Part Ii. a Historical Argument

VIII.—Irish Nationality. BY MRS. J. R. GREEN

“Justice requires power, intelligence, and will.”—(Leonardo da Vinci.)

“Sinister information,” reported a Governor of Ireland under Henry VIII., “hath been of more hindrance to the reformation of Ireland than all the rebels and Irishry within the realm.” The complaint is as true to-day as it was nearly four hundred years ago, for false tongues still gain power through ignorance. Irish history has the misfortune of being at the same time trite and unknown. Men hear with the old acquiescence the old formulæ, and the well-known words carry to them the solace of the ancient prejudices.

There is indeed in these latter days a change of accusation. In former times Irishmen were marked off as an inferior people, but within the last few years the attack is altered; and it is now the fashion to assume that the Irish fail, not as individuals, but only in their corporate capacity. To Irishmen is still denied “the delight of admiration and the duty of reverence.” Holding in their hearts the image of a nation, they are warned not to ask whether it was a nation of any value, whether there has been any conspicuous merit which justifies the devotion that the Irish people feel to their race, and which may claim the regard of others. For it is not enough to have the mere instinct of passion for our country, unless our heart and reason are convinced that we give our allegiance to a people that, in spite of human errors, has been of noble habit and distinguished spirit.

The policy of “Unionist” leaders is to meet the Irish desire for an uplifting pride in the life of the Irish commonwealth by a flat denial. Ireland, we are told, is not, nor ever has been, nor ever can be, a nation. A disorganized and contentious people, incapable of rightly using any polity Irish or English, we have not, it is said, even the materials of a nation. We are only “material,” to use an old Irish expression, for an Empire. The island in fact was never a kingdom till England gave it a king worthy the name; so how could it be a nation? To the gift of a king England added her invention of a Parliament, but the failure of Parliament in Ireland was open and flagrant; how then talk about a nation?

“There are Englishmen and Scotchmen,” says Mr. Balfour, “who really suppose that England has deprived Ireland of its own national institutions, has absorbed Ireland, which had a polity and a civilization of its own—has absorbed it in the wider sphere of British politics; and who think that a great wrong has thereby been done to a separate nationality.... It is a profound illusion. It has no basis in historical fact at all.”

He gives a history of his own.

“Those whom the Nationalists choose more particularly and especially to call Irishmen, namely, the original inhabitants of Ireland—those who were there before the Celt and before the Saxon and before the Norman—never had the chance of developing, they never could have developed, a polity of their own, any more than the Highlanders. That does not mean that they are in any sense inferior, but it does mean that all this talk of restoring to Ireland Irish institutions, and of governing Ireland according to Irish ideas, has no historic basis whatever.”

It is for such wayward imaginings that the historic claim of Ireland is denied. What meaning shall we give to this new dogma of the partiality of Nationalists for some pre-Celtic race—whether Iberian, or whether (as some explain the phrase) Finn MacCumhaill and his followers, ingeniously regarded by Mr. Balfour as having adorned Ireland before the Celtic age? Where was the “Saxon” settlement in Ireland between the Celts and the Normans? What is the comparison of the Highlanders with the original inhabitants of Ireland? Why should Mr. Balfour’s doubts of a pre-Celtic polity put an end to all talk of Irish institutions and Irish ideas?

To come to somewhat later times, under the clan system, says Mr. Balfour, it was impossible to rise to civilization. “And when England dealt with Ireland, Ireland was completely under the tribal system” (a theory false to history). The superior English polity in due time, however, spread its hand over Iberian chaos. “An Irish Parliament is a British invention”—the word, with Mr. Balfour’s easy adjustment of history to politics, is probably chosen to give the Scotch a gratuitous share in the credit, with a compliment to their spirit; for, as he says, “my Lowland ancestors in Scotland had precisely the same contempt for my Highland fellow-countrymen as the English had for the Irish in Ireland”—(the word Lowland being here misused in a non-historic sense). “Every political idea in Ireland is of English growth—the Irish dependent Parliament, the Irish independent Parliament—it is all of British extraction.” Mr. Balfour seems to imagine in his indifferent way that the “dependent form” was the first; he seems to guess that it was a single form, “the dependent Parliament”; and he calls his “independent Parliament” “a practically sovereign legislature.” It would be hard to gather more fundamental errors into one sentence. At any rate in his simplified scheme both forms of “the British invention” failed in Ireland. But in the success of the Union and the assembly at Westminster, England has established successfully what Mr. Balfour calls “the unity which we have inherited from our forefathers.”

Such are the “General Principles” which Mr. Balfour—speaking with all the authority of an “Unionist” statesman, head of a great English party, leader for a generation of those who refuse to Ireland any claim to national memory or national hope, absolute ruler for four years of that island—has issued in his book “Aspects of Home Rule” to rally his followers. This confusion of fictions, in all their brave untruth, furnishes the historic background and justification of the Unionist creed. We might not easily expect an “Imperial” leader so far to forego respect for himself or for his public.

There is an Old Irish proverb: “Three candles that illumine every darkness: truth, nature, knowledge.” But Mr. Balfour is as a man for his pleasure wandering in the dark among the tombs of vain things. And from places of death comes as of old “sinister information” to minister to ignorance and prejudice, and to be still the hindrance to the reformation of Ireland.

These comprehensive charges cover the two strongly-contrasted periods of Irish history—the period of Gaelic civilization, and that of Norman, or later of English settlement. All races are alike condemned. The one people had no institutions. The other misused what were given to it. In either case the fault is said to be “Irish”—the general word of contempt. Confounded together by Mr. Balfour for his own purposes, the two accusations have nothing in common, and must be separately considered if we wish to think justly.

We may, however, observe that to both races is denied the praise of a “nation” or “nationality.”

The definition of a “nation” may be varied: every man has his opinion, for, as the old Irish saying went, “’tis his own head he has on him.” But in the matter nature and history cannot be wholly set aside, and we may attach some importance to the unity of a country, the persistence of its race, and the continuity of its life. If we consider outward form, who ever thinks of the map of Great Britain as a whole? The form that is in men’s minds is of two configurations, one of England and one of Scotland, two countries mapped out on separate sheets. The names of the countries have changed, Alban and Scotland; Britain and England; and the title of the whole is a somewhat awkward evasion or compromise. Ireland on the other hand has its unchangeable boundaries fixed by the Ocean, its provinces from immemorial times subordinate territories of the undivided country. Its successive peoples, perhaps for some four thousand years, have never known it but by one name, Erin; or by the variations of that name as it passed into other speech, Iberia, Hibernia, Ire-land. The Old Irish knew it some fourteen hundred years ago as their “Fatherland.” As far back as we can go the unity of the country as a whole is prominent in their thought; as, for example, in an ancient poem on the passing of the pagan world and the triumph of Christianity:

“God’s counsel at every time concerning virgin Erin is greater than can be told; though glittering Liffey is thine to-day, it has been the land of others in their turn.”

In the Middle Irish period a legend of the coming to Tara of the most ancient of all the sages carried to the people the same rapt love of Ireland. When all the assembly rose up before him:

“There is no need to make rejoicing for me, for I am sure of your welcome as every son is sure of his foster-mother, and this, then, is my foster-mother,” said Fintan, “the island in which ye are, even Erin, and the familiar knee of this island in which ye are, namely, Tara. Moreover it is the mast and the produce, the flowers and the food of this island that have sustained me from the deluge until this day. And I am skilled in its feasts and its cattle-spoils, its destructions and its courtships, in all that have taken place from the deluge until now.”

Every race in turn that entered Ireland drank in the spirit of the soil: all became citizens of the one land. Even that gift of “English invention” and “British extraction,” the Pale Parliament, was by mere human nature and necessity stirred to loyalty for “the land of Ireland.” “More conveniently,” so they urged in a statute of 1460, “a proper coin distinct from the coin of the realm of England was to be had therein.” And the Anglo-Norman colonists decreed that of the coins they ordered one should be called an “Irelands,” with that name engraven on it, and the other a “Patrick,” with the name and cross of the national Irish saint.

This persistence of the name of Ireland with its national pride, and its perpetual recalling of a distinct people, was displeasing to Englishmen in the height of their “godly conquest.” If the name was extinguished the fact might be more easily denied. They pleaded, as we learn in the Carew Papers (I. 251-2), for its disappearance, in the true spirit of modern Unionism. When Paul IV. gave to Philip and Mary the title of King and Queen of Ireland:

“Men of judgment, ... thought it a vanity, not seeing what profit, either of authority or honour, it might bring to a King to have many titles in the country which he possesseth, considering that the Most Christian King is more honoured by the only title of King of France, than if his state were divided into as many kingly titles as he hath provinces.... But it seemed hard to induce England to quit that which two kings had used, and the Queen, not thinking much of it, had continued.”

There was indeed a power in nature far older than the habit of two English kings; and in spite of the Unionist grumblings the ancient name survived, and the ancient fact. Cardinal Pole was appointed legate to “the realms of England and Ireland.” Our ambassadors and consuls still carry with them abroad the significant title “of Great Britain and Ireland”; and we may read in a Russian newspaper concerned with the East, of the “policy of Great Britain and Ireland in Afghanistan.”

The persistence of race in Ireland was no less remarkable than the triumph of its name. There are some who profess to distinguish the Iberians. We know that successive streams of immigrants, Danes, Normans, English, French, have been merged in the commonwealth. But the Registrar-General gives, in spite of outgoings of the Celtic and incomings of Teutonic peoples, an overwhelming majority of men of Celtic blood and name—a majority which is in fact less than the truth, owing to the continual change during centuries of Celtic into English surnames. But it is not on purity of race that Ireland, any more than other countries, would rely. Difference in blood was recognised, but it was not held a bar to patriotism. Ireland was the common country to which all races who entered it were bound by every human interest. It had a unity of its own, which as “the Pale” shrank and the sense of country deepened, laid hold on the minds of the later as of the earlier inhabitants. Belfast Orangemen indeed, as “the loyalists of Ireland,” accepted the doctrine in 1886 that a Parliament in Dublin chosen by the whole Irish people “must be to them a foreign and alien assembly.” It was the echo of an old fiction. We know that the ascendency of a constantly recruited English group, above all of safe men born in England and consequently held worthy of trust there, was for seven centuries the favourite dream of English politicians; and that it invariably failed before the broader and humaner influences that move communities of men dwelling side by side under the equal heavens. Faithful citizens of Norman or English stock did brave service for their country: “Ireland-men” they called themselves, or “commonwealth men,” or “good ‘country men’ as they would be gloriously termed.” What name indeed is there for men of Ireland to take unless they frankly own their country? The term chosen for them by The Times: “The British Colony on the other side of St. George’s Channel” will scarcely endure.

Mr. Balfour is probably the last statesman to press a claim to ascendency in the partial favour of Great Britain for a selected group, “who, of all others in the United Kingdom, surely deserve the protection of England and Scotland.” It is a curious return in these days of equal citizenship to the tyrannical distinctions of the middle ages—“wild Irish our enemies, Irish rebels, and obedient English,” who had varying claims on the dominating race according to their deserts.

To return, however, to the special charges urged against Gaelic life in Ireland. The island may be the same, and the race of ancient date, and with no less than their ancient pride; but what of that, if the people could not have, nor ever did have, a polity of their own, nor any Irish institutions nor an Irish idea of government? “The fiction has been assiduously propagated,” says a Unionist writer in the Morning Post, “by the Irish extreme section ... that the nationhood of Ireland is a thing which once had an actual objective existence.... But such teaching, however romantically attractive, is simply incompatible with the plain facts of history. Ireland as a political entity dates from the period of the conquest by England, when for the first time the princes and chieftains with their followers were fused into something like national unity.” So Macedon might have boasted that for the first time it had put some order into Greece, given it a political entity, and brought it into line with modern Imperial civilization.

Is this unhistoric statement all the Unionists have in the end got to give us of the Irish story? Is there nothing behind it—no trace of any soul of the people in Ireland? How then was it that with so incomplete a military or political organization, they could defy for centuries the whole power of England? Ireland in fact drew her strength from a remarkable State system of her own. In the Gaelic form of civilization the national sentiment did not gather round a military king, as in the Teutonic states, but round a common learning, literature, and tradition; and this exalted belief in the spiritual existence of a nation, though it is not the English idea of a kingdom, may belong nevertheless to a high order of human aspiration. It produced in Ireland a literature which has not been surpassed among any people for its profound and ardent sense of nationality.

The union of the Irish people lay in the absolute community of learning, institutions, and law. Irish law was one of the most striking products of Irish genius. If we know nothing of its beginnings, we see it as a body of custom that spread over the entire country, varying not at all from province to province. Highly finished, highly technical, worked on for hundreds of years by successive commentators, it still remained the law of the people, and claimed their allegiance—an allegiance could only have been possible to a law founded on reason and justice, and expedient and efficient in practice. If we take that which in an agricultural country comes home to every peasant—the land system—the native law in Ireland was equal, enduring, and respected. The farmer was assured a fair rent and compensation for improvements. No chief in Ireland could molest the people in their ancient privilege; he could neither evict them, nor take their grazing-lands, nor make a forest waste and impose a forest law for his hunting. Five hundred years after the Norman invasion Irish farmers holding under the old Irish law were still paying the same rent that their forefathers had paid centuries before. It is certain that no system can wholly prevent misfortune, injustice, or usurpation; but there seems to have been among the people a social content far beyond that in mediæval England, a long security of farmers, a passionate belief in their land system, an extraordinary tenacity in its defence against any other, and as far as we can see no bitterness of classes. A satirist might mock at the depth of the chief’s pocket, as deep as the pocket of the Church or of the poet; but the Irish no more wanted to get rid of the chief than of the poet or the priest. In Tudor times the only way in which a chief could be absolutely alienated and divided from his people was by pledging him to the English land system and government.

The Irish were further reminded of their essential unity by the great genealogical compilations in which every element of the population, Celtic and aboriginal, free and unfree, were traced to a common ancestry. Pride in the country which they possessed was maintained by the Dinnsenchus or collection of topographical legends dealing with hundreds of places, mountains, rivers, earthworks, roads, strands, venerable trees, in every nook and corner of Ireland—none elsewhere—all evidently things of interest to the whole people. The dignity of their race and history was recalled to them in the semi-legendary history of pagan Ireland—which is really a great epic in prose and verse, in two main sections, the Book of Invasions and the Irish Book of Kings. The subject of this work is simply Ireland. It has no other connecting motive than to satisfy the desire of the Irish to possess a complete and brilliant picture of Ireland from all antiquity. The charge was a solemn one, and carried out by generations of scholars with exact fidelity. There is no parallel elsewhere to the writing down of the great pagan epics five hundred years after Christianity, with no more direct influence of Christianity on them than we might find in the Odyssey or the Iliad.

Nor was their language the least of the spiritual possessions of the Gaelic people—that language which, following their people over Scotland, Lowlands and Highlands and the Isles, remained for some fourteen centuries the symbol of immemorial unity of their race. The pride of the race in their language was beyond that of any other people in Europe outside of the Greeks and Romans. Grammars of Irish were written in the eighth or ninth centuries, perhaps earlier, full of elaborate declensions and minute rules, accounts of obsolete words and forms and esoteric literary jargons, treatises on the Ogham alphabet, dictionaries of celebrated men and women of Ireland from remote antiquity, numerous festilogies of the national saints in prose and verse, with their pedigrees and legends. What mediæval language in Europe had a school of grammarians, and at what date? It may seem strange to Englishmen that this affection should have stirred the hearts of pastoral and agricultural people; but no Irish man was far removed from the immaterial and spiritual life of his country. The famous works in verse and prose, the stories, the hymns, and the songs of heroes old and new, were known by heart, and handed down faithfully for centuries in thousands of cabins; and the Irish tiller of the ground in remote places has even in our own day a rich vocabulary of six or seven thousand words. The pleasure and pride of art, so widely diffused among the mass of the people by the Irish scheme of life and education, became a natural part of the Irishman’s thoughts. Their main concern in the Danish devastations was the threatened destruction of an ancient order of civilization. Before the “flood of outlanders,” says the “Colloquy of the Sages,” written probably before 850, “every art will be buffoonery, and every falsehood will be chosen.” Poems would be dark, music would be given over to boors, and embroidery to fools and base women so that no more beauty of colour could be expected; everyone will turn his art into false teaching and false intelligence, to seek to surpass his teacher. Instruction and skill would end, they lamented, with lawful princes and sages, belief and offerings, the respect of ranks and families, due honour of the young to the old, the ordered hospitality of the wealthy, and the high justice on the hilltop: “On every hill-top treachery will adventure.”

The great expression of Gaelic life was the assembly of the people, those “parles upon hills” that seemed so grievous to Elizabethan rulers. In every Federal State, such as Leinster or Munster, and in every petty State, they were the ever-recurring guarantee of the national civilization. The feeling of the people is shown by the constant references to “frequent assemblies,” “an assembly according to rules,” “a lawful synod.” The serious organization of these gatherings in stately form had been brought to a fine art. The business and science of the country was there open to the whole democracy. Many were the directions for the right conduct of those who took part in the assemblies—against stiffness of delivery, a muttering speech, hair-splitting, uncertain proofs, despising books, inciting the multitude, very violent urging, playing a dangerous game to disconcert the meeting, above all against ignorant or false pleading. The authority of the assembly in its exposition of the law was never questioned by the people.

“Irishmen,” wrote an English judge to Henry VIII., “doth observe and keep such laws and statutes which they make upon hills in their country firm and stable, without breaking them for any favour or reward.”

“As touching their government in their corporations where they bear rule,” wrote an Englishman, Payne, from Connacht in 1589, “is done with such wisdom, equity, and justice, as demerits worthy commendations. For I myself divers times have seen in several places within their jurisdictions well near twenty causes decided at one sitting, with such indifference that, for the most part, both plaintiff and defendant hath departed contented; yet many that make show of peace and desireth to live by blood do utterly mislike this or any good thing that the poor Irishman doth.”

A poem of about 1100 A.D. describes how the people of Leinster, by their tribes and families, celebrated their fair of Carman—Carman reputed to have come “from delightful Athens westward.” Every third year they held the feast and two years for the preparation. The kings sat in order in their Forud (a word cognate with Forum), surrounded by their councillors and retinue. “Each one sits in his lawful place, so that all attend to them to listen.” The women were seated in the same manner, “a noble, most delightful host, women whose fame is not small abroad.” There was a week for considering the laws and rights of the provinces for the next three years. “There aloud with boldness they proclaimed the rights of every law and the restraints.” “Annals there are verified, every division into which Erin was divided; the history of the household of Tara—not insignificant, the knowledge of every territory in Erin, the history of the women of illustrious families, of courts, prohibitions, conquests.” The accurate synchronisms of noble races, “the succession of the sovereign kings, their battles and their stern valour,” “Fenian tales of Finn, an untiring entertainment,” proverbs, maxims, royal precepts, occult poetry, topographical etymologies, the precepts of law-givers and sages—all came in their turn; and inscribed tablets, and books of trees, satires, and sharp-edged runes.

While the memory of their origin, laws, and the title of every man to his land, was thus imprinted on the people’s minds, every other element of their civilization was displayed. Every day of the seven there was a show of the national sport of horse-racing. Commerce had its three markets—a market of food; a market of live stock, cows and horses; and the great market of “the foreign Greeks,” where gold and noble clothes were wont to be, carried from the branching harbours that brought hosts into the noble fair. There were trumpets and music of all sorts, and poets, exerting their utmost power till each art had its rightful meed in proper measure from the king. Professors of every sort, both the noble arts and the base arts, were there selling and exhibiting their competitions and their professional works to kings, and rewards were given for every art that was just or lawful to be sold or exhibited or listened to. The people might enjoy the rivalry of rustic buffoonery, pipes, fiddles, chainmen, bonemen, and tube players, a crowd of babbling painted masks—all in their due place. Everything was provided for—the slope of the steeds, the slope of the cooking, the slope of the embroidering women. And finally the day of solemnity, masses, adorations, and psalm singing, and the fast of all of them together; and so the assembly came to an end “without breach of law, without crime, without deed of violence, without dishonour.”

The king who presided over these assemblies was not a ruler in the Teutonic military sense. Ireland was free from two sources of military rule—the danger of conquest, and the fear of any attempt to force on the people a new and alien law. Protected by distance and the ocean, the island was long secured from foreign conquest: nor did the Irish need a central military power to enforce a native code which was already strong in the allegiance of the people. In this situation of comparative security the natural aim of the Irish was to preserve their local freedom. They objected, as the English after them have done, to military establishments and to compulsory service as systems which were a danger to liberty—and “liberty,” as the English officials complained, “was the only thing that Scots and Irish constantly contended for.” Herdsmen and ploughmen who carried on the business of the country refused to serve as soldiers for more than a few weeks in the year, and that only after sowing and reaping was done, and the cattle driven to pasture. Ireland was not in fact a military country. The dangers to peace lay mainly in the Gaelic law of succession to kingship and chieftainship, according to which the best man of the ruling kindred was elected by the freemen. Such a system provided frequent occasions of fighting—in rivalries of candidates and revolts of ambitious aspirants to power, all too ready to look for outside support, no matter where, from a neighbouring chief, a Norman baron, or an English deputy. From such variety of petty conflicts the feudal law of primogeniture saved other countries to some extent, though, as we know, that too was very far from insuring peace or harmony at all times.

Ireland no doubt suffered under this very conservative system of election, come down from the honoured past. The evils, however, were not incurable in a country left to itself. An attempt was already made to lessen them by the custom of electing along with the chief a Tanist or successor; and we can trace in Ireland also the growing custom of inheritance from father to son. The way of natural development was closed, not by the incompetence of the Irish, but by foreign enemies, who were careful to aggravate the mischief. It was the Danish wars and their results, and far more the wars of the English lord deputies, which made the very life of the tribe depend on military leadership and on that alone. The danger of local strife among independent states was in like manner exaggerated beyond measure when the deputies adopted the ferocious policy of advancing the English conquest by isolating the territories, and forcing them, on one plea or another, into civil war with their neighbours. Every territory had to maintain a retinue of soldiers out of all proportion to the normal state. Natural conditions were overturned, and statesmen then as now crippled the communities they governed with preparations for war in the interests of peace.

In the same way the growth in authority of the high-king was frustrated by external violence. During the Danish invasions the position of the high-king was of great importance as leader and centre of the national resistance, and head of the general assemblies of the country “to bring concord among the men of Ireland.” After these wars, when Ireland came more directly under European influences, efforts were made there, as in other countries, to shape a “kingdom” in the modern sense of a centralised monarchy. Such efforts after unity, which in Ireland, as in every other European country, were in any case slow and difficult, found a determined enemy in England from the time of Ruaidhri O’Conor and Henry II. onwards. In English interests, under the English “Lord of Ireland,” the island was to have no home-born king “coming to Tara,” as the mediæval phrase went, and not even a strong governor of any kind.

“A phantom government,” wrote Richey, “planted at Dublin fulfilled none of the duties of a ruler, but by its presence prevented the formation of any other authority or form of rule.”

If any leader appeared among the Irish of authority in peace or power in war, the whole force of England was immediately called in to his destruction, and to reestablish confusion and strife. “Ireland were as good as lost,” the English said, “if a wild wyrlinge should be chosen there as king.”

It cannot be doubted that the Irish system had sprung from the soul of a people with an intense national consciousness, that it bound the various clans under obedience to one common law, that it gave to all the inhabitants, rich and poor, learned and simple, an enthusiasm for their race and country which rooted that law in their hearts, and endowed it with a tenacity of life that no political misfortune could destroy.

The people were inspired by more than material considerations, and through centuries of suffering nothing but death could extinguish their passionate loyalty to their chief and devotion to their race. English governors could never catch the reason or meaning of that patriotism. “It should seem,” said Perrott, the ostentatious proclaimer of English superiority, “that they think, when once they leave their old customs, ... they are out of all frame or good fashion, according to that saying, They which are born in Hell think there is no Heaven.”

