A Leap in the Dark Part 10

[130] 'The crime of the Land League was a trifle compared to the crime of the landlords.'--Mr. s.e.xton, April 20, 1893, _Times Parliamentary Debates_, p. 525.

[131] Bryce, _American Commonwealth_ (1st ed.), ii. pp. 190, 191.

[132] Compare _ibid_. ii. p. 618.

[133] 'Carnot me dit avec cette niaiserie que les democrates honnetes ne manquent guere de meler a leur vertu: "Croyez-moi, mon cher collegue, il faut toujours se fier au peuple." Je me rappelle que je lui repondis a.s.sez brusquement: "Eh! que ne me disiez-vous cela la veille du 15 mai?"'--_Souvenirs de Alexis de Tocqueville_, p. 196.

CHAPTER V

THE PATH OF SAFETY

We stand on the brink of a precipice.[134] To say that Englishmen are asked to take a leap in the dark is far to understate the peril of the moment. We are asked to leave an arduous but well-known road, and to spring down an unfathomed ravine filled with rocks, on any one of which we may be dashed to pieces.

The very excess of the peril hides its existence from ordinary citizens.

Mr. Gladstone, they argue, is a wise man and a good man, his colleagues are partisans, they are not conspirators; it is incredible that they should recommend a measure fraught with ruin to England. But the matter is intelligible enough. Mr. Gladstone's weakness, no less than his strength, has always lain in his temporary but exclusive preoccupation with some one dominant idea. The one notion which possesses his mind--to judge from his public conduct and speeches--is that at any cost Home Rule, that is, an Irish Executive and an Irish Parliament, must be conceded to Ireland. Enthusiasm, pride, ambition, all the motives, good and bad, which can influence a statesman, urge him to achieve this one object. If he succeeds his political career is crowned with victory, if not with final triumph; if he fails his whole course during the last seven years turns out an error. But it has long been manifest that only with the greatest difficulty can English electors be persuaded to accept Home Rule. Hence it has been found essential that the principles of the measure should not be known before the time for pa.s.sing it into law.

Hence the ill-starred avoidance of discussion. Hence the ultimate framing of a scheme which is made to pa.s.s, but is not made to work, and which probably enough does not represent the real wishes or convictions of any one statesman. Where is the Minister who will tell us that this particular Government of Ireland Bill is according to his judgment--I will not say in its details, but in each and all of its leading principles--the best const.i.tution which can be framed for determining the relations between England and Ireland? This Minister has not appeared--I doubt whether he exists. The Bill may be a model of artful provision for conciliating the prejudices or soothing the fears of English electors, but it is not a well-digested const.i.tution. It is inferior to the Home Rule Bill of 1886. Another consequence of the circ.u.mstances under which the Bill has been framed is that its authors themselves have never had the benefit to be derived from the mature discussion of its principles. Mr. Gladstone himself cannot say what are and what are not the fundamental ideas of his scheme. He obviously held, at any rate when the Bill was introduced, that the presence of the Irish members at Westminster was a detail, whereas it is in reality the fact which governs the character of the new const.i.tution. To imply that such a matter can be treated as subsidiary is, in the eyes of any student of const.i.tutions, as ridiculous as it would seem to Mr. Gladstone for a Chancellor of the Exchequer, on introducing his budget, to a.s.sert that, whether he maintained or did not maintain the income tax, was an organic detail which did not fundamentally affect his financial proposals. The Ministry are as much at sea as their chief; nor is this wonderful. There are two things of which English statesmen have had little experience.

The one is a revolutionary movement, the other is the construction of a const.i.tution. But the Home Rule Bill is at once the effect and the sign of a revolutionary movement, and the task in which the Gladstonians are engaged is the formation of a new const.i.tution. Blind leaders are leading a blind people, and our blind leaders, some of whom care more for Radical supremacy in England than for Imperial supremacy in Ireland, are like many other men of our time, the slaves of phrases, such as 'trust in the people,' which pa.s.s muster for principles. If the blind lead the blind, what wonder if they stumble over a precipice?

