AUSTRALIA AND IRELAND
I have described the Canadian crisis at considerable length because it
was the turning-point in Imperial policy. Yet policy is scarcely the
right word. The Colonists themselves wrenched the right to
self-government from a reluctant Mother Country, and the Mother Country
herself was hardly conscious of the loss of her prerogatives until it
was too late to regret or recall them. The men who on principle believed
in and laboured for Home Rule for Canada were a mere unconsidered
handful in the country, while most of those who voted for the Act of
1840 thought that it killed Home Rule. No general election was held to
obtain the "verdict of the predominant partner" on the real question at
issue, with the cry of "American dollars" (which had, in fact, been
paid); with lurid portraits of Papineau and Mackenzie levying black-mail
on the Prime Minister, and quotations from their old speeches to show
that they were traitors to the Empire; with jeremiads about the terrors
of Rome, the abandonment of the loyal minority, and the dismemberment of
the Empire, to shake the nerves and stimulate the slothful conscience of
an ignorant electorate. Had there been any such opportunity we know it
would have been used, and we can guess what the result would have been;
for nothing is easier, alas! than to spur on a democracy with such cries
as these to the exercise of the one function it should refrain
from--interference with another democracy, be it in Ireland or anywhere
else. As it was, a merciful veil fell over Canada; Lord Elgin's action
in 1849 passed with little notice, and a mood of weary indifference to
colonial affairs, for which, in default of any Imperial idealism, we
cannot be too thankful, took possession of Parliament and the nation.
It was in this mood that the measures conferring self-government on the
Australasian Colonies, 12,000 miles away from the Mother Country, and
exciting proportionately less concern than Canada, were passed a few
years later.
From the landing of the first batch of convicts at Botany Bay in 1788,
New South Wales, the Mother Colony, was a penal settlement pure and
simple, under military Government, for some thirty years. The island
Colony, Tasmania, founded under the name of Van Diemen's Land in 1803,
was used for the same purpose. Victoria, originally Port Phillip, just
escaped a like fate in 1803, and remained uncolonized till 1835, when
the free settlers set their faces against the penal system, and in 1845,
acting like the Bostonians of 1774 with the famous cargo of tea, refused
to allow a cargo of convicts to land. South Australia, first settled in
1829, also escaped; so did New Zealand, which was annexed to the Crown
in 1839. Western Australia, dating from 1826, proceeded on the opposite
principle to that of Victoria. Free from convicts until 1849, when
transportation to other Colonies was checked at their own repeated
request, and came to an end in 1852, this Colony, owing to a chronic
shortage of labour, actually petitioned the Home Government to divert
the stream of criminals to its shores, with the result that in ten
years' time nearly half the male adults in the Colony, and more than
half in the towns, were, or had been, convicts. It was not until 1865,
under strong pressure from the other Colonies, that the system was
finally abolished which threw Western Australia forty years behind its
sister Colonies in the attainment of Home Rule.
The transportation policy has been unmercifully criticized, and with all
the more justice in that Pitt, when the American war closed the
traditional dumping-ground for criminals, had the chance of employing
the exiled loyalists of America, many of whom were starving in London,
as pioneers of the new lands in the Antipodes. "The outcasts of an old
society cannot form the foundations of a new one," said a Parliamentary
Report of July 28, 1785. But they could do so, and did do so. Ruskin's
saying, _à propos_ of Australia, that "under fit conditions the human
race does not degenerate, but wins its way to higher levels," comes
nearer the truth. In an amazingly short time after the transportation
policy was reversed the taint disappeared. We must remember, however,
that, sheer refuse as some of the convicts were, especially in the later
period, a large number of the earlier convicts were the product of that
"stupid severity of our laws" which the Vicar of Wakefield deplored, and
to this category belonged many an unhappy Irish peasant, sound in
character, but driven into Whiteboyism, or into the rebellions of 1798
and 1803 by some of the worst laws the human brain ever conceived.
Hundreds of these men survived the barbarous and brutalizing ordeal of a
penal imprisonment to become prosperous and industrious citizens.
