FullReads

The strength of the argument from Nationality is great, and full of significance; but Nationality is not the whole essence of either the argument from History or the argument from Self-government. Their force lies in considerations of political expediency as tested by practical experience.

The point of the argument from the lessons of History is that for some reason or another the international concern, whose unlucky affairs we are now trying to unravel, has always been carried on at a loss: the point of the argument from Self-government is that the loss would have been avoided if the Irish shareholders had for a certain number of the transactions been more influentially represented on the Board. That is quite apart from the sentiment of pure nationality. The failure has come about, not simply because the laws were not made by Irishmen as such, but because they were not made by the men who knew most about Ireland. The vice of the connection between the two countries has been the stupidity of governing a country without regard to the interests or customs, the peculiar objects and peculiar experiences, of the great majority of the people who live in it. It is not enough to say that the failures of England in Ireland have to a great extent flowed from causes too general to be identified with the intentional wrong-doing either of rulers or of subjects. We readily admit that, but it is not the point. It is not enough to insist that James I., in his plantations and transplantations, probably meant well to his Irish subjects. Probably he did. That is not the question. If it is “absolutely certain that his policy worked gross wrong,” what is the explanation and the defence? We are quite content with Mr. Dicey’s own answer. “Ignorance and want of sympathy produced all the evils of cruelty and malignity. An intended reform produced injustice, litigation, misery, and discontent. The case is noticeable, for it is a type of a thousand subsequent English attempts to reform and improve Ireland.” This description would apply, with hardly a word altered, to the wrong done by the Encumbered Estates Act in the reign of Queen Victoria. That memorable measure, as Mr. Gladstone said, was due not to the action of a party, but to the action of a Parliament. Sir Robert Peel was hardly less responsible for it than Lord John Russell. “We produced it,” said Mr. Gladstone, “with a general, lazy, uninformed, and irreflective good intention of taking capital to Ireland. What did we do? We sold the improvements of the tenants” (House of Commons, April 16). It is the same story, from the first chapter to the last, in education, poor law, public works, relief Acts, even in coercion Acts–lazy, uninformed, and irreflective good intention. That is the argument from history. When we are asked what good law an Irish Parliament would make that could not equally well be made by the Parliament at Westminster, this is the answer. It is not the will, it is the intelligence, that is wanting. We all know what the past has been. Why should the future be different?

“It is an inherent condition of human affairs,” said Mill in a book which, in spite of some chimeras, is a wholesome corrective of the teaching of our new jurists, “that no intention, however sincere, of protecting the interests of others can make it safe or salutary to tie up their own hands. Still more obviously true is it, that by their own hands only can any positive and durable improvement of their circumstances in life be worked out” ( Repres. Government, p. 57). It is these wise lessons from human experience to which the advocate of Home Rule appeals, and not the wild doctrine that any body of persons claiming to be united by a sense of nationality possesses an inherent and divine right to be treated as an independent community. It is quite true that circumstances sometimes justify a temporary dictatorship. In that there is nothing at variance with Liberalism. But the Parliamentary dictatorship in Ireland has lasted a great deal too long to be called temporary, and its stupid shambling operations are finally and decisively condemned by their consequences. That is a straightforward utilitarian argument, and has nothing whatever to do with inherent and divine rights, or any other form of political moonshine.