Now, the English are not a nimble-minded people. They cannot, to use a familiar metaphor, turn round in their own length. Their momentum is such as to carry them on for some distance in the direction wherein they have been moving, even after the order to stop has been given. They need time to appreciate, digest, and comprehend a new proposition. Timid they are not, nor, perhaps, exceptionally cautious, but they do not like to be hurried, and insist on looking at a proposition for a good while before they come to a decision regarding it. It is one of the qualities which make them a great people. As has been observed, this proposition was novel, was most serious, and raised questions which they felt that their knowledge was insufficient to determine. Accordingly, a certain section of the Liberal party refused to accept it. A great number, probably the majority, of these doubtful men abstained from voting. Others voted against the Home Rule Liberal candidates, not necessarily because they condemned the policy, but because, as they were not satisfied that it was right, they deemed delay a less evil than the committal of the nation to a new departure, which might prove irrevocable.

It must not, however, be supposed that it was only hesitation which drove many Liberals into the host arrayed against the Irish Government Bill. I have already said that among the leaders there were some, and those men of great influence, who condemned its principles. This was true also of a considerable, though a relatively smaller, section of the rank and file. And it was only what might have been expected. The proposal to undo much of the work done in 1800, to alter fundamentally the system which had for eighty-six years regulated the relations of the two islands, by setting up a Parliament in Ireland, was a proposal which not only had not formed a part of the accepted creed of the Liberal party, but fell outside party lines altogether. It might, no doubt, be argued, as was actually done, and as those who understand the history of the Liberal party have more and more come to see, that Liberal principles recommended it, since they involve faith in the people, and faith in the curative tendency of local self-government. But this was by no means axiomatic. Taking the whole complicated facts of the case, and taking Liberalism as it had been practically understood in England, a man might in July, 1886, deem himself a good Liberal and yet think that the true interests of both peoples would be best served by maintaining the existing Parliamentary system. Similarly, there was nothing in Toryism or Tory principles to prevent a fair-minded and patriotic Tory from approving the Home Rule scheme. It was a return to the older institutions of the monarchy, and not inconsistent with any of the doctrines which the Tory party had been accustomed to uphold. The question, in short, was one of those which cut across ordinary party lines, creating new divisions among politicians; and there might have been and ought to have been Liberal Home Rulers and Tory Home Rulers, Liberal opponents of Home Rule and Tory opponents of Home Rule.

But here comes in a feature, a natural but none the less a regrettable feature, of the English party system. As the object of the party in opposition is to turn out the party in power and seat itself in their place, every Opposition regards with the strongest prejudice the measures proposed by a ruling Ministry. Cases sometimes occur where these measures are so obviously necessary, or so evidently approved by the nation, that the Opposition accepts them. But in general it scans them with a hostile eye. Human nature is human nature; and when the defeat of Government can be secured by defeating a Government Bill, the temptation to the Opposition to secure it is irresistible. Now, the Tory party is far more cohesive than the Liberal party, far more obedient to its leaders, far less disposed to break into sections, each of which thinks and acts for itself. Accordingly, that division of opinion in the Tory party which might have been expected, and which would have occurred if those who composed the Tory party had been merely so many reflecting men, and not members of a closely compacted political organization, did not occur. Liberals were divided, as such a question would naturally divide them. Tories were not divided; they threw their whole strength against the Bill. I am far from suggesting that they did so against their consciences. Whatever may be said as to two or three of the leaders, whose previous language and conduct seemed to indicate that they would themselves, had the election of 1885 gone differently, have been inclined to a Home Rule policy, many of the Tory chiefs, as well as the great mass of the party, honestly disapproved Mr. Gladstone's measure. But their party motives and party affiliations gave it no chance of an impartial verdict at their hands. They went into the jury-box with an invincible prepossession against the scheme of their opponents. When all these difficulties are duly considered, and especially when regard is had to those which I have last enumerated, the suddenness with which the new policy was launched, and the fact that as coming from one party it was sure beforehand of the hostility of the other, no surprise can be felt at its fate. Those who, in England, now look back over the spring and summer of 1886 are rather surprised that it should come so near succeeding. To have been rejected by a majority of only thirty in Parliament, and of little over ten per cent. of the total number of electors who voted at the general election, is a defeat far less severe than any one who knew England would have predicted.

That the decision of the country is regarded by nobody as a final decision goes without saying. It was not regarded as final, even in the first weeks after it was given. This was not because the majority was comparatively small, for a smaller majority the other way would have been conclusive. It is because the country had not time enough for full consideration and deliberate judgment. The Bill was brought in on April 14th, the elections began on July 1st; no one can say what might have been the result of a long discussion, during which the first feelings of alarm (for alarm there was) might have worn off. And the decision is without finality, also, because the decision of the country was merely against the particular plan proposed by Mr. Gladstone, and not in favour of any alternative plan for dealing with Ireland, most certainly not for the coercive method which has since been adopted. One particular solution of the Irish problem was refused. The problem still stands confronting us, and when other modes of solving it have been in turn rejected, the country may come back to this mode.

We may now turn from the past to the future. Yet the account which has been given of the feelings and ideas arrayed against the Bill does not wholly belong to the past. They are the feelings to which the opponents of any plan of self-government for Ireland still appeal, and which will have to be removed or softened down before it can be accepted by the English. In particular, the probability of separation, and the supposed dangers to the Protestants and the landlords from an Irish Parliament, will continue to form the themes of controversy so long as the question remains unsettled.

What are the prospects of its settlement? What is the position which it now occupies? How has it affected the current politics of England?

It broke up the Liberal party in Parliament. The vast numerical majority of that party in the country supported, and still supports, Mr. Gladstone and the policy of Irish self-government. But the dissentient minority includes many men of influence, and constitutes in the House of Commons a body of about seventy members, who hold the balance between parties. For the present they are leagued with the Tory Ministry to resist Home Rule, and their support insures a parliamentary majority to that Ministry. But it is, of course, necessary for them to rally to Lord Salisbury, not only on Irish questions, but on all questions; for, under our English system, a Ministry defeated on any serious issue is bound to resign, or dissolve Parliament. Now, to maintain an alliance for a special purpose, between members of opposite parties, is a hard matter. Agreement about Ireland does not, of itself, help men to agree about foreign policy, or bimetallism, or free trade, or changes in land laws, or ecclesiastical affairs. When these and other grave questions come up in Parliament, the Tory Ministry and their Liberal allies must, on every occasion, negotiate a species of concordat, whereby the liberty of both is fettered. One party may wish to resist innovation, the other to yield to it, or even to anticipate it. Each is obliged to forego something in order to humour the other; neither has the pleasure or the credit of taking a bold line on its own responsibility. There is, no doubt, less difference between the respective tenets of the great English parties than there was twenty years ago, when Mr. Disraeli had not yet completed the education of one party, and economic laws were still revered by the other. But, besides its tenets, each party has its tendencies, its sympathies, its moral atmosphere; and these differ so widely as to make the co-operation of Tories and Liberals constrained and cumbrous. Moreover, there are the men to be considered, the leaders on each side, whose jealousies, rivalries, suspicions, personal incompatibilities, neither old habits of joint action nor corporate party feeling exist to soften. On the whole, therefore, it is unlikely that the league of these two parties, united for one question only, and that a question which will pass into new phases, can be durable. Either the league will dissolve, or the smaller party will be absorbed into the larger. In England, as in America, third parties rarely last. The attraction of the larger mass is irresistible, and when the crisis which created a split or generated a new group has passed, or the opinion the new group advocates has been either generally discredited or generally adopted, the small party melts away, its older members disappearing from public life, its younger ones finding their career in the ranks of one of the two great standing armies of politics. If the dissentient, or anti-Home Rule, Liberal party lives till the next general election, it cannot live longer, for at that election it will be ground to powder between the upper and nether millstones of the regular Liberals and the regular Tories.

