IX.—Ireland As A Dependency. By Professor A. F. Pollard
“The ocean,” said Grattan, with reference to the connexion between Great Britain and Ireland, “protests against separation, and the sea against union.” The protests of natural forces cannot be ignored, and the history of the relations between the two islands is filled with the efforts of statesmen to find a middle way between the horns of this dilemma, and to adjust the estranging drift of the Irish Channel, the Irish climate, and racial divergence to the bonds of common interest imposed by the Atlantic Ocean and foreign competition upon the British Isles. After a brief eighteen years of uneasy legislative independence, the pendulum swung to the other extreme, and the Act of Union inaugurated a century of restless incorporation; but, for five out of the six and a half centuries of English parliamentary history, Ireland had a subordinate Parliament. Union has been the exception, not the rule, in the relations of the kingdoms.
The mere existence of an Irish Parliament was not, therefore, fatal to England's security or to the growth of its Empire. A Parliament sat at Dublin while England won the battles of Crecy and Agincourt, of Blenheim and the Nile, defied the menace of Rome, defeated the Spanish Armada, and laid the foundations [pg 252] of British dominion in India, in Canada, in the West Indies, and in South Africa. Spaniards, it is true, landed at Smerwick in 1579 and at Kinsale in 1601, and French troops landed at Carrickfergus in 1760 and at Kilala in 1798; but Spaniards also landed at Penzance in 1593, and Frenchmen landed on English soil countless times from the days of William the Conqueror to their descent at Fishguard in 1796. England has ever been saved by its navy and not by its parliamentary unions, and the attraction to foreign invaders has not been an Irish Parliament, but the existence of Irish discontent. No invasion of Ireland, in spite of the Irish Parliament, came so near to success as did the Jacobite risings after the Scottish Union.
The recapitulation of these facts is, perhaps, otiose, except to allay fears which sane politicians do not entertain; and it is more to the point to show that the causes of Irish dissatisfaction are historical, and are identical with those which, under similar conditions, produced a similar discontent in England. The notion that the Irish are naturally turbulent and disloyal, while the English are by nature the reverse, is one which could only have grown up after England had rid itself of those irritants which cause the Irish friction. Between the Norman Conquest and the Revolution of 1688 England rebelled against more than half its sovereigns: some were imprisoned, some were expelled, some were assassinated, and some were done to death in more decorous fashion; and English treason and turbulence were once quite as much bywords in Europe as ever Irish disloyalty was in England. The conventional English pictures of Irish disorder could easily be capped as late as the seventeenth century by French descriptions of English lawlessness and barbarity. A French guide-book, [pg 253] published in 1654, declared that England was inhabited by demons and parricides, and a few years later another Frenchman averred that the English were a cruel and ferocious race of wolves. The truth of the matter is that English and Irish alike prefer to manage their own affairs in accord with their own ideas, and are only contented and loyal when this condition obtains. The Revolution of 1688 placed its realisation within the reach of the English people, and there has been no English rebellion since. But the sovereign remedy for disaffection was refused the Irish and the American colonists: the latter rebelled, and, being distant, achieved their independence. The Canadians followed suit in 1837, but found peace and prosperity under a parliament of their own. South Africa was converted to the cause of empire by the same expedient; only the Irish, who are most at England's mercy, have been condemned to nurse their grievance and denied the conditions of loyalty.
The remedy does not apply, we are told, to Irish disorders, firstly because parliamentary institutions are an exotic[122] unsuited to the Irish soil and temperament, and secondly because they have been weighed in Irish balances and found wanting. It is hard to see why they should be regarded as more exotic in Irish Dublin than in French Quebec: Sir Wilfrid Laurier cannot be termed a failure as a parliamentarian; British parties at Westminster have been inconvenienced by the parliamentary skill rather than by the parliamentary incompetence of Irish members; and the present menace to parliamentary institutions does not come from Ireland. Nor, indeed, is the argument one which we can employ with any consistency, for there is hardly a word in our legal and constitutional terminology [pg 254] that is not of foreign origin. Parliament itself is not of Anglo-Saxon derivation, and nearly all the things we cherish most have been imported from abroad—our racehorses and our religion, our alphabet and our algebra, our trial by jury and our vote by ballot. Pure-bred civilisations have been rare, inelastic, and unprogressive, and the test of a nation's political capacity lies not in its rigid adherence to its original stock-in-trade, but in its powers of assimilation and adaptability to its environment. It is no reproach to us that we have dethroned indigenous deities, nor to the Irish that they have appropriated our Parliamentary weapons; for it is a poor country which cannot borrow its neighbours' wisdom and profit by their experience.
The misfortune for Ireland was that in the earlier stages of its development it borrowed so little, and retained so much of its primitive tribal decentralisation. England would have been no less unfortunate had William the Conqueror only succeeded in establishing a Norman Pale on this side of the English Channel, and had England retained its connexion with Normandy. As it was, the Normans and Angevins cured us of our primitive tribalism, and then left England to work out its own salvation. The severance of Normandy from England converted the descendants of William's companions from a Norman garrison into an English aristocracy, while the successors of Strongbow's followers were maintained by the English connexion as an alien garrison quartered in the barracks of a dwindling Irish Pale. At first, indeed, they had spread a thin veneer of Anglo-Norman conquest over the greater part of Ireland; but baronial feuds only added to the distraction of native septs; and when Edward I.'s premature imperialism provoked a general Celtic [pg 255] reaction under Robert Bruce in Scotland and Edward Bruce in Ireland, Anglo-Norman rule was doomed. The conquerors either threw in their lot with the natives and became more Irish than the Irish, or withdrew within the Pale and maintained a troubled existence by sowing division throughout the rest of the realm. Hence the Irish were always the enemies, seldom the subjects of the English Crown; and outside the Pale there was no English government of Ireland during the middle ages. Constitutional relations only existed between England and the Pale; relations with Ireland outside the Pale were in that state of nature, in which, says Hobbes, the life of man is “nasty, short, brutish, and mean.” The Government had not the means to govern; it felt and it acknowledged no obligations of duty or humanity towards its foes outside the Pale.
