Irish History And The Irish Question Part 7

Bartholomew must surely have made all hearers but the Irish smile. Upon this subject the speaker raves, and generally he forgets that the mission of reconciliation which he had undertaken would not be furthered by opening old sores. The examples of Austria-Hungary and the connection of Norway with Sweden, cited by him as proofs that a conjunction of two Parliaments worked well, would be generally taken not as encouragements but as warnings. The case of Norway and Sweden has since become a warning indeed. The intricate machinery by which the speaker proposes to regulate the action of his two Parliaments has too much the look of a speculative structure elaborated without reference to the peculiar state of Ireland and the forces to be encountered there. Of the force of the Catholic priesthood, nothing is said. In fact, the political architect knew little of the country with which he was dealing, having been in it only for three weeks, and then not at a good point of view.

Thus the Irish question, which the greatest among the public men of his time had failed to settle, was once more thrown into the cauldron of party strife.

XV

Looking back on these most melancholy annals, we shall find that for their general sadness Nature is as much to be blamed as man. She did well in placing at the side of a country rich in coal and minerals, destined to be manufacturing, one of pasture to supply food. She made a fatal mistake in peopling them with different and uncongenial races. War, in the age of war, and conquest of the weaker by the stronger were sure to be the result. For the form in which conquest came, the Papacy has partly to answer. It used the sword of the Norman adventurer in this case, as it had in the case of England, to crush religious independence and force all churches to bow to its own dominion, while, as the wails of its own partisans in the Becket controversy show, it was itself unworthy of the sovereignty of Christendom. Of this Catholics are bound to take note, as they are of the fact that the Papacy at a later day, by inciting the Irish to rebellion on its own account, brought upon them no small portion of their woes. The Norman conquest of England had incidentally the bad effect of connecting the English monarchy with dominion in France, and thus turning the forces of the English kings from Ireland, where they might have ended the agony, to a field where they were much worse than wasted. Things could not have taken a more unfortunate course than that of a colony of half-civilized conquerors carrying on war with barbarous tribes of a different race and tongue, yet without force to effect the conquest. The invasion of Edward Bruce, with which England had nothing to do, probably did further harm by breaking up whatever there was of Anglo-Norman order and turning barons into chiefs of Irish Septs. Then the Reformation, a European convulsion involving Ireland, and in the most unfortunate way, since it identified Protestantism with conquest, Catholicism with the struggle for independence, introduced another deadly source of strife, and made Ireland the point of danger to England in her desperate struggle for her own existence and the salvation of the Protestant cause. Otherwise it seems not impossible that the Tudor statesmen, with such a man as Burleigh at their head, might, as they desired, have effected a peaceful settlement. Civilization, not extermination, was their aim. The great Celtic rebellions of Shane O'Neil, Desmond, and Tyrone, the last two Catholic as well as Celtic, forced upon them the policy of extermination with all its horrors. The rising and ma.s.sacre of 1641 were the sequel. The vengeance of the victor and the transplantation of the vanquished to Connaught were in their turn the sequel of the rising and ma.s.sacre of 1641. Of these again the rebound was the Catholic rising of 1688, which, had it been successful, would have ended certainly in the dispossession, probably in the expulsion, possibly in the extermination, of the Protestants. English liberty and religion were at the same time threatened by an Irish Catholic force encamped at Hounslow. The Penal law was execrable; yet hardly more execrable than the Great Act of Attainder. In later days Castle government by corruption was vile; but it was the inevitable accompaniment of the const.i.tution of 1782, the work of Grattan and the Volunteers. Of the master evil of all, the state of the ma.s.ses of the Irish people, English protectionism must share the blame with the penal laws. But protectionism was then the delusion of the commercial world. Irish patriots were not free from it. To deal with peasant distress was the immediate duty of the Irish Parliament, which refused even to turn its eyes that way. Peasant distress, organized for rebellion by a revolutionary party at Belfast, itself deriving its inspiration from the American and French revolutions, produced the rising, ever to be accursed and deplored, of 1798.

Irish patriots are apt to talk of England as a single person or, rather, fiend, actuated in her dealings with Ireland by hatred and contempt.

