laws which they have made themselves, under whatever form it be of
government." This definition, which applies strictly to England, applies
not at all to Ireland. The English system of government has broken down
there so completely that all parties profess to be agreed that something
must be devised in its place. Liberals have always held that a people or
a class knows better what is good for it than any other people or any
other class, however enlightened or well-meaning. That has been one of
the main reasons for giving the suffrage to the poor, the ignorant, and
the helpless, because the experience of ages has taught that the rich,
the educated, and the powerful, while well able to take care of
themselves, are either too careless or have too little knowledge to take
the same care of others. And as with the suffrage, so with
self-government. Any extension must be granted upon broad principles:
small concessions grudgingly given are always accepted without
gratitude, and used to extort greater.
"Well," it may be said, "I am willing to give Ireland a large measure of
self-government, but I won't yield to agitators." This is one of the
oldest of all replies to demands for reform. How could anything be
gained in politics without agitation? The Tories swear they will yield
nothing until agitation has ceased; and if it ceases, if only for a
moment, they declare it is evident there is no popular wish for reform.
"Proceed, my lords," said Lord Mansfield, when the American colonies
revolted--"proceed, my lords, with spirit and firmness; and when you
shall have established your authority, it will then be time to show
lenity." And their lordships proceeded; but the "time to show lenity"
never came, for it was such counsels which lost the American colonies to
the British Crown.
"But," it will be added, "this is not an ordinary agitation; it is a
revolutionary one." In some of its phases that is true, and it is all
the more reason why its cause should be closely examined. It is the
English themselves who have taught the Irish that ordinary
constitutional agitation gains them nothing. If it had not been for the
organization of the Volunteers, Grattan's Parliament of 1782 would never
have been granted; the Duke of Wellington in 1829 admitted that he
yielded Catholic Emancipation to the threat of civil war; it needed the
terrible crimes of the early "thirties" to arouse England to the
necessity for abolishing an iniquitous system of levying tithe; the
Fenian outbreaks, the attack on a prison van at Manchester, and the
blowing up of a gaol in London, opened the eyes of the English to the
need for disestablishing the Irish Church and clipping the claws of the
Irish landlords; the fearful winter of 1880 led to the granting of still
further protection to the tenants; and to the "plan of campaign" of the
winter of 1886 was it owing that a Tory Government felt compelled to
still further encroach upon the property and privileges of the landlords
of Ireland. As long as Ireland has held to constitutional agitation--as
witness that for Catholic Emancipation from 1801 to 1825, and that for
tenant right from 1850 to 1868--so long has England refused to grant a
single just demand; and this is exactly what the Tories are doing now.
Is it any wonder that Irish agitation should have become revolutionary
when that is the only kind we have rewarded? In the relations between
the governing classes and popular movements there has all through been
this difference--in England, revolution has been staved off by reform;
in Ireland, reform has been staved off till there was revolution.
"But," it may be continued, "it is not so much that the agitation is
revolutionary as that it is criminal which makes me object." But a
movement ought not to be called criminal because of the excesses of a
few of its extreme partisans. No great popular agitation has ever been
free from lewd fellows of the baser sort, who have given occasion to the
enemy to blaspheme. But did English Liberals hesitate to support Mazzini
because he was accused of favouring assassination; to sympathize with
the French Republicans because Orsini prepared bombs for the destruction
of Napoleon III.; or to-day to wish well to those Russians who conspire
for liberty because the wilder spirits among them have assassinated one
Czar and attempted to assassinate another? In our own history, are the
Covenanters to be condemned because some of them murdered Archbishop
Sharpe; the early Radicals because Thistlewood and his fellows plotted
to kill King and Cabinet; the Reformers of 1831 because of the Bristol
riots and the destruction of Nottingham Castle; or those of 1866 because
the Hyde Park railings were thrown down? When it is remembered that even
such a man as Peel could, in the midst of a heated controversy, accuse
such another as Cobden of conniving at assassination, we should be
careful how we accept the testimony of any partisan concerning the
criminality of an agitation to which he is opposed.
