[1] "Commercial Relations Between England and Ireland." By Miss A.E. Murray (P.S. King & Sons).
[2] Attorney General in the Irish Parliament, and later Earl of Clare.
The greater part of the present volume is devoted to showing why this country should not adopt Home Rule; but it is perhaps worth while for the ordinary British citizen to ask himself a preliminary question, namely, why he should be pressed even to consider it. That the establishment of an Irish Parliament must involve doubtful and far-reaching consequences is denied by no one. What then is the primâ facie case which has induced many Englishmen and Scotchmen to think that it ought to be seriously debated? If we could erase the past and approach the problem of framing representative institutions in their most practicable shape for the inhabitants of the United Kingdom, who would think it wise to crowd into these small Islands two, or, as some would have it, three, four, or five separate Parliaments, with their separate elections, their separate sets of ministers and Offices, their separate party systems, their divergent policies? Distances are, under modern conditions, so small, our population is so compact, the interests of its component parts are so intimately fused together, that any device at all resembling Home Rule would seem at the best cumbersome, costly, and ineffective; at the worst, perilous to the rights of minorities, the peace of the country, and the unity of the Kingdom. If, then, these common-sense considerations are thrust on one side by so many well-meaning persons, it must surely be because they think that for the destruction of our existing system there is to be found a compelling justification in the history of the past:
I am well aware that many of the persons of whom I am thinking profess to base their approval of Home Rule on purely administrative grounds. The Parliament of the United Kingdom, they say, is overweighted; it has more to do than it can manage; we must diminish its excessive burdens; and we can only do so by throwing them in part upon other and subordinate assemblies. But this, if it be a reason at all, is certainly a most insufficient one. Would any human being, anxious merely to give relief to the House of Commons, adopt so illogical a scheme as one which involves a provincial Parliament in Ireland, and no provincial Parliaments anywhere else; which puts Ireland under two Parliaments, and left the rest of the country under one; which, if Irishmen are to be admitted to the Imperial Parliament, would give Ireland privileges and powers denied to England and Scotland, and, if they are to be excluded from the Imperial Parliament, would deprive Ireland of rights which surely she ought to possess?
Again, if the "administrative" argument was really more than an ornament of debate, would any one select Ireland as the administrative district in which to make trial of the new system? Would any one, in his desire to relieve the Imperial Parliament of some of its functions, select as an area of self-government a region where one part is divided against another by passions, and, if you will, by prejudices, more violent, and more deeply-rooted than those which afflict any other fraction of the United Kingdom, choose that other fraction where, and how, you will?
I take it, then, as certain that in the mind of the ordinary British Home Ruler the justification for Home Rule is not administrative but historical. He pictures Ireland before the English invasion as an organised and independent State, happy in the possession of a native polity which Englishmen have ruthlessly destroyed, now suffering under laws and institutions forced upon her by the conquerors, suitable it may be to men of Anglo-Saxon descent, but utterly alien to the genius and temper of a Celtic population. To him, therefore, Home Rule presents itself as an act of National restitution.
Personally, I believe this to be a complete misreading of history. It is not denied—at least I do not deny—that both the English and British Governments, in their dealings with Ireland have done many things that were stupid, and some things that were abominable. But among their follies or their crimes is not to be counted the destruction of any such State as I have described; for no such State existed. They did not uproot one type of civilisation in order to plant another. The Ireland with which England had to deal had not acquired a national organisation, and when controversialists talk of "restoring" this or that institution to Ireland, the only institutions that can possibly be "restored" are in their origin importations from England.
This does not, of course, mean that the English were a superior race dealing with an inferior one. Indeed, there is, in my view, no sharp division of race at all. In the veins of the inhabitants of these Islands runs more than one strain of blood. The English are not simply Teutonic—still less are the Irish Celtic. We must conceive the pre-historic inhabitants both of Britain and of Ireland as subject to repeated waves of invasion from the wandering peoples of the Continent. The Celt preceded the Teuton; and in certain regions his language still survives. The Teuton followed him in (as I suppose) far greater numbers, and his language has become that of a large fraction of the civilised world. But in no part of the United Kingdom is the Teutonic strain free from either the Celtic or pre-Celtic strain; nor do I believe that the Celtic strain has anywhere a predominance such as that which, speaking very roughly, the Teutonic strain possesses in the East of these Islands, or the pre-Celtic strain in the West.
There is, therefore, no race frontier to be considered, still less is there any question of inferiority or superiority. The Irish difficulty, historically considered, arises in the main from two circumstances. The first of these, to which I have just referred, is that when England began to intervene in the welter of Irish inter-tribal warfare, she was already an organised State, slowly working its way through feudal monarchy to constitutional freedom. The second is that while the religious revolution of the sixteenth century profoundly and permanently affected the larger Island, it left the smaller Island untouched. The result of the first of these has been that Irish institutions, Irish laws, Irish forms of local government, and Irish forms of parliamentary government are necessarily of the English type. The result of the second has been that while no sharp divisions of race exist, divisions of religion have too often taken their place; that in the constitutional struggles of the seventeenth century Ireland was not the partner but the victim of English factions; and that civil war in its most brutal form, with the confiscations and penal laws which followed in its train, have fed, have indeed created, the bitter fiction that Ireland was once a "nation" whose national life has been destroyed by its more powerful neighbour.
