Handbook of Home Rule: Being Articles on the Irish Question — The ''Unionist'' Case for Home Rule by R. Barry O'Brien, pt 3

MR.

GOLDWIN SMITH.

None of the recent opponents of Home Rule have written against that policy with more brilliance and epigrammatic keenness than Mr. Goldwin Smith.

But no one has stated with more force the facts and considerations which, operating on men's mind for years past, have made the Liberal party Home Rulers now.

His _coup d'oeil_ remains the most pointed indictment ever drawn from the historical annals of Ireland against the English methods of governing that country.

Twenty years ago he anticipated the advice recently given by Mr. Gladstone.

In 1867 he wrote:-- "I have myself sought and found in the study of Irish history the explanation of the paradox, that a people with so many gifts, so amiable, naturally so submissive to rulers, and everywhere but in their own country industrious, are in their own country bywords of idleness, lawlessness, disaffection, and agrarian crime."

[37] He explains the paradox thus: "But it is difficult to distinguish the faults of the Irish from their misfortunes.

It has been well said of their past industrial character and history,--'We were reckless, ignorant, improvident, drunken, and idle.

We were idle, for we had nothing to do;

we were reckless, for we had no hope; we were ignorant, for learning was denied us; we were improvident, for we had no future; we were drunken, for we sought to forget our misery.

That time has passed away for ever.'

No part of this defence is probably more true than that which connects the drunkenness of the Irish people with their misery.

Drunkenness is, generally speaking, the vice of despair; and it springs from the despair of the Irish peasant as rankly as from that of his English fellow.

The sums of money which have lately been transmitted by Irish emigrants to their friends in Ireland seem a conclusive answer to much loose denunciation of the national character, both in a moral and an industrial point of view....

There seems no good reason for believing that the Irish Kelts are averse to labour, provided they be placed, as people of all races require to be placed, for two or three generations in circumstances favourable to industry."

[38] He shows that the Irish have not been so placed.

"Still more does justice require that allowance should be made on historical grounds for the failings of the Irish people.

If they are wanting in industry, in regard for the rights of property, in reverence for the law, history furnishes a full explanation of their defects, without supposing in them any inherent depravity, or even any inherent weakness.

They have never had the advantage of the training through which other nations have passed in their gradual rise from barbarism to civilization.

The progress of the Irish people was arrested at almost a primitive stage, and a series of calamities, following close upon each other, have prevented it from ever fairly resuming its course.

The pressure of overwhelming misery has now been reduced; government has become mild and just; the civilizing agency of education has been introduced; the upper classes are rapidly returning to their duty, and the natural effect is at once seen in the improved character of the people.

Statesmen are bound to be well acquainted with the historical sources of the evil with which they have to deal, especially when those evils are of such a nature as, at first aspect, to imply depravity in a nation.

There are still speakers and writers who seem to think that the Irish are incurably vicious, because the accumulated effects of so many centuries cannot be removed at once by a wave of the legislator's wand.

Some still believe, or affect to believe, that the very air of the island is destructive of the characters and understandings of all who breathe it."

[39] Elsewhere he adds, referring to the land system: "How many centuries of a widely different training have the English people gone through in order to acquire their boasted love of law."

[40] Of the "training" through which the Irish went, he says-- "The existing settlement of land in Ireland, whether dating from the confiscations of the Stuarts, or from those of Cromwell, rests on a proscription three or four times as long as that on which the settlement of land rests over a considerable part of France.

It may, therefore, be considered as placed upon discussion in the estimation of all sane men;

and, this being the case, it is safe to observe that no inherent want of respect for property is shown by the Irish people if a proprietorship which had its origin within historical memory in flagrant wrong is less sacred in their eyes than it would be if it had its origin in immemorial right."

[41] The character which he gives of Irish landlordism deserves to be quoted: "The Cromwellian landowners soon lost their religious character, while they retained all the hardness of the fanatic and the feelings of Puritan conquerors towards a conquered Catholic people.

'I have eaten with them,' said one, 'drunk with them, fought with them; but I never prayed with them.'

Their descendants became, probably, the very worst upper class with which a country was ever afflicted.

The habits of the Irish gentry grew beyond measure brutal and reckless, and the coarseness of their debaucheries would have disgusted the crew of Comus.

Their drunkenness, their blasphemy, their ferocious duelling, left the squires of England far behind.

If there was a grotesque side to their vices which mingles laughter with our reprobation, this did not render their influence less pestilent to the community of which the motive of destiny had made them social chiefs.

Fortunately, their recklessness was sure, in the end, to work, to a certain extent, its own cure; and in the background of their swinish and uproarious drinking-bouts, the Encumbered Estates Act rises to our view."

[42] Mr. Goldwin Smith deals with agrarian crime thus: "The atrocities perpetrated by the Whiteboys, especially in the earlier period of agrarianism (for they afterwards grew somewhat less inhuman), are such as to make the flesh creep.