The peril in which the country stands is concealed from us by a curious reaction of opinion. Good political inst.i.tutions, it was at one time held, were the cause of a nation's happiness, and England, it was firmly believed, owed her prosperity wholly to her const.i.tution. A century of revolutions has taught us all that a good form of government cannot of itself save a state from ruin, and many of us have come to think that forms of government are nothing, and that no const.i.tutional changes can impair the strength of England. No delusion however is more patent or more noxious. Never was a country richer in the elements of strength than were the Thirteen Colonies when their independence was acknowledged by England. Yet the Confederation by the vices of its const.i.tution filled the colonies with discord, and made them both weak at home and contemptible abroad, whilst the creation of the United States restored them to peace and opened for them the road to greatness. The predominance for more than fifty years of the Slave Power in the politics of the American Union, the struggle measured by centuries through which at last the Protestant and progressive Cantons of Switzerland a.s.serted their rightful supremacy over the Catholic and unprogressive Cantons of Switzerland, the weakness of Prussia when, not much more than forty[135] years back, she could hardly maintain her rights and her dignity against Austria, the cla.s.sical instance of Germany, which though possessed of every source of power lay for generations at the mercy of France, mainly on account of vicious political inst.i.tutions, are proofs, if evidence were wanting, of the capacity of ill-designed const.i.tutions to hamper the action and threaten the prosperity of great nations. A const.i.tution in truth is a national garb. A good const.i.tution will not make a weak country strong, but an unsuitable const.i.tution may reduce a strong country to feebleness. A weakling does not become a strong man by putting on armour, but a giant can derive no advantage from his strength if once he be got by fraud or force into a strait waistcoat.

Strength, it is true, will in the long run a.s.sert itself. The artificial supremacy of Ireland, or of a faction supported by Irish votes, will not last for ever; probably it will not last long. If the new const.i.tution prove unbearable by England it will not be borne; it will be overthrown or evaded. Far am I from a.s.serting that the breach or evasion will, when it shall occur, be justifiable. Englishmen's ideas of good faith are strict, but they are narrow. One main reason for dreading the new const.i.tution is that it may try beyond measure the patience and the honesty of England. If, for instance, Ulster should resist the legal authority of the Parliament at Dublin, there may arise one of those terrible periods in which the observation of pledged faith seems inconsistent with the natural dictates of honour and humanity, and weak concession at the present moment will, at such a crisis, be found to have contained among its other perils the danger lest England, when at last she re-a.s.serts her power in Ireland, should not re-establish her justice.

Where then lies the path of safety? The road is difficult, but it is clearly marked; it is at any rate to be found, not by any exercise of subtlety or of extraordinary acuteness, but by obeying the plain dictates of common sense and sound public morality. The characteristics of Unionist policy must be seriousness, simplicity, and reliance upon an appeal to the nation.

Seriousness is essential.

The need of the time is to impress on the ma.s.s of the people the intense gravity of the crisis. Far too much was said before the general election about the weaknesses and the inconsistencies of the Gladstonians, and far too little about the causes of their strength and the absolute necessity for arduous efforts to defeat the Separatists at the polling-booths. The error must not be repeated.

The people must be told, as they may be told with absolute truth, that the fate of England is in question, and that nothing but the efforts of every Unionist throughout the land can save the country from destruction. The contest has, without either party being aware of the change, shifted its character since 1886. Then the names of Unionists and Separatists expressed the whole difference between the opponents and supporters of the Home Rule Bill. The Gladstonians for the most part meant the Bill to affect, as far as possible, the condition of Ireland alone. They did not mean to change the const.i.tution of the United Kingdom. It is now plain, as has been shown throughout these pages, that the measure of so-called Home Rule is a new const.i.tution for the whole United Kingdom. In 1886 the Gladstonians _bona fide_ intended to close the period of agitation. In 1893 many Gladstonians see in Home Rule for Ireland only the first step towards an extended scheme of federalism.

