IRELAND TO-DAY
Why does present-day Ireland need Home Rule? I put the question in that
way because I am not going to question the fact that she wants Home
Rule. She has always said she wanted it: she says so still, and that is
enough. There is a powerful minority in Ireland against Home Rule. There
always have been minorities more or less powerful against Home Rule in
all ages and places. That does not alter the national character of the
claim. If once we go behind the voice of a people, constitutionally
expressed, we court endless risks. National leaders have always been
called "agitators," which, of course, they are, and non-representative
agitators, which they are not. To deny the genuineness of a claim which
is feared is an invariable feature of oppositions to measures of Home
Rule. The denial is generally irreconcilable with the case made for the
dangers of Home Rule, and that contradiction in its most glaring shape
characterizes the present opposition to the Irish claims. But Unionists
should elect to stand on one ground or the other, and for my part I
shall assume that the large majority of Irishmen, as shown by successive
electoral votes, want Home Rule. Precisely what form of Home Rule they
want is another and by no means so clear a matter, on which I shall
presently have a word to say. But they want, in the general sense, to
manage their own local affairs. Her best friends would despair of
Ireland if that was not her desire.
What, in the Colonies, Ireland, and everywhere else, is the deep
spiritual impulse behind the desire for Home Rule? A craving for
self-expression, self-reliance. Home Rule is synonymous with the growth
of independent character. That is why Ireland instinctively and
passionately wants it, that is why she needs it, and that is why Great
Britain, for her own sake, and Ireland's, should give it. If that is not
the reason, it is idle to talk about Home Rule; but it is the reason.
Character is the very foundation of national prosperity and happiness,
and we are blind to the facts of history if we cannot discern the
profound effect of political institutions upon human character.
Self-government in the community corresponds to free will in the
individual. I am far from saying that self-government is everything. But
I do say that it is the master-key. It is fundamental. Give
responsibility and you will create responsibility. Through political
responsibility only can a society brace itself to organized effort, find
out its own opinions on its own needs, test its own capabilities, and
elicit the will, the brains, and the hands to solve its own problems.
These are such commonplaces in every other part of the Empire, which has
an individual life of its own, that men smile if you suggest the
contrary. But ordinary reasoning is rarely applied to Ireland. There
"good government" has been held to be "a substitute for self-government"
and a régime of benevolent paternalism to be a full and sufficient
compensation for cruel coercion and crueller neglect. In this paternal
régime it is impossible to include those great measures of land reform
passed in 1870, 1881, and 1887, which revolutionized the agrarian
system, and converted the cottier tenant into a judicial tenant.[42]
Although these measures, which fall into an altogether different
category from the subsequent policy of State-aided Land Purchase,[43]
were inspired by an earnest desire to mitigate frightful social evils,
they cannot be regarded as voluntary. They were extorted, shocking as
the reflection is, by crime and violence, by the spectacle of a whole
social order visibly collapsing, and by the desperate efforts of a
handful of Irishmen, determined at any cost, by whatever means, to save
the bodies and souls of their countrymen. The methods of these men were
destructive. They were constructive only in this, the highest sense of
all, that while battling against concrete economic evils, they sought to
obtain for Ireland the right to control her own affairs and cure her own
economic evils. It is often said that Parnell gave a tremendous impetus
to the Home Rule movement by harnessing it to the land question. True;
but what a strange way of expressing a truth! Anywhere outside Ireland
men would say that self-government was the best road to the reform of a
bad land system.
With the tranquillity which was slowly restored by the alterations in
agrarian tenure and the immense economic relief derived from the
lowering of rents, a change came over the spirit of British
statesmanship. With the exception of the short Liberal Government of
1892-1895, which failed for the second time to carry Home Rule,
Conservatives were responsible for Ireland from 1886 to 1905. They felt
that opposition to Home Rule could be justified only by a strenuous
policy of amelioration in Ireland, and the efforts of three Chief
Secretaries, Mr. Arthur Balfour, Mr. Gerald Balfour, and Mr. George
Wyndham--efforts often made in the teeth of bitter opposition from Irish
Unionists--to carry out this policy, were sincere and earnest. The Act
of 1891, with its grants for light railways, its additional facilities
for Land Purchase, and its establishment of the Congested Districts
Board to deal with the terrible poverty of certain districts in the
west, may be said to mark the beginning of the new era. The Land Act of
1896 was another step, and the establishment of a complete system of
Irish Local Government in 1898 another. In the following year came the
Act setting up the Department of Agriculture, and in 1903 Mr. Wyndham's
great Land Purchase Act. Then came the strange "devolutionist" episode,
arising from the appointment of Sir Antony (now Lord) MacDonnell to the
post of Under-Secretary at Dublin Castle, the Government who selected
him being fully aware that he was in favour of some change in the
government of Ireland. He entered into relations with a group of
prominent Irishmen, headed by Lord Dunraven, who were thinking out a
scheme for a mild measure of devolution. When the fact became known,
there was an explosion of anger among Irish Unionists. Mr. Wyndham, who
had been a popular Chief Secretary, resigned office, and was succeeded
by Mr. Walter Long; perhaps the most dramatic and significant example in
modern times of the policy of governing Ireland in deliberate and direct
defiance of the wishes and sentiments of the vast majority of Irishmen.
The Liberal Government of 1906, coming into office under a pledge to
refrain from a full Home Rule measure, confined itself to the
introduction of the Irish Council Bill of 1907, which, rightly, in my
opinion, was repudiated by the Irish people, and accordingly dropped.
But the Government was in general sympathy with Nationalist Ireland, so
that a number of useful measures were added to the statute books; for
example, the Labourers (Ireland) Act of 1906, empowering Rural Councils,
with the aid of State credit, to acquire land for labourers' plots and
cottages; the Town Tenants Act, extending the principle of compensation
for improvements at the termination of a lease to the urban tenant; the
very important Irish Universities Act of 1908, which gave to Roman
Catholics facilities for higher education which they had lacked for
centuries, and, lastly, Mr. Birrell's Land Act of 1909, which was
designed partly to meet the imminent collapse of Land Purchase, owing to
the failure of the financial arrangements made under the Wyndham Act of
1903, and partly to extend the powers of the Congested Districts Board.
To these measures must be added another which was not confined to
Ireland, but which has exercised a most potent influence, and by no
means a wholly beneficial influence, on Irish life and Irish finance,
the Old Age Pensions Act of 1908, under which the enormous sum of two
and three-quarter millions is now allocated to Ireland.[44]
The best that can be said of the legislation since 1881 is that it has
laid the foundations of a new social order. Agrarian crime has
disappeared and material prosperity has greatly increased. Government in
the interests of a small favoured class has almost vanished. It survives
to this extent, that civil administration and patronage, which are
still, be it remembered, removed from popular control, remain, in fact,
in Protestant and Unionist hands to an extent altogether
disproportionate to the distribution of creeds, classes, and opinions.
And, of course, in the major matter of Home Rule, the power of the
Unionist minority, as represented in the Commons by seventeen out of the
thirty-three Ulster representatives, and in the House of Lords by an
overwhelming preponderance of Unionist peers, is still enormous. But
within Ireland itself, central administration apart, the exceptional
privileges and exceptional political power of Protestants and landlords,
which lasted almost intact until forty years ago, is now non-existent.
The Disestablishment Act of 1869, while immensely enhancing the moral
power and religious zeal of the Church of Ireland, and even
strengthening its financial position, took away its political monopoly,
and through the final abolition of tithes, its baneful and irritating
interference with economic life. The successive measures of land
legislation, culminating in the transfer of half the land of Ireland
from landlord to peasant proprietorship, and the Local Government Act of
1898, surrendering at a stroke the whole local administration of the
country into popular control, destroyed the exceptional political
privileges of the landlord class.
Ascendancy, then, in the old sense, is a thing of the past. What has
taken its place? What is the ruling power within Ireland? Is it a public
opinion derived from the vital contact of ideas and interests, and
taking shape in a healthy and normal distribution of parties? Is thought
free? Has merit its reward? Is there any unity of national purpose,
transcending party divisions? If it were necessary to give a categorical
"Yes" or "No" to these questions, the answer would be "No." Sane
energizing politics, and the sovereign ascendancy of a sane public
opinion, are absolutely unattainable in Ireland or anywhere else without
Home Rule. It is all the more to the credit of Irishmen that, in the
face of stupendous difficulties, and in a marvellously short space of
time since the attainment, barely twenty years ago, of the elementary
conditions of social peace, they have gone so far as they have gone
towards the creation of a self-reliant, independently thinking, united
Ireland. The whole weight of Imperial authority has been thrown into the
scale against them. Whatever the mood and policy of British upholders of
the Union, whether sympathetic or hostile, wise or foolish, their
constant message to both parties in Ireland has been, "Look to us. Trust
in us. You are divided. We are umpires," and the reader will no doubt
remember that the theory of "umpirage" was used in exactly the same way
in the Colonies, notably in Upper Canada,[45] to thwart the tendency
towards a reconciliation of creeds, races, and classes. Fortunately,
there have been Irishmen who have laboured to counteract the effects of
this enervating policy, and to reconstruct, by native effort from
within, a new Ireland on the ruins of the old. Whether or not they have
consciously aimed at Home Rule matters not a particle. Some have, some
have not; but the result of these efforts has been the same, to pull
Irishmen together and to begin the creation of a genuinely national
atmosphere.