England is a nation divided into parties and swayed by varying influences from time to time. The England of Peel and Gladstone is not the England of the Georges, the Stuarts, the Tudors, the Plantagenets, or responsible for the doings of those dynasties. In the evil days of her political history, England, if she oppressed Ireland, also suffered herself. The Liberal party in England did its best for Ireland, and if the Irish members had been what they ought to have been and done what they ought to have done, more rapid progress might have been made. As it was, Ireland shared the great measures of Parliamentary and munic.i.p.al reform which there had been little prospect of her achieving by herself. She received the boon of national and undenominational education about a generation before England, and but for the reactionary influence of her own priesthood would have received it in full measure. The same influence maimed as far as it could the undenominational colleges. Nothing could be more deplorable than the long series of coercion acts. But it was hardly to be expected that the English government should strike its flag to a.s.sa.s.sination and boycotting, or that the British nation would be moved to concession by the inroads of American conspirators combined with domestic rebellion. It was about 1866 that Guizot, talking of Ireland as he walked with an English guest, stopped in his walk and said with an emphatic gesture, "The conduct of England to Ireland for the last thirty years has been admirable." This, before disestablishment, was too strong, as the English guest remarked at the time; but as the judgment of a cool-headed foreign statesman, whose course had not been one of unbroken harmony with England, it was likely to be more just at least to the motives of England than the invectives of O'Connell.

Since the Union there has been no 1641, no 1688, no 1798. The two races and religions have lived generally at peace if not in concord with each other. The religious riots at Belfast are a very mitigated relic of the religious wars of former days. Reform, though its advance has been slow and fitful, has advanced. Within a generation from the date of the Union, Catholic Emanc.i.p.ation was carried. The t.i.the-proctor did not very long survive. Presently the State Church itself was abolished. Ireland shared with Great Britain Parliamentary reform, to which the Irish oligarchy could never have consented without political and social convulsion. Not long afterwards came national education, bestowed on Ireland before it was bestowed on England. None of these improvements would directly touch the agrarian sore, the malignity of which was increased by the growth of the Irish population under the reign of order, far beyond the power of the land to maintain it. But relief has been given to famine, and strenuous efforts have been made and are still being made to effect a radical cure.

Ireland has enjoyed free trade with Great Britain and with the whole British Empire. Everything has been open to Irish merit and industry.

Millions of Irish and their children have found homes in Britain and the colonies. To sever Ireland from Great Britain is still possible. To divide the Irish from the British is not possible. In both islands and in all the colonies the two races are now joined and cannot be put asunder.

Besides, as has already been said, we must always bear it in mind that we do not see the other side of Destiny's cards. Suppose Ireland had remained the land of the Septs, would her lot certainly have been more happy?

Neither at the time of the Norman Conquest nor afterwards do the Septs appear to have shown any tendency to a union such as would have given birth to a national polity and its attendant civilization. For aught we can see, they might have gone on indefinitely, like the clans of the Scottish Highlands, in a state of barbarous strife fatal to progress of every kind. Even their common interest in the struggle against the Anglo-Norman invader produced no general or permanent union. The Brehon law, which was their princ.i.p.al bond, had no executive force and was in itself barbarous, not distinguishing public from private wrong. The Septs warred upon each other not less savagely than the conqueror warred upon them all. If anything like union came at last, it was not political but religious, and brought with it a fatal share in the European war of religions. Nor were conquests other than Anglo-Norman impossible. From the Highlands and islands of Scotland came bodies of marauding adventurers which might have been reenforced, and, in the North at least, have prevailed. It is not certain that without the aid of John de Bermingham and his Anglo-Normans, the Septs would have got rid of Edward Bruce.

That the interest of Ireland should be regarded as subordinate to that of Great Britain was the principle on which British politicians acted in the days that are past. To the past this principle must now be and indeed has been decisively consigned. That union, to be good for either party, must be good for both, is the accepted basis of discussion. On the other hand, it is not to be a.s.sumed that the aspirations of Irish politicians naturally bent on carving out an independent field of action for themselves, are entirely free from the bias of personal ambition or identical with a dispa.s.sionate view of the interest of the Irish people.

Nor is it to be forgotten that Ulster is a part of Ireland.

There are two questions, perfectly distinct and calling for separate consideration, though they have become blended in the course and for the purposes of the political agitation. One is economical, the other political.