The Irish struggle of 1886 has had another momentous consequence. It has brought the Nationalist or Parnellite party into friendly relations with the mass of English Liberals. When the Home Rule party was founded by Mr. Butt, some fifteen years ago, it had more in common with the Liberal than with the Tory party. But as it demanded what both English parties were then resolved to refuse, it was forced into antagonism to both; and from 1877 onward (Mr. Butt being then dead) the antagonism became bitter, and, of course, specially bitter as toward the statesmen in power, because it was they who continued to refuse what the Nationalists sought. Mr. Parnell has always stated, with perfect candour, that he and his friends must fight for their own hand unhampered by English alliances, and getting the most they could for Ireland from the weakness of either English party. This position they still retain. If the Tory party will give them Home Rule, they will help the Tory party. However, as the Tory party has gained office by opposing Home Rule, this contingency may seem not to lie within the immediate future. On the other hand, the Gladstonian Liberals have lost office for their advocacy of Home Rule, and now stand pledged to maintain the policy they have proclaimed. The Nationalists have, therefore, for the first time since the days immediately following the Union of A.D. 1800 (a measure which the Whigs of those days resisted), a great English party admitting the justice of their claim, and inviting them to agitate for it by purely constitutional methods. For such an alliance the English Liberals are hotly reproached, both by the Tories and by the dissentients who follow Lord Harrington and Mr. Chamberlain. They are accused of disloyalty to England. The past acts and words of the Nationalists are thrown in their teeth, and they are told that in supporting the Irish claim they condone such acts, they adopt such words. They reply by denying the adoption, and by pointing out that the Tories themselves were from 1881 till 1886 in a practical, and often very close, though unavowed, Parliamentary alliance with the Nationalists in the House of Commons. The student of history will, however, conceive that the Liberals have a stronger and higher defence than any tu quoque. Issues that involve the welfare of peoples are far too serious for us to apply to them the same sentiments of personal taste and predilection which we follow in inviting a dinner party, or selecting companions for a vacation tour. If a man has abused your brother, or got drunk in the street, you do not ask him to go with you to the Yellowstone Park. But his social offences do not prevent you from siding with him in a political convention. So, in politics itself, one must distinguish between characters and opinions. If a man has shown himself unscrupulous or headstrong, you may properly refuse to vote him into office, or to sit in the same Cabinet with him, because you think these faults of his dangerous to the country. But if the cause he pleads be a just one, you have no more right to be prejudiced against it by his conduct than a judge has to be swayed by dislike to the counsel who argues a case. There were moderate men in America, who, in the days of the anti-slavery movement, cited against it the intemperate language of many abolitionists. There were aristocrats in England, who, during the struggle for the freedom and unity of Italy, sought to discredit the patriotic party by accusing them of tyrannicide. But the sound sense of both nations refused to be led away by such arguments, because it held those two causes to be in their essence righteous. In all revolutionary movements there are elements of excess and violence, which sober men may regret, but which must not disturb our judgment as to the substantial merits of an issue. The revolutionist of one generation is, like Garibaldi or Mazzini, the hero of the next; and the verdict of posterity applauds those who, even in his own day, were able to discern the justice of the cause under the errors or faults of its champion. Doubly is it the duty of a great and far-sighted statesman not to be repelled by such errors, when he can, by espousing a revolutionary movement, purify it of its revolutionary character, and turn it into a legitimate constitutional struggle. This is what Mr. Gladstone has done. If his policy be in itself dangerous and disloyal to the true interests of the people of our islands, let it be condemned. But if it be the policy which has the best promise for the peace, the prosperity, and the mutual good will of those peoples, he and those who follow him would be culpable indeed were they to be deterred by the condemnation which they have so often expressed, and which they still express, for some of the past acts of a particular party, from declaring that the aims of that party were substantially right aims, and from now pressing upon the country what their conscience approves.

However, as the Home Rule Liberals and Nationalists, taken together, are in a minority (although a minority which obtains recruits at many bye-elections) in the present Parliament, it is not from them that fresh proposals are expected. They will, of course, continue to speak, write, and agitate on behalf of the views they hold. But practical attempt to deal with Irish troubles must for the present come from the Tory Ministry; for in the English system of government those who command a Parliamentary majority are responsible for legislation as well as administration, and are censured not merely if their legislation is bad, but if it is not forthcoming when events call for it.

Why, it may be asked, should Lord Salisbury's Government burn its fingers over Ireland, as so many governments have burnt their fingers before? Why not let Ireland alone, giving to foreign affairs and to English and Scottish reforms all the attention which these too much neglected matters need?

Well would it be for England, as well as for English Ministries, if Ireland could be simply let alone, her maladies left to be healed by the soft, slow hand of nature. But Irish troubles call aloud to be dealt with, and that promptly. They stand in the way of all other reforms, indeed of all other business. Letting alone has been tried, and it has succeeded no better, even in times less urgent than the present, than the usual policy of coercion followed by concession, or concession followed by coercion.

There are three aspects of the Irish question, three channels by which the troubles of the "distressful island" stream down upon us, forcing whoever now rules or may come to rule in England to attempt some plan for dealing with them. I will take them in succession.

The first is the Parliamentary difficulty. In the British House of Commons, with its six hundred and seventy members, there are nearly ninety Irish Nationalists. They are a well-disciplined body, voting as one man, though capable of speaking enough for a thousand. They have no interest in English or Scotch or colonial or Indian affairs, but only in Irish, and look upon the vote which they have the right of giving upon the former solely as a means of furthering their own Irish aims. They are, therefore, in the British Parliament not merely a foreign body, indifferent to the great British and imperial issues confided to it, but a hostile body, opposed to its present constitution, seeking to discredit it in its authority over Ireland, and to make more and more palpable and incurable the incompetence for Irish business whereof they accuse it. Several modes of doing this are open to them. They may, as some of the more actively bitter among them did in the Parliaments of 1874 and 1880, obstruct business by long and frequent speeches, dilatory motions, and all those devices which in America are called filibustering. The House of Commons may, no doubt, try to check these tactics by more stringent rules of procedure, but the attempts already made in this direction have had but slight success, and every restriction of debate, since it trenches on the freedom of English and Scotch no less than of Irish members, injures Parliament as a whole. They may disgust the British people with the House of Commons by keeping it (as they have done in former years) so constantly occupied with Irish business as to leave it little time for English and Scotch measures. They may throw the weight of their collective vote into the scale of one or other British party, according to the amount of concession it will make to them, or, by always voting against the Ministry of the day, they may cause frequent and sudden changes of Government. This plan also they have followed in time past; for the moment it is not so applicable, because the Tories and dissentient Liberals, taken together, possess a majority in the House of Commons. But at any moment the alliance of those two sections may vanish, or another General Election may leave Tories and Liberals so nearly balanced that the Irish vote could turn the scale. Whoever reflects on the nature of Parliamentary Government will perceive that it is based on the assumption that the members of the ruling assembly, however much they may differ on other subjects, agree in desiring the strength, dignity, and welfare of the assembly itself, and in caring for the main national interests which it controls. He will therefore be prepared to expect countless and multiform difficulties in working such a Government, where a large section of the assembly seeks not to use, but to make useless, its forms and rules—not to preserve, but to lower and destroy, its honour, its credit, its efficiency. In vain are Irish members blamed for these tactics, for they answer that the interests of their own country require them to seek first her welfare, which can in their view be secured only by removing her from the direct control of what they deem a foreign assembly. Now that the demand for Irish self-government has obtained the sympathy of the bulk of English Liberals, they are unlikely forthwith to resume the systematic obstruction of past years. But they will be able, without alienating their English friends, to render the conduct of Parliamentary business so difficult that every English Ministry will be forced either to crush them, if it can, or to appease them by a series of concessions.

The second difficulty is that of maintaining social order in Ireland. What that difficulty is, and whence it arises, every one knows. It is chronic, but every second or third winter, when there has been a wet season, or the price of live stock declines, it becomes specially acute. The tenants refuse to pay rents which they declare to be impossible. The landlords, or the harsher among them, try to enforce rents by evictions; evictions are resisted by outrages and boycotting. Popular sentiment supports those who commit outrages, because it considers the tenantry to be engaged in a species of war, a righteous war, against the landlord. Evidence can seldom be obtained, and juries acquit in the teeth of evidence. Thus the enforcement of the law strains all the resources of authority, while a habit of lawlessness and discontent is transmitted from generation to generation. Of the remedies proposed for this chronic evil the most obvious is the strengthening of the criminal law. We have been trying this for more than one hundred years, since Whiteboyism appeared, and trying it in vain. Since the Union, Coercion Acts, of more or less severity, have been almost always in force in Ireland, passed for two or three years, then dropped for a year or two, then renewed in a form slightly varying, but always with the same result of driving the disease in for a time, but not curing it. Mr. Gladstone proposed to buy out the landlords and then leave an Irish Parliament to restore social order, with that authority which it would derive from having the will of the people behind it; because he held that when the people felt the law to be of their own making, and not imposed from without, their sentiment would be enlisted on its side, and the necessity for a firm Government recognized. This plan, has, however, been rejected, so the choice was left of a fresh Coercion Act, or of some scheme, necessarily a costly scheme, for getting rid of the source of trouble by transferring the land of Ireland to the peasantry. The present Government, while guided by Sir M. Hicks-Beach, who had some knowledge of Ireland, did its best to persuade the landlords to accept reduced rents, while the Nationalist leaders, on their side, sought to restrain the people from outrages. But the armistice did not last. The Ministry yielded to the foolish counsels of its more violent supporters, and entrusted Irish affairs to the hands of a Chief Secretary without previous knowledge of the island. An unusually severe Coercion Act has been brought in and passed by the aid of the dissentient Liberals. And we now see this Act administered with a mixture of virulence and incompetence to which even the dreary annals of Irish misgovernment present few parallels. The feeling of the English people is rising against the policy carried out in their name. So far from being solved, the problem of social order becomes every day more acute.

