The Framework of Home Rule Part 9

In point of fact, Irish local authorities, under the circ.u.mstances, are wonderfully free from these evils, only another proof of the resilience and vitality of the country under persistent mismanagement. On the whole they bear comparison with British local authorities in thrift, purity, and efficiency. None of them has ever yet had a scandal like that of Poplar. All of them have shown sense and spirit in forwarding sanitation and technical education. They vary widely, of course, the lowest units in the scale being the least efficient, as in England. County Councils, for example, are better than Rural District Councils. On the other hand, Dublin Corporation, though not so bad as it is sometimes painted, occasionally sets a very bad example. The standard of efficiency is higher in the Protestant north than in the Catholic south, the standard of religious toleration lower. But at bottom it is not a question of theology, as every well-informed person knows, but a question of politics. The same causes that keep the landed gentry out of Parliament keep them, although not to the same degree, out of local politics.

Sometimes this is their own fault, for declining to take part in them; for many of the Protestant upper cla.s.s in Nationalist districts obtain election in spite of being Unionists. Tolerance is slowly growing in Nationalist, though not, it is to be feared, in Unionist, districts; again a quite intelligible fact.[58] But when all is said and done, it is an undeniable fact that Irish local authorities, especially those in the poverty-stricken west, where all social activities are more retrograde than elsewhere, are capable of great improvement, and that improvement can come only by allowing them to concentrate on local affairs, and obtain the co-operation of all cla.s.ses and religions. The very existence of a central Government of which Irishmen were proud would influence the tone and standard of all minor authorities to the bottom of the scale.

Meanwhile, obvious and urgent problems, which no Parliament but an Irish Parliament can deal with, cry aloud for settlement. The Poor Law, railways, arterial drainage, afforestation, are questions which I need only refer to by name, confining myself to the greater issues.

Education, primary and intermediate, is perhaps the greatest. The present system is almost universally condemned, and its bad results are recognized. It has got to be reformed. By no possibility can it be reformed so long as the Union lasts, not only because the Boards, National and Intermediate, which control education, are composed of unelected amateurs, but because there is no means of finding out what the national opinion is as to the course reform is to take. Meanwhile the children and the country suffer. The Intermediate Board is a purely examining and prize-giving body, and its system by general agreement is imperfect. In the National or Primary schools the percentage of average daily attendance (71.1 per cent.), though slowly improving, is still very bad.[59] Many of the school-houses are, in the words of the Commissioners, "mere hovels," unsanitary, leaky, ill-ventilated. The distribution of schools and funds is chaotic and wasteful. Out of 8,401 schools (in 1909-10)[60] nearly two hundred have an average daily attendance of less than fifteen pupils. In 1730 the number is less than thirty, and it is not only in spa.r.s.ely inhabited country districts, but in big towns, that the distribution is bad. The power of the Commissioners to stop the creation of unduly small schools, and even semi-bogus establishments which come into being in the great cities, is imperfect. Another example of the curious mixture of anarchy and despotism that the system of Irish government presents may be seen in the Annual Report of the Commissioners. With a mutinous audacity which would be laughable, if the case were one for laughing, the Commissioners openly rail at the Treasury for the parsimony of its grants, and, in order to stir its compa.s.sion, paint the condition of Irish education in black colours. Imagine the various Departmental Ministers in Great Britain publicly attacking in their Annual Reports the Cabinet of which they were members! The Treasury, needless to say, is not to blame. It pays out of the common Imperial purse all but a negligible fraction of the cost of primary education in Ireland. Nothing is raised by rates, and only 141,096 (in 1909-10) from voluntary and local sources, as compared with 1,688,547 from State grants. The Treasury has no guarantee that this money is well spent; on the contrary, it knows from the Reports of the Commissioners themselves that a great deal of it is very badly spent. The business is a comic opera, but it has a tragic significance for Ireland. Primary education is so bad that a great number of the pupils are absolutely unfit to receive the expensive and excellent technical instruction organized by the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction, and contributed to by the ratepayers. The Belfast Technical Inst.i.tute, for example, has to go outside its proper functions, and spend from its too small stock in providing introductory courses in elementary subjects, so as to equip children for the reception of higher knowledge.[61] All over the country the complaint is the same. No machinery whatever exists for co-ordinating primary, secondary, technical, and University education, and opportioning funds in an economical and profitable manner.