It was not until 1825, or thereabouts, that free white settlers, many
Irishmen among them, came in any substantial number to the Mother Colony
of New South Wales, and not until 1832 that these men began to press
claims for the management of their own affairs, under the inspiration of
an Irish surgeon's son, William Wentworth, the Hampden of Australia. The
later Colonies rapidly came into line, Western Australia, for the reason
given above, remaining stationary. The first representative institutions
were granted in 1842 to New South Wales, and in 1850 to Victoria, South
Australia, and Tasmania. At that date, therefore, these settlements
stood in much the same constitutional position as the Canadas had stood
in 1791 (although technically their Constitutions were of a different
kind), but with this important difference, that the Act of 1850, "for
the better Government of Her Majesty's Australian Colonies," gave power
to those Colonies to frame new Constitutions for themselves. This they
soon proceeded to do, each constructing its own, but all keeping in view
the same model, the British Constitution itself, and aiming at the same
ideal, responsible Government by a Colonial Cabinet under a Government
representing the Crown. Since responsible Government in Great Britain
itself was not a matter of legal enactment, but the product of slowly
evolved conventions and precedents, to which political scientists had
not yet given a scientific form, it is no wonder that the colonial
Constitution-makers found great difficulty in expressing exactly what
they wanted in legal terms, and, indeed, none of them came near
succeeding; but time, their own political instinct, a succession of
sensible Governors, and the forbearance of the Home Government solved
the problem, and evolved home-ruled States legally subordinate to the
Crown, but with a Constitution closely resembling our own. The
Constitutions became law by Acts of the Imperial Parliament passed by a
Liberal Ministry in 1855. They are of unusual interest because they
represent the first rude attempt to put into legal language a small part
of the theory of the British Constitution as applied to dependencies of
the Crown.
In the most vital point of all, the relation of the dependency to the
Home Government (as distinguished from questions of internal political
structure), they are almost as reserved as the Canadian Act of 1840,
which, as we have seen, did not recognize by a word the duty of the
Governor to govern through a Colonial Cabinet. In certain clauses they
hint, by distant implication, at the existence of such a Cabinet,
responsible to the colonial popular Legislature--the Canadian Act did
not assume even that--but they do not anywhere imply that the Governor
is bound normally to place himself in the hands of that Cabinet, while
they expressly and rightly reaffirm the supreme power of the Crown,
whether acting through the Governor or not, over colonial legislation.
How far this reticence about responsible Government facilitated the
passage of the Australian Acts in the British Parliament, as it
certainly facilitated the Canadian Act of 1840, it is difficult to
decide. It was probably a factor of some importance. At any rate, it is
true to say that Home Rule, as in Canada, was mainly a result of
practice rather than of statutory enactment. The case of New Zealand is
a striking example of this. In 1852 New Zealand obtained from a Tory
Government a Constitutional Act, which resembles the Canadian Act of
1840 in abstaining from any expression, direct or indirect which implies
the existence of a Colonial Cabinet, and it is probable that the framers
of the Act intended no such development, but on the contrary
contemplated a permanent, irremovable Executive. But the Act was no
sooner passed than an agitation began for responsible government, under
the leadership of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, part-author of the Durham
Report, and at that time a member of the New Zealand Assembly. By 1855,
when the Australian Acts were passed, New Zealand, without further
legislation, had obtained what she wanted.
To complete the story, Queensland, carved out of New South Wales in
1859, entered upon full responsible government at once, and Western
Australia, retarded for so long by the servile system of convict-labour,
gained the same rights in 1890.
Reading the debates of the middle of the nineteenth century, one is left
with the impression that the Australasian Colonies obtained Home Rule by
virtue of their distance, and because most politicians at home could not
be bothered to fight hard against a principle which at bottom they
disliked as heartily for the Colonies as for Ireland. The views of the
various parties were not much changed since the days of the crisis in
Canada. There were some able Colonial Secretaries who thoroughly
understood and believed in the principle of responsible government. On
the other hand, some Liberals were not yet converted, though Liberal
Governments fathered the Constitutional Acts of 1850 and 1855.