This Pale, about twenty miles broad and sixty miles long, was almost as narrow and quite as lawless as the Welsh Marches or the Scottish Borders; and it was the nursery of the English-seedling-parliament in Ireland. A sort of parliament containing knights from a dozen shires had been summoned in 1295; boroughs appear to have been represented first in 1310. It was only designed to supply the financial needs of an English Government, and give statutory form to the edicts of Dublin Castle; and the statutes of Kilkenny (1367), which penalised everything Irish, were merely striking examples of the ferocity and the futility of its customary legislation. Nevertheless, it began to strike feeble roots in Irish soil, and when, in 1374, Edward III.'s deputy directed the clergy and laity of the Pale to send their representatives to Westminster, their constituents, while obeying, instructed them to reject all financial demands upon Ireland made at St. Stephen's. Demands made at Dublin were not, [pg 256] however, much more fruitful, and for thirty years in the fifteenth century only one Irish Parliament met. Spasmodic efforts by sovereigns and royal princes like Richard II., Lionel and Thomas (Dukes of Clarence), and Richard (Duke of York,) alternated with longer periods, during which the Crown abandoned the government to the greatest chieftain in the Pale, and made believe that the power he wielded was due to his royal commission. Richard of York, indeed, established a reputation for vigorous rule which won him the support of the Parliament of the Pale in his assertion of an independent kingship in Ireland after his defeat in England in 1459; and the Anglo-Irish, either out of gratitude to him or of spite to the Tudors, afterwards discovered Yorkist features in every pretender to Henry VII.'s throne. Their favour to Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck precipitated Poynings' laws.
These famous enactments were aimed at Dublin Castle rather than at the Dublin parliament. The Crown had always controlled Irish legislation, but the control had been exercised through a deputy, who was often more powerful in Ireland than the Crown; this independence was to cease, and the control of Irish legislation was transferred from the Irish deputy to the English Privy Council. No Parliament was to be summoned in the Pale without the consent, and no legislation introduced without the approval, of that body. Acts previously passed by the English Parliament were declared in force in Ireland, and in practice the English Parliament proceeded to legislate for, though not to tax, Ireland without the concurrence of its Parliament. Poynings also attempted to conquer the native Irish, and to rule the Pale according to English ways; but the expense proved greater than [pg 257] Henry VII. could bear, and, with the bit of Poynings' laws in his mouth, the Earl of Kildare was sent back to govern the Pale in the time-honoured fashion.
Ireland was one of the questions upon which Wolsey and Henry VIII. disagreed. The Cardinal's policy was to neglect Ireland and save expenses in that direction in order to act as the paymaster and to pose as the arbiter of Europe, with the result that on the eve of his fall, England's hold on Ireland was said to be weaker than it had been since the conquest. When Wolsey was gone, Henry's imperialism found vent in Ireland as well as in other spheres, and it was stimulated by the appearance as early as 1528 of Spanish emissaries at the courts of Irish chiefs. But the brutal hatred which later conflicts engendered did not inspire the Irish efforts of Henry VIII. His warfare in Ireland was less ferocious than that which he waged on Scotland, or on the monks of England. If he confiscated the lands of Irish monasteries, he shared the spoils with Irish chiefs, and he also confiscated the lands of habitual absentees; and if he proscribed the Earl of Kildare, he gave earldoms to O'Neill, O'Brien, and MacWilliam. Whatever plans for the expropriation of the Irish clans were propounded to his ears, his own policy was not expropriation, but the conversion of Irish chiefs into Irish peers holding their lands of him as their king; and by the common testimony of English and Irish alike, the land enjoyed greater peace and prosperity at the end of his reign than it had within living memory. The destruction of papal jurisdiction was no grievance to the Irish, for pope after pope had prohibited their preferment and restricted Irish sees to men of English race. Even Edward VI.'s Acts of Uniformity, which were applied to Ireland without the authorisation of its Parliament, [pg 258] evoked no Irish rebellion; and so mild was religious conflict that there was no Irish martyr under Protestant Edward VI. or under Catholic Mary.
The permanent schism between the two races was, indeed, due neither to politics nor to religion, but to the expropriation of the Irish from their land. At the middle of the sixteenth century the antagonism between English and Irish was slighter than that between English and Scots, or that between Britons and Boers in 1900. Men can heal the wounds of the conquered, but those of the disinherited fester for ever, unless the race dies out or restitution is made. The Irish are the only white race that the English have evicted in modern times. They ate up the land piecemeal because there was no Irish State to be subdued by political conquest; because their arts of division, which failed against Scottish national feeling, succeeded against Irish septs; because the English conquest of Ireland was, in fact, a barbarian conquest achieved by a more or less civilised race centuries after the normal age of white barbarian conquests had closed. No conquered States pay ransom with the wholesale confiscation of the lands of private individuals; that is a price which is only exacted from the disorganised and the defenceless.
This process began with an Act of Philip and Mary, supported by the Roman Catholic Church, which was still the Church of the English rulers rather than that of the Irish people; and the Lord-Deputy Sussex was required to permit the Primate to “exercise and use all manner of ecclesiastical censures against the disordered Irishry.” Leix and Offaly, where the O'Conors and O'Mores had rebelled under Edward VI., were confiscated to the Crown and converted into King's and Queen's Counties. They were to be planted partly [pg 259] with English settlers and partly with such Irish as would abjure their native language, laws, and customs. But it took more than half a century to carry out the plantation, and eighteen rebellions broke out before the natives could be eradicated from the soil; even when the miserable remnants had been transplanted to Kerry, many of them straggled back to live as hirelings on lands that had been their own. Such was the new model on which Ireland was to be moulded into “civility and good government;” and in 1622 a Royal Commission pronounced this plantation to have been well begun and prosperously continued.
Literally, it was a war of extermination, which spread into other parts of Ireland, and brought political and religious issues in its train. A year after the Plantation Act, but before Mary Tudor's death, Sussex wrote that the native Irish were denying England's right to Ireland, and preparing to assist the French and Scots. The events of Elizabeth's reign taught them to look rather to Spain and to the Papacy, and by degrees Philip II., after whom King's County and its capital, Philipstown, had been named, became the patron of the Irish who suffered from the plantation. Religion, too, came into play. The first Jesuit missionaries had returned in despair from their labours on the unresponsive Irish soil. But expropriation left the peasants with little solace save religion, and their religion would not be that of their oppressor; to them Protestantism meant plantation. The links between English Government and Roman Catholic hierarchy had been broken; and Catholicism, which has no natural affinities with nationalism, became the adventitious ally of the Irish people in their resistance to the intruding imperialism of their English foes.
