Home Rule Part 10

The artificial stimulus given to agriculture by the French wars concealed for some years the greatness of the disaster. The population of Ireland continued to rise. The Irish landlords, indeed, had for the moment a strong motive to multiply their tenants, in the existence of the forty shilling freehold vote granted by the Irish Parliament.

Holdings were sub-divided, and the cultivation of the potato encouraged an even larger population on a lower level of subsistence. This prepared the way for the great catastrophe of the Irish famine in 1847. It was that famine which brought out fully, for the first time, the tremendous calamity inflicted on Ireland by the destruction of her Parliament.

For it was not that England showed any lack of sympathy in dealing with the Irish famine. It was indeed that event which finally converted Sir Robert Peel to the abolition of the Corn Laws, and, more even than the agitation of Richard Cobden or the speeches of John Bright, contributed to the final triumph of Free Trade. It was not want of sympathy that wrecked Ireland then. It was want of understanding. For it was only an Irish Government, living on the spot, and responsible to the people of Ireland itself, that could have risen to the great height of that tremendous emergency.

The monstrous human disaster that followed--the loss of 2,000,000 of population in twenty years--was the direct result of the destruction of all the means of prompt salvage and repair which could have been brought to bear only by a Home Rule Government.

During those calamitous decades another great evil emerged as a result of the Union. Many bad things have been said against the Irish land laws, and many of them are justified. But the Irish land laws in their old working were simply rather an exaggerated form of the very same laws that have survived in England right up to the present moment. Why is it that these laws proved intolerable in Ireland, and have yet survived up to the present moment in England? Simply because, after the pa.s.sing of the Act of Union, they were aggravated by the great and terrible social evil of Absenteeism.

Even those bad laws could be made to work as long as there was a human relationship between the landlords and their tenants. Up to 1830, at any rate, there was a strong motive for that relationship. The victory of Catholic emanc.i.p.ation was a colossal triumph for the genius of Daniel O'Connell. It removed one of the worst surviving religious injustices in this kingdom. But in Ireland it was a victory of the tenant over the landlord, and it was achieved by a new alliance between tenant and priest against the landlord. While giving emanc.i.p.ation to the Catholics, the Act of 1830 also raised the level of the franchise, and abolished the forty shilling freehold vote, thus removing the landlord's motive for preserving the small tenancies.

The result was that the Irish landlords as a cla.s.s--always, of course, with many conspicuous individual exceptions--entered from 1830 onwards upon a new career of hostility towards their tenants, amounting to little less than a pa.s.sion for revenge. Being, for the most part, both Protestant and Absentee, they lost all interest in their tenantry, except that of rent collectors. The Irish famine made matters far worse. For the famine deprived the Irish tenant, for the moment, of the power of paying rent. Not only so, but by reducing him to pauperism it turned him into a distinct and definite burden on the rates.

The Irish landlords then first conceived the idea that, by getting rid of the people, they could save their pockets. At the same time, they made the great discovery that beasts were more profitable than peasants. Hence the great clearances and evictions of the period between 1840-1870. Hence the cruel compulsory exodus of vast ma.s.ses of the people of Ireland to the sh.o.r.es of America. Hence, finally, the bitter cleavage between landlords and tenantry which brought the whole land system of Ireland crashing into ruin.

These disasters had one good effect. They roused the Irish people from their indifference. The bitter proofs of mis-government shown by the breakdown of their land system brought home to every cottager the need of a Home Rule Government. The great agitations for land reform and Home Rule went on side by side--sometimes taking a form of violence, but more and more of orderly const.i.tutional pressure--until in the seventies there emerged at Westminster a powerful Irish Party, too strong either for the neglect or the indifference of any British Government.

ENGLAND'S NEED

It was impossible, indeed, for Great Britain to be indifferent, for she had suffered almost as much as Ireland. The hostility of the Irish Party formed a perpetual source of danger to her Governments, both Liberal and Tory, and a chronic source of instability in her administration. The democratic movement in England was continually weakened by the necessity of keeping Ireland down. That necessity largely broke the strength of the great reform movement of the thirties. It destroyed Sir Robert Peel's Government in the forties. It broke down the strength of Mr. Gladstone's Government in the eighties.

