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

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

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22

The change I have to describe was slow and gradual. It was
reluctant--that is to say, it seemed rather forced upon us by the
teaching of events than the work of our own minds. Each session marked a
further stage in it; and I therefore propose to examine its progress
session by session.

Session of 1880.--The General Election of 1880 turned mainly on the
foreign policy of Lord Beaconsfield's Government. Few Liberal candidates
said much about Ireland. Absorbed in the Eastern and Afghan questions,
they had not watched the progress of events in Ireland with the
requisite care, nor realized the gravity of the crisis which was
approaching. They were anxious to do justice to Ireland, in the way of
amending both the land laws and local government, but saw no reason for
going further. Nearly all of them refused, even when pressed by Irish
electors in their constituencies, to promise to vote for that
"parliamentary inquiry into the demand for Home Rule," which was then
propounded by those electors as a sort of test question. We (_i.e._ the
Liberal candidates of 1880) then declared that we thought an Irish
Parliament would involve serious constitutional difficulties, and that
we saw no reason why the Imperial Parliament should not do full justice
to Ireland. Little was said about Coercion. Hopes were expressed that it
would not be resorted to, but very few (if any) pledged themselves
against it.

When Mr. Forster was appointed Irish Secretary in Mr. Gladstone's
Government which the General Election brought into power, we (by which I
mean throughout the new Liberal members) were delighted. We knew him to
be conscientious, industrious, kind-hearted. We believed him to be
penetrating and judicious. We applauded his conduct in not renewing the
Coercion Act which Lord Beaconsfield's Government had failed to renew
before dissolving Parliament, and which indeed there was scarcely time
left after the election to renew, a fact which did not save Mr. Forster
from severe censure on the part of the Tories.

The chief business of the session was the Compensation for Disturbance
Bill, which Mr. Forster brought in for the sake of saving from immediate
eviction tenants whom a succession of bad seasons had rendered utterly
unable to pay their rents. This Bill was pressed through the House of
Commons with the utmost difficulty, and at an expenditure of time which
damaged the other work of the session, though the House continued to sit
into September. The Executive Government declared it to be necessary, in
order not only to relieve the misery of the people, but to secure the
tranquillity of the country. Nevertheless, the whole Tory party, and a
considerable section of the Liberal party, opposed it in the interests
of the Irish landlords, and of economic principles in general,
principles which (as commonly understood in England) it certainly
trenched on. When it reached the House of Lords it was contemptuously
rejected, and the unhappy Irish Secretary left to face as he best might
the cries of a wretched peasantry and the rising tide of outrage. What
was even more remarkable, was the coolness with which the Liberal party
took the defeat of a Bill their leaders had pronounced absolutely
needed. Had it been an English Bill of the same consequence to England
as it was to Ireland, the country would have been up in arms against the
House of Lords, demanding the reform or the abolition of a Chamber which
dared to disregard the will of the people. But nothing of the kind
happened. It was only an Irish measure. We relieved ourselves by a few
strong words, and the matter dropped.

It was in this session that the Liberal party first learnt what sort of
a spirit was burning in the hearts of Irish members. There had been
obstruction in the last years of the previous Parliament, but, as the
Tories were in power, they had to bear the brunt of it. Now that a
Liberal Ministry reigned, it fell on the Liberals. At first it incensed
us. Full of our own good intentions towards Ireland, we thought it
contrary to nature that Irish members should worry us, their friends, as
they had worried Tories, their hereditary enemies. Presently we came to
understand how matters stood. The Irish members made little difference
between the two great English parties. Both represented to them a
hostile domination. Both were ignorant of the condition of their
country. Both cared so little about Irish questions that nothing less
than deeds of violence out of doors or obstruction within doors could
secure their attention. Concessions had to be extorted from both by the
same devices; Coercion might be feared at the hands of both. Hence the
Irish party was resolved to treat both parties alike, and play off the
one against the other in the interests of Ireland alone, using the
questions which divide Englishmen and Scotchmen merely as levers
whereby to effect their own purposes, because themselves quite
indifferent to the substantial merits of those questions. To us new
members this was an alarming revelation. We found that the House of
Commons consisted of two distinct and dissimilar bodies: a large British
body (including some few Tories and Liberals from Ireland), which,
though it was distracted by party quarrels, really cared for the welfare
of the country and the dignity of the House, and would set aside its
quarrels in the presence of a great emergency; and a small Irish body,
which, though it spoke the English language, was practically foreign,
felt no interest in, no responsibility for, the business of Britain or
the Empire, and valued its place in the House only as a means of making
itself so disagreeable as to obtain its release. When we had grasped
this fact, we began to reflect on its causes and conjecture its effects.
We had read of the same things in the newspapers, but what a difference
there is between reading a drama in your study and seeing it acted on
the stage! We realized what Irish feeling was when we heard these angry
cries, and noted how appeals that would have affected English partisans
fell on deaf ears. I remember how one night in the summer of 1880, when
the Irish members kept us up very late over some trivial Bill of theirs,
refusing to adjourn till they had extorted terms, a friend, sitting
beside me, said, "See how things come round. They keep us out of bed
till five o'clock in the morning because our ancestors bullied theirs
for six centuries." And we saw that the natural relations of an
Executive, even a Liberal Executive, to the Irish members were those of
strife. Whose fault it was we were unable to decide. Perhaps the
Government was too stiff; perhaps the members were vexatious. Anyhow,
this strife was evidently the normal state of things, wholly unlike that
which existed between Scotch members, to whichever party they belonged,
and the executive authorities of Scotland.