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

England, however, according to the Unionist teaching, offered a better thing. She “invented” for Ireland a Parliament. What did the Irish make of that? Here we enter on a new range of denunciations—the inadequacy to English ideas and benevolences, not of Iberians and Celts, but of Normans and of English themselves.

Every form of Parliament, the best that England could do, ended in Ireland, according to Mr. Balfour, in a “series of failures.” Ireland was already well accustomed in every one of its territories to meetings of notables and assemblies for public business; and there was no special difficulty in introducing among a people of their training a representative Parliament. But from this “British invention” the Celtic people were in effect shut out, either formally or practically. The Parliament was conferred on Normans, who had so distinguished a history in England, and on English Protestants. And yet, we are told, every experiment of an “Irish” Parliament failed; under the same malign influences, it would seem, as were set forth by a lord deputy under Henry VIII.: “As I suppose, it is predestinate to this country to bring forth sedition, inventions, lies, and such other naughty fruits, and also that no man shall have thanks for services done here.”

This seems to have been the view of Mr. Litton Falkiner, who in his Essays has drawn attention to the conspicuous faults of the Parliament as shown in the history of Poyning’s Act. That statute, according to him, reduced Ireland to legislative impotence, but the Parliament willingly and with no difficulty passed it; and not only was the bridle placed in the mouth of the Irish legislature with its own assent, but it was so placed by its own desire, and the Parliament long and strenuously resisted its removal. An explanation, suitable to Ireland, for this singularly irrational conduct is given.

“Not the least curious feature in the history of the subsequent operation of Poyning’s Law is the great inconvenience which it occasioned to the English Government, and its corresponding popularity with the anti-English element in the Irish legislature.”

The conclusion would seem to be that the atmosphere of the island so contaminated the Anglo-Norman settlers that they exchanged reason for fantastic inconsequence, and replaced self-interest by an insanity of “patriotism.” We have here a typical illustration of the way in which the “Irish” Parliament has been thrown under rebuke, and the spirit of its condemnation. It is interesting to ask whether the facts bear out this theory of unreason, and of a wilfulness inexplicable and characteristic of this island alone.

There is a close parallel between the history of Poyning’s Act in 1494 and that of the Union in 1800, so that the one may help us to understand the other. In the fifteenth century, as in the eighteenth, trade and wealth were increasing fast in Ireland with commercial intercourse of the peoples, and barriers were breaking down between the two races. In both these centuries alike the commercial jealousies of England were quickened by the growth of Irish trade, and its political fears by a question of the Crown—by Irish preference to the House of York over that of Lancaster under Henry VI.—and under George III., by views held in Ireland as to the Regency. Alike with Poyning’s Act and with the Union the proposed remedy was to bring Ireland under closer subjection to England. The statute ordered that no Parliament should be held in Ireland till the Council had certified to the King under the great seal of Ireland all the causes and considerations, and the Acts that should pass in it; and had received the King’s license under the great seal of England, as well in affirmation of these Acts as to summon Parliament. The means used for carrying this Act and the Act of Union were practically the same; the promise on each occasion was that the Act would ensure the order and liberties of Ireland; while for the unconvinced there remained threats, military demonstrations, and bribery—both subtle and extensive. Every place of authority in the country was newly packed with English officials, all servants of the Lancastrian party in power. A Parliament was called from which all the great earls were absent—Ormond, Desmond, Kildare. This mere shadow of a Parliament—strangers, place-hunters, and men, as we shall see, under sentence of ruin, without natural leaders, controlled by English officials—was required to accept the King’s decree for “the whole and perfect obedience of the country.” In Poyning’s Law notice was given of the King’s intention to make an Act for the general resumption of his whole revenues since 1327, an Act never equalled by any measure before or since for throwing all civil rights and liberties into the hands of the Crown. From pieces of parchment hanging to it with the autograph of Henry VII. written at the top, it appears that savings were made in favour of various persons exempting them from the operation of this Act. Thus according to their conduct or deserts at the passing of Poyning’s Law, men would find ruin or protection at the King’s hand. Alike in their ignoble beginnings, Poyning’s Law and the Act of Union remained in their later developments the source of dissension and the great battle-ground between English rulers and Irish subjects.

So much for the passing of the Act with “no difficulty.” How it was intended to work by Henry VII. we cannot tell, but the violent methods of later Tudor sovereigns respected no barriers. Whenever Poyning’s Act stood in their way, the first remedy was an Act for its “repeal”—that is, an “exposition” how it was to be understood, or an enactment that all statutes of that Parliament were valid, “notwithstanding Poyning’s Act.” No Tudor ever proposed to “repeal” that part of the statute which limited the freedom of Parliament: but only to abrogate the formalities which interfered with his own direct method of government. The Dublin Parliament, for its part, clearly saw that if the Act gave a tremendous power to the Crown, it yet held provisions which were a protection, so far as they went, from arbitrary tyranny. The preparing, before a Parliament could be called, of Acts to which the Seal of Ireland had to be affixed before they went to receive the Seal of England, assured some discussion in Ireland, some degree of publicity, and some hindrance to unexpected laws sprung upon it by a foreign and uncontrolled Executive, and rushed through by a packed majority. Parliament, in fact, held that law and recognised order were safeguards to liberty; and its battle in Dublin was for the security of law, even of Poyning’s Law, against the mere will of the King and his ministers: a motive neither trivial nor irrational.

The first conflict arose with the Parliament of 1536-7, which was called to establish what we may call the Protestant succession, to declare Henry head of the Church, to order the suppression of abbeys, and to decree vast confiscations in Leinster to the King’s benefit (in many cases estates of members of the Parliament), with the purpose of new “Plantation.” It was not likely that such laws would be peaceably drawn up in Dublin and offered to Henry in the form he preferred. On the first day of its session, May 1st, 1536, therefore, the “repeal of Poyning’s Act” was ordered—that is, to declare it void for that Parliament. The experiment was new and untried, and the Houses obeyed. By the “repeal” Henry and Cromwell were set free from every restriction. They could send over new and unforeseen bills, neither known nor discussed in Ireland, without agreement with the Irish Council, at any time before or after Parliament opened, and could alter bills during the session as they chose. Every shred of protection to the framing of bills in Ireland, or their discussion there, disappeared. The usurped powers were used to the uttermost. In seventeen days ten Acts had passed the Commons. Cromwell wrote to delay the Act for the Succession if it was still in an incomplete stage, probably for some changes. The King wrote to desire an astounding Act to confer on himself all the land in Ireland. But resistance had already begun. Parliament had attempted to protect the country by providing in their Repealing Act that a number of matters should be excluded from its operation, such as the liberties of boroughs, etc., and that no laws should be enacted by this Parliament but such as were for the honour of the King, the increase of his revenue, and the commonweal of the land. As Acts poured over from England members pleaded that they were contrary to these conditions, and prepared to carry the matter to a court of law. The struggle lasted eighteen months. Parliament was adjourned, contrary to law, six times in the next year. Finally Commissioners were sent over in September, 1537, carrying with them a series of Acts drawn up in England, and added others of their own devising; all to be passed “notwithstanding Poyning’s Act.” The limitations which Parliament had attempted to set up in their “Repealing” Act were set aside by a new “repeal,” which declared the “mere truth” of the first to be that every Bill was valid which concerned either the King’s honour, or the increase of his revenue, or the common weal of the land: and that anyone who brought the question to a suit in any court of law should suffer as a felon.

In this first battle, Parliament, taken by surprise, was defeated. Every attempted safeguard was thrown down, and nothing left but the royal tyranny. “The King’s causes in Parliament take good effect,” wrote the Commissioners; and twenty-four Acts were passed. Having finished their work, and having discovered in searching among old Acts that this Parliament was illegally held, they hastily dissolved it, making provision to hide its unlawful character.

The Parliament of 1541 which gave to Henry the title of king was the only one of the century in which we find no proposition to repeal Poyning’s Act. Other means had been used during four years of widespread and deceitful negotiations (1537-1541) to ensure the King’s success. A series of false promises as to rights in land had been cunningly dispatched through the country. There was a careful scrutiny of the coming Parliament. Lists were drawn up for Henry’s benefit. The House of Lords was safe. The vast majority of prelates in it were docile nominees of the new head of the Church. Of the score of peers on the list six were reported to Henry as having “neither wit nor company of men”; one was wise in counsel but without any soldiers; and nine were new creations, at the King’s bidding—six of them scarcely a month old, some indeed still waiting for their letters patent. In the Common House were divers knights and many gentlemen of fair possessions, but no list of these is given. The House had evidently been packed: for an Act was passed repealing the old statute against non-residents and proroguing of Parliaments. There was indeed a concession to placate opponents. “From henceforth” the knights and burgesses were to be resident, under penalty of fines—a provision well calculated to disappoint the hopes it raised. Under these circumstances the repeal of Poyning’s Act was for once dispensed with. Having secured his title of King, Henry could fling away his Parliament, and no assembly met again for thirteen years.

Queen Mary called her one Parliament in 1556 to carry two Acts which surpassed in terror and ferocity any yet proposed. The Act for the confiscation and plantation of Leinster lands, ordered Leix and Offaly to be turned into the King’s and Queen’s counties, the first shires made since the time of John; and desired they should be “planted” with “good men.” A second Act gave power to Commissioners to perambulate the whole realm and divide it into shires as they thought convenient, without further reference to Parliament. Henceforth any Irish chief or Norman lord might learn suddenly that by a mere decree of the Deputy his authority was abolished, his territory dissolved into a chaotic mass of helpless people, under officers speaking a foreign tongue, and laws wholly unknown to them, the land leased out according to English tenure, new taxes imposed, and a Commissioner with his hangmen placed in their midst to govern “in a course of discretion.”

When Parliament met, two drafts of the Act for “the well-disposing” of Leinster lands were “lost.” The loss or embezzlement was perhaps contrived with the hope of resisting any third Act that might arrive after the session had opened, as contrary to Poyning’s Law. If so, the hope was vain. An Act was prepared to explain “how Poyning’s Act was to be exponed and taken,” and to enact that since events might happen, (as for example the loss of unwelcome drafts) during the time of Parliament necessary to be provided for, which at the time of the summoning of Parliament were not thought or agreed upon, therefore the Irish Government might send over considerations and causes for new ordinances, and that these being returned under the Great Seal of England might be enacted, notwithstanding Poyning’s Act. A third draft was sent over, and the Act of Confiscation passed—the first of the Great Plantations.

That sinister measure, “An exposition of Poyning’s Act,” was again prepared for Elizabeth’s Parliament of 1560, which was called to declare the Queen’s Title and her Supremacy over the Church. But the Houses disappeared before it was brought in:

“The Lord-Deputy is said to have used force, and the speaker treachery.... I heard,” said Dr. Lynch, “that it had been previously announced in the House that Parliament would not sit on that very day on which the laws against religion were enacted; but, in the meantime, a private summons was sent to those who were well known to be favourable to the new creed ... the few members present assented, and the speaker won for himself the name of being the chief author of the laws enacted against the Catholic religion.”

The Deputy Sussex sought to calm the rage of the Parliament by pledging himself solemnly that the Statute of Uniformity should not be enforced during Elizabeth’s reign. So violent was the opposition of lords and chieftains to “the laws against religion,” that Sussex, it was said, prorogued Parliament and went to England to consult the Queen. Thus it ended after nineteen days.

After this experience:

“We have small disposition to assent to any Parliament,” wrote Elizabeth to the Deputy in 1566. “Nevertheless, when we call to remembrance the ancient manner of that our Realm, that no manner of thing there ought to be commented or treated upon, but such as we shall first understand from you, and consent thereunto ourself, and consequently return the same under our great seal of this our Realm of England; we are the better minded to assent to this your request.”

The legal correctness of this regard for Poyning’s Act disappeared in the course of three years’ preparation for the new assembly. The Parliament met in 1569 to find the Commons packed with strangers, contrary to the renewed law which had been won from Henry VIII. in 1542 against the practice. The gentry of the Pale and the Dublin burgesses protested in vain against the return of strangers for boroughs which they had never even seen: “the more words the more choler.” Elizabeth’s vast schemes of confiscation and breaking up of the old Irish society were met with hostility. Under pressure of the Deputy, therefore, a second session was held to pass a single bill, the “Repeal of Poyning’s Act”; on the plea that grievous sores known to the high court in Ireland could not be reformed as not having been certified to the Queen. This bill was bitterly opposed: “so jealous were they that they would not in long time enter into the consideration thereof.” The remonstrants did in fact force some concessions; that provisions made by the present Parliament for the common weal, the augmentation of the Queen’s revenues, and the assurance to her of lands and profits, which were certified under the Great Seal of Ireland, and returned to Ireland under the Great Seal of England, should first be publicly proclaimed in six cities, and only after these proclamations should pass into law, “Poyning’s Act notwithstanding.”

The way was now clear, and the next session brought the attainder of Shane O’Neill and the tremendous confiscation of Tyrone and other lands in Ulster. A beginning was made of Munster confiscations. The Deputy was to appoint English-speaking clergy to all ecclesiastical dignities in Munster. Other Acts ordered all Ireland to be reduced to shire land; and abolished all Irish and Anglo-Norman chieftaincies or “captainships” except by special patent (thus depriving the chiefs of the benefit of their indentures), under penalty of death without benefit of clergy, as the law was drafted in England; the Parliament substituted a fine and passed the decree with great opposition, for “the matter misliked them more than the pain.” The Queen herself sent letters ordering Parliament to pass a heavy impost which must ruin the Irish wine trade, in which matter “they showed themselves so unquiet that they were more like a bear-baiting of disordered persons than a Parliament of wise and grave men.” Taught by experience, the Parliament now insisted on a law to limit the repeal of Poyning’s Act, in which they explained their reasons for objecting to any repeal at any time. Before that Act, they said, when liberty was given to the governors to call Parliament at their pleasure, “Acts passed as well to the dishonour of the Prince, as to the hindrance of their subjects, the remembrance whereof would indeed have stayed us from condescending to the repeal of the said statute,” save for their persuasion that Sydney through his motion meant only the honour of the Queen and the common benefit of the Realm (going back in these words to the first repeal of 1536); but they feared that the like liberty might be abused by other governors, and therefore enacted that none other should ever use the liberty of Sydney, and that no Bill should ever be certified into England for repealing or suspending of Poynings’ Act unless it was first agreed on in a Session of Parliament in Ireland, by the greater number of the Lords and the greater number of the Common House, that is by both Houses carrying the Bill by a separate vote.

The Parliament of 1569, distinguished by a high order of public spirit and legal ability, was driven to its fatal close in a general war against those “that banish Ireland and mean conquest,” a striking phrase of Anglo-Irish patriots.

A new “Repeal of Poynings’ Act” was demanded of the Parliament in 1585. The reason was again the same—for the more convenient passing of Acts to deprive the people of Ireland of their land and their religion; Elizabeth mainly anxious about her property in land, and the deputy about religious uniformity. There was a Bill to extend to Ireland all the English laws against Popish recusants, and demand the Oath of Supremacy as a test of the fidelity of Parliament: an Act for the attainder of Baltinglas; another for the attainder of Desmond, and a hundred and sixty more “traitors,” and for the confiscation of Munster; one to limit the landowners’ old-established rights of conveyancing of land as “likely to tend to disinherit the Queen’s Majesty.” Such Acts could never be passed under the formalities of Poynings’ Law.

The Viceroy, however, had to reckon with two new problems. Representatives of the Irish race sat in the Parliament, Hugh O’Neill in the Lords, some fourteen Irishmen in the Commons. And the effect of the enactment made by the last Parliament was now seen in its enactment that “repeal” henceforth must be carried by a majority in each of the two Houses, voting separately. By fraudulently counting an absent vote Perrott declared the Bill carried by one in the Lords: the Commons threw it out by thirty-five. He prorogued Parliament for three days, and when it met again brought in the Bill; again the Ireland Party in the Commons defeated the Englishmen who supported the Government; and thus overthrew, in Perrott’s words, “the repeal of Poynings’ Act that should have set them at liberty to treat of that and all other things necessary for the State.” The opponents of suspension, he said, desired only to make void the whole Parliament because they could abide no reformation in matters of religion or State; and would bring the new chiefs, O’Reillys, Maguires, and the rest, into jealousy of the Parliament. The landowners and gentry, “the stirrers of Parliament and the lawyers,” on their side declared they feared to give despotic power to the Viceroy and distrusted his purpose, “some of the Irishmen either mistaking or conceiving it was framed to another intent than it did pretend, whereby they drew on them the Deputy’s disfavour, and displeasure on him from the Queen.”

The defeat of “repeal” showed the Houses their strength. The Lords dashed new Acts proposed against treason and the trial of accessories—statutes namely, said Perrott, for the safety of the Queen. The Commons wrecked the Bill for Desmond’s attainder, striking out eight score names of “men of living” and leaving only eight. They refused, moreover, to escheat lands protected by law, and to tax land in a manner tyrannous and contrary to Irish custom. The “disturbers of Parliament” were met by five adjournments in eleven months; but the devices by which these sticklers for the law were finally subdued is too long to tell here. Parliament met at last in April, 1586, to register the royal will. The Lords read and passed the four Acts for the attainder of rebels in Munster. The Commons still resisted for a week. The official intrigue to compel their submission is confused by the bitter wrangle of the Deputy and the Treasurer for the honour of the plot. Finally the Desmond confiscations were “wrought out” of the Parliament with so great difficulty, said Spenser, “that were it to be passed again I dare undertake it would never be compassed”; and the Deputy gave the royal assent to the Bill by which over half a million acres of Desmond land were forfeited by Act of Parliament to the Crown, as the O’Neill land had been forfeited nearly twenty years before. After which Parliament was dissolved, with an oration of Justice Walshe, the Speaker, who, in “the universal comfort of all estates,” asked the Commons “what is there more of earthly felicity that can be required,” reminded them that the escheated lands “accepted by the Queen of us” were of far less value than the smallest portion of Her Majesty’s charges for their benefit, and mentioned how they had “willingly consented to attaint and stain in blood Her Majesty’s disloyal subjects and unbar the succession of their traitorous lines, to the end that the memory of their names may be quite extinguished.”

Thus after a hundred years the Parliament won its first success in refusing the repeal of Poyning’s Act. Mr. Litton Falkiner calls us to wonder at the “curious circumstance” that “successive Parliaments of the sixteenth century declined on patriotic grounds to abrogate the very statute the repeal of which was to become the greatest triumph of Irish patriotism in the eighteenth century,” and insinuates that we may here see displayed the captious and capricious spirit that infects the “predestinate” peoples of Ireland. Out of the old habit of contempt it has being boldly suggested by some that the independence of Parliament, by others that the Catholic religion, were in no way valued by Irishmen until they made the discovery that these could be used to annoy and disconcert England. Such unworthy suspicions must disappear as we watch the grave conflict of men threatened with ruin, imprisonment, death, in their struggle to defend the first rights of law, property, and religion.

It was a slow battle, with rare and scanty triumphs for defenders of the constitution. Long silence followed the first victory of the Parliament in refusing the repeal of Poyning’s Act: it was not summoned again for twenty-six years. Its next meeting was amid dark threatenings. The old sessions in Dublin had been honourably held in “the house called Christ’s Church situate in the high place of the same, like as St. Paul’s in London”; Parliament was now ordered to hold its debates in the Castle, surrounded by extra troops brought to overawe an assembly which was robbed of even the appearance of free deliberations. When they objected to being placed over the Castle stores of powder (in a room which had been, in fact, lately wrecked by an accidental explosion of gunpowder) and made a reference to Guy Fawkes, their objections were set aside with a scornful taunt “of what religion they were that had hatched such cockatrice’s eggs.” From that time began a new and even more ominous story than before.

A fatal doom in fact hung over the two Houses in Dublin. The Irish Parliament, which at this time had no relation whatever with the English Parliament, depended directly and solely on the King. The royal policy of Tudors and Stuarts, in their different ways, was to fortify their personal authority over Ireland and its Parliament, and by this means to strengthen the despotic and military power of the Crown; and make Ireland, without or against its will, a peril to the liberties of England. The natural result was to bring the Irish Parliament under the angry suspicion of the English Parliament and people, and create a forced and disastrous hostility. Not only was the constitutional party in Ireland cut off from the natural support of their brethren who were fighting the battle of liberty in England, and separated from its due share in the general struggle for liberty; but the royal policy finally drove the English Parliament to determine that all independent action of the Irish Parliament should be entirely suppressed, and thus brought about a constitutional revolution which for the first time subjected the Irish Parliament to the absolute control, not of the King, but of the English Parliament itself. From this time, it is evident, Poynings’ Act and its repeal took a new significance.

The Parliament which “England gave to Ireland,” that gift “of British extraction,” was, as we know, very far indeed from the Parliament which the English won for themselves. The English Parliament had behind it in effect the people of England. The Irish Parliament was by the Castle policy separated from the people of Ireland, who were utterly excluded, or if cautiously admitted were selected in small and discreet numbers from among those who had cut themselves off from their own people and pledged themselves to the Government. It was sedulously weakened within by perpetual infusion among its high officials, its peers, its prelates, and its members from boroughs and shires, of strangers born across the sea—men whose special mission was to “banish Ireland” and reduce all to subservience to the interests of another country. Its Statutes were treated with negligent contempt: “The same Statutes, for lack they be not in print, be unknown to the most part of your subjects here ... these of the Irishrie which newly have submitted themselves be in great doubt of such uncertain and unknown laws,” the Deputy reported. In 1569 it was proposed, apparently without any reference to Parliament, to print such of the Statutes “as it was desirable for our subjects to take note of”; in 1571 Recorder Stanihurst carried to London the roll of 170 statutes which were thought meet to be printed by the new English settler, Carew, (perhaps the most hated of all by the Parliament itself) and a few officials—a selection which was in London again corrected by Burghley, and the printing still delayed.

That a Parliament hampered, mutilated, restricted, demoralised, should have made such a stand for the country’s interests, testifies to the vigour of constitutional and national life in Ireland. Society indeed is so closely bound together in any country that the most imperfect and exclusive body of its inhabitants must feel to some degree the needs and aspirations of the whole. Mr. A. M. Sullivan, in the last Home Rule controversy, rightly argued that it was not what the Parliament was that chiefly mattered, but where it was: “Anything will do, if it is only in Ireland,” he said, “the Protestant Synod would do.” The same need for some representative life of a people in their own land was felt by the Great Earl of Kildare over four hundred years ago. “You hear of our case as in a dream,” he cried to the London councillors, “and feel not the smart that vexeth us.”

The close of the old Irish polity, the fate of the Irish Parliaments, have a deeper lesson to teach than the supposed faults of the Irish temper, Iberian, Celtic, or Norman. The story of the old Gaelic State, and of the later Anglo-Irish Commonwealth, both alike reveal a power of patriotism, a passion of human aspiration, which cannot find its final satisfaction in material gifts; and which is ill understood by those who deny to Ireland fair fame, dignity, and a lofty patriotism, and offer in their place oblivion, with a promise for the future of Tariff Reform and its financial consequences. The series of failures that have through seven centuries followed the English dealing with Ireland have their inexorable lesson:

“That nothing has a natural right to last But equity and reason; that all else Meets foes irreconcilable, and at best Lives only by variety of disease.”

IX.—Ireland As A Dependency. BY PROFESSOR A. F. POLLARD

“The ocean,” said Grattan, with reference to the connexion between Great Britain and Ireland, “protests against separation, and the sea against union.” The protests of natural forces cannot be ignored, and the history of the relations between the two islands is filled with the efforts of statesmen to find a middle way between the horns of this dilemma, and to adjust the estranging drift of the Irish Channel, the Irish climate, and racial divergence to the bonds of common interest imposed by the Atlantic Ocean and foreign competition upon the British Isles. After a brief eighteen years of uneasy legislative independence, the pendulum swung to the other extreme, and the Act of Union inaugurated a century of restless incorporation; but, for five out of the six and a half centuries of English parliamentary history, Ireland had a subordinate Parliament. Union has been the exception, not the rule, in the relations of the kingdoms.