There remains the question of a reform of local government. For many years past, every English Ministry has undertaken to frame a measure creating a new system of popular rural self-government in England. It is the first large task of domestic legislation which we ask from Parliament. When such a scheme is proposed, can Ireland be left out of it? Should she be left out, the argument that she is being treated unequally and unfairly, as compared with England, would gain immense force; because the present local government of Ireland is admittedly less popular, less efficient, altogether less defensible, than even that of England which we are going to reform. If, therefore, the theory that the Imperial Parliament is both anxious and able to do its duty by Ireland is to be maintained, Ireland, too, must have her scheme of local government. And a scheme of local government is a large project, the discussion of which must pass into a discussion of the government of the island as a whole.

Since, then, we may conclude that whatever Ministry is in power will be bound to take up the state of Ireland—since Parliament and the nation will be occupied with the subject during the coming sessions fully as much as they have been during those that have recently passed—the next inquiry is, What will the tendency of opinion and legislation be? Will the reasons and forces described above bring us to Home Rule? and if so, when, how, and why?

There are grounds for answering these questions in the negative. A majority of the House of Commons, including the present Ministry and such influential Liberals as Mr. Bright, Lord Hartington, Mr. Chamberlain, stand pledged to resist it, and seem—such is the passion which controversy engenders—more disposed to resist it than they were in 1885. But this ground is less strong than it may appear. We have had too many changes of opinion—ay, and of action too—upon Irish affairs not to be prepared for further changes. A Ministry in power learns much which an Opposition fails to learn. Home Rule is an elastic expression, and some of those who were loudest in denouncing Mr. Gladstone's Bill will find it easy to explain, should they bring in a Bill of their own for giving self-government to Ireland, that their measure is a different thing, and free from the objections brought against his. Nor, if such a conversion should come, need it be deemed a dishonest one, for events are potent teachers, and governments now seek rather to follow than to form opinion. Although a decent interval must be allowed, no one will be astonished if the Tory leaders should move ere long in the direction indicated. Toryism itself, as has been remarked already, contains nothing opposed to the idea.

Far greater obstacles exist in the aversion which (as already observed) so many Englishmen of both parties have entertained for any scheme which should seem to leave the Protestant minority at the mercy of the peasant and Roman Catholic majority, and to carry us some way toward the ultimate separation of the islands. These alarms are genuine and deep-seated. One who (like the present writer) thinks them, if not baseless, yet immensely overstrained, is, of course, convinced that they may be allayed. But time must first pass, and the plan that is to allay them may have to be framed on somewhat different lines from those of Mr. Gladstone's measure. It is even possible that a conflict more sharp and painful than any of recent years may intervene before a settlement is reached.

Nevertheless, great as are the obstacles in the way, bitter as are the reproaches with which Mr. Gladstone is pursued by the richer classes in England, there is good reason to believe that the current is setting toward his policy. In proceeding to state the grounds for this view, I must frankly own that I am no longer (as in most of the preceding pages) merely setting forth facts on which impartial men in England would agree. The forecast which I seek to give may be tinged by my own belief that the grant of self-government is the best, if not the only method, now open to us of establishing peace between the islands, relieving the English Parliament of work it is ill fitted to discharge, allowing Ireland opportunities to learn those lessons in politics which her people so much need. The future, even the near future, is more than usually dim. Yet, if we examine those three branches of the Irish question which have been enumerated above, we shall see how naturally, in each of them, the concession of self-government seems to open, I will not say the most direct, but the least dangerous way, out of our troubles.

The Parliamentary difficulty arises from the fact that the representatives of Ireland have the feelings of foreigners sitting in a foreign assembly, whose honour and usefulness they do not desire. While these are their feelings they cannot work properly in it, and it cannot work properly with them. The inconvenience may be endured, but the English will grow tired of it, and be disposed to rid themselves of it, if they see their way to do so without greater mischief. There are but two ways out of the difficulty. One is to get rid of the Irish members altogether; the other is to make them, by the concession of their just demands, contented and loyal members of a truly united Parliament. The experience of the Parliament of 1880, which was mainly occupied with Irish business, and began, being a strongly Liberal Parliament, with a bias toward the Irish popular party, showed how difficult it is for a House of Commons which is ignorant of Ireland to legislate wisely for it. In the House of Lords there is not a single Nationalist; indeed, up till 1886, that exalted chamber contained only one peer, Lord Dalhousie (formerly member for Liverpool), who had ever said a word in favour of Home Rule. The more that England becomes sensible, as she must become sensible, of the deficiencies of the present machinery for appreciating the needs and giving effect to the wishes of Irishmen, the more disposed will she be to grant them some machinery of their own.

As regards social order, I have shown that the choice which lies before the opponents of Home Rule is either to continue the policy of coercing the peasantry by severe special legislation, or to remove the source of friction by buying out the landlords for the benefit of the tenants. The present Ministry have chosen the former alternative, but they dangle before the eyes of their supporters some prospect that they may ultimately revert to the latter. Now, the only way that has yet been pointed out of buying out the landlords, without imposing tremendous liabilities of loss upon the British Treasury, is the creation of a strong Home Rule Government in Dublin. Supposing, however, that some other plan could be discovered, which would avoid the fatal objections to which an extension of the plan of the (Salisbury) Land Purchase Act of 1885 is open, such a plan would remove one of the chief objections to an Irish Parliament, by leaving no estates for such a Parliament to confiscate. As for coercion every day, I might say, every bye-election shows us how it becomes more and more odious to the British democracy. They dislike severity; they dislike the inequality involved in passing harsher laws for Ireland than those that apply to England and Scotland. They find themselves forced to sympathize with acts of violence in Ireland which they would condemn in Great Britain, because these acts seem the only way of resisting harsh and unjust laws. When the recoil comes, it will be more violent than in former days. The wish to discover some other course will be very strong, and the obvious other course will be to leave it to an Irish authority to enforce social order in its own way—probably a more rough-and-ready way than that of British officials. The notion which has possessed most Englishmen, that Irish self-government would be another name for anarchy, is curiously erroneous. Conflicts there may be, but a vigorous rule will emerge.

Lastly, as to local government. If a popular system is established in Ireland—one similar to that which it is proposed to establish in England—the control of its assemblies and officials will, over four-fifths of the island, fall into Nationalist hands. Their power will be enormously increased, for they will then command the machinery of administration, and the power of taxing. What with taxing landlords, aiding recalcitrant tenants, stopping the wheels of any central authority which may displease or oppose them, they will be in so strong a position that the creation of an Irish Parliament may appear to be a comparatively small further step, may even appear (as the wisest Nationalists now think it would prove) in the light of a check upon the abuse of local powers. These eventualities will unquestionably, when English opinion has realized them, make such a Parliament as the present pause before it commits rural local government to the Irish democracy. But it could not refuse to do something; and if it tried to restrain popular representative bodies by the veto of a bureaucracy in Dublin, there would arise occasions for quarrel and irritation more serious than now exist.[70] Those who once begin to repair an old and tottering building are led on, little by little, into changes they did not at starting contemplate. So it will be if once the task is undertaken of reforming the confessedly bad and indefensible system of Irish administration. We may stop at some half-way house on the way, but Home Rule stands at the end of the road.

Supposing, then, that the Nationalist party, retaining its present strength and unity, perseveres in its present demands, there is every prospect that these demands will be granted. But will it persevere? There are among the English Dissentients those who prophesy that it will break up, as such parties have broken up before—will lose hope and wither away. Or the support of the Irish peasantry may be withdrawn—a result which some English politicians expect from a final settlement of the land question in the interest of the tenants. Any of these contingencies is possible, but at present most improbable. The moment when long-cherished aims begin to seem attainable is not that at which men are disposed to abandon them.