Religion is the immediate cause of the trouble; absence of popular control the fundamental cause. The national system of primary education, designed originally in 1831 to be undenominational, has become rigidly denominational. Out of 8,401 primary schools, 2,461 only are attended by both Protestants and Roman Catholics. The rest are of an exclusively sectarian character. Even the Protestants do not combine. The Church of Ireland, the Presbyterians, the Methodists, and other smaller denominations, frequently have small separate schools in the same parish. The management (save in the model schools, which are attended only by Protestants) is exclusively sectarian, the local clergyman, Roman Catholic, Church of Ireland, or Nonconformist having almost autocratic control over the school.

This education question has got to be thrashed out by a Home Ruled Ireland, and the sooner the better. After Home Rule the Treasury grant will stop, and Ireland will have to raise and apportion the funds herself, and set her house in order. At whatever sacrifice of religious scruples, and, it is needless to add that to the Roman Catholic hierarchy the sacrifice will be the greatest, the Irish people must control and finance its schools, whether through a central department alone, or through local authorities as well. There is no reason in the world why a compromise should not be arrived at which would secure vastly increased efficiency and leave the teaching of denominational religion uninjured. Other countries, where the same religions exist side by side, have attained that compromise. Ireland will be judged by her success in attaining it.

Another important question is the treatment of the Congested Districts.

More than a third of Ireland is now under the benevolent jurisdiction of a despotic Board.[62] So long as its funds are raised from general Imperial taxation, the inevitable tendency is to shirk the thorough discussion of this grave subject, to lay the responsibility on Great Britain, to acquiesce in a policy of extreme paternalism, and to appeal for higher and higher doles from the Treasury. This cannot go on.

Whoever, in the eyes of Divine Justice, was originally responsible for the condition of the submerged west, and for the ruin of the evicted tenants, Ireland, if she wants Home Rule, must shoulder the responsibility herself, and think out the whole question independently.

The Congested Districts Board has done, and continues to do, good work in the purchase and resettlement of estates; but even in this sphere there are wide differences of opinion as to the proper methods and policy to be employed, especially with regard to the division of gra.s.slands and the migration of landless men. Its other remedial work (part of which is now taken over by the Department of Agriculture under the Land Act of 1909), in encouraging fisheries, industries, and farm improvements out of State money, is open to criticism on the ground of its tendency to pauperize and weaken character. I do not care to p.r.o.nounce on the controversy, though I think that there is much to be said for the view that money is best spent by encouraging agricultural co-operation. Many able and distinguished men have devoted their minds to the subject, but it is plain that Ireland as a whole has not thought, and cannot think, the matter out in a responsible spirit, and that the only way of reaching a truly Irish decision is through an Irish Parliament, which both raises and votes money for the purpose.[63] The reinstatement of evicted tenants teems with practical difficulties which can only be solved in the same way. As long as Great Britain remains responsible, errors are liable to be made which one day may be deeply regretted.

The same observation applies to all future land legislation, not excepting Land Purchase, which I deal with fully in a later chapter.[64]

That great department of administration must, for financial reasons, be worked in harmonious consultation with the British Government; but it ought to be controlled by Ireland, and a free and normal outlet given to criticisms like those emanating from Mr. William O'Brien, whatever the intrinsic value of these criticisms. Purchase itself settles nothing beyond the bare ownership of the land. It leaves the distribution and use of the land, except in the "resettled" districts, where it was, with a third or a quarter of the holdings so small as to be cla.s.sed as "uneconomic." Ireland is not as yet awake to the possibilities of the silent revolution proceeding from the erection of a small peasant proprietorship. The sense of responsibility in these new proprietors will be quickened and the interests of the whole country forwarded by a National Parliament.

Temperance will never be tackled thoroughly but by an Irish Parliament.

All Irishmen are ashamed in their hearts of the encouragement given to drunkenness by the still grossly excessive number of licensed houses, which in 1909 was 22,591, and of the National Drink Bill, which in the same year was 13,310,469,[65] or 3 11d. per head of a population not rich in this world's goods. Temperance is not really a party or a sectarian question. All the Churches make n.o.ble efforts to forward reform, and in a rationally governed Ireland reform would be considered on its merits. At present it is inextricably mixed up with Nationalist and anti-Nationalist politics, and with irrelevant questions of Imperial taxation.

