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THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE
BY
ERSKINE CHILDERS
AUTHOR OF
"THE RIDDLE OF THE SANDS," "WAR AND THE ARME BLANCHE," "GERMAN INFLUENCE
ON BRITISH CAVALRY"; EDITOR OF VOL. V. OF THE _TIMES_ "HISTORY OF THE
WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA," ETC.
LONDON
EDWARD ARNOLD
1911
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGES
INTRODUCTION vii-xvi
I. THE COLONIZATION OF IRELAND AND AMERICA 1-20
II. REVOLUTION IN AMERICA AND IN IRELAND 21-41
III. GRATTAN'S PARLIAMENT 42-59
IV. THE UNION 60-71
V. CANADA AND IRELAND 72-104
VI. AUSTRALIA AND IRELAND 105-119
VII. SOUTH AFRICA AND IRELAND 120-143
VIII. THE ANALOGY 144-149
IX. IRELAND TO-DAY 150-187
X. THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 188-229
I. The Elements of the Problem 188-197
II. Federal or Colonial Home Rule 198-203
III. The Exclusion or Retention of Irish Members
at Westminster 203-213
IV. Irish Powers and their Bearing on Exclusion 213-229
XI. UNION FINANCE 230-257
I. Before the Union 230-231
II. From the Union to the Financial Relations
Commission of 1894-1896 232-239
III. The Financial Relations Commission of 1894-1896 239-257
XII. THE PRESENT FINANCIAL SITUATION 258-279
I. Anglo-Irish Finance To-day 258-264
II. Irish Expenditure 264-274
III. Irish Revenue 274-279
XIII. FINANCIAL INDEPENDENCE 280-306
I. The Essence of Home Rule 280-281
II. The Deficit 281-286
III. Further Contribution to Imperial Services 286
IV. Ireland's Share of the National Debt 286
V. Ireland's Share of Imperial Miscellaneous Revenue 287
VI. Irish Control of Customs and Excise 287-294
VII. Federal Finance 294-300
VIII. Alternative Schemes of Home Rule Finance 300-306
XIV. LAND PURCHASE FINANCE 307-321
I. Land Purchase Loans 307-319
II. Minor Loans to Ireland 319-321
XV. THE IRISH CONSTITUTION 322-338
CONCLUSION 339-341
APPENDIX 342-347
INDEX 348-354
INTRODUCTION
My purpose in this volume is to advocate a definite scheme of
self-government for Ireland. That task necessarily involves an
historical as well as a constructive argument. It would be truer,
perhaps, to say that the greater part of the constructive case for Home
Rule must necessarily be historical. To postulate a vague acceptance of
the principle of Home Rule, and to proceed at once to the details of the
Irish Constitution, would be a waste of time and labour. It is
impossible even to attempt to plan the framework of a Home Rule Bill
without a tolerably close knowledge not only of Anglo-Irish relations,
but of the Imperial history of which they form a part. The Act will
succeed exactly in so far as it gives effect to the lessons of
experience. It will fail at every point where those lessons are
neglected. Constitutions which do not faithfully reflect the experience
of the sovereign power which accords them, and of the peoples which have
to live under them, are at the best perilous experiments liable to
defeat the end of their framers.
I shall enter into history only so far as it is relevant to the
constitutional problem, using the comparative method, and confining
myself almost exclusively to the British Empire past and present. For
the purposes of the Irish controversy it is unnecessary to travel
farther. In one degree or another every one of the vexed questions which
make up the Irish problem has arisen again and again within the circle
of the English-speaking races. As a nation we have a body of experience
applicable to the case of Ireland incomparably greater than that
possessed by any other race in the world. If, from timidity, prejudice,
or sheer neglect, we fail to use it, we shall earn the heavy censure
reserved for those who sin against the light.
For the comparative sketch I shall attempt, materials in the shape of
facts established beyond all controversy are abundant. Colonial history,
thanks to colonial freedom, is almost wholly free from the distorting
influence of political passion. South African history alone will need
revision in the light of recent events. When, under the alchemy of free
national institutions, Ireland has undergone the same transformation as
South Africa, her unhappy history will be chronicled afresh with a
juster sense of perspective and a juster apportionment of responsibility
for the calamities which have befallen her. And yet, if we consider the
field for partisan bias which Irish history presents, the amount of
ground common to writers of all shades of political opinion is now
astonishingly large. The result, I think, is due mainly to the good
influence of that eminent historian and Unionist politician, the late
Professor Lecky. Indeed, an advocate of Home Rule, nervously suspicious
of tainted material, could afford to rely solely on his "History of
Ireland in the Eighteenth Century," "Leaders of Public Opinion in
Ireland," and "Clerical Influences,"[1] which are Nationalist textbooks,
and, for quite recent events, on "A Consideration of Ireland in the
Nineteenth Century," by Mr. G. Locker-Lampson, the present Unionist
Member for Salisbury. A strange circumstance; but Ireland, like all
countries where political development has been forcibly arrested from
without, is a land of unending paradox. It is only one of innumerable
anomalies that Irish Nationalists should use Unionist histories as
propaganda for Nationalism; that the majority of Irish Unionists should
insist on ignoring all historical traditions save those which in any
normal country would long ago have been consigned by general consent to
oblivion and the institutions they embody overthrown; and that Unionist
writers such as those I have mentioned should be able to reconcile their
history and their politics only by a pessimism with regard to the
tendencies of human nature in general, or of Irish nature in particular,
with which their own historical teaching, founded on a true perception
of cause and effect, appears to be in direct contradiction.
The truth is that the question is one of the construction, not of the
verification, of facts; of prophecy for the future, rather than of bare
affirmation or negation. No one can presume to determine such a question
without a knowledge of how human beings have been accustomed to act
under similar circumstances. Illumination of that sort Irish history and
the contemporary Irish problem incontestably need. The modern case for
the Union rests mainly on the abnormality of Ireland, and that is
precisely why it is such a formidable case to meet. For Ireland in many
ways is painfully abnormal. The most cursory study of her institutions
and social, economic, and political life demonstrate that fact. The
Unionist, fixing his eyes on some of the secondary peculiarities, and
ignoring their fundamental cause, demonstrates it with ease, and by a
habit of mind which yields only with infinite slowness to the growth of
political enlightenment, passes instinctively to the deduction that
Irish abnormalities render Ireland unfit for self-government. In other
words, he prescribes for the disease a persistent application of the
very treatment which has engendered it. Whatever the result, there is a
plausible answer. If Ireland is disorderly and retrograde, how can she
deserve freedom? If she is peaceful, and shows symptoms of economic
recuperation, clearly she does not need or even want it. In other words,
if all that is healthy in the patient battles desperately and not in
vain, first against irritant poison, and then against soporific drugs,
this healthy struggle for self-preservation is attributed not to native
vitality, but to the bracing regimen of coercive government.
This train of argument, so far from being confined to Ireland, is as old
as the human race itself. Of all human passions, that for political
domination is the last to yield to reason. Men are naturally inclined to
attribute admitted social evils to every cause--religion, climate, race,
congenital defects of character, the inscrutable decrees of Divine
Providence--rather than to the form of political institutions; in other
words, to the organic structure of the community, and to rest the
security of an Empire on any other foundation than that of the liberty
of its component parts. If, in one case, their own experience proves
them wrong, they will go to the strangest lengths of perversity in
misreading their own experience, and they will seek every imaginable
pretext for distinguishing the case from its predecessor. Underlying all
is a nervous terror of the abuse of freedom founded on the assumption
that men will continue to act when free exactly as they acted under the
demoralizing influence of coercion. The British Empire has grown, and
continues to grow, in spite of this deeply rooted political doctrine.
Ireland is peculiar only in that her proximity to the seat of power has
exposed her for centuries to an application of the doctrine in its most
extreme form and without any hope of escape through the merciful
accidents to which more fortunate communities owe their emancipation.
Canada owes her position in the Empire, and the Empire itself exists in
its present form to-day, owing to the accident that the transcendantly
important principle of responsible government advocated by Lord Durham
as a remedy for the anarchy and stagnation in which he found both the
British and the French Provinces of Canada in 1838, did not require
Imperial legislation, and was established without the Parliamentary or
electoral sanction of Great Britain. Lord Durham was derided as a
visionary, and abused as unpatriotic for the assertion of this simple
principle. Far in advance of his time as he was, he himself shrank from
the full application of his own lofty ideal, and consequently made one
great, though under the circumstances not a capital, mistake in his
diagnosis, and it was to that mistake only that Parliament gave
legislative effect in 1840. By one of the most melancholy ironies in all
history Ireland was the source of his error, so that the Union of the
Canadas, dissolved as a failure by the Canadians themselves in 1867, was
actually based on the success of the Anglo-Irish Union in repressing a
dangerous nationality. Did the proof of the error in Canada induce
Englishmen to question the soundness of the precedent on which the error
was based? On the contrary, the lesson passed unnoticed, and the Irish
precedent has survived to darken thought, to retard democratic progress,
and to pervert domestic and Imperial policy to this very day. It even
had the truly extraordinary retrospective effect of obliterating from
the minds of many eminent statesmen the significance of the Canadian
parallel; for it is only six years ago that a Secretary of State for the
Colonies penned a despatch recommending for the Transvaal a form of
government similar to that which actually produced the Canadian
disorders of 1837, and supporting it by an argument whose effect was not
merely to resuscitate what time had proved to be false in Durham's
doctrine, but to discard what time had proved to be true. As for
Ireland herself, I know no more curious illustration of the strong
tendency, even on the part of the most fair-minded men, to place that
country outside the pale of social or political science, and of the
extreme reluctance to judge its inhabitants by the elementary standards
of human conduct, than the book to which I referred above--Mr.
Locker-Lampson's "A Consideration of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century."
For what he admits to be the ruinous results of British Government in
the past, the author in the last few pages of a lengthy volume has no
better cure to suggest than a continuance of British government, and he
defends this course by a terse enumeration of the very phenomena which
in Durham's opinion rendered the grant of Home Rule to Canada
imperative, concluding with a paragraph which, with the substitution of
"Canada" for "Ireland," constitutes an admirably condensed epitome of
the arguments used both by politicians at home, and the minorities in
Canada, in favour of Durham's error and against the truth he
established.
Mr. Lecky represents a somewhat different school of thought, and reached
his Unionism by reasoning more profound and consistent, but, on the
other hand, wholly destructive of the Imperial theory as held by the
modern school of Imperialists. His fear and distrust of democracy in all
its forms and in all lands[2] was such that he naturally dreaded Irish
Nationalism, which is a form of democratic revolt suppressed so long and
by such harsh methods as to exhibit features easily open to criticism.
But the gist of his argument would have applied just as well to the
political evolution of the self-governing Colonies. Indeed, if he had
lived to see the last Imperial Conference, the pessimism of so clear a
thinker would assuredly have given way before the astounding contrast
between those countries in which his political philosophy had been
abjured, and the only white country in the Empire where by sheer force
it had been maintained intact.
If my only object in writing were to contribute something toward the
dissipation of the fears and doubts which render it so hard to carry any
measure, however small, of Home Rule for Ireland, I should hope for
little success. Practical men, with a practical decision to make, rarely
look outside the immediate facts before them. Extremists, in a case like
that of Ireland, are reluctant to take account of what Lord Morley
calls "the fundamental probabilities of civil society." Sir Edward
Carson would be more than human if he were to be influenced by a
demonstration that the case he makes against Home Rule is the same as
that made by the minority leaders, not only in the French, but in the
British Province of Canada. Most of the minority to which he appeals
would now regard as an ill-timed paradox the view that the very vigour
of their opposition to Home Rule is a better omen for the success of
Home Rule than that kind of sapless Nationalism, astonishingly rare in
Ireland under the circumstances, which is inclined to yield to the
insidious temptation of setting the "eleemosynary benefits"--to use Mr.
Walter Long's phrase[3]--derived from the British connection above the
need for self-help and self-reliance. The real paradox is that any
Irishmen, Unionist or Nationalist, should tolerate advisers who, however
sincere and patriotic, avowedly regard Ireland as the parasite of Great
Britain; who appeal to the lower nature of her people; to the fears of
one section and the cupidity of both; advising Unionists to rely on
British power and all Irishmen on British alms. A day will come when the
humiliation will be seen in its true light. Even now, I do venture to
appeal to that small but powerful group of moderate Irish Unionists who,
so far from fearing revenge or soliciting charity, spend their whole
lives in the noble aim of uniting Irishmen of all creeds on a basis of
common endeavour for their own economic and spiritual salvation; who
find their work checked in a thousand ways by the perpetual maintenance
of a seemingly barren and sentimental agitation; who distrust both the
parties to this agitation; but who are reluctant to accept the view
that, without the satisfaction of the national claim, and without the
national responsibility thereby conferred, their own aims can never be
fully attained. I should be happy indeed if I could do even a little
towards persuading some of these men that they mistake cause and effect;
misinterpret what they resent; misjudge where they distrust, and in
standing aloof from the battle for legislative autonomy, unconsciously
concede a point--disinterested, constructive optimists as they are--to
the interested and destructive pessimism which, from Clare's savage
insults to Mr. Walter Long's contemptuous patronage, has always lain at
the root of British policy towards Ireland.
In the meantime, for those who like or dislike it, Home Rule is
imminent. We are face to face no longer with a highly speculative, but
with a vividly practical problem, raising legislative and administrative
questions of enormous practical importance, and next year we shall be
dealing with this problem in an atmosphere of genuine reality totally
unlike that of 1886, when Home Rule was a startling novelty to the
British electorate, or of 1893, when the shadow of impending defeat
clouded debate and weakened counsel. It would be pleasant to think that
the time which has elapsed, besides greatly mitigating anti-Irish
prejudice, had been used for scientific study and dispassionate
discussion of the problem of Home Rule. Unfortunately, after eighteen
years the problem remains almost exactly where it was. There are no
detailed proposals of an authoritative character in existence. No
concrete scheme was submitted to the country in the recent elections.
None is before the country now. The reason, of course, is that the Irish
question is still an acute party question, not merely in Ireland, but in
Great Britain. Party passion invariably discourages patient constructive
thought, and all legislation associated with it suffers in consequence.
Tactical considerations, sometimes altogether irrelevant to the special
issue, have to be considered. In the case of Home Rule, when the balance
of parties is positively determined by the Irish vote, the difficulty
reaches its climax. It is idle to blame individuals. We should blame the
Union. So long as one island democracy claims to determine the destinies
of another island democracy, of whose special needs and circumstances it
is admittedly ignorant, so long will both islands suffer.
This ignorance is not disputed. No Irish Unionist claims that Great
Britain should govern Ireland on the ground that the British electorate,
or even British statesmen, understand Irish questions. On the contrary,
in Ireland, at any rate, their ignorance is a matter for satirical
comment with all parties. What he complains of is, that the British
electorate is beginning to carry its ignorance to the point of believing
that the Irish electorate is competent to decide Irish questions, and
in educating the British electorate he has hitherto devoted himself
exclusively to the eradication of this error. The financial results of
the Union are such that he is now being cajoled into adding, "It is your
money, not your wisdom, that we want." Once more, an odd state of
affairs, and some day we shall all marvel in retrospect that the Union
was so long sustained by a separatist argument, reinforced in latter
days by such an inconsistent and unconscionable claim.
In the meantime, if only the present situation can be turned to
advantage, this crowning paradox is the most hopeful element in the
whole of a tangled question. It is not only that the British elector is
likely to revolt at once against the slur upon his intelligence and the
drain upon his purse, but that Irish Unionism, once convinced of the
tenacity and sincerity of that revolt, is likely to undergo a dramatic
and beneficent transformation. If they are to have Home Rule, Irish
Unionists--even those who now most heartily detest it--will want the
best possible scheme of Home Rule, and the best possible scheme is not
likely to be the half measure which, from no fault of the statesman
responsible for it, tactical difficulties may make inevitable. If the
vital energy now poured into sheer uncompromising opposition to the
principles of Home Rule could be transmuted into intellectual and moral
effort after the best form of Home Rule, I believe that the result would
be a drastic scheme.
Compromise enters more or less into the settlement of all burning
political questions. That is inevitable under the party system; but of
all questions under the sun, Home Rule questions are the least
susceptible of compromise so engendered. The subject, in reality, is not
suitable for settlement at Westminster. This is a matter of experience,
not of assertion. Within the present bounds of the Empire no lasting
Constitution has ever been framed for a subordinate State to the
moulding of which Parliament, in the character of a party assembly,
contributed an active share. Constitutions which promote prosperity and
loyalty have actually or virtually been framed by those who were to live
under them. If circumstances make it impossible to adopt this course for
Ireland, let us nevertheless remember that all the friction and enmity
between the Mother Country and subordinate States have arisen, not from
the absence, but from the inadequacy of self-governing powers. Checks
and restrictions, so far from benefiting Great Britain or the Colonies,
have damaged both in different degrees, the Colonies suffering most
because these checks and restrictions produce in the country submitted
to them peculiar mischiefs which exist neither under a despotic régime
nor an unnatural Legislative Union, fruitful of evil as both those
systems are. The damage is not evanescent, but is apt to bite deep into
national character and to survive the abolition of the institutions
which caused it. The Anglo-Irish Union was created and has ever since
been justified by a systematic defamation of Irish character. If it is
at length resolved to bury the slander and trust Ireland, in the name of
justice and reason let the trust be complete and the institutions given
her such as to permit full play to her best instincts and tendencies,
not such as to deflect them into wrong paths. Let us be scrupulously
careful to avoid mistakes which might lead to a fresh campaign of
defamation like that waged against Canada, as well as Ireland, between
1830 and 1840.
The position, I take it, is that most Irish Unionists still count,
rightly or wrongly, on defeating Home Rule, not only in the first
Parliamentary battle, but by exciting public opinion during the long
period of subsequent delay which the Parliament Bill permits. Not until
Home Rule is a moral certainty, and perhaps not even then, do the
extremists intend to consider the Irish Constitution in a practical
spirit. Surely this is a perilous policy. Surely it must be so regarded
by the moderate men--and there are many--who, if Home Rule comes, intend
to throw their abilities into making it a success, and who will be
indispensable to Ireland at a moment of supreme national importance.
Irretrievable mistakes may be made by too long a gamble with the chances
of political warfare. Whatever the scheme produced, the extremists will
have to oppose it tooth and nail. If the measure is big, sound, and
generous, it will be necessary to attack its best features with the
greatest vigour; to rely on beating up vague, anti-separatist sentiment
in Great Britain; to represent Irish Protestants as a timid race forced
to shelter behind British bayonets; in short, to use all the arguments
which, if Irish Unionists were compelled to frame a Constitution
themselves, they would scorn to employ, and which, if grafted on the Act
in the form of amendments, they themselves in after-years might
bitterly regret. Conversely, if the measure is a limited one, it will be
necessary to commend its worst features; to extol its eleemosynary side
and all the infractions of liberty which in actual practice they would
find intolerably irksome. Whatever happens, things will be said which
are not meant, and passions aroused which will be difficult to allay on
the eve of a crisis when Ireland will need the harmonious co-operation
of all her ablest sons.
If, behind the calculation of a victory within the next two years, there
lies the presentiment of an eventual defeat, let not the thought be
encouraged that a better form of Home Rule is likely to come from a Tory
than from a Liberal Government. Many Irish Unionists regard the prospect
of continued submission to a Liberal, or what they consider a
semi-Socialist, Government as the one consideration which would
reconcile them to Home Rule. No one can complain of that. But they make
a fatal mistake in denying Liberals credit for understanding questions
of Home Rule better than Tories. That, again, is a matter of proved
experience. Compare the abortive Transvaal Constitution of 1905 with the
reality of 1906, and measure the probable consequences of the former by
the actual results of the latter. Let them remember, too, that every
year which passes aggravates the financial difficulties which imperil
the future of Ireland.
