Handbook of Home Rule: Being Articles on the Irish Question — Lessons of Irish History in the Eighteenth Century by W. E. Gladstone, M.P., pt 1

BY W.

E.

GLADSTONE.

Ireland for more than seven hundred years has been part of the British territory, and has been with slight exceptions held by English arms, or governed in the last resort from this side the water.

Scotland was a foreign country until 1603, and possessed absolute independence until 1707. Yet, whether it was due to the standing barrier of the sea, or whatever may have been the cause, much less was known by Englishmen of Ireland than of Scotland.

Witness the works of Shakespeare, whose mind, unless as to book-knowledge, was encyclopædic, and yet who, while he seems at home in Scotland, may be said to tell us nothing of Ireland, unless it is that-- "The uncivil kerns of Ireland are in arms."

[73] During more recent times, the knowledge of Scotland on this side the border, which before was greatly in advance, has again increased in afar greater degree than the knowledge of Ireland.

It is to Mr. Lecky that we owe the first serious effort, both in his _Leaders of Public Opinion_ and in his _History of England in the Eighteenth Century_, to produce a better state of things.

He carefully and completely dovetailed the affairs of Ireland into English History, and the debt is one to be gratefully acknowledged.

But such remedies, addressing themselves in the first instance to the lettered mind of the country, require much time to operate upon the mass, and upon the organs of superficial and transitory opinion, before the final stage, when they enter into our settled and familiar traditions.

Meantime, since Ireland threatens to absorb into herself our Parliamentary life, there is a greatly enhanced necessity for becoming acquainted with the true state of the account between the islands that make up the United Kingdom, and with the likelihoods of the future in Ireland, so far as they are to be gathered from her past history.

That history, until the eighteenth century begins, has a dismal simplicity about it.

Murder, persecution, confiscation too truly describe its general strain; and policy is on the whole subordinated to violence as the standing instrument of government.

But after, say, the reign of William III.

, the element of representation begins to assert itself.

Simplicity is by degrees exchanged for complexity; the play of human motives, singularly diversified, now becomes visible in the currents of a real public life.

It has for a very long time been my habit, when consulted by young political students, to recommend them carefully to study the characters and events of the American Independence.

Quite apart from the special and temporary reasons bearing upon the case, I would now add a twin recommendation to examine and ponder the lessons of Irish history during the eighteenth century.

The task may not be easy, but the reward will be ample.

The mainspring of public life had, from a venerable antiquity, lain _de jure_ within Ireland herself.

The heaviest fetter upon this life was the Law of Poynings; the most ingenious device upon record for hamstringing legislative independence, because it cut off the means of resumption inherent in the nature of Parliaments such as were those of the three countries.

But the Law of Poynings was an Irish Law.

Its operation effectually aided on the civil side those ruder causes, under the action of which Ireland had lain for four centuries usually passive, and bleeding at every pore.

The main factors of her destiny worked, in practice, from this side the water.

But from the reign of Anne, or perhaps from the Revolution onwards, "Novus sæcorum nascitur ordo."

Of the three great nostrums so liberally applied by England, extirpation and persecution had entirely failed, but confiscation had done its work.

The great Protestant landlordism of Ireland[74] had been strongly and effectually built up.

But, like other human contrivances, while it held Ireland fast, it had also undesigned results.

The repressed principle of national life, the struggles of which had theretofore been extinguished in blood, slowly sprang up anew in a form which, though extremely narrow, and extravagantly imperfect, was armed with constitutional guarantees; and, the regimen of violence once displaced, these guarantees were sure to operate.

What had been transacted in England under Plantagenets and Stuarts was, to a large extent, transacted anew by the Parliament of Ireland in the eighteenth century.

That Parliament, indeed, deserves almost every imaginable epithet of censure.

It was corrupt, servile, selfish, cruel.

But when we have said all this, and said it truly, there is more to tell.

It was alive, and it was national.

Even absenteeism, that obstinately clinging curse, though it enfeebled and distracted, could not, and did not, annihilate nationality.

The Irish Legislation was, moreover, compressed and thwarted by a foreign executive; but even to this tremendous agent the vital principle was too strong eventually to succumb.

Mr. Lecky well observes that the Irish case supplied "one of the most striking examples upon record"[75] of an unconquerable efficacy in even the most defective Parliament.

I am, however, doubtful whether in this proposition we have before us the whole case.

This efficacy is not invariably found even in tolerably constructed Parliaments.

Why do we find it in a Parliament of which the constitution and the environment were alike intolerable?

My answer is, because that Parliament found itself faced by a British influence which was entirely anti-national, and was thus constrained to seek for strength in the principle of nationality.

Selfishness is a rooted principle of action in nations not less than in single persons.

It seems to draw a certain perfume from the virtue of patriotism, which lies upon its borders.

