England's Case Against Home Rule

by A. V. Dicey

The positive arguments in favour of Home Rule are not easy to grasp. Their strength lies in their correspondence with the prevailing opinions of the day. But though public opinion under any form of government, and especially under the system of what is called popular government, deserves great consideration, still the value of a prevailing belief or conviction cannot be determined without examining the elements which have gone to its production. The state of opinion which favours Home Rule is found to result from various and even self-contradictory feelings, some of which belong to the highest and some to the lowest parts of human nature; humanity and a sense of justice are in this instance curiously combined with indolence and impatience. The arguments again for Home Rule rest upon one dubious assumption and one undoubted fact. The dubious assumption is that the root of Irish discontent is the outraged feeling of nationality. The undoubted fact is that in Ireland, on all matters either directly or even remotely connected with the tenure of land, the law of the Courts is opposed to the customs, to the moral sentiment, we may say to the law of the people; hence the Queen's tribunals are weak because they are not supported by that popular assent whence judges derive half their authority; the tribunals of the League are strong because their decisions commend themselves to the traditional feeling of the people. But the doubtful hypothesis and the undoubted fact, though one or other of them lies at the basis of all the strongest arguments in favour of Home Rule, each invalidate almost as much as they support the contention that an Irish Parliament will prove the specific for the diseases (due in the first instance to the original vice of the connection between England and Ireland) under which Irish society now suffers. If the passion of nationality is the cause of the malady, then the proposed cure is useless, for Home Rule will not turn the people of Ireland into a nation. If a vicious system of land tenure is the cause of lawlessness, then the restoration or re-creation of an Irish Parliament is needless, for the Parliament of the United Kingdom can reform, and ought to reform, the land system of Ireland, and ought to be able to carry through a final settlement of agrarian disputes with less injustice to individuals than could any Parliament sitting at Dublin.

Reasoning, however, which fails to establish the expediency of creating an Irish Parliament may prove, and in fact does amply prove, that the task of maintaining peace order and freedom in Ireland is at the present juncture a matter of supreme difficulty. Any possible course, moreover, open to English statesmanship involves gigantic inconvenience, not to say tremendous perils. A man involved practically in the conduct of public affairs may easily bring himself to believe that the policy which he recommends is not only the best possible under the circumstances, but is also open to no serious objection. Outsiders, who in this matter are better because more impartial judges than the ablest of politicians, know that this is not so. We have nothing before us but a choice of difficulties or of evils. Every course is open to valid criticism.

The maintenance of the Union must necessarily turn out as severe a task as ever taxed a nation's energies, for to maintain the Treaty of Union with any good effect means that while refusing to accede to the wishes of millions of Irishmen, we must sedulously do justice to every fair demand from Ireland, must strenuously and without either fear or favour assert the equal rights of landlords and tenants, of Protestants and Catholics, and must at the same time put down every outrage and reform every abuse.

To carry out by peaceful means the political separation of countries which for good and for evil have for centuries been bound together by position and by history, is an operation so critical that in the judgment of statesmen it involves dangers too vast for serious contemplation.

How, lastly, to devise a scheme of Home Rule which, while giving to Ireland as much of legislative independence as may satisfy her wants or wishes, shall leave to England as much supremacy as may be necessary for the prosperity of the United Kingdom, or for the continued existence of the British Empire, is a problem which jurists would find it hard to solve as a matter of speculative science, and which politicians may not without reason hold to admit of no practical solution.

Yet Maintenance of the Union, Separation, Home Rule, are names which designate the only paths open to us. To one of these three courses we are absolutely tied down. Each path is arduous. To complain about the nature of things is childish. The course of wisdom is obvious. We must all of us look facts in the face. "Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be. Why then should we desire to be deceived?"[^[71]] We must calmly compare the advantages of the three steep roads which lie open to the nation, and then on the strength of this comparison determine the course which the nation is bound to follow by motives of expediency and of justice.

Such a comparison we have already instituted:[^[72]] its results to any reader who assents to my train of reasoning must be obvious.