There are, however, other reasons which suggest the likelihood of a change in English sentiment on the whole matter. The surprise with which the Bill of last April was received has worn off. The alarm is wearing off too. Those who set their teeth at what seemed to them a surrender to the Parnellites and their Irish-American allies, having relieved their temper by an emphatic No, have begun to ponder things more calmly. The English people are listening to the arguments from Irish history that are now addressed to them. They will be moved by the solid grounds of policy which that history suggests; will understand that what they have deemed insensate hatred is the natural result of long misgovernment, and will disappear with time and the removal of its causes. Many of the best minds of both nations will be at work to discover some method of reconciling Irish self-government with imperial supremacy and union free from the objections brought against the Bills of 1886. It is reasonable to expect that they may greatly improve upon these measures, which were prepared under pressure from a clamorous Opposition. What Mr. Disraeli once called the historical conscience of the country will appreciate those great underlying principles to which Mr. Gladstone's policy appeals. It has been accused of being a policy of despair; and may have commended itself to some who supported it as being simply a means of ridding England of responsibility. But to others it seemed, and more truly, a policy of faith; not, indeed, of thoughtless optimism, but of faith according to the definition which calls it "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Faith, by which nations as well as men must live, means nothing less than a conviction that great principles, permanent truths of human nature, lie at the bottom of all sound politics, and ought to be boldly and consistently applied, even when temporary difficulties surround their application. Such a principle is the belief in the power of freedom and self-government to cure the faults of a nation, in the tendency of responsibility to teach wisdom, and to make men see that justice and order are the surest sources of prosperity. Such a principle is the perception that national hatreds do not live on of themselves, but will expire when oppression has ceased, as a fire burns out without fuel. Such a principle is the recognition of the force of national sentiment, and of the duty of allowing it all the satisfaction that is compatible with the maintenance of imperial unity. Such, again, is the appreciation of those natural economic laws which show that nations, when disturbing passions have ceased, follow their own permanent interests, and that an island which finds its chief market in England and draws its capital from England will prefer a connection with England to the poverty and insignificance of isolation. It is the honour of Mr. Gladstone to have built his policy of conciliation upon principles like these, as upon a rock; and already the good effects are seen in the new friendliness which has arisen between the English masses and the people of Ireland, and in the better temper with which, despite the acrimony of some prominent politicians, the relations of the two peoples are discussed. When one looks round the horizon it is still far from clear; nor can we say from which quarter fair weather will arrive. But the air is fresher, and the clouds are breaking overhead.

* * * * *

POSTSCRIPT.

What has happened since the above paragraphs were written, ten months ago, has confirmed more quickly and completely than the writer expected the forecasts they contain. Home Rule is no longer a word of terror, even to those English and Scotch voters who were opposed to it in July, 1886. Most sensible men in the Tory and Dissentient Liberal camps have come to see that it is inevitable; and, while they continue to resist it for the sake of what is called consistency, or because they do not yet see in what form it is to be granted, they are disposed to regard its speedy arrival as the best method of retreat from an indefensible position.

The repressive policy which the present Ministry are attempting in Ireland—for in the face of their failures one cannot say that they are carrying out any policy—is rendering Coercion Acts more and more detested by the English people. The actualities of Ireland, the social condition of her peasantry, the unwisdom of the dominant caste, the incompetence of the bureaucracy which affects to rule her, are being, by the full accounts we now receive, brought home to the mind of England and Scotland as they never were before, and produce their appropriate effect upon the heart and conscience of the people. The recognition by the Liberal party of the rights of Ireland, the visits of English Liberals to Ireland, the work done by Irishmen in English constituencies, are creating a feeling of unity and reciprocal interest between the masses of the people on both sides of the Channel without example in the seven hundred years that have passed since Strongbow's landing.

This was the thing most needed to make Home Rule safe and full of promise, because it affords a guarantee that in such political contests as may arise in future, the division will not be, as heretofore, between the Irish people on the one side and the power of Britain on the other, but between two parties, each of which will have adherents in both islands. We may now at last hope that national hatreds will vanish; that England will unlearn her arrogance and Ireland her suspicion; that the basis is being laid for a harmonious co-operation of both nations in promoting the welfare and greatness of a common Empire.

Many of the Irish patriots of 1798 and 1848 desired Separation, because they thought that Ireland, attached to England, could never be more than the obscure satellite of a greater State. When Ireland has been heartily welcomed by the democracy of Great Britain as an equal partner, the ground for any such desire will have disappeared, and Union will rest on a foundation firmer than has ever before existed. Ireland will feel, when those rights of self-government have been secured for which she has pleaded so long, that she owes them, not only to her own tenacity and courage, but to the magnanimity, the justice, and the freely given sympathy of the English and Scottish people.

October, 1887.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 69: This article, which originally appeared in the American New Princeton Review, has been added to in a few places, in order to bring its narrative of facts up to date.]

[Footnote 70: The experience of the last few months, which has shown us rural Boards of Guardians and municipal bodies over four-fifths of Ireland displaying their zeal in the Nationalist cause, has amply confirmed this anticipation, expressed nearly a year ago.]



SOME ARGUMENTS CONSIDERED.[71]

BY JOHN MORLEY.

It is a favourite line of argument to show that we have no choice between the maintenance of the Union and the concession to Ireland of national independence. The evils of Irish independence are universally reckoned by Englishmen to be so intolerable that we shall never agree to it. The evils of Home Rule are even more intolerable still. Therefore, it is said, if we shall never willingly bring the latter upon our heads, a fortiori we ought on no account to invite the former. The business in hand, however, is not a theorem, but a problem; it is not a thesis to be proved, but a malady to be cured; and the world will thank only the reasoner who winds up, not with Q.E.D., but with Q.E.F. To reason that a patient ought not to take a given medicine because it may possibly cause him more pain than some other medicine which he has no intention of taking, is curiously oblique logic. The question is not oblique; it is direct. Will the operation do more harm to his constitution than the slow corrosions of a disorder grown inveterate? Are the conditions of the connection between England and Ireland, as laid down in the Act of Union, incapable of improvement? Is the present working of these conditions more prosperous and hopeful, or happier for Irish order and for English institutions, than any practicable proposal that it is within the compass of statesmanship to devise, and of civic sense to accept and to work? That is the question.

Some people contend that the burden of making out a case rests on the advocate of change, and not on those who support things as they are. But who supports things as they are? Things as they are have become insupportable. If you make any of the constitutional changes that have been proposed, we are told, parliamentary government, as Englishmen now know it, is at an end; and our critic stands amazed at those "who deem it a slighter danger to innovate on the Act of Union than to remodel the procedure of the House of Commons." As if that were the alternative. Great changes in the rules may do other good things, but no single competent authority believes that in this particular they will do the thing that we want. We cannot avoid constitutional changes. It is made matter of crushing rebuke that the Irish proposals of the late Government were an innovation on the old constitution of the realm. But everybody knows that, while ancient forms have survived, the last hundred years have witnessed a long succession of silent but most profound innovations. It was shortsighted to assume that the redistribution of political power that took place in 1884-5 was the last chapter of the history of constitutional change. It ought to have been foreseen that new possessors of power, both Irish and British, would press for objects the pursuit of which would certainly involve further novelties in the methods and machinery of government. Every given innovation must be rigorously scrutinized, but in the mere change or in the fact of innovation there is no valid reproach. When one of the plans for the better government of Ireland is described as depriving parliamentary institutions of their elasticity and strength, as weakening the Executive at home, and lessening the power of the country to resist foreign attack, no careful observer of the events of the last seven years can fail to see that all this evil has already got its grip upon us. Mr. Dicey himself admits it. "Great Britain," he says, "if left to herself, could act with all the force, consistency, and energy given by unity of sentiment and community of interests. The obstruction and the uncertainty of our political aims, the feebleness and inconsistency with which they are pursued, arise in part at least from the connection with Ireland." So then, after all, it is feebleness and inconsistency, not elasticity and strength, that mark our institutions as they stand; feebleness and inconsistency, distraction and uncertainty. The supporter of things as they are is decidedly as much concerned in making out a case as the advocate of change.

The strength of the argument from Nationality is great, and full of significance; but Nationality is not the whole essence of either the argument from History or the argument from Self-government. Their force lies in considerations of political expediency as tested by practical experience.