The economical question is whether Ireland can support her present population. Patriotic eloquence will not change her skies, or render it otherwise than cruel to induce her people to stay in a land in which they cannot make their bread. Instances there may be of barren soil made by the loving industry of the small owner fruitful and capable of supporting a large population; but the industry of the small owner, though it can improve the soil, cannot alter the skies. What is to be desired is a special report, calm and expert, upon this subject. Is Ireland generally capable of being turned with advantage into an arable country? Can wheat or grain of any kind be profitably raised there in face of the compet.i.tion of the great grain-growing countries such as that now opened, and bidding fair to be opened over a much larger area, in the Canadian Northwest? The small farmer to live must have something to sell. Is there reason to look in any other direction than farming for a speedy extension of Irish industries such as would provide bread sufficient for the population? Is the water-power of Ireland, now that electricity has been developed, likely to do what has been done for England by coal? Is the shipping trade, for which the Irishman has had little opportunity of showing a turn, likely to increase? These are questions which it is for economists, not for politicians or patriotic orators, to decide. It is said that there are tracts of land in Ireland still unoccupied and fit for occupation. If there are, the survey will show the fact. Land purchase by government subvention is a policy hardly to be pursued unless it is certain that its results will not presently be reversed by nature.

The worst part of emigration is that it carries away the pith and sinews of a nation, taking the strong and leaving the weak, the aged, and unsupported women. It is a pleasant proof, already noticed, of the warmth of the Irish heart that there has been less of solitary and more of family emigration in their case than in those of some other emigrating races.

After all, how has the earth been peopled, how have all the nations been formed but by migration?

To turn to the political question. The danger of insurrection has probably pa.s.sed away. Fenianism has been largely deprived of its trans-Atlantic base, and can no longer look confidently to American sympathy for support and supplies. The Irish vote has less power. Little at least was heard of it in the last presidential election. Yet the political question is still most serious, and presses urgently for settlement; a state of things largely due to the division of parties in the British government which showed its influence in the abandonment of the Crimes Act by the Salisbury administration; in the Maamtrasna debate; and in Mr. Gladstone's sudden coalition with Parnell; but above all in the votes of British members of the House of Commons for Mr. Gladstone's second Home Rule Bill, giving Ireland a Parliament of her own and representation in the British Parliament at the same time. Parliament still has in it a body of Irish members not only alien but hostile, avowing that their object is not to aid in deliberation but to coerce, playing upon the balance of parties for purposes of their own, degrading the a.s.sembly, and distracting the councils of the nation. Nor is the source of this evil confined to the const.i.tuencies of Ireland. There is in England and Scotland a large Irish population, which, as was seen in the election of 1885, obeys the voice of the Irish leaders and at their command votes inimically to the country in which it lives and earns its bread. In Ireland itself, moreover, the h.e.l.l-broth of agitation is kept constantly seething to the inevitable detriment of recuperative effort, which cannot do its full work without security for the future.

As the first step it should be calmly settled what are the specific grievances under which Ireland labours, and which the Imperial legislature cannot, but an Irish Parliament could, remove. Historic wrongs are past remedy. Ireland has more than her share of representation in Parliament.

She has no established Church. If her priesthood would let her, she would have a complete system of national education. Her land law is now far more favourable to the tenant than that of the other kingdoms, and she has been and still is receiving government subventions in aid of the tillers of her soil which English and Scotch tenants do not receive and which would cease if she became independent. Nothing is closed against her people. They have the markets of the whole Empire. All its offices, patronage, and services are perfectly open to them. So long as they will abstain from outrage and murder, they enjoy all the personal privileges of British freemen. It cannot be said that the law has been suspended for any purpose other than the repression of outrage. If the ordinary law and government were very bad, Ulster would hardly have prospered as it has done. If Castle government is the grievance, abolition of it was offered to Ireland long ago and was by her rejected. Let the existing grievances be specified, and let it be seen whether Imperial legislation is incapable of redressing them. The truth is that with the Irish leaders it has not been redress of particular wrongs and grievances or the introduction of practical improvements that has been the object of desire. Their aim has been to create a nationalist feeling which should end in political separation.

Such has been the constant tenor of their appeals to sentiment and the end to which their policy has really pointed.