In 1886 no Gladstonian had palliated crime or oppression, no Gladstonian statesman had discovered that boycotting was nothing but exclusive dealing, no Gladstonian Chancellor had made light of conspiracy. All this is changed. Alliance with revolutionists or conspirators has imbued respectable English statesmen with revolutionary doctrines and revolutionary sentiment. The difference between Unionist and Separatist remains, but it is merged in the wider difference between Const.i.tutionalists and Revolutionists. The question at issue is not merely, though this is serious enough, whether the Act of Union shall be repealed or relaxed, but whether the United Kingdom is morally a nation, and whether as a nation it has a right to insist upon the supreme authority belonging to the majority of its citizens. A similar question was some thirty-two years ago put to the people of the United States; it was decided by the arbitrament of battle.

The terrible calamity of an appeal to the test of force Englishmen may avoid, but if it is to be avoided the national rights of the whole people of the United Kingdom must be a.s.serted as strenuously by their votes as the rights of the citizens of the United States were vindicated by their arms. The people of England again must be solemnly warned that errors in policy or acts of injustice may s.n.a.t.c.h from us the power of determining a political controversy at the ballot-box instead of on the battle-field. It is folly to raise cases on the const.i.tution; it is always of the most doubtful prudence to handle the casuistry of politics. Nothing will tempt me to discuss in these pages what are the ethical limits to the exercise of const.i.tutionally unlimited sovereignty, or at what point legal oppression justifies armed resistance. Two considerations must at this crisis be kept in mind. The one is that, until oppression is actually committed, the maintenance of order is the duty of every citizen, and, like most political duties, is also a matter of the most obvious expediency; the other is that the compulsion of loyal citizens to forgo the direct protection of the government whose sovereignty they admit, and to accept the rule of a government whose moral claim to their allegiance they deny, is a proceeding of the grossest injustice. Let the people of England also be solemnly warned that the Gladstonian policy of 1893 repeats the essential error of the condemned policy of Protestant ascendency.

Gladstonians hold that the democracy of England may ally itself with the democracy of Ireland, and may treat lightly the rights and the wishes of a Protestant and Conservative minority. In bygone times the aristocratic and Protestant government of England allied itself with the Protestant and aristocratic government of Ireland, and held light the rights and the wishes of the Catholic majority. Each policy labours under the same defect. The enforced supremacy of a cla.s.s, be it a minority or a majority, is opposed to the equitable principle of the supremacy of the whole nation. There is no reason to suppose that Catholic ascendency will be found more tolerable than was Protestant ascendency.

The policy of Unionism should be marked by simplicity.

The Unionist leaders have a clear though a difficult duty to perform.

Their one immediate function is resistance to a dangerous revolution.

Logically and politically, there was a good deal to be said for the deliberate refusal to discuss, or to vote upon, any of the details of the Home Rule Bill. There is always a danger lest the attempt to amend a radically and essentially vicious measure should promote the delusion that it is amendable. And any success in debate would be dearly purchased if it led the electors to suppose that the Government of Ireland Bill, which in fact embodies a policy, so fundamentally perverse that no alteration of details can render it tolerable, is a measure which, though faulty in its execution, is sound in principle. The Unionists leaders, however, whom we can absolutely trust, have decided that abstention from debate would be an error. As far as the matter is to be looked at from a parliamentary point of view their judgment is decisive, and since the policy of combating the Bill point by point has been adopted it should be carried out, as it is being carried out, with the utmost stringency. Minute discussion of the clauses of the Bill is elaborate instruction for the ma.s.s of the nation.

To the cry of obstruction no heed whatever need be paid. As long as there is real discussion obstruction becomes, when the matter in debate is the formation of a new const.i.tution for the United Kingdom, an impossibility. The business needs the most careful consideration.