These objections touch, after all, only the fringe of the matter, and
another which is frequently urged--that the Irish agitation is a
"foreign conspiracy" because it receives aid from the United
States--does not go much closer to the root. But this, like the others,
may be disposed of by English examples. Did not Englishmen aid, both by
men and money, in liberating Greece and uniting Italy? Did they not help
by subscriptions the insurrections in Hungary and Poland, and, when the
former failed, did not many of them take the refugees into their homes?
Did they not even raise a fund to assist the slave-holding States when
in rebellion? And in all these cases, except in a remote degree the
last, they had no tie in blood, but only one in sympathy, with those
concerned. That the Nationalist movement has been largely aided from the
United States is undoubted; but that aid has mainly come from those of
Irish birth or parentage who have been driven across the Atlantic to
seek a home. And when it is said that, because of this help, a
self-governed Ireland would rely upon the United States to the detriment
of England, may we not ask why it is that Italy does not rely upon
France, though it was France that struck the first effective blow for
Italian unity; or Bulgaria upon Russia, though without the
blood-sacrifice of Russia that principality would never have occupied a
place on the European map? However much it may be to be regretted,
gratitude does not play any large part in international affairs.
When the more serious objections to the granting Home Rule are urged
they are no more difficult to meet. "Ireland is not a nation," it is
said; "its people are of different races." The argument has been used
before by the Tories, and the value of it may be judged by an example.
The late Lord Derby, as leader of the Tory party, addressed the House of
Lords in 1860 in savage denunciation of the efforts then being made to
secure the unity of Italy; and to the contention that all the
inhabitants of that peninsula were Italians, he answered, in the words
of _Macbeth_ to his hired murderers,
Aye, in the catalogue ye go for men;
As hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs,
Shoughs, water-rugs, and demi-wolves are cleped
All by the name of dogs.
And those who remember the unbridgeable differences which then appeared
to exist between the Sardinian and the Sicilian, the Florentine and the
Neapolitan, the dweller in Venice and the resident in Rome, will know
that the perfect unity between them which now makes Italy one of the
Great Powers would have been considered as unlikely as any between a
Belfast man and an inhabitant of Cork to-day.
"The Irish are not fit for self-government," is the next contention. If
this be so, the shame is ours in not having given them the opportunity
for being trained. We did not refuse to liberate the slaves until they
were proved to be fit for freedom; we did not decline to give the
labourers the suffrage until they were proved to be capable of rightly
using it; for we knew in each case that no such proof could be afforded
until the opportunity was offered. No proof that the Irish are not able
to manage a Parliament is given by the corruption of the
semi-independent body which they enjoyed from 1782 to 1799; for that
consisted entirely of Protestants, mainly chosen by a band of
borough-mongers, whom Pitt had to buy out at a high price. The same
thing exactly was said by the Tories--sneers about the pigs and all--of
the Bulgarians in 1876; and they have had good reason since to change
their minds. What reason is there to believe that the Irish would be
less able to manage their own affairs than the people of Bulgaria?
"But they are naturally lawless." Where is the proof? It is true that in
certain mountainous districts of Kerry and Clare there have been
outbursts of moonlighting, but these have been as nothing compared with
the prevalence of brigandage in Greece before the Greeks were allowed to
rule themselves, or in Italy before the Italians founded their united
kingdom. Where there is little popular respect for the law, there
lawlessness flourishes; where the people make their own laws, there
lawlessness is put down with a strong hand.
"If they had the power they would persecute the Protestants." This is a
prophecy, and a prophet has the advantage of being able to soar above
proofs. But the fact that every prominent defender of national rights in
Ireland for the last century and a half, except O'Connell, from Dean
Swift down to Mr. Parnell, has been a Protestant, should count for
something. The fact that Protestants have again and again been returned
to the Corporations of the most Catholic cities should count for much.
