The Government of England (Vol. I)

by A. Lawrence Lowell

The contrast between the relations of England to Scotland and to Ireland is striking. By the Act of Union of 1707 England and Scotland became one state, with a common Parliament and a common executive government, but political differences have not been obliterated. The Act of Union preserved the ecclesiastical and legal institutions of Scotland; and at the present day she has her own established church, which is Presbyterian; her own system of education, which is quite different from the English; and her own system of law, based upon the Civil not the Common Law, and adorned by a nomenclature so disfigured as to pass for her own. With such differences as these it has been not uncommon for Parliament, even where the same legislative principles were to be applied on both sides of the Tweed, to enact them in separate statutes, each adapted to the institutions of the country in which it is to operate. Socially, also, the fusion has not been complete. Every Scotchman is an Englishman, but an Englishman is not a Scotchman. The Scotch regard themselves as an elect race who are entitled to all the rights of Englishmen and to their own privileges besides. All English offices ought to be open to them, but Scotch posts are the natural heritage of the Scots. They take part freely in the debates on legislation affecting England alone, but in their opinion acts confined to Scotland ought to be, and in fact they are in the main, governed by the opinion of the Scotch members. Such a condition is due partly to the fact that Scotch institutions and ideas are sufficiently distinct from those of England to require separate treatment, and not different enough to excite repugnance. It is due in part also to the fact that the Scotch are both a homogeneous and a practical people, so that all classes can unite in common opinions about religion, politics and social justice. The result is that Scotland is governed by Scotchmen in accordance with Scotch ideas, while Ireland has been governed by Englishmen, and until recently, in accordance with English ideas.

Ireland.

The Act of Union with Ireland in 1801 abolished the Irish Parliament, and vested the whole legislative power for the United Kingdom in the joint Parliament at Westminster; but the executive government for Ireland was left at Dublin. It is conducted in the name of the Lord Lieutenant as the representative of the Crown.[139:1] The work is nominally done by him in his Privy Council, subject to such instructions as may be sent to him by the English government through the Home Secretary. In practice, however, matters have worked out very differently, for the administration of Ireland has been far too important to rest under the wing of the Home Office. The Lord Lieutenant is always a great nobleman, and he is expected to keep up a vice-regal state, sometimes at an expense exceeding his enormous salary of £20,000 a year; but he is not ordinarily the real head of the Irish Office. Since 1868 he has been a member of the cabinet less than eleven years, whereas his Chief Secretary has been in the cabinet during the whole of that period, except from 1882 to 1885, and for three other intervals that were very brief. Moreover, the Chief Secretary is always a member of the House of Commons, where he must defend the administration of Ireland against the attacks of the Irish members, and often of the English Opposition also. Thus it has come about that the Chief Secretary habitually plays the part of minister for Ireland, and is practically the ruler of the country. He is at the head of the Irish Local Government Board, Congested Districts Board and Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction, and in general he is held responsible for all administration of a political character, except in the case of the revenue and the Irish Board of Works, which are under the direct control of the Treasury.[140:1] He possesses, indeed, not only the authority vested in a number of ministers in England, but also powers not conferred upon them at all. During the greater part of the time since the Union in 1801, Ireland has been subject to a long series of coercion acts, temporary in duration, but renewed at short intervals under different names.[140:2] The provisions have varied, but the object has always been to arm the Irish government with extraordinary and arbitrary powers for the suppression of disorder. Moreover, the police of Ireland, instead of being, as in England and Scotland, under the control of the local authorities, is under the direct orders of Dublin Castle. This force, the Royal Irish Constabulary, contains over twelve thousand men, a number twice as large in proportion to the population as that of the police in Great Britain.

Causes of Misgovernment.

The administration of Ireland has been the conspicuous failure of the English government. Its history for a century has been a long tale of expedients, palliations and concessions, which have never availed to secure either permanent good order or the contentment and loyalty of the inhabitants. Each step has been taken, not of foresight, but under pressure. The repressive measures have been avowedly temporary, devised to meet an emergency, not part of a permanent policy; while concessions, which if granted earlier might have had more effect, have only come when attention to the matter has been compelled by signs of widespread and grievous discontent. Catholic emancipation was virtually won by the Clare election; disestablishment of the Anglican Church was hastened by the Fenian movement; the Home Rule Bill followed the growth of the Irish parliamentary party, culminating in Parnell's hold upon the balance of power in the House of Commons; and the land laws have resulted from agrarian agitation. It has been said that the same thing is true of English reforms, that Parliament seldom gives redress until a wrong has been brought forcibly to its notice, and this is no doubt a natural if not an inevitable result of the parliamentary form of government. It is a part of the general tendency to treat symptoms rather than causes, to which we shall have occasion to refer again. But while Parliament, now that all classes are represented there, is certain to be made aware of an English grievance long before it has become intolerable, it is by no means so keenly sensitive to an Irish one. The fact is that Irish problems lie beyond the experience of the English member and his constituents. Being unable to distinguish readily a real grievance from an unreasonable demand, he does not heed it until he is obliged to; and the cabinet, with its hands already full, is not inclined to burn its fingers with matters in which the House is not deeply or generally interested. All this is merely one of many illustrations of the truth that parliamentary government can work well only so far as the nation itself is fairly homogeneous in its political aspirations.