The latest examples of the embarra.s.sment into which Ireland without Home Rule is liable to drift from the absence of a formed public opinion and the means to give it effect, are the labour troubles and the National Insurance scheme. There are signs that English labour is thrusting forward Irish labour in advance of its own will and in advance of general Irish opinion. In all labour questions Ireland's position as an agricultural country is totally different from that of Great Britain.

The same legislation cannot be applicable to both. Ireland should frame her own. Under present conditions it is impossible to know the considered judgment of Ireland. There is certainly much opposition to Insurance, and if all Irishmen thoroughly realized that the scheme might complicate the finance of Home Rule and involve a greater financial dependence on Great Britain than exists even at present, they would study it with still more critical eyes,[66] as they would certainly have studied the Old Age Pensions scheme with more critical eyes.

Here I am led naturally to the great and all-embracing questions of Irish finance and expenditure, which lie behind all the topics already discussed and many others. The subject is far too important and interwoven with history to be dealt with otherwise than as an historical whole, and that course I propose to take in a later part of the book. It is enough to say that all the arguments for Home Rule are summed up in the fiscal argument. Every Irishman worth his salt ought to be ashamed and indignant at the present position.

The whole machinery of Irish Government, and the whole fiscal system under which Ireland lives, need to be thoroughly overhauled by Irishmen in their own interests, and in the interests of Great Britain. Among many other writers, Mr. Barry O'Brien, in his "Dublin Castle and the Irish People," Lord Dunraven in "The Outlook in Ireland," and Mr. G.F.H.

Berkeley in a paper contributed to "Home Rule Problems," have lucidly and wittily described the wonderful collection of sixty-seven irresponsible and unrelated Boards nominated by the Chief Secretary, or Lord-Lieutenant, which, with the official services beneath them, const.i.tute the colonial bureaucracy of Ireland; the extravagance of the judicial and other salaries, and the total lack of any central control worthy of the name. By omitting a number of insignificant little bureaux, the figure 67, according to Mr. Berkeley's cla.s.sification, may be reduced to 42, of which 26 are directly under Castle influence, and the rest either branches of British Departments or directly under the Treasury. In 1906, out of 1,611 princ.i.p.al official posts, 626 were obtained purely by nomination, and 766 by a qualifying examination only.

In an able-bodied male population, which we may estimate at a million, there are reckoned to be about 60,000 persons employed by the State, or 1 in 18. If we add 180,000 Old Age Pensioners, we reach the figure of nearly a quarter of a million persons, out of a total population of under four and a half millions, dependent wholly or partially for their living on the State, exclusive of Army and Navy pensioners; again about 1 in 18. Four millions of money are paid in salaries or pensions to State employees, and two and three-quarter millions to Old Age Pensioners.

It is so easy to make fun about Irish administration that one has to be cautious not to mistake the nature or exaggerate the dimensions of the evil. The great defect is that the expenditure is not controlled by Ireland and has no relation to the revenue derived from Ireland. The Castle is not the odious inst.i.tution that it was in the dark days of the land war; but it is still a foreign, not an Irish inst.i.tution, working, like the Government of the most dependent of Crown Colonies, in a world of its own, with autocratic powers, and immunity from all popular influence. Beyond the criticism that one religious denomination, the Church of Ireland, is rather unduly favoured in patronage, there is no personal complaint against the officials. They are as able, kindly, hard-working, and courteous as any other officials. Some of the princ.i.p.al posts are held by men of the highest distinction, who will be as necessary to the new Government as to the old. It is absolutely essential, but it will not be easy, to make substantial administrative economies at the outset, not only from the additional stress of novel work which will be thrown upon a Home Rule Government, but from the widespread claims of vested interests. It will require courageous statesmanship, backed by courageous public opinion, to overhaul a bureaucracy so old and extensive. Take the police, for example, the first and most urgent subject for reduction. Adding the Royal Irish Constabulary and the Dublin Metropolitan Police together, we have a force of no less than 12,000 officers and men, a force twice as numerous in proportion to population as those of England and Wales, and costing the huge sum of a million and a half; and this in a country which now is unusually free from crime, and which at all times has been naturally less disposed to crime than any part of Great Britain. It is the forcible maintenance of bad economic conditions that has produced Irish crime in the past. Irishmen hotly resent that symbol of coercion, the swollen police force, which is as far removed from their own control as a foreign army of occupation. On the other hand, the force itself is composed of Irishmen, and is a considerable, though an unhealthy, economic factor in the life of the country. It performs some minor official duties outside the domain of justice; it is efficient, and its individual members are not unpopular. Reduction will be difficult. But drastic reduction, at least by a half, must eventually be brought about if Ireland is to hold up her head in the face of the world.