Thus the session of 1880, though it did not bring us consciously nearer
to Home Rule, impressed three facts upon us: first, that the House of
Lords regarded Ireland solely from the point of view of English
landlords, sympathizing with Irish landlords; secondly, that the House
of Commons knew so little or cared so little about Ireland that when the
Executive declared a measure essential to the peace of Ireland, it
scarcely resented the rejection of that measure by the House of Lords;
thirdly, that the Irish Nationalists in the House of Commons were a
foreign body, foreign in the sense in which a needle which a man
swallows is foreign, not helping the organism to discharge its
functions, but impeding them, and setting up irritation. We did not yet
draw from these facts all the conclusions we should now draw. But the
facts were there, and they began to tell upon our minds.

SESSION OF 1881.--The winter of 1880-81 was a terrible one in Ireland.
The rejection of the Compensation for Disturbance Bill had borne the
fruit which Mr. Forster had predicted, and which the House of Lords had
ignored. Outrages were numerous and serious. The cry in England for
repressive measures had gone on rising from November, when it occasioned
a demonstration at the Guildhall banquet. Several Liberal members (of
whom I was one) went to Ireland at Christmas, to see with our own eyes
how things stood. We were struck by the difficulty of obtaining
trustworthy information in Dublin, where the richer classes, with whom
we chiefly came in contact, merely abused the Land League, while the
Land Leaguers declared that the accounts of outrages were grossly
exaggerated. The most prominent, Mr. Michael Davitt, assured me, and I
believe with perfect truth, that he had exerted himself to
discountenance outrage, and that if, as he expected, he was locked up by
the Government, outrages would increase. When one reached the disturbed
districts, where, of course, one talked to members as well of the
landlord class as of the peasantry, the general conclusion which emerged
from the medley of contradictions was that, though there was much
agrarian crime, and a pervading sense of insecurity, the disorders were
not so bad as people in England believed, and might have been dealt with
by a vigorous administration of the existing law. Unfortunately, the
so-called "better classes," full of bitterness against the Liberal
Ministry and Mr. Forster (whom they did not praise till it was too
late), had not assisted the Executive, and had allowed things to reach a
pass at which it found the work of governing very difficult.

When the Coercion Bill of 1881 was introduced, many English Liberals
were inclined to resist it. The great majority voted for it, but within
two years they bitterly repented their votes. Our motives, which I
mention by way of extenuation, not of defence, were these. The Executive
Government declared that it could not deal with crime by the ordinary
law. If its followers refused exceptional powers, they must displace the
Ministry, and let in the Tories, who would doubtless obtain such powers,
and probably use them worse. We had still confidence in Mr. Forster's
judgment, and a deference to Irish Executive Governments generally which
Parliamentary experience is well fitted to dissipate. The violence with
which the Nationalist members resisted the introduction of the Bill had
roused our blood, and the foolish attempts which the Radical and Irish
electors in some constituencies had made to deter their members from
supporting it had told the other way, and disposed these members to vote
for it, in order to show that they were not to be cowed by threats.
Finally, we were assured that votes given for the Coercion Bill would
purchase a thorough-going Land Bill, and our anxiety for the latter
induced us, naturally, but erringly, to acquiesce in the former.