Ireland and Irish affairs absorbed so much of the time of the British Parliament that the affairs of Great Britain herself were neglected.

The old free and easy ways of the British Parliament were brought to a summary close by the obstruction of the Irish Party in the eighties, and the modern rules of compartment closure and strict limitation of debate were forced upon the Mother of Parliaments.

It was these consequences, quite as much as the sufferings of Ireland, that gradually converted a great body of the British people to the cause of Home Rule. That process was going on throughout the seventies and the eighties, and was brought to a climax by the conversion of Mr.

Gladstone in 1886. Since then the cause which was so despised in the days of O'Connell has had one of the great English parties behind it, and has so steadily made its way in the favour of the British nation that it now stands on the threshold of accomplishment.

What, then, emerges from this survey? It is that in returning to Home Rule as the mode of governing Ireland we are simply going back to the old and traditional method of Irish rule. It is also that, on surveying the past, we find not merely that Home Rule has often saved Ireland, but that always the wider and the more generous the form of Home Rule the more it has helped Ireland. The wiser course of accepting Irish advice in Irish affairs has always turned the tide of disaster, and brought the hope of a new happiness for Ireland. Surely here we have a convincing proof that the logical consummation of this policy by the restoration of Home Rule is the only means of bringing back Ireland to a full and secure enjoyment of lasting well-being.

FOOTNOTES:

[65] For confirmation of this see Lecky's "Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland," Vol. I., p. 120.

[66] It is clear from Lecky's account that Lord Fitzwilliam's recall was due, not so much to any change of policy in London as to his action in dismissing Beresford, one of the most prominent figures of the Irish Protestant Party.

[67] There is a very close and minute account of the growth of Irish prosperity under the Grattan Parliament in O'Connell's great Repeal speeches to the British Parliament in 1834. Between 1782 and 1797 the consumption of coffee in Ireland went up by 600 per cent., the consumption of tea by 84 per cent., of tobacco by 100 per cent., and wine by 74 per cent. All these figures ran down rapidly after 1800.

[68] The Irish Parliament House, built in the eighteenth century, was, after the Act of Union, handed over to the Bank of Ireland. The House of Lords has been left intact, but special secret instructions were given that the Irish House of Commons should be divided into compartments in order that the memories of the Irish Parliament should be forgotten. Those instructions were carried out, and the Chamber of the Irish House of Commons ceased to exist.

HOME RULE IN THE WORLD

THE CASE FROM a.n.a.lOGY

"I wish the Irish were negroes, and then we should have an advocate in the Hon. Baronet. His erratic humanity wanders beyond the ocean, and visits the hot islands of the West Indies, and thus having discharged the duties of kindness there, it returns burning and desolating, to treat with indignity and to trample upon the people of Ireland."

O'CONNELL.

CHAPTER IX.

HOME RULE IN THE WORLD

"Ah!" but I shall be told by Unionist critics who have followed me so far, "but the tendency of the world at present is all towards great empires and away from little states. You are reversing the process."

This will probably be one of the most frequent arguments that we shall hear during the present discussions. We shall, perhaps, have thrown at our heads cases like the absorption of Persia by Russia, of Tripoli by Italy, of Morocco by France, and of the Congo by Germany.

If we are to argue the matter on those lines it will be fair to point out, on the other side, that during the last decade Norway has separated from Sweden, new provincial and state governments have been created in Canada and the United States, new self-governing powers have been given to Cuba and the Philippines by the Americans in faithful and loyal adherence to their word at the time of the Spanish-American war, and, even more recently, new powers have been given to Alsace and Lorraine by the German Empire.

So the argument might go on, to and fro, each party pelting one another with cases from other parts of the world. Perhaps at that point it might be well to remember the grave and wise warning given us by Lord Morley in his "Life of Gladstone"--that each case of political re-adjustment really stands by itself, and that often little light can be thrown, but rather darkness deepened, by studying too closely the a.n.a.logies from other communities.

