I mean when I say that English people are in every circumstance of
their outlook precluded from eliminating in their view of Irish affairs
that deep-seated conviction, which in the case of their own country is
founded on indisputable fact, that radical change in the well-ordered
evolution of the State is out of keeping with the sequence which has
hitherto held sway, and in so far as it is so is a thing to be guarded
against and avoided.
In Ireland no one can claim to see a similar gradual metamorphosis in
the light-of the history of the last one hundred, or even fifty, years,
Radicalism, experimentalism, empiricism have been let loose on every
institution of the country, and it is only when we take the greatest
common measure of the results that we can see that the upshot has been
on the whole rather good than bad. When Parnell declared that while
accepting Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule proposals he must nevertheless state
definitely that no one could set a limit to the march of a nation, he
was stating an axiom which is every day illustrated by English statesmen
of either party when they say, on the one hand, that the refusal, and on
the other hand the concession, of certain fiscal proposals will lead to
the dismemberment of the Empire. What can be stated in cold blood as a
possible contingency in the case of, say, Canada or New Zealand has only
to be adumbrated in that of Ireland to be denounced, not as a
justifiable retort to the flouting of local demands, but as a
treasonable aspiration to be put down with a strong hand.
The new aspect of Imperial responsibility as entailing on the mother
country a position not of contempt of, but rather of deference to, the
wishes of the colonies cannot but have a direct bearing on Anglo-Irish
relations.
It is the greatest feature in Parnell's achievement that he succeeded in
persuading ardent spirits to lay aside other weapons, while he strove
what he could do by stretching the British Constitution to the utmost,
linking up as he did all the forces of discontent to a methodical use of
the Parliamentary machine. In the very depth of the winter of our
discontent, in 1881, when he was in Kilmainham Gaol, crime became most
rampant; in truth--as he had grimly said would be the case--Captain
Moonlight had taken his place, and in the following year when he was let
out of gaol it was expressly to slow down the agitation. More than one
Prime Minister has had to echo those words of the Duke of Wellington of
seventy years ago--"If we don't preserve peace in Ireland we shall not
be a Government," and the periodic recrudescence of lawlessness which
the island has seen has, it is freely admitted, forced the hands of
Governments which were inflexible in the face of mere constitutional
opposition.
The latest aspect which this anti-constitutional movement has taken in
Ireland is what is known as Sinn Féin, which adopts a rigid attitude of
protest against the existing condition of things, and which declares
that the recognition of the _status quo_ involved in any acquiescence in
the present mode of government is a betrayal of the whole position. The
existence of this spirit, which is entirely negligible outside two or
three large towns, is not surprising; although it advocates a passive
resistance it is the direct descendant of the party which advocated
physical force in the past, and in so far as it proposes to use morally
defensible weapons it is likely to have the more driving power. The
consistent opposition which the Catholic Church offered to revolutionary
violence and her sympathy with constitutionally-expressed Parliamentary
agitation have resulted in an anti-clerical colour which this new
movement has acquired, and to this, force is added by the measure of
strength which it has gained among a certain number of young Protestants
in Belfast, whose fathers must turn in their graves at this reversal of
opinion on a question which was to them a _chose jugée_, a veritable
article of faith. The proposals of Sinn Féin include a boycott of all
English institutions in Ireland, educational and of other kinds, the
abandonment of the attendance of Irish members in the Imperial
Parliament at Westminster, elections to which Sinn Féin candidates are,
if necessary, to contest on the undertaking that if elected they will
not take the oath at Westminster, but will attend a self-constituted
National Council in Dublin, under the control of which a system of
National education and of National arbitration courts, in addition to a
National Stock Exchange, will be established. To develop Irish
industries this body, it is suggested, will appoint in foreign ports
Irish Consuls, completely independent of the British Consular service,
who will attend to the interests and the development of Irish trade.
Lastly, the most practical of their proposals lies in the discouragement
of recruiting, a movement which, if applied on a large scale, would have
a remarkable effect on the resources of the three kingdoms under a
voluntary system of military service.
These proposals, which, until a Gaelic name was thought necessary for
their acceptance in Ireland, were known as the Hungarian policy, are
admittedly based on the success of the struggle for Hungarian autonomy
which culminated in 1867, but the fact which the advocates of the
application of this policy to Ireland omit to mention, is that Hungary
was face to face with a divided and distracted Austria, defeated by the
Prussians at Sadowa, while in the case of Ireland we are concerned with
a united Great Britain, which has shown no great signs of diminution in
her power. A closer parallel than that of Hungary is to be found in the
case of Bohemia, which, in respect of general social conditions and the
proportion of national to hostile forces, bore a much stronger
resemblance to Ireland, and which adopted in 1867 a policy of withdrawal
of its representatives from a hostile legislature with results so
disastrous that after a few years she returned to the methods which the
Sinn Féin party are anxious to make an end of in Ireland.