Suppose Ireland severed from Great Britain, what would be her lot? She would then have to a.s.sume all the burdens and responsibilities of an independent nation, including military and naval defence, as well as the entire expense of a separate government. As she could not hope to vie in strength with her powerful neighbour, she would be at that neighbour's mercy; nor, considering the temper in which the parting would take place, would occasions for quarrel be unlikely to arise. Ireland might have to seek the protection and become the va.s.sal of some foreign power. Irish trade would no longer be free of British markets or of the markets of British dependencies. Irish labour would no longer be free of the British labour market. The Indian service and the Imperial services generally would be closed against Irishmen.

Nor would Ireland be entirely united in herself or perfectly set free from the hated British influence. She would still have in her the men of Ulster, Saxon and Protestant, antagonistic probably to the Catholic majority, and if they were pressed in the unequal conflict, stretching out their hands for aid to their fellow-Protestants and kinsmen in Great Britain.

A mere arm of the sea, such as that which divides Ireland from Great Britain, is surely not enough in these days of improved navigation, to form a bar to political union. The distance from London to Dublin is now practically far less than it was a century ago from London to Edinburgh.

Nor does there seem any reason why salt water should be fatal. The Ionian Islands are in the kingdom of Greece; so probably some day will be Crete.

If Ireland were detached from Great Britain, into what hands would she fall? The gentry would be extinguished. To excite popular hatred of them as landlords has been the constant aim of the Nationalist leaders. There would be a general repudiation of rent, which the Irish government and judiciary would lack the will, while the British government and judiciary would have lost the power, to prevent. The record of Irish landlordism is not bright. Absenteeism has been a great evil, though the estates of some absentees have been notably well managed. There have been hideously cruel evictions, especially it seems on the lands purchased by speculators under the Enc.u.mbered Estates Act. Landlordism, as mere drawing of rent, is an evil. It is not desirable that any man should own land as a non-resident or own more land than he can manage or superintend. The old feudal law attaching service to lordship of land was sound in principle.

But if the Irish gentry would accept that principle, be resident, look after their estates, and do their duty to their tenants, they would probably be accepted by their people as social leaders, and they might play that part with good effect. The life of the French peasant is not the acme either of civilization or of happiness, even though we may make some abatement from the picture presented by Zola in "La Terre." Unhappily the tendency, even in England, seems to be towards the detachment of the owner from his land and the abandonment on his part of every function save that of receiving the rent and spending it, perhaps in some pleasure city or abroad. The decadence of the agricultural interest in England is by some ascribed to this cause.

The gentry being no more, Catholic Ireland would at first fall into the hands of the priesthood. The moral character of the Irish priesthood in the opinion of impartial judges is high, as is that of the priesthood of French Canada. In both cases ecclesiastical influence is strong, and in both a population virtuous after the Catholic model is the result. The two are probably about the best things that the Roman Catholic Church has to show. But the Roman Catholic religion is mediaeval. The training of its ministers inevitably shuts out light which would be fatal to mediaeval belief. An Irish peasant lad, having been intellectually secluded for seven years at Maynooth, comes out proof against the intellectual influences and advancing science of his time. He is the mental liegeman and the preacher of the Syllabus, which anathematizes freedom of thought and claims for the Church dominion, not only over the soul but over the body, such as was hers in the Middle Ages. He laid his ban on the Queen's Colleges, and has discouraged and thwarted the extension of popular education. In regard to education and intelligence, he has been in Ireland what he has been in Spain and other countries subject to his sway. In the sphere of industry and commerce the influence has generally been the same.

The religious ideal of life with its Church festivals and Saints' Days has prevailed. In Ireland as in Canada the priest inculcates early marriages, the effects of which may be morally good but are economically perilous.

The excessive conversion of the fruits of industry to the unproductive purposes of the Church has already begun to call forth protests.

The power of the Roman Catholic priesthood would be encountered by the stalwart Protestantism of Ulster in the Parliamentary arena as it still is sometimes in the streets of Belfast. It might presently find itself encountered by another adversary, revolutionary Nationalism, the heir of that party of force which broke away from the leadership of O'Connell, the devout son of the Church, and was an object of well-founded suspicion and aversion to the hierarchy of his day. The affinity of this element is to the revolutionary party in other countries; and if, like the United Irishmen of Belfast, it has been willing to act with allies devoted to the Church, it is not itself devout, as the Church, if she comes to share power with it, may be led to feel.

