Project Gutenberg's The Framework of Home Rule, by Erskine Childers This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net Title: The Framework of Home Rule Author: Erskine Childers Release Date: February 17, 2005 [EBook #15086] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE *** Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Susan Skinner and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team. THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE BY ERSKINE CHILDERS AUTHOR OF "THE RIDDLE OF THE SANDS," "WAR AND THE ARME BLANCHE," "GERMAN INFLUENCE ON BRITISH CAVALRY"; EDITOR OF VOL. V. OF THE _TIMES_ "HISTORY OF THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA," ETC. LONDON EDWARD ARNOLD 1911 CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGES INTRODUCTION vii-xvi I. THE COLONIZATION OF IRELAND AND AMERICA 1-20 II. REVOLUTION IN AMERICA AND IN IRELAND 21-41 III. GRATTAN'S PARLIAMENT 42-59 IV. THE UNION 60-71 V. CANADA AND IRELAND 72-104 VI. AUSTRALIA AND IRELAND 105-119 VII. SOUTH AFRICA AND IRELAND 120-143 VIII. THE ANALOGY 144-149 IX. IRELAND TO-DAY 150-187 X. THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE 188-229 I. The Elements of the Problem 188-197 II. Federal or Colonial Home Rule 198-203 III. The Exclusion or Retention of Irish Members at Westminster 203-213 IV. Irish Powers and their Bearing on Exclusion 213-229 XI. UNION FINANCE 230-257 I. Before the Union 230-231 II. From the Union to the Financial Relations Commission of 1894-1896 232-239 III. The Financial Relations Commission of 1894-1896 239-257 XII. THE PRESENT FINANCIAL SITUATION 258-279 I. Anglo-Irish Finance To-day 258-264 II. Irish Expenditure 264-274 III. Irish Revenue 274-279 XIII. FINANCIAL INDEPENDENCE 280-306 I. The Essence of Home Rule 280-281 II. The Deficit 281-286 III. Further Contribution to Imperial Services 286 IV. Ireland's Share of the National Debt 286 V. Ireland's Share of Imperial Miscellaneous Revenue 287 VI. Irish Control of Customs and Excise 287-294 VII. Federal Finance 294-300 VIII. Alternative Schemes of Home Rule Finance 300-306 XIV. LAND PURCHASE FINANCE 307-321 I. Land Purchase Loans 307-319 II. Minor Loans to Ireland 319-321 XV. THE IRISH CONSTITUTION 322-338 CONCLUSION 339-341 APPENDIX 342-347 INDEX 348-354 INTRODUCTION My purpose in this volume is to advocate a definite scheme of self-government for Ireland. That task necessarily involves an historical as well as a constructive argument. It would be truer, perhaps, to say that the greater part of the constructive case for Home Rule must necessarily be historical. To postulate a vague acceptance of the principle of Home Rule, and to proceed at once to the details of the Irish Constitution, would be a waste of time and labour. It is impossible even to attempt to plan the framework of a Home Rule Bill without a tolerably close knowledge not only of Anglo-Irish relations, but of the Imperial history of which they form a part. The Act will succeed exactly in so far as it gives effect to the lessons of experience. It will fail at every point where those lessons are neglected. Constitutions which do not faithfully reflect the experience of the sovereign power which accords them, and of the peoples which have to live under them, are at the best perilous experiments liable to defeat the end of their framers. I shall enter into history only so far as it is relevant to the constitutional problem, using the comparative method, and confining myself almost exclusively to the British Empire past and present. For the purposes of the Irish controversy it is unnecessary to travel farther. In one degree or another every one of the vexed questions which make up the Irish problem has arisen again and again within the circle of the English-speaking races. As a nation we have a body of experience applicable to the case of Ireland incomparably greater than that possessed by any other race in the world. If, from timidity, prejudice, or sheer neglect, we fail to use it, we shall earn the heavy censure reserved for those who sin against the light. For the comparative sketch I shall attempt, materials in the shape of facts established beyond all controversy are abundant. Colonial history, thanks to colonial freedom, is almost wholly free from the distorting influence of political passion. South African history alone will need revision in the light of recent events. When, under the alchemy of free national institutions, Ireland has undergone the same transformation as South Africa, her unhappy history will be chronicled afresh with a juster sense of perspective and a juster apportionment of responsibility for the calamities which have befallen her. And yet, if we consider the field for partisan bias which Irish history presents, the amount of ground common to writers of all shades of political opinion is now astonishingly large. The result, I think, is due mainly to the good influence of that eminent historian and Unionist politician, the late Professor Lecky. Indeed, an advocate of Home Rule, nervously suspicious of tainted material, could afford to rely solely on his "History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century," "Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland," and "Clerical Influences,"[1] which are Nationalist textbooks, and, for quite recent events, on "A Consideration of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century," by Mr. G. Locker-Lampson, the present Unionist Member for Salisbury. A strange circumstance; but Ireland, like all countries where political development has been forcibly arrested from without, is a land of unending paradox. It is only one of innumerable anomalies that Irish Nationalists should use Unionist histories as propaganda for Nationalism; that the majority of Irish Unionists should insist on ignoring all historical traditions save those which in any normal country would long ago have been consigned by general consent to oblivion and the institutions they embody overthrown; and that Unionist writers such as those I have mentioned should be able to reconcile their history and their politics only by a pessimism with regard to the tendencies of human nature in general, or of Irish nature in particular, with which their own historical teaching, founded on a true perception of cause and effect, appears to be in direct contradiction. The truth is that the question is one of the construction, not of the verification, of facts; of prophecy for the future, rather than of bare affirmation or negation. No one can presume to determine such a question without a knowledge of how human beings have been accustomed to act under similar circumstances. Illumination of that sort Irish history and the contemporary Irish problem incontestably need. The modern case for the Union rests mainly on the abnormality of Ireland, and that is precisely why it is such a formidable case to meet. For Ireland in many ways is painfully abnormal. The most cursory study of her institutions and social, economic, and political life demonstrate that fact. The Unionist, fixing his eyes on some of the secondary peculiarities, and ignoring their fundamental cause, demonstrates it with ease, and by a habit of mind which yields only with infinite slowness to the growth of political enlightenment, passes instinctively to the deduction that Irish abnormalities render Ireland unfit for self-government. In other words, he prescribes for the disease a persistent application of the very treatment which has engendered it. Whatever the result, there is a plausible answer. If Ireland is disorderly and retrograde, how can she deserve freedom? If she is peaceful, and shows symptoms of economic recuperation, clearly she does not need or even want it. In other words, if all that is healthy in the patient battles desperately and not in vain, first against irritant poison, and then against soporific drugs, this healthy struggle for self-preservation is attributed not to native vitality, but to the bracing regimen of coercive government. This train of argument, so far from being confined to Ireland, is as old as the human race itself. Of all human passions, that for political domination is the last to yield to reason. Men are naturally inclined to attribute admitted social evils to every cause--religion, climate, race, congenital defects of character, the inscrutable decrees of Divine Providence--rather than to the form of political institutions; in other words, to the organic structure of the community, and to rest the security of an Empire on any other foundation than that of the liberty of its component parts. If, in one case, their own experience proves them wrong, they will go to the strangest lengths of perversity in misreading their own experience, and they will seek every imaginable pretext for distinguishing the case from its predecessor. Underlying all is a nervous terror of the abuse of freedom founded on the assumption that men will continue to act when free exactly as they acted under the demoralizing influence of coercion. The British Empire has grown, and continues to grow, in spite of this deeply rooted political doctrine. Ireland is peculiar only in that her proximity to the seat of power has exposed her for centuries to an application of the doctrine in its most extreme form and without any hope of escape through the merciful accidents to which more fortunate communities owe their emancipation. Canada owes her position in the Empire, and the Empire itself exists in its present form to-day, owing to the accident that the transcendantly important principle of responsible government advocated by Lord Durham as a remedy for the anarchy and stagnation in which he found both the British and the French Provinces of Canada in 1838, did not require Imperial legislation, and was established without the Parliamentary or electoral sanction of Great Britain. Lord Durham was derided as a visionary, and abused as unpatriotic for the assertion of this simple principle. Far in advance of his time as he was, he himself shrank from the full application of his own lofty ideal, and consequently made one great, though under the circumstances not a capital, mistake in his diagnosis, and it was to that mistake only that Parliament gave legislative effect in 1840. By one of the most melancholy ironies in all history Ireland was the source of his error, so that the Union of the Canadas, dissolved as a failure by the Canadians themselves in 1867, was actually based on the success of the Anglo-Irish Union in repressing a dangerous nationality. Did the proof of the error in Canada induce Englishmen to question the soundness of the precedent on which the error was based? On the contrary, the lesson passed unnoticed, and the Irish precedent has survived to darken thought, to retard democratic progress, and to pervert domestic and Imperial policy to this very day. It even had the truly extraordinary retrospective effect of obliterating from the minds of many eminent statesmen the significance of the Canadian parallel; for it is only six years ago that a Secretary of State for the Colonies penned a despatch recommending for the Transvaal a form of government similar to that which actually produced the Canadian disorders of 1837, and supporting it by an argument whose effect was not merely to resuscitate what time had proved to be false in Durham's doctrine, but to discard what time had proved to be true. As for Ireland herself, I know no more curious illustration of the strong tendency, even on the part of the most fair-minded men, to place that country outside the pale of social or political science, and of the extreme reluctance to judge its inhabitants by the elementary standards of human conduct, than the book to which I referred above--Mr. Locker-Lampson's "A Consideration of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century." For what he admits to be the ruinous results of British Government in the past, the author in the last few pages of a lengthy volume has no better cure to suggest than a continuance of British government, and he defends this course by a terse enumeration of the very phenomena which in Durham's opinion rendered the grant of Home Rule to Canada imperative, concluding with a paragraph which, with the substitution of "Canada" for "Ireland," constitutes an admirably condensed epitome of the arguments used both by politicians at home, and the minorities in Canada, in favour of Durham's error and against the truth he established. Mr. Lecky represents a somewhat different school of thought, and reached his Unionism by reasoning more profound and consistent, but, on the other hand, wholly destructive of the Imperial theory as held by the modern school of Imperialists. His fear and distrust of democracy in all its forms and in all lands[2] was such that he naturally dreaded Irish Nationalism, which is a form of democratic revolt suppressed so long and by such harsh methods as to exhibit features easily open to criticism. But the gist of his argument would have applied just as well to the political evolution of the self-governing Colonies. Indeed, if he had lived to see the last Imperial Conference, the pessimism of so clear a thinker would assuredly have given way before the astounding contrast between those countries in which his political philosophy had been abjured, and the only white country in the Empire where by sheer force it had been maintained intact. If my only object in writing were to contribute something toward the dissipation of the fears and doubts which render it so hard to carry any measure, however small, of Home Rule for Ireland, I should hope for little success. Practical men, with a practical decision to make, rarely look outside the immediate facts before them. Extremists, in a case like that of Ireland, are reluctant to take account of what Lord Morley calls "the fundamental probabilities of civil society." Sir Edward Carson would be more than human if he were to be influenced by a demonstration that the case he makes against Home Rule is the same as that made by the minority leaders, not only in the French, but in the British Province of Canada. Most of the minority to which he appeals would now regard as an ill-timed paradox the view that the very vigour of their opposition to Home Rule is a better omen for the success of Home Rule than that kind of sapless Nationalism, astonishingly rare in Ireland under the circumstances, which is inclined to yield to the insidious temptation of setting the "eleemosynary benefits"--to use Mr. Walter Long's phrase[3]--derived from the British connection above the need for self-help and self-reliance. The real paradox is that any Irishmen, Unionist or Nationalist, should tolerate advisers who, however sincere and patriotic, avowedly regard Ireland as the parasite of Great Britain; who appeal to the lower nature of her people; to the fears of one section and the cupidity of both; advising Unionists to rely on British power and all Irishmen on British alms. A day will come when the humiliation will be seen in its true light. Even now, I do venture to appeal to that small but powerful group of moderate Irish Unionists who, so far from fearing revenge or soliciting charity, spend their whole lives in the noble aim of uniting Irishmen of all creeds on a basis of common endeavour for their own economic and spiritual salvation; who find their work checked in a thousand ways by the perpetual maintenance of a seemingly barren and sentimental agitation; who distrust both the parties to this agitation; but who are reluctant to accept the view that, without the satisfaction of the national claim, and without the national responsibility thereby conferred, their own aims can never be fully attained. I should be