different from that which attaches to the history of England and to
that of most of the great nations of the Continent. In very few
histories do we find so little national unity or continuous progress,
or such long spaces which are almost wholly occupied by perplexed,
petty internal broils, often stained by atrocious crimes, but turning
on no large issue and leading to no clear or stable results. Except
during the great missionary period of the sixth and seventh centuries,
and during a brief portion of the eighteenth century, we have little
of the interest that arises from dramatic situations or shining
characters, and in few countries has the highest intellect been, on
the whole, so slightly connected with the administration of affairs.
To a philosophical student of politics, however, Irish history
possesses an interest of the highest order. It is an invaluable study
of morbid anatomy. In very few histories can we trace so clearly the
effects of political and social circumstances in forming national
character; the calamity of missed opportunities and of fluctuating and
procrastinating policy; the folly of attempting to govern by the same
methods and institutions nations that are wholly different in their
characters and their civilisation.
The idea which still floats vaguely in many minds that Ireland, before
the arrival of the Normans, was a single and independent nation, is
wholly false. Ireland was not a nation, but a collection of separate
tribes and kingdoms, engaged in almost constant warfare. In this
respect, however, she resembled many countries which have since
attained the most perfect unity, and there can be little doubt that,
if her development had been impeded by no extraneous influences,
Ireland would have followed the same path as England or France. Much
stress has been justly laid on the disorganising influence of a long
succession of Danish invasions, though it must be remembered that
Ireland owes to the Danes the foundation of some of her most important
cities. Roman conquest, which introduced into most of Europe
invaluable elements of order, organisation, and respect for law, never
extended to Ireland. The Anglo-Norman invasion and conquest produced
consequences which were almost wholly evil. If the invaders had been
driven from the Irish shore, the natural course of development would,
no doubt, have been in time continued. If the invaders had completely
conquered Ireland, a fusion might have taken place as complete and as
healthy as in England. Neither of these two events occurred. The
English conquest was prolonged over nearly four hundred years. A
hostile and separate power was planted in the centre of Ireland
sufficiently powerful to prevent the formation of another
civilisation, yet not sufficiently powerful to impose a civilisation
of its own. Feudalism was introduced, but the keystone of the system,
a strong resident sovereign, was wanting, and Ireland was soon torn by
the wars of great Anglo-Norman nobles, who were, in fact, independent
sovereigns, much like the old Irish kings. The Scotch invasion of the
fourteenth century added enormously to the anarchy and confusion; the
English power as a living reality contracted to the narrow limits of
the pale; in outlying districts the Anglo-Norman assimilated quickly
with the Celtic element, while the English legislators in Ireland,
alarmed at the tendency, made it the main object of their policy, in
the words of Sir John Davies, 'to make a perpetual separation and
enmity between the English and Irish, pretending no doubt that the
English should in the end root out the Irish.'
Such a state of things continued till the long and terrible wars of
Henry VIII. and Elizabeth broke the power of the independent chiefs
and of the Celtic clans, and gave Ireland, for the first time, a
political unity. It is one of the great infelicities of Irish history
that this result was obtained at the very period of the Reformation.
The conquerors adopted one religion, while the conquered retained the
other, and thus a new and most enduring barrier was raised between the
two nations in Ireland, and a pernicious antagonism was established
between law and religion.
Another influence not less powerful than religion had at the same time
come into play. It had become the English policy to place great bodies
of English and Scotch settlers on the land that was confiscated in
consequence of rebellion, and under the impulse of the strong spirit
of adventure which grew up in the generation that followed the
Reformation, streams of English and Scotch adventurers poured over.
The great settlement of Ulster under James I. proved ultimately a
success, and laid the foundation of the prosperity of that province.
Other plantations were in time absorbed and assimilated by the Celtic
population; but vast revolutions in the ownership of land, accompanied
by the subversion of the old tribal customs, laid the foundation of an
agrarian war which still continues.
Religious and agrarian causes combined with the civil war in England
to produce the great rebellion of 1641 and the eleven years of
ghastly, exterminating war which followed. Hardly any page in human
history is more appalling. A full third of the population of Ireland
perished. Thirty or forty thousand of the most energetic left the
country and took service in foreign armies. Great tracts were left
absolutely depopulated, and after the rearrangement of land, which was
accomplished by the Act of Settlement, the immense preponderance of
landed property remained in the hands of the Protestant nation.