All foreign parallels, however, are apt to be misleading, but Irishmen
have only to remember the fact that the secession of Grattan and his
followers from the Irish Parliament in 1797 paved the way for the
passing of the Act of Union to find in it a warning against what is the
main plank in the platform of Sinn Féin--"the policy of
withdrawal"--which, moreover, would leave the control of Irish
legislation to the tender mercies of such Irish members as Mr. Walter
Long and Mr. William Moore, which would further involve the condemnation
of the policy pursued by every Irish leader since the Union, and would
mean the abandonment of the weapon by which every Irish reform has been
wrested from English prejudice--namely, an independent party in the
House of Commons, backed up by a vigorous organisation in Ireland.
For the rest, those who have read the high-flown manifestoes of the Sinn
Féin party will be concerned to look around for the result of the
proposal which they have been preaching for the last three years, and if
they find nothing but a ridiculous mouse in the matter of achievement
will be inclined to declare that not a mountain but a molehill has been
in labour. It is a singular fact that although since the general
election there have been no less than ten by-elections in Ireland, of
which only two were in "safe" Unionist seats, in no single instance have
the advocates of the policy of abstention from attendance from
Westminster had the courage to go to the polls with a candidate of
their own. We are told by the exponents of the new policy that they are
sweeping the country before them, but the only certain data which
Irishmen have as to its popularity is that in ten per cent. of the
constituencies in the country, the only ones to which any test has been
applied, in no instance has Sinn Féin dared to show its face at the
hustings.
Two Irish members, it is true, resigned uncompromisingly from the Irish
Party and joined the new organisation in disgust at the scope of the
Irish Council Bill. Sir Thomas Esmonde, who expressed his intention of
resigning, was, with what it must have come to regret as indecent haste,
elected a member of the Sinn Féin organisation, but within a few weeks
declared his willingness "to act with the Parliamentary Party, or any
other set of men who put the National question in the forefront," and
went on to express his opinion that the chances of a Sinn Féin candidate
in his constituency of North Wexford would be nil.
So far at any rate Sinn Féiners must admit that "_beacoup de bruit, pen
de fruit_" sums up their action in regard to Irish affairs. Any success
in propagandism which they may have achieved is to be traced to a
natural impatience, especially among _dilletante_ politicians, whose
experience is purely academic, at the slowness of the Parliamentary
machine in effecting reforms, but any force which it possesses is
discounted by the fact that men whose views are extreme in youth tend to
become the most moderate with advancing years--a fact of which a classic
example is to be found in the career of Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, one of
the most distinguished of the Young Irelanders, who, after a brilliant
career in Australia, returned to European his old age and spent several
years in the attempt to persuade Conservatives to adopt the policy of
Home Rule--a propaganda on his part to which the episode of Lord
Carnarvon bears witness, and which was advocated by him in the
_National_ and _Contemporary Reviews_ in 1884 and 1885. It may well be
that the political groundlings who are at present the backbone of the
Sinn Féin movement will, when they gain political experience, alter
their views in as complete a manner. One can draw an English parallel to
this movement in Ireland. There are in the former, as in the latter,
country a certain limited number of people who hold extreme political
views, which in the case of the English are pure socialism. The English
extremists have been so far successful as to secure the return of one
Member of Parliament in full sympathy with their aspirations. The Irish
extremists have not so far dared to put to the test their chance of
obtaining even one Parliamentary ewe lamb. Without the advantage which
the English _intransigeants_ possess, of a few weeks' knowledge on the
part of one person of the inside working of Parliamentary government, in
exactly the same manner as do the Englishmen of the same type, these
Irishmen spend their time reviling popular representatives as ignorant,
venal, and beneath contempt. A prophet who, on the basis of the election
of Mr. Grayson, foretold an imminent dissolution of the democratic
forces in Great Britain, would in truth have more ground on which to
base his forecast than has one who from the nebulous movements of the
Sinn Féin party, arrives at an analogous conclusion in the case of
Ireland. That the political landmarks in Ireland have in the last few
years shifted is obvious to the most superficial observer. The
devolutionist secession from orthodox Unionism, the Independent Orange
Lodge represented by Mr. Sloan, the "Russellite" Ulster tenant-farmers,
and the rise of a democratic vote in Belfast regardless of the strife of
sects, all serve as indications of this fact; but let it be noted that
while we have evidences in these directions of the forces at work in the
disintegration of the old Orange strongholds, we have no such obvious
indications of the upheaval going on in the traditional Nationalist
Party, save only the mere _ipse dixit_ of the very people who assure us
that they themselves are making it felt. There is every reason to
suppose that the Sinn Féin movement, in so far as it consists of passive
