HOME RULE IN HISTORY
Grattan's Parliament was the first Parliament with full legislative
authority possessed by Ireland since the time of Henry VII. It existed
for nearly twenty years, and in that brief time it did a great work for
Ireland. If we look for its epitaph we shall find it, strangely enough,
in the words spoken in 1798 by the man who pursued Grattan's Parliament
with his venomous hate, and finally compassed its doom--the famous
Irish Chancellor, Lord Clare:--
"=There is not a nation on the face of the habitable globe
which has advanced in cultivation, in agriculture, in
manufactures, with the same rapidity, in the same period, as
Ireland.="[65]
But, great and splendid as was Grattan's victory, there were two points
of weakness in the settlement of 1782, soon to be revealed by
experience. One was that although the Irish Parliament obtained the
right of legislation, the appointment of the Government and the
Executive was still placed in the hands of the Irish Privy Council, and
therefore of the British Central Government. That meant, in the end,
that the British Government still possessed the leverage for recovering
the powers of legislative initiative and legislative veto.
As far as Ireland possessed separate executive powers, she used them
with loyalty and patriotism. Take, for instance, her finance. Ireland
possessed, under the settlement, a separate Irish Exchequer, and the
British Government could levy no war taxes in Ireland, except with the
consent of the Irish Parliament. That gave to the Irish Parliament an
immense power of checking and hampering England in her struggle against
Napoleon. If we were to judge from some of the talk heard at the
present moment, one would take for granted that Ireland must have
refused all help to England in that struggle.
On the contrary, the Irish Parliament voted sums freely to Pitt for the
wars against France. The Irish statesmen would have no dealings with
the English Whigs in their pro-French policy. Like that other great
Irishman, Edmund Burke, Grattan was opposed to the spirit of the French
Revolution. In that great European crisis Ireland showed herself what
she really is--a nation inclined in all essentials to conservative
rather than revolutionary ideas.
"CATHOLIC EMANCIPATION"
But it was the existence of a separate external executive, gradually
limiting the legislative powers of the Irish Parliament, that finally
brought out the gravity of the other signal defect in the settlement of
1782. That defect was the failure to effect a complete settlement of
the Catholic question. For the Irish Parliament, even after 1782, was
still confined to Protestants. Could any reasonable man call that a
final solution of the problem of government in a country where
four-fifths of the people were Catholics? With a truer foresight than
Grattan, Flood desired that the Volunteers should refuse to lay down
their arms until the Catholic question had been settled. But Grattan,
still filled with that spirit of generous trust which has been the
undoing of so many noble Irishmen, refused to use the military power
for any further exaction of terms. He disbanded the Volunteers.
Grattan trusted that once the Irish Parliament was endowed with full
powers, the Catholic question would settle itself. He could rely with
certainty on his own Protestant followers. He persuaded them to repeal
the penal laws. He prevailed upon them to extend the franchise to the
Catholic peasant. Both those great reforms were passed through the
Irish Parliament in the fulness of its strength and power, and the
British Government were compelled to acquiesce. But there Grattan
reached the limit of his authority. There was one more great step which
had to be taken before the Catholic claims could be satisfied. It was
necessary to concede the right to a Catholic, as to a Protestant, to
sit in the Irish Parliament. When Grattan made that proposal, he found
himself faced with new forces. The British Government and the
Ascendancy Party in Ireland had already begun to regain their hold over
the Irish Parliament. The forces of patronage and corruption were
already at work.
If those had been the only powers Grattan might have defeated them.
Neither he nor his admirers were perhaps wholly aware of what we now
know to be the centre of this resistance--the dogged, almost insane,
obstinacy of George III. Pitt indeed had already lost his earlier
reforming zeal. The shadow of the French struggle had already fallen
across his path, and had already shaken his early faith in freedom and
progress. But if Pitt had been left alone he might still have done
justice. It was George III. that lost us the soul of Ireland, as he
lost us both the body and soul of North America.
