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

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.

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.

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.

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 Colony, subjected to the worst conceivable form of colonial Government, groaning under economic evils unknown in the least fortunate of the Colonies, and without the numerous mitigating circumstances and the hope of ultimate cure due to remoteness from the seat of Empire. On the contrary, nearness to England, and, above all, nearness to France, where the misrule and miseries of ages were about to culminate in a fearful upheaval of social order, complicated immensely the problem of regeneration in Ireland.

What was the remedy? Parliamentary reform. The Volunteers saw this instantly. Parliament itself scouted the idea of reform, because it threatened the Protestant ascendancy. Any weakening of the Protestant ascendancy was unthinkable to Irish statesmen, even to Grattan, who in 1778 had coined the grandiose phrase that "the Irish Protestant could never be free until the Irish Catholic had ceased to be a slave," and who afterwards explained what he meant by saying that the liberty of the Catholic was to be only such as was "entirely consistent with the Protestant ascendancy," and that "the Protestant interest was his first object." Ascendancy, then, in the mind of the ruling class in Ireland was fundamental. What was its corollary? Dependence on England. Ascendancies, whether based on creed or property, or, as in Ireland, on both, cannot last in any white community without external support, and the external support for ascendancy in Ireland was English force without and English bribes within. There was the chain of causation, the vicious circle rather; and yet Grattan, who never touched a bribe, thought he had freed his beloved Ireland from the English influences which were throttling her. He could not see that the more he wrestled for the independence of a sham Parliament, while resisting its transformation into a real Parliament, the more he strengthened those influences, because he inevitably widened the gulf between Parliament and the Irish people. The glamour his brilliant gifts had thrown over the Irish Parliament only served to divert his own mind and the minds of other talented and high-minded men from the seat of disease in Ireland. Time and talent were wasted from the first over points of pride, trivialities which seemed portentous to over-sensitive minds; metaphysical puzzles as to the exact nature of the relations now existing between Ireland and England; whether the repeal of the Poynings' Act and the Declaratory Act were sufficient guarantees of freedom; whether Ireland herself should nominate a Regent or accept the nomination from England. Meanwhile, the sands were running out, and Ireland was a slave to a minute but powerful minority of her sons and, only through them, to England.

Yet the heart of Ireland was sound. All the materials for regeneration were there. The Catholics, whom by an old inherited instinct Grattan professed to dread, were the most Conservative part of the population, so Conservative as to be unaware of the source of their miseries, without the smallest leaning towards a counter-ascendancy, and without a notion of sedition or rebellion. Paradox as it seems, if they leaned in any political direction, it was dimly towards the constituted authority of the day, the Irish Parliament. But the truth is that they were without political consciousness, behind the times, unappreciative of the new forces operating round them. In sore need of courageous and enlightened guidance from men of their own faith, they were almost leaderless. The leeway to be made up after the destructive action of the penal laws was so enormous that Catholic philanthropists had no time or will for high politics, and devoted their whole energy to the further relaxation of those laws, to the education of their backward co-religionists, and to the mitigation of poverty. For relief they instinctively looked towards the only legal source of relief, though the source of secular oppression, Parliament. But this was habit. The Catholics at this time were like clay in the hands of the potter, open to any curative and ennobling impulse. That impulse came, as was right and natural, from the Protestant side. The only healthy political organization in Ireland in 1782 was that of the Volunteers of the North, with their headquarters at Belfast. They represented all that was best in the Protestant population. They had won the practical victory, such as it was, Parliament, with all its flaming rhetoric, only the titular victory. They grasped the essential truth that Parliament was rotten, and that Ireland's future depended on its reform. Numbering some 80,000 or 100,000, they at once began to press for reform, and, since they had no constitutional resources, to overawe Parliament. Parliament at once stood on its dignity and on its civil rights against the "Pretorian bands." "And now," said Grattan in his magnificent way, "having given a Parliament to the people, the Volunteers will, I doubt not, leave the people to Parliament, and thus close specifically and majestically a great work."

But the work was not begun. Parliament was the enemy of the people, and the Volunteers knew it. Now, what was the "people" in the minds of the Volunteers? Undoubtedly they did not, after a century of racial ascendancy, perform the miracle of accepting at once in its entirety the principle of absolute political equality for all Irishmen, Catholic and Protestant alike. Such mental revulsions rarely occur among men, and when they do occur are apt to produce reactionary cataclysms. But they did from the first give a real meaning to Grattan's vague rhetoric about Catholic slaves; from the first they made overtures towards the Catholics, and ventilated proposals for the Catholic franchise as a part of their scheme of reform ten years before that enfranchisement, without Parliamentary reform and therefore valueless, became a practical issue. For the present these proposals were outvoted, and the effective demand of the Volunteers, as framed in the great Convention held at Dublin in November, 1783, was for a purification and reconstruction of Parliament on a democratic Protestant basis. The Catholic franchise had been strongly supported, but by the influence of Charlemont and Flood rejected. It is, of course, easy to maintain in theory that a democratic Protestant ascendancy so designed was as incompatible with Irish freedom as an aristocratic and corrupt ascendancy; but nobody with faith in human nature or any knowledge of history, will care to affirm that the process of reform would have ended with the enactment of the Volunteer Bill. No present-day Protestant Ulsterman should entertain such a dishonouring doubt. Mercifully, men are so made that, if left to themselves, they go forward, not backward. A pure Assembly, formed on the Volunteer plan, stimulated by the enlightened conscience which such an Assembly invariably develops, by the discovery of the fundamental identity of interests between the great bulk of Catholics and Protestants, and by the manly instinct of self-preservation against undue English encroachment, would have moved rapidly towards tolerance and equality.

But the Assembly which might have saved Ireland never came into being. The Volunteers were in weak and incompetent hands. The metamorphosis they had undergone from a body formed for home defence into a militant political organization found them at the critical moment unprovided with the right stamp of leader. Flood, who helped to draft their Bill, was a brilliant but unscrupulous and discredited Parliamentarian, and a fanatical advocate of an unimpaired Protestant ascendancy. Lord Charlemont, one of the most influential founders of the movement, and a man of the highest integrity, was lukewarm for reform, an aristocrat and an ascendancy man to the finger-tips, dreading the mysterious forces he had helped to call into being, and desirous to keep them, as he said, "respectable." Was it respectable for armed men to dictate to a Parliament, however just their cause? As often happens in the ferment of popular movements, the one leader who spoke undiluted truth and sense spoke it in florid and unmeasured language and was himself of a figure and behaviour little likely to inspire permanent confidence. This was the famous Bishop of Derry, called by Charlemont a blasphemous Deist, by Wesley an exemplary Divine, by Fox a dishonest madman, and by Jeremy Bentham "a most excellent companion, pleasant, intelligent, well-bred, and liberal-minded to the last degree." He was certainly vain and ostentatious, certainly a democratic free-thinker, but a full knowledge of his character is not of much concern to us. The point is that he was right about Ireland's needs, though the wrong man at the moment to drive home her claims. Many finer agitators than he have failed in causes just as good. Many without half his merits have succeeded. We shall find his Canadian counterparts later in the figures of Mackenzie and Papineau.

The crisis came on November 29, 1783, when the Reform Bill reached Parliament, and was introduced by Flood, wearing the Volunteer dress. It was rejected on the first vote. No doubt the circumstances were humiliating, and if there had been any serious inclination in Parliament towards self-reform and the relinquishment of an odious and mischievous monopoly, we should freely forgive rejection. But there was little or none, as after-events proved, and the real humiliation lay, not in the dictation of the Irish Volunteers, but in the fact that the Volunteers themselves were overawed by a strong body of British regular troops, mustered for the occasion under General Burgoyne. The vicious circle was complete. Forced to choose between reform and dependence on England, Parliament chose the latter. And only a year and a half before Grattan had dazzled his hears with the words: "Ireland is now a nation ... esto perpetua."

There are very few critical dates in Irish history, and of those few the night of November 29, 1783, was the most critical of all. It marked the climax of a brief and bright renaissance from the long stagnation of the eighteenth, and heralded a decline into the long agony of the nineteenth century, a decline concealed by the fictitious lustre which still hangs over the first decade of Grattan's unreformed Parliament, but none the less already present. The Volunteers, their grand opportunity lost, slowly broke up. Should they have used force, even under the threat of Burgoyne's guns? It would have been infinitely better both for England and Ireland if they had. Nothing but force could avail. Never would force have been better justified, for the very soul of a people "rang zwischen Tod und Leben."

It is hard, nevertheless, to blame the Volunteers for not appreciating the full magnitude of the crisis and acting accordingly. They were ahead of their time as it was in the political instinct which taught them the vital importance of a reformed Parliament. They were far ahead of England, where the younger Pitt had failed to carry Reform a few months before, and was to fail again two years later when he urged reform for Ireland. They were even ahead of their time in religious tolerance—witness the Gordon riots in London two years before. Their Parliament wore the crown and spoke the regal language of a patriot Assembly. For five years they themselves had glorified justifiably in the perfect discipline and sobriety with which they had used their irregular power. Their most trusted leaders suggested that they would yet achieve their ends without violence, while the large majority of the Volunteers themselves were still as loyal to the Crown as the Catholics, and were inclined, therefore, to shrink from action which, although in itself not in the remotest degree connected with dynastic questions, involved a theoretical conflict with the Crown, and perhaps an actual collision with Royal troops. One of the last acts of the Volunteer Convention, before its dissolution, was to pass an address to the King expressing fervent zeal for the Crown, reminding him of their quiet and dignified behaviour in the past, and praying that "their humble wish to have certain manifest perversions of the Parliamentary representation of this kingdom remedied by the Legislature in some reasonable degree, might not be imputed to any spirit of innovation in them, but to a sober and laudable desire to uphold the Constitution, to confirm the satisfaction of their fellow-subjects, and to perpetuate the cordial union of the two kingdoms." This document might have been copied mutatis mutandis from the American petitions prior to the war, and was to be reproduced almost word for word in Canadian petitions dealing with less serious grievances whose neglect at the hands of the Government did actually lead to armed rebellion. It must be taken, as Mr. Lecky truly says, as the "defence of the Convention before the bar of history." Drawn up by the most moderate and least prescient leaders, it was a vindication of the past, not a pledge for the future; for "from that time," as Mr. Lecky writes, "the conviction sank deep into the minds of many that reform in Ireland could only be effected by revolution, and the rebellion of 1798 might be already foreseen."

The story of that transition, with all its disastrous consequences in the denationalization of Ireland, in the arrest of healing forces, in the reawakening of slumbering bigotries and hatreds, in the artificial transformation of Catholics into anti-English rebels, and Protestants into anti-Irish Loyalists, in the long agony of the land war, the tithe war, the Church war, and the loathsome savageries of the rebellion itself, is one of the most repulsive in history. It is repulsive because you can watch, as it were, upon a dissecting-table the moral fibre of a people, from no inherent germ of decay, against reason, against nature, visibly wasting under a corrosive acid. Typical figures stand out: the strong figure of Fitzgibbon, voicing ascendancy in its crudest and ugliest form; at the other extreme the ardent but inadequate figure of Wolfe Tone, affirming in words which expressed the literal truth of the case that "to subvert the tyranny of our execrable Government, to break the connection with England, the never-failing source of all our political evils, and to assert the independence of my country—these were my objects." Midway stands Grattan, the defeated and disillusioned "Girondin," as Mr. Fisher aptly calls him,[17] blind until it was too late to the errors which plunged his country into anarchy, and retiring in despair when he saw that anarchy coming. And on the other side of the water, Pitt, dispassionately prescribing for Ireland in 1784, while there was yet time, the radical remedy, Reform, patiently turning, when that was refused, to palliatives like mutual free trade in 1785 and the Catholic franchise in 1793; and meanwhile, with an undercurrent of cool scepticism, preparing the ground for the only alternative to Reform, short of a revolutionary separation of the two countries, legislative Union, and remorselessly pushing that Union through by the only available means, bribery.

In this wretched story we seek in vain for individual scapegoats. Tracing events to their source, we strike against two obstructions, proximity and ignorance, and we may as well make them our scapegoats. If proximity had implied knowledge and forbearance, all would have been well, but it implied just the reverse, and prohibited the kind of solution which, after very much the same sort of crisis, and in the teeth of ignorance and error, was afterwards reached in the case of Canada and South Africa.

The immediate cause is clear. The failure of Reform is the key to the Rebellion and the Union. In a patriotic anxiety to idealize Grattan's Parliament, with a view to justifying later claims for autonomy, Irishmen have generally shut their eyes to this cardinal fact, and have preferred to dwell with exaggerated emphasis on the little good that Parliament did rather than on the enormous evils which it not only left untouched, but scarcely observed. We must remember that it was not only a Protestant body, but a close body of landlords, with an infusion of lawyers and others devoted to the interest of landlords. In that capacity it was incapable of diagnosing, much less of remedying, the gravest material ills of Ireland. In the very narrow domain where the landlord interest was not concerned, as in industrial and commercial matters, Parliament seems to have acted on the whole with wisdom. It endeavoured to encourage industries, while refusing to squander its newly won commercial powers in waging tariff wars with Great Britain, where prohibitive duties against Irish goods still continued to be imposed. But Ireland was no longer an industrial country. All the encouragement in the world could not replace lost aptitudes or bring back the exiled craftsmen who, during a century past, had left Ireland to enrich European countries with their skill. The favoured linen industry alone survived to reach its present flourishing condition. The revival in other manufactures, even in that of wool, which was remarkably rapid and strong, seems to have been artificial and transient. No wonder; for, while Ireland had been stagnant for a century, her great competitor, England, had been steadily building up that capacity for organized industry which, under the inventive genius of Arkwright, Hargreaves, and Watt, and the economic genius of Adam Smith, made the last twenty years of the eighteenth century such a marvellous period of industrial expansion, and eventually converted England from an agricultural into a manufacturing nation. Ireland was hopelessly late in the race. On the other hand, the fertile land of Ireland remained as the indestructible source of wealth and the prime means of subsistence for the great bulk of the four and a half million souls who inhabited the country. Parliament seems to have been almost indifferent to the miseries of the agricultural population, wholly indifferent, certainly, to their source, the vicious agrarian system which it was the interest of its own members to sustain. Foster's famous Corn Law without doubt increased tillage, and, in conjunction with the inflated prices for produce caused by the French War, gave a powerful though a somewhat unhealthy impulse to the trade in corn. But it enriched only the landlords, and left untouched the real abuses, absenteeism, middlemanism, insecurity of tenure, rack-rents, and tithes. The Whiteboy risings of the sixties and seventies recurred, and were met with Coercion Acts as stupid and cruel as those of the nineteenth century. The tithe grievance, which festered and grew into civil war in the nineteenth century, was never touched. While tenants in North-East Ulster were painfully and forcibly establishing their custom of tenant right in the teeth of the law, the inhuman system of cottier tenancy, which was to last until 1881, became more and more firmly rooted in other parts of Ireland.

None but a democratic Assembly could possibly have grappled with these evils; nor is there any reason to suppose that in the existing condition of Ireland a Protestant democratic Assembly, even if temporarily it retained its sectarian character, would have grappled with them less boldly and drastically than an Assembly composed of Catholics and Protestants. The material interests of nineteen-twentieths of the people were the same, while the education and intelligence belonged mainly to the Protestants. Ulster tenants had as much need of good land laws as other tenants. Tithes were as much disliked in the north as in the south. The Established Church was the Church of a very small minority, and its clergy, numbers of whom were absentees, were as unpopular as the absentee landlords and the absentee office-holders and pensioners.

But with no redress, and, what is more important, no prospect of redress for the primary ills of Ireland, the centrifugal forces of religion and race had full scope for their baneful influence. And it was at the very moment when tolerance was steadily gaining ground among all classes that these spectres of ancient wrong were summoned up to destroy the good work.

How did this come about? Let us remember once more that everything hinged on Reform. Reform gained a little, but suffered far more, by its association with the question of Catholic franchise, which was useless without Reform, while it was the corollary of Reform. Nothing is more remarkable than the growth of academic tolerance during this period, doubtful and suspect as the motives sometimes were. It is true that the great Relief Act of 1793, giving Catholics the vote and removing a quantity of other disqualifications, would scarcely have been sanctioned by the Parliamentary managers without the stern dictation of Pitt, whose mind was strongly influenced by the violent anti-Catholic turn just taken by the French Revolution; but, once sanctioned, it passed rapidly, and was received with universal satisfaction in the country at large. Without "Emancipation," that is, the permission to elect Catholics to sit in Parliament and hold office, the franchise was illusory and even harmful. In the counties the forty-shilling "freehold" vote ("freehold" was an ironical misnomer) encouraged Protestant landlords for another generation, before and after the Union, still further to subdivide already excessively small holdings, while the benefits to be derived from the admission to power of propertied Catholics, with all their intensely Conservative instincts, were thrown away. Emancipation apart, the franchise without Reform was a complete farce, for the boroughs, which controlled the Parliamentary balance, were the personal property of Protestant landlords, and the 110 Parliamentary placemen were indirectly their tools. As usual, the men of light and leading contributed unconsciously to the strength of a system which, in their hearts, as honest men, they condemned. Each of them had some fatal defect of understanding. Grattan became a strong Emancipator, but remained an academic and ineffectual reformer striving in vain to reconcile Reform with a passionate abhorrence of democracy and a determination to keep power in the hands of landed property. In England, which was Protestant in the Established sense, he would have done no more harm than Burke, who for the same reason fought Reform as strongly as Pitt and his father Chatham had advocated it. But in Ireland, which was Catholic and Nonconformist, landed property signified Episcopalian landed property, that is, the narrowest form of ascendancy. Charlemont was an even stranger paradox. He was an academic Reformer before Grattan, but not an Emancipator, arriving at the same sterility as Grattan through a religious bias which Grattan ceased to feel, a bias inspired, not by a fanatical fear of democracy in itself, but by a fear of Catholic revenge for past wrongs. These men and their like, admirable and lovable as in many respects they were, were useless to Ireland in those terrible times. Whether Emancipation, unaccompanied by Reform, had any real chance of passing Parliament in 1795, when the Whig Viceroy Fitzwilliam, the one Viceroy in the eighteenth century who ever conceived the idea of governing Ireland according to Irish ideas, came over from England with the avowed intention of proposing it, is a matter of conjecture. Fitzwilliam was snuffed out by Pitt, and recalled under circumstances which still remain a matter of controversy. All we can say with certainty is that the opinion of Ireland at large was absolutely ignored, and that English party intrigues and English claims on Irish patronage had much to do with the result. On the whole, however, I agree with Mr. Fisher that too much importance has been given to this episode, especially by Mr. Lecky, who devotes nearly a volume to it.

The anti-national Irish Parliament was past praying for. Long before 1795 the Irish aristocracy had lost whatever power for good it ever possessed, and most of the resolute reformers of Wolfe Tone's middle-class Protestant school had turned, under the enthralling fascination of the French Revolution, into revolutionaries. Reform had been refused in 1782; again, and without coercion from the Volunteers, in 1783. It was refused again in 1784, against the advice of Pitt and at the instigation of Pitt's own Viceroy, Rutland, whom Pitt had urged—what a grim irony it seems!—to give "unanswerable proofs that the cases of Ireland and England are different," and who answered with truth that the ascendancy of a minority could only be maintained "by force or corruption." Every succeeding year showed the same results. Wolfe Tone was more than justified, he was compelled, to convert his Society of United Irishmen, founded in 1791, into a revolutionary organization and to seek by forcible means to overthrow the Executive which controlled Parliament and, through it, Ireland. Since the symbol of the Irish Executive was the British Crown, he, of course, abjured the Crown, though he had no more quarrel with the Crown as such than had the American or Canadian patriots. He simply loved his country, and from the first saw with clear eyes the only way to save her. Tolerance to him was not an isolated virtue, but an integral part of democracy. He took little interest in the Parliamentary side of Catholic relief, realizing its hollow unreality, and, in the case of the Bill of 1793, actually ridiculing the absurd spectacle of the Catholic cottiers being herded to the poll by their Protestant landlords. Nor was he even an extreme Democrat, for he advocated a ten-pound, instead of a forty shilling franchise. His original pamphlet of 1791 contains nothing but the most sober political common sense.

His aim was to unite Irishmen of all creeds to overthrow a Government which did not emanate from or represent them, and which was ruinous to them. It is not surprising that he failed. Ireland was very near England. French intervention had been decisive in distant America, and the French Revolution in its turn had been hastened by the American example. But the intervention in Ireland of Republican France, for purely selfish and strategic reasons, without effective command of the sea, and with the stain of the Terror upon her, was of little material value and a grave moral handicap to the Irish Revolutionists. It is the manner of Tone's failure and the consequences of his failure that have such a tragic interest. A united Ireland could have dispensed with the aid of France. What prevented unity? Tone laboured to bring both creeds together, and to a certain degree was successful. Until the very last it was the Catholics, not the Protestants, who shrank most from revolution. Yet, in the Rebellion of 1798, the North never moved, while Catholic Wexford and Wicklow rose.

The root cause is to be found in those agrarian abuses whose long neglect by the Irish Parliament constituted the strongest justification for Reform. The Orange Society, founded under that name in 1795, originated in the "Peep o' Day Boys," a local association formed in Armagh in 1784 for the purpose of bullying Catholics. There is no doubt that the underlying incentive was economic. Even when the Penal Code had lost in efficacy, its results survived in the low standard of living of the persecuted Catholics. As I pointed out in a former chapter, the reckless cupidity of the landlords in terminating leases and fixing new rents by auction, with the alternative of eviction, threw those Protestant tenants who did not emigrate into direct competition with Catholic peasants of a lower economic stamp, who because they lived on little could afford to offer fancy rents. Hence much bitter friction, leading to sordid village rows and eventually to the organized ruffianism of the Peep o' Day Boys. The Catholic Franchise Act of 1793, unaccompanied by Emancipation, actually intensified the trouble by removing the landlord's motive to prefer a Protestant tenant on account of his vote. Under ill-treatment, the Catholics naturally retaliated with a society known as the "Defenders," and in some districts were themselves the aggressors. Defenderism, in its purely agrarian aspect, spread to other parts of Ireland, where Protestants were few, and became merged in Whiteboyism. This had always been an agrarian movement, directed against abuses which the law refused to touch, and without religious animus, although the overwhelming numbers of the Catholics in the regions where it flourished would have placed the Protestants at their mercy. In Ulster both the contending organizations necessarily acquired a religious form and necessarily retained it. But at bottom bad laws, not bigotry, were the cause. There was nothing incurable, or even unique, about the disorders. Analogous phenomena have appeared elsewhere, for example, in Australia, between the original squatters on large ranches and new and more energetic colonists in search of land for closer settlement. Under a rational system of tenure and distribution there was plenty of good land in Ireland for an even larger population. Tone, who was a middle-class lawyer, seems never to have appreciated what was going on. So far from healing the schism, he appears to have widened it by throwing the United Irish Committee of Ulster into the scale of the Catholics against the Orangemen. But, in truth, he was helpless. Good administration only could unite these distracted elements, and without the Reform for which he battled, good administration was impossible. The dissension, widening and acquiring an increasingly religious and racial character, paralyzed Ulster, which originally was the seat of the Revolution. The forces normally at work to favour law and order—loyalty to the Crown, dislike of the French Revolution, and resentment at Franco-Irish conspiracies—gathered proportionately greater strength.

The Southern Rebellion of 1798—a mad, pitiful thing at the best, the work of half-starved peasants into whose stunted minds the splendid ideal of Tone had scarcely begun to penetrate—was a totally different sort of rebellion from any he had contemplated. It was neither national nor Republican. The French invasions had met with little support; the first with positive reprobation. Nor was it in origin sectarian, although, once aflame, it inevitably took a sectarian turn. Several of the prominent leaders were Protestants. Priests naturally joined in it because they were the only friends the people had had in the dark ages of oppression. In so far as it can be regarded as spontaneous, it was of Whiteboy origin, anti-tithe and anti-rack-rent. But it was not even spontaneous; that is another dreadful and indisputable fact which emerges. The barbarous measures taken to repress and disarm, prior to the outbreak, together with the skilfully propagated reports of a coming massacre by Orangemen, would have goaded any peasantry in the world to revolt, and the only astonishing thing is that the revolt was so local and sporadic. General Sir Ralph Abercromby retired, sickened with the horrors he was forbidden to avert. "Within these twelve months," he wrote of the conduct of the soldiery at the time of his resignation, "every crime, every cruelty that could be committed by Cossacks or Calmucks has been transacted here.... The struggle has been, in the first place, whether I was to have the command of the Army really or nominally, and then whether the character and discipline of it were to be degraded and ruined in the mode of using it, either from the facility of one man or from the violence and oppression of a set of men who have for more than twelve months employed it in measures which they durst not avow or sanction."

Abercromby's resignation, in Mr. Lecky's opinion, "took away the last faint chance of averting a rebellion." Fitzgibbon, Lord Clare, was now supreme in the Government, and henceforth represents incarnate the forces which provoked the Rebellion and founded upon it the Union. He had bided his time for a decade, watching the trend of events, foreseeing their outcome, and smiling sardonically at the ineffectual writhings of the men of compromise. He stands out like a block of black granite over against the slender figure of Wolfe Tone, who was his anti-type in ideas and aims, his inferior in intellect, his superior in morals, but no more than his rival in sincerity, clarity, and consistency of ideas. Clare was a product of the Penal Code, the son of a Catholic Irishman who, to obtain a legal career, had become a Protestant. He himself was not a bigot, but a very able cynic, with a definite theory of government. Tolerance, Emancipation, Reform, were so much noxious, sentimental rubbish to him, and he had never scrupled to say so. Ireland was a Colony, English colonists were robbers in Ireland, and robbers must be tyrants, or the robbed will come by their own again; that was his whole philosophy,[18] his frigid and final estimate of the tendencies of human nature, and his considered cure for them. Racial fusion was a crazy conception not worth argument. Wrong on one side, revenge on the other; policy, coercion. As he put it in his famous speech on the Union, the settlers to the third and fourth generation "were at the mercy of the old inhabitants of the island." "Laws must be framed to meet the vicious propensities of human nature," and laws of this sort for the case of Ireland should, he held with unanswerable logic, properly be made in England, not by the travesty of a Parliament in Ireland, which, in so far as it was in any degree Irish, had shown faint but ominous tendencies towards tolerance and the reunion of Irishmen. He never took the trouble to demonstrate the truth of his theory of revenge by a reasoned analysis of Irish symptoms. He took it for granted as part of a universal axiomatic truth, and, like all philosophers of his school, pointed to the results of misgovernment and coercion as proofs of the innate depravity of the governed and of their need for more coercion. Anticipating a certain limited class of Irishmen of to-day, often brilliant lawyers like himself, he used to bewail English ignorance of Ireland, meaning ignorance of the incurable criminality of his own kith and kin. He was just as immovably cynical about the vast majority of his own co-religionists as about the conquered race. If, as was obvious, so far from fearing the revenge of the Catholics, their unimpeded instinct was to take sides with them to secure good government, they were not only traitors, but imbeciles who could not see the doom awaiting them. Yet Fitzgibbon's admirers must admit that his consistency was not complete. He was perfectly cognizant of the real causes of Irish discontent. He was aware of the grievances of Ulster, and his description of the conditions of the Munster peasantry in the Whiteboy debates of 1787 is classical. If pressed, he would have answered, we may suppose, that it was impolitic to cure evils which were at once the consequence of ascendancy and the condition of its maintenance. That other strange lapse in 1798, when he described the unparalleled prosperity of Ireland since 1782 under a Constitution which, in the Union debates of 1800, he afterwards covered with deserved ridicule as having led to anarchy, destitution, and bankruptcy, must be attributed to the exigencies of debate; for he was an advocate as well as a statesman, and occasionally gave way to the temptation of making showy but unsubstantial points.

These slips were rare, and do not detract from the massive coherence of his doctrine. He remains the frankest, the most vivid, and the most powerful exponent of a theory of government which has waged eternal conflict with its polar rival, the Liberal theory, in the evolution of the Empire. The theory, of course, extends much farther than the bi-racial Irish case, to which Fitzgibbon applied it. It was used, as we shall see, to meet the bi-racial circumstances of Canada and South Africa, and it was also used in a modified form to meet the uni-racial circumstances of Australia and of Great Britain itself. Anyone who reads the debates on the Reform Bill of 1831 will notice that the opposition rested at bottom on a profoundly pessimistic distrust of the people, and on the alleged necessity of an oligarchy vested with the power and duty of "framing laws to meet the vicious propensities of human nature." In a word, the theory is in essence not so much anti-racial as anti-democratic, while finding its easiest application where those distinctions of race and creed exist which it is its effect, though not its purpose, to intensify and envenom. Fitzgibbon is a repulsive figure. Yet it would be unjust to single him out for criticism. Like him, the philosophers Hume and Paley believed in oligarchy, and accepted force or corruption as its two alternative props. Burke thought the same, though the Pitts thought otherwise. Fitzgibbon's brutal pessimism was only the political philosophy of Paley, Hume, and Burke pushed relentlessly in an exceptional case to its extreme logical conclusion. But we can justly criticize statesmen of the present day who, after a century's experience of the refutation of the doctrine in every part of the world, still adhere to it.

CHAPTER IV

THE UNION

The worst feature of Fitzgibbonism is that it has the power artificially to produce in the human beings subject to it some of the very phenomena which originally existed only in the perverted imagination of its professors. Some only of the phenomena; not all; for human nature triumphs even over Fitzgibbonism. There has never been a moment since the Union when a representative Irish Parliament, if statesmen had been wise and generous enough, to set such a body up, would have acted on the principle of revenge or persecution. Nor, in spite of all evidences to the contrary, has there ever been a moment when Protestant Ulstermen, heirs of the noble Volunteer spirit, once represented in such a Parliament, would have acted on the assumption that they had to meet a policy of revenge. Nevertheless, Fitzgibbonism did succeed, as it was to succeed in Canada, in making pessimism at least plausible and in achieving an immense amount of direct ascertainable mischief.

The rift between the creeds and races, just beginning to heal three generations after the era of confiscation, but reopened under the operations of economic forces connected with race and religion, yet perfectly capable of adjustment by a wise and instructed Government, yawned wide from 1798 onwards, when Government had become a soulless policeman, and scenes of frenzy and slaughter had occurred which could not be forgotten. Swept asunder by a power outside their control, Protestants and Catholics stood henceforth in opposite political camps, and it became a fixed article of British policy to govern Ireland by playing upon this antagonism. The flame of the Volunteer spirit never perished, but it dwindled to a spark under the irresistible weight of a manufactured reaction. Dissenters and Anglicans united, not to lead the way in securing better conditions for their Catholic fellow-countrymen, not for the interests of Ireland as a whole, but under the ignoble colours of religious fanaticism. Hence that strangely artificial alliance between the landlords of the South and West and the democratic tenantry, artisans, and merchants of the North; an alliance formed to meet an imaginary danger, and kept in being with the most mischievous results to the social and economic development of Ireland. Since the Protestant minority had made up its mind to depend once more on the English power it had defied in 1782, the old machine of Ascendancy, which had showed certain manifest signs of decrepitude under Grattan's Parliament, was reconstructed on a firmer, less corrupt, and more lasting basis.

The Legislative Union is not a landmark or a turning-point in Irish history. It reproduced "under less assailable forms" the Government which existed prior to 1782. The real crisis, as I have said, came at the end of 1783, when the Volunteers tried, by reforming Parliament, to give Irish Government an Irish character. It is essential to remember—now as much as ever before—that Ireland has never had a national Parliament. She has never been given a chance of self-expression and self-development. It is useless, though Home Rulers frequently give way to the temptation, to advocate Home Rule by arguing from Grattan's Parliament. O'Connell, in the Repeal debate of 1834, devoted hours to praising that Parliament, and had his own argument turned against him with crushing force by the Secretary to the Treasury, who easily proved that it was the most corrupt and absurd body that ever existed. The same game of cross-purposes went on in the Home Rule debates of 1886 and 1893, and reappeared but this year in a debate of the House of Lords (July 4, 1911), when the Roman Catholic Home Ruler, Lord MacDonnell, eulogized Grattan's Parliament in answer to Lord Londonderry, the Protestant Unionist landlord, who painted it in its true colours. Yet Lord Londonderry springs from the class and school of Charlemont, who, by refusing to act as an Irishman, hastened the ruin of the Parliament which Lord Londonderry satirizes, and Lord MacDonnell from the race which was betrayed by that Parliament. The anomaly need not surprise us. It is not stranger than the fact that the Union would never have been carried without Catholic support in Ireland.

The point we have to grasp is that Ireland was a victim to the crudity and falsity of the political ideas current at the time of the Union, persistent all over the Empire for long afterwards, and not extinct yet. Between Separation, personified by Tone, and Union, personified by Fitzgibbon, and carried by those milder statesmen, Castlereagh and Pitt, there seemed to be no alternative. Actually there was and is an alternative: a responsible Irish Parliament and Government united to England by sympathy and interest.

The Parliamentary history of the Union does not much concern us. Bribery, whether by titles, offices, or cash, had always been the normal means of securing a Government majority in the Irish House of Commons. Corruption was the only means of carrying the vote for the Union, and the time and labour needed for securing that vote are a measure of the rewards gained by those who formed the majority. Disgusting business as it was, we have to admit that a Parliament which refused to reform itself at the bidding of all that was best and healthiest in Ireland did, on its own account, deserve extinction. The sad thing is that the true Ireland was sacrificed.

Pitt and Castlereagh, though they plunged their hands deep in the mire to obtain the Union, quite honestly believed in the policy of the Union. They were wrong. They merely reestablished the old ascendancy in a form, morally perhaps more defensible, but just as damaging to the interests of Ireland. In addition to absentee landlords, an alien and a largely absentee Church, there was now an absentee Parliament, remote from all possibility of pressure from Irish public opinion, utterly ignorant of Ireland, containing within it, for twenty-nine years, at any rate, representatives of only one creed, and that the creed of the small minority. Pitt had virtually pledged himself to make Catholic Emancipation an immediate consequence of the Union, and his Viceroy, Cornwallis, had thereby obtained the invaluable support of the Catholic hierarchy and of many of the Catholic gentry. The King, half mad at the time, refused to sanction the redemption of the pledge, and Pitt, to his deep dishonour, accepted the insult and dropped the scheme. Fitzgibbonism in its extreme form had triumphed. It was a repetition of the perfidy over the Treaty of Limerick a century before. Indeed, at every turn of Irish history, until quite recent times, there seems to have been perpetrated some superfluity of folly or turpitude which shut the last outlet for natural improvement. It cannot be held, however, that the refusal of Emancipation for another generation seriously damaged the prospects of the Union as a system of government. After it was granted, the system worked just as badly as before, and in all essentials continues to work just as badly now. Inequalities in the Irish franchise were only an aggravation. In order to cripple Catholic power, Emancipation itself was accompanied in 1829 by an Act which disfranchised at a stroke between seven and eight tenths of the Irish county electorate, nor was it until the latest extension of the United Kingdom franchise, that is, eighty-five years after the Union, that the Irish representation was a true numerical reflection of the Irish democracy. But these were not vital matters. In the Home Rule campaigns of 1886 and 1893, Irish opinion, constitutionally expressed, was impotent. The vital matter was that the Union killed all wholesome political life in Ireland, destroyed the last chance of promoting harmony among Irishmen, and transferred the settlement of Irish questions to an ignorant and prejudiced tribunal, incapable of comprehending these questions, much less of adjudicating upon them with any semblance of impartiality.

The Legislative Union was unnatural. The two islands, near as they were to each other, were on different planes of civilization, wealth, and economic development, without a common tradition, a common literature, or a common religion. Each had a temperament and genius of its own, and each needed a different channel of expression. Laws applicable to one island were meaningless or noxious in the other; taxation applicable to a rich industrial island was inappropriate and oppressive for a poor agricultural island. And upon a system comprising all these incompatibilities there was grafted the ruinous principle of ascendancy.

There is nothing inherently strange about the difference between England and Ireland. Artificial land-frontiers often denote much sharper cleavages of sentiment, character, physique, language, history. A sea-frontier sometimes makes a less, sometimes a more, effective line of delimitation. Denmark and Sweden, France and England, are examples. Nor, on the other hand, did the profound differences between Ireland and England preclude the possibility of their incorporation in a political system under one Crown. We know, by a mass of experience from Federal and other systems, that elements the most diverse in language, religion, wealth, and tradition may be welded together for common action, provided that the union be voluntary and the freedom of the separate parts be preserved. The first conditions of a true union were lacking in the case of Ireland. The arrangement was not voluntary. It was accompanied by gross breach of faith, and it signified enslavement, not liberty.

A true Union was not even attempted. The Government of Ireland, in effect, and for the most part in form, was still that of a conquered Colonial Dependency. It was no more representative in any practical sense after the Union than before the Union. The popular vote was submerged in a hostile assembly far away. The Irish peerage was regarded rightly by the Irish people as the very symbol of their own degradation, the Union having been purchased with titles, and titles having been for a century past the price paid for the servility of Anglo-Irish statesmen. But the peerage, in the persons of the twenty-eight representatives sent to Westminster, still remained a powerful nucleus of anti-Irish opinion, infecting the House of Lords with anti-Irish prejudice, and often opposing a last barrier to reform when the opposition of the British House of Commons had been painfully overcome. In truth the cardinal reforms of the nineteenth century were obtained, not by persuasion, but by unconstitutional violence in Ireland itself. There was still a separate Executive in Ireland, a separate system of local administration, and until 1817 a separate financial system, all of them wholly outside Irish control. The only change of constitutional importance was that the Viceroy gradually became a figure-head, and his autocratic powers, similar to those of the Governor of a Crown Colony, were transferred to the Chief Secretary, who was a member of the British Ministry. Gradually, as the activity of Government increased, there grew up that grotesque system of nominated and irresponsible Boards which at the present day is the laughing-stock of the civilized world. The whole patronage remained as before, either directly or indirectly, in English hands. If it was no longer manipulated in ways frankly corrupt, it was manipulated in a fashion just as deleterious to Ireland. Before, as after, the Union there was no public career in Ireland for an Irishman who was in sympathy with the great majority of his countrymen. To win the prizes of public life, judgeships, official posts, and the rest, it was not absolutely necessary to be a Protestant, though for a long time all important offices were held exclusively, and are still held mainly, by Protestants; but it was absolutely necessary to be a thoroughgoing supporter of the Ascendancy, and in thoroughgoing hostility to Irish public opinion as a whole. In other words, the unwritten Penal Code was preserved after the abolition of the written enactments, and was used for precisely the same pernicious purpose. It was a subtle and sustained attempt "to debauch the intellect of Ireland," as Mr. Locker-Lampson puts it, to denationalize her, and to make her own hands the instrument of her humiliation. The Bar was the principal sufferer, because now, as before, it was the principal road to humiliation. Fitzgibbons multiplied, so that for generations after the Union some of the ablest Irish lawyers were engaged in the hateful business of holding up their own people to execration in the eyes of the world, of combating legislation imperatively needed for Ireland, and of framing and carrying into execution laws which increased the maladies they were intended to allay.

Let nobody think these phenomena are peculiar to Ireland. In many parts of the world where Ascendancies have existed, or exist, the same methods are employed, and always with a certain measure of success. Irish moral fibre was at least as tough as that of any other nationality in resisting the poison.

But the results were as calamitous in Ireland as in other countries. No country can progress under such circumstances. The test of government is the condition of the people governed. Judged by this criterion, it is no exaggeration to say that Ireland as a whole went backward for at least seventy years after the Union. Even Protestant North-East Ulster, with its saving custom of tenant-right, its linen industry, and all the special advantages derived from a century of privilege, though it escaped the worst effects of the depression, suffered by emigration almost as heavily as the rest of Ireland, and built up its industries with proportionate difficulty. Over the rest of Ireland the main features of the story are continuous from a period long antecedent to the Union. A student of the condition of the Irish peasantry in the eighteenth and in the first three-quarters of the nineteenth centuries can ignore changes in the form or personnel of government. He would scarcely be aware, unless he travelled outside his subject, that Grattan's Parliament ever existed, or that subsequently a long succession of Whig and Tory Ministers, differing profoundly in their political principles, had alternately sent over to Ireland Chief Secretaries with theoretically despotic powers for good or evil. These "transient and embarrassed phantoms" came and went, leaving their reputations behind them, and the country they were responsible for in much the same condition.

It is not my purpose to enter in detail into the history of Ireland in the nineteenth century, but only to note a few salient points which will help us to a comparison with the progress of other parts of the Empire. It is necessary to repeat that the basis upon which the whole economic structure of Ireland rested, the Irish agrarian system, was inconsistent with social peace and an absolute bar to progress. I described in Chapter I. how it came into being and the collateral mischiefs attending it. During the nineteenth century, by accident or design, these mischiefs were greatly aggravated. Until 1815 high war prices and the low Catholic franchise stimulated subdivision of holdings, already excessively small, and the growth of population. With the peace came evictions, conversions into pasture, and consolidation of farms. The disfranchisement of the mass of the peasantry which accompanied Emancipation in 1829 inspired fresh clearances on a large scale and caused unspeakable misery, with further congestion on the worst agricultural land. "Cottier" tenancy, at a competitive rent, and terminable without compensation for the improvements which were made exclusively by the tenant, was general over the greater part of Ireland. Generally it was tenancy-at-will, with perpetual liability to eviction. Leaseholders, however, were under conditions almost as onerous. The labourer, who was allowed a small plot, which he paid for in labour, was in the worst plight of all. In addition, burdensome tithes were collected by an alien Church and rents were largely spent abroad. If Irish manufactures had not been destroyed, and there had been an outlet from agriculture into industry, the evil effects of the agrarian system would have been mitigated. As it was, in one of the richest and most fertile countries in the world the congestion and poverty were appalling. Competition for land meant the struggle for bare life. Rent had no relation to value, but was the price fixed by the frantic bidding of hungry peasants for the bare right to live. The tenant had no interest in improving the land, because the penalty for improvement was a higher rent, fixed after another bout of frantic competition.

"Almost alone amongst mankind," wrote John Stuart Mill,[19] "the cottier is in this condition, that he can scarcely be either better or worse off by any act of his own. If he were industrious or prudent, nobody but his landlord would gain; if he is lazy or intemperate, it is at his landlord's expense. A situation more devoid of motives to either labour or self-command, imagination itself cannot conceive. The inducements of free human beings are taken away, and those of a slave not substituted. He has nothing to hope, and nothing to fear, except being dispossessed of his holding, and against this he protects himself by the ultima ratio of a defensive civil war. Rockism and Whiteboyism were the determination of a people, who had nothing that could be called theirs but a daily meal of the lowest description of food, not to submit to being deprived of that for other people's convenience.

"Is it not, then, a bitter satire on the mode in which opinions are formed on the most important problems of human nature and life, to find public instructors of the greatest pretension imputing the backwardness of Irish industry, and the want of energy of the Irish people in improving their condition, to a peculiar indolence and insouciance in the Celtic race? Of all vulgar modes of escaping from the consideration of the effect of social and moral influences on the human mind, the most vulgar is that of attributing the diversities of conduct and character to inherent natural differences."

The "civil war" referred to by Mill as the ultima ratio of the cottier tenant went on intermittently for ninety years of the nineteenth century, as it had gone on during the eighteenth century, and was met by coercive laws of the same general stamp. Until Mr. Gladstone took the question in hand in 1870, no reformer could get a hearing in Parliament. Bill after Bill, privately introduced, met with contemptuous rejection in favour of some senseless measure of semi-military coercion. There can, I believe, be no doubt that responsible Irish opinion, made effective, would have grappled with the evil firmly and conscientiously. Until the peasant class was driven to the last pitch of desperation, their leaders did not conceive, and, indeed, never wholly succeeded in implanting, the idea of a complete overthrowal of landlordism. The peasant was not unwilling to pay rent. He had, and still has, a deep, instinctive respect for a landed aristocracy, and was ready, and is still ready, to repay good treatment with an intensity of devotion difficult to parallel in other parts of the United Kingdom. In that veritably cataclysmic dispersion of the Irish race which ensued upon the great famine, rent continued to be paid at home out of sums remitted from relatives in America. No less than nineteen millions of money were thus remitted, according to the Emigration Commissioners of 1863, between 1847 and that date. The Roman Catholic Church, as in every part of the world, was strongly on the side of law and order, and, indeed, on many occasions stepped in to condemn disorder legitimately provoked by intolerable suffering. The wealthy and educated landlord class, face to face in a free Parliament with the tenant class, including, be it remembered, the Ulster Protestant tenants, with grievances less acute in degree, but similar in kind, would have consented to meet reform halfway under the stimulus of patriotism and an enlightened self-interest. Against the great majority of Irish landlords there was no personal charge. They came into incomes derived from a certain source under ancient laws for which they were not responsible. But, acting through the ascendancy Parliament far away in London, they remained, as an organized class—for we must always make allowance for an enlightened and public-spirited minority—blind to their own genuine interests and to the demands of humane policy. Their responsibility was transferred to English statesmen, who were not fitted, by temperament or training, to undertake it, and who always looked at the Irish land question, which had no counterpart in England, through English spectacles. We cannot attribute their failure to lack of information. At every stage there was plenty of unbiassed and instructed testimony, Whig and Tory, Protestant and Catholic, independent and official, as to the nature and origin of the trouble. Mill and Bright, in 1862, only emphasized what Arthur Young had said in 1772, and what Edward Wakefield, Sharman Crawford, Michael Sadler, Poulett Scrope, and many other writers, thinkers, and politicians had confirmed in the intervening period, and what every fair-minded man admits now to be the truth. Commission after Commission reported the main facts correctly, if the remedies they proposed were inadequate. The Devon Commission, reporting in 1845, on the eve of the great famine, condemned the prevalent agrarian tenure, and recommended the statutory establishment of the Ulster custom of tenant right. A very mild and cautious Bill was introduced and dropped.

Next year came the famine, revealing in an instant the rottenness of the economic foundations upon which the welfare of Ireland depended. The population had swollen from four millions in 1788 to nearly eight and a half millions in 1846, an unhealthy expansion, due to the well-known law of propagation in inverse ratio to the adequacy of subsistence. What happened was merely the failure of the potato-crop, not a serious matter in most countries, but in Ireland the cause of starvation to three-quarters of a million persons, and the starting-point of that vast exodus which in the last half of the nineteenth century drained Ireland of nearly four million souls. The famine passed, and with it all recollection of the report of the Devon Commission. Hitherto most of the land legislation had been designed to facilitate evictions. Now came the Encumbered Estates Act of 1849, whose purpose was to facilitate the buying out of bankrupt Irish landlords, and whose effect was to perpetuate the old agrarian system under a new set of more mercenary landlords, pursuing the old policy of rack-rents and evictions. In the three years 1849-1852, 58,423 families were evicted, or 306,120 souls. Aroused from the stupor of the famine, the peasants had to retaliate with the same old defensive policy of outrage. Peaceful agitation was of no use. The Tenant League of North and South, formed in 1852, claimed in vain the simplest of the rights granted under pressure of violence in 1870 and 1881.

Violence, indeed, was the only efficient lever in Ireland for any but secondary reforms until the last fifteen years of the century, when a remedial policy was spontaneously adopted, with the general consent of British statesmen and parties. Fear inspired the Emancipation Act of 1829, which was recommended to Parliament by the Duke of Wellington as a measure wrong in itself, but necessary to avert an organized rebellion in Ireland. Tithes, the unjust burden of a century and a half, were only commuted in 1838, after a Seven Years' War revolting in its incidents. Mr. Gladstone admitted, and no one who studies the course of events can deny, that without the Fenianism of the sixties, and the light thrown thereby on the condition of Ireland, it would have been impossible to carry the Act—again overdue by a century—for the disestablishment of the Irish Church in 1869, or the Land Act, timid and ineffectual as it was, of 1870. Without the organized lawlessness of the Land League it would have been equally impossible to bring about those more drastic changes in Irish land tenure which, amidst storms of protest from vested interests affected, were initiated under the great Land Act of 1881, and, after another miserable decade of crime and secret conspiracy, extended by the Acts of 1887, 1891, and 1896.

Briefly, the effect of these Acts was to establish three principles: a fair rent, fixed by a judicial tribunal, the Land Commission, and revisable every fifteen years; fixity of tenure as long as the rent is paid; and free sale of the tenant-right.

The remedy eventually brought widespread relief, but, from a social and economic standpoint, it was not the right remedy. There is no security for good legislation unless it be framed by those who are to live under it. Constructive thought in Ireland for the solution of her own difficulties and the harmonizing of her own discordant elements had been systematically dammed, or diverted into revolutionary excesses, which, in the traditional spirit of Fitzgibbonism, were made the pretext for more stupid torture. Thus, O'Connell, whose attachment to law was so strong that in 1843, when the Repeal agitation had reached seemingly irresistible proportions, he deliberately restrained it, was tried for sedition. So, too, were dissipated the brilliant talents of the Young Ireland group and the grave statesmanship of Isaac Butt. Fits intervened of a penitent and bungling philanthropy which has left its traces on nearly all Irish institutions. For example, it was decided in 1830 that the Irish must be educated, and a system was set up which was deliberately designed to anglicize Ireland and extirpate Roman Catholicism. Four years later, in defiance of Irish opinion, a Poor Law pedantically copied from the English model was applied to Ireland. The railway system also was grossly mismanaged. And so with the land. When reform eventually came, the evil had gone too far, and it was beyond the art of the ablest and noblest Englishmen, inheriting English conceptions of the rights of landed property, to devise any means of placing the relations between landlord and tenant in Ireland, inhuman and absurd as they were, on a sound and durable basis. The dual ownership set up by the Land Acts was more humane, but in some respects no less absurd and mischievous. It exasperated the landlord, while, by placing before the tenant the continual temptation of further reductions in rent, it tended to check good cultivation.

Men came to realize at last that the complete expropriation of the landlords through the State-aided purchase of the land was the only logical resource, and this process, begun tentatively and on a very small scale as far back as 1870, under the inspiration of John Bright, and extended under a series of other Acts, was eventually set in motion on a vast scale by the Wyndham Act of 1903.

I leave a final review of Purchase and of other quite recent remedial legislation, as well as the far more important movements for regeneration from within, to later chapters. Meanwhile, let us pause for a moment and pronounce upon the political system which made such havoc in Ireland. All this havoc, all this incalculable waste of life, energy, brains, and loyalty, was preventable and unnecessary. Ethics and honour apart, where was the common sense of the legislative Union? Would it have been possible to design a system better calculated to embitter, impoverish, and demoralize a valuable portion of the Empire?

Let us now turn our eyes across the Atlantic, and observe the effects of an Imperial policy founded on the same root idea.

CHAPTER V

CANADA AND IRELAND

In comparing the history of Canada with the closely allied history of Ireland, we must bear in mind that in the last half of the eighteenth century the present British North America consisted of three distinct portions: Acadia, or the Maritime Provinces, which we now know as Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, colonized originally by a few Frenchmen and later by Scotch and Irish; Lower Canada, extensively colonized by the French, which we now know as the Province of Quebec; and Upper Canada, which we now know as Ontario, colonized last of all by Americans under circumstances to be described.

In 1763, before the repeal of any part of the Penal Code against Irish Roman Catholics, the French Catholic Colony of Lower Canada, with a population of about seventy thousand souls and the two small towns of Quebec and Montreal, passed definitely into British possession under the Treaty of Paris, which brought to a conclusion the Seven Years' War. Fortunately, there was no question, as in Ireland, of expropriating the owners of the soil in favour of State-aided British planters, and hence no question of a Penal Code, even on the moderate scale current in Great Britain at the same period. On the contrary, it became a matter of urgent practical expediency to conciliate the conquered Province in view of the growing disaffection of the American Colonies bordering it on the South. This disaffection, assuming ominous proportions on the enactment of the Stamp Act in 1765, was itself an indirect result of the conquest of Canada a few years before; for the claim to tax the Americans for Imperial purposes arose from the enormous expense of the war of conquest and of the subsequent charges for defence and upkeep. It was forgotten that American volunteers had captured Louisburg in 1745, and had borne a distinguished part in later operations, and that to lay a compulsory tax upon them would banish glorious memories common to America and Britain. Henceforward, conquered French Canada was made a political bulwark against rebellious America. The French colonists, a peaceable, primitive folk, as attached to their religion as the Irish, and devoted mainly to agriculture, retained, as long as they desired it, the old French system of law known as the Custom of Paris and the free exercise of their religion. Like the Irish, they were strongly monarchical and strongly conservative in feeling, and as impervious to the Republican propaganda emanating from their American neighbours as the Catholic Irish always at heart remained to the revolutionary principles of Wolfe Tone's school. Unmolested in their habits and possessions, they philosophically accepted the transference from the Bourbon to the Hanoverian dynasty, and became an indispensable source of strength to George III. when that monarch was using his German troops to coerce his American subjects and his British troops to overawe the Ulster Volunteers.

In 1774, immediately before the outbreak of a war against which Ireland was protesting, and in which, with the soundest justification, the Irish-Americans, Catholic and Protestant, took such a prominent part against the British arms, the Quebec Act was passed giving formal statutory sanction to the Catholic religion, and setting up a nominated legislative Council, whose members were subject to no religious test. In Ireland it was not till six years later, and, as we have seen, by means of precisely the same pressure—British fear of America—that the Irish Protestant Volunteers obtained the abolition of the test for Dissenters, while Catholics in Ireland were still little more than outlaws, and had to wait for nearly sixty years for complete emancipation. The result of the Quebec Act, together with the sympathetic administration of that great Irishman, Sir Guy Carleton, was the firm allegiance of the French Province in spite of an exceedingly formidable invasion, during the whole of the American War, and even after the intervention of European France. It is part of the dramatic irony of these occurrences that some of the invading army was composed of Morgan's Irish-American riflemen, and that one of the two joint leaders of the invasion was the Irish-American, General Richard Montgomery, who fell at the unsuccessful assault of Quebec on December 31, 1775.

In spite of Burke's noble appeal in the House of Commons, toleration in the abstract had nothing to do with the treatment of the French Catholics. British Catholics in the neighbouring Prince Edward Island were denied all civil rights in 1770, and only gained them in 1830. In England, the Quebec Act with difficulty survived a storm of indignation, in which even Chatham joined. The small minority of British settled in Quebec and Montreal made vehement protests, while the American Congress itself in 1774 committed the irreparable blunder of making the establishment of the Roman Catholic religion in Canada one of its formally published grievances against Great Britain. When war broke out, and the magnitude of the mistake was seen, efforts were made to seduce the Canadians by hints of a coming British tyranny, but the Canadians very naturally abode by their first impressions.

The peace of 1783 and the final recognition of American Independence led to results of far-reaching importance for the further development of the British Empire. Out of the loss of the American Colonies came the foundation of Australia and of British Canada. Before the war it had been the custom to send convicts from the United Kingdom to penal settlements in the American Colonies. The United States stopped this traffic. Pitt's Government decided, after several years of doubt and delay, to divert the stream of convicts to the newly acquired and still unpopulated territory of New South Wales, made known by the voyages of Captain Cook and Sir Joseph Banks. At the same period a very different class of men, seeking a new home, were thrown upon the charity of the British Government. These were the "United Empire Loyalists," as they styled themselves, some 40,000 Americans, with a sprinkling of Irishmen among them, such as Luke Carscallion, Peter Daly, Willet Casey, and John Canniff,[20] who had fought on the Royalist side throughout the war, and at the end of it found their fortunes ruined and themselves the objects of keen resentment. Pitt, with a "total lack of Imperial imagination," as Mr. Holland Rose puts it,[21] does not seem to have considered the plan of colonizing Australia with a part of these men, 433 of whom were reported to be living in destitution in London three years after the war. No more alacrity was shown in relieving the distress of those still in America. In 1788, however, a million and a quarter pounds were voted by Parliament for relief, and large grants of land were made in Canada, whither most of the Loyalists had already begun to emigrate. Some went to the Maritime Provinces, notably to the region now known as New Brunswick; a few went to the towns of the Quebec Province, for the country lands on the lower reaches of the St. Lawrence were already monopolized by the French "habitants"; the rest, estimated at 10,000, to the upper reaches of the St. Lawrence and along the shores of the Lakes Ontario and Erie, in short, to what we now know as the Province of Ontario, and to what then became known as Upper Canada.

From this moment the three Canadas gain sharp definition. To the west Upper Canada, exclusively American or, as we must now say, British in character; next to the east, and cutting off its neighbour from the sea, the ancient Province of Lower Canada, predominantly French, with a minority of British traders in the two towns Quebec and Montreal; last of all the Maritime Provinces, small communities with an almost independent history of their own, although, like Upper and Lower Canada, they eventually presented a problem similar fundamentally to the Irish problem on the other side of the Atlantic. Prince Edward Island is the closest parallel, for, besides the Catholic disabilities of 1770, in 1767 the whole of its land had been granted away by ballot in a single day to a handful of absentee English proprietors, who sublet to occupiers without security of tenure, with the result that a land question similar to that of Ireland arose, which inflamed society and retarded the development of the island for a whole century. Ultimately, moreover, statesmen were driven to an even more drastic solution—compulsory and universal State-aided land purchase.[22] Before the period we have now reached, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, which was carved out of it, had been given rude systems of representative Government, and New Brunswick, also at one time a part of Nova Scotia, received a Constitution in 1784.

The great question after the American War was how to govern the two contiguous Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, the one newly settled by men of British race and Protestant faith, the other also under the British flag, but overwhelmingly French and Catholic, both, in the critical half-century to come, to be reinforced by immigrants from the Old World, and to a large extent from misgoverned Ireland. But let the reader once and for all grasp this point, that, once out of Ireland, there ceases, not immediately, but in course of time, to be any racial or political distinction between the different classes of Irishmen, whose antagonism at home, artificially provoked and fomented by the bad form of government under which they lived, so often made Ireland itself a very hell on earth. I want to dwell on this point in order to avoid confusion when I speak of the bi-racial conditions of Lower Canada and Ireland respectively.

To return to the question of Government. The American Colonies were lost. Here in Canada was an opportunity for a new Imperial policy, better calculated to retain the affections of the colonists. Three distinct problems were involved:

1. Was French or Lower Canada, with its small minority of British, to be given representative Government at all?

2. If so, was it to be left as a separate unit, or was it to be amalgamated in a Union with its neighbour, Upper Canada?

3. Whichever course was taken, what was to be the relation between the Home Government and Canada?

All these questions arise in the case of Ireland itself, and the parallel in each case is interesting. In Canada they were determined for the space of half a century by the Constitutional Act of 1791, passed at the period when Grattan's unreformed Parliament was hastening to its fall, and Wolfe Tone was founding his Society of United Irishmen. Let us take in turn the three questions posed above.

1. The British minority in Lower Canada, supported by a corresponding school in England, were strong for an undisguised British ascendancy, without any recognition of the French. They urged, what was true, that the French were unaccustomed to representative government, and implied, what was neither true nor politic, that they could not, and ought not to, be educated to it. If there was to be an Assembly at all, it should, they claimed, be wholly British and Protestant, or, in the alternative, the Protestant minority only should be represented at Westminster. In other words, they wished either for the pre-Union Irish system or for the post-Union Irish system, both of them, as time was just beginning to prove, equally disastrous to the interests of Ireland. We are not surprised to find these ideas supported by the Irishman Burke, in whom horror of the French Revolution had destroyed the last particle of Liberalism. If Pitt lacked "Imperial imagination," he knew more than most of his contemporaries about the elementary principles of governing white men. It was only a few years before that he had urged upon his Irish Viceroy, Rutland, a reform of the Irish Parliament which might have united the races and averted all the disasters to come, and in this very year (1791) he was pressing forward the Catholic franchise in Ireland. The French in Canada must, he said, be represented in a popular Assembly equally with the British, and on the broadest possible franchise, and they were.

2. The next question was that of the union or separation of Upper and Lower Canada. Here, and from the same underlying motive, the British minority in Lower Canada were for the Union, partly on commercial grounds, but mainly as a step in the direction of overcoming French influence. Upper Canada, wholly British, was, on the whole, neutral. Pitt, on high principle, again took correct ground. He did not, indeed, foresee that separation, for geographical reasons, would cause certain inconveniences; but he did understand—and experience in both Provinces ultimately proved him right—that it was absolutely hopeless to try and avert social and racial discord by artificially swamping the French element. He declared, then, for the separation of the two Canadas into two distinct Provinces. Note the beginnings of another, though a distant, analogy with the relations of Ireland and Great Britain, distant because the French at this time largely outnumbered the British of both Provinces, and in after-years maintained something very near a numerical equality. But the same underlying principle was involved. Pitt, in the Legislative Union of Ireland and Great Britain nine years later, constructed without geographical necessity, indeed, in defiance of geography and humanity, the very system which, in a form by comparison almost innocuous, he had condemned for Canada; but not, we must in fairness remember, before doing his part at an earlier date to arrive at a solution which, given a fair chance, would have rendered the Union of Ireland and England unnecessary.

3. So far, good. But there still remained a further question far transcending the other in importance—What was to be the relation between the Home Government and the new Colonies? Here all British intellects, that of Fox alone excepted, were as much at a loss as ever. One simple deduction was made from what had happened in America, namely, that the new Colonies must not be forced to contribute to Imperial funds by taxes levied from London. That claim had already been abandoned in 1778 by the Colonial Tax Repeal Act, which nevertheless expressly reserved the King's right to levy "such duties as it may be expedient to impose for the regulation of commerce," the sum so raised to be retained for the use of the Colony. No one made the more comprehensive deduction, even in the case of wholly British Upper Canada, that Colonial affairs should be controlled by Colonial opinion, constitutionally ascertained, and that the British Governor should act primarily through advisers chosen by the majority of the people under his rule. We must bear in mind that, had Grattan's Parliament been reformed, and the warring races in Ireland been brought into harmony, it would still have had to pass through the crucial phase of establishing its right to choose Ministers by whose advice the Lord-Lieutenant should be guided, that is, if it were to become a true Home Rule Parliament of the kind we aim at to-day.

From the date of the Constitutional Act passed for Canada in 1791, it took fifty-six troubled years and an armed rebellion in each Province to establish the principle of what we call "responsible Government" for Canada, and, through Canada, for the rest of the white Colonies of the Empire. During these fifty-six years, which correspond in Irish history to a period dating from the middle of Grattan's Parliament down to the great Famine, ascendancies, with the symptoms of disease which always attended ascendancies, grew up in Canada, as they had in Ireland, in spite of conditions which were far more favourable in Canada to healthy political growth. Canada started with this great advantage over Ireland, that instead of a corrupt parody of a Parliament, each of her Provinces, under the Constitutional Act of 1791, had a real popular Assembly, elected without regard to race or religion. It was the Upper House or Legislative Council, as it was called, that interposed the first obstacle to the free working of popular institutions. In both Provinces this Council was nominated by the Governor, and could be used, and was naturally used, to represent minority interests and obstruct the popular assembly. Fox had correctly prophesied that it would soon come "to inspire hatred and contempt." But he did not mean that such a chamber was in itself an insuperable bar to harmony. Nominated or hereditary second chambers are not necessarily inconsistent with popular government, provided that the Executive Government itself possesses the confidence of the representative Assembly. Under that lever, obstruction eventually gives way. But this idea of a tie of confidence between the Governors and the governed was exactly what was lacking.

The Executive Council in each Province was also chosen by the British Governor or Lieutenant-Governor, generally a military man, from persons representing either his own purely British policy or the ideas of a privileged colonial minority, and without regard to the wishes or opinions of the Colonial Assembly, just as the Executive officers in Ireland, both before and after the Union, were chosen out of corresponding elements by the Lord-Lieutenant or Chief Secretary, acting under the orders of the British Government, and without any regard to the wishes or opinions of the majority of Irishmen. Behind all, in remote Downing Street stood the British Government, in the shape of the Colonial Office for Canada and the Irish Office for Ireland, both working in dense ignorance of the real needs of the countries for which they were responsible, and permeated with prejudice and pedantry. To complete the parallel, there was now a foreign Power in the close neighbourhood of each dependency, the United States in the case of Canada, France in the case of Ireland, both of them Republican Powers, and both able and willing to take advantage of disaffection in the dependencies in order to further a quarrel with the Mother Country. We have seen the results in Ireland. Let us now observe the results in Canada, taking especial care to notice that an ascendancy Government gives rise to the same type of evil in a uni-racial as in a bi-racial community.

Let us glance first at what happened in Upper Canada, which was uni-racial, that is, composed of settlers from the United Kingdom (including Ireland) and America. Here the original settlers, the "United Empire Loyalists" from America, formed from the first, and maintained for half a century, an ascendancy of wealth and religion over the incoming settlers, who soon constituted the majority of the population. As in Ireland, though in a degree small by comparison, there was a land question and a religious question, closely related to one another. Happily, it was not a case of robbery, but of simple monopoly. Excessively large grants of land, nine-tenths of which remained uncultivated, were obtained by the original settlers, most of whom were Episcopalian in faith, and, under the Act of 1791, further tracts of enormous extent, which for the most part lay waste and idle, were set apart in each township, under the name of "Clergy Reserves" for the Episcopalian Church. Since the majority of the incoming settlers were Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, or Roman Catholics, many of them from the Protestant and Catholic parts of Ireland, some from America, some even from Germany, these conditions caused intense irritation, checking both the development of the country and the growth of solid character among the colonists. Absentee ownership was a grave economic evil, though happily it was not complicated and embittered by a vicious system of tenure. Education suffered severely through the diversion of the income from public lands to private purposes.

The ascendancy was maintained on lines familiar in Ireland—through the mutual dependence of the colonial minority and the Home Government acting through its Governor. A few leading Episcopalian families from among the United Empire Loyalists, installed at Toronto, with the support of a succession of High Tory Lieutenant-Governors, monopolized the Executive Council, the Legislative Council, the Bench, the Bar, and all offices of profit, denying a Canadian career to the vast majority of Upper Canadians, just as Irishmen were excluded from an Irish career. For a long time the Assembly itself, which retained its original Constitution long after the influx of immigrants had rendered necessary its enlargement on a new electoral basis, was a subject of monopoly also. Even when enlarged in 1821 it was helpless against the nominated Council and Executive, backed by Downing Street. The oligarchy came to be known by the name of the "family compact," and, as the reader will observe, it bore a close resemblance in form to the "undertaker" system in Ireland before the Union, and to the monopoly of patronage obtained by certain families, notably the Beresfords.

While the Colony was still small, the system worked tolerably well; but from the second decade of the nineteenth century onwards, when the population grew from 150,000 to 250,000 in 1832, and to 500,000 a few years later, and the Episcopalians sank into a numerical minority as low as a quarter, troubles of the Irish type became proportionately acute. The Colony was in reality perfectly content with its position under the Crown, and in the war with America in 1812 all classes and creeds united to repel invasion with enthusiasm. One of the prominent leaders was an Irishman, James Fitzgibbon, and a poor Irish private, James O'Hara, won fame by refusing to surrender at the capture of Toronto Fort. As usual, however, a fictitious standard of "loyalty," which, in fact, meant privilege, was set up, obscuring those questions of good government which were the only real matters at issue in Canada, as in Ireland. There were Republican immigrants of many denominations from America, Radicals of Cobbett's school from England and Scotland, tenants of a democratic turn from Ulster, and a growing stream of Catholic cottiers flying from the "clearances" and tithe war in other Irish Provinces. All these classes of men made excellent settlers, and only wanted fair and equal treatment to make them perfectly peaceable citizens. To the official oligarchy, however, even their moderate leaders came to be viewed as rebels, and were often subjected to imprisonment or to banishment.

Among others William Gourlay, a Scotsman, Stephen Willcocks and Francis Collins, Irishmen, all three perfectly respectable reformers, suffered in this way. Bidwell, the great Robert Baldwin, and other good men were rendered powerless for good. As invariably happens in any part of the world where a course is pursued which estranges moderate men and embitters extreme men, agitators came to the front lacking that self-control and sense of responsibility which the sobering education of office alone can give, and generally ruining themselves while they benefit humanity at large. Chief of these was W.L. Mackenzie, a Presbyterian Scot from Dundee. All this man really wanted was what exists to-day as a matter of course in all self-governing countries—responsible government. He even conceived that great idea of the Confederation of British North America, which came to birth in 1867. Thwarted in his attacks on the oligarchy, he degenerated into violent courses, and ultimately organized, or rather was provoked into organizing, the rebellion of 1837. The grievances which led to this outbreak were genuine and severe, and were all in course of time admitted and redressed. One, the powerlessness of the Assembly, owing to the control by the Executive of annual sums sufficient to pay the official expenses of Government, corresponded to a pre-Union Irish grievance, and was remedied by an Act of 1831. Most of the other grievances were incurable by constitutional effort. They may be found summarized in the "Seventh Report of Grievances," a temperate and truthful document drawn up by a Committee of the Assembly in 1835. The huge unsettled Clergy Reserves and Crown Lands were the worst concrete abuse, and matters had just then been aggravated by the sudden establishment of scores of sinecure rectories. Jobbery, maladministration, and the dependence of the judges on the Executive were other complaints; but the main assault was made quite rightly on the form of the Colonial Government, which rendered peaceful reform of any abuse as impossible as in Ireland, and the cardinal claim was that the Executive should act, not under the dictation of Downing Street, of an irresponsible Governor, or of a narrow colonial oligarchy, but in accordance with popular opinion. Mackenzie's rebellion of 1837 was a no more formidable affair than the similar efforts in Ireland made under incomparably greater provocation by Emmett in 1803 and Smith O'Brien in 1848, and was as easily suppressed; but, unlike the Irish outbreaks, and in conjunction with a revolt arising in the same year and from similar causes in the adjoining Province of Lower Canada, it led to a complete change of system.

In Lower Canada the same preposterous system of government was aggravated by the presence of the two races, French and English. Yet there was nothing inherently dangerous or unwholesome about this situation. The French, like the Catholics in Ireland, never showed the smallest tendency towards religious intolerance, nor were they less loyal at heart than the Radicals of Upper Canada or the Tories of either Province. They took the same energetic part in repelling the American invasion of 1812, and produced at least one remarkable leader in the person of Colonel Salaberry, who commanded the French-Canadian Voltigeurs. Like their co-religionists in Ireland, they were temperamentally averse to Republicanism in any shape, whether on the American model over the border or on the model of revolutionary France, where Republicanism since 1793 was anti-Catholic and the result of miseries and oppressions as bad as those in Ireland; whence, moreover, many priests and nobles fled from persecution to Lower Canada. As in eighteenth-century Ireland, we find that the Roman Catholic clergy, the seigneurs or aristocrats, and the habitants or peasants, were of a Conservative cast, throwing their weight, often even against their own interests, into the scale of the established Government, while the lawyers and journalists alone produced determined agitators. The racial cleavage, moreover, as in Ireland, was artificially accentuated by the political system. There was in reality a strong community of interest between the British lower class and the French lower class against the tyranny of an official clique, and to the end a substantial number of Englishmen worked with the French for reform; but with the failure of their efforts came that inevitable tightening of the bonds of race, even against interest, which we have seen operating with such lamentable effect in Ireland. And, as in Ireland, we find the best instincts of the people withered and perverted into rebellion by "Fitzgibbonism," the policy of distrust and coercion.

The British official ascendancy, supreme from the first, became extraordinarily rigid. The Executive Council and Legislative Council were almost entirely British, the Assembly overwhelmingly French. There were no regular heads of departments, so that the Governor had no skilled advice, much less responsible advice. The Councils blocked all legislation they disliked, and for more than forty years, by means of unrestricted control over a large part of the provincial revenues, were able to defy the Assembly. It will be observed that, although Ireland never had anything worth calling an Assembly, her structure both before and after the Union was essentially the same, in that Irish public opinion, whether voiced by the Volunteers against the unreformed Parliament or after the Union by the Nationalist party at Westminster, was powerless. The existence of a popular Assembly in Canada only made the anomalies more obvious.

There were, of course, marked divergencies of character and less marked divergencies of interest between the French majority and the British minority in Canada. The French, by comparison, were a backward and conservative race, less well educated and less progressive and energetic both in agriculture and commerce than the British. On the other hand, subsequent experience showed that, under free constitutional government, British intelligence, wealth, and energy would, here as elsewhere, have preserved their full legitimate influence. Under a system which throttled French ideas and aspirations, and treated the most harmless popular movements as treasonable machinations, deadlock and anarchy were in the long run inevitable.

The popular demands were much the same as those in Upper Canada: control of the purse, the independence of the judges, an elective Legislative Council, and a curtailment of the arbitrary powers and privileges of the Executive, which led to gross jobbery, favouritism, and extravagance. As in Upper Canada, the greatest practical grievance, though it assumed a somewhat different form, was the disposal of the public lands. Here, too, there were extensive and undeveloped Clergy Reserves for the Episcopalian Church, as well as free grants on a large scale to speculators. The estates of the Jesuit Order had been confiscated, so that disputes about their disposal were tinged with religious bitterness. But most of the friction over the land question came from the operations of a chartered land company, which, under the protection of the Government, and with financial and political support from England, dealt with the unsettled land in a manner very unfair and often corrupt, and promoted here, as in Upper Canada and Ireland, absentee ownership.

The popular agitation ran the same course as in Upper Canada, reached its crisis at the same moment, threw into prominence the same types of men, moderate and extreme, and produced the same waste of good human material and distortion of human character, both in the ascendant and the subject classes. As Sir John Cockburn tells us in his "Political Annals of Canada" (p. 177), some of the most incendiary speakers and writers (in 1836) were "most able and worthy men, who in the subsequent days of tranquillity occupied most prominent and distinguished positions in the public service, revered as loyal, true, and able statesmen by all classes." The popular movement was by no means wholly French. A Scot, John Neilson; an Englishman, Wilfred Nelson; and an Irish journalist, Dr. O'Callaghan, were prominent members of a kind of Radical party; but the ablest and most influential among the agitators, and in every respect more admirable than Mackenzie, was the Frenchman, Louis Papineau, who first became Speaker of the Assembly in 1817, and retained that high position until the verge of the rebellion of 1837. By no means devoid of superficial faults, but eloquent, honest, accomplished and adored by his compatriots, here was a man who, if he had been given reasonable scope for his talents, and steadied by official responsibility, would have been a tower of strength to the Colony and the British connection. He corresponds in position and aims, and to a certain extent in character and gifts, to his great Irish contemporary, O'Connell. But O'Connell was too conservative to produce great results. Papineau, dashing himself in vain for twenty years against the entrenched camp of the ascendancy, finally degenerated, like Mackenzie, into a commonplace rebel.

The phases through which the agitation passed before it reached this disastrous point need only a brief review. Naturally enough, owing to the bi-racial conditions, friction had arisen earlier in Lower than in Upper Canada, yet the first recognition of the flagrant defects of the Constitution was not made till 1828, when a Committee of the British House of Commons published a Report which, though its recommendations were mild and inadequate, was in effect a censure of the whole political system of the Province and an admission of the justice of the agitation. There was no result for four years, while matters went from bad to worse in the Colony. At last, in 1832, under an Act similar to that passed for Upper Canada, all the provincial revenues were placed under the control of the Assembly in return for the voting of a fixed Civil List. This well-meant half-measure made matters worse, because it left the Assembly just as powerless as before over the details of legislation and administration, while giving it the power to paralyze the Government by refusing all, instead of only part, of the supplies. This it proceeded to do, and in the next five years large deficits were piled up, and the Colony became insolvent.

Meanwhile, in February, 1834, a year before the publication of the "Seventh Report of Grievances" in Upper Canada, and three months before O'Connell's celebrated motion in the House of Commons for the Repeal of the Union between England and Ireland, the Assembly of Lower Canada, at Papineau's instance, passed the equally celebrated "Ninety-two Resolutions." Bombastic and diffuse, like parts of O'Connell's speech, this historic document nevertheless was as true in all really essential respects as Mackenzie's manifesto and as O'Connell's tremendous indictment of the system of Government in Ireland. All three men, O'Connell with far the most justification, demanded the same thing, good government for their respective countries under a responsible Parliament and Ministry. They all occasionally used wild language, O'Connell the least wild. O'Connell, who nine years later deliberately quenched a popular revolt he could have headed, failed in his aim as completely as Tone, Emmett, and Smith O'Brien, who pressed their efforts to the point of violence. Mackenzie and Papineau, who took to arms, succeeded in their aim.

The crisis in Lower Canada was precipitated, and, indeed, provoked, by a challenge thrown out in March, 1837, from the British House of Commons, where, at Lord John Russell's instance, the Ten Resolutions were agreed to, which amounted in effect to a denial of all the colonial claims and a declaration of war upon those who made them. Papineau had to eat his words or make them good, and he chose the latter course. His insurrection was arranged in concert with that of the Upper Province, broke out simultaneously in the winter of 1837, and was extinguished with little difficulty. The men who made it suffered. Canada and the Empire profited. Both Papineau and Mackenzie, following the precedent of Wolfe Tone with France, endeavoured with little success to engage American sympathy and the aid of her army, though Canada had as little desire for American rule as Ireland had for French rule.

Let us remark, as an interesting fact for those who imagine that Irishmen are always instinctively on the side of turbulence and disorder, that the Irish immigrants who poured into Canada at the average annual rate of 20,000 in the years—terrible years in Ireland—preceding the rebellions,[23] acted much as we might expect. In the Lower Province, following the lead of the French Catholic hierarchy, they declared in November, 1837, against Papineau's party, and thus strengthened the hands of the Government when the crisis approached.[24] In the Upper Province Catholics were strongly on the side of reform, but took no part in the rebellion. Orangemen in both Provinces, as we might guess, sided as strongly with the ascendancy parties, but colonial air seems to have taken some of the theological venom out of Orangeism. If Charles Buller is to be trusted, some Catholics joined the societies in Upper Canada, which were more Tory than religious, and the healths of William of Orange and the Catholic Bishop Macdonnell were drunk in impartial amity.[25]

In the meantime, three of the four outlying Provinces of North America—Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island—where the same form of Constitution prevailed as in Upper and Lower Canada, had been passing through a similar phase of misgovernment and agitation during the previous thirty years. Each suffered under a little monopolist ascendancy, called by the same name, "the family compact," and sustained, against the prevailing sentiment and interest, by the British Governor, and in each had arisen, or was arising, the same loud demand for responsible government. Samuel Wilmot in New Brunswick, Joseph Howe in Nova Scotia, were the best-known spokesmen. There was no violence, but a growing dislocation. In five Provinces of North America, therefore, the Colonial Government had broken down or was tottering, and from exactly the same cause as in Ireland, though under provocation infinitely less grave. For the moment, however, attention was concentrated upon the Canadas, where, as a result of the rebellion, the Constitution of Lower Canada was suspended early in 1838. In the summer of 1838 Lord Durham, the Radical peer, was sent out by Melbourne's Ministry as Governor-General, with provisionally despotic powers, and with instructions to advise upon a new form of government.

Before we come to Durham's proposals, let us pause and examine the state of home opinion on the Irish and Colonial questions. The people of Great Britain at large had no opinion at all. They were ignorant both of Canada and Ireland, and had been engaged, and, indeed, were still engaged, in a political struggle of their own which absorbed all their energies. The Chartist movement in 1838 was assuming grave proportions. The Reform, won in 1832 under the menace of revolution and in the midst of shocking disorders, was in reality a first step toward the domestic Home Rule that Ireland and the five Provinces of North America were clamouring for. Tory statesmen were quite alive to this political fact, and condemned all the political movements, British, Irish, and Colonial, indiscriminately and on the same broad anti-democratic grounds. The Duke of Wellington, who was not a friend of the Reform Act, and had only adopted Catholic Emancipation in order to avoid civil war in Ireland, speaking about Canada in the House of Lords on January 18, 1838, coupled together the United States, British North America, and Ireland as dismal examples of the folly of concession to popular demands. Pointing to the results of the Canada Act of 1831, to which I have already alluded, and which gave the Assemblies control of the provincial revenue, and with an eye, no doubt, on the tithe war barely at an end in Ireland, he said: "Let noble lords learn from Canada and our other dominions in North America what it is to hold forth what are called popular rights, but which are not popular rights here or elsewhere, and what occasion is given thereby to perpetuate a system of agitation which ends in insurrection and rebellion."

The Whig statesmen who, if we except Peel's short Administration of 1834-35, were in power from 1830 to 1841, though by no means democratic men, were clear enough about Reform for Great Britain, but nearly as ignorant and quite as wrong about Ireland and Canada as the Tories. The only prominent Parliamentarian who, as after events proved, correctly diagnosed and prescribed for the disease in both countries was O'Connell. Not fully alive to the Irish analogy, but correct from first to last about Canada, was a small group of independent Radicals, of whom Roebuck, Hume, Grote, Molesworth, and Leader were the principal representatives. After the insurrections in Canada came John Stuart Mill, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, Charles Buller, and with them Lord Durham himself.

No one can understand either Irish or Colonial history without reading the debates of this period in the Lords and Commons on Canada and Ireland. Alternating with one another with monotonous regularity, they nevertheless leave an impression of an extraordinary lack of earnestness, sympathy, and knowledge, and an extraordinary degree of prejudice and of bigotry in the Parliament to whose care for better or worse the welfare of nearly ten millions of British citizens outside Great Britain was entrusted. Save for an occasional full-dress debate at some peculiarly critical juncture, the debates were ill-attended. The prevailing sentiment seems to have been that Ireland and Canada, leavened by a few respectable "loyalists" and officials, on the whole, were two exceedingly mutinous and embarrassing possessions, which, nevertheless, it was the duty of every self-respecting Briton to dragoon into obedience. Both dependencies were assumed to be equally expensive, though, in fact, Ireland, as we know now, was showing a handsome profit at the time, whereas Canada was costing a quarter of a million a year. For the rest, the pride of power tempered a sort of fatalistic apathy. In the case of Ireland the element of pure selfishness was stronger, because the immense vested interests, lay and clerical, in Irish land were strongly represented. The proximity of Ireland, too, rendered coercion more obvious and easy. Otherwise, her case was the same as that of Canada. "The Canadas are endeavouring to escape from us, America has escaped us, but Ireland shall not escape us," said an English member to O'Connell just before the Repeal debate of 1834. Such was the current view.

Yet, as in the case of Ireland and of the lost American Colonies, the materials for knowledge of Canada were considerable. Petitions poured in; Committees and Commissions were appointed, and made reports which were consigned to oblivion. Roebuck, one of the small Radical group, was himself a Lower Canadian by birth, and acted as agent at Westminster for the popular party in that Province. He was as impotent as O'Connell, the spokesman of the Irish popular party. If the Colonial Office was not quite the "den of peculation and plunder" which Hume called it in 1838,[26] it was an obscure and irresponsible department, where jobbery was as rife as in Dublin Castle. In the ten years of colonial crisis (1828-1838), there were eight different Colonial Secretaries and six Irish Chief Secretaries.

Over and above all this apathy and arrogance was the perfectly genuine incapacity to comprehend that idea of responsible government which even the most hot-headed and erratic of the colonial agitators did instinctively comprehend. Until Durham had at last opened Lord John Russell's eyes, the great Whig statesman was as positive and explicit as the Tories, Wellington and Stanley, in declaring that it was utterly impossible for the Monarch's Representative overseas to govern otherwise than by instructions from home and through Ministers appointed by himself in the name of the King. One constitutional King ruled over Great Britain, Canada, and Ireland. He could not be advised by two sets of Ministers. The thing was not only an unthinkably absurd nullification of the whole Imperial theory, but, in practice, would destroy and dissolve the Empire. William IV. himself told Lord Melbourne that it was his "fixed resolution never to permit any despatch to be sent ... that can for a moment hold out the most distant idea of the King ever permitting the question even to be entertained by His Majesty's confidential servants of a most remote bearing relative to any change of the appointment of the King's Councils in the numerous Colonies." Lord Stanley said, in 1837, that the "double responsibility" was impossible, that there must either be separation or no responsible government, and that it was "no longer a question of expediency but of Empire." Lord John Russell, polished, sober, scorning to descend to the mere vulgar abuse of the colonials which disfigured the utterances of many of his opponents, struggling visibly to reconcile Liberalism with Empire, nevertheless arrived at the same conclusion. In a debate of March 6, for example, in the same year, in proposing the defiant Resolutions which provoked the rebellion in Canada, he argued at length that a responsible Colonial Ministry was "incompatible with the relations of a Mother Country and a Colony," and would be "subversive of the power of the British Crown," and again, on December 22, that it meant "independence." O'Connell rightly replied to the former speech that Russell and his followers were supporting "principles that had been the fruitful source of civil war, dissension, and distractions in Ireland for centuries." The Radical group pushed home the Irish parallel. Hume quoted, as applicable to Canada, Fox's saying: "I would have the whole Irish Government regulated by Irish notions and Irish prejudices, and I firmly believe ... that the more she is under Irish Government the more she will be bound to English interests." Molesworth declared, what was perfectly true at that moment of passion and folly, that his extreme political opponents wanted to make the reconquest of Ireland a precedent for the reconquest of Canada.

It would repay the reader to turn back from this debate to the Irish Repeal Debate of three years earlier, and listen to Sir Robert Peel stating as one of the "truths which be too deep for argument," that the Repeal of the Union "must lead to the dismemberment of this great Empire, must make Great Britain a fourth-rate Power, and Ireland a savage wilderness," which, as a matter of fact, it was at the very time he was speaking, after thirty years of the Legislative Union, and seven hundred years of irresponsible government. We must listen to him claiming that the beneficent and impartial British Government was "saving Ireland from civil war" between its own "warring sects," whereas, in fact, it was that Government which had brought those warring sects into being, which had fomented and exploited their dissensions, which had provoked the rebellion of 1798, and by its shameful neglect and partiality in the succeeding generation had flung Ireland into a social condition hardly distinguishable from "civil war." And we must realize that closely similar arguments, with special stress on the right of taxation, had been used for the coercion of the American Colonies, and that exactly the same arguments, founded on the same inversion of cause and effect, were used to defend the coercion of Canada. There, also, the Fitzgibbonist doctrine of revenge and oppression by a majority vested with power was freely used, even by Lord John Russell, in his speech of March 6, 1837, and of December 22 in the same year, when he spoke of the "deadly animosity" of the French and "of the wickedness of abandoning the British to proscription, loss of property, and probably of lives." He ignored the fact that the same state of anarchy had been reached in uni-racial Upper Canada as in bi-racial Canada, and that the "loyalists" in both cases were not only in the same state of unreasoning alarm for their vested rights, but, in the spirit of the Ulstermen of that day and ever since, were threatening to "cut the painter," and declare for annexation to the United States if their ascendancy were not sustained by the Home Government. Then, as to-day, the ascendant minority were supported in their threats by a section of British politicians. Lord Stanley's speech of March 8, 1837, where he boasted that the "loyal minority of wealth, education, and enterprise" would protect themselves, and, if necessary, call in the United States, is being matched in speeches of to-day. In all the debates of the period it is interesting to see the ignorance which prevailed about the troubles in Upper Canada. The racial question in Lower Canada, owing to the analogy with Ireland, was seized on to the exclusion of the underlying and far more important political question in both Provinces.

Against the policy of the two great political parties in England the little group of Radicals struggled manfully, and in the long run not in vain, although for years they had to submit to insult and contumely in their patriotic efforts to expose the vices of the colonial administration and to avert the rebellion they foresaw in the Canadas. What they feared, with only too good cause, was that the American and Irish precedents would be followed, and war made for the coercion of the Canadas, to be followed, if successful, by a still more despotic form of government, which would in its turn provoke a new revolt. Rather than that such a catastrophe should take place, they went, rightly, to the extreme point of saying that an "amicable separation" should be arranged, maintaining, what is indisputable, that the claims of humanity should supersede the claims of possession. With Russell himself declaring till the eleventh hour that responsible government was out of the question because it meant "separation," they were quite justified in demanding that separation, if indeed inevitable, should come about by agreement, not as the possible result of a fratricidal war. For such a war, though Russell could not see it until Durham made him see it, was the only alternative to the grant of responsible government. But the Radicals never used this argument unless circumstances forced them to. Molesworth, in a debate of March 6, 1838, denounced the prevailing view of the Colonies, insisted that we should be proud of them and study their interests, that reform, not separation, should be our aim. The Radicals were fully aware of the alternatives, and were unwearied in pointing out the justice and policy, in the Imperial interests, of acceding to the colonial popular demands. Grote had expressed the truth in the December debate of 1837, when he implored the House "not to use a tone of triumph at the superior power of England," but to remember that the colonists, "though freemen, like ourselves," desired to remain, "if they could do so with honour, in connection with England as the Mother Country." He was followed by a gentleman named Inglis, who said that "it was in Canada as in Ireland," a faction called itself Canada, and that we must bring "back the colonists," like the Irish, "to subordination."

Roebuck, who led the Radicals in Canadian matters, had some of the faults of Papineau and Mackenzie; yet posterity should give him and his comrades credit for a constructive Imperialism which the great men of his day lacked. It is now known that he and Sir William Molesworth powerfully influenced Durham's policy. In a paper he drew up at Durham's request on the eve of that nobleman's departure for Canada he sketched a plan, imperfect in some details, but wise in broad conception, for pacifying the Canadas, and went further in elaborating a scheme, also defective, for the Confederation of British North America under the Crown on the lines conceived by the despised demagogue, Mackenzie.[27] But the two men who, by influencing Durham, probably did most to save Canada for the Empire and to lay the foundations of the present Imperial structure, were Charles Buller, the Radical M.P., and Edward Gibbon Wakefield, both of whom accompanied the new Governor-General to Canada, and who are generally believed to have inspired, if they did not actually write, the greater part of the celebrated Report which became the Magna Charta of the self-governing Colonies of the Empire.

A word about the events which ended in the publication of this Report. Durham reached Canada at the end of May, 1838, and in November was recalled in disgrace for exceeding—strange as it seems!—the almost absolute powers temporarily entrusted to him. He was an extraordinary mixture of a despot and a democrat, an extreme Radical in politics, an autocrat in manners, as vain and tactless as he was generous and sincere, making bitter enemies and warm friends in turn. He began by winning and ended by estranging almost every class in both Provinces of Canada, and returned to England to all appearances a spent and extinguished meteor. There is some truth, perhaps, in Greville's observation that, had he been "plain John Lambton," he would never have been chosen for Canada. It is certain that those who sent him there little dreamed of the consequences of their action. Lord Melbourne, the Prime Minister, in a letter to the Queen, charged him with magnifying the Canadian troubles "in order to give greater éclat to his own departure."[28] Still, he did his work of investigation faithfully, and formed his conclusions sanely, and there were plain men of greater ability at his elbow in the persons of Wakefield and Buller, by whose advice he was wise enough to be guided. All opinion was against him when news came of his recall, and even Roebuck was denouncing him in the Spectator for his autocratic excesses; but a brilliant article by John Stuart Mill in the Westminster Review, pleading for time and confidence, arrested the tide of obloquy.

Durham's long Report, and the events which followed it, ought to be studied carefully by every voter, however lowly, who has a voice in deciding the fate of Irish Home Rule. After an exhaustive discussion of the causes of disorder in Canada, Durham made two recommendations, the first of incalculable importance, and proved by subsequent experience to be right; the second of minor consequence, and proved by subsequent experience to be wrong.

The first was that responsible government should be inaugurated both in Canada and in the Maritime Provinces of North America, whose constitutional troubles Durham also discussed. His proposal was that the Governor should govern in accordance with advice given by Colonial Ministers in whom the popular Assembly reposed confidence, and who, through that Assembly, were in touch with popular opinion; for it was to the strangulation of popular opinion that Durham attributed all the disorders and disasters of the past. This recommendation was eventually adopted, not in the Act subsequently passed, but by instructions to the Governors concerned; instructions which were first interpreted in the full liberal spirit by Lord Elgin in 1847. The Maritime Provinces at various dates and under various Governors received full responsible government by 1854. Responsible government proved the salvation of Canada and the Empire, as it would have proved, if given the chance, the salvation of Ireland and a source of immensely enhanced strength to the Empire.

The second and less important recommendation, afterwards embodied in the Act of 1840, was the Union of the two Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada. Here Lord Durham, misled unhappily by the Irish precedent, fell into an error. During his visit to Canada he came near to accepting that higher conception of a Federal Union with local Home Rule for each Province, outlined by Roebuck and Mackenzie, and eventually consummated thirty years later. When he came home to London he made a volte face, rejecting the Federal idea and accepting its antitype, that Legislative and Administrative Union of the two Provinces which had been rejected by Pitt in 1791. There were, of course, economic arguments for Union apart from the racial factor; but they do not seem to have been decisive with Durham. At the last moment he gave way to a dread of predominant French influence in Lower Canada, similar at bottom to his dread of the unchecked influence of the British minority. While he feared that the latter, if let alone, would inaugurate a reign of terror, he added also: "Never again will the present generation of French-Canadians yield a loyal submission to a British Government." The argument is inconsistent with the whole spirit of the Report, which attributes the friction in both Provinces to bad political institutions. It is probable that Durham was really more influenced by the quite reasonable recognition that the French were relatively backward in civilization and ideas. He sought, therefore, both to disarm them politically and to anglicize them socially, by amalgamating their political system with that of wholly British Upper Canada. His calculation was that in a joint assembly the British would have a small but sufficient majority. The estimated population of Lower Canada was 550,000, of whom 450,000 were French, and 100,000 British and Irish; that of Upper Canada 400,000, all British and Irish. That is to say, that in both Provinces together there was a British and Irish majority of 100,000. The calculation over-estimated the British element, but in the event this mistake proved to be immaterial. Though Durham himself appears to have intended representation to be in strict accordance with population, the Union Act, passed in 1840, allotted an equal number of representatives in the Joint Assembly to each of the old Provinces. The assumption here was that the British Members from Upper Canada would unite with those of old Lower Canada to vote down the French, just as the Ulster Protestants voted with English members to vote down the Irish majority.

In practice the Union, after lasting twenty-six years, eventually broke down. Durham's fear of French disloyalty proved to be as groundless as his ideal of complete anglicization was futile. It was neither necessary, sensible, nor possible to extinguish French sentiment, and human nature triumphed over this half-hearted effort to apply in dilution the medicine of Fitzgibbonism to the Colonies. Little harm was done, because the introduction of responsible government, far transcending the Union in importance, worked irresistibly for good. Parties did not run wholly on racial lines, but racialism was encouraged by the equal representation of the two Provinces in the Assembly, in spite of the greater growth of population in the Upper Province. The system was unhealthy, and at last produced a state of deadlock, in which two exactly equal parties were balanced, and a stable Government impossible. When that point was reached, men began to observe the strong and supple Constitution of the adjacent United States, and to recognize that a politically feeble Canada was courting an absorption from that quarter which all Canadians disliked. The Legislative Union was dissolved by the mutual consent of the Provinces with the approval of the Mother Country, and in 1867, under the British North America Act, the Federal Union was formed which exists in such strength and stability to-day. Fear of French disloyalty or tyranny was a night-mare of the past, even with the British minority in Lower Canada. It was realized that French national sentiment was perfectly consistent with racial harmony under the British flag. Upper Canada became Ontario, Lower Canada Quebec. Each Province reserved a local autonomy for itself, and each at the same moment voluntarily surrendered certain high powers to a supreme centralized Government, in which both had confidence. Such a political system is capable of indefinite expansion. Nova Scotia and New Brunswick joined the Federation at the outset, Prince Edward Island and British Columbia a little later, and were followed in turn by the successively developed Provinces which now form the united and powerful Dominion of Canada.

Turn back to Ireland and weigh well the analogy. Mutatis mutandis, almost every paragraph of the Durham Report applied with greater force to the Ireland of his day. The ascendancy of a caste and creed minority in Upper Canada; of a race minority in Lower Canada; "the conflict of races, not of principles"; the consequent obliteration of natural political divisions, and the substitution of unnatural and vindictive antagonisms demoralizing both sides to every quarrel; the universal disgust with and distrust of the British Government, though for reasons diametrically opposite; the hopelessness of true reforms; the perpetuation of abuses; the stagnation of trade and agriculture; the re-emigration to America, and the abuses of a Church Establishment with endowments from sources by right public—all these phenomena and many others had their counterpart in Ireland. Some have disappeared. The Church is disestablished. The land question is on the way to settlement. The old ascendancy is mitigated. But many of the political, and all the psychological, features of the situation which Durham described do, alas! exist to-day in Ireland. Ireland, like the Canada of 1838, is a land of bewildering paradox. There is a similarly unwholesome arrest of free political life, the same unnatural division of parties, the same suppression of moderate opinion, and the same inevitable maintenance of a Home Rule agitation, harmful in itself, because it retards the country and accentuates for the time being the very divisions it seeks to cure, but absolutely necessary for the final salvation of Ireland. Durham, in the case of Canada, saw the truth, and swept into the limbo of discredited bogies the old figments of the coercionists. In a singularly noble and profound passage (p. 229), revealing the ethical basis on which his philosophy rested, he declared that even if the political freedom of the Colony were to lead in the distant future to her separation from the Empire, she nevertheless had an indefeasible moral right to the blessings of freedom; but he prophesied correctly that the connection with the Empire "would only become more durable and advantageous by having more of equality, of freedom, and of local administration."

If only Irish and British Unionists would realize that these words came from a profound knowledge of human nature in the mass, and are applicable to Irishmen in Ireland just as much as to Irish, British, French, and Dutch in the Colonies!

The tenacity of the old superstition is extraordinary, and we can see it in the case of Canada. It remains a wonder to this day how responsible government was ever introduced. There can be no question that the Act of 1840 only secured a smooth passage because, in providing for the Union of the French and British Provinces, it represented a superficial analogy to that Union of Britain and Ireland which had paralyzed Irish aspirations. Durham himself had actually quoted both the Irish and Scotch Unions as successful expedients for "compelling the obedience of a refractory population," and thus arrived at the outstanding and solitary defect of his otherwise noble scheme. And O'Connell, in a debate upon the Report on June 3, 1839, opposed the Canadian Union for Irish reasons, and in language which after-experience proved to be perfectly correct. Happily, as we have seen, the defect was small and curable, because the analogy with Ireland, where there was no responsible, but, on the contrary, a separate and wholly irresponsible Executive Government, and whose interests were upheld by only 100 Members in a House of 670, was exceedingly remote. On responsible government itself the Canadian Act of 1840 was entirely silent. We may thank Providence for the fact. Durham's cardinal proposals had received unbridled vituperation as sentimental rubbish where they were not treasonable poison, the whole controversy taking precisely the same form as in 1886 and 1893 over Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bills for Ireland. The Quarterly Review spoke of "this rank and infectious Report," though it is fair to say that Peel and Wellington did not join in such wild language. Five months after the issue of Lord Durham's Report, Lord John Russell, in the debate of June 3, was denying, with the approval of all but the Radicals, the possibility of responsible government as emphatically as ever. Durham seems to have partially converted him in the summer, for in introducing the Act itself in 1840 he cautiously committed himself to the plan of instructing the Canadian Governor to include in his Executive Council, or Cabinet, men expressly chosen because they possessed the confidence of the Assembly. But the Act as it stood, ignoring this vital change, was impeccably Conservative, and on that account went through. In some points it seemed, without good reason, to be even reactionary, and was regarded in that light with displeasure by the Radicals, with satisfaction by Whigs and Tories. While confirming the control of revenue by the Assembly, in return for a fixed civil list, it took away from the Assembly, and vested in the Executive, the power of recommending money votes, and it also retained the Legislative Council or Upper Chamber as a nominated, not as an elective, body. Provided that the Executive had the confidence of the representative Assembly or Lower House, the first point was perfectly sound, and the second was not vital; but there was no security for the condition precedent other than Russell's vague outline of subsequent policy. While the supreme power of the King, acting with or without the Governor, was reaffirmed in the most vigorous terms, there was not a word in the Act about the composition of the Executive Council or its relation to the Assembly.

In Canada much the same misconceptions prevailed, and promoted the acceptance of the Act by the supporters of the old ascendancies. The question of the Union and the question of responsible government, both raised by Lord Durham's Report, became inextricably confused, and the various petitions and resolutions of the time reflect this confusion. The French opposed the Union and supported responsible government on the same grounds, and in almost identical terms, as the Irish opposed, and still oppose, their Union with Great Britain, and ask for responsible government in Ireland. Moderate Britishers supported both proposals, but the extremists of the old ascendancy bitterly denounced the whole theory of responsible government, Union or no Union. Their views are ably and incisively set forth by a Committee of the old Legislative Council of Upper Canada, that is, by the members of the "family compact," in a protest signed and transmitted to London, where it was quoted with approval by Lord John Russell. It may be found, together with other petitions of the time, in the "Canadian Constitutional Development" of Messrs. Grant and Egerton. With a few unessential changes and modifications, the whole document might be signed to-day by a Committee of Ulster Unionists, and I heartily wish that every Ulsterman would read it in a spirit of reason and generosity, and observe how every line of it was falsified by history, before he declares that the situation of Ulster is peculiar, and sets his hand or gives his adhesion to a similar document. The signatories, who, it must be remembered, were a small ruling minority of the colonists, whose power was artificially sustained by the British Governor, claim that they alone, in glorifying and in battling for "colonial dependence," are the true Imperialists. They hold dear the "unity of the Empire." Responsible government within their own Colony would lead to the "overthrowal" of that Empire, and the reduction of Britain to a "second-rate Power." A colonial Cabinet is absurd; the local and sectional interests are too strong; the British Government must remain as "umpire" to keep the parties from flying at one another's throats. The majority, who are themselves a prey to divisions (and one thinks of Nationalist splits), are seeking only for illegitimate power; the minority are for "justice and protection, and impartial government." Yet in the same breath we are told that all is happy and peaceable as it is. Why subject the Colony to the dissensions of party? Why foster a spirit of undying enmity among a people disposed to dwell together in harmony? The signatories argue from the history of Ireland and Scotland, "which never had responsible government, yet government became impracticable the moment it approached to equal rights." Hence a Union, because "government must be conducted with a view to some supreme ruling power, which is not practicable with several independent Legislatures." Finally, Loyalists and Imperialists as they are, they are not going to stand an attempt to "force independence" on them. They will take the matter into their own hands, and, if necessary, call in the United States to "replace the British influence needlessly overthrown."

I do not quote this sort of thing in order to add any tinge of bitterness to present controversies. The signatories lived to see their errors and to be ashamed of what they wrote. They, like the Irish Unionist leaders of to-day, were able and sincere men, unconscious, we may assume, that their pessimism about the tendencies of their fellow-citizens was really due to the defective institutions which they themselves were upholding, and to the forcible suppression of the finer attributes of human nature; unconscious, we may also assume, of identifying loyalty with privilege, and "the supreme ruling power" with their own ruling power; unconscious that what they called "Imperial Unity" was in reality on the verge of producing Imperial disruption; and wholly unconscious, certainly, of the ghastly irony of their analogy drawn from the brutally misgoverned, job-ridden, tithe-ridden, rack-rented Ireland of their day, living, for no fault of its own, under a condition of intermittent martial law, and hurrying at that moment towards the agony of the famine years. Less severe in degree, analogous abuses perpetuated in their own interest existed in their own Colony, and were only abolished under the new régime which they attacked with such vehemence before it came, and which, because it transformed and elevated their own character and that of their fellow-citizens, while drawing them closer to the old country, they afterwards learned to regard with pride and thankfulness.

As an effective contrast to the mistaken views of the Upper Canadian statesmen, the reader cannot do better than study the letters of Joseph Howe, the brilliant Nova Scotia "agitator," to Lord John Russell, in answer to that statesman's speech of June 3, 1839, when he argued against responsible government, and quoted the Upper Canadian manifesto as his text. These letters make a wonderful piece of sustained and humorous satire, of which every word was true and every word applicable to Ireland. Howe's portrait, for example, of the average Colonial Governor applies line for line to the average Chief Secretary, coming at an hour's notice to a country he has never seen, and knows nothing of, vested with absolute powers of patronage, and often pledged to carry out a policy in direct conflict with the wishes of the vast majority of the people whose interests he is supposed to guard.

The Act of 1840 went through, but it had little to do with the regeneration and reconciliation of Canada. Poulett Thompson, the first Governor, peremptorily declined to admit the principle of Ministerial responsibility. Some good reforms were, indeed, made in the early years, but the Act was on the verge of breaking down when Lord Elgin, Durham's son-in-law, came to Canada as Governor-General in 1847. After many party changes and combinations, French influence was temporarily in the ascendant, and in 1849 a Bill was on the stocks for compensating French as well as British subjects for losses in the rebellion of 1837. Elgin, following the advice of his Ministers, of whom Baldwin was one, Lafontaine another, gave the Royal Assent to the Bill. The British, with the old cry of "loyalism," and with Orangemen in the van, rioted, mobbed the Governor, and burnt down the Parliament House at Montreal. Elgin, expostulating with Lord John Russell, who was as pessimistic as ever, and threatened with recall, stuck to his guns under fierce obloquy, and the principle of responsible government was definitely established. It was applied at about the same period to the other British Provinces of North America, with the ulterior results I have described, and in a few years to Australia.

The great year, then, was 1847, the year of the Irish famine, and the year before the pitiful rebellion of Smith O'Brien, surrendering in the historic cabbage-garden. Our thoughts go back sixty-four years to 1783, when the American War of Independence ended; when, as a result of that war, British Canada and Australia were founded, and when, at the crisis—premature, alas!—of Ireland's fortunes, the Volunteers in vain demanded the Reform which might have saved their country. Look into historical details, read contemporary debates, and watch the contrast. Within five years of responsible government Canada solved all the great questions which had been convulsing society for so long, and turned her liberated energies towards economic development. In Ireland the abuses of ages lingered to a point which seems incredible. The Church was not disestablished, amid outcries of imminent ruin and threats of a Protestant rebellion, till 1869, when Canada had already become a Federated Dominion. The Irish land question, dating from the seventeenth century, was not seriously tackled until 1881, not drastically and on the right lines till 1903. Education languishes at the present day. Canada started an excellent system of municipal and local government in the forties. In Ireland, while the minority, in Greville's words, were "bellowing spoliation and revolution," an Act was passed in 1840 with the utmost difficulty, removing an infinitesimal part of the gross abuses of municipal government under the ascendancy system, and it was not till 1898 that the people at large are admitted to a full share in county and town government. Even this step inverted the natural order of things, for the new authorities are hampered in their work by the incessant political agitation for the Home Rule which should have preceded their establishment, as it preceded it in Great Britain and Canada. Home Rule, the tried specific, was resisted, as those who read the debates of 1886 and 1893 will recognize, on the same grounds as Canadian Home Rule, in the same spirit, and often in terms absolutely identical.

Was it because Ireland, unlike Canada, was "so near"? Let us reflect. Did Durham advocate Canadian Home Rule because Canada was "so far"? On the contrary, it was a superficial inference, drawn not merely from Ireland, but from Scotland, and since proved to be false both in Canada and South Africa, that made him shrink from the full application of a philosophy which was already far in advance of the political thought and morality of his day. Is it to be conceived that if he had lived to see the Canadian Federation, the domestic and Imperial results of South African Home Rule, and the consequences of seventy more years of coercive government in Ireland, he would still have regarded the United Kingdom in the light of a successful expedient for "compelling the obedience of refractory populations"? In truth, Durham, like ninety-nine out of a hundred Englishmen of his day, knew nothing of Ireland, not even that her political system differed, as it still differs, toto coelo from that of Scotland, and came into being under circumstances which had not the smallest analogy in Scotland. So far as his knowledge went, he was a student of human nature as affected by political institutions. Wakefield, who advised him, was a doctrinaire theorist who put his preconceived principles into highly successful practice both in Australia and Canada. They said: "Your coercive system degrades and estranges your own fellow-citizens. Change it, and you will make them friendly, manly, and prosperous." They were right, and one reflects once more on the terrible significance of Mr. Chamberlain's admission in 1893, that "if Ireland had been a thousand miles away, she would have what Canada had had for fifty years."

CHAPTER VI

AUSTRALIA AND IRELAND

I have described the Canadian crisis at considerable length because it was the turning-point in Imperial policy. Yet policy is scarcely the right word. The Colonists themselves wrenched the right to self-government from a reluctant Mother Country, and the Mother Country herself was hardly conscious of the loss of her prerogatives until it was too late to regret or recall them. The men who on principle believed in and laboured for Home Rule for Canada were a mere unconsidered handful in the country, while most of those who voted for the Act of 1840 thought that it killed Home Rule. No general election was held to obtain the "verdict of the predominant partner" on the real question at issue, with the cry of "American dollars" (which had, in fact, been paid); with lurid portraits of Papineau and Mackenzie levying black-mail on the Prime Minister, and quotations from their old speeches to show that they were traitors to the Empire; with jeremiads about the terrors of Rome, the abandonment of the loyal minority, and the dismemberment of the Empire, to shake the nerves and stimulate the slothful conscience of an ignorant electorate. Had there been any such opportunity we know it would have been used, and we can guess what the result would have been; for nothing is easier, alas! than to spur on a democracy with such cries as these to the exercise of the one function it should refrain from—interference with another democracy, be it in Ireland or anywhere else. As it was, a merciful veil fell over Canada; Lord Elgin's action in 1849 passed with little notice, and a mood of weary indifference to colonial affairs, for which, in default of any Imperial idealism, we cannot be too thankful, took possession of Parliament and the nation.

It was in this mood that the measures conferring self-government on the Australasian Colonies, 12,000 miles away from the Mother Country, and exciting proportionately less concern than Canada, were passed a few years later.

From the landing of the first batch of convicts at Botany Bay in 1788, New South Wales, the Mother Colony, was a penal settlement pure and simple, under military Government, for some thirty years. The island Colony, Tasmania, founded under the name of Van Diemen's Land in 1803, was used for the same purpose. Victoria, originally Port Phillip, just escaped a like fate in 1803, and remained uncolonized till 1835, when the free settlers set their faces against the penal system, and in 1845, acting like the Bostonians of 1774 with the famous cargo of tea, refused to allow a cargo of convicts to land. South Australia, first settled in 1829, also escaped; so did New Zealand, which was annexed to the Crown in 1839. Western Australia, dating from 1826, proceeded on the opposite principle to that of Victoria. Free from convicts until 1849, when transportation to other Colonies was checked at their own repeated request, and came to an end in 1852, this Colony, owing to a chronic shortage of labour, actually petitioned the Home Government to divert the stream of criminals to its shores, with the result that in ten years' time nearly half the male adults in the Colony, and more than half in the towns, were, or had been, convicts. It was not until 1865, under strong pressure from the other Colonies, that the system was finally abolished which threw Western Australia forty years behind its sister Colonies in the attainment of Home Rule.

The transportation policy has been unmercifully criticized, and with all the more justice in that Pitt, when the American war closed the traditional dumping-ground for criminals, had the chance of employing the exiled loyalists of America, many of whom were starving in London, as pioneers of the new lands in the Antipodes. "The outcasts of an old society cannot form the foundations of a new one," said a Parliamentary Report of July 28, 1785. But they could do so, and did do so. Ruskin's saying, à propos of Australia, that "under fit conditions the human race does not degenerate, but wins its way to higher levels," comes nearer the truth. In an amazingly short time after the transportation policy was reversed the taint disappeared. We must remember, however, that, sheer refuse as some of the convicts were, especially in the later period, a large number of the earlier convicts were the product of that "stupid severity of our laws" which the Vicar of Wakefield deplored, and to this category belonged many an unhappy Irish peasant, sound in character, but driven into Whiteboyism, or into the rebellions of 1798 and 1803 by some of the worst laws the human brain ever conceived. Hundreds of these men survived the barbarous and brutalizing ordeal of a penal imprisonment to become prosperous and industrious citizens.

It was not until 1825, or thereabouts, that free white settlers, many Irishmen among them, came in any substantial number to the Mother Colony of New South Wales, and not until 1832 that these men began to press claims for the management of their own affairs, under the inspiration of an Irish surgeon's son, William Wentworth, the Hampden of Australia. The later Colonies rapidly came into line, Western Australia, for the reason given above, remaining stationary. The first representative institutions were granted in 1842 to New South Wales, and in 1850 to Victoria, South Australia, and Tasmania. At that date, therefore, these settlements stood in much the same constitutional position as the Canadas had stood in 1791 (although technically their Constitutions were of a different kind), but with this important difference, that the Act of 1850, "for the better Government of Her Majesty's Australian Colonies," gave power to those Colonies to frame new Constitutions for themselves. This they soon proceeded to do, each constructing its own, but all keeping in view the same model, the British Constitution itself, and aiming at the same ideal, responsible Government by a Colonial Cabinet under a Government representing the Crown. Since responsible Government in Great Britain itself was not a matter of legal enactment, but the product of slowly evolved conventions and precedents, to which political scientists had not yet given a scientific form, it is no wonder that the colonial Constitution-makers found great difficulty in expressing exactly what they wanted in legal terms, and, indeed, none of them came near succeeding; but time, their own political instinct, a succession of sensible Governors, and the forbearance of the Home Government solved the problem, and evolved home-ruled States legally subordinate to the Crown, but with a Constitution closely resembling our own. The Constitutions became law by Acts of the Imperial Parliament passed by a Liberal Ministry in 1855. They are of unusual interest because they represent the first rude attempt to put into legal language a small part of the theory of the British Constitution as applied to dependencies of the Crown.

In the most vital point of all, the relation of the dependency to the Home Government (as distinguished from questions of internal political structure), they are almost as reserved as the Canadian Act of 1840, which, as we have seen, did not recognize by a word the duty of the Governor to govern through a Colonial Cabinet. In certain clauses they hint, by distant implication, at the existence of such a Cabinet, responsible to the colonial popular Legislature—the Canadian Act did not assume even that—but they do not anywhere imply that the Governor is bound normally to place himself in the hands of that Cabinet, while they expressly and rightly reaffirm the supreme power of the Crown, whether acting through the Governor or not, over colonial legislation.

How far this reticence about responsible Government facilitated the passage of the Australian Acts in the British Parliament, as it certainly facilitated the Canadian Act of 1840, it is difficult to decide. It was probably a factor of some importance. At any rate, it is true to say that Home Rule, as in Canada, was mainly a result of practice rather than of statutory enactment. The case of New Zealand is a striking example of this. In 1852 New Zealand obtained from a Tory Government a Constitutional Act, which resembles the Canadian Act of 1840 in abstaining from any expression, direct or indirect which implies the existence of a Colonial Cabinet, and it is probable that the framers of the Act intended no such development, but on the contrary contemplated a permanent, irremovable Executive. But the Act was no sooner passed than an agitation began for responsible government, under the leadership of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, part-author of the Durham Report, and at that time a member of the New Zealand Assembly. By 1855, when the Australian Acts were passed, New Zealand, without further legislation, had obtained what she wanted.

To complete the story, Queensland, carved out of New South Wales in 1859, entered upon full responsible government at once, and Western Australia, retarded for so long by the servile system of convict-labour, gained the same rights in 1890.

Reading the debates of the middle of the nineteenth century, one is left with the impression that the Australasian Colonies obtained Home Rule by virtue of their distance, and because most politicians at home could not be bothered to fight hard against a principle which at bottom they disliked as heartily for the Colonies as for Ireland. The views of the various parties were not much changed since the days of the crisis in Canada. There were some able Colonial Secretaries who thoroughly understood and believed in the principle of responsible government. On the other hand, some Liberals were not yet converted, though Liberal Governments fathered the Constitutional Acts of 1850 and 1855. Disraeli's well-known saying in 1852 that "these wretched Colonies will all be independent, too, in a few years, and are a mill-stone round our necks," was typical of the Tory attitude.[29] Lord John Russell, in the same year, 1852, was complaining, as Lord Morley tells us,[30] that we were "throwing the shields of our authority away," and leaving "the monarchy exposed in the Colonies to the assaults of democracy." A group of Radicals, headed by Sir William Molesworth and Hume in Parliament, and by Wakefield from outside, still pushed the policy of emancipation energetically and persistently on the principle which they had urged in the case of Canada, that freedom was better both for the Colonies and the Mother Country.

But Molesworth and Wakefield gained one illustrious convert and coadjutor in the person of Mr. Gladstone, whose speeches on the Colonies at this period, 1849 to 1855, placed him, in regard to that topic, in the Radical ranks, and in veiled opposition to the Whig leaders. Lord Morley quotes a minute from his hand, written in 1852 in answer to the view of Lord John Russell, referred to above, where he says "that the nominated Council and independent Executive were not 'shields of authority,' but sources of weakness, disorder, disunion, and disloyalty." His Parliamentary and platform speeches, passing with little notice at the time, nevertheless remain the most eloquent and exalted expression of wise colonial policy that is to be found in our language. If it was not till a generation later that he applied the same arguments to the case of Ireland, the arguments nevertheless did apply to Ireland almost word for word. Proximity to the Mother Country does not affect them. Mr. Gladstone attacks the problem on its human side, showing that coercive government is always and everywhere bad for those who administer it, and bad for those who live under it, expensive, inefficient, demoralizing, and that the longer it is maintained the more difficult it is to remove. He condemns the fallacy of preparing men by slow degrees for freedom, and the "miserable jargon about fitting them for the privileges thus conferred, while in point of fact every year and every month during which they are retained under the administration of a despotic Government renders them less fit for free institutions." As to cost, "no consideration of money ought to induce Parliament to sever the connection between any one of the Colonies and the Mother Country," but the greater part of the cost, he urged, was due to the despotic system itself. His words are more applicable to the Ireland of to-day than the Ireland of the middle of the nineteenth century, for it is one of the many painful anomalies of Irish history that that country, at the lowest point of its economic misery, was paying a relatively enormous contribution to Imperial funds, and, incidentally, to the colonial vote, while the Colonies were maintained at a loss correspondingly large, and at times even larger.[31] But cost is, after all, a very small matter. The first consideration is the character and happiness of human beings, and here Gladstone's words, like Durham's, have a universal application. If the reader cannot study them at length in Hansard, he should read the great speech on the New Zealand Bill in 1852, and Lord Morley's masterly summary of others. I conclude with a passage quoted by him from a platform speech at Chester in 1855, the year when the Australian Constitutions were sanctioned. "Experience has proved that if you want to strengthen the connection between the Colonies and this country, if you want to see British law held in respect, and British institutions adopted and beloved in the Colonies, never associate with them the hated name of force and coercion exercised by us at a distance over their rising fortunes. Govern them upon a principle of freedom." At that moment, after half a century of coercion and neglect under what was called the "Union," Ireland was bleeding, as it seemed, to death. Scarcely recovered from the stunning blow of the famine, she was undergoing in a fresh dose of clearances and evictions the result of that masterpiece of legislative unwisdom, the Encumbered Estates Act. Her people were leaving her by hundreds of thousands, cursing the name of England as bitterly as the evicted Ulster farmers and the ruined weavers of the eighteenth century had cursed it, and bearing their wrongs and hatred to the same friendly shore, America. For the main stream of emigration, which before the Union had set towards the American States, and from the Union until the famine towards Canada, reverted after the famine towards the United States, impregnating that nation with an hostility to Great Britain which in subsequent years became a grave international danger, and which, though greatly diminished, still remains an obstacle to the closer union of the English-speaking races. On the other hand, it is interesting to observe that among the Irish emigrants to countries within the Empire, and a very important part of this emigration was to Australasia, the anti-British sentiment was far less tenacious, though the affection for their own native country was no less passionate.

Whatever we may conclude about the motives behind the concession of Home Rule to Australia and New Zealand, we may regard it as fortunate that they lay too far away for any close criticism from statesmen at home, whether before or after the attainment of self-government. Most of these statesmen would have been scandalized by the manner in which these vigorous young democracies, destitute of the patrician element, shaped their own political destiny by the light of nature and in the teeth of great difficulties. Almost to a man their leaders in this great work would have been regarded as "turbulent demagogues and dangerous agitators," and often were so regarded, when the rumour of their activities penetrated to far-off London. The old catchwords of revolution, spoliation and treason, consecrated to the case of Ireland, would have been applied here with equal vehemence, and were in fact applied by the official classes in the Colonies themselves, round whom small anti-democratic groups, calling themselves "loyal," crystallized, as in the Provinces of Upper Canada and in Ireland, and with whom the ruling classes at home were in instinctive sympathy. There were stormy, agitated times, there were illegal movements against the reception of convicts, struggles over land questions, religious questions, financial questions, the emancipation of ex-convicts, and the many difficult problems raised by the discovery of gold and the mushroom growth of digger communities in remote places. There was in the air more genuine lawlessness—irrespective, I mean, of revolt against bad laws—than ever existed in Ireland, though there was never at any time any practical grievance approaching in magnitude to the practical grievances of Ireland at the same period. But, could the spirit of English statesmanship towards analogous problems in Ireland have been maintained in Australasia, systematically translated into law and enforced with the help of coercion acts by soldiers and police, communities would have been artificially produced presenting all the lawless and retrograde features of Ireland.

The famous affair of the Eureka Stockade in 1854 is an interesting illustration. A great mass of diggers collected in the newly discovered Ballarat goldfields had petitioned repeatedly against the Government regulations about mining licences, for which extortionate fees were levied. This was before responsible government. The goldfields were not represented in the Legislature, and there was no constitutional method of redress. The authorities held obstinately to their obsolete and irritating regulations, and eventually the miners revolted under the leadership of an Irishman, Peter Lalor, and with the watchword "Vinegar Hill." There was a pitched battle with the military forces of the Crown, ending after much bloodshed in the victory of the soldiers. Lalor was wounded, and carried into hiding by his friends. Other captured rioters were tried for "high treason" before juries of townsmen picked by the Crown on the lines long familiar in Ireland; but even these juries refused to convict, as they so often refused to convict in cases of agrarian crime in Ireland. The State trials were then abandoned, a Royal Commission reported against the licence system, and Parliamentary representation was given to the goldfields. It came to be universally acknowledged that the talk of "treason" was nonsense, that the outbreak had been provoked by laws which could not be constitutionally changed, and that the moral was to change them, not to expatriate and persecute those who had suffered under them. Lalor reappeared, entered political life, became Speaker of the reformed Assembly of 1856, and lived and died respected by everyone. He now appears as a prominent figure in a little book entitled "Australian Heroes," and it is admitted that the whole episode powerfully assisted the movement for responsible government in the Colony. Smith O'Brien, Meagher, Mitchell, and others concerned in the Irish rebellion of 1848 were at that moment languishing in the penal settlement of Tasmania for sedition provoked by laws fifty times worse; laws, too, that a Royal Commission three years earlier had shown to be inconsistent with social peace, and which others subsequently condemned in still stronger terms. From their first establishment far back in the seventeenth century it took two centuries to abolish these laws. In the Australian case it took one year.

As for the Irishmen of all creeds and classes who took such an important part in the splendid work of building up these new communities, and who are still estimated to constitute a quarter of the population, one can only marvel at the intensity of the prejudice which declared these men "unfit" for self-government at home, and which is not yet dissipated by the discovery that they were welcomed under the Southern Cross, not only as good workaday citizens in town, bush, or diggings, but as barristers, judges, bankers, stock-owners, mine-owners, as honoured leaders in municipal and political life, as Speakers of the Representative Assemblies, and as Ministers and Prime Ministers of the Crown.[32] is true, and the fact cannot surprise us, that the intestinal divisions of race and creed in Ireland itself, stereotyped there by ages of bad government, were at first to a certain extent reproduced in Australia, as in Canada. Aggressive Orangeism was to be found sowing discord where no cause for discord existed. But the common sense of the community and the pure air of freedom tended to sterilize, though they have not to this day wholly killed, these germs of disease. A career was opened to every deserving Irishman, whether Catholic or Protestant. Hungry, hopeless, listless cottiers from Munster and Connaught built up nourishing towns like Geelong and Kilmore. Two Irishmen, Dunne and Connor, were the first discoverers of the Ballarat goldfields. An Irishman, Robert O'Hara Burke, led the first transcontinental expedition, and another Irishman, Ambrose Kyte, financed it; Wentworth was the father of Australian liberties. An Irish Roman Catholic, Sir Redmond Barry, founded the Public Library, Museum, and University of Melbourne. In the political annals of Victoria and New South Wales the names of Irish Catholics, men to whom no worthy political career was open in their own country, were prominent. Sir John O'Shanassy, for example, was three times Prime Minister of Victoria, Sir Brian O'Loughlen once. Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, a member of O'Shanassy's Cabinets, and at last Prime Minister himself, is the colonial statesman whose career and personality are the best proof of what Ireland has lost in high-minded, tolerant, constructive statesmanship, through a system which silenced or drove from her shores the men who loved her most, who saw her faults and needs with the clearest eyes, and who sought to unite her people on a footing of self-reliance and mutual confidence. One of the ablest of O'Connell's young adjutants, editor and founder of the Nation, part-organizer of the Young Ireland Movement which united men of opposite creeds in one of the finest national movements ever organized in any country, Duffy's central aim had been to give Ireland a native Parliament, where Irishmen could solve their own problems for themselves. He saw the rebellion of 1848 fail, and Mitchell, Smith O'Brien, Meagher, McManus, and O'Donoghue transported to Tasmania; he laboured on himself in Ireland for seven years at land reform and other objects, and in 1855 gave up the struggle against such hopeless odds, and reached Melbourne early in 1856 in time to sit in the first Victorian Parliament returned under the constitutional Act of 1855. From the beginning to the end of an honourable political career which lasted thirty years, he made it his dominant purpose to ensure that Australia should be saved from the evils which cursed Ireland; from government by a favoured class, from land monopoly, and from religious inequality and the venomous bigotries it engenders, and he took a large share in bringing about their exclusion. His Land Act of 1862, for example, where he had another Roman Catholic Irishman, Judge Casey, as an auxiliary, put an end in those districts where it was fairly worked to the grave abuses caused by the speculative acquisition of immense tracts of land by absentee owners, and promoted the closer settlement of the country by yeoman farmers.

In Australia, as in Canada, we see the vital importance of good land laws, and can measure the misery which resulted in Ireland from an agrarian system incalculably more absurd and unjust than anything known in any other part of the Empire. The stagnation of Western Australia was originally due to the cession of huge unworkable estates to a handful of men. South Australia was retarded for some little time from the same cause, and Victoria and New South Wales were all hampered in the same way. It was not a question, as in Ireland, and to a less degree in Prince Edward Island, of the legal relations between the landlord and tenant of lands originally confiscated, but of the grant and sale of Crown lands. Yet the after-results, especially in the check to tillage and the creation of vast pasture ranches, were often very similar.[33]

Duffy was not the only colonial statesman to apply Irish experience to the problems of newly settled countries. An Englishman who became one of the greatest of colonial statesmen and administrators, the Radical Imperialist, Sir George Grey, began life as a Lieutenant on military service in Ireland in the year 1829, and came away sick with the scenes he had witnessed at the evictions and forced collections of tithes where his troops were employed to strengthen the arm of the law. "Ireland," his biographer, Professor Henderson, tells us,[34] "was to him a tragedy of unrealized possibilities." The people had "good capacities for self-government," but Englishmen "showed a vicious tendency to confuse cause and effect," and attributed to inherent lawlessness what was a revolt against bad economic conditions. "All that they or their children could hope for was to obtain, after the keenest competition, the temporary use of a spot of land on which to exercise their industry"; "for the tenant's very improvements went to swell the accumulations of the heirs of an absentee, not of his own." "Haunted by the Irish problem," Grey made it his effort first in South Australia, and afterwards in New Zealand, where he was both Governor and Premier at various times, to secure the utmost possible measure of Home Rule for the colonists, and, in pursuance of a policy already inaugurated by Edward Gibbon Wakefield, to establish a land system based, not on extravagant free grants, or on private tenure, but on sales by the State to occupiers at fair prices. The aim was to counteract that excessive accumulation of people in the large cities which, thanks to imperfect legislation, still exists in most of the Australian States. Subsequent New Zealand land policy has been generally in the right direction, and is acknowledged to be highly successful. In the Australian mainland States the absentee and the squatter caused constant difficulties and occasional disorder. The Commonwealth at the present day is suffering for past neglect, and has found itself within the last year compelled to imitate New Zealand in placing taxes on undeveloped land, with a higher percentage against absentees.

Let us add that Grey, like Duffy and most of the strongest advocates of Home Rule for the Colonies, was a Federalist long before Federation became practical politics, seeing in that policy the best means of achieving the threefold aim of giving each Colony in a group ample local freedom, of binding the whole group together into a compact, coherent State, and of strengthening the connection between that State and the Mother Country. As Governor at the Cape from 1854 to 1861 he vainly urged the Home Government to promote a Federal Union of the various South African States, Dutch and British, in order, as he said, to create "an United South Africa under the British flag," a scheme which, it is generally agreed, could then have been carried out, and which would have saved South Africa from terrible disasters. And he wished to apply the same Federal principle to the Australian Colonies, and to the case of Ireland and Great Britain.

He realized earlier than most men that the talk of "separation" and "disloyalty" was, in his own words already quoted, the result of a "vicious tendency to confuse cause and effect," and that to govern men by their own consent, to let them work out their own ideals in their own way, to encourage, not to repress, their sense of nationality, is the best way to gain their affection, or, if we choose to use that very misleading word, their loyalty.

Australia and New Zealand present remarkable examples of this beneficent process, Australia in particular, because there, for a long time even after the introduction of responsible government and, indeed, until a dozen years ago, there was a large party of so-called "disloyalists" who were never weary of decrying British influences and upholding Australian nationality. Mr. Jebb, in his "Colonial Nationalism," gives an interesting account of this movement and of its organ, the widely circulated Sydney Bulletin, with its furiously anti-British views, its Radicalism, its Republicanism, and what not. He shows amusingly how entirely harmless the propaganda really was, and what a healthy effect it actually had in promoting an independence of feeling and national self-respect among Australians, to such a degree that when the South African War broke out, there was a universal outburst of patriotism and a universal desire, which was realized, to share to the full as a nation in the expense, danger, and hardships of the war. Mr. Jebb adds the interesting suggestion that the reluctance of New Zealand to enter the Australian Federation may be partly due to the strong individual sentiment of nationality evoked within her by the war and the exceptional exertions she made to aid the Imperial troops.

His book is a psychological study of men in the mass. What he sets out to prove, and what he does successfully prove, is that the encouragement of minor nationalities is not merely consistent with, but essential to, the unity of the Empire. Yet he never mentions Ireland, not even for the purpose of proving her an exception to the rule, and I do not think I ever gauged the full extent of the prejudice against that country until I realized that in such a book such a topic did not receive even a line of notice; yet one would naturally suppose that it was as important to the Empire, morally and strategically, to possess the affection and respect of four and a half million citizens within 60 miles of the British coast as of the same number of citizens at the Antipodes.

Mr. Jebb is a Unionist. How he reaches his conclusion I do not know. It would seem to be beyond human power to construct a case against Home Rule for Ireland, with its strongly marked individuality of character and sentiment, which did not textually stultify his case for the more distant dependencies. His party generally is in sympathy with the views expressed in his book, and has done much to further them. How do they reconcile them with opposition to Home Rule for Ireland? How do they explain away the support for that policy in the Dominions? It seems to me that their only resource would be to say: "We are bound to maintain, and we have the necessary physical force to maintain, the present political system in Ireland, because to alter it would impair the formal legislative 'unity' of the United Kingdom; but let us frankly admit that as long as we take this view there can be no 'Union' in the highest sense of the word. Ireland must be retarded and estranged. We cannot raise Territorial Volunteers within her borders; on the contrary, we must keep and pay for a standing army of police to preserve our authority there. Her population must diminish, her vital energy ebb away to other lands; as a market for our goods and as a source of revenue for Imperial purposes she must remain undeveloped and unprogressive. She will continue rightly to agitate for Home Rule, and this agitation will always be baneful both to her and to us. It will distract her energies from her own economic and social problems. It will embitter and degrade our politics, and dislocate our Parliamentary institutions. She must suffer, we must suffer, the Empire must suffer. It is sad, but inevitable."

Morality aside, is that common sense? Is it strange that the Colonies themselves regard such logic, when applied to Ireland, as perverted and absurd?

Before leaving Australia we have only to recall the fact that at the close of the last century, after a generation of controversy and negotiation, the Canadian example of 1867 was at length imitated, and the Federal Union formed which amalgamated all the mainland States, together with Tasmania, in the Commonwealth of Australia, and that the Union was sanctioned and legalized by the Imperial Act of 1900. New Zealand preferred to remain a distinct State. The Australians departed in some important respects from the Canadian model, the main difference being that a greater measure of independence was retained by the individual States, and smaller powers delegated to the central Government. This was a matter of voluntary arrangement as between the States themselves, the Home Government standing wholly aside on the sound principle that Australia knew its own interests best, and that what was best for Australia was best for the Empire.

CHAPTER VII

SOUTH AFRICA AND IRELAND

In the years 1836-37, when Wentworth was agitating for self-government in New South Wales, and when Canada was in rebellion for the lack of it, thousands of waggons, driven by men smarting under the same sort of grievance, were jolting northward across the South African veld bearing Dutch families from the British Colony of the Cape of Good Hope to the new realms we now know as the Orange River Colony and the Transvaal. The "Great Trek" was a form of protest against bad government to which we have no parallel in the Empire save in the wholesale emigrations from Ireland at various periods of her history—after the Treaty of Limerick, again after the destruction of the wool trade, again in 1770-1777, after the Ulster evictions, and lastly after the great famine. The trekkers, like the Irish emigrants, nursed a resentment against the British Government which was a source of untold expense and suffering in the future. Indeed, the whole history of South Africa bears a close resemblance to the history of Ireland. In no other part of the Empire, save in Ireland, was the policy of the Home Government so persistently misguided, in spite of constantly recurring opportunities for the repair of past errors. Fatality seems from first to last to have dogged the footsteps of those who tried to govern there. Before the British conquest the Dutch East India Company and the Netherlands Government were as unsuccessful as their British successors, whose legal claim to the Cape, established for the second time by conquest in 1806, was definitely confirmed by the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The Dutch colonists were a fine race of men, whose ancestors, like the Puritan founders of New England, had fled in 1652 from religious persecution, and who retained the virile qualities of their race. Though in many respects they resembled the backward and intensely conservative French-Canadian inhabitants, they differed from them, and resembled their closer relatives in race, the New Englanders, in an innate passion for free representative government. They had rebelled repeatedly against their Dutch oppressors, and had gone through a brief Republican phase. It is an example, therefore, of the thoughtless inconsequence of our old colonial policy that we gave the French-Canadians, who were the least desirous of it, the form, without the spirit, of representative institutions, while we denied, until it was too late to avert racial discord, even the form to the Cape Dutch. In truth, the Colony seems to have been regarded purely in the light of a naval station, while the British and Irish inflow of settlers, dating from about the year 1820, contemporaneously with the advent of free settlers in Australia, suggested the possibility of racial oppression by the Dutch majority. Yet if there was little real reason to fear oppression by the French in Canada, there was still less reason to fear such oppression in the Cape, where Dutch ideals and civilization were far more similar to those of the British. In America the absorption of the Dutch Colonies in the seventeenth century had led to the peaceful fusion of both races, nor was there any reason why, under wise rule, the same fusion should not have occurred in South Africa. Until 1834 authority was purely military and despotic. In that year was established a small Legislative Council of officials and nominated members, with no representative element. In 1837 came the Great Trek.

No one disputes that the Dutch colonists had grievances, without the means of redress. As usual, we find a land question in the shape of enhanced rents charged by Government after the British occupation; the Dutch language was excluded from official use, and English local institutions were introduced with unnecessary abruptness; but the principal grievance concerned the native tribes. Slavery existed in the Colony, and its borders were continually threatened by these tribes. The Dutch colonists were often terribly brutal to the natives; nevertheless there is little doubt that a tactful and sympathetic policy could easily have secured for them a more humane treatment, and the abolition of slavery without economic dislocation. But a strong humanitarian sentiment was sweeping over England at the time, including in its range the negro slaves of Jamaica and the unconquered Kaffirs of South Africa, but absolutely ignoring, let us note in passing, the economic serfdom of the half-starved Irish peasantry at our very doors. Members of this school took too little account of the tremendous difficulties faced in South Africa by small handfuls of white colonists in contact with hordes of savages. The Colonial Government, with a knowledge of the conditions gained only from well-meaning but somewhat prejudiced missionaries, endeavoured from 1815 onwards to enforce an impracticable equality between white and coloured men, and abolished slavery at one sudden stroke in 1833 without reasonable compensation. A large number of the Dutch, unable to tolerate this treatment, deserted the British flag. Those that remained were under suspicion for more than thirty years, so that political progress was very slow. It was not till 1854 that the Colony received a Representative Assembly, and not until 1872, eighteen years later than in Australia, and twenty-five years later than in Canada, that full responsible government was established.

Piet Retief, one of the leaders of the voluntary exiles, had published a proclamation in the following terms before he joined the trek: "We quit this Colony under the full assurance that the English Government has nothing more to require of us, and will allow us to govern ourselves without its interference in the future. We are now leaving the fruitful land of our birth, in which we have suffered enormous losses and continual vexation, and are about to enter a strange and dangerous territory; but we go with a firm reliance on an all-seeing, just, and merciful God, whom we shall always fear and humbly endeavour to obey." This was high language, yet after-events proved that a steady, consistently fair treatment on our part would even then have reconciled these men to a permanent continuance of British sovereignty. Unfortunately, our policy oscillated painfully between irritating interference and excessive timidity. First of all attempts were made to stop the trek by force, then to compel the trekkers to return by cutting off their supplies and ammunition, then to throttle their development of the new lands north of the Orange and Vaal Rivers by calling into being fictitious native States on a huge scale in the midst of and around them, then tardily to repair the disastrous effects of this policy; but not before it had led to open hostilities (1845). Hostilities, however, had this temporarily good result, in that it brought to the front one of the ablest and wisest of the Cape Governors, Sir Harry Smith, who defeated the Boers at Boomplatz in 1848, established what went by the name of the Orange River Sovereignty, and in a year or two secured such good and peaceful government within its borders as to attract considerable numbers of English and Scotch colonists. The malcontents retired across the Vaal. Then came an abrupt change of policy in the Home Government, a sudden desire actuated mainly by fear of more native wars, to cancel all that was possible of our commitments in South Africa. The Transvaal, by the Sand River Convention, was declared independent in 1852, the Orange Free State, by the Convention of Bloemfontein, in 1854. This was to rush from one extreme to the other. It was as though in 1847 we had erected Quebec into a sovereign State instead of giving it responsible government under the Crown, or as if in 1843 we had been so deeply convinced by O'Connell's second agitation for repeal that we had leapt straight from coercive government to the foundation of an independent Republic in Ireland, instead of giving her the kind of Home Rule which she was asking for.

It was not yet too late to mend. In 1854, when the cession of the Free State had just been carried out, Sir George Grey, whom we have met with in Australia and New Zealand, came as High Commissioner to the Cape. In 1859 he made the proposal I alluded to in the last chapter for federating all the South African States, including the two new Republics. There is little doubt that the scheme was feasible then. The Orange Free State was willing to join, and, indeed, had initiated proposals for Federation. Its adhesion would have compelled the Transvaal, always more hostile to British rule, to come in eventually, if not at once; for the relations of the two Republics were friendly enough at the time to permit one man, Pretorius, to be President of both States.

The scheme was rejected by Lord Derby's Tory Cabinet, and Grey, a "dangerous man," as Lord Carnarvon, the Colonial Secretary, dubbed him, was recalled.

Sixteen years later, in 1875, Lord Carnarvon himself, as a member of the Disraeli Ministry, revived the project. Converted in his views of the Colonies, like many of his Tory colleagues at this period, he had carried through Parliament the Federation of Canada in 1867, and hoped to do the same with South Africa. But it was too late. The Cape Parliament, now in possession of a responsible Ministry, was hostile, while twenty years of self-government, for the most part under the great President Brand, had changed the sentiments of the Free State. Federation, then, was impossible. On the other hand, the Transvaal was in a state of political unrest and of danger from native aggression, which gave a pretext for reversion to the long-abandoned policy of annexation, and to that extreme Carnarvon promptly went in April, 1877. He took this dangerous course without ascertaining the considered wishes of the majority of the Boers, acting through his emissary, Sir T. Shepstone, on the informal application of a minority of townsmen who honestly wished to come under British rule.

Rash as the measure was, lasting good might have come of it had the essential step been taken of preserving representative government. The promise was given and broken. For three years the Assembly, or Volksraad, was not summoned. Once more home statesmanship was blind, and local administration blunderingly oppressive. Shepstone was the wrong man for the post of Administrator. Sir Owen Lanyon, his successor, was an arrogant martinet of the stamp familiar in Canada before 1840, and painfully familiar in Ireland. The refusal of an Assembly naturally strengthened the popular demand for a reversal of the annexation, and this demand, twice pressed in London through a deputation headed by Paul Kruger, obscured the whole issue, and raised a question of British national pride, with all its inevitable consequences, where none need have been raised. There was a moment of hope when Sir Bartle Frere, who stands, perhaps, next to Sir George Grey on the roll of eminent High Commissioners, endeavoured to pacify the Boer malcontents, and drafted the scheme of a liberal Constitution for the Transvaal. But one of the last acts of the Tory Government, at the end of 1879, was to recall Frere for an alleged transgression of his powers in regard to the Zulu War, and to pigeon-hole his scheme. Mr. Gladstone, who in opposition had denounced the annexation with good enough justification, though in terms which under the circumstances were immoderate, found himself compelled to confirm it when he took office in April, 1880. But he, too, allowed the liberal Constitution to sleep in its pigeon-hole. He was assured by the officials on the spot that there was no danger, that the majority were loyal, and only a minority of turbulent demagogues disloyal; and in December, 1880, the rebellion duly broke out, and the Transvaal Republic was proclaimed. What followed we know, war, Laing's Nek, Majuba, and one more violent oscillation of policy in the concession of a virtual independence to the Transvaal.

Whatever we may think of the policy of this concession, and Lord Morley has made the best case that can be made for Mr. Gladstone's action, it is certain that it was only a link in a long chain of blunders for which both great political parties had been equally responsible, and of which the end had not yet come. The nation at large, scarcely alive until now to the existence of the Colonies, was stung into Imperial consciousness by a national humiliation, for so it was not unnaturally regarded, coming from an obscure pastoral community confusedly identified as something between a Colony, a foreign power, and a troublesome native tribe. The history of the previous seventy years in South Africa was either unknown or forgotten, and Mr. Gladstone, who in past years had preached to indifferent hearers the soundest and sanest doctrine of enlightened Imperialism, suddenly appeared, and for ever after remained in the eyes of a great body of his countrymen, as a betrayer of the nation's honour. Resentment was all the greater in that it was universally believed that Laing's Nek and Majuba were unlucky little accidents, and that another month or two of hostilities would have humbled the Boers to the dust.

This illusion, which is not yet eradicated, and which has coloured all subsequent discussion of the subject, lasted unmodified until the first months of the war in 1899, when events took place exactly similar to Laing's Nek and Majuba, and were followed by a campaign lasting nearly three years, requiring nearly 500,000 men for its completion, and the co-operation of the whole Empire. It is impossible to estimate the course events would have taken in 1881 had the war been prolonged. If the Free State had joined the Transvaal, it may be reasonably conjectured that we should have been weaker, relatively, than in 1899. Though the Boers were less numerous, less well organized, and less united as a nation in 1881, they were even better shots and stalkers than in 1899, because they had had more recent practice against game and natives; nor was there a large British population in the Transvaal to counteract their efforts and supply magnificent corps like the Imperial Light Horse for service in arms against them. Our army, just as brave, was in every other respect, especially in the matter of mounted men and marksmanship, less fitted for such a peculiar campaign, and could have counted with far less certainty upon that assistance from mounted colonial troops without which the war of 1899-1902 could never have been finished at all. Our command of the sea was less secure; the Egyptian War of 1882 was brewing, and Ireland, where the Great Land Act of 1881 was not yet law, was seething with crime and disorder little distinguishable from war itself, and demanding large bodies of troops.

If the further course of a war in 1881 is a matter of speculation, what we all know for certain is, first, that the conditions which led to war were produced by seventy years of vacillating policy, and, second, that war itself would have been a useless waste of life and treasure, unless success in it had been followed, as in 1906, by the grant of that responsible Government which all along had been the key to the whole difficulty, the condition precedent to a Federal Union of the South African States, and to their closer incorporation in the Empire.

Few persons realized this at the time. The whole situation changed disastrously for the worse. Arrogance and mutual contempt embittered the relations of the races. Then came a crucial test for the Boer capacity for enlightened and generous statesmanship. Gold was discovered in the Transvaal, and a large British population flocked in. The same problem, with local modifications, faced the Boers as had been faced in Upper and Lower Canada, and for centuries past in Ireland. Were they to trust or suspect, to admit or to exclude from full political rights, the new-comers? Was it to be the policy of the Duke of Wellington or of the Earl of Durham, of Fitzgibbon or the Volunteers? They chose the wrong course, and set up an oligarchical ascendancy like the "family compact" of Upper Canada and Nova Scotia. Can we be surprised that they, a rude, backward race, failed under the test where we ourselves, with far less justification, had failed so often? Their experience of our methods had been bad from first to last. Their latest taste of our rule had been the coercive system of Lanyon, and they feared, with only too good reason, as events after the second war proved, that any concession would lead to a counter-ascendancy of British interests in a country which was legally their own, not a portion of the British dominions. We had suffered nothing, and had no reason to fear anything, from the Irish and French-Canadian Catholics, nor from the Nonconformist Radicals of Upper Canada. It would have been well if a small fraction of the abuse lavished on the tyrannical Boer oligarchy six thousand miles away had been diverted into criticism of the government of a country within sixty miles of our shores, where a large majority of the inhabitants had been for generations asking for the same thing as the Uitlander minority in the Transvaal—Home Rule—and were stimulated to make that demand by grievances of a kind unknown in the Transvaal.

But the British blood was up; the Boer blood was up. Such an atmosphere is not favourable to far-seeing statesmanship, and it would have taken statesmanship on both sides little short of superhuman to avert another war. The silly raid of 1895 and its condonation by public opinion in England hastened the explosion. Can anyone wonder that public opinion in Ireland was instinctively against that war? Only a pedant will seize on the supposed paradox that a war for equal rights for white men should have met with reprobation from an Ireland clamouring for Home Rule. Irish experience amply justified Irishmen in suspecting precisely what the Boers suspected, a counter-ascendancy in the gold interest, and in seeing in a war for the conquest of a small independent country by a mighty foreign power an analogy to the original conquest of Ireland by the same power. It is hard to speak with restraint of the educated men—men with books and time to read them, with brains and the wealth and leisure to develop them—who to this very day abuse their talents in encouraging among the ignorant multitude the belief that the Irish leaders of that day were, to use the old hackneyed phrase, "traitors to the Empire." If we look at the whole of these events in just perspective, if we search coolly and patiently for abiding principles beneath the sordid din and confusion of racial strife, we shall agree that in some respects Irishmen were better friends to the Empire than the politicians who denounced them, and sounder judges of its needs. Yet there can be no doubt that the Transvaal complications, followed unhappily by the Gordon episode in the Soudan, reacted fatally on Ireland, and that the Irish problem in its turn reacted with bad effect on the Transvaal. When the statesman who refused to avenge Majuba in 1881 proposed his Irish Home Rule Bills in 1886 and 1893, it was easy for prejudiced minds to associate the two policies as harmonious parts of one great scheme of national dismemberment and betrayal. Boers, Irish, and Soudanese savages, all were confusedly lumped together as dangerous people whom it was England's duty to conquer and coerce.

The South African War of 1899-1902 came and passed. People will discuss to the end of time whether or not it could have been avoided. Parties will differ to the end of time about its moral justification. For my own part, I think it is pleasanter to dwell on the splendid qualities it evoked in both races, and above all on the mutual respect which replaced the mutual contempt of earlier days. I myself am disposed to think that at the pass matters had reached in 1896 nothing but open war could have set the relations of the two races on a healthy footing.

But bold and generous statesmanship was needed if the fruits of this mutual respect were to be reaped. The defeated Republics were now British Colonies, their inhabitants British subjects. After many vicissitudes we were back once more in the old political situation of 1836 before the Great Trek, and the policy which was right then was right now. Bitter awakening as it was to our proud people after a war involving such colossal sacrifices, it was still just as true as of old that in Ireland, Canada, Australia, South Africa, or anywhere else, it is utterly impossible for one white democracy to rule another properly on the principle of ascendancy. It was physically possible, thanks to Ireland's proximity, to deny that country Home Rule, but it would not have been even physically possible in the Transvaal and Orange River Colony. Yet the idea was conceived and the policy strongly backed which could only have had the disastrous effect of bringing into being two Irelands in the midst of our South African dominions. It is not yet generally recognized that we owe the defeat of this policy in the first instance to Lord Kitchener. From the moment he took the supreme military command in South Africa at the end of 1900, while prosecuting the war with iron severity and sleepless energy, he insisted on and worked for a settlement by consent, with a formal promise of future self-government to the Boers. In this he was in sharp opposition to Lord Milner, who desired to extort an unconditional surrender. Of these two strong, able, high-minded men, the soldier, curiously enough, was the better statesman. In temperament he recalls the General Abercromby of 1797 on the eve of the Irish rebellion, still more perhaps General Carleton, who administered French Canada in the critical period after its conquest and during the American War. Lord Milner, in political theory, not in personality, corresponds to Fitzgibbon. His view was that British prestige and authority could only be maintained in the future by thus humbling the national pride of our adversaries, who, moreover, by the formal annexations of 1900, carried into effect when the war was still young, were by a legal fiction rebels, not belligerents. Lord Kitchener, besides seeing, as the responsible soldier in the field, the sheer physical impossibility of lowering the Boer national pride by any military operations he had the power to undertake, from the beginning of the guerilla war onwards, was a truer judge of human nature and a better Imperialist at heart in realizing that the self-respect of the Boers was a precious asset, not a dangerous menace to the Empire, and that the whole fate of South Africa depended on a racial reconciliation on the basis of equal political rights, which would be for ever precluded by compelling the Boers to pass under the Caudine Forks.

Fortunately Lord Kitchener was supported by the Home Government, and the Peace of Vereeniging took the form of a surrender on terms, or, virtually, of a treaty, formally guaranteeing, among other things, the concession "when circumstances should permit" of "representative institutions leading up to self-government." The next ordeal of British statesmanship came when the time arrived in 1905 to redeem this promise. There were two distinctly defined alternatives: one, to profit by experience and to give responsible government at once; the other, for the time being, to copy one of the constitutional models which had long been obsolete curiosities in the history of all the white Colonies, which had never failed to produce mischievous results, whether in a bi-racial or a uni-racial community, and which were in reality suited only to groups of officials and traders living in the midst of uneducated coloured races in tropical lands. The Government, and we cannot doubt that their traditional policy toward Ireland warped their views, declared for the latter alternative, and issued under Letters Patent a Constitution which happily never came into force. Like the Act of Union with Ireland, it gave the shadow of freedom without the substance. It set up a single Legislative Chamber, four-fifths elective, but containing, as ex-officio members, the whole of the Executive Council as nominated by the Crown. Executive power, therefore, together with the last word in all legislation, was to remain wholly in the hands of the Crown, acting through a Ministry not responsible to the people's representatives. It would have been difficult to design a plan more certain to promote friction, racialism, and an eventual deadlock, necessitating either a humiliating surrender by the Government under pressure of the refusal of supplies, or a reversion to despotic government which would have produced another war. With wide differences of detail and with the added risk of financial deadlock, it was sought to establish the kind of political situation prevalent in Ireland after the Act of Union. The executive power in that country, and, with the exception of the Department of Agriculture, the policy and personnel of the host of nominated Boards through which its affairs are administered, still stand wholly outside popular control, while legislation in accordance with Irish views is only possible when, in the fluctuation of the British party balance, a British Ministry happens to be in sympathy with these views, and only too often not even then.

Statesmen who looked with complacency on the history of a century in Ireland under such a system naturally took a similar view of the Transvaal, deriving it from the same low estimate of human tendencies. The literature, despatches, and speeches of the period carry us straight back to the Canadian controversies of 1837-1840, and beyond them to the Union controversy of 1800. In one respect the parallel with the Irish Union is closer, because, while British opinion in Lower Canada was predominantly against responsible government, there was in Ireland a strong current of unbribed Protestant opinion against the Union. Similarly, in the Transvaal, there was a strong feeling among a section of the British population, coinciding with the general wishes of the Dutch population, in favour of full responsible government. In other words, the mere prospect of self-government lessened racial cleavage, brought men of the two races together, and began the evolution of a new party cleavage on the normal lines natural to modern communities. The whole question was keenly canvassed at public meetings and in the Press from November, 1904, to February 5, 1905, and in Johannesburg a British party of considerable strength took the lead in demanding the fuller political rights, and formed the Responsible Government Association. The controversy was embodied in a Blue-Book laid before Parliament,[35] and at every stage of its progress the facts were cabled home by Lord Milner to the Government, who thus had the whole situation before them when they came to their decision.

It would be worth the reader's while to study with some care the terms of the despatch announcing that decision.[36] He will feel himself in contact with fundamental principles, undisturbed by individual bias; for no one could suspect Mr. Lyttelton, the genial and popular Secretary of State who penned the despatch, of any violent prejudices. Yet the spirit of the whole despatch, though gentle and persuasive in its terms, is the spirit of Fitzgibbon's brutally outspoken argument for the extinction of the Irish Parliament, and the complete exclusion of Irish Roman Catholics from influence over their country's affairs. The despatch begins, it is true, by explaining that the proposed Constitution is only intended to be temporary; that it had been the invariable custom to grant freedom to the Colonies by degrees, and that the custom must be followed; but the reasons adduced for following it, if we consider that they were adduced in the year 1905, instead of a century and a half back, constitute one of the strangest of all the strange inversions of historical cause and effect which a Home Rule controversy has ever suggested to the human brain. Instead of inferring from our bitter experiences in Upper and Lower Canada, which are mentioned in the despatch, and in Ireland, which is not, that race distinctions increase instead of lessening the necessity for responsible government, Mr. Lyttelton complacently quotes bi-racial Lower Canada as a precedent for his Transvaal Constitution. Quite frankly, though in curiously misleading terms,[37] he records the fact that a similar Constitution there led to deadlock and rebellion. Without intention to deceive, he ignores the fact that wholly British Upper Canada reached the same pass for the same reasons; and he appears to look forward with equanimity to the passage of the unfortunate Transvaal through an identically painful phase of history toward the same sanguinary climax. The radical error in the official version of events in Canada appears in the comparison between the rebellions of 1837 and the South African War of 1899-1902. To contrast the "brief armed rising" in Canada with the three years' war in South Africa, and to argue that a degree of freedom could safely be given after the former, which would involve great danger after the latter, was to show ignorance of the chain of historical events and blindness to their true moral. The underlying idea is the one applied to the old American Colonies and for centuries to Ireland, namely, that the more mutinous a dependency is, the less reason for giving it Home Rule, with the paradoxical corollary applied even to this day in Ireland, that if it is not disorderly it does not need Home Rule. So from age to age statesmen run their heads against facts, perpetuate the errors of their forefathers, and do their unconscious best to intensify the evils they deplore. It was erroneous to regard either the Canadian Rebellions or the Boer War as events which rendered responsible government more or less dangerous. Each of these events was itself the climax of a long period of irresponsible misgovernment dating from about the same period, the second decade of the nineteenth century, and demanding the same remedy. In the Boer case, continuity was twice broken by grants of independence, and the climax proportionally delayed, but the origin of the trouble was the same. If the Boers had not trekked en masse from Cape Colony in order to escape from misgovernment, both movements—in the Cape and Canada—might have come to a head in exactly the same year, 1837.

In sober, weighty, tactful phrases, carefully chosen to avoid giving needless offence to the Dutch, the despatch laboriously overthrows the Liberal theory of government, and works out the negation of all Imperial experience. It deplores the "bitter memories" of war, which free institutions, by tending to "emphasize and stereotype the racial line," will make more, not less bitter, and which can be effaced only by the "healing effect of time." We think of the Durham Report, of Ireland, and marvel. We recollect the bulky Blue-Book at Mr. Lyttelton's elbow as he wrote, full of speeches and articles by Englishmen, showing quite correctly, as has since been proved, that the "racial line" in Johannesburg was growing fainter daily with the mere prospect of responsible government. These men were not afraid of the Dutch, and said so. The answer was that they ought to be, or, in the persuasive language of diplomacy, as follows:

"His Majesty's Government trust that those of British origin in the Transvaal who, with honest conviction, have advocated the immediate concession of full responsible government, will recognize the soundness and cogency of the reasons, both in their own interests and in those of the Empire, for proceeding more cautiously and slowly, and that under a political system which admittedly has its difficulties they will, notwithstanding a temporary disappointment, do their best to promote the welfare of the country and the smooth working of its institutions."

Then came a chivalrous compliment to the Dutch for their "gallant struggle" in the war, coupled with a reminder that they are not to be trusted with political power, a reminder so courteously worded that it, too, becomes a compliment:

"The inhabitants of Dutch origin have recently witnessed, after their gallant struggle against superior power, the fall of the Republic founded by the valour and sufferings of their ancestors, and cannot be expected, until time has done more to heal the wound, to entertain the most cordial feelings towards the Government of the Transvaal. But from them also, as from a people of practical genius, who have learned by long experience to make the best of circumstances, His Majesty's Government expect co-operation in the task of making their race, no longer in isolated independence, a strong pillar in the fabric of a world-wide Empire. That this should be the result, and that a complete reconciliation between men of two great and kindred races should, under the leading of Divine Providence, speedily come to pass, is the ardent desire of His Majesty the King and of His Majesty's Government."

The tone recalls the tone of Pitt and Castlereagh in proposing the Union. But Fitzgibbon went more directly to the point in saying outright that, Ireland having been conquered and confiscated, the colonists "were at the mercy of the old inhabitants of the island," and that laws must be framed by an external power to "meet the vicious propensities of human nature." Let us recognize unreservedly that the words of the Transvaal despatch were the outcome of deep and sincere conviction. That is the worst of it. From age to age Ireland has to suffer for the depth and sincerity of these convictions. There, too, the cleavage of race and religion, never complete, always defying the official efforts to "stereotype and emphasize it," to quote the despatch of 1905, grows fainter with time, and will grow fainter as long as the national movement lives to draw men together in the common interest of Ireland. The Volunteers, Wolfe Tone, Emmet, many of the Young Irelanders, Isaac Butt, Parnell, were Protestants. And there is a strong band of Protestant Home Rulers to-day in Ulster and out of it, landlords, tenants, capitalists, labourers, Members of Parliament, and clergymen, who declare that they are not afraid of Catholic oppression, and who are told by Unionists that they ought to be. And in Ireland, too, the Roman Catholic majority are told, rarely, it is true, in the courteous phrases of Mr. Lyttelton's despatch, that they "cannot be expected to entertain the most cordial feelings towards the Government." In Ireland, also, is a "political system which admittedly has its difficulties," ironical euphemism for a system whose analogue in the Transvaal could have been used by the subject race, had they so willed, to bring civil government to a standstill, without the means of furnishing anything better, and which under the Act of Union can be, and has been, used to dislocate the Parliamentary life of the United Kingdom. The Boers were asked "as a people of practical genius" to assist the "smooth working" of an unworkable Constitution, so as to promote the "reconciliation of two great and kindred races." The Irish are pursued with invective for legitimately using the constitutional power given them in order, while freeing Parliament from an intolerable incubus, to gain the right to elicit character and responsibility in themselves by shouldering their own burdens and saving their own souls.

If the official view of the Transvaal was mistaken, the summit of error was reached in the view taken of the Orange River Colony. In that Colony, which was almost wholly pastoral and Dutch, and which until the war had enjoyed free institutions uninterruptedly for half a century, and had made remarkably good vise of them, representative government, even of the illusory kind designed for the Transvaal, was to be indefinitely postponed, postponed at any rate until the results of the "experiment" in the Transvaal had been observed.

The Government "recognize that there are industrial and economic conditions peculiar to the Transvaal, which make it very desirable in that Colony to have at the earliest possible date some better means of ascertaining the views of the different sections of the population than the present system affords. The question as regards the Orange River Colony being a less urgent one, it appears to them that there will be advantage in allowing a short period to intervene before elective representative institutions are granted to the last-named Colony, because this will permit His Majesty's Government to observe the experiment, and, if need be, to profit by the experience so gained."

What is the train of reasoning in this strange specimen of political argument? It was important to "ascertain the views" of the bi-racial Transvaal, but needless to ascertain the views of the practically homogeneous Orange River Colony. The "question" there is a "less urgent one." What question? Why less urgent? Is it that the British minority, being so very small, is more liable to oppression by the Dutch? That is a tenable point, though by parity of reasoning it would seem to make the question more, not less, urgent, and the importance of "ascertaining the views" of the different sections of the population, greater, not less. Or is it the diametrically opposite train of thought, namely, that an assumed improbability of disorder owing to the homogeneity of the population is a reason, not for giving Home Rule, but for withholding it? These contradictions and confusions are painfully familiar in anti-Home Rule dialectics all over the world. A quiet Ireland does not want Home Rule; a turbulent Ireland is not fit for it. If the Unionist element in Ireland is strong, that is clearly an argument for withholding Home Rule in deference to the wishes of a strong minority. If the minority, on the other hand, is proved to be small, all the greater reason for withholding it, because oppression by the majority will be easier. So the sterile argument swings back and forth, and men still talk of "experiments" and "profiting by experience," while the demonstration of their errors is written in the blood and tears of centuries, and while masses of facts accumulate, demonstrating the great truth that free democratic government, whatever its disadvantages and dangers—and it has both—is the best resource for uniting, strengthening, and enriching a community of white men.

The Transvaal Constitution of 1905 was cancelled on the incoming of the Liberal Ministry at the end of that year, and in the following year full responsible government was granted both to the Transvaal and Orange River Colony, with the results that we know. Instantaneously there permeated the bi-racial urban society in the Transvaal a new sense of brotherhood. Men of different race, as far apart in spirit as the members of the Kildare Street Club, the Orange Societies, and the Ancient Order of Hibernians, met and made friends because it was not only natural but necessary to make friends, since on all alike lay the burden of doing their best for their country on a basis of equal citizenship. Nobody out there called the new system an "experiment." The wrench once over, the thing once done, there was general unanimity that whatever the difficulties—and there were great difficulties—it was the right thing to be done under the circumstances, and if this unanimity was combined, rightly or wrongly, with a good deal of resentment against the Liberal attitude at home towards Chinese labour, nobody is any the worse for that. The day will come when even that burning question will be seen in its true perspective as an infinitesimally small point beside the great principle of responsible government, which includes the decision of labour questions, together with all other branches of domestic policy.

Conservative opinion at home has been slower to change than British opinion in the Transvaal. But, again, this was natural. Parties had long been divided on the South African question. The abrupt reversal of policy was felt as a humiliation, and the ingrained mental habits engendered by the traditional policy towards Ireland yielded slowly, grudgingly, and fearfully to the proof of error in South Africa. It is not for the sake of opening an old wound, but solely because it is absolutely necessary for the completion of my argument, that I have to recall the angry and violent speeches which followed the announcement of the new policy; the dogmatic prognostications of Imperial disruption, of financial collapse, and of a cruel Boer tyranny in the emancipated Colonies; the charges of wanton betrayal of loyalists, of disgraceful surrender to "the enemy." Some of the leading actors in these scenes, notably Mr. Balfour and Mr. Lyttelton, have since acknowledged that they were wrong, while apparently feeling it their duty as honourable and loyal men to give a somewhat misleading turn to an old controversy in their praise of Lord Milner's services to South Africa. That Lord Milner, in his administration during and after the war, did, indeed, do a vast amount of sound and lasting work for South Africa is perfectly true, and he deserves all honour for it. Probably no public servant of the Empire ever laboured in its service with more unstinted devotion and a higher sense of duty. But good administration is not an adequate substitute for knowledge of men, and that knowledge Lord Milner lacked. He did no service to the British colonists of South Africa in telling them that they had been shamefully betrayed by the Home Government in 1906. It would have been wiser to advise them to rely on themselves and on the justice and wisdom of their Dutch fellow-citizens. His violent speeches in 1906-1908 about the calamitous results of permitting Dutch influences free play in South Africa—speeches breathing the essential spirit of Fitzgibbonism—would have wrought incalculable mischief had they coincided with effective British policy; while his view, as expressed in the House of Lords,[38] that a preparatory régime of benevolent despotism, showing "the obvious solicitude of the Government for the welfare of the people," and taking shape "in a hundred and one works of material advancement," would "win us friends and diminish our enemies," evinces an ignorance of the ordinary motives influencing the conduct of white men, which would be incredible if we had not Irish experience before us. "Twenty years of resolute government," said Lord Salisbury. "Home Rule will be killed by kindness," said many of his successors. In later chapters I shall have to show what well-meant kindness and resolute government have done for Ireland. If even at this late hour Lord Milner would frankly acknowledge his error, I believe he would enormously enhance his reputation in the eyes of the whole Empire.

As practical men, let us remember that the Constitutions of 1906 would not have become law if, instead of being issued under Letters Patent, they had had to pass through Parliament in the form of a Bill. The whole Conservative party, following Lord Milner, was vehemently against the Letters Patent. Those who witnessed the debate upon them in the House of Commons will not forget the scene. I recall this fact without any desire to entangle myself in the current controversy about the Upper House, but with the strictly practical object of showing that because a Home Rule Bill is defeated in Parliament, as the Irish Bills of 1886 and 1893 were defeated, it does not necessarily follow that its policy is wrong. Nor does it follow that its policy is wrong if that defeat in Parliament is confirmed by a General Election. Home Rule for Canada never had to pass, and would not have passed even the Parliamentary test. Skilful and determined organization could have wrecked even the Australian Constitutions. No one, certainly, could have guaranteed a favourable result of a General Election taken expressly upon the Transvaal and Orange River Constitutions of 1906, with the whole machinery of one of the great parties thrown into the scale against them. We know the case made against Ireland on such occasions, and the case against the conquered Republics was made in Parliament with ten times greater force. If anyone doubts this, let him compare the speeches on Ireland in 1886 and 1893 with the speeches on South Africa in 1905-06. With the alteration of a name or two, with the substitution, for example, of Johannesburg for Ulster, the speeches against South African and Irish Home Rule might be almost interchangeable. For electioneering purposes, evidences, in word and act, of Boer treason, rapacity, and vindictiveness, could have been made by skilful orators to seem damning and unanswerable. All the arts for inflaming popular passion under the pretext of "patriotism" would have been used, and we know that patriotism sometimes assumes strange disguises. The material would have been rich and easily accessible. Instead of having to ransack ancient numbers of Irish or American newspapers for incautious phrases dropped by Mr. Redmond or Mr. O'Brien in moments of unusual provocation, the speeches of Botha, Steyn, and De Wet, during the war, and even at the Peace Conference, would have been ready for the hoardings and the fly-sheets, and they would have had an appreciable effect.

Am I weakening the case for democracy itself in pressing this view? Surely not. One democracy is incapable of understanding the domestic needs and problems of another. Whenever, therefore, a democracy finds itself responsible for the adjudication of a claim for Home Rule from white men, it should limit itself to ascertaining whether the claim is genuine and sincere. If it is, the claim should be granted, and a Constitution constructed in friendly concert with the men who are to live under it. That way lies safety and honour, and, happily, the democracy is being educated to that truth. If this be a counsel of perfection; if the difficult and delicate task of settling the details of Irish Home Rule is to be hampered and complicated by the resuscitation of those time-honoured discussions over abstract principles which ought long ago to have been buried and forgotten, let every patriotic and enlightened man at any rate do his best to sweeten and mollify the controversy, to extirpate its grosser manifestations, and to substitute reason for passion.

The grant of responsible government to the Transvaal and Orange River Colony reacted with amazing rapidity on South African politics as a whole. It took the Canadian Provinces twenty-seven years (if we reckon from 1840), and the Australian States forty-five years (if we reckon from 1855), to reach a Federal Union. Hardly a minute was wasted in South Africa. Under very able guidance, the scheme was canvassed almost from the first, and in two years trusted leaders of both races, representing Natal, Cape Colony, and two newly emancipated Colonies—men, some of whom had been shooting at one another only five years before—were sitting at a table together hammering out the details of a South African Union. Here, indeed, was shown the "practical genius" which the Government of 1905 had piously invoked for their abortive Constitution. In the spirit of forbearance, of sympathy, of wise compromise, which governed the proceedings of this famous Conference, was to be found the measure of the longing of all parties to extinguish racialism and make South Africa truly a nation. The Imperial Act legalizing the arrangements ultimately arrived at by the agreement of the colonists was passed in 1909. The political system constructed cannot be called Federal. The framers rejected the Australian model, and went much beyond the Canadian model in centralizing authority and diminishing local autonomy; nor can there be any doubt that the strongest motive behind that policy was that of securing the harmony of the two white races.

All this was the result of trusting the Dutch in 1906. "We cannot expect you to trust us, and we shall not trust you," said the despatch of 1905. We know what the consequences of that policy would have been. It is not a question of imagination or hypothesis. It is a question of the operation of certain unchanging laws in the conduct of all white men. Good or bad, our government would have been detested. We should have manufactured sedition, lawlessness, and discord. Then the tendency would have been strong to follow the old Irish precedent, and make the evil symptoms we had ourselves educed the pretext for tightening the screw of anti-popular government. It would have been said that we must sustain our prestige to the end and at all costs, a phrase which often cloaks the obstinacy of moral cowardice. Or, too late to escape the contempt of the Boers, we might have abruptly surrendered to clamour. It would have taken a long time to reach union then. Contempt is a bad foundation.

It brings one near despair to see the Union of South Africa used by men who should know better as an argument against Irish Home Rule. The chain of causation is so clear, one would think, as to be incapable of misconstruction. But there seems to be no limit in certain minds to the prejudice against the principle of Home Rule. If it is seen to work well, the phenomenon is hurriedly swept into oblivion, and its results attributed with feverish ingenuity to any cause but the true one. The very speed with which the antidote pervades the body politic and expels the old poison helps these untiring propagators of error to suppress the history of recuperation, and to ascribe the cure of the patient to a treatment which, if applied long enough, would have killed him. The Conservative party appear to have now reached this amazing conclusion: that they and Lord Milner were the authors of the South African Union, and that that Union is a weapon sent them by Providence for combating the Irish claims. This is what Ireland has to pay for being the sport of British parties. Individual statesmen may point at past mistakes; but a party, as a party, can never admit error: it is against the rules. To make things easier, there is that question-begging phrase, the "Union." If South Africa, like Australia, had been federalized, this windfall would have been lost, because the word "Federal" might have suggested some form of Federal Home Rule for Ireland. Labels mean an enormous amount in politics.

There is not the slightest doubt that Mr. Walter Long, and even Lord Selborne, who, as High Commissioner, actually witnessed the whole evolution from responsible government in the two conquered States to the Union of South Africa, are perfectly sincere in their opposition to Irish Home Rule. But, I would respectfully suggest, it is their duty to use their knowledge and convictions in the right and fair way. Let them say, if they will, ignoring the intermediate and indispensable phase of Home Rule in South Africa: "Here are two Unions; never mind how they arose. Both are good: all Unions are good. The modern tendency to unify is sound; do not let us react to devolution." Let them, in other words, confine their argument to the domain of political science. What, I submit, they should refrain from, is the imputation of sordid motives to Nationalist leaders, the prognostications of religious and racial tyranny in Ireland, and all those inflammatory arguments against the principle of Home Rule which have been used all the world over, from time immemorial, for the maintenance of Unions based on legal, not on moral, ties, which were used against responsible government for the Transvaal, and which, I venture to affirm, degrade our public life.

I am assuming for the moment that most Conservatives will elect to use the South African parallel in the way that Mr. Long and Lord Selborne have used it, that is, while tacitly approving in retrospect of the Home Rule of 1906, to argue from Union to Union. But it is of no use to blink the fact that there are pessimists who will put forward an antithetical case, boldly declaring that we were wrong ever to trust the Boers, that racialism is as bad as ever, that General Botha's loyalty is cant, the Cullinan diamond an insult, and that South Africa will go from bad to worse under a Dutch tyranny. Party propaganda is quite elastic enough to permit the two opposite views to be used to convince the same electorate at the same election. Pessimists are always active in these affairs, and they can always produce something in the nature of a plausible case, because it stands to reason that the evils of generations cannot be swept away in a moment, either in South Africa or Ireland. Miracles do not happen, and the pessimists, who are the curse of Ireland to-day, will be able to demonstrate with ease that the free Ireland of to-morrow will not enter instantaneously upon a millennium. It is useless to attempt to convert these extremists. For a century back, Hansard and the columns of daily papers have been full of their unfulfilled jeremiads about Canada, about Australia, and about the very smallest and most tardy attempts to give a little responsibility to the majority of citizens in Ireland. The vocabulary of impending ruin has been exhausted long ago; there is nothing new to be said. But those who care to study in a cool temper the course of recent South African politics in the columns of the Times, or, better still, in those of that excellent magazine for the discussion of Imperial affairs, the Round Table, will conclude that extraordinary progress has been made towards racial reunion, and that in this respect no serious peril threatens South Africa. The settlement, by friendly compromise at the end of the last session, of the very thorny question of language in the education of children, is a good example of what good-will can accomplish under free institutions. By a laboured construction of fragments of speeches culled from the utterances of exceptionally vehement partisans, it would be still possible to make up a theory of the "disloyalty" of the South African Dutch. It would have been equally possible for a painstaking British student of the Sydney Bulletin within recent memory to start a panic over the imminent "loss" of Australia. Some people think that Canada is as good as "lost" now. Yet the Empire has never been so strong or so united as to-day.

CHAPTER VIII

THE ANALOGY

Let the reader endeavour to see the closely related stories of Ireland and of these more distant communities as a whole, undistracted by the varying degrees of their proximity to the Mother Country, making his study one of men and laws, and remembering that Ireland was the first and nearest of the British Colonies. Does not she become a convex mirror, in which, swollen to unnatural proportions, the mistakes of two centuries are reflected? Principles of government universal in their nature, transcending geography, and painfully evolved in more distant parts of the Empire, we have thrown to the winds in Ireland. Economic evils, resembling, in however distant a degree, those of Ireland, have irritated and retarded every community in which they have been allowed to take root. A sound agrarian system has been the primary need of every country. To take the closest parallel, if absentee proprietorship and insecurity of tenure kept little Prince Edward Island, peacefully and legally settled, backward and disturbed for a century, it is not surprising that Ireland, submitted to confiscation, the Penal Code, and commercial rum, did not flourish under a land system beside which that of Prince Edward Island was a paradise. Tardy redress of the worst Irish abuses is no defence of the system which created them and sustained them with such ruinous results. No white community of pride and spirit would willingly tolerate the grotesque form of Crown Colony administration, founded on force, and now tempered by a kind of paternal State Socialism, under which Ireland lives to-day. Unionism for Ireland is anti-Imperialist. Its upholders strenuously opposed colonial autonomy, and but yesterday were passionately opposing South African autonomy. To-day colonial autonomy is an axiom. But Ireland is a measure of the depth of these convictions. There would be no Empire to idealize if their Irish principles had been applied just a little longer to any of the oversea States which constitute the self-governing Colonies of to-day. As it is, these principles have wrought great and perhaps lasting mischief which, in the righteous glow of self-congratulation upon what we are accustomed to call our constructive political genius, we are too apt to overlook. It was bad for America to pass through that phase of agitation and discord which preceded the revolutionary war. It was demoralizing for the Canadas to be driven into rebellion by the vices of ascendancy government. Mr. Gladstone, speaking of Australian autonomy, was right in satirizing the "miserable jargon" about fitting men for political privileges, and in demonstrating the harm done by withholding those privileges. And the Irish race all over the world, fine race as it is, would be finer still if Ireland had been free.

The political habits formed in dealing with Ireland have disastrously influenced Imperial policy in the past. Cannot we, by a supreme national effort, reverse the mental process, and, if we have always failed in the past to learn from Irish lessons how not to treat the Colonies, at any rate learn, even at the eleventh hour, from our colonial lessons how to treat Ireland? Must we for ever sound the old alarms about "disloyalty" and "dismemberment" and "abandonment of the loyal minority to the tender mercies of their foes"; phrases as old as the Stamp Act of 1765? Must we carry the "gentle art of making enemies," practised to the last point of danger in the Colonies, to the preposterous pitch of estranging men at our very doors, while pluming ourselves on the friendship of peoples 12,000 miles away? These are anxious times. We have a mighty rival in Europe, and we need the co-operation of all our hands and brains. On a basis of mere profit and loss, is it sensible to maintain a system in Ireland which weakens both Ireland and the whole United Kingdom, clogs the delicate machinery of Parliamentary government, and, worked out in hard figures of pounds, shillings, and pence, has ceased even to show a pecuniary advantage?

Have Unionists really no better prescription for the constitutional difficulties caused by the Union than to reduce the representation of Ireland in Parliament so as to give Ireland still less control than at present over her own affairs? Is that seriously their last word in statesmanship, to exasperate Nationalist Ireland without even providing in any appreciable degree a mechanical remedy for disordered political functions? The idea has only to be stated to be dismissed. It is not even practical politics. Some things are sheer impossibilities; and to leave the Union system as it is, while reducing representation, is one of them.

We revert, then, to a contemplation of the well-tried expedient, "Trust, and you will be trusted." But then we have to meet pessimists of two descriptions, the honest and the merely cynical. The honest pessimist (often, unhappily, an educated Irishman) says: "The Irish in Ireland are an incurably criminal race. They differ from Irishmen elsewhere and from Anglo-Saxons everywhere. Air and soil are unaccountable. The Union policy has been, and remains, a painful but a quite inevitable necessity. It is sound, now and for all time." The cynical pessimist, on the other hand, admits the errors of past policy, but says frankly that it is too late to change. "We have gone too far, raised passions we cannot allay." I shall not try further to confute the honest pessimist. The preceding chapters have been written in vain if they do not shatter the theory of original sin. And to the cynical pessimist, who is a reincarnation of our old friend Fitzgibbon (for that clear-headed statesman frankly imputed original sin to the conquerors of Ireland, as well as to the conquered), I would only say: "Use your common sense." These panics over the vagaries and excesses of an Irish Parliament, always groundless, are beginning to look highly ridiculous. In 1893, when the last Home Rule Bill was being discussed, a Franco-Irish alliance was the fear. Now it is the other way, and the Spectator has been writing solemn articles to warn its readers that Mr. Dillon, in a speech on foreign policy, has shown ominous signs of hostility to France. In the election of January, 1910, an ex-Cabinet Minister informed the public that Home Rule meant the presence of a German fleet in Belfast Lough—at whose invitation he did not explain, though he probably did not intend to insult Ulster. This wild talk has not even the merit of a strategical foundation. It belongs to another age. Ireland has neither a fleet nor the will or money to build one. Our fleet, in which large numbers of Irishmen serve, guarantees the security of New Zealand, and if it cannot maintain the command of home waters, including St. George's Channel, our situation is desperate, whether Ireland is friendly or hostile. We guarantee the independent existence of the kingdom of Belgium, which is as near as Ireland, with military liabilities vastly more serious than any which Ireland could conceivably entail; but we do not claim, as a consequence, to control the Executive of Belgium and remove her Parliament to Westminster, in order to be quite sure that the Belgians are not intriguing against us with Germany. Germany, our alarmists fear, is to invade Ireland, and Ireland is to greet the invaders with open arms. The same prophecy was being made not more than three years ago of the South African Dutch. After asking for a century and a half to manage her own affairs, the Irish are not likely to ask to be ruled by Germans. The German strategists are men of common sense. If they were fortunate enough to gain the command of the sea, they could make no worse mistake than to dissipate their energies on Ireland.

Perhaps it is a waste of time to attempt to destroy these foolish myths. Let those that are sceptical about the effect of Home Rule in producing friendlier feelings between Ireland and Great Britain consider in a reasonable spirit the commonplace question of mutual interests. What is the really practical significance of Ireland's proximity to England? This, that their material interests are indissociably intertwined. If it is "safe," as the phrase goes, to entrust Australia with Home Rule, surely it is safer still to entrust Ireland with it. Has Ireland anything to gain by separation? Clearly nothing. Has she anything to lose? Much. Most of her trade is with Great Britain. British credit is of enormous value to her. The Imperial forces are of less proportionate value to her because her external trade is small; but she willingly supplies a large and important part of their personnel; she shares in their glorious traditions; and if it is a case of protection for her trade, she will get no protection elsewhere.

How idle are these calculations of profit and loss! The truth is that Ireland has taken her full share in winning and populating the Empire. The result is hers as much as Britain's. Mr. Redmond spoke for his countrymen last May[39] in saying: "We, as Irishmen, are not prepared to surrender our share in the heritage [that is, the British Empire] which our fathers created." That is sound sentiment and sound sense. It is the view taken by the Colonies, where Irishmen are known, respected, and understood, and where the support for Home Rule, based on personal experience of its blessings, has been, and remains, consistent and strong. Indeed, we miss the significance of that support if we do not realize that Irish Home Rule is an indispensable preliminary to the closer union of the various parts of the Empire. Let us add the wider generalization that it is an indispensable preliminary to the closer union of all the English-speaking races. It may be fairly computed that a fifth of the present white population of the United States is of Irish blood.[40] American opinion, as a whole, so far as it is directed towards Ireland and away from a host of absorbing domestic problems, is favourable to Home Rule. Irish-American opinion has never swerved, although it has become more sober, as the material condition of Ireland has improved, and the interests of Irish-Americans themselves have become more closely identified with those of their adopted country. Fenianism is altogether extinct. The extreme claim for the total separation of Ireland from Great Britain is now no more than a sentimental survival among a handful of the older men, of the fierce hatreds provoked by the miseries and horrors of an era which has passed away.[41] Even Mr. Patrick Ford and the Irish World have moderated their tone, and where that tone is still inflammatory it is not representative of Irish-American opinion. I have studied with a good deal of care the columns of that journal for some months back, smiling over the imaginary terrors of the nervous people on this side of the Atlantic who are taught by their party Press to believe that Mr. Patrick Ford is going to dynamite them in their beds. Any liberal-minded student of history and human nature would pronounce the whole propaganda perfectly harmless. But the sane instinct that Ireland should have a local autonomy of her own, an instinct common to the whole brotherhood of nations which have sprung from these shores, lasts undiminished and takes shape, quite rightly and naturally, as it takes shape in the Colonies, in financial support of the Nationalist party in Ireland. Anti-British sentiment in the United States, once a grave international danger, is that no longer; but it does still represent an obstacle to the complete realization of an ideal which all patriotic men should aim at: the formation of indestructible bonds of friendship between Great Britain and the United States. Nor must it be forgotten that the calm and reasonable character of Irish-American opinion is due in a large degree to confidence in the ultimate success of the constitutional movement here for Home Rule. Every successive defeat of that policy tends to embitter feeling in America.

Oh, for an hour of intelligent politics! The old choice is before us—to make the best or the worst of the state of opinion in America; to disinter from ancient files of the Irish World sentences calculated to inflame an ignorant British audience; or to say in sensible and manly terms: "The situation is more favourable than it has been for a century past for the settlement of just Irish claims."

CHAPTER IX

IRELAND TO-DAY

Why does present-day Ireland need Home Rule? I put the question in that way because I am not going to question the fact that she wants Home Rule. She has always said she wanted it: she says so still, and that is enough. There is a powerful minority in Ireland against Home Rule. There always have been minorities more or less powerful against Home Rule in all ages and places. That does not alter the national character of the claim. If once we go behind the voice of a people, constitutionally expressed, we court endless risks. National leaders have always been called "agitators," which, of course, they are, and non-representative agitators, which they are not. To deny the genuineness of a claim which is feared is an invariable feature of oppositions to measures of Home Rule. The denial is generally irreconcilable with the case made for the dangers of Home Rule, and that contradiction in its most glaring shape characterizes the present opposition to the Irish claims. But Unionists should elect to stand on one ground or the other, and for my part I shall assume that the large majority of Irishmen, as shown by successive electoral votes, want Home Rule. Precisely what form of Home Rule they want is another and by no means so clear a matter, on which I shall presently have a word to say. But they want, in the general sense, to manage their own local affairs. Her best friends would despair of Ireland if that was not her desire.

What, in the Colonies, Ireland, and everywhere else, is the deep spiritual impulse behind the desire for Home Rule? A craving for self-expression, self-reliance. Home Rule is synonymous with the growth of independent character. That is why Ireland instinctively and passionately wants it, that is why she needs it, and that is why Great Britain, for her own sake, and Ireland's, should give it. If that is not the reason, it is idle to talk about Home Rule; but it is the reason.

Character is the very foundation of national prosperity and happiness, and we are blind to the facts of history if we cannot discern the profound effect of political institutions upon human character. Self-government in the community corresponds to free will in the individual. I am far from saying that self-government is everything. But I do say that it is the master-key. It is fundamental. Give responsibility and you will create responsibility. Through political responsibility only can a society brace itself to organized effort, find out its own opinions on its own needs, test its own capabilities, and elicit the will, the brains, and the hands to solve its own problems.

These are such commonplaces in every other part of the Empire, which has an individual life of its own, that men smile if you suggest the contrary. But ordinary reasoning is rarely applied to Ireland. There "good government" has been held to be "a substitute for self-government" and a régime of benevolent paternalism to be a full and sufficient compensation for cruel coercion and crueller neglect. In this paternal régime it is impossible to include those great measures of land reform passed in 1870, 1881, and 1887, which revolutionized the agrarian system, and converted the cottier tenant into a judicial tenant.[42] Although these measures, which fall into an altogether different category from the subsequent policy of State-aided Land Purchase,[43] were inspired by an earnest desire to mitigate frightful social evils, they cannot be regarded as voluntary. They were extorted, shocking as the reflection is, by crime and violence, by the spectacle of a whole social order visibly collapsing, and by the desperate efforts of a handful of Irishmen, determined at any cost, by whatever means, to save the bodies and souls of their countrymen. The methods of these men were destructive. They were constructive only in this, the highest sense of all, that while battling against concrete economic evils, they sought to obtain for Ireland the right to control her own affairs and cure her own economic evils. It is often said that Parnell gave a tremendous impetus to the Home Rule movement by harnessing it to the land question. True; but what a strange way of expressing a truth! Anywhere outside Ireland men would say that self-government was the best road to the reform of a bad land system.

With the tranquillity which was slowly restored by the alterations in agrarian tenure and the immense economic relief derived from the lowering of rents, a change came over the spirit of British statesmanship. With the exception of the short Liberal Government of 1892-1895, which failed for the second time to carry Home Rule, Conservatives were responsible for Ireland from 1886 to 1905. They felt that opposition to Home Rule could be justified only by a strenuous policy of amelioration in Ireland, and the efforts of three Chief Secretaries, Mr. Arthur Balfour, Mr. Gerald Balfour, and Mr. George Wyndham—efforts often made in the teeth of bitter opposition from Irish Unionists—to carry out this policy, were sincere and earnest. The Act of 1891, with its grants for light railways, its additional facilities for Land Purchase, and its establishment of the Congested Districts Board to deal with the terrible poverty of certain districts in the west, may be said to mark the beginning of the new era. The Land Act of 1896 was another step, and the establishment of a complete system of Irish Local Government in 1898 another. In the following year came the Act setting up the Department of Agriculture, and in 1903 Mr. Wyndham's great Land Purchase Act. Then came the strange "devolutionist" episode, arising from the appointment of Sir Antony (now Lord) MacDonnell to the post of Under-Secretary at Dublin Castle, the Government who selected him being fully aware that he was in favour of some change in the government of Ireland. He entered into relations with a group of prominent Irishmen, headed by Lord Dunraven, who were thinking out a scheme for a mild measure of devolution. When the fact became known, there was an explosion of anger among Irish Unionists. Mr. Wyndham, who had been a popular Chief Secretary, resigned office, and was succeeded by Mr. Walter Long; perhaps the most dramatic and significant example in modern times of the policy of governing Ireland in deliberate and direct defiance of the wishes and sentiments of the vast majority of Irishmen.

The Liberal Government of 1906, coming into office under a pledge to refrain from a full Home Rule measure, confined itself to the introduction of the Irish Council Bill of 1907, which, rightly, in my opinion, was repudiated by the Irish people, and accordingly dropped. But the Government was in general sympathy with Nationalist Ireland, so that a number of useful measures were added to the statute books; for example, the Labourers (Ireland) Act of 1906, empowering Rural Councils, with the aid of State credit, to acquire land for labourers' plots and cottages; the Town Tenants Act, extending the principle of compensation for improvements at the termination of a lease to the urban tenant; the very important Irish Universities Act of 1908, which gave to Roman Catholics facilities for higher education which they had lacked for centuries, and, lastly, Mr. Birrell's Land Act of 1909, which was designed partly to meet the imminent collapse of Land Purchase, owing to the failure of the financial arrangements made under the Wyndham Act of 1903, and partly to extend the powers of the Congested Districts Board.

To these measures must be added another which was not confined to Ireland, but which has exercised a most potent influence, and by no means a wholly beneficial influence, on Irish life and Irish finance, the Old Age Pensions Act of 1908, under which the enormous sum of two and three-quarter millions is now allocated to Ireland.[44]

The best that can be said of the legislation since 1881 is that it has laid the foundations of a new social order. Agrarian crime has disappeared and material prosperity has greatly increased. Government in the interests of a small favoured class has almost vanished. It survives to this extent, that civil administration and patronage, which are still, be it remembered, removed from popular control, remain, in fact, in Protestant and Unionist hands to an extent altogether disproportionate to the distribution of creeds, classes, and opinions. And, of course, in the major matter of Home Rule, the power of the Unionist minority, as represented in the Commons by seventeen out of the thirty-three Ulster representatives, and in the House of Lords by an overwhelming preponderance of Unionist peers, is still enormous. But within Ireland itself, central administration apart, the exceptional privileges and exceptional political power of Protestants and landlords, which lasted almost intact until forty years ago, is now non-existent. The Disestablishment Act of 1869, while immensely enhancing the moral power and religious zeal of the Church of Ireland, and even strengthening its financial position, took away its political monopoly, and through the final abolition of tithes, its baneful and irritating interference with economic life. The successive measures of land legislation, culminating in the transfer of half the land of Ireland from landlord to peasant proprietorship, and the Local Government Act of 1898, surrendering at a stroke the whole local administration of the country into popular control, destroyed the exceptional political privileges of the landlord class.

Ascendancy, then, in the old sense, is a thing of the past. What has taken its place? What is the ruling power within Ireland? Is it a public opinion derived from the vital contact of ideas and interests, and taking shape in a healthy and normal distribution of parties? Is thought free? Has merit its reward? Is there any unity of national purpose, transcending party divisions? If it were necessary to give a categorical "Yes" or "No" to these questions, the answer would be "No." Sane energizing politics, and the sovereign ascendancy of a sane public opinion, are absolutely unattainable in Ireland or anywhere else without Home Rule. It is all the more to the credit of Irishmen that, in the face of stupendous difficulties, and in a marvellously short space of time since the attainment, barely twenty years ago, of the elementary conditions of social peace, they have gone so far as they have gone towards the creation of a self-reliant, independently thinking, united Ireland. The whole weight of Imperial authority has been thrown into the scale against them. Whatever the mood and policy of British upholders of the Union, whether sympathetic or hostile, wise or foolish, their constant message to both parties in Ireland has been, "Look to us. Trust in us. You are divided. We are umpires," and the reader will no doubt remember that the theory of "umpirage" was used in exactly the same way in the Colonies, notably in Upper Canada,[45] to thwart the tendency towards a reconciliation of creeds, races, and classes. Fortunately, there have been Irishmen who have laboured to counteract the effects of this enervating policy, and to reconstruct, by native effort from within, a new Ireland on the ruins of the old. Whether or not they have consciously aimed at Home Rule matters not a particle. Some have, some have not; but the result of these efforts has been the same, to pull Irishmen together and to begin the creation of a genuinely national atmosphere.