The best hope of securing a final settlement of the Irish question in
the immediate future lies in promoting open discussion on the details of
the Home Rule scheme, and of drawing into that discussion all Irishmen
and Englishmen who realize the profound importance of the issue. This
book is offered as a small contribution to the controversy.
For help in writing it I am deeply indebted to many friends on both
sides of the Irish Channel, in Ireland to officials and private persons,
who have generously placed their experience at my disposal; while in
England I owe particular thanks to the Committee of which I had the
honour to be a member, which sat during the summer of this year under
the chairmanship of Mr. Basil Williams, and which published the series
of essays called "Home Rule Problems."
E.C.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The two latter works were written by Mr. Lecky in his Nationalist
youth the first and greater work after he had become a Unionist. They
form a connected whole, however, and are not inconsistent with one
another.
[2] See "Democracy and Liberty."
[3] "Did the people of Ireland understand that the destruction of the
Union, so lightly advocated by Lord Haldane, must result in the
cessation of those largely eleemosynary benefits to which the progress
of Ireland is due, her 'dissatisfaction' would be unmistakably directed
towards her false advisers?"--Letter to the _Belfast Telegraph_, October
7, 1911, criticizing Lord Haldane's preface to "Home Rule Problems."
ERRATA
Since this book went to press the Treasury has issued a revised version
of Return No. 220, 1911 [Revenue and Expenditure (England, Scotland, and
Ireland)], cancelling the Return issued in July, and correcting an error
made in it. It now appears that the "true" Excise revenue attributable
to Ireland from _spirits_ in 1910-11 (with deductions made by the
Treasury from the sum actually collected in Ireland) should be
£3,575,000, instead of £3,734,000, and that the total "true" Irish
revenue in that year was, therefore, £11,506,500, instead of
£11,665,500. In other words, Irish revenue for 1910-11 was
over-estimated in the Return now cancelled by £159,000.
The error does not affect the Author's argument as expounded in Chapters
XII. and XIII.; but it necessitates the correction of a number of
figures given by him, especially in Chapter XII., the principal change
being that the deficit in Irish revenue, as calculated on the mean of
the two years 1909-10 and 1910-11, should actually be £1,392,000,
instead of £1,312,500.
The full list of corrections is as follows:
Page 259, line 9, _for_ "£1,312,500," _read_ "£1,392,000."
Page 260, table, third column, line 6, _for_ "£10,032,000," _read_
"£9,952 500"; last line, _for_ "£1,312,500," _read_ "£1,392,000."
Page 261, table, last column, last line but one, _for_ "£321,000,"
_read_ "£162,000"; last line (total), _for_ "£329,780,970," _read_
"£329,621,970."
Page 262, line 7, _for_ "£10,032,000," _read_ "£9,952,500"; line 10,
_for_ "£1,312,500," _read_ "£1,392,000."
Page 275. table, last column, line 2, _for_ "£3,734,000," _read_
"£3,575,000"; line 7, _for_ "£10,371,000," _read_ "£10,212,000"; line
14, _for_ "£11,665,500," _read_, "£11,506,500"; in text, last line but
one of page, _for_ "£10,032,000," _read_ "£9,952,500."
Page 276, line 5, _for_ "£500,000," _read_, "£340,000"; table, last
column, line 2, _for_ "£3,316,000," _read_ "£3,236,500"; line 3, _for_
"£6,182,000," _read_ "£6,102,500"; line 9, _for_ "£8,737,500," _read_
"£8,658,000"; last line, _for_ "£10,032,000," _read_ "£9,952,500."
Page 277, line 2, _for_ "£1,672,500," _read_ "£1,752,000"; line 7, _for_
"£1,312,500," _read_ "£1,392,000"; line 8, _for_ "£10,032,000," _read_
"£9,952,500"; line 12, _for_ "£1,672,500," _read_ "£1,752,000";
footnote, line 1, _for_ "£1,793,000," _read_ "£1,952,000."
Page 279, line 8, _for_ "70.75," _read_ "70.48."
Page 282, sixth line from bottom, _for_ "£1,312,500," _read_
"£1,392,000."
* * * * *
Page 246, line 8 and footnote, and page 295, lines 21-31: A temporary
measure has been passed (Surplus Revenue Act, 1910), under which the
Surplus Commonwealth Revenue is returned to the States on a basis of £1
5s. per head of the population of each State.
* * * * *
Page 288, line 2, _omit_ "like the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands."
These islands have distinct local tariffs, but they cannot be said to be
wholly under local control.
THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE
CHAPTER I
THE COLONIZATION OF IRELAND AND AMERICA
I.
Ireland was the oldest and the nearest of the Colonies. We are apt to
forget that she was ever colonized, and that for a long period, although
styled a Kingdom, she was kept in a position of commercial and political
dependence inferior to that of any Colony. Constitutional theory still
blinds a number of people to the fact that in actual practice Ireland is
still governed in many respects as a Colony, but on principles which in
all other white communities of the British Empire are extinct. Like all
Colonies, she has a Governor or Lord-Lieutenant of her own, an Executive
of her own, and a complete system of separate Government Departments,
but her people, unlike the inhabitants of a self-governing Colony,
exercise no control over the administration. She possesses no
Legislature of her own, although in theory she is supposed to possess
sufficient legislative control over Irish affairs through representation
in the Imperial Parliament. In practice, however, this control has
always been, and still remains, illusory, just as it would certainly
have proved illusory if conferred upon any Colony. It can be exercised
only by cumbrous, circuitous, and often profoundly unhealthy methods;
and over a wide range of matters it cannot by any method whatsoever be
exercised at all.
To look behind mere technicalities to the spirit of government, Ireland
resembles one of that class of Crown Colonies of which Jamaica and Malta
are examples, where the inhabitants exercise no control over
administration, and only partial control over legislation.[4]
Why is this?
Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, always frank and fearless in his political
judgments, gave the best answer in 1893, when opposing the first reading
of the second of Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bills. "Does anybody doubt,"
he said, "that if Ireland were a thousand miles away from England she
would not have been long before this a self-governing Colony?" Now this
was not a barren geographical truism, which might by way of hypothesis
be applied in identical terms to any fraction of the United
Kingdom--say, for example, to that part of England lying south of the
Thames. Mr. Chamberlain never made any attempt to deny--no one with the
smallest knowledge of history could have denied--that Ireland, though
only sixty miles away from England, was less like England than any of
the self-governing Colonies then attached to the Crown, possessing
distinct national characteristics which entitled her, in theory at any
rate, to demand, not merely colonial, but national autonomy. On the
contrary, Mr. Chamberlain went out of his way to argue, with all the
force and fire of an accomplished debater, that the Bill was a highly
dangerous measure precisely because, while granting Ireland a measure of
autonomy, it denied her some of the elementary powers, not only of
colonial, but of national States; for instance, the full control over
taxation, which all self-governing Colonies possessed, and the control
over foreign policy, which is a national attribute. The complementary
step in his argument was that, although nominally withheld by statute,
these fuller powers would be forcibly usurped by the future Irish
Government through the leverage offered by a subordinate Legislature and
Executive, and that, once grasped, they would be used to the injury of
Great Britain and the minority in Ireland. Ireland ("a fearful danger")
might arm, ally herself with France, and, while submitting the
Protestant minority to cruel persecution, would retain enough national
unity to smite Britain hip and thigh, and so avenge the wrong of ages.
Even to the most ardent Unionist the case thus presented must, in the
year 1911, present a doubtful aspect. The British _entente_ with France,
and the absence of the smallest ascertainable sympathy between Ireland
and Germany, he will dismiss, perhaps, as points of minor importance,
but he will detect at once in the argument an antagonism, natural enough
in 1893, between national and colonial attributes, and he will remember,
with inner misgivings, that his own party has taken an especially active
part during the last ten years in furthering the claim of the
self-governing Colonies to the status of nationhood as an essential step
in the furtherance of Imperial unity. The word "nation," therefore, as
applied to Ireland, has lost some of its virtue as a deterrent to Home
Rule. Even the word "Colony" is becoming harmless; for every year that
has passed since 1893 has made it more abundantly clear that colonial
freedom means colonial friendship; and, after all, friendship is more
important than legal ties. In one remarkable case, that of the conquered
Dutch Republic in South Africa, a flood of searching light has been
thrown on the significance of those phrases "nation" and "Colony."
There, as in Ireland, and originally in Canada, "national" included
racial characteristics, and colonial autonomy signified national
autonomy in a more accurate sense than in Australia or Newfoundland. But
we know now that it does not signify either a racial tyranny within
those nations, or a racial antipathy to the Mother Country; but, on the
contrary, a reconciliation of races within and friendship without.
Would Mr. Chamberlain recast his argument now? Unhappily, we shall not
know. But it does seem to me that recent history and his own temperament
would force him to do so. As in his abandonment of Free Trade, it was a
strong and sincere Imperialist instinct that eventually transformed him
from the advocate of provincial Home Rule into the relentless enemy of
Home Rule in any shape. Take the Imperial argument, shaken to its
foundations by subsequent events, from the case he stated in 1893, and
what remains? Two pleas only--first, the abnormality of Irishmen;
second, Ireland's proximity to England. The first expresses the old
traditional view that Ireland is outside the pale of all human analogy;
the exception to all rules; her innate depravity and perversity such
that she would abuse power where others respect it, derive enmity where
others derive friendship, and willingly ruin herself by internal
dissension and extravagant ambitions in order, if possible, at the same
time to ruin England. Unconnected, however loosely, with the high
Imperial argument, I do not believe that this plea could have been used
with sincerity by Mr. Chamberlain even in 1893. He was a democrat,
devoted to the cause of enfranchising and trusting the people; and this
plea was, after all, only the same anti-democratic argument applied to
Ireland, and tipped with racial venom, which had been used for
generations by most Tories and many Whigs against any extension of
popular power. Lord Randolph Churchill, the Tory democrat, in his
dispassionate moments, always scouted it, resting his case against Home
Rule on different grounds. It was strange enough to see the argument
used by the Radical author of all the classic denunciations of class
ascendancy and the classic eulogies of the sense, forbearance and
generosity of free electorates. It was all the stranger in that Mr.
Chamberlain himself a few years before had committed himself to a scheme
of restricted self-government for Ireland, and in the debates on Mr.
Gladstone's first Home Rule Bill of 1886, when the condition of Ireland
was far worse than in 1893, had declared himself ready to give that
country a Constitution similar to that enjoyed by Quebec or Ontario
within the Dominion of Canada. But politics are politics. Under the
inexorable laws of the party game, politicians are advocates and swell
their indictments with every count which will bear the light. The system
works well enough in every case but one--the indictment of a
fellow-nation for incapacity to rule itself. There, both in Ireland and
everywhere else, as I shall show, it works incalculable mischief. Once
committed irrevocably to the opposition of Mr. Gladstone's Bills, Mr.
Chamberlain, standing on Imperial ground, which seemed to him and his
followers firm enough then, used his unrivalled debating powers to
traduce and exasperate the Irish people and their leaders by every
device in his power.
One other point survives in its integrity from the case made by Mr.
Chamberlain in 1893, and that is the argument about distance. Clearly
this is a quite distinct contention from the last; for distance from any
given point does not by itself radically alter human nature. Australians
are not twice as good or twice as bad as South Africans because they
are twice as far from the Mother Country. "Does anybody doubt"--let me
repeat his words--"that if Ireland were a thousand miles from England
she would not have been long before this a self-governing Colony?" The
whole tragedy of Ireland lies in that "if"; but the condition is,
without doubt, still unsatisfied. Ireland is still only sixty miles away
from the English shores, and the argument from proximity, for what it is
worth, is still plausible. To a vast number of minds it still seems
conclusive. Put the South African parallel to the average moderate
Unionist, half disposed to admit the force of this analogy, he would
nevertheless answer: "Ah, but Ireland is so near." Well, let us join
issue on the two grounds I have indicated--the ground of Irish
abnormality, and the ground of Ireland's proximity. It will be found, I
think, that neither contention is tenable by itself; that a supporter of
one unconsciously or consciously reinforces it by reference to the
other, and that to refute one is to refute both. It will be found, too,
that, apart from mechanical and unessential difficulties, the whole case
against Home Rule is included and summed up in these two contentions,
and that the mechanical problem itself will be greatly eased and
illuminated by their refutation.
II.
Those sixty miles of salt water which we know as the Irish Channel--if
only every Englishman could realize their tremendous significance in
Anglo-Irish history--what an ineffectual barrier "in the long result of
time" to colonization and conquest; what an impassable barrier--through
the ignorance and perversity of British statesmanship--to sympathy and
racial fusion!
For eight hundred years after the Christian era her distance from Europe
gave Ireland immunity from external shocks, and freedom to work out her
own destiny. She never, for good or ill, underwent Roman occupation or
Teutonic invasion. She was secure enough to construct and maintain
unimpaired a civilization of her own, warlike, prosperous, and
marvellously rich, for that age, in scholarship and culture. She
produced heroic warriors, peaceful merchants, and gentle scholars and
divines; poets, musicians, craftsmen, architects, theologians. She had a
passion for diffusing knowledge, and for more than a thousand years sent
her missionaries of piety, learning, art, and commerce, far and wide
over Europe. For two hundred years she resisted her first foreign
invaders, the Danes, with desperate tenacity, and seems to have absorbed
into her own civilization and polity those who ultimately retained a
footing on her eastern shores.
With the coming of the Anglo-Normans at the end of the twelfth century
the dark shadow begins to fall, and for the first time the Irish Channel
assumes its tragic significance. England, compounded of Britons,
Teutons, Danes, Scandinavians, Normans, with the indelible impress of
Rome upon the whole, had emerged, under Nature's mysterious alchemy, a
strong State. Ireland had preserved her Gaelic purity, her tribal
organization, her national culture, but at the cost of falling behind in
the march of political and military organization. Sixty miles divided
her from the nearest part of the outlying dominions of feudal England,
150 miles from the dynamic centre of English power. The degree of
distance seems to have been calculated with fatal exactitude, in
correspondence with the degrees of national vitality in the two
countries respectively, to produce for ages to come the worst possible
effects on both. The process was slow. Ireland was near enough to
attract the Anglo-Norman adventurers and colonists, but strong enough
and fair enough for three hundred years to transform them into patriots
"more Irish than the Irish"; always, however, too near and too weak,
even with their aid, to expel the direct representatives of English rule
from the foothold they had obtained on her shores, while at the same
time too far and too formidable to enable that rule to expand into the
complete conquest and subjugation of the realm.
"The English rule," says Mr. Lecky, "as a living reality, was confined
and concentrated within the limits of the Pale. The hostile power
planted in the heart of the nation destroyed all possibility of central
government, while it was itself incapable of fulfilling that function.
Like a spear-point embedded in a living body, it inflamed all around it
and deranged every vital function. It prevented the gradual reduction
of the island by some native Clovis, which would necessarily have taken
place if the Anglo-Normans had not arrived, and instead of that peaceful
and almost silent amalgamation of races, customs, laws, and languages,
which took place in England, and which is the source of many of the best
elements in English life and character, the two nations remained in
Ireland for centuries in hostility."
From this period dates that intense national antipathy felt by the
English for the Irish race which has darkened all subsequent history. It
was not originally a temperamental antipathy, or it would be impossible
to explain the powerful attraction of Irish character, manners, and laws
for the great bulk of the Anglo-Norman colonists. Nor within Ireland,
even after the Reformation, was it a religious antipathy between a
Protestant race and a race exclusively and immovably Catholic. It was in
origin a political antipathy between a small official minority, backed
by the support of a powerful Mother Country struggling for ascendancy
over a large native and naturalized majority, divided itself by tribal
feuds, but on the whole united in loathing and combating that
ascendancy. Universal experience, as I shall afterwards show, proves
that an enmity so engendered takes a more monstrous and degrading shape
than any other. Religion becomes its pretext. Ignorance makes it easy,
and interest makes it necessary, to represent the native race as savages
outside the pale of law and morals, against whom any violence and
treachery is justifiable. The legend grows and becomes a permanent
political axiom, distorting and abasing the character of those who act
on it and those who, suffering from it, and retaliating against its
consequences, construct their counter-legend of the inherent wickedness
of the dominant race. If left to themselves, white races, of diverse
nationalities, thrown together in one country, eventually coalesce, or
at least learn to live together peaceably. But if an external power too
remote to feel genuine responsibility for the welfare of the
inhabitants, while near enough to exert its military power on them,
takes sides in favour of the minority, and employs them as its permanent
and privileged garrison, the results are fatal to the peace and
prosperity of the country it seeks to dominate, and exceedingly
harmful, though in a degree less easy to gauge, to itself. So it was
with Ireland; and yet it cannot fail to strike any student of history
what an extraordinary resilience she showed again and again under any
transient phase of wise and tolerant government.
Such a phase occurred in the latter part of the reign of Henry VIII.,
when, after the defeat of the Geraldines, for the first time some
semblance of royal authority was established over the whole realm; and
when an effort was also made, not through theft or violence, but by
conciliatory statecraft, to replace the native Brehon system of law and
land tenure by English institutions, and to anglicize the Irish chiefs.
The process stopped abruptly and for ever with the accession of Mary, to
be replaced by the forcible confiscation of Irish land, and the
"planting" of English and Scotch settlers.
Ireland, for four hundred years the only British Colony, is now drawn
into the mighty stream of British colonial expansion. Adventurous and
ambitious Englishmen began to regard her fertile acres as Raleigh
regarded America, and, in point of time, the systematic and State-aided
colonization of Ireland is approximately contemporaneous with that of
America. It is true that until the first years of the sixteenth century
no permanent British settlement had been made in America, while in
Ireland the plantation of King's and Queen's Counties was begun as early
as 1556, and under Elizabeth further vast confiscations were carried out
in Munster within the same century. But from the reign of James I.
onward, the two processes advance _pari passu_. Virginia, first founded
by Raleigh in 1585, is firmly settled in 1607, just before the
confiscation of Ulster and its plantation by 30,000 Scots; and in 1620,
just after that huge measure of expropriation, the Pilgrim Fathers
landed in New Plymouth. Puritan Massachusetts--with its offshoots,
Connecticut, New Haven and Rhode Island--as well as Catholic Maryland,
were formally established between 1629 and 1638, and Maine in 1639, at a
period when the politically inspired proscription of the Catholic
religion, succeeding the robbery of the soil, was goading the unhappy
Irish to the rebellion of 1641. While that rebellion, with its fierce
excesses and pitiless reprisals, was convulsing Ireland, the united
Colonies of New England banded themselves together for mutual defence.
A few years later Cromwell, aiming, through massacre and rapine, at the
extermination of the Irish race, with the savage watchword "To Hell or
Connaught," planted Ulster, Munster, and Leinster with men of the same
stock, stamp, and ideas as the colonists of New England, and in the
first years of the Restoration Charles II. confirmed these
confiscations, at the same time that he granted Carolina to Lord
Clarendon, New Netherlands to the Duke of York, and New Jersey to Lord
Berkeley, and issued fresh Charters for Connecticut and Maryland.
