THE MAINTENANCE OF THE UNION.
The failure of the Union; its nature.
Eighty-six years have elapsed since the conclusion of the Treaty of Union between England and Ireland. The two countries do not yet form an united nation. The Irish people are, if not more wretched (for the whole European world has made progress, and Ireland with it), yet more conscious of wretchedness; and Irish disaffection to England is, if not deeper, more wide-spread than in 1800. An Act meant by its authors to be the source of the prosperity and concord which, though slowly, followed upon the union with Scotland, has not made Ireland rich, has not put an end to Irish lawlessness, has not terminated the feud between Protestants and Catholics, has not raised the position of Irish tenants, has not taken away the causes of Irish discontent, and has therefore not removed Irish disloyalty. This is the indictment which can fairly be brought against the Act of Union. It is, however, of importance to notice that the main charges to which the Act of Union is liable are negative. It has not removed (its foes, say that it has not mitigated) great evils; but the mass of ills for which the Union is constantly made chargeable were in existence before the days of Pitt or Cornwallis. Destitution, sectarian animosities, harsh evictions, met by savage outrages, the terror of secret societies, the stern enforcement of law which to the people represented anything but justice, are phenomena of Irish society, which, as they existed before the Volunteers established the Parliamentary independence of the country, and continued to exist when Ireland was subject to no laws but those passed by an Irish Parliament, cannot be attributed to the Act of Union. That enactment introduced a purely political change. It could not, except very indirectly, either increase or remove evils which it did not affect to touch. To two charges its authors are indeed, with more or less of justice, liable; they committed the intellectual error of supposing that a change or improvement in the form of the Constitution would remove evils due to social and economical causes; they committed the moral error of thinking that a beneficial enactment might allowably be passed by means which outraged all the best moral feeling of Ireland. Their mistakes are worth notice. England is again told that a Constitutional change is the remedy for Irish misery. Ethical considerations (in this case the moral rights of a loyal minority and the legal rights of Irish landlords) are, it is again intimated, to be held of slight account compared with the benefit to Ireland and to England which is to be expected from an experiment in Constitution-making. To impartial observers it may appear that the proposed policy of 1886 threatens to reproduce in its essence the errors and the vices of the policy of 1800. Be this as it may, the reflection that the ill results of the Act of Union are mainly negative suggests the conclusion that the good results (if any) of its repeal would probably be negative also, and clears the way for the question with which we are immediately concerned, namely, What are the actual and undoubted evils to England of maintaining a legislative union with Ireland?
The evils of maintaining the Union
The nature and extent of these evils has been considered in criticising the arguments in favour of Home Rule. A bare enumeration of them therefore may here suffice.
1. Complication of English policy.
First.—The Union hampers and complicates English policy, and this even independently of the existing agitation for Home Rule. The tenacity of England during the war with America, her triumphant energy during the revolutionary struggle, were due to a unity of feeling on the part, at any rate, of her governing classes, which even under the most favourable circumstances can hardly exist in a Parliament containing, as the Parliament of the United Kingdom always must contain, a large body of Irish Roman Catholics. If it be urged that the presence of Roman Catholics is due to the Catholic Emancipation Act, and not to the Act of Union, the remark is true but irrelevant. No maintainer or assailant of the Union is insane enough to propose the repeal of the Emancipation Act.
2. Obstruction
Secondly.—The refusal of Home Rule involves a long, tedious, and demoralising contest with opponents will use, and from their own point of view have a right to use, all the arts of obstruction and of Parliamentary intrigue. The battle of the Constitution must be fought out in Parliament, and if it is to be won, Englishmen may be compelled to forego for a time much useful legislation, to modify the rules of party government, and, it is possible, even the forms of the Constitution.
3. Strict government in Ireland.
Thirdly.—If the Union is to be maintained with advantage to any part of the United Kingdom, the people of the United Kingdom must make the most strenuous, firm, and continuous effort, lasting, it may well be, for twenty years or more, to enforce throughout every part of the United Kingdom obedience to the law of the land. This effort can only be justified by the equally strenuous determination (which must involve an infinity of trouble) to give ear to every Irish complaint, and to see that the laws which the Irish people obey are laws of justice, and (what is much the same thing) laws which in the long run the people of Ireland will feel to be just. To carry out this course of action is difficult for all governments, is perhaps specially difficult for a democratic government. To maintain the Union is no easy task, though it has yet to be proved that any form of Home Rule will give more ease to the people of England; nor can the difficulty be got rid of, though it may be somewhat changed, by abolishing the Irish representation in Parliament, or by treating Ireland as a Crown colony. Such steps, which could hardly be termed maintenance of the Union, might, as expedients for carrying through safely a course of reform, be morally and for a time justifiable. Their adoption is, however, liable to an almost insuperable objection. Democracy in Great Britain does not comport with official autocracy in Ireland. Every government must be true to its principles, and a democracy which played the benevolent despot would suffer demoralisation.
Good results of the Union.