There were, indeed, moments in those difficult days when the British
people seemed to realise dimly the wisdom of what Burke saw to be the
wisest British fighting policy--the policy of rallying Catholic
Ireland against revolutionary France. There was, for instance, the
mission of Lord Fitzwilliam in 1795--a Whig mission extorted from Pitt
against his will, due to a Parliamentary complication, and backed from
London with but half-hearted support. That famous mission which sent
through Ireland such a strange, sad thrill of hope, soon closed in mist
and darkness. Lord Fitzwilliam went to Ireland, as many Englishmen have
gone since, with the intention of doing justice. He was thwarted, like
most others, by the resistance of the local Ascendancy Party, fighting
doggedly for the remnants of its power. It was the place-holders of
Ireland who, intriguing with the Ministry in London, led to the recall
of Lord Fitzwilliam.[66]
For that party was then playing the same part as it is attempting to
play to-day. They were playing then, as ever since, on the nerves of
Protestant England. They were conjuring up the dread of Catholic power,
and the terror of Irish disloyalty. Unhappily, in the confusions of the
moment--the confusions of the French wars--they succeeded. By
compelling the recall of Lord Fitzwilliam they wrecked the hopes of the
Grattan Parliament.
For after 1795 that Parliament was practically doomed, and events moved
rapidly to their climax. Grattan, thwarted in his policy, and unwilling
to be responsible for a body over which he had no control, withdrew
into retirement. The Irish Catholics, feeling themselves again betrayed
and deserted, relapsed all over Ireland into sullen indifference and
detachment. The Protestant Parliament, deprived of their leader, swung
more and more towards the Ascendancy Party. Even so, indeed, the virtue
of self-government continued to work. No Parliament has left a better
record of good local work for the prosperity of its country than
Grattan's Parliament. From end to end of Ireland new industries had
sprung up, and new life had been put into old industries. Ireland then
was prosperous. Her exports had doubled. Her wealth was increasing. Her
towns overflowed with life, and Dublin for the moment almost rivalled
London in its brilliancy and its wit.[67]
THE GREAT REBELLION
This prosperity might have saved Grattan's Parliament but for a new
movement which had crossed the two channels from France. It is doubtful
whether the Catholics alone could have wrecked Grattan's Parliament. It
was, curiously enough, the Irish Presbyterians of Ulster--our friends,
the Orangemen--who sowed the seeds of revolt against the Protestant
Parliament of 1782. It was they, in the combination known as the
"United Irishmen," who started the movement that culminated in the
Irish Rebellion in 1798. These Presbyterian Nonconformists had all been
deeply affected by the doctrines of the French Revolution. They had for
years past been agitating for a reform of the Irish Parliament on the
lines subsequently adopted in 1831--chiefly by the abolition of the
rotten boroughs. Grattan was with them, but again he was powerless. He
was opposed, both in Dublin and in London, by the existing executives.
Those executives now rested their power almost entirely on the members
returned by those very same rotten boroughs. For ever since 1782
bribery had been going on, and as early as 1790 England had been
rapidly buying back the hold she had lost in 1782. These being her
weapons, it was not likely that the Irish executive was going to yield
to the claims of the Irish Presbyterians. The Government resisted, and
the movement of the Irish Reformers became more and more formidable.
All these causes of unrest culminated in the Irish Rebellion of 1798--a
horrible event, beginning with the lawlessness of the revolutionary
Presbyterians in the north--lawlessness so feebly checked as to raise
grave suspicions in regard to the attitude of the Irish Government
itself towards a possible revolution. But the outrages of the Orangemen
on the Catholics in Ulster, and the Catholic feeling of desertion by
the Government, soon produced a far more terrible outbreak in the
south. That practically culminated in a religious war between Catholic
and Protestant. From that moment the Rebellion was marked by atrocities
on both sides almost as terrible as anything which occurred in the
French Revolution. The Rebellion was extinguished in blood and fire.
The period of exhaustion and despair that followed in Ireland was
seized upon by Castlereagh and Pitt for destroying the Irish
Parliament. An immense machinery of bribery and corruption, assisted by
pledges that were broken and prophecies that failed, all working under
the double shadow of rebellion and war, drove the Irish Parliament to
reluctant suicide, and passed into law, both at Dublin and Westminster,
the Union Act of 1800.