The point of the argument from the lessons of History is that for some reason or another the international concern, whose unlucky affairs we are now trying to unravel, has always been carried on at a loss: the point of the argument from Self-government is that the loss would have been avoided if the Irish shareholders had for a certain number of the transactions been more influentially represented on the Board. That is quite apart from the sentiment of pure nationality. The failure has come about, not simply because the laws were not made by Irishmen as such, but because they were not made by the men who knew most about Ireland. The vice of the connection between the two countries has been the stupidity of governing a country without regard to the interests or customs, the peculiar objects and peculiar experiences, of the great majority of the people who live in it. It is not enough to say that the failures of England in Ireland have to a great extent flowed from causes too general to be identified with the intentional wrong-doing either of rulers or of subjects. We readily admit that, but it is not the point. It is not enough to insist that James I., in his plantations and transplantations, probably meant well to his Irish subjects. Probably he did. That is not the question. If it is "absolutely certain that his policy worked gross wrong," what is the explanation and the defence? We are quite content with Mr. Dicey's own answer. "Ignorance and want of sympathy produced all the evils of cruelty and malignity. An intended reform produced injustice, litigation, misery, and discontent. The case is noticeable, for it is a type of a thousand subsequent English attempts to reform and improve Ireland." This description would apply, with hardly a word altered, to the wrong done by the Encumbered Estates Act in the reign of Queen Victoria. That memorable measure, as Mr. Gladstone said, was due not to the action of a party, but to the action of a Parliament. Sir Robert Peel was hardly less responsible for it than Lord John Russell. "We produced it," said Mr. Gladstone, "with a general, lazy, uninformed, and irreflective good intention of taking capital to Ireland. What did we do? We sold the improvements of the tenants" (House of Commons, April 16). It is the same story, from the first chapter to the last, in education, poor law, public works, relief Acts, even in coercion Acts—lazy, uninformed, and irreflective good intention. That is the argument from history. When we are asked what good law an Irish Parliament would make that could not equally well be made by the Parliament at Westminster, this is the answer. It is not the will, it is the intelligence, that is wanting. We all know what the past has been. Why should the future be different?

"It is an inherent condition of human affairs," said Mill in a book which, in spite of some chimeras, is a wholesome corrective of the teaching of our new jurists, "that no intention, however sincere, of protecting the interests of others can make it safe or salutary to tie up their own hands. Still more obviously true is it, that by their own hands only can any positive and durable improvement of their circumstances in life be worked out" (Repres. Government, p. 57). It is these wise lessons from human experience to which the advocate of Home Rule appeals, and not the wild doctrine that any body of persons claiming to be united by a sense of nationality possesses an inherent and divine right to be treated as an independent community. It is quite true that circumstances sometimes justify a temporary dictatorship. In that there is nothing at variance with Liberalism. But the Parliamentary dictatorship in Ireland has lasted a great deal too long to be called temporary, and its stupid shambling operations are finally and decisively condemned by their consequences. That is a straightforward utilitarian argument, and has nothing whatever to do with inherent and divine rights, or any other form of political moonshine.

There are some who believe that an honest centralized administration of impartial officials, and not Local Self-Government, would best meet the real wants of the people. In other words, everything is to be for the people, nothing by the people—which has not hitherto been a Liberal principle. Something, however, may be said for this view, provided that the source of the authority of such an administration be acceptable. Austrian administration in Lombardy was good rather than bad, yet it was hated and resisted because it was Austrian and not Italian. No rational person can hold for an instant that the source of a scheme of government is immaterial to its prosperity. More than that, when people look for success in the government of Ireland to "honest centralized administration," we cannot but wonder what fault they find with the administration of Ireland to-day in respect of its honesty or its centralization. What administration ever carried either honesty or centralization to a higher pitch than the Irish administration of Mr. Forster? What could be less successful? Those who have been most directly concerned in the government of Ireland, whether English or Irish, even while alive to the perils of any other principle, habitually talk of centralization as the curse of the system. Here, again, why should we expect success in the future from a principle that has so failed in the past?

Again, how are we to get a strong centralized administration in the face of a powerful and hostile parliamentary representation? It is very easy to talk of the benefits that might have been conferred on Ireland by such humanity and justice as was practised by Turgot in his administration of the Generality of Limoges. But Turgot was not confronted by eighty-six Limousin members of an active sovereign body, all interested in making his work difficult, and trusted by a large proportion of the people of the province with that as their express commission. It is possible to have an honest centralized administration of great strength and activity in India, but there is no Parliament in India. If India, or any province of it, ever gets representative government and our parliamentary system, from that hour, if there be any considerable section of Indian feeling averse from European rule, the present administrative system will be paralyzed, as the preliminary to being revolutionized. It is conceivable, if any one chooses to think so, that a body of impartial officials could manage the national business in Ireland much better without the guidance of public opinion and common sentiment than with it. But if you intend to govern the country as you think best—and that is the plain and practical English of centralized administration—why ask the country to send a hundred men to the great tribunal of supervision to inform you how it would like to be governed? The Executive cannot set them aside as if they were a hundred dummies; in refusing to be guided, it cannot escape being harassed, by them. You may amend procedure, but that is no answer, unless you amend the Irish members out of voice and vote. They will still count. You cannot gag and muzzle them effectually, and if you could, they would still be there, and their presence would still make itself incessantly felt. Partly from a natural desire to lessen the common difficulties of government, and partly from a consciousness, due to the prevailing state of the modern political atmosphere, that there is something wrong in this total alienation of an Executive from the possessors of parliamentary power, the officials will incessantly be tempted to make tacks out of their own course; and thus they lose the coherency and continuity of absolutism without gaining the pliant strength of popular government. This is not a presumption of what would be likely to happen, but an account of what does happen, and what justified Mr. Disraeli in adding a weak Executive to the alien Church and the absentee aristocracy, as the three great curses of Ireland. Nothing has occurred since 1844 to render the Executive stronger, but much to the contrary. There is, and there can be, no weaker or less effective Government in the world than a highly centralized system working alongside of a bitterly inimical popular representation. I say nothing of the effect of the fluctuations of English parties on Irish administration. I say nothing of the tendency in an Irish government, awkwardly alternating with that to which I have just adverted, to look over the heads of the people of Ireland, and to consider mainly what will be thought by the ignorant public in England. But these sources of incessant perturbation must not be left out. The fault of Irish centralization is not that it is strong, but that it is weak. Weak it must remain until Parliament either approves of the permanent suspension of the Irish writs, or else devises constitutional means for making Irish administration responsible to Irish representatives.

If experience is decisive against the policy of the past, experience too, all over the modern world, indicates the better direction for the future. I will not use my too scanty space in repeating any of the great wise commonplaces in praise of self-government. Here they are superfluous. In the case of Ireland they have all been abundantly admitted in a long series of measures, from Catholic Emancipation down to Lord O'Hagan's Jury Law and the Franchise and Redistribution Acts of a couple of years ago. The principle of self-government has been accepted, ratified, and extended in a hundred ways. It is only a question of the form that self-government shall take. Against the form proposed by the late Ministry a case is built up that rests on a series of prophetic assumptions. These assumptions, from the nature of the case, can only be met by a counter-statement of fair and reasonable probabilities. Let us enumerate some of them.

1. It is inferred that, because the Irish leaders have used violent language and resorted to objectionable expedients against England during the last six years, they would continue in the same frame of mind after the reasons for it had disappeared. In other words, because they have been the enemies of a Government which refused to listen to a constitutional demand, therefore they would continue to be its enemies after the demand had been listened to. On this reasoning, the effect is to last indefinitely and perpetually, notwithstanding the cessation of the cause. Our position is that all the reasonable probabilities of human conduct point the other way. The surest way of justifying violent language and fostering treasonable designs, is to refuse to listen to the constitutional demand.