It is not part of my scheme to describe in detail the various movements,
agricultural, industrial, economic, literary, political, which in the
last twenty years have contributed to this national revival. Some have a
world-wide fame, all have been excellently described at one time or
another by writers of talent and insight.[46] My purpose is to note
their characteristics and progress, and to estimate their political
significance. In the first place it must be remembered that some of the
most important of the modern legislative measures have been initiated
and promoted by Home Rulers and Unionists, Roman Catholics and
Protestants, acting in friendly co-operation and throwing aside their
political and religious antagonisms. Such was the origin of the great
Land Purchase Act of 1903, which Mr. Wyndham drafted on the basis of an
agreement reached at a friendly conference of landlords and
representatives of tenants. But a far more interesting and hopeful
instance of co-operation had taken place seven years earlier. One of the
very few really constructive measures of the last twenty years, the Act
of 1899 for setting up the Department of Agriculture and Technical
Instruction, was the direct outcome of the recommendations of the Recess
Committee brought together in 1895 and 1896 by Sir Horace Plunkett; a
Committee containing Nationalist and Unionist Members of the House of
Commons, Tory and Liberal Unionist peers, Ulster captains of industry,
the Grand Master of the Belfast Orangemen, and an eminent Jesuit.[47] In
its reunion of men divided by bitter feuds, it was just the kind of
Conference that assembled in Durban in 1908, six years after a
devastating war, to discuss and to create the framework of South African
Union. That Conference was the natural outcome of the grant of Home Rule
to the defeated Boer States. The Irish Conference, succeeding a land-war
far more destructive and demoralizing, was brought together in spite of
the absence of Home Rule, and the prejudice it had to overcome,[48] is a
measure of the fantastically abnormal conditions produced by the denial
of self-government. There lay Ireland, an island with a rich soil and a
clever population, yet terribly backward, far behind England, far behind
all the progressive nations of Europe in agriculture and industry, her
population declining, her land passing out of cultivation,[49] her
strongest sons and daughters hurrying away to enrich with their wits and
sinews distant lands. There, in short, lay a country groaning for
intelligent development by the concentrated energies of her own people.
"We have in Ireland," runs the first paragraph of the Report of the
Committee, "a poor country practically without manufactures--except for
the linen and shipbuilding of the north, and the brewing and distilling
of Dublin--dependent upon agriculture, with its soil imperfectly tilled,
its area under cultivation decreasing, and a diminishing population
without industrial habits or technical skill."
The leeway to make up was enormous. To go no farther back than the
institution of the Penal Code and the deliberate destruction of the
woollen industry, two centuries of callous repression at the hands of an
external authority had maimed and exhausted the country whose condition
the Committee had met to consider. These facts the members of the
Committee frankly recognized in that part of the Report which is
entitled with gentle irony "Past Action of the State." Here, then, was a
purely Irish problem, intimately concerning every Irishman, poor or
rich, Roman Catholic or Protestant, a problem of which Great Britain,
though responsible both for its existence and its solution, knew and
cared little. The really strange thing is, not that representative
Irishmen should have met together to consider and prescribe for the
deplorable economic condition of their country, but that they should not
also, like the South African Conference, have drafted a Constitution for
Ireland, on the sound ground that a system of government which had
promoted and sustained the evils they described could never, with the
best will in the world, become a good government for Ireland. Yet for a
brief space of time these men actually had Home Rule, and by virtue of
that privilege they did better work for Ireland in six months than had
been done in two centuries.
What is more, they used the Home Rule principle in their recommendations
for the establishment of a Department of Agriculture and Technical
Instruction. "We think it essential," they reported on p. 101, "that the
new Department should be in touch with the public opinion of the classes
whom its work concerns, and should rely largely for its success upon
their active assistance and co-operation." Its chief, they added, should
be a Minister directly responsible to Parliament, and on p. 103 they
advocated a Consultative Council, whose functions should be--(1) To keep
the Department in direct touch with the public opinion of those classes
whom the work of the Ministry concerns; and (2) to distribute some of
the responsibility for administration amongst those classes. Now these,
in Ireland, were revolutionary proposals. The idea of any part of the
Government "being in touch with public opinion" was wholly new. The idea
of "distributing responsibility for administration" amongst the subjects
of administration was startlingly novel. Ireland, both before and after
the Union, had always been governed on a diametrically opposite
principle. Since the Union, when Irish departmental Ministers, never
responsible to the people, disappeared, not one of the host of nominated
Irish Boards was legally amenable to Irish public opinion. Not one had
a separate Minister responsible even to the Parliament at Westminster,
which was not an Irish Parliament. _A fortiori_, not one relied on the
co-operation and advice of the classes for whose benefit it was supposed
to exist.
Proposed, nevertheless, by a group of representative Irishmen, the
scheme for a democratically constituted Department of Agriculture passed
smoothly into law as soon as the machinery for ascertaining public
opinion on the matters at issue had been brought into existence. Mr.
Gerald Balfour, the Chief Secretary, was engaged at the time upon his
measure for the extension of Local Government to Ireland. This measure
became law in 1898, and the Department Act in 1899. Under that Act, the
duty was laid upon each of the new County Councils of electing two
members to serve upon a Consultative Council of Agriculture, to which a
minority of nominated members was added, and this Council in its turn
elects two-thirds of the members of an Agricultural Board, and supplies
four representatives to a Board of Technical Instruction, which, like
the Council and the Agricultural Board, has a predominantly popular
character.[50]
At the summit stands the Minister, or Vice-President, as he is called
(for in accordance with ancient custom, the Chief Secretary is nominally
in supreme control of this as of all other Irish Departments), and a
large and efficient staff of permanent officials. He and his staff have
a large centralized authority, but this authority is subject to a
constitutional check in the shape of a veto wielded by the Boards over
the expenditure of the Endowment Fund. What is more important, policy
tends to be shaped in accordance with popular views by the existence of
the Council and the Boards.
Here, then, is the germ of responsible government. At first sight a
critic might exclaim: "Why, here is democracy pushed to a point unknown
even in Great Britain, where Government Departments are wholly
independent of Local Councils." That is in a limited sense true, and it
is quite arguable that British Departments would be the better for an
infusion of local control. But we must not be misled by a false analogy.
Great Britain reaches the Irish ideal by other means. Her departmental
Ministers are directly responsible to a predominantly British House of
Commons where a hostile vote can at any moment eject them from
office.[51] There is no Irish Parliament, nor any kind of predominantly
Irish body which is vested with the same power. The Vice-President of
the Irish Department of Agriculture, an institution concerned
exclusively with Irish affairs, whether he sits in the House of Commons
or not (and for two years Mr. T.W. Russell had not a seat at
Westminster), could not be ejected from office even by a unanimous vote
of Irish Members of the House, with the moral backing of a unanimous
Irish people.[52] That is one of the anomalous results of the Union, and
it was a recognition, though rather a confused one, of this anomaly,
that inspired the ingenious compromise invented by the Recess Committee
for introducing an element of popular control. But what a light the
compromise throws on the anomaly which evoked it! Is it common sense to
make these elaborate arrangements for promoting an Irish Department on
an Irish popular basis while recoiling in terror from the prospect of
crowning them with a Minister responsible to ah Irish Parliament? The
consequence is that even in this solitary example of an Irish
Department under semi-popular control we see the subtle taint of Crown
Colony Government. Popular opinion, acting indirectly, first through the
Council and then through the Boards, can legally paralyze the Department
by declining to appropriate money in the way it prescribes, while
possessing no legal power to enforce a different policy or change the
personnel of administration. This is only an object-lesson. I hasten to
add that such a paralysis has never taken place, though some acrimonious
controversy, natural enough under the anomalous state of things, has
arisen over the office of Vice-President. There is now only one means by
which Irish opinion can, if it be so disposed, displace the holder of
the office, and that is a thoroughly unreliable and unhealthy means,
namely, through pressure brought to bear by one or other of the Irish
Parliamentary parties upon a newly elected British Ministry.[53] But why
in the world should the British party pendulum determine an important
Irish matter like this? Why, _a fortiori_, should it determine the
appointment to the office of Chief Secretary, the irresponsible Prime
Minister, or, rather the autocrat of Ireland? It is the _reductio ad
absurdum_ of the Union.
The Department commands a large measure of confidence. It would command
far greater confidence if it were responsible to an Irish Parliament;
but Irishmen are sensible enough to perceive that as long as the Union
lasts, everyone is interested in making the existing system work
smoothly and well. The general policy as laid down in the first
instance, by the first Vice-President, Sir Horace Plunkett, has been
sound and wise;[54] to proceed slowly, while building up a staff of
trained instructors, inspectors, organizers; to devote money and labour
mainly to education, both industrial and agricultural, and to evoke
self-reliance and initiative in the people by, so far as possible,
spending money locally only where a local contribution is raised and a
local scheme prepared. The last aim met with a fine response. Every
County Council in Ireland raises a rate, and has a scheme for
agricultural and technical instruction. I can only enumerate some of the
multifarious functions which the Department evolved for itself or took
over from various other unrelated Boards and concentrated under single
control. It gives instruction in agriculture and rural domestic economy
(horticulture, butter-making, bee-keeping, poultry-keeping, etc.)
through schools, colleges, or agricultural stations under its own
direction, through private schools for both sexes, and through an
extensive system of itinerant courses conducted (in 1909) by 128 trained
instructors. It gives premiums for the breeding of horses, cattle,
asses, poultry, swine. It conducts original research, it experiments in
crops, and, among other things, is slowly resuscitating the depressed
industry of flax-growing, and starting a wholly new industry in the
southern counties, that of early potatoes. It sprays potatoes,
prescribes for the diseases of trees, crops, and stock, advises on
manures and feeding-stuffs, teaches forestry, and gives scholarships at
various colleges for proficiency in agricultural science. On the side of
Technical Instruction it teaches and encourages all manner of small
industries, such as lace-making. It superintends all technical
instruction in secondary schools, and organizes and subsidizes similar
instruction in a multitude of different subjects under schemes prepared
by local authorities, while at the same time carrying on an important
and extensive system of training teachers. It also superintends
sea-fisheries and improves harbours.