And the fact that, when for years not a single one of the 450 English
members was a Roman Catholic, several of the 103 Irish members, even
from the most Catholic districts, were Protestants, should count for
more. Such religious persecution as exists in Ireland is certainly more
at Belfast than at Cork.
"Giving them a Parliament would break up the empire." Why should the
empire be broken up because there was extended to Ireland the principle
we have granted to Australia and Canada, New Zealand and the Cape? How
is it that the German Empire continues united, though the Reichstag, its
Imperial Parliament, is one body, and the Prussian Parliament, the Saxon
Parliament, the Wuertemberg Parliament, and the Bavarian Parliament are
quite others? Is there no union between Austria and Hungary, or between
Sweden and Norway, though each has its Parliament, and are the United
States disintegrated because every one of the States has its own Senate
and House of Representatives? If one were asked to name two of the
strongest nations outside our own, Germany and the United States would
be the reply; and in each there is a system of Home Rule for the
separate portions.
"But did not the United States crush the Confederates when secession
was demanded?" Of course they did; the United States fought against the
South separating from the North, as we should against Ireland separating
from England. But every State which joined the Confederacy possessed as
ample a measure of Home Rule as the Liberals now propose for Ireland;
and, to the lasting honour of the Northern States, that measure was
restored soon after the war. Home Rule the South had, and has still;
separation the South asked for, and did not receive.
"The Irish are ungrateful people; whatever you give them they ask for
more." Would it not be well to first ask what the Irish have had to be
grateful for? Granting that we yielded Catholic Emancipation, reformed
the tithe system, disestablished the Church, and legalized tenant right;
why, after all these things, should we expect gratitude? The old phrase
that "gratitude is a lively sense of favours to come" may be unduly
cynical; but is it not absurd to ask that recompense for the doing of
acts of simple justice? Former generations of Englishmen deprived the
Irish of their rights. To what thanks are later generations entitled for
simply restoring to the Irish the rights of which they had been robbed?
"Be just and fear not," was said of ancient time: "Be just and expect
not gratitude," should be added to-day. And when it is stated that "the
Irish ought to accept what we choose to give them," it must be replied
that this is the purely despotic argument which has already done England
sufficient injury by losing her the United States.
It is only in this, the briefest, fashion that an answer has been
sketched to the various arguments and assumptions against Home Rule. In
determining to grant it, the Liberals are acting strictly according to
their old policy of favouring struggling nationalities. The support
given by Burke to the cause of America; by Fox to Ireland; by Canning
(in this, as in some other matters, truly Liberal) to Greece; by
Palmerston to Italy; and by Mr. Gladstone to Bulgaria, indicates with
sufficient clearness the traditional Liberal position. For a century we
have been telling the whole world the advantages of autonomy; are we
now to decline to adopt, in similar circumstances, the remedy for
discontent we have all along preached to, and sometimes forced upon,
others?
The Liberals say with Landor, "Let us try rather to remove the evils of
Ireland than to persuade those who undergo them that there are none."
They are utterly opposed to the idea that it is right to give a people
free representation and then deliberately to ignore all that that
representation asks. They are, it is true, in a minority at this moment,
but they do not forget that all great causes have three stages--first to
be laughed at, next to be looked at, and last to be loved. Home Rule has
certainly reached the second stage; it will soon reach the third. The
Liberals have been beaten before, but they have always won in the end.
And it is well to be beaten sometimes. If life were all sunshine we
should find it oppressive; an occasional cloud serves to temper the
heat. To the Liberals, as to nature itself, a misty morning is often the
prelude to the brightest day.
XI.--WHAT SHOULD BE DONE WITH THE LORDS?
