The New Irish Constitution Part 20

XII.-"The Government Of Ireland In The Nineteenth Century". BY R. BARRY O'BRIEN

I

When you speak to Englishmen about English rule in Ireland they say: "Oh!

you Irish are always looking back. You always want to talk about the past.

You read nothing but ancient history. You never think of all we have done for you in recent years. Come to modern times; forget the past."

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

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

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

1800-1801. Insurrection Act, Habeas Corpus Suspension Act, and Martial Law.

1803. Insurrection Act.

1804. Habeas Corpus Suspension Act.

1807-1810. Insurrection Act, Martial Law and Habeas Corpus Suspension Act.

1814. Habeas Corpus Suspension Act.

1814-1818. Insurrection Act.

1822-1824. Habeas Corpus Suspension Act, Insurrection Act.

1825-1828. Act for Suppression of Catholic a.s.sociation.

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

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

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

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

"The landlord," says Mr. Froude, "may become a direct oppressor.

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

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

English statesmen saw nothing wrong in the exclusive establishment and endowment of the Church of the Protestant minority in a Catholic country, nor did they see just cause for complaint because Catholic peasants were forced, at the point of the bayonet, to pay t.i.thes to Protestant parsons.

Protestant education was a.s.sisted by the State. Nothing was done by the Government for the education of Catholics. Thus for the first twenty-eight years of the century the policy of the English in Ireland was calculated to embitter religious feelings, and to inflame national animosities. When Catholic emanc.i.p.ation (granted under the pressure of a great revolutionary agitation) came in 1829 it did not improve the situation because the people saw in it, not the measure of England's justice, but the measure of her fears.

II

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

1830. Arms Act.

1831-1832. Stanley's Arms Act.

1833-1834. Grey's Coercion Act.

1834-1835. Grey's Coercion (Continuance) Act amended.

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

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

In 1832 a worthless Irish Reform Act, under which the representation of the country became "virtually extinguished,"(149) was pa.s.sed against the protest of the Irish members, all of whose amendments, aiming at making it a genuine measure for the extension of the franchise, were contemptuously rejected. Ignorance and prejudice, the absence of all sense of justice, an utter inability to understand the Irish case, a determination to trample on popular rights and to disregard public opinion-these were the characteristics of English statesmanship in Ireland between 1829 and 1835.

Mr. Lecky's account of the manner in which Catholic Emanc.i.p.ation was carried out is worth quoting:

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

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

III

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

"I am trying an experiment, I want to see if an English Parliament can do justice to Ireland. I do not think it can, but I mean to give the present Government a chance, and see what they can do.

And I will suspend the demand for repeal to give them a fair trial."

What came of that "fair trial" we shall now see.

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

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

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

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