FOOTNOTES:
[66] See Mr. Wyndham's article, p. 249.
IX
THE SOUTHERN MINORITIES
BY RICHARD BAGWELL, M.A.
At the present moment no county or borough in the three southern provinces of Ireland returns a Unionist member. There are substantial minorities in many places, but very few in which there would be any chance of a successful contest. The University of Dublin sends two conspicuous Unionists to Parliament, who represent not only a constituency of graduates, but the vast majority of educated and thinking people. The bearing of the question on religious interests will be dealt with by others, but it may be said here that the Protestant community is Unionist. The exceptions are few, and are much more than counter-balanced by the Roman Catholic opponents of Home Rule, who for obvious reasons are less outspoken, but are quite as anxious to avert the threatened revolution.
The great bone of contention has always been the land, the cause of various wars and of ceaseless civil disputes. Parnell saw and said that purely political Nationalism was weak by itself, and he took up the land question to get leverage. For many years it has been evident that the only feasible solution was to convert occupiers into owners, and a very long step was made by the Purchase Act of 1903. Progress has now been arrested, for the Act of 1909 does not work. The vendors or expropriated owners, whichever is the more correct term, are expected to take a lower price and to be paid in depreciated paper. The minorities to be most immediately affected by legislation consist of landlords who are unable, though willing, to sell, and of tenants who are unable but very anxious to buy. The present deadlock is disastrous, for many tenants think they ought not to pay more than their neighbours, and demand reductions of rent without considering that the owner has received no part of his capital and dares not destroy the basis on which he hopes to be ultimately paid. It has been an essential part of the purchase policy that the instalment due by the occupier to recoup the State advance should be less than the rent. This has been made possible by the magic of British credit, and if that is withheld the confusion in Ireland will be worse than ever. The Exchequer has lost little or nothing, and even at much greater cost it would be the cheapest money that England ever spent. More than half the tenanted land has now passed to the occupiers, and it would be the most cruel injustice to leave the remaining landlords without power either to sell their property or to collect rents judicially fixed and refixed. They would fare badly with an Irish legislature and an Irish executive. They are, for the most part, poor but loyal men, and have exercised a great civilising influence. Are they to be deserted and ruined to keep an English party in place by the votes of men who have never pretended to be anything but England's enemies?
Irish Unionists laugh at the idea of a local Parliament being kept subordinate. It will have the power of making laws for everything Irish, that is, for everything that immediately concerns those that live in Ireland. There will be ceaseless efforts to enlarge its sphere of action, and if Irish members continue to sit at Westminster they will be as troublesome as ever there. If there are to be no Irish members Ireland will be a separate nation. Even candid Home Rulers confess that statutory safeguards would be of none effect. Hedged in by British bayonets the Lord Lieutenant may exercise his veto, but upon whose advice will he do it? If on that of an Irish Ministry the minority will have no protection at all, and does any one suppose it possible to go back to the practice of the seventeenth century, when all Irish Bills were settled in the English Privy Council, and could not be altered in a Dublin Parliament? Orators declaim about our lost legislature, but they take good care not to say what it was. In the penultimate decade of the eighteenth century the trammels were taken off, and a Union was soon found necessary. During the short interval of Independence there were two French invasions and a bloody rebellion. Protestant ascendency, though used as a catchword, is a thing long past. Roman Catholic ascendency would be a very real thing under Home Rule. The supremacy of the Imperial Parliament alone makes both the one and the other impossible.
If a legislature is established it must be given the means of enforcing its laws. We do not know what the present Government propose to do with the Irish police, but whatever the law says in practice, they will be under the local executive. Unpopular people will not be protected, and many of them will be driven out of the country. Parliamentary Home Rulers draw rosy pictures of the future Arcadia; but they will not be able to fulfil their own prophecies. Apart from the agrarian question, there is the party of revolutionists in Ireland whose headquarters are in America. They have furnished the means for agitation, and will look for their reward. The Fenian party has less power in the United States than it used to have, but there will be congenial work to do in Ireland. A violent faction can be kept in order where there is a strong government, but in a Home Rule Ireland it would not be strong for any such purpose. Appeals to cupidity and envy would find hearers, and there could be no effective resistance. The French Jacobins were a minority but they swept all before them. In the end better counsels might prevail, but the mischief done would be great, and much of it irreparable.
The justice dealt out by the superior courts in Ireland is as good as it is anywhere. A judge in the last resort has the whole force of the State behind him, and no one dreams of resistance. With an Irish Parliament and an Irish Executive this would hardly be the case. The judges would still be lawyers, but their power would be greatly impaired. In Ireland popular feeling is always against creditors, and it would be very hard indeed either to execute a writ of ejectment or a seizure of goods. If the sanction of the law is weakened, public respect for it is lessened, and the result will be a general relaxation of the bonds which draw society together. There is nothing in the antecedents of the Home Rule Party to make one suppose that it contains the materials of a good and impartial government.
