THE HOME RULE CASE
But Land Purchase and County Councils are only part of the great change
that has come over Ireland since 1893.
There are other great transformations. There is the redemption of the
congested districts. There is the revival of agriculture. There is the
Old Age Pensions Act. Finally, there is the reform of the Universities.
THE CONGESTED DISTRICTS BOARD
Take, first, the daring policy of social renovation by which the
forlorn peasantry of the West are being saved from the grey wilderness
into which they had been thrust by the landlordism of 1830 to 1880.
It is the habit of the Unionist Press to claim the whole of this work
as their own. That is rather bold of a party that lifted not a finger
while these people--said by those who know them to be the best
peasantry in Europe--were driven from the rich lands of Ireland to till
the barren moorland and scratch the very rocks on the shores of the
Atlantic. The Tories do not explain why they allowed the House of Lords
for a whole half century to seal up the exile of these poor folk by
rejecting every measure proposed for their welfare. As a matter of
fact, of course, the policy of redeeming the congested districts was
not first proposed either by the Tories or by the Liberals, but by the
Irish members themselves.
The Tory claim is based, of course, on the fact that the first step
towards action by the British Government dates from the famous Western
tour of Mr. Arthur Balfour in the early nineties. Perhaps Mr. Balfour
was tired of the monotony of five years of coercion. At any rate, he
took that journey, and it was the best act of his political life. He
travelled along that misty fringe of the Atlantic. He saw--as we saw
last summer, and I saw in 1891--the utter poverty of that unhappy land,
where human life, sustained only by the charity of American exiles,
still pays its doleful toll to far-off, indifferent landlords. Who can
tell whether some touch of remorse did not enter into the heart of the
man who up to that time had been the greatest of Irish coercionists
since Castlereagh, when he saw with his own eyes the sorry plight of
the poorest people in Europe--the people who, in the opinion of General
Gordon, were, as a result of a century of British civilisation, more
destitute and miserable than the savages of Central Africa?
Mr. Balfour, at any rate, relented from his policy of more oppression.
He even entered upon the first small beginnings of a policy of
restoration.
It was a very small beginning--that first Congested Board--and a
Commission that reported on its work nearly twenty years after[28]
decided that the Board had neither powers nor cash sufficient for its
work. The Liberal Government of 1906-10 frankly accepted the opinion of
the Commission, and gave the Board both new powers and new funds in the
Irish Land Act of 1909. Under that Act the Congested Board is endowed
with £250,000 a year, and has authority over half the area and a third
of the population of Ireland.[29] Over these great regions[30] this
authority now possesses extensive powers of purchase, rehousing,
replanting, creation of fisheries, provision of seed and
stocks--powers, in short, extending to the complete restoration, by
compulsion if necessary, of a whole community. The Board is appointed
by the Chief Secretary,[31] and already in two short years it has
accomplished great work. Estates are being bought and replanted;
holders are being migrated from bad land to good; villages are being
rebuilt; industries encouraged; health safeguarded; fisheries revived.
Those who examine its work as we did last summer will experience the
feeling of men looking on at a splendid and gallant effort to salvage a
race submerged.
This work, indeed, is still in its infancy. There are many absentee
landlords who are still holding out for heavy and extravagant prices as
a reward for the poverty and misery which they have often in large part
caused by their own neglect. The Board appears to be reaching the
limits of voluntary action. Much of the hope for the future of Ireland
rests on their courage and skill.
THE BOARD OF AGRICULTURE
The passing of landlordism has produced a great revival of energy and
life in the rural districts. That revival began in the nineties, and
the credit for first realising its importance and significance must be
given to Sir Horace Plunkett. But private organisation alone could not
meet the needs of the situation. In 1899 the Government were persuaded
by the Irish party to pass an Act founding a new Irish Board of
Agriculture on broad and generous lines.[32]
This Irish Board of Agriculture is a very remarkable body. It is
practically a Home Rule authority for agricultural purposes only. The
Irish Minister for Agriculture by no means rules as an autocrat. He has
to submit his policy to a large "Advisory Council" of over 100 members
elected by all the County Councils of Ireland. Out of this Council a
committee is chosen which is practically a Cabinet. This Agricultural
Parliament now plays a most important part in the life of Ireland. It
speaks for the whole nation more than any other public body. Its
discussions are practical and useful. It is a training ground for the
rulers of the future, and it is playing a vital part in bringing
together the best men of the North and South. The Ulster members are
already, in agricultural matters, working in a friendly spirit side by
side with the men from the South.