To all this it will perhaps be replied that even if the general accuracy of the foregoing statement be admitted (and nothing about Ireland ever is admitted), it is quite irrelevant to the question of Home Rule; because what is of importance to practical statesmanship is not what did actually happen in the past, but what those who live in the present suppose to have happened. If, therefore, to the imagination of contemporary Irishmen, Ireland appears a second Poland, statesmen must act as if the dream were fact.
In such a contention there is some element of truth. But it must be observed in the first place that dreams, however vivid, are not eternal; and, in the second place, that while this particular dream endures it supplies a practical argument against Home Rule, the full force of which is commonly under-rated. For what are the main constitutional dangers of creating rival Parliaments in the same State? They are—friction, collision of jurisdiction, and, in the end, national disintegration. Of these, friction is scarcely to be avoided. I doubt whether it has been wholly avoided in any State where the system, either of co-equal or of subordinate Parliaments, has been thoroughly tried. It certainly was not avoided in the days past when Ireland had a Parliament of its own. It is incredible that it should be avoided in the future, however elaborate be the safeguards which the draughtsman's ingenuity can devise. But friction, in any case inevitable, becomes a peril to every community where the rival assemblies can appeal to nationalist sentiment. The sore gets poisoned. What under happier conditions might be no more than a passing storm of rhetoric, forgotten as soon as ended, will gather strength with time. The appetite for self-assertion, inherent in every assembly, and not likely to be absent from one composed of orators so brilliantly gifted as the Irish, will take the menacing form of an international quarrel. The appeal will no longer be to precedents and statutes, but to patriotism and nationality, and the quarrel of two Parliaments will become the quarrel of two peoples. What will it avail, when that time comes, that in 1912 the Irish leaders declared themselves content with a subordinate legislature? It is their earlier speeches of a very different tenour that will be remembered; and it will be asked, with a logic that may well seem irresistible, by what right Irish "nationality" was ever abandoned by Irish representatives.
On these dangers I do not in this brief note propose to dwell, though it seems to me insane either to ignore them or to belittle them. The point on which I desire to insist is that they arise not from the establishment of a subordinate Parliament alone, nor from the existence of a "nationalist" sentiment alone, but from the action and reaction of the sentiment upon the institution, and of the institution upon the sentiment.
Let me conclude by asking whether Irish history does not support to the full these gloomy prognostications. The Parliament that came to an end at the Union was a Parliament utterly antagonistic to anything that now goes by the name of Irish Nationalism. In every sphere, except the economic sphere, it represented the forces, political and religious, which the Irish Nationalist now regards as English and alien, and against which, for many years, he has been waging bitter warfare. Yet this Parliament, representing only a small minority of the inhabitants of Ireland, found its position of subordination intolerable. It chose a moment of national disaster to assert complete equality, and so used its powers that at last the Union became inevitable. It is surely no remedy for the ancient wrongs of Ireland—real, alas! though they were—that we should compel her again to tread the weary round of constitutional experiment, and that, in the name of Irish Nationalism, we should again make her the victim of an outworn English scheme, which has been tried, which has failed, which has been discarded, and which, in my judgment, ought never to be revived.
When Pitt commended his proposals for the Union to "the dispassionate and sober judgment of the Parliament of Ireland," he argued that such a measure was at once "transcendently important" to the Empire, and "eminently useful" to the true interests of Ireland. Lord Clare, as an Irishman, naturally reversed the order, but his compelling points were the same:—To Ireland the Union was a "vital interest," which at the same time "intimately affected the strength and prosperity of the British Empire." From that day to this the two fundamental arguments for the Union of Great Britain and Ireland have remained unchanged, and they apply with ever-growing force to the existing situation at home and abroad. But the argument from history has, perhaps, been a little neglected of late, and calls for at least a passing notice.
Popular oratory will have it that England has always been keen and aggressive in regard to the incorporation of Ireland within the Empire, but as a matter of fact, the very opposite has been the case. From the time of Pope Adrian's Bull, Laudabiliter, in 1154, which granted to Henry II. the Lordship of Ireland, but which Henry left unemployed for seventeen years, to that of the Irish petition for a legislative Union in 1703, which remained unanswered for nearly a century, vacillation and hesitation rather than eagerness for aggression have been the characteristic marks of English policy in Ireland. Far-sighted statesmen could point out the benefits to Ireland from such a connection, but as a rule it was the presence of actual foreign danger that forced the British Parliament to act. For four centuries the Lordship of the English Kings over Ireland was largely nominal. It was only when the religious quarrels of the sixteenth century became acute that the Tudors—already alarmed at the action of the Irish Parliament in recognising and crowning a pretender in Dublin Castle—found themselves compelled to assert direct Kingship.