resistance, will be regarded by the Irish people as merely doing
nothing. They could understand a non-Parliamentary action were it
replaced by physical force, and the weakness of passive resistance lies
precisely in this, that the logical result of its failure is an appeal
to armed revolt which no man in his senses can in modern conditions in
Ireland think possible, or, if possible, calculated to be other than
disastrous. The attempt which the Sinn Féin organisation has
consistently, if unsuccessfully, made to arrogate to itself all credit
for the progress of the Gaelic League and of the Industrial Revival, is
singularly disingenuous in view of the assistance which both those
movements have received and are receiving from the Parliamentary Party
and its allies. The provisions of the Merchandise Marks Act, and the
fact that through the agency of members of the Irish Party the Foreign
Office has directed British Consuls abroad to publish separately the
returns of Irish imports, which have hitherto been lost by their
inclusion in the returns under the one head "British," will do far more
for the development of the Irish export trade than the well-meaning but
academic resolutions of their critics; and in the matter of social
reform I have yet to learn that any body of men have done such good work
for their country as have the Irish members by the passing into law, on
their initiative, of the Labourers Act, by which nearly half a million
of the Irish population will be rescued from conditions of life which,
with a population lacking the religious sense of the Irish poor, would
have resulted in absolute moral degradation.
I have spoken throughout of the exponents of Sinn Féin as of a party,
but it is difficult to find the common measure of agreement which such
a term connotes in the heterogeneous elements which for the moment call
themselves by the same name. We read of old Fenians, who have ever
hankered after physical force, presiding over meetings to expound
passive resistance in which young Republicans from Belfast rub shoulders
with men whose ideal is vaguely expressed as repeal--a return one must
suppose to that anomalous constitution of Grattan's Parliament in which,
while the legislature was independent the Executive was not responsible
thereto, but went out of office with the Ministry in the Parliament at
Westminster.
Irish Parliamentary candidates are selected under a system in which the
party caucus has far less share than in any part of the three kingdoms.
They have behind them the credentials of popular election which are not
possessed by a single one of the self-constituted group of critics who
assail them; and one need only say that vague, unfounded charges as to
political probity, in no instance substantiated by a single shred of
proof, do not redound to the credit of those who frame them.
When the advocates of Sinn Féin can point to a record of services as
disinterested and as consistent as those of the Irish Parliamentary
Party, when they can produce evidence of work in the immediate past as
fruitful for the good of their country as the Labourers Act, the Town
Tenants Act, and the Merchandise Marks Act, they will have some ground
upon which to claim a hearing from their countrymen. Till then they have
no cause to throw stones at those who are honestly working for the good
of their country, although they do not proclaim themselves on the
housetops the only patriotic section of the Irish people.
Not one of the advocates of this bloodless war which they propose has,
so far as I am aware, in spite of three years spent in preaching on the
subject, refused to pay income tax, the only tax resistance to which is
possible in Ireland. Those who hold Civil Service appointments under the
British Crown have not in a single instance, unless I am mistaken,
handed in their resignations. These are the criticisms which they
inevitably draw down on their heads by stooping to make imputations as
to men whose services to the country should put them above reach of
anything of the kind. Within the last few months two of the leaders of
Sinn Féin appeared, in the course of a few weeks--the one as plaintiff,
the other as defendant--represented by a Tory counsel, in the Four
Courts in Dublin, before a member of a foreign judiciary, which on their
fundamental axiom should be taboo. The reason is to be found, perhaps,
in the fact that they have not yet devised a means by which attachment
and committal for contempt of their proposed amateur tribunals will be
made effectual. The method by which the resolutions of the National
Council are to be carried into effect has not yet been explained, nor
have the means by which they will acquire a sanction in so far as their
breach will involve the offender in a punishment. We have yet to learn
what guarantee there is that the consuls in foreign parts, whom they
propose to establish and maintain by voluntary subscription, will be
given any facilities by the countries in which they are stationed,
without which their presence in those foreign countries would be of no
service whatever.
Half a century ago a great voluntary effort, which may well be called
Sinn Féin, was made in the foundation of the Catholic University in
Dublin. In spite of the glamour of John Henry Newman's name it was
crippled from the fact of the poverty of the country on the voluntary
contributions of which it had to depend. One may well ask if the
exponents of the new policy have any confidence that the same obstacle
will not stand in the way of more than a trivial fraction of their
extensive, and as I think Utopian, proposals. The No Rent Manifesto
fell flat in the midst of the very bitterest struggle of the land war.