No language can be too strong in speaking of the horrors of such a state of society.

But it would be unjust to confound these agrarian conspiracies with ordinary crime, or to suppose that they imply a propensity to ordinary crime either on the part of those who commit them, or on the part of the people who connive at and favour their commission.

In the districts where agrarian conspiracy and outrage were most rife, the number of ordinary crimes was very small.

In Munster, in 1833, out of 973 crimes, 627 were Whiteboy, or agrarian, and even of the remainder, many, being crimes of violence, were probably committed from the same motive.

"In plain truth, the secret tribunals which administered the Whiteboy code were to the people the organs of a wild law of social morality by which, on the whole, the interest of the peasant was protected.

They were not regular tribunals; neither were the secret tribunals of Germany in the Middle Ages, the existence of which, and the submission of the people to their jurisdiction, implied the presence of much violence, but not of much depravity, considering the wildness of the times.

The Whiteboys 'found in their favour already existing a general and settled hatred of the law among the great body of the peasantry.'

[43] We have seen how much the law, and the ministers of the law, had done to deserve the peasant's love.

We have seen, too, in what successive guises property had presented itself to his mind: first as open rapine; then as robbery carried on through the roguish technicalities of an alien code;

finally as legalized and systematic oppression.

Was it possible that he should have formed so affectionate a reverence either for law or property as would be proof against the pressure of starvation?"

[44] "A

people cannot be expected to love and reverence oppression because it is consigned to the statute-book, and called law."

[45] These extracts are taken from _Irish History and Irish Character_, which was published in 1861. But in 1867 Mr. Goldwin Smith wrote a series of letters to the _Daily News_, which were republished in 1868 under the title of _The Irish Question_; and these letters form, perhaps, the most statesmanlike and far-seeing pronouncement that has ever been made on the Irish difficulty.

In the preface Mr. Goldwin Smith begins: "The Irish legislation of the last forty years, notwithstanding the adoption of some remedial measures, has failed through the indifference of Parliament to the sentiments of Irishmen; and the harshness of English public opinion has embittered the effects on Irish feeling of the indifference of Parliament.

Occasionally a serious effort has been made by an English statesman to induce Parliament to approach Irish questions in that spirit of sympathy, and with that anxious desire to be just, without which a Parliament in London cannot legislate wisely for Ireland.

Such efforts have hitherto met with no response; is it too much to hope that it will be otherwise in the year now opening?"

[46] The only comment I shall make on these words is: they were penned more than half a century after Mr. Pitt's Union, which was to shower down blessings on the Irish people.

Mr. Goldwin Smith's first letter was written on the 23rd of November, 1867, the day of the execution of the Fenians Allen, Larkin, and O'Brien.

He says-- "There can be no doubt, I apprehend, that the Irish difficulty has entered on a new phase, and that Irish disaffection has, to repeat an expression which I heard used in Ireland, come fairly into a line with the other discontented nationalities of Europe.

Active Fenianism probably pervades only the lowest class; passive sympathy, which the success of the movement would at once convert into active co-operation, extends, it is to be feared, a good deal higher.

"England has ruin before her, unless she can hit on a remedy, and overcome any obstacles of class interest or of national pride which would prevent its application, the part of Russia in Poland, or of Austria in Italy--a part cruel, hateful, demoralizing, contrary to all our high principles and professions, and fraught with dangers to our own freedom.

Our position will be worse than that of Russia in this respect, that, while her Poland is only a province, our Fenianism is an element pervading every city of the United Kingdom in which Irish abound, and allying itself with kindred misery, discontent, and disorder.

Wretchedness, the result of misgovernment, has caused the Irish people to multiply with the recklessness of despair, and now here are their avenging hosts in the midst of us, here is the poison of their disaffection running through every member of our social frame.

Not only so, but the same wretchedness has sent millions of emigrants to form an Irish nation in the United States, where the Irish are a great political power, swaying by their votes the councils of the American Republic, and in immediate contact with those Transatlantic possessions of England, the retention of which it is now patriotic to applaud, and will one day be patriotic to have dissuaded.

" ...

That Ireland is not at this moment, materially speaking, in a particularly suffering state, but, on the contrary, the farmers are rather prosperous, and wages, even when allowance is made for the rise in the price of provisions, considerably higher than they were, only adds to the significance of this widespread disaffection.

"The Fenian movement is not religious, nor radically economical (though no doubt it has in it a socialistic element), but national, and the remedy for it must be one which cures national discontent.

This is the great truth which the English people have to lay to heart."

[47] Mr. Goldwin Smith then dispels the notion that the Irish question is a religious one.

"When Fenianism first appeared, the Orangemen, in accordance with their fixed idea, ascribed it to the priests.

They were undeceived, I was told, by seeing a priest run away from the Fenians in fear of his life."

[48] Neither was it a question of the land.

"The land question, no doubt, lies nearer to the heart of the matter, and it is the great key to Irish history in the past; but I do not believe that even this is fundamental."