The difficulty will extend through all the ramifications of public expenditure. Ireland, through no fault of her own, against her persistent protests, has been retained in a position which is destructive to thrifty instincts. A rain of officials has produced an unhealthy thirst for the profits of officialdom. No one feels responsibility for the money spent for national purposes, because no one in Ireland _is_, in any real sense, responsible. There is no Irish Budget or Irish Exchequer to make a separate Irish Government logically defensible. The people are heavily taxed, but, rightly, they do not connect their taxes with the expenditure going on around them. On the contrary, their mental habit is to look to Great Britain as the source of grants, salaries, pensions.

And the worst of it is that they are now at the point of being financially dependent on Great Britain. After more than a century of Union finance, after contributing, all told, over three hundred and twenty millions of money to the Imperial purse over and above expenditure in Ireland, they have now ceased to contribute a penny, and are a little in debt. As we shall see, when I come to a closer examination of finance, the main factor in producing this result has been the Old Age Pensions. The application of the British scale, unmodified, to Ireland is the kind of blunder which the Union encourages. Ireland, where wages and the standard of living are far lower than in England, does not need pensions on so high a scale, and already suffers too much from benevolent paternalism. It was an unavoidable blunder, given a joint financial system, but it has gravely compromised Home Rule finance.

For acquiescing in this and similar grants, beyond the ascertained taxable resources of the country; for the general deficiency of public spirit and matured public opinion in Ireland; for the backwardness of education, temperance legislation, and other important reforms, the Irish Parliamentary parties cannot be held responsible. They are abnormal in their composition and aims, and, beyond a certain limited point, they are powerless, even if they had the will, to promote Irish policies. That is the pernicious result of an unsatisfied claim for self-government. It is the same everywhere else. While an agitation for self-government lasts, a country is stagnant, retrograde, or, like Ireland, progressive only by dint of extraordinary native exertions.

Read the Durham report on the condition of the Canadas during the long agitation for Home Rule, and you will recognize the same state of things. The leaders of the agitation have to concentrate on the abstract and primary claim for Home Rule, and are reluctant to dissipate their energies on minor ends. Yet they, too, are liable to irrational and painful divisions, like that which divides Mr. O'Brien from Mr. Redmond; symptoms of irritation in the body politic, not of political sanity.

They cannot prove their powers of constructive statesmanship, because they are not given the power to construct or the responsibility which evokes statesmanship. The anti-Home Rule partisans degenerate into violent but equally sincere upholders of a pure negation.

Many of the able men who belong to both the Irish parties will, it is to be hoped, soon be finding a far more fruitful and practical field for their abilities in a free Ireland. But the parties, as such, will disappear, on condition that the measure of Home Rule given to Ireland is adequate. On that point I shall have more to say later. If it is adequate, and Irish politicians are absorbed in vital Irish politics, the structure of the existing parties falls to pieces, to the immense advantage both of Ireland--including the Protestant sections of Ulster--and of Great Britain. At present both parties, divided normally by a gulf of sentiment, do combine for certain limited purposes of Irish legislation, but both are, in different degrees and ways, sterile. The policy of the Nationalist party has been positive in the past, because it wrung from Parliament the land legislation which saved a perishing society. It is essentially positive still in that it seeks Home Rule, which is the condition precedent to practical politics in Ireland. More, the party is independent, in a sense which can be applied to no other party in the United Kingdom. Its Members accept no offices or t.i.tles, the ordinary prizes of political life. But they themselves could not contend that they are truly representative of three-quarters of Ireland in any other sense than that they are Home Rulers. Half of the wit, brains, and eloquence of their best men runs to waste. Some of them are merely nominated by the party machine, to represent, not local needs, but a paramount principle which the electors insist rightly on setting above immediate local needs.