This coalition of hostile forces supplied the English [pg 260] Government with what it considered convincing arguments for persisting in its course; fresh Jesuit missions to Ireland, and intrigues between Irish chiefs and Spanish ambassadors sped the policy of plantation by provoking rebellion in Munster. The way seemed to have been prepared by the death of 30,000 Irish from starvation in that province within six months, and the pick of England's aristocracy, Raleigh, Grenville, Herbert, Spenser, and Norris, undertook the work of civilisation. They performed it mostly by bailiffs, who let the land at rack-rents to its former proprietors; and the whole fabric vanished in the rebellion which flamed out in 1598 on the news of Tyrone's victories in Ulster. With the assistance of Spain, Tyrone shook English rule in Ireland almost to its foundations; but they remained firm, embedded in the sea. The Spanish squadrons were annihilated in Kinsale and Castlehaven Harbours, and Tyrone was granted terms of peace. Ireland was conquered as it never had been before, but England had not yet learnt how to pacify a conquered country. Four years later Tyrone and Tyrconnell fled to Spain; the claims of their natural successors were set aside; and their lands were divided among the Scottish and English founders of modern Ulster. Thousands of natives, however, remained as tenants on the land of which they had been robbed, “hoping,” wrote the Lord-Deputy, “at one time or other to find an opportunity of cutting their landlords' throats.” The unique character and the success of the Ulster plantation were due less to the original planters than to the Calvinistic Scots who found there a refuge from Laud and the Stuarts, and like the Pilgrim Fathers regarded themselves as a people chosen to root out the Amalekite and Philistine natives. Like the founders of New [pg 261] England, too, their relations with the natives were far worse than those of the southern planters in Ireland, and the southern planters in North America.
Thirty years later the natives of Ulster found their opportunity, and wreaked on their landlords, in the massacre of 1641, vengeance for a generation of robbery and oppression. There ensued a decade of indescribable confusion, in which native Irish, Anglo-Irish, Ulster Scots, English parliamentarians, and Royalists fought one another, until Cromwell repaid the massacre of 1641 by those of Drogheda and Wexford, and by a further process of expropriation called the Cromwellian Settlement. More than two-thirds of Irish land had now passed into the hands of Englishmen; and although the Cromwellians had to disgorge a part of their spoil at the Restoration, it was estimated by Sir William Petty in 1664 that not more than one-third of the land belonged to the native Irish, including in that category the descendants of Anglo-Norman families; of the remainder, about half belonged to Elizabethan and Jacobean planters, and half to the Cromwellians. Nor was the process yet complete: the new expropriation was followed in 1689-90 by yet another attempt on the part of the Irish to recover their inheritance, and the failure of that attempt by further confiscation. At the beginning of the eighteenth century three-quarters of the land was owned by the English garrison, and the progress of the century was marked by fresh evictions. Political reasons had ceased, but economic causes supplied their place; and wide stretches of pasture were needed in order that the landlords might turn their property to the most profitable grazing purposes. Only land that would not do for cattle was left to the Irish peasants; from the bogs there looked up, from the barren hills there looked down, the Roman [pg 262] Catholic disinherited upon the smiling meadows of their Protestant supplanters.
Upon this broadening basis of plantation was developed the Irish Parliament, a Parliament doomed from the first by the very conditions of its being to a sterile and troubled existence. Here and there from the days of Elizabeth a native name may be traced in the lists of its members, but it was almost exclusively the Parliament of a caste, the instrument of oppression. Ten counties only sent representatives to Elizabeth's Parliament of 1560; plantation increased the number to twenty-seven in 1585; and the tale was fairly complete when, after the plantation of Ulster, James I. next summoned a Parliament in 1613. But the “Irish interest” which struggled therein against the “English interest” represented only the Anglo-Irish families, who had struck some roots in the soil and resented the dictation of English officials. The “native interest” had no voice in Parliament until O'Connell's triumph in 1828. Hence the pitiful impotence of this Parliament, the emptiness of the sound and fury of its constitutional debates. The beneficiaries of conquest could not in logic use the armoury of consent. The dependence of the colonists upon England placed their Parliament at the mercy of the English Government. They relied upon English force to expropriate the native Irish and to proscribe the Roman Catholic religion; and this reliance deprived them of moral and material grounds of resistance to the political, commercial, and industrial tyranny of their masters. The power which gave the planters their land could laugh at their constitutional pretensions. So the Dublin Parliament idly strove to emulate its exemplar at Westminster, and clamoured in vain for responsible government, for control of the [pg 263] Irish Executive. In spite of its Irish Parliament, Ireland has never been given the chance of governing itself.
But nothing could eradicate the “protest of the sea” against union with England, or the tendency of dwellers on Irish soil to become Irishmen. The Anglo-Normans had grown Hibernis ipsis Hiberniores in the middle ages, and nothing short of the Tudor Conquest would have perpetuated English dominion; for even the gentry of the Pale rebelled in Elizabeth's reign against “cess,” a form of arbitrary taxation compared in its constitutional bearings with ship-money. In their turn the Tudor planters were gripped by the Irish soil, and resisted the rule of Strafford; and a fresh immigration of Cromwellian settlers alone enabled William of Orange to hold Ireland against Tyrconnell and James II. Even their descendants, too, became part of the “Irish interest” in the eighteenth century; and Pitt's Act of Union was England's final effort to circumvent the insinuating strength of Irish nature.
The more Ireland's Parliament succumbed to Irish ideas, the more it was flouted by England, and the greater the efforts made to secure in it the predominance of the English interest. England, in spite of itself, was creating an Irish nation. It had destroyed the system of septs which it could divide and play off against one another; by imposing on all a grinding tyranny it had crushed out local distinctions and family feuds, and had evoked a national spirit which could not be corrupted by bribes or disarmed by division. Poynings' Laws were the first attempt at the new methods of control which led to the Act of Union. They were soon found insufficient. Not only must Irish legislation be curbed by the [pg 264] English Privy Council; the English Parliament must also have the power of initiating and passing laws for Ireland; and this practice grew up against which Molyneux vainly protested in 1694. In 1719 the practice was confirmed by an English statute, which transferred to the British House of Lords the appellate jurisdiction claimed by the Irish peers, and expressly asserted the right of the British Parliament to legislate for Ireland and override Irish laws. Similarly the Irish electorate was more and more rigidly restricted to the English interest; members of both houses were, by an English statute of William and Mary, required to be Protestants, and in 1727, by an English statute of George II., Catholics, who numbered four-fifths of the Irish people, were excluded from the franchise.