He then states what is "fundamental."

[49] "The real root of the disaffection which exhibits itself at present in the guise of Fenianism, and which has been suddenly kindled into flame by the arming of the Irish in the American civil war, but which existed before in a nameless and smouldering state, is, as I believe, the want of national institutions, of a national capital, of any objects of national reverence and attachment, and consequently of anything deserving to be called national life.

The English Crown and Parliament the Irish have never learnt, nor have they had any chance of learning, to love, or to regard as national, notwithstanding the share which was given them, too late, in the representation.

The greatness of England is nothing to them.

Her history is nothing, or worse.

The success of Irishmen in London consoles the Irish in Ireland no more than the success of Italian adventurers in foreign countries (which was very remarkable) consoled the Italian people.

The drawing off of Irish talent, in fact, turns to an additional grievance in their minds.

Dublin is a modern Tara, a metropolis from which the glory has departed; and the viceroyalty, though it pleases some of the tradesmen, fails altogether to satisfy the people.

'In Ireland we can make no appeal to patriotism, we can have no patriotic sentiments in our schoolbooks, no patriotic emblems in our schools, because in Ireland everything patriotic is rebellious.'

These were the words uttered in my hearing, not by a complaining demagogue, but by a desponding statesman.

They seemed to me pregnant with fatal truths.

"If the craving for national institutions, and the disaffection bred in this void of the Irish people's heart, seem to us irrational and even insane, in the absence of any more substantial grievance, we ought to ask ourselves what would become of our own patriotism if we had no national institutions, no objects of national loyalty and reverence, even though we might be pretty well governed, at least in intention, by a neighbouring people whom we regarded as aliens, and who, in fact, regarded us pretty much in the same light.

Let us first judge ourselves fairly, and then judge the Irish, remembering always that they are more imaginative and sentimental, and need some centre of national feeling and affection more than ourselves."

[50] And all this was written sixty-seven years after the Union of 1800. Mr. Goldwin Smith then deals with the subject of the Irish and Scotch unions much in the same way as Mr. Lecky.

"The incorporation of the Scotch nation with the English, being conducted on the right principles by the great Whig statesman of Anne, has been perfectly successful.

The attempt to incorporate the Irish nation with the English and Scotch, the success of which would have been, if possible, a still greater blessing, being conducted by very different people and on very different principles, has unhappily failed.

What might have been the result if even the Hanoverian sovereigns had done the personal duty to their Irish kingdom which they have unfortunately neglected, it is now too late to inquire.

The Irish Union has missed its port, and, in order to reach it, will have to tack again.

We may hold down a dependency, of course, by force, in Russian and Austrian fashion; but force will never make the hearts of two nations one, especially when they are divided by the sea.

Once get rid of this deadly international hatred, and there will be hope of real union in the future."

[51] Mr. Goldwin Smith finally proposes a "plan" by which the "deadly international hatred" might be got rid of, and a "real union" brought about.

Here it is.

"1. The residence of the Court at Dublin, not merely to gratify the popular love of royalty and its pageantries, which no man of sense desires to stimulate, but to assure the Irish people, in the only way possible as regards the mass of them, that the sovereign of the United Kingdom is really their sovereign, and that they are equally cared for and honoured with the other subjects of the realm.

This would also tend to make Dublin a real capital, and to gather and retain there a portion of the Irish talent which now seeks its fortune elsewhere.

"2. An occasional session (say once in every three years) of the Imperial Parliament in Dublin, partly for the same purposes as the last proposal, but also because the circumstances of Ireland are likely to be, for some time at least, really peculiar, and the personal acquaintance of our legislators with them is the only sufficient security for good Irish legislation.

There could be no serious difficulty in holding a short session in the Irish capital, where there is plenty of accommodation for both Houses.

"3. A liberal measure of local self-government for Ireland.

I would not vest the power in any single assembly for all Ireland, because Ulster is really a different country from the other provinces.

I would give each province a council of its own, and empower that council to legislate (subject, of course, to the supremacy of the Imperial Parliament) on all matters not essential to the political and legal unity of the empire, in which I would include local education.

The provincial councils should of course be elective, and the register of electors might be the same as that of electors to the Imperial Parliament.

In England itself the extension of local institutions, as political training schools for the masses, as checks upon the sweeping action of the great central assembly, and as the best organs of legislation in all matters requiring (as popular education, among others, does) adaptation to the circumstances of particular districts, would, I think, have formed a part of any statesmanlike revision of our political system.

Here, also, much good might be done, and much evil averted, by committing the present business of quarter sessions, other than the judicial business, together with such other matters as the central legislative might think fit to vest in local hands, to an assembly elected by the county."

[52] Thus it will be seen that twenty years ago Mr. Goldwin Smith anticipated Mr. Chamberlain's scheme of provincial councils, and got a good way on the road to an Irish Parliament.

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