The purpose of the Irish Unionist party in the Commons is purely negative, to defeat Home Rule. It does not represent North-East Ulster, or any other fragment of Ireland, in any sense but that. It is pa.s.sionately sentimental and absolutely unrepresentative of the practical, virile genius of Ulster industry. The Irish Unionist peers, in addition to voicing the same negative, are for the most part the spokesmen of a small minority of Irishmen in whom the long habit of upholding landlord interests has begun to outlive the need.

I have said little directly about the problem of modern Ulster, not because I underrate its importance, which is very great, but because I have some hope that my arguments up to this point may be perceived to have a strong, though indirect, bearing upon it.[67] The religious question I leave to others, with only these few observations. It is impossible to make out a historical case for the religious intolerance of Roman Catholics in Ireland, or a practical case for the likelihood of a Roman Catholic tyranny in the future. No attempt which can be described as even plausible has ever been made in either direction. The late Mr. Lecky, a Unionist historian, and one of the most eminent thinkers and writers of our time, has n.o.bly vindicated Catholic Ireland, banishing both the theory and the fear into the domain of myth.[68]

He has shown, what, indeed, n.o.body denies, that, from the measures which provoked the Rebellion of 1641, through the Penal Code, to the middle of the nineteenth century, intolerance, inspired by supposed political necessities, and of a ferocity almost unequalled in history, came from the Protestant colonists. In that brilliant little essay of his Nationalist youth, "Clerical Influences" (1861), he described the sectarian animosity which was raging at that period as "the direct and inevitable consequence of the Union," and wrote as follows: "Much has been said of the terrific force with which it would rage were the Irish Parliament restored. We maintain, on the other hand, that no truth is more clearly stamped upon the page of history, and more distinctly deducible from the const.i.tution of the human mind, than that a national feeling is the only check to sectarian pa.s.sions." He was himself an anti-Catholic extremist in the sense of holding (with many others) that "the logical consequences of the doctrines of the Church of Rome would be fatal to an independent and patriotic policy in any land." But he insists in the same pa.s.sage "that nothing is more clear than that in every land where a healthy national feeling exists, Roman Catholic politicians are both independent and patriotic."

He never recanted these opinions (which are confirmed by the subsequent course of events) even after his conversion to Unionism, but derived his opposition to Home Rule from a dread of all democratic tendencies,[69]

the only ground on which, if men would be willing to confess the naked truth, it can be opposed. There the matter ought to rest. If the doctrines of the Church of Rome are, in fact, inconsistent with political freedom--I myself p.r.o.nounce no opinion on that point--it is plain to the most superficial observer that the Church, as a factor in politics, stands to lose rather than to gain by Home Rule. British statesmen have often accepted that view, and have endeavoured to use the Roman Catholic hierarchy against popular movements, just as they enlisted its influence to secure the Union. The Roman Catholic laity have often subsequently rejected what they have considered to be undue political dictation from the seat of authority in Rome.

If I may venture an opinion, I believe that both of these mutually irreconcilable propositions--that Home Rule means Rome Rule, and that Rome is the enemy to Home Rule--are wrong.[70] Such ludicrous contradictions only help to destroy the case against trusting a free Ireland to give religion its legitimate, and no more than legitimate, position in the State. Ireland is intensely religious, and it would be a disaster of the first magnitude if the Roman Catholic ma.s.ses were to lose faith in their Church. The preservation of that faith depends on the political Liberalism of the Church.