Finally, Quaker Penn founded Pennsylvania in 1682, and in 1691 William
III., after the hopeless Jacobite insurrections in favour of the last of
the Stuarts, wrung the last million acres of good Irish land from the
old Catholic proprietors, planted them with Protestant Englishmen, and
completed the colonization of Ireland. Forty years passed (1733) before
Georgia, the last of the "Old Thirteen Colonies," was planted, as Ulster
had been planted, mainly by Scotch Presbyterians.
During the greater part of this period we must remember that conquered
Ireland herself was contributing to the colonization of America. Every
successive act of spoliation drove Catholic Irishmen across the Atlantic
as well as into Europe, and gave every Colony an infusion of Irish
blood. Until the beginning of the eighteenth century this class of
emigration was for the most part involuntary. Cromwell, for example,
shipped off thousands of families indiscriminately to the West Indies
and America for sale, as "servants" to the colonists. The only organized
and voluntary expedition in which Irish Catholics took part was that to
Maryland under Lord Baltimore. The distinction in course of time became
immaterial. In the free American air English, Scotch, and Irish became
one people, with a common political and social tradition.
It is interesting, and for a proper understanding of the Irish question,
indispensable, briefly to contrast the characteristics and progress of
the American and Irish settlements, and in doing so to observe the
profound effects of geographical position and political institutions on
human character. I shall afterwards ask the reader to include in the
comparison the later British Colonies formed in Canada and South Africa
by conquest, and in Australia by peaceful settlement.
Let us note, first, that both in America and Ireland the Colonies were
bi-racial, with this all-important distinction, that in America the
native race was coloured, savage, heathen, nomadic, incapable of fusion
with the whites, and, in relation to the almost illimitable territory
colonized, not numerous; while in Ireland the native race was white,
civilized, Christian, numerous, and confined within the limits of a
small island to which it was passionately attached by treasured national
traditions, and whose soil it cultivated under an ancient and revered
system of tribal tenure. The parallel, then, in this respect, is slight,
and becomes insignificant, except in regard to the similarity of the
mental attitude of the colonists towards Indians and Irish respectively.
In natural humanity the colonists of Ireland and the colonists of
America differed in no appreciable degree. They were the same men, with
the same inherent virtues and defects, acting according to the pressure
of environment. Danger, in proportionate degree, made both classes
brutal and perfidious; but in America, though there were moments of
sharp crisis, as in 1675 on the borders of Massachusetts, the degree was
comparatively small, and through the defeat and extrusion of the Indians
diminished steadily. In Ireland, because complete expulsion and
extermination were impossible, the degree was originally great, and,
long after it had actually disappeared, haunted the imagination and
distorted the policy of the invading nation.
In America there was no land question. Freeholds were plentiful for the
meanest settlers and the title was sound and indisputable. In the
"proprietary" Colonies, it is true, vast tracts of country were
originally vested by royal grants in a single nobleman or a group of
capitalists, just as vast estates were granted in Ireland to peers,
London companies, and syndicates of "undertakers"; but by the nature of
things, the extent of territory, its distance, and the absence of a
white subject race, no agrarian harm resulted in America, and a healthy
system of tenure, almost exclusively freehold, was naturally evolved.
In Ireland the land question was the whole question from the first. If
the natives had been exterminated, or their remnants wholly confined,
as Cromwell planned, to the barren lands of Connaught, all might have
been well for the conquerors. Or if Ireland had been, in Mr.
Chamberlain's phrase, a thousand miles away, all might have come right
under the compulsion of circumstances and the healing influence of time.
That the Celtic race still possessed its strong powers of assimilation
was shown by the almost complete denationalization and absorption of a
large number of Cromwell's soldier-colonists in the south and south-east
under what Mr. Lecky calls the "invincible Catholicism" of the Irish
women. But the Irish were not only numerous, but fatally near the seat
of Empire. The natives--Irish or Anglo-Irish--were still more than twice
as numerous as the colonists; they were scattered over the whole
country, barren or fertile, and that country was within a day's sail of
England. The titles of the colonists to the land rested on sheer
violence, sometimes aggravated by the grossest meanness and treachery,
and these titles were not recognized by the plundered race. Even with
their gradual recognition it would have been difficult to introduce the
English system of tenure, which was radically different and repellent to
the Irish mind. The bare idea of one man absolutely owning land and
transmitting it entire to his heirs was incomprehensible to them.
The solution for all these difficulties was unfortunately only too easy
and obvious. England was near, strong, and thoroughly imbued with the
policy of governing Ireland on the principle of antagonizing the races
within her. It was possible, therefore, by English help, under laws made
in England, to constitute the Irish outlaws from the land, labourers on
it, no doubt, that was an economic necessity, precarious occupiers of
plots just sufficient to support life; but, in the eyes of the law,
serfs. The planters of the southern American Colonies imported African
negroes for the same purpose, with irretrievably mischievous results to
their own descendants. Nor is it an exaggeration to compare the use made
of the Irish for a certain period to the use made of these negroes, for
great numbers of the Irish were actually exported as slaves to
Barbadoes, Jamaica, and even to Carolina.
The outlawed multitude in Ireland were deprived, not only of all rights
to the land, but, as a corollary, of all social privileges whatsoever.
"The law," said an Irish Lord Chancellor, "does not suppose any such
person to exist as an Irish Roman Catholic." The instrument of ostracism
was the famous Penal Code, begun in William's reign in direct and
immediate defiance of a solemn pledge given in the Treaty of Limerick,
guaranteeing liberty of conscience to the Catholics, and perfected in
the reign of Anne. This Code, ostensibly framed to extirpate
Catholicism, was primarily designed to confirm and perpetuate the
gigantic dislocation of property caused by the transference of Irish and
Anglo-Irish land into English and Scotch ownership. Since the rightful
owners were Catholic, and the wrongful owners Protestants, the laws
against the Catholic religion--a religion feared everywhere by
Englishmen at this period--were the simplest means of legalizing and
buttressing the new régime. I shall not linger over the details of the
Code. Burke's description of it remains classic and unquestioned: "A
complete system full of coherence and consistency, well digested and
composed in all its parts ... a machine of wise and elaborate
contrivance; and as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and
degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature
itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man."
The aim was to reduce the Catholics to poverty, ignorance, and
impotence, and the aim was successful. Of the laws against priests,
worship, education, and of the bars to commerce and the professions, I
need not speak. In the matter of property, the fundamental enactments
concerned the land, namely, that no Catholic could own land, or lease it
for more than thirty years, and even then on conditions which made
profitable tenure practically impossible. This law created and sustained
the serfdom I have described, and is the direct cause of the modern land
problem. It remained unaltered in the smallest respect for seventy
years, that is, until 1761, when a Catholic was permitted to lease for
sixty-one years as much as fifty acres of bog not less than four feet
deep. Long before this the distribution of landed property and the
system of land tenure had become stereotyped.
This system of tenure was one of the worst that ever existed on the face
of the globe. It has been matched in portions of India, but nowhere
else in this Empire save in little Prince Edward Island, where we shall
meet with it again. In Ireland, where it assumed its worst form, violent
conquest by a neighbouring power not only made it politic to outlaw the
old owners, but precluded the introduction of the traditional English
tenures, even into the relations between the British superior landlord
and the British occupying colonist. The bulk of the confiscated Irish
land, as I have mentioned, had been granted in fee to English noblemen,
gentlemen, or speculators, who planted it with middle or lower-class
tenants. A number of Cromwell's private soldiers settled in Leinster and
Munster, and, holding small farms in fee, formed an exception to this
rule. But the greater part of Ireland, in ownership, as distinguished
from occupation, consisted of big estates, and a large number of the
English owners, being only a day's sail from England, became, by natural
instinct, habitual absentees. Others lived in Dublin and neglected their
estates. Absenteeism, non-existent in America, assumed in Ireland the
proportions of an enormous economic evil. In England the landlord was,
and remains, a capitalist, providing a house and a fully equipped farm
to the tenant. In Ireland he was a rent receiver pure and simple,
unconnected with the occupier by any healthy bond, moral or economic.
The rent-receiving absentee involved a resident middleman, who
contracted to pay a stipulated rent to the absentee, and had to extract
that rent, plus a profit for himself, out of the occupiers, whether
Catholic serfs, Protestant tenants, or both, and usually did so by
subdivision of holdings and disproportionate elevation of rents. Over
three of the four Provinces of Ireland--for a small part of Ulster was
differently situated--the middleman himself frequently became an
absentee and farmed his agency to another middleman, who by further
subdivisions and extortions made an additional private profit, and who,
in his turn, would create a subsidiary agency, until the land in many
cases was "subset six deep."[5] The ultimate occupier and sole creator
of agricultural wealth lived perpetually on the verge of starvation,
beggared not only by extortionate rents, partly worked out in virtually
forced labour, but by extortionate tithes paid to the alien Anglican
Church, in addition to the scanty dues willingly contributed to the
hunted priests of his own prescribed religion. His resident upper
class--though we must allow for many honourable exceptions--was the
Squirearchy, satirized by Arthur Young as petty despots with the vices
of despots; idle, tyrannical, profligate, boorish, fit founders of the
worst social system the modern civilized world has ever known. The
slave-owning planters of Carolina were by no means devoid of similar
faults, which are the invariable products of arbitrary control over
human beings, but there the physiological gulf between the dominant and
subject race was too broad and deep to permit of substantial
deterioration in the former. In Ireland the ethnological difference was
small; the artificial cleavage and deterioration great in inverse
proportion.
For the greater part of a century, in every part of Ireland, tenancies
of land, whether held by Catholic or Protestant, by lease or at will,
were alike in certain fundamental characteristics. The tenant had
neither security of tenure nor right to the value of the improvements
which were invariably made by his own capital and labour. Even a
leaseholder, when his lease expired, had no prescriptive claim to
renewal, but must take his chance at a rent-auction with strangers, the
farm going to the highest bidder. If he lost, he was homeless and
penniless, while the fruits of his labour and capital passed into other
hands. The miserable Catholic cottier was, of course, in a similar case,
though relatively his hardship was less, since his condition, being the
lowest possible in all circumstances, could scarcely be worse.
Obviously, in a case where the landlord was neither the capitalist nor
the protector and friend of the tenant, the possession of those
elementary rights, security of tenure and compensation for improvements,
was the condition precedent to the growth of a sound agrarian system.
Their denial was incompatible with social order. Yet they were denied,
and for one hundred and eighty years an intermittent struggle to obtain
them by violence and criminal conspiracy degraded and retarded Ireland.
But a marked distinction grew up between a small portion of Ireland and
the rest. James I.'s plantation of Ulster had been far more drastic and
thorough than any operation of the kind before or since. Later
immigrants had flowed in, and at the beginning of the eighteenth
century in the north-eastern portion--the predominantly Protestant
Ulster of to-day--Scotch Protestant tenants, mainly Presbyterian, were
thickly settled, and formed an industrious community of strong and
tenacious temper. In the original leases granted by the concessionaires
in the seventeenth century, fixity of tenure was implied, and a nominal
rent levied, somewhat after the American model; but under the example of
other Provinces, and the economic pressure exerted by the growth in the
Catholic population, these privileges seem to have been almost wholly
obliterated. The absentee landlords, reckless of social welfare, exacted
the rack or competitive rent. As in the south and west, tithes to the
Established Church and oppressive and corrupt local taxation for roads
and other purposes, aggravated the discontent. For agrarian reasons
only--and there were others which I shall mention--many thousands of
Protestants left Ireland for ever. It required a long period of outrage
and conspiracy, attaining in 1770 the proportions of a small civil war,
and at the end of the century, by the anti-Catholic passions it
inspired, wrecking new hopes of racial unity, to establish what came to
be known as the Ulster Custom of Tenant Right. If Protestant freemen had
to resort to these demoralizing methods to obtain, and then only after
irreparable damage to Ireland, the first condition of social stability,
a tolerable land system, the effect of the agrarian system on Catholic
Ireland, prostrate under the Penal Code, may be easily imagined.
In addition to excessive subdivision of holdings and excessive tithes,
rents, and local burdens, another agrarian evil, unknown in the vast and
thinly populated tracts of America intensified the misery of the Irish
peasantry of the eighteenth century. This was the conversion of the best
land from tillage into pasture, with the resulting clearances and
migrations, and the ultimate congestion on the worst land. Lecky quotes
a contemporary pamphlet, which speaks of the "best arable land in the
kingdom in immense tracts wantonly enjoyed by the cattle of a few
individuals, and at the same time the junctions of our highways and
streets crowded with shoals of mendicant fellow-creatures." This change
from arable to pasture has been a common and often in the long run a
healthy, economic tendency in many countries, England and Scotland
included, though temporarily a fruitful source of misery. Under normal
conditions the immediate evils right themselves in course of time.
Nothing was normal in Ireland, and any breath of economic change in the
outside world reacted cruelly on the wretched subject class, which
produced, though it did not enjoy, the greater part of the wealth of the
kingdom. Under an accumulation of hardships famine was periodic, and
from 1760, when the first Whiteboys appeared, disorder in one degree or
another was chronic. The motive, it is universally agreed now, was
material, not religious. The Whiteboys of the south and west were the
counterparts of the Protestant Steelboys and Oakboys of the north, and
even in the south and west there were Protestant as well as Catholic
Whiteboys. Lord Charlemont, the Protestant Irish statesman, denying this
now well-ascertained fact, was nevertheless explicit enough about the
cause of the disorders. "The real causes," he said, "were ... exorbitant
rents, low wages, want of employment, farms of enormous extent let by
their rapacious and indolent proprietors to monopolizing land-jobbers,
by whom small portions of them were again let and relet to intermediate
oppressors, and by them subdivided for five times their value among the
wretched starvers upon potatoes and water; taxes yearly increasing, and
still more tithes, which the Catholic, without any possible benefit,
unwillingly pays in addition to his priest's money ... misery,
oppression, and famine."[6]
Agrarian crime, operating through an endless succession of secret
societies, Whiteboys and Rightboys in the eighteenth century; Terry
Alts, Rockites, Caravats, Ribbonmen, Moonlighters, in the nineteenth,
was rampant for nearly two centuries, long surviving the repeal of the
Penal Code; and its last echoes may be heard at this moment. In the
absence of all wholesome law, violence and terror were the only means of
self-defence. The remedy applied was retaliatory violence under forms of
law. Nothing whatsoever was done to remove the essential vices of
agrarian tenure during the eighteenth century; nothing tentative even
during the nineteenth century until the year 1870; nothing effective and
permanent until 1881, when, as far as humanly possible, it was sought
to give direct statutory expression to the Ulster Custom, with the
addition of the principle of a fair judicial rent. Englishmen should
realize this when they discuss Irish character. It is a very old story,
but nine out of ten Englishmen, when talking vaguely of Irish
discontent, disloyalty, and turbulence, forget, or have never learnt,
this and other fundamental facts. As for the Irish landlords, we must
remember that the founders of that class differed in no respect from
other English landlords, or from the aristocratic American
concessionaires, just as their compatriot tenants and lessees were
identical in stock with the American colonists. Their descendants and
successors have been the victims of circumstance. Each generation has
inherited the vested interests of the last, and it is not in human
nature to look far behind vested interests into the wrongful acts which
created them and the bad laws that perpetuate them. Doubly victimized
have been those resident landlords who at all periods, from the earliest
era of colonization, in spite of temptation and bad examples around
them, have acted towards their tenantry as humane and patriotic
citizens. A bad agrarian system infects the whole body politic. Good
landlords and contented tenants inevitably suffered with the rest.
In commerce and industry, as in land, the Irish Colony stood at a heavy
disadvantage by comparison with America. From the Restoration onward,
English statesmen took the same view of both dependencies, namely, that
their commercial interests should be wholly subordinate to those of the
Mother Country, and the same Department, the Board of Trade and
Plantations, made the fiscal regulations for Ireland and America. The
old idea that for trade purposes Ireland counted as an integral part of
the United Kingdom did not last longer than 1663. But it was not wholly
abrogated by the great Navigation Act of that year, which, though it
placed harsh restrictions on the Irish cattle trade with England, did
not expressly exclude Irish ships from the monopoly of the colonial
trade conferred upon English vessels, so that for seven years longer a
tolerably prosperous business was carried on direct between Ireland and
the American Colonies.[7] An Act of 1670, prohibiting, with a few
negligible exceptions, all direct imports from the Colonies into
Ireland, gave a heavy check to this business, arrested the growth of
Irish shipping, and, in conjunction with subsequent measures of
navigational, fiscal, and industrial repression, converted Ireland for a
century into a kind of trade helot. She was treated either as a foreign
country, as a Colony, or as something inferior to either, according to
the dictation of English interests, while possessing neither the
commercial independence of a foreign country nor the natural and
indefeasible immunity which distance, climate, variety of soil, and
unlimited room for expansion continued to confer, in spite of all
coercive restraints, upon the American Colonies. Though the British
trade monopoly was certainly a contributory cause in promoting the
American revolution, it was never, any more than the British claim to
tax, a severe practical grievance. The prohibition of the export of
manufactures, and the compulsory reciprocal exchange of colonial natural
products for British manufactured goods and the chartered merchandise of
the Orient, were not very onerous restrictions for young communities
settled in virgin soil; nor, with a few exceptions like raw wool, whose
export was forbidden, were the American natural products of a kind which
could compete with those of the Mother Country. The real damage
inflicted upon the Colonies by the mercantile system--one which its
modern defenders are apt to forget--was moral. To practise and condone
smuggling was habitual in America, and some of the English Governors set
the worst example of all by making a profit out of connivance at the
illicit traffic. "Graft" was their creation. The moral mischief done was
permanent, and it resembled in a lesser degree the mischief done in
Ireland both by bad agrarian and bad commercial laws. Ireland, owing to
her proximity, was in the unhappy position of being a competitor in the
great staples of trade, both raw and manufactured, and she was near
enough and weak enough to render it easy to stamp out this competition
so far as it was thought to be inimical to English interests. The cattle
and provision trade with England had been damaged as far back as 1663,
and was killed in 1666, though the export of provisions to foreign
countries survived, and became almost the sole source of Irish trade
during the eighteenth century. The policy with raw wool was to admit
just as much as would satisfy the English weavers without arousing the
determined opposition of the competitive English graziers. The Irish
manufactured wool trade, a flourishing business, for which Irishmen
showed exceptionally high aptitude, and which in the normal course of
things would probably have become her staple industry, was destroyed
altogether, avowedly in the interests of the English staple industry, by
prohibitory export duties imposed in 1698. Subsidiary
industries--cotton, glass, brewing, sugar-refining, sail-cloth, hempen
rope, and salt--were successively strangled. One manufacture alone, that
of linen, centred in the Protestant North, was spared, and for a short
period was even encouraged, not because it was a Protestant industry,
but because at first it aroused no trade jealousy in England, and was in
some respects serviceable to her. In 1708, when it was proposed to
extend the industry to Leinster, considerations of foreign trade
provoked an outburst of hostility, and harassing restrictions were
imposed on this industry also. On the whole, however, it suffered less
than the rest, and lived to become one of the two important
manufacturing industries of present-day Ireland.