Home Rule politicians are talkative and pertinacious. As members of Parliament they are of course listened to, while Unionists outside Ulster make little noise; it is, therefore, constantly said that they acquiesce in the inevitable change. Unrepresented men cannot easily make themselves heard, but they have done what they could. An enormous meeting has been held in Dublin, and the building, which contains some 7000, was filled in a quarter of an hour. There has since been a large gathering of young men who wish to remain full citizens of the Empire in which they were born, and others are to follow. In rural districts it is almost impossible to collect people in winter. Days are short and distances are long. Unionist farmers cannot forget the outrages that prevailed some years ago, and are not yet unknown. In the native land of boycotting and cattle-driving it is not surprising that they do not wish to be conspicuous. The difficulty extends to the towns, in many of which it would be almost impossible to hire a room for Unionist purposes. Hotel keepers object to risking their business and their windows, for a mob is easily excited to riot on patriotic grounds. Shopkeepers also have to be cautious in a country which has been wittily described as a land of liberty where no one can do as he likes, but where every one must do exactly what everybody else likes. In the summer people can meet in the open air, and there will, no doubt, be abundant protests from Southern Unionists. There will then be something definite to talk about.
It is often said that the County Councils have done well, and that therefore there is no danger in an Irish Parliament, but the two things are different in kind. County or District Councils, or Boards of Guardians, are constituted by Acts of the Imperial Parliament to administer Acts of the same, and are subject to constant supervision by the Local Government Board, and to the peremptory action of the King's Bench. A Parliament is by nature supreme within its sphere of action, and its constant effort would be to enlarge that field. The men who aim at independence would have the easy part to play, for no one in or out of Ulster, former Unionist or confirmed Nationalist, would have any interest in opposing them. In the meantime local councils have taught us what is likely to happen. Minorities are virtually excluded from them and from paid places in their gift. Of Protestants holding local office the great majority are survivals from the old Grand Jury system. Political discussions are frequent, but they are all among Nationalists. Intolerance of independent opinion and impatience of criticism are everywhere noticeable, and the Corporation of Dublin does not show a good example. It is intolerance of this kind rather than any approach to religious persecution that Protestants suffer from in the present and fear for the future.
Men who have something to lose dread the idea of Home Rule, including farmers who have bought their holdings, but as yet this has not been allowed time to work. There is a long way between not caring to support a Nationalist and voting for a Unionist. The chief employers of labour are mostly for the Union, but few are in a position to help the Unionist cause effectively, for they have to deal with strike makers and possible boycotters. When Labour troubles come, Nationalist politicians try to make out that they are caused by English agitators, and that there would be none under Home Rule. The probability is all the other way. There could be nothing in the existence of an Irish Parliament to prevent English Socialists from crossing the Channel, and some Labour leaders in England are Irish. We have heard a great deal lately about the union of the two democracies, and that is the point where they would unite. Passing from labour to land, which is after all the great interest of Southern and Western Ireland, the danger is even greater. With the loss of British credit it would be almost impossible to carry out the plan of occupying ownership without the grossest injustice, and the mischief would not stop there. An Irish Government would be poor, but would be expected to do all and more than all that the united government has done. At first the gap might be stopped by extravagant super-income tax, by half-compensated seizures of demesne land, and by penalising the owners of ground rents and town property. Confiscation is not a permanent source of wealth, for it soon kills the goose that laid the golden egg. Then the turn of the large farmer would come.
Most Unionists, and many who call themselves Home Rulers, are satisfied with the form of government they now have. The country has prospered wonderfully, and it will continue to prosper if the land purchase system is carried out to the end in a liberal spirit. The worst danger comes from the check given to the process by the present Ministry. But the national feelings of Ireland must not be ignored. Her far-back history, bad in itself, but represented worse by unscrupulous writers, makes it necessary to maintain an impartial power above the warring elements. In a pastoral country people have much time on their hands, and are apt to spend it in brooding over bygone wrongs. But over the past not Jove himself hath power, and it is for the future that we are responsible. From Wellington onwards Ireland has given many great soldiers to the British Army, and it is the classes from which they spring that it is now proposed to abandon. Under Home Rule the flag would be a foreign emblem, useless to protect the weak in Ireland, and perhaps available to oppress them. England would have cast off her friends and gained none in exchange. Nothing will conciliate the revolutionary faction in Ireland, and there is every reason to think that it would become the strongest. Modern Ireland is the creation of English policy, and many wrong things were formerly done, but for a long time amends have been making. If England, from weariness or for the sake of Party advantage, abandons her supporters, they will have no successors. Ireland will be more troublesome than ever, and the crime will receive its fitting punishment.