Thus advised and kept in touch with public opinion, the Board of
Agriculture is the most popular and effective Department in Dublin
Castle. It gives us a foretaste of the new power that will be given to
Irish administration by the Home Rule spirit.
For it is just this central guidance that the other great new Irish
developments chiefly lack. Take local government. There is not a County
Council in Ireland which would not be stronger if it were directed--and
sometimes, perhaps, even commanded--from the centre by a sympathetic
national authority. There is not a Board in Ireland, whether it be the
Congested Districts Board, or the Estates Commissioners, or the Land
Commission, that would not be more wisely directed if there were some
central arena in which the great principles of administration could be
seriously and responsibly debated and settled. For, in spite of the
popular notion that Irishmen are too talkative, there is really too
little discussion in Ireland on practical affairs. The great unsolved
political problem blocks the way. The block cannot be removed except by
settlement. One of the strongest reasons for granting Home Rule is in
order to free the mind of the nation for attention to the national
housekeeping.
OLD-AGE PENSIONS
One of the most remarkable events of the last few years has been the
unexpected side-share of Ireland in the great social legislation of
Great Britain. Even the Irish members themselves have scarcely foreseen
how immensely Ireland, being the poorest partner in the United Kingdom,
would benefit by a policy "tender to the poor." The most conspicuous
example of that effect has been Old-age Pensions. Old-age Pensions have
fallen on Ireland as a shower of gold. Her share is already well over
£2,000,000. The great new fact in Irish social welfare is that she now
draws that great draught from the Imperial Exchequer.
Travelling along the Atlantic coast last summer, I inquired in many
local post-offices as to the amount of pensions given weekly in those
little grey villages. I found that often the old-age pensioners would
number between 100 and 200 in small villages of less than 2,000 people.
The emigration of the youth has left a disproportionate number of the
old, and it is not necessary to bring any railing accusation against
the honesty of the Irish race in order to understand why it is that
Old-age Pensions have done so much for Ireland. But the fact remains,
and it carries with it a great and unexpected relief to the Irish
ratepayer.[33]
THE NEW UNIVERSITY ACT
Last, but not least, we have the great stimulus given to higher
education by the passage of Mr. Birrell's Irish University Act. For a
whole generation the progress of higher education in Ireland has been
held up by a barren and wearisome religious quarrel. Now that quarrel
has vanished, and Ireland is organising a great system of University
education for her Catholic as well as her Protestant youth. Not the
least stimulating experience of the Eighty Club in Ireland was the day
which we spent, under the guidance of the distinguished Principal, at
Cork University College, where we saw Catholics and Protestants, men
and women, young and old, working together in friendly harmony in the
splendid buildings which have sprung up to house the undergraduates of
the south-west. The same process is going on at Dublin, Galway, and
Belfast. The machinery is being rapidly prepared for training up in the
best possible atmosphere of mutual tolerance the new rulers of Home
Rule Ireland.
* * * * *
Such have been the great Acts of Parliament which have created a
changed situation in Ireland. But the crown is still wanting to the
work. Those who travel in Ireland and make any close inquiry into the
work of these Acts must feel that there is a great gap unfilled. It is
a gap at the top. All these new roads of reform are well and truly
laid--but they all lead nowhere.
Take one startling fact. Two Commissions of late years have considered
the great and glaring need of Ireland in the want of swift, cheap, and
convenient transport both for persons and goods. One of these
Commissions was on Canals, and the other on Railways. Both decided in
favour of national control. But as there is no national authority which
anyone trusts, both reports have been stillborn.[34]
It was probably some such facts that led, as far back as August, 1903,
to the uprising among the more moderate Unionist Irishmen of a
remarkable movement which is still affecting Ireland. This movement
took shape in a body; called the Irish Reform Association, presided
over, like the Land Conference, by that remarkable Irish peer Lord
Dunraven. That Conference put forward a set of proposals which are now
historical, and which have since, in varying forms, inspired the
movement for what is popularly known as "Devolution."[35]
Mild as are the proposals of this new party, they do not differ in
principle from the proposals of the Home Rulers.
These proposals obtained the backing of a large section of the Unionist
Party. They undoubtedly had the sympathy of Sir Anthony MacDonnell. It
is difficult to say, at the present moment, what precise part was
played by Mr. George Wyndham, then still the Irish Chief Secretary. But
the eloquent fact remains that the ultimate triumph of the Ulster
Unionists over the Devolution Party of 1903 was marked by his
resignation. There would seem to be no substantial doubt that in 1903
there arose in the Unionist Party the same division in regard to Home
Rule as arose in 1885, when Lord Carnarvon, the Tory Viceroy, met Mr.