The same fear of a nascent Irish nationalism was the real motive for the Irish penal code, which assumed its worst features under Anne, and was largely extended under George I. and George II., although no Jacobite rebellion in Ireland threatened those sovereigns, and the only provocation was the silent growth of Irish national feeling. That its cause was not religious is clear, for there was little religious persecution, and the penal code in Ireland was at its worst in the heyday of English latitudinarianism. The design was really to shut out the Irish by means of their religion from political and social influence. Hence their exclusion from the legal and teaching professions, from the university, from the army and the navy, from corporations, grand juries and vestries; hence the barbarous laws by which a son converted to Protestantism could reduce his Catholic father to a mere life-tenant, by which no Catholic could buy or bequeath land or inherit or receive it as a gift from Protestants, by which he could not act as a [pg 265] guardian, a constable, or a gamekeeper, possess a horse worth more than £5, or keep more than two apprentices. A Protestant husband who married a Catholic wife fell under this penal code; a Protestant wife who married a Catholic husband was deprived of her inheritance; and an Act of George II. declared that mixed marriages should be null, and that the priests who made them should be hanged. Some knowledge of Irish history is required in order to appreciate the virtuous indignation roused by the Pope's Ne Temere decree. In the eighteenth century, wives were bribed by the law to turn against Catholic husbands, and children against their Catholic fathers; the fractious wife, the unnatural son had only to feign conversion in order to secure immunity and reward for undutiful conduct, and to deprive those whom they had injured of the management and disposal of their estates. Such was the system begotten by force and fraud through the breach of the Treaty of Limerick, when William III.'s generals, in order to pacify Ireland, guaranteed to the Irish people the enjoyment of their religious liberties. The arts which earlier English Governments had used to set chief against chief and clan against clan, were now employed on a more generous scale to set a dominant caste against the people they ruled, and to place at the absolute disposal of an alien garrison the lives, the liberties, the conscience, the property, and the domestic happiness of the nation it had robbed, maltreated, and betrayed.
Dominion, however, was not in the eighteenth century an end in itself, but a means for securing wealth. The age of commercial rivalry had set in during the latter half of the seventeenth century, and English traders, who had clamoured for the destruction of the Protestant Dutch, valued their hold over [pg 266] Catholic Ireland as a means for exploiting its markets and crushing its competition. One after another of Ireland's infant industries was massacred to satisfy English jealousy. Strafford's boasted encouragement of Irish linen was a blind to cover his campaign against Irish woollens. In the reign of Charles II. the importation of Irish cattle into England was prohibited because it lowered English rents, and Ireland's magnificent harbours were kept empty by its exclusion from the Navigation Acts, lest its incipient colonial trade should compete with England's. Deprived of their market for cattle, the Irish developed sheep-rearing and woollen manufactures; in 1699 the English Parliament accordingly prohibited the export of Irish manufactured wool to any country whatever. The hypocritical plea was anxiety to stimulate Irish linen, which the English Parliament thereupon practically excluded by a duty of 30 per cent. Having thus impoverished Ireland, Englishmen based their case against Irish claims to self-government on the thriftlessness of its people.
All classes in Ireland, Catholics and Protestants, landlords and tenants, traders and farmers, were, however, involved in this common misfortune, which in its helpless position the Irish Parliament was powerless to avert; and in spite of the discord sown with malignant ingenuity between the English, the Irish, and the native interests, in spite of the perverted skill of viceroys and primates in maintaining the English faction by purchasing boroughs and corrupting parliaments, a common impulse began to pervade the carefully dislocated members of the Irish body politic. Scandals like “Wood's Halfpence” provoked a national protest in Swift's “Drapier's Letters”; a common feeling began to mitigate the ferocity of the penal code, [pg 267] and to inspire a united demand for Irish freedom from English oppression. The opportunity came with the War of American Independence. Formed to provide a defence which England could not afford, the Irish Volunteers demanded the price for their services, and England had to pay it in Grattan's Parliament. The history of Ireland's packed and bribed and muzzled Parliament affords no proof of Ireland's incapacity to rule itself; rather it shows the lengths of cruelty and violence to which English Parliaments, in spite of their political genius, of their “glorious Revolution” of 1688, of their vaunted love of civil and religious liberty, have been driven by fruitless efforts to govern a gifted people against its will. England sought, and inevitably failed, to rule Ireland on principles the reverse of those on which were based its own proud liberties and democratic Empire.
X.—Ireland, 1782 And 1912[123] By Lord Fitzmaurice
The events of 1782 will always loom large in history, and the views of the members of the Rockingham Ministry on the proper relations to be established between Great Britain and Ireland, and the possible course of events had they met with a negotiator less intractable than Grattan, are subjects of more than merely historical interest.
In that ministry the Duke of Portland was Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, and he took with him Colonel Fitzpatrick as Chief Secretary; Mr. Fox was Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs; Lord Shelburne was Secretary of State for the Home and Colonial Departments, and as such was responsible for the government of Ireland.
The recognition of the claim of Ireland to be a distinct Kingdom, with a right to a separate Legislature of her own for all purposes, was the object of the movement of which Grattan was the leader. That this claim was founded on historic right, and had also on grounds of expediency to be accepted, was admitted by the Whig statesmen of the time in England. But they also saw that there were subjects which the geographical position [pg 269] of the two countries, their past history, and their industrial interests, rendered it desirable and indeed necessary should be recognized as common property. Ireland, in their opinion, was too near to be a separate State with safety to the external relations of Great Britain; she was too distant to be altogether incorporated with due regard to the efficient management of her own internal affairs.
The Ministry of Lord Rockingham came into office on March 27th, 1782. The moment was one of the gloomiest in English history. The nation had just been stunned by the news of the great surrender at York Town; it was an open question whether the intelligence of the surrender of Gibraltar might not be expected to follow; the power of the fleet to cope successfully with the combined navies of France, Spain, and Holland, was doubtful; an invasion was discussed in every household in the land as a serious possibility, and the resources of the country to meet it were disputed by competent judges. The new Prime Minister was himself a dying man, though the dangerous character of his illness was concealed; the two Secretaries of State were separated by mutual suspicions which were rapidly ripening into estrangement. Ireland was in the hands of the armed Volunteers, and England's difficulty was, as usual, Ireland's opportunity. “The liberties of America were inseparable from ours,” Grattan said in 1799, referring to this period; “they were the only hope of Ireland, and the only refuge of the liberties of mankind.”[124] The satisfaction of Ireland was therefore, in 1782, the first condition of the safety of England, and imposed itself on the Ministers as their most imperious duty.