English policy was as fatuous as it was cruel. Numbers of the Irish
manufacturers and artisans, both Catholic and Protestant, emigrated to
Europe, and devoted their skill and energy to strengthening industries
which competed with those of England. Within Ireland, since industry and
commerce formed the one outlet left by the Penal Code for Catholic
brains and capital--though even here the Code imposed harassing
disabilities--the commercial restrictions completed the ruin of the
proscribed sect. But at this period the main source of weakness to
Ireland, of strength to America, and of danger to the Empire as a whole,
was the Protestant emigration. Lecky estimates that 12,000 Protestant
families in Dublin and 30,000 in the rest of the country were ruined by
the suppression of the wool trade. The great majority of these
Protestants were Presbyterians belonging to North-East Ulster, and
descendants of the men who had defended that Province with such
desperate gallantry against the Irish insurgents under the deposed James
II. Political power in Ireland was wielded in the interests of a small
territorial and Episcopalian aristocracy, largely absentee. The
Dissenters belonged to the middle and lower classes, and were for the
most part tenants or artisans. Creed and caste antipathies were combined
against them. Their value as citizens was ignored. Though their right to
worship was legally recognized by an Act of 1719, they remained from
1704 to 1778 subject to the Test, were incapacitated for all public
employment, and were forbidden to open schools. Under an accumulation of
agrarian, economic, and religious disabilities, they naturally left
Ireland to find freedom in America. And it is beyond question that they
turned the scale against the British arms in the great War of
Independence.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] Class C. in Sir William Anson's classification, "Law and Custom of
the Constitution," p. 253.
[5] J. Fisher, "End of the Irish Parliament" cited.
[6] MS. Autobiography cited by Lecky, vol. ii., p. 35.
[7] The best modern account of the commercial relations of Great Britain
Mid Ireland is Miss Murray's "Commercial Relations between England and
Ireland."
CHAPTER II
REVOLUTION IN AMERICA AND IN IRELAND
In the Old World and in the New, therefore, two societies, composed of
human beings similar in all essential respects, were growing up under
the protection of the British Crown; the one servile, the other free;
the one stagnant where it was not retrograde, the other prosperous,
progressive, and, by the magnetism of its own freedom, progress, and
prosperity, steadily draining its Irish fellow of talent, energy, and
industrial skill.
What was the ultimate cause of this glaring divergency? Religion, as a
spiritual force, was not the root cause. The American Colonies, with
three exceptions--the earliest Virginia, the latest Georgia, and the
Catholic community of Maryland--were formed by Dissenters,[8] exiles
themselves from persecution, but not necessarily forbearing to others,
and, in the case of the New England Puritans, bitterly intolerant. It is
interesting to observe that the Quakers and the Catholics, men standing
at the opposite poles of theology, set the highest example of tolerance.
Quaker Pennsylvania enforced absolute liberty of conscience, and Quakers
in all the Provinces worked for religious harmony and freedom. Catholic
Maryland, as long as its government remained in Catholic hands, and
under the guidance of the wise and liberal Proprietary, Lord Baltimore,
pursued the same policy, and attracted members of sects persecuted in
New England.[9] The parallel with Ireland is significant. At the end of
the seventeenth century, when a quarrel was raging between the Crown and
Massachusetts over the persecution of Quakers in that Colony, and for a
further period in the eighteenth century, Quaker missionaries and
settlers were conducting a campaign of revivalism in Ireland with no
molestation from the Catholics, though with intermittent obstruction
from magistrates and Protestant clergy. Wesleyans received the same
sympathetic treatment.[10] The tolerance shown by Irish Catholics, in
spite of terrible provocation, is acknowledged by all reputable
historians. Nor was Protestant intolerance, whether Anglican or
Nonconformist, of a deeper dogmatic shade than anywhere else in the
King's dominions. But in Ireland it was political, economic, and social,
while in America it was purely theological, and, moreover, purely
American. The Episcopalian ascendancy in Ireland represented foreign
interests, and therefore struck against Dissent as well as against
Popery, and estranged both. The root of the American trouble, leading to
the separation of the Colonies, was political and wholly unconnected
with religion. The root of the Irish trouble, adventitiously connected
with religion, lay, and lies still, in the Irish political system. Other
evils were transient and curable; this was permanent. The Penal Code was
eventually relaxed; the disabilities of the Dissenters were eventually
removed; the commercial servitude was abolished, but the political
system _in essentials_ has never been changed. Let us see what it was
and how it worked at the period we are considering, again by comparison
with America.
Though the word "plantation" was applied alike to the colonization of
Ireland and America, Ireland was never called a Colony, but a Kingdom.
The distinction was not scientific, and operated, like all other
distinctions, to the injury of Ireland. Neither country was represented
in the British Parliament. In both countries the representatives of the
Crown were appointed by England, and controlled, in America almost
completely, in Ireland absolutely, the Executive and Judges. In Ireland
the Viceroy was always an Englishman; in America, the Governors of a few
of the non-proprietary Colonies were colonials, but most Governors were
English, and some of the proprietary class were absentees.[11] In the
case both of Ireland and America the English Government claimed a
superior right of control over legislation and taxation, and in both
cases it was found necessary to remove all doubts as to this right by
passing Declaratory Acts, for Ireland in 1719, for America in 1766. The
great difference lay in the Legislature, and was the result of different
degrees of remoteness from the seat of power. America was profoundly
democratic from the beginning, outpacing the Mother Country by fully two
centuries. There was no aristocracy, and in most Colonies little
distinction between upper and middle classes. The popular Assemblies,
elected on the broadest possible franchise, were truly representative.
Some of the Legislative Councils, or Upper Chambers, were elective also.
Most of them, although nominated, and therefore inclined to be hostile
to the popular body, were nevertheless of identical social composition;
so that there was often an official, but never a caste, ascendancy. From
very early times there was occasional friction between the Home
Government, represented by the Governors, and the colonial democracies,
over such matters as taxation, official salaries, quartering of troops,
and navigation laws. Writs of _quo warranto_ were issued against
Connecticut, Carolina, New York, and Maryland, in the latter part of the
seventeenth century, and the Charter of Massachusetts, after long
wrangles with the Crown, was forfeited in 1684, and not restored until
1692, after a period of despotic government under Sir Edmund Andros. But
for a century or more the system worked well enough upon the whole.
Under the powerful lever of the representative Assembly, neutralized by
the ever-present need for military protection from the Mother Country,
and with the wholesome check to undue coercion set by the broad
Atlantic, civic freedom grew and flourished to a degree unknown in any
other part of the civilized world.
In Ireland civic freedom was unknown. There was no popular Assembly. A
wealthy aristocracy of English extraction and of Anglican faith, partly
resident, partly absentee, and wholly subservient to the English
Government, constituted the Upper House of that strange institution
known as Parliament, and to a great extent nominated and controlled the
Lower House through means frankly corrupt. Representation was almost
nominal; close pocket-boroughs predominated, and seats were bought and
sold in the open market. In the year 1790 more than a third of the
Members of the House of Commons were placemen, 216 Members out of 300
were elected by boroughs and manors, and, of these, 176 were elected by
individual patrons. Fifty-three of these patrons, nominating 123
Members, sat as Peers in the Upper House. Cash, places, and peerages,
were the usual considerations paid for maintaining a Government
majority. The Catholics, from three-quarters to five-sixths of the
population, had neither votes nor members; the Dissenters scarcely any
members and an almost powerless vote. The Irish Legislature, by an Act
as old as 1495, the famous Poynings' Law, could neither initiate nor
pass a measure without the consent of the English Privy Council, and the
Declaratory Act of 1719 confirmed the power of making English Acts
applicable to Ireland. Government in England itself was, no doubt,
unrepresentative and corrupt at that period, and the people paid the
penalty in full; but it was a national government, under the aegis of
the national faith, and resting, however remotely, on the ultimate
sanction of the people, just as American opinion, more democratically
ascertained, continued to control the major part of American affairs. In
Ireland the Government was systematically anti-Irish. There was no
career for Irishmen in Ireland. Both Catholics and Dissenters were
excluded from all civil and military offices; the highest posts were
generally given to Englishmen born and bred, and the country,
Episcopalian only to a fractional extent, was ruled by a narrow
Episcopalian oligarchy of wealthy landowners and prelates, who bartered
Irish freedom for the place and power of their own families and
dependents. The conditions of this sordid exchange were the ground of
the first important Anglo-Irish political struggle in the eighteenth
century, when the English Viceroy, Townshend, succeeded in 1770-71, at
the cost of half a million, in transferring the bribing power, and
therefore the controlling power, from the "Undertakers," as they were
known, direct to the Crown.
There seems to have been no continuous English policy beyond that of
making Ireland completely subservient to English interests and purposes,
and often to purposes of the most humiliating and degrading kind. The
Irish Pension List has earned immortal infamy. Jobs too scandalous to
pass muster in England were systematically foisted upon the Irish
establishment. Royal mistresses, a host of needy Germans, a Danish Queen
banished for adultery, lived in England or abroad upon incomes drawn
from the impoverished Irish Exchequer. Nor was it only a question of
pensions. Quantities of valuable sinecure offices were habitually given
to Englishmen who never came near the shores of Ireland. In short, the
English policy towards Ireland was similar to Spain's policy towards her
South American Colonies, minus the grosser forms of physical cruelty and
oppression. Yet Ireland, like the American Colonies until the verge of
the revolutionary struggle, was consistently loyal to the Crown both in
peace and war. The loyalty of Catholic Ireland, poverty-stricken,
inarticulate, almost leaderless, and shamefully misgoverned, does not,
from the human standpoint, appear worthy of admiration, but it was a
fact. The few Catholic noblemen outdid the Protestants in expressions of
devotion; the Whiteboy risings were as little disloyal as religious. Not
a hand stirred for James or his heirs when Jacobite plots and risings
were causing grave public danger in England and Scotland. Catholic Lord
Trimleston offered exclusively Catholic regiments with Catholic officers
to George III. for foreign service in 1762, though they were vetoed by
what his Viceroy Halifax called the "ill-bred bigotry" of the Irish
Parliament. Nor was it till thirty years after that date that Protestant
discontent, under intolerable provocation, assumed an anti-dynastic and
Republican form. To compare the Imperial spirit displayed by America and
Ireland in their views and action is difficult, partly because the
various American Colonies differed widely, partly because there existed
in Ireland no organ of government which could express popular feeling.
Neither country, of course, paid any cash contribution to Imperial
expenses, though both could fairly claim that the English monopoly of
trade imposed an indirect tribute of indefinite size, while Ireland, in
pensions, rents to absentees, and sinecure appointments, was drained of
many millions more. American patronage was an element of substantial
value to England, but it was not on the Irish scale. America on the
whole, perhaps, showed less patriotic feeling than Ireland. With full
allowance for the lack of sympathy and understanding shown by the
British regulars to the American volunteers in their co-operation in the
French wars, it can scarcely be denied that the colonists, together with
much heroism and public spirit, showed occasional slackness and
parsimony in resisting the penetration of a foreign Power which
threatened to hem in their settlements from the St. Lawrence to the
mouth of the Mississippi. Ireland during the Seven Years' War, and until
the Peace of Paris in 1763, maintained a war establishment of 24,000
troops. She maintained a peace establishment of 12,000 troops, and from
1767 onwards of 15,000 troops. There never seems to have been a whisper
of protest from the Catholic population against these measures, nor,
except in the matter of the American War, to which we shall come
presently, from the Protestants. It may be added that, after 1767,
Catholics in considerable numbers were surreptitiously enlisted in the
ranks, in spite of the Penal Code, and from then until the present day
have fought for the Flag as staunchly as any other class of the King's
subjects.
It never occurred to responsible English statesmen that here was ground,
firm as a rock in America, and firm enough in Ireland, on which, if only
they obeyed the instincts and maxims upon which England herself had
risen to greatness, they might build a mighty and durable Imperial
structure. That loyalty, to be genuine and lasting, must spring from
liberty was a truth they did not appreciate, and to this truth,
strangely enough, in spite of the lessons of nearly a century and a
half, a numerous school of English statesmen is still blind. It was no
doubt a fatality that the smouldering discontent both of America and
Ireland burst into flame in the reign of a monarch who endeavoured, even
within the limits of Britain, to regain the arbitrary power which had
cost their throne to the Stuarts; it was an additional fatality that the
standard of public morals among the class through which he ruled during
the period of crisis had fallen to lower depths than ever before or
since. Even incorruptible men were either weak and selfish or subject to
some cardinal defect of temper or intellect which, at times of crisis,
neutralized their genius. Chatham and Burke were the noblest figures of
the time, yet Chatham, in his highest mood a nobler and truer champion
of American liberty than Burke, was Minister--nominally, at any
rate--when the Revenue Duties imposed upon the American Colonies in 1867
destroyed in a moment the reconciliation brought about by the repeal of
the Stamp Act. Burke was surely false to his political philosophy in
founding his American argument on expedience rather than on principle.
Chatham was a thorough democrat, trusting the people, poor or rich, rude
or cultured, common or noble, American or British. Burke, at a time when
the reflection of the genuine opinion of the nation in a pure and free
Parliament might have saved us, as his splendid orations could not save
us, from a disastrous war, scouted Parliamentary reform, and took his
unconscious share in playing the game of the most narrow coercionist
Tories like Charles Townshend and George III.
Of the interminable chain of fatalities which sicken the mind in
following every phase of Ireland's history, Burke's rigid temperamental
conservatism always seems to me the most fatal and the most melancholy.
It is not that he, the greatest intellect Ireland has ever produced,
made his career in England. By the time one reaches the period in which
he lived one gets used to the expatriation of Irish brains and vigour,
not only to England and America, but to Spain, France, Russia, and
Germany. It is that his intellect was so constituted as in the long run
to be useless, and on some occasions absolutely harmful, to Ireland,
sincerely as he loved her, and often as he supported measures for her
temporary benefit, and rejoiced in their temporary success. An incident
occurred in 1773 which tested his worth to Ireland, and incidentally
threw into strong light English views of Ireland and America at the
period immediately preceding the revolutionary epoch. The Irish
Government, not with any high social aim, but in desperation at the
growing Treasury deficit, proposed a tax upon the rents of absentee
landlords, and the fate of the measure, like all Irish measures, had to
be decided in the first instance in England. North's Tory Ministry
actually consented to it. Chatham, far from the active world, and too
broken in health to influence policy either way, wrote a powerful plea
for it; but a strong group of Whig magnates, themselves wealthy absentee
proprietors of Irish land, signed a vehement remonstrance which carried
the day against it, and the author of this remonstrance, of all men in
the world, was the Irishman Burke, who, owning not an acre of Irish land
himself, devoted all his transcendent talents, all the subtlety and
variety of his reasoning, to clothing the selfish greed of others with
the garb of an enlightened patriotism.
He was wrong fundamentally about Ireland, and only superficially right
about America. In the terms of this celebrated remonstrance, as
illuminated by his own private correspondence, his consistency is
revealed. By the very nature of things, he maintained, the central
Parliament of a great heterogeneous Empire must exercise a supreme
superintending power and regulate the polity and economy of the several
parts as they relate to one another, a principle which, of course, would
have justified the taxation of America, and which, save on the ground of
expediency alone, he would certainly have applied to America. The
proximity of Ireland helped his logic, and surely logic was never
distorted to stranger ends. The "ordinary residence" of the threatened
Irish landowners was in England, "to which country they were attached,
not only by the ties of birth and early habit, but also by those of
indisputable public duties," as though these facts did not constitute in
themselves a damning satire on the system of Irish Government. They were
to be "fined" for living in England, as though that fine were not the
most just and politic which could be conceived, if it went even an inch
towards establishing the principle that Ireland's affairs were the
business of responsible resident Irishmen, or towards the further
principle, enshrined in Drummond's celebrated phrase of seventy years
later in regard to the agrarian system which these Whig noblemen shared
in founding, that "property has its duties as well as its rights."
Finally, argued Burke, heaping irony upon irony, the tax would lead
directly to the "separation" of the two Kingdoms both in interest and
affection. The Colonies would follow the Irish example, and thus a
principle of disunion and separation would pervade the whole Empire; the
bonds of common interest, knowledge, and sympathy which now knit it
together would everywhere be loosened, and a narrow, insulated, local
feeling and policy would be proportionately increased.[12] Such was
Burke's Imperialism, as evoked by an Irish measure which struck at the
root of a frightful social evil and of a vicious political system. But
the idea expressed by Burke--the spirit of his whole argument--went far
beyond this particular absentee tax or any similar tax proposed, as
happened in one instance, by a Colony. It was the superbly grandiose
expression, and all the more insidiously seductive in that it was so
grandiose, of a principle which all thinking men now know, or ought to
know, is the negation of Empire, which lost us America, which came
within an ace of losing us Canada, which might well have lost us South
Africa, and which has in very fact lost us, though not yet irrevocably,
the "affection," to use Burke's word, of Ireland. We may call local
patriotism "narrow and insulated," if we please, but we recognize now,
in every case save that of Ireland, that it is the only foundation for,
and the only stimulant to, Imperial patriotism.
Chatham, an Englishman of the English, was nevertheless a better
Irishman than Burke, and therefore a better Imperialist. "The tax," he
wrote, "was founded on strong Irish policy. England, it is evident,
profits by draining Ireland of the vast incomes spent here from that
country. But I could not, as a Peer of England, advise the King, on
principles of indirect, accidental English policy, to reject a tax on
absentees sent over here as the genuine desire of the Commons of Ireland
acting in their proper and peculiar sphere, and exercising their
inherent exclusive right by raising supplies in the manner they judge
best." Chatham, in short, applied precisely the same argument to Ireland
as, in his memorable speeches of the next year (1774), he applied to
America, and in both cases he was right. The only mistake he made was in
his estimate of that travesty of a representative assembly, the Irish
House of Commons, which, at the secret instigation of the Viceroy,
though without actual coercion, eventually threw out a tax so
distasteful to its English patrons. But the argument for financial
independence remained unassailable, and eventually the Irish Parliament
itself summoned up the courage to adopt and act upon it.
It may seem almost impossible that in a body so corrupt and exclusive a
national sentiment should have arisen. But every elective assembly,
however badly constituted, contains the seeds of its own regeneration,
and, under even moderately favourable circumstances, moves irresistibly
towards freedom. The pity was that circumstances, save for one brief and
invigorating interlude, were persistently unfavourable to Ireland. The
task was enormous, demanding infinitely more self-sacrifice than even
the ablest and most prescient of her Parliamentarians realized. Until it
was too late, in fact, they never awoke to the true nature of the task,
dazzled by illusory victories. Rotten to the core as the Irish
Parliament was, they sought, strengthened by popular influences, to make
it the instrument for freeing Ireland from a paralyzing servitude; and
up to a point they succeeded, but they did not see that the only
security for real and permanent success was to reform the Parliament
itself. There the inveterate spirit of creed and class ascendancy,
resting in the last resort on English military power, survived long
enough to nullify their efforts.
The American Revolution and the Irish revolutionary renaissance--the one
achieved by a long and bitter war, the other without
bloodshed--originated and culminated together, were derived from the
same sources, and ran their course in close connection. In Ireland the
movement was exclusively Protestant, in America unsectarian; but in both
cases finance was the lever of emancipation. America, resenting the
commercial restrictions imposed by the Mother Country, but not, until
passion had obscured all landmarks, contesting their abstract justice,
and suffering no great material harm from their incidence, fought for
the principle of self-taxation--a principle which did, of course,
logically include, as the Americans instinctively felt, that of
commercial freedom. Ireland, harassed by commercial restrictions far
more onerous, naturally regarded their abolition as vital, and the
control of internal taxation as subsidiary. Apart from concrete
grievances, both countries had to fear an unlimited extension of British
claims founded on the all-embracing Declaratory Acts of 1719 and 1766.