happy indeed if I could do even a little towards persuading some of these men that they mistake cause and effect; misinterpret what they resent; misjudge where they distrust, and in standing aloof from the battle for legislative autonomy, unconsciously concede a point--disinterested, constructive optimists as they are--to the interested and destructive pessimism which, from Clare's savage insults to Mr. Walter Long's contemptuous patronage, has always lain at the root of British policy towards Ireland. In the meantime, for those who like or dislike it, Home Rule is imminent. We are face to face no longer with a highly speculative, but with a vividly practical problem, raising legislative and administrative questions of enormous practical importance, and next year we shall be dealing with this problem in an atmosphere of genuine reality totally unlike that of 1886, when Home Rule was a startling novelty to the British electorate, or of 1893, when the shadow of impending defeat clouded debate and weakened counsel. It would be pleasant to think that the time which has elapsed, besides greatly mitigating anti-Irish prejudice, had been used for scientific study and dispassionate discussion of the problem of Home Rule. Unfortunately, after eighteen years the problem remains almost exactly where it was. There are no detailed proposals of an authoritative character in existence. No concrete scheme was submitted to the country in the recent elections. None is before the country now. The reason, of course, is that the Irish question is still an acute party question, not merely in Ireland, but in Great Britain. Party passion invariably discourages patient constructive thought, and all legislation associated with it suffers in consequence. Tactical considerations, sometimes altogether irrelevant to the special issue, have to be considered. In the case of Home Rule, when the balance of parties is positively determined by the Irish vote, the difficulty reaches its climax. It is idle to blame individuals. We should blame the Union. So long as one island democracy claims to determine the destinies of another island democracy, of whose special needs and circumstances it is admittedly ignorant, so long will both islands suffer. This ignorance is not disputed. No Irish Unionist claims that Great Britain should govern Ireland on the ground that the British electorate, or even British statesmen, understand Irish questions. On the contrary, in Ireland, at any rate, their ignorance is a matter for satirical comment with all parties. What he complains of is, that the British electorate is beginning to carry its ignorance to the point of believing that the Irish electorate is competent to decide Irish questions, and in educating the British electorate he has hitherto devoted himself exclusively to the eradication of this error. The financial results of the Union are such that he is now being cajoled into adding, "It is your money, not your wisdom, that we want." Once more, an odd state of affairs, and some day we shall all marvel in retrospect that the Union was so long sustained by a separatist argument, reinforced in latter days by such an inconsistent and unconscionable claim. In the meantime, if only the present situation can be turned to advantage, this crowning paradox is the most hopeful element in the whole of a tangled question. It is not only that the British elector is likely to revolt at once against the slur upon his intelligence and the drain upon his purse, but that Irish Unionism, once convinced of the tenacity and sincerity of that revolt, is likely to undergo a dramatic and beneficent transformation. If they are to have Home Rule, Irish Unionists--even those who now most heartily detest it--will want the best possible scheme of Home Rule, and the best possible scheme is not likely to be the half measure which, from no fault of the statesman responsible for it, tactical difficulties may make inevitable. If the vital energy now poured into sheer uncompromising opposition to the principles of Home Rule could be transmuted into intellectual and moral effort after the best form of Home Rule, I believe that the result would be a drastic scheme. Compromise enters more or less into the settlement of all burning political questions. That is inevitable under the party system; but of all questions under the sun, Home Rule questions are the least susceptible of compromise so engendered. The subject, in reality, is not suitable for settlement at Westminster. This is a matter of experience, not of assertion. Within the present bounds of the Empire no lasting Constitution has ever been framed for a subordinate State to the moulding of which Parliament, in the character of a party assembly, contributed an active share. Constitutions which promote prosperity and loyalty have actually or virtually been framed by those who were to live under them. If circumstances make it impossible to adopt this course for Ireland, let us nevertheless remember that all the friction and enmity between the Mother Country and subordinate States have arisen, not from the absence, but from the inadequacy of self-governing powers. Checks and restrictions, so far from benefiting Great Britain or the Colonies, have damaged both in different degrees, the Colonies suffering most because these checks and restrictions produce in the country submitted to them peculiar mischiefs which exist neither under a despotic régime nor an unnatural Legislative Union, fruitful of evil as both those systems are. The damage is not evanescent, but is apt to bite deep into national character and to survive the abolition of the institutions which caused it. The Anglo-Irish Union was created and has ever since been justified by a systematic defamation of Irish character. If it is at length resolved to bury the slander and trust Ireland, in the name of justice and reason let the trust be complete and the institutions given her such as to permit full play to her best instincts and tendencies, not such as to deflect them into wrong paths. Let us be scrupulously careful to avoid mistakes which might lead to a fresh campaign of defamation like that waged against Canada, as well as Ireland, between 1830 and 1840. The position, I take it, is that most Irish Unionists still count, rightly or wrongly, on defeating Home Rule, not only in the first Parliamentary battle, but by exciting public opinion during the long period of subsequent delay which the Parliament Bill permits. Not until Home Rule is a moral certainty, and perhaps not even then, do the extremists intend to consider the Irish Constitution in a practical spirit. Surely this is a perilous policy. Surely it must be so regarded by the moderate men--and there are many--who, if Home Rule comes, intend to throw their abilities into making it a success, and who will be indispensable to Ireland at a moment of supreme national importance. Irretrievable mistakes may be made by too long a gamble with the chances of political warfare. Whatever the scheme produced, the extremists will have to oppose it tooth and nail. If the measure is big, sound, and generous, it will be necessary to attack its best features with the greatest vigour; to rely on beating up vague, anti-separatist sentiment in Great Britain; to represent Irish Protestants as a timid race forced to shelter behind British bayonets; in short, to use all the arguments which, if Irish Unionists were compelled to frame a Constitution themselves, they would scorn to employ, and which, if grafted on the Act in the form of amendments, they themselves in after-years might bitterly regret. Conversely, if the measure is a limited one, it will be necessary to commend its worst features; to extol its eleemosynary side and all the infractions of liberty which in actual practice they would find intolerably irksome. Whatever happens, things will be said which are not meant, and passions aroused which will be difficult to allay on the eve of a crisis when Ireland will need the harmonious co-operation of all her ablest sons. If, behind the calculation of a victory within the next two years, there lies the presentiment of an eventual defeat, let not the thought be encouraged that a better form of Home Rule is likely to come from a Tory than from a Liberal Government. Many Irish Unionists regard the prospect of continued submission to a Liberal, or what they consider a semi-Socialist, Government as the one consideration which would reconcile them to Home Rule. No one can complain of that. But they make a fatal mistake in denying Liberals credit for understanding questions of Home Rule better than Tories. That, again, is a matter of proved experience. Compare the abortive Transvaal Constitution of 1905 with the reality of 1906, and measure the probable consequences of the former by the actual results of the latter. Let them remember, too, that every year which passes aggravates the financial difficulties which imperil the future of Ireland. The best hope of securing a final settlement of the Irish question in the immediate future lies in promoting open discussion on the details of the Home Rule scheme, and of drawing into that discussion all Irishmen and Englishmen who realize the profound importance of the issue. This book is offered as a small contribution to the controversy. For help in writing it I am deeply indebted to many friends on both sides of the Irish Channel, in Ireland to officials and private persons, who have generously placed their experience at my disposal; while in England I owe particular thanks to the Committee of which I had the honour to be a member, which sat during the summer of this year under the chairmanship of Mr. Basil Williams, and which published the series of essays called "Home Rule Problems." E.C. FOOTNOTES: [1] The two latter works were written by Mr. Lecky in his Nationalist youth the first and greater work after he had become a Unionist. They form a connected whole, however, and are not inconsistent with one another. [2] See "Democracy and Liberty." [3] "Did the people of Ireland understand that the destruction of the Union, so lightly advocated by Lord Haldane, must result in the cessation of those largely eleemosynary benefits to which the progress of Ireland is due, her 'dissatisfaction' would be unmistakably directed towards her false advisers?"--Letter to the _Belfast Telegraph_, October 7, 1911, criticizing Lord Haldane's preface to "Home Rule Problems." ERRATA Since this book went to press the Treasury has issued a revised version of Return No. 220, 1911 [Revenue and Expenditure (England, Scotland, and Ireland)], cancelling the Return issued in July, and correcting an error made in it. It now appears that the "true" Excise revenue attributable to Ireland from _spirits_ in 1910-11 (with deductions made by the Treasury from the sum actually collected in Ireland) should be £3,575,000, instead of £3,734,000, and that the total "true" Irish revenue in that year was, therefore, £11,506,500, instead of £11,665,500. In other words, Irish revenue for 1910-11 was over-estimated in the Return now cancelled by £159,000. The error does not affect the Author's argument as expounded in Chapters XII. and XIII.; but it necessitates the correction of a number of figures given by him, especially in Chapter XII., the principal change being that the deficit in Irish revenue, as calculated on the mean of the two years 1909-10 and 1910-11, should actually be £1,392,000, instead of £1,312,500. The full list of corrections is as follows: Page 259, line 9, _for_ "£1,312,500," _read_ "£1,392,000." Page 260, table, third column, line 6, _for_ "£10,032,000," _read_ "£9,952 500"; last line, _for_ "£1,312,500," _read_ "£1,392,000." Page 261, table, last column, last line but one, _for_ "£321,000," _read_ "£162,000"; last line (total), _for_ "£329,780,970," _read_ "£329,621,970." Page 262, line 7, _for_ "£10,032,000," _read_ "£9,952,500"; line 10, _for_ "£1,312,500," _read_ "£1,392,000." Page 275. table, last column, line 2, _for_ "£3,734,000," _read_ "£3,575,000"; line 7, _for_ "£10,371,000," _read_ "£10,212,000"; line 14, _for_ "£11,665,500," _read_, "£11,506,500"; in text, last line but one of page, _for_ "£10,032,000," _read_ "£9,952,500." Page 276, line 5, _for_ "£500,000," _read_, "£340,000"; table, last column, line 2, _for_ "£3,316,000," _read_ "£3,236,500"; line 3, _for_ "£6,182,000," _read_ "£6,102,500"; line 9, _for_ "£8,737,500," _read_ "£8,658,000"; last line, _for_ "£10,032,000," _read_ "£9,952,500." Page 277, line 2, _for_ "£1,672,500," _read_ "£1,752,000"; line 7, _for_ "£1,312,500," _read_ "£1,392,000"; line 8, _for_ "£10,032,000," _read_ "£9,952,500"; line 12, _for_ "£1,672,500," _read_ "£1,752,000"; footnote, line 1, _for_ "£1,793,000," _read_ "£1,952,000." Page 279, line 8, _for_ "70.75," _read_ "70.48." Page 282, sixth line from bottom, _for_ "£1,312,500," _read_ "£1,392,000." * * * * * Page 246, line 8 and footnote, and page 295, lines 21-31: A temporary measure has been passed (Surplus Revenue Act, 1910), under which the Surplus Commonwealth Revenue is returned to the States on a basis of £1 5s. per head of the population of each State. * * * * * Page 288, line 2, _omit_ "like the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands." These islands have distinct local tariffs, but they cannot be said to be wholly under local control. THE FRAMEWORK OF HOME RULE CHAPTER I THE COLONIZATION OF IRELAND AND AMERICA I. Ireland was the oldest and the nearest of the Colonies. We are apt to forget that she was ever colonized, and that for a long period, although styled a Kingdom, she was kept in a position of commercial and political dependence inferior to that of any Colony. Constitutional theory still blinds a number of people to the fact that in actual practice Ireland is still governed in many respects as a Colony, but on principles which in all other white communities of the British Empire are extinct. Like all Colonies, she has a Governor or Lord-Lieutenant of her own, an Executive of her own, and a complete system of separate Government Departments, but her people, unlike the inhabitants of a self-governing Colony, exercise no control over the administration. She possesses no Legislature of her own, although in theory she is supposed to possess sufficient legislative control over Irish affairs through representation in the Imperial Parliament. In practice, however, this control has always been, and still remains, illusory, just as it would certainly have proved illusory if conferred upon any Colony. It can be exercised only by cumbrous, circuitous, and often profoundly unhealthy methods; and over a wide range of matters it cannot by any method whatsoever be exercised at all. To look behind mere technicalities to the spirit of government, Ireland resembles one of that class of Crown Colonies of which Jamaica and Malta are examples, where the inhabitants exercise no control over administration, and only partial control over legislation.[4] Why is this? Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, always frank and fearless in his political judgments, gave the best answer in 1893, when opposing the first reading of the second of Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bills. "Does anybody doubt," he said, "that if Ireland were a thousand miles away from England she would not have been long before this a self-governing Colony?" Now this was not a barren geographical truism, which might by way of hypothesis be applied in identical terms to any fraction of the United Kingdom--say, for example, to that part of England lying south of the Thames. Mr. Chamberlain never made any attempt to deny--no one with the smallest knowledge of history could have denied--that Ireland, though only sixty miles away from England, was less like England than any of the self-governing Colonies then attached to the Crown, possessing distinct national characteristics which entitled her, in theory at any rate, to demand, not merely colonial, but national autonomy. On the contrary, Mr. Chamberlain went out of his way to argue, with all the force and fire of an accomplished debater, that the Bill was a highly dangerous measure precisely because, while granting Ireland a measure of autonomy, it denied her some of the elementary powers, not only of colonial, but of national States; for instance, the full control over taxation, which all self-governing Colonies possessed, and the control over foreign policy, which is a national attribute. The complementary step in his argument was that, although nominally withheld by statute, these fuller powers would be forcibly usurped by the future Irish Government through the leverage offered by a subordinate Legislature and Executive, and that, once grasped, they would be used to the injury of Great Britain and the minority in Ireland. Ireland ("a fearful danger") might arm, ally herself with France, and, while submitting the Protestant minority to cruel persecution, would retain enough national unity to smite Britain hip and thigh, and so avenge the wrong of ages. Even to the most ardent Unionist the case thus presented must, in the year 1911, present a doubtful aspect. The British _entente_ with France, and the absence of the smallest ascertainable sympathy between Ireland and Germany, he will dismiss, perhaps, as points of minor importance, but he will detect at once in the argument an antagonism, natural enough in 1893, between national and colonial attributes, and he will remember, with inner misgivings, that his own party has taken an especially active part during the last ten years in furthering the claim of the self-governing Colonies to the status of nationhood as an essential step in the furtherance of Imperial unity. The word "nation," therefore, as applied to Ireland, has lost some of its virtue as a deterrent to Home Rule. Even the word "Colony" is becoming harmless; for every year that has passed since 1893 has made it more abundantly clear that colonial freedom means colonial friendship; and, after all, friendship is more important than legal ties. In one remarkable case, that of the conquered Dutch Republic in South Africa, a flood of searching light has been thrown on the significance of those phrases "nation" and "Colony." There, as in Ireland, and originally in Canada, "national" included racial characteristics, and colonial autonomy signified national autonomy in a more accurate sense than in Australia or Newfoundland. But we know now that it does not signify either a racial tyranny within those nations, or a racial antipathy to the Mother Country; but, on the contrary, a reconciliation of races within and friendship without. Would Mr. Chamberlain recast his argument now? Unhappily, we shall not know. But it does seem to me that recent history and his own temperament would force him to do so. As in his abandonment of Free Trade, it was a strong and sincere Imperialist instinct that eventually transformed him from the advocate of provincial Home Rule into the relentless enemy of Home Rule in any shape. Take the Imperial argument, shaken to its foundations by subsequent events, from the case he stated in 1893, and what remains? Two pleas only--first, the abnormality of Irishmen; second, Ireland's proximity to England. The first expresses the old traditional view that Ireland is outside the pale of all human analogy; the exception to all rules; her innate depravity and perversity such that she would abuse power where others respect it, derive enmity where others derive friendship, and willingly ruin herself by internal dissension and extravagant ambitions in order, if possible, at the same time to ruin England. Unconnected, however loosely, with the high Imperial argument, I do not believe that this plea could have been used with sincerity by Mr. Chamberlain even in 1893. He was a democrat, devoted to the cause of enfranchising and trusting the people; and this plea was, after all, only the same anti-democratic argument applied to Ireland, and tipped with racial venom, which had been used for generations by most Tories and many Whigs against any extension of popular power. Lord Randolph Churchill, the Tory democrat, in his dispassionate moments, always scouted it, resting his case against Home Rule on different grounds. It was strange enough to see the argument used by the Radical author of all the classic denunciations of class ascendancy and the classic eulogies of the sense, forbearance and generosity of free electorates. It was all the stranger in that Mr. Chamberlain himself a few years before had committed himself to a scheme of restricted self-government for Ireland, and in the debates on Mr. Gladstone's first Home Rule Bill of 1886, when the condition of Ireland was far worse than in 1893, had declared himself ready to give that country a Constitution similar to that enjoyed by Quebec or Ontario within the Dominion of Canada. But politics are politics. Under the inexorable laws of the party game, politicians are advocates and swell their indictments with every count which will bear the light. The system works well enough in every case but one--the indictment of a fellow-nation for incapacity to rule itself. There, both in Ireland and everywhere else, as I shall show, it works incalculable mischief. Once committed irrevocably to the opposition of Mr. Gladstone's Bills, Mr. Chamberlain, standing on Imperial ground, which seemed to him and his followers firm enough then, used his unrivalled debating powers to traduce and exasperate the Irish people and their leaders by every device in his power. One other point survives in its integrity from the case made by Mr. Chamberlain in 1893, and that is the argument about distance. Clearly this is a quite distinct contention from the last; for distance from any given point does not by itself radically alter human nature. Australians are not twice as good or twice as bad as South Africans because they are twice as far from the Mother Country. "Does anybody doubt"--let me repeat his words--"that if Ireland were a thousand miles from England she would not have been long before this a self-governing Colony?" The whole tragedy of Ireland lies in that "if"; but the condition is, without doubt, still unsatisfied. Ireland is still only sixty miles away from the English shores, and the argument from proximity, for what it is worth, is still plausible. To a vast number of minds it still seems conclusive. Put the South African parallel to the average moderate Unionist, half disposed to admit the force of this analogy, he would nevertheless answer: "Ah, but Ireland is so near." Well, let us join issue on the two grounds I have indicated--the ground of Irish abnormality, and the ground of Ireland's proximity. It will be found, I think, that neither contention is tenable by itself; that a supporter of one unconsciously or consciously reinforces it by reference to the other, and that to refute one is to refute both. It will be found, too, that, apart from mechanical and unessential difficulties, the whole case against Home Rule is included and summed up in these two contentions, and that the mechanical problem itself will be greatly eased and illuminated by their refutation. II. Those sixty miles of salt water which we know as the Irish Channel--if only every Englishman could realize their tremendous significance in Anglo-Irish history--what an ineffectual barrier "in the long result of time" to colonization and conquest; what an impassable barrier--through the ignorance and perversity of British statesmanship--to sympathy and racial fusion! For eight hundred years after the Christian era her distance from Europe gave Ireland immunity from external shocks, and freedom to work out her own destiny. She never, for good or ill, underwent Roman occupation or Teutonic invasion. She was secure enough to construct and maintain unimpaired a civilization of her own, warlike, prosperous, and marvellously rich, for that age, in scholarship and culture. She produced heroic warriors, peaceful merchants, and gentle scholars and divines; poets, musicians, craftsmen, architects, theologians. She had a passion for diffusing knowledge, and for more than a thousand years sent her missionaries of piety, learning, art, and commerce, far and wide over Europe. For two hundred years she resisted her first foreign invaders, the Danes, with desperate tenacity, and seems to have absorbed into her own civilization and polity those who ultimately retained a footing on her eastern shores. With the coming of the Anglo-Normans at the end of the twelfth century the dark shadow begins to fall, and for the first time the Irish Channel assumes its tragic significance. England, compounded of Britons, Teutons, Danes, Scandinavians, Normans, with the indelible impress of Rome upon the whole, had emerged, under Nature's mysterious alchemy, a strong State. Ireland had preserved her Gaelic purity, her tribal organization, her national culture, but at the cost of falling behind in the march of political and military organization. Sixty miles divided her from the nearest part of the outlying dominions of feudal England, 150 miles from the dynamic centre of English power. The degree of distance seems to have been calculated with fatal exactitude, in correspondence with the degrees of national vitality in the two countries respectively, to produce for ages to come the worst possible effects on both. The process was slow. Ireland was near enough to attract the Anglo-Norman adventurers and colonists, but strong enough and fair enough for three hundred years to transform them into patriots "more Irish than the Irish"; always, however, too near and too weak, even with their aid, to expel the direct representatives of English rule from the foothold they had obtained on her shores, while at the same time too far and too formidable to enable that rule to expand into the complete conquest and subjugation of the realm. "The English rule," says Mr. Lecky, "as a living reality, was confined and concentrated within the limits of the Pale. The hostile power planted in the heart of the nation destroyed all possibility of central government, while it was itself incapable of fulfilling that function. Like a spear-point embedded in a living body, it inflamed all around it and deranged every vital function. It prevented the gradual reduction of the island by some native Clovis, which would necessarily have taken place if the Anglo-Normans had not arrived, and instead of that peaceful and almost silent amalgamation of races, customs, laws, and languages, which took place in England, and which is the source of many of the best elements in English life and character, the two nations remained in Ireland for centuries in hostility." From this period dates that intense national antipathy felt by the English for the Irish race which has darkened all subsequent history. It was not originally a temperamental antipathy, or it would be impossible to explain the powerful attraction of Irish character, manners, and laws for the great bulk of the Anglo-Norman colonists. Nor within Ireland, even after the Reformation, was it a religious antipathy between a Protestant race and a race exclusively and immovably Catholic. It was in origin a political antipathy between a small official minority, backed by the support of a powerful Mother Country struggling for ascendancy over a large native and naturalized majority, divided itself by tribal feuds, but on the whole united in loathing and combating that ascendancy. Universal experience, as I shall afterwards show, proves that an enmity so engendered takes a more monstrous and degrading shape than any other. Religion becomes its pretext. Ignorance makes it easy, and interest makes it necessary, to represent the native race as savages outside the pale of law and morals, against whom any violence and treachery is justifiable. The legend grows and becomes a permanent political axiom, distorting and abasing the character of those who act on it and those who, suffering from it, and retaliating against its consequences, construct their counter-legend of the inherent wickedness of the dominant race. If left to themselves, white races, of diverse nationalities, thrown together in one country, eventually coalesce, or at least learn to live together peaceably. But if an external power too remote to feel genuine responsibility for the welfare of the inhabitants, while near enough to exert its military power on them, takes sides in favour of the minority, and employs them as its permanent and privileged garrison, the results are fatal to the peace and prosperity of the country it seeks to dominate, and exceedingly harmful, though in a degree less easy to gauge, to itself. So it was with Ireland; and yet it cannot fail to strike any student of history what an extraordinary resilience she showed again and again under any transient phase of wise and tolerant government. Such a phase occurred in the latter part of the reign of Henry VIII., when, after the defeat of the Geraldines, for the first time some semblance of royal authority was established over the whole realm; and when an effort was also made, not through theft or violence, but by conciliatory statecraft, to replace the native Brehon system of law and land tenure by English institutions, and to anglicize the Irish chiefs. The process stopped abruptly and for ever with the accession of Mary, to be replaced by the forcible confiscation of Irish land, and the "planting" of English and Scotch settlers. Ireland, for four hundred years the only British Colony, is now drawn into the mighty stream of British colonial expansion. Adventurous and ambitious Englishmen began to regard her fertile acres as Raleigh regarded America, and, in point of time, the systematic and State-aided colonization of Ireland is approximately contemporaneous with that of America. It is true that until the first years of the sixteenth century no permanent British settlement had been made in America, while in Ireland the plantation of King's and Queen's Counties was begun as early as 1556, and under Elizabeth further vast confiscations were carried out in Munster within the same century. But from the reign of James I. onward, the two processes advance _pari passu_. Virginia, first founded by Raleigh in 1585, is firmly settled in 1607, just before the confiscation of Ulster and its plantation by 30,000 Scots; and in 1620, just after that huge measure of expropriation, the Pilgrim Fathers landed in New Plymouth. Puritan Massachusetts--with its offshoots, Connecticut, New Haven and Rhode Island--as well as Catholic Maryland, were formally established between 1629 and 1638, and Maine in 1639, at a period when the politically inspired proscription of the Catholic religion, succeeding the robbery of the soil, was goading the unhappy Irish to the rebellion of 1641. While that rebellion, with its fierce excesses and pitiless reprisals, was convulsing Ireland, the united Colonies of New England banded themselves together for mutual defence. A few years later Cromwell, aiming, through massacre and rapine, at the extermination of the Irish race, with the savage watchword "To Hell or Connaught," planted Ulster, Munster, and Leinster with men of the same stock, stamp, and ideas as the colonists of New England, and in the first years of the Restoration Charles II. confirmed these confiscations, at the same time that he granted Carolina to Lord Clarendon, New Netherlands to the Duke of York, and New Jersey to Lord