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

by A. V. Dicey

As though, however, the Restraints were not enough to cause first irritation and then agitation, the financial provisions contemplated by the Bill are in themselves certain to generate, not future, but immediate discord.

Of the financial arrangements instituted under the new constitution, my purpose is to say very little. My object is not to show that Mr. Gladstone's financial calculations are wrong, or that they are ruinous to Ireland or unfair to England. All this is for my present purpose immaterial. My aim is to insist that, in their very nature, they are a cause of conflict; and that they bring the interest, and, even more, the sentiment, of Ireland into direct opposition with the power of England.[85]

All the customs payable at every Irish port are to be regulated, collected, and managed by, and to be paid into, the Exchequer of the United Kingdom. Not a penny of these customs benefits Ireland; they are all—and this is certainly the light in which they will appear to most Irishmen—a contribution to the revenue of the United Kingdom, that is, of England. If every taxable article were smuggled into Ireland, so that not one pound of Irish customs were paid to the English treasury, the Imperial power would lose, but the Irish State would gain. Ireland would be delivered from a tax which will soon be called a tribute. If, moreover, Ireland continues to be treated as financially a part of the United Kingdom, then free smuggling, which is free trade, would make Ireland a free port, where might be landed untaxed the goods required by the whole United Kingdom. It is easy to see how the English revenue would suffer, but it is equally easy to see that Irish commerce might flourish. If I am told that the ruin of the British revenue may be averted by the examination of goods brought from Ireland to Great Britain—this, of course, is so. But then freedom of trade within the United Kingdom is at an end. We are compelled, in substance, to raise an internal line of custom houses; we abolish at one stroke one great benefit of the Treaty of Union.

The mode, again, in which the customs are levied outrages every kind of national sentiment. Coast-guards, custom-house officers, and gaugers are never popular among a population of smugglers; they will not be the more beloved when every custom-house officer or coastguard is the representative of an alien power, and is employed to levy tribute from Ireland.

Another leading feature of the financial arrangements is the charging upon the Irish Consolidated Fund of various sums rightly due and payable to the Exchequer of the United Kingdom.[86] They are made a first charge upon the revenue of Ireland. They are to be paid in the last resort upon the order of the Lord Lieutenant, acting as an Imperial officer. The necessity for some arrangement of this kind is clear. Millions have been lent to Ireland, and these millions must be repaid. But if the need for some such arrangement be certain, its desperate impolicy is no less certain. England and Ireland, the English Government and the Irish Government, are brought into direct hostile collision. The rich English Government appears in the light of an imperious creditor the Irish Government stands in the position of a poverty-stricken debtor. Note, and this is the point which should be pressed home, that in all confederations the difficulty of exacting the money needed by the federal government from any state of the confederacy has been found all but insuperable. Study the history of the thirteen American colonies between the time of the acknowledgment of their independence by England and the formation of the United States. This has been termed 'the critical period' of American history. The colonies were united by recollections of common suffering and of common triumph, they were not divided by race or religion; no State aspired to separate nationality, yet they drifted rapidly towards anarchy; they were discontented at home, they were powerless abroad, above all, they nearly made shipwreck on the financial arrangements. Congress was never able, for the satisfaction either of national needs or of national honour, to obtain fair contributions from the different States.[87]

Already, further, before the Home Rule Bill has passed from the hands of the House of Commons Mr. Gladstone's very moderate demands, as they seem to Englishmen, are held by some Irish Nationalists to be outrageous.[88] The difference, moreover, is not a matter of calculation, to be settled by accounts and balances, or disposed of by auditors. No one can read the statements of Nationalists such as Mr. Redmond or Mr. Clancy without seeing that the real difference of view lies very deep. These typical Nationalists do not regard the United Kingdom as a nation. Ireland is the nation. They doubt what is her interest in the British Empire; they believe, and already hint, that the financial arrangements between the two countries cannot be treated as a mere pecuniary transaction. Ireland has been overtaxed and overburdened. She has claims for compensation. All the feelings or convictions which inspired hatred of Irish landlords are already being aroused with regard to the Imperial power. A campaign against tribute may become as popular as a campaign against rent. The two campaigns indeed have a close affinity; a large portion of the tribute is in reality payment in respect of rent, and the instalments which an Irish farmer pays to buy his land will, to him at any rate, appear rent or tribute payable to Great Britain. The rent or tribute will be collected under the new constitution by the Irish Government.[89] No Irish Ministry will relish the position of collector. It would have been difficult for a landlord to collect rent after his agent had publicly announced that it was excessive and unjust. Yet a landlord could dismiss his agent; the English Cabinet cannot dismiss the Irish Government. It is certain too that the Irish Ministry will not find the collection of rent easy. Should the Irish Government state that the rent is iniquitously high, and refuse to collect it, what will be the position of the British Ministry? It must either set the constitution aside or undertake for itself the collection of rent in opposition to, or, at any rate, unaided by, the Irish Executive and the Irish Parliament. No more odious task was ever undertaken by a government. Suppose, however, that things do not come to the worst, the financial arrangements of the Bill ensure that Ireland will soon demand modifications of its provisions. Opposition is a probability, discontent is a certainty.