Ministers themselves are uncertain as to what are the essential principles of their own scheme. Every detail involves a principle, and in a Bill where clearness is of vital importance, every clause involves an ambiguity. Each part moreover of the new const.i.tution must be considered with regard to the rest, and the expression of different views as to the meaning of the Bill is of itself of utility, when it is of the greatest importance that Englishmen and Irishmen, Conservatives and Radicals, should be agreed as to the meaning of the new Fundamental Law. When, in short, a const.i.tution for the country is being drawn up, no discussion which is rational can be obstructive. If a week or a fortnight of parliamentary time is expended in defining the meaning of the supreme authority of Parliament, or in deciding whether the Irish delegacy is or is not to be retained at Westminster, not a moment too much is devoted to points of such transcendent importance. 'But the debate,' it is urged, 'will at this rate last for months.' Why not? 'No other Bills,' it is added, 'can be pa.s.sed.' What Bills, I answer, ought to be pa.s.sed whilst the const.i.tution of England is undergoing fundamental alteration? 'But the principles of the measure,' it is objected, 'might have been discussed and settled during the last seven years.' So, I reply, they might, if it had pleased the Gladstonians either to produce their Bill or to announce its general principles.

Their silence was politic; it won them a majority at the general election, but you cannot from the nature of things combine the advantages both of reticence and of outspokenness. Silence may have been justified as a piece of clever party tactics; it is a very different question whether the concealment of seven years has turned out high statesmanship. Gladstonians, like other men, cannot, as the saying goes, have their cake and eat it. They have had the advantages, they are now paying the inevitable price of reserve. Unionists in any case are bound to turn this invaluable time to account. Discussion of the const.i.tution is the education of the people.

In order, however, that this political training may be effective, our parliamentary teachers must take care that the public are not confused by the prominence necessarily given to details. Minute criticism of the Bill is important, but at the present moment it is important only as enforcing the radical vice of its main principles. No effort must be spared to keep the mind of the nation well fixed upon these principles.

The surrender by the British Parliament and the British Government of all effective part in the government of Ireland, the ambiguities of such a term as 'Imperial supremacy' and all that these ambiguities involve, the inadequacy and the futility of the Restrictions, the errors and impolicy of the financial arrangements, above all the injustice to England and the injury to Ireland of retaining, under a system of Home Rule, even a single Irish representative at Westminster, these broad considerations are the things which should be pressed, and pressed home, upon the electors. Minor matters are good topics for parliamentary discussion, but should not receive a confusing and illusory prominence.

The electors again must be made to feel that it is the essential principle of Home Rule, the setting up of an Irish Government and an Irish Parliament, to which Unionists are opposed. The least appearance of concession to Home Rulers, or any action which gives increased currency to the delusion, certainly cherished by some moderate Gladstonians, that Home Rule can be identified with or cut down to extended local self-government,[136] will be fatal to the cause of Unionism. The concession to Ireland of a petty, paltry, peddling legislature, which dare hardly call itself a Parliament, and is officially designated say as a national council, combined with some faint imitation of a Cabinet, called say a committee, would disappoint and irritate Home Rulers; it would cheat their hopes, but it would afford them the means of gaining their end. It would not give a.s.surance to Unionists, it would not be a triumph of Unionist policy, it would rather be the destruction of Unionism. The one course of safety is to take care that at the next general election the country has laid before it for determination a clear and unmistakable issue. The question for every elector to answer must be reducible to the form Aye or No; will you, or will you not, repeal the Union and establish an Irish Executive and an Irish Parliament in Dublin? If the question be so raised Unionists have no reason to fear an answer.

The policy of Unionism has always relied on an appeal to the nation.

The one desire of Unionists has always been to fight their opponents on the clear unmistakable issue of Home Rule. The policy of Separatists has been to keep Home Rule in the background whilst making its meaning indefinite, and to mix up all the multifarious issues raised by the Newcastle programme, as well as many others, with the one essential question whether we should or should not repeal or modify the Act of Union.

To their policy of appeal to the people the Unionists will, of course, adhere. The House of Lords will, it may be presumed, as a matter not so much of right as of obvious duty, reject the present Home Rule Bill, so as to refer to the electors of the United Kingdom the question whether we shall, or shall not, have a new const.i.tution. Even if such a reference to the electors should result in a Gladstonian majority, it is still possible that a further dissolution might be necessary. The majority for Home Rule might be much reduced. I doubt whether Mr.