The material results have been great; the moral results perhaps even
greater. Just as we should expect, wherever education goes, and wherever
men work together for economic improvement, unnatural antagonisms of
race and religion tend to disappear. This is not the result of any
direct influence wielded by the Department, which never finds it
necessary to lecture people on the duty of mutual tolerance; it is the
result of common sense and a small experience in Home Rule. High
officials of the Department have informed me that their work, for all
intents and purposes, is unhampered by local religious prejudices. A
spirit of keen and wholesome rivalry permeates the people. County and
Borough Committees in districts almost wholly Roman Catholic, with large
powers of patronage, almost invariably appoint the best men, regardless
of creed and local influence. Anyone who wishes to gain a glimpse of the
real Belfast of the present and the future, as distinguished from the
ugly, bigoted caricature of a great city which some even of its own
citizens perversely insist on displaying to their English friends, a
Belfast as tolerant and generous as it is energetic and progressive,
should visit the magnificent Municipal Technical Institute, where 6,000
boys and girls, Roman Catholic and Protestant, mix together on equal
terms, and derive the same benefit from an extraordinary variety of
educational courses in a building furnished with lecture-rooms,
laboratories, experimental plant, and gymnasia, of a perfection hardly
to be surpassed in any city of the United Kingdom.
Here is something grand and fruitful accomplished in eleven years, and
it is the outcome, be it remembered, of original, constructive thought
devoted by Irishmen to the needs of their own country.
Let us also remember that it represents the application of State-aid to
economic development. But with the utmost caution, and the utmost
efforts to elicit self-help, one may go too far in the direction of
State-aid, and even in this sphere it is by no means certain that
Ireland is free from danger. Let us pass to another movement whose
essence is self-help: I mean the movement for Agricultural Co-operation.
Here again Sir Horace Plunkett was the originator. Indeed, with him and
his able associates and advisers, of whom Lord Monteagle and Mr. R.A.
Anderson, the Secretary of the I.A.O.S., were the first, the twin aims
of self-help and State-aid were combined as they should be, in one big,
harmonious policy. Self-help must, indeed, they held, be antecedent to,
and preparatory for, State-aid. The position confronting them was that
half a million unorganized tenant farmers, for the most part cultivating
excessively small holdings, and just beginning to emerge after
generations of agrarian war from an economic serfdom, were face to face
with the competition of highly organized European countries, and of vast
and rapidly developing territories of North and South America. It was as
far back as 1889 that the first propaganda was begun, and in 1894, a
year before the Recess Committee met, the Irish Agricultural
Organization Society was formed. By unwearied pains and patience,
seemingly hopeless obstacles had been overcome, apathy, ignorance, and
often contemptuous opposition from men of both political parties. For,
with that ruinous pessimism always endemic in countries not politically
free, and exactly paralleled in the Canada described by the Durham
Report of 1839, extremists were inclined to suspect any movement which
drew recruits from both political camps. Nevertheless, the island is now
covered with a network of 886 co-operative societies, creameries,
agricultural societies (for selling implements, foodstuffs, etc.),
credit banks, poultry societies, and other miscellaneous organizations.
The total membership is nearly 100,000, the total turnover nearly two
and a half millions.[55] Nearly half the butter exported from Ireland is
made in the 392 co-operative creameries, and at the other end of the
scale extraordinarily valuable work is done by the 237 agricultural
credit banks, which supply small loans, averaging only £4 apiece, for
strictly productive purposes on a system of mutual credit.
Moral and material regeneration go together. The aim is to build up a
new rural civilization, to put life, heart, and hope into the monotony
of country life and unite all classes in the strong bonds of sympathy
and interest: a splendid ideal, applicable not to Ireland alone, but to
all countries, and Ireland may truly be said to be pointing the way to
many another country, Great Britain included.
The Co-operative movement attracts the most intelligent and progressive
elements of the rural population. Strictly non-political itself, it
unites creeds and parties. It is as strong in predominantly Roman
Catholic districts as in predominantly Protestant districts, strongest
of all in Catholic Wexford. Probably two-thirds or more of the
co-operators are Home Rulers, but that only accidentally reflects the
distribution of Irish parties. On the local committees political animus
is unknown. The governing body contains members, lay and clerical, of
all shades of opinion. Step into Plunkett House, that hospitable
headquarters of the Organization Society, and if you have been nurtured
in legends about inextinguishable class and creed antipathies, which are
supposed to render Home Rule impossible and the eternal "umpirage" of
Great Britain inevitable, you will soon learn to marvel that anyone can
be found to propagate them. Here, just because men are working together
in a practical, self-contained, home-ruled organization for the good of
the whole country, you will find liberality, open-mindedness,
brotherhood, and keen, intelligent patriotism from Ulsterman and
Southerners alike. The atmosphere is not political. But you will come
away with a sense of the absurdity, of the insolence, of saying that a
country which can produce and conduct fine movements like this is
_unfit_ for self-government. I should add a word about a new
organization which only came into being this year, and which also has
its home at Plunkett House, the United Irishwomen, whose aim, in their
own words, is to "unite Irishwomen for the social and economic advantage
of Ireland." "They intend to organize the women of all classes in every
rural district in Ireland for social service. These bodies will discuss,
and, if need be, take action upon any and every matter which concerns
the welfare of society in their several localities. So far as women's
knowledge and influence will avail, they will strive for a higher
standard of material comfort and physical well-being in the country
home, a more advanced agricultural economy, and a social existence a
little more in harmony with the intellect and temperament of our
people." Anyone who wants to understand something of the spirit of the
new self-reliant Ireland which is springing up to-day should read the
thrilling little pamphlet (I cannot describe it otherwise) from which I
quote these words, and which introduced the United Irish-women to the
world, with its preface by Father T.A. Finlay, and its essays by Mrs.
Ellice Pilkington, Sir Horace Plunkett, and Mr. George W. Russell,
better known as "Æ," poet, painter, and Editor of the Co-operative
weekly, the _Irish Homestead_. Nor can I leave this part of my subject
without referring to that amazing little journal. No other newspaper in
the world that I know of bears upon it so deep an impress of genius.
There are no "politics," in the Irish sense, in it. It would be
impossible to infer from its pages how the Editor voted. What fascinates
the reader is the shrewd and witty analysis of Irish problems, the high
range of vision which exposes the shortcomings and reveals the
illimitable possibilities of a regenerated Ireland and the ceaseless and
implacable war waged by the Editor upon all pettiness, melancholy, and
pessimism.
What the Agricultural Organization Society is doing for agriculture the
Industrial Development Associations, formed only in quite recent years,
are doing, in a different way, for the encouragement of Irish
industries. The Associations of Belfast, Cork, and other cities work in
harmony, and meet in an annual All-Ireland Industrial Conference. Their
effort is to secure the concentration of Irish brains and capital on
Irish industrial questions, to promote the sale of Irish goods, both in
Ireland, Great Britain, and foreign countries, and to protect these
goods against piracy and illicit competition.[56] Here again
co-operation for Irish welfare brings together the creeds and races, and
tends to extinguish old bigotries and antipathies. Here again the truth
is recognized that Ireland is a distinct economic entity whose
conditions and needs demand special study from her citizens. In a
country of which that basal truth is recognized it would seem
inexplicable that Protestants and Catholics who meet in committee-rooms
and on platforms to promote, outside Parliament, the common interests of
Ireland, should not unite as one man to demand an Irish Legislature in
which to focus those interests and make them the subjects of direct
legislative enactment, free both from the paternal and the coercive
interference of a country differently situated, and absorbed in its own
affairs.
I pass from the agricultural and industrial movements to another
powerful factor in the reconstruction of Ireland, namely, the Gaelic
League, founded in 1893, whose success under the Presidency of Dr.
Douglas Hyde in reviving the old national language, culture, and
amusements, is attracting the attention of the world. Fortunately the
League encountered some ridicule at the outset and prospered
proportionately. Some of its work is not above criticism, but few
persons--and none who have the least knowledge of such intellectual
revivals elsewhere--now care to laugh at it. The League is non-political
and non-sectarian. Strange, is it not, that such a movement should have
to emphasize the fact? Strange paradox that in a country which is being
re-born into a consciousness of its own individuality, which is
regaining its own pride and self-respect, recovering its lost literature
and culture, and vibrating to that "iron string, Trust thyself," the
conflict for self-government, that elementary symbol of self-trust,
should still retain enough intestinal bitterness to compel men to label
national movements as non-political and non-sectarian! It would be idle,
of course, to pretend that this national movement, like all others in
Ireland, does not strengthen, especially among the younger generation,
which grows increasingly Nationalist, the sentiment for Home Rule. If it
did not, we should indeed be in the presence of something miraculously
abnormal.