From that time till the legislative Union every enemy of England could safely count on finding a foothold and active friends in Ireland. It is much too late in the day to indulge in any recriminations on this score. The issues were the most tremendous that have divided Europe; each side was passionately convinced of the rightness and justice of its cause. There were, in Pitt's words relating to a later day, "dreadful and inexcusable cruelties" on the one side, and "lamentable severities" upon the other, just as there were all over Europe. But in the case of Ireland every evil was exaggerated and every danger intensified by the system of dualism which encouraged resistance from within and invited interference from without. For England and English liberty it was more than once a question of existence or extinction, and the knowledge of the constant danger from the immediate west did not tend to sweeten the situation.
In Elizabeth's time the menace was from Spain; Spanish forces twice succeeded in effecting a landing on the Irish coast, and were welcomed by the inhabitants. Spain was then the most powerful enemy of England and of civil and religious liberty all the world over; Elizabeth was declared by the Pope to have forfeited the crown of England, and if the Armada had been successful at sea, the Spanish army in England would have found enthusiastic supporters in Ireland. Later on it was in Ireland, and by the aid of subsidies from an Irish Parliament, that Strafford raised 10,000 men to invade Scotland and England in support of Charles I. against his Parliament, and, incidentally, to drive the Scottish settlers out of Ulster. As the Articles of Impeachment put it, his object in raising the Irish army was "for the ruin and destruction of England and of his Majesty's subjects, and altering and subverting the fundamental laws and established Government of this Kingdom." Strafford fell, but the insurrection and massacre of 1641 were the natural result of his intrigues with the Irish Parliament and the Irish chiefs. It was under the impression of this manifest danger that Cromwell—a century and a half before his time—abolished the Dublin Parliament and summoned Irish representatives to the first United Parliament at Westminster.
As the power of Spain declined, France came to be the chief menace to England and to the peace of Europe. Again Ireland instinctively allied herself with the enemy. Tyrconnel now played the part of Strafford, and with the aid of French troops and French subsidies, and a sympathetic Irish Parliament, endeavoured to destroy the Ulster Plantation, and make Ireland a jumping-off place for the invasion of England. The Irish Parliament, in the meantime, did its part by confiscating the estates of the settlers, driving out the Protestant clergy, and outlawing English sympathisers by name in "the hugest Bill of Attainder which the world has seen."[3] It was the successful defence of Derry and Enniskillen by the Scotch and English colonists that saved Ireland and gave King William and his troops the foothold that enabled them to save England, too, in the Irish campaign of the following year.
Not the least remarkable instance of the use to which separate Parliaments within the Kingdom could be put for the ruin of England occurred during the activity of James the Second's son, the so-called "Old Pretender." In 1723 his chief adviser, the Earl of Mar, presented to the Regent of France a memorial setting out in detail a project for betraying Britain into the power of France by dismembering the British Parliament.[4] The Irish Parliament, in close alliance with a restored Scottish Parliament, was to be used to curb the power of England. "The people of Ireland and Scotland," according to Mar, "are of the same blood and possess similar interests," and they should thus always be allied against England and oppose their "united strength"—backed, of course, by that of France—to any undue growth of the English power. The scheme came to nothing, but if the Pretender had possessed a little more energy and capacity; if the French Court had been in earnest, and if Ireland and Scotland had each possessed a separate Parliament, "with an executive responsible to it," and with the control of a national militia, the story of 1745 might have ended differently.
It is necessary that these facts should be kept in mind when complaint is made of the oppressive and demoralising Irish Penal Code. That Code no one defends now, although it was lauded at the time by Swift as a bulwark of the Church against the Catholics on the one hand, and the Presbyterians on the other. It was the product of a cruel and bigoted age, and at its worst it was less severe than similar laws prevailing against Protestants in those parts of the Continent where the Roman Church held sway.[5] Spain and France were at that time vastly more powerful, populous, and wealthy countries than England: England was never free from the dread of foreign invasion, and to the would-be invader Ireland always held a guiding light and an open door.
Finally, it must also be remembered that at a time when the chances seemed fairly even, as between William and England on the one hand, and James and France on the other, the Prince of Orange, accustomed to the German way of settling such differences, had made formal offer to Tyrconnel of a working compromise—the free exercise of their religion to the Irish Catholics: half the Churches of the Kingdom: half the employments, civil and military, if they pleased, and even the moiety of their ancient properties. "These proposals," says the Chevalier Wogan, Tyrconnel's nephew and confidant, who is our informant, "though they were to have had an English Act of Parliament for their sanction, were refused with universal contempt." In other words, the party which with the assistance of France still hoped to obtain all, refused to be content with half. It is true that Wogan, in the letter from which we have quoted,[6] after stating that the exiles, "in the midst of their hard usage abroad, could not be brought to repent of their obstinacy," justifies their refusal by the way in which the Articles of Limerick were afterwards disregarded by the Irish Parliament. But this is evidently an argument of retrospective invention, and it may fairly be argued that the position would have been very different if peace on equal terms had been made on the direct authority of the King before Aughrim rather than by his deputies after Limerick.
