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

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There are about eighty, closely printed, large octavo pages of this kind
of testimony given by sufferers from the outrages.

Something was done to suppress the Ku-Klux by a Federal Act passed in
1871, which made offences of this kind punishable in the Federal Courts.
Considerable numbers of them were arrested, tried, and convicted, and
sent to undergo their punishment in the Northern jails. But there was no
complete pacification of the South until the carpet-bag governments were
refused the support of the Federal troops by President Hayes, on his
accession to power in 1876. Then the carpet-bag _regime_ disappeared
like a house of cards. The chief carpet-baggers fled, and the government
passed at once into the hands of the native whites. I do not propose to
defend or explain the way in which they have since then kept it in their
hands, by suppressing or controlling the negro vote. This is not
necessary to my purpose.

What I seek to show is that the Irish are not peculiar in their manner
of expressing their discontent with a government directed or controlled
by the public opinion of another indifferent or semi-hostile community
which it is impossible to resist in open warfare; that Anglo-Saxons
resort to somewhat the same methods under similar circumstances, and
that lawlessness and cruelty, considered as expressions of political
animosity, do not necessarily argue any incapacity for the conduct of an
orderly and efficient government, although I admit freely that they do
argue a low state of civilization.

I will add one more illustration which, although more remote than those
which I have taken from the Southern States during the reconstruction
period, is not too remote for my purpose, and is in some respects
stronger than any of them. I do not know a more orderly community in the
world, or one which, down to the outbreak of the Civil War, when
manufactures began to multiply, and the Irish immigration began to pour
in, had a higher average of intelligence than the State of Connecticut.
Down to 1818 all voters in that State had to be members of the
Congregational Church. It had no large cities, and this, with the aid of
its seat of learning, Yale College, preserved in it, I think, in greater
purity than even Massachusetts, the old Puritan simplicity of manners,
the Puritan spirit of order and thrift, and the business-like view of
government which grew out of the practice of town government. A less
sentimental community, I do not think, exists anywhere, or one in which
the expression of strong feeling on any subject but religion is less
cultivated or viewed with less favour. In the matter of managing their
own political affairs in peace or war, I do not expect the Irish to
equal the Connecticut people for a hundred years to come, no matter how
much practice they may have in the interval, and I think that fifty
years ago it was only picked bodies of Englishmen who could do so. Yet,
in 1833, in the town of Canterbury, one of the most orderly and
intelligent in the State, an estimable and much-esteemed lady, Miss
Prudence Crandall, was carrying on a girls' school, when something
happened to touch her conscience about the condition of the free negroes
of the North. She resolved, in a moment of enthusiasm, to undertake the
education of negro girls only. What follows forms one of the most famous
episodes in the anti-slavery struggle in America, and is possibly
familiar to many of the older readers of this article. I shall extract
the account of it as given briefly in the lately published life of
William Lloyd Garrison, by his sons. Some of the details are much worse
than is here described.

"The story of this remarkable case cannot be pursued here except in
brief.... It will be enough to say that the struggle between the modest
and heroic young Quaker woman and the town lasted for nearly two years;
that the school was opened in April; that attempts were immediately made
under the law to frighten the pupils away and to fine Miss Crandall for
harbouring them; that in May an Act prohibiting private schools for
non-resident coloured persons, and providing for the expulsion of the
latter, was procured from the legislature, amid the greatest rejoicing
in Canterbury (even to the ringing of church bells); that, under this
Act, Miss Crandall was in June arrested and temporarily imprisoned in
the county jail, twice tried (August and October) and convicted; that
her case was carried up to the Supreme Court of Errors, and her
persecutors defeated on a technicality (July, 1834), and that pending
this litigation the most vindictive and inhuman measures were taken to
isolate the school from the countenance and even the physical support of
the townspeople. The shops and the meeting-house were closed against
teacher and pupils, carriage in the public conveyances was denied them,
physicians would not wait upon them, Miss Crandall's own family and
friends were forbidden, under penalty of heavy fines, to visit her, the
well was filled with manure and water from other sources refused, the
house itself was smeared with filth, assailed with rotten eggs and
stones, and finally set on fire" (vol. i. p. 321).