Unfortunately for herself, Ireland for seventy years or more had been
steadily supplying America with the human elements of resistance in
their most energetic and independent form, and robbing herself
proportionately Approximately, how many Protestants belonging mainly to
Ulster, whether through eviction from the land, industrial unemployment,
or disgust at social and political ostracism, left Ireland for America
in the course of the eighteenth century, it is impossible to say; but
the number, both relatively to population and relatively to the total
emigration, Catholic and Protestant, to all parts of the world, was
undoubtedly very large. Mr. Egerton, in his "Origin and Growth of the
English Colonies," reckons that in 1775 a sixth part of the thirteen
insurrectionary Colonies was composed of Scots-Irish exiles from Ulster,
and that half the Protestant population of that Province emigrated to
those Colonies between 1730 and 1770. As the crisis approached,
emigration became an exodus. Thirty thousand of the farming class are
said to have been driven west by the wholesale evictions of the early
seventies, and ten thousand weavers followed them during the disastrous
depression in the linen trade caused by interruption of commerce with
America. The majority went to the northern Colonies, especially
Pennsylvania, took from the first a vehement stand against the Royal
claims, and supplied some of Washington's best soldiers. A minority went
to the backwoods of Virginia, Maryland, and Carolina, and were little
heard of until as late in the war as 1780, when Tarleton began his
anti-guerilla campaign in the South. Then they woke up, and became, like
their compatriots of the North, formidable and implacable foes.
Ireland and America, therefore, embarked on their struggle with the
English Parliament in close sympathy. The treatise of Molyneux on Irish
liberty was read with wide approval in America. Franklin visited and
encouraged the Irish patriots, and the Americans in 1775 issued a
special address to them, asserting an identity of interest. Chatham, on
the eve of war, dwelt strongly in the House of Lords upon the same
identity of interest, and in doing so expressly coupled together Irish
Catholics and Protestants.
Although united by interest and sentiment, Ireland and America entered
on the struggle under widely varying conditions. The American Colonies
were thirteen separate units, with only a rude organization for common
action, and in each of these units there existed a cleavage of opinion,
based neither on class nor creed, between rebels and loyalists. In spite
of this weakness, the revolt was thoroughly national in the sense that
it was organized and maintained through the State Assemblies, resting on
a broad popular franchise. In Ireland, unbought and unofficial opinion
was united against England. On the other hand, there was no national
Legislature; only an enslaved and unrepresentative Legislature, tempered
by a band of exceptionally brilliant and upright men, and continually
thrust forward in spite of itself into bold and independent action by
unconstitutional pressure from the unrepresented elements outside.
Success so won, as we shall see, was delusive.
We may note two important additional circumstances: first, the dense
mist of ignorance in which, and largely in consequence of which, England
began her quarrel both with America and Ireland. The average Englishman
was probably even more ignorant of Ireland, which was sixty miles away,
than of America, which was three thousand miles away. I am not at all
sure that that fact is not true still. At any rate, it was true then.
Yet knowledge of Ireland was more necessary, because her condition was
bad in ways unknown in America. In all the essentials of material
well-being, America was supremely fortunate, while Ireland was in the
depths of misery. It is not that this misery went undescribed or
unlamented, or that it was not realized by a small number of Englishmen.
Some of the most famous writings of the time, from the mordant satire of
Swift to the learned and elaborate diagnosis of Arthur Young, laid bare
the hideous ravages wrought by misrule in Ireland; but they had little
or no effect upon English statesmen, and were unread by the only classes
from which, if they had had knowledge, proper practical sympathy might
have come. Until Townshend's Viceroyalty (1767-1772) most of the Irish
Viceroys were absentees for the greater part of their term of office,
leaving the conduct of Irish affairs to English Bishops and Judges, the
wisest and most humane of whom could make little or no impression on
English official indifference. American Governors were at any rate
resident, or mainly resident, and a few were good and popular
administrators, though the information which most of them supplied to
the Home Government showed a blindness to what was going on under their
very eyes which would be incomprehensible if we did not know by
experience that it is the invariable result of irresponsible rule over
white men, whether at home or abroad. If, without the presence of race
distinctions, it needed Parliamentary reform in England itself to force
the ruling class to study with real sympathy the needs, character, and
desires of their own people, naturally the same ruling class, sending
out its own members or dependents to America, obtained the most
grotesquely distorted notions of what Americans were and what they
wanted or resented. "Their office," wrote Franklin of the Governors,[13]
"makes them indolent, their indolence makes them odious, and, being
conscious that they are hated, they become malicious. Their malice urges
them to continual abuse of the inhabitants in their letters to
Administration, representing them as disaffected and rebellious, and (to
encourage the use of severity) as weak, divided, timid, and cowardly.
Government believes all, thinks it necessary to support and countenance
its officers," etc. The same spirit pervades the official correspondence
of even the best Irish Viceroys of the eighteenth century, and
ultimately had a far more disastrous effect in that there were at all
times in Ireland ancient elements of social dissension which needed only
skilful fomentation by her English rulers to ruin all hopes of
reconciliation and unity. That phase was to come after the first Irish
victories. For the present the system--for it can scarcely be called a
policy--was to irritate all Irishmen and all Americans alike,
irrespective of creed, class, or sentiment, and thus to create on each
side of the Atlantic that dangerous phenomenon, an united people.
The other noticeable point, admirably described by Mr. Holland in his
"Imperium et Libertas," is the confusion of political ideas in regard to
the status of white dependencies--a confusion greatly augmented by
loose and misleading analogies with India and the tropical Colonies.
Even a genius like Burke, as I have already pointed out, was misled.
Chatham came nearest to the truth, but, naturally, the actual outbreak
of war with America checked his political thinking, and threw him back
on the bare doctrine of supremacy, right or wrong. It was not fully
understood that there must be a radical difference between the
government of places settled and populated by white colonists and of
places merely exploited by white traders. All the prerogatives of the
Crown and Parliament were theoretically valid over both classes of
dependency, and to abandon any of them seemed to most men of that day to
be inconsistent with Imperial supremacy. Honest and fair-minded
politicians and thinkers tried in vain to reconcile local freedom with
Imperial unity. We have the key now, though we have made no use of it in
Ireland; but most of our forefathers not only had no glimmering of the
truth when the fratricidal war began, but learnt nothing from the war
itself, and remained unenlightened for sixty years more. If the
renunciation in 1778 of the right to tax the Colonies, and the
negotiations founded thereon, had led to a peace, it is quite certain
that friction would have subsequently arisen on other points. The idea
of what we now know as "responsible government" was unknown. Short of
coercive war, there seemed to be only two altogether logical
alternatives--complete separation and legislative Union. America
obtained the one, Ireland was eventually to undergo the other; but it is
interesting to remember that suggestions, rejected by Franklin as
useless, were made for the representation of the American Colonies in
the English Parliament, just as suggestions for a legislative Union
between Ireland and England appeared intermittently all through the
eighteenth century, long before such a Union was a question of practical
politics.
I need only briefly summarize the incidents which ended in the year 1782
with the final loss of the American Colonies, and the simultaneous
achievement by Ireland of an apparent legislative independence. To take
America first, the Stamp Act was passed in 1765, and, thanks to the
tumult it created, repealed by the Whigs in 1766, though the Declaratory
Act which accompanied the repeal neutralized its good results. The new
Revenue Duties on glass, paper, painters' colours, and tea were imposed
in 1767, reviving the old irritation, and all but that on tea were
removed, after a period of growing friction, in 1770. Another
comparative lull was succeeded by fresh disorder when in 1773 the East
India Company was permitted to send tea direct to America, and Boston
celebrated its historic "tea-party." The coercion of Massachusetts
followed, with Gage as despotic Military Governor, and, as a result, all
the Colonies were galvanized into unity. In September, 1774, the
Continental Congress met, framed a Declaration of Rights, and obtained a
general agreement to cease from all commerce with Britain until
grievances were redressed. Fresh coercion having been applied, war broke
out in 1775. The Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776,
by John Hancock, President of Congress and the descendant of an Ulster
exile, and was first read aloud in Philadelphia by Captain John Nixon,
the son of an evicted Wexford farmer. Another Irishman, General
Montgomery, led the invasion of Canada.[14] The war, with manifold
vicissitudes, dragged on for eight years; but the surrender of
Cornwallis at Yorktown on October 19, 1781, virtually ended the physical
struggle, while the resolution of the House of Commons on February 27,
1782, against the further prosecution of hostilities, ended the contest
of principle.
The turning-point had been the intervention of the French in 1778, and
the same event was to turn the scale in Ireland. There, for many years
past, the public finances had been sinking into a more and more
scandalous condition. Taxation was by no means heavy, but pensions and
sinecures multiplied, and the debt swelled. Inevitably there grew up
within Parliament a small independent opposition which would not be
bribed into conniving at the ruin of Ireland, while even bought placemen
were stung into throwing their votes into the Irish rather than the
English scale. Frequent efforts were made to use the insufficiency of
the hereditary revenue as a lever for gaining control of finance and for
obtaining domestic reform. An Octennial Act, passed in 1768, went a
little way towards transforming Parliament from a permanent privileged
Committee, under the control of the Executive, into the semblance at
least of a free Assembly, and the first dissolution under this Act, in
1776, produced the famous Parliament which, though elected on the same
narrow and corrupt basis as before, in the space of six years first
admitted the principle of toleration for all creeds, and wrested from
English hands commercial and legislative autonomy. It came too late to
avert--if, indeed, it could ever have averted--the implication of
Ireland in the American War, its predecessor of 1775 having, in defiance
of Irish opinion, subscribed an Address to the Crown, expressing
"abhorrence" of the American revolt and "inviolable attachment to the
just rights" of the King's Government, and having obediently voted four
thousand Irish troops for the war.
Nor, for all the impassioned eloquence of Grattan and Hussey Burgh, did
the real driving-power of the new Parliament come from within its own
ranks, but from the unrepresented multitude outside. A clause removing
the test from Dissenters was struck out of the Catholic Relief Act of
1778, mainly owing to dictation from England, but partly from resentment
against Presbyterian sympathy with the American cause. It was only in
1780, when the Presbyterians were enrolled in that formidable
revolutionary organization known as the Volunteers, that a test which
had excluded them from all share in the government of their adopted
country for seventy-four years was repealed. As for the Catholics, the
small measure of legal relief granted to them excited no opposition
anywhere. Parts of the Penal Code, especially the laws against worship
and the clergy, had become inoperative with time and the sheer
impossibility of enforcement. The religion, naturally, had thriven under
persecution, so that in spite of the Code's manifold temptations to
recant, only four thousand converts had been registered in the last
fifty years. The laws designed to safeguard the wholesale confiscations
of the previous century had long ago achieved their purpose, and men
were beginning to perceive the fatal economic effects of keeping the
great mass of the people poor and ignorant. The real spirit of
toleration shown in the enactments of 1778, the most important of which
enabled Catholics to obtain land on a lease of 999 years, was small
enough if we consider the quiescence of the Catholics for generations
past, the absence of all tendency in them towards counter-persecution,
or even towards intolerance of Protestantism in any of its forms,
Quaker, Huguenot, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, or Methodist, in spite of
their own overwhelming numbers and of the burning grievance of the
tithes. Politically they were a source of great strength to the
Government. When the Presbyterians condemned the American War, the
Catholic leaders memorialized the Government in favour of it as warmly
as the tame majority in Parliament.
Conservatives by religion, their devotion to authority annulled all
instincts of revenge for the hideous wrongs of the past. The Government,
now on the verge of a war with the two great Catholic Powers of Europe,
began to realize this, and to feel the wisdom of some degree of
conciliation. After all, only four years before they had not merely
tolerated, but established, the Catholic Church in the conquered
province of Quebec, with the result that the French Canadians remained
loyal during the American War. But neither the Government nor the finest
independent men in Parliament--not even Grattan--entertained the
remotest idea of admitting Irish Catholics to any really effective share
in the Government which their loyalty made stable. That noble but
hopeless conception originated later, as the dynamic impulse for
commercial freedom and legislative independence was originating now,
outside the walls of Parliament.
The rupture with France in 1778 denuded Ireland of troops, and called
into being the Protestant Volunteers; a disciplined, armed body, headed
by leaders as weighty and respectable as Lord Charlemont. This body,
formed originally for home defence, by a natural and legitimate
transition assumed a political aspect, and demanded from a dismayed and
terrorized Government commercial freedom for Ireland. For once in her
life Ireland was too strong to be coerced. Punishment like that applied
to Massachusetts was physically impossible. The bitter protests of
English merchants passed unheeded, and the fiscal claims of the
Volunteers, with their cannon labelled "Free Trade or this," were
granted in full early in 1780. The moral was to persist. From 40,000 the
numbers of the Volunteers rose in the two succeeding years to 80,000,
and they stood firm for further concessions. The national movement grew
like a river in spate; it swept forward the lethargic Catholics and
engulfed Parliament. In a tempest of enthusiasm Grattan's Declaration of
Independence was carried unanimously in the Irish House of Commons on
April 16, 1782, and a month later received legal confirmation in England
at the hands of the same Whig Government and Parliament which broke off
hostilities with America, and in the same session.
America took her own road and worked out her own magnificent destiny.
Most of us now honour Washington and the citizen troops he led. We say
they fought, as Hampden and their English forefathers fought, for a
sublime ideal, freedom, and that they were chips of the old block. But
let not distance delude us into supposing that they were without the
full measure of human weakness, or that they did not suffer
considerable, perhaps permanent, harm from the ten years of smothered
revolt and lawless agitation, followed by the seven years of open war
which preceded their victory. Washington's genius carried them safely
through the ordeal of the war, and the still more exacting ordeal of
political reconstruction after the war, but it is well known how nearly
he and his staunchest supporters failed. The Revolution, like all
revolutions, brought out all the bad as well as all the good in human
nature. Bad laws always deteriorate a people; they breed a contempt for
law which coercion only aggravates, and which survives the establishment
of good laws. As I have already indicated, the dislike and the
systematic evasion by smuggling of the trade laws during the long period
when the revolt was incubating harmed American character, and probably
sowed the seed of future corruption and dissension. However true that
may be, it is certainly true that the American rebels showed no more
heroism or self-sacrifice than the average Englishman or Irishman in any
other part of the world might have been expected to show under similar
conditions. Historians and politicians, to whom legal authority always
seems sacrosanct and agitation against it a popular vice, who mistake
cause and effect so far as to derive freedom from character, instead of
character from freedom, can make, and have made, the conventional case
against Home Rule for the Americans as plausibly as the same case has,
at various times, been made against Home Rule for Canada, South Africa,
and Ireland. Since all white men are fundamentally alike in their
faults as well as in their virtues, there is always abundant material
for an indictment on the ground of bad character. The Americans of the
revolutionary war, together with much fortitude, integrity, and public
spirit, showed without doubt a good deal of levity, self-seeking,
vindictiveness, and incompetence; and whoever chooses to amass, magnify,
and isolate evidences of their guilt can demonstrate their unfitness for
self-government just as well as he can demonstrate the same proposition
in the case of Ireland. Mr. J.W. Fortescue, the learned and entertaining
historian of the British Army, has done the former task as well as it
can be done. He denounces the whole Colony of Massachusetts--men of his
own national stock--as the pestilent offspring of an "irreconcilable
faction," which had originally left England deeply imbued with the
doctrines of Republicanism. Having gained, and by lying and subterfuge
retained, some measure of independence, they sank from depth to depth of
meanness and turpitude. They struggled for no high principle, and
refused to be taxed from England, simply because they were too
contemptibly stingy and unpatriotic to pay a shilling a head towards the
maintenance of the Imperial Army. It is always the "mob," the
"ruffians," the "rabble," of Boston who carry out the reprisals against
the royal coercion, and, like the Irish peasants of the nineteenth
century, they are always the half-blind, half-criminal tools of
unscrupulous "agitators." It has been, and remains, an obsession with
the partisans of law over liberty all the world over that the fettered
community, wherever it may be and however composed, does not really want
liberty, but that the majority of its sober citizens are dragged into an
artificial agitation by mercenary scribes and sham patriots--a view
which is always somewhat difficult to reconcile, as students of American
and Irish history are aware, not only with the facts of prolonged and
tenacious resistance, but with the other view, equally necessary to the
argument for law, that the whole community is sinfully unfit for
liberty; and Mr. Fortescue falls into the usual maze of
self-contradiction and obscurity when he tries to give an intelligible
account of a war which lasted seven long and weary years, and yet was
"factitious," initiated by an hysterical rabble, stimulated and
sustained by the basest and pettiest motives, and which, he contends,
was "the work of a small but energetic and well-organized minority
towards which the mass of the people, when not directly hostile, was
mainly indifferent." Happily, Mr. Fortescue's candour as an historian of
facts gives us the clue to this strange tangle. We find no evidence that
the sober loyalist majority who sustain one side of his argument, and
whom we should expect to find crushing the revolt with ease in
co-operation with the British regular troops, were, in fact, a majority,
nor that they were either better or worse men, or more or less ardent
patriots, than the mutinous minority, or the British regular soldiers
themselves. Their loyalty, like the disloyalty of the other side, is
sometimes interested and evanescent, more often sincere and tenacious;
they are given to desertion, like Washington's troops, like Lee's and
Grant's troops nearly a century later, like the Boer troops and like all
Volunteer levies, which have somehow to combine war with the duty of
keeping their homes and business afloat. We find, too, that a
counter-current of desertion flows from the British, and still more from
the German, regulars, also a natural enough phenomenon in what was
virtually a civil war for liberty; so that "General Greene was often
heard to say that at the close of the war he fought the enemy with
British soldiers, and that the British fought him with those of
America." And then Mr. Fortescue, ignoring the British side of the case,
exultingly quotes against the Americans "the cynical Benedict Arnold,
who knew his countrymen," and who said: "Money will go farther than arms
in America." Yet Arnold, whose opinion of his countrymen Mr. Fortescue
accepts as correct and conclusive, was himself, not a plain deserter,
but a perjured military traitor of the most despicable kind. We may
conclude, perhaps, after taking a broad view of the whole Revolution,
that Washington not only knew his countrymen, who were Mr. Fortescue's
countrymen, better than Arnold, but was a better representative of their
dominant characteristics.[15]
Mr. Fortescue is peculiar in the violence of his prepossession, and we
know the source of that prepossession, a passionate love of the British
Army, which does him great honour, while it distorts his political
vision. I should not refer at such length to his view of the American
War were it not that, whenever a concrete case of Home Rule comes up for
discussion, his philosophy is apt to become the typical and predominant
philosophy. Historical sense seems to vanish, and the same savage racial
bias supervenes, whether the unruly people concerned are absolutely
consanguineous, closely related, or of foreign nationality. Instead of a
general acceptance of the ascertained truth that men thrive and coalesce
under self-government and sink into deterioration and division under
coercion, we get the same pharisaical assumption of superiority in the
dominant people, the same attribution of sordid and ugly motives to the
leaders of an unruly people, the same vague idealization of the loyalist
minority, the same fixed hallucination that the majority does not want
what by all the constitutional means in its power it says it wants, and
the correspondingly fatal tendency to gauge the intensity of a
conviction solely by the amount of physical violence it evokes, while
making that very violence an argument for the depravity of those who use
it, and a pretext for denying them self-government.
All this is terribly true in the case of Ireland, and when I next revert
to the American continent, the reader will observe that the same ideas
were entertained towards Canada, the only white Colony left to the
British Empire after the loss of the thirteen States.