The mere existence of an Irish Parliament was not, therefore, fatal to England’s security or to the growth of its Empire. A Parliament sat at Dublin while England won the battles of Crecy and Agincourt, of Blenheim and the Nile, defied the menace of Rome, defeated the Spanish Armada, and laid the foundations of British dominion in India, in Canada, in the West Indies, and in South Africa. Spaniards, it is true, landed at Smerwick in 1579 and at Kinsale in 1601, and French troops landed at Carrickfergus in 1760 and at Kilala in 1798; but Spaniards also landed at Penzance in 1593, and Frenchmen landed on English soil countless times from the days of William the Conqueror to their descent at Fishguard in 1796. England has ever been saved by its navy and not by its parliamentary unions, and the attraction to foreign invaders has not been an Irish Parliament, but the existence of Irish discontent. No invasion of Ireland, in spite of the Irish Parliament, came so near to success as did the Jacobite risings after the Scottish Union.

The recapitulation of these facts is, perhaps, otiose, except to allay fears which sane politicians do not entertain; and it is more to the point to show that the causes of Irish dissatisfaction are historical, and are identical with those which, under similar conditions, produced a similar discontent in England. The notion that the Irish are naturally turbulent and disloyal, while the English are by nature the reverse, is one which could only have grown up after England had rid itself of those irritants which cause the Irish friction. Between the Norman Conquest and the Revolution of 1688 England rebelled against more than half its sovereigns: some were imprisoned, some were expelled, some were assassinated, and some were done to death in more decorous fashion; and English treason and turbulence were once quite as much bywords in Europe as ever Irish disloyalty was in England. The conventional English pictures of Irish disorder could easily be capped as late as the seventeenth century by French descriptions of English lawlessness and barbarity. A French guide-book, published in 1654, declared that England was inhabited by demons and parricides, and a few years later another Frenchman averred that the English were a cruel and ferocious race of wolves. The truth of the matter is that English and Irish alike prefer to manage their own affairs in accord with their own ideas, and are only contented and loyal when this condition obtains. The Revolution of 1688 placed its realisation within the reach of the English people, and there has been no English rebellion since. But the sovereign remedy for disaffection was refused the Irish and the American colonists: the latter rebelled, and, being distant, achieved their independence. The Canadians followed suit in 1837, but found peace and prosperity under a parliament of their own. South Africa was converted to the cause of empire by the same expedient; only the Irish, who are most at England’s mercy, have been condemned to nurse their grievance and denied the conditions of loyalty.

The remedy does not apply, we are told, to Irish disorders, firstly because parliamentary institutions are an exotic(122) unsuited to the Irish soil and temperament, and secondly because they have been weighed in Irish balances and found wanting. It is hard to see why they should be regarded as more exotic in Irish Dublin than in French Quebec: Sir Wilfrid Laurier cannot be termed a failure as a parliamentarian; British parties at Westminster have been inconvenienced by the parliamentary skill rather than by the parliamentary incompetence of Irish members; and the present menace to parliamentary institutions does not come from Ireland. Nor, indeed, is the argument one which we can employ with any consistency, for there is hardly a word in our legal and constitutional terminology that is not of foreign origin. Parliament itself is not of Anglo-Saxon derivation, and nearly all the things we cherish most have been imported from abroad—our racehorses and our religion, our alphabet and our algebra, our trial by jury and our vote by ballot. Pure-bred civilisations have been rare, inelastic, and unprogressive, and the test of a nation’s political capacity lies not in its rigid adherence to its original stock-in-trade, but in its powers of assimilation and adaptability to its environment. It is no reproach to us that we have dethroned indigenous deities, nor to the Irish that they have appropriated our Parliamentary weapons; for it is a poor country which cannot borrow its neighbours’ wisdom and profit by their experience.

The misfortune for Ireland was that in the earlier stages of its development it borrowed so little, and retained so much of its primitive tribal decentralisation. England would have been no less unfortunate had William the Conqueror only succeeded in establishing a Norman Pale on this side of the English Channel, and had England retained its connexion with Normandy. As it was, the Normans and Angevins cured us of our primitive tribalism, and then left England to work out its own salvation. The severance of Normandy from England converted the descendants of William’s companions from a Norman garrison into an English aristocracy, while the successors of Strongbow’s followers were maintained by the English connexion as an alien garrison quartered in the barracks of a dwindling Irish Pale. At first, indeed, they had spread a thin veneer of Anglo-Norman conquest over the greater part of Ireland; but baronial feuds only added to the distraction of native septs; and when Edward I.’s premature imperialism provoked a general Celtic reaction under Robert Bruce in Scotland and Edward Bruce in Ireland, Anglo-Norman rule was doomed. The conquerors either threw in their lot with the natives and became more Irish than the Irish, or withdrew within the Pale and maintained a troubled existence by sowing division throughout the rest of the realm. Hence the Irish were always the enemies, seldom the subjects of the English Crown; and outside the Pale there was no English government of Ireland during the middle ages. Constitutional relations only existed between England and the Pale; relations with Ireland outside the Pale were in that state of nature, in which, says Hobbes, the life of man is “nasty, short, brutish, and mean.” The Government had not the means to govern; it felt and it acknowledged no obligations of duty or humanity towards its foes outside the Pale.

This Pale, about twenty miles broad and sixty miles long, was almost as narrow and quite as lawless as the Welsh Marches or the Scottish Borders; and it was the nursery of the English-seedling-parliament in Ireland. A sort of parliament containing knights from a dozen shires had been summoned in 1295; boroughs appear to have been represented first in 1310. It was only designed to supply the financial needs of an English Government, and give statutory form to the edicts of Dublin Castle; and the statutes of Kilkenny (1367), which penalised everything Irish, were merely striking examples of the ferocity and the futility of its customary legislation. Nevertheless, it began to strike feeble roots in Irish soil, and when, in 1374, Edward III.’s deputy directed the clergy and laity of the Pale to send their representatives to Westminster, their constituents, while obeying, instructed them to reject all financial demands upon Ireland made at St. Stephen’s. Demands made at Dublin were not, however, much more fruitful, and for thirty years in the fifteenth century only one Irish Parliament met. Spasmodic efforts by sovereigns and royal princes like Richard II., Lionel and Thomas (Dukes of Clarence), and Richard (Duke of York,) alternated with longer periods, during which the Crown abandoned the government to the greatest chieftain in the Pale, and made believe that the power he wielded was due to his royal commission. Richard of York, indeed, established a reputation for vigorous rule which won him the support of the Parliament of the Pale in his assertion of an independent kingship in Ireland after his defeat in England in 1459; and the Anglo-Irish, either out of gratitude to him or of spite to the Tudors, afterwards discovered Yorkist features in every pretender to Henry VII.’s throne. Their favour to Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck precipitated Poynings’ laws.

These famous enactments were aimed at Dublin Castle rather than at the Dublin parliament. The Crown had always controlled Irish legislation, but the control had been exercised through a deputy, who was often more powerful in Ireland than the Crown; this independence was to cease, and the control of Irish legislation was transferred from the Irish deputy to the English Privy Council. No Parliament was to be summoned in the Pale without the consent, and no legislation introduced without the approval, of that body. Acts previously passed by the English Parliament were declared in force in Ireland, and in practice the English Parliament proceeded to legislate for, though not to tax, Ireland without the concurrence of its Parliament. Poynings also attempted to conquer the native Irish, and to rule the Pale according to English ways; but the expense proved greater than Henry VII. could bear, and, with the bit of Poynings’ laws in his mouth, the Earl of Kildare was sent back to govern the Pale in the time-honoured fashion.

Ireland was one of the questions upon which Wolsey and Henry VIII. disagreed. The Cardinal’s policy was to neglect Ireland and save expenses in that direction in order to act as the paymaster and to pose as the arbiter of Europe, with the result that on the eve of his fall, England’s hold on Ireland was said to be weaker than it had been since the conquest. When Wolsey was gone, Henry’s imperialism found vent in Ireland as well as in other spheres, and it was stimulated by the appearance as early as 1528 of Spanish emissaries at the courts of Irish chiefs. But the brutal hatred which later conflicts engendered did not inspire the Irish efforts of Henry VIII. His warfare in Ireland was less ferocious than that which he waged on Scotland, or on the monks of England. If he confiscated the lands of Irish monasteries, he shared the spoils with Irish chiefs, and he also confiscated the lands of habitual absentees; and if he proscribed the Earl of Kildare, he gave earldoms to O’Neill, O’Brien, and MacWilliam. Whatever plans for the expropriation of the Irish clans were propounded to his ears, his own policy was not expropriation, but the conversion of Irish chiefs into Irish peers holding their lands of him as their king; and by the common testimony of English and Irish alike, the land enjoyed greater peace and prosperity at the end of his reign than it had within living memory. The destruction of papal jurisdiction was no grievance to the Irish, for pope after pope had prohibited their preferment and restricted Irish sees to men of English race. Even Edward VI.’s Acts of Uniformity, which were applied to Ireland without the authorisation of its Parliament, evoked no Irish rebellion; and so mild was religious conflict that there was no Irish martyr under Protestant Edward VI. or under Catholic Mary.

The permanent schism between the two races was, indeed, due neither to politics nor to religion, but to the expropriation of the Irish from their land. At the middle of the sixteenth century the antagonism between English and Irish was slighter than that between English and Scots, or that between Britons and Boers in 1900. Men can heal the wounds of the conquered, but those of the disinherited fester for ever, unless the race dies out or restitution is made. The Irish are the only white race that the English have evicted in modern times. They ate up the land piecemeal because there was no Irish State to be subdued by political conquest; because their arts of division, which failed against Scottish national feeling, succeeded against Irish septs; because the English conquest of Ireland was, in fact, a barbarian conquest achieved by a more or less civilised race centuries after the normal age of white barbarian conquests had closed. No conquered States pay ransom with the wholesale confiscation of the lands of private individuals; that is a price which is only exacted from the disorganised and the defenceless.

This process began with an Act of Philip and Mary, supported by the Roman Catholic Church, which was still the Church of the English rulers rather than that of the Irish people; and the Lord-Deputy Sussex was required to permit the Primate to “exercise and use all manner of ecclesiastical censures against the disordered Irishry.” Leix and Offaly, where the O’Conors and O’Mores had rebelled under Edward VI., were confiscated to the Crown and converted into King’s and Queen’s Counties. They were to be planted partly with English settlers and partly with such Irish as would abjure their native language, laws, and customs. But it took more than half a century to carry out the plantation, and eighteen rebellions broke out before the natives could be eradicated from the soil; even when the miserable remnants had been transplanted to Kerry, many of them straggled back to live as hirelings on lands that had been their own. Such was the new model on which Ireland was to be moulded into “civility and good government;” and in 1622 a Royal Commission pronounced this plantation to have been well begun and prosperously continued.

Literally, it was a war of extermination, which spread into other parts of Ireland, and brought political and religious issues in its train. A year after the Plantation Act, but before Mary Tudor’s death, Sussex wrote that the native Irish were denying England’s right to Ireland, and preparing to assist the French and Scots. The events of Elizabeth’s reign taught them to look rather to Spain and to the Papacy, and by degrees Philip II., after whom King’s County and its capital, Philipstown, had been named, became the patron of the Irish who suffered from the plantation. Religion, too, came into play. The first Jesuit missionaries had returned in despair from their labours on the unresponsive Irish soil. But expropriation left the peasants with little solace save religion, and their religion would not be that of their oppressor; to them Protestantism meant plantation. The links between English Government and Roman Catholic hierarchy had been broken; and Catholicism, which has no natural affinities with nationalism, became the adventitious ally of the Irish people in their resistance to the intruding imperialism of their English foes.

This coalition of hostile forces supplied the English Government with what it considered convincing arguments for persisting in its course; fresh Jesuit missions to Ireland, and intrigues between Irish chiefs and Spanish ambassadors sped the policy of plantation by provoking rebellion in Munster. The way seemed to have been prepared by the death of 30,000 Irish from starvation in that province within six months, and the pick of England’s aristocracy, Raleigh, Grenville, Herbert, Spenser, and Norris, undertook the work of civilisation. They performed it mostly by bailiffs, who let the land at rack-rents to its former proprietors; and the whole fabric vanished in the rebellion which flamed out in 1598 on the news of Tyrone’s victories in Ulster. With the assistance of Spain, Tyrone shook English rule in Ireland almost to its foundations; but they remained firm, embedded in the sea. The Spanish squadrons were annihilated in Kinsale and Castlehaven Harbours, and Tyrone was granted terms of peace. Ireland was conquered as it never had been before, but England had not yet learnt how to pacify a conquered country. Four years later Tyrone and Tyrconnell fled to Spain; the claims of their natural successors were set aside; and their lands were divided among the Scottish and English founders of modern Ulster. Thousands of natives, however, remained as tenants on the land of which they had been robbed, “hoping,” wrote the Lord-Deputy, “at one time or other to find an opportunity of cutting their landlords’ throats.” The unique character and the success of the Ulster plantation were due less to the original planters than to the Calvinistic Scots who found there a refuge from Laud and the Stuarts, and like the Pilgrim Fathers regarded themselves as a people chosen to root out the Amalekite and Philistine natives. Like the founders of New England, too, their relations with the natives were far worse than those of the southern planters in Ireland, and the southern planters in North America.

Thirty years later the natives of Ulster found their opportunity, and wreaked on their landlords, in the massacre of 1641, vengeance for a generation of robbery and oppression. There ensued a decade of indescribable confusion, in which native Irish, Anglo-Irish, Ulster Scots, English parliamentarians, and Royalists fought one another, until Cromwell repaid the massacre of 1641 by those of Drogheda and Wexford, and by a further process of expropriation called the Cromwellian Settlement. More than two-thirds of Irish land had now passed into the hands of Englishmen; and although the Cromwellians had to disgorge a part of their spoil at the Restoration, it was estimated by Sir William Petty in 1664 that not more than one-third of the land belonged to the native Irish, including in that category the descendants of Anglo-Norman families; of the remainder, about half belonged to Elizabethan and Jacobean planters, and half to the Cromwellians. Nor was the process yet complete: the new expropriation was followed in 1689-90 by yet another attempt on the part of the Irish to recover their inheritance, and the failure of that attempt by further confiscation. At the beginning of the eighteenth century three-quarters of the land was owned by the English garrison, and the progress of the century was marked by fresh evictions. Political reasons had ceased, but economic causes supplied their place; and wide stretches of pasture were needed in order that the landlords might turn their property to the most profitable grazing purposes. Only land that would not do for cattle was left to the Irish peasants; from the bogs there looked up, from the barren hills there looked down, the Roman Catholic disinherited upon the smiling meadows of their Protestant supplanters.

Upon this broadening basis of plantation was developed the Irish Parliament, a Parliament doomed from the first by the very conditions of its being to a sterile and troubled existence. Here and there from the days of Elizabeth a native name may be traced in the lists of its members, but it was almost exclusively the Parliament of a caste, the instrument of oppression. Ten counties only sent representatives to Elizabeth’s Parliament of 1560; plantation increased the number to twenty-seven in 1585; and the tale was fairly complete when, after the plantation of Ulster, James I. next summoned a Parliament in 1613. But the “Irish interest” which struggled therein against the “English interest” represented only the Anglo-Irish families, who had struck some roots in the soil and resented the dictation of English officials. The “native interest” had no voice in Parliament until O’Connell’s triumph in 1828. Hence the pitiful impotence of this Parliament, the emptiness of the sound and fury of its constitutional debates. The beneficiaries of conquest could not in logic use the armoury of consent. The dependence of the colonists upon England placed their Parliament at the mercy of the English Government. They relied upon English force to expropriate the native Irish and to proscribe the Roman Catholic religion; and this reliance deprived them of moral and material grounds of resistance to the political, commercial, and industrial tyranny of their masters. The power which gave the planters their land could laugh at their constitutional pretensions. So the Dublin Parliament idly strove to emulate its exemplar at Westminster, and clamoured in vain for responsible government, for control of the Irish Executive. In spite of its Irish Parliament, Ireland has never been given the chance of governing itself.

But nothing could eradicate the “protest of the sea” against union with England, or the tendency of dwellers on Irish soil to become Irishmen. The Anglo-Normans had grown Hibernis ipsis Hiberniores in the middle ages, and nothing short of the Tudor Conquest would have perpetuated English dominion; for even the gentry of the Pale rebelled in Elizabeth’s reign against “cess,” a form of arbitrary taxation compared in its constitutional bearings with ship-money. In their turn the Tudor planters were gripped by the Irish soil, and resisted the rule of Strafford; and a fresh immigration of Cromwellian settlers alone enabled William of Orange to hold Ireland against Tyrconnell and James II. Even their descendants, too, became part of the “Irish interest” in the eighteenth century; and Pitt’s Act of Union was England’s final effort to circumvent the insinuating strength of Irish nature.

The more Ireland’s Parliament succumbed to Irish ideas, the more it was flouted by England, and the greater the efforts made to secure in it the predominance of the English interest. England, in spite of itself, was creating an Irish nation. It had destroyed the system of septs which it could divide and play off against one another; by imposing on all a grinding tyranny it had crushed out local distinctions and family feuds, and had evoked a national spirit which could not be corrupted by bribes or disarmed by division. Poynings’ Laws were the first attempt at the new methods of control which led to the Act of Union. They were soon found insufficient. Not only must Irish legislation be curbed by the English Privy Council; the English Parliament must also have the power of initiating and passing laws for Ireland; and this practice grew up against which Molyneux vainly protested in 1694. In 1719 the practice was confirmed by an English statute, which transferred to the British House of Lords the appellate jurisdiction claimed by the Irish peers, and expressly asserted the right of the British Parliament to legislate for Ireland and override Irish laws. Similarly the Irish electorate was more and more rigidly restricted to the English interest; members of both houses were, by an English statute of William and Mary, required to be Protestants, and in 1727, by an English statute of George II., Catholics, who numbered four-fifths of the Irish people, were excluded from the franchise.

The same fear of a nascent Irish nationalism was the real motive for the Irish penal code, which assumed its worst features under Anne, and was largely extended under George I. and George II., although no Jacobite rebellion in Ireland threatened those sovereigns, and the only provocation was the silent growth of Irish national feeling. That its cause was not religious is clear, for there was little religious persecution, and the penal code in Ireland was at its worst in the heyday of English latitudinarianism. The design was really to shut out the Irish by means of their religion from political and social influence. Hence their exclusion from the legal and teaching professions, from the university, from the army and the navy, from corporations, grand juries and vestries; hence the barbarous laws by which a son converted to Protestantism could reduce his Catholic father to a mere life-tenant, by which no Catholic could buy or bequeath land or inherit or receive it as a gift from Protestants, by which he could not act as a guardian, a constable, or a gamekeeper, possess a horse worth more than £5, or keep more than two apprentices. A Protestant husband who married a Catholic wife fell under this penal code; a Protestant wife who married a Catholic husband was deprived of her inheritance; and an Act of George II. declared that mixed marriages should be null, and that the priests who made them should be hanged. Some knowledge of Irish history is required in order to appreciate the virtuous indignation roused by the Pope’s Ne Temere decree. In the eighteenth century, wives were bribed by the law to turn against Catholic husbands, and children against their Catholic fathers; the fractious wife, the unnatural son had only to feign conversion in order to secure immunity and reward for undutiful conduct, and to deprive those whom they had injured of the management and disposal of their estates. Such was the system begotten by force and fraud through the breach of the Treaty of Limerick, when William III.’s generals, in order to pacify Ireland, guaranteed to the Irish people the enjoyment of their religious liberties. The arts which earlier English Governments had used to set chief against chief and clan against clan, were now employed on a more generous scale to set a dominant caste against the people they ruled, and to place at the absolute disposal of an alien garrison the lives, the liberties, the conscience, the property, and the domestic happiness of the nation it had robbed, maltreated, and betrayed.

Dominion, however, was not in the eighteenth century an end in itself, but a means for securing wealth. The age of commercial rivalry had set in during the latter half of the seventeenth century, and English traders, who had clamoured for the destruction of the Protestant Dutch, valued their hold over Catholic Ireland as a means for exploiting its markets and crushing its competition. One after another of Ireland’s infant industries was massacred to satisfy English jealousy. Strafford’s boasted encouragement of Irish linen was a blind to cover his campaign against Irish woollens. In the reign of Charles II. the importation of Irish cattle into England was prohibited because it lowered English rents, and Ireland’s magnificent harbours were kept empty by its exclusion from the Navigation Acts, lest its incipient colonial trade should compete with England’s. Deprived of their market for cattle, the Irish developed sheep-rearing and woollen manufactures; in 1699 the English Parliament accordingly prohibited the export of Irish manufactured wool to any country whatever. The hypocritical plea was anxiety to stimulate Irish linen, which the English Parliament thereupon practically excluded by a duty of 30 per cent. Having thus impoverished Ireland, Englishmen based their case against Irish claims to self-government on the thriftlessness of its people.

All classes in Ireland, Catholics and Protestants, landlords and tenants, traders and farmers, were, however, involved in this common misfortune, which in its helpless position the Irish Parliament was powerless to avert; and in spite of the discord sown with malignant ingenuity between the English, the Irish, and the native interests, in spite of the perverted skill of viceroys and primates in maintaining the English faction by purchasing boroughs and corrupting parliaments, a common impulse began to pervade the carefully dislocated members of the Irish body politic. Scandals like “Wood’s Halfpence” provoked a national protest in Swift’s “Drapier’s Letters”; a common feeling began to mitigate the ferocity of the penal code, and to inspire a united demand for Irish freedom from English oppression. The opportunity came with the War of American Independence. Formed to provide a defence which England could not afford, the Irish Volunteers demanded the price for their services, and England had to pay it in Grattan’s Parliament. The history of Ireland’s packed and bribed and muzzled Parliament affords no proof of Ireland’s incapacity to rule itself; rather it shows the lengths of cruelty and violence to which English Parliaments, in spite of their political genius, of their “glorious Revolution” of 1688, of their vaunted love of civil and religious liberty, have been driven by fruitless efforts to govern a gifted people against its will. England sought, and inevitably failed, to rule Ireland on principles the reverse of those on which were based its own proud liberties and democratic Empire.

X.—Ireland, 1782 And 1912(123) BY LORD FITZMAURICE

The events of 1782 will always loom large in history, and the views of the members of the Rockingham Ministry on the proper relations to be established between Great Britain and Ireland, and the possible course of events had they met with a negotiator less intractable than Grattan, are subjects of more than merely historical interest.

In that ministry the Duke of Portland was Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, and he took with him Colonel Fitzpatrick as Chief Secretary; Mr. Fox was Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs; Lord Shelburne was Secretary of State for the Home and Colonial Departments, and as such was responsible for the government of Ireland.

The recognition of the claim of Ireland to be a distinct Kingdom, with a right to a separate Legislature of her own for all purposes, was the object of the movement of which Grattan was the leader. That this claim was founded on historic right, and had also on grounds of expediency to be accepted, was admitted by the Whig statesmen of the time in England. But they also saw that there were subjects which the geographical position of the two countries, their past history, and their industrial interests, rendered it desirable and indeed necessary should be recognized as common property. Ireland, in their opinion, was too near to be a separate State with safety to the external relations of Great Britain; she was too distant to be altogether incorporated with due regard to the efficient management of her own internal affairs.