Does anyone think it likely that we shall see behind the doctrinaires of
the Sinn Féin group a country united in cold blood to repudiate its
obligations under the Land Purchase and Labourers' Acts?
The Irish people are under no illusions as to the advocates of Sinn
Féin, and will, I am convinced, refuse to judge it on its own valuation.
If for no other reason its exponents would be suspect in that they have
not scrupled to assure a sympathetic Orange audience of the fact that
they are on the point of rending asunder the allegiance of Ireland to
the National cause. While protesting aloud their patriotism they have
not thought it incompatible with their declarations to flood the columns
of the Unionist Press--the most hostile to the democracy of their
country--with expositions of their views, coupled with strident
denunciations of their Nationalist opponents.
Their tirades have been received with open arms by the Orangemen as
affording a weapon in the division of their common enemy, by which may
be maintained that _de facto_, if not _de jure_, ascendancy, which in
spite of the ballot, the extended franchise, and local government,
persists in Ireland. But, on the other hand, as has been well said, the
fact is not lost on the great bulk of the Irish people that it is from
the Sinn Féin section--the little coterie which professes to stand for
every sort of idealism--that all the imputations and innuendoes have
come.
This extreme school, of course, will in no sense be pleased by
ameliorative legislation as applied by this or any other Government,
because the worse England treats Ireland the stronger will be their
position, and every concession gained by the country is so much ground
cut from under their feet; but the policy of refusing all attempts at
piecemeal improvement, on the ground that a complete reversal of the
existing system is called for, may be magnificent, and on this there
must be two opinions, but it is not practical politics which will
commend itself to the ordinary Irishman. "Men," wrote Edmund Burke more
than a hundred years ago, "do not live upon blotted paper; the
favourable or the unfavourable mind of the rulers is of more consequence
to a nation than the black letter of any statute." Irish people are not
likely to fail to realise this, and the experience of the past is such
as to show that remedial legislation has been powerless to stay the
National demand, and concessions, so far from putting a period to the
appeals of the people for the control of their own affairs, have rather
increased the vehemence of their demand, for with democracy, as with
most things, _l'appétit vient en mangeant_.
As against the body which we have been considering one hears people
speaking of the liberal school of Unionists--the rise of which is so
marked a product of recent years in Ireland--as a body who represent the
moderate section of opinion, the demands of which are reasonable and
comprise all that the Liberal Party can be expected to concede; and
among this section of recent writers on Irish politics three stand out
prominently by reason of their position and of their proposals:--Mr.
T.W. Russell, in "Ireland and the Empire," preached with cogent force
the need for the last step in the expropriation of the Irish landlords,
the one great obstacle, in his eyes, to a prosperous and contented
Ireland. In the economic field Sir Horace Plunkett has pleaded, in
"Ireland in the New Century," for the salvation of the Irish race by the
development of industries; while in the political sphere Lord Dunraven,
in "The Outlook in Ireland," has urged the pressing need for the closer
association of Irishmen with the government of their own country. I am
not concerned to deny the remarkable fact which these volumes indicate
in the change of view on the part of three representative Protestant and
Unionist Irishmen; but in this connection two things, on which
sufficient stress has not so far been laid, must be recalled. In the
first place the members of what is called the middle party are recruits
not from Nationalism but from Unionism; it is some of the members of the
latter party who have abated their vehemence, and not any of those of
the former who have altered their orientation in respect of great
democratic principles.
To speak of the new school of opinion as a party, moreover, is to
overstate the case as to the relative positions of three small groups of
Unionist opinion, which have little or nothing in common except a joint
denunciation of the present _régime_.
The views of Mr. Russell with regard to compulsory purchase are not, one
suspects, those of Lord Dunraven. Lord Dunraven's views as to
Devolution, it may be surmised, are too democratic for Sir Horace
Plunkett, and are not sufficiently democratic for Mr. Russell. It is
impossible to conceive a plan of reform which would enjoy the support of
all these three while the ideas of ameliorative work entertained by the
body of Orangemen led by Mr. Sloan, who are disgusted by the attitude
traditionally attached to their order, would, there is no doubt, differ
from those of any others. It would be impossible to find a common
denominator between the views of these modern converts from the old
Unionism which presented an unbending refusal to every demand for reform
and held as sacrosanct the existing state of affairs, constitutional and
social.