Miss Crandall is still living in the West, in extreme old age, and the
Connecticut legislature voted her a small pension two years ago, as a
slight expiation of the ignominy and injustice from which she had
suffered at the hands of a past generation.

The _Spectator_ frequently refers to the ferocious hatred displayed
toward the widow of Curtin, the man who was cruelly murdered by
moonlighters somewhere in Kerry, as an evidence of barbarism which
almost, if not quite, justifies the denial of self-government to a
people capable of producing such monsters in one spot and on one
occasion. Let me match this from Mississippi with a case which I
produce, not because it was singular, but because it was notorious at
the North, where it occurred, in 1877. One Chisholm, a native of the
State, and a man of good standing and character, became a Republican
after the war, and was somewhat active in organizing the negro voters in
his district. He was repeatedly warned by some of his neighbours to
desist and abandon politics, but continued resolutely on his course. A
mob, composed of many of the leading men in the town, then attacked him
in his house. He made his escape, with his wife and young daughter and
son, a lad of fourteen, to the jail. His assailants broke the jail open,
and killed him and his son, and desperately wounded the daughter. The
poor lad received such a volley of bullets, that his blood went in one
rush to the floor, and traced the outlines of his trunk on the ceiling
of the room below, where it remained months afterwards, an eye-witness
told me, as an illustration of the callousness of the jailer. The
leading murderers were tried. They had no defence. The facts were not
disputed. The judge and the bar did their duty, but the jury acquitted
the prisoners without leaving their seats. Mrs. Chisholm, the widow,
found neither sympathy nor friends at the scene of the tragedy. She had
to leave the State, and found refuge in Washington, where she now holds
a clerkship in the Treasury department.

Let me cite as another illustration the violent ways in which popular
discontent may find expression in communities whose political capacity
and general respect for the law and its officers, as well as for the
sanctity of contracts, have never been questioned. Large tracts of land
were formerly held along the Hudson river in the State of New York, by a
few families, of which the Van Rensselaers and the Livingstons were the
chief, either under grants from the Dutch at the first settlement of the
colony, or from the English Crown after the conquest. That known as the
"Manor of Rensselaerwick," held by the Van Rensselaers, comprised a
tract of country extending twenty-four miles north and south, and
forty-eight miles east and west, lying on each side of the Hudson river.
It was held by the tenants for perpetual leases. The rents were, on the
Van Rensselaer estate, fourteen bushels of wheat for each hundred acres,
and four fat hens, and one day's service with a carriage and horses, to
each farm of one hundred and sixty acres. Besides this, there was a fine
on alienation amounting to about half a year's rent. The Livingston
estates were let in much the same way.

In 1839, Stephen Van Rensselaer, the proprietor, or "Patroon" as he was
called, died, with $400,000 due to him as arrears from the tenants, for
which, being a man of easy temper, he had forborne to press them. But he
left the amount in trust by his will for the payment of his debts, and
his heirs proceeded to collect it, and persisted in the attempt during
the ensuing seven years. What then happened I shall describe in the
words of Mr. John Bigelow. Mr. Tilden was a member of the State
Legislature in 1846, and was appointed Chairman of a Committee to
investigate the rent troubles, and make the report which furnished the
basis for the legislation by which they were subsequently settled. Mr.
Bigelow, who has edited Mr. Tilden's _Public Writings and Speeches_,
prefaces the report with the following explanatory note:--

"Attempts were made to enforce the collection of these rents. The
tenants resisted. They established armed patrols, and, by the adoption
of various disguises, were enabled successfully to defy the civil
authorities. Eventually it became necessary to call out the military,
but the result was only partially satisfactory. These demonstrations of
authority provoked the formation of 'anti-rent clubs' throughout the
manorial district, with a view of acquiring a controlling influence in
the legislature. Small bands, armed and disguised as Indians, were also
formed to hold themselves in readiness at all times to resist the
officers of the law whenever and wherever they attempted to serve legal
process upon the tenants. The principal roads throughout the infected
district were guarded by the bands so carefully, and the animosity
between the tenants and the civil authorities was so intense, that at
last it became dangerous for any one not an anti-renter to be found in
these neighbourhoods. It was equally dangerous for the landlords to make
any appeal to the law or for the collection of rents or for protection
of their persons. When Governor Wright entered upon his duties in Albany
in 1845, he found that the anti-rent party had a formidable
representation in the legislature, and that the questions involved were
assuming an almost national importance."