FOOTNOTES:
[8] The origin of North Carolina is, perhaps, debatable. Nearly all
historians have represented it as settled by Dissenting refugees; but
Mr. S.B. Weeks, a Carolina historian, has written an essay to prove that
this was not the case ("Religious Development in the Province of North
Carolina," Baltimore, 1892). The Charter contained a clause for liberty
of conscience on the instructive ground that, "by reason of the remote
distance of those places, toleration would be no breach of the unity and
conformity established in this realm."
[9] "Church and State in Maryland," George Petrie. Lord Baltimore, the
Catholic founder and Proprietary, enforced complete tolerance from the
first (1634), and secured the passage of an Act in 1649 giving legal
force to the policy, with heavy penalties against interference with any
sect. In 1654 Puritans gained control of the Assembly, and passed an Act
against Popery. A counter-revolution repealed this Act, but finally in
1689 the Church of England was established by law.
[10] Lecky, "History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century," vol. i., pp.
408-410.
[11] Until 1692 Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, elected
their own Governors. Massachusetts continued to have Colonial Governors,
and sometimes New Jersey and New Hampshire. Proprietary Governments were
gradually abolished and converted into "Royal" Governments like the
rest. At the period of the Declaration of Independence two only were
left--Pennsylvania and Maryland (see "Origin and Growth of the English
Colonies," H.E. Egerton).
[12] Lecky, "History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century," vol. ii.,
pp. 124-126.
[13] Trevelyan, "The American Revolution," vol. i., p. 16.
[14] See "The Irish Race in America," by Captain Ed. O'Meagher Condore.
[15] "History of the British Army," vol. iii.
CHAPTER III
GRATTAN'S PARLIAMENT
We left Ireland in 1782 apparently in possession of a triumph as great
as that of America, though won without bloodshed and without the least
tincture of sedition; for the Volunteers of 1782 were as loyal to the
Crown as the most ardent American royalists. In the light of political
ideas developed at a much later period, we know that the American
Colonies might have remained within the Empire, even if their utmost
claims had been granted. Had the idea of responsible government been
understood, it would have been realized that their exclusive control of
taxation and legislation was not inconsistent with Imperial Union, but
essential to it. Grattan and his Irish friends, ignorant of the true
solution, honestly thought, in the intoxication of the moment, that they
had solved the problem so disastrously bungled for America. The facts of
ethnology and geography seemed to have been recognized. Ireland and
England, united by a Crown which both reverenced, stood together, like
Britain and the Dominions of to-day, as sister nations, with the old
irritating servitude swept away, and the bonds of natural affection and
natural interest substituted. That the close proximity of the two
nations, however marked the contrast between their natural
characteristics, made these bonds far more necessary and valuable than
in the case of America, stood to reason, and, again, the fact was
recognized in Anglo-Irish relations. America had fought rather than
submit to a forced contribution to Imperial funds. Nobody in Ireland, in
or out of Parliament, had ever objected in principle to an indirect
voluntary contribution in troops, and now that the American War was
ended, non-Parliamentary objections to one particular application of the
principle had no further substance. Nor, as was shortly to be shown in
the reception given in Ireland to Pitt's abortive Commercial
Propositions of 1785, was there any objection to a direct contribution
in money on a fixed annual scale in return for a mutual free trade.[16]
The sun had surely risen over a free yet loyal Ireland.
Never was there a more complete delusion. It would have been far better
for Ireland if she had never had a Parliament at all, but had had to
seek her own salvation in the healthy rough-and-tumble of domestic
revolution. The mere name of "Parliament" seems perpetually to have
hypnotized even its best members, and the illusion was at its highest
now. Nothing essential had been changed. Commercial freedom was the most
real gain, because it involved the definite repeal of certain trade-laws
and the permission to Ireland to make what she liked and send it where
she liked; but it was a small gain without some means of finding out
what Ireland really liked, and translating that will, without external
pressure, into law. The Parliament was neither an organ of public
opinion nor a free agent. It was even more corrupt and less
representative than before. It was as completely under the control of
the English Government as before. The modern conception of a Colonial
Ministry serving under a constitutional Governor selected by the Crown,
but acting with the advice of his Ministry, was unknown. The English
Government, through its Lord-Lieutenant, still appointed English
Ministers in Ireland, and in the hands of these Ministers lay not only
that large portion of the national income known as the hereditary
revenue, but the whole machinery of patronage and corruption. Even the
legislative independence was unreal; for majorities still had to be
bought, Irish Bills had still to receive the Royal Assent, that is,
English ministerial assent; so that powerful English pressure could be,
and was, brought to bear upon their policy and construction. And the
worst of it was that English pressure here and elsewhere meant then what
it meant in the next century, and what it too often means now, English
party pressure exercised spasmodically and ignorantly, in order to serve
sectional English ends. In short, Ireland, so far from being a nation,
was still virtually a Colony, subjected to the worst conceivable form of
colonial Government, groaning under economic evils unknown in the least
fortunate of the Colonies, and without the numerous mitigating
circumstances and the hope of ultimate cure due to remoteness from the
seat of Empire. On the contrary, nearness to England, and, above all,
nearness to France, where the misrule and miseries of ages were about to
culminate in a fearful upheaval of social order, complicated immensely
the problem of regeneration in Ireland.
What was the remedy? Parliamentary reform. The Volunteers saw this
instantly. Parliament itself scouted the idea of reform, because it
threatened the Protestant ascendancy. Any weakening of the Protestant
ascendancy was unthinkable to Irish statesmen, even to Grattan, who in
1778 had coined the grandiose phrase that "the Irish Protestant could
never be free until the Irish Catholic had ceased to be a slave," and
who afterwards explained what he meant by saying that the liberty of the
Catholic was to be only such as was "entirely consistent with the
Protestant ascendancy," and that "the Protestant interest was his first
object." Ascendancy, then, in the mind of the ruling class in Ireland
was fundamental. What was its corollary? Dependence on England.
Ascendancies, whether based on creed or property, or, as in Ireland, on
both, cannot last in any white community without external support, and
the external support for ascendancy in Ireland was English force without
and English bribes within. There was the chain of causation, the vicious
circle rather; and yet Grattan, who never touched a bribe, thought he
had freed his beloved Ireland from the English influences which were
throttling her. He could not see that the more he wrestled for the
independence of a sham Parliament, while resisting its transformation
into a real Parliament, the more he strengthened those influences,
because he inevitably widened the gulf between Parliament and the Irish
people. The glamour his brilliant gifts had thrown over the Irish
Parliament only served to divert his own mind and the minds of other
talented and high-minded men from the seat of disease in Ireland. Time
and talent were wasted from the first over points of pride, trivialities
which seemed portentous to over-sensitive minds; metaphysical puzzles as
to the exact nature of the relations now existing between Ireland and
England; whether the repeal of the Poynings' Act and the Declaratory Act
were sufficient guarantees of freedom; whether Ireland herself should
nominate a Regent or accept the nomination from England. Meanwhile, the
sands were running out, and Ireland was a slave to a minute but powerful
minority of her sons and, only through them, to England.
Yet the heart of Ireland was sound. All the materials for regeneration
were there. The Catholics, whom by an old inherited instinct Grattan
professed to dread, were the most Conservative part of the population,
so Conservative as to be unaware of the source of their miseries,
without the smallest leaning towards a counter-ascendancy, and without a
notion of sedition or rebellion. Paradox as it seems, if they leaned in
any political direction, it was dimly towards the constituted authority
of the day, the Irish Parliament. But the truth is that they were
without political consciousness, behind the times, unappreciative of the
new forces operating round them. In sore need of courageous and
enlightened guidance from men of their own faith, they were almost
leaderless. The leeway to be made up after the destructive action of the
penal laws was so enormous that Catholic philanthropists had no time or
will for high politics, and devoted their whole energy to the further
relaxation of those laws, to the education of their backward
co-religionists, and to the mitigation of poverty. For relief they
instinctively looked towards the only legal source of relief, though the
source of secular oppression, Parliament. But this was habit. The
Catholics at this time were like clay in the hands of the potter, open
to any curative and ennobling impulse. That impulse came, as was right
and natural, from the Protestant side. The only healthy political
organization in Ireland in 1782 was that of the Volunteers of the North,
with their headquarters at Belfast. They represented all that was best
in the Protestant population. They had won the practical victory, such
as it was, Parliament, with all its flaming rhetoric, only the titular
victory. They grasped the essential truth that Parliament was rotten,
and that Ireland's future depended on its reform. Numbering some 80,000
or 100,000, they at once began to press for reform, and, since they had
no constitutional resources, to overawe Parliament. Parliament at once
stood on its dignity and on its civil rights against the "Pretorian
bands." "And now," said Grattan in his magnificent way, "having given a
Parliament to the people, the Volunteers will, I doubt not, leave the
people to Parliament, and thus close specifically and majestically a
great work."
But the work was not begun. Parliament was the enemy of the people, and
the Volunteers knew it. Now, what was the "people" in the minds of the
Volunteers? Undoubtedly they did not, after a century of racial
ascendancy, perform the miracle of accepting at once in its entirety the
principle of absolute political equality for all Irishmen, Catholic and
Protestant alike. Such mental revulsions rarely occur among men, and
when they do occur are apt to produce reactionary cataclysms. But they
did from the first give a real meaning to Grattan's vague rhetoric about
Catholic slaves; from the first they made overtures towards the
Catholics, and ventilated proposals for the Catholic franchise as a part
of their scheme of reform ten years before that enfranchisement, without
Parliamentary reform and therefore valueless, became a practical issue.
For the present these proposals were outvoted, and the effective demand
of the Volunteers, as framed in the great Convention held at Dublin in
November, 1783, was for a purification and reconstruction of Parliament
on a democratic Protestant basis. The Catholic franchise had been
strongly supported, but by the influence of Charlemont and Flood
rejected. It is, of course, easy to maintain in theory that a democratic
Protestant ascendancy so designed was as incompatible with Irish freedom
as an aristocratic and corrupt ascendancy; but nobody with faith in
human nature or any knowledge of history, will care to affirm that the
process of reform would have ended with the enactment of the Volunteer
Bill. No present-day Protestant Ulsterman should entertain such a
dishonouring doubt. Mercifully, men are so made that, if left to
themselves, they go forward, not backward. A pure Assembly, formed on
the Volunteer plan, stimulated by the enlightened conscience which such
an Assembly invariably develops, by the discovery of the fundamental
identity of interests between the great bulk of Catholics and
Protestants, and by the manly instinct of self-preservation against
undue English encroachment, would have moved rapidly towards tolerance
and equality.
But the Assembly which might have saved Ireland never came into being.
The Volunteers were in weak and incompetent hands. The metamorphosis
they had undergone from a body formed for home defence into a militant
political organization found them at the critical moment unprovided with
the right stamp of leader. Flood, who helped to draft their Bill, was a
brilliant but unscrupulous and discredited Parliamentarian, and a
fanatical advocate of an unimpaired Protestant ascendancy. Lord
Charlemont, one of the most influential founders of the movement, and a
man of the highest integrity, was lukewarm for reform, an aristocrat and
an ascendancy man to the finger-tips, dreading the mysterious forces he
had helped to call into being, and desirous to keep them, as he said,
"respectable." Was it respectable for armed men to dictate to a
Parliament, however just their cause? As often happens in the ferment of
popular movements, the one leader who spoke undiluted truth and sense
spoke it in florid and unmeasured language and was himself of a figure
and behaviour little likely to inspire permanent confidence. This was
the famous Bishop of Derry, called by Charlemont a blasphemous Deist, by
Wesley an exemplary Divine, by Fox a dishonest madman, and by Jeremy
Bentham "a most excellent companion, pleasant, intelligent, well-bred,
and liberal-minded to the last degree." He was certainly vain and
ostentatious, certainly a democratic free-thinker, but a full knowledge
of his character is not of much concern to us. The point is that he was
right about Ireland's needs, though the wrong man at the moment to drive
home her claims. Many finer agitators than he have failed in causes just
as good. Many without half his merits have succeeded. We shall find his
Canadian counterparts later in the figures of Mackenzie and Papineau.
The crisis came on November 29, 1783, when the Reform Bill reached
Parliament, and was introduced by Flood, wearing the Volunteer dress. It
was rejected on the first vote. No doubt the circumstances were
humiliating, and if there had been any serious inclination in Parliament
towards self-reform and the relinquishment of an odious and mischievous
monopoly, we should freely forgive rejection. But there was little or
none, as after-events proved, and the real humiliation lay, not in the
dictation of the Irish Volunteers, but in the fact that the Volunteers
themselves were overawed by a strong body of British regular troops,
mustered for the occasion under General Burgoyne. The vicious circle was
complete. Forced to choose between reform and dependence on England,
Parliament chose the latter. And only a year and a half before Grattan
had dazzled his hears with the words: "Ireland is now a nation ... _esto
perpetua_."
There are very few critical dates in Irish history, and of those few the
night of November 29, 1783, was the most critical of all. It marked the
climax of a brief and bright renaissance from the long stagnation of the
eighteenth, and heralded a decline into the long agony of the nineteenth
century, a decline concealed by the fictitious lustre which still hangs
over the first decade of Grattan's unreformed Parliament, but none the
less already present. The Volunteers, their grand opportunity lost,
slowly broke up. Should they have used force, even under the threat of
Burgoyne's guns? It would have been infinitely better both for England
and Ireland if they had. Nothing but force could avail. Never would
force have been better justified, for the very soul of a people "rang
zwischen Tod und Leben."
It is hard, nevertheless, to blame the Volunteers for not appreciating
the full magnitude of the crisis and acting accordingly. They were ahead
of their time as it was in the political instinct which taught them the
vital importance of a reformed Parliament. They were far ahead of
England, where the younger Pitt had failed to carry Reform a few months
before, and was to fail again two years later when he urged reform for
Ireland. They were even ahead of their time in religious
tolerance--witness the Gordon riots in London two years before. Their
Parliament wore the crown and spoke the regal language of a patriot
Assembly. For five years they themselves had glorified justifiably in
the perfect discipline and sobriety with which they had used their
irregular power. Their most trusted leaders suggested that they would
yet achieve their ends without violence, while the large majority of the
Volunteers themselves were still as loyal to the Crown as the
Catholics, and were inclined, therefore, to shrink from action which,
although in itself not in the remotest degree connected with dynastic
questions, involved a theoretical conflict with the Crown, and perhaps
an actual collision with Royal troops. One of the last acts of the
Volunteer Convention, before its dissolution, was to pass an address to
the King expressing fervent zeal for the Crown, reminding him of their
quiet and dignified behaviour in the past, and praying that "their
humble wish to have certain manifest perversions of the Parliamentary
representation of this kingdom remedied by the Legislature in some
reasonable degree, might not be imputed to any spirit of innovation in
them, but to a sober and laudable desire to uphold the Constitution, to
confirm the satisfaction of their fellow-subjects, and to perpetuate the
cordial union of the two kingdoms." This document might have been copied
_mutatis mutandis_ from the American petitions prior to the war, and was
to be reproduced almost word for word in Canadian petitions dealing with
less serious grievances whose neglect at the hands of the Government did
actually lead to armed rebellion. It must be taken, as Mr. Lecky truly
says, as the "defence of the Convention before the bar of history."
Drawn up by the most moderate and least prescient leaders, it was a
vindication of the past, not a pledge for the future; for "from that
time," as Mr. Lecky writes, "the conviction sank deep into the minds of
many that reform in Ireland could only be effected by revolution, and
the rebellion of 1798 might be already foreseen."
The story of that transition, with all its disastrous consequences in
the denationalization of Ireland, in the arrest of healing forces, in
the reawakening of slumbering bigotries and hatreds, in the artificial
transformation of Catholics into anti-English rebels, and Protestants
into anti-Irish Loyalists, in the long agony of the land war, the tithe
war, the Church war, and the loathsome savageries of the rebellion
itself, is one of the most repulsive in history. It is repulsive because
you can watch, as it were, upon a dissecting-table the moral fibre of a
people, from no inherent germ of decay, against reason, against nature,
visibly wasting under a corrosive acid. Typical figures stand out: the
strong figure of Fitzgibbon, voicing ascendancy in its crudest and
ugliest form; at the other extreme the ardent but inadequate figure of
Wolfe Tone, affirming in words which expressed the literal truth of the
case that "to subvert the tyranny of our execrable Government, to break
the connection with England, the never-failing source of all our
political evils, and to assert the independence of my country--these
were my objects." Midway stands Grattan, the defeated and disillusioned
"Girondin," as Mr. Fisher aptly calls him,[17] blind until it was too
late to the errors which plunged his country into anarchy, and retiring
in despair when he saw that anarchy coming. And on the other side of the
water, Pitt, dispassionately prescribing for Ireland in 1784, while
there was yet time, the radical remedy, Reform, patiently turning, when
that was refused, to palliatives like mutual free trade in 1785 and the
Catholic franchise in 1793; and meanwhile, with an undercurrent of cool
scepticism, preparing the ground for the only alternative to Reform,
short of a revolutionary separation of the two countries, legislative
Union, and remorselessly pushing that Union through by the only
available means, bribery.
In this wretched story we seek in vain for individual scapegoats.
Tracing events to their source, we strike against two obstructions,
proximity and ignorance, and we may as well make them our scapegoats. If
proximity had implied knowledge and forbearance, all would have been
well, but it implied just the reverse, and prohibited the kind of
solution which, after very much the same sort of crisis, and in the
teeth of ignorance and error, was afterwards reached in the case of
Canada and South Africa.
The immediate cause is clear. The failure of Reform is the key to the
Rebellion and the Union. In a patriotic anxiety to idealize Grattan's
Parliament, with a view to justifying later claims for autonomy,
Irishmen have generally shut their eyes to this cardinal fact, and have
preferred to dwell with exaggerated emphasis on the little good that
Parliament did rather than on the enormous evils which it not only left
untouched, but scarcely observed. We must remember that it was not only
a Protestant body, but a close body of landlords, with an infusion of
lawyers and others devoted to the interest of landlords. In that
capacity it was incapable of diagnosing, much less of remedying, the
gravest material ills of Ireland. In the very narrow domain where the
landlord interest was not concerned, as in industrial and commercial
matters, Parliament seems to have acted on the whole with wisdom. It
endeavoured to encourage industries, while refusing to squander its
newly won commercial powers in waging tariff wars with Great Britain,
where prohibitive duties against Irish goods still continued to be
imposed. But Ireland was no longer an industrial country. All the
encouragement in the world could not replace lost aptitudes or bring
back the exiled craftsmen who, during a century past, had left Ireland
to enrich European countries with their skill. The favoured linen
industry alone survived to reach its present flourishing condition. The
revival in other manufactures, even in that of wool, which was
remarkably rapid and strong, seems to have been artificial and
transient. No wonder; for, while Ireland had been stagnant for a
century, her great competitor, England, had been steadily building up
that capacity for organized industry which, under the inventive genius
of Arkwright, Hargreaves, and Watt, and the economic genius of Adam
Smith, made the last twenty years of the eighteenth century such a
marvellous period of industrial expansion, and eventually converted
England from an agricultural into a manufacturing nation. Ireland was
hopelessly late in the race. On the other hand, the fertile land of
Ireland remained as the indestructible source of wealth and the prime
means of subsistence for the great bulk of the four and a half million
souls who inhabited the country. Parliament seems to have been almost
indifferent to the miseries of the agricultural population, wholly
indifferent, certainly, to their source, the vicious agrarian system
which it was the interest of its own members to sustain. Foster's famous
Corn Law without doubt increased tillage, and, in conjunction with the
inflated prices for produce caused by the French War, gave a powerful
though a somewhat unhealthy impulse to the trade in corn. But it
enriched only the landlords, and left untouched the real abuses,
absenteeism, middlemanism, insecurity of tenure, rack-rents, and tithes.