Disraeli's well-known saying in 1852 that "these wretched Colonies will
all be independent, too, in a few years, and are a mill-stone round our
necks," was typical of the Tory attitude.[29] Lord John Russell, in the
same year, 1852, was complaining, as Lord Morley tells us,[30] that we
were "throwing the shields of our authority away," and leaving "the
monarchy exposed in the Colonies to the assaults of democracy." A group
of Radicals, headed by Sir William Molesworth and Hume in Parliament,
and by Wakefield from outside, still pushed the policy of emancipation
energetically and persistently on the principle which they had urged in
the case of Canada, that freedom was better both for the Colonies and
the Mother Country.
But Molesworth and Wakefield gained one illustrious convert and
coadjutor in the person of Mr. Gladstone, whose speeches on the Colonies
at this period, 1849 to 1855, placed him, in regard to that topic, in
the Radical ranks, and in veiled opposition to the Whig leaders. Lord
Morley quotes a minute from his hand, written in 1852 in answer to the
view of Lord John Russell, referred to above, where he says "that the
nominated Council and independent Executive were not 'shields of
authority,' but sources of weakness, disorder, disunion, and
disloyalty." His Parliamentary and platform speeches, passing with
little notice at the time, nevertheless remain the most eloquent and
exalted expression of wise colonial policy that is to be found in our
language. If it was not till a generation later that he applied the same
arguments to the case of Ireland, the arguments nevertheless did apply
to Ireland almost word for word. Proximity to the Mother Country does
not affect them. Mr. Gladstone attacks the problem on its human side,
showing that coercive government is always and everywhere bad for those
who administer it, and bad for those who live under it, expensive,
inefficient, demoralizing, and that the longer it is maintained the more
difficult it is to remove. He condemns the fallacy of preparing men by
slow degrees for freedom, and the "miserable jargon about fitting them
for the privileges thus conferred, while in point of fact every year and
every month during which they are retained under the administration of a
despotic Government renders them less fit for free institutions." As to
cost, "no consideration of money ought to induce Parliament to sever the
connection between any one of the Colonies and the Mother Country," but
the greater part of the cost, he urged, was due to the despotic system
itself. His words are more applicable to the Ireland of to-day than the
Ireland of the middle of the nineteenth century, for it is one of the
many painful anomalies of Irish history that that country, at the lowest
point of its economic misery, was paying a relatively enormous
contribution to Imperial funds, and, incidentally, to the colonial vote,
while the Colonies were maintained at a loss correspondingly large, and
at times even larger.[31] But cost is, after all, a very small matter.
The first consideration is the character and happiness of human beings,
and here Gladstone's words, like Durham's, have a universal application.
If the reader cannot study them at length in Hansard, he should read
the great speech on the New Zealand Bill in 1852, and Lord Morley's
masterly summary of others. I conclude with a passage quoted by him from
a platform speech at Chester in 1855, the year when the Australian
Constitutions were sanctioned. "Experience has proved that if you want
to strengthen the connection between the Colonies and this country, if
you want to see British law held in respect, and British institutions
adopted and beloved in the Colonies, never associate with them the hated
name of force and coercion exercised by us at a distance over their
rising fortunes. Govern them upon a principle of freedom." At that
moment, after half a century of coercion and neglect under what was
called the "Union," Ireland was bleeding, as it seemed, to death.
Scarcely recovered from the stunning blow of the famine, she was
undergoing in a fresh dose of clearances and evictions the result of
that masterpiece of legislative unwisdom, the Encumbered Estates Act.