The sheriff made gallant attempts to enforce the law, but his deputies
were killed, and a legal investigation in which two hundred persons were
examined, failed to reveal the perpetrators of the crime. The militia
were called out, but they were no more successful than the sheriff. In
the case of one murder committed in Delaware County in 1845, however,
two persons were convicted, but their sentence was commuted to
imprisonment for life. Various others concerned in the disturbances were
convicted of minor offences, but when Governor Young succeeded Governor
Seward after an election in which the anti-renters showed considerable
voting strength, he pardoned them all on the ground that their crimes
were political. The dispute was finally settled by a compromise--that
is, the Van Rensselaers and the Livingstons both sold their estates,
giving quit-claim deeds to the tenants for what they chose to pay, and
the granting of agricultural leases for a longer term than twelve years
was forbidden by the State Constitution of 1846.

This anti-rent agitation is described by Professor Johnston of
Princeton, in the _Cyclopaedia of Political Science_, as "a reign of
terror which for ten years practically suspended the operations of law
and the payment of rent throughout the district." Suppose all the land
of the State had been held under similar tenures; that the controversy
had lasted one hundred years; that the rents had been high; and that the
Van Rensselaers and the Livingstons had had the aid of the Federal army
in enforcing distraints and evictions, and in enabling them to set local
opinion at defiance, what do you suppose the state of morals and manners
would have been in New York by this time? What would have been the
feelings of the people towards the Federal authority had the matter been
finally adjusted with the strong hand, in accordance, not with the views
of the people of the State, but of the landholders of South Carolina or
of the district of Columbia? I am afraid they would have been terribly
Irish.

I know very well the risk I run, in citing all these precedents and
parallels, of seeming to justify, or at all events to palliate, Irish
lawlessness. But I am not doing anything of the kind. I am trying to
illustrate a somewhat trite remark which I recently made: "that
government is a very practical business, and that those succeed best in
it who bring least sentiment or enthusiasm to the conduct of their
affairs." The government of Ireland, like the government of all other
countries, is a piece of business--a very difficult piece of business, I
admit--and therefore horror over Irish doings, and the natural and human
desire to "get even with" murderers and moonlighters, by denying the
community which produces them something it would like much to possess,
should have no influence with those who are charged with Irish
government. It is only in nurseries and kindergartens that we can give
offenders their exact due and withhold their toffee until they have
furnished satisfactory proofs of repentance. Rulers of men have to
occupy themselves mainly with the question of drying up the sources of
crime, and often, in order to accomplish this, to let much crime and
disorder go unwhipped of justice.

With the state of mind which cannot bear to see any concessions made to
the Irish Nationalists because they are such wicked men, in which so
many excellent Englishmen, whom we used to think genuine political
philosophers, are now living, we are very familiar in the United States.
It is a state of mind which prevailed in the Republican party with
regard to the South, down to the election of 1884, and found constant
expression on the stump and in the newspapers in what is described, in
political slang, as "waving the bloody shirt." It showed itself after
the war in unwillingness to release the South from military rule; then
in unwillingness to remove the disfranchisement of the whites or to
withdraw from the carpet-bag State governments the military support
without which they could not have existed for a day; and, last of all,
in dread of the advent of a Democratic Federal Administration in which
Southerners or "ex-rebels" would be likely to hold office. At first the
whole Republican party was more or less permeated by these ideas; but
the number of those who held them gradually diminished, until in 1884 it
was at last possible to elect a Democratic President. Nevertheless a
great multitude witnessed the entrance into the White House of a
President who is indebted for his election mainly to the States formerly
in rebellion, with genuine alarm. They feared from it something
dreadful, in the shape either of a violation of the rights of the
freedmen, or of an assault on the credit and stability of the Federal
Government. Nothing but actual experiment would have disabused them.