It stalks abroad with a semblance of decency, nay, even of excellence.

And under this cover a paramount community readily embraces the notion, that a dependent community may be made to exist not for its own sake, but for the sake of an extraneous society of men.

With this idea, the European nations, utterly benighted in comparison with the ancient Greeks, founded their transmarine dependencies.

But a vast maritime distance, perhaps aided by some filtration of sound ideas, prevented the application of this theory in its nakedness and rigour to the American Colonies of England.

In Ireland we had not even the title of founders to allege.

Nay, we were, in point of indigenous civilization, the junior people.

But the maritime severance, sufficient to prevent accurate and familiar knowledge, was not enough to bar the effective exercise of overmastering power.

And power was exercised, at first from without, to support the Pale, to enlarge it, to make it include Ireland.

When this had been done, power began, in the seventeenth century, to be exercised from within Ireland, within the precinct of its government and its institutions.

These were carefully corrupted, from the multiplication of the Boroughs by James I. onwards, for the purpose.

The struggle became civil, instead of martial;

and it was mainly waged by agencies on the spot, not from beyond the Channel.

When the rule of England passed over from the old violence into legal forms and doctrines, the Irish reaction against it followed the example.

And the legal idea of Irish nationality took its rise in very humble surroundings; if the expression may be allowed, it was born in the slums of politics.

Ireland reached the nadir of political depression when, at and after the Boyne, she had been conquered not merely by an English force, but by continental mercenaries.

The ascendant Protestantism of the island had never stood so low in the aspect it presented to this country; inasmuch as the Irish Parliament, for the first time, I believe, declared itself dependent upon England,[76] and either did not desire, or did not dare, to support its champion Molyneux, when his work asserting Irish independence was burned in London.

It petitioned for representation in the English Parliament, not in order to uplift the Irish people, but in order to keep them down.

In its sympathies and in its aims the overwhelming mass of the population had no share.

It was Swift who, by the _Drapier's Letters_, for the first time called into existence a public opinion flowing from and representing Ireland as a whole.

He reasserted the doctrine of Molyneux, and denounced Wood's halfpence not only as a foul robbery, but as a constitutional and as a national insult.

The patience of the Irish Protestants was tried very hard, and they were forced, as Sir Charles Duffy states in his vivid book, to purchase the power of oppressing their Roman Catholic fellow-countrymen at a great price.

[77] Their pension list was made to provide the grants too degrading to be tolerated in England.

The Presbyterians had to sit down under the Episcopal monopoly; but the enjoyment of that monopoly was not left to the Irish Episcopalians.

In the time of Henry VIII.

it had been necessary to import an English Archbishop Browne[78] and an English Bishop Bale, or there might not have been a single Protestant in Ireland.

It was well to enrich the rolls of the Church of Ireland with the piety and learning of Ussher, and to give her in Bedell one name, at least, which carries the double crown of the hero and the saint.

But, after the Restoration, by degrees the practice degenerated, and Englishmen were appointed in numbers to the Irish Episcopate in order to fortify and develop by numerical force what came to be familiarly known as the English interest.

So that the Primate Boulter, during his government of Ireland, complains[79] that Englishmen are still less than one-half the whole body of Bishops, although the most important sees were to a large extent in their hands.

The same practice was followed in the higher judicial offices.

Fitzgibbon was the first Irishman who became Lord Chancellor.

[80] The Viceroy, commonly absent, was represented by Lords Justices, who again were commonly English; and Primate Boulter, a most acute and able man, jealous of an Irish Speaker in that character, recommends that the commander of the forces should take his place.

[81] When, later on, the Viceroy resided, it was a rule that the Chief Secretary should be an Englishman.

On the occasion when Lord Castlereagh was by way of exception admitted to that office, an apology was found for it in his entire devotion to English policy and purposes.

"His appointment," says Lord Cornwallis, "gives me great satisfaction, as he is so very unlike an Irishman!"

[82] Resources were also found in the military profession, and among the voters for the Union we find the names of eight[83] English generals.

The arrangements under Poynings's Law, and the commercial proscription, drove the iron ever deeper and deeper into the souls of Irishmen.

It is but small merit in the Irish Parliament of George I. and George II.

, if under these circumstances a temper was gradually formed in, and transmitted by, them, which might one day achieve the honours of patriotism.

It was in dread of this most healthful process, that the English Government set sedulously to work for its repression.

The odious policy was maintained by a variety of agencies; by the misuse of Irish revenue, a large portion of which was unhappily under their control; by maintaining the duration of the Irish House of Commons for the life of the Sovereign; and, worst of all, by extending the range of corruption within the walls, through the constant multiplication of paid offices tenable by members of Parliament without even the check of re-election on acceptance.