Gladstone himself would maintain that with a majority say of ten or twenty, a Minister would be morally justified in attempting a fundamental change in the const.i.tution. As to such speculative matters there is no need to say anything. It is worth while, however, to repeat a statement which cannot be too often insisted upon, that the most important function of the House of Lords at the present day is to take care that no fundamental change in the const.i.tution takes place which has not received the undoubted a.s.sent of the nation. The peers are more and more clearly awakening to the knowledge that under the circ.u.mstances of modern public life this protection of the rights of the nation, which is in complete conformity with democratic principle, is the supreme duty of the Upper House.

The question, however, to be considered at the moment is whether for the performance of this duty something more may not be required than the compelling of a dissolution. This something more is a direct appeal to the electors in the nature of a Referendum. The question is still a theoretical one; it cannot (unfortunately as it will appear to many persons) be raised during the debates on the Bill in the House of Commons. When the Bill reaches the House of Lords, it will, we may suppose, be rejected, and all that a Unionist can wish for is, first, that before actual rejection its general principles should be subjected to complete discussion, and what is in this case the same thing, exposure, and next that the House of Lords should, if necessary, take steps which can easily be imagined, for providing that the rejection of the Bill shall entail a dissolution. If, however, the dissolution should result in a Gladstonian majority, and should lead to another Home Rule Bill being sent up to their lordships, the question then arises as to the Referendum. My own conviction, which has been before laid before the public, is that the Lords would do well if they appended to any Home Rule Bill which they were prepared to accept a clause which might make its coming into force depend upon its, within a limited time, receiving the approval of the majority of the electors of the United Kingdom. And in the particular case of the Home Rule Bill it is fair, for reasons already stated,[137] that the Bill before becoming law should receive the a.s.sent of a majority of the electors both of Great Britain and of Ireland. This course, it may be said, is unconst.i.tutional. This word has no terrors for me; it means no more than unusual, and the inst.i.tution of a Referendum would simply mean the formal acknowledgment of the doctrine which lies at the basis of English democracy--that a law depends at bottom for its enactment on the a.s.sent of the nation as represented by the electors. At a time when the true danger is that sections or cla.s.ses should arrogate to themselves authority which belongs to the State, it is an advantage to bring into prominence the sovereignty of the nation.

The present is exactly a crisis at which we may override the practices to save the principles of the const.i.tution. The most forcible objection which can be made is that you ought not for the sake of avoiding a particular evil to introduce an innovation of dubious expediency. The objection itself is valid, but it is in the present instance inapplicable. My conviction is that the introduction of the Referendum, in one shape or another in respect of large const.i.tutional changes, would be a distinct benefit to the country. It affords the one available check on the recklessness of party leaders; for the check is at once effective and in perfect conformity with democratic principle and sentiment. A second objection is that a Referendum renders any law which obtains the approval of the electors more difficult of alteration than an ordinary Act of Parliament. The allegation is true, but it really tells greatly in favour of an ultimate reference to the people of any Home Rule Bill pa.s.sed in a Parliament. If such a Bill becomes law, it ought to be a law not admitting of easy repeal. No doubt reaction may be justifiable, but reaction is a great evil, and the Referendum puts a check as well on reaction as on hasty innovation. In any case the time has arrived when Unionist statesmen should consider the expediency of announcing that no Home Rule Bill will finally be accepted until it has undergone a reference to and received the approval of the electors. On no better issue could battle be joined with revolutionists than on the question whether the people of the United Kingdom should or should not be allowed to express their will. Unionists have every reason to feel confidence in their cause; their only policy, their one path of safety is to make it, as they can do, absolutely plain that they rely upon justice, and that they appeal from parties to the nation.

We have now before us the essential features of the new const.i.tution framed by Gladstonians for the whole United Kingdom. We know its inherent defects and inconsistencies; we have considered what may be said on its behalf, or rather of the policy of which it is the outcome.