I am very familiar with the controversy with them, for I have taken some
part in it ever since the passage of the reconstruction Acts, and I know
very well how they felt, and am sometimes greatly impressed by the
similarity between their arguments and those of the opponents of Irish
Home Rule. One of their fixed beliefs for many years, though it is now
extinct, was that Southerners were so bent on rebelling again, and were
generally so prone to rebellion, that the awful consequences of their
last attempt in the loss of life and property, had made absolutely no
impression on them. The Southerner was, in fact, in their eyes, what Mr.
Gladstone says the Irishman is in the eyes of some Englishmen: "A _lusus
naturae_; that justice, common sense, moderation, national prosperity had
no meaning for him; that all he could appreciate was strife and
perpetual dissension. It was for many years useless to point out to them
the severity of the lesson taught by the Civil War as to the physical
superiority of the North, or the necessity of peace and quiet to enable
the new generation of Southerners to restore their fortunes, or even
gain a livelihood. Nor was it easy to impress them with the
inconsistency of arguing that it was slavery which made Southerners what
they were before they went to war, and maintaining at the same time that
the disappearance of slavery would produce no change in their manners,
ideas, or opinions. All this they answered by pointing to speeches
delivered by some fiery adorer of "the lost cause," to the Ku-Klux
outrages, to political murders, like that of Chisholm, to the building
of monuments to the Confederate dead, or to some newspaper expression of
reverence for Confederate nationality. In fact, for fully ten years
after the close of the war the collection of Southern "outrages" and
their display before Northern audiences, was the chief work of
Republican politicians. In 1876, during the Hayes-Tilden canvass, the
opening speech which furnished what is called "the key-note of the
campaign" was made by Mr. Wheeler, the Republican candidate for the
Vice-Presidency, and his advice to the Vermonters, to whom it was
delivered, was "to vote as they shot," that is, to go to the polls with
the same feelings and aims as those with which they enlisted in the war.

I need hardly tell English readers how all this has ended. The
withdrawal of the Federal troops from the South by President Hayes, and
the consequent complete restoration of the State governments to the
discontented whites, have fully justified the expectations of those who
maintained that it is no less true in politics than in physics, that if
you remove what you see to be the cause, the effect will surely
disappear. It is true, at least in the Western world, that if you give
communities in a reasonable degree the management of their own affairs,
the love of material comfort and prosperity which is now so strong among
all civilized, and even partially civilized men, is sure in the long run
to do the work of creating and maintaining order; or, as Mr. Gladstone
has expressed it, in setting up a government, "the best and surest
foundation we can find to build on is the foundation afforded by the
affections, the convictions, and the will of men."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 2: Report of Secretary of War, 1869-70, vol. i. p. 89.]

HOW WE BECAME HOME RULERS.

BY JAMES BRYCE, M.P.