Berkeley, and issued fresh Charters for Connecticut and Maryland. Finally, Quaker Penn founded Pennsylvania in 1682, and in 1691 William III., after the hopeless Jacobite insurrections in favour of the last of the Stuarts, wrung the last million acres of good Irish land from the old Catholic proprietors, planted them with Protestant Englishmen, and completed the colonization of Ireland. Forty years passed (1733) before Georgia, the last of the "Old Thirteen Colonies," was planted, as Ulster had been planted, mainly by Scotch Presbyterians. During the greater part of this period we must remember that conquered Ireland herself was contributing to the colonization of America. Every successive act of spoliation drove Catholic Irishmen across the Atlantic as well as into Europe, and gave every Colony an infusion of Irish blood. Until the beginning of the eighteenth century this class of emigration was for the most part involuntary. Cromwell, for example, shipped off thousands of families indiscriminately to the West Indies and America for sale, as "servants" to the colonists. The only organized and voluntary expedition in which Irish Catholics took part was that to Maryland under Lord Baltimore. The distinction in course of time became immaterial. In the free American air English, Scotch, and Irish became one people, with a common political and social tradition. It is interesting, and for a proper understanding of the Irish question, indispensable, briefly to contrast the characteristics and progress of the American and Irish settlements, and in doing so to observe the profound effects of geographical position and political institutions on human character. I shall afterwards ask the reader to include in the comparison the later British Colonies formed in Canada and South Africa by conquest, and in Australia by peaceful settlement. Let us note, first, that both in America and Ireland the Colonies were bi-racial, with this all-important distinction, that in America the native race was coloured, savage, heathen, nomadic, incapable of fusion with the whites, and, in relation to the almost illimitable territory colonized, not numerous; while in Ireland the native race was white, civilized, Christian, numerous, and confined within the limits of a small island to which it was passionately attached by treasured national traditions, and whose soil it cultivated under an ancient and revered system of tribal tenure. The parallel, then, in this respect, is slight, and becomes insignificant, except in regard to the similarity of the mental attitude of the colonists towards Indians and Irish respectively. In natural humanity the colonists of Ireland and the colonists of America differed in no appreciable degree. They were the same men, with the same inherent virtues and defects, acting according to the pressure of environment. Danger, in proportionate degree, made both classes brutal and perfidious; but in America, though there were moments of sharp crisis, as in 1675 on the borders of Massachusetts, the degree was comparatively small, and through the defeat and extrusion of the Indians diminished steadily. In Ireland, because complete expulsion and extermination were impossible, the degree was originally great, and, long after it had actually disappeared, haunted the imagination and distorted the policy of the invading nation. In America there was no land question. Freeholds were plentiful for the meanest settlers and the title was sound and indisputable. In the "proprietary" Colonies, it is true, vast tracts of country were originally vested by royal grants in a single nobleman or a group of capitalists, just as vast estates were granted in Ireland to peers, London companies, and syndicates of "undertakers"; but by the nature of things, the extent of territory, its distance, and the absence of a white subject race, no agrarian harm resulted in America, and a healthy system of tenure, almost exclusively freehold, was naturally evolved. In Ireland the land question was the whole question from the first. If the natives had been exterminated, or their remnants wholly confined, as Cromwell planned, to the barren lands of Connaught, all might have been well for the conquerors. Or if Ireland had been, in Mr. Chamberlain's phrase, a thousand miles away, all might have come right under the compulsion of circumstances and the healing influence of time. That the Celtic race still possessed its strong powers of assimilation was shown by the almost complete denationalization and absorption of a large number of Cromwell's soldier-colonists in the south and south-east under what Mr. Lecky calls the "invincible Catholicism" of the Irish women. But the Irish were not only numerous, but fatally near the seat of Empire. The natives--Irish or Anglo-Irish--were still more than twice as numerous as the colonists; they were scattered over the whole country, barren or fertile, and that country was within a day's sail of England. The titles of the colonists to the land rested on sheer violence, sometimes aggravated by the grossest meanness and treachery, and these titles were not recognized by the plundered race. Even with their gradual recognition it would have been difficult to introduce the English system of tenure, which was radically different and repellent to the Irish mind. The bare idea of one man absolutely owning land and transmitting it entire to his heirs was incomprehensible to them. The solution for all these difficulties was unfortunately only too easy and obvious. England was near, strong, and thoroughly imbued with the policy of governing Ireland on the principle of antagonizing the races within her. It was possible, therefore, by English help, under laws made in England, to constitute the Irish outlaws from the land, labourers on it, no doubt, that was an economic necessity, precarious occupiers of plots just sufficient to support life; but, in the eyes of the law, serfs. The planters of the southern American Colonies imported African negroes for the same purpose, with irretrievably mischievous results to their own descendants. Nor is it an exaggeration to compare the use made of the Irish for a certain period to the use made of these negroes, for great numbers of the Irish were actually exported as slaves to Barbadoes, Jamaica, and even to Carolina. The outlawed multitude in Ireland were deprived, not only of all rights to the land, but, as a corollary, of all social privileges whatsoever. "The law," said an Irish Lord Chancellor, "does not suppose any such person to exist as an Irish Roman Catholic." The instrument of ostracism was the famous Penal Code, begun in William's reign in direct and immediate defiance of a solemn pledge given in the Treaty of Limerick, guaranteeing liberty of conscience to the Catholics, and perfected in the reign of Anne. This Code, ostensibly framed to extirpate Catholicism, was primarily designed to confirm and perpetuate the gigantic dislocation of property caused by the transference of Irish and Anglo-Irish land into English and Scotch ownership. Since the rightful owners were Catholic, and the wrongful owners Protestants, the laws against the Catholic religion--a religion feared everywhere by Englishmen at this period--were the simplest means of legalizing and buttressing the new régime. I shall not linger over the details of the Code. Burke's description of it remains classic and unquestioned: "A complete system full of coherence and consistency, well digested and composed in all its parts ... a machine of wise and elaborate contrivance; and as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man." The aim was to reduce the Catholics to poverty, ignorance, and impotence, and the aim was successful. Of the laws against priests, worship, education, and of the bars to commerce and the professions, I need not speak. In the matter of property, the fundamental enactments concerned the land, namely, that no Catholic could own land, or lease it for more than thirty years, and even then on conditions which made profitable tenure practically impossible. This law created and sustained the serfdom I have described, and is the direct cause of the modern land problem. It remained unaltered in the smallest respect for seventy years, that is, until 1761, when a Catholic was permitted to lease for sixty-one years as much as fifty acres of bog not less than four feet deep. Long before this the distribution of landed property and the system of land tenure had become stereotyped. This system of tenure was one of the worst that ever existed on the face of the globe. It has been matched in portions of India, but nowhere else in this Empire save in little Prince Edward Island, where we shall meet with it again. In Ireland, where it assumed its worst form, violent conquest by a neighbouring power not only made it politic to outlaw the old owners, but precluded the introduction of the traditional English tenures, even into the relations between the British superior landlord and the British occupying colonist. The bulk of the confiscated Irish land, as I have mentioned, had been granted in fee to English noblemen, gentlemen, or speculators, who planted it with middle or lower-class tenants. A number of Cromwell's private soldiers settled in Leinster and Munster, and, holding small farms in fee, formed an exception to this rule. But the greater part of Ireland, in ownership, as distinguished from occupation, consisted of big estates, and a large number of the English owners, being only a day's sail from England, became, by natural instinct, habitual absentees. Others lived in Dublin and neglected their estates. Absenteeism, non-existent in America, assumed in Ireland the proportions of an enormous economic evil. In England the landlord was, and remains, a capitalist, providing a house and a fully equipped farm to the tenant. In Ireland he was a rent receiver pure and simple, unconnected with the occupier by any healthy bond, moral or economic. The rent-receiving absentee involved a resident middleman, who contracted to pay a stipulated rent to the absentee, and had to extract that rent, plus a profit for himself, out of the occupiers, whether Catholic serfs, Protestant tenants, or both, and usually did so by subdivision of holdings and disproportionate elevation of rents. Over three of the four Provinces of Ireland--for a small part of Ulster was differently situated--the middleman himself frequently became an absentee and farmed his agency to another middleman, who by further subdivisions and extortions made an additional private profit, and who, in his turn, would create a subsidiary agency, until the land in many cases was "subset six deep."[5] The ultimate occupier and sole creator of agricultural wealth lived perpetually on the verge of starvation, beggared not only by extortionate rents, partly worked out in virtually forced labour, but by extortionate tithes paid to the alien Anglican Church, in addition to the scanty dues willingly contributed to the hunted priests of his own prescribed religion. His resident upper class--though we must allow for many honourable exceptions--was the Squirearchy, satirized by Arthur Young as petty despots with the vices of despots; idle, tyrannical, profligate, boorish, fit founders of the worst social system the modern civilized world has ever known. The slave-owning planters of Carolina were by no means devoid of similar faults, which are the invariable products of arbitrary control over human beings, but there the physiological gulf between the dominant and subject race was too broad and deep to permit of substantial deterioration in the former. In Ireland the ethnological difference was small; the artificial cleavage and deterioration great in inverse proportion. For the greater part of a century, in every part of Ireland, tenancies of land, whether held by Catholic or Protestant, by lease or at will, were alike in certain fundamental characteristics. The tenant had neither security of tenure nor right to the value of the improvements which were invariably made by his own capital and labour. Even a leaseholder, when his lease expired, had no prescriptive claim to renewal, but must take his chance at a rent-auction with strangers, the farm going to the highest bidder. If he lost, he was homeless and penniless, while the fruits of his labour and capital passed into other hands. The miserable Catholic cottier was, of course, in a similar case, though relatively his hardship was less, since his condition, being the lowest possible in all circumstances, could scarcely be worse. Obviously, in a case where the landlord was neither the capitalist nor the protector and friend of the tenant, the possession of those elementary rights, security of tenure and compensation for improvements, was the condition precedent to the growth of a sound agrarian system. Their denial was incompatible with social order. Yet they were denied, and for one hundred and eighty years an intermittent struggle to obtain them by violence and criminal conspiracy degraded and retarded Ireland. But a marked distinction grew up between a small portion of Ireland and the rest. James I.'s plantation of Ulster had been far more drastic and thorough than any operation of the kind before or since. Later immigrants had flowed in, and at the beginning of the eighteenth century in the north-eastern portion--the predominantly Protestant Ulster of to-day--Scotch Protestant tenants, mainly Presbyterian, were thickly settled, and formed an industrious community of strong and tenacious temper. In the original leases granted by the concessionaires in the seventeenth century, fixity of tenure was implied, and a nominal rent levied, somewhat after the American model; but under the example of other Provinces, and the economic pressure exerted by the growth in the Catholic population, these privileges seem to have been almost wholly obliterated. The absentee landlords, reckless of social welfare, exacted the rack or competitive rent. As in the south and west, tithes to the Established Church and oppressive and corrupt local taxation for roads and other purposes, aggravated the discontent. For agrarian reasons only--and there were others which I shall mention--many thousands of Protestants left Ireland for ever. It required a long period of outrage and conspiracy, attaining in 1770 the proportions of a small civil war, and at the end of the century, by the anti-Catholic passions it inspired, wrecking new hopes of racial unity, to establish what came to be known as the Ulster Custom of Tenant Right. If Protestant freemen had to resort to these demoralizing methods to obtain, and then only after irreparable damage to Ireland, the first condition of social stability, a tolerable land system, the effect of the agrarian system on Catholic Ireland, prostrate under the Penal Code, may be easily imagined. In addition to excessive subdivision of holdings and excessive tithes, rents, and local burdens, another agrarian evil, unknown in the vast and thinly populated tracts of America intensified the misery of the Irish peasantry of the eighteenth century. This was the conversion of the best land from tillage into pasture, with the resulting clearances and migrations, and the ultimate congestion on the worst land. Lecky quotes a contemporary pamphlet, which speaks of the "best arable land in the kingdom in immense tracts wantonly enjoyed by the cattle of a few individuals, and at the same time the junctions of our highways and streets crowded with shoals of mendicant fellow-creatures." This change from arable to pasture has been a common and often in the long run a healthy, economic tendency in many countries, England and Scotland included, though temporarily a fruitful source of misery. Under normal conditions the immediate evils right themselves in course of time. Nothing was normal in Ireland, and any breath of economic change in the outside world reacted cruelly on the wretched subject class, which produced, though it did not enjoy, the greater part of the wealth of the kingdom. Under an accumulation of hardships famine was periodic, and from 1760, when the first Whiteboys appeared, disorder in one degree or another was chronic. The motive, it is universally agreed now, was material, not religious. The Whiteboys of the south and west were the counterparts of the Protestant Steelboys and Oakboys of the north, and even in the south and west there were Protestant as well as Catholic Whiteboys. Lord Charlemont, the Protestant Irish statesman, denying this now well-ascertained fact, was nevertheless explicit enough about the cause of the disorders. "The real causes," he said, "were ... exorbitant rents, low wages, want of employment, farms of enormous extent let by their rapacious and indolent proprietors to monopolizing land-jobbers, by whom small portions of them were again let and relet to intermediate oppressors, and by them subdivided for five times their value among the wretched starvers upon potatoes and water; taxes yearly increasing, and still more tithes, which the Catholic, without any possible benefit, unwillingly pays in addition to his priest's money ... misery, oppression, and famine."