The idea of unity of race as a basis of Irish nationality has little support. In the North there is a strong and masterful Saxon element. There must be a large Anglo-Saxon and English element in the old Pale. The men of Tipperary, though characteristically Irish, are believed to be descendants of Cromwellians. There is Huguenot blood.

The revival of Erse as a national language is surely a patriotic dream.

How is it possible to revive a language all but dead, with no valuable literature or wealth of printed books, in face of a language which has a grand literature, is spoken by all the educated cla.s.ses, indeed almost universally, in Ireland, and is necessary for intercourse with Great Britain. O'Connell, we are told, had no great sympathy with the revival of Irish archaeology, and no sympathy at all with the project of reviving the Irish language. He recognized the superior utility of the English tongue as the medium of all modern communication, and saw without regret the gradual disuse of Erse. Fancy and sentiment may prevail among a literary cla.s.s which nevertheless will hardly carry its patriotism so far as to darken its own mind by unlearning English.

"Ireland ought to be governed in accordance with Irish ideas." Such is the current saying, and it sounds wise. But statesmanship would hardly act upon it before taking measures to learn what ideas are peculiarly Irish and whether they are features of national character, innate and indelible, and not traces of historic accident or fancies instilled in the course of political agitation. The perpetuation of weaknesses accidentally contracted cannot be wise for man or nation. The political idea which seems most characteristic is the tendency to personal leadership rather than to self-government or const.i.tutional rule. But this has been common to all races in early times. It was fostered and prolonged by the circ.u.mstances of Irish history. It could hardly be p.r.o.nounced incapable of modification by familiarity with free inst.i.tutions.

What would be the political const.i.tution of an independent Ireland? How would its form be settled? The political training of the people generally since they came out of political thraldom has been agitation against government and law; their only notion of rule has been personal. Nor is a hierarchy friendly to political liberty. To set up a stable democracy in Ireland, if that is the aim of the revolutionary party, would surely be an arduous undertaking.

All who look coolly into the matter apart from faction and its necessities have p.r.o.nounced that the choice lies between separation and legislative union. Two Parliaments, two nations; so all wisdom says and so experience before the Union proved. The forces which under Grattan's const.i.tution held the two Parliaments together in strained and precarious fellowship, the nomination boroughs, the pension list, the sinecures, the peerages, the bishoprics, would no longer exist. What is even more important, there would no longer be an oligarchical and exclusionist Parliament in Ireland dependent on British support for its ascendency, perhaps even for the security of its lands. Antagonism would almost inevitably ensue; the more surely as the partners would set out with the embitterment of a divorce.

Nothing apparently could avert collision; the result of which would be repression, making the latter end worse than the first.

The proposal of federation is surely preposterous. It would be necessary first to cut the United Kingdom in two and create an Irish government in order that negotiations for a federal union might be set on foot. But how could there be a federation of two states, one of them enormously superior in power to the other? What sort of deliberative a.s.sembly would the federal council be?

Another plan is to form a federation of the four nationalities, as they are a.s.sumed to be, England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales; wrenching apart the members of a great nation which have long been united and cancelling the highest work of British statesmanship. Here again federation could not work. England being so much the predominant partner, the result would almost certainly be a perpetual league of the three minor powers against her domination. The federal system is applicable only to a group of tolerably equal States. The restoration of the Heptarchy with the addition of Scotland, divided into Highland and Lowland, and the four provinces of Ireland erected into States, would be a comparatively practicable system.

The present condition of the Federal system in the United States does not encourage experiments of that kind.

The mildest proposal of all is devolution; in other words, the concession to Ireland of a larger measure of local self-government. This probably would be readily granted to any extent compatible with supremacy of law and security of life and property, which no government without abdicating its plainest duty can forgo. Gradual extension of local self-government would not entail any acute crisis or bring on any party conflict. The Lord-lieutenancy, Parliament has already shown itself ready to abolish. It was in deference to the wish of Ireland that it has been retained. The only thing in the way of undue centralization of which, so far as the writer remembers, his Irish friends complained, was the necessity of carrying Irish causes to Westminster as the final court of appeal.

Whether concession on this point would be feasible it is for legal authorities to say.