Meanwhile the Celtic revival does visible good. The language is no
longer a fad; it is an envied accomplishment, a mark of distinction and
education. Wherever it goes, North and South, it obliterates race and
creed distinctions, and all the terrible memories associated with them.
There are Ulstermen of Saxon or Scottish stock in whom the fascination
of Irish art and literature has extirpated every trace of Orangeism and
all implied in it. The language revivifies traditions, as beautiful as
they are glorious, of an Ireland full of high passions and stormy
domestic feuds, but united in sentiment, breeding warriors, poets,
lawgivers, saints, and fertilizing Europe with her missionary genius.
However far those times are, however grim and pitiful the havoc wrought
by the race war, it is nevertheless a fact for thinkers and statesmen
to ponder over, not a phantasy to sneer at, that Celtic Ireland lives.
Anglicization has failed, not because Celts cannot appreciate the
noblest manifestations of English genius in art, letters, science, war,
colonization, but because to repress their own culture and nationality
is at the same time to repress their power of appreciation and
assimilation. Until comparatively recent times, it was only the worst of
English literature and music, the cheapest newspaper twaddle, the
inanest music-hall songs, which penetrated beyond a limited circle of
culture into the life of the country. The revolt against this
sterilizing and belittling side of anglicization is strong and healthy.
It affects all classes. Farmers, labourers, small tradesmen, who had
never conceived the idea of learning for learning's sake, and who had
grown up, thanks to the national system of education, in all but
complete ignorance of their own country's history and literature, spend
time on reading and study and in the practice of the old indigenous
dances and music, which was formerly wasted in idleness or dissipation.
Temperance and social harmony are irresistibly forwarded. Nor is it a
question of a few able men imposing their will on the many, or of an
artificial, State-aided process. Though the language has obtained a
footing in more than a third of the State schools and in the National
University,[57] the motive force behind it comes from the people
themselves. In the country district, with which I am best acquainted,
boys and girls from very poor families are clubbing together to pay
instructors in the Irish language and dances, and the same thing is
going on all over Ireland.
The brilliant modern school of poets and playwrights who, steeped in the
old Celtic thought and culture, have found for it such an exquisite
vehicle in the English tongue, speak for themselves and are winning
their own way to renown. The only criticism I venture to make is that
some of them are too much inclined to look backward instead of forward,
to idealize the far past rather than to illuminate the future, and to
delineate the deformities of national character produced by ages of
repression, rather than to aid in conjuring into being a virile, normal
nation.
The name of the last movement to be referred to sums up all the others,
Sinn Fein. Unlike the others, it had a purely political origin, and for
that reason, probably, never made the same progress. Yet the explanation
is simple. In pursuance of the general purpose of inspiring Irishmen to
rely on themselves for their own salvation, economic and spiritual, Sinn
Feiners, like John Mitchel and others in the past, and like the
Hungarian patriots, attacked, with much point and satire, the whole
policy of constitutional and Parliamentary agitation for Home Rule. The
policy, they said, had failed for half a century; it was not only
negative and barren, but positively harmful. Nationalists should refuse
to send Members to Westminster and abide by the consequences. Sensibly
enough, most Irishmen, while recognizing that there was an element of
indisputable and valuable truth in this bold diagnosis, decided that it
was premature to adopt the prescription. Public opinion in Britain was
slowly changing, and confidence existed that this opinion would be
finally converted. If the Sinn Fein alternative meant anything at all,
it meant complete separation, which Ireland does not want, and a final
abandonment of constitutional methods. If another Home Rule Bill were to
fail, Sinn Fein would undoubtedly redouble its strength. Its ideas are
sane and sound. They are at bottom exactly the ideas which actuate every
progressive and spirited community, and which in Ireland animate the
Industrial Development Associations, the Co-operative movement, the
thirst for technical instruction, the Gaelic League, the literary
revival, and the work of the only truly Irish organ of government, the
Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction.
Now, where do we stand? Are the phenomena I have reviewed arguments for
Home Rule or against Home Rule? Do they tend to show that Ireland is
"fitter" now for Home Rule, or that she manages very well without Home
Rule? These are superfluous questions. They are never asked save of
countries obviously designed to govern themselves and obstinately denied
the right. Who would say now of Canada or Australia that they ought to
have solved their economic, agrarian, and religious problems and have
evolved an indigenous literature before they were declared fit for Home
Rule, or--still more unreasonable proposition--that their strenuous
efforts after self-help and internal harmony in the teeth of political
disabilities proved, in so far as they were successful, that external
government was a success?
Yet these questions were, as a fact, asked of the Colonies, as they are
asked of Ireland. And misgovernment increased, and passions rose, and
blood flowed, while, in the guise of dispassionate psychologists, a
great many narrow, egotistical, and bullying people at home propounded
these arid conundrums. Where is our common sense? The Irish phenomena I
have described arise in spite of the absence of Home Rule, and the
denial of Home Rule sets an absolute and final bar to progress beyond a
certain point.
That is certain; one cannot live in Ireland with one's eyes and ears
open without realizing it. All social and economic effort, successful as
it is up to a certain point, and strong as its tendency is to promote
nationalist feeling of the noblest kind, has to struggle desperately
against the benumbing influence of abstract "politics." Suspicion comes
from both sides. Both Unionists and Nationalists, for example, at one
time or another have looked askance on the Co-operative movement and on
the Department of Agriculture as being too Nationalist or too Unionist
in tendency. Unionists caused Sir Horace Plunkett to lose his seat in
Parliament in 1905; and Nationalists, though with some constitutional
justification, secured his removal from office in 1907. At this moment
there is friction and suspicion in this particular matter which seems to
the impartial observer to be artificial, and which would not exist, or
would be transmuted into something perfectly harmless, and probably
highly beneficial, were there any normal political life in Ireland and a
central organ of public opinion. As long as Great Britain insists, to
her own infinite inconvenience, upon deciding Irish questions by party
majorities fluctuating from Toryism to Radicalism, and thereby compels
Ireland to send parties to Westminster whose _raison d'être_ is, not to
represent crystallized Irish opinion on Irish domestic questions--that
is at present wholly impossible--but to assert or deny the fundamental
right for Ireland to settle her own domestic questions, so long will
these dislocations continue, to the grave prejudice of Ireland and the
deep discredit of Great Britain. Ireland, like Canada in 1838, has no
organic national life. Apart from the abstract but paramount question of
Home Rule, there are no formed political principles or parties. Such
parties as there are have no relation to the economic life of the
country, and all interests suffer daily in consequence. In a normal
country you would find urban and agricultural interests distinctly
represented, but not in Ireland. We should expect to rind clear-cut
opinions on Tariff Reform and Free Trade. No such opinions exist. On the
other hand, agreement on important industrial and agricultural questions
finds not the smallest reflection in Parliamentary representation.
Education, and other latent issues of burning importance, are not
political issues. A Budget may cause almost universal dissatisfaction,
but it goes through, and the amazing thing is that Unionists complain of
its going through! Most of the Parliamentary elections are uncontested,
though everybody knows that a dozen questions would set up a salutary
ferment of opinion if they were not stifled by the refusal of Home Rule.
The Protestant tenant-farmers of Ulster have identical interests with
those of other Provinces, and have profited largely by the legislation
extorted by Nationalists; but for the most part, though by no means
wholly, they vote Unionist. The two great towns, Dublin and Belfast, are
divided by the most irrational antagonism. Labourers, both rural and
urban, have distinct and important interests; the rural labourers have
no spokesman, the town-labourers only one. It was admitted to me by a
Unionist organizer in Belfast that that city, but for the Home Rule
issue, would probably return four labour members. Nor have parties any
close relation to the distribution of wealth. In the matter of incomes
the prosperous traders of Cork, Limerick, and Waterford are in the same
case as regards taxation with those of Londonderry and Belfast.
Publicans are Unionists in England, Nationalists in Ireland, both in
Ulster and elsewhere. Before the Home Rule issue was raised, Ulster was
largely Liberal. Ulster Liberalism is almost dead. Extreme Socialism may
almost be said to be non-existent in Ireland, yet Ireland is not only
administered on semi-collectivist principles, but continually runs the
risk of being involved in legislation of a Socialistic kind, which,
rightly or wrongly, she heartily dislikes.
As for the landed aristocracy all over Ireland, their historic alliance
with the intensely democratic tenant-farmers of one small corner of
Ireland, North-East Ulster, against those of all the rest, presented
strange enough features in the past, and is now becoming artificial in
the highest degree. Thanks to Land Purchase, no landed aristocracy in
the world now has a better chance of throwing its wealth and
intelligence into public life for the good of the whole country, of
thinking out problems, of conciliating factions, and of ennobling public
life. The landlord who has sold his land is a free man, far freer than
the English landlord from misgivings caused by divergency of interest.