[6] Agrarian crime, operating through an endless succession of secret societies, Whiteboys and Rightboys in the eighteenth century; Terry Alts, Rockites, Caravats, Ribbonmen, Moonlighters, in the nineteenth, was rampant for nearly two centuries, long surviving the repeal of the Penal Code; and its last echoes may be heard at this moment. In the absence of all wholesome law, violence and terror were the only means of self-defence. The remedy applied was retaliatory violence under forms of law. Nothing whatsoever was done to remove the essential vices of agrarian tenure during the eighteenth century; nothing tentative even during the nineteenth century until the year 1870; nothing effective and permanent until 1881, when, as far as humanly possible, it was sought to give direct statutory expression to the Ulster Custom, with the addition of the principle of a fair judicial rent. Englishmen should realize this when they discuss Irish character. It is a very old story, but nine out of ten Englishmen, when talking vaguely of Irish discontent, disloyalty, and turbulence, forget, or have never learnt, this and other fundamental facts. As for the Irish landlords, we must remember that the founders of that class differed in no respect from other English landlords, or from the aristocratic American concessionaires, just as their compatriot tenants and lessees were identical in stock with the American colonists. Their descendants and successors have been the victims of circumstance. Each generation has inherited the vested interests of the last, and it is not in human nature to look far behind vested interests into the wrongful acts which created them and the bad laws that perpetuate them. Doubly victimized have been those resident landlords who at all periods, from the earliest era of colonization, in spite of temptation and bad examples around them, have acted towards their tenantry as humane and patriotic citizens. A bad agrarian system infects the whole body politic. Good landlords and contented tenants inevitably suffered with the rest. In commerce and industry, as in land, the Irish Colony stood at a heavy disadvantage by comparison with America. From the Restoration onward, English statesmen took the same view of both dependencies, namely, that their commercial interests should be wholly subordinate to those of the Mother Country, and the same Department, the Board of Trade and Plantations, made the fiscal regulations for Ireland and America. The old idea that for trade purposes Ireland counted as an integral part of the United Kingdom did not last longer than 1663. But it was not wholly abrogated by the great Navigation Act of that year, which, though it placed harsh restrictions on the Irish cattle trade with England, did not expressly exclude Irish ships from the monopoly of the colonial trade conferred upon English vessels, so that for seven years longer a tolerably prosperous business was carried on direct between Ireland and the American Colonies.[7] An Act of 1670, prohibiting, with a few negligible exceptions, all direct imports from the Colonies into Ireland, gave a heavy check to this business, arrested the growth of Irish shipping, and, in conjunction with subsequent measures of navigational, fiscal, and industrial repression, converted Ireland for a century into a kind of trade helot. She was treated either as a foreign country, as a Colony, or as something inferior to either, according to the dictation of English interests, while possessing neither the commercial independence of a foreign country nor the natural and indefeasible immunity which distance, climate, variety of soil, and unlimited room for expansion continued to confer, in spite of all coercive restraints, upon the American Colonies. Though the British trade monopoly was certainly a contributory cause in promoting the American revolution, it was never, any more than the British claim to tax, a severe practical grievance. The prohibition of the export of manufactures, and the compulsory reciprocal exchange of colonial natural products for British manufactured goods and the chartered merchandise of the Orient, were not very onerous restrictions for young communities settled in virgin soil; nor, with a few exceptions like raw wool, whose export was forbidden, were the American natural products of a kind which could compete with those of the Mother Country. The real damage inflicted upon the Colonies by the mercantile system--one which its modern defenders are apt to forget--was moral. To practise and condone smuggling was habitual in America, and some of the English Governors set the worst example of all by making a profit out of connivance at the illicit traffic. "Graft" was their creation. The moral mischief done was permanent, and it resembled in a lesser degree the mischief done in Ireland both by bad agrarian and bad commercial laws. Ireland, owing to her proximity, was in the unhappy position of being a competitor in the great staples of trade, both raw and manufactured, and she was near enough and weak enough to render it easy to stamp out this competition so far as it was thought to be inimical to English interests. The cattle and provision trade with England had been damaged as far back as 1663, and was killed in 1666, though the export of provisions to foreign countries survived, and became almost the sole source of Irish trade during the eighteenth century. The policy with raw wool was to admit just as much as would satisfy the English weavers without arousing the determined opposition of the competitive English graziers. The Irish manufactured wool trade, a flourishing business, for which Irishmen showed exceptionally high aptitude, and which in the normal course of things would probably have become her staple industry, was destroyed altogether, avowedly in the interests of the English staple industry, by prohibitory export duties imposed in 1698. Subsidiary industries--cotton, glass, brewing, sugar-refining, sail-cloth, hempen rope, and salt--were successively strangled. One manufacture alone, that of linen, centred in the Protestant North, was spared, and for a short period was even encouraged, not because it was a Protestant industry, but because at first it aroused no trade jealousy in England, and was in some respects serviceable to her. In 1708, when it was proposed to extend the industry to Leinster, considerations of foreign trade provoked an outburst of hostility, and harassing restrictions were imposed on this industry also. On the whole, however, it suffered less than the rest, and lived to become one of the two important manufacturing industries of present-day Ireland. English policy was as fatuous as it was cruel. Numbers of the Irish manufacturers and artisans, both Catholic and Protestant, emigrated to Europe, and devoted their skill and energy to strengthening industries which competed with those of England. Within Ireland, since industry and commerce formed the one outlet left by the Penal Code for Catholic brains and capital--though even here the Code imposed harassing disabilities--the commercial restrictions completed the ruin of the proscribed sect. But at this period the main source of weakness to Ireland, of strength to America, and of danger to the Empire as a whole, was the Protestant emigration. Lecky estimates that 12,000 Protestant families in Dublin and 30,000 in the rest of the country were ruined by the suppression of the wool trade. The great majority of these Protestants were Presbyterians belonging to North-East Ulster, and descendants of the men who had defended that Province with such desperate gallantry against the Irish insurgents under the deposed James II. Political power in Ireland was wielded in the interests of a small territorial and Episcopalian aristocracy, largely absentee. The Dissenters belonged to the middle and lower classes, and were for the most part tenants or artisans. Creed and caste antipathies were combined against them. Their value as citizens was ignored. Though their right to worship was legally recognized by an Act of 1719, they remained from 1704 to 1778 subject to the Test, were incapacitated for all public employment, and were forbidden to open schools. Under an accumulation of agrarian, economic, and religious disabilities, they naturally left Ireland to find freedom in America. And it is beyond question that they turned the scale against the British arms in the great War of Independence. FOOTNOTES: [4] Class C. in Sir William Anson's classification, "Law and Custom of the Constitution," p. 253. [5] J. Fisher, "End of the Irish Parliament" cited. [6] MS. Autobiography cited by Lecky, vol. ii., p. 35. [7] The best modern account of the commercial relations of Great Britain Mid Ireland is Miss Murray's "Commercial Relations between England and Ireland." CHAPTER II REVOLUTION IN AMERICA AND IN IRELAND In the Old World and in the New, therefore, two societies, composed of human beings similar in all essential respects, were growing up under the protection of the British Crown; the one servile, the other free; the one stagnant where it was not retrograde, the other prosperous, progressive, and, by the magnetism of its own freedom, progress, and prosperity, steadily draining its Irish fellow of talent, energy, and industrial skill. What was the ultimate cause of this glaring divergency? Religion, as a spiritual force, was not the root cause. The American Colonies, with three exceptions--the earliest Virginia, the latest Georgia, and the Catholic community of Maryland--were formed by Dissenters,[8] exiles themselves from persecution, but not necessarily forbearing to others, and, in the case of the New England Puritans, bitterly intolerant. It is interesting to observe that the Quakers and the Catholics, men standing at the opposite poles of theology, set the highest example of tolerance. Quaker Pennsylvania enforced absolute liberty of conscience, and Quakers in all the Provinces worked for religious harmony and freedom. Catholic Maryland, as long as its government remained in Catholic hands, and under the guidance of the wise and liberal Proprietary, Lord Baltimore, pursued the same policy, and attracted members of sects persecuted in New England.[9] The parallel with Ireland is significant. At the end of the seventeenth century, when a quarrel was raging between the Crown and Massachusetts over the persecution of Quakers in that Colony, and for a further period in the eighteenth century, Quaker missionaries and settlers were conducting a campaign of revivalism in Ireland with no molestation from the Catholics, though with intermittent obstruction from magistrates and Protestant clergy. Wesleyans received the same sympathetic treatment.[10] The tolerance shown by Irish Catholics, in spite of terrible provocation, is acknowledged by all reputable historians. Nor was Protestant intolerance, whether Anglican or Nonconformist, of a deeper dogmatic shade than anywhere else in the King's dominions. But in Ireland it was political, economic, and social, while in America it was purely theological, and, moreover, purely American. The Episcopalian ascendancy in Ireland represented foreign interests, and therefore struck against Dissent as well as against Popery, and estranged both. The root of the American trouble, leading to the separation of the Colonies, was political and wholly unconnected with religion. The root of the Irish trouble, adventitiously connected with religion, lay, and lies still, in the Irish political system. Other evils were transient and curable; this was permanent. The Penal Code was eventually relaxed; the disabilities of the Dissenters were eventually removed; the commercial servitude was abolished, but the political system _in essentials_ has never been changed. Let us see what it was and how it worked at the period we are considering, again by comparison with America. Though the word "plantation" was applied alike to the colonization of Ireland and America, Ireland was never called a Colony, but a Kingdom. The distinction was not scientific, and operated, like all other distinctions, to the injury of Ireland. Neither country was represented in the British Parliament. In both countries the representatives of the Crown were appointed by England, and controlled, in America almost completely, in Ireland absolutely, the Executive and Judges. In Ireland the Viceroy was always an Englishman; in America, the Governors of a few of the non-proprietary Colonies were colonials, but most Governors were English, and some of the proprietary class were absentees.