The Whiteboy risings of the sixties and seventies recurred, and were met
with Coercion Acts as stupid and cruel as those of the nineteenth
century. The tithe grievance, which festered and grew into civil war in
the nineteenth century, was never touched. While tenants in North-East
Ulster were painfully and forcibly establishing their custom of tenant
right in the teeth of the law, the inhuman system of cottier tenancy,
which was to last until 1881, became more and more firmly rooted in
other parts of Ireland.
None but a democratic Assembly could possibly have grappled with these
evils; nor is there any reason to suppose that in the existing condition
of Ireland a Protestant democratic Assembly, even if temporarily it
retained its sectarian character, would have grappled with them less
boldly and drastically than an Assembly composed of Catholics and
Protestants. The material interests of nineteen-twentieths of the people
were the same, while the education and intelligence belonged mainly to
the Protestants. Ulster tenants had as much need of good land laws as
other tenants. Tithes were as much disliked in the north as in the
south. The Established Church was the Church of a very small minority,
and its clergy, numbers of whom were absentees, were as unpopular as the
absentee landlords and the absentee office-holders and pensioners.
But with no redress, and, what is more important, no prospect of redress
for the primary ills of Ireland, the centrifugal forces of religion and
race had full scope for their baneful influence. And it was at the very
moment when tolerance was steadily gaining ground among all classes that
these spectres of ancient wrong were summoned up to destroy the good
work.
How did this come about? Let us remember once more that everything
hinged on Reform. Reform gained a little, but suffered far more, by its
association with the question of Catholic franchise, which was useless
without Reform, while it was the corollary of Reform. Nothing is more
remarkable than the growth of academic tolerance during this period,
doubtful and suspect as the motives sometimes were. It is true that the
great Relief Act of 1793, giving Catholics the vote and removing a
quantity of other disqualifications, would scarcely have been sanctioned
by the Parliamentary managers without the stern dictation of Pitt, whose
mind was strongly influenced by the violent anti-Catholic turn just
taken by the French Revolution; but, once sanctioned, it passed
rapidly, and was received with universal satisfaction in the country at
large. Without "Emancipation," that is, the permission to elect
Catholics to sit in Parliament and hold office, the franchise was
illusory and even harmful. In the counties the forty-shilling "freehold"
vote ("freehold" was an ironical misnomer) encouraged Protestant
landlords for another generation, before and after the Union, still
further to subdivide already excessively small holdings, while the
benefits to be derived from the admission to power of propertied
Catholics, with all their intensely Conservative instincts, were thrown
away. Emancipation apart, the franchise without Reform was a complete
farce, for the boroughs, which controlled the Parliamentary balance,
were the personal property of Protestant landlords, and the 110
Parliamentary placemen were indirectly their tools. As usual, the men of
light and leading contributed unconsciously to the strength of a system
which, in their hearts, as honest men, they condemned. Each of them had
some fatal defect of understanding. Grattan became a strong Emancipator,
but remained an academic and ineffectual reformer striving in vain to
reconcile Reform with a passionate abhorrence of democracy and a
determination to keep power in the hands of landed property. In England,
which was Protestant in the Established sense, he would have done no
more harm than Burke, who for the same reason fought Reform as strongly
as Pitt and his father Chatham had advocated it. But in Ireland, which
was Catholic and Nonconformist, landed property signified Episcopalian
landed property, that is, the narrowest form of ascendancy. Charlemont
was an even stranger paradox. He was an academic Reformer before
Grattan, but not an Emancipator, arriving at the same sterility as
Grattan through a religious bias which Grattan ceased to feel, a bias
inspired, not by a fanatical fear of democracy in itself, but by a fear
of Catholic revenge for past wrongs. These men and their like, admirable
and lovable as in many respects they were, were useless to Ireland in
those terrible times. Whether Emancipation, unaccompanied by Reform, had
any real chance of passing Parliament in 1795, when the Whig Viceroy
Fitzwilliam, the one Viceroy in the eighteenth century who ever
conceived the idea of governing Ireland according to Irish ideas, came
over from England with the avowed intention of proposing it, is a matter
of conjecture. Fitzwilliam was snuffed out by Pitt, and recalled under
circumstances which still remain a matter of controversy. All we can say
with certainty is that the opinion of Ireland at large was absolutely
ignored, and that English party intrigues and English claims on Irish
patronage had much to do with the result. On the whole, however, I agree
with Mr. Fisher that too much importance has been given to this episode,
especially by Mr. Lecky, who devotes nearly a volume to it.
The anti-national Irish Parliament was past praying for. Long before
1795 the Irish aristocracy had lost whatever power for good it ever
possessed, and most of the resolute reformers of Wolfe Tone's
middle-class Protestant school had turned, under the enthralling
fascination of the French Revolution, into revolutionaries. Reform had
been refused in 1782; again, and without coercion from the Volunteers,
in 1783. It was refused again in 1784, against the advice of Pitt and at
the instigation of Pitt's own Viceroy, Rutland, whom Pitt had
urged--what a grim irony it seems!--to give "unanswerable proofs that
the cases of Ireland and England are different," and who answered with
truth that the ascendancy of a minority could only be maintained "by
force or corruption." Every succeeding year showed the same results.
Wolfe Tone was more than justified, he was compelled, to convert his
Society of United Irishmen, founded in 1791, into a revolutionary
organization and to seek by forcible means to overthrow the Executive
which controlled Parliament and, through it, Ireland. Since the symbol
of the Irish Executive was the British Crown, he, of course, abjured the
Crown, though he had no more quarrel with the Crown as such than had the
American or Canadian patriots. He simply loved his country, and from the
first saw with clear eyes the only way to save her. Tolerance to him was
not an isolated virtue, but an integral part of democracy. He took
little interest in the Parliamentary side of Catholic relief, realizing
its hollow unreality, and, in the case of the Bill of 1793, actually
ridiculing the absurd spectacle of the Catholic cottiers being herded to
the poll by their Protestant landlords. Nor was he even an extreme
Democrat, for he advocated a ten-pound, instead of a forty shilling
franchise. His original pamphlet of 1791 contains nothing but the most
sober political common sense.
His aim was to unite Irishmen of all creeds to overthrow a Government
which did not emanate from or represent them, and which was ruinous to
them. It is not surprising that he failed. Ireland was very near
England. French intervention had been decisive in distant America, and
the French Revolution in its turn had been hastened by the American
example. But the intervention in Ireland of Republican France, for
purely selfish and strategic reasons, without effective command of the
sea, and with the stain of the Terror upon her, was of little material
value and a grave moral handicap to the Irish Revolutionists. It is the
manner of Tone's failure and the consequences of his failure that have
such a tragic interest. A united Ireland could have dispensed with the
aid of France. What prevented unity? Tone laboured to bring both creeds
together, and to a certain degree was successful. Until the very last it
was the Catholics, not the Protestants, who shrank most from revolution.
Yet, in the Rebellion of 1798, the North never moved, while Catholic
Wexford and Wicklow rose.
The root cause is to be found in those agrarian abuses whose long
neglect by the Irish Parliament constituted the strongest justification
for Reform. The Orange Society, founded under that name in 1795,
originated in the "Peep o' Day Boys," a local association formed in
Armagh in 1784 for the purpose of bullying Catholics. There is no doubt
that the underlying incentive was economic. Even when the Penal Code had
lost in efficacy, its results survived in the low standard of living of
the persecuted Catholics. As I pointed out in a former chapter, the
reckless cupidity of the landlords in terminating leases and fixing new
rents by auction, with the alternative of eviction, threw those
Protestant tenants who did not emigrate into direct competition with
Catholic peasants of a lower economic stamp, who because they lived on
little could afford to offer fancy rents. Hence much bitter friction,
leading to sordid village rows and eventually to the organized
ruffianism of the Peep o' Day Boys. The Catholic Franchise Act of 1793,
unaccompanied by Emancipation, actually intensified the trouble by
removing the landlord's motive to prefer a Protestant tenant on account
of his vote. Under ill-treatment, the Catholics naturally retaliated
with a society known as the "Defenders," and in some districts were
themselves the aggressors. Defenderism, in its purely agrarian aspect,
spread to other parts of Ireland, where Protestants were few, and became
merged in Whiteboyism. This had always been an agrarian movement,
directed against abuses which the law refused to touch, and without
religious animus, although the overwhelming numbers of the Catholics in
the regions where it flourished would have placed the Protestants at
their mercy. In Ulster both the contending organizations necessarily
acquired a religious form and necessarily retained it. But at bottom bad
laws, not bigotry, were the cause. There was nothing incurable, or even
unique, about the disorders. Analogous phenomena have appeared
elsewhere, for example, in Australia, between the original squatters on
large ranches and new and more energetic colonists in search of land for
closer settlement. Under a rational system of tenure and distribution
there was plenty of good land in Ireland for an even larger population.
Tone, who was a middle-class lawyer, seems never to have appreciated
what was going on. So far from healing the schism, he appears to have
widened it by throwing the United Irish Committee of Ulster into the
scale of the Catholics against the Orangemen. But, in truth, he was
helpless. Good administration only could unite these distracted
elements, and without the Reform for which he battled, good
administration was impossible. The dissension, widening and acquiring an
increasingly religious and racial character, paralyzed Ulster, which
originally was the seat of the Revolution. The forces normally at work
to favour law and order--loyalty to the Crown, dislike of the French
Revolution, and resentment at Franco-Irish conspiracies--gathered
proportionately greater strength.
The Southern Rebellion of 1798--a mad, pitiful thing at the best, the
work of half-starved peasants into whose stunted minds the splendid
ideal of Tone had scarcely begun to penetrate--was a totally different
sort of rebellion from any he had contemplated. It was neither national
nor Republican. The French invasions had met with little support; the
first with positive reprobation. Nor was it in origin sectarian,
although, once aflame, it inevitably took a sectarian turn. Several of
the prominent leaders were Protestants. Priests naturally joined in it
because they were the only friends the people had had in the dark ages
of oppression. In so far as it can be regarded as spontaneous, it was of
Whiteboy origin, anti-tithe and anti-rack-rent. But it was not even
spontaneous; that is another dreadful and indisputable fact which
emerges. The barbarous measures taken to repress and disarm, prior to
the outbreak, together with the skilfully propagated reports of a coming
massacre by Orangemen, would have goaded any peasantry in the world to
revolt, and the only astonishing thing is that the revolt was so local
and sporadic. General Sir Ralph Abercromby retired, sickened with the
horrors he was forbidden to avert. "Within these twelve months," he
wrote of the conduct of the soldiery at the time of his resignation,
"every crime, every cruelty that could be committed by Cossacks or
Calmucks has been transacted here.... The struggle has been, in the
first place, whether I was to have the command of the Army really or
nominally, and then whether the character and discipline of it were to
be degraded and ruined in the mode of using it, either from the facility
of one man or from the violence and oppression of a set of men who have
for more than twelve months employed it in measures which they durst not
avow or sanction."
Abercromby's resignation, in Mr. Lecky's opinion, "took away the last
faint chance of averting a rebellion." Fitzgibbon, Lord Clare, was now
supreme in the Government, and henceforth represents incarnate the
forces which provoked the Rebellion and founded upon it the Union. He
had bided his time for a decade, watching the trend of events,
foreseeing their outcome, and smiling sardonically at the ineffectual
writhings of the men of compromise. He stands out like a block of black
granite over against the slender figure of Wolfe Tone, who was his
anti-type in ideas and aims, his inferior in intellect, his superior in
morals, but no more than his rival in sincerity, clarity, and
consistency of ideas. Clare was a product of the Penal Code, the son of
a Catholic Irishman who, to obtain a legal career, had become a
Protestant. He himself was not a bigot, but a very able cynic, with a
definite theory of government. Tolerance, Emancipation, Reform, were so
much noxious, sentimental rubbish to him, and he had never scrupled to
say so. Ireland was a Colony, English colonists were robbers in Ireland,
and robbers must be tyrants, or the robbed will come by their own again;
that was his whole philosophy,[18] his frigid and final estimate of the
tendencies of human nature, and his considered cure for them. Racial
fusion was a crazy conception not worth argument. Wrong on one side,
revenge on the other; policy, coercion. As he put it in his famous
speech on the Union, the settlers to the third and fourth generation
"were at the mercy of the old inhabitants of the island." "Laws must be
framed to meet the vicious propensities of human nature," and laws of
this sort for the case of Ireland should, he held with unanswerable
logic, properly be made in England, not by the travesty of a Parliament
in Ireland, which, in so far as it was in any degree Irish, had shown
faint but ominous tendencies towards tolerance and the reunion of
Irishmen. He never took the trouble to demonstrate the truth of his
theory of revenge by a reasoned analysis of Irish symptoms. He took it
for granted as part of a universal axiomatic truth, and, like all
philosophers of his school, pointed to the results of misgovernment and
coercion as proofs of the innate depravity of the governed and of their
need for more coercion. Anticipating a certain limited class of Irishmen
of to-day, often brilliant lawyers like himself, he used to bewail
English ignorance of Ireland, meaning ignorance of the incurable
criminality of his own kith and kin. He was just as immovably cynical
about the vast majority of his own co-religionists as about the
conquered race. If, as was obvious, so far from fearing the revenge of
the Catholics, their unimpeded instinct was to take sides with them to
secure good government, they were not only traitors, but imbeciles who
could not see the doom awaiting them. Yet Fitzgibbon's admirers must
admit that his consistency was not complete. He was perfectly cognizant
of the real causes of Irish discontent. He was aware of the grievances
of Ulster, and his description of the conditions of the Munster
peasantry in the Whiteboy debates of 1787 is classical. If pressed, he
would have answered, we may suppose, that it was impolitic to cure
evils which were at once the consequence of ascendancy and the
condition of its maintenance. That other strange lapse in 1798, when he
described the unparalleled prosperity of Ireland since 1782 under a
Constitution which, in the Union debates of 1800, he afterwards covered
with deserved ridicule as having led to anarchy, destitution, and
bankruptcy, must be attributed to the exigencies of debate; for he was
an advocate as well as a statesman, and occasionally gave way to the
temptation of making showy but unsubstantial points.
These slips were rare, and do not detract from the massive coherence of
his doctrine. He remains the frankest, the most vivid, and the most
powerful exponent of a theory of government which has waged eternal
conflict with its polar rival, the Liberal theory, in the evolution of
the Empire. The theory, of course, extends much farther than the
bi-racial Irish case, to which Fitzgibbon applied it. It was used, as we
shall see, to meet the bi-racial circumstances of Canada and South
Africa, and it was also used in a modified form to meet the uni-racial
circumstances of Australia and of Great Britain itself. Anyone who reads
the debates on the Reform Bill of 1831 will notice that the opposition
rested at bottom on a profoundly pessimistic distrust of the people, and
on the alleged necessity of an oligarchy vested with the power and duty
of "framing laws to meet the vicious propensities of human nature." In a
word, the theory is in essence not so much anti-racial as
anti-democratic, while finding its easiest application where those
distinctions of race and creed exist which it is its effect, though not
its purpose, to intensify and envenom. Fitzgibbon is a repulsive figure.
Yet it would be unjust to single him out for criticism. Like him, the
philosophers Hume and Paley believed in oligarchy, and accepted force or
corruption as its two alternative props. Burke thought the same, though
the Pitts thought otherwise. Fitzgibbon's brutal pessimism was only the
political philosophy of Paley, Hume, and Burke pushed relentlessly in an
exceptional case to its extreme logical conclusion. But we can justly
criticize statesmen of the present day who, after a century's experience
of the refutation of the doctrine in every part of the world, still
adhere to it.
FOOTNOTES:
[16] Pitt's original scheme was accepted in Ireland, but defeated in
England, owing to the angry opposition of British commercial interests.
The scheme, as amended to conciliate these interests, was deservedly
rejected in Ireland.
[17] J. Fisher, "The End of the Irish Parliament." The author is much
indebted to this brilliant study, which appeared only this year (1911).
[18] See Fitzgibbon's Speeches in the Irish House of Lords, on the
Catholic Franchise Bill, March 13, 1793, and on the Union, February 10,
1800.
CHAPTER IV
THE UNION
The worst feature of Fitzgibbonism is that it has the power artificially
to produce in the human beings subject to it some of the very phenomena
which originally existed only in the perverted imagination of its
professors. Some only of the phenomena; not all; for human nature
triumphs even over Fitzgibbonism. There has never been a moment since
the Union when a representative Irish Parliament, if statesmen had been
wise and generous enough, to set such a body up, would have acted on the
principle of revenge or persecution. Nor, in spite of all evidences to
the contrary, has there ever been a moment when Protestant Ulstermen,
heirs of the noble Volunteer spirit, once represented in such a
Parliament, would have acted on the assumption that they had to meet a
policy of revenge. Nevertheless, Fitzgibbonism did succeed, as it was to
succeed in Canada, in making pessimism at least plausible and in
achieving an immense amount of direct ascertainable mischief.
The rift between the creeds and races, just beginning to heal three
generations after the era of confiscation, but reopened under the
operations of economic forces connected with race and religion, yet
perfectly capable of adjustment by a wise and instructed Government,
yawned wide from 1798 onwards, when Government had become a soulless
policeman, and scenes of frenzy and slaughter had occurred which could
not be forgotten. Swept asunder by a power outside their control,
Protestants and Catholics stood henceforth in opposite political camps,
and it became a fixed article of British policy to govern Ireland by
playing upon this antagonism. The flame of the Volunteer spirit never
perished, but it dwindled to a spark under the irresistible weight of a
manufactured reaction. Dissenters and Anglicans united, not to lead the
way in securing better conditions for their Catholic fellow-countrymen,
not for the interests of Ireland as a whole, but under the ignoble
colours of religious fanaticism. Hence that strangely artificial
alliance between the landlords of the South and West and the democratic
tenantry, artisans, and merchants of the North; an alliance formed to
meet an imaginary danger, and kept in being with the most mischievous
results to the social and economic development of Ireland. Since the
Protestant minority had made up its mind to depend once more on the
English power it had defied in 1782, the old machine of Ascendancy,
which had showed certain manifest signs of decrepitude under Grattan's
Parliament, was reconstructed on a firmer, less corrupt, and more
lasting basis.
The Legislative Union is not a landmark or a turning-point in Irish
history. It reproduced "under less assailable forms" the Government
which existed prior to 1782. The real crisis, as I have said, came at
the end of 1783, when the Volunteers tried, by reforming Parliament, to
give Irish Government an Irish character. It is essential to
remember--now as much as ever before--that Ireland has never had a
national Parliament. She has never been given a chance of
self-expression and self-development. It is useless, though Home Rulers
frequently give way to the temptation, to advocate Home Rule by arguing
from Grattan's Parliament. O'Connell, in the Repeal debate of 1834,
devoted hours to praising that Parliament, and had his own argument
turned against him with crushing force by the Secretary to the Treasury,
who easily proved that it was the most corrupt and absurd body that ever
existed. The same game of cross-purposes went on in the Home Rule
debates of 1886 and 1893, and reappeared but this year in a debate of
the House of Lords (July 4, 1911), when the Roman Catholic Home Ruler,
Lord MacDonnell, eulogized Grattan's Parliament in answer to Lord
Londonderry, the Protestant Unionist landlord, who painted it in its
true colours. Yet Lord Londonderry springs from the class and school of
Charlemont, who, by refusing to act as an Irishman, hastened the ruin of
the Parliament which Lord Londonderry satirizes, and Lord MacDonnell
from the race which was betrayed by that Parliament. The anomaly need
not surprise us. It is not stranger than the fact that the Union would
never have been carried without Catholic support in Ireland.