X
HOME RULE AND NAVAL DEFENCE
BY ADMIRAL LORD CHARLES BERESFORD, M.P.
Ireland under Home Rule must, in the event of war, be regarded as a potentially hostile country.
In this statement resides the dominant factor of the situation viewed from the naval and military point of view. It is not asserted that the government of Ireland would be disloyal; but it is asserted that the authorities charged with the defence of his Majesty's dominions cannot afford to take risks when the safety of the country is at stake. That such risks must exist under the circumstances indicated, is obvious to all those who have studied the speeches of the leaders of the Irish Nationalist party, in which they have unequivocally declared their intention to rid Ireland of English rule, and in which they extol as heroes such men as Theobald Wolfe Tone, who intrigued with France against England in order to achieve Irish independence, and who took his own life rather than receive the just reward of his deeds. That some among the Irish Nationalist leaders have recently professed their devotion to the British Empire cannot be regarded by serious persons as a relevant consideration. The demand for Home Rule is in fact a demand for separation from the United Kingdom or it is nothing. Naval officers are accustomed to deal with facts rather than with words.
In the great sea-wars of the past, Ireland has always been regarded by the enemy as providing the base for a flank attack upon England. Had King Louis XIV. rightly used his opportunities, the army of King William would have been cut off from its base in England, and would have been destroyed by reinforcements arriving from France to assist King James II. There is no more concise presentment of the case than the account of it given by Admiral Mahan in "The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783."
"The Irish Sea, separating the British Islands, rather resembles an estuary than an actual division; but history has shown the danger from it to the United Kingdom. In the days of Louis XIV., when the French navy nearly equalled the combined English and Dutch, the gravest complications existed in Ireland, which passed almost wholly under the control of the natives and the French. Nevertheless, the Irish Sea was rather a danger to the English—a weak point in their communications—than an advantage to the French. The latter did not venture their ships-of-the-line in its narrow waters, and expeditions intending to land were directed upon the ocean ports in the south and west. At the supreme moment the great French fleet was sent upon the south coast of England, where it decisively defeated the allies, and at the same time twenty-five frigates were sent to St. George's Channel, against the English communications. In the midst of a hostile people the English army in Ireland was seriously imperilled, but was saved by the battle of the Boyne and the flight of James II. This movement against the enemy's communications was strictly strategic, and would be just as dangerous to England now as in 1690[67]....
"There can be little doubt that an effective co-operation of the French fleet in the summer of 1689 would have broken down all opposition to James in Ireland, by isolating that country from England, with corresponding injury to William's power....
"The battle of the Boyne, which from its peculiar religious colouring has obtained a somewhat factitious celebrity, may be taken as the date at which the English crown was firmly fixed on William's head. Yet it would be more accurate to say that the success of William, and with it the success of Europe, against Louis XIV. in the war of the League of Augsburg, was due to the mistakes and failure of the French naval campaign in 1690; though in that campaign was won the most conspicuous single success the French have ever gained at sea over the English."
Every great naval power has gone to school to Admiral Mahan; and this country can hardly expect again to profit by those mistakes in strategy which the gifted American writer has so lucidly exposed.
Ireland, lying on the western flank of Great Britain, commands on the south the approaches to the Channel, on the west the North Atlantic; and on the east the Irish Sea, all sea-roads by which millions of pounds' worth of supplies are brought to England. On every coast Ireland has excellent harbours. There are Lough Swilly on the north, Blacksod Bay on the west, Bantry Bay, Cork Harbour and Waterford Harbour on the south, Kingstown Harbour and Belfast Lough on the east—to name but these—besides numerous lesser inlets which can serve as shelter for small craft and destroyers. It should here be noted that Belfast Harbour, owing to the enterprise of the Harbour Board, now possesses a channel and dock capable of accommodating a ship of the Dreadnought type[68].
There is no necessity to presuppose an actively hostile Ireland; but an Ireland ruled by a disloyal faction would easily afford shelter to the warships of the enemy in her ports, whence they could draw supplies, where they could execute small repairs, and could coal from colliers despatched there for the purpose or captured. Thus lodged, a fleet or a squadron would command the main trade routes to England; and might inflict immense damage in a short time. Intelligence of its position could be prevented from reaching England by the simple method of destroying wireless stations and cutting cables.
These considerations would necessarily impose upon the Navy the task of detaching a squadron of watching cruisers charged with the duty of keeping guard about the whole of Ireland.