The opportunity is still there. Will they profit by it? One thing is
essential: they must become Nationalists, and in breathing that phrase,
one is conscious of all the misleading implications and the bitter
historical feuds it suggests. Yet a small but powerful group of
landlords is already leading the way. And the way, even before Home
Rule, in reality is so simple. I speak from close observation. If a man
is a good man, and worthy to represent a constituency, he has only to
declare his belief that he thinks that he and his own fellow-citizens
are fit to govern themselves. Irishmen, especially in Roman Catholic
districts, and, indeed, as an indirect result of Catholicism, have never
lost their belief in aristocracy. When a landlord, or any other
Protestant, comes forward as a Nationalist, he is welcomed. His
religion, whatever it may be, does not count. Parnell and Smith O'Brien
were Protestant landlords. Many of the most trusted popular leaders,
Tone, Robert Emmet, John Mitchel, Isaac Butt, and others in the past
have been Protestants. Ten Members of the present Nationalist party are
Protestants. The Home Rule issue would have lost some of its bitterness
if a Unionist electorate had ever elected a Catholic to Parliament.
Still, it is unfortunately true that the great bulk of the landlords and
ex-landlords stand aloof from the Home Rule movement. The collateral
result is that far too many of them instinctively stand aloof even from
those purely economic and intellectual movements which tend to make a
living united Ireland out of chaos. The national loss is heavy; the
waste of talent and of driving-power, for Ireland needs driving-power
from her leisured and cultured classes, is melancholy to contemplate.
Everywhere one sees waste of talent in Ireland. The land abounds in men
with ideas and potentialities waiting for those normal chances of
development which self-governed countries provide. Much of this good
material is crushed under unnatural political tyrannies caused by
ceaseless agitation for and against an abstract aim which should have
been satisfied long ago, so that the energies it absorbed might have
been diverted into practical channels. There is too much moral
cowardice, too little bold, independent thought and action. Nobody knows
what Ireland really is, and of what she is capable. Nobody can know
until she has responsibility for her own fate.
Local government, where popular opinion is nominally free, suffers from
the absence of free central government. Is it not on the face of it
preposterous to give complete powers of local taxation and
administration to a country while withholding from it, as unsafe and
improper, central co-ordinating control? For any country but Ireland--at
any rate, in the British self-governing Colonies and the United
States--such a policy would be regarded as crazy. Still more
unreasonable is it to complain that local authorities under such a
system spend part of the energy which should be devoted wholly to local
affairs in abstract politics. I forbear from engaging in the statistical
war over the numbers of Catholics and Protestants employed and elected
by local bodies. One must remember, what Unionists sometimes forget,
that Ireland is, broadly speaking, a Roman Catholic country, and that
until thirteen years ago local administration and patronage were almost
exclusively in Protestant hands. We should naturally expect a marked
change; but, with that reminder, I prefer to appeal to the reader's
common sense. Deny national Home Rule, and give local Home Rule. What
would one expect to happen? What would have happened in any Colony? What
would Mr. Arthur Balfour himself have prophesied with certainty in the
case of any other country but Ireland? Why, this, that each little local
body would become an outlet for suppressed agitation, and that national
or anti-national politics, not urgent local necessities, would enter
into local elections and influence the composition of local bodies. And
what would be the further consequence? That numbers of the best local
men would stand aloof or be rejected, and that favouritism would find a
congenial soil.
In point of fact, Irish local authorities, under the circumstances, are
wonderfully free from these evils, only another proof of the resilience
and vitality of the country under persistent mismanagement. On the whole
they bear comparison with British local authorities in thrift, purity,
and efficiency. None of them has ever yet had a scandal like that of
Poplar. All of them have shown sense and spirit in forwarding sanitation
and technical education. They vary widely, of course, the lowest units
in the scale being the least efficient, as in England. County Councils,
for example, are better than Rural District Councils. On the other hand,
Dublin Corporation, though not so bad as it is sometimes painted,
occasionally sets a very bad example. The standard of efficiency is
higher in the Protestant north than in the Catholic south, the standard
of religious toleration lower. But at bottom it is not a question of
theology, as every well-informed person knows, but a question of
politics. The same causes that keep the landed gentry out of Parliament
keep them, although not to the same degree, out of local politics.
Sometimes this is their own fault, for declining to take part in them;
for many of the Protestant upper class in Nationalist districts obtain
election in spite of being Unionists. Tolerance is slowly growing in
Nationalist, though not, it is to be feared, in Unionist, districts;
again a quite intelligible fact.[58] But when all is said and done, it
is an undeniable fact that Irish local authorities, especially those in
the poverty-stricken west, where all social activities are more
retrograde than elsewhere, are capable of great improvement, and that
improvement can come only by allowing them to concentrate on local
affairs, and obtain the co-operation of all classes and religions. The
very existence of a central Government of which Irishmen were proud
would influence the tone and standard of all minor authorities to the
bottom of the scale.
Meanwhile, obvious and urgent problems, which no Parliament but an Irish
Parliament can deal with, cry aloud for settlement. The Poor Law,
railways, arterial drainage, afforestation, are questions which I need
only refer to by name, confining myself to the greater issues.
Education, primary and intermediate, is perhaps the greatest. The
present system is almost universally condemned, and its bad results are
recognized. It has got to be reformed. By no possibility can it be
reformed so long as the Union lasts, not only because the Boards,
National and Intermediate, which control education, are composed of
unelected amateurs, but because there is no means of finding out what
the national opinion is as to the course reform is to take. Meanwhile
the children and the country suffer. The Intermediate Board is a purely
examining and prize-giving body, and its system by general agreement is
imperfect. In the National or Primary schools the percentage of average
daily attendance (71.1 per cent.), though slowly improving, is still
very bad.[59] Many of the school-houses are, in the words of the
Commissioners, "mere hovels," unsanitary, leaky, ill-ventilated. The
distribution of schools and funds is chaotic and wasteful. Out of 8,401
schools (in 1909-10)[60] nearly two hundred have an average daily
attendance of less than fifteen pupils. In 1730 the number is less than
thirty, and it is not only in sparsely inhabited country districts, but
in big towns, that the distribution is bad. The power of the
Commissioners to stop the creation of unduly small schools, and even
semi-bogus establishments which come into being in the great cities, is
imperfect. Another example of the curious mixture of anarchy and
despotism that the system of Irish government presents may be seen in
the Annual Report of the Commissioners. With a mutinous audacity which
would be laughable, if the case were one for laughing, the Commissioners
openly rail at the Treasury for the parsimony of its grants, and, in
order to stir its compassion, paint the condition of Irish education in
black colours. Imagine the various Departmental Ministers in Great
Britain publicly attacking in their Annual Reports the Cabinet of which
they were members! The Treasury, needless to say, is not to blame. It
pays out of the common Imperial purse all but a negligible fraction of
the cost of primary education in Ireland. Nothing is raised by rates,
and only £141,096 (in 1909-10) from voluntary and local sources, as
compared with £1,688,547 from State grants. The Treasury has no
guarantee that this money is well spent; on the contrary, it knows from
the Reports of the Commissioners themselves that a great deal of it is
very badly spent. The business is a comic opera, but it has a tragic
significance for Ireland. Primary education is so bad that a great
number of the pupils are absolutely unfit to receive the expensive and
excellent technical instruction organized by the Department of
Agriculture and Technical Instruction, and contributed to by the
ratepayers. The Belfast Technical Institute, for example, has to go
outside its proper functions, and spend from its too small stock in
providing introductory courses in elementary subjects, so as to equip
children for the reception of higher knowledge.[61] All over the country
the complaint is the same. No machinery whatever exists for
co-ordinating primary, secondary, technical, and University education,
and opportioning funds in an economical and profitable manner.
Religion is the immediate cause of the trouble; absence of popular
control the fundamental cause. The national system of primary education,
designed originally in 1831 to be undenominational, has become rigidly
denominational. Out of 8,401 primary schools, 2,461 only are attended by
both Protestants and Roman Catholics. The rest are of an exclusively
sectarian character. Even the Protestants do not combine. The Church of
Ireland, the Presbyterians, the Methodists, and other smaller
denominations, frequently have small separate schools in the same
parish. The management (save in the model schools, which are attended
only by Protestants) is exclusively sectarian, the local clergyman,
Roman Catholic, Church of Ireland, or Nonconformist having almost
autocratic control over the school.
This education question has got to be thrashed out by a Home Ruled
Ireland, and the sooner the better. After Home Rule the Treasury grant
will stop, and Ireland will have to raise and apportion the funds
herself, and set her house in order. At whatever sacrifice of religious
scruples, and, it is needless to add that to the Roman Catholic
hierarchy the sacrifice will be the greatest, the Irish people must
control and finance its schools, whether through a central department
alone, or through local authorities as well. There is no reason in the
world why a compromise should not be arrived at which would secure
vastly increased efficiency and leave the teaching of denominational
religion uninjured. Other countries, where the same religions exist side
by side, have attained that compromise. Ireland will be judged by her
success in attaining it.
Another important question is the treatment of the Congested Districts.
More than a third of Ireland is now under the benevolent jurisdiction of
a despotic Board.[62] So long as its funds are raised from general
Imperial taxation, the inevitable tendency is to shirk the thorough
discussion of this grave subject, to lay the responsibility on Great
Britain, to acquiesce in a policy of extreme paternalism, and to appeal
for higher and higher doles from the Treasury. This cannot go on.
Whoever, in the eyes of Divine Justice, was originally responsible for
the condition of the submerged west, and for the ruin of the evicted
tenants, Ireland, if she wants Home Rule, must shoulder the
responsibility herself, and think out the whole question independently.