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
And if the separatist theory has involved, as we have seen, such external dangers to the Empire, the case for the old Irish Parliament from the point of the "vital interests" of Ireland itself is even weaker. By it the bulk of the Irish people were treated for a century in a fashion described by an Irish Chief Secretary as "ingrafting absurdity on the wisdom of England and tyranny on the religion that professes humanity." It was conspicuous for its corruption even in a corrupt age, and, as was inevitable, it involved Ireland in constant conflicts with England, conflicts that were vexatious and injurious to both countries. Swift, who, amongst those who have not read his works, passes for an Irish patriot, is at his savagest when inveighing against this sham Parliament.[7]
Its members are, he says—
And if only the Devil were some day to come "with poker fiery red," and—
Capable observers, from Swift to Arthur Young, bear continuous testimony to the systematic and habitual corruption of the Irish Parliament. Offices were multiplied and were distributed among clamorous applicants on the ground of family or personal influence, or political support—never by any chance on the ground of merit or capacity. Public money was squandered for private purposes. Sir George Macartney, himself an Irishman and a Member of Parliament, in his "Account of Ireland," speaking of the year 1745, says—[8]
"The House of Commons now began to appropriate a considerable part of the additional duties to their own use. This was done under pretence of encouraging public works such as inland navigation, collieries, and manufactories of different kinds; but the truth is that most of these public works were private jobs carried on under the direction and for the advantage of some considerable gentlemen in the House of Commons."
Arthur Young, whose careful and impartial study of the state of affairs in Ireland under the Dublin Parliament has become a classic, speaks of the same class of transaction,[9]
"The members of the House of Commons at the conclusion of the sessions met for the purpose of voting the uses to which this money should be applied: the greater part of it was amongst themselves, their friends or dependants, and though some work of apparent use to the public was always the plea, yet under the sanction there were a great number of very scandalous jobs."
Young admits that some useful public work was done, but that most of the money was misappropriated was matter of common report. After a reference to the construction of a certain canal he adds—
"Some gentlemen I have talked with on this subject have replied, 'It is a job: 'twas meant as a job: you are not to consider it as a canal of trade, but as a canal for public money!' ... Sorry I am to say that a history of public works in Ireland would be a history of jobs."
Money was voted, he says elsewhere, for—
"Collieries where there is no coal, for bridges where there are no rivers, navigable cuts where there is no water, harbours where there are no ships, and churches where there are no congregations."
And when the Union was finally on its way, Hamilton Rowan, one of the founders of the United Irishmen, then in exile in America, wrote home to his father: "I congratulate you on the report which spreads here that a Union is intended. In that measure I see the downfall of one of the most corrupt assemblies, I believe, that ever existed."[10]
It is little wonder that men of good will in Ireland prayed to be delivered from such a Parliament. Molyneux, the first of the Irish Parliamentary patriots, whose book, "The Case of Ireland's being Governed by Laws made in England Stated," was burnt by the common hangman, pleaded indeed for a reformed and independent Parliament, but only because fair representation in the English Parliament was at the time "a happiness they could hardly hope for." And a few years later the Irish House, in congratulating Queen Anne on the Union of England and Scotland, added, "May God put it into your royal heart to add greater strength and lustre to your Crown by a yet more comprehensive Union."
The English Parliament, through sheer lethargy and carelessness, missed at this time an opportunity which would have peacefully launched Ireland on her career on an equality with Scotland and England, and must have profoundly modified the relations of the two countries. Immediate prosperity, in the case of a land wasted by a century of strife and bloodshed, was not indeed to be hoped for any more than in the case of Scotland, which had still two armed rebellions, and much bickering and jealousy in store before settling down to peaceful development. But if Ireland had been granted her petitions for Union in 1703 and 1707, and had thus secured equal laws and equal trading privileges, she would at any rate have emerged from her period of trial and discord not later than Scotland, and would have anticipated the economic and social advantages predicted by Adam Smith,[11] when he says—
"By a union with Great Britain, Ireland would gain, besides the freedom of trade, other advantages much more important, and which would much more than compensate any increase of taxes that might accompany that union. By the union with England, the middling and inferior ranks of people in Scotland gained a complete deliverance from the power of an aristocracy which had always before oppressed them. By a union with Great Britain, the greater part of the people of all ranks in Ireland would gain an equally complete deliverance from a much more oppressive aristocracy, an aristocracy not founded, like that of Scotland, in the natural and respectable distinctions of birth and fortune, but in the most odious of all distinctions, those of religious and political prejudices.... Without a union with Great Britain, the inhabitants of Ireland are not likely, for many ages, to consider themselves as one people."
Pitt, who was proud to proclaim himself the pupil of Adam Smith in politics and in economics, found himself, a quarter of a century after these words were written, in a position to carry out, in face of great difficulties and dangers at home and abroad, the beneficent reform advocated by his great master—a reform which, as we have seen, could have been carried a century earlier without any difficulty whatever. But the century that had been wasted involved many concurrent miseries and misfortunes: social and economic stagnation, an intensification of religious and racial bitterness, conspiracy, and invasion; savage outbreaks savagely repressed. When the time comes to measure up the rights and wrongs of those dark days, the judgment on England will assuredly be that her fault was not the carrying of the Union, but the delaying of that great measure of reform and emancipation until it was almost too late.