2. The Irish, we are told, hate the English with an irreconcilable hatred, and would unquestionably use any Constitution as an instrument for satisfying their master passion. Irrational hatred, they say, can be treated by rational men with composure. The Czechs of Bohemia are said to be irreconcilable, yet the South Germans bear with their hatred; and if we cannot cure we might endure the antipathy of Ireland. Now, as for the illustration, I may remark that the hatred of the Czechs would be much too formidable for German composure, if the Czechs did not happen to possess a provincial charter and a special constitution of their own. If the Irish had the same, their national dislike—so far as it exists—might be expected to become as bearable as the Germans have found the feeling of the Czechs. But how deep does Irish dislike go? Is it directed against Englishmen, or against an English official system? The answers of every impartial observer to the whole group of such questions as these favour the conclusion that the imputed hatred of England in Ireland has been enormously exaggerated and overcoloured by Ascendency politicians for good reasons of their own; that with the great majority of Irishmen it has no deep roots; that it is not one of those passionate international animosities that blind men to their own interests, or lead them to sacrifice themselves for the sake of injuring their foe; and, finally, that it would not survive the amendment of the system that has given it birth.[72]

3. It is assumed that there is a universal desire for Separation. That there is a strong sentiment of nationality we of course admit; it is part of the case, and not the worst part. But the sentiment of nationality is a totally different thing from a desire for Separation. Scotland might teach our pseudo-Unionists so much as that. Nowhere in the world is the sentiment of nationality stronger, yet there is not a whisper of Separation. That there is a section of Irishmen who desire Separation is notorious, but everything that has happened since the Government of Ireland Bill was introduced, including the remarkable declarations of Mr. Parnell in accepting the Bill (June 7), and including the proceedings at Chicago, shows that the separatist section is a very small one either in Ireland or in America, and that it has become sensibly smaller since, and in consequence of, the proposed concession of a limited statutory constitution. The Irish are quite shrewd enough to know that Separation, if it were attainable—and they are well aware that it is not—would do no good to their markets; and to that knowledge, as well as to many other internal considerations, we may confidently look for the victory of strong centripetal over very weak centrifugal tendencies. Even if we suppose these centrifugal tendencies to be stronger than I would allow them to be, how shall we best resist them—by strengthening the hands and using the services of the party which, though nationalist, is also constitutional; or by driving that party also, in despair of a constitutional solution, to swell the ranks of Extremists and Irreconcilables?

4. Whatever may be the ill-feeling towards England, it is at least undeniable that there are bitter internal animosities in Ireland, and a political constitution, our opponents argue, can neither assuage religious bigotry nor remove agrarian discontent.

It is true, no doubt, that the old feud between Protestant and Catholic might, perhaps, not instantly die down to the last smouldering embers of it all over Ireland. But we may remark that there is no perceptible bad blood between Protestant and Catholic, outside of one notorious corner. Second, the real bitterness of the feud arose from the fact that Protestantism was associated with an exclusive and hostile ascendency, which would now be brought to an end. Whatever feeling about what is called Ulster exists in the rest of Ireland, arises not from the fact that there are Protestants in Ulster, but that the Protestants are anti-National. Third, the Catholics would no longer be one compact body for persecuting, obscurantist, or any other evil purposes; the abatement of the national struggle would allow the Catholics to fall into the two natural divisions of Clerical and Liberal. What we may be quite sure of is that the feud will never die so long as sectarian pretensions are taken as good reasons for continuing bad government.

It is true, again, that a constitution would not necessarily remove agrarian discontent. But it is just as true that you will never remove agrarian discontent without a constitution. Mr. Dicey, on consideration, will easily see why. Here we come to an illustration, and a very impressive illustration it is, of the impotence of England to do for Ireland the good which Ireland might do for herself. Nobody just now is likely to forget the barbarous condition of the broad fringe of wretchedness on the west coast of Ireland. Of this Lord Dufferin truly said in 1880 that no legislation could touch it, that no alteration in the land laws could effectually ameliorate it, and that it must continue until the world's end unless something be contrived totally to change the conditions of existence in that desolate region. Parliament lavishly pours water into the sieve in the shape of Relief Acts. Even in my own short tenure of office I was responsible for one of these terribly wasteful and profoundly unsatisfactory measures. Instead of relief, what a statesman must seek is prevention of this great evil and strong root of evil; and prevention means a large, though it cannot be a very swift, displacement of the population. But among the many experts with whom I have discussed this dolorous and perplexing subject, I never found one of either political party who did not agree that a removal of the surplus population was only practicable if carried out by an Irish authority, backed by the solid weight of Irish opinion. Any exertion of compulsory power by a British Minister would raise the whole country-side in squalid insurrection, government would become impossible, and the work of transplantation would end in ghastly failure. It is misleading and untrue, then, to say that there is no possible relation between self-government and agrarian discontent, misery, and backwardness; and when Mr. Dicey and others tell us that the British Parliament is able to do all good things for Ireland, I would respectfully ask them how a British Parliament is to deal with the Congested Districts.

Nearly as much may be said of the prevention of the mischievous practice of Subdivision. Some contend that the old disposition to subdivide is dying out; others, however, assure us that it is making its appearance even among the excellent class who purchased their holdings under the Church Act. That Act did not prohibit subdivision, but it is prohibited in the Act of 1881. Still the prohibition can only be made effective, if operations take place on anything like a great scale, on condition that representative, authorities resident on the spot have the power of enforcing it, and have an interest in enforcing it. Some of the pseudo-Unionists are even against any extension of local self-government, and if it be unaccompanied by the creation of a central native authority they are right. What such people fail to see is that, in resisting political reconstruction, they are at the same time resisting the only available remedies for some of the worst of agrarian maladies.

The ruinous interplay between agrarian and political forces, each using the other for ends of its own, will never cease so long as the political demand is in every form resisted. That, we are told, is all the fault of the politicians. Be it so; then the Government must either suppress the politicians outright, or else it must interest them in getting the terms of its land settlement accepted and respected. Home Rule on our scheme was, among other things, part of an arrangement for "settling the agrarian feud." It was a means of interposing between the Irish tenant and the British State an authority interested enough and strong enough to cause the bargain to be kept. It is said that the Irish authority would have had neither interest nor strength enough to resist the forces making for repudiation. Would those forces be any less irresistible if the whole body of the Irish peasantry stood, as Land Purchase minus Self-Government makes them to stand, directly face to face with the British State? This is a question that our opponents cannot evade, any more than they can evade that other question, which lies unnoticed at the back of all solutions of the problem by way of peasant ownership—Whether it is possible to imagine the land of Ireland handed over to Irishmen, and yet the government of Ireland kept exclusively and directly by Englishmen? Such a divorce is conceivable under a rule like that of the British in India: with popular institutions it is inconceivable and impossible.

5. It is argued that Home Rule on Mr. Gladstone's plan would not work, because it follows in some respects the colonial system, whereas the conditions at the root of the success of the system in the Colonies do not exist in Ireland. They are distant, Ireland is near; they are prosperous, Ireland is poor; they are proud of the connection with England, Ireland resents it. But the question is not whether the conditions are identical with those of any colony; it is enough if in themselves they seem to promise a certain basis for government. It might justly be contended that proximity is a more favourable condition than distance; without it there could not be that close and constant intercommunication which binds the material interests of Ireland to those of Great Britain, and so provides the surest guarantee for union. If Ireland were suddenly to find herself as far off as Canada, then indeed one might be very sorry to answer for the Union. Again, though Ireland has to bear her share of the prevailing depression in the chief branch of her production, it is a great mistake to suppose that outside of the margin of chronic wretchedness in the west and south-west, the condition not only of the manufacturing industries of the north, but of the agricultural industry in the richer parts of the middle and south, is so desperately unprosperous as to endanger a political constitution. Under our stupidily [Transcriber: sic] centralized system, Irishmen have no doubt acquired the enervating trick of attributing every misfortune, great or small, public or private, to the Government. When they learn the lessons of responsibility, they will unlearn this fatal habit, and not before.

I do not see, therefore, that the differences in condition between Ireland and the Colonies make against Home Rule. What I do see is ample material out of which would arise a strong and predominant party of order. The bulk of the nation are sons and daughters of a Church which has been hostile to revolution in every country but Ireland, and which would be hostile to it there from the day that the cause of revolution ceased to be the cause of self-government. If the peasantry were made to realize that at last the land settlement, wisely and equitably made, was what it must inexorably remain, and what no politicians could help them to alter, they would be as conservative as the peasantry under a similar condition in every other spot on the surface of the globe. There is no reason to expect that the manufacturers, merchants, and shopkeepers of Ireland would be less willing or less able to play an active and useful part in the affairs of their country than the same classes in England or Scotland. It will be said that this is mere optimist prophesying. But why is that to be flung aside under the odd name of sentimentalism, while pessimist prophesying is to be taken for gospel?

The only danger is lest we should allot new responsibilities to Irishmen with a too grudging and restrictive hand. For true responsibility there must be real power. It is easy to say that this power would be misused, and that the conditions both of Irish society and of the proposed Constitution must prevent it from being used for good. It is easy to say that separation would be a better end. Life is too short to discuss that. Separation is not the alternative either to Home Rule or to the status quo. If the people of Ireland are not to be trusted with real power over their own affairs, it would be a hundred times more just to England, and more merciful to Ireland, to take away from her that semblance of free government which torments and paralyzes one country, while it robs the other of national self-respect and of all the strongest motives and best opportunities of self-help. The status quo is drawing very near to its inevitable end. The two courses then open will be Home Rule on the one hand, and some shy bungling underhand imitation of a Crown Colony on the other. We shall have either to listen to the Irish representatives or to suppress them. Unless we have lost all nerve and all political faculty we shall, before many months are over, face these alternatives. Liberals are for the first; Tories at present incline to the second. It requires very moderate instinct for the forces at work in modern politics to foresee the path along which we shall move, in the interests alike of relief to Great Britain and of a sounder national life for Ireland. The only real question is not Whether we are to grant Home Rule, but How.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 71: The following pages, with one or two slight alterations, are extracted, by the kind permission of Mr. James Knowles, from two articles which were published in the Nineteenth Century at the beginning of the present year, in reply to Professor Dicey's statement of the English case against Home Rule.]