The four grievances of Ireland were, in the words of [pg 270] Grattan, “a foreign legislature, a foreign judicature, a legislative Privy Council, and a perpetual army,”[125] and they were set forth in the Amendment to the Address carried by him in the Irish Parliament on April 17th.[126]
“My opinion,” Fox wrote to Fitzpatrick, on April 28th, “is clear for giving them all they ask; but for giving it them so as to secure us from further demands, and at the same time to have some clear understanding with respect to what we are to expect from Ireland in return for the protection and assistance which she receives from those fleets which cost us such enormous sums and her nothing. If they mean really well to their country, they must wish some final adjustment which may preclude further disputes; if they mean nothing but consequence to themselves, they will insist upon these points being given up simply, without any reciprocal engagement; and as soon as this is done, begin to attack whatever is left, in order to continue the ferment of the country. In one word, what I want to guard against is Jonathan Wild's plan of seizing one part in order to dispute afterwards about the remainder.”[127]
Lord Rockingham, writing in an exactly similar strain, said: “that the essential points of the Irish demands having first been conceded, it would be the duty of both countries to consider how finally to arrange, settle, and adjust all matters, whereby the union of power and strength, and mutual and reciprocal advantage, might be best permanently fixed;” and he spoke favourably of the appointment of “Commissioners” on both sides, to draw up the heads of an agreement between the two countries.[128] Of a similar character was the language of Lord Shelburne.
“If,” he said, writing to the Duke of Portland, on the day following that on which Fox had addressed the Chief Secretary, “the ties by which the two kingdoms have been hitherto so closely united [pg 271] are to be loosened or cut asunder, is your Grace yet prepared to advise whether any, and if so what, substitutions are thought of for the preservation of the remaining connection between us? If by the proposed modification of Poynings' Law, so much power is taken from the two Privy Councils as they are now constituted, are we to look for any agreement in any new institution of Council, which may answer the purpose of keeping up the appendancy and connection of Ireland to the Crown of Great Britain, and of preventing that confusion which must arise in all cases of common concern from two Parliaments with distinct and equal powers, and without any operating centre.”[129]
On May 11th, Fox, in another letter to Fitzpatrick, explained his views; what he intended, he said, was to grant the “concession of ‘internal legislation’ as a preliminary, accompanied with a modification of Poyning's Law and a temporary Mutiny Bill;” and he hoped that, having made these concessions, “they might be able to treat of 'other matters' so amicably as to produce an arrangement that would preserve the connection between the two countries.”[130] The other matters were the Final Judicature and the question of the contribution of Ireland to Imperial expenses. Shelburne suggested the formal negotiation of “the articles of a treaty,” for as such, he said, he regarded his proposals;[131] and he urged a little judicious temporizing in the hope that the situation abroad might in the interval improve. But Grattan, recognizing the immense advantage which this situation gave him in negotiating with Great Britain, refused to entertain any idea of compromise. There was not only, he said, to be no “foreign legislature, but there were to be no commissioners” to negotiate a treaty,[132] and there was, above all, to be no delay in granting all the demands [pg 272] of Ireland. With this information before him, the Duke of Portland, who from the time of his arrival in Dublin had up till this moment encouraged both the Secretaries of State to believe that Grattan would come into their views, and might even make concessions[133] in regard to the final appeal in judicial matters, now informed them that the claims of Ireland on all the four principal demands must be conceded, and conceded at once, as the whole country was in a state of the wildest excitement, and was rapidly escaping control.[134] The concession of all the Irish demands was accordingly decided upon. The preliminary steps were taken on May 17th, by a resolution in both Houses of the British Parliament, for effecting the repeal of the 6th of Geo. I., c. 5, the Act by which the right of the British Parliament to legislate for Ireland was declared; and the necessary Bill was then introduced and rapidly passed into law.
At the same time, however, another resolution was adopted in the following terms:
“That it is the opinion of this House that it is indispensable to the interest and happiness of both kingdoms that the connection between them should be established by mutual consent upon a solid and permanent footing; and that an humble address be presented to His Majesty, that His Majesty will be graciously pleased to take such measures as His Majesty in his royal wisdom shall think most conducive to that end.”
On these resolutions Fox commented as follows:
“Ireland,” he said, “would have no reason to complain; the terms acceded to by England were proposed by herself, and all her wishes would now be gratified in the way which she herself liked best. But as it was possible that if nothing more was to be done than what he had stated to be his intention, Ireland might, perhaps, think of fresh grievances and rise yearly in her demands, it was fit [pg 273] and proper that something should be done towards establishing on a firm and solid basis the future connection of the two kingdoms. But that was not to be proposed by him here in Parliament: it would be the duty of the Crown to look to that; the business might be first begun by His Majesty's servants in Ireland, and if afterwards it should be necessary to enter into a treaty, Commissioners might be sent from the British Parliament or from the Crown, to enter upon it and bring the negotiation to a happy issue, by giving mutual satisfaction to both countries, and establishing a treaty which should be sanctified by the most solemn forms of the Constitution of both countries.”[135]
For the moment, however, the hope of commencing negotiations with these objects had to be abandoned, and when, on May 27th, the Royal Message conveying the intention of His Majesty to concede all the demands of the Irish Parliament was delivered in Dublin, the Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant announced that no measures were then intended to be grounded on the second English resolution of May 17th. For a time, however, the Duke of Portland continued to hope against hope, and to nourish the vain expectations with which from the beginning he had buoyed himself up, and had misled his colleagues. During the month of June he allowed himself to be persuaded by Mr. Ogilvy, the husband of the Duchess of Leinster, and stepfather to Lord Edward Fitzgerald, that Grattan was not really so intractable as he seemed to be, and in a secret and confidential despatch, written on June 6th, he urged that the Irish Parliament should not be at once prorogued, in order to give time for a possible arrangement in regard to common affairs. But on June 22nd he was reluctantly compelled to express his disappointment and mortification at finding that his hopes had proved entirely fallacious, and that Mr. Ogilvy was a person not to be relied upon. The [pg 274] prorogation of the Irish Parliament was accordingly suffered to take place on July 27th, and here the matter ended.[136] “Thus,” exclaimed Grattan to his applauding audience—“thus have you sealed a treaty with Great Britain; on her side the restoration of the final judicature; the extinction of her legislative claim; of her Privy Council; of her perpetual Mutiny Bill; the repeal of the Act of legislative supremacy; on your side satisfaction! And thus are the two nations compacted for ever in freedom and peace.”[137]