Ireland is provided under the new constitution with the readiest means of nullifying the Restrictions. The Irish Cabinet and its servants can at any moment reduce an unpopular law to a nullity. Even in England a resolution of the House of Commons may be enough to turn a law into a dead letter. The Imperial Cabinet at this moment could go very near making the Vaccination Acts of no effect, and by declining to have troops sent to Hull could, as I have already pointed out, give victory to the Trades Unionists. Nor is it necessary that the Cabinet should decline sending forces to Hull for the support of the law. An intimation that persons accused of intimidation would either not be prosecuted at all, or if prosecuted and convicted, would be pardoned, would be sufficient of itself to make the strike successful. In no country could the Executive do more to render laws ineffectual than in Ireland. The Irish Cabinet might by mere inaction render the collection of rent impossible; they might, as I have already pointed out, give tacit encouragement to smuggling. If the people regarded a coastguard as an enemy, if he and his family were left severely alone, if he were often maltreated and occasionally shot, his position might be a difficult one, even if supported by the whole force of the state. But if smuggling were regarded as no crime, if the smuggler were looked upon as the patriot who deprived an alien power of a revenue to which England had no right, it is clear that nothing but the energetic support of all the central and local authorities in the country could give a revenue officer the remotest chance of victory in his contest with smugglers. But suppose the national government were apathetic, suppose that the Irish Ministry looked with favourable eye on the diminution of English revenue; suppose that no Irish official gave any aid to a custom-house officer; suppose that, if a British coastguardsman were murdered, Irish detectives made no effort to discover the wrong-doer; and that when the culprit was discovered the Irish law officers hesitated to prosecute; suppose that when a prosecution took place the Attorney-General showed that his heart was not in the matter, and that the jury acquitted a ruffian clearly guilty of murder, is it not as clear as day that smuggling would flourish and no customs be collected? In the same way the Irish Ministry might by mere apathy, by the very easy process of doing nothing, nullify the effect of judgments delivered by the Exchequer judges, and the Irish Ministry would show very little ingenuity if they could not without any open breach of the law impede the carrying out of executions against the goods of persons whom popular feeling treated as patriots.

The Irish Executive might, as already pointed out,[90] easily raise an Irish army. Drilling countenanced or winked at by the Irish Ministry could never be stopped by the British Government. Prussia at the period of her extreme weakness, and under the jealous eye of Napoleon, sent every Prussian through the ranks. Bulgaria raised an army while pretending to encourage athletic sports. The value of the precedent is not likely to escape an Irish Premier.

The Irish Parliament cannot legally repeal a single provision of the constitution, but an Irish Parliament might render much of the constitution a nullity. The Parliament might pass Acts which trenched upon the Restrictions limiting its authority. Till treated as void such statutes would be the law of the land. Such voidable Acts, and even parliamentary resolutions,[91] would go like a watchword through the country and encourage throughout Ireland popular resistance to Imperial law. A profound observer has remarked that people do not reckon highly enough the importance at a revolutionary crisis of any show or appearance of legality.[92] Revolution acquires new force when masked under the form of law. This is a point which Englishmen constantly overlook. They know the moral influence of leagues and combinations; they do not reflect that a Parliament or House of Commons in sympathy with resistance to Imperial demands would possess tenfold the moral authority of any National League. Note too that the Irish Ministry and the Irish Parliament would play into one another's hands, and would further be strengthened by their Irish allies at Westminster, as also by the Irish electoral vote in England.

For the true stronghold of the Irish Government lies, under the new constitution, at Westminster.[93]