Parnell. For the moment the better spirits seriously contemplated
removing once and for all the bitterness of the Irish grievance. There
was a return of that feeling in the autumn of 1910, when, for the
moment, at a period still known politically as the "age of reason,"
most of the Unionist Press admitted how much good reason and
common-sense there was on the side of Home Rule. On each of these
occasions the same result has occurred. At the critical moment the
extreme faction of the Ulster Unionists has intervened and driven back
the Tory Party to its fatal enslavement.
But the great fact which produced these movements still remains as
valid and potent as ever. It is that, whatever improvements you
introduce into the Irish machine, it can never work properly until the
central motive power is a self-governing authority.
So deeply have the better Unionists been committed to that view in the
past, in 1885, 1903, and 1910, that they are now shaping a new argument
to face the situation of 1912. This argument is simple. It is that the
new prosperity of Ireland is not a help, but a bar to Home Rule.
"If Ireland can prosper so well without Home Rule," so runs this line
of reasoning, "why give her Home Rule at all?"
This is indeed a strange and cruel argument. We all know the people who
used to say Home Rule was impossible because Ireland was disturbed.
They are now occupied in saying that she must be denied Home Rule
because she is so peaceful.
But now it appears that this ingenious dilemma is to be applied to her
material condition also. As with order, so with finance. In the old
days Ireland was refused Home Rule because she was too poor. How could
she get on without England? She would be bankrupt. But now that she is
better off she is to be refused it because she is too prosperous!
Is it not quite obvious that these are arguments after judgment? That
the people who use them are merely seeking excuses for refusing Home
Rule altogether and at all seasons?
The British people, essentially a just and serious people, will not
listen to these last desperate pleas, the coward fugitives of a routed
case.
They will rather believe that all these material improvements in the
condition of Ireland only make the need for Home Rule stronger and more
urgent. They will realise that Ireland requires not a material, but a
moral cure to give her the full value of the new reforms. Her need is
to be removed once and for all from the class of dependent communities.
She wants the great tonic cure of self-reliance and
self-responsibility.
For it is as true to-day as it was when Mr. Gladstone spoke these wise
and searching words in April, 1886[36]:--
"The fault of the administration of Ireland is simply this:
that its spring and source of action, and what is called its
motor muscle, is English and not Irish. Without providing a
domestic Legislature for Ireland, without having an Irish
Parliament, I want to know how you will bring about this
wonderful, superhuman, and, I believe, in this condition,
impossible result, that your administrative system shall be
Irish and not English?"
The greatest need is still this--to make the "motor-muscle" Irish.
* * * * *
FOOTNOTES:
[28] The Report of the Congested Districts Commission was issued in
1908.
[29] See 19th Report (1911), Cd. 5712. The Act of 1909 more than
doubled the area and population, bringing the area to 4,000,000 acres,
and the population to 600,000. The former endowment was £86,000.
[30] Comprising the whole of the counties of Donegal, Leitrim, Sligo,
Roscommon, Mayo, Galway, Kerry, and parts of the counties of Clare and
Cork.
[31] The members of this admirable Board are Mr. Birrell, Lord
Shaftesbury, Mr. O'Donnell, Dr. Mangan, Sir Horace Plunkett, Sir David
Harrel, and six others.
[32] For the governing clauses of that Act see Appendix E.
[33] May not the Insurance Act do the same? It is very likely.
[34] See Appendix J.
[35] Private Bill legislation to be settled in Dublin. Irish internal
expenditure to be handed to a financial council half elected and half
nominated. An Irish Assembly to be created with a small power of
initiative.
[36] April 8th.--Second Reading Speech on 1886 Home Rule Bill.
THE HOME RULE PLAN
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY BILLS AND THE
BILL OF 1912.
"Without union of hearts identification is extinction, is
dishonour, is conquest--not identification."
GRATTAN.
"It would be a misery to me if I had forgotten or omitted, in
these my closing years, any measure possible for me to take
towards upholding and promoting the cause, not of one Party or
another, of one nation or another, but of all Parties and of
all nations inhabiting these islands; and to these nations,
viewing them as I do with all their vast opportunities, under a
living union for power and for progress, I say, let me entreat
you to let the dead bury the dead, and to cast behind you every
recollection of bygone evils, and to cherish, to love, and
sustain one another through all the vicissitudes of human
affairs in the times that are to come."
Mr. GLADSTONE
(First reading of 1893 Bill, 13th February).