That great light of the Irish Parliament thus passed suddenly into
darkness. The Chamber which had resounded with the eloquence of Flood
and Grattan passed over to the money-changers, and ever since the clink
of coin has taken the place of the silver voices of the Irish
orators.[68]
AFTER THE UNION
The events of 1800 left Ireland, for the moment, prostrate under the
heel of Great Britain. The last remnants of self-government disappeared
with the absorption of the two exchequers in 1817. Although Ireland
still retained a separate administration, that administration was not
under the control of any self-governing authority. Out of the Dragon's
teeth of the Union rose the sinister army of a new bureaucracy,
recruited almost entirely by the enemies of Ireland, and for the most
part even working with its guns trained against the hopes and
aspirations of the Irish race.
The artificial stimulus given to agriculture by the French wars
concealed for some years the greatness of the disaster. The population
of Ireland continued to rise. The Irish landlords, indeed, had for the
moment a strong motive to multiply their tenants, in the existence of
the forty shilling freehold vote granted by the Irish Parliament.
Holdings were sub-divided, and the cultivation of the potato encouraged
an even larger population on a lower level of subsistence. This
prepared the way for the great catastrophe of the Irish famine in
1847. It was that famine which brought out fully, for the first time,
the tremendous calamity inflicted on Ireland by the destruction of her
Parliament.
For it was not that England showed any lack of sympathy in dealing with
the Irish famine. It was indeed that event which finally converted Sir
Robert Peel to the abolition of the Corn Laws, and, more even than the
agitation of Richard Cobden or the speeches of John Bright, contributed
to the final triumph of Free Trade. It was not want of sympathy that
wrecked Ireland then. It was want of understanding. For it was only an
Irish Government, living on the spot, and responsible to the people of
Ireland itself, that could have risen to the great height of that
tremendous emergency.
The monstrous human disaster that followed--the loss of 2,000,000 of
population in twenty years--was the direct result of the destruction of
all the means of prompt salvage and repair which could have been
brought to bear only by a Home Rule Government.
During those calamitous decades another great evil emerged as a result
of the Union. Many bad things have been said against the Irish land
laws, and many of them are justified. But the Irish land laws in their
old working were simply rather an exaggerated form of the very same
laws that have survived in England right up to the present moment. Why
is it that these laws proved intolerable in Ireland, and have yet
survived up to the present moment in England? Simply because, after the
passing of the Act of Union, they were aggravated by the great and
terrible social evil of Absenteeism.
Even those bad laws could be made to work as long as there was a human
relationship between the landlords and their tenants. Up to 1830, at
any rate, there was a strong motive for that relationship. The victory
of Catholic emancipation was a colossal triumph for the genius of
Daniel O'Connell. It removed one of the worst surviving religious
injustices in this kingdom. But in Ireland it was a victory of the
tenant over the landlord, and it was achieved by a new alliance between
tenant and priest against the landlord. While giving emancipation to
the Catholics, the Act of 1830 also raised the level of the franchise,
and abolished the forty shilling freehold vote, thus removing the
landlord's motive for preserving the small tenancies.
The result was that the Irish landlords as a class--always, of course,
with many conspicuous individual exceptions--entered from 1830 onwards
upon a new career of hostility towards their tenants, amounting to
little less than a passion for revenge. Being, for the most part, both
Protestant and Absentee, they lost all interest in their tenantry,
except that of rent collectors. The Irish famine made matters far
worse. For the famine deprived the Irish tenant, for the moment, of the
power of paying rent. Not only so, but by reducing him to pauperism it
turned him into a distinct and definite burden on the rates.
The Irish landlords then first conceived the idea that, by getting rid
of the people, they could save their pockets. At the same time, they
made the great discovery that beasts were more profitable than
peasants. Hence the great clearances and evictions of the period
between 1840-1870. Hence the cruel compulsory exodus of vast masses of
the people of Ireland to the shores of America. Hence, finally, the
bitter cleavage between landlords and tenantry which brought the whole
land system of Ireland crashing into ruin.