In dealing with the other questions which the Liberals will have to
consider, it will be well to take them in what may be called their
constitutional order, and a beginning, therefore, may be made with the
reform of the House of Lords. The theory upon which that House is upheld
is that it is an assembly of our most notable men, called to rule either
by descent from the great ones of the past, or by the proved capacity of
themselves in the present, who discuss every question laid before them
with impartiality, and who act as a check upon the hasty and
ill-considered legislation of the House of Commons.
So much for the theory: what of the fact? Those peers who are not
creations of to-day mainly spring either from Pitt's plutocrats or from
those who have been granted their patents because of having lavishly
spent their money in electoral support of some party; those who can
claim their peerage by direct descent from the great ones of the past
can be numbered by tens, while the whole body is numbered by hundreds;
and just as a sprinkling of successful lawyers, soldiers, and brewers
adds nothing to its historical character, it in no sense brings the
peerage into clear and close contact with the people. As to the
impartiality displayed by the House of Lords, it is notorious that in
these days it is little other than an appanage of the Carlton Club, and
that, whatever the Tory whips desire it to do, it accomplishes without
demur. And its power as a check upon hasty and ill-considered
legislation may be judged from the fact that it never dares reject a
measure which public opinion strongly demands and upon which the Commons
insist.
When the history of the House of Lords is studied, it will be found
that during the past century it has initiated no great measure for the
public good, and a hundred times has wantonly mutilated or impotently
opposed the reforms the people asked. The mischief it has done touches
every department of public life. Whether it was to throw out a bill
abolishing the penalty of death for stealing in a shop to the value of
five shillings, on the ground stated by one of the bishops in the
majority that it was "too speculative to be safe;" to again and again
vote down every proposal to relieve Roman Catholics and Jews from civil
disabilities; to pander to the will of George IV. in the prolonged
persecution of his wife; or to defeat measures calculated to place the
electoral power in the hands of the people--the House of Lords has
always been one of the main forces in the army of darkness and
oppression. Remember that every one of the reforms the Liberals have
secured within the last 50 years has been distasteful to the House of
Lords, and calculate the worth or wisdom of that institution.
It does not add to the estimation of either the worth or the wisdom that
the Lords have ultimately accepted what they have bitterly opposed, for
if they have consistently been a stumbling-block in the path of every
reform which the people now cherish their tardy repentance is of little
avail as long as they pursue the same obstructive course. And it is not
merely measures which they throw out, but measures which they mutilate,
that render them a power for harm. For the Lords are like rabbits; it is
not so much what they swallow as what they spoil which makes them so
destructive.
Those who defend the institution as it exists should, therefore, be
called upon to point to some one definite case in recent history in
which it can be said, "Here has the House of Lords done good." Mere talk
about the admirable administrators and the dexterous debaters it
contains is no argument; for if the legislative functions of the peers
were abolished to-morrow, those among them who were worthy a seat in the
House of Commons would have no difficulty in securing it. What Liberals
object to is the being subjected to the caprices, the passions, and the
prejudices of some five hundred men, the majority of whom are not
merely unskilled in legislative faculty and unqualified in
administrative experience, but are drawn from a single class out of
touch and sympathy with the mass of the people.
It is not the least of the evils of the present system that the
attendance at the sittings of the Lords is of so perfunctory a nature.
Even during the discussion of important measures not more than sixty or
seventy peers, out of over five hundred, are commonly present, while ten
or twelve is not an unusual number to deal with Bills. As Erskine May
has pointed out, "Three peers may wield all the authority of the House.
Nay, even less than that number are competent to pass or reject a law,
if their unanimity should avert a division, on notice of their imperfect
constitution." And he furnishes an instance where an Irish Land Bill,
"which had occupied weeks of discussion in the Commons, was nearly lost
by a disagreement between the two Houses, the numbers, on a division,
being seven and six."
