now intensely unpopular, but the reformers in the Irish Parliament
were seriously divided. Flood and Charlemont desired Parliamentary
reform on a purely Protestant basis. They believed that this would
include in political life the bulk of the property, loyalty,
intelligence, and energy of the country, and that the Irish Catholics
could not for a long period be safely admitted to political power.
Grattan, on the other hand, believed that it was the first interest of
Ireland to efface the political distinction between the two creeds and
nations, and that an introduction of a certain proportion of Catholic
gentry into the Irish Parliament would be in the highest degree
beneficial. He, at the same time, always taught that Ireland was
utterly unfit for democracy, and that under her peculiar conditions no
policy could be more disastrous than one which would 'destroy the
influence of landed property'; 'set population adrift from the
influence of property'; subvert or weaken the guiding influence of the
loyal and educated. When the United Irishmen proposed a Reform Bill
which would have made the Irish Parliament a purely democratic body,
Grattan denounced it with the greatest vehemence. 'This plan of
personal representation,' he said, 'from a revolution of power, would
speedily lead to a revolution of property, and become a plan of
plunder as well as a scene of confusion.... Of such a representation
the first ordinance would be robbery, accompanied with the
circumstance incidental to robbery, murder.' He believed, however,
that with a substantial property qualification independent
constituencies might be formed which would safely represent the best
elements of both creeds.
The denial of parliamentary reform and Catholic emancipation, and the
refusal of the Irish Parliament to deal with the still more pressing
question of tithes, produced much disaffection; but still the country
was steadily improving, and no serious danger was felt till the French
Revolution burst upon Europe. In every country it stimulated the
smouldering elements of disorder. In few countries was its influence
more fatal than in Ireland. I have very lately described at length the
terrible years of growing conspiracy, anarchy, and crime; of
fluctuating policy, and savage repression, and revived religious
animosity, and maddening panic, deliberately and malignantly fomented,
that preceded and prepared the rebellion. It is sufficient here to say
that in the beginning of 1798 three provinces were organised to assist
a French invasion. But at the last moment the leaders were betrayed
and arrested; the French did not arrive; the rebellion was almost
confined to a few Leinster counties, and it broke out without leaders
and without a plan. In most places the rebels proved to be wretched
bands of marauders intent only on plunder, and, although they
committed many murders, they were utterly incapable of meeting the
loyalists in the field. But in Wexford, priests put themselves at the
head of the movement and turned it into a religious war, deriving its
main force from religious fanaticism, and waged with desperate courage
and ferocity. The massacre of Protestants on Vinegar Hill, in
Scullabogue Barn, and on Wexford Bridge, and the general character
the rebellion in Leinster assumed, at once and for ever checked all
that tendency to rebellion which had so long existed among the
Protestants of Ulster. Some twenty thousand persons perished before
the flame was extinguished. The repression was as savage as the
rebellion, and it left Ireland torn by fiercer religious animosities
than at any period since the Restoration.
It will dispel many illusions if the reader will remember that the
great Irish rebellion was directed mainly against the Irish
Parliament, and that it received its death-blow from Irish loyalists
acting under that Parliament before any assistance arrived from
England. The conspiracy began among Protestants and Deists, who aimed
at a union of sects for the purpose of obtaining a democratic
republic. It turned into a war which was scarcely less essentially
religious than the wars of the Cevennes or of the Anabaptists. Yet two
great Catholic provinces remained quiet during the struggle, and a
great proportion of the loyalist force which crushed the rebellion
consisted of Catholic militia.