Her people were leaving her by hundreds of thousands, cursing the name
of England as bitterly as the evicted Ulster farmers and the ruined
weavers of the eighteenth century had cursed it, and bearing their
wrongs and hatred to the same friendly shore, America. For the main
stream of emigration, which before the Union had set towards the
American States, and from the Union until the famine towards Canada,
reverted after the famine towards the United States, impregnating that
nation with an hostility to Great Britain which in subsequent years
became a grave international danger, and which, though greatly
diminished, still remains an obstacle to the closer union of the
English-speaking races. On the other hand, it is interesting to observe
that among the Irish emigrants to countries within the Empire, and a
very important part of this emigration was to Australasia, the
anti-British sentiment was far less tenacious, though the affection for
their own native country was no less passionate.
Whatever we may conclude about the motives behind the concession of Home
Rule to Australia and New Zealand, we may regard it as fortunate that
they lay too far away for any close criticism from statesmen at home,
whether before or after the attainment of self-government. Most of these
statesmen would have been scandalized by the manner in which these
vigorous young democracies, destitute of the patrician element, shaped
their own political destiny by the light of nature and in the teeth of
great difficulties. Almost to a man their leaders in this great work
would have been regarded as "turbulent demagogues and dangerous
agitators," and often were so regarded, when the rumour of their
activities penetrated to far-off London. The old catchwords of
revolution, spoliation and treason, consecrated to the case of Ireland,
would have been applied here with equal vehemence, and were in fact
applied by the official classes in the Colonies themselves, round whom
small anti-democratic groups, calling themselves "loyal," crystallized,
as in the Provinces of Upper Canada and in Ireland, and with whom the
ruling classes at home were in instinctive sympathy. There were stormy,
agitated times, there were illegal movements against the reception of
convicts, struggles over land questions, religious questions, financial
questions, the emancipation of ex-convicts, and the many difficult
problems raised by the discovery of gold and the mushroom growth of
digger communities in remote places. There was in the air more genuine
lawlessness--irrespective, I mean, of revolt against bad laws--than ever
existed in Ireland, though there was never at any time any practical
grievance approaching in magnitude to the practical grievances of
Ireland at the same period. But, could the spirit of English
statesmanship towards analogous problems in Ireland have been maintained
in Australasia, systematically translated into law and enforced with the
help of coercion acts by soldiers and police, communities would have
been artificially produced presenting all the lawless and retrograde
features of Ireland.
The famous affair of the Eureka Stockade in 1854 is an interesting
illustration. A great mass of diggers collected in the newly discovered
Ballarat goldfields had petitioned repeatedly against the Government
regulations about mining licences, for which extortionate fees were
levied. This was before responsible government. The goldfields were not
represented in the Legislature, and there was no constitutional method
of redress. The authorities held obstinately to their obsolete and
irritating regulations, and eventually the miners revolted under the
leadership of an Irishman, Peter Lalor, and with the watchword "Vinegar
Hill." There was a pitched battle with the military forces of the
Crown, ending after much bloodshed in the victory of the soldiers. Lalor
was wounded, and carried into hiding by his friends. Other captured
rioters were tried for "high treason" before juries of townsmen picked
by the Crown on the lines long familiar in Ireland; but even these
juries refused to convict, as they so often refused to convict in cases
of agrarian crime in Ireland. The State trials were then abandoned, a
Royal Commission reported against the licence system, and Parliamentary
representation was given to the goldfields. It came to be universally
acknowledged that the talk of "treason" was nonsense, that the outbreak
had been provoked by laws which could not be constitutionally changed,
and that the moral was to change them, not to expatriate and persecute
those who had suffered under them. Lalor reappeared, entered political
life, became Speaker of the reformed Assembly of 1856, and lived and
died respected by everyone. He now appears as a prominent figure in a
little book entitled "Australian Heroes," and it is admitted that the
whole episode powerfully assisted the movement for responsible
government in the Colony. Smith O'Brien, Meagher, Mitchell, and others
concerned in the Irish rebellion of 1848 were at that moment languishing
in the penal settlement of Tasmania for sedition provoked by laws fifty
times worse; laws, too, that a Royal Commission three years earlier had
shown to be inconsistent with social peace, and which others
subsequently condemned in still stronger terms. From their first
establishment far back in the seventeenth century it took two centuries
to abolish these laws. In the Australian case it took one year.
