Handbook of Home Rule (1887) by W. E. Gladstone et al.

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

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

FOOTNOTES:

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

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

LESSONS OF IRISH HISTORY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

BY W.E. GLADSTONE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Novus saecorum nascitur ordo."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In order to measure the space which had at this period been covered by
the forward movement of liberality and patriotism, it is necessary to
look back to the early years of the Georgian period, when Whiggism had
acquired a decisive ascendency, and the spirits of the great deep were
let loose against Popery. But the temper of proscription in the two
countries exhibited specific differences. Extravagant in both, it became
in Ireland vulgar and indecent. In England, it was Tilburina,[90] gone
mad in white satin; in Ireland it was Tilburina's maid, gone mad in
white linen. The Lords Justices of Ireland, in 1715, recommended the
Parliament to put an end to all other distinctions in Ireland "but that
of Protestant and Papist."[91] And the years that followed seem to mark
the lowest point of constitutional depression for the Roman Catholic
population in particular, as well as for Ireland at large. The Commons,
in 1715, prayed for measures to discover any Papist enlisting in the
King's service, in order that he might be expelled "and punished with
the utmost severity of the law."[92] When an oath of abjuration had been
imposed which prevented nearly all priests from registering, a Bill was
passed by the Commons in 1719 for branding the letter P on the cheek of
all priests, who were unregistered, with a red-hot iron. The Privy
Council "disliked" this punishment, and substituted for it the loathsome
measure by which safe guardians are secured for Eastern harems. The
English Government could not stomach this beastly proposal; and, says
Mr. Lecky,[93] unanimously restored the punishment of branding. The
Bill was finally lost in Ireland, but only owing to a clause concerning
leases. It had gone to England winged with a prayer from the Commons
that it might be recommended "in the most effectual manner to his
Majesty," and by the assurance of the Viceroy in reply that they might
depend on his due regard to what was desired.[94] In the same year
passed the Act which declared the title of the British Parliament to
make laws for the government of Ireland. On the accession of George II.,
a considerable body of Roman Catholics offered an address of
congratulation. It was received by the Lords Justices with silent
contempt, and no one knows whether it ever reached its destination.
Finally, the acute state-craft of Primate Boulter resisted habitually
the creation of an "Irish interest," and above all any capacity of the
Roman Catholics to contribute to its formation; and in the first year of
George II. a clause was introduced in committee into a harmless Bill[95]
for the regulation of elections, which disfranchised at a single stroke
all the Roman Catholic voters in Ireland who up to that period had
always enjoyed the franchise.

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