The Congested Districts Board has done, and continues to do, good work
in the purchase and resettlement of estates; but even in this sphere
there are wide differences of opinion as to the proper methods and
policy to be employed, especially with regard to the division of
grasslands and the migration of landless men. Its other remedial work
(part of which is now taken over by the Department of Agriculture under
the Land Act of 1909), in encouraging fisheries, industries, and farm
improvements out of State money, is open to criticism on the ground of
its tendency to pauperize and weaken character. I do not care to
pronounce on the controversy, though I think that there is much to be
said for the view that money is best spent by encouraging agricultural
co-operation. Many able and distinguished men have devoted their minds
to the subject, but it is plain that Ireland as a whole has not thought,
and cannot think, the matter out in a responsible spirit, and that the
only way of reaching a truly Irish decision is through an Irish
Parliament, which both raises and votes money for the purpose.[63] The
reinstatement of evicted tenants teems with practical difficulties which
can only be solved in the same way. As long as Great Britain remains
responsible, errors are liable to be made which one day may be deeply
regretted.
The same observation applies to all future land legislation, not
excepting Land Purchase, which I deal with fully in a later chapter.[64]
That great department of administration must, for financial reasons, be
worked in harmonious consultation with the British Government; but it
ought to be controlled by Ireland, and a free and normal outlet given to
criticisms like those emanating from Mr. William O'Brien, whatever the
intrinsic value of these criticisms. Purchase itself settles nothing
beyond the bare ownership of the land. It leaves the distribution and
use of the land, except in the "resettled" districts, where it was, with
a third or a quarter of the holdings so small as to be classed as
"uneconomic." Ireland is not as yet awake to the possibilities of the
silent revolution proceeding from the erection of a small peasant
proprietorship. The sense of responsibility in these new proprietors
will be quickened and the interests of the whole country forwarded by a
National Parliament.
Temperance will never be tackled thoroughly but by an Irish Parliament.
All Irishmen are ashamed in their hearts of the encouragement given to
drunkenness by the still grossly excessive number of licensed houses,
which in 1909 was 22,591, and of the National Drink Bill, which in the
same year was £13,310,469,[65] or £3 11d. per head of a population not
rich in this world's goods. Temperance is not really a party or a
sectarian question. All the Churches make noble efforts to forward
reform, and in a rationally governed Ireland reform would be considered
on its merits. At present it is inextricably mixed up with Nationalist
and anti-Nationalist politics, and with irrelevant questions of Imperial
taxation.
The latest examples of the embarrassment into which Ireland without Home
Rule is liable to drift from the absence of a formed public opinion and
the means to give it effect, are the labour troubles and the National
Insurance scheme. There are signs that English labour is thrusting
forward Irish labour in advance of its own will and in advance of
general Irish opinion. In all labour questions Ireland's position as an
agricultural country is totally different from that of Great Britain.
The same legislation cannot be applicable to both. Ireland should frame
her own. Under present conditions it is impossible to know the
considered judgment of Ireland. There is certainly much opposition to
Insurance, and if all Irishmen thoroughly realized that the scheme might
complicate the finance of Home Rule and involve a greater financial
dependence on Great Britain than exists even at present, they would
study it with still more critical eyes,[66] as they would certainly have
studied the Old Age Pensions scheme with more critical eyes.
Here I am led naturally to the great and all-embracing questions of
Irish finance and expenditure, which lie behind all the topics already
discussed and many others. The subject is far too important and
interwoven with history to be dealt with otherwise than as an historical
whole, and that course I propose to take in a later part of the book. It
is enough to say that all the arguments for Home Rule are summed up in
the fiscal argument. Every Irishman worth his salt ought to be ashamed
and indignant at the present position.
The whole machinery of Irish Government, and the whole fiscal system
under which Ireland lives, need to be thoroughly overhauled by Irishmen
in their own interests, and in the interests of Great Britain. Among
many other writers, Mr. Barry O'Brien, in his "Dublin Castle and the
Irish People," Lord Dunraven in "The Outlook in Ireland," and Mr. G.F.H.
Berkeley in a paper contributed to "Home Rule Problems," have lucidly
and wittily described the wonderful collection of sixty-seven
irresponsible and unrelated Boards nominated by the Chief Secretary, or
Lord-Lieutenant, which, with the official services beneath them,
constitute the colonial bureaucracy of Ireland; the extravagance of the
judicial and other salaries, and the total lack of any central control
worthy of the name. By omitting a number of insignificant little
bureaux, the figure 67, according to Mr. Berkeley's classification, may
be reduced to 42, of which 26 are directly under Castle influence, and
the rest either branches of British Departments or directly under the
Treasury. In 1906, out of 1,611 principal official posts, 626 were
obtained purely by nomination, and 766 by a qualifying examination only.
In an able-bodied male population, which we may estimate at a million,
there are reckoned to be about 60,000 persons employed by the State, or
1 in 18. If we add 180,000 Old Age Pensioners, we reach the figure of
nearly a quarter of a million persons, out of a total population of
under four and a half millions, dependent wholly or partially for their
living on the State, exclusive of Army and Navy pensioners; again about
1 in 18. Four millions of money are paid in salaries or pensions to
State employees, and two and three-quarter millions to Old Age
Pensioners.
It is so easy to make fun about Irish administration that one has to be
cautious not to mistake the nature or exaggerate the dimensions of the
evil. The great defect is that the expenditure is not controlled by
Ireland and has no relation to the revenue derived from Ireland. The
Castle is not the odious institution that it was in the dark days of the
land war; but it is still a foreign, not an Irish institution, working,
like the Government of the most dependent of Crown Colonies, in a world
of its own, with autocratic powers, and immunity from all popular
influence. Beyond the criticism that one religious denomination, the
Church of Ireland, is rather unduly favoured in patronage, there is no
personal complaint against the officials. They are as able, kindly,
hard-working, and courteous as any other officials. Some of the
principal posts are held by men of the highest distinction, who will be
as necessary to the new Government as to the old. It is absolutely
essential, but it will not be easy, to make substantial administrative
economies at the outset, not only from the additional stress of novel
work which will be thrown upon a Home Rule Government, but from the
widespread claims of vested interests. It will require courageous
statesmanship, backed by courageous public opinion, to overhaul a
bureaucracy so old and extensive. Take the police, for example, the
first and most urgent subject for reduction. Adding the Royal Irish
Constabulary and the Dublin Metropolitan Police together, we have a
force of no less than 12,000 officers and men, a force twice as numerous
in proportion to population as those of England and Wales, and costing
the huge sum of a million and a half; and this in a country which now is
unusually free from crime, and which at all times has been naturally
less disposed to crime than any part of Great Britain. It is the
forcible maintenance of bad economic conditions that has produced Irish
crime in the past. Irishmen hotly resent that symbol of coercion, the
swollen police force, which is as far removed from their own control as
a foreign army of occupation. On the other hand, the force itself is
composed of Irishmen, and is a considerable, though an unhealthy,
economic factor in the life of the country. It performs some minor
official duties outside the domain of justice; it is efficient, and its
individual members are not unpopular. Reduction will be difficult. But
drastic reduction, at least by a half, must eventually be brought about
if Ireland is to hold up her head in the face of the world.
The difficulty will extend through all the ramifications of public
expenditure. Ireland, through no fault of her own, against her
persistent protests, has been retained in a position which is
destructive to thrifty instincts. A rain of officials has produced an
unhealthy thirst for the profits of officialdom. No one feels
responsibility for the money spent for national purposes, because no one
in Ireland _is_, in any real sense, responsible. There is no Irish
Budget or Irish Exchequer to make a separate Irish Government logically
defensible. The people are heavily taxed, but, rightly, they do not
connect their taxes with the expenditure going on around them. On the
contrary, their mental habit is to look to Great Britain as the source
of grants, salaries, pensions.
And the worst of it is that they are now at the point of being
financially dependent on Great Britain. After more than a century of
Union finance, after contributing, all told, over three hundred and
twenty millions of money to the Imperial purse over and above
expenditure in Ireland, they have now ceased to contribute a penny, and
are a little in debt. As we shall see, when I come to a closer
examination of finance, the main factor in producing this result has
been the Old Age Pensions. The application of the British scale,
unmodified, to Ireland is the kind of blunder which the Union
encourages. Ireland, where wages and the standard of living are far
lower than in England, does not need pensions on so high a scale, and
already suffers too much from benevolent paternalism. It was an
unavoidable blunder, given a joint financial system, but it has gravely
compromised Home Rule finance.
For acquiescing in this and similar grants, beyond the ascertained
taxable resources of the country; for the general deficiency of public
spirit and matured public opinion in Ireland; for the backwardness of
education, temperance legislation, and other important reforms, the
Irish Parliamentary parties cannot be held responsible. They are
abnormal in their composition and aims, and, beyond a certain limited
point, they are powerless, even if they had the will, to promote Irish
policies. That is the pernicious result of an unsatisfied claim for
self-government. It is the same everywhere else. While an agitation for
self-government lasts, a country is stagnant, retrograde, or, like
Ireland, progressive only by dint of extraordinary native exertions.