Corresponding tolerance will be demanded of Ulster Protestants. At present pa.s.sion, not reason, governs the religious side of their opposition to Home Rule. It is futile to criticize Ulster Unionists for making the religious argument the spear-head of their attack on Home Rule. The argument is one which especially appeals to portions of the British electorate, and the rules of political warfare permit free use of it. It was pushed beyond the legitimate point, to actual violence, in the Orange opposition to responsible government in Canada in 1849. And it has more than once inflamed and embittered Australian politics, as it inflames the politics of certain English const.i.tuencies. But it is hardly to be conceived that Ulster Unionists really fear Roman Catholic tyranny. The fear is unmanly and unworthy of them. To anyone who has lived in an overwhelmingly Catholic district, and seen the complete tranquillity and safety in which Protestants exercise their religion, it seems painfully abnormal that a great city like Belfast, with a population more than two-thirds Protestant, should become hysterical over Catholic tyranny. It would be physically impossible to enforce any tyrannical law in Ulster or anywhere else, even if such a law were proposed, and many leading Protestants from all parts of Ireland have stated publicly that they have no fear of any such result from Home Rule.[71]

"Loyalty" to the Crown is a false issue. Disloyalty to the Crown is a negligible factor in all parts of Ireland. Loyalty or disloyalty to a certain political system is the real matter at issue. At the present day the really serious objections to Home Rule on the part of the leading Ulster Unionists seem to be economic. They have built up thriving trades under the Union. They have the closest business connections with Great Britain, and a mutual fabric of credit. They cherish sincere and profound apprehensions that their business prosperity will suffer by any change in the form of government. To scoff at these apprehensions is absurd and impolitic in the last degree. But to reason against them is also an almost fruitless labour. Those who feel them vaguely picture an Irish Parliament composed of Home Rulers and Unionists, in the same proportion to population as at present, and divided by the same bitter and demoralizing feuds. But there will be no Home Rulers after Home Rule, that is to say, if the Home Rule conceded is sufficient. I believe that Ulster Unionists do not realize either the beneficent transformation which will follow a change from sentimental to practical politics in Ireland, as it has followed a similar change in every other country in the Empire, or the enormous weight which their own fine qualities and strong economic position will give them in the settlement of Irish questions.

Nor do they realize, I venture to think, that any Irish Government, however composed, will be a patriotic Government pledged and compelled for its own credit and safety to do its best for the interests of Ireland. I have never met an Irishman who was not proud of the northern industries, and it is obvious that the industrial prosperity of the north is vital to the fiscal and general interests of Ireland, just as the far more wealthy mining interests of the Rand are vital to the stability and prosperity of the Transvaal, and were regarded as such and treated as such by the farmer majority of the Transvaal after the grant of Home Rule. Those interests have prospered amazingly since, and in that country, be it remembered, volunteer British corps raised on the Rand had been the toughest of all the British foes which the peasant commandos had to meet in a war ended only four years before.

If the fears of Ulster took any concrete form, it would be easier to combat them; but they are unformulated, nebulous. Meanwhile, it is hard to imagine what measure of oppression could possibly be invented by the most malignant Irish Government which would not recoil like a boomerang upon those in whose supposed interests it was framed. I shall have to deal with this point again in discussing taxation, and need here only remind the reader that Ulster is not a Province, any part of which could possibly be injured by any form of taxation which did not hit other Provinces equally.

It is the belief of Ulster Unionists that their prosperity depends on the maintenance of the Union, but the belief rests on no sound foundation. Rural emigration from Ulster, even from the Protestant parts, has been as great as from the rest of Ireland.[72] It is easy to point to a fall in stocks when the Home Rule issue is uppermost, but such phenomena occur in the case of big changes of government in any country. They merely reflect the fact that certain moneyed interests do, in fact, fear a change of government, and whether those fears are irrational or not, the effect is the same. It is an historical fact, on the other hand, that political freedom in a white country, in the long run invariably promotes industrial expansion and financial confidence.

Canada is one remarkable example, Australia is another. The Balkan States are others. Not that I wish to push the colonial example to extremes. Vast undeveloped territories impair the a.n.a.logy to Ireland; but it is none the less true that when a country with a separate economic life of its own obtains rulers of its own choice, and gains a national pride and responsibility, it goes ahead, not backward.

Intense, indeed, must be the racial prejudice which can cause Ulstermen to forget the only really glorious memories of their past. Orange memories are stirring, but they are not glorious beside the traditions of the Volunteers. The Orange flag is the symbol of conquest, confiscation, racial and religious ascendancy. It is not n.o.ble for Irishmen to celebrate annually a battle in which Ireland was defeated, or to taunt their Catholic compatriots with agrarian lawlessness to which their own forefathers were forced to resort, in order to obtain a privileged immunity from the same scandalous land laws. Ulstermen reached spiritual greatness when, like true patriots, they stood for tolerance, Parliamentary reform, and the unity of Ireland. They fell, surely, when they consented to style themselves a "garrison" under the shelter of an absentee Parliament, which, through the enslavement and degradation of the old Irish Parliament, had driven tens of thousands of their own race into exile and rebellion.