The Act of Union has been the aim of so much random invective that its good fruits (for it has borne good no less than evil fruits) are in danger of being forgotten. It ended once and for all an intolerable condition of affairs, and its scope will never be understood unless its enactments are read in the lurid light cast upon them by the rebellion of 1798. The hateful means used to obtain an apparently good end have cast a slur on the reputation of more than one high-toned statesman. Humanity, in the case of Cornwallis at least, had far more share than ambition in his determination to abolish the Irish Parliament. His anxiety in 1798 to save Catholics and rebels from oppression was as keen and as noble as the anxiety of Canning in 1858 to protect the natives of India from the resentments excited by the Mutiny. Every reason which in our own day after the Gordon riots made it necessary to abolish the ancient constitution of Jamaica told in 1800 in favour of abolishing the still more ancient Parliament of Ireland. If statesmen, bent on restoring at least the rule of law and peace in a distracted country, fancied that the corruption of the legislature might be counted a low price to pay for protecting the mass of the population from the rule or the vengeance of a faction, they committed a grave moral error. But their mistake was more pardonable than it seems to modern critics, and the lesson which it teaches—that you cannot base a just policy upon a foundation of iniquity—is one which the modern censors of Pitt may well lay to heart. However this may be, the transactions which discredited the passing of the Act of Union give no ground for repealing it, and, except to a rhetorician in want of an argumentum ad hominem, it will never appear that the philosophic historian who maintains that the Treaty of Union was ill-conceived and premature, contradicts the political philosopher who contends that to repeal the Union would be not to cancel but to aggravate the evils of an historical error. The considerations which recommend or require the maintenance of the Union are often forgotten, but are obvious.
Reasons for maintaining the Union.
The support of the Union is, after all, let controversialists say what they like, the policy which in fact holds the field, and it is (strange though the assertion may appear) on the advocates of innovation, not on the supporters of things as they are, that lies the burden of making out their case. A fundamental alteration in the constitution of the realm is in itself no light matter, and any man who has eyes to see or ears to hear may easily convince himself that the creation of an Irish Parliament must be the beginning, not the end, of a revolution. Dublin is not the only city in the United Kingdom which has contained an Assembly which not only occasionally denied, but during the whole of its existence never admitted, the sovereignty of the Parliament at Westminster; and in the present state of the world it is inconceivable that Irish autonomy—if such be the proper term—should not excite or justify claims for local independence which would unloose the ties which bind together the huge fabric of the British Empire.
Strengthens the English Crown.
The Union again of England and Ireland has increased, as its relaxation would of necessity diminish, the power of the central government. That the Treaty of Union has, disappointing and even harmful as some of its results have been, formed a guarantee against successful rebellion, hardly admits of question. The difference between the abortive revolt of 1848 or the Fenian disturbances of 1866, and the desperate insurrection of 1798, affords some measure of the strength which the legislative unity of the kingdom has added to the English Crown. If it be suggested that the disloyalty which has prompted sedition during this century was less deep than the animosities which armed the insurgents of '98, the suggestion may be true, but it incidentally shows that under the Union some progress, however slight, has been made towards national harmony, and recalls the important fact that at the present day the wealth and the energy of Protestant Ireland firmly support the legislative unity of the kingdom. Consider again what are the facilities possessed, say, by the State of New York, by the kingdom of Bavaria, or by the Cape Colony for interfering with or arresting the action of the central power to which the State, kingdom, or dependency is subject, and you perceive at once how ample must, from the very necessity of the case, be the opportunities possessed by a semi-independent Irish executive representing a semi-independent Irish Parliament for embarrassing the action of the Government in London. This will appear more clearly from a detailed examination of the different forms which may be assumed by Home Rule. One remark, however, may with advantage be made at this point of our argument, since it holds good of every possible scheme for repealing or modifying the Union. Powers conferred upon an executive and a Parliament at Dublin must from the nature of things be a deduction from the powers which can be exercised by the Parliament and Ministry at Westminster. This is a principle the truth of which is independent of the wishes or fancies either of Englishmen or of Irishmen. "The more you have of the more," runs a quaint Spanish proverb, "the less you have of the less." The saying is of mathematical certainty, but the depth and variety of its application are constantly forgotten in the excitement of controversy.
Enables it to maintain freedom.
To the existence of the Union and to the power which it confers upon the executive, is due the possibility of curbing the violence of religious and political zealots by the interposition of an authority endowed at once with overpowering strength and obvious impartiality. In Belfast even a Nationalist must, if he is a peaceable citizen, feel that the withdrawal of the Queen's troops would not conduce to his comfort. Under a system of Home Rule, it will perhaps be said, one body of fanatics or the other would, with or without the aid of the army, gain the upper hand and restore order. Grant the truth, which may perhaps be a little doubtful of this suggestion, it is at best a plea not for Home Rule but for separation, since no civilised government could, whilst England and Ireland formed under any terms whatever parts of the same political community, suffer Belfast to become the scene of a free fight which should decide by the ordeal of battle whether Protestants should tyrannise over Catholics, or Catholics coerce Protestants by a reign of terror. A reign of order moreover is not equivalent to the reign of justice. Still less is it equivalent to the establishment of that personal freedom which can only exist under the equal rule of equal law, and is the blessing which every government worthy the name is bound to confer upon its subjects.