The English Government thought that the time had now come for carrying
a legislative Union, and, in the eyes of Lord Cornwallis at least, one
of its chief recommendations was that it would take the government of
Ireland out of the hands of the triumphant party, and would make
Catholic emancipation a possibility. The Catholic bishops were sounded
and found to be very favourable. They declared their full willingness
to accept an endowment for the priesthood and to give the English
Government a right of veto on episcopal appointments, and they warmly,
efficiently, and unanimously supported the Union. The great majority
of the Catholic landed gentry and probably of the lower priests were
on the same side; but in general the Catholic laity seem to have
shown little interest and to have taken little part in the contest. In
Dublin, Catholics as well as Protestants were generally hostile, but
Catholic Cork was decidedly favourable, and an assurance that the
Government desired to carry emancipation in an Imperial Parliament
proved sufficient to prevent any serious Catholic opposition. The
United Irishmen seem to have witnessed rather with pleasure than the
reverse the dethronement of the body which had defeated them, and the
Presbyterians showed scarcely any interest in the question.
Yet outside the ranks of the Catholic clergy the measure found few
active supporters, while the Protestants of the Established Church
were in general ardently and passionately hostile. The great majority
of the county members and the great preponderance of petitions were
against the Union, and the opposition to it, which was led by Foster,
Grattan, Parsons, and Plunket, comprised nearly all the independent
and unbribed talent in Parliament. The very eminent ability of that
small group of Protestant gentlemen never flashed more brightly than
in the closing scenes, and there was a moment when the attitude of the
Orangemen and the yeomanry was so menacing that the Government were
seriously alarmed. But a lavish distribution of peerages and places
purchased a majority, and the troops stationed in Ireland were too
numerous for armed opposition to be possible. In truth, however, no
opposition beyond the dimensions of a riot was to be feared. Outside
Dublin, Catholic, Presbyterian, and seditious Ireland remained almost
indifferent. Even before the measure had passed, opposition speakers
complained bitterly that they were deserted by popular support; and it
is a memorable fact that in the general election that followed the
Union not a single Irish member of Parliament was defeated because he
had voted for it.
Pitt intended the Union to be immediately followed by measures
admitting the Catholics into the Imperial Parliament, paying the
priests, and commuting the tithes. If these three measures, or even if
the last two (which were, in truth, the most important), had been
promptly carried, the Union might have become popular. The Catholic
question had, of late, been greatly mismanaged. The chief men who
directed the government in Ireland were bitterly opposed to any
concession of political power to the Catholics, but the views of the
English Ministers had been materially changed. They desired above all
things to separate the Catholics from the United Irishmen, and in 1793
they forced upon their reluctant advisers in Ireland an Act which
extended the suffrage to the vast ignorant Catholic masses, though it
left the Catholic gentry still excluded from Parliament. Two years
later Lord Fitzwilliam was sent over with instructions to postpone the
question if possible, but with authority, as he believed, to carry
emancipation if it could not be postponed, and he found the Irish
Parliament perfectly prepared to pass it. But the opposition of the
King and a question of patronage produced a fatal division and led to
the recall of the Viceroy. The passions aroused by the rebellion
greatly increased the difficulties of admitting Catholics to a
separate Parliament, but there is clear evidence that at the time of
the Union the Irish Protestants were in favour of their admission into
the Imperial one. The dispositions of the King were well known, but it
was believed that, if the scheme of Pitt was submitted to him as the
matured policy of a united Cabinet, he must have yielded. It is well
known how the plan was prematurely revealed; how Pitt resigned office
when the King refused his consent; how the agitation of the question
threw the King into an access of insanity; and how Pitt then promised
that he would not again raise it during the reign. Pitt's conduct on
this occasion is, and probably always will be, differently judged.
There can be but one opinion of its calamitous effect upon Irish
history.
Ninety years have passed since the Union, and the conditions of
Ireland have completely changed. The whole system of religious
disqualification and commercial disability has long since passed away.