Difficulty of the Problem.

But if the parliamentary system has proved an instrument ill-fitted for ruling Ireland, it is also true that the problem has been one of extreme difficulty. English statesmen might have repeated what Lord Durham said of Canada in his famous report: "I expected to find a contest between a government and a people. I found two nations warring in the bosom of a single state."[141:1] For centuries Ireland has remained a conquered land without a thorough fusion of the victors and the vanquished; the native stock has been subjected without being assimilated, and the difference of race has been intensified by a difference of creed. The Celt still looks upon his Saxon landlord, and upon the Orangemen in Ulster, as aliens, and upon the constabulary as the garrison of a foreign power. This has not only made the management of Ireland an exceedingly hard thing for an English government to carry on, but it also stands in the way of any other solution of the problem. To allow the Irish to govern themselves means putting the under dog on top and the upper dog underneath. The difficulty has been further increased by a deep-seated divergence in the conceptions of law and justice. Unlike Scotland, Ireland has the English system of jurisprudence. Her courts are modelled on those at Westminster, and administer the English Common Law, while most of the statutes affecting civil rights are the same. But, as men have often pointed out, there are in times of agitation two laws, and two governments, in the country; on one side the English law, administered by the English government through its officials, and on the other a hostile system resting upon very different principles, and applied by an extra-legal political organisation, but in fact more vigorously enforced than the first, and often more in harmony with the popular sense of justice.

The Land Question.

The divergence between the legal conceptions of the English and Irish is most marked in the case of land. According to the ideas of Englishmen, and of Irish landlords, the land belongs to the owner, and apart from special statutory provisions, the tenant has only a contractual right of possession, during the continuance, and subject to the terms, of his contract. But the tenants feel that, subject to somewhat indefinite duties towards the landlord in the way of rent, they have rights in the land, of which their forbears were robbed, and which they have reclaimed from the waste.[142:1] Such a difference is fundamental, and cannot be adjusted to the satisfaction of both parties. People speak of the hunger of the Irish for land, as if that were the cause of the difficulty, but the Irishman has no general land-hunger. When he has emigrated to America, instead of going, like the Swede, to the great open prairies where any industrious man can easily own a farm, he has settled, like the landless Hebrew, in the great cities. What the Irish want is Irish land, and to this they think they have a right.

Various remedies for solving the relation of landlord and tenant have been tried. First came the Act of 1860, which based that relation strictly upon contract, though restraining to some extent its enforcement by summary eviction. Ten years later the Act of 1870 proceeded upon quite a different principle, for it extended the Ulster tenant-right over the whole country, giving to the tenant a salable property in his holding. It granted, even to a tenant from year to year, a claim against his landlord for disturbance; and it conferred a right to compensation for past as well as future improvements. But these provisions did not set the questions at rest. Later followed in 1881 the judicial reduction of rents,—the fixing by public authority of fair rents as they were called. But here trouble arose on both sides. If the landlord's views were right, and the land belonged absolutely to him, it was clearly unjust to deprive him of its market value in rent, and he was entitled to feel that the government was giving away his property to smooth its own political difficulties.[143:1] On the other hand, the fair rents did not end the matter for the tenant. The English, deeply impressed with the sanctity of contract, meant the new rents to be paid as rents are paid in England; but the Irishman, living in what might almost be called a world of status, and brought up under a system of rack rent, had far less respect for contract, and regarded rents as things to be paid approximately rather than exactly. The result was more friction, and a further judicial reduction in 1887. Finally, after a series of land-purchase acts designed to promote peasant proprietorship, but too limited in scope to affect general social conditions, had been tried, a number of landlords and some of the Irish leaders held a conference in 1902, and virtually agreed that as both parties claimed rights in the land, the government should pay the landlord for it and transfer it to the tenant, an arrangement the more easy because by that time the landlords' interest had fallen greatly in value. The government undertook to carry out the plan by the Land Purchase Act of 1903, making not indeed an immediate gift, but a loan of its credit, and charging the tenant a low rent which is expected eventually to repay the advance, and leave him the owner of the land.[144:1] Since that time the purchase and distribution of estates, under the act, has been going on, but the process naturally takes time, and as might be expected, it has been far more rapid in the prosperous than in the poor parts of the country. One may hope that by this means the land question will in time be solved, but he must have a blind faith who believes that with it the Irish question will disappear.