The Ministry of Lord Rockingham came into office on March 27th, 1782. The moment was one of the gloomiest in English history. The nation had just been stunned by the news of the great surrender at York Town; it was an open question whether the intelligence of the surrender of Gibraltar might not be expected to follow; the power of the fleet to cope successfully with the combined navies of France, Spain, and Holland, was doubtful; an invasion was discussed in every household in the land as a serious possibility, and the resources of the country to meet it were disputed by competent judges. The new Prime Minister was himself a dying man, though the dangerous character of his illness was concealed; the two Secretaries of State were separated by mutual suspicions which were rapidly ripening into estrangement. Ireland was in the hands of the armed Volunteers, and England’s difficulty was, as usual, Ireland’s opportunity. “The liberties of America were inseparable from ours,” Grattan said in 1799, referring to this period; “they were the only hope of Ireland, and the only refuge of the liberties of mankind.”(124) The satisfaction of Ireland was therefore, in 1782, the first condition of the safety of England, and imposed itself on the Ministers as their most imperious duty.

The four grievances of Ireland were, in the words of Grattan, “a foreign legislature, a foreign judicature, a legislative Privy Council, and a perpetual army,”(125) and they were set forth in the Amendment to the Address carried by him in the Irish Parliament on April 17th.(126)

“My opinion,” Fox wrote to Fitzpatrick, on April 28th, “is clear for giving them all they ask; but for giving it them so as to secure us from further demands, and at the same time to have some clear understanding with respect to what we are to expect from Ireland in return for the protection and assistance which she receives from those fleets which cost us such enormous sums and her nothing. If they mean really well to their country, they must wish some final adjustment which may preclude further disputes; if they mean nothing but consequence to themselves, they will insist upon these points being given up simply, without any reciprocal engagement; and as soon as this is done, begin to attack whatever is left, in order to continue the ferment of the country. In one word, what I want to guard against is Jonathan Wild’s plan of seizing one part in order to dispute afterwards about the remainder.”(127)

Lord Rockingham, writing in an exactly similar strain, said: “that the essential points of the Irish demands having first been conceded, it would be the duty of both countries to consider how finally to arrange, settle, and adjust all matters, whereby the union of power and strength, and mutual and reciprocal advantage, might be best permanently fixed;” and he spoke favourably of the appointment of “Commissioners” on both sides, to draw up the heads of an agreement between the two countries.(128) Of a similar character was the language of Lord Shelburne.

“If,” he said, writing to the Duke of Portland, on the day following that on which Fox had addressed the Chief Secretary, “the ties by which the two kingdoms have been hitherto so closely united are to be loosened or cut asunder, is your Grace yet prepared to advise whether any, and if so what, substitutions are thought of for the preservation of the remaining connection between us? If by the proposed modification of Poynings’ Law, so much power is taken from the two Privy Councils as they are now constituted, are we to look for any agreement in any new institution of Council, which may answer the purpose of keeping up the appendancy and connection of Ireland to the Crown of Great Britain, and of preventing that confusion which must arise in all cases of common concern from two Parliaments with distinct and equal powers, and without any operating centre.”(129)

On May 11th, Fox, in another letter to Fitzpatrick, explained his views; what he intended, he said, was to grant the “concession of ‘internal legislation’ as a preliminary, accompanied with a modification of Poyning’s Law and a temporary Mutiny Bill;” and he hoped that, having made these concessions, “they might be able to treat of ’other matters’ so amicably as to produce an arrangement that would preserve the connection between the two countries.”(130) The other matters were the Final Judicature and the question of the contribution of Ireland to Imperial expenses. Shelburne suggested the formal negotiation of “the articles of a treaty,” for as such, he said, he regarded his proposals;(131) and he urged a little judicious temporizing in the hope that the situation abroad might in the interval improve. But Grattan, recognizing the immense advantage which this situation gave him in negotiating with Great Britain, refused to entertain any idea of compromise. There was not only, he said, to be no “foreign legislature, but there were to be no commissioners” to negotiate a treaty,(132) and there was, above all, to be no delay in granting all the demands of Ireland. With this information before him, the Duke of Portland, who from the time of his arrival in Dublin had up till this moment encouraged both the Secretaries of State to believe that Grattan would come into their views, and might even make concessions(133) in regard to the final appeal in judicial matters, now informed them that the claims of Ireland on all the four principal demands must be conceded, and conceded at once, as the whole country was in a state of the wildest excitement, and was rapidly escaping control.(134) The concession of all the Irish demands was accordingly decided upon. The preliminary steps were taken on May 17th, by a resolution in both Houses of the British Parliament, for effecting the repeal of the 6th of Geo. I., c. 5, the Act by which the right of the British Parliament to legislate for Ireland was declared; and the necessary Bill was then introduced and rapidly passed into law.

At the same time, however, another resolution was adopted in the following terms:

“That it is the opinion of this House that it is indispensable to the interest and happiness of both kingdoms that the connection between them should be established by mutual consent upon a solid and permanent footing; and that an humble address be presented to His Majesty, that His Majesty will be graciously pleased to take such measures as His Majesty in his royal wisdom shall think most conducive to that end.”

On these resolutions Fox commented as follows:

“Ireland,” he said, “would have no reason to complain; the terms acceded to by England were proposed by herself, and all her wishes would now be gratified in the way which she herself liked best. But as it was possible that if nothing more was to be done than what he had stated to be his intention, Ireland might, perhaps, think of fresh grievances and rise yearly in her demands, it was fit and proper that something should be done towards establishing on a firm and solid basis the future connection of the two kingdoms. But that was not to be proposed by him here in Parliament: it would be the duty of the Crown to look to that; the business might be first begun by His Majesty’s servants in Ireland, and if afterwards it should be necessary to enter into a treaty, Commissioners might be sent from the British Parliament or from the Crown, to enter upon it and bring the negotiation to a happy issue, by giving mutual satisfaction to both countries, and establishing a treaty which should be sanctified by the most solemn forms of the Constitution of both countries.”(135)

For the moment, however, the hope of commencing negotiations with these objects had to be abandoned, and when, on May 27th, the Royal Message conveying the intention of His Majesty to concede all the demands of the Irish Parliament was delivered in Dublin, the Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant announced that no measures were then intended to be grounded on the second English resolution of May 17th. For a time, however, the Duke of Portland continued to hope against hope, and to nourish the vain expectations with which from the beginning he had buoyed himself up, and had misled his colleagues. During the month of June he allowed himself to be persuaded by Mr. Ogilvy, the husband of the Duchess of Leinster, and stepfather to Lord Edward Fitzgerald, that Grattan was not really so intractable as he seemed to be, and in a secret and confidential despatch, written on June 6th, he urged that the Irish Parliament should not be at once prorogued, in order to give time for a possible arrangement in regard to common affairs. But on June 22nd he was reluctantly compelled to express his disappointment and mortification at finding that his hopes had proved entirely fallacious, and that Mr. Ogilvy was a person not to be relied upon. The prorogation of the Irish Parliament was accordingly suffered to take place on July 27th, and here the matter ended.(136) “Thus,” exclaimed Grattan to his applauding audience—“thus have you sealed a treaty with Great Britain; on her side the restoration of the final judicature; the extinction of her legislative claim; of her Privy Council; of her perpetual Mutiny Bill; the repeal of the Act of legislative supremacy; on your side satisfaction! And thus are the two nations compacted for ever in freedom and peace.”(137)

Subsequently at the time of the Union a controversy arose in regard to these events. Mr. Pitt asserted that the adjustment of 1782 was not considered by the British Ministers by whom it was effected as final in its character; but that, on the contrary, they were fully convinced of the necessity of adopting some further measures to strengthen the connection between the two countries, and he produced the correspondence which had passed in 1782—extracts from which have been given above—as a reply to the lame attempt of General Fitzpatrick, who was still in Parliament, to deny that any such negotiation had been desired by the members of Lord Rockingham’s Ministry. General Fitzpatrick had declined to admit more than that the Duke of Portland, during his residence in Ireland, might have entertained a vague idea of some farther arrangement for consolidating the connection with Ireland, but had soon given it up; and Grattan in the Irish Parliament openly accused Lord Shelburne and the Duke of having concealed their views from their colleagues, and said that, above all, Mr. Fox knew nothing of the project contained in the despatch of June 6th.(138) The truth is, that the Rockingham Ministry was in June a house divided against itself, owing to differences of opinion as to the peace negotiation with France and the United States, and was almost in the actual throes of dissolution. From a letter written by Fox in 1799 to Fitzpatrick, it certainly appears that the so-called “Ogilvy” negotiation never was communicated to him.(139) But the assertion of Mr. Pitt went far beyond the Ogilvy negotiation—if negotiation it can be called. What Mr. Pitt asserted was, not that the correspondence proved that in June, 1782, the Ministers were actually intending to enter on any such negotiation, but that the Prime Minister, the Lord-Lieutenant, and both Secretaries of State, from the very commencement of the correspondence in April, considered the arrangement insisted on by Grattan deficient, and lacking in finality, and were only prevented by the stress of adverse circumstances and the impracticable character of the Irish leaders, from trying to negotiate an agreement, by which Ireland should acknowledge that “the superintending power and supremacy were where Nature had placed them”—viz., in the Government of Great Britain.

What, then, was the view which the British Ministers in 1782 took of the relations which it was desirable to establish between Great Britain and Ireland—the relations which, had events been more favourable, they would have established? Evidently it was not a legislative union, though they wished to retain the final judicial appeal in London. The object of the Duke of Portland, as he explained in the secret despatch of June 6th, was that an Act of Parliament should be passed by the Legislatures of the respective kingdoms, by which “the superintending power and supremacy” of Great Britain in all matters of State and general commerce would be virtually and effectively acknowledged; by which also a share of the expense in carrying on a defensive or offensive war, either in support of our dominions or those of our allies, should be borne by Ireland in proportion to the state of her abilities; and that she should adopt every such regulation as might be judged necessary by Great Britain for the better ordering and securing her trade and commerce with foreign nations, or her own colonies and dependencies; consideration being duly had to the circumstances of Great Britain. “This plan,” Lord Shelburne explained during the debates of 1799, “had nothing to do with a legislative union.”(140) “It related,” he said, “to what might be called the expense of the system which was carried on under the two Parliaments, in Army, Navy, commerce and finance, and in the great establishments of Church and State; and it did not imply ‘bringing the two Parliaments together.’ ”(141)

From these passages it appears that what the Whig statesmen aimed at in 1782 was to obtain, in the first place, a clear acknowledgment of the Imperial supremacy, or, as they would have said in the language of the time, of the power of Great Britain in “external” as distinct from “internal” legislation; and, in the next place, a contribution from Ireland to the expenses of external administration and policy: the Fleet, the Army, and the diplomatic and commercial establishments. “I humbly conceive,” said Burke, who was a member of the Rockingham Government, and the trusted adviser of his official chief, “that the whole of the superior, and what I should call Imperial politics, ought to have its residence here [in London]; and that Ireland, locally, civilly and commercially independent, ought politically to look up to Great Britain in all matters of peace or war, and, in a word, with her to live and die. At bottom, Ireland has no other choice—I mean no other national choice.”(142)

Very different were the views of the Irish Parliamentary leaders: not of Grattan only, but of his rival, Flood, as can be gathered from the perusal of the debates in the Irish Parliament, which culminated in the famous struggle between Flood and Grattan on October 28th, 1782, when Flood, having denounced Grattan as a “mendicant patriot,” and Grattan having retorted by likening his rival “to a bird of prey with an evil aspect and a sepulchral note,” the two leaders left the House in order to solve their differences by a duel, and were only prevented meeting in deadly combat by the interposition of the Speaker, who wisely issued his warrant to apprehend them both.

The contention of Flood was that the mere repeal of the Act of George I. was insufficient, and did not prevent its revival at any future period; that it really left the matter where it stood, and that it was therefore necessary to bring in a Bill for declaring the sole and exclusive right of the Irish Parliament to make laws in all cases whatsoever, internal and external, for the kingdom of Ireland. His desire was to trump Grattan’s cards, and destroy his popularity, which in the following year he all but succeeded in doing, when a decision of Lord Mansfield in the Court of King’s Bench enabled him to raise a cry that the independence of the Irish Courts of Judicature was in danger; and a further Act was forced on the British Government renouncing any claim to legislate and confirming the independence of the Irish Courts of Justice.(143) The contention of Grattan was that the relations between Great Britain and Ireland were to be ascertained from the record of the whole of the recent transactions, which were transactions between two independent nations having a common Sovereign; and this being so, he said it was no more possible for Great Britain to reassert her legislative supremacy over Ireland than it would be for her to do so over the American colonies, if the pending negotiations resulted, as they evidently were about to do, in a recognition of the independence of those colonies. Grattan, indeed, went so far as to say that the relations between Great Britain and Ireland were in future to be sought in the law of nations and not in the municipal legislation of either country, which he said was no longer applicable. But both the Irish leaders agreed that in one way or another the legislative, financial, and judicial links between the two countries were to be severed, however much they differed as to the legal formulas which were to impress and carry out these ideas.(144)

The following propositions can, then, be based on the events of 1782:

(1) That the Irish leaders insisted on the freedom of Ireland from interference by the British Parliament both in internal and external affairs, or, as would now be said, both on Home and Imperial questions.

(2) That the British Ministers were ready to concede the former, and were not ready to yield the latter; but conceded both, owing to the circumstances of the time, and considered the concession final.

(3) That the British Ministers wished to obtain a contribution from Ireland for Imperial purposes, and the maintenance of a final appeal to an Imperial Court of Judicature.

(4) That the British Ministers do not appear to have proposed the representation of Ireland in the British Legislature.

In substance the plan proposed by Mr. Gladstone in 1886 was the plan which Grattan rejected in 1782. The objection to any such plan is the probability that if Ireland were to be asked, and were even to consent for the moment to make an appreciable contribution to the common expenses of the Empire, without being given through her representatives any share in the Parliamentary control of the funds so voted, and in the discussion of Imperial affairs—if, in other words, she was made a tribute-paying colony, instead of being treated as a member of a Federal system having an undiminished area of taxation for National purposes—a fresh and formidable grievance would arise in a few years, on the ground that taxation without representation was an intolerable thing, and contrary to the first principles of the Constitution. It was with these considerations present to his mind that Mr. Butt, when leader of the Irish Home Rule Party, in order to get over the difficulty, had proposed that a Federal arrangement should be instituted between Great Britain and Ireland—i.e., an arrangement under which Great Britain and Ireland should agree to vest certain powers in a purely Irish Legislature and certain others in the Imperial Parliament. The late Mr. Sharman Crawford, who like Mr. Butt was an Ulsterman and a Protestant, held similar views at an earlier epoch, and put them prominently forward during the period which elapsed between the imprisonment of O’Connell and the collapse of the first Tenant-right movement. With their opinion before us, it may be asked—why was no such plan proposed in 1782 by the English statesmen of the day? The answer is not far to seek.

The eighteenth century knew little or nothing about Federal Government. The Constitution of the United States, the parent of all the numerous later schemes of Federalism, was still in the limbo of the future; and it would be as idle to blame the Government of 1782 for not entering on a journey into the region of the unknown, especially at a moment of unexampled public difficulty, as it would be to blame the statesmen of the present day for not anticipating the political discoveries of the next generation, whatever they may prove to be. It was owing no doubt to the idea of Federal Government being practically unknown to the men of 1782, and to the unwillingness of the English mind to strike out on a new and as yet untrodden path in the art of Government, that in all the discussions of that time there is little or no suggestion of instituting a Federal link between Great Britain and Ireland. Some such suggestion was made during the negotiations on the Scotch Union, but it was decisively rejected by England, and only weakly urged by Scotland. The period was, in fact, one when Europe was still under the influence of a set of ideas which worked in an exactly opposite direction to the ideas of nationality and Federalism. The period was indeed drawing to a close; but the whole tendency of history had for two centuries previously been in the direction of large agglomerations of territory and centralization of government, quite irrespective of questions of nationality and race, and that tendency was still potent in 1782. The idea that the advantages of a national Government, extending over a large territory, might be combined with those of a decentralization of authority by a division of jurisdictions, was not one which the statesmen of the day in Europe had begun seriously to consider. Separation they understood, or an incorporate union: the possibility of an intermediate arrangement they ignored.

And yet an experiment in Federal Government is not to be approached with a light heart, and perhaps one thing only can be said about it with any certainty, that whatever success has attended it, wherever in fact it has worked smoothly, it has been when the powers reserved to the Federal or National Government have been those only which were strictly necessary, and in regard to which differences of opinion would presumably not arise amongst the States forming the Union.

It is the more important to bear these considerations in mind, because of the existence of a widely spread but erroneous idea in regard to the United States Constitution, to the effect that the Federal Government has very numerous and extensive powers in internal affairs assured to it by the jurisdiction of the Federal Court. This Court, it is said, can intervene, under the terms of the Constitution, to arrest the action of the State Governments, and therefore, once given a Federal Court, the success of the Federal experiment is assured.

But it is necessary to realize that it is only because the powers of the Federal Government are very strictly limited, and that the Federal Court is not overweighted with the assertion of rights, the exercise of which the public opinion of the States might not support, that its jurisdiction, when asserted, is as a rule respected, while over the State Legislatures as such it has no power at all, by way of injunction or prohibition. Nor have cases been wanting from which the precarious character of its powers, and its occasional lack of any sufficient sanction to enforce its decrees, may be gathered, when it has happened that those decrees have not been in accord with the prevailing opinion of the State within which execution has had to be carried out. In 1812, when a state of war existed with Great Britain, the States of Massachusetts and Connecticut refused obedience to the orders of the Federal Government for the concentration of the militias of all the Northern States on the frontier, giving as their reason that the Constitution only empowered the Federal Government to call out the militia in the case of “insurrection or actual invasion,” and that neither of these two eventualities had arisen. These doctrines met with general approval in the two States in question, and were endorsed by their Governors, their Legislatures, and their tribunals, nor were the Federal Courts able to enforce obedience to the commands of the Government at Washington. By a strict limitation of the powers of the National Government to what is absolutely necessary in order to secure the existence of the United States as a nation, the framers of the Constitution of 1787 did as much as it was possible to do, in order to render their work permanent; but they were not able, as De Tocqueville pointed out, even before the war of Secession had come to confirm the foresight of his views, altogether to avoid the dangers which are the natural inheritance of all Federal forms of Government.

The possibility, then, of establishing a Federal connection of any kind between Great Britain and Ireland—that is to say, an arrangement under which certain powers would be vested in an Irish Legislature and Executive, and certain others in a Parliament and Executive common to both countries—depends entirely on whether it is believed not only that such a division of power can be successfully made upon paper—a feat which any constitution-monger can accomplish—but also that public opinion in Ireland will not interpose hopeless obstacles to the assertion of the reserved rights and powers of the Imperial Legislature and Executive.

That under a Federal arrangement there would be any real possibility of frequent interference from London in Irish internal affairs is not probable, even were such interference legal. The attempt could only end in failure. Much has been said about the supremacy of the British or Imperial Parliament; and some of those who have used this expression apparently mean that every Act of the Irish Legislature and Executive is in some way or another to be reviewed by the British Parliament and Executive; or that in defiance of the plain teaching of history there is to be no responsible Irish Executive. The certain result of this would be to destroy the sense of responsibility in the Irish Legislature, to create endless differences of opinion between the two countries, and to make Great Britain the “whipping-boy” of Ireland, whenever Ireland had done anything foolish, and the British Parliament had not stepped in to prevent it. Reasonable men will continue to differ about the grant of Home Rule; but whatever is granted to Ireland in the way of legislative or executive right must be given fully and frankly, without looking backward. We must allow ourselves in this matter to listen to the voice of the statesmen of 1782. On the other hand, whatever is reserved must be clearly reserved, with ample guarantees for the arm of the Imperial Executive being long enough and strong enough to put down resistance. But that the power of the Imperial Parliament and Executive could, under any circumstances, be exerted frequently and in many matters, is a dangerous and impotent delusion. That power can only be maintained by carefully selecting and limiting the objects to which it is to relate; and by admitting Irish representatives to their full share—neither more nor less—of the control of Imperial questions in the Imperial Parliament, and securing adequate machinery for the execution of the decrees of the Imperial Government in Ireland when necessary. The arguments against any petty and irritating interference with the internal affairs of Ireland would be just as strong now as those which Lord Chatham used in 1774 against the proposed interference of the British House of Commons with the Absentee tax which the Irish Parliament was in that year supposed to be about to pass:

“The justice or policy of the tax,” he said, “is not the question; and on these two, endless arguments may be maintained pro and con. The simple question is, have the Commons of Ireland exceeded the powers lodged with them by the essential constitution of Parliament? I answer, they have not, and the interference of the British Parliament would in this case be unjust, and the measure destructive of all fair correspondence between England and Ireland for ever.”(145)

In what way would the British Parliament be more able to interfere in such a case than it was in 1774?

That Great Britain, if she chooses, is strong enough to govern Ireland for a prolonged period against the wishes of the majority of the people of Ireland, is indeed true; and under a strong and consistent Administration, strict and even justice might no doubt produce quiet and a considerable degree of material prosperity, without the constitutional question being touched. But the existence of outward calm and material prosperity has always been a favourite plea with the opponents of political reform. And it is the most subtle and dangerous of all possible pleas, so soothing in character, and making apparently so winning an appeal to plain common sense and to self-evident facts. “Now, after all this,” says Lord Clarendon, when describing the period in which England was administered, judged, and legislated for by the Privy Council, “I must be so just as to say that during the whole time that these measures were exercised, and these new and extraordinary ways were run, this kingdom enjoyed the greatest calm and the fullest measure of felicity that any people in any age for so long a time together (for the above-mentioned eleven or twelve years) have been blessed with, to the wonder and envy of all the other parts of Christendom.” But a few years after the happy period described in such glowing terms by the great historian the Civil War broke out.

If the necessity for a political change exists, sooner or later it forces its way to the front, notwithstanding outward calm. It has been so before, and there is no reason to doubt that it will be so again, because the claim made by Ireland depends on permanent facts which statesmen cannot alter notwithstanding occasional periods of material prosperity and outward calm. As the ultimate solution of existing difficulties it is indicated by the geography and by the history of the island; and these are the two conditions of every political problem, which it is difficult to surmount or evade. Time may indeed slowly soften the asperities produced by past errors and the crimes of bygone generations; but the geographical conditions of a problem remain fixed and unalterable, and in the long run will be found to be the permanent factor which governs the situation. Not by empty formulas, such as “governing Ireland according to Irish ideas,” or, “extending all the liberties enjoyed by the subjects of Great Britain to those of the sister island,” shall we advance one yard on our way, or indeed do aught but make it clear to friend and foe alike, that we are cultivating contradictory ideas without even being apparently aware that we are doing so. What we have to do is to resolve to take our stand on the few firm bits of fact which emerge like stepping-stones traversing a quaking bog; and then we may get over, and some day perhaps climb the distant hills which are on the other side. Otherwise we shall go on “filling our belly with the east wind” to the end of time; we shall fish all night and take nothing. These few firm bits of fact are those provided by history and geography. Open the map and look at the situation of Great Britain and of Ireland relatively to each other; observe how they lie near, yet apart; how they are separated by intervening seas, but seas so narrow as to be a bond quite as much as a bar; how they are inhabited by races speaking the same language but professing different religions; and bear in mind that these are the features of the picture which cannot be altered. This being so, let us next suppose that some stranger ignorant of all the trivial details of the Irish question, on his arrival amongst us, were asked to state what, in his opinion, with the above conditions placed before him, the institutions of two such islands relatively to one another were likely to be, judging from his experience of other countries. Would he not probably reply that the wise statesmen of Great Britain, of whose fame he had heard in foreign lands, had doubtless long ago come to the conclusion that their separation for some purposes, and their union for others, was stamped on the map as the certain and inevitable condition of any satisfactory settlement of their mutual relations, and that, alike to their complete separation and to their complete union, there was one and the same answer: Opposuit natura.

But, further, let us suppose him in his turn to inquire what the experience of the past had been in this particular case; and whether the two countries at the present time were entirely united or entirely separate, or were linked by some intermediate arrangement adapted to their relative needs and springing out of them; and suppose that the answer was, as it would have to be, that after several centuries of aggravated strife, they had first tried entire legislative separation, and had then abandoned it for an absolute incorporate union. Would he in that case be astonished if he was informed that history had vindicated geography, and that under neither of these two relations had peace, goodwill, and amity, been the distinguishing characteristics of the relations of Great Britain and Ireland?