Subsequently at the time of the Union a controversy arose in regard to these events. Mr. Pitt asserted that the adjustment of 1782 was not considered by the British Ministers by whom it was effected as final in its character; but that, on the contrary, they were fully convinced of the necessity of adopting some further measures to strengthen the connection between the two countries, and he produced the correspondence which had passed in 1782—extracts from which have been given above—as a reply to the lame attempt of General Fitzpatrick, who was still in Parliament, to deny that any such negotiation had been desired by the members of Lord Rockingham's Ministry. General Fitzpatrick had declined to admit more than that the Duke of Portland, during his residence in Ireland, might have entertained a vague idea of some farther arrangement for consolidating the connection with Ireland, but had soon given it up; and Grattan in the Irish Parliament openly accused Lord Shelburne and the Duke of having concealed their views from their [pg 275] colleagues, and said that, above all, Mr. Fox knew nothing of the project contained in the despatch of June 6th.[138] The truth is, that the Rockingham Ministry was in June a house divided against itself, owing to differences of opinion as to the peace negotiation with France and the United States, and was almost in the actual throes of dissolution. From a letter written by Fox in 1799 to Fitzpatrick, it certainly appears that the so-called “Ogilvy” negotiation never was communicated to him.[139] But the assertion of Mr. Pitt went far beyond the Ogilvy negotiation—if negotiation it can be called. What Mr. Pitt asserted was, not that the correspondence proved that in June, 1782, the Ministers were actually intending to enter on any such negotiation, but that the Prime Minister, the Lord-Lieutenant, and both Secretaries of State, from the very commencement of the correspondence in April, considered the arrangement insisted on by Grattan deficient, and lacking in finality, and were only prevented by the stress of adverse circumstances and the impracticable character of the Irish leaders, from trying to negotiate an agreement, by which Ireland should acknowledge that “the superintending power and supremacy were where Nature had placed them”—viz., in the Government of Great Britain.
What, then, was the view which the British Ministers in 1782 took of the relations which it was desirable to establish between Great Britain and Ireland—the relations which, had events been more favourable, they would have established? Evidently it was not a legislative union, though they wished to retain the final judicial appeal in London. The object of the [pg 276] Duke of Portland, as he explained in the secret despatch of June 6th, was that an Act of Parliament should be passed by the Legislatures of the respective kingdoms, by which “the superintending power and supremacy” of Great Britain in all matters of State and general commerce would be virtually and effectively acknowledged; by which also a share of the expense in carrying on a defensive or offensive war, either in support of our dominions or those of our allies, should be borne by Ireland in proportion to the state of her abilities; and that she should adopt every such regulation as might be judged necessary by Great Britain for the better ordering and securing her trade and commerce with foreign nations, or her own colonies and dependencies; consideration being duly had to the circumstances of Great Britain. “This plan,” Lord Shelburne explained during the debates of 1799, “had nothing to do with a legislative union.”[140] “It related,” he said, “to what might be called the expense of the system which was carried on under the two Parliaments, in Army, Navy, commerce and finance, and in the great establishments of Church and State; and it did not imply ‘bringing the two Parliaments together.’ ”[141]
From these passages it appears that what the Whig statesmen aimed at in 1782 was to obtain, in the first place, a clear acknowledgment of the Imperial supremacy, or, as they would have said in the language of the time, of the power of Great Britain in “external” as distinct from “internal” legislation; and, in the next place, a contribution from Ireland to the expenses [pg 277] of external administration and policy: the Fleet, the Army, and the diplomatic and commercial establishments. “I humbly conceive,” said Burke, who was a member of the Rockingham Government, and the trusted adviser of his official chief, “that the whole of the superior, and what I should call Imperial politics, ought to have its residence here [in London]; and that Ireland, locally, civilly and commercially independent, ought politically to look up to Great Britain in all matters of peace or war, and, in a word, with her to live and die. At bottom, Ireland has no other choice—I mean no other national choice.”[142]
Very different were the views of the Irish Parliamentary leaders: not of Grattan only, but of his rival, Flood, as can be gathered from the perusal of the debates in the Irish Parliament, which culminated in the famous struggle between Flood and Grattan on October 28th, 1782, when Flood, having denounced Grattan as a “mendicant patriot,” and Grattan having retorted by likening his rival “to a bird of prey with an evil aspect and a sepulchral note,” the two leaders left the House in order to solve their differences by a duel, and were only prevented meeting in deadly combat by the interposition of the Speaker, who wisely issued his warrant to apprehend them both.
The contention of Flood was that the mere repeal of the Act of George I. was insufficient, and did not prevent its revival at any future period; that it really left the matter where it stood, and that it was therefore necessary to bring in a Bill for declaring the sole and exclusive right of the Irish Parliament to make laws in all cases whatsoever, internal and external, for the kingdom of Ireland. His desire was to trump Grattan's cards, and destroy his popularity, which in the following [pg 278] year he all but succeeded in doing, when a decision of Lord Mansfield in the Court of King's Bench enabled him to raise a cry that the independence of the Irish Courts of Judicature was in danger; and a further Act was forced on the British Government renouncing any claim to legislate and confirming the independence of the Irish Courts of Justice.[143] The contention of Grattan was that the relations between Great Britain and Ireland were to be ascertained from the record of the whole of the recent transactions, which were transactions between two independent nations having a common Sovereign; and this being so, he said it was no more possible for Great Britain to reassert her legislative supremacy over Ireland than it would be for her to do so over the American colonies, if the pending negotiations resulted, as they evidently were about to do, in a recognition of the independence of those colonies. Grattan, indeed, went so far as to say that the relations between Great Britain and Ireland were in future to be sought in the law of nations and not in the municipal legislation of either country, which he said was no longer applicable. But both the Irish leaders agreed that in one way or another the legislative, financial, and judicial links between the two countries were to be severed, however much they differed as to the legal formulas which were to impress and carry out these ideas.[144]
The following propositions can, then, be based on the events of 1782:
(1) That the Irish leaders insisted on the freedom of Ireland from interference by the British Parliament both in internal and external affairs, [pg 280] or, as would now be said, both on Home and Imperial questions.
(2) That the British Ministers were ready to concede the former, and were not ready to yield the latter; but conceded both, owing to the circumstances of the time, and considered the concession final.