[11] In the case both of Ireland and America the English Government claimed a superior right of control over legislation and taxation, and in both cases it was found necessary to remove all doubts as to this right by passing Declaratory Acts, for Ireland in 1719, for America in 1766. The great difference lay in the Legislature, and was the result of different degrees of remoteness from the seat of power. America was profoundly democratic from the beginning, outpacing the Mother Country by fully two centuries. There was no aristocracy, and in most Colonies little distinction between upper and middle classes. The popular Assemblies, elected on the broadest possible franchise, were truly representative. Some of the Legislative Councils, or Upper Chambers, were elective also. Most of them, although nominated, and therefore inclined to be hostile to the popular body, were nevertheless of identical social composition; so that there was often an official, but never a caste, ascendancy. From very early times there was occasional friction between the Home Government, represented by the Governors, and the colonial democracies, over such matters as taxation, official salaries, quartering of troops, and navigation laws. Writs of _quo warranto_ were issued against Connecticut, Carolina, New York, and Maryland, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, and the Charter of Massachusetts, after long wrangles with the Crown, was forfeited in 1684, and not restored until 1692, after a period of despotic government under Sir Edmund Andros. But for a century or more the system worked well enough upon the whole. Under the powerful lever of the representative Assembly, neutralized by the ever-present need for military protection from the Mother Country, and with the wholesome check to undue coercion set by the broad Atlantic, civic freedom grew and flourished to a degree unknown in any other part of the civilized world. In Ireland civic freedom was unknown. There was no popular Assembly. A wealthy aristocracy of English extraction and of Anglican faith, partly resident, partly absentee, and wholly subservient to the English Government, constituted the Upper House of that strange institution known as Parliament, and to a great extent nominated and controlled the Lower House through means frankly corrupt. Representation was almost nominal; close pocket-boroughs predominated, and seats were bought and sold in the open market. In the year 1790 more than a third of the Members of the House of Commons were placemen, 216 Members out of 300 were elected by boroughs and manors, and, of these, 176 were elected by individual patrons. Fifty-three of these patrons, nominating 123 Members, sat as Peers in the Upper House. Cash, places, and peerages, were the usual considerations paid for maintaining a Government majority. The Catholics, from three-quarters to five-sixths of the population, had neither votes nor members; the Dissenters scarcely any members and an almost powerless vote. The Irish Legislature, by an Act as old as 1495, the famous Poynings' Law, could neither initiate nor pass a measure without the consent of the English Privy Council, and the Declaratory Act of 1719 confirmed the power of making English Acts applicable to Ireland. Government in England itself was, no doubt, unrepresentative and corrupt at that period, and the people paid the penalty in full; but it was a national government, under the aegis of the national faith, and resting, however remotely, on the ultimate sanction of the people, just as American opinion, more democratically ascertained, continued to control the major part of American affairs. In Ireland the Government was systematically anti-Irish. There was no career for Irishmen in Ireland. Both Catholics and Dissenters were excluded from all civil and military offices; the highest posts were generally given to Englishmen born and bred, and the country, Episcopalian only to a fractional extent, was ruled by a narrow Episcopalian oligarchy of wealthy landowners and prelates, who bartered Irish freedom for the place and power of their own families and dependents. The conditions of this sordid exchange were the ground of the first important Anglo-Irish political struggle in the eighteenth century, when the English Viceroy, Townshend, succeeded in 1770-71, at the cost of half a million, in transferring the bribing power, and therefore the controlling power, from the "Undertakers," as they were known, direct to the Crown. There seems to have been no continuous English policy beyond that of making Ireland completely subservient to English interests and purposes, and often to purposes of the most humiliating and degrading kind. The Irish Pension List has earned immortal infamy. Jobs too scandalous to pass muster in England were systematically foisted upon the Irish establishment. Royal mistresses, a host of needy Germans, a Danish Queen banished for adultery, lived in England or abroad upon incomes drawn from the impoverished Irish Exchequer. Nor was it only a question of pensions. Quantities of valuable sinecure offices were habitually given to Englishmen who never came near the shores of Ireland. In short, the English policy towards Ireland was similar to Spain's policy towards her South American Colonies, minus the grosser forms of physical cruelty and oppression. Yet Ireland, like the American Colonies until the verge of the revolutionary struggle, was consistently loyal to the Crown both in peace and war. The loyalty of Catholic Ireland, poverty-stricken, inarticulate, almost leaderless, and shamefully misgoverned, does not, from the human standpoint, appear worthy of admiration, but it was a fact. The few Catholic noblemen outdid the Protestants in expressions of devotion; the Whiteboy risings were as little disloyal as religious. Not a hand stirred for James or his heirs when Jacobite plots and risings were causing grave public danger in England and Scotland. Catholic Lord Trimleston offered exclusively Catholic regiments with Catholic officers to George III. for foreign service in 1762, though they were vetoed by what his Viceroy Halifax called the "ill-bred bigotry" of the Irish Parliament. Nor was it till thirty years after that date that Protestant discontent, under intolerable provocation, assumed an anti-dynastic and Republican form. To compare the Imperial spirit displayed by America and Ireland in their views and action is difficult, partly because the various American Colonies differed widely, partly because there existed in Ireland no organ of government which could express popular feeling. Neither country, of course, paid any cash contribution to Imperial expenses, though both could fairly claim that the English monopoly of trade imposed an indirect tribute of indefinite size, while Ireland, in pensions, rents to absentees, and sinecure appointments, was drained of many millions more. American patronage was an element of substantial value to England, but it was not on the Irish scale. America on the whole, perhaps, showed less patriotic feeling than Ireland. With full allowance for the lack of sympathy and understanding shown by the British regulars to the American volunteers in their co-operation in the French wars, it can scarcely be denied that the colonists, together with much heroism and public spirit, showed occasional slackness and parsimony in resisting the penetration of a foreign Power which threatened to hem in their settlements from the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi. Ireland during the Seven Years' War, and until the Peace of Paris in 1763, maintained a war establishment of 24,000 troops. She maintained a peace establishment of 12,000 troops, and from 1767 onwards of 15,000 troops. There never seems to have been a whisper of protest from the Catholic population against these measures, nor, except in the matter of the American War, to which we shall come presently, from the Protestants. It may be added that, after 1767, Catholics in considerable numbers were surreptitiously enlisted in the ranks, in spite of the Penal Code, and from then until the present day have fought for the Flag as staunchly as any other class of the King's subjects. It never occurred to responsible English statesmen that here was ground, firm as a rock in America, and firm enough in Ireland, on which, if only they obeyed the instincts and maxims upon which England herself had risen to greatness, they might build a mighty and durable Imperial structure. That loyalty, to be genuine and lasting, must spring from liberty was a truth they did not appreciate, and to this truth, strangely enough, in spite of the lessons of nearly a century and a half, a numerous school of English statesmen is still blind. It was no doubt a fatality that the smouldering discontent both of America and Ireland burst into flame in the reign of a monarch who endeavoured, even within the limits of Britain, to regain the arbitrary power which had cost their throne to the Stuarts; it was an additional fatality that the standard of public morals among the class through which he ruled during the period of crisis had fallen to lower depths than ever before or since. Even incorruptible men were either weak and selfish or subject to some cardinal defect of temper or intellect which, at times of crisis, neutralized their genius. Chatham and Burke were the noblest figures of the time, yet Chatham, in his highest mood a nobler and truer champion of American liberty than Burke, was Minister--nominally, at any rate--when the Revenue Duties imposed upon the American Colonies in 1867 destroyed in a moment the reconciliation brought about by the repeal of the Stamp Act. Burke was surely false to his political philosophy in founding his American argument on expedience rather than on principle. Chatham was a thorough democrat, trusting the people, poor or rich, rude or cultured, common or noble, American or British. Burke, at a time when the reflection of the genuine opinion of the nation in a pure and free Parliament might have saved us, as his splendid orations could not save us, from a disastrous war, scouted Parliamentary reform, and took his unconscious share in playing the game of the most narrow coercionist Tories like Charles Townshend and George III. Of the interminable chain of fatalities which sicken the mind in following every phase of Ireland's history, Burke's rigid temperamental conservatism always seems to me the most fatal and the most melancholy. It is not that he, the greatest intellect Ireland has ever produced, made his career in England. By the time one reaches the period in which he lived one gets used to the expatriation of Irish brains and vigour, not only to England and America, but to Spain, France, Russia, and Germany. It is that his intellect was so constituted as in the long run to be useless, and on some occasions absolutely harmful, to Ireland, sincerely as he loved her, and often as he supported measures for her temporary benefit, and rejoiced in their temporary success. An incident occurred in 1773 which tested his worth to Ireland, and incidentally threw into strong light English views of Ireland and America at the period immediately preceding the revolutionary epoch. The Irish Government, not with any high social aim, but in desperation at the growing Treasury deficit, proposed a tax upon the rents of absentee landlords, and the fate of the measure, like all Irish measures, had to be decided in the first instance in England. North's Tory Ministry actually consented to it. Chatham, far from the active world, and too broken in health to influence policy either way, wrote a powerful plea for it; but a strong group of Whig magnates, themselves wealthy absentee proprietors of Irish land, signed a vehement remonstrance which carried the day against it, and the author of this remonstrance, of all men in the world, was the Irishman Burke, who, owning not an acre of Irish land himself, devoted all his transcendent talents, all the subtlety and variety of his reasoning, to clothing the selfish greed of others with the garb of an enlightened patriotism. He was wrong fundamentally about Ireland, and only superficially right about America. In the terms of this celebrated remonstrance, as illuminated by his own private correspondence, his consistency is revealed. By the very nature of things, he maintained, the central Parliament of a great heterogeneous Empire must exercise a supreme superintending power and regulate the polity and economy of the several parts as they relate to one another, a principle which, of course, would have justified the taxation of America, and which, save on the ground of expediency alone, he would certainly have applied to America. The proximity of Ireland helped his logic, and surely logic was never distorted to stranger ends. The "ordinary residence" of the threatened Irish landowners was in England, "to which country they were attached, not only by the ties of birth and early habit, but also by those of indisputable public duties," as though these facts did not constitute in themselves a damning satire on the system of Irish Government. They were to be "fined" for living in England, as though that fine were not the most just and politic which could be conceived, if it went even an inch towards establishing the principle that Ireland's affairs were the business of responsible resident Irishmen, or towards the further principle, enshrined in Drummond's celebrated phrase of seventy years later in regard to the agrarian system which these Whig noblemen shared in founding, that "property has its duties as well as its rights." Finally, argued Burke, heaping irony upon irony, the tax would lead directly to the "separation" of the two Kingdoms both in interest and affection. The Colonies would follow the Irish example, and thus a principle of disunion and separation would pervade the whole Empire; the bonds of common interest, knowledge, and sympathy which now knit it together would everywhere be loosened, and a narrow, insulated, local feeling and policy would be proportionately increased.[12] Such was Burke's Imperialism, as evoked by an Irish measure which struck at the root of a frightful social evil and of a vicious political system. But the idea expressed by Burke--the spirit of his whole argument--went far beyond this particular absentee tax or any similar tax proposed, as happened in one instance, by a Colony. It was the superbly grandiose expression, and all the more insidiously seductive in that it was so grandiose, of a principle which all thinking men now know, or ought to know, is the negation of Empire, which lost us America, which came within an ace of losing us Canada, which might well have lost us South Africa, and which has in very fact lost us, though not yet irrevocably, the "affection," to use Burke's word, of Ireland. We may call local patriotism "narrow and insulated," if we please, but we recognize now, in every case save that of Ireland, that it is the only foundation for, and the only stimulant to, Imperial patriotism. Chatham, an Englishman of the English, was nevertheless a better Irishman than Burke, and therefore a better Imperialist. "The tax," he wrote, "was founded on strong Irish policy. England, it is evident, profits by draining Ireland of the vast incomes spent here from that country. But I could not, as a Peer of England, advise the King, on principles of indirect, accidental English policy, to reject a tax on absentees sent over here as the genuine desire of the Commons of Ireland acting in their proper and peculiar sphere, and exercising their inherent exclusive right by raising supplies in the manner they judge best." Chatham, in short, applied precisely the same argument to Ireland as, in his memorable speeches of the next year (1774), he applied to America, and in both cases he was right. The only mistake he made was in his estimate of that travesty of a representative assembly, the Irish House of Commons, which, at the secret instigation of the Viceroy, though without actual coercion, eventually threw out a tax so distasteful to its English patrons. But the argument for financial independence remained unassailable, and eventually the Irish Parliament itself summoned up the courage to adopt and act upon it. It may seem almost impossible that in a body so corrupt and exclusive a national sentiment should have arisen. But every elective assembly, however badly constituted, contains the seeds of its own regeneration, and, under even moderately favourable circumstances, moves irresistibly towards freedom. The pity was that circumstances, save for one brief and invigorating interlude, were persistently unfavourable to Ireland. The task was enormous, demanding infinitely more self-sacrifice than even the ablest and most prescient of her Parliamentarians realized. Until it was too late, in fact, they never awoke to the true nature of the task, dazzled by illusory victories. Rotten to the core as the Irish Parliament was, they sought, strengthened by popular influences, to make it the instrument for freeing Ireland from a paralyzing servitude; and up to a point they succeeded, but they did not see that the only security for real and permanent success was to reform the Parliament itself. There the inveterate spirit of creed and class ascendancy, resting in the last resort on English military power, survived long enough to nullify their efforts. The American Revolution and the Irish revolutionary renaissance--the one achieved by a long