The proposed change in our form of government touches the very foundations of the State, and deeply, though indirectly, threatens the unity of the whole Empire. Never surely since the day when the National a.s.sembly of France drew up that Const.i.tution of 1791, which built to be eternal endured for not quite a year, has an ancient nation been so strangely invited to accept an untried and unknown polity.

The position indeed of the French const.i.tution-makers was in some respects stronger and more defensible than the position of our English innovators. The members of the National a.s.sembly knew precisely what they were doing. They meant to alter the fundamental inst.i.tutions of France. A change moreover in the whole scheme of French government was an admitted necessity. France might be uncertain as to the working of the new const.i.tution, but France was absolutely certain that the _ancien regime_ was detestable. Individuals or nations may wisely risk much when they are escaping from a social condition which they detest, they may know that an innovation is in itself of doubtful expediency, yet may consider any alleged reform worth a trial when no change can be a change for the worse. In the France of 1791 confidence in the future meant abhorrence of the past.

The authors of our new const.i.tution can hardly be called the designers of their own handiwork; they have been the sport of accident. Their intention, or rather the intention of their leader, was in 1886 merely to grant some sort of Parliamentary independence to Ireland. The resolution to concede Home Rule was sudden; it may have been taken up without due weighing of its consequences. It has a.s.suredly led to unexpected results. The statesmen who meant merely to give Home Rule to Ireland have stumbled into the making of a new const.i.tution for the United Kingdom. What wonder that their workmanship betrays its accidental origin. It has no coherence, no consistency; nothing is called by its right name, and words are throughout subst.i.tuted for facts; the new Parliament of Ireland is denied its proper t.i.tle; the supremacy of the Imperial Parliament is nominally saved, and is really destroyed; and the very statesmen who proclaim the supremacy of the Imperial Parliament refuse to a.s.sert the subordination of the Irish Parliament. The authors of the const.i.tution are at sea as to its leading principles, and its most essential provision they deem an organic detail, which may at any moment be modified or removed. The whole thing is an incongruous patchwork affair, made up of shreds and tatters torn from the inst.i.tutions of other lands. It is as inconsistent with the proposed and rejected Const.i.tution of 1886 as with the existing Const.i.tution of England. While however our const.i.tution-makers tender for the acceptance of the nation a scheme of fundamental change, whereof the effect is uncertain, conjectural, and perilous, and the permanence is not guaranteed by its authors, Englishmen are well satisfied with their old const.i.tution; they may desire its partial modification or expansion, they have never even contemplated its overthrow. Politicians, in short, who meant to initiate a moderate reform, are pressing a revolutionary change on a country which neither needs nor desires a revolution; they propose to get rid of grave, though temporary, inconveniences by a permanent alteration of which no man can calculate the results in our whole system of government. Never before was a nation so strangely advised by such bewildered counsellors to take for so little apparent reason so desperate a leap in the dark.

FOOTNOTES:

[134] The whole gist of this chapter applies to the state of England in 1911 with greater force than even to its condition in 1893. Home Rule will be carried, if at all, only by a House of Commons freed from the authority of the House of Lords, and from the need of an appeal to the people.

[135] Now sixty-one years.

[136] If any one wishes to see the difference between local self-government and Home Rule, let him compare the Bill for the extension of self-government in Ireland, brought in by the late Ministry, with the Home Rule Bill. The Local Government Bill went very far, some persons may even maintain dangerously far, in creating and in extending the authority of local bodies in Ireland. But it was not Home Rule, or anything like Home Rule. The most extended Local Government Bill and the most restricted Home Rule Bill differ fundamentally in principle. The one in effect denies, the other in effect concedes, a separate national government to Ireland.

[137] See pp. 119-121, _ante_.

APPENDIX

GOVERNMENT OF IRELAND BILL

ARRANGEMENT OF CLAUSES

_Legislative Authority_ Clause.

1. Establishment of Irish Legislature.

2. Powers of Irish Legislature.

3. Exceptions from powers of Irish Legislature.

4. Restrictions on powers of Irish Legislature.

_Executive Authority_ 5. Executive power in Ireland.