To such a traveller it might perhaps be explained as an unexampled portent, that although constitutional liberty, limited only by the right of every Government to suppress crime and repress disorder, had been extended by the larger to the smaller country; that although an equal representation, a wide suffrage and vote by ballot had also been given, and no alien Church any longer vexed the conscientious scruples of the majority, and the land system of the country had also been reformed, yet so unreasonable were the minds of the Irish people that they refused to be contented, and were now asking for a modification of the fundamental articles of the existing incorporate union, and that a constant agitation in consequence prevailed.

Might he not reply that he had heard it said by them of old time, that it was a mistake to be too much alarmed by the existence of political agitation; that absolute quiet is not a necessary sign of political health even in a constitutional State; that what is called union within a political system may be a very equivocal expression; that the true union is a harmony, the result of which is that all parties, however opposed in appearance, co-operate towards the common good; that union may even exist in a State where the eye at first seems only to recognize a busy confusion; and that the contentment of the population with the institutions under which they live is the only solid guarantee of their permanence.(146) Englishmen, he might add, in conclusion, had themselves been occupied for two centuries in proclaiming these and similar liberal sentiments from one end of Europe to the other, and the time had now perhaps arrived for applying them nearer home.

XI.—Grattan’s Parliament. BY G. P. GOOCH

Grattan’s Parliament was born of the American War of Independence and was slain by the French Revolution. Brief as was its life, it forms the most brilliant and interesting episode in Irish history. Never has the ancient and unconquerable spirit of nationality spoken in more eloquent accents than during the years when Grattan, loyal alike to the British connection and to Irish ideals, had won for his countrymen a measure of self-government. Representing only the Protestant minority, clogged with corruption, and containing its full share of selfish and reactionary influences, it was none the less the focus and the mouthpiece of national feeling. Fairly to judge the Grattan Parliament we must not only recall its limitations and errors but contrast its throbbing vitality with the servitude that preceded its foundation and the creeping paralysis which followed its dissolution.

A long sleep had succeeded the final expulsion of James II. from Ireland. The penal code was perfected into a system accurately described by Burke as most perfectly fitted to degrade and brutalise the human spirit. Catholic Ireland was voiceless and wholly lacking in political consciousness; and the silence of Protestants was only broken by a rare protest from Molyneux, Swift, or Lucas. If any doubt remained under Poynings’ Laws as to the complete dependence on Great Britain, it was set at rest by the Declaratory Act passed at Westminster in 1719. The Viceroys before Townshend only spent a few weeks in Dublin every second year for the biennial sessions of Parliament. The Lords Justices governed the country for its English masters by influence and corruption, and the Irish pension list provided grants too degrading to be charged on English revenues. A new era opened when Flood took his seat in 1759 and organised an Opposition, the programme of which included the limitation of parliaments, the revision of the pension list, the creation of a militia and the independence of the Irish Legislature. The first object was secured in 1768 by the Octennial Act; but at the height of his power and popularity he was captured by the Government, which naturally desired to disarm its most formidable foe. After an interval of independent support, the great orator accepted a salaried office and a seat in the Privy Council in 1775. In the same year Grattan entered Parliament at the age of twenty-nine, and quickly asserted his title to the leadership of the national party which Flood, in an evil moment for himself and his country, had abdicated.

The new leader was favoured by circumstances. While Flood clamoured for the suppression of the American revolt, the Presbyterians of the north loudly applauded the colonists, many thousands of whom had recently emigrated from Ulster. The community of interest was fully realised on both sides of the Atlantic; but Ireland asked for political and commercial autonomy, not for independence. With the demand there rapidly emerged the instrument of its realisation. Ireland was almost without troops when France declared war in 1778. When it became clear that the Government were unable to defend the island, the Protestant gentry came forward, and in a few weeks a disciplined and enthusiastic force of 40,000 men was under arms. Though organised for defence, the Volunteers, inspired by Charlemont and Grattan, determined to employ their strength in exacting concessions from the British Government. To use the words of Fox, the American war was the Irish harvest. The larger part of the damage inflicted on Irish commerce and manufactures by the legislation of the prominent partner was irreparable; but something might be saved from the wreck. The menacing aspect of the Volunteers and the panic-stricken despatches from Dublin Castle convinced the North Ministry that there was no alternative but to yield. Foreign and colonial trade was thrown open, the embargo on exports was removed, and Ireland was at last free to make use of her resources.

The easy overthrow of commercial restrictions encouraged Grattan to a bolder flight. In 1780 he moved his historic resolution “That no person on earth, save the King, Lords, and Commons of Ireland, has a right to make laws for Ireland.” The motion was withdrawn after an impressive debate; but when the Volunteer Convention, which met shortly after, unanimously adopted the demand for self-government, the British Ministry surrendered. In April, 1782, the declaration of legislative independence was brought forward by Grattan in one of his noblest orations. “I found Ireland on her knees. She is now a nation. In that character I hail her, and, bowing in her august presence, I say, Esto perpetua!” A new and happier era seemed at last to be opening in the fortunes of Ireland and in her relations with Great Britain. “I am convinced,” wrote Burke to Charlemont in words of gold, “that no reluctant tie can be a strong one, and that a natural, cheerful alliance will be a far more secure link of connection than any principle of subordination borne with grudging and discontent.” Grattan was fully satisfied with the repeal of the Declaratory Act of 1719; but when the demand arose for an express renunciation of the authority of the British Parliament, the Coalition Ministry of Fox and North passed an Act unconditionally recognising the right of the Irish people to be bound only by laws enacted by the King and the Irish Parliament.

The Grattan Parliament appeared to enter on its career with a fair capital of good will. Irishmen began to feel that they had a country; and though autonomy had been wrested in an hour of weakness by a show of force, there was no trace of resentment in the debates at St. Stephen’s which accompanied the renunciation of power. The new constitution seemed to enable Ireland to work out her own salvation without let or hindrance. But the powers which appeared so ample were in reality strictly limited. In the first place, while the Irish Legislature became in theory the peer of the British Legislature, the Irish Executive—the Lord-Lieutenant and the Chief Secretary—continued to be appointed by and responsible to the British Ministry. Secondly, Irish Bills did not become law till they were sanctioned by the King and sealed by the Great Seal on the advice of British Ministers. Finally, a majority of the Irish Parliament rested not on the free choice of the people or even of the Protestant population, but on the owners of nomination boroughs, most of whom were bound to the Executive by the possession or prospect of titles, pensions or sinecures. Government by patronage survived the Renunciation Act, and reduced the authority of the Grattan Parliament to a shadow. The power of withholding supplies was an empty privilege; for the greater part of the income of the country came from the hereditary revenue, which was independent of Parliament.

The difficulties inherent in the novel situation were speedily revealed. It was Grattan’s fervent wish that the Volunteers, their emancipating task accomplished, should dissolve and leave the parliament to carry out its work. Flood, on the other hand, who had rejoined the ranks of the Opposition, had less confidence in the sincerity of the British Government, and desired to retain the weapon that had proved so effective, at any rate till a Reform Bill had placed the Legislature in a position to withstand the insidious assaults of the Executive. Parliamentary reform was the natural corollary of the Renunciation Act. Flood laid his proposals before the Volunteer Convention, and, armed with its approval, carried them to College Green. His object was to emancipate parliament from the control of placemen and pensioners and to break the power of the borough-owners by the extension of the franchise. The fault of the measure was that, contrary to the wishes of Grattan, it perpetuated the exclusion of Catholics from political rights. The Executive opposed the Bill on the ground that it emanated from Prætorian bands, though the Volunteers themselves were held in check by British troops. The whole open and secret influence of the Government was exerted, and the proposals were defeated. Reform was the condition of genuine autonomy. Without it the Legislature was clay in the hands of the potter. Though a share of the blame falls to the members who saw their influence endangered, the main responsibility for its defeat lies with the agents of the British Government. Having granted legislative equality, England took care to secure that the Grattan Parliament should possess the shadow but not the substance of power.

The next disappointment arose in the sphere not of politics but of commerce. It was the wish both of Pitt, the disciple of Adam Smith, and of Grattan that commercial intercourse between the two countries should be facilitated. But the offer to open the English market was accompanied by a proposal that Ireland should make a definite contribution to Imperial expenditure. She already maintained an army of 15,000 men, a fifth of whom were at the disposal of the British Government while the rest could be employed outside Ireland with the consent of the Dublin Parliament. But Pitt, convinced that free trade with England would stimulate Irish prosperity, felt justified in demanding a share of the increased revenue for the Imperial navy. Grattan disliked the suggestion of anything which could be represented as a tribute, and would have preferred voluntary grants; but he waived his objection, and Pitt’s scheme, in the form of resolutions, was approved by the Irish Parliament. At this stage the jealousy of the British commercial classes flamed out, and the scheme, on emerging from the debates at Westminster, was found to have been radically altered. As in its final form it curtailed the independence of the Irish Parliament, Grattan strongly opposed it. A scheme which failed to satisfy England and had lost its friends in Ireland was not worth further effort. Pitt had done his best, but had been overborne by the commercial interests. When the Irish Parliament later declared its readiness to discuss a commercial treaty, it met with no response.

Pitt was bitterly disappointed by his failure, and lost a good deal of his interest in Ireland. He adopted the view of successive Lords-Lieutenant that genuine parliamentary reform was incompatible with the supremacy of the Executive. “There can, I think, be little doubt,” pronounces Lecky, “that the prospect of a legislative union was already in his mind, and it was probably the real key to much of his subsequent policy.” Dr. Holland Rose quotes a significant letter of Pitt to the Viceroy, Lord Westmorland, in the autumn of 1792. “The idea of the present fermentation gradually bringing both parties to think of an Union with this country has long been in my mind. I hardly dare flatter myself with the hope of its taking place; but I believe it, though itself not easy to be accomplished, to be the only solution for other and greater difficulties.” Thus the Grattan Parliament never had a fair chance. The dual system could only be worked by mutual good will, and if one of the partners withheld her aid, the experiment was doomed. Pitt was not yet openly hostile; but he allowed his agents in Dublin to shape their own course. He recognised that the root of Irish crime was to be found in the tithe system, and suggested in 1786 that tithes should be commuted; yet when Grattan brought forward proposals with this object he allowed the Executive to defeat them.

Pitt’s growing dislike of the system of 1782 was reinforced by the action of the Irish Parliament in the Regency crisis. When the King became insane in 1788, the Whigs contended that their patron, the Prince of Wales, should automatically exercise the power of the Crown, while Pitt retorted that it was for Parliament to appoint him Regent, and to define his powers. The Irish Parliament sided with the Whigs, Grattan and the Nationalists on the constitutional ground that Pitt’s proposed safeguards were unnecessary in Ireland, the camp-followers in view of the probable change in the source of patronage. The controversy terminated with the King’s restoration to health; but the Prime Minister never forgot nor forgave the encouragement rendered to his enemies at the crisis of his fate.

Pitt had attempted nothing for Ireland since the failure of his commercial proposals; but the ferment created by the seductive doctrines of the French Revolution determined him to conciliate the Catholics, to whom he had always been friendly and whom he agreed with Burke in regarding as naturally conservative. On being informed of his wishes in 1791 the Irish Government did its utmost to dissuade him, and succeeded in whittling down the concessions till they were scarcely worth granting. Though Flood and Charlemont were immovably opposed to the extension of any kind of political rights to Catholics, and though Grattan always explicitly reserved Protestant ascendency, there was a large body of opinion prepared for a fairly liberal policy; and the new organisation of United Irishmen, founded in 1791 by Wolfe Tone, rested on the recognition of a common effective citizenship. In view of these circumstances, Pitt for the first and last time determined to overrule his agents. The Relief Bill of 1793 enfranchised Catholics on the same terms as Protestants, admitted them to juries, to the magistracy, and to commissions in the Army and Navy, allowed them to receive degrees in Dublin University and to carry arms. This generous measure, which the Executive hated but dared not oppose, passed without difficulty. Though the main merit belongs to Pitt, the acceptance of such far-reaching concessions by a Protestant body is a proof that, left to itself, it was not unwilling to concede substantial instalments of justice to the Catholic majority. Recent attempts to minimise the importance of the Act, on the ground that the franchise without eligibility to Parliament was worthless, misjudge the situation. The measure was hailed by Catholic opinion as a decisive breach with the intolerant traditions of a century; and its easy passage to the Statute-book suggests how different might have been the record and the fate of the Grattan Parliament had Pitt throughout encouraged its more generous intuitions and compelled his agents to support the policy which he knew to be right.

The union of the Portland Whigs with Pitt in 1794 seemed to bring further reforms within sight. Grattan travelled to London to discuss the situation, and met Fitzwilliam, who was designed for the Viceroyalty. Fitzwilliam was known to favour Parliamentary Reform and Catholic Emancipation, and the liveliest hopes and fears were entertained of a decisive change of system. On learning from Dublin that there was already open talk of the dismissal of the Chancellor and other members of the Ascendency party, Pitt was deeply annoyed. It would be best, he declared, that Fitzwilliam should not go to Ireland; and, in any case, he must understand that no idea of a new system could be entertained, and that no supporters of the Government should be displaced. Shortly before his departure Pitt and Grenville met Portland, Spencer, Windham and Fitzwilliam to determine the policy to be pursued. No notes were made of the conversation, and the Viceroy left England on January 4th, 1795, without written instructions, though well aware of Pitt’s general views and wishes. Three days after landing he dismissed Beresford, the head of the Revenue and an inveterate enemy of Catholic claims, who possessed enormous borough influence and was often described as the King of Ireland. Fitzwilliam afterwards stated that he told Pitt the step might be necessary and that he had acquiesced by his silence. Pitt rejoined that he had no recollection of the incident. In any case a man of such importance should not have been removed without communicating with the Home Government. A few days later the Viceroy informed Portland, the Home Secretary, of the unanimity of Catholics and the readiness of Protestants for a measure of emancipation. Despite pressing and repeated communications, Portland delayed his reply and finally urged him not to commit himself. Next day Pitt wrote censuring the removal of Beresford, but without mentioning the Catholic question. Fitzwilliam replied that Pitt must choose between him and Beresford, and informed Portland that he would not risk a rebellion by deferring the measure. A week later Portland wrote in peremptory terms that Grattan’s Bill, which enjoyed the Viceroy’s support, must go no further, and on the following day Fitzwilliam was recalled.

The Viceroyalty had lasted six weeks; but Fitzwilliam is remembered while the phantom rulers who preceded and followed him are forgotten. The episode has a narrower and a wider aspect. That his dismissals were in contravention of the understanding on which his appointment rested was admitted by his personal and political friends in the Cabinet. But though the Viceroy was guilty of disloyalty to his instructions, a strong case can be made out for his policy. He knew that the prevailing system was thoroughly vicious, and he realised that if a policy of conciliation and reform was to be undertaken it could not be effectively carried out by men who were opposed to it. As Pitt had explicitly vetoed a change of system, it would have been wiser to have refused the post. The aims of the two men were fundamentally different. Though in favour of admitting Catholics to Parliament, Pitt thought it safer to defer emancipation till a Union was accomplished, and therefore determined to preserve Government patronage and control for future emergencies. Fitzwilliam desired to govern Ireland in accordance with Irish ideas, in the spirit of the Constitution of 1782 and with the help of men who were loyal to it. In his recent work, “The End of the Irish Parliament,” Mr. Fisher, who finds nothing to admire in the Grattan Parliament and little in its founder, suggests that the Fitzwilliam crisis was a storm in a tea-cup, and that the main issue involved was the substitution of the Ponsonbys for the Beresfords as the dispensers of patronage. But Irish tradition is in this case a safe guide as to the character and importance of the incident. Ireland instinctively felt, as India was to feel nearly a century later in regard to Ripon, that Fitzwilliam was a friend. The news of his recall was received with delight in Ascendency circles, and elsewhere with consternation. It was taken as a definite rejection of the Catholic claims, and increasing numbers despaired of achieving any real reform by peaceful means. It revealed in a flash that the autonomy of Ireland was a sham. From this point the rebellion of 1798 and the Union were in sight.

The new Viceroy, Camden, was an anæmic personality, and with the establishment of Maynooth the tale of reforms came to an end. The uncrowned king of Ireland and the brain of Dublin Castle was Fitzgibbon, who as Attorney-General stood by Pitt in the Regency crisis and had been rewarded by the Chancellorship and the earldom of Clare. In his discriminating study of Clare, the late Litton Falkiner has advanced all that can be said for the ablest and most ruthless of the opponents of the Grattan Parliament, pointing out that he remained on friendly terms with the Opposition till 1789. Wholly destitute of national feeling, Clare openly scoffed at the Catholic Relief Act of 1793, which the Government was compelled to support. It was from him that emanated in 1795 the fatal suggestion that the King could not assent to the repeal of laws affecting Irish Catholics without violating his Coronation oath. “In forcefulness and narrowness, in bravery and bigotry,” writes Dr. Holland Rose with entire truth, “he was a fit spokesman of the British garrison, which was resolved to hold every outwork of the citadel.” With Pitt’s glance fixed on Union and Clare in virtual command of the machine, there was no place for Grattan in his own Parliament. He disapproved the revolutionary republicanism of the United Irishmen and the ascendency principles of Dublin Castle, and refused to encourage the one by attacking the other. After a final attempt in 1797 to procure the admission of Catholics to Parliament and to introduce household franchise, he retired into private life, his Letter to the Citizens of Dublin firing a parting shot at the Government.

The rebellion of 1798 and the French invasions form no integral part of the history of the Grattan Parliament; but they none the less sealed its doom. In his speech on the Union, Clare frankly confessed that he had been working for the Union since 1793, and he began to urge the policy on Pitt in the same year. Pitt, who had long regarded a Union followed by Catholic Emancipation as the ultimate solution of the Irish problem, was now convinced that further delay was dangerous. In the early part of the eighteenth century the idea of Union was by no means unpopular; but the American war had shaken Ireland from her slumbers, and the debates on the Commercial Propositions and the Regency showed that the Grattan Parliament was jealous of the slightest infringement of the settlement of 1782. But the matter was not to be settled by argument, and no dissolution was allowed. The high-minded Cornwallis, who had succeeded Camden, groaned over his hateful task. “My occupation is most unpleasant, negotiating and jobbing with the most corrupt people under heaven. How I long to kick those whom my public duty obliges me to court! I despise and hate myself every hour for engaging in such dirty work, and am supported only by the reflection that without an Union the British Empire must be dissolved.” There was no national opposition to the measure. The Catholics were won by the promises of Emancipation, though they were not informed that the King had already declared his objections to it insuperable. The main fight was waged by the Ulster Protestants from whom had sprung the Volunteers. When the Irish Parliament met for the last time in January, 1800, a majority had been secured by Cornwallis, Castlereagh, and Clare. Grattan had sought re-election and returned to utter an eloquent protest against the destruction of the body that for ever bears his name. He predicted that the Union would be one of Parliaments, not of peoples. To destroy the Parliament was to destroy an organ of national intelligence, a source and symbol of national life. “The thing it is proposed to buy is what cannot be sold—liberty.” He reiterated his conviction that nature was on the side of autonomy. “Ireland hears the ocean protesting against separation, but she hears the sea likewise protesting against Union.” The warnings of the most spotless of Irish patriots were of no avail. The Grattan Parliament was swallowed up. In his touching words, he watched by its cradle and followed its hearse.

There is a good deal to be said for the assertion that after the rebellion of 1798 the continuance of the experiment of 1782 was a source of danger to Great Britain in her life and death struggle with France. But there is no ground for the contention that the constitution itself was intrinsically unworkable. Its congenital weakness was that the Executive was responsible not to the Irish but to the British Parliament. Friction between the Legislature and the Executive was thus inevitable; but with tact and goodwill even this anomaly need not have stopped the working of the machine. What would have happened had the British Ministry unselfishly co-operated with Grattan and the moderate Nationalists to secure urgent political and economic reforms we can but conjecture. But we know only too well the effect of withholding such co-operation. There is scarcely a trace in the voluminous correspondence of the Viceroys, except perhaps the Duke of Rutland, of any consideration for the good of the country over which they ruled. Their mandate was to watch the interest of England. When Cornwallis proposed in 1798 that Castlereagh should become Chief Secretary, the King objected that the post ought to be held by a Briton; but his scruples were allayed by the Viceroy’s assurance that his candidate was “so very unlike an Irishman” that the appointment would be perfectly safe. There is no ground whatever for the notion that the Parliament was a wholly corrupt and reactionary body. That Grattan was not prepared to endanger the Protestant Ascendency is true but irrelevant; for he was ready to champion such measures of Parliamentary Reform and Catholic Emancipation as would have transformed Parliament into a tolerable mirror of Irish opinion. There can be little doubt that if the Executive had lent its aid, such measures could have been carried as easily as the Relief Bill of 1793.

In his thoughtful and eloquent volume, “The Framework of Home Rule,” Mr. Erskine Childers gently chides Home Rulers for wasting vain regrets on the Grattan Parliament, in which he loses interest after the rejection of Flood’s Reform Bill of 1783. No instructed Home Ruler would dream of setting that celebrated body on a pedestal. We know too well that, in the words of Litton Falkiner, it was a parliament of landlords, of placemen, and of Protestants. It was fundamentally conservative and aristocratic. It was ever ready to pass Coercion Acts. It was no more a council of disinterested patriots than the sister assembly at Westminster. On the other hand a large and influential section of its members was eager to purge it of its baser elements. “With every inducement to religious bigotry, it carried the policy of toleration in many respects further than the Parliament of England. With many inducements to disloyalty, it was steadily faithful to the connection. Nor should it be forgotten that it was on the whole a vigilant and intelligent guardian of the material interests of the country.”(147) Though cabin’d, cribbed, confined, it was at least in some degree an organ of public opinion and a symbol of nationality, as the Third Duma, tame though it be, has stood for the principle of representation in autocratic Russia. The duty of British statesmen was to mend it, not to end it. If Grattan’s Parliament was a failure, the Union was a greater failure. For the one experiment recognised, however imperfectly, the separateness of Ireland, while the other started from its denial. To use the jargon of the Ascendency party, Ireland was “loyal” before the Union and “disloyal” after it. The clear moral of those chequered years for latter-day statesmen is that a responsible Executive is of more importance than a co-equal legislature, and that having granted autonomy the British Parliament and British Ministers must strive to render it a success. Pitt’s Union was not partnership but subjection. The only true Union between countries so different is to be found in loyal comradeship. Against such a relationship history cannot bear witness, for it has never been tried.

XII.—“The Government Of Ireland In The Nineteenth Century”. BY R. BARRY O’BRIEN

When you speak to Englishmen about English rule in Ireland they say: “Oh! you Irish are always looking back. You always want to talk about the past. You read nothing but ancient history. You never think of all we have done for you in recent years. Come to modern times; forget the past.”

Well, the point is, what are modern times? What date are we to fix for the beginning of good government in Ireland—1800? Scarcely. I do not think that the rankest Tory that ever lived will now attempt to defend English rule in Ireland between 1800 and 1828. In fact, this is what they call ancient history. They will say to you: “Well, of course, we know that the Catholics ought to have been emancipated at the Union, and a great many other things ought to have been done! But what is the good of talking about that now?” The good is, that the lessons of the past are the safeguards of the future. Hence they must be learned.

“Progress,” says Lamennais, “is in a straight line. To find it we must go back to the past.” Let us take the line of “progress” in Ireland throughout the nineteenth century. In 1800 the Irish Parliament was destroyed; the English Parliament took Ireland in hand. A new era was to dawn upon the country. The Catholics were to be emancipated, measures of social and political amelioration were to be passed, peace and prosperity were to reign in the land. Such was the promise of the Union. How was it fulfilled? The Catholics were not emancipated; measures of social amelioration were not carried; but the Statute book was filled with Coercion Acts passed to crush the efforts of the people in their struggle for justice and freedom.