[Footnote 72: The late J.E. Cairnes, after describing the clearances after the famine, goes on to say, "I own I cannot wonder that a thirst for revenge should spring from such calamities; that hatred, even undying hatred, for what they could not but regard as the cause and symbol of their misfortunes—English rule in Ireland—should possess the sufferers.... The disaffection now so widely diffused throughout Ireland may possibly in some degree be fed from historical traditions, and have its remote origin in the confiscations of the seventeenth century; but all that gives it energy, all that renders it dangerous, may, I believe, be traced to exasperation produced by recent transactions, and more especially to the bitter memories left by that most flagrant abuse of the rights of property and most scandalous disregard of the claims of humanity—the wholesale clearances of the period following the famine."—Political Essays, p. 198.]



LESSONS OF IRISH HISTORY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

BY W.E. GLADSTONE.

Ireland for more than seven hundred years has been part of the British territory, and has been with slight exceptions held by English arms, or governed in the last resort from this side the water. Scotland was a foreign country until 1603, and possessed absolute independence until 1707. Yet, whether it was due to the standing barrier of the sea, or whatever may have been the cause, much less was known by Englishmen of Ireland than of Scotland. Witness the works of Shakespeare, whose mind, unless as to book-knowledge, was encyclopaedic, and yet who, while he seems at home in Scotland, may be said to tell us nothing of Ireland, unless it is that—

"The uncivil kerns of Ireland are in arms."[73]

During more recent times, the knowledge of Scotland on this side the border, which before was greatly in advance, has again increased in afar greater degree than the knowledge of Ireland.

It is to Mr. Lecky that we owe the first serious effort, both in his Leaders of Public Opinion and in his History of England in the Eighteenth Century, to produce a better state of things. He carefully and completely dovetailed the affairs of Ireland into English History, and the debt is one to be gratefully acknowledged. But such remedies, addressing themselves in the first instance to the lettered mind of the country, require much time to operate upon the mass, and upon the organs of superficial and transitory opinion, before the final stage, when they enter into our settled and familiar traditions. Meantime, since Ireland threatens to absorb into herself our Parliamentary life, there is a greatly enhanced necessity for becoming acquainted with the true state of the account between the islands that make up the United Kingdom, and with the likelihoods of the future in Ireland, so far as they are to be gathered from her past history.

That history, until the eighteenth century begins, has a dismal simplicity about it. Murder, persecution, confiscation too truly describe its general strain; and policy is on the whole subordinated to violence as the standing instrument of government. But after, say, the reign of William III., the element of representation begins to assert itself. Simplicity is by degrees exchanged for complexity; the play of human motives, singularly diversified, now becomes visible in the currents of a real public life. It has for a very long time been my habit, when consulted by young political students, to recommend them carefully to study the characters and events of the American Independence. Quite apart from the special and temporary reasons bearing upon the case, I would now add a twin recommendation to examine and ponder the lessons of Irish history during the eighteenth century. The task may not be easy, but the reward will be ample.

The mainspring of public life had, from a venerable antiquity, lain de jure within Ireland herself. The heaviest fetter upon this life was the Law of Poynings; the most ingenious device upon record for hamstringing legislative independence, because it cut off the means of resumption inherent in the nature of Parliaments such as were those of the three countries. But the Law of Poynings was an Irish Law. Its operation effectually aided on the civil side those ruder causes, under the action of which Ireland had lain for four centuries usually passive, and bleeding at every pore. The main factors of her destiny worked, in practice, from this side the water. But from the reign of Anne, or perhaps from the Revolution onwards,

"Novus saecorum nascitur ordo."

Of the three great nostrums so liberally applied by England, extirpation and persecution had entirely failed, but confiscation had done its work. The great Protestant landlordism of Ireland[74] had been strongly and effectually built up. But, like other human contrivances, while it held Ireland fast, it had also undesigned results. The repressed principle of national life, the struggles of which had theretofore been extinguished in blood, slowly sprang up anew in a form which, though extremely narrow, and extravagantly imperfect, was armed with constitutional guarantees; and, the regimen of violence once displaced, these guarantees were sure to operate. What had been transacted in England under Plantagenets and Stuarts was, to a large extent, transacted anew by the Parliament of Ireland in the eighteenth century. That Parliament, indeed, deserves almost every imaginable epithet of censure. It was corrupt, servile, selfish, cruel. But when we have said all this, and said it truly, there is more to tell. It was alive, and it was national. Even absenteeism, that obstinately clinging curse, though it enfeebled and distracted, could not, and did not, annihilate nationality. The Irish Legislation was, moreover, compressed and thwarted by a foreign executive; but even to this tremendous agent the vital principle was too strong eventually to succumb.

Mr. Lecky well observes that the Irish case supplied "one of the most striking examples upon record"[75] of an unconquerable efficacy in even the most defective Parliament. I am, however, doubtful whether in this proposition we have before us the whole case. This efficacy is not invariably found even in tolerably constructed Parliaments. Why do we find it in a Parliament of which the constitution and the environment were alike intolerable? My answer is, because that Parliament found itself faced by a British influence which was entirely anti-national, and was thus constrained to seek for strength in the principle of nationality.

Selfishness is a rooted principle of action in nations not less than in single persons. It seems to draw a certain perfume from the virtue of patriotism, which lies upon its borders. It stalks abroad with a semblance of decency, nay, even of excellence. And under this cover a paramount community readily embraces the notion, that a dependent community may be made to exist not for its own sake, but for the sake of an extraneous society of men. With this idea, the European nations, utterly benighted in comparison with the ancient Greeks, founded their transmarine dependencies. But a vast maritime distance, perhaps aided by some filtration of sound ideas, prevented the application of this theory in its nakedness and rigour to the American Colonies of England. In Ireland we had not even the title of founders to allege. Nay, we were, in point of indigenous civilization, the junior people. But the maritime severance, sufficient to prevent accurate and familiar knowledge, was not enough to bar the effective exercise of overmastering power. And power was exercised, at first from without, to support the Pale, to enlarge it, to make it include Ireland. When this had been done, power began, in the seventeenth century, to be exercised from within Ireland, within the precinct of its government and its institutions. These were carefully corrupted, from the multiplication of the Boroughs by James I. onwards, for the purpose. The struggle became civil, instead of martial; and it was mainly waged by agencies on the spot, not from beyond the Channel. When the rule of England passed over from the old violence into legal forms and doctrines, the Irish reaction against it followed the example. And the legal idea of Irish nationality took its rise in very humble surroundings; if the expression may be allowed, it was born in the slums of politics. Ireland reached the nadir of political depression when, at and after the Boyne, she had been conquered not merely by an English force, but by continental mercenaries. The ascendant Protestantism of the island had never stood so low in the aspect it presented to this country; inasmuch as the Irish Parliament, for the first time, I believe, declared itself dependent upon England,[76] and either did not desire, or did not dare, to support its champion Molyneux, when his work asserting Irish independence was burned in London. It petitioned for representation in the English Parliament, not in order to uplift the Irish people, but in order to keep them down. In its sympathies and in its aims the overwhelming mass of the population had no share. It was Swift who, by the Drapier's Letters, for the first time called into existence a public opinion flowing from and representing Ireland as a whole. He reasserted the doctrine of Molyneux, and denounced Wood's halfpence not only as a foul robbery, but as a constitutional and as a national insult. The patience of the Irish Protestants was tried very hard, and they were forced, as Sir Charles Duffy states in his vivid book, to purchase the power of oppressing their Roman Catholic fellow-countrymen at a great price.[77] Their pension list was made to provide the grants too degrading to be tolerated in England. The Presbyterians had to sit down under the Episcopal monopoly; but the enjoyment of that monopoly was not left to the Irish Episcopalians. In the time of Henry VIII. it had been necessary to import an English Archbishop Browne[78] and an English Bishop Bale, or there might not have been a single Protestant in Ireland. It was well to enrich the rolls of the Church of Ireland with the piety and learning of Ussher, and to give her in Bedell one name, at least, which carries the double crown of the hero and the saint. But, after the Restoration, by degrees the practice degenerated, and Englishmen were appointed in numbers to the Irish Episcopate in order to fortify and develop by numerical force what came to be familiarly known as the English interest. So that the Primate Boulter, during his government of Ireland, complains[79] that Englishmen are still less than one-half the whole body of Bishops, although the most important sees were to a large extent in their hands. The same practice was followed in the higher judicial offices. Fitzgibbon was the first Irishman who became Lord Chancellor.[80] The Viceroy, commonly absent, was represented by Lords Justices, who again were commonly English; and Primate Boulter, a most acute and able man, jealous of an Irish Speaker in that character, recommends that the commander of the forces should take his place.[81] When, later on, the Viceroy resided, it was a rule that the Chief Secretary should be an Englishman. On the occasion when Lord Castlereagh was by way of exception admitted to that office, an apology was found for it in his entire devotion to English policy and purposes. "His appointment," says Lord Cornwallis, "gives me great satisfaction, as he is so very unlike an Irishman!"[82] Resources were also found in the military profession, and among the voters for the Union we find the names of eight[83] English generals.