New elements, however, of great energy had been planted in Ireland,
and the field had been thrown open to their exertions. The excellence
of Irish wool and the cheapness of Irish labour laid the foundation of
a flourishing woollen manufacture, and with peace, mild
administration, and much practical tolerance, the wounds of the
country seemed gradually healing. The later Stuart reigns, which form
a dark page in English history, were a period of considerable
prosperity in Ireland, but that period was soon interrupted by the
Revolution. There was no general or passionate rising in Ireland
resembling that of 1641, but it was inevitable that the Irish
Catholics should have adopted the side of the Catholic King, and it
was equally inevitable that when a Catholic Parliament, consisting
largely of sons of the men whose properties had recently been
confiscated, had assembled at Dublin, its members should have made a
desperate effort to reverse their fortunes and replace the land of the
country mainly in Catholic hands. The battle of the Boyne shattered
the Catholic hopes, and it was followed by a new confiscation, by a
new emigration of the ablest and most energetic Catholics, by a long
period of commercial restraints, penal laws, and complete Protestant
ascendancy.
The commercial restraints formed part of a protective policy which was
at that time general in Europe, and which was severely felt in the
American colonies. Though it did not absolutely originate in, it was
greatly intensified by, the Revolution, which gave the manufacturing
and commercial classes a new power in English government. The linen
manufacture was spared, but the total destruction by law of the
flourishing woollen manufacture, followed by a number of restrictions
imposed on other branches of industry, deprived Ireland of her most
promising sources of wealth, drove great multitudes of energetic
Protestants out of the country, and threw the people more and more
upon the soil as almost their sole means of support.
The penal laws against the Catholics accompanied or closely followed
the commercial restraints. The blame of them may be divided with some
equality between the Government of England and the Parliament of
Ireland. It was the Irish Parliament which enacted these laws, but an
English Act first made the Irish Parliament exclusively Protestant,
and the whole legislation was carried at a time when the Irish
Parliament was completely dependent, and incompetent even to discuss
any measure without the previous approbation of the English
Government. In order to judge this legislation with equity, it must be
remembered that in the beginning of the eighteenth century restrictive
laws against Protestantism in Catholic countries, and against
Catholicism in Protestant ones, almost universally prevailed. The laws
against Irish Catholics were, on the whole, less stringent than those
against Catholics in England. They were largely modelled after the
French legislation against the Huguenots, but persecution in Ireland
never approached in severity that of Louis XIV., and was absolutely
insignificant compared with that which had extirpated Protestantism
and Judaism from Spain. The code, however, was not mainly the product
of religious feeling, but of policy, and in this respect it has been
defended in its broad outlines, though not in all its details, by such
Irishmen as Charlemont, Flood, and Parsons. They argued that at the
close of a long period of savage civil war it was absolutely necessary
for a small minority, who found themselves in possession of the
government and land of the country, to deprive the conquered and
hostile majority of every element of political and military strength.
This was the real object of the code. It was a measure of self-defence
justified by necessity and by the fact that it produced in Ireland for
the space of about eighty years the most perfect tranquillity.
There is much truth in these considerations, but it is also true that
the penal code produced more pernicious moral, social, and political
effects than many sanguinary persecutions. In other countries
disqualifying or persecuting laws were directed against small
fractions of the nation. In Ireland they were directed against the
bulk of the community. Being supported by little or no genuine
religious fanaticism or proselytising ardour, they made few
Protestants except in the upper orders, where many conformed in order
to keep their land or to enter professions; but they drove nearly all
the best and most energetic Catholics to the Continent; they
discouraged industry; closed the door of knowledge; taught the people
to look upon law as something hostile to religion; introduced
division and immorality into families by the rewards they offered to
apostasy; and condemned the whole country to poverty and impotence by
fatally depressing the great majority of its people. Under the
influence of the penal laws the Catholics inevitably acquired the
vices of serfs, and the Protestants the vices of monopolists. A great
portion of the code was pronounced, with good reason, to be flagrantly
opposed to the articles of the Treaty of Limerick, and it completed
the work of the confiscations by making the landlord class in Ireland
almost wholly Protestant, while the great majority of the tenantry
were Catholics.