Read the Durham report on the condition of the Canadas during the long
agitation for Home Rule, and you will recognize the same state of
things. The leaders of the agitation have to concentrate on the abstract
and primary claim for Home Rule, and are reluctant to dissipate their
energies on minor ends. Yet they, too, are liable to irrational and
painful divisions, like that which divides Mr. O'Brien from Mr. Redmond;
symptoms of irritation in the body politic, not of political sanity.
They cannot prove their powers of constructive statesmanship, because
they are not given the power to construct or the responsibility which
evokes statesmanship. The anti-Home Rule partisans degenerate into
violent but equally sincere upholders of a pure negation.
Many of the able men who belong to both the Irish parties will, it is
to be hoped, soon be finding a far more fruitful and practical field for
their abilities in a free Ireland. But the parties, as such, will
disappear, on condition that the measure of Home Rule given to Ireland
is adequate. On that point I shall have more to say later. If it is
adequate, and Irish politicians are absorbed in vital Irish politics,
the structure of the existing parties falls to pieces, to the immense
advantage both of Ireland--including the Protestant sections of
Ulster--and of Great Britain. At present both parties, divided normally
by a gulf of sentiment, do combine for certain limited purposes of Irish
legislation, but both are, in different degrees and ways, sterile. The
policy of the Nationalist party has been positive in the past, because
it wrung from Parliament the land legislation which saved a perishing
society. It is essentially positive still in that it seeks Home Rule,
which is the condition precedent to practical politics in Ireland. More,
the party is independent, in a sense which can be applied to no other
party in the United Kingdom. Its Members accept no offices or titles,
the ordinary prizes of political life. But they themselves could not
contend that they are truly representative of three-quarters of Ireland
in any other sense than that they are Home Rulers. Half of the wit,
brains, and eloquence of their best men runs to waste. Some of them are
merely nominated by the party machine, to represent, not local needs,
but a paramount principle which the electors insist rightly on setting
above immediate local needs.
The purpose of the Irish Unionist party in the Commons is purely
negative, to defeat Home Rule. It does not represent North-East Ulster,
or any other fragment of Ireland, in any sense but that. It is
passionately sentimental and absolutely unrepresentative of the
practical, virile genius of Ulster industry. The Irish Unionist peers,
in addition to voicing the same negative, are for the most part the
spokesmen of a small minority of Irishmen in whom the long habit of
upholding landlord interests has begun to outlive the need.
I have said little directly about the problem of modern Ulster, not
because I underrate its importance, which is very great, but because I
have some hope that my arguments up to this point may be perceived to
have a strong, though indirect, bearing upon it.[67] The religious
question I leave to others, with only these few observations. It is
impossible to make out a historical case for the religious intolerance
of Roman Catholics in Ireland, or a practical case for the likelihood of
a Roman Catholic tyranny in the future. No attempt which can be
described as even plausible has ever been made in either direction. The
late Mr. Lecky, a Unionist historian, and one of the most eminent
thinkers and writers of our time, has nobly vindicated Catholic Ireland,
banishing both the theory and the fear into the domain of myth.[68]
He has shown, what, indeed, nobody denies, that, from the measures which
provoked the Rebellion of 1641, through the Penal Code, to the middle of
the nineteenth century, intolerance, inspired by supposed political
necessities, and of a ferocity almost unequalled in history, came from
the Protestant colonists. In that brilliant little essay of his
Nationalist youth, "Clerical Influences" (1861), he described the
sectarian animosity which was raging at that period as "the direct and
inevitable consequence of the Union," and wrote as follows: "Much has
been said of the terrific force with which it would rage were the Irish
Parliament restored. We maintain, on the other hand, that no truth is
more clearly stamped upon the page of history, and more distinctly
deducible from the constitution of the human mind, than that a national
feeling is the only check to sectarian passions." He was himself an
anti-Catholic extremist in the sense of holding (with many others) that
"the logical consequences of the doctrines of the Church of Rome would
be fatal to an independent and patriotic policy in any land." But he
insists in the same passage "that nothing is more clear than that in
every land where a healthy national feeling exists, Roman Catholic
politicians are both independent and patriotic."
He never recanted these opinions (which are confirmed by the subsequent
course of events) even after his conversion to Unionism, but derived his
opposition to Home Rule from a dread of all democratic tendencies,[69]
the only ground on which, if men would be willing to confess the naked
truth, it can be opposed. There the matter ought to rest. If the
doctrines of the Church of Rome are, in fact, inconsistent with
political freedom--I myself pronounce no opinion on that point--it is
plain to the most superficial observer that the Church, as a factor in
politics, stands to lose rather than to gain by Home Rule. British
statesmen have often accepted that view, and have endeavoured to use the
Roman Catholic hierarchy against popular movements, just as they
enlisted its influence to secure the Union. The Roman Catholic laity
have often subsequently rejected what they have considered to be undue
political dictation from the seat of authority in Rome.
If I may venture an opinion, I believe that both of these mutually
irreconcilable propositions--that Home Rule means Rome Rule, and that
Rome is the enemy to Home Rule--are wrong.[70] Such ludicrous
contradictions only help to destroy the case against trusting a free
Ireland to give religion its legitimate, and no more than legitimate,
position in the State. Ireland is intensely religious, and it would be a
disaster of the first magnitude if the Roman Catholic masses were to
lose faith in their Church. The preservation of that faith depends on
the political Liberalism of the Church.
Corresponding tolerance will be demanded of Ulster Protestants. At
present passion, not reason, governs the religious side of their
opposition to Home Rule. It is futile to criticize Ulster Unionists for
making the religious argument the spear-head of their attack on Home
Rule. The argument is one which especially appeals to portions of the
British electorate, and the rules of political warfare permit free use
of it. It was pushed beyond the legitimate point, to actual violence, in
the Orange opposition to responsible government in Canada in 1849. And
it has more than once inflamed and embittered Australian politics, as it
inflames the politics of certain English constituencies. But it is
hardly to be conceived that Ulster Unionists really fear Roman Catholic
tyranny. The fear is unmanly and unworthy of them. To anyone who has
lived in an overwhelmingly Catholic district, and seen the complete
tranquillity and safety in which Protestants exercise their religion, it
seems painfully abnormal that a great city like Belfast, with a
population more than two-thirds Protestant, should become hysterical
over Catholic tyranny. It would be physically impossible to enforce any
tyrannical law in Ulster or anywhere else, even if such a law were
proposed, and many leading Protestants from all parts of Ireland have
stated publicly that they have no fear of any such result from Home
Rule.[71]
"Loyalty" to the Crown is a false issue. Disloyalty to the Crown is a
negligible factor in all parts of Ireland. Loyalty or disloyalty to a
certain political system is the real matter at issue. At the present day
the really serious objections to Home Rule on the part of the leading
Ulster Unionists seem to be economic. They have built up thriving trades
under the Union. They have the closest business connections with Great
Britain, and a mutual fabric of credit. They cherish sincere and
profound apprehensions that their business prosperity will suffer by any
change in the form of government. To scoff at these apprehensions is
absurd and impolitic in the last degree. But to reason against them is
also an almost fruitless labour. Those who feel them vaguely picture an
Irish Parliament composed of Home Rulers and Unionists, in the same
proportion to population as at present, and divided by the same bitter
and demoralizing feuds. But there will be no Home Rulers after Home
Rule, that is to say, if the Home Rule conceded is sufficient. I believe
that Ulster Unionists do not realize either the beneficent
transformation which will follow a change from sentimental to practical
politics in Ireland, as it has followed a similar change in every other
country in the Empire, or the enormous weight which their own fine
qualities and strong economic position will give them in the settlement
of Irish questions.
Nor do they realize, I venture to think, that any Irish Government,
however composed, will be a patriotic Government pledged and compelled
for its own credit and safety to do its best for the interests of
Ireland. I have never met an Irishman who was not proud of the northern
industries, and it is obvious that the industrial prosperity of the
north is vital to the fiscal and general interests of Ireland, just as
the far more wealthy mining interests of the Rand are vital to the
stability and prosperity of the Transvaal, and were regarded as such and
treated as such by the farmer majority of the Transvaal after the grant
of Home Rule. Those interests have prospered amazingly since, and in
that country, be it remembered, volunteer British corps raised on the
Rand had been the toughest of all the British foes which the peasant
commandos had to meet in a war ended only four years before.
If the fears of Ulster took any concrete form, it would be easier to
combat them; but they are unformulated, nebulous. Meanwhile, it is hard
to imagine what measure of oppression could possibly be invented by the
most malignant Irish Government which would not recoil like a boomerang
upon those in whose supposed interests it was framed. I shall have to
deal with this point again in discussing taxation, and need here only
remind the reader that Ulster is not a Province, any part of which could
possibly be injured by any form of taxation which did not hit other
Provinces equally.
It is the belief of Ulster Unionists that their prosperity depends on
the maintenance of the Union, but the belief rests on no sound
foundation. Rural emigration from Ulster, even from the Protestant
parts, has been as great as from the rest of Ireland.[72] It is easy to
point to a fall in stocks when the Home Rule issue is uppermost, but
such phenomena occur in the case of big changes of government in any
country. They merely reflect the fact that certain moneyed interests do,
in fact, fear a change of government, and whether those fears are
irrational or not, the effect is the same. It is an historical fact, on
the other hand, that political freedom in a white country, in the long
run invariably promotes industrial expansion and financial confidence.