When that Land Bill went into Committee we perceived how much harm the
Coercion Bill had done in intensifying the bitterness of Irish members.
Although the Ministry was fighting for their interests against the Tory
party and the so-called Whiggish section of its own supporters, who were
seeking to cut down the benefits which the measure offered to Irish
tenants, the Nationalist members regarded it, and in particular Mr.
Forster, as their foe. They resented what they deemed the insult put
upon their country. They saw those who had been fighting, often, no
doubt, by unlawful methods, for the national cause, thrown into prison
and kept there without trial. They anticipated (not without reason) the
same fortune for themselves. Hence the friendliness which the Liberal
party sought to show them met with no response, and Mr. Forster was
worried with undiminished vehemence. In the discussions on the Bill we
found the Ministry generally resisting all amendments which came from
Irish members. When these amendments seemed to us right, we voted for
them, but they were almost always defeated by the union of the Tories
with the steady Ministerialists. Subsequent events have proved that many
were right, but, whether they were right or wrong, the fact which
impressed us was that in matters which concerned Ireland only, and lay
within the exclusive knowledge of Irishmen, Irish members were
constantly outvoted by English and Scotch members, who knew nothing at
all of the merits of the case, but simply obeyed the party whip. This
happened even when the Irish members who sat on the Liberal side (such
as Mr. Dickson and his Liberal colleagues from Ulster) joined the
Nationalist section in demanding some extension of the Bill which the
Ministry refused. And we perceived that nothing incensed the Irish
members more than the feeling that their arguments were addressed to
deaf ears; that they were overborne, not by reason, but by sheer weight
of numbers. Even if they convinced the Ministry, they could seldom hope
to obtain its assent, because the Ministry had to consider the House of
Lords, sure to reject amendments which favoured the tenant, while to
detach a number of Ministerialists sufficient to carry an amendment
against the Treasury Bench, the Moderate Liberals, and the Tories, was
evidently hopeless.

At the end of the session the House of Lords came again upon the scene.
It seriously damaged the Bill by its amendments, and would have
destroyed it but for the skill with which the head of the Government
handled these amendments, accepting the least pernicious, so as to
enable the Upper House without loss of dignity to recede from those
which were wholly inadmissible. Several times it seemed as if the
conflict would have to pass from Westminster to the country, and, in
contemplating the chances of a popular agitation or a dissolution, we
were regretfully obliged to own that the English people cared too little
and knew too little about Irish questions to give us much hope of
defeating the House of Lords and the Tories upon these issues.

An incident which occurred towards the end of the session seems, though
trifling in itself, so illustrative of the illogical position in which
we stood towards Ireland, as to deserve mention. Mr. Forster, still
Chief Secretary, had brought in a Bill for extinguishing the Queen's
University in Ireland, and creating in place of it a body to be called
the Royal University, which, however, was not to be a real university at
all, but only a set of examiners plus some salaried fellowships, to be
held at various places of instruction. Regarding this as a gross
educational blunder, which would destroy a useful existing body, and
create a sham university in its place, and finding several Parliamentary
friends on whose judgment I could rely to be of the same opinion, I gave
notice of opposition to the Bill. Mr. Forster came to me, and pressed
with great warmth that the opposition should be withdrawn. The Bill, he
said, would satisfy the Roman Catholic hierarchy, and complete the work
of the Land Bill in pacifying Ireland. The Irish members wanted it: what
business had an English member to interfere to defeat their wishes, and
thwart the Executive? The reply was obvious. Not to speak of the
simplicity of expecting the hierarchy to be satisfied by this small
concession, what were such arguments but the admission of Home Rule in
its worst form? "You resist the demand of the Irish members to legislate
for Ireland; you have just been demanding, and obtaining, the support of
English members against those amendments of the Land Bill which Irish
members declare to be necessary. Now you bid us surrender our own
judgment, ignore our own responsibility, and blindly pass a Bill which
we, who have studied these university questions as they affect both
Ireland and England, believe to be thoroughly mischievous to the
prospects of higher education in Ireland, only because the Irish
members, as you say, desire it. Do one thing or the other. Either give
them the power and the responsibility, or leave both with the Imperial
Parliament. You are now asking us to surrender the power, but to remain
still subject to the responsibility. We will not bear the latter without
the former. We shall prefer Home Rule." Needless to add that this
device--a sample of the petty sops by which successive generations of
English statesmen, Whigs and Tories alike, have sought to win over a
priesthood which uses and laughs at them--failed as completely as its
predecessors to settle the University question or to range the bishops
on the side of the Government.