Every path has been thrown open, and English professions, as well as
the great Colonial and Indian services, are crowded with Irishmen. The
Established Church no longer exists. Representation has been placed on
a broadly democratic basis, giving Ireland, however, an absurdly
disproportioned weight in the representation of the kingdom, and its
poorest and most backward districts an absurdly disproportioned weight
in the representation of Ireland. Finally, an attempt has been made to
put down agrarian agitation by legislation to which there is no real
parallel in English history, and some parts of which would have been
impossible under the Constitution of the United States. Landlords who
possessed by the clearest title known to English law the most absolute
ownership of their estates have been converted into mere
rent-chargers. Tenants who entered upon their tenancies under formal
written contracts for limited periods have been rooted for ever on the
soil. Rents have been reduced by judicial sentence, with complete
disregard both to previous contracts and to market value, and the
legal owner has had no option of refusing the change and re-entering
on the occupation of his land. A scheme of purchase, too, based upon
Imperial credit, has been established and will probably soon be
largely extended, which is so extravagantly and almost grotesquely
favorable to the tenant that it enables him by paying for the space of
forty-nine years, instead of his reduced judicial rent, an annual sum
which is considerably smaller, to purchase the freehold of his farm.
It is a simple and incontestable truth that neither in the United
States, nor in England, nor in any portion of the Continent of Europe,
is the agricultural tenant so favoured by law as in Ireland, or
anything of the nature of landlord oppression made so impossible. But
though agitation has diminished, it has not ceased, and the great body
of the poorer Catholics still follow the banner of Home Rule.
About a third of the population of Ireland, on the other hand, regard
Home Rule as the greatest catastrophe that could befall themselves,
their country, or the Empire; and it is worthy of notice that they
include almost all the descendants of Grattan's Parliament, and of the
volunteers and of those classes who in the eighteenth century
sustained the spirit of nationality in Ireland. Belfast and the
surrounding counties, which alone in Ireland have attained the full
height and vigour of English industrial civilisation; almost all the
Protestants, both Episcopalian and Nonconformist; almost all the
Catholic gentry; the decided preponderance of Catholics in the lay
professions, and a great and guiding section of the Catholic
middle-class are on the same side. Their conviction does not rest upon
any abstract doctrine about the evil of federal governments or of
local parliaments. It rests upon their firm persuasion that in the
existing conditions of Ireland no Parliament could be established
there which could be trusted to fulfil the most elementary conditions
of honest government--to maintain law; to protect property; to observe
or enforce contracts; to secure the rights and liberties of
individuals and minorities; to act loyally in times of difficulty and
danger in the interests of the Empire.
They know that the existing Home Rule movement has grown up by the
guidance and by the support of men who are implacable enemies to the
British Empire; that it has been for years the steady object of its
leaders to inspire the Irish masses with feelings of hatred to that
Empire, contempt for contracts, defiance of law and of those who
administer it; that, having signally failed in rousing the
agricultural population in a national struggle, those leaders resolved
to turn the movement into an organised attack upon landed property;
that in the prosecution of this enterprise they have been guilty, not
only of measures which are grossly and palpably dishonest, but also of
an amount of intimidation, of cruelty, of systematic disregard for
individual freedom scarcely paralleled in any country during the
present century; and finally that, through subscriptions which are not
drawn from Ireland, political agitation in Ireland has become a large
and highly lucrative trade--a trade which, like most others, will no
doubt continue as long as it pays.
The nature, methods, and objects of the organisation which would
probably exercise a dominant influence over an Irish Parliament have
been established by overwhelming evidence and beyond all reasonable
doubt, after a long, careful, and most impartial judicial
investigation. The report of the late Special Commissioners[7] and the
evidence on which it is founded have been published; and their
conclusions have very recently been summed up in an admirable work by
Professor Dicey, perhaps the ablest of living writers on political
subjects. Readers may find in these works abundant evidence of the
true character of the Irish Home Rule movement. If they read them with
impartiality they will, I believe, have little difficulty in
concluding that there have been few political movements in the
nineteenth century which are less deserving of the respect or support
of honest men.
FOOTNOTES:
[7] The Parnell Commission.--ED.
FORMATIVE INFLUENCES
It was about four years before the great upheaval of beliefs in
England, which was partly caused and partly disclosed by the
publication of the 'Essays and Reviews,' in 1860, that I entered
Trinity College, Dublin. I had then a strong leaning toward
theological studies and looked forward to a peaceful clerical life in
a family living near Cork; and in addition to the ordinary university
course, I went through that appointed for divinity students. I found
my life at the university one of more than common intellectual
activity, for although circumstances and temperament made me perhaps
culpably indifferent to college ambitions and competitions, I soon
threw myself with intense eagerness into a long course of private
reading, chiefly relating to the formation and history of opinions.