There was a moment, however, in the beginning of the century when the
whole current of Irish history might easily have changed. Scotland had
suffered, like Ireland, from the protective policy that followed the
Revolution, and her independent Parliament had retaliated by measures
which threatened the speedy separation of the two crowns, and soon led
to a legislative Union. In Ireland such a Union was ardently desired
by enlightened Irishmen, and there is every reason to believe that it
could then have been carried with universal consent. The Catholics
were perfectly passive, and would gladly have accepted a change which
withdrew them from the direct government of the conquerors in a recent
civil war. The Protestants had as yet no distinctively national
feeling, and a legislative Union would have emancipated their industry
and added enormously to their security. Molyneux, the first great
champion of the legislative independence of Ireland, emphatically
declared that he and those who thought with him would gladly have
accepted the alternative of a Union, and both the Irish Houses of
Parliament voted addresses in favour of such a measure. If it had
been carried, Ireland would have been at least saved from the evils
that rose from the commercial restrictions and from the extreme
jobbing that grew up around the local legislature, and she would,
perhaps, have been saved from some parts of the penal code. But the
golden opportunity was lost. The English commercial classes dreaded
Irish competition in their markets, and the petition of the Irish
legislature was disregarded.
Nearly seventy years of quiet followed. The establishment of the
Hanoverian dynasty, the Jacobite risings of 1715 and 1745, the
different wars in which England was engaged, left Ireland absolutely
undisturbed. The House of Commons then sat for a whole reign and met
only every second year. It was completely subservient to the English
Privy Council, and it consisted so largely of nomination boroughs that
a few great nobles commanded a decisive preponderance, and they
practically conducted the government and administered the patronage of
Ireland. There was great jobbing and corruption, but taxation, on the
whole, was exceedingly light, and there was no tendency to throw it
unduly on the poor, or to create in Ireland any of the many feudal
burdens that prevailed in France and Germany. The practical evil most
felt was the system of tithes for the support of the Protestant
establishment, and it was aggravated by a very unfair exemption of
pasture land, and also by the prevailing system of farming out tithes
to a class of men known as tithe proctors. In the country districts
all power was concentrated in the hands of the landlords, who, with
many faults and under many difficulties, at least succeeded in
attaining a large measure of genuine popularity.
There was an Irish army of twelve thousand men, but the greater part
of it was always sent abroad in time of war, and Ireland was then
often left with not more than five thousand soldiers. No militia and
no constabulary force existed, but when Whiteboy or other disturbances
arose, the landlords put themselves at the head of their tenantry, and
usually succeeded in suppressing them. Law was very little observed;
industrial virtues were at the lowest ebb; there was abundance of
drunkenness, idleness, turbulence, neglect of duty, extreme ignorance,
and extreme poverty; but there was not much real oppression or
religious bigotry, and there were no signs of political disturbance or
conspiracy. After a few years the portions of the penal code which
restricted the Catholic worship became a dead letter, and Catholic
chapels were everywhere rising on the Protestant estates. The
monopoly, however, of place and power continued, though the legal
profession was full of professing converts. The theological
temperature in both sects had greatly subsided. Land was usually let
by the owner on long leases, and at very low rents, to tenants who
almost invariably divided and sublet their tenancies.
At a later period of the century, when population pressed closely on
subsistence, the system of middlemen produced a fierce competition
which raised rent in the lower grades to an enormous height, but this
evil was less felt with a scanty population, and the hierarchy of
tenants at least saved the landlords from the dangerous isolation
which their circumstances tended to produce. Arthur Young, who
examined the condition of the country very carefully between 1776 and
1778, perceived great signs of growing prosperity, especially in the
towns, and, although agriculture was far behind that of England, he
found a considerable number of active, intelligent, and improving
landlords. In the opinion of Young the rental of Ireland was unduly
and unnaturally low, but he urged the landlords to exercise a more
direct and controlling influence over their estates, and he
recommended them, for this purpose, to give leases for shorter periods
and gradually to abolish the system of middlemen and subletting.
In the north there was a powerful, intelligent Protestant community,
with a strong leaning to republicanism. They were chiefly
Presbyterians, and they resented bitterly the commercial restrictions
and the obligation of paying tithes to an Episcopal church. The Irish
Parliament was so constituted that they had no political power at all
equivalent to their importance, and, like the Presbyterians in
England, they were burdened by the Test Act, and their marriages were
only valid if celebrated in the Established Church. The great power of
the bishops, both in the Privy Council and in the House of Lords,
formed a very serious obstacle to church reform. In all classes of
Protestants, however, in the closing years of George II., there was a
strong resentment at the political subjection of Ireland, and a
determination to obtain, if possible, those constitutional rights
which the Revolution of 1688 had secured for England.
