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The Past And Future Of The Irish Question
by
Besides some circumstances attending the production of the Bill, to which I shall refer presently, and which told heavily against it, there were three feelings which worked upon men’s minds, disposing them to reject it.
The first of these was dislike and fear of the Irish Nationalist members. In the previous House of Commons this party had been uniformly and bitterly hostile to the Liberal Government. Measures intended for the good of Ireland, like the Land Act of 1881, had been ungraciously received, treated as concessions extorted, for which no thanks were due–inadequate concessions, which must be made the starting-point for fresh demands. Obstruction had been freely practised to defeat not only bills restraining the liberty of the subject in Ireland, but many other measures. Some few members of the Irish party had systematically sought to delay all English and Scotch legislation, and, in fact, to bring the work of Parliament to a dead stop. Much violent language had been used, even where the provocation was slight. The outbreaks of crime which had repeatedly occurred in Ireland had been, not, indeed, defended, but so often passed over in silence by Nationalist speakers, that English opinion was inclined to hold them practically responsible for disorders which, so it was thought, they had neither wished nor tried to prevent. (I am, of course, expressing no opinion as to the justice of this view, nor as to the excuses to be made for the Parliamentary tactics of the Irish party, but merely stating how their conduct struck many Englishmen.) There could be no doubt as to the hostility which they, still less as to that which their fellow-countrymen in the United States, had expressed toward England, for they had openly wished success to Russia while war seemed impending with her, and the so-called Mahdi of the Soudan was vociferously cheered at many a Nationalist meeting. At the Election of 1885 they had done their utmost to defeat Liberal candidates in every English and Scotch constituency where there existed a body of Irish voters, and had thrown some twenty seats or more into the hands of the Tories. Now, to many Englishmen, the proposal to create an Irish Parliament seemed nothing more or less than a proposal to hand over to these Irish members the government of Ireland, with all the opportunities thence arising to oppress the opposite party in Ireland and to worry England herself. It was all very well to urge that the tactics which the Nationalists had pursued when their object was to extort Home Rule would be dropped, because superfluous, when Home Rule had been granted; or to point out that an Irish Parliament would contain different men from those who had been sent to Westminster as Mr. Parnell’s nominees. Neither of these arguments could overcome the suspicious antipathy which many Englishmen felt, nor dissolve the association in their minds between the Nationalist leaders and the forces of disorder. The Parnellites (thus they reasoned) are bad men; what they seek is therefore likely to be bad, and whether bad in itself or not, they will make a bad use of it. In such reasonings there was more of sentiment and prejudice than of reason, but sentiment and prejudice are proverbially harder than arguments to expel from minds where they have made a lodgment.
The internal condition of Ireland supplied more substantial grounds for alarm. As everybody knows, she is not, either in religion or in blood, or in feelings and ideas, a homogeneous country. Three-fourths of the people are Roman Catholics, one-fourth Protestants, and this Protestant fourth subdivided into bodies not fond of one another, who have little community of sentiment. Besides the Scottish colony in Ulster, many English families have settled here and there through the country. They have been regarded as intruders by the aboriginal Celtic population, and many of them, although hundreds of years may have passed since they came, still look on themselves as rather English than Irish. The last fifty years, whose wonderful changes have in most parts of the world tended to unite and weld into one compact body the inhabitants of each part of the earth’s surface, connecting them by the ties of commerce, and of a far easier and swifter intercourse than was formerly possible, have in Ireland worked in the opposite direction. It has become more and more the habit of the richer class in Ireland to go to England for its enjoyment, and to feel itself socially rather English than Irish. Thus the chasm between the immigrants and the aborigines has grown deeper. The upper class has not that Irish patriotism which it showed in the days of the National Irish Parliament (1782-1800), and while there is thus less of a common national feeling to draw rich and poor together, the strife of landlords and tenants has continued, irritating the minds of both parties, and gathering them into two hostile camps. As everybody knows, the Nationalist agitation has been intimately associated with the Land agitation–has, in fact, found a strong motive-force in the desire of the tenants to have their rents reduced, and themselves secured against eviction. Now, many people in England assumed that an Irish Parliament would be under the control of the tenants and the humbler class generally, and would therefore be hostile to the landlords. They went farther, and made the much bolder assumption that as such a Parliament would be chosen by electors, most of whom were Roman Catholics, it would be under the control of the Catholic priesthood, and hostile to Protestants. Thus they supposed that the grant of self-government to Ireland would mean the abandonment of the upper and wealthier class, the landlords and the Protestants, to the tender mercies of their enemies. Such abandonment, it was proclaimed on a thousand platforms, would be disgraceful in itself, dishonouring to England, a betrayal of the very men who had stood by her in the past, and were prepared to stand by her in the future, if only she would stand by them. It was, of course, replied by the defenders of the Home Rule Bill, that what the so-called English party in Ireland really stood by was their own ascendency over the Irish masses–an oppressive ascendency, which had caused most of the disorders of the country. As to religion, there were many Protestants besides Mr. Parnell himself among the Nationalist leaders. There was no ill-feeling (except in Ulster) between Protestants and Roman Catholics in Ireland. There was no reason to expect that either the Catholic hierarchy or the priesthood generally would be supreme in an Irish Parliament, and much reason to expect the contrary. As regards Ulster, where, no doubt, there were special difficulties, due to the bitter antagonism of the Orangemen (not of the Protestants generally) and Catholics, Mr. Gladstone had undertaken to consider any special provisions which could be suggested as proper to meet those difficulties. These replies, however, made little impression. They were pronounced, and pronounced all the more confidently the more ignorant of Ireland the speaker was, to be too hypothetical. To many Englishmen the case seemed to be one of two hostile factions contending in Ireland for the last sixty years, and that the gift of self-government might enable one of them to tyrannize over the other. True, that party was the majority, and, according to the principles of democratic government, therefore entitled to prevail. But it is one thing to admit a principle and another to consent to its application. The minority had the sympathy of the upper classes in England, because the minority contained the landlords. It had the sympathy of a part of the middle class, because it contained the Protestants. And of those Englishmen who were impartial as between the Irish factions, there were some who held that England must in any case remain responsible for the internal peace and the just government of Ireland, and could not grant powers whose possession might tempt the one party to injustice, and the other to resist injustice by violence.