The point we have to grasp is that Ireland was a victim to the crudity
and falsity of the political ideas current at the time of the Union,
persistent all over the Empire for long afterwards, and not extinct yet.
Between Separation, personified by Tone, and Union, personified by
Fitzgibbon, and carried by those milder statesmen, Castlereagh and Pitt,
there seemed to be no alternative. Actually there was and is an
alternative: a responsible Irish Parliament and Government united to
England by sympathy and interest.
The Parliamentary history of the Union does not much concern us.
Bribery, whether by titles, offices, or cash, had always been the normal
means of securing a Government majority in the Irish House of Commons.
Corruption was the only means of carrying the vote for the Union, and
the time and labour needed for securing that vote are a measure of the
rewards gained by those who formed the majority. Disgusting business as
it was, we have to admit that a Parliament which refused to reform
itself at the bidding of all that was best and healthiest in Ireland
did, on its own account, deserve extinction. The sad thing is that the
true Ireland was sacrificed.
Pitt and Castlereagh, though they plunged their hands deep in the mire
to obtain the Union, quite honestly believed in the policy of the Union.
They were wrong. They merely reestablished the old ascendancy in a form,
morally perhaps more defensible, but just as damaging to the interests
of Ireland. In addition to absentee landlords, an alien and a largely
absentee Church, there was now an absentee Parliament, remote from all
possibility of pressure from Irish public opinion, utterly ignorant of
Ireland, containing within it, for twenty-nine years, at any rate,
representatives of only one creed, and that the creed of the small
minority. Pitt had virtually pledged himself to make Catholic
Emancipation an immediate consequence of the Union, and his Viceroy,
Cornwallis, had thereby obtained the invaluable support of the Catholic
hierarchy and of many of the Catholic gentry. The King, half mad at the
time, refused to sanction the redemption of the pledge, and Pitt, to his
deep dishonour, accepted the insult and dropped the scheme.
Fitzgibbonism in its extreme form had triumphed. It was a repetition of
the perfidy over the Treaty of Limerick a century before. Indeed, at
every turn of Irish history, until quite recent times, there seems to
have been perpetrated some superfluity of folly or turpitude which shut
the last outlet for natural improvement. It cannot be held, however,
that the refusal of Emancipation for another generation seriously
damaged the prospects of the Union as a system of government. After it
was granted, the system worked just as badly as before, and in all
essentials continues to work just as badly now. Inequalities in the
Irish franchise were only an aggravation. In order to cripple Catholic
power, Emancipation itself was accompanied in 1829 by an Act which
disfranchised at a stroke between seven and eight tenths of the Irish
county electorate, nor was it until the latest extension of the United
Kingdom franchise, that is, eighty-five years after the Union, that the
Irish representation was a true numerical reflection of the Irish
democracy. But these were not vital matters. In the Home Rule campaigns
of 1886 and 1893, Irish opinion, constitutionally expressed, was
impotent. The vital matter was that the Union killed all wholesome
political life in Ireland, destroyed the last chance of promoting
harmony among Irishmen, and transferred the settlement of Irish
questions to an ignorant and prejudiced tribunal, incapable of
comprehending these questions, much less of adjudicating upon them with
any semblance of impartiality.
The Legislative Union was unnatural. The two islands, near as they were
to each other, were on different planes of civilization, wealth, and
economic development, without a common tradition, a common literature,
or a common religion. Each had a temperament and genius of its own, and
each needed a different channel of expression. Laws applicable to one
island were meaningless or noxious in the other; taxation applicable to
a rich industrial island was inappropriate and oppressive for a poor
agricultural island. And upon a system comprising all these
incompatibilities there was grafted the ruinous principle of ascendancy.
There is nothing inherently strange about the difference between England
and Ireland. Artificial land-frontiers often denote much sharper
cleavages of sentiment, character, physique, language, history. A
sea-frontier sometimes makes a less, sometimes a more, effective line of
delimitation. Denmark and Sweden, France and England, are examples.
Nor, on the other hand, did the profound differences between Ireland and
England preclude the possibility of their incorporation in a political
system under one Crown. We know, by a mass of experience from Federal
and other systems, that elements the most diverse in language, religion,
wealth, and tradition may be welded together for common action, provided
that the union be voluntary and the freedom of the separate parts be
preserved. The first conditions of a true union were lacking in the case
of Ireland. The arrangement was not voluntary. It was accompanied by
gross breach of faith, and it signified enslavement, not liberty.
A true Union was not even attempted. The Government of Ireland, in
effect, and for the most part in form, was still that of a conquered
Colonial Dependency. It was no more representative in any practical
sense after the Union than before the Union. The popular vote was
submerged in a hostile assembly far away. The Irish peerage was regarded
rightly by the Irish people as the very symbol of their own degradation,
the Union having been purchased with titles, and titles having been for
a century past the price paid for the servility of Anglo-Irish
statesmen. But the peerage, in the persons of the twenty-eight
representatives sent to Westminster, still remained a powerful nucleus
of anti-Irish opinion, infecting the House of Lords with anti-Irish
prejudice, and often opposing a last barrier to reform when the
opposition of the British House of Commons had been painfully overcome.
In truth the cardinal reforms of the nineteenth century were obtained,
not by persuasion, but by unconstitutional violence in Ireland itself.
There was still a separate Executive in Ireland, a separate system of
local administration, and until 1817 a separate financial system, all of
them wholly outside Irish control. The only change of constitutional
importance was that the Viceroy gradually became a figure-head, and his
autocratic powers, similar to those of the Governor of a Crown Colony,
were transferred to the Chief Secretary, who was a member of the British
Ministry. Gradually, as the activity of Government increased, there grew
up that grotesque system of nominated and irresponsible Boards which at
the present day is the laughing-stock of the civilized world. The whole
patronage remained as before, either directly or indirectly, in English
hands. If it was no longer manipulated in ways frankly corrupt, it was
manipulated in a fashion just as deleterious to Ireland. Before, as
after, the Union there was no public career in Ireland for an Irishman
who was in sympathy with the great majority of his countrymen. To win
the prizes of public life, judgeships, official posts, and the rest, it
was not absolutely necessary to be a Protestant, though for a long time
all important offices were held exclusively, and are still held mainly,
by Protestants; but it was absolutely necessary to be a thoroughgoing
supporter of the Ascendancy, and in thoroughgoing hostility to Irish
public opinion as a whole. In other words, the unwritten Penal Code was
preserved after the abolition of the written enactments, and was used
for precisely the same pernicious purpose. It was a subtle and sustained
attempt "to debauch the intellect of Ireland," as Mr. Locker-Lampson
puts it, to denationalize her, and to make her own hands the instrument
of her humiliation. The Bar was the principal sufferer, because now, as
before, it was the principal road to humiliation. Fitzgibbons
multiplied, so that for generations after the Union some of the ablest
Irish lawyers were engaged in the hateful business of holding up their
own people to execration in the eyes of the world, of combating
legislation imperatively needed for Ireland, and of framing and carrying
into execution laws which increased the maladies they were intended to
allay.
Let nobody think these phenomena are peculiar to Ireland. In many parts
of the world where Ascendancies have existed, or exist, the same methods
are employed, and always with a certain measure of success. Irish moral
fibre was at least as tough as that of any other nationality in
resisting the poison.
But the results were as calamitous in Ireland as in other countries. No
country can progress under such circumstances. The test of government is
the condition of the people governed. Judged by this criterion, it is no
exaggeration to say that Ireland as a whole went backward for at least
seventy years after the Union. Even Protestant North-East Ulster, with
its saving custom of tenant-right, its linen industry, and all the
special advantages derived from a century of privilege, though it
escaped the worst effects of the depression, suffered by emigration
almost as heavily as the rest of Ireland, and built up its industries
with proportionate difficulty. Over the rest of Ireland the main
features of the story are continuous from a period long antecedent to
the Union. A student of the condition of the Irish peasantry in the
eighteenth and in the first three-quarters of the nineteenth centuries
can ignore changes in the form or personnel of government. He would
scarcely be aware, unless he travelled outside his subject, that
Grattan's Parliament ever existed, or that subsequently a long
succession of Whig and Tory Ministers, differing profoundly in their
political principles, had alternately sent over to Ireland Chief
Secretaries with theoretically despotic powers for good or evil. These
"transient and embarrassed phantoms" came and went, leaving their
reputations behind them, and the country they were responsible for in
much the same condition.
It is not my purpose to enter in detail into the history of Ireland in
the nineteenth century, but only to note a few salient points which will
help us to a comparison with the progress of other parts of the Empire.
It is necessary to repeat that the basis upon which the whole economic
structure of Ireland rested, the Irish agrarian system, was inconsistent
with social peace and an absolute bar to progress. I described in
Chapter I. how it came into being and the collateral mischiefs attending
it. During the nineteenth century, by accident or design, these
mischiefs were greatly aggravated. Until 1815 high war prices and the
low Catholic franchise stimulated subdivision of holdings, already
excessively small, and the growth of population. With the peace came
evictions, conversions into pasture, and consolidation of farms. The
disfranchisement of the mass of the peasantry which accompanied
Emancipation in 1829 inspired fresh clearances on a large scale and
caused unspeakable misery, with further congestion on the worst
agricultural land. "Cottier" tenancy, at a competitive rent, and
terminable without compensation for the improvements which were made
exclusively by the tenant, was general over the greater part of Ireland.
Generally it was tenancy-at-will, with perpetual liability to eviction.
Leaseholders, however, were under conditions almost as onerous. The
labourer, who was allowed a small plot, which he paid for in labour,
was in the worst plight of all. In addition, burdensome tithes were
collected by an alien Church and rents were largely spent abroad. If
Irish manufactures had not been destroyed, and there had been an outlet
from agriculture into industry, the evil effects of the agrarian system
would have been mitigated. As it was, in one of the richest and most
fertile countries in the world the congestion and poverty were
appalling. Competition for land meant the struggle for bare life. Rent
had no relation to value, but was the price fixed by the frantic bidding
of hungry peasants for the bare right to live. The tenant had no
interest in improving the land, because the penalty for improvement was
a higher rent, fixed after another bout of frantic competition.
"Almost alone amongst mankind," wrote John Stuart Mill,[19] "the cottier
is in this condition, that he can scarcely be either better or worse off
by any act of his own. If he were industrious or prudent, nobody but his
landlord would gain; if he is lazy or intemperate, it is at his
landlord's expense. A situation more devoid of motives to either labour
or self-command, imagination itself cannot conceive. The inducements of
free human beings are taken away, _and those of a slave not
substituted_. He has nothing to hope, and nothing to fear, except being
dispossessed of his holding, and against this he protects himself by the
_ultima ratio_ of a defensive civil war. Rockism and Whiteboyism were
the determination of a people, who had nothing that could be called
theirs but a daily meal of the lowest description of food, not to submit
to being deprived of that for other people's convenience.
"Is it not, then, a bitter satire on the mode in which opinions are
formed on the most important problems of human nature and life, to find
public instructors of the greatest pretension imputing the backwardness
of Irish industry, and the want of energy of the Irish people in
improving their condition, to a peculiar indolence and insouciance in
the Celtic race? Of all vulgar modes of escaping from the consideration
of the effect of social and moral influences on the human mind, the most
vulgar is that of attributing the diversities of conduct and character
to inherent natural differences."
The "civil war" referred to by Mill as the _ultima ratio_ of the
cottier tenant went on intermittently for ninety years of the nineteenth
century, as it had gone on during the eighteenth century, and was met by
coercive laws of the same general stamp. Until Mr. Gladstone took the
question in hand in 1870, no reformer could get a hearing in Parliament.
Bill after Bill, privately introduced, met with contemptuous rejection
in favour of some senseless measure of semi-military coercion. There
can, I believe, be no doubt that responsible Irish opinion, made
effective, would have grappled with the evil firmly and conscientiously.
Until the peasant class was driven to the last pitch of desperation,
their leaders did not conceive, and, indeed, never wholly succeeded in
implanting, the idea of a complete overthrowal of landlordism. The
peasant was not unwilling to pay rent. He had, and still has, a deep,
instinctive respect for a landed aristocracy, and was ready, and is
still ready, to repay good treatment with an intensity of devotion
difficult to parallel in other parts of the United Kingdom. In that
veritably cataclysmic dispersion of the Irish race which ensued upon the
great famine, rent continued to be paid at home out of sums remitted
from relatives in America. No less than nineteen millions of money were
thus remitted, according to the Emigration Commissioners of 1863,
between 1847 and that date. The Roman Catholic Church, as in every part
of the world, was strongly on the side of law and order, and, indeed, on
many occasions stepped in to condemn disorder legitimately provoked by
intolerable suffering. The wealthy and educated landlord class, face to
face in a free Parliament with the tenant class, including, be it
remembered, the Ulster Protestant tenants, with grievances less acute in
degree, but similar in kind, would have consented to meet reform halfway
under the stimulus of patriotism and an enlightened self-interest.
Against the great majority of Irish landlords there was no personal
charge. They came into incomes derived from a certain source under
ancient laws for which they were not responsible. But, acting through
the ascendancy Parliament far away in London, they remained, as an
organized class--for we must always make allowance for an enlightened
and public-spirited minority--blind to their own genuine interests and
to the demands of humane policy. Their responsibility was transferred to
English statesmen, who were not fitted, by temperament or training, to
undertake it, and who always looked at the Irish land question, which
had no counterpart in England, through English spectacles. We cannot
attribute their failure to lack of information. At every stage there was
plenty of unbiassed and instructed testimony, Whig and Tory, Protestant
and Catholic, independent and official, as to the nature and origin of
the trouble. Mill and Bright, in 1862, only emphasized what Arthur Young
had said in 1772, and what Edward Wakefield, Sharman Crawford, Michael
Sadler, Poulett Scrope, and many other writers, thinkers, and
politicians had confirmed in the intervening period, and what every
fair-minded man admits now to be the truth. Commission after Commission
reported the main facts correctly, if the remedies they proposed were
inadequate. The Devon Commission, reporting in 1845, on the eve of the
great famine, condemned the prevalent agrarian tenure, and recommended
the statutory establishment of the Ulster custom of tenant right. A very
mild and cautious Bill was introduced and dropped.
Next year came the famine, revealing in an instant the rottenness of the
economic foundations upon which the welfare of Ireland depended. The
population had swollen from four millions in 1788 to nearly eight and a
half millions in 1846, an unhealthy expansion, due to the well-known law
of propagation in inverse ratio to the adequacy of subsistence. What
happened was merely the failure of the potato-crop, not a serious matter
in most countries, but in Ireland the cause of starvation to
three-quarters of a million persons, and the starting-point of that vast
exodus which in the last half of the nineteenth century drained Ireland
of nearly four million souls. The famine passed, and with it all
recollection of the report of the Devon Commission. Hitherto most of the
land legislation had been designed to facilitate evictions. Now came the
Encumbered Estates Act of 1849, whose purpose was to facilitate the
buying out of bankrupt Irish landlords, and whose effect was to
perpetuate the old agrarian system under a new set of more mercenary
landlords, pursuing the old policy of rack-rents and evictions. In the
three years 1849-1852, 58,423 families were evicted, or 306,120 souls.
Aroused from the stupor of the famine, the peasants had to retaliate
with the same old defensive policy of outrage. Peaceful agitation was
of no use. The Tenant League of North and South, formed in 1852, claimed
in vain the simplest of the rights granted under pressure of violence in
1870 and 1881.
Violence, indeed, was the only efficient lever in Ireland for any but
secondary reforms until the last fifteen years of the century, when a
remedial policy was spontaneously adopted, with the general consent of
British statesmen and parties. Fear inspired the Emancipation Act of
1829, which was recommended to Parliament by the Duke of Wellington as a
measure wrong in itself, but necessary to avert an organized rebellion
in Ireland. Tithes, the unjust burden of a century and a half, were only
commuted in 1838, after a Seven Years' War revolting in its incidents.
Mr. Gladstone admitted, and no one who studies the course of events can
deny, that without the Fenianism of the sixties, and the light thrown
thereby on the condition of Ireland, it would have been impossible to
carry the Act--again overdue by a century--for the disestablishment of
the Irish Church in 1869, or the Land Act, timid and ineffectual as it
was, of 1870. Without the organized lawlessness of the Land League it
would have been equally impossible to bring about those more drastic
changes in Irish land tenure which, amidst storms of protest from vested
interests affected, were initiated under the great Land Act of 1881,
and, after another miserable decade of crime and secret conspiracy,
extended by the Acts of 1887, 1891, and 1896.
Briefly, the effect of these Acts was to establish three principles: a
fair rent, fixed by a judicial tribunal, the Land Commission, and
revisable every fifteen years; fixity of tenure as long as the rent is
paid; and free sale of the tenant-right.
The remedy eventually brought widespread relief, but, from a social and
economic standpoint, it was not the right remedy. There is no security
for good legislation unless it be framed by those who are to live under
it. Constructive thought in Ireland for the solution of her own
difficulties and the harmonizing of her own discordant elements had been
systematically dammed, or diverted into revolutionary excesses, which,
in the traditional spirit of Fitzgibbonism, were made the pretext for
more stupid torture. Thus, O'Connell, whose attachment to law was so
strong that in 1843, when the Repeal agitation had reached seemingly
irresistible proportions, he deliberately restrained it, was tried for
sedition. So, too, were dissipated the brilliant talents of the Young
Ireland group and the grave statesmanship of Isaac Butt. Fits intervened
of a penitent and bungling philanthropy which has left its traces on
nearly all Irish institutions. For example, it was decided in 1830 that
the Irish must be educated, and a system was set up which was
deliberately designed to anglicize Ireland and extirpate Roman
Catholicism. Four years later, in defiance of Irish opinion, a Poor Law
pedantically copied from the English model was applied to Ireland. The
railway system also was grossly mismanaged. And so with the land. When
reform eventually came, the evil had gone too far, and it was beyond the
art of the ablest and noblest Englishmen, inheriting English conceptions
of the rights of landed property, to devise any means of placing the
relations between landlord and tenant in Ireland, inhuman and absurd as
they were, on a sound and durable basis. The dual ownership set up by
the Land Acts was more humane, but in some respects no less absurd and
mischievous. It exasperated the landlord, while, by placing before the
tenant the continual temptation of further reductions in rent, it tended
to check good cultivation.
Men came to realize at last that the complete expropriation of the
landlords through the State-aided purchase of the land was the only
logical resource, and this process, begun tentatively and on a very
small scale as far back as 1870, under the inspiration of John Bright,
and extended under a series of other Acts, was eventually set in motion
on a vast scale by the Wyndham Act of 1903.
I leave a final review of Purchase and of other quite recent remedial
legislation, as well as the far more important movements for
regeneration from within, to later chapters. Meanwhile, let us pause for
a moment and pronounce upon the political system which made such havoc
in Ireland. All this havoc, all this incalculable waste of life, energy,
brains, and loyalty, was preventable and unnecessary. Ethics and honour
apart, where was the common sense of the legislative Union? Would it
have been possible to design a system better calculated to embitter,
impoverish, and demoralize a valuable portion of the Empire?
Let us now turn our eyes across the Atlantic, and observe the effects of
an Imperial policy founded on the same root idea.
FOOTNOTES:
[19] "Principles of Political Economy," vol. ii., p. 392.