Canada is one remarkable example, Australia is another. The Balkan
States are others. Not that I wish to push the colonial example to
extremes. Vast undeveloped territories impair the analogy to Ireland;
but it is none the less true that when a country with a separate
economic life of its own obtains rulers of its own choice, and gains a
national pride and responsibility, it goes ahead, not backward.
Intense, indeed, must be the racial prejudice which can cause Ulstermen
to forget the only really glorious memories of their past. Orange
memories are stirring, but they are not glorious beside the traditions
of the Volunteers. The Orange flag is the symbol of conquest,
confiscation, racial and religious ascendancy. It is not noble for
Irishmen to celebrate annually a battle in which Ireland was defeated,
or to taunt their Catholic compatriots with agrarian lawlessness to
which their own forefathers were forced to resort, in order to obtain a
privileged immunity from the same scandalous land laws. Ulstermen
reached spiritual greatness when, like true patriots, they stood for
tolerance, Parliamentary reform, and the unity of Ireland. They fell,
surely, when they consented to style themselves a "garrison" under the
shelter of an absentee Parliament, which, through the enslavement and
degradation of the old Irish Parliament, had driven tens of thousands of
their own race into exile and rebellion.
They cherish the Imperial tradition, but let them love its sublime and
reject its ignoble side. It is sublime where it stands for liberty;
ignoble--and none knew this better than the Ulster-American
rebels--where it stands for government based on the dissensions of the
governed.
The verdict of history is that for men in the position of the Ulster
Unionists, the path of honour and patriotism, and the path of true
self-interest, lies in co-operation with their fellow-citizens for the
attainment of political freedom under the Crown. It is not as if they
had to create a tradition. The tradition lives.
FOOTNOTES:
[42] See pp. 13-17 and 66-71.
[43] Dealt with fully in Chapter XIV.
[44] In 1910-11, £2,408,000 (Treasury Return No. 220, 1911); plus
£225,000 estimated increase owing to removal of Poor Law
disqualification (Answer to Question in House of Commons, February 15,
1911).
[45] See p. 101.
[46] See particularly "Ireland in the New Century," Sir Horace Plunkett;
"Contemporary Ireland," E. Paul-Dubois; "The New Ireland," Sydney
Brooks.
[47] "Report of the Recess Committee," New Edition (Fisher Unwin).
[48] Colonel Saunderson, for example, the leader of the Irish Unionists
in the Commons, refused publicly to be a member of a committee on which
Mr. Redmond sat. Mr. John Redmond himself wrote that he could not take a
very sanguine view of the Conference, but that he was "unwilling to take
the responsibility of declining to aid in any effort to promote useful
legislation in Ireland."
[49] Area under cultivation in 1875, 5,332,813 acres; in 1894, 4,931,011
acres (in 1899, 4,627,545 acres; in 1900, on a system of classification
dividing arable land more accurately from pasture, there were only
3,100,397 acres arable, and in 1905 the figures were 2,999,082 acres)
(Official Returns). Population in 1841, 8,175,124; in 1851, 6,552,385;
in 1861, 5,798,976; in 1871, 5,412,377; in 1881, 5,174,836; in 1891,
4,704,750; in 1892, 4,633,808; in 1893, 4,607,462; in 1894, 4,589,260;
in 1895, 4,559,936 (in 1901, 4,458,775; in 1905, 4,391,543).--Census
Returns and _Thoms' Directory_.
[50] _Council of Agriculture_: 68 members elected by County Councils; 84
appointed by the Department from the various provinces. Total 102.
_Board of Agriculture_: 8 members elected by Council of Agriculture; 4
appointed by the Department. Total 12.
_Board of Technical Instruction_: 10 members appointed by County
Boroughs; 4 elected by Council of Agriculture; 6 appointed by the
various Government Departments; 1 by a joint Committee of Dublin
District Councils. Total 21.
[51] I am not forgetting Scotland. Her few local departments are
theoretically, but not practically, at the mercy of English votes and
influence. Scotch opinion, broadly speaking, governs Scotch affairs.
Precisely to the extent to which it does not so govern them, is a demand
for Home Rule likely to grow.
[52] Even the Recess Committee (and we cannot wonder) but dimly grasped
the constitutional position when they laid stress on the necessity for
an Agricultural Minister "directly responsible to Parliament."
Logically, they should have first recommended the establishment of an
Irish Parliament to which the Minister should be responsible. To make
him responsible to the House of Commons was absurd; and a Departmental
Committee of 1907 has, in fact, recommended that the Vice-President
should not have a seat in Parliament, but should remain in his proper
place, Ireland. Meanwhile, the original mistake has caused friction and
controversy. Soon after the Liberal Ministry took office in 1906, Sir
Horace Plunkett, the first Vice-President, as a Unionist, was replaced
by Mr. T.W. Russell, a Home Ruler. On the assumption that such an Office
was Parliamentary, its holder standing or falling with the British
Ministry of the day, the step was quite justifiable, and even necessary.
On the opposite assumption, confirmed by the Departmental Committee, the
step was unjustifiable, that is, on the theory of the Union. An Irish
Parliament alone should have the power of displacing Irish Ministers.
[53] See footnote, p. 159.
[54] "Organization and Policy of the Department," Official Pamphlet.
[55]
STATISTICS OF THE IRISH AGRICULTURAL ORGANIZATION MOVEMENT TO DECEMBER
31, 1909, WITH NUMBER OF SOCIETIES IN EXISTENCE ON DECEMBER 31, 1910
(SUPPLIED BY THE I.A.O.S.):
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Description. |Number of |Membership.|Paid-up |Loan |Turnover.
|Societies. | |Shares. |Capital. |
|-----------| | | |
|1910.|1909.| | | |
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Creameries | 392 | 380 | 44,213 | 138,354 | 111,365 | 1,841,400
Agricultural | 169 | 155 | 16,050 | 6,253 | 40,326 | 112,222
Credit | 237 | 234 | 18,422 | -- | 56,469 | 57,641
Poultry | 18 | 18 | 6,152 | 2,292 | 4,026 | 64,342
Industries | 21 | 21 | 1,375 | 1,267 | 1,450 | 7,666
Miscellaneous| 37 | 15 | 4,633 | 15,015 | 2,864 | 48,987
Flax | 9 | 9 | 589 | 482 | 5,796 | 2,286
Federations | 3 | 3 | 227 | 6,753 | 6,360 | 259,925
---------------------------------------------------------------------
| 886 | 835 | 91,661 | 170,416 | 228,656 | 2,394,469
---------------------------------------------------------------------
[56] An Irish Trademark has been secured, and has proved of great value
"Irish Weeks," for the furtherance of the sale of Irish products, are
held. The organ of the Association is the _Irish Industrial Journal_,
published weekly in Dublin.
[57] On December 31, 1909, Irish was taught as an "extra subject" in
3,006 primary schools out of 8,401, and in 161 schools in Irish-speaking
districts in the West a bi-lingual programme of instruction was in force
(Report of Committee of National Education, 1910). Forty-six thousand
pupils passed the test of the inspectors. Irish in 1910 was made a
compulsory subject for matriculation at the National University.
[58] The election by Nationalist votes of Lord Ashtown, a militant
Unionist peer of the most uncompromising type, in the spring of 1911 to
one of the Galway District Councils is a good recent example of this
tendency.
[59] Permissive powers exist for County Councils to enforce compulsory
attendance.
[60] Including 342 convent, 54 monastery, 125 workhouse, and 71 model
schools.
[61] See "Prospectus of the Municipal Technical Institute, Belfast,"
1910-11, pp. 55 and 57-58. Reading, Grammar, and Simple Arithmetic are
taught.
[62] See Report of the Congested Districts Board, 1909-11.
[63] See Report of Royal Commission on Congestion in Ireland (Cd. 4097);
especially a Memorandum by Sir Horace Plunkett, published as a separate
pamphlet by the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction.
[64] See Chapter XIV.
[65] Annual Report (1910) of the "Irish Association for the Prevention
of Intemperance." The estimate is that of Dr. Dawson Burns. By the
Licensing (Ireland) Act of 1902, the issue of any new licenses was
prohibited.
[66] I write before the scheme has been fully discussed in Parliament.
[67] It is scarcely necessary for me to remind the reader that the word
"Ulster," as used in current political dialectics, is misleading. Part
of Ulster is overwhelmingly Catholic; in part the population is divided
between the two creeds, and in two counties it is overwhelmingly
Protestant. In the whole province the Protestants are in a majority of
150,000, but since a number of Protestants vote Nationalist, the
representation of the province is almost equal, the Unionists holding
seventeen seats out of thirty-three.
[68] "Ireland in the Eighteenth Century," "Leaders of Public Opinion in
Ireland," "Clerical Influences."
[69] See "Democracy and Liberty."
[70] Many Unionists are to be found in the same breath prophesying
Catholic tyranny under Home Rule and averring without any evidence that
clerical influence caused the repudiation in 1907 of the Council Bill,
because it placed education under a semi-popular body.
[71] "Religious Intolerance under Home Rule: Some Opinions of Leading
Irish Protestants," pamphlet (1911) compiled by J. McVeagh, M.P.
[72] The Census of 1911 shows that the population of Ireland is still
falling. The province of Leinster, mainly Catholic, alone shows a small
increase, derived from the counties of Dublin (including Dublin City)
and Kildare. In Ulster, Down and Antrim, which include the city of
Belfast, alone show an increase, but not so great as that of County
Dublin.