That the numbers of the moderate Unionists of all sections are at
present small is not surprising. The country has too long been governed
as a dependency, with the Protestant gentry as the _oculus reipublicae_,
for the "garrison" readily to waive that which they have come to look
upon as their inalienable heritage. That the numbers of Orangemen will
grow small by degrees as a result of land purchase is the general
belief; but it must not be forgotten that the more violent among them,
in their efforts to rake the ashes; and blow up the cinders of dead
prejudices and extinguished hate, will have the backing of a powerful
Press, the eagerness of the greatest organ of which in this matter in
the past led to the worst blow its prestige has ever endured. Liberal
statesmen during the recent general election were constrained to call
attention to the manner in which the power of the Press had been
exploited by a few persons who had endeavoured to secure a "corner" in
those sources of political education, and the obviousness of the policy,
it was admitted, did something to defeat its own ends. Of one thing we
may be certain, the Orange drum will be beaten once more, for the old
ascendancy spirit will die hard; all the devices of artificial
respiration will be called in to prolong its life, and when it does
breathe its last one may expect it to do so in the arms of its friends
in an attic in Printing House Square.
One can only hope that the "ultras" will pitch their tone too high, and
that their efforts to revive the old perverse antipathies will fail, so
that Irish Unionists will realise, as some of them are doing already,
that patriotism, like charity, begins at home, and that they cannot
compound for distrust of their own countrymen by loud-voiced
protestations of loyalty to the blessings of British rule.
It was very generally admitted that the logical outcome of Mr. Wyndham's
Land Act was an Irish authority to stand between the Irish tenant and
the British Exchequer, which, under the Act, is left in the invidious
position of an absentee landlord to people who dislike its ascendancy
and distrust its administrative methods, while an Irish authority with a
direct interest in the transaction would be able to see that payments
were punctually made. In the not very likely contingency of failure to
do this, under the Act as passed, the remedy which lies, is for the
Treasury to stop administrative payments to local bodies, an action
which would bring Government to a standstill and plunge the country
into disaffection. Mr. T.W. Russell has long advocated the creation at
Westminster of a Grand Committee of Irish members to deal with the
Estimates and with Irish legislation; and, as if there were not a
plethora of proposals for the modification of the present system of
Government, the plans of the Irish Reform Association have for the last
three years been before the country.
The object of their first proposal is the creation of a Financial
Council to which the control of Irish expenditure should be handed by
the Treasury with the object of making it interested in economising in
finance for Irish purposes.
Their proposal with regard to Private Bill Legislation is merely that
the principle adopted in 1899 in the case of Scottish Private Bills
should apply to Ireland, and this has not met with much objection. Under
it local inquiries, which are at present conducted at Westminster, would
be carried out in the localities affected, with much saving of expense;
and it is only necessary to add that as long ago as 1881 a Bill was
introduced to transfer from Westminster to Ireland the semi-judicial and
semi-legislative business entailed in the passage of Private Bills
through Parliament.
The statutory administrative council proposed by the Irish Reform
Association was to consist of thirteen members, of whom six were to be
elected by the County Councils, six were to be the nominees of the
Crown, while the Lord Lieutenant, who was to preside as chairman, was to
have the right to exercise the privilege of a casting vote. From a
democratic point of view such a body would be an assembly _pour rire_,
and would only serve to entrench the present bureaucracy more securely
by the semblance of representation which it would offer, while retaining
the power of the purse in the hands of a body carefully constituted in
such a way that the small minority who comprise the ascendancy faction
in the country would be permanently maintained in a majority on the
council. A great deal more could be said in defence of another proposal
which has been mooted--namely, that the principle of proportional
representation should be adopted. In a country like Ireland, where the
dividing line between the two great parties is unusually wide, with an
ordinary system of small constituencies, the men of intermediate views
like those of Mr. Sloan or of the members of the Reform Association
would, even though they existed in much larger numbers than is the case,
not secure any great measure of representation, but in comparatively
large constituencies this would not be so.
The attitude of the Nationalists in anticipation of the Government
proposal of last session was expressed by Mr. Redmond, speaking on St.
Patrick's Day at Bradford:--
"If the scheme gave the Irish people genuine power and control over
questions of administration alone, if it left unimpaired the National
movement and the National Party, and if it lightened the financial
burden under which Ireland staggered, then very possibly Ireland might
seriously consider whether such a scheme ought not to be accepted for
what it was worth."