Adding to their number does not improve the average attendance, and yet
the pace at which that number is growing is a scandal. In 1885, the
first time since 1832, the total membership of the House of Commons was
enlarged, not without trepidation and despite the fact that every member
would be directly responsible to a constituency. The increase was only
twelve, and a Premier often creates within a year as many legislators on
his own account, who, with their successors, are responsible to no one
for their public conduct. Is it not an absurdity to speak of ourselves
as freely governed and ruled only by our own consent when a Prime
Minister can make as many legislators as he chooses, and there be none
to gainsay him?
If it were only that under the present system the drunken and the
dissolute, the blackleg and the debauchee are allowed to sit in the
Lords and make laws for us and our children, we should have a right to
demand that the institution should be "mended or ended." The former
process has now distinctly been adopted as a plank in the Liberal
platform, and the question of reform can, therefore, no longer be put on
one side.
There are many Radicals who say that as the House of Lords, if it agrees
with the Commons, is useless, and if it disagrees is dangerous, its
abolition as a legislative body should at once be made a plank in the
party programme. They argue further, that to reform will be to
strengthen it, and that, by the reasoning just given, this is
undesirable. But the main point is to secure the best legislative
machine we can, and there is much to be said for the improvement of the
House of Lords into a Senate which shall be in fact what the present
institution is in theory--a body of sage statesmen, experienced in
affairs, and elected for a specified term, so as to be directly amenable
to the people, and not removed from obedience to public opinion.
As a first step to any reform, the creation of hereditary peerages,
conferring a power to legislate, ought to be stopped. "The tenth
transmitter of a foolish face" ought no longer to be able to transmit
with the foolishness a power over the lives and liberties of his
fellow-men. If there is any one who continues honestly to believe that
because a man has secured a peerage by his brains (and the proportion of
creations upon that ground is exceeding small) his successors are likely
to prove good legislators, he would do well to procure a list of those
peers who are descended from "law lords;" and he would find that while
not one of them is distinguished for great political or administrative
skill, there are various notorious instances, which will occur to every
reader of the daily newspaper, of those distinguished for exactly the
reverse.
One minor reform in the constitution of the House of Lords ought to be
pressed at once, and that is the removal of the bishops from their
present place within it. Not only has no one section of religious
persons the right to a State-created ascendency over others, but all
parties are agreed in the most practical form that bishops as bishops
have no inherent right to legislative power. In 1847, when the bishopric
of Manchester was created, it was provided that the junior member of the
episcopal bench for the time being should not have a seat in the Lords,
and thirty years later, when the Government of Lord Beaconsfield made
further new bishoprics, it similarly did not venture to add to the
number of spiritual peers; there are consequently always four or five
waiting outside the gilded chamber until the death of their seniors
shall let them in.
What Liberals, therefore, demand is that the House of Lords shall be
thoroughly reformed. The bishops must be excluded, no more hereditary
legislators created, and a system devised by which the House shall
become a Senate so chosen as to be directly responsible to the people,
whose interests it is assumed to serve. A sprinkling of life peers would
aggravate instead of lessen the difficulty. An hereditary legislator
may, for the sake of his successors, be careful not too grievously to
offend the people; an elected legislator, for his own sake, will be the
same; but a legislator who was neither one nor the other would have no
such check, and all experience has shown that corporations elected for
life become cliquish or even corrupt, for want of the frequent and
wholesome breeze of public opinion.
XII.--IS THE HOUSE OF COMMONS PERFECT?
There was a time, and that not far distant, when the question "Is the
House of Commons perfect?" would have been considered by many
well-intentioned and easy-going persons to be impertinent, even if not
actually irreverent. But we live in days when every institution has to
submit to the test of free discussion, and its usefulness and efficiency
have to be proved, if it is to retain its place in the political system.
And as there can be little doubt that, for many reasons, a feeling has
been widely growing within the past few years that the House of Commons
is neither as useful nor as efficient as it ought to be, the popular
reverence for that great assembly has somewhat diminished; and it
behoves all who wish to preserve parliamentary government in its fullest
and freest form to examine the causes of apparent decay and to suggest
methods of amelioration.