and bitter war, the other without bloodshed--originated and culminated together, were derived from the same sources, and ran their course in close connection. In Ireland the movement was exclusively Protestant, in America unsectarian; but in both cases finance was the lever of emancipation. America, resenting the commercial restrictions imposed by the Mother Country, but not, until passion had obscured all landmarks, contesting their abstract justice, and suffering no great material harm from their incidence, fought for the principle of self-taxation--a principle which did, of course, logically include, as the Americans instinctively felt, that of commercial freedom. Ireland, harassed by commercial restrictions far more onerous, naturally regarded their abolition as vital, and the control of internal taxation as subsidiary. Apart from concrete grievances, both countries had to fear an unlimited extension of British claims founded on the all-embracing Declaratory Acts of 1719 and 1766. Unfortunately for herself, Ireland for seventy years or more had been steadily supplying America with the human elements of resistance in their most energetic and independent form, and robbing herself proportionately Approximately, how many Protestants belonging mainly to Ulster, whether through eviction from the land, industrial unemployment, or disgust at social and political ostracism, left Ireland for America in the course of the eighteenth century, it is impossible to say; but the number, both relatively to population and relatively to the total emigration, Catholic and Protestant, to all parts of the world, was undoubtedly very large. Mr. Egerton, in his "Origin and Growth of the English Colonies," reckons that in 1775 a sixth part of the thirteen insurrectionary Colonies was composed of Scots-Irish exiles from Ulster, and that half the Protestant population of that Province emigrated to those Colonies between 1730 and 1770. As the crisis approached, emigration became an exodus. Thirty thousand of the farming class are said to have been driven west by the wholesale evictions of the early seventies, and ten thousand weavers followed them during the disastrous depression in the linen trade caused by interruption of commerce with America. The majority went to the northern Colonies, especially Pennsylvania, took from the first a vehement stand against the Royal claims, and supplied some of Washington's best soldiers. A minority went to the backwoods of Virginia, Maryland, and Carolina, and were little heard of until as late in the war as 1780, when Tarleton began his anti-guerilla campaign in the South. Then they woke up, and became, like their compatriots of the North, formidable and implacable foes. Ireland and America, therefore, embarked on their struggle with the English Parliament in close sympathy. The treatise of Molyneux on Irish liberty was read with wide approval in America. Franklin visited and encouraged the Irish patriots, and the Americans in 1775 issued a special address to them, asserting an identity of interest. Chatham, on the eve of war, dwelt strongly in the House of Lords upon the same identity of interest, and in doing so expressly coupled together Irish Catholics and Protestants. Although united by interest and sentiment, Ireland and America entered on the struggle under widely varying conditions. The American Colonies were thirteen separate units, with only a rude organization for common action, and in each of these units there existed a cleavage of opinion, based neither on class nor creed, between rebels and loyalists. In spite of this weakness, the revolt was thoroughly national in the sense that it was organized and maintained through the State Assemblies, resting on a broad popular franchise. In Ireland, unbought and unofficial opinion was united against England. On the other hand, there was no national Legislature; only an enslaved and unrepresentative Legislature, tempered by a band of exceptionally brilliant and upright men, and continually thrust forward in spite of itself into bold and independent action by unconstitutional pressure from the unrepresented elements outside. Success so won, as we shall see, was delusive. We may note two important additional circumstances: first, the dense mist of ignorance in which, and largely in consequence of which, England began her quarrel both with America and Ireland. The average Englishman was probably even more ignorant of Ireland, which was sixty miles away, than of America, which was three thousand miles away. I am not at all sure that that fact is not true still. At any rate, it was true then. Yet knowledge of Ireland was more necessary, because her condition was bad in ways unknown in America. In all the essentials of material well-being, America was supremely fortunate, while Ireland was in the depths of misery. It is not that this misery went undescribed or unlamented, or that it was not realized by a small number of Englishmen. Some of the most famous writings of the time, from the mordant satire of Swift to the learned and elaborate diagnosis of Arthur Young, laid bare the hideous ravages wrought by misrule in Ireland; but they had little or no effect upon English statesmen, and were unread by the only classes from which, if they had had knowledge, proper practical sympathy might have come. Until Townshend's Viceroyalty (1767-1772) most of the Irish Viceroys were absentees for the greater part of their term of office, leaving the conduct of Irish affairs to English Bishops and Judges, the wisest and most humane of whom could make little or no impression on English official indifference. American Governors were at any rate resident, or mainly resident, and a few were good and popular administrators, though the information which most of them supplied to the Home Government showed a blindness to what was going on under their very eyes which would be incomprehensible if we did not know by experience that it is the invariable result of irresponsible rule over white men, whether at home or abroad. If, without the presence of race distinctions, it needed Parliamentary reform in England itself to force the ruling class to study with real sympathy the needs, character, and desires of their own people, naturally the same ruling class, sending out its own members or dependents to America, obtained the most grotesquely distorted notions of what Americans were and what they wanted or resented. "Their office," wrote Franklin of the Governors,[13] "makes them indolent, their indolence makes them odious, and, being conscious that they are hated, they become malicious. Their malice urges them to continual abuse of the inhabitants in their letters to Administration, representing them as disaffected and rebellious, and (to encourage the use of severity) as weak, divided, timid, and cowardly. Government believes all, thinks it necessary to support and countenance its officers," etc. The same spirit pervades the official correspondence of even the best Irish Viceroys of the eighteenth century, and ultimately had a far more disastrous effect in that there were at all times in Ireland ancient elements of social dissension which needed only skilful fomentation by her English rulers to ruin all hopes of reconciliation and unity. That phase was to come after the first Irish victories. For the present the system--for it can scarcely be called a policy--was to irritate all Irishmen and all Americans alike, irrespective of creed, class, or sentiment, and thus to create on each side of the Atlantic that dangerous phenomenon, an united people. The other noticeable point, admirably described by Mr. Holland in his "Imperium et Libertas," is the confusion of political ideas in regard to the status of white dependencies--a confusion greatly augmented by loose and misleading analogies with India and the tropical Colonies. Even a genius like Burke, as I have already pointed out, was misled. Chatham came nearest to the truth, but, naturally, the actual outbreak of war with America checked his political thinking, and threw him back on the bare doctrine of supremacy, right or wrong. It was not fully understood that there must be a radical difference between the government of places settled and populated by white colonists and of places merely exploited by white traders. All the prerogatives of the Crown and Parliament were theoretically valid over both classes of dependency, and to abandon any of them seemed to most men of that day to be inconsistent with Imperial supremacy. Honest and fair-minded politicians and thinkers tried in vain to reconcile local freedom with Imperial unity. We have the key now, though we have made no use of it in Ireland; but most of our forefathers not only had no glimmering of the truth when the fratricidal war began, but learnt nothing from the war itself, and remained unenlightened for sixty years more. If the renunciation in 1778 of the right to tax the Colonies, and the negotiations founded thereon, had led to a peace, it is quite certain that friction would have subsequently arisen on other points. The idea of what we now know as "responsible government" was unknown. Short of coercive war, there seemed to be only two altogether logical alternatives--complete separation and legislative Union. America obtained the one, Ireland was eventually to undergo the other; but it is interesting to remember that suggestions, rejected by Franklin as useless, were made for the representation of the American Colonies in the English Parliament, just as suggestions for a legislative Union between Ireland and England appeared intermittently all through the eighteenth century, long before such a Union was a question of practical politics. I need only briefly summarize the incidents which ended in the year 1782 with the final loss of the American Colonies, and the simultaneous achievement by Ireland of an apparent legislative independence. To take America first, the Stamp Act was passed in 1765, and, thanks to the tumult it created, repealed by the Whigs in 1766, though the Declaratory Act which accompanied the repeal neutralized its good results. The new Revenue Duties on glass, paper, painters' colours, and tea were imposed in 1767, reviving the old irritation, and all but that on tea were removed, after a period of growing friction, in 1770. Another comparative lull was succeeded by fresh disorder when in 1773 the East India Company was permitted to send tea direct to America, and Boston celebrated its historic "tea-party." The coercion of Massachusetts followed, with Gage as despotic Military Governor, and, as a result, all the Colonies were galvanized into unity. In September, 1774, the Continental Congress met, framed a Declaration of Rights, and obtained a general agreement to cease from all commerce with Britain until grievances were redressed. Fresh coercion having been applied, war broke out in 1775. The Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776, by John Hancock, President of Congress and the descendant of an Ulster exile, and was first read aloud in Philadelphia by Captain John Nixon, the son of an evicted Wexford farmer. Another Irishman, General Montgomery, led the invasion of Canada.[14] The war, with manifold vicissitudes, dragged on for eight years; but the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown on October 19, 1781, virtually ended the physical struggle, while the resolution of the House of Commons on February 27, 1782, against the further prosecution of hostilities, ended the contest of principle. The turning-point had been the intervention of the French in 1778, and the same event was to turn the scale in Ireland. There, for many years past, the public finances had been sinking into a more and more scandalous condition. Taxation was by no means heavy, but pensions and sinecures multiplied, and the debt swelled. Inevitably there grew up within Parliament a small independent opposition which would not be bribed into conniving at the ruin of Ireland, while even bought placemen were stung into throwing their votes into the Irish rather than the English scale. Frequent efforts were made to use the insufficiency of the hereditary revenue as a lever for gaining control of finance and for obtaining domestic reform. An Octennial Act, passed in 1768, went a little way towards transforming Parliament from a permanent privileged Committee, under the control of the Executive, into the semblance at least of a free Assembly, and the first dissolution under this Act, in 1776, produced the famous Parliament which, though elected on the same narrow and corrupt basis as before, in the space of six years first admitted the principle of toleration for all creeds, and wrested from English hands commercial and legislative autonomy. It came too late to avert--if, indeed, it could ever have averted--the implication of Ireland in the American War, its predecessor of 1775 having, in defiance of Irish opinion, subscribed an Address to the Crown, expressing "abhorrence" of the American revolt and "inviolable attachment to the just rights" of the King's Government, and having obediently voted four thousand Irish troops for the war. Nor, for all the impassioned eloquence of Grattan and Hussey Burgh, did the real driving-power of the new Parliament come from within its own ranks, but from the unrepresented multitude outside. A clause removing the test from Dissenters was struck out of the Catholic Relief Act of 1778, mainly owing to dictation from England, but partly from resentment against Presbyterian sympathy with the American cause. It was only in 1780, when the Presbyterians were enrolled in that formidable revolutionary organization known as the Volunteers, that a test which had excluded them from all share in the government of their adopted country for seventy-four years was repealed. As for the Catholics, the small measure of legal relief granted to them excited no opposition anywhere. Parts of the Penal Code, especially the laws against worship and the clergy, had become inoperative with time and the sheer impossibility of enforcement. The religion, naturally, had thriven under persecution, so that in spite of the Code's manifold temptations to recant, only four thousand converts had been registered in the last fifty years. The laws designed to safeguard the wholesale confiscations of the previous century had long ago achieved their purpose, and men were beginning to perceive the fatal economic effects of keeping the great mass of the people poor and ignorant. The real spirit of toleration shown in the enactments of 1778, the most important of which enabled Catholics to obtain land on a lease of 999 years, was small enough if we consider the quiescence of the Catholics for generations past, the absence of all tendency in them towards counter-persecution, or even towards intolerance of Protestantism in any of its forms, Quaker, Huguenot, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, or Methodist, in spite of their own overwhelming numbers and of the burning grievance of the tithes. Politically they were a source of great strength to the Government. When the Presbyterians condemned the American War, the Catholic leaders memorialized the Government in favour of it as warmly as the tame majority in Parliament. Conservatives by religion, their devotion to authority annulled all instincts of revenge for the hideous wrongs of the past. The Government, now on the verge of a war with the two great Catholic Powers of Europe, began to realize this, and to feel the wisdom of some degree of conciliation. After all, only four years before they had not merely tolerated, but established, the Catholic Church in the conquered province of Quebec, with the result that the French Canadians remained loyal