A chronology of Ireland lies before me. Such entries as these meet the eye at every turn.

1800-1801. Insurrection Act, Habeas Corpus Suspension Act, and Martial Law. 1803. Insurrection Act. 1804. Habeas Corpus Suspension Act. 1807-1810. Insurrection Act, Martial Law and Habeas Corpus Suspension Act. 1814. Habeas Corpus Suspension Act. 1814-1818. Insurrection Act. 1822-1824. Habeas Corpus Suspension Act, Insurrection Act. 1825-1828. Act for Suppression of Catholic Association.

Nothing can give a better idea of the character of English Government in Ireland during the first quarter of the century than the mere recital of these Acts. And then when we look at the Statute book for the measures passed to ameliorate the condition of the people, to reconcile them to the loss of their Parliament, and to give them confidence in the English Legislature, what do we find? At the General Election of 1910, a pamphlet was published in the county——. It bore the title—“What Mr. M—— has done for the people of ——” You then turned over the leaves and found every page a blank. So is it with the English Statute book, during the years 1800-1829, as far as measures of justice for Ireland are concerned. Out of a total population of 5,000,000 people at the time of the Union, 4,000,000 were Catholics. These Catholics, representing the old Irish race, were treated as outlanders in their own country. Ireland was governed through the Protestant minority who, (themselves the descendants of English settlers), were, under England, the masters of the land. In 1798, Cornwallis had written to Pitt:

“It has always appeared to me a desperate measure for the British Government to make an irrevocable alliance with a small party in Ireland (which party has derived all its consequence from, and is, in fact, entirely dependent upon the British Government), and to wage eternal war against the Papists.”

The “desperate measure” which Cornwallis deplored, the British Government adopted. In 1802, Lord Redesdale, the Irish Lord Chancellor of the day, wrote: “The Catholics must have no more political power”; and he added: “I have said that this country must be kept for some time as a garrison country—I meant a Protestant garrison.” The policy enunciated by Lord Redesdale was the policy enforced by the English statesmen of the Union. I think it is Lord Acton who says somewhere that nothing stimulates the sentiment of nationality so much as the presence of a foreign ruler. The Irish people saw the hand of the foreign ruler everywhere, and national hatred was naturally intensified and perpetuated.

Besides the question of Catholic emancipation—the question of political freedom—there were many other questions calling for the immediate attention of Parliament. There was the church question, the tithe question, the question of the education of the people, and the eternal land question. The very existence of these questions was ignored by English statesmen. Land was the staple industry of Ireland; yet it was worked under conditions which were fatal to the peace and prosperity of the country. What were the conditions? The landlord let the land—perhaps a strip of bog, barren, wild, dreary. The tenant reclaimed the bog; built, fenced, drained, did all that had to be done. When the tenant had done these things, had made the land tenantable, the rent was raised. He could not pay the increased rental—he had spent himself on the land; he needed time to recoup himself for his outlay and labour. He got no time: when he failed to pay, he was evicted—flung on the roadside, to starve, to die. He took refuge in an Agrarian Secret Society, told the story of his wrong, and prayed for vengeance on the man whom he called a tyrant, and an oppressor. Too often his prayer was heard, and vengeance was wreaked on the landlord, or agent, and sometimes on both.

“The landlord,” says Mr. Froude, “may become a direct oppressor. He may care nothing for the people, and have no object but to squeeze the most that he can out of them fairly or unfairly. The Russian Government has been called despotism, tempered by assassination. In Ireland landlordism was tempered by assassination.... Every circumstance combined in that country to exasperate the relations between landlord and tenant. The landlords were, for the most part, aliens in blood and in religion. They represented conquest and confiscation, and they had gone on from generation to generation with an indifference for the welfare of the people which would not have been tolerated in England or Scotland.”

English statesmen did not understand—did not try to understand—the Irish land question. They believed that force was the best—the only—remedy for agrarian disorders. They did not grasp the essential fact that rack-rents, insecurity of tenure, and the confiscation of the tenants’ improvements by the landlords, lay at the root of the trouble, and that legislation to protect the tenant from injustice and oppression was the cure. The result was that the staple industry of the country was paralysed, and periodical famines, and constant outbursts of lawlessness and crime, almost threatened the very existence of society. No stronger argument can be used to prove the incompetence of Englishmen to rule Ireland, than the ignorance and incapacity shown by English statesmen throughout the nineteenth century, in dealing, or rather in refusing to deal, with this vital question of the land.

English statesmen saw nothing wrong in the exclusive establishment and endowment of the Church of the Protestant minority in a Catholic country, nor did they see just cause for complaint because Catholic peasants were forced, at the point of the bayonet, to pay tithes to Protestant parsons. Protestant education was assisted by the State. Nothing was done by the Government for the education of Catholics. Thus for the first twenty-eight years of the century the policy of the English in Ireland was calculated to embitter religious feelings, and to inflame national animosities. When Catholic emancipation (granted under the pressure of a great revolutionary agitation) came in 1829 it did not improve the situation because the people saw in it, not the measure of England’s justice, but the measure of her fears.

All, then, that happened, between 1800 and 1829, served only to make the chasm which separated the two countries, deeper and wider. What happened between 1829 and 1835? I turn once more to my chronology:

1830. Arms Act. 1831-1832. Stanley’s Arms Act. 1833-1834. Grey’s Coercion Act. 1834-1835. Grey’s Coercion (Continuance) Act amended.

Ireland remained as disaffected and disturbed as ever. Why? Because Catholic Emancipation (delayed for twenty-nine years), was, when carried, practically made a dead letter; the country was still governed, through the Protestant minority, in opposition to the opinions and feelings of the masses of the people; while the incompetence of Parliament to deal with the tithe question, and the land question, led to an agrarian and tithe war, which the Coercion Acts were powerless to stop. In 1831, indeed, Parliament had established the “national” schools, but the scheme was not what the people wanted. Protestants and Catholics alike desired denominational education, but the Government gave them a mixed system. For many years the system was worked (by a board consisting of five Protestants and two Catholics in a country where Catholics were to Protestants as four to one) in an anti-Irish spirit, and it failed, accordingly, to win popular support or confidence. In truth, the people saw in the “national” schools only institutions for anglicising the country. A Scotch Presbyterian practically managed the system. The books, with one exception, were prepared by Englishmen or Scotchmen. Irish history and national poetry were boycotted. Patriotic songs were suppressed. The limit of folly and absurdity was reached when Scott’s “Breathes there a man” was replaced in one of the books by these lines:

“I thank the goodness and the grace That on my birth have smiled, And made me in these Christian days A happy English Child.”(148)

In 1832 a worthless Irish Reform Act, under which the representation of the country became “virtually extinguished,”(149) was passed against the protest of the Irish members, all of whose amendments, aiming at making it a genuine measure for the extension of the franchise, were contemptuously rejected. Ignorance and prejudice, the absence of all sense of justice, an utter inability to understand the Irish case, a determination to trample on popular rights and to disregard public opinion—these were the characteristics of English statesmanship in Ireland between 1829 and 1835. Mr. Lecky’s account of the manner in which Catholic Emancipation was carried out is worth quoting:

“In 1833—four years after Emancipation—there was not in Ireland a single Catholic judge or stipendiary magistrate. All the high sheriffs, the overwhelming majority of the unpaid magistrates and of the grand jurors, the five inspectors-general, and the thirty-two sub-inspectors of the police, were Protestants. The chief towns were in the hands of narrow, corrupt, and for the most part, intensely bigoted, corporations. For many years promotion had been steadily withheld from those who advocated Catholic Emancipation, and the majority of the people thus found their bitterest enemies in the foremost places.”

No wonder that, Lord Melbourne, in coming into office thirty-five years after the Union, should have found Ireland still a centre of disaffection and disturbance.

III

The Melbourne Ministry was kept in office from 1835 to 1841 by the Irish Vote. O’Connell made a compact—the historic Lichfield House compact—with Ministers. It came to this: They were to introduce remedial measures for Ireland, and he was, meanwhile, to suspend the demand for repeal of the Union. He said to the Irish people:

“I am trying an experiment, I want to see if an English Parliament can do justice to Ireland. I do not think it can, but I mean to give the present Government a chance, and see what they can do. And I will suspend the demand for repeal to give them a fair trial.”

What came of that “fair trial” we shall now see.

The tithe question was the question of the hour. A tithe war had been raging, between 1830 and 1835, distracting the country, and forcing the attention of Parliament to Irish affairs. On March 20th, 1835, the Government of Sir Robert Peel took up the question, and Sir Henry Hardinge, the English Chief Secretary in Ireland, moved a resolution to convert tithes into a rent charge at 75 per cent. of the tithe. O’Connell, in dealing with Hardinge’s resolution, said that no measure relating to tithes would be satisfactory which did not contain a clause appropriating the surplus revenues of the established church to purposes of general utility. Subsequently (on April 7th), Lord John Russell moved:

“That it is the opinion of this House that no measure upon the subject of tithes in Ireland can lead to a satisfactory adjustment which does not embody the principle of appropriation.”

This resolution was carried by a majority of twenty-seven. Whereupon the Government of Sir Robert Peel resigned, and Lord Melbourne became Prime Minister, with Lord John Russell as leader of the House of Commons. What was the upshot of the Parliamentary struggle, lasting for three years, over the tithe question? Simply this. In 1838 an Act was passed, converting tithe into a rent charge of 75 per cent. of the tithe, and containing no appropriation clause. Peel had proposed a Bill of the very same kind in 1835. Russell objected to it, insisting on the necessity of an appropriation clause, and proposing the conversion of tithes into a rent charge of 68% of the tithe. Successful (by the Irish vote) in the Commons, but defeated in the Lords, he ultimately abandoned his conversion scheme, flung the appropriation clause to the winds, and passed what was really Peel’s measure of 1835. Of course tithes were not abolished. The payment of them was, in the first instance, transferred from the tenants to the landlords, then the landlords added the tithes to the rent, so that the unfortunate tenants were still mulcted in one way, if not in the other.

In 1838, also, the Irish Poor Law was introduced under circumstances thoroughly characteristic of English methods in Ireland: In 1833, a Royal Commission was appointed to consider the subject of Irish destitution in reference to the advisability of establishing “workhouses” to alleviate Irish distress. The Commission consisted chiefly of Irishmen, though the Chairman, Archbishop Whateley, was an Englishman. The Commissioners took three years to consider the subject submitted to them; and, at the end of that time, made a report which, in the light of subsequent events, must be pronounced a statesmanlike document. They said, in effect, that the cure for Irish distress was work, not workhouses. The labouring poor were able-bodied men who only needed employment, and scope for their energies; and should be provided with work which would develop the resources of the country, and remove the causes of poverty. A Vice-regal Poor Law Reform Commission, which reported in 1906, refers to the Report of the Commissioners of 1833, in the following language:

“It will probably surprise most of those who study the condition of Ireland, and who have considered how to improve it, to find that a Commission that sat seventy years ago recommended land drainage and reclamation on modern lines, the provision of labourers’ cottages and allotments, the bringing of agricultural instruction to the doors of the peasant, the improvement of land tenure, the transfer of fixed powers from grand juries to county boards, the employment of direct labour on roads by such county boards, the sending of vagrants to colonies to be employed there or to penitentiaries in this country; the closing of public-houses on Sundays, and the prevention of the sale of groceries and intoxicating drink in the same house for consumption on the premises. Such were the recommendations of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Condition of the Poorer Classes.”(150)

For the sick and impotent poor the Royal Commission reported practically that relief ought to be afforded by voluntary associations, controlled by State Commissioners, and whose revenues might be strengthened by the imposition of a contributory parochial rate. Emigration, as a temporary expedient, was also recommended in certain cases.

The Report of the Royal Commissioners was laid before Lord John Russell. Lord John Russell flung the Report into the ministerial waste paper basket, and despatched a young Englishman named Nicholls, a member of the English Poor Law Commission, to report afresh on the subject. Mr. Nicholls paid a roving visit to Ireland. The Royal Commission had taken three years to consider the question. Mr. Nicholls disposed of it in six weeks. He, of course, made the report that was expected of him. He recommended the establishment of workhouses. The Government brought in a Workhouse Bill, which was opposed by the Irish Members in committee, and on the third reading, but was carried, nevertheless, by overwhelming majorities.(151)

In concluding this story let me quote the following brief extracts from the Vice-regal Commission of 1903-6:

“I. The poverty of Ireland cannot be adequately dealt with by any Poor Relief Law, such as that of 1838, but by the development of the country’s resources, which is, therefore, most strongly urged.

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

“III. The present workhouse system should be abolished.”

Thus, after the lapse of three-quarters of a century, has the policy of the Irish Commission of 1833 been vindicated, and the policy of the English Parliament condemned.

The Government also took up the question of municipal reform. There were at the time sixty-eight municipalities in Ireland, all in the hands of the Protestant ascendency. It was the policy of O’Connell to preserve all these municipalities and to reform them. The Government tried to carry out his policy, but in vain. Then, in 1836, they carried through the House of Commons, a Bill creating a £10 household suffrage in seven of the largest cities, and a £5 one in the others, but the measure was rejected in the House of Lords which desired the abolition of the Irish municipalities altogether. In 1837 the Bill was again passed through the Commons, and again rejected by the Lords. Peel then proposed, as a compromise—a £10 rating franchise in twelve of the largest towns, and a similar franchise in the smaller, provided the Lord Lieutenant allowed them to be re-incorporated. Lord John Russell consented to this proposal on conditions that the franchise in the small towns—corporations in posse—should be reduced to £5. For two years longer a struggle was carried on between the two parties, mainly over the question of the franchise in the smaller towns (in the event of their being incorporated). Finally, in 1840, the Government gave way all along the line, passing an Act which abolished fifty-eight municipalities, and conferred a £10 franchise on the remaining ten.

The Melbourne Ministry fell in 1841. O’Connell had kept the Government in office for five years. During that time they had passed useful measures for England; but in their Irish legislation they failed utterly. The Tithe Act was a sham, the Poor Law, passed in the teeth of Irish Opposition, was detested in Ireland, and the Municipal Reform Act has well been described by Sir Erskine May “as virtually a scheme of municipal disfranchisement.” When all was over, O’Connell said:

“The experiment which I have tried has proved that an English Parliament cannot do justice to Ireland, and our only hope now is in the Repeal of the Union.”

He then unfurled the banner of repeal, and threw himself heart and soul into the movement.

While the Melbourne Ministry failed utterly in their Irish legislation, the administration of the country by Thomas Drummond (Under-Secretary at Dublin Castle, 1835-1840) was eminently successful. Though there were Coercion Acts on the Statute book they were not enforced. Drummond governed according to the ordinary law, and, by meting out even-handed justice to all, won popular support and confidence. However, on the fall of the Ministry, coercion again soon became the order of the day—thus:

1843-1845. Arms Act. 1847. Crime and Outrage Act. 1848-1849. Habeas Corpus Suspension Act, Crime and Outrage Act, Removal of Aliens Act.

Between 1842 and 1845 Ireland rang with the demand for repeal. Great meetings—monster meetings they were called—were held everywhere; and O’Connell, by a series of the most eloquent and vehement speeches ever addressed to public audiences, re-awakened the spirit of nationality and intensified the popular hatred of England. In the days of the Melbourne Ministry his policy was a policy of peace; but the English people would not accept the olive branch. His policy now was a policy of war. His case for repeal rested on two main propositions:

“(1) Ireland was fit for legislative independence in position, population, and natural advantages. Five independent kingdoms in Europe possessed less territory or people; and her station in the Atlantic, between the old world and the new, designed her to be the entrepôt of both, if the watchful jealousy of England had not rendered her natural advantages nugatory.

“(2) She was entitled to legislative independence; the Parliament of Ireland was as ancient as the Parliament of England, and had not derived its existence from any Charter of the British Crown, but sprang out of the natural rights of freedom. Its independence, long claimed, was finally recognised and confirmed by solemn compact between the two nations in 1782; that compact has since been shamefully violated, indeed, but no statute of limitation ran against the right of a nation.”(152)

The Government of Sir Robert Peel put forth its full strength to crush O’Connell, and the repeal movement. In 1844 O’Connell was tried by a packed bench and a packed jury for seditious conspiracy, found guilty, and sent to jail. His trial was one of the most scandalous incidents in the history of British rule in Ireland, during the nineteenth century.

“The most eminent Catholic in the Empire,” says Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, “a man whose name was familiar to every Catholic in the world, was placed upon his trial in the Catholic Metropolis of a Catholic country before four judges and twelve jurors, among whom there was not a single Catholic.”

It is well known that the condemnation of O’Connell by this tribunal was too much even for the House of Lords, which quashed the conviction and set O’Connell free.

In 1847 O’Connell died, and a terrible famine swept over the land decimating the people. Before the famine the population of Ireland was 8,175,124, three years afterwards it had sunk to 6,574,278. But that was not the end. The “Young Ireland” party had sprung out of the repeal movement. The “Young Irelanders” began as constitutional agitators. Like O’Connell himself they simply demanded the repeal of the Union. But they gradually became more extreme, and, ultimately, under the influence of the wave of revolution, which swept over Europe in 1848, drifted into insurrection. The rising of 1848 was quickly put down, and the “Young Ireland” leaders were banished beyond the seas. All seemed lost. Ireland was in despair. Yet the seed, sown by O’Connell and the “Young Irelanders,” took root. The fruit was gathered in our own day. Home Rule sprang out of the one movement, and Fenianism out of the other.

“The spirit of National Independence,” says Mr. Froude, “is like a fire, so long as a spark remains a conflagration can be kindled.”

The fire of nationality burned low during the Melbourne Administration; but rekindled by O’Connell in 1842, and fanned into flame by “Young Ireland,” it was not put out by the misfortunes and disasters in which the first forty-eight years of the Union closed.

I have said that land was the staple industry of Ireland. Yet Government after Government failed to realize that the enactment of laws for the protection of the tenant—the protection of his improvements from confiscation by the landlords, protection of himself from rack-rents and arbitrary eviction—were necessary for the prosperity and peace of the country. In 1836 Mr. Sharman Crawford introduced a Bill proposing that the tenant should be entitled, on eviction, to compensation for improvements of a permanent nature made with the landlord’s consent; or without his consent, provided that such improvements were, according to the Chairman of Quarter Sessions, necessary for the actual wants of the tenant. This moderate Bill, strongly opposed by the landlords, was read a first time, but it never reached another stage. Parliament having refused to protect the tenants—refused indeed to take the slightest heed of their complaints and grievances—the tenants continued to protect themselves by forming secret societies whose operations struck terror in the land. In 1838 the Under-Secretary, Thomas Drummond, boldly told the Tipperary Magistrates, who cried out for coercion, that landlordism was the cause of agrarian crime, and that remedial legislation, not coercion, was the remedy. He said, in memorable words:

“The Government has been at all times ready to afford the utmost aid in its power to suppress disturbance and crime, and its efforts have been successful so far as regards open violations of the law.... But there are certain classes of crime, originating in other causes which are much more difficult of repression. The utmost exertion of vigilance and precaution cannot always effectually guard against them, and it becomes of importance to consider the causes which have led to a state of society so much to be deplored, with a view to ascertain whether any corrective means are in the immediate power of the Government or the Legislature. When,” he continues, “the character of the great majority of serious outrages occurring in many parts of Ireland, though unhappily most frequent in Tipperary, is considered, it is impossible to doubt that the causes from which they mainly spring are connected with the tenure and occupation of land.

“Property,” he adds, “has its duties as well as its rights; to the neglect of those duties in times past is mainly to be ascribed to that diseased state of society in which such crimes take their rise; and it is not in the enactment or enforcement of statutes of extraordinary severity, but chiefly in the better and more faithful performance of those duties, and the more enlightened and humane exercise of those rights that a permanent remedy for such disorders is to be sought.”

Another fierce outburst of agrarianism in 1842 startled English public opinion, and drew from The Times a memorable condemnation of landlordism. The great English journal wrote:

“With feelings of mingled pain we have witnessed the reappearance of that frightful system of murder and outrage which has so long infested the south of Ireland, and in particular the unhappy County of Tipperary.... The evil has arisen in the general system upon which the occupation of land has been based and conducted, and in the treatment of the occupier by the landlord.... A landlord is not a tradesman; he stands to his tenantry, or he ought to do so, in loco parentis; he is there as well for their good as his own; they are not mere contractors with him, to hold his land as capital, and pay him the full interest, or incur a forfeiture; they are rather agents placed in his hands, and under his care and protection, for the purpose of working the land, and whose natural relation with him cannot be determined except by negligence or ill-conduct.

“If the land be treated as money, and tenantry as borrowers, people may be sure that the landlord will be an usurer. This is generally true, but in Ireland the tenant who is thus treated as though he had been an unfettered party to the original agreement, has not the shadow of the character of a voluntary contractor. It is with him, either to continue in the quarter of an acre which he occupies, or to starve. There is no other alternative. Rack-rent may be misery, but ejectment is ruin.”

At length in 1843 Sir Robert Peel appointed the famous Devon Commission to enquire into the occupation and tenure of land in Ireland. In 1845 the Commission reported that:

“(1) All the improvements in the soil were made by the tenants.

“(2) That these improvements were subjected to confiscation, and were confiscated by the landlord.

“(3) That the outrage system sprang from the ejectment system; and

“(4) That it was necessary for Parliament to intervene to compel the landlord to recoup the tenant on eviction for his outlay on the land.”

The Report of the Devon Commission proved the case of the tenants up to the hilt. What was done?

In May, 1845, Lord Devon declared in the House of Lords that if a Bill were passed giving tenants compensation for improvements made by them in the land “it would much strengthen the industry of the people of Ireland.” In the same year Lord Stanley, in behalf of the Government, introduced a Bill proposing that tenants should be entitled to compensation, on disturbance, for prospective improvements of a permanent nature, made with the consent of the landlord; or, without his consent, provided the improvements had been effected with the authority and approval of a Commissioner of Improvements, to be specially appointed for the purpose. The functions of the Commissioners were to inspect the lands, and to examine and inquire whether they would “bear” improvement; and then, if he thought well of it, to authorise the works contemplated by the tenant and to award, in case of eviction, such measure of compensation as was deemed fair and equitable. This Bill was read a second time, then referred to a Select Committee, and abandoned. In 1846 substantially the same Bill was brought forward by the Government, and read a first time. Then the Government fell and the Bill disappeared. In 1847, Mr. Sharman Crawford brought forward a Bill to extend the Ulster Custom (practically fixity of tenure and free sale) to the rest of Ireland. The Government—a Liberal Government—took no interest in the subject. Crawford spoke to empty benches and the Bill was defeated on the second reading by an overwhelming majority. In 1848 Crawford brought forward his Bill again, and it was again defeated. In the same year the Government brought forward a Bill which was the same as the Government Bill of 1846. It was read a second time, then referred to a Select Committee and heard of no more that session. So far Parliament had done nothing to carry out the recommendations of the Devon Commission—nothing for the protection of the tenants. But in 1849 Lord John Russell passed a Bill for the relief of the landlords—a Bill giving landlords facilities for selling their encumbered estates. This measure is well known as “The Encumbered Estates Act.” Let me quote what Lord Russell of Killowen said about it before the Parnell Commission:

“It is hardly conceivable that a Legislature in which Ireland was represented—imperfectly, it is true—that a Legislature purporting to deal with Ireland should have so misconceived the position as to have passed that Act. For what did it do? It sold the estates of the bankrupt landlords to men with capital, who were mainly jobbers in land, with the accumulated improvements and interests of the tenants, and without the slightest protection against the forfeiture and confiscation of these improvements and interests, at the hands of the proprietor newly acquiring the estate. It was intended, I doubt not, to effect good. It proved a cause of the gravest evil.”