The great High Church wave which had a few years before been so
powerful, had been broken when Newman and many other leaders of the
party had passed to Catholicism. Darwin and Herbert Spencer had not
yet risen above the horizon. Mill was in the zenith of his fame and
influence. The intellectual atmosphere was much agitated by the recent
discoveries of geology, by their manifest bearing on the Mosaic
cosmogony and on the history of the Fall, and by the attempts of Hugh
Miller, Hitchcock, and other writers to reconcile them with the
received theology. In poetry, Tennyson and Longfellow reigned, I
think with an approach to equality which has not continued. In
politics, the school of orthodox political economy was almost
unchallenged. In spite of the protests of Carlyle, all sound Liberals
in England then desired to restrict as much as possible the functions
of government, and to enlarge as much as possible the sphere of
individual liberty; and they regarded unrestrained competition and
inviolable contracts as the chief conditions of material progress.
The first great intellectual influence which I experienced was, I
believe, that of Bishop Butler, who was at that time probably studied
more assiduously at Dublin than in any other university in the
kingdom. There were few sermons in the college chapel in which some
allusion to his writings might not be found, and few serious students
whose modes of thought were not at least coloured by his influence.
That influence now appears to me to have been not only various, but
even in some measure contradictory. The 'Analogy' is perhaps the most
original, if not the most powerful, book ever written in defence of
the Christian creed; but it has probably been the parent of much
modern Agnosticism, for its method is to parallel every difficulty in
revealed religion by a corresponding difficulty in natural religion,
and to argue that the two must stand or fall together. Butler's
unrivalled sermons on human nature, on the other hand, have been
essentially conservative and constructive, and their influence has
been at least as strong on character as on belief. Their doctrine is
that consciousness reveals in the inner principles of our being a
moral hierarchy, 'a difference in nature and kind altogether distinct
from strength'; and that among these principles conscience has, by the
very structure of our nature, a recognised supremacy or guiding
authority which clearly distinguishes it from all others.
'The principle of reflection or conscience being compared with the
various appetites, affections, and passions in men, the former is
manifestly supreme and chief, without regard to strength.... From its
very nature it manifestly claims superiority over all others, so that
you cannot form a notion of this faculty, conscience, without taking
in judgment, direction, superintendency. To preside and govern, from
the very economy and constitution of man, belongs to it. Had it
strength as it has right, it would govern the world.'
It was a noble philosophy, well fitted to strengthen and elevate the
character, and it has supported many amid the dissolution of positive
beliefs. Utilitarian theories of morals move very smoothly as long as
their only task is to define the course which it is in the interests
of society that each man should pursue. They are less successful in
furnishing any firm and adequate reason why a man should pursue that
course when individual interests and individual passion are opposed to
it. It is the merit of the schools of Kant and of Butler, that they
raise the idea of duty above all the calculations of self-interest,
and make it the supreme and guiding principle of life.
Among living men, the strongest intellectual influence at that time in
Dublin was, I think, Whately, our archbishop, an original and powerful
thinker who has scarcely obtained a place in the literary and
intellectual history of his time commensurate with the wide and deep
influence he undoubtedly exercised. For this there are many reasons.