(3) That the British Ministers wished to obtain a contribution from Ireland for Imperial purposes, and the maintenance of a final appeal to an Imperial Court of Judicature.
(4) That the British Ministers do not appear to have proposed the representation of Ireland in the British Legislature.
In substance the plan proposed by Mr. Gladstone in 1886 was the plan which Grattan rejected in 1782. The objection to any such plan is the probability that if Ireland were to be asked, and were even to consent for the moment to make an appreciable contribution to the common expenses of the Empire, without being given through her representatives any share in the Parliamentary control of the funds so voted, and in the discussion of Imperial affairs—if, in other words, she was made a tribute-paying colony, instead of being treated as a member of a Federal system having an undiminished area of taxation for National purposes—a fresh and formidable grievance would arise in a few years, on the ground that taxation without representation was an intolerable thing, and contrary to the first principles of the Constitution. It was with these considerations present to his mind that Mr. Butt, when leader of the Irish Home Rule Party, in order to get over the difficulty, had proposed that a Federal [pg 281] arrangement should be instituted between Great Britain and Ireland—i.e., an arrangement under which Great Britain and Ireland should agree to vest certain powers in a purely Irish Legislature and certain others in the Imperial Parliament. The late Mr. Sharman Crawford, who like Mr. Butt was an Ulsterman and a Protestant, held similar views at an earlier epoch, and put them prominently forward during the period which elapsed between the imprisonment of O'Connell and the collapse of the first Tenant-right movement. With their opinion before us, it may be asked—why was no such plan proposed in 1782 by the English statesmen of the day? The answer is not far to seek.
The eighteenth century knew little or nothing about Federal Government. The Constitution of the United States, the parent of all the numerous later schemes of Federalism, was still in the limbo of the future; and it would be as idle to blame the Government of 1782 for not entering on a journey into the region of the unknown, especially at a moment of unexampled public difficulty, as it would be to blame the statesmen of the present day for not anticipating the political discoveries of the next generation, whatever they may prove to be. It was owing no doubt to the idea of Federal Government being practically unknown to the men of 1782, and to the unwillingness of the English mind to strike out on a new and as yet untrodden path in the art of Government, that in all the discussions of that time there is little or no suggestion of instituting a Federal link between Great Britain and Ireland. Some such suggestion was made during the negotiations on the Scotch Union, but it was decisively rejected by England, and only weakly urged by Scotland. The period was, in fact, one when Europe was still under the influence of a set of ideas which worked [pg 282] in an exactly opposite direction to the ideas of nationality and Federalism. The period was indeed drawing to a close; but the whole tendency of history had for two centuries previously been in the direction of large agglomerations of territory and centralization of government, quite irrespective of questions of nationality and race, and that tendency was still potent in 1782. The idea that the advantages of a national Government, extending over a large territory, might be combined with those of a decentralization of authority by a division of jurisdictions, was not one which the statesmen of the day in Europe had begun seriously to consider. Separation they understood, or an incorporate union: the possibility of an intermediate arrangement they ignored.
And yet an experiment in Federal Government is not to be approached with a light heart, and perhaps one thing only can be said about it with any certainty, that whatever success has attended it, wherever in fact it has worked smoothly, it has been when the powers reserved to the Federal or National Government have been those only which were strictly necessary, and in regard to which differences of opinion would presumably not arise amongst the States forming the Union.
It is the more important to bear these considerations in mind, because of the existence of a widely spread but erroneous idea in regard to the United States Constitution, to the effect that the Federal Government has very numerous and extensive powers in internal affairs assured to it by the jurisdiction of the Federal Court. This Court, it is said, can intervene, under the terms of the Constitution, to arrest the action of the State Governments, and therefore, once given a Federal Court, the success of the Federal experiment is assured.
But it is necessary to realize that it is only because the powers of the Federal Government are very strictly limited, and that the Federal Court is not overweighted with the assertion of rights, the exercise of which the public opinion of the States might not support, that its jurisdiction, when asserted, is as a rule respected, while over the State Legislatures as such it has no power at all, by way of injunction or prohibition. Nor have cases been wanting from which the precarious character of its powers, and its occasional lack of any sufficient sanction to enforce its decrees, may be gathered, when it has happened that those decrees have not been in accord with the prevailing opinion of the State within which execution has had to be carried out. In 1812, when a state of war existed with Great Britain, the States of Massachusetts and Connecticut refused obedience to the orders of the Federal Government for the concentration of the militias of all the Northern States on the frontier, giving as their reason that the Constitution only empowered the Federal Government to call out the militia in the case of “insurrection or actual invasion,” and that neither of these two eventualities had arisen. These doctrines met with general approval in the two States in question, and were endorsed by their Governors, their Legislatures, and their tribunals, nor were the Federal Courts able to enforce obedience to the commands of the Government at Washington. By a strict limitation of the powers of the National Government to what is absolutely necessary in order to secure the existence of the United States as a nation, the framers of the Constitution of 1787 did as much as it was possible to do, in order to render their work permanent; but they were not able, as De Tocqueville pointed out, even before the war of Secession had come to confirm the foresight of his views, altogether to [pg 284] avoid the dangers which are the natural inheritance of all Federal forms of Government.
The possibility, then, of establishing a Federal connection of any kind between Great Britain and Ireland—that is to say, an arrangement under which certain powers would be vested in an Irish Legislature and Executive, and certain others in a Parliament and Executive common to both countries—depends entirely on whether it is believed not only that such a division of power can be successfully made upon paper—a feat which any constitution-monger can accomplish—but also that public opinion in Ireland will not interpose hopeless obstacles to the assertion of the reserved rights and powers of the Imperial Legislature and Executive.
