A Leap in the Dark / A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the / Bill of 1893

by A. V. Dicey

'I have told you candidly my sentiments. I think they are not likely to alter yours.... But hereafter they may be of some use to you, in some future form which your commonwealth may take. In the present it can hardly remain; but before its final settlement it may be obliged to pass, as one of our poets says, "through great varieties of untried being," and in all its transmigrations to be purified by fire and blood.'—Burke's Works, ii. (ed. 1872), p. 517, 'Reflections on the Revolution in France.'

As to the general causes of the strength of the Home Rule movement in England, and the general considerations in its favour, see England's Case against Home Rule (3rd ed.), ch. iii. and iv. pp. 34-127. From the opinions expressed in these chapters I see no reason for receding.

Mr. M'Carthy, April 10, 1893, Times Parliamentary Debate, 353.

[May 6, 1882. Now twenty-nine years back.]

Every one should read Mr. Lecky's letter of April 4, 1893, addressed to the Belfast Chamber of Commerce, and printed in the Chamber's Reply to Mr. Gladstone's speech. It deals immediately not with the relations between England and Ireland, but with the alleged prosperity of Ireland under Grattan's Constitution. But in principle it applies to the point here discussed, and I venture to say that every page of Mr. Lecky's History of England in the Eighteenth Century which refers to Grattan's Parliament bears out the contention, that no inference can be drawn from it as to the successful working, as regards either England or Ireland, of the legislature to be constituted under the Home Rule Bill.

Add also that steamboats and railways have practically, since the time of Grattan, brought Ireland nearer to England, and Dublin nearer to London. At the end of the last or the beginning of this century a Lord Lieutenant was for weeks prevented by adverse winds from crossing from Holyhead to Dublin. Mr. Morley can attend a Cabinet Council at Westminster one afternoon and breakfast next morning in Dublin.

With the conclusions as to Home Rule of my lamented friend Mr. Freeman it is impossible for me to agree. But for that very reason I can the more freely insist upon the merit of his paper on Irish Home Rule and its Analogies as an attempt to clear up our ideas as to the meaning of Home Rule. He, for instance, points out that the relations between Hungary and Austria do not constitute the relation of Home Rule and afford no analogy to the relation which Home Rulers propose to establish between Great Britain and Ireland. See The New Princeton Review for 1888, vol. vi. pp. 172, 190.

A Gladstonian who thinks the case of the Channel Islands in point, would do well to get up the facts of their history. They were no more 'given' a constitution by England than, as most Frenchmen believe, they were conquered from France. See Mr. Haldane, April 7, 1893, Times Parliamentary Debates, p. 333.

They have now (1911) led to political separation, happily without the need for civil war.

See further on this point, Home Rule as Federalism, England's Case against Home Rule (3rd ed.), pp. 160-197, and for Home Rule as Colonial Independence, ib. pp. 197-218.