The Irish Council Bill, as all the world knows, proposed to set up in
Dublin an administrative Council, consisting of 82 elected, 24
nominated, members, with the Under Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant as
an _ex officio_ member. This body was to have control over eight of the
forty-five departments which constitute "Dublin Castle"--namely, those
relating to Local Government, Public Works, National Education,
Intermediate Education, the Registrar-General's Office, Public Works,
the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction, Congested
Districts, and Reformatory Schools. The nature of the departments
excluded from its jurisdiction is of more consequence, including as they
do the Supreme Court of Judicature, the Royal Irish Constabulary, the
Dublin Metropolitan Police, the Land Commission, and the Prisons' Board.
The Bill proposed that the Council should be elected triennially on the
same franchise as that on which local authorities are at present
elected, and its powers were to be exercised by four Committees--of
Local Government, Finance, Education, and Public Works--the decisions of
which were to come up before the Council as a whole, for alteration or
approval. The Bill proposed to constitute an Irish Treasury with an
Irish fund of £4,000,000, made up of the moneys at present voted to the
departments concerned, together with an additional £650,000. The sums
paid into this fund were to be fixed by the Imperial Parliament every
five years. Finally, the resolutions of the Council, by Clause 3 of the
Bill, were subject to the confirmation of the Lord Lieutenant, who, by
the same clause, was to be empowered to reserve such resolutions for his
own consideration, to remit them for further consideration by the
Council, or, lastly, "if in the opinion of the Lord Lieutenant immediate
action is necessary with respect to the matter to which the resolution
relates, in order to preserve the efficiency of the service, or to
prevent public or private injury, the Lord Lieutenant may make such
order with respect to the matter as in his opinion the necessity of the
case requires, and any order so made shall have the same effect and
operate in the same manner as if it were the resolution of the Irish
Council."
These were the provisions of the measure which the Liberals introduced
to the disappointment of their Unionist opponents, who had foretold that
it would be a Home Rule Bill under some form of alias, intended to dupe
the predominant partner. It is to be noted that in 1885 Mr. Chamberlain
made a proposal which was on the same lines as this, but went further in
one respect--that there was no nominated element on the Board which he
proposed to create, and furthermore, the powers of the departments would
under it have been transferred to a single elective Board, whereas under
the Council Bill the departments were to be suffered to continue, albeit
under control. Lord Randolph Churchill was prepared at the time of Mr.
Chamberlain's proposal to give even more than the latter wished to
concede, but both proposals were forgotten on the announcement by Mr.
Gladstone of his intention to legislate on a comprehensive basis.
The attitude of Mr. Redmond on the first reading of the Bill has been so
grossly misrepresented by the English Press, both Liberal and
Conservative, which published only carefully-prepared epitomes of his
speech, that it is necessary that one should devote some attention to
what he actually said. After asserting that no one could expect him or
his colleagues--until they had the actual Bill in their hand and had
time to consider every portion of the scheme, and to elicit Irish public
opinion with reference to it--to offer a deliberate or final judgment,
Mr. Redmond went on to reaffirm what the Irish people have long
considered the minimum demand which can satisfy their aspirations, and
declared that since the measure was introduced as neither a substitute
nor an alternative for Home Rule, he would proceed to consider its
terms. "Does the scheme," the Irish leader went on to ask, "give a
genuine and effective control to Irish public opinion over those matters
of administration referred to the Council? If not the scheme is worse
than useless." After protesting strongly against the nominated element
in the Council as being undemocratic, Mr. Redmond went on to express his
willingness "to accept it or any other safeguard that the wit of man
could devise, consistent with the ordinary principles of representative
government, which is necessary to show the minority in Ireland that
their fears are groundless." He then proceeded strongly to criticise
the power of the Lord Lieutenant under Clause 3--a power not confined to
a mere exercise of veto such as is possessed by a colonial governor, but
something much more than this--"a power on the part of the Lord
Lieutenant to interfere with and thwart every single act, so that a
hostile Lord Lieutenant might stop the whole machine. If that was the
intention of the Government it destroyed the valuable and genuine
character of the power given to the Council." Having protested against
the proposal that the Chairmen of Committees were to be the nominees of
the Lord Lieutenant, and, therefore, not necessarily in sympathy with
the majority of the Council, Mr. Redmond went on to say:--"The whole
question hinges on whether the finance is adequate. The money grant is
ludicrously inadequate. I fear that the £650,000 would be mortgaged from
the day the measure passed, and that it would be impossible with such an
amount to work the scheme."
Mr. Redmond then concluded his speech with the paragraph to which most
prominence was given in the English Press, with a view to suggest that
he accepted, with only minor reservations, the proposals of the
Government. I quote it _in extenso_ to show how slender is the ground
for this imputation:--
"I am most anxious to find, if I can, in this scheme an instrument
which, while admittedly it will not solve the Irish problem, will, at
any rate, remove some of the most glaring and palpable causes which keep
Ireland poverty-stricken and Irishmen hopeless and disaffected. It is in
that spirit that my colleagues and I will address ourselves to the Bill.