The story of the Union has been told and retold in the utmost detail throughout the century. The present writer has attempted quite recently to summarise it,[12] and there is little to add. The charge that it was carried by corruption is simply another way of saying that it had, constitutionally, to be passed through the Dublin Parliament, that body which, from the days of Swift's invective to those of its final condemnation, lived and moved and had its being solely in and by corruption. As Lord Castlereagh, who had charge of the Bill in the Irish House of Commons, put it, the Government was forced to recognise the situation and its task was "to buy out and secure to the Crown forever the fee simple of Irish corruption, which has so long enfeebled the power of Government and endangered the connection."
The Irish Parliament had run its course, and had involved the unhappy country in chaos, bankruptcy, revolution, and bloodshed. Lord Clare—a late and reluctant convert to the policy of the Union—said in the Irish House of Lords (Feb. 10, 1800)—
"We have not three years of redemption from bankruptcy, intolerable taxation, nor one hour's security against the renewal exterminating civil war. Session after session have you been compelled to enact laws of unexampled rigour and novelty to repress the horrible excesses of the mass of your people: and the fury of murder and pillage and desolation have so outrun all legislative exertions that you have been at length driven to the hard necessity of breaking down the pale of municipal law, and putting your courage under the ban of military government—and in every little circle of dignity and independence we hear whispers of discontent at the temperate discretion with which it is administered.... Look to your civil and religious dissensions. Look to the fury of political faction and the torrents of human blood that stain the face of your country, and of what materials is that man composed who will not listen with patience and good will to any proposition that can be made to him for composing the distractions and healing the wounds and alleviating the miseries of this devoted nation?"
Lord Clare's words—unanswered and unanswerable then and now—constitute a sufficient comment on the foolish fable of later invention, that Ireland was a land of peace and harmony, of orderly government and abounding prosperity, when a wicked English minister came and "stole away the Parliament House"—since which all has been decay and desolation. The halcyon period is generally made to coincide with that of "Grattan's Parliament"—of the semi-independent and quite unworkable Constitution of 1782, which had been extorted from England's weakness when Ireland was denuded of regular troops, and at the mercy of a Volunteer National Guard, when Cornwallis had just surrendered at Yorktown, and Spain and France were once more leagued with half Europe for the destruction of the British Empire.
It is quite true that the latter part of the eighteenth century was, on the whole, a time of considerable prosperity to certain classes in Ireland—a prosperity varied by periods of acute depression and distress. But that prosperity, such as it was, neither began with Grattan's Parliament nor ended with it—had, indeed, no more connection with the Irish Parliament in any of its phases than had the Goodwin Sands with Tenterden steeple. With the exception of the respite between the Treaty of Versailles and the outbreak of the French Revolution, England was almost constantly at war, or feverishly preparing for war. Simultaneously came the unprecedented increase of urban industry, following on the invention of the steam-engine and spinning machinery. The result was an enormous and growing demand for corn, beef, and pork, sailcloth, stores of all kinds for our armies and fleets, a demand which England, owing to the growth of her town population and the consequent growth of the home demand, was unable adequately to meet.
Ireland reaped the benefit. As a largely agricultural country, she was as yet little influenced by the discoveries of Watt, of Hargreaves, of Arkwright, or of Crompton. But her long-rested soil could produce in apparently unlimited quantities those very products of which the British forces stood most in need. The fleets were victualled and fitted out at Cork, and they carried thence a constant stream of supplies of all sorts for our armies in the field. Indeed, so keen was the demand that it was soon discovered that not only our own troops, but those of the enemy, were receiving Irish supplies, and smugglers on the south and west coasts reaped a rich harvest.
The result was obvious. Cattle graziers and middlemen made enormous profits, rents were doubled and trebled. Dublin, Cork, Waterford, Limerick and Belfast flourished exceedingly on war prices and war profits. But there is no evidence that the mass of the people in their degraded and debased condition shared to any extent in this prosperity. It was at this very period that Arthur O'Connor spoke of them as "the worst clad, the worst fed, the worst housed people in Europe." Whiteboyism, outrage and lawlessness spread over the face of the country, and, as Lord Clare reminded Parliament, "session after session have you been compelled to enact laws of unexampled rigour and novelty to repress the horrible excesses of the mass of your people." It has been made a charge against the Union that during some disturbed periods of the nineteenth century the United Parliament had to pass "Coercion" Acts at the rate of nearly one every session. The complainants should look nearer home and they would find from the records of the Irish Legislature that during the "halcyon" days of "Grattan's Parliament"—the eighteen years between 1782 and the Union—no less than fifty-four Coercion Acts were passed, some of them of a thoroughness and ferocity quite unknown in later legislation. The close of the nineteenth century and the opening of the twentieth were, in reality, in spite of a certain amount of agrarian crime, organised and subsidised from abroad, a period of much greater peace and more widespread prosperity than the bloodstained years that marked the close of the eighteenth century—and of the Irish Parliament.