Thus by degrees those who sat in the Irish Houses came to feel both that they had a country, and that their country had claims upon them.

The growth of a commercial interest in the Roman Catholic body must have accelerated the growth of this idea, as that interest naturally fell into line with the resistance to the English prescriptive laws.

But the rate of progress was fearfully slow.

It was hemmed in on every side by the obstinate unyielding pressure of selfish interests: the interest of the Established Church against the Presbyterians; the interest of the Protestant laity, or tithe-payers, against the clergy; the bold unscrupulous interest of a landlords' Parliament against the occupier of the soil; which, together with the grievance of the system of tithe-proctors, established in Ireland through the Whiteboys the fatal alliance between resistance to wrong and resistance to law, and supplied there the yet more disastrous facility of sustaining and enforcing wrong under the name of giving support to public tranquillity.

Yet, forcing on its way amidst all these difficulties by a natural law, in a strange haphazard and disjointed method, and by a zigzag movement, there came into existence, and by degrees into steady operation, a sentiment native to Ireland and having Ireland for its vital basis, and yet not deserving the name of Irish patriotism, because its care was not for a nation, but for a sect.

For a sect, in a stricter sense than may at first sight be supposed.

The battle was not between Popery and a generalized Protestantism, though, even if it had been so, it would have been between a small minority and the vast majority of the Irish people.

It was not a party of ascendency, but a party of monopoly, that ruled.

It must always be borne in mind that the Roman Catholic aristocracy had been emasculated, and reduced to the lowest point of numerical and moral force by the odious action of the penal laws, and that the mass of the Roman Catholic population, clerical and lay, remained under the grinding force of many-sided oppression, and until long after the accession of George III.

had scarcely a consciousness of political existence.

As long as the great bulk of the nation could be equated to zero, the Episcopal monopolists had no motive for cultivating the good-will of the Presbyterians, who like the Roman Catholics maintained their religion, with the trivial exception of the _Regium Donum_, by their own resources, and who differed from them in being not persecuted, but only disabled.

And this monopoly, which drew from the sacred name of religion its title to exist, offered through centuries an example of religious sterility to which a parallel can hardly be found among the communions of the Christian world.

The sentiment, then, which animated the earlier efforts of the Parliament might be _Iricism_, but did not become patriotism until it had outgrown, and had learned to forswear or to forget, the conditions of its infancy.

Neither did it for a long time acquire the courage of its opinions; for, when Lucas, in the middle of the century, reasserted the doctrine of Molyneux and of Swift, the Grand Jury of Dublin took part against him, and burned his book.

[84] And the Parliament,[85] prompted by the Government, drove him into exile.

And yet the smoke showed that there was fire.

The infant, that confronted the British Government in the Parliament House, had something of the young Hercules about him.

In the first exercises of strength he acquired more strength, and in acquiring more strength he burst the bonds that had confined him.

"Es machte mir zu eng, ich mussie fort."

[86] The reign of George IV.

began with resolute efforts of the Parliament not to lengthen, as in England under his grandfather, but to shorten its own commission, and to become septennial.

Surely this was a noble effort.

It meant the greatness of their country, and it meant also personal self-sacrifice.

The Parliament which then existed, elected under a youth of twenty-two, had every likelihood of giving to the bulk of its members a seat for life.

This they asked to change for a _maximum_ term of seven years.

This from session to session, in spite of rejection after rejection in England, they resolutely fought to obtain.

It was an English amendment which, on a doubtful pretext; changed seven years to eight.

Without question some acted under the pressure of constituents; but only a minority of the members had constituents, and popular exigencies from such a quarter might have been bought off by an occasional vote, and could not have induced a war with the Executive and with England so steadily continued, unless a higher principle had been at work.

The triumph came at last; and from 1768 onwards the Commons never wholly relapsed into their former quiescence.

True, this was for a Protestant House, constituency, and nation; but ere long they began to enlarge their definition of nationality.

Flood and Lucas, the commanders in the real battle, did not dream of giving the Roman Catholics a political existence, but to their own constituents they performed an honourable service and gave a great boon.

Those, who had insincerely supported the measure, became the dupes of their own insincerity.

In the very year of this victory, a Bill for a slight relaxation of the penal laws was passed, but met its death in England.

[87] Other Bills followed, and one of them became an Act in 1771. A beginning had thus been made on behalf of religious liberty, as a corollary to political emancipation.

It was like a little ray of light piercing its way through the rocks into a cavern and supplying the prisoner at once with guidance and with hope.

Resolute action, in withholding or shortening supply, convinced the Executive in Dublin, and the Ministry in London, that serious business was intended.

And it appeared, even in this early stage, how necessary it was for a fruitful campaign on their own behalf to enlarge their basis, and enlist the sympathies of hitherto excluded fellow-subjects.