In the Home Rule contest of the last eighteen months no argument has
been more frequently used against the Liberal party than the charge of
sudden, and therefore, it would seem, dishonest change of view. "You
were opposed to an Irish Parliament at the election of 1880 and for some
time afterward; you are not entitled to advocate it in 1886." "You
passed a Coercion Bill in 1881, your Ministry (though against the
protests of an active section of its supporters) passed another Coercion
Bill in 1882; you have no right to resist a third such Bill in 1887,
and, if you do, your conduct can be due to nothing but party spite and
revenge at your own exclusion from office." Reproaches of this kind are
now the stock-in-trade, not merely of the ordinary politician, who, for
want of a case, abuses the plaintiff's attorney, but of leading men,
and, still more, of leading newspapers, who might be thought bound to
produce from recent events and an examination of the condition of
Ireland some better grounds for the passion they display. It is
noticeable that such reproaches come more often from the so-called
Liberal Unionists than from the present Ministry. Perhaps, with their
belief that all Liberals are unprincipled revolutionaries, the Tories
deem a sin more or less to be of small account. Perhaps a recollection
of their own remarkable gyrations, before and after the General
Election of 1885, may suggest that the less said about the past the
better for everybody. Be the cause what it may, it is surprising to find
that a section commanding so much ability as the group of Dissentient
Liberals does, should rely rather on the charge of inconsistency than on
the advocacy of any counter-policy of their own. It is not large and
elevated, but petty, minds that rejoice to say to an opponent (and all
the more so if he was once a friend), "You must either be wrong now, or
have been wrong then, because you have changed your opinion. I have not
changed; I was right then, and I am right now." Such an argument not
only dispenses with the necessity of sifting the facts, but it fosters
the satisfaction of the person who employs it. Consistency is the pet
virtue of the self-righteous, and the man who values himself on his
consistency can seldom be induced to see that to shut one's eyes to the
facts which time develops, to refuse to reconsider one's position by the
light they shed, to cling to an old solution when the problem is
substantially new, is a proof, not of fortitude and wisdom, but rather
of folly and conceit.

Such persons may be left to the contemplation of their own virtues. But
there are many fair-minded men of both political parties, or of neither,
who, while acquitting those Liberal members who supported Home Rule in
1886 and opposed Coercion in 1887 of the sordid or spiteful motives with
which the virulence of journalism credits them, have nevertheless been
surprised at the apparent swiftness and completeness of the change in
their opinions. It would be idle to deny that, in startling the minds of
steady-going people, this change did, for the moment, weaken the
influence and weight of those who had changed. This must be so. A man
who says now what he denied six years ago cannot expect to be believed
on his _ipse dixit_. He must set forth the grounds of his conviction. He
must explain how his views altered, and why reasons which formerly
satisfied him satisfy him no longer. It may be that the Liberal party
have omitted to do this as they ought. Occupied by warm and incessant
discussions, and conscious, I venture to believe, of their own honesty,
few of its members have been at the trouble of showing what were the
causes which modified their views, and what the stages of the process
which carried them from the position of 1880 to that of 1886.

Of that process I shall attempt in the following pages to give a sketch.
Such a sketch, though mainly retrospective, is pertinent to the issues
which now divide the country. It will indicate the origin and the
strength of the chief reasons by which Liberals are now governed. And,
if executed with proper fairness and truth, it may, as a study in
contemporary history, be of some little interest to those who in future
will attempt to understand our present conflict. The causes which
underlie changes of opinion are among the most obscure phenomena in
history, because those who undergo, these changes are often only half
conscious of them, and do not think of recording that which is
imperceptible in its growth, and whose importance is not realized till
it already belongs to the past.

The account which follows is based primarily on my own recollection of
the phases of opinion and feeling through which I myself, and the
friends whom I knew most intimately in the House of Commons, passed
during the Parliament which sat from 1880 till 1885. But I should not
think of giving it to the public if I did not believe that what happened
to our minds happened to many others also, and that the record of our
own slow movement from the position of 1880 to that of 1886 is
substantially a record of the movement of the Liberal party at large. We
were fairly typical members of that party, loyal to our leaders, but
placing the principles for which the Liberal party exists above the
success of the party itself; with our share of prepossessions and
prejudices, yet with reasonably open minds, and (as we believed)
inferior to no other section of the House of Commons in patriotism and
in attachment to the Constitution. I admit frankly that when we entered
Parliament we knew less about the Irish question than we ought to have
known, and that even after knowledge had been forced upon us, we were
more deferential to our leaders than was good either for us or for them.
But these are faults always chargeable on the great majority of members.
It is because those of whom I speak were in these respects fairly
typical, that it seems worth while to trace the history of their
opinions. If any one should accuse me of attributing to an earlier year
sentiments which began to appear in a later one, I can only reply that I
am aware of this danger, as one which always besets those who recall
their past states of mind, and that I have done my utmost to avoid it.

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