Another fiction regarding the Union may perhaps be worth notice. It has sometimes been suggested that it was carried by a venal oligarchy in opposition to the will of the great mass of the population, of the Roman Catholic population in particular. This is precisely the reverse of the truth. The oligarchy controlled the Parliament, and it therefore followed that the uniformly corrupt traditions of the Irish Parliament had to be observed in carrying the Union as in carrying every other Government Bill throughout the century. But, so far from the Act of Union being carried by landowners and Protestants against the will of the Catholics, it was, as a matter of fact, carried with the ardent and unanimous assent and support of the Catholic hierarchy, and against the embittered opposition of the old ascendancy leaders, who feared the loss of their influence of power.
The evidence on this point is documentary and precise. Indeed, no one thought of doubting or challenging it at the time; Grattan contented himself with denouncing the Catholic Bishops as "a band of prostituted men." Dr. Troy, Archbishop of Dublin, was, as his correspondence shows, a warm, consistent and active supporter of the Union. Dr. Dillon, Archbishop of Tuam, wrote in September, 1799, that he had had an opportunity during his recent visitation "of acquiring the strongest conviction that this measure alone can restore harmony and happiness to our unhappy country." His neighbour, Dr. Bodkin, Bishop Galway, wrote that the Union was the only measure to save "poor infatuated Ireland" from "ruin and destruction." Dr. Moylan, Bishop of Cork, was equally emphatic. "I am perfectly satisfied," he says, "that it is impossible to extinguish the feuds and animosities which disgrace this Kingdom, nor give it the advantages of its natural local situation, without a Union with Great Britain. God grant that it may soon take place!"
As for the feeling of the rank and file of the electors—under a very widely extended franchise—two examples will suffice. In two cases—in the County of Kerry and the borough of Newry—both open constituencies—by-elections occurred during the passing of the Union legislation. In both instances the Roman Catholic vote predominated, and in both the feeling was so strong in favour of the Union that no opponent dared to face the poll. In after years Mr. Maurice Fitzgerald, the Knight of Kerry, recounted his experiences. "Having accepted office," he says, "as a supporter of the Union, I went to two elections pending the measure and was returned without opposition in a county where the Roman Catholic interest greatly preponderated, and a declaration almost unanimous in favour of the Union proceeded from the County of Kerry. One of my most strenuous supporters in bringing forward that declaration was Mr. Maurice O'Connell, uncle of Mr. Daniel O'Connell, and my most active partisan was Mr. John O'Connell, brother of Mr. Daniel O'Connell."
In Newry an attempt was made to put up an anti-Unionist candidate, but the Roman Catholic Bishop, Dr. Lennan, met and repulsed the intruder in militant fashion. "Mr. Bell," he reports to Archbishop Troy, "declined the poll, and surrendered yesterday. The Catholics stuck together like the Macedonian phalanx, and with ease were able to turn the scale in favour of the Chancellor of the Exchequer."
To the Irish Catholic at the time of the Union, the Dublin legislature was, indeed, in the words of Mr. Denys Scully, a leading Catholic layman, "not our Parliament, for we had no share in it, but their Club-house."
The summing up of the whole matter is perhaps best expressed in the measured judgment of Mr. John Morley in his study of the life of Edmund Burke. Burke, in an evil moment for himself and for Ireland, had lent himself in 1785 to what Mr. Morley called the "factious" and "detestable" course of Fox and the English Whig leaders in destroying Pitt's Commercial Propositions.
"Had it not been for what he himself called the delirium of the preceding session" (writes Burke's biographer)[13] "he would have seen that Pitt was in truth taking his first measures for the emancipation of Ireland from an unjust and oppressive subordination and for her installation as a corporate member of the Empire—the only position permanently possible for her.... A substantial boon was sacrificed amid bonfires and candles to the phantom of Irish Legislative Independence. The result must have convinced Pitt more firmly than ever that his great master, Adam Smith, was right in predicting that nothing short of the Union of the two countries would deliver Ireland out of the hands of her fatuous chiefs and of their too worthy followers."
What would Mr. John Morley, the historian who wrote those words in the prime of his intellectual strength and judgment, have said if any one had told him that in his old age Lord Morley, the politician, would have been actively engaged in assisting another generation of "fatuous chiefs" and still more worthy followers to sacrifice the true interests of Ireland in the pursuit of "the phantom of Irish Legislative Independence"?
That the Union to some extent failed in the beneficent effects which it was calculated to produce in Ireland is only another instance of the working of the "curse of mis-chance" which has so often, before and since, interposed to thwart the intentions of statesmen in their dealings with the two countries. Pitt, Castlereagh, and Cornwallis, the three men chiefly concerned in planning the change, were all agreed in explaining that the Union was not a policy complete in itself, but was only the necessary foundation upon which a true remedial policy was to be based. As Lord Cornwallis said at the time, "the word 'Union' will not cure the ills of this wretched country. It is a necessary preliminary, but a great deal more remains to be done." Catholic Emancipation, a series of parliamentary, educational, financial, and economic reforms, and the abolition of the Viceroyalty, the visible symbol of separatism and dependence, were all essential portions of Pitt's scheme. But Pitt was destined to sink into an early grave without seeing any of them materially furthered. Treacherous colleagues and the threatened insanity of the King blocked the way of some of them: England's prolonged struggle for existence against the power of Napoleon, involving as it did financial embarrassment and a generation of political reaction, accounted for the rest.