What a mockery of legislation! The Devon Commission had reported in favour of the tenant’s claims, and recommended the enactment of laws for his protection. Parliament passed an Act introducing into Ireland a new set of landlords who were worse than the old, and leaving the tenant hopelessly at their mercy.

In 1850 the Irish Secretary of the day brought in a Bill (practically the same as Lord Stanley’s Bill of 1845) giving the tenant compensation for improvements. The Bill was read a second time, committed, and dropped. In the same year Sharman Crawford again introduced his “Tenant Right” Bill, but it was never read a second time.

In November, 1852 (when the Irish Parliamentary Party held the balance between English parties),(153) the Tory Government introduced a Bill giving to the tenant compensation for improvements, prospective and retrospective, made by him in the land. The Bill was read a second time without opposition in December and then referred to a Select Committee. When the Whigs came into office in 1853 they took up the measure which, subject to certain alterations, was approved of by the Select Committee. The Bill was finally read a second time in the Lords and then dropped for the session. It was reintroduced in 1854, and read a second time in the Lords; referred to a Select Committee, condemned by the Committee, and lost. Between 1854 and 1860 Land Bill after Land Bill was introduced by the Irish Parliamentary Party for the purpose of giving compensation to tenants for improvements, but all were rejected. Finally (in 1860), imitating the example of 1849, the Whig Government of the day passed a Land Act in the interests of the landlords. Let me describe this Act in the words of Lord Russell of Killowen. “This was an Act passed to help the landlords, and not one passed for the protection of the tenants. It turned the relation between landlord and tenant from relation by tenure into relation by contract;(154) it gave certain facilities in the matter of proceedings in ejectment; it recognized and formulated what had been an existing law in Ireland—going back for a long period—a state of law unknown in this country. I mean the right of ejectment, pure and simple, for non-payment of rent.” The recommendations of the Devon Commission were not only not carried out but were absolutely ignored. Happily however the Act proved a dead letter. “This enactment,” said the Bessborough Commission of 1881, “has produced little or no effect. It may be said to have given utterance to the wishes of the Legislature, that the traditional rights of tenants should cease to exist, rather than to have seriously affected the conditions of their existence.” It was in reference to the Encumbered Estates Act, and this Act, that Mr. Gladstone once exclaimed in the House of Commons: “In our very remedies we have failed.”

In 1866 the Government brought in a Bill to amend the Act of 1860 in the interest of the tenants, but it never became law. The Bill was again brought forward in 1867 and again lost. While every Land Act in the interest of the tenant between 1849 and 1867 was rejected, the Statute book continued to be filled with Coercion Acts. Thus:

1850-1855. Crime and Outrage (Continuance) Act. 1856, 1857. Peace Preservation Act. 1858-1864. Peace Preservation (Continuance) Act. 1865. Peace Preservation (Continuance) Act. 1866-1869 (off and on). Habeas Corpus Suspension Act.

As Parliament treated the land question, so it treated the church question, and every question in which the Irish people were interested. Their complaints, as Bright said, “were met with denial, with contempt, with insult.” Ministers, indeed, slumbered peacefully as if there were no Irish question, until they were rudely awakened in 1867 by the ringing of the “Chapel bell.” Fenianism—a Society founded to sever the connection between England and Ireland—brought Liberals and Tories to their bearings; and under the pressure of that great revolutionary organization (which set Ireland in a blaze), the Church was disestablished in 1869, and the first Land Act (which in the slightest degree served the interests of the tenants) passed in 1870. This Act provided that tenants, when evicted, should receive compensation for improvements, and in certain cases, for disturbance. It also contained clauses for the creation of a peasant proprietary, and recognized and legalized the Ulster custom of tenant right. But the Act was a failure. The peasant proprietary clauses did not work; rack-renting continued, evictions increased, and the general discontent remained the same as ever. In these circumstances the Irish members demanded fresh legislation, and introduced several Bills for this purpose between 1876 and 1881. They were all rejected by overwhelming majorities. Then the Land League came; lawlessness and outrage came; treason and anarchy came; and the Land Act of 1881 was passed in a storm of revolution. The reasons given by Lord Salisbury for not opposing the Bill in the House of Lords are too remarkable, and too little known not to be quoted. He said:

“In view of the prevailing agitation, and having regard to the state of anarchy (in Ireland), I cannot recommend my followers to vote against the second reading of the Bill.”

and in the same speech he added:

“What will be the attitude of the tenant all this time? He, like the landlord, will be looking to the future, but in a very different temper. He knows perfectly well that all he has hitherto got he has not got because he has moved your convictions, but because he has moved your fears.”

“The pivot of the Act of 1881,” to use the language of Mr. Forster, was the “Land Court” established to stand between landlords and tenants, to fix fair or judicial rents. Previously, the landlord was master of the situation. The competition for land placed the tenant at his mercy, and he accordingly fixed the rent at his own pleasure. But henceforth rents were to be fixed by legal tribunals; and while the tenant paid the rent so fixed, he could not be disturbed in his holding for a period of fifteen years. Roughly speaking, the Act changed Irish tenancies from tenancies at will practically to leaseholds, renewable every fifteen years, subject to revision of rent by the Land Courts. It also recognised the tenant’s right to sell his holding, and provided facilities for the creation of a peasant proprietary.

But the Land Act of 1881 did not settle the land question. The system of dual ownership which it set up was agreeable neither to landlord nor tenant, and both now combined to demand fresh legislation for the purpose of enabling the tenants to purchase their holdings. The Act had destroyed the prestige of the landlords; they were disgusted with the spectacle of seeing “briefless barristers,” (as the Judges of the Land Courts were called), “rambling about the country” and fixing rents independently of their wishes; their occupation as territorial magnates was gone and they were now willing to dispose of their estates, if only they could obtain good terms. The cry of the tenant always had been the “land for the people,” and they raised that cry now louder than ever. Extraordinary as it may seem the English Tory party took the lead in responding to it. In 1885 the first of a series of Tory Land Purchase Acts was passed. By this measure the state was empowered to advance the whole of the purchase money to tenants who had agreed with their landlords to purchase their holdings; forty-nine years were allowed for repayment of the purchase money, at the rate of 4 per cent. per annum. Between 1885 and 1912 six more Land Purchase Acts were placed on the Statute book. With a single exception, all these Acts were passed by Tories. Therefore the Tories take credit to themselves for the policy of land purchase. But rather the credit belongs to Charles Stewart Parnell and the Land League, who, by the revolution of 1881, not only made land purchase possible, but made it inevitable. I cannot here deal with these Acts in detail(155) but the following table gives a list of them and shows how they have worked. It also mentions other Acts which contain provisions for facilitating the creation of a peasant proprietary.

Act. No. of Purchasers. Amount of Advances. I.—Irish Church Act, 6,057 1,674,841 1869 II.—Landlord and 877 514,536 Tenant Act, 1870 III.—Land Law 731 240,801 (Ireland) Act, 1881 IV.—Land Purchase 25,367 9,992,536 Acts, 1885, 1887, 1888 and 1889 V.—Land Purchase 46,806 13,633,190 Acts, 1891, 1896 VI.—Irish Land Act, 117,010 41,293,564 1903 VII.—Evicted Tenants 550 307,550 Act, 1907 VIII.—Irish Land 1,444 422,562 Act, 1909 Total 198,842 68,079,580(156)

Mr. Gladstone once said to me that he was deeply moved by the Parliamentary history of the Irish Land question. It was a subject of the greatest magnitude affecting as it did the life of the country. Yet the Imperial Parliament failed for three quarters of a century to realize the importance and the gravity of the case; and even then did not grapple successfully with it.

“A sad and a discreditable story,” was his comment.

Nowhere, I repeat, can a stronger argument in favour of Home Rule be found than in the history of the Irish Land Question.

There is one fact in connection with the Government of Ireland during the nineteenth century with which, I think, English Statesmen are but imperfectly acquainted, viz., that the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 was an utter failure. It was thought that when Irish Catholics were admitted to the English Parliament all would go well with Ireland. But the Irish Catholic member in the English Parliament was absolutely useless to Ireland; and it was that uselessness which led to the Repeal Agitation, Young Ireland, Fenianism, and the Home Rule movement.

The policy of the English Parliament in truth fostered the idea of Irish nationality. It is, perhaps, within the range of possibility, that good legislation, and good administration might have put out the fire. I know not. But as it was those who made the laws, and those who administered the laws, fed the flame. Every Coercion Act was a nail in the coffin of the Union; and a reminder that the foreigner ruled in the land. When O’Connell was “master of the situation” in 1835, he thought that the opportunity had at length arrived of obtaining important remedial measures for Ireland. We know how his hopes were disappointed. When the Irish Members held the balance between English parties in 1852, they thought that the time had come for securing a beneficial Land Act; but they also were doomed to disappointment.

In fact between 1829 and 1869 the Irish Members failed to place upon the Statute book one single measure for which the Irish people had loudly called; and the measures of 1869 and 1870 were due to Fenianism and not to parliamentary action.

Between 1870 and 1881 the efforts of the Parliamentarians were again marked by failure, and we know, from Mr. Gladstone himself, that, there would have been no Land Act in 1881 if there had been no Land League. In 1884 household suffrage was extended to Ireland. The General Election of 1885 made Parnell “master of the situation.” What was he able to do? He certainly got the Home Rule Bill of 1886 and converted the Liberal party to the cause; but he did not win Home Rule. Between 1892 and 1895 a Liberal Government was once more kept in office by the Irish vote. But though a Home Rule Bill was carried through the Commons in 1893 Home Rule was not won. Finally between 1895 and 1906 Home Rule was thrust into the background by an English majority.

Well might Sir Spencer Walpole have written: “The treatment of Ireland made representative Government in Ireland a fraud. It is absurd to say that a country enjoys representative institutions if its delegates are uniformly out-voted by men of another race.”

While the Irish representation in the Imperial Parliament was a fraud, the English Administration of Ireland was an outrage on national sentiment. After Catholic Emancipation, as before, it was, in the main, based on Protestant Ascendency principles, which meant not Ireland for the Irish, but Ireland for an English faction. As a rule no man in touch with popular feeling was allowed to have a voice in the government of the country. Catholics as Catholics were habitually excluded from office. Since Catholic Emancipation there has not been a Catholic Lord-Lieutenant, nor a Catholic Chief Secretary. There have been 3 Catholic Under-Secretaries. There have been 3 Lord Chancellors. In the High Court of Justice there are 17 Judges; 3 of them are Catholics. There are 21 County Court Judges and Recorders; 8 of them are Catholics. There are 37 County Inspectors of Police; 5 of them are Catholics. There are 202 District Inspectors of Police; 62 of them are Catholics. There are 5,518 ordinary Justices of the Peace; 1,805 of them are believed to be Catholics. There are 68 Privy Councillors; 8 of them are Catholics. And in other offices, through the whole gamut of the administration, the same principle of exclusiveness was observed. Nor was this all. Catholics who were appointed to office, feeling that they were “suspect” as Catholics, only too often, in order to show that their loyalty was above suspicion, became more Protestant than the Protestants, and more English than the English. “We have now captured the Castle,” I heard an Irish Catholic official say, in reference to a Catholic appointment which had recently been made. The retort was obvious. “No, but the Castle has captured you.” In truth, no matter what was the religion of the official, he appeared before the people as the instrument of a foreign government, not as the servant of the Irish nation. Let us remember that it was in the year 1885, not in “ancient times,” that Mr. Chamberlain said in memorable language:

“I do not believe that the great majority of Englishmen have the slightest conception of the system under which this free nation attempts to rule the sister country. It is a system which is founded on the bayonets of 30,000 soldiers encamped permanently as in a hostile country. It is a system as completely centralised and bureaucratic as that with which Russia governs Poland, or as that which prevailed in Venice under the Austrian rule. An Irishman at the moment cannot move a step—he cannot lift a finger in any parochial, municipal, or educational work, without being confronted with, interfered with, controlled by an English official, appointed by a foreign Government, and without a shade or shadow of representative authority.”

It was not until 1898 that popular control in local affairs was established by the County Councils’ Act.

Englishmen often say to me: “What an illogical and unreasonable people you Irish are. At the very time when we were showing our determination to do justice to Ireland, when we had disestablished the State Church in 1869, and passed the Land Act of 1870 at that very time, in the very year 1870, you started the Home Rule movement.” Englishmen say many foolish things about Ireland, because they know nothing about Irish history, and indeed give very little serious thought to Irish affairs. The fact that the English State Church was not disestablished for sixty-nine years after the Union, and that an Act for the protection of the tenants and for securing the proper cultivation of the soil was not passed until seventy years after the Union; and that it took constant agitation and incessant outbursts of lawlessness and crime and finally a revolutionary convulsion to accomplish these things, was a sufficient justification for the establishment of the Home Rule movement in 1870. Had the government of Ireland in the nineteenth century been as good as it was bad, still I hope that the Irish people would not have relinquished their national claims—would not have sold their birthright for any mess of porridge; but they did not get the porridge; rather vinegar and gall had been the offering of England to the “sister” isle during sixty-nine years of “Union.” I have said that the seed sown by O’Connell and Young Ireland took root, so did the seed sown by England. Extremes meet. The agitator—the rebel—and the English Government combined to keep the spirit of nationality alive, and to make the demand for Home Rule inevitable and irresistible.

It was on May 19th, 1870, that the Home Rule Association was founded. It was no wonder after seventy years of the Union that failed that the following resolution should have been passed:

“That it is the opinion of this meeting that the true remedy for the evils of Ireland is the establishment of an Irish Parliament with full control over our domestic affairs.”

The objects of the Association were then set forth.

“To obtain for our country the right and privilege of managing our own affairs by a Parliament assembled in Ireland, composed of Her Majesty, the Sovereign, and her successors, and the Lords and Commons of Ireland.

“To secure for that Parliament, under a federal arrangement, the right of legislating for, and regulating all matters relating to the internal affairs of Ireland, and control over Irish resources and expenditure, subject to the obligation of contributing our just proportion of the Imperial expenditure; [leaving to] an Imperial Parliament the power of dealing with all questions affecting the Imperial Crown and Government, legislation regarding the Colonies and other dependencies of the Crown, the relations of the United Empire with foreign States, and all matters appertaining to the defence and stability of the Empire at large....”

At the General Election of 1874, 59 Home Rulers were returned to Parliament. At the election of 1880 the number was increased to 61. At the election of 1885 it was increased to 85, at which figure it stands to-day.

On June 30th, 1874, a motion by Isaac Butt for an enquiry into the subject of Home Rule was defeated in the House of Commons by 458 votes to 61. Nineteen years afterwards a Bill to establish a Parliament and an Executive in Dublin for the management of Irish Affairs was carried through the House of Commons by the Government of Mr. Gladstone. On the retirement of Mr. Gladstone from public life Home Rule received a set back in England, but to-day it holds the field once more.

If the Land Act of 1870 had been a success instead of a failure it could not have checked the flowing tide. It was in 1871 that Mr. Lecky wrote: “The sentiment of nationality lies at the root of Irish discontent.” Ten years earlier Goldwin Smith used the following remarkable language:

“The real root of Irish disaffection is the want of national institutions, of a national capital, of any objects of national reverence and attachment, and, consequently, of anything deserving to be called national life. The greatness of England is nothing to the Irish. Her history is nothing, or worse. The success of Irishmen in London consoles the Irish no more than the success of Italian adventurers in foreign countries (which was very remarkable) consoled the Italian people. The drawing off of Irish talent, in fact, turns to an additional grievance in their mind. Dublin is a modern Tara; a Metropolis from which the glory has departed; and the Vice-Royalty, though it pleases some of the tradesmen, fails altogether to satisfy the people. ’In Ireland we can make no appeal to patriotism; we can have no patriotic sentiments in our school books, no patriotic emblems in our schools, because in Ireland everything patriotic is rebellious.’ These were the words uttered in my hearing, not by a complaining demagogue, but by a desponding statesman.”

Between 1861 and 1871 the tide of nationality was rising. Fenianism diverted it in the direction of separation. Isaac Butt brought it back to the channel of legislative autonomy. The failure of the Land Act of 1870, the refusal of Parliament to amend it, the renewal of Coercion, the political excitement caused by Fenianism and the definite demand for Home Rule, swelled the tide and gave it fresh force. All the Land Acts passed between 1881 and 1909 have not changed the current of public feeling. Home Rule has not been killed by kindness.

The class which long refused to remove Irish material grievances, now say, that, since some of those grievances have been remedied, the Irish ought to abandon the demand for Home Rule. John Stuart Mill warned the class in question many years ago that if the removal of material grievances were delayed, the time might come when the fight would be for an idea, and that then the Irish problem would be more formidable than ever. The fight to-day is for an idea—the idea of nationality—and English Unionist statesmen do not apparently understand it:

“Alas for the self-complacent ignorance of irresponsible rulers, be they monarchs, classes, or nations! If there is anything sadder than the calamity itself, it is the unmistakable sincerity and good faith with which numbers of Englishmen confess themselves incapable of comprehending it. They know not that the disaffection which neither has nor needs any other motive than aversion to the rulers, is the climax to a long growth of disaffection arising from causes that might have been removed. What seems to them the causelessness of the Irish repugnance to our rule, is the proof that they have almost let pass the last opportunity they are ever likely to have of setting it right. They have allowed what once was indignation against particular wrongs, to harden into a passionate determination to be no longer ruled on any terms by those to whom they ascribe all their evils.”(157)

Englishmen thoroughly appreciate the idea of nationality except when it applies to Ireland.

Mr. Redmond has been recently censured because he said, in effect, that material prosperity is not everything. Yet what did Mr. Disraeli say in his inaugural address to the University of Glasgow in 1873:

“It is not true that physical happiness is the highest happiness; it is not true that physical happiness is a principle on which you can build up a flourishing and enduring commonwealth. A civilised community must rest on a large realised capital of thought and sentiment; there must be a reserved fund of public morality to draw upon in the exigencies of national life. Society has a soul as well as a body, the traditions of a nation are part of its existence. Its valour and its discipline, its religious faith, its venerable laws, its science and erudition, its poetry, its art, its eloquence and its scholarship, are as much portions of its existence as its agriculture, its commerce, and its engineering skill. Nay, I would go further, I would say that without these qualities, material excellence cannot be attained.”

That is the true doctrine. The spirit of nationality is the spirit of life. Material progress itself springs from national freedom.

XIII.—The History Of Devolution. BY THE EARL OF DUNRAVEN

Before attempting to sketch the history of devolution in connection with Ireland, two somewhat remarkable facts should be mentioned. A widespread impression appears to exist that devolution as a means for solving the Irish political problem is a modern invention, and that I am, in a large measure, responsible for its introduction. I must in honesty disclaim the honour. There is nothing new either in the expression or in its application to Ireland. The term has been freely used by many statesmen, and, as I think I can demonstrate, the advocacy of a scheme of Devolution for Ireland has not been confined to any one of the two great political parties of the State.

The second remarkable fact in connection with devolution, in its latest expression, is the hostile attitude assumed towards it by the Nationalist party. That the programme, modest as it was, published by the Irish Reform Association in 1904 should have been assailed by many Unionists was natural enough, but that any Nationalists should have denounced it with equal or greater bitterness is very difficult to account for. The wiser spirits welcomed the movement. The leader of the party—Mr. John Redmond—alluding to us in America, said: “With these men with us Home Rule may come at any moment,” and the Convention of the United Irish League of America spoke of our action as “a victory unparalleled in the whole history of moral warfare.” But Mr. John Dillon and Mr. Michael Davitt took a very different view and condemned us in no measured terms. Mr. Davitt at Clonmacnoise on September 4th, 1904, said: “If we are foolish enough to be wiled by Lord Dunraven and Mr. George Wyndham, who is possibly behind this wooden-horse stratagem, we will richly merit the contempt of our race and friends everywhere for so abject a surrender of the National Movement,” and at Enniscorthy, far from agreeing with Mr. Redmond that our assistance was of the greatest value to the cause of Home Rule, he declared that: “No party or leader can consent to accept the Dunraven substitute without betraying a national trust.” Mr. Dillon at Sligo accused devolution of being a scheme to “break National unity in Ireland and to block the advance of the Nationalist cause.”

Unfortunately these sentiments prevailed, and every effort was made to discredit and obstruct the movement. The attitude adopted towards devolution is natural on the part of anyone whose aim is separation; but, failing that, can be accounted for only by the animosity displayed by the inner group of the party to any expression of opinion, unauthorised by their official stamp. Devolution was anathematised simply because it was suggested as a method of political reform by persons who did not necessarily recognise the infallibility of the Party. It is impossible to believe that by any contortion of thought the theory was really looked upon as a cunningly constructed device for countering, or in some way undermining, Home Rule, for whatever opinion might be held about the personal honesty of myself and those associated with me, very little examination into the question would have sufficed to dispel that delusion. Home Rule up to a point necessarily implies devolution. Devolution is up to a point the same thing as Home Rule. The difference lies in this. Home Rule may be held to mean, has been held to mean, and is now by some held to mean, repeal of the union and separation. Devolution means, and can only mean, as applicable to the existing state of things—the delegation by the one existing authority—the Imperial Parliament—of power to a Parliament or body—call it what you will—created to exercise the power delegated to it. The term of necessity implies supremacy and subordinacy. Devolution may be confined to administration, as for instance in the abortive Irish Councils Bill of 1907; or to legislative functions conferring a status analogous to that of Grattan’s Parliament, which while enjoying full legislative power exercised practically no executive authority whatever; or it may embrace all the functions of government. The devolution may be large or small, confined or comprehensive. There is no limit save one to the delegating power of the central authority. It can confer whatever legislative and executive functions it pleases, but it cannot divest itself of its power of resumption, and it must remain supreme.

It will be seen therefore that devolution does not connote separation. It is incompatible with repeal, but it is compatible with—it is in fact indistinguishable from, any conception of Home Rule that acknowledges the supremacy of the Imperial Parliament. It is applicable to propositions of reform however small or however large. The modest little Councils Bill already alluded to proceeded by devolution. Complete reconstruction of the United Kingdom on federal lines can be accomplished only by devolution, for to commence operations by restoring Wales to the position she occupied in 1284, and Scotland and Ireland to the status they respectively held in 1707 and 1800, and then to invite them to enter a federal union would be an idea worthy of the pen of a Lewis Carroll in a sort of political “Alice in Wonderland.” Ireland’s political problem can be solved only in one of two ways. She must be granted either absolute independence tempered only by the precarious tie of a common Crown, or legislative and administrative powers delegated by a superior to a subordinate Parliament. By Home Rule separation may be meant. Separation would, in my opinion, be disastrous to Great Britain and fatal to Ireland. Devolution would be beneficial to both, and it is because the term draws a clear distinction between independence and any form of autonomy short of independence, that I prefer to call myself a Devolutionist rather than a Home Ruler.

That devolution to a local authority, or to local authorities, is the proper remedy for evils affecting Great Britain and Ireland, has been, for various reasons, admitted by responsible statesmen during the last fifty years. As long ago as 1865 the late Lord Salisbury, then Lord Robert Cecil, enquiring why “a people with so wonderful a soil, with such enormous resources (as the Irish) lagged so far behind the English in the race?” and examining critically all the usual reasons assigned, came to the conclusion that the cause was not to be found in any of them, but was to be sought for in the system of government. “I am afraid,” he said, “that the one thing which has been peculiar to Ireland has been the Government of England.” About the same time Lord Beaconsfield went so far as to indicate his desire for a federal arrangement. In a conversation with the American Ambassador in London in the early ’seventies he stated that: “If he had to deal with the situation he would propose to place Ireland in a similar position that New York held in the Federal Government.” In 1879 Mr. Gladstone advocated devolution, and devolution on federal lines, for the relief of Parliament.

“I desire,” he said, “I may almost say I intensely desire, to see Parliament relieved of some portion of its duties.... We have got an over-weighted Parliament; and if Ireland, or any other portion of the country, is desirous and able so to arrange its affairs that by taking the local part, or some local part, of its transactions off the hands of Parliament, it can liberate and strengthen Parliament for Imperial concerns, I say I will not only accord a reluctant assent, but I will give a zealous support to any such scheme.”