The arrangements under Poynings's Law, and the commercial proscription, drove the iron ever deeper and deeper into the souls of Irishmen. It is but small merit in the Irish Parliament of George I. and George II., if under these circumstances a temper was gradually formed in, and transmitted by, them, which might one day achieve the honours of patriotism. It was in dread of this most healthful process, that the English Government set sedulously to work for its repression. The odious policy was maintained by a variety of agencies; by the misuse of Irish revenue, a large portion of which was unhappily under their control; by maintaining the duration of the Irish House of Commons for the life of the Sovereign; and, worst of all, by extending the range of corruption within the walls, through the constant multiplication of paid offices tenable by members of Parliament without even the check of re-election on acceptance.

Thus by degrees those who sat in the Irish Houses came to feel both that they had a country, and that their country had claims upon them. The growth of a commercial interest in the Roman Catholic body must have accelerated the growth of this idea, as that interest naturally fell into line with the resistance to the English prescriptive laws. But the rate of progress was fearfully slow. It was hemmed in on every side by the obstinate unyielding pressure of selfish interests: the interest of the Established Church against the Presbyterians; the interest of the Protestant laity, or tithe-payers, against the clergy; the bold unscrupulous interest of a landlords' Parliament against the occupier of the soil; which, together with the grievance of the system of tithe-proctors, established in Ireland through the Whiteboys the fatal alliance between resistance to wrong and resistance to law, and supplied there the yet more disastrous facility of sustaining and enforcing wrong under the name of giving support to public tranquillity. Yet, forcing on its way amidst all these difficulties by a natural law, in a strange haphazard and disjointed method, and by a zigzag movement, there came into existence, and by degrees into steady operation, a sentiment native to Ireland and having Ireland for its vital basis, and yet not deserving the name of Irish patriotism, because its care was not for a nation, but for a sect. For a sect, in a stricter sense than may at first sight be supposed. The battle was not between Popery and a generalized Protestantism, though, even if it had been so, it would have been between a small minority and the vast majority of the Irish people. It was not a party of ascendency, but a party of monopoly, that ruled. It must always be borne in mind that the Roman Catholic aristocracy had been emasculated, and reduced to the lowest point of numerical and moral force by the odious action of the penal laws, and that the mass of the Roman Catholic population, clerical and lay, remained under the grinding force of many-sided oppression, and until long after the accession of George III. had scarcely a consciousness of political existence. As long as the great bulk of the nation could be equated to zero, the Episcopal monopolists had no motive for cultivating the good-will of the Presbyterians, who like the Roman Catholics maintained their religion, with the trivial exception of the Regium Donum, by their own resources, and who differed from them in being not persecuted, but only disabled. And this monopoly, which drew from the sacred name of religion its title to exist, offered through centuries an example of religious sterility to which a parallel can hardly be found among the communions of the Christian world. The sentiment, then, which animated the earlier efforts of the Parliament might be Iricism, but did not become patriotism until it had outgrown, and had learned to forswear or to forget, the conditions of its infancy. Neither did it for a long time acquire the courage of its opinions; for, when Lucas, in the middle of the century, reasserted the doctrine of Molyneux and of Swift, the Grand Jury of Dublin took part against him, and burned his book.[84] And the Parliament,[85] prompted by the Government, drove him into exile. And yet the smoke showed that there was fire. The infant, that confronted the British Government in the Parliament House, had something of the young Hercules about him. In the first exercises of strength he acquired more strength, and in acquiring more strength he burst the bonds that had confined him.

"Es machte mir zu eng, ich mussie fort."[86]

The reign of George IV. began with resolute efforts of the Parliament not to lengthen, as in England under his grandfather, but to shorten its own commission, and to become septennial. Surely this was a noble effort. It meant the greatness of their country, and it meant also personal self-sacrifice. The Parliament which then existed, elected under a youth of twenty-two, had every likelihood of giving to the bulk of its members a seat for life. This they asked to change for a maximum term of seven years. This from session to session, in spite of rejection after rejection in England, they resolutely fought to obtain. It was an English amendment which, on a doubtful pretext; changed seven years to eight. Without question some acted under the pressure of constituents; but only a minority of the members had constituents, and popular exigencies from such a quarter might have been bought off by an occasional vote, and could not have induced a war with the Executive and with England so steadily continued, unless a higher principle had been at work.

The triumph came at last; and from 1768 onwards the Commons never wholly relapsed into their former quiescence. True, this was for a Protestant House, constituency, and nation; but ere long they began to enlarge their definition of nationality. Flood and Lucas, the commanders in the real battle, did not dream of giving the Roman Catholics a political existence, but to their own constituents they performed an honourable service and gave a great boon. Those, who had insincerely supported the measure, became the dupes of their own insincerity. In the very year of this victory, a Bill for a slight relaxation of the penal laws was passed, but met its death in England.[87] Other Bills followed, and one of them became an Act in 1771. A beginning had thus been made on behalf of religious liberty, as a corollary to political emancipation. It was like a little ray of light piercing its way through the rocks into a cavern and supplying the prisoner at once with guidance and with hope. Resolute action, in withholding or shortening supply, convinced the Executive in Dublin, and the Ministry in London, that serious business was intended. And it appeared, even in this early stage, how necessary it was for a fruitful campaign on their own behalf to enlarge their basis, and enlist the sympathies of hitherto excluded fellow-subjects.

It may seem strange that the first beginnings of successful endeavour should have been made on behalf not of the "common Protestantism," but of Roman Catholics. But, as Mr. Lecky has shown, the Presbyterians had been greatly depressed and distracted, while the Roman Catholics had now a strong position in the commerce of the country, and in Dublin knocked, as it were, at the very doors of the Parliament. There may also have been an apprehension of republican sentiments among the Protestants of the north, from which the Roman Catholics were known to be free. Not many years, however, passed before the softening and harmonizing effects, which naturally flow from a struggle for liberty, warmed the sentiment of the House in favour of the Presbyterians.

A Bill was passed by the Irish Parliament in 1778, which greatly mitigated the stringency of the penal laws. Moreover, in its preamble was recited, as a ground for this legislation, that for "a long series of years" the Roman Catholics had exhibited an "uniform peaceable behaviour." In doing and saying so much, the Irish Parliament virtually bound itself to do more.[88] In this Bill was contained a clause which repealed the Sacramental Test, and thereby liberated the Presbyterians from disqualification. But the Bill had to pass the ordeal of a review in England, and there the clause was struck out. The Bill itself, though mutilated, was wisely passed by a majority of 127 to 89. Even in this form it excited the enthusiastic admiration of Burke.[89] Nor were the Presbyterians forgotten at the epoch when, in 1779-80, England, under the pressure of her growing difficulties, made large commercial concessions to Ireland. The Dublin Parliament renewed the Bill for the removal of the Sacramental Test. And it was carried by the Irish Parliament in the very year which witnessed in London the disgraceful riots of Lord George Gordon, and forty-eight years before the Imperial Parliament conceded, on this side the Channel, any similar relief. Other contemporary signs bore witness to the growth of toleration; for the Volunteers, founded in 1778, and originally a Protestant body, after a time received Roman Catholics into their ranks. These impartial proceedings are all the more honourable to Irish sentiment in general, because Lord Charlemont, its champion out of doors, and Flood, long the leader of the Independent party in the Parliament, were neither of them prepared to surrender the system of Protestant ascendency.