As for the Irishmen of all creeds and classes who took such an important
part in the splendid work of building up these new communities, and who
are still estimated to constitute a quarter of the population, one can
only marvel at the intensity of the prejudice which declared these men
"unfit" for self-government at home, and which is not yet dissipated by
the discovery that they were welcomed under the Southern Cross, not only
as good workaday citizens in town, bush, or diggings, but as barristers,
judges, bankers, stock-owners, mine-owners, as honoured leaders in
municipal and political life, as Speakers of the Representative
Assemblies, and as Ministers and Prime Ministers of the Crown.[32] is
true, and the fact cannot surprise us, that the intestinal divisions of
race and creed in Ireland itself, stereotyped there by ages of bad
government, were at first to a certain extent reproduced in Australia,
as in Canada. Aggressive Orangeism was to be found sowing discord where
no cause for discord existed. But the common sense of the community and
the pure air of freedom tended to sterilize, though they have not to
this day wholly killed, these germs of disease. A career was opened to
every deserving Irishman, whether Catholic or Protestant. Hungry,
hopeless, listless cottiers from Munster and Connaught built up
nourishing towns like Geelong and Kilmore. Two Irishmen, Dunne and
Connor, were the first discoverers of the Ballarat goldfields. An
Irishman, Robert O'Hara Burke, led the first transcontinental
expedition, and another Irishman, Ambrose Kyte, financed it; Wentworth
was the father of Australian liberties. An Irish Roman Catholic, Sir
Redmond Barry, founded the Public Library, Museum, and University of
Melbourne. In the political annals of Victoria and New South Wales the
names of Irish Catholics, men to whom no worthy political career was
open in their own country, were prominent. Sir John O'Shanassy, for
example, was three times Prime Minister of Victoria, Sir Brian
O'Loughlen once. Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, a member of O'Shanassy's
Cabinets, and at last Prime Minister himself, is the colonial statesman
whose career and personality are the best proof of what Ireland has lost
in high-minded, tolerant, constructive statesmanship, through a system
which silenced or drove from her shores the men who loved her most, who
saw her faults and needs with the clearest eyes, and who sought to unite
her people on a footing of self-reliance and mutual confidence. One of
the ablest of O'Connell's young adjutants, editor and founder of the
_Nation_, part-organizer of the Young Ireland Movement which united men
of opposite creeds in one of the finest national movements ever
organized in any country, Duffy's central aim had been to give Ireland a
native Parliament, where Irishmen could solve their own problems for
themselves. He saw the rebellion of 1848 fail, and Mitchell, Smith
O'Brien, Meagher, McManus, and O'Donoghue transported to Tasmania; he
laboured on himself in Ireland for seven years at land reform and other
objects, and in 1855 gave up the struggle against such hopeless odds,
and reached Melbourne early in 1856 in time to sit in the first
Victorian Parliament returned under the constitutional Act of 1855. From
the beginning to the end of an honourable political career which lasted
thirty years, he made it his dominant purpose to ensure that Australia
should be saved from the evils which cursed Ireland; from government by
a favoured class, from land monopoly, and from religious inequality and
the venomous bigotries it engenders, and he took a large share in
bringing about their exclusion. His Land Act of 1862, for example, where
he had another Roman Catholic Irishman, Judge Casey, as an auxiliary,
put an end in those districts where it was fairly worked to the grave
abuses caused by the speculative acquisition of immense tracts of land
by absentee owners, and promoted the closer settlement of the country by
yeoman farmers.