It is impossible, within the narrow limits assigned to me, to give
even a sketch of the successive stages by which the independence of
the Irish Parliament was established. The movement began with the
Octennial Act, limiting the duration of Parliament, and it came to
full maturity during the war of the American Revolution. Among the
Irish Catholics there appears to have been absolutely no sympathy with
the American cause, but Ulster Protestantism was enthusiastically on
the side of America. Presbyterians from Ulster bore a considerable
part in the American armies, and under the influence of American
example public opinion in Ireland rapidly advanced. The great
Volunteer movement of 1778 and the following years was originated by
the fact that the Government could supply no troops for the defence of
Ulster at a time when it was in imminent danger of attack from France.
The Protestant gentry called their people to arms; and a great
Protestant force was created, which not only secured the country
against foreign danger and maintained the most perfect internal order,
but also exercised a decisive influence over Irish politics. Volunteer
conventions were assembled which represented both property and
educated Protestant opinion much more truly than the borough
Parliament, and which loudly demanded free trade and Parliamentary
independence. Grattan made himself the mouthpiece of the popular
feeling; and the English Government and Parliament yielded to the
demand. The whole system of commercial restraints, which prevented
Ireland from developing her resources and trading with foreign
countries and the British colonies, was abolished, leaving the
commercial intercourse between Great Britain and Ireland to be
regulated by special Acts. The power of the Privy Council over
legislation was abolished. The appellate jurisdiction of the Irish
House of Lords was restored, and, above all, the sole competence of
the King, Lords, and Commons of Ireland to legislate for Ireland was
recognised. The Irish Parliament nearly at the same time made great
steps towards uniting the people by relieving the Presbyterians from
the Test Act and from the restrictions on their marriages, and the
Catholics from those parts of the penal code which chiefly restrained
their worship, their education, and their industry. At the same time
the Protestant monopoly of political power and of the higher offices
remained.
Ireland thus found herself in possession of a Parliament which was, in
name at least, perfectly independent. It was a purely Protestant
Parliament, elected by Protestants, consisting mainly of landlords and
great Protestant lawyers, and representing pre-eminently the property
of the country. It was intensely and exclusively loyal, and always
ready to adopt far more stringent coercive measures against anarchy
and sedition than have ever been adopted by an Imperial Parliament. It
included many men of great talents and great liberality, and through
the county constituencies and the representatives of the chief towns
educated public opinion was seriously felt within its walls; but the
large majority of its members sat for nomination boroughs within the
control of the government, and places and pensions were inordinately
multiplied for the purpose of securing a majority.
Could this constitution last? In framing the course of foreign and
Imperial policy, in all questions of peace or war, of negotiations or
alliances, the Irish Parliament had no voice. Yet it might in time of
war, by withholding its concurrence, withdraw the whole weight of
Ireland from the forces and fatally dislocate the policy of the
Empire. It might pursue a commercial policy absolutely inconsistent
with Imperial interests, and bring Ireland into intimate commercial
connection with the enemies of England; and if English party spirit
extended to Ireland and ran in opposite directions in the two
legislatures, a collision was inevitable. The Lord Lieutenant and
Chief Secretary, who administered the government of Ireland, were
appointed by a British Ministry representing the dominant British
party; the counsels of the Irish Government were framed in a British
Cabinet; the royal consent was given to every Irish Bill under the
Great Seal of Great Britain and upon the advice of a British Minister.
If a machine so constituted could work as long as it was in the hands
of a small and undoubtedly loyal and largely influenced class, could
it work if Parliamentary reform made the Irish Parliament subject to
the fierce and fluctuating tides of popular opinion? above all, if
Catholic enfranchisement brought a vast, ignorant, and possibly
seditious element into political life?
It was the recorded opinion of each successive Lord Lieutenant who
administered the Irish Government after 1782 that it could not, and
that it must sooner or later end either in a union or a separation.
They said this, though they fully acknowledged the perfect loyalty
hitherto shown by the Irish Parliament; the liberality with which it
voted its supplies; the care with which it subordinated its particular
measures to the general interests of the Empire. The failure--not
solely or even mainly through Irish fault--of an attempt to establish
a fixed commercial arrangement between England and Ireland, and a
difference between the British and Irish Parliaments on the Imperial
question of a regency, strengthened the opinion of the English
Government, and for many years before the Union was enacted it was in
contemplation. On the two great and pressing questions at issue this
policy exercised a powerful influence. The Government obstinately
resisted every serious attempt to reform the Parliament, lest they
should lose that controlling power which they believed to be essential
to the permanence of the connection. On the Catholic question their
views were more fluctuating, but their dominant impression was that
emancipation could only be safely conceded in an Imperial Parliament,
and that it ought to be reserved as a boon which might one day make a
legislative Union acceptable to the Irish people.