The crisis came on November 29, 1783, when the Reform Bill reached Parliament, and was introduced by Flood, wearing the Volunteer dress. It was rejected on the first vote. No doubt the circumstances were humiliating, and if there had been any serious inclination in Parliament towards self-reform and the relinquishment of an odious and mischievous monopoly, we should freely forgive rejection. But there was little or none, as after-events proved, and the real humiliation lay, not in the dictation of the Irish Volunteers, but in the fact that the Volunteers themselves were overawed by a strong body of British regular troops, mustered for the occasion under General Burgoyne. The vicious circle was complete. Forced to choose between reform and dependence on England, Parliament chose the latter. And only a year and a half before Grattan had dazzled his hears with the words: "Ireland is now a nation ... esto perpetua."
There are very few critical dates in Irish history, and of those few the night of November 29, 1783, was the most critical of all. It marked the climax of a brief and bright renaissance from the long stagnation of the eighteenth, and heralded a decline into the long agony of the nineteenth century, a decline concealed by the fictitious lustre which still hangs over the first decade of Grattan's unreformed Parliament, but none the less already present. The Volunteers, their grand opportunity lost, slowly broke up. Should they have used force, even under the threat of Burgoyne's guns? It would have been infinitely better both for England and Ireland if they had. Nothing but force could avail. Never would force have been better justified, for the very soul of a people "rang zwischen Tod und Leben."
It is hard, nevertheless, to blame the Volunteers for not appreciating the full magnitude of the crisis and acting accordingly. They were ahead of their time as it was in the political instinct which taught them the vital importance of a reformed Parliament. They were far ahead of England, where the younger Pitt had failed to carry Reform a few months before, and was to fail again two years later when he urged reform for Ireland. They were even ahead of their time in religious tolerance—witness the Gordon riots in London two years before. Their Parliament wore the crown and spoke the regal language of a patriot Assembly. For five years they themselves had glorified justifiably in the perfect discipline and sobriety with which they had used their irregular power. Their most trusted leaders suggested that they would yet achieve their ends without violence, while the large majority of the Volunteers themselves were still as loyal to the Crown as the Catholics, and were inclined, therefore, to shrink from action which, although in itself not in the remotest degree connected with dynastic questions, involved a theoretical conflict with the Crown, and perhaps an actual collision with Royal troops. One of the last acts of the Volunteer Convention, before its dissolution, was to pass an address to the King expressing fervent zeal for the Crown, reminding him of their quiet and dignified behaviour in the past, and praying that "their humble wish to have certain manifest perversions of the Parliamentary representation of this kingdom remedied by the Legislature in some reasonable degree, might not be imputed to any spirit of innovation in them, but to a sober and laudable desire to uphold the Constitution, to confirm the satisfaction of their fellow-subjects, and to perpetuate the cordial union of the two kingdoms." This document might have been copied mutatis mutandis from the American petitions prior to the war, and was to be reproduced almost word for word in Canadian petitions dealing with less serious grievances whose neglect at the hands of the Government did actually lead to armed rebellion. It must be taken, as Mr. Lecky truly says, as the "defence of the Convention before the bar of history." Drawn up by the most moderate and least prescient leaders, it was a vindication of the past, not a pledge for the future; for "from that time," as Mr. Lecky writes, "the conviction sank deep into the minds of many that reform in Ireland could only be effected by revolution, and the rebellion of 1798 might be already foreseen."
The story of that transition, with all its disastrous consequences in the denationalization of Ireland, in the arrest of healing forces, in the reawakening of slumbering bigotries and hatreds, in the artificial transformation of Catholics into anti-English rebels, and Protestants into anti-Irish Loyalists, in the long agony of the land war, the tithe war, the Church war, and the loathsome savageries of the rebellion itself, is one of the most repulsive in history. It is repulsive because you can watch, as it were, upon a dissecting-table the moral fibre of a people, from no inherent germ of decay, against reason, against nature, visibly wasting under a corrosive acid. Typical figures stand out: the strong figure of Fitzgibbon, voicing ascendancy in its crudest and ugliest form; