A Leap in the Dark by A.V. Dicey

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Were it true, then, which it certainly is not, that the conditions exist
in Ireland which conduce to the maintenance of federal power in the
State of a well-arranged federation, and to the maintenance of Imperial
power in a self-governing British colony, this would not be enough to
support the argument in favour of the new constitution. For the Imperial
Government needs that the law should be maintained, and the rights of
individuals be protected, in Ireland with greater stringency than the
law is enforced or the rights of individuals are protected either under
a federal government or in a British colony. Miserable indeed would be
the position of England were she forced in Ireland to wink at
lawlessness such as but the other day disgraced New Orleans, or at mob
law countenanced by the 'Executive,' such as in 1883 ruled supreme at
Melbourne. Foreign powers at any rate would rightly decline to let the
defects of our constitution excuse the neglect of international duties.
If England cannot shuffle off her responsibilities, England is bound in
prudence to maintain her power.

iv. _The Policy of Trust_. 'I believe myself that suspicion is the
besetting vice of politicians and that trust is often the truest
wisdom.'[122]

This sentiment is followed by curious and ambiguous qualifications. It
is not cited for the sake of fixing Mr. Gladstone with any doctrine
whatever; it is quoted because it neatly expresses the sentiment which,
in one form or another, underlies most of the arguments in favour of
Home Rule or of our new constitution. The right attitude for a
politician, it is urged, is trust; he should trust the Irish leaders and
their assurances or professions; he should trust in the training
conferred upon men by the exercise of power; he should trust in the
healing effects of a policy of conciliation, or, to put the matter
shortly, he should trust in the goodness and reasonableness of human
nature. Exercise only a little trustfulness and the policy of Home Rule,
it is suggested, may be seen to be a wise and prudent policy.[123]

How far, then, is trust in any of the three forms, which it may on this
occasion take, a reasonable sentiment?

We are told to trust the Irish leaders.

My answer to this advice is plain and decided. Confidence is not a
matter of choice. You cannot give your trust simply because you wish to
give it. Men are trusted because they are trustworthy. The Irish Home
Rule leaders as a body cannot inspire trust, for the simple reason that
their whole policy and conduct prove them untrustworthy. Politicians,
strange as the fact may appear to them, cannot get quit of their past.

Look for a moment at the history--the patent, acknowledged history--of
the agitators or the patriots (and I doubt not that many of them are,
from their own point of view, patriotic) in whom we are asked to
confide, and whose assurances are to form the basis on which to rest a
dubious policy. They have been till recently the foes of England. This
in itself is not much; many a rebel has been the enemy of England, and
yet has been entitled to the respect of Englishmen. But there are deeds
which neither hatred to England nor love of Ireland can justify. Even
sedition has its moral code, and like war itself is subject to
obligations which no man can neglect without infamy. The conspirators
condemned by the Special Commission--and among them are to be found the
most prominent of the Irish leaders[124]--have been guilty of conduct
which no wise man ought to forget and no good man ought to palliate.
They have for years excited Irish ignorance against England and against
English officials by a system of gross incessant slander; witness the
pages of _United Ireland_ when Lord Spencer and Sir George Trevelyan
were in power at Dublin. The men whom we are told to trust are men who
did enter into a criminal conspiracy by a system of coercion and
intimidation to promote an agrarian agitation against the payment of
agricultural rents, for the purpose of impoverishing and expelling from
the country the English landlords[125]; they are men found guilty of not
denouncing intimidation which led to crime and outrage, but of
persisting in it with a knowledge of its effect.[126] They are proved to
have made payments to compensate persons injured in the commission of
crime[127]; they are men who have solicited and taken the money of
Patrick Ford, the advocate of dynamite; and have invited and obtained
the co-operation of the Clan-na-Gael.[128] Their whole system of
agitation has been utterly unlike that of honourable agitators,
conspirators, or rebels; it would have excited the horror of O'Connell;
it would have been repudiated with disgust by Davis, by Gavan Duffy, by
Smith O'Brien, and the other Irish leaders of 1848. The men who now ask
for our confidence have in their attack upon England forgotten what was
due to Ireland; they have deliberately taught Irish peasants lessons of
dishonesty, oppression, and cruelty, which the farmers of Ireland may
take years to unlearn. Of the degradation which they have gradually
inflicted upon the English Parliament one is glad to say little. It is,
however, well that the House of Commons should recollect that
parliamentary debates are open to all the world and that Englishmen and
Englishwomen see no reason why brutalities of expression should be
tolerated in the oldest representative Assembly of Europe which would be
reproved in any respectable English meeting. But you can sometimes trust
men's capacity where you cannot trust their moral feeling. Unfortunately
the Irish Parliamentary party have given us examples of their ability in
matters of government which are not reassuring. The scenes of Committee
Room No. 15[129] are a rehearsal of parliamentary life under Home Rule
at Dublin.

But the Gladstonians, we shall be told, guarantee the good faith of
their associates. Unfortunately, as judges of character the Gladstonians
are out of court. The leader who first obtained their confidence was Mr.
Parnell. If the Home Rule Bill of 1886 had become law Mr. Parnell would
have become Premier of Ireland, and we should have been bidden to put
trust in his loyalty and his integrity. There are no Gladstonians now
who think Mr. Parnell trustworthy. Why should they be better judges of
the trustworthiness of Mr. Dillon, Mr. M'Carthy, or Mr. Davitt, than
they were of the character of the statesman who was the leader, friend
or patron of the whole Irish Parliamentary party? Note, however--for in
this matter it is essential to make one's meaning perfectly clear--I do
not allege, or suppose, that the assurances of the Irish leaders are
mendacious. They believe, I doubt not, what they say at the moment; but
their words mean very little. In a sense they believed, or did not
disbelieve, the slanderous accusations which filled the pages of _United
Ireland_. In a sense they now believe that the Home Rule Bill is a
satisfactory compromise. But the belief in each case must be considered
essentially superficial. Men are the victims of their own career: it is
absolutely impossible that leaders many of whom have indulged in
virulence, in slanders, in cruelty, in oppression, should be suddenly
credited with strict truthfulness, with sobriety, with respect for the
rights of others. Even as it is, landlords are, in Mr. Sexton's eyes,
criminals,[130] and he therefore cannot be trusted to act with fairness
towards Irish landowners. Mr. Redmond holds that imprisoned dynamiters
and other criminals should be released, whether guilty or not, and it is
therefore reasonable not to put Mr. Redmond in a position where he can
insist upon an amnesty for dynamiters and conspirators. Nor is it at all
clear that as regards amnesty any Anti-Parnellite dare dissent from the
doctrine of Mr. Redmond. It is odious, it will be said, to dwell on
faults or crimes which, were it possible, every man would wish
forgotten. But when we are asked to trust politicians who are
untrustworthy, it is a duty to say why we must refuse to them every kind
of confidence. Of the penalty for such plain speaking I am well aware.
It will be said that to attack the Irish leaders is to slander the Irish
people. This is untrue. In times of revolution men perpetually come to
the front unworthy of the nation whom they lead. To treat distrust of
the leaders of the Land League as dislike or distrust of the Irish
people is as unfair as to say that the censor of Robespierre, of Marat,
or of Barere denies that during the Revolution Frenchmen displayed high
genius and rare virtues. There are thousands of Irishmen who will
endorse every word I have written about the Irish leaders. Add to this
that I am not called upon to pronounce any further condemnation upon the
party than was pronounced upon the chief among them by the Special
Commission. All I assert is that from the nature of things the men found
guilty by the Commission cannot inspire trust.

Power, it is often intimated, teaches its own lessons. Trust Irishmen
with the government of their own country, and you may feel confident
that experience will teach them how to govern justly.

To this argument I need not myself provide a reply: it has been
admirably given by my friend Mr. Bryce. Every word which in the
following passage refers to the State legislatures of the United States
applies in principle to the future Parliament at Dublin:--

'The chief lesson which a study of the more vicious among the State
legislatures teaches, is that power does not necessarily bring
responsibility in its train. I should be ashamed to write down so
bald a platitude were it not that it is one of those platitudes
which are constantly forgotten or ignored. People who know well
enough that, in private life, wealth or rank or any other kind of
power is as likely to mar a man as to make him, to lower as to
raise his sense of duty, have nevertheless contracted the habit of
talking as if human nature changed when it entered public life, as
if the mere possession of public functions, whether of voting or of
legislating, tended of itself to secure their proper exercise. We
know that power does not purify men in despotic governments, but we
talk as if it did so in free governments. Every one would of course
admit, if the point were put flatly to him, that power alone is not
enough, but that there must be added to power, in the case of the
voter, a direct interest in the choice of good men, in the case of
the legislator, responsibility to the voters, in the case of both,
a measure of enlightenment and honour. What the legislatures of the
worst States show is not merely the need for the existence of a
sound public opinion, for such a public opinion exists, but the
need for methods by which it can be brought into efficient action
upon representatives who, if they are left to themselves, and are
not individually persons with a sense of honour and a character to
lose, will be at least as bad in public life as they could be in
private. The greatness of the scale on which they act, and of the
material interests they control, will do little to inspire them.
New York and Pennsylvania are by far the largest and wealthiest
States in the Union. Their legislatures are confessedly the
worst.'[131]

The passage is the more impressive just because it is not written with a
view to Ireland. No one doubts that the people of the United States,
both in morality and in talent, equal if they do not excel the people of
any other country in the world. But the warmest eulogist of America
seeks throughout his work for the explanation of the fact which is
really past dispute, that the political morality of the United States
sinks below the general morality of the nation.[132] There is not the
least reason why under a vicious constitution the government at Dublin
should not reflect or exaggerate the vices, rather than represent the
noble qualities and the gifts, of the Irish people.

But the doctrine of trust takes another and more general form. You may
place confidence, it is alleged, in the goodness of human nature, and
should believe that the concession of Home Rule, just because it meets
the wishes of the Irish people, will take away every source of
discontent, and thereby remove any difficulty in making even an
imperfect constitution work well.

To this the answer may fairly be made, which I have made in the
preceding pages, that Home Rule does not meet the wish of the most
important part of the Irish people, but in truth arouses their
abhorrence, and that even Home Rulers care much less than Gladstonians
suppose about constitutional changes. To give a man a vote for a
Parliament at Dublin when he is demanding an acre or two of land, comes
very near giving him a stone when he asks for bread. But I assume for a
moment that the Irishmen, who express no great enthusiasm for the Home
Rule Bill, desire the new constitution as ardently as sixty years or so
ago our fathers desired parliamentary reform. Yet even on this
assumption the belief in Home Rule as a panacea for Irish ills is
childish, and belongs to a bygone stage of opinion. We now know that
changes in political machinery, however important, do not of themselves
produce content. A poverty-stricken peasant in Connaught will not be
made happy because a Parliament meets at Dublin. We now further know
that the difficulty of satisfying popular aspirations often arises from
the fundamental faults of human nature. Trust in the people may often be
wiser than distrust, but to suppose that masses of men are wiser, more
reasonable, or more virtuous than the individuals of which they consist,
is as idle a political delusion as the corresponding ecclesiastical
delusion that a church has virtues denied to the believers who make up
the church. On this point an anecdote makes my meaning clearer than an
argument. On May 15, 1848, the French National Assembly was invaded by
an armed mob, who shouted and yelled for three hours and more, and
threatened at any moment to slaughter the representatives of France.
From June 22-26, 1848, there raged the most terrible of the
insurrections which Paris has seen. For the first time in modern history
the workmen of the capital rose against the body of the more or less
well-to-do citizens. There was not a man in Paris who did not tremble
for his property and his life. Householders feared the very servants in
their homes. Between these days of ferocity intervened a day of
sentiment. On May 21, 1848, the Assembly attended a Feast of Concord.
There were carts filled with allegorical figures, there were
processions, there were embraces; the whole town, soldiers, national
guards, gardes mobiles, armed workmen, a million of men or more, passed
in array before the deputies. The feast was a feast of concord, but
every deputy had provided himself with pistols or some weapon of
defence. This was the occasion when we are told by the reporter of the
scene, 'Carnot said to me with a touch of that silliness (_niaiserie_)
which is always to be found mixed up with the virtues of honest
democrats, "Believe me, my dear colleague, you must always trust the
people." I remember I answered him rather rudely, "Ah! why didn't you
remind me of that on the day before May 15?"' The anecdote is told by
the greatest political thinker whom France has produced since the days
of Montesquieu. 'Trust in the people' did not appear the last word of
political wisdom to Alexis de Tocqueville.[133]

The Gladstonian pleas to which answer has been made are, it will be
said, arguments not in favour of our new constitution, but in support of
Home Rule. The remark is just; it points to a curious weakness in the
reasoning of Gladstonians. They adduce many reasons of more or less
weight for conceding some kind of Home Rule to Ireland. But few indeed
are the reasons put forward, either in the House of Commons or
elsewhere, in favour of the actual Home Rule Bill of 1893. As to the
merits of this definite measure Ministerialists show a singular
reticence. It may be that they wish to save time and hold that the
measure commends itself without any recommendation by force of its own
inherent merits. But to a critic of the new constitution another
explanation suggests itself. Can it be possible that Ministerialists
themselves are not certain what are the fixed principles of the new
policy? Everything about it is indefinite, vague, uncertain. Who can say
with assurance what Gladstonians understand by Imperial supremacy? Is
there or is there not any idea of excluding Ulster from the operation of
the Bill? Is it or is it not a principle that members from Ireland shall
be summoned to Westminster? Are the Irish members, if summoned, to vote
on all matters, or on some only? To each of these questions the only
answer that can be given is--nobody knows. But in this state of
ignorance it is natural and excusable that apologists should confine
themselves to general lines of defence. No politician who respects
himself would willingly risk a vigorous apology for the special
provisions of a particular measure, when, for aught he knows, the
provision which he thinks essential turns out to be an unimportant
detail, and is liable to sudden variation.

FOOTNOTES:

[108] 'I have told you candidly my sentiments. I think they are not
likely to alter yours.... But hereafter they may be of some use to you,
in some future form which your commonwealth may take. In the present it
can hardly remain; but before its final settlement it may be obliged to
pass, as one of our poets says, "through great varieties of untried
being," and in all its transmigrations to be purified by fire and
blood.'--_Burke's Works_, ii. (ed. 1872), p. 517, 'Reflections on the
Revolution in France.'

[109] As to the general causes of the strength of the Home Rule movement
in England, and the general considerations in its favour, see _England's
Case against Home Rule_ (3rd ed.), ch. iii. and iv. pp. 34-127. From the
opinions expressed in these chapters I see no reason for receding.

[110] Mr. M'Carthy, April 10, 1893, _Times Parliamentary Debate_, 353.

[111] [May 6, 1882. Now twenty-nine years back.]

[112] Every one should read Mr. Lecky's letter of April 4, 1893,
addressed to the Belfast Chamber of Commerce, and printed in the
_Chamber's Reply_ to Mr. Gladstone's speech. It deals immediately not
with the relations between England and Ireland, but with the alleged
prosperity of Ireland under Grattan's Constitution. But in principle it
applies to the point here discussed, and I venture to say that every
page of Mr. Lecky's _History of England in the Eighteenth Century_ which
refers to Grattan's Parliament bears out the contention, that no
inference can be drawn from it as to the successful working, as regards
either England or Ireland, of the legislature to be constituted under
the Home Rule Bill.

[113] Add also that steamboats and railways have practically, since the
time of Grattan, brought Ireland nearer to England, and Dublin nearer to
London. At the end of the last or the beginning of this century a Lord
Lieutenant was for weeks prevented by adverse winds from crossing from
Holyhead to Dublin. Mr. Morley can attend a Cabinet Council at
Westminster one afternoon and breakfast next morning in Dublin.

[114] With the conclusions as to Home Rule of my lamented friend Mr.
Freeman it is impossible for me to agree. But for that very reason I can
the more freely insist upon the merit of his paper on _Irish Home Rule
and its Analogies_ as an attempt to clear up our ideas as to the meaning
of Home Rule. He, for instance, points out that the relations between
Hungary and Austria do not constitute the relation of Home Rule and
afford no analogy to the relation which Home Rulers propose to establish
between Great Britain and Ireland. See _The New Princeton Review_ for
1888, vol. vi. pp. 172, 190.

[115] A Gladstonian who thinks the case of the Channel Islands in point,
would do well to get up the facts of their history. They were no more
'given' a constitution by England than, as most Frenchmen believe, they
were conquered from France. See Mr. Haldane, April 7, 1893, _Times
Parliamentary Debates_, p. 333.

[116] They have now (1911) led to political separation, happily without
the need for civil war.

[117] See further on this point, Home Rule as Federalism, _England's
Case against Home Rule_ (3rd ed.), pp. 160-197, and for Home Rule as
Colonial Independence, _ib_. pp. 197-218.

[118] Then the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

[119] See 'Andrew Jackson,' _American Statesmen Series_, p. 182.

[120] Hilty, _Separatabdruck aus dem Politischen Jahrbuch der
Schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft_ (_Jahrgang_ 1891), p. 377.

[121] For the story of Kavanagh, Hanlon, and Smith, and their attempted
landing at Melbourne, see _England's Case_ (3rd ed.), p. 207.

[122] Mr. Gladstone, February 13, 1893, _Times Parliamentary Debates_,
p. 307.

[123] An eminent and very able Gladstonian M.P. once said in my
presence, in effect, for I cannot cite his actual words, that the
difference between Gladstonians and Unionists was a difference in their
judgment of character or of human nature. He touched I believe far more
nearly than do most politicians the root of the differences which divide
the authors and the critics of our new constitution.

[124] Report of Special Commission, pp. 54, 55.

[125] _Ibid_. pp. 53, 119.

[126] _Ibid_. pp. 119, 120.

[127] Report of Special Commission, p. 120.

[128] _Ibid_.

[129] This Committee Room was the scene of the desertion of Parnell by
the majority of his former followers.

[130] 'The crime of the Land League was a trifle compared to the crime
of the landlords.'--Mr. Sexton, April 20, 1893, _Times Parliamentary
Debates_, p. 525.

[131] Bryce, _American Commonwealth_ (1st ed.), ii. pp. 190, 191.

[132] Compare _ibid_. ii. p. 618.

[133] 'Carnot me dit avec cette niaiserie que les democrates honnetes ne
manquent guere de meler a leur vertu: "Croyez-moi, mon cher collegue, il
faut toujours se fier au peuple." Je me rappelle que je lui repondis
assez brusquement: "Eh! que ne me disiez-vous cela la veille du 15
mai?"'--_Souvenirs de Alexis de Tocqueville_, p. 196.

CHAPTER V

THE PATH OF SAFETY

We stand on the brink of a precipice.[134] To say that Englishmen are
asked to take a leap in the dark is far to understate the peril of the
moment. We are asked to leave an arduous but well-known road, and to
spring down an unfathomed ravine filled with rocks, on any one of which
we may be dashed to pieces.

The very excess of the peril hides its existence from ordinary citizens.
Mr. Gladstone, they argue, is a wise man and a good man, his colleagues
are partisans, they are not conspirators; it is incredible that they
should recommend a measure fraught with ruin to England. But the matter
is intelligible enough. Mr. Gladstone's weakness, no less than his
strength, has always lain in his temporary but exclusive preoccupation
with some one dominant idea. The one notion which possesses his mind--to
judge from his public conduct and speeches--is that at any cost Home
Rule, that is, an Irish Executive and an Irish Parliament, must be
conceded to Ireland. Enthusiasm, pride, ambition, all the motives, good
and bad, which can influence a statesman, urge him to achieve this one
object. If he succeeds his political career is crowned with victory, if
not with final triumph; if he fails his whole course during the last
seven years turns out an error. But it has long been manifest that only
with the greatest difficulty can English electors be persuaded to accept
Home Rule. Hence it has been found essential that the principles of the
measure should not be known before the time for passing it into law.
Hence the ill-starred avoidance of discussion. Hence the ultimate
framing of a scheme which is made to pass, but is not made to work, and
which probably enough does not represent the real wishes or convictions
of any one statesman. Where is the Minister who will tell us that this
particular Government of Ireland Bill is according to his judgment--I
will not say in its details, but in each and all of its leading
principles--the best constitution which can be framed for determining
the relations between England and Ireland? This Minister has not
appeared--I doubt whether he exists. The Bill may be a model of artful
provision for conciliating the prejudices or soothing the fears of
English electors, but it is not a well-digested constitution. It is
inferior to the Home Rule Bill of 1886. Another consequence of the
circumstances under which the Bill has been framed is that its authors
themselves have never had the benefit to be derived from the mature
discussion of its principles. Mr. Gladstone himself cannot say what are
and what are not the fundamental ideas of his scheme. He obviously held,
at any rate when the Bill was introduced, that the presence of the Irish
members at Westminster was a detail, whereas it is in reality the fact
which governs the character of the new constitution. To imply that such
a matter can be treated as subsidiary is, in the eyes of any student of
constitutions, as ridiculous as it would seem to Mr. Gladstone for a
Chancellor of the Exchequer, on introducing his budget, to assert that,
whether he maintained or did not maintain the income tax, was an organic
detail which did not fundamentally affect his financial proposals. The
Ministry are as much at sea as their chief; nor is this wonderful. There
are two things of which English statesmen have had little experience.
The one is a revolutionary movement, the other is the construction of a
constitution. But the Home Rule Bill is at once the effect and the sign
of a revolutionary movement, and the task in which the Gladstonians are
engaged is the formation of a new constitution. Blind leaders are
leading a blind people, and our blind leaders, some of whom care more
for Radical supremacy in England than for Imperial supremacy in Ireland,
are like many other men of our time, the slaves of phrases, such as
'trust in the people,' which pass muster for principles. If the blind
lead the blind, what wonder if they stumble over a precipice?

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