Pitt and Castlereagh resigned on the King's refusal to accept their advice, "and so," as Lord Rosebery says,[14] "all went wrong." It was "like cutting the face out of a portrait and leaving the picture in the frame. The fragment of policy flapped forlornly on the deserted mansions of the capital." A generation of agitation, strife, and discontent was to pass before Emancipation was carried, and the reforms had to wait still longer. Meanwhile a wonderful change of front had taken place. The leading opponents of the Union—Plunket, Foster, Beresford—even Grattan himself—came to accept it, and, in some cases, figured as its warmest defenders. And the Catholic Party, whom we have seen so strongly supporting the Union, gradually grew into opponents. Daniel O'Connell, whose brother and uncle were the leading supporters of the Union candidate for Kerry, started a formidable agitation first for Emancipation and then for Repeal of the Union. In the former he succeeded because enlightened public opinion in both countries was on his side: in the latter he failed utterly, both parties in Great Britain and a large section in Ireland being inflexibly opposed to any such reactionary experiment. In the end O'Connell died disillusioned and broken-hearted, and the Repeal movement disappeared from the field of Irish politics till revived many years later in the form of Home Rule.
But whilst recognising the fact that the Union, owing to the causes stated, failed partially, and for a time, to respond to all the anticipations of its authors, readers must be warned against accepting the wild and woeful tales of decay and ruin that were recklessly circulated for propagandist purposes by O'Connell and the Repealers. Many people who are content to take their facts at second hand have thus come to believe that the legislative Union changed a smiling and prosperous Kingdom into a blighted province where manufactures and agriculture, commerce and population fell into rapid and hopeless decline. Needless to say, things do not happen in that way: economic changes, for better or for worse, are slow and gradual and depend on natural causes, not on artificial. Ireland has not, as a whole, kept in line with nineteenth-century progress, and her population, after a striking increase for over forty years, showed under peculiar causes an equally striking decrease; but to assert that her course has been one of universal decay and of decay dating from the Union is to say what is demonstrably untrue.
It was inevitable that a city of very limited industry like Dublin should suffer from the disappearance of its Parliament, which brought into residence for some months in every year some hundreds of persons of wealth and distinction. It was also inevitable that the mechanical inventions to which we have already alluded—the steam-engine, the "spinning jenny," and the "mule"—which revolutionised the world's industry, should have their effect in Ireland also. Under primitive conditions, with lands almost roadless and communications slow, difficult and costly, the various districts of any country had of necessity to produce articles of food and clothing to satisfy their requirements, or they had to go without. With the progress of invention, and with the opening up of the world by roads and canals, a totally different state of things presents itself. Industries tend to become centralised—the fittest survive and grow, the unfit wither away. This is what occurred in many districts of England and Scotland, and the course of events was naturally the same in Ireland.
When we read of small towns now lying idle, which in the eighteenth century produced woollen cloth, linen, cotton, fustian, boots, hats, glass, beer, and food products, it simply means that a more highly organised system of industry has in its progress left such districts behind in the race. The woollen manufacture has centred in Yorkshire, cotton in Lancashire, linen in Belfast, and so forth—one district dwindled as others advanced and tended to monopolise production, without the legislature having anything to say to it. To say that this or that manufacture is not so prosperous in Ireland as it was a century ago before power looms, spindles, steamships, and railways came to revolutionise industry, is simply to say that Ireland, like other countries, has had its part, for better or for worse, in the great world-movement of nineteenth-century industry.
The figures of Irish exports and imports lend no countenance to the story of decay setting in with the Union. Taking the two decennial periods, before and after the Union, the figures are as follows:—[15]
| Total value | Total value | |||
| of imports. | of exports. | |||
| 1790-1801 | ... | ... | £49,000,000 | £51,000,000 |
| 1802-1813 | ... | ... | £74,000,000 | £63,000,000 |
| ————— | ————— | |||
| Increase | ... | £25,000,000 | £12.000,000 |
an increase of over fifty per cent. in imports, and over twenty-three per cent. in exports in the ten years after the Union as compared with the ten years before it.
Taking single years the result is similar. The amalgamation of the two Exchequers and the financial re-arrangements that followed, put an end to the accurate record of exports and imports until quite recently, but the increase during the early years of the Union and also over the whole country is unmistakable. The average annual value of Irish exports at the time of the Union was, according to Mr. Chart.[16] £4,000,000. In 1826 they had increased to £8,000,000, a corresponding increase being recorded in imports. Coming down to the period of the Financial Relations Commission (1895), that very cautious and painstaking statistician, the late Sir Robert Giffen,[17] roughly estimated Irish imports at £25,000,000 and exports at £20,000,000. Since that time the Irish Agricultural Department has been created, and has undertaken the collection and tabulation of such statistics. Turning to their latest report we find that the imports had in 1910 attained the relatively enormous figure of £65,000,000, and the exports £65,800,000, a total of over £130,000,000 in place of nine or ten millions, at the very outside, of the time of the Union. And it is worth noting in addition that, for the first time in these recorded tables, Ireland's exports exceed her imports.
