Handbook of Home Rule: Being Articles on the Irish Question — How We Became Home Rulers by James Bryce, M.P., pt 2

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 Forster came to me, and pressed with great warmth that the opposition should be withdrawn.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: hêmeis d' ouk aitioi esmen Alla Zeus kai Moira kai êerophoitis 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.

SESSION OF 1883.

--Three facts stood out in the history of this comparatively quiet session, each of which brought us further along the road we had entered.

One was the omission of Parliament to complete the work begun by the Land Bill of 1881, of improving the condition of the Irish peasantry and reorganizing Irish administration.

The Nationalist members brought in Bills for these purposes, including one for amending the Land Act by admitting leaseholders to its benefits and securing tenants against having their improvements reckoned against them in the fixing of rents.

Though we could not approve all the contents of these Bills, we desired to see the Government either take them up and amend them, or introduce Bills of its own to do what was needed.

Some of us spoke strongly in this sense, nor will any one now deny that we were right.

Sound policy called aloud for the completion of the undertaking of 1881. The Government however refused, alleging, no doubt with some truth, that Ireland could not have all the time of Parliament, but must let England and Scotland have their turn.

Nor was anything done towards the creation of new local institutions in Ireland, or the reform of the Castle bureaucracy.

We were profoundly disheartened.

We saw golden opportunities slipping away, and doubted more than ever whether Westminster was the place in which to legislate for Irish grievances.

Another momentous fact was the steady increase in the number of Nationalist members.

Every seat that fell vacant in Ireland was filled by them.

The moderate Irish party, most of whom had by this time crossed the floor of the House, and were sitting among us, had evidently no future.

They were estimable, and, in some cases, able men, from whom we had hoped much, as a link between the Liberal party and the Irish people.

But they seemed to have lost their hold on the people, nor were they able to give us much practical counsel as to Irish problems.

It was clear that they would vanish at the next General Election, and Parliament be left to settle accounts with the extreme men, whose spirits rose as those of our friends steadily sank.

Lastly: it was in this session that the alliance of the Nationalists and the Tory Opposition became a potent factor in politics.

Its first conspicuous manifestation was in the defeat of the Government by the allied forces on the Affirmation Bill, when the least respectable privates in both armies vied with one another in boisterous rejoicings over the announcement of numbers in the division.

I do not refer to this as ground for complaint.

It was in the course of our usual political warfare that two groups, each hating and fearing the Ministry, should unite to displace it.

But we now saw what power the Irish section must exert when it came to hold the balance of numbers in the House.

Till this division, the Government had commanded a majority of the whole House.

This would probably not outlast a dissolution.

What then?

Could the two English parties, differing so profoundly from one another, combine against the third party?

Evidently not.

We must, therefore, look forward to unstable Governments, if not to a total dislocation of our Parliamentary system.

Session of 1884. --I pass over the minor incidents of this year, including the continued neglect of remedial legislation for Ireland to dwell on its dominant and most impressive lesson.

It was the year of the Franchise Bill, which, as regards Ireland, worked an extension, not merely of the county but also of the borough franchise, and produced, owing to the economic condition of the humbler classes in that country, a far more extensive change than in England or Scotland.

When the Bill was introduced the question at once arose--Should Ireland be included?

There were two ways of treating Ireland between which Parliament had to choose.

One was to leave her out of the Bill, on the ground that the masses of her population could not be trusted with the franchise, as being ignorant, sympathetic to crime, hostile to the English Government.

This course was the logical concomitant of exceptional coercive legislation, such as had been passed in 1881 and 1882. It was quite compatible with generous remedial legislation.

But it placed Ireland in an unequal and lower position, treating her, as the Coercion Acts did, as a dependent country, inhabited by a population unfit for the same measure of power which the inhabitants of Britain might receive.

The other course was to bestow on Ireland the same extended franchise which the English county occupiers were to receive, applying the principle of equality, and disregarding the obvious consequences.

These consequences were both practical and logical.

The practical consequence was the increase in numbers and weight of the Irish party in Parliament hostile to Parliament itself.

The logical consequence was the duty of complying with the wishes of the enfranchised nation.

Whatever reasons were good for giving this enlarged suffrage to the Irish masses, were good for respecting the will which they might use to express it.

If the Irish were deemed fit to exercise the same full constitutional rights in legislation as the English, must they not be fit for the same rights of trial by jury, a free press, and all the privileges of personal freedom?

Of these two courses the Cabinet chose the latter, those of its members whom we must suppose, from the language they now hold, to have then hesitated, either stifling their fears or not apprehending the consequences of their boldness.

It might have been expected, and indeed was generally expected, that the Tory party would refuse to follow.

They talked largely about the danger of an extended Irish suffrage, and pointed out that it would be a weapon in the hands of disloyalty.

But when the moment for resistance came, they swerved, and never divided in either House against the application of the Bill to Ireland.

They might have failed to defeat the measure; but they would have immensely strengthened their position, logically and morally, had they given effect by their votes to the sentiments they were known to entertain, and which not a few Liberals shared.