These disasters had one good effect. They roused the Irish people from
their indifference. The bitter proofs of mis-government shown by the
breakdown of their land system brought home to every cottager the need
of a Home Rule Government. The great agitations for land reform and
Home Rule went on side by side--sometimes taking a form of violence,
but more and more of orderly constitutional pressure--until in the
seventies there emerged at Westminster a powerful Irish Party, too
strong either for the neglect or the indifference of any British
Government.
ENGLAND'S NEED
It was impossible, indeed, for Great Britain to be indifferent, for she
had suffered almost as much as Ireland. The hostility of the Irish
Party formed a perpetual source of danger to her Governments, both
Liberal and Tory, and a chronic source of instability in her
administration. The democratic movement in England was continually
weakened by the necessity of keeping Ireland down. That necessity
largely broke the strength of the great reform movement of the
thirties. It destroyed Sir Robert Peel's Government in the forties. It
broke down the strength of Mr. Gladstone's Government in the eighties.
Ireland and Irish affairs absorbed so much of the time of the British
Parliament that the affairs of Great Britain herself were neglected.
The old free and easy ways of the British Parliament were brought to a
summary close by the obstruction of the Irish Party in the eighties,
and the modern rules of compartment closure and strict limitation of
debate were forced upon the Mother of Parliaments.
It was these consequences, quite as much as the sufferings of Ireland,
that gradually converted a great body of the British people to the
cause of Home Rule. That process was going on throughout the seventies
and the eighties, and was brought to a climax by the conversion of Mr.
Gladstone in 1886. Since then the cause which was so despised in the
days of O'Connell has had one of the great English parties behind it,
and has so steadily made its way in the favour of the British nation
that it now stands on the threshold of accomplishment.
* * * * *
What, then, emerges from this survey? It is that in returning to Home
Rule as the mode of governing Ireland we are simply going back to the
old and traditional method of Irish rule. It is also that, on surveying
the past, we find not merely that Home Rule has often saved Ireland,
but that always the wider and the more generous the form of Home Rule
the more it has helped Ireland. The wiser course of accepting Irish
advice in Irish affairs has always turned the tide of disaster, and
brought the hope of a new happiness for Ireland. Surely here we have a
convincing proof that the logical consummation of this policy by the
restoration of Home Rule is the only means of bringing back Ireland to
a full and secure enjoyment of lasting well-being.
* * * * *
FOOTNOTES:
[65] For confirmation of this see Lecky's "Leaders of Public Opinion in
Ireland," Vol. I., p. 120.
[66] It is clear from Lecky's account that Lord Fitzwilliam's recall
was due, not so much to any change of policy in London as to his action
in dismissing Beresford, one of the most prominent figures of the Irish
Protestant Party.
[67] There is a very close and minute account of the growth of Irish
prosperity under the Grattan Parliament in O'Connell's great Repeal
speeches to the British Parliament in 1834. Between 1782 and 1797 the
consumption of coffee in Ireland went up by 600 per cent., the
consumption of tea by 84 per cent., of tobacco by 100 per cent., and
wine by 74 per cent. All these figures ran down rapidly after 1800.
[68] The Irish Parliament House, built in the eighteenth century, was,
after the Act of Union, handed over to the Bank of Ireland. The House
of Lords has been left intact, but special secret instructions were
given that the Irish House of Commons should be divided into
compartments in order that the memories of the Irish Parliament should
be forgotten. Those instructions were carried out, and the Chamber of
the Irish House of Commons ceased to exist.
HOME RULE IN THE WORLD
THE CASE FROM ANALOGY
"I wish the Irish were negroes, and then we should have an
advocate in the Hon. Baronet. His erratic humanity wanders
beyond the ocean, and visits the hot islands of the West
Indies, and thus having discharged the duties of kindness
there, it returns burning and desolating, to treat with
indignity and to trample upon the people of Ireland."
O'CONNELL.