Is the Admiralty prepared to discharge this office in the event of war?
If not, there falls to be considered the further danger of the invasion of Ireland. That such a peril is not imaginary, is proved by the fact that Ireland has been invaded in the past.
The attempt of Hoche and Grouchy to land in Bantry Bay in 1796 failed ignominiously; and the next expedition designed to invade Ireland was defeated at Camperdown. But in 1798, the year of the Great Rebellion in Ireland, three French frigates evaded the British cruisers, and on August 22 dropped anchor in Killala Bay. General of Brigade, Jean Joseph Amable Humbert, landed with his second in command, General Sarazin, several rebel Irish leaders, 1700 men and 82 officers.
On August 27 Humbert defeated the British troops at Castlebar "Races." On September 8, his forces surrendered at Ballinamuck to Lord Cornwallis. General Humbert was carried to England; and it is worth noting that while he was on his way, Admiral Bompard set sail from Brest with a ship of the line and three frigates, carrying 2587 men and 172 officers, commanded by General Hardy and the notorious Wolfe Tone (called General Smith for the occasion). Bompard was turned back by an English fleet of forty-two sail. The obvious conclusion of the whole matter is that the fleet can stop an invasion, always provided that the ships thereof are the right number in the right place at the right time.
The Irish Rebellion of 1798 is often discussed as though it was wholly bred of the corruption of Ireland itself. The fact was, of course, that it was an offshoot of the French Revolution, and that the condition of Ireland at the time was no more than a contributory cause. My Lords Cornwallis, Castlereagh, and Clare, in combating the forces of the Rebellion, were actually in conflict with the vast insurrections of the French nation. The design of the Irish rebels was to enlist the mighty destructive force of France to serve their own ends.
Wolfe Tone and his colleague Lewens, in 1796, had succeeded in persuading Carnot and the French Directory to embrace the cause of Ireland. When the Rebellion of 1798 broke out, Lewens wrote to the Directory reminding them that they had promised that France should postulate the conferring of independence upon Ireland as the condition of making peace with England, and specifying five thousand troops of all arms, and thirty thousand muskets with artillery and ammunition, as sufficient to ensure the success of the Rebellion.
The attitude of the Directory is defined in the despatch addressed to General Hardy (upon whom the supreme command of the Humbert expedition at first devolved) by Bruix, Minister of Marine, dated July 30, 1798.
"The executive Directory is busily engaged in arranging to send help to the Irish who have taken up arms to sever the yoke of British rule. It is for the French Government to second the efforts of a brave people who have too long suffered under oppression."
In other words, the Directory regarded the achievement of her independence by Ireland as an enterprise incidental to the greater scheme of the conquest of England and of Europe.
It was further laid down in the despatch that "it is most important to take every possible means to arouse the public spirit of the country, and particularly to foster sedulously its hatred of the English name ... There has never been an expedition whose result might more powerfully affect the political situation in Europe, or could more advantageously assist the Republic...."
Irish conspirators have never risen to play any part higher than the office of cat's-paw to a foreign nation. To-day, they are content—at present—to bribe with votes a political party in England. But it is none the less essential to remember that, as in 1688 and as in 1798 a great and militant foreign Power used the weapon of Irish sedition against England, so in 1912 the same instrument lies ready to hand. For the Home Rule conspiracy of to-day is nothing but the lees of the evil heritage bequeathed by the French Revolution.
It is the business of the naval officer, who is not concerned with party politics, to estimate the posture of international affairs solely in relation to the security of the State. The condition of Ireland at this moment, when the Home Rule issue has been wantonly revived, would, in the event of a war occurring between Great Britain and a foreign Power, involve the necessity of regarding Ireland as a strategic base of essential value, a part of whose inhabitants might combine with the hostile forces by giving them shelter and supplies, and even by inviting them to occupy the country. Elsewhere in these pages, Lord Percy has pointed out that the necessity of holding a disaffected Ireland by garrisoning the country would totally disorganise our military preparations for war—such as they are.
These considerations must materially affect strategical dispositions in the event of war, involving the establishment and maintenance of a separate force of cruisers charged with the duty of patrolling the sea routes which converge upon Ireland, and of watching the harbours of her coasts. As matters stand at present, such a force does not exist.
It may, of course, be urged that a strategical plan designed for the double purpose of surveying the movements of a hostile battle-fleet and of guarding the trade-routes, must of necessity cover the coasts of Ireland, on the principle that the greater includes the less. The argument, however, omits the essential qualification that a part of the Irish population cannot be trusted. It is this additional difficulty which has been introduced into the problem of naval defence by the revival by politicians of the agitation of 1798, under another name.