That under a Federal arrangement there would be any real possibility of frequent interference from London in Irish internal affairs is not probable, even were such interference legal. The attempt could only end in failure. Much has been said about the supremacy of the British or Imperial Parliament; and some of those who have used this expression apparently mean that every Act of the Irish Legislature and Executive is in some way or another to be reviewed by the British Parliament and Executive; or that in defiance of the plain teaching of history there is to be no responsible Irish Executive. The certain result of this would be to destroy the sense of responsibility in the Irish Legislature, to create endless differences of opinion between the two countries, and to make Great Britain the “whipping-boy” of Ireland, whenever Ireland had done anything foolish, and the British Parliament had not stepped in to prevent it. Reasonable men will continue to differ about the grant of Home Rule; but whatever is granted to Ireland in the way of legislative [pg 285] or executive right must be given fully and frankly, without looking backward. We must allow ourselves in this matter to listen to the voice of the statesmen of 1782. On the other hand, whatever is reserved must be clearly reserved, with ample guarantees for the arm of the Imperial Executive being long enough and strong enough to put down resistance. But that the power of the Imperial Parliament and Executive could, under any circumstances, be exerted frequently and in many matters, is a dangerous and impotent delusion. That power can only be maintained by carefully selecting and limiting the objects to which it is to relate; and by admitting Irish representatives to their full share—neither more nor less—of the control of Imperial questions in the Imperial Parliament, and securing adequate machinery for the execution of the decrees of the Imperial Government in Ireland when necessary. The arguments against any petty and irritating interference with the internal affairs of Ireland would be just as strong now as those which Lord Chatham used in 1774 against the proposed interference of the British House of Commons with the Absentee tax which the Irish Parliament was in that year supposed to be about to pass:
“The justice or policy of the tax,” he said, “is not the question; and on these two, endless arguments may be maintained pro and con. The simple question is, have the Commons of Ireland exceeded the powers lodged with them by the essential constitution of Parliament? I answer, they have not, and the interference of the British Parliament would in this case be unjust, and the measure destructive of all fair correspondence between England and Ireland for ever.”[145]
In what way would the British Parliament be more able to interfere in such a case than it was in 1774?
That Great Britain, if she chooses, is strong enough to [pg 286] govern Ireland for a prolonged period against the wishes of the majority of the people of Ireland, is indeed true; and under a strong and consistent Administration, strict and even justice might no doubt produce quiet and a considerable degree of material prosperity, without the constitutional question being touched. But the existence of outward calm and material prosperity has always been a favourite plea with the opponents of political reform. And it is the most subtle and dangerous of all possible pleas, so soothing in character, and making apparently so winning an appeal to plain common sense and to self-evident facts. “Now, after all this,” says Lord Clarendon, when describing the period in which England was administered, judged, and legislated for by the Privy Council, “I must be so just as to say that during the whole time that these measures were exercised, and these new and extraordinary ways were run, this kingdom enjoyed the greatest calm and the fullest measure of felicity that any people in any age for so long a time together (for the above-mentioned eleven or twelve years) have been blessed with, to the wonder and envy of all the other parts of Christendom.” But a few years after the happy period described in such glowing terms by the great historian the Civil War broke out.
If the necessity for a political change exists, sooner or later it forces its way to the front, notwithstanding outward calm. It has been so before, and there is no reason to doubt that it will be so again, because the claim made by Ireland depends on permanent facts which statesmen cannot alter notwithstanding occasional periods of material prosperity and outward calm. As the ultimate solution of existing difficulties it is indicated by the geography and by the history of the island; and these are the two conditions of every [pg 287] political problem, which it is difficult to surmount or evade. Time may indeed slowly soften the asperities produced by past errors and the crimes of bygone generations; but the geographical conditions of a problem remain fixed and unalterable, and in the long run will be found to be the permanent factor which governs the situation. Not by empty formulas, such as “governing Ireland according to Irish ideas,” or, “extending all the liberties enjoyed by the subjects of Great Britain to those of the sister island,” shall we advance one yard on our way, or indeed do aught but make it clear to friend and foe alike, that we are cultivating contradictory ideas without even being apparently aware that we are doing so. What we have to do is to resolve to take our stand on the few firm bits of fact which emerge like stepping-stones traversing a quaking bog; and then we may get over, and some day perhaps climb the distant hills which are on the other side. Otherwise we shall go on “filling our belly with the east wind” to the end of time; we shall fish all night and take nothing. These few firm bits of fact are those provided by history and geography. Open the map and look at the situation of Great Britain and of Ireland relatively to each other; observe how they lie near, yet apart; how they are separated by intervening seas, but seas so narrow as to be a bond quite as much as a bar; how they are inhabited by races speaking the same language but professing different religions; and bear in mind that these are the features of the picture which cannot be altered. This being so, let us next suppose that some stranger ignorant of all the trivial details of the Irish question, on his arrival amongst us, were asked to state what, in his opinion, with the above conditions placed before him, the institutions of two such islands relatively to [pg 288] one another were likely to be, judging from his experience of other countries. Would he not probably reply that the wise statesmen of Great Britain, of whose fame he had heard in foreign lands, had doubtless long ago come to the conclusion that their separation for some purposes, and their union for others, was stamped on the map as the certain and inevitable condition of any satisfactory settlement of their mutual relations, and that, alike to their complete separation and to their complete union, there was one and the same answer: Opposuit natura.
But, further, let us suppose him in his turn to inquire what the experience of the past had been in this particular case; and whether the two countries at the present time were entirely united or entirely separate, or were linked by some intermediate arrangement adapted to their relative needs and springing out of them; and suppose that the answer was, as it would have to be, that after several centuries of aggravated strife, they had first tried entire legislative separation, and had then abandoned it for an absolute incorporate union. Would he in that case be astonished if he was informed that history had vindicated geography, and that under neither of these two relations had peace, goodwill, and amity, been the distinguishing characteristics of the relations of Great Britain and Ireland?
To such a traveller it might perhaps be explained as an unexampled portent, that although constitutional liberty, limited only by the right of every Government to suppress crime and repress disorder, had been extended by the larger to the smaller country; that although an equal representation, a wide suffrage and vote by ballot had also been given, and no alien Church any longer vexed the conscientious scruples of the majority, and the land system of the country had also [pg 289] been reformed, yet so unreasonable were the minds of the Irish people that they refused to be contented, and were now asking for a modification of the fundamental articles of the existing incorporate union, and that a constant agitation in consequence prevailed.
Might he not reply that he had heard it said by them of old time, that it was a mistake to be too much alarmed by the existence of political agitation; that absolute quiet is not a necessary sign of political health even in a constitutional State; that what is called union within a political system may be a very equivocal expression; that the true union is a harmony, the result of which is that all parties, however opposed in appearance, co-operate towards the common good; that union may even exist in a State where the eye at first seems only to recognize a busy confusion; and that the contentment of the population with the institutions under which they live is the only solid guarantee of their permanence.[146] Englishmen, he might add, in conclusion, had themselves been occupied for two centuries in proclaiming these and similar liberal sentiments from one end of Europe to the other, and the time had now perhaps arrived for applying them nearer home.