Still, though the case of the relations between England and Ireland must always stand on its own merits, there are general tendencies in the world which come under law. There are certain lessons to be gathered from other countries which we should be unwise to ignore. The Greeks, who were great const.i.tution builders, amused themselves in their later period by making immense collections of political specimens from among the h.e.l.lenic States. Doubtless their politicians derived some advantage from this practice of their philosophers.

There are general tendencies, and those tendencies may be cla.s.sified under the two familiar heads of (1) the tendency towards unity and (2) the tendency towards division. These two tendencies are always going on side by side in various parts of the world. But the puzzling part of political study is that very often what seems a tendency towards unity conceals a tendency towards division, and that what seems a tendency towards division is really a tendency to unity.

THE BRITISH EMPIRE

Take, for instance, the famous case of the British Empire. Any superficial observer from another clime or another planet might conclude from reading the records, that the tendency within the British Empire during the last century lay toward division. He would find on looking the matter up in any book of reference that the British Empire now includes nearly thirty Parliaments.[69] He would discover that the powers of the central authority have been gradually waning until practically every great white community outside the United Kingdom has now complete control over its own local affairs. He might even be excused some astonishment if he discovered also that these communities placed heavy taxes on the imports of the mother country, and were in no degree restrained from doing so, and that there even existed a party in the home country who contended that that act of filial attention ought to be rewarded by special preferences to colonial imports at home.

Perhaps he would be most astonished when he discovered that these colonies were now engaged in raising their own navies and armies, which might possibly in the future be used for purposes independent of the central control.

Pursuing his enquiries, he would discover that this country of Great Britain had conducted at great cost of life and money, less than ten years ago, a war to prevent the separation and secession of one great white community--that of South Africa--and that, having carried that war to a successful conclusion, the central government had followed up that war by granting to that great white community a strong central local government, with complete control of its local affairs. "You talk about the tendency to unity," he would say, "but have we not here a clear instance of division?"

To all of which we should reply, and reply correctly--"Not at all! The secret of our Empire is that we have found unity in difference. We have achieved the miracle of combination by means of division of power."

We should probably have some difficulty in persuading him of this truth. He might be some Rip Van Winkle, who had gone to sleep during the War of American Independence, and still derived from those days his notions of the right principles of colonial government. But if he conducted his enquiries further he would end by being fully persuaded.

For what would he discover? He would find out that in spite of, or perhaps by means of, this principle of division the British Empire was now the most united Empire in the world. He would learn the amazing story, incredible to almost any other nation, of the great rally of colonial troops to the help of the Empire at the time of the Boer War.

He would read of the periodical Imperial Conferences at the Centre in London. He would learn of the new drawing together now going on both in regard to foreign policy and military strategy. He would contrast all this with the spirit of the American Colonies between 1776 and 1782. He would look back, perhaps, to the beginning of this new era of self-government, and recall the memory of Canada in rebellion, of Australia in a state of permanent quarrel with Downing Street, and of South Africa in perpetual, recurring, chronic confusion and disorder.

He would learn that before 1837 every white British colony was discontented,[70] and that now every colony was loyal. He would contrast these two pictures of Empire. Perhaps, then, he would realise that the true secret of the strength of the modern British Empire lay neither in militarism nor Imperialism, neither in swagger nor bounce nor boasting nor pride, but in the gradual development of that amazing policy of generosity and goodwill which is best typified in the phrase, "Home Rule."

It is Home Rule that has saved the British Empire up to the present. Is it not likely that it is Home Rule that will save her in the future?

"Ah! but"--again will come the cry of the critic of the narrow vision--"look at the South African Union. Is not that an instance of unionism as against Home Rule? Have we not there in this latest achievement a specimen of State authorities over-ruled by a central power?"

In answer to that cry, I turn to the eighty-fifth clause of the South African Act, 1909. In that clause I find the following powers reserved for the local authorities of Cape Colony, Natal, Transvaal, and the Orange River Colony:--

(1) Direct taxation within their provinces.