But we are assured with triumphant and invincible despondency that population has decreased alarmingly. The movements of population since the time of the Union have been, it may be admitted, very remarkable, but the figures are double-edged and require a more careful handling than they generally receive. If we are to assume, as the prophets of gloom will have it, that increase and decrease of population are an infallible test of a country's growth or decay, then Ireland for nearly half a century after the Union must have been the most prosperous country in Europe. The population of Ireland, which in 1792 was estimated at 4,088,226, had increased in 1814 to 5,937,856, in 1821 to 6,801,827, and in 1841 to 8,196,597. In other words, the population, like the trade, of the doomed island had more than doubled since the Union. We doubt if any European country could say as much.
Then came the great disaster, the potato famine of 1846-47, which, undoubtedly, dealt a stunning blow to Irish agriculture. It was not the first, nor the worst, of Irish famines—there is evidence that the famines of 1729 and 1740 were, proportionately, more widespread and more appalling in their effects. But, occurring as it did, in the middle of the nineteenth century, with the press of the world as witnesses, it attracted immense attention, and the nations, whom England, then high and mighty in the undisputed supremacy of the doctrines of laissez faire and free trade, were not slow in retorting on their mentor. The State, it was laid down dogmatically by the economists, must not do anything to feed the starving people, because that would interfere with the principle of private enterprise; and as there was naturally no private enterprise in wide stretches of country where landlord and tenant, shopkeeper and labourer, were involved in common ruin, the people starved. For the same reason, the sufferers must not be paid to do useful work, so they were set to make roads that led to nowhere—and that have been grass-grown ever since—and to build walls that had to be pulled down again.
It was a ghastly specimen of doctrinaire dogmatism run mad, and though it was not the fault of the Government so much as of the arid doctrines of ill-understood economics which then prevailed in the schools, it did more than anything to embitter the relations between the Irish people and the Imperial Government. The death-rate from famine and famine-fever was appalling. The poor law system—then a new experiment in Ireland—broke down hopelessly, and agitators were not slow to improve the occasion by denouncing the "callousness" of the Imperial Government.
Nations, as a rule, recover from such calamities as famine, war, and pestilence with surprising quickness; but there were certain incidents connected with the famine of 1846-47 that intensified and perpetuated the evil in the case of Ireland. We have already referred to the high-and-dry doctrines of laissez faire then in the ascendant, and any real or permanent recovery of Irish agriculture was rendered practically impossible by England's adhesion to the doctrine of free imports, by the abolition of the Corn Laws, and by the crushing increase of taxation under Mr Gladstone's budgets of 1853 and the succeeding years.
Ireland was entitled under the Act of Union to "special exemptions and abatements" in taxation, in consideration of her backward economic condition. All Chancellors of the Exchequer till Mr. Gladstone's time respected these exemptions, and although no one could suggest, in view of Ireland's recent progress, that she could have been permanently exempted from the burdens imposed on the British taxpayer, it will be admitted that the time chosen by Mr. Gladstone for abruptly raising the taxation of Ireland from 14s. 9d. per head to 26s. 7d. was inopportune, not to say ungenerous.
Sir David Barbour, in his minority report on the Financial Relations Commission, perhaps the most carefully thought out and the most practical of all the many reports emanating from that heterogeneous body, gives a table of the "estimated true revenue" extracted from Great Britain and Ireland respectively from 1819 to 1894. This table shows that the revenue raised from Ireland was increased between 1849-50 and 1859-60 from £4,861,465 to £7,700,334, and he adds: "It will be observed that a great and rapid rise took place in the taxation of Ireland during the decade 1850-1860. This great increase was due to the equalisation of the spirit duties in the two countries, and the extension of the Income Tax to Ireland. The special circumstances of Ireland do not appear to have received due consideration at this time. Many arguments of a general character might be employed to justify the equalisation of the spirit duties, and the imposition of an Income Tax, but Ireland was entitled under the Act of Union to such exemptions and abatements as her circumstances might require, and the time was not opportune for imposing additional burdens upon her."
Irish Agriculture was thus almost simultaneously struck down by the greatest famine of the century, which swept away two million of the population, disabled for resuming the competition by the free admission of foreign grain, which in the long run rendered successful corn-growing in Ireland impossible, and saddled with an additional two and a quarter millions of taxation. When remonstrated with, Mr. Gladstone retorted flippantly that he could not see that it was any part of the rights of man that an Irishman should be able to make himself drunk more cheaply than the inhabitant of Great Britain. The taunt would have possessed more relevance if whisky had been an article of importation. Seeing, however, that it was an article of manufacture and export, employing directly or indirectly much capital and labour, the injury to Irish industry was very serious, many distilleries and breweries being obliged to close their doors.
As Miss Murray says in her masterly work on Irish commerce[18]:—