However, it can hardly be doubted that in the course of this struggle a sentiment has been cultivated among the people of Ireland for which it is wise as well as kind in some way to provide satisfaction. The Irishman being of lively sensibility and impressible through sight has never seen the power which really governs him. A session or two of the Imperial Parliament held at Dublin for the settlement of Irish questions would probably have had a very good effect, but it was thought to entail too much inconvenience. Would there be any objection to empowering the Irish members of both Houses to sit annually at Dublin as a preparatory House of Irish legislation framing bills to be commended to Parliament? There would then be something in College Green. The experiment would involve none of the difficulties or perils of a statutory division of the powers of Parliament. It would be at first on the footing of an experiment, nor would it preclude further concessions if further concessions should be found needful.

With the question of national character, social or industrial, and its special requirements, I do not pretend to deal. It has been treated systematically, perhaps for the first time, by an excellent authority, Sir Horace Curzon Plunkett, in his "Ireland in the New Century." Of Irish character a part may be aboriginal and fundamental. A part probably is the result of historical accident more or less ingrained, and probably capable of modification. I am told that Irish character has been even acquiring a more serious cast since I watched the Tipperary steeplechases or stood on the fair-ground of Ballinasloe. Not a little, so far as the ma.s.ses are concerned, is probably the work of a priesthood strongly and inherently reactionary, which has exercised the same influence on the ideal of life, character, mind, and industry here as in other Catholic countries. Ireland is perhaps happy in having been cut off from the prodigious development of luxury and dissipation which, as social writers tell us, has been taking place on the other side of the Channel as well as from the domination of the stock-exchange. She may in this way become a saving element in the social character of the United Kingdom.

Is it vain to hope that for the settlement of a question so vital party may for one short hour suspend its war? What far-off object of aggrandizement can be half so important as a contented and loyal Ireland.

AN ACCOUNT OF THE IRISH LAND CODE

BY HUGH J. MCCANN, B.L.

The Irish landlord, poor as his circ.u.mstances were before the famine, was in many instances reduced to sorer straits after the terrible scourge had pa.s.sed away. The good landlord, anxious to do his duty by his tenants, helped them as far as his mortgages and other financial burdens would allow. The tyrannical one, regardless of the sufferings of his victims, sought to extract impossible rents from an unfortunate tenantry who had scarcely the means of subsistence. The Enc.u.mbered Estates Act, it was thought, would relieve the tension. It empowered a court specially const.i.tuted for the purpose to order the sale of estates enc.u.mbered with debt, on the pet.i.tion of any person sufficiently interested as owner or creditor.

Landlordism, it was thought, would, by this act, be relieved of much that made it tyrannical, even when it meant well. But the act was a failure. It was worse. It was the means of wrecking many a fortune, and driving many a proprietor to ruin. Men who, in hard times, were doing well for their tenants and their country under difficult circ.u.mstances were driven from the land.

The act came into operation towards the end of 1849. A wild rush was made by creditors to the court. Prices fell with amazing rapidity, and landed property became a drug in the market. Valuable properties failed to realize sufficient to meet the mortgages, and their owners were inevitably ruined.

A new cla.s.s of landlord now appeared on the scene in the person of the speculator, who bought up the bankrupt properties as they presented themselves. The new proprietors had nothing in common with their tenantry.

They knew little of their needs and requirements and cared less. They had but one interest and that was a commercial one. To make their properties realize a good dividend on their outlay was their one concern, and up went the rents accordingly. Such was the fate of the unfortunate tenants who were allowed to continue as tenants of the new proprietor. This was bad enough, but those that were given notice to quit were even more cruelly wronged. Compensation for wrongful disturbance was not recognized in Ireland in 1850, and tenant property amounting to three millions sterling was sold to pay the landlord's creditors.

Nothing could demonstrate more clearly how utterly rotten was the whole land system in Ireland at the time. Landlord and tenant alike were in a miserable plight. Rents fell heavily in arrear, and evictions were the order of the day. The landlord played the bold game, struck hard, and without mercy. The tenant sought protection in combination and conspiracy.

Such was the condition of Ireland when thoughtful men sought by legislation to cure the crying evils of the time. Many remedies were proposed between 1850 and 1860, but none of them reached the stage of legislative enactment. In the latter year, however, Cardwell made an attempt to place the law of landlord and tenant on a better footing.