They cherish the Imperial tradition, but let them love its sublime and reject its ign.o.ble side. It is sublime where it stands for liberty; ign.o.ble--and none knew this better than the Ulster-American rebels--where it stands for government based on the dissensions of the governed.

The verdict of history is that for men in the position of the Ulster Unionists, the path of honour and patriotism, and the path of true self-interest, lies in co-operation with their fellow-citizens for the attainment of political freedom under the Crown. It is not as if they had to create a tradition. The tradition lives.

FOOTNOTES:

[42] See pp. 13-17 and 66-71.

[43] Dealt with fully in Chapter XIV.

[44] In 1910-11, 2,408,000 (Treasury Return No. 220, 1911); plus 225,000 estimated increase owing to removal of Poor Law disqualification (Answer to Question in House of Commons, February 15, 1911).

[45] See p. 101.

[46] See particularly "Ireland in the New Century," Sir Horace Plunkett; "Contemporary Ireland," E. Paul-Dubois; "The New Ireland," Sydney Brooks.

[47] "Report of the Recess Committee," New Edition (Fisher Unwin).

[48] Colonel Saunderson, for example, the leader of the Irish Unionists in the Commons, refused publicly to be a member of a committee on which Mr. Redmond sat. Mr. John Redmond himself wrote that he could not take a very sanguine view of the Conference, but that he was "unwilling to take the responsibility of declining to aid in any effort to promote useful legislation in Ireland."

[49] Area under cultivation in 1875, 5,332,813 acres; in 1894, 4,931,011 acres (in 1899, 4,627,545 acres; in 1900, on a system of cla.s.sification dividing arable land more accurately from pasture, there were only 3,100,397 acres arable, and in 1905 the figures were 2,999,082 acres) (Official Returns). Population in 1841, 8,175,124; in 1851, 6,552,385; in 1861, 5,798,976; in 1871, 5,412,377; in 1881, 5,174,836; in 1891, 4,704,750; in 1892, 4,633,808; in 1893, 4,607,462; in 1894, 4,589,260; in 1895, 4,559,936 (in 1901, 4,458,775; in 1905, 4,391,543).--Census Returns and _Thoms' Directory_.

[50] _Council of Agriculture_: 68 members elected by County Councils; 84 appointed by the Department from the various provinces. Total 102.

_Board of Agriculture_: 8 members elected by Council of Agriculture; 4 appointed by the Department. Total 12.

_Board of Technical Instruction_: 10 members appointed by County Boroughs; 4 elected by Council of Agriculture; 6 appointed by the various Government Departments; 1 by a joint Committee of Dublin District Councils. Total 21.

[51] I am not forgetting Scotland. Her few local departments are theoretically, but not practically, at the mercy of English votes and influence. Scotch opinion, broadly speaking, governs Scotch affairs.

Precisely to the extent to which it does not so govern them, is a demand for Home Rule likely to grow.

[52] Even the Recess Committee (and we cannot wonder) but dimly grasped the const.i.tutional position when they laid stress on the necessity for an Agricultural Minister "directly responsible to Parliament."

Logically, they should have first recommended the establishment of an Irish Parliament to which the Minister should be responsible. To make him responsible to the House of Commons was absurd; and a Departmental Committee of 1907 has, in fact, recommended that the Vice-President should not have a seat in Parliament, but should remain in his proper place, Ireland. Meanwhile, the original mistake has caused friction and controversy. Soon after the Liberal Ministry took office in 1906, Sir Horace Plunkett, the first Vice-President, as a Unionist, was replaced by Mr. T.W. Russell, a Home Ruler. On the a.s.sumption that such an Office was Parliamentary, its holder standing or falling with the British Ministry of the day, the step was quite justifiable, and even necessary.

On the opposite a.s.sumption, confirmed by the Departmental Committee, the step was unjustifiable, that is, on the theory of the Union. An Irish Parliament alone should have the power of displacing Irish Ministers.