An impartial foreigner again would probably hold, as indeed De Beaumont (unless I misunderstand his teaching) did to the end of his life actually hold, that the existing connection between England and Ireland is dictated by the state of the world, by the circumstances of the times, by the very nature of things. We are living in 1886, not in 1782: the nineteenth century is not the age for small States or for weak States. Such an observer, however, would also see much that is hidden by the dust of battle from the combatants in a desperate political conflict What is really needed to meet the real wants of which the cry for Home Rule is a more or less factitious expression is, he would note, much more a change in the spirit of Englishmen than an alteration in the constitution of England. If Englishmen could learn to speak and think of Irishmen with the respect and consideration due to fellow-citizens, if they could cease to jeer at Irishmen now as not much more than a century ago they used to jeer at Scotchmen, the Union would soon become something more than a mere work of legal ingenuity. A change of feeling would make it easy for English politicians and English voters to perceive that the local affairs of Ireland ought to be managed in the Parliament of the United Kingdom in accordance with the opinion of the Parliamentary representatives of Ireland, just as Scotch affairs are managed at Westminster in accordance with the opinions of Parliamentary representatives of Scotland. Towards this reform in the practice which need not change anything in the law of our constitution, Mr. Bright has already pointed the way, and Mr. Bright's moral intuitions have more than once given him a power denied to our other statesmen of prophetic insight into the future of English policy. Meanwhile those who urge the maintenance of the Union have a right to insist upon the possibilities which it contains of reconciling the strength of the Empire with due regard to the local interests and local sentiment of Ireland.
And carry out just reforms.
The Union, lastly, whilst it increases the power of the whole United Kingdom, provides the means of carrying out, and of carrying out with due regard to justice, any reform, innovation, or if you please revolution, required for the prosperity of the Irish people. The duty, it has been laid down, of an English Minister is to effect by his policy all those changes in Ireland which a revolution would effect by force. The maxim comes from a strange quarter, but the doctrine of Disraeli sums up on this matter the teaching of Mill and De Beaumont, and it is absolutely sound if you add to it the implied condition that an English Minister, whilst aiming at the ends of a wise revolutionist, must pay a respect to the demands of justice not always evinced by the revolutionary spirit. But to put in force a policy of just revolution, nothing is so necessary as the combination of resistless power with infinite wealth. This is exactly what the government of the United Kingdom can, and no Irish government could, supply. Mr. Gladstone and his followers fully admit this, and the Land Purchase Bill was the sign of their conviction that the policy of Home Rule itself needs for its success and justification the power to draw upon the wealth of the United Kingdom. Let the United Kingdom, it is said in effect, pay fifty millions, that without any injustice to Irish landlords Irish tenants may be turned into landowners, and may then enjoy the blessings of Home Rule, freed from all temptation to use legislative power for purposes of confiscation. The advice may in one sense be sound, but prudence suggests that if the fifty millions are to be expended, it were best first to settle the agrarian feud, and then to see whether the demand for Home Rule would not die a natural death. French peasants were Jacobins until the revolution secured to them the soil of France. The same men when transformed into landed proprietors became the staunch opponents of Jacobinism. It is in any case the interest of England to see whether, say in a generation, the existing or further changes in the tenure of land may not avert all necessity or demand for changes in the constitution. Interest here coincides with duty. No scheme whether of Home Rule or of Irish independence has been proposed, nor, it may be said with confidence, ever can be proposed, which, disguise the matter as you will, does not savour of treachery to thousands of Irishmen who have performed the duties and claim to retain the rights of citizens of the United Kingdom. The worst delusion of the revolutionary spirit is the notion that justice to the people may be based upon injustice to individuals. Protestants have not more, but neither have they less, claim to protection from the State than Catholics. Even landowners are not of necessity wrong-doers. Rent is a debt, and it may occasionally be the duty, even of a tenant, to pay his creditor. An insolvent debtor has, however excusable or pitiable his position, no absolute moral right to improve his own position by torturing or murdering any solvent neighbour who may be inclined to pay his own debts. To maintain the Union is to maintain the effort to perform the obligations of the country, and to compel all citizens of the country to perform the duties imposed by law. The effort is an arduous one, the more so since it must be combined with the equally strenuous endeavour to see that in Ireland, as in every part of the United Kingdom, the demands of the law be made to coincide with the demands of morality and of humanity. Still pactum serva is a good maxim for nations no less than for individuals: there may be a higher law than the rule of keeping one's promise, but before a man or a government incurs even the appearance of bad faith, it were well to see whether the so-called higher law of conscience may not in reality be the lower dictates of indolence or cowardice. Neither nations nor individuals are bound in duty to do impossibilities. The limit of power is the limit of responsibility, but if England can no longer enforce justice in Ireland, there will still be the grave question whether this fearful result of past misdoing or error does not suggest and justify Separation rather than Home Rule.