The autumn and winter of 1881 revealed the magnitude of the mischief
done by making a Coercion Bill precede a Relief Bill. The Land Bill was
the largest concession made to the demands of the people since Catholic
Emancipation. It was a departure, justified by necessity, but still a
departure from our established principles of legislation. It ought to
have brought satisfaction and confidence, if not gratitude, with it;
ought to have led Ireland to believe in the sincere friendliness of
England, and produced a new cordiality between the islands. It did
nothing of the kind. It was held to have been extorted from our fears;
its grace and sweetness were destroyed by the concomitant severities
which the Coercion Act had brought into force, as wholesome food becomes
distasteful when some bitter compound has been sprinkled over it. We
were deeply mortified at this result of our efforts. What was the malign
power which made the boons we had conferred shrivel up, "like fairy
gifts fading away"? We still believed the Coercion Act to have been
justified, but lamented the fate which baffled the main object of our
efforts, the winning over Ireland to trust the justice and the capacity
of the Imperial Parliament. And thus the two facts which stood out from
the history of this eventful session were, first, that even in
legislating for the good of Ireland we were legislating against the
wishes of Ireland, imposing on her enactments which her representatives
opposed, and which we supported only at the bidding of the Ministry;
and, secondly, that at the end of a long session, entirely devoted to
her needs, we found her more hostile and not less disturbed than she had
been at its beginning. We began to wonder whether we should ever succeed
better on our present lines. But we still mostly regarded Home Rule as a
disagreeable solution.

SESSION OF 1882.--Still graver were the lessons of the first four months
of this year. Mr. Forster went on filling the prisons of Ireland with
persons whom he arrested under the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act, and
never brought to trial. But the country grew no more quiet. At last he
had nine hundred and forty men under lock and key, many of them not
"village ruffians," whose power a few weeks' detention was to break, but
political offenders, and even popular leaders. How long could this go
on? Where was it to stop? It became plain that the Act was a failure,
and that the people, trained to combination by a century and a half's
practice, were too strong for the Executive. Either the scheme and plan
of the Act had been wrong, or its administration had been incompetent.
Whichever was the source of the failure (most people will now blame
both), the fault must be laid at the door of the Irish Executive; not of
Mr. Forster himself, but of those on whom he relied. It had been a
Dublin Castle Bill, conceived and carried out by the incompetent
bureaucracy which has so long pretended to govern Ireland. Such a proof
of incompetence destroyed whatever confidence in that bureaucracy then
remained to us, and the disclosures which the Phoenix Park murders and
the subsequent proceedings against the Invincibles brought out, proved
beyond question that the Irish Executive had only succeeded in giving a
more dark and dangerous form, the form of ruthless conspiracy, to the
agitation it was combating.

When therefore the Prevention of Crime Bill of 1882 was brought in, some
of us felt unable to support it, and specially bound to resist those of
its provisions which related to trials without a jury, and to
boycotting. It was impossible, on the morrow of the Phoenix Park
murders, to deny that some coercive measure might be needed; but we had
so far lost faith in repression, and in the officials who were to
administer it, as to desire to limit it to what was absolutely
necessary, and we protested against enacting for Ireland a criminal code
which was not to be applied to Great Britain. Our resistance might have
been more successful but for the manner in which the Nationalist members
conducted their opposition. When they began to obstruct--not that under
the circumstances we felt entitled to censure them for obstructing a
Bill dealing so harshly with their countrymen--we were obliged to
desist, and our experience of the stormy scenes of the summer of 1882
deepened our sense of the passionate bitterness with which they regarded
English members, scarcely making an exception in favour of those who
were most disposed to sympathize with them. Many and many a time when we
listened to their fierce cries, we seemed to hear in them the
battle-cries of the centuries of strife between Celt and Englishman from
Athenry to Vinegar Hill; many a time we felt that this rage and mistrust
were chiefly of England's making; and yet not of England's, but rather
of the overmastering fate which had prolonged to our own days the
hatreds and the methods of barbarous times:

hemeis d' ouk aitioi esmen
Alla Zeus kai Moira kai eerophoitis Herinus.