during the American War. But neither the Government nor the finest independent men in Parliament--not even Grattan--entertained the remotest idea of admitting Irish Catholics to any really effective share in the Government which their loyalty made stable. That noble but hopeless conception originated later, as the dynamic impulse for commercial freedom and legislative independence was originating now, outside the walls of Parliament. The rupture with France in 1778 denuded Ireland of troops, and called into being the Protestant Volunteers; a disciplined, armed body, headed by leaders as weighty and respectable as Lord Charlemont. This body, formed originally for home defence, by a natural and legitimate transition assumed a political aspect, and demanded from a dismayed and terrorized Government commercial freedom for Ireland. For once in her life Ireland was too strong to be coerced. Punishment like that applied to Massachusetts was physically impossible. The bitter protests of English merchants passed unheeded, and the fiscal claims of the Volunteers, with their cannon labelled "Free Trade or this," were granted in full early in 1780. The moral was to persist. From 40,000 the numbers of the Volunteers rose in the two succeeding years to 80,000, and they stood firm for further concessions. The national movement grew like a river in spate; it swept forward the lethargic Catholics and engulfed Parliament. In a tempest of enthusiasm Grattan's Declaration of Independence was carried unanimously in the Irish House of Commons on April 16, 1782, and a month later received legal confirmation in England at the hands of the same Whig Government and Parliament which broke off hostilities with America, and in the same session. America took her own road and worked out her own magnificent destiny. Most of us now honour Washington and the citizen troops he led. We say they fought, as Hampden and their English forefathers fought, for a sublime ideal, freedom, and that they were chips of the old block. But let not distance delude us into supposing that they were without the full measure of human weakness, or that they did not suffer considerable, perhaps permanent, harm from the ten years of smothered revolt and lawless agitation, followed by the seven years of open war which preceded their victory. Washington's genius carried them safely through the ordeal of the war, and the still more exacting ordeal of political reconstruction after the war, but it is well known how nearly he and his staunchest supporters failed. The Revolution, like all revolutions, brought out all the bad as well as all the good in human nature. Bad laws always deteriorate a people; they breed a contempt for law which coercion only aggravates, and which survives the establishment of good laws. As I have already indicated, the dislike and the systematic evasion by smuggling of the trade laws during the long period when the revolt was incubating harmed American character, and probably sowed the seed of future corruption and dissension. However true that may be, it is certainly true that the American rebels showed no more heroism or self-sacrifice than the average Englishman or Irishman in any other part of the world might have been expected to show under similar conditions. Historians and politicians, to whom legal authority always seems sacrosanct and agitation against it a popular vice, who mistake cause and effect so far as to derive freedom from character, instead of character from freedom, can make, and have made, the conventional case against Home Rule for the Americans as plausibly as the same case has, at various times, been made against Home Rule for Canada, South Africa, and Ireland. Since all white men are fundamentally alike in their faults as well as in their virtues, there is always abundant material for an indictment on the ground of bad character. The Americans of the revolutionary war, together with much fortitude, integrity, and public spirit, showed without doubt a good deal of levity, self-seeking, vindictiveness, and incompetence; and whoever chooses to amass, magnify, and isolate evidences of their guilt can demonstrate their unfitness for self-government just as well as he can demonstrate the same proposition in the case of Ireland. Mr. J.W. Fortescue, the learned and entertaining historian of the British Army, has done the former task as well as it can be done. He denounces the whole Colony of Massachusetts--men of his own national stock--as the pestilent offspring of an "irreconcilable faction," which had originally left England deeply imbued with the doctrines of Republicanism. Having gained, and by lying and subterfuge retained, some measure of independence, they sank from depth to depth of meanness and turpitude. They struggled for no high principle, and refused to be taxed from England, simply because they were too contemptibly stingy and unpatriotic to pay a shilling a head towards the maintenance of the Imperial Army. It is always the "mob," the "ruffians," the "rabble," of Boston who carry out the reprisals against the royal coercion, and, like the Irish peasants of the nineteenth century, they are always the half-blind, half-criminal tools of unscrupulous "agitators." It has been, and remains, an obsession with the partisans of law over liberty all the world over that the fettered community, wherever it may be and however composed, does not really want liberty, but that the majority of its sober citizens are dragged into an artificial agitation by mercenary scribes and sham patriots--a view which is always somewhat difficult to reconcile, as students of American and Irish history are aware, not only with the facts of prolonged and tenacious resistance, but with the other view, equally necessary to the argument for law, that the whole community is sinfully unfit for liberty; and Mr. Fortescue falls into the usual maze of self-contradiction and obscurity when he tries to give an intelligible account of a war which lasted seven long and weary years, and yet was "factitious," initiated by an hysterical rabble, stimulated and sustained by the basest and pettiest motives, and which, he contends, was "the work of a small but energetic and well-organized minority towards which the mass of the people, when not directly hostile, was mainly indifferent." Happily, Mr. Fortescue's candour as an historian of facts gives us the clue to this strange tangle. We find no evidence that the sober loyalist majority who sustain one side of his argument, and whom we should expect to find crushing the revolt with ease in co-operation with the British regular troops, were, in fact, a majority, nor that they were either better or worse men, or more or less ardent patriots, than the mutinous minority, or the British regular soldiers themselves. Their loyalty, like the disloyalty of the other side, is sometimes interested and evanescent, more often sincere and tenacious; they are given to desertion, like Washington's troops, like Lee's and Grant's troops nearly a century later, like the Boer troops and like all Volunteer levies, which have somehow to combine war with the duty of keeping their homes and business afloat. We find, too, that a counter-current of desertion flows from the British, and still more from the German, regulars, also a natural enough phenomenon in what was virtually a civil war for liberty; so that "General Greene was often heard to say that at the close of the war he fought the enemy with British soldiers, and that the British fought him with those of America." And then Mr. Fortescue, ignoring the British side of the case, exultingly quotes against the Americans "the cynical Benedict Arnold, who knew his countrymen," and who said: "Money will go farther than arms in America." Yet Arnold, whose opinion of his countrymen Mr. Fortescue accepts as correct and conclusive, was himself, not a plain deserter, but a perjured military traitor of the most despicable kind. We may conclude, perhaps, after taking a broad view of the whole Revolution, that Washington not only knew his countrymen, who were Mr. Fortescue's countrymen, better than Arnold, but was a better representative of their dominant characteristics.[15] Mr. Fortescue is peculiar in the violence of his prepossession, and we know the source of that prepossession, a passionate love of the British Army, which does him great honour, while it distorts his political vision. I should not refer at such length to his view of the American War were it not that, whenever a concrete case of Home Rule comes up for discussion, his philosophy is apt to become the typical and predominant philosophy. Historical sense seems to vanish, and the same savage racial bias supervenes, whether the unruly people concerned are absolutely consanguineous, closely related, or of foreign nationality. Instead of a general acceptance of the ascertained truth that men thrive and coalesce under self-government and sink into deterioration and division under coercion, we get the same pharisaical assumption of superiority in the dominant people, the same attribution of sordid and ugly motives to the leaders of an unruly people, the same vague idealization of the loyalist minority, the same fixed hallucination that the majority does not want what by all the constitutional means in its power it says it wants, and the correspondingly fatal tendency to gauge the intensity of a conviction solely by the amount of physical violence it evokes, while making that very violence an argument for the depravity of those who use it, and a pretext for denying them self-government. All this is terribly true in the case of Ireland, and when I next revert to the American continent, the reader will observe that the same ideas were entertained towards Canada, the only white Colony left to the British Empire after the loss of the thirteen States. FOOTNOTES: [8] The origin of North Carolina is, perhaps, debatable. Nearly all historians have represented it as settled by Dissenting refugees; but Mr. S.B. Weeks, a Carolina historian, has written an essay to prove that this was not the case ("Religious Development in the Province of North Carolina," Baltimore, 1892). The Charter contained a clause for liberty of conscience on the instructive ground that, "by reason of the remote distance of those places, toleration would be no breach of the unity and conformity established in this realm." [9] "Church and State in Maryland," George Petrie. Lord Baltimore, the Catholic founder and Proprietary, enforced complete tolerance from the first (1634), and secured the passage of an Act in 1649 giving legal force to the policy, with heavy penalties against interference with any sect. In 1654 Puritans gained control of the Assembly, and passed an Act against Popery. A counter-revolution repealed this Act, but finally in 1689 the Church of England was established by law. [10] Lecky, "History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century," vol. i., pp. 408-410. [11] Until 1692 Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, elected their own Governors. Massachusetts continued to have Colonial Governors, and sometimes New Jersey and New Hampshire. Proprietary Governments were gradually abolished and converted into "Royal" Governments like the rest. At the period of the Declaration of Independence two only were left--Pennsylvania and Maryland (see "Origin and Growth of the English Colonies," H.E. Egerton). [12] Lecky, "History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century," vol. ii., pp. 124-126. [13] Trevelyan, "The American Revolution," vol. i., p. 16. [14] See "The Irish Race in America," by Captain Ed. O'Meagher Condore. [15] "History of the British Army," vol. iii. CHAPTER III GRATTAN'S PARLIAMENT We left Ireland in 1782 apparently in possession of a triumph as great as that of America, though won without bloodshed and without the least tincture of sedition; for the Volunteers of 1782 were as loyal to the Crown as the most ardent American royalists. In the light of political ideas developed at a much later period, we know that the American Colonies might have remained within the Empire, even if their utmost claims had been granted. Had the idea of responsible government been understood, it would have been realized that their exclusive control of taxation and legislation was not inconsistent with Imperial Union, but essential to it. Grattan and his Irish friends, ignorant of the true solution, honestly thought, in the intoxication of the moment, that they had solved the problem so disastrously bungled for America. The facts of ethnology and geography seemed to have been recognized. Ireland and England, united by a Crown which both reverenced, stood together, like Britain and the Dominions of to-day, as sister nations, with the old irritating servitude swept away, and the bonds of natural affection and natural interest substituted. That the close proximity of the two nations, however marked the contrast between their natural characteristics, made these bonds far more necessary and valuable than in the case of America, stood to reason, and, again, the fact was recognized in Anglo-Irish relations. America had fought rather than submit to a forced contribution to Imperial funds. Nobody in Ireland, in or out of Parliament, had ever objected in principle to an indirect voluntary contribution in troops, and now that the American War was ended, non-Parliamentary objections to one particular application of the principle had no further substance. Nor, as was shortly to be shown in the reception given in Ireland to Pitt's abortive Commercial Propositions of 1785, was there any objection to a direct contribution in money on a fixed annual scale in return for a mutual free trade.[16] The sun had surely risen over a free yet loyal Ireland. Never was there a more complete delusion. It would have been far better for Ireland if she had never had a Parliament at all, but had had to seek her own salvation in the healthy rough-and-tumble of domestic revolution. The mere name of "Parliament" seems perpetually to have hypnotized even its best members, and the illusion was at its highest now. Nothing essential had been changed. Commercial freedom was the most real gain, because it involved the definite repeal of certain trade-laws and the permission to Ireland to make what she liked and send it where she liked; but it was a small gain without some means of finding out what Ireland really liked, and translating that will, without external pressure, into law. The Parliament was neither an organ of public opinion nor a free agent. It was even more corrupt and less representative than before. It was as completely under the control of the English Government as before. The modern conception of a Colonial Ministry serving under a constitutional Governor selected by the Crown, but acting with the advice of his Ministry, was unknown. The English Government, through its Lord-Lieutenant, still appointed English Ministers in Ireland, and in the hands of these Ministers lay not only that large portion of the national income known as the hereditary revenue, but the whole machinery of patronage and corruption. Even the legislative independence was unreal; for majorities still had to be bought, Irish Bills had still to receive the Royal Assent, that is, English ministerial assent; so that powerful English pressure could be, and was, brought to bear upon their policy and construction. And the worst of it was that English pressure here and elsewhere meant then what it meant in the next century, and what it too often means now, English party pressure exercised spasmodically and ignorantly, in order to serve sectional English ends. In short, Ireland, so far from being a nation, was still virtually a Colo