After indicating that the only limit he knew to the extension of local government was the limit imposed by the necessity of maintaining the supremacy of the Imperial Parliament, he went on to say:

“I will consent to give to Ireland no principle, nothing that is not upon equal terms offered to Scotland and to the different parts of the United Kingdom. But I say that the man who shall devise a machinery by which some portion of the excessive and impossible task now laid upon the House of Commons shall be shifted to the more free, and therefore more efficient, hands of secondary and local authorities, will confer a blessing upon his country that will entitle him to be reckoned among the prominent benefactors of the land.”

In 1885 Mr. Gladstone, the Duke of Devonshire and Mr. Chamberlain all spoke in favour of devolution. The “Radical programme,” published with a preface by Mr. Chamberlain, before the General Election of that year, advocated the creation, in addition to County Councils and District Councils, of elected National Councils for Ireland, Scotland, and (if desired by the Welsh) Wales, to take over part of the duties of the central administration, and also to deal with private Bills, but apparently not with other matters of legislation. The appointment of a Secretary for Scotland had not then been decided upon, but the subject was under discussion, and the writer doubtless expected that greater attention to Scotch legislation would be secured by that means. In the course of his argument he said:

“Before dealing, as we presently shall at some length, with the case of Ireland, it seems well to say a few words on another object of the first importance, which can be accomplished only in connection with some such extension of the principles of local government as we are now considering. Recent experience has made it perfectly clear that Parliamentary Government is being exposed to a strain for which it may prove unequal. The overwhelming work thrown upon the Imperial Legislature is too much for its machinery.... The Imperial evil is not less than the domestic. What, for instance, can be more deplorable than the systematic neglect at Westminster of Colonial and Indian topics of the highest moment? It is obvious that no mere extension of local government upon the ordinary and restricted lines will relieve the Parliamentary congestion which has long since become a national calamity.”

The late Duke of Devonshire expressed, for so cautious a man, pretty strong views on the imperfections of “Castle Government” and on the advantages of devolution. Speaking in Belfast on November 5th, 1885, he defended the Irish Government against accusations which he considered unjust, but added:

“At the same time, I am perfectly willing to admit that it is very possible and even probable, that the Irish Government as now constituted is not the best fitted in all respects to discharge, still less to undertake new and more important duties. I would not shrink from a great and bold reconstruction of Irish government....”

He explained that, in his opinion, considerable power ought to be left in the hands of the executive, but added:

“I would endeavour so to frame those powers as to make them capable of relaxation, perhaps ultimately of relinquishment, in response to any proof we may receive from the Irish people of their fitness for self-government, their fitness for the assumption of those responsibilities.”

Later in the same year, Mr. Gladstone, in his address to the electors of Midlothian, used the word “devolution” as, I believe, for the first time in connection with the Parliamentary problem due to the over-pressure of work. He said:

“It has gratified me to find abundant proof that the country was, and is, fully alive to the vital importance of devolution.... The task of the House of Commons in our time has habitually exceeded what had ever been imposed upon a legislative body in the whole history of the world.... I desire to point out the three cardinal points of the question. First, the congestion of business, now notorious and inveterate, degrades the House of Commons by placing it at the mercy of those among its members who seek for notoriety by obstructing business, instead of pursuing the more honourable road to reputation by useful service, or of those who, with more semblance of warrant, seek to cripple the action of the House of Commons in order to force the acceptance of their own political projects. Secondly, it disappoints, irritates, and injures the country by the suspension of useful legislation. And lastly, and perhaps worst of all, it defeats the fundamental rule of our Parliamentary system—that the majority shall prevail.... This country will not, in the full sense, be a self-governing country until the machinery of the House of Commons is amended, and its procedure reformed.”

It is possible that Mr. Gladstone had in his mind reform of procedure of the nature of devolution to bodies within the House of Commons such as Grand Committees; but in view of his former utterances it is probable that he foresaw the necessity for devolution on a larger scale.

Mr. Chamberlain continued, even during the Home Rule controversy, faithful in his advocacy of devolution. In a manifesto to his supporters, issued on July 11th, 1886, he appealed to the moderate opinion in Great Britain for a “delegation not a surrender of power,” on the part of the Imperial Parliament. He outlined his political aims in the following succinct statement:

The objects to be kept in view are:

(1) To relieve the Imperial Parliament by devolution of Irish local business, and to set it free for other and more important work.

(2) To secure the free representation of Irish opinion in all matters of purely Irish concern.

(3) To offer to Irishmen a fair field for legitimate local ambition and patriotism, and to bring back the attention of the Irish people, now diverted to a barren conflict in the Imperial Parliament, to the practical consideration of their own wants and necessities.

And, lastly, by removing all unnecessary interference with Irish Government on the part of Great Britain, to diminish the causes of irritation and the opportunity of collision.

Mr. Chamberlain was acutely aware of the intimate connection between political and agrarian reform, and outlined a general constructive policy which was adopted up to a point later on by the Unionist party under the inspiration of Mr. George Wyndham:

“It is clear,” said Mr. Chamberlain, “that suggested land reform must precede the political change; and until the long-standing quarrel between land-owners and land-occupiers has been compounded, it will not be safe to trust the latter with full control over the property of the former.... But, assuming that the social war which now exists in Ireland were terminated by a reasonable settlement, there are strong reasons for desiring, on the one hand, to relieve the Imperial Parliament of some of the constantly increasing burden of its local work, and, on the other hand, to open up to Irishmen in their own country a larger field of local ambition, together with greater liberty of action and greater personal responsibility.”

The Duke of Devonshire also expressed himself in favour of devolution, provided that “the powers which may be conferred on local bodies should be delegated—not surrendered—by Parliament”; that “the subjects to be delegated should be clearly defined; and the right of Parliament to control and revise the action of legislative or administrative authorities should be quite clearly reserved”; but he urged that “the administration of justice ought to remain in the hands of an authority which is responsible to Parliament.”

As recently as April, 1893, in the course of an article in The Nineteenth Century Mr. Chamberlain stated that “every Liberal Unionist will readily agree” with a desire “to give to Ireland the management of such of its affairs as can be handed over to an Irish Assembly without any risk or danger to this country, and, I hope that I may add, without the loss of honour that would be involved if the property and the liberties of all Her Majesty’s subjects were not fully safeguarded.” It is evident that the Liberal Unionist seceders drew a sharp distinction between separation and devolution. They objected to Mr. Gladstone’s Bills because rightly or wrongly they were convinced that they involved separation; but while opposing them on that ground they held fast to their belief in the efficacy of devolution.

After 1893 devolution was little heard of, but about ten years later the theory was revived in the movement with which I became associated. This modern suggestion of devolution was an offspring of the Conference on the land question which was held during the winter of 1902. That Conference produced a profound impression not only on the individuals composing it, but also, with a few exceptions of a retrogressive or perverted type, upon the classes represented, and consequently upon the whole community. The land had been for generations, and for centuries, the cause of bitter strife. The parties represented—indeed some of the individuals representing them had come straight out of the firing line to confer upon a question bristling with difficulties and overlain with passion and prejudice. The Landlords’ Convention not unnaturally laughed to scorn the idea of a settlement or even of amicable discussion; but they were wrong—prejudice and passion were put aside and the difficulties were overcome.

The Land Conference—an inspiration of the inarticulate moderate opinion existing in Ireland—proved that frank and honest discussion between Irishmen holding opposing views could be productive of good results, and it naturally occurred to many of those interested that the tolerance, good feeling and good sense displayed in settling so vexed a question might be utilised to find a solution for other problems, social, economic and political, presenting difficulties of a less formidable character.

On March 3rd, 1903, five members of the Land Conference Committee issued a circular stating that it was “now becoming evident that only in a reasonable system of devolution of legislative powers is to be found the solution of the problem that demands such urgent consideration. In no other way can Parliament be relieved from the ever-increasing strain of public business or the legitimate aspirations of Ireland for some definite form of self-government be met.”

The idea was a good one, but somewhat premature. The Land Conference Committee having been appointed for a definite purpose—the settlement of the land question, which had not then been fulfilled, had no authority to deal with any other matter. All men’s minds were still occupied with the consideration of the land purchase problem, and obviously the moment was not suitable for a further step forward. The matter was therefore allowed to drop; but in the summer of 1904, the way for the new—but yet old—policy seemed open. The Land Conference had fulfilled its purpose. The Committee was about to dissolve, and it occurred to some of us that a meeting should be held in Dublin with a view to inaugurating a general policy for the betterment of Ireland. In preparation for the meeting I sketched out roughly what I thought our objects should be, and among them was a larger control for Ireland over her local affairs. The Committee met on August 25th, and two resolutions were passed, one dissolving the Committee and another forming the Irish Reform Association. We then set to work to consider a programme, and on August 26th we adopted the following as setting forth the objects of the Association:

“Believing, as we do, that the prosperity of the people of Ireland, the development of the resources of the country, and the satisfactory settlement of the land and other questions, depend upon the pursuance of a policy of conciliation and goodwill and of reform, we desire to do everything in our power to promote a union of all moderate and progressive opinion, irrespective of creed or class; to discourage sectarian strife and class animosities from whatever source arising; to co-operate in re-creating and promoting industrial enterprises; and to advocate all practical measures of reform.

“While firmly maintaining that the parliamentary union between Great Britain and Ireland is essential to the political stability of the Empire, and to the prosperity of the two islands, we believe that such union is compatible with the devolution to Ireland of a larger measure of local government than she now possesses.

“We consider that this devolution, while avoiding matters of Imperial concern, and subjects of common interest to the Kingdom as a whole, would be beneficial to Ireland, and would relieve the Imperial Parliament of a mass of business with which it cannot now deal satisfactorily, and which occupies its time to the detriment of much more important concerns. In particular, we consider the present system of financial administration to be wasteful and inappreciative of the needs of the country.

“We think it possible to devise a system of Irish finance whereby the expenditure could be conducted in a more efficient and economic manner, and whereby the sources of revenue might be expanded. We believe that a remedy for the present unsatisfactory system can be found in such a decentralisation or localisation of Irish finance as will secure to its administration the application of local knowledge, interest and ability, without in any way sacrificing the ultimate control over the estimates presented, or in respect of the audit of money expended, at present possessed by the Imperial Parliament. All moneys derived from administrative reform, together with whatever proportion of the general revenue is allocated to Irish purposes, should be administered subject to the above conditions.

“We think that the time has come to extend to Ireland the system of Private Bill Legislation which has been so successfully worked in Scotland, with such modifications as Scotch experience may suggest, as may be necessary to meet the requirements of this country.

“We are of opinion that a settlement of the question of higher education is urgently needed, and that the whole system of education in this country requires remodelling and co-ordinating.

“We desire to do all in our power to further the policy of land purchase in the spirit of, and on the general lines laid down in, the Land Conference Report.

“We consider that suitable provision for the housing of the labouring classes is of the utmost importance, and we shall be prepared to co-operate in any practical proposals having the betterment of this class in view.

“Among many other problems already existing, or which may arise in the future, the above-mentioned appear to us to comprise those most deserving of immediate attention, and which afford the most reasonable prospect of attaining practical results; towards their solution we earnestly invite the co-operation of all Irishmen who have the highest interests of their country at heart.”

The programme was, as will be seen, socially and economically a comprehensive one; but, so far as political reform was concerned, limited to the devolution of administrative functions and reform of Private Bill procedure.

Shortly afterwards we explained our views more in detail, and made a further suggestion in recommending a delegation, not only of administrative, but also of legislative functions to the Irish body. On this point, and after giving our reasons for desiring a Private Bill Procedure Act for Ireland, we said:

“... But the disabilities under which Ireland labours are not confined to Private Bill procedure. The problems that affect her well-being, the peculiarities of her position and requirements are such that similarity of treatment does not always involve equal justice ... under existing circumstances the special needs of Ireland do not, and cannot receive, adequate attention. Sufficient relief cannot, in our opinion, be afforded by mere amendment in the Standing Orders of the House of Commons. Some delegation of authority is necessary. We believe that power to deal with much of the business relating to Irish affairs which Parliament is at present unable to cope with, might, with perfect safety and with advantage both to Ireland and Parliament, be delegated to an Irish body to be constituted for the purpose.... Parliament should take power to refer to the Statutory Body not only business connected with Private Bill Legislation, but also such other matters as in its wisdom it may deem suitable for reference, under prescribed conditions. The experience gained by this method of ad hoc reference would materially assist Parliament in the ultimate grouping into distinct classes of matters to be referred to the Statutory Body.”

The document is far too long to quote in full. We dealt critically with the Irish problem as it presented itself to us then, and concluded with a recommendation which, if it had been acted upon, would by now have borne fruit in the shape of information of great value, to the public.

“... We do not consider it now opportune,” we said, “to make more definite proposals on the points herein raised. We are prepared to inquire fully into them if the Association so desire, but we submit that inquiry can be best conducted by means of a Royal Commission, and that the proper function of this Association is to place its opinions and propositions before such a Commission. We therefore recommend the Association to use its best endeavours to secure the appointment of a Commission, and to instruct this or some other Committee to prepare a detailed report for its consideration, with a view to placing the same in evidence before the Commission....”

In preparing this second programme we had the invaluable assistance of Sir Antony MacDonnell (now Lord MacDonnell of Swynford) who occupied the position of Under-Secretary, but on somewhat peculiar terms. Our proposals, which are to be found in full in “The Outlook in Ireland,” published for me by Mr. John Murray in 1907, may be considered as cramped and limited in character, but the circumstances in which we found ourselves must be considered. We had to deal with existing conditions. A Unionist administration was in power. Home Rule was in abeyance, by many looked upon as dead and decently buried out of sight for ever. But the Chief Secretary and Under-Secretary were pledged to a policy of administrative and economic reform, and the latter was known to be in favour of some modification of the terms of the legislative union.

It is not necessary to re-open the controversy as to the connivance of the Unionist party, or any of its members, with the early work of myself and others.(158) No ministerial or official comment was made on our first programme published on August 31st, 1904. Mr. Wyndham was away at the time and in his absence I consulted with the Permanent Under-Secretary for Ireland, a proceeding which I felt sure, would meet with the Chief Secretary’s approval. The Unionist Lord-Lieutenant, the Earl of Dudley, was also cognisant of the movement. The second programme was published on September 26th of that year, and on the following day a letter from Mr. Wyndham commenting upon it appeared in The Times. After criticising our proposals he said “without reserve or qualification that the Unionist Government is opposed to the multiplication of legislative bodies within the United Kingdom,” and declared that such of our “aspirations” as were “unimpeachable” were “prejudiced and not enhanced when they are confused with any plan, however tentative, for the multiplication of legislative assemblies within the limits of the United Kingdom.” Mr. George Wyndham, in order not to embarrass his party, resigned his office, but Lord Dudley remained Lord-Lieutenant after Mr. Walter Long had become Chief Secretary. In some later correspondence, published in the spring of 1906, with Sir Edward Carson, Lord Dudley after relinquishing his office stated:

“(1) That though I fully explained to the late Prime Minister the nature of my connection with what you describe as Sir A. MacDonnell’s Home Rule scheme, he never conveyed to me any intimation that he or the Government disapproved, strongly or otherwise, of my conduct, though, of course, I can well believe that you and a few other Ministers disapproved not only of the devolution proposals, but also of any attempt at governing Ireland in sympathy with Irish ideas.

“(2) That I was never asked for and never gave any assurance that it was no longer my intention to act in a manner at variance with my position as a Unionist Lord-Lieutenant. It was not my opinion then, nor is it now, that I ever so acted, and I do not consider that my knowledge of the devolution proposal, still less my conviction that Ireland should be governed according to Irish ideas, is inconsistent with the position which I occupied.”

Devolution held the field when a Liberal administration came into power in 1906 and found expression in the Councils Bill. That Bill practically gave to an Irish body control over the great spending departments. It embodied devolution on a large scale, but entirely confined to administration. The Liberal party had passed a self-denying ordinance in respect to Home Rule while still in opposition. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, speaking at Stirling on November 23rd, 1905, said it was “his desire to see the effective management of Irish affairs in the hands of a representative Irish authority”; but he advised Irish Nationalists thankfully to take “an instalment of representative control” ... “or any administrative improvement” ... “provided it was consistent, and led up to their larger policy.” We have it on the authority of Mr. T. P. O’Connor that this declaration “was all that the Irish Nationalist party could have expected at that moment, and it enabled them to give their full support at the elections to the Liberal party”; and, in alluding to the private breakfast-table conference between himself, a friend and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, he informs us that “the exchange of views was brief, for there was complete agreement as to both policy and tactics.” Mr. Redmond also, speaking at Motherwell a couple of days after the Stirling speech, announced his readiness to accept any concession “which would shorten and smooth the way to Home Rule.”

Notwithstanding these plain declarations Mr. Redmond, having accepted the Councils Bill in the House of Commons, moved its rejection at the National Convention and endeavoured to justify his action at the expense of devolutionists by protesting “that the responsibility for this Bill largely rests upon those who first encouraged this idea of devolution”—a protest in which Mr. T. P. O’Connor joined him. The truth is that in their Councils Bill the Government went in principle as far as they could under the circumstances. The idea that they, or the Irish Reform Association in general, and I myself in particular, were actuated by a desire to shelve Home Rule by substituting a measure of administrative reform, is pre-eminently absurd. The tactics pursued by the Nationalist party towards the Irish Reform Association and the Government were most unwise. The Association would, had it received the support it deserved, have certainly organised and rendered articulate a body of moderate opinion strong enough to neutralise any immoderate demonstration against the principle of Home Rule on religious, racial, or social grounds. Had the Councils Bill been amended and accepted by Ireland, and, as is probable, had it been passed into law, Ireland would have had an opportunity, which she would have availed herself of, of proving her aptitude to manage her own affairs, and she would be now in a position of inestimable advantage to her. But neither I nor the Reform Association considered the Bill as satisfying Ireland’s reasonable demands. We looked upon it as valuable in itself pro tanto and as the honest effort of a Government with self-imposed limits to do justice to Ireland. The Association having considered the matter, passed and published a series of resolutions which space forbids me from quoting in full. To summarise, we criticised the limited transfer of departmental authority, and considered the financial proposals of the Bill insufficient. We regretted “that the Bill entirely excludes consideration of any powers of a legislative character.” But, as we thought the Bill constituted an advance towards necessary reforms and was capable of amendment in Committee, we expressed our regret at its summary rejection by the National Convention.

Such is the story of the devolution movement in its modern expression. Devolution is an elastic though not a vague term. As I have already said, it is incompatible with repeal of the Union. It predicates a union of some sort—connection with a superior delegating authority, but under that union and subject to that authority its powers of expansion are unlimited. If I may be allowed to quote from myself, an evil habit, I thus defined my position in 1907. I then declared it was:

“... my ambition to see:—

“(1) Cordial, honest co-operation among Irishmen for their country’s good. A true, living sense of Irish nationality is necessary. Ireland united can accomplish anything in reason.

“(2) The exercise of moderation and common-sense on the part of Irishmen.

“(3) The creation of friendly, fraternal relations between Great Britain and Ireland on both sides—‘let the dead bury their dead.’

“(4) Recognition by Ireland of: (a) Her Imperial mission, her share in the larger nationality covered by the Flag, and her consequent duties and responsibilities; and (b) of the political necessities of Great Britain.

“(5) Recognition by Great Britain of: (a) Irish nationality; and (b) of the economic and social requirements of Ireland, and of her just claim for exceptional treatment.”

and I concluded by saying:

“... My political creed is clear and simple. One Parliament is my centre; its ultimate effective supremacy is my circumference; but, emanating from that centre, and within that circumscribing limit, I desire to see the largest possible freedom of action and self-governing power delegated to Ireland.”

That was the opinion I then held and, in its general principles, that is the opinion I hold now. I have endeavoured to obtain such a measure of devolution as was at the time practical of attainment. My ideal is devolution on federal lines—that is to say, devolution of a character as nearly analogous as circumstances permit, to such an arrangement as would be come to between co-ordinate legislatures federating for their mutual advantages.

It has been necessary to recall the public declarations of statesmen of the Victorian period in order to get a true conception of the devolution movement in proper perspective. Among English statesmen of the front rank we find Lord Beaconsfield, Lord Salisbury, the Duke of Devonshire, Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Gladstone all admitting the great fact that both for British and for Irish purposes, some scheme of devolution was necessary. It would be easy to multiply instances and to give quotations in profusion, but I have said enough to show that for the last half century statesmen have, for various reasons, advocated devolution. Upon some the necessity has been impressed by deliberate obstruction in the House of Commons, others have been actuated by a desire to relieve congestion and to restore dignity and efficiency to the Commons House of Parliament. Upon others again the conviction has been forced that, under the system created by the Act of Union, Ireland cannot be well governed or contented; and a few have foreseen that both for domestic and Imperial purposes reconstruction on federal lines is desirable. Yet, in spite of this remarkable expression of opinion, nothing has been done, though the necessity for action has become more and more urgent with every passing year, and though many of the objections felt in former days can no longer be entertained. The doubts felt by the Duke of Devonshire as to the fitness of the Irish people to exercise self-governing power have been dispelled by experience of the working of the Act of 1898. The settlement of the land question rightly deemed by Mr. Chamberlain an essential preliminary to, or accompaniment of, political reform, has been half accomplished under the Act of 1903, and can be fully accomplished by reverting to the principles of that Act.

Many attempts have been made to reform procedure within the House of Commons and all of them have proved inadequate. Owing to an actual increase of business, and to the growing complexity of domestic affairs, Parliament is over-burdened with work to a far greater extent to-day than it was in the seventies and eighties. Since those days the idea of union on federal lines in the Mother Country, as not only desirable in her interest, but as also indicating the path to some larger form of union, has become prevalent. It has become more and more evident that some scheme of devolution is necessary to enable the Parliamentary machine to deal with the great industrial questions that perplex us, and to give adequate consideration to the problems of Imperial policy which press for consideration. Under these circumstances it is indeed extraordinary that this great question has not been settled in the only way by which, in my humble opinion, it can be settled satisfactorily and permanently, namely, by consent of both the great parties in the State; and it is passing strange to see the leaders of one of the great parties, despite the opinions of their predecessors in title, taking up an irreconcilable attitude towards devolution of any kind. It would be most interesting, but impossible, within the scope of this article to consider how far contemporaneous events in Ireland, faulty tactics on the part of Irish politicians, and the exigencies of party political warfare are respectively chargeable with this lamentable legislative default. The fact is the question has never been considered on its merits. The party system is probably the principal offender, but impatience on the part of the Irish people, vagueness in the demands put forward by their leaders, inconvenient alliances, vacillating counsels, a short-sighted policy, and mistaken tactics are much to blame.

It is a curious circumstance in the historical development of this policy, that Devolutionists in going forward have come back to the standpoint of the greatest leader the Tory party ever had. Speaking in the House of Commons in 1844, Mr. Disraeli is reported in Hansard as saying:

“I always thought that the greatest cause of misery in Ireland was identity of institutions with England. It has become a great historical aphorism that Ireland is to be the great difficulty of the Minister. Now this is an opinion in which I never shared. I never believed that Ireland would be a great difficulty, because I felt certain that a Minister of great ability and of great power would, when he found himself at the head of a great majority, settle that question. What, then, is the duty of the English Minister? To effect by his policy all those changes which a revolution would do by force. That is the Irish question in its integrity. It is quite evident that to effect this we must have an Executive in Ireland which shall bear a much nearer relation to the leading parties and characters of the country than it does at present.”

These principles Mr. Disraeli declared to be “Tory principles, the national principles of the democracy of England.” When a quarter of a century later, and holding a most responsible position, he was challenged in the House of Commons as to this statement of his views, he still declared that: “in my historical conscience the sentiment of that speech was right.”