The maintenance of the Union involves at the outset a strenuous and most regrettable conflict with the will of the majority of the Irish people. It necessitates at once the strict enforcement of law, combined with the resolute effort to strip law of all injustice. It may require large pecuniary sacrifices, and it certainly will require a constancy in just purpose which is supposed, and not without reason, to be specially difficult to a democracy. The difficulties on the other hand which meet us are not unprecedented, though some of them have assumed a new form. We have some advantages unknown to our forefathers: we can, more easily than they could, remodel the practices of the Constitution, modify the rules of party government, or, incredible as it may seem to members of Parliament, touch with profane hands the venerable procedure of the House of Commons. The English democracy, further, just because it is a democracy, may, like the democracy of America, enforce with unflinching firmness laws which, representing the deliberate will of the people, are supported by the vast majority of the citizens of the United Kingdom. The English democracy, because it is a democracy, may also with a good conscience destroy the remnants of feudal institutions, and all systems of land tenure found unsuitable to the wants of the Irish people. Nor, though the crisis be difficult, are there features lacking in the tendencies of the modern world which in the United Kingdom as in the United States and in the Swiss Confederacy favour every effort to uphold the political unity of the State. Whatever be the difficulties (and they are many) of maintaining the Union, not in form only but in reality, the policy is favoured no less by the current of English history, than by the tendencies of modern civilization. It preserves that unity of the State which is essential to the authority of England and to the maintenance of the Empire. It provides, as matters now stand, the only means of giving legal protection to a large body of loyal British subjects. It is the refusal not only to abdicate legitimate power, but (what is of far more consequence) to renounce the fulfilment of imperative duties. Nor does Union imply uniformity. Unity of Government—equality of rights—diversity of institutions,—these are the watchwords for all Unionists. To attain these objects may be beyond our power, and the limit to power is the limit to responsibility. Still, whatever may be the difficulties, or even the disadvantages, of maintaining the Union, it undoubtedly has in its favour not only all the recommendations which must belong to a policy of rational conservatism, but also these two decisive advantages—that it does sustain the strength of the United Kingdom, and that it does not call for any dereliction of duty.

Separation, or in other words the national independence of Ireland, is an idea which has not entered into the practical consideration of Englishmen. The evils which it threatens are patent: it at the same moment diminishes the means of Great Britain and increases the calls upon her resources. It lowers the fame of the country, and plants by the side of England a foreign, it may be a hostile, neighbour; it involves the desertion of loyal fellow-citizens who have trusted in the good faith of England. Yet, on the other hand, the material losses and perhaps the dangers involved in the independence of Ireland are liable to exaggeration. Great Britain might find in her complete freedom of action and in restored unity of national sentiment elements of power which might balance the obvious damage resulting from Separation; she might also find it possible to make for the protection of Loyalists terms more efficacious than any guarantees contained in the articles of a statutory constitution. If, further, the spirit of nationality has the vivifying power ascribed to it by its votaries, then Ireland might gain from it blessings which cannot be conferred by any scheme of merely Parliamentary independence, since no form of Home Rule can transform Ireland into a nation.

For Home Rule it may be pleaded that it offers two obvious advantages: it satisfies the immediate wish of millions of Irishmen, and it facilitates the adaptation of Irish institutions to Irish wants. These advantageous results are the best that can be hoped for from Home Rule. They are real, and to underrate them is folly; the moral gain indeed of meeting the wishes of the body of the Irish people is so incalculable, that did Home Rule involve no intolerable evils a rational man might think it wise to venture on the experiment. Home Rule, it may be suggested, has the further gain of lessening English responsibility for the government of Ireland. What it really might effect is to lighten England's sense of responsibility for misrule in Ireland. But this, so far from being a blessing, would in truth be one of the greatest of evils. The distinguished author of the Gladstonian Constitution denies in his recent pamphlet that the Government of Ireland Bill would, if passed, repeal the Act of Union. To follow the reasoning by which this denial is made good is beyond my powers. But there is one aspect in which the statement, paradoxical though it be, that the Union is not dissolved by the existence of an Irish Parliament, has a most serious meaning, which ought to command hearty and general assent. Under the Gladstonian Constitution, as under any form of Home Rule, the Government of the United Kingdom must still remain in the last resort responsible for the administration of justice throughout the whole realm. Admit for the sake of argument that the Act of Union, though affected in every section, is not repealed, then assuredly if men be wrongfully deprived of their property, if they be denied their lawful freedom, if they suffer unlawful injury to life or limb in any part of the United Kingdom, the responsibility for seeing that right be done falls on the executive, and in the last resort on the Parliament, of the United Kingdom. The delegated authority of a subordinate legislature will not free the principal from the liability inherent in the delegation of power; and if Home Rule in Ireland fosters, as it must foster, the notion that the United Kingdom is not as a whole responsible for misdeeds done in Ireland, this is one of the worst results of the proposed constitutional change.