In Australia, as in Canada, we see the vital importance of good land
laws, and can measure the misery which resulted in Ireland from an
agrarian system incalculably more absurd and unjust than anything known
in any other part of the Empire. The stagnation of Western Australia was
originally due to the cession of huge unworkable estates to a handful of
men. South Australia was retarded for some little time from the same
cause, and Victoria and New South Wales were all hampered in the same
way. It was not a question, as in Ireland, and to a less degree in
Prince Edward Island, of the legal relations between the landlord and
tenant of lands originally confiscated, but of the grant and sale of
Crown lands. Yet the after-results, especially in the check to tillage
and the creation of vast pasture ranches, were often very similar.[33]
Duffy was not the only colonial statesman to apply Irish experience to
the problems of newly settled countries. An Englishman who became one of
the greatest of colonial statesmen and administrators, the Radical
Imperialist, Sir George Grey, began life as a Lieutenant on military
service in Ireland in the year 1829, and came away sick with the scenes
he had witnessed at the evictions and forced collections of tithes
where his troops were employed to strengthen the arm of the law.
"Ireland," his biographer, Professor Henderson, tells us,[34] "was to
him a tragedy of unrealized possibilities." The people had "good
capacities for self-government," but Englishmen "showed a vicious
tendency to confuse cause and effect," and attributed to inherent
lawlessness what was a revolt against bad economic conditions. "All that
they or their children could hope for was to obtain, after the keenest
competition, the temporary use of a spot of land on which to exercise
their industry"; "for the tenant's very improvements went to swell the
accumulations of the heirs of an absentee, not of his own." "Haunted by
the Irish problem," Grey made it his effort first in South Australia,
and afterwards in New Zealand, where he was both Governor and Premier at
various times, to secure the utmost possible measure of Home Rule for
the colonists, and, in pursuance of a policy already inaugurated by
Edward Gibbon Wakefield, to establish a land system based, not on
extravagant free grants, or on private tenure, but on sales by the State
to occupiers at fair prices. The aim was to counteract that excessive
accumulation of people in the large cities which, thanks to imperfect
legislation, still exists in most of the Australian States. Subsequent
New Zealand land policy has been generally in the right direction, and
is acknowledged to be highly successful. In the Australian mainland
States the absentee and the squatter caused constant difficulties and
occasional disorder. The Commonwealth at the present day is suffering
for past neglect, and has found itself within the last year compelled to
imitate New Zealand in placing taxes on undeveloped land, with a higher
percentage against absentees.
Let us add that Grey, like Duffy and most of the strongest advocates of
Home Rule for the Colonies, was a Federalist long before Federation
became practical politics, seeing in that policy the best means of
achieving the threefold aim of giving each Colony in a group ample local
freedom, of binding the whole group together into a compact, coherent
State, and of strengthening the connection between that State and the
Mother Country. As Governor at the Cape from 1854 to 1861 he vainly
urged the Home Government to promote a Federal Union of the various
South African States, Dutch and British, in order, as he said, to create
"an United South Africa under the British flag," a scheme which, it is
generally agreed, could then have been carried out, and which would have
saved South Africa from terrible disasters. And he wished to apply the
same Federal principle to the Australian Colonies, and to the case of
Ireland and Great Britain.
He realized earlier than most men that the talk of "separation" and
"disloyalty" was, in his own words already quoted, the result of a
"vicious tendency to confuse cause and effect," and that to govern men
by their own consent, to let them work out their own ideals in their own
way, to encourage, not to repress, their sense of nationality, is the
best way to gain their affection, or, if we choose to use that very
misleading word, their loyalty.
Australia and New Zealand present remarkable examples of this beneficent
process, Australia in particular, because there, for a long time even
after the introduction of responsible government and, indeed, until a
dozen years ago, there was a large party of so-called "disloyalists" who
were never weary of decrying British influences and upholding Australian
nationality. Mr. Jebb, in his "Colonial Nationalism," gives an
interesting account of this movement and of its organ, the widely
circulated _Sydney Bulletin_, with its furiously anti-British views, its
Radicalism, its Republicanism, and what not. He shows amusingly how
entirely harmless the propaganda really was, and what a healthy effect
it actually had in promoting an independence of feeling and national
self-respect among Australians, to such a degree that when the South
African War broke out, there was a universal outburst of patriotism and
a universal desire, which was realized, to share to the full as a nation
in the expense, danger, and hardships of the war. Mr. Jebb adds the
interesting suggestion that the reluctance of New Zealand to enter the
Australian Federation may be partly due to the strong individual
sentiment of nationality evoked within her by the war and the
exceptional exertions she made to aid the Imperial troops.