So much of the session as the Crime Bill had spared was consumed by the
Arrears Bill, over which we had again a "crisis" with the House of
Lords. This was the third session that had been practically given up to
Irishmen. The freshness and force of the Parliament of 1880--a
Parliament full of zeal and ability--had now been almost spent, yet few
of the plans of domestic legislation spread before the constituencies of
1880 had been realized. The Government had been anxious to legislate,
their majority had been ready to support them, but Ireland had blocked
the way; and now the only expedient for improving the procedure of the
House was to summon Parliament in an extra autumn session. Here was
another cause for reflection. England and Scotland were calling for
measures promised years ago, but no time could be found to discuss them.
Nothing was done to reorganize local government, to reform the liquor
laws, to improve secondary education, to deal with the housing of the
poor, or a dozen other urgent questions, because we were busy with
Ireland; and yet how little more loyal or contented did Ireland seem to
be for all we had done. We began to ask whether Home Rule might not be
as much an English and Scotch question as an Irish question. It was, at
any rate, clear that to allow Ireland to manage her own affairs would
open a prospect for England and Scotland to obtain time to attend to
theirs.[3]

This feeling was strengthened by the result of the attempts made in the
autumn session of 1882, to improve the procedure of the House of
Commons. We had cherished the hope that more drastic remedies against
obstruction and better arrangements for the conduct of business, might
relieve much of the pressure Irish members had made us suffer. The
passing of the New Rules shattered this hope, for it was plain they
would not accomplish what was needed. Some blamed the Government for not
framing a more stringent code. Some blamed the Tory and the Irish
Oppositions (now beginning to work in concert) for cutting down the
proposals of the Government. But most of us saw, and came to see still
more clearly in the three succeeding sessions, that the evil was too
deep-rooted to be cured by any changes of procedure, unless they went so
far as to destroy freedom of debate for English members also. The
presence in a deliberative assembly of a section numbering (or likely
soon to number) one-seventh of the whole--a section seeking to lower the
character of the assembly, and to derange its mechanism, with no further
interest in the greater part of its business except that of preventing
it from conducting that business--this was the phenomenon which
confronted us, and we felt that no rules of debate would overcome the
dangers it threatened.

It is from this year 1882 that I date the impression which we formed,
that Home Rule was sure to come. "It may be a bold experiment," we said
to one another in the lobbies; "there are serious difficulties in the
way, though the case for it is stronger than we thought two years ago.
But if the Irishmen persist as they are doing now, they will get it. It
is only a question of their tenacity."

It was impossible not to be struck during the conflicts of 1881 and 1882
with the small amount of real bitterness which the conduct of the Irish
members, irritating as it often was, provoked among the Liberals, who of
course bore the brunt of the conflict. The Nationalists did their best
to injure a Government which was at the same time being denounced by the
Tories as too favourable to Irish claims; they lowered the character of
Parliament by scenes far more painful than those of the session of 1887,
on which so much indignation has been lately expended; they said the
hardest things they could think of against us in the House; they
attacked us in our constituencies. Their partisans (for I do not charge
this on the leaders) interrupted and broke up our meetings.
Nevertheless, all this did not provoke responsive hatred from the
Liberals. There could not be a greater contrast than that between the
way in which the great bulk of the Liberal members all through the
Parliament of 1880 behaved towards their Irish antagonists, and the
violence with which the Tory members, under much slighter provocation,
conduct themselves towards those antagonists now. I say this not to the
credit of our temper, which was no better than that of other men heated
by the struggles of a crowded assembly. It was due entirely to our
feeling that there was a great balance of wrong standing to the debit of
England; that if the Irish were turbulent, it was the ill-treatment of
former days that had made them so; and that, whatever might be their
methods, they were fighting for their country. Although, therefore,
there was little social intercourse between us and them, there was
always a hope and a wish that the day might come when the Liberal party
should resume its natural position of joining the representatives of the
Irish people in obtaining radical reforms in Irish government. And the
remarkable speech of February 9, 1882, in which Mr. Gladstone declared
his mind to be open on the subject, and invited the Nationalists to
propound a practicable scheme of self-government, had encouraged us to
hope that this day might soon arrive.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22