Unlike the High Church leaders who flourished with him at Oxford in
the second quarter of the nineteenth century, he never identified
himself with any organised party or school of thought, and he thus
deprived himself of many echoes and of much support. It was, indeed,
one of his first principles that there is no more fatal obstacle to
the discovery of truth than the deflecting influence of party and
system, and that the jealous maintenance of an independent judgment is
the first element of intellectual honesty. Few considerable writers
have appealed less to common passions or wide sympathies; and the only
passion--if it can be called so--that appears strongly in his
writings, is the love of truth for its own sake, which is the rarest
and highest of all. He was accustomed to speculate much upon that
strange power of intellectual magnetism which enables some men to draw
others to their views apart from any process of definite reasoning;
and he acknowledged with truth that he was wholly destitute of it;
that he had never produced any effect which could not be clearly
accounted for, or altered any judgment except by distinct reasons. As
a writer, his style, though wholly without grace, was admirable in its
lucidity. He had a singular felicity of illustration, and especially
of metaphor, and a rare power of throwing his thoughts into terse and
pithy sentences; but his many books, though full of original thinking
and in a high degree suggestive to other writers, had always a certain
fragmentary and occasional character, which prevented them from taking
a place in standard literature. He was conscious of it himself, and
was accustomed to say that it was the mission of his life to make up
cartridges for others to fire. The little volume of 'Miscellanies,'
including his commonplace book and his notes for his books, which was
published by his daughter, exhibits with great clearness the character
of his mind. Though a very candid and, in the best sense of the word,
a very tolerant man, and an excellent scholar, he had, I think, little
power of reproducing the modes of thought of men whose mental
structure was widely different from his own, or of entering into the
intellectual conditions of other ages; but he touched a large circle
of subjects, social, political, and even scientific, as well as moral
and religious, with an original and most independent judgment; and he
raised greatly the moral standard of love of truth and the
intellectual standard of severe reasoning wherever his influence
extended. He delighted in that fine saying of Hobbes that, 'words are
the counters of the wise man, but the money of the fool'; he believed
that most controversies might be resolved into verbal ambiguities; and
his hatred of vagueness, grandiloquence, affected obscurity, and
rhetorical exaggeration exercised a very useful influence over young
men. He was also a most attentive and sagacious observer of human
nature, and few modern writers have written so wisely on the
diversities and the management of character and on the science of
life. In this respect he had a strong affinity to Bacon--the Bacon not
of the 'Organon,' but of the 'Essays'--and perhaps still more to
Benjamin Franklin. In theology he challenged the severest inquiry, and
believed that if honestly pursued it would lead only to orthodox
belief. 'A good man,' he once wrote, 'will indeed wish to find the
evidence of the Christian religion satisfactory; but a wise man will
not for that reason think it satisfactory, but will weigh the evidence
the more carefully on account of the importance of the question.'
His strongest antipathy was to the teaching of the Oxford 'Tracts,'
and he wrote about them with great severity, but more from the moral
than the intellectual side. He believed the Tractarian doctrines of
'reserve' and 'economy' to be essentially disingenuous; he considered
that there was good reason to conclude that leading members of the
Oxford school had remained in the Church of England for a considerable
time after they had adopted the Roman theology, had used language
deliberately intended to mask their position, and had employed their
influence as English clergymen to sap the English Church; and he
especially denounced as the grossest dishonesty the attempt that was
made in Tract XC. to show that a man was justified in subscribing to
the Articles of the Church of England and at the same time holding
everything laid down by the Council of Trent, 'though the Articles
were expressly drawn up to condemn the authoritative teaching of the
Roman Church, and after the Council of Trent had held 22 out of its
whole number of 25 sessions.' The quibbling, special-pleading,
equivocating mind which is consciously or half-consciously
endeavouring by subtle distinctions to maintain an untenable position,
was of all things the most abhorrent to him, and while the
Evangelicals denounced the Tractarians as leading men to Rome,
Whately, perhaps alone among his contemporaries, steadily predicted
that their teachings would be followed by a great period of religious
scepticism. This, he said, would be the result of the discredit they
were throwing on the evidential school, of their habit of coupling
ecclesiastical with Scripture miracles, and of their doctrine that it
is the function of faith to supply the missing links of imperfect
evidence and to impart the character of certainty to propositions
which in reason rest only on probabilities. He himself was of the
school of Grotius and Paley, and believed that simple historical
evidence established supernatural facts. This subject long held a
foremost place in my thoughts and studies, and I afterward wrote much
upon it in connection with the history of witchcraft and the miracles
of the Saints.