His book is a psychological study of men in the mass. What he sets out
to prove, and what he does successfully prove, is that the encouragement
of minor nationalities is not merely consistent with, but essential to,
the unity of the Empire. Yet he never mentions Ireland, not even for the
purpose of proving her an exception to the rule, and I do not think I
ever gauged the full extent of the prejudice against that country until
I realized that in such a book such a topic did not receive even a line
of notice; yet one would naturally suppose that it was as important to
the Empire, morally and strategically, to possess the affection and
respect of four and a half million citizens within 60 miles of the
British coast as of the same number of citizens at the Antipodes.
Mr. Jebb is a Unionist. How he reaches his conclusion I do not know. It
would seem to be beyond human power to construct a case against Home
Rule for Ireland, with its strongly marked individuality of character
and sentiment, which did not textually stultify his case for the more
distant dependencies. His party generally is in sympathy with the views
expressed in his book, and has done much to further them. How do they
reconcile them with opposition to Home Rule for Ireland? How do they
explain away the support for that policy in the Dominions? It seems to
me that their only resource would be to say: "We are bound to maintain,
and we have the necessary physical force to maintain, the present
political system in Ireland, because to alter it would impair the formal
legislative 'unity' of the United Kingdom; but let us frankly admit that
as long as we take this view there can be no 'Union' in the highest
sense of the word. Ireland must be retarded and estranged. We cannot
raise Territorial Volunteers within her borders; on the contrary, we
must keep and pay for a standing army of police to preserve our
authority there. Her population must diminish, her vital energy ebb away
to other lands; as a market for our goods and as a source of revenue for
Imperial purposes she must remain undeveloped and unprogressive. She
will continue rightly to agitate for Home Rule, and this agitation will
always be baneful both to her and to us. It will distract her energies
from her own economic and social problems. It will embitter and degrade
our politics, and dislocate our Parliamentary institutions. She must
suffer, we must suffer, the Empire must suffer. It is sad, but
inevitable."
Morality aside, is that common sense? Is it strange that the Colonies
themselves regard such logic, when applied to Ireland, as perverted and
absurd?
Before leaving Australia we have only to recall the fact that at the
close of the last century, after a generation of controversy and
negotiation, the Canadian example of 1867 was at length imitated, and
the Federal Union formed which amalgamated all the mainland States,
together with Tasmania, in the Commonwealth of Australia, and that the
Union was sanctioned and legalized by the Imperial Act of 1900. New
Zealand preferred to remain a distinct State. The Australians departed
in some important respects from the Canadian model, the main difference
being that a greater measure of independence was retained by the
individual States, and smaller powers delegated to the central
Government. This was a matter of voluntary arrangement as between the
States themselves, the Home Government standing wholly aside on the
sound principle that Australia knew its own interests best, and that
what was best for Australia was best for the Empire.
FOOTNOTES:
[29] Letter to Lord Malmesbury, August 13, 1852 ("Memoirs of an
Ex-Minister," by the Earl of Malmesbury, vol. i., p. 344).
[30] "Life of Gladstone," vol. i., p. 363.
[31] Annual Treasury Returns ["Imperial Revenue (Collection and
Expenditure)"]. According to these returns, Ireland's Imperial
contribution in 1839, before the famine, was £3,626,322; in 1849, after
the famine, £2,613,778, and in 1859-60 no less than £5,396,000. At the
latter date the Colonies were estimated to cost three and a half
millions a year, of which nine-tenths were contributed by the taxpayers
at home, British and Irish.
[32] Full information may be found in "The Irish in Australia," by J.F.
Hogan.
[33] For an excellent historical description of the various Australian
land systems, see the official "Year-Book of the Commonwealth," 1909.
[34] "Life of Sir George Grey," Professor G.C. Henderson.