We shrink from the responsibility of rejecting anything which after the
full consideration which this Bill will secure, seems to our deliberate
judgment calculated to ease the suffering of Ireland, and hasten the day
of full convalescence."[27]
No one can suggest, in view of these words, that Mr. Redmond committed
himself or his colleagues to anything further than to consider the Bill
in a critical but not a hostile spirit. As to the suggestion that a vote
for the first reading and the printing of the Bill in any sense involved
the party in even a modified acceptance of the measure, in doing so the
Irish members were acting in fulfilment of a pledge given by Mr. Redmond
six months before, when, speaking on September 23rd, he said:--
"When the scheme is produced it will be anxiously and carefully
examined. It will be submitted to the judgment of the Irish people, and
no decision will be come to, whether by me or by the Irish Party, until
the whole question has been submitted to a National Convention. When the
hour of that Convention comes any influence which I possess with my
fellow-countrymen will be used to induce them firmly to reject any
proposal, no matter how plausible, which, in my judgment, may be
calculated to injure the prestige of the Irish Party and disrupt the
National movement, because my first and my greatest policy, which
overshadows everything else, is to preserve a united National Party in
Parliament, and a United powerful organisation in Ireland, until we have
achieved the full measure of National freedom to which we are entitled."
If the Irish Party had not voted for the first reading we should have
been told by their critics that their action was a despotic attempt to
override and smother the freely-expressed opinions of the Irish people,
but it must not be forgotten that it is due to Mr. Redmond's own
initiative that in the case of this Bill, as in the case of the Land
Bill of 1903, the final decision has rested, not, as in the case of the
Home Rule Bills of 1886 and 1893, with the members of the Parliamentary
Party, but, by a sort of referendum, with a National Convention
containing representative Irishmen elected for the purpose from every
part of the country in the most democratic manner. It is worthy of
attention that the very people who five years ago were declaring in
Great Britain that Home Rule was dead and damned were those who were
loudest during the general election in the attempt to raise latent
prejudice on that score, and to bring it to pass that the condition of
things existing twenty years ago was repeated when, as Lord Salisbury
declared in a speech to the National Conservative Club, "all the
politics of the moment are summarised in the one word--Ireland."
In spite of these facts, Mr. Balfour, speaking on the first reading of
the Council Bill, was constrained to admit that it bore no resemblance
to any plan which the Irish people had ever advocated, and he went on to
declare his inability to see how by any process of development it was
capable of being turned into anything which the Nationalists ever
contemplated. The unanimity with which the Bill was repudiated by
Nationalist public opinion in Ireland is to be seen from the fact that
not a single voice was raised on its behalf at the National Convention,
comprising 3,000 delegates, which was the most representative meeting of
any kind which has ever been held in Ireland. The reasons for its
rejection are to be read in the light of the repeatedly expressed
opinions of the more radical section of the Ministerial Party, to the
effect that a bolder and more comprehensive scheme might have been well
introduced without any infringement of the election pledges of the
Government. Under Clause 3 the Lord Lieutenant, an officer under the new
_régime_, as now, of a British Ministry, would have been empowered to
act in defiance of the opinion of the Council either by modifying their
resolutions as to Executive action or by overriding them by orders of
his own, or rather of the Ministry of which he was a member. On points
such as this dealing with the constitution of the assembly, Mr. Redmond
was able to inform the Convention that no amendments would be accepted
by the Government, and experience has taught Irishmen that although
these powers might generally, under a Liberal Government, be exercised
in a legitimate manner, under a Unionist Lord Lieutenant they would be
exercised in a despotic fashion, just as, in the words of the Estates
Commissioners themselves, the instructions issued by the Lord Lieutenant
in February, 1905, were designed "seriously to impede the expeditious
working of the Land Act of 1903." Great objection was taken to the fact
that the resources of the Council would be such as to effect little
administrative improvement, since the departments under its control were
the very bodies which demanded increased expenditure, while it left
untouched the Police, the Prisons' Board, and the Judiciary, the
reckless extravagance of which afforded obvious sources from which, by
modification of their wasteful expense, one could make large economies
for the benefit of those portions of the Irish service which at the
present moment are starved.
Though it may be said that the acceptance of the Bill without prejudice
would not have stultified the principles already vindicated in a long
struggle by the Irish people, the body as constituted, it was felt,
would have served the purpose of the Unionist party by dividing without
a sufficient _quid pro quo_ the attention of the Irish people from their
devotion to the cause for the broad principles of which they have been
striving, and there was this further danger that a body so restricted in
its scope and anti-democratic in its administration would have broken
down in action, and would have in this way provided Unionists with the
very strongest possible argument for opposition to a full autonomy.
While a certain proportion of Liberals are prepared to admit that the
Bill made havoc of Liberal principles there is a Laodicean section who
have greatly blamed Irish Nationalists for having refused what was
offered them, when having asked for bread they were given a stone. To
such people as I have in mind I should like to quote what Mr. Gladstone
wrote to Lord Hartington on November 10th, 1885:--
"If that consummation--the concession to Ireland of full power to manage
her own local affairs--is in any way to be contemplated, action at a
stroke will be more honourable, less unsafe, less uneasy than the
jolting process of a series of partial measures."[28]
The position of that section of Liberals is strange which is represented
by the assertion that their party has already made enough sacrifices in
regard to Irish affairs, and which is anxious to return to the _laissez
faire_ policy of their mid-Victorian predecessors. The point I submit is
this, either Liberals do or they do not believe in the principle of
self-government as applied to Ireland, and if they do adhere to it no
effort is too great, no difficulty too extreme, for them to face in the
attempt to solve so serious a problem. Those who think that because in
1886, and again in 1893, the Liberals, with Irish support,
unsuccessfully attempted to solve the Irish question, they have thereby
contracted out of their moral obligation, take a very curious view of
the responsibilities of popular government; but it is not so strange as
the position of those who hold that because in 1907 the Irish people
refused a particular form of change in the methods of government for
which they never asked, they have in consequence closed every avenue to
constitutional reform which can be opened for many years.
In politics it is often the unexpected that happens, and he would be a
bold prophet who should declare it impossible that within a few years
Liberals may not return _in toto_ to the advocacy of sound principles in
regard to Ireland, the abandonment of which is to be traced to the
recrudescence of Whiggism after Mr. Gladstone's death and the desire to
find some line of policy which might be pilloried as a scapegoat to
account for the disgust of the country with a divided party in the years
following 1895. Liberalism, for its part, if it is to settle the
problem, must fully appreciate the fact that its proposals, if they are
to succeed, must be accepted with the full concurrence of the Irish
representative majority, and on the part of Irishmen what is demanded is
a recognition of the results of the dispensation which has placed the
two islands side by side; by these means only can a practicable policy
be ensured, but it must be remembered with regard to those in Ireland
who hold extreme views, that the continuance of the system of government
which holds the field, and the financial burden at the expense of
Ireland which it perpetuates, serve increasingly to obscure and at the
same time to counteract the advantages accruing from the connection
between the two countries, which one may hope would, in happier
circumstances, be obvious.
The Irish people still appreciate the force of that maxim of Edmund
Burke's, that the things which are not practicable are not desirable.
While they claim that as of right they are entitled to demand a
separation of the bonds, to the forging of which they were not
consenting parties, as practical men they are prepared loyally to abide
by a compromise which will maintain the union of the crowns while
separating the Legislatures. An international contract leaving them an
independent Parliament with an Executive responsible to it, having
control over domestic affairs, is their demand. Grattan's constitution
comprised a sovereign Parliament with a non-Parliamentary Executive, in
so far as the latter was appointed and dismissed by English Ministers.
The constitution which is demanded to-day is the same as that enjoyed by
such a colony as Victoria, with a non-sovereign Parliament, having, that
is, a definite limit to its legislative powers, such as those under the
Bill of 1886 referring to Church Establishment and Customs, but having
an Executive directly responsible to it.
The case of the Irish people has never been put with more clearness and
frankness than it was by Mr. Redmond in the House of Commons two years
ago. Having been accused by Unionists of adopting a more extreme line
outside Parliament than that which he followed at St. Stephen's, the
Irish leader in reply, after declaring that separation from Great
Britain would be better than a continuance of the present method of
government, and that he should feel bound to recommend armed revolt if
there were any chance of its success, went on to say:--
"I am profoundly convinced that by constitutional means, and within the
constitution, it is possible to arrive at a compromise based upon the
concession of self-government--or, as Mr. Gladstone used to call it,
autonomy--to Ireland, which would put an end to this ancient
international quarrel upon terms satisfactory and honourable to both
nations."
An Orangeman described the late Government as being engaged in the
useless task of trying to conciliate those who will not be conciliated.
The words of Mr. Redmond indicate the one way in which a _Pacata
Hibernia_ can be secured within the Empire. It is a compromise, but it
has this one virtue which compromises rarely possess--that it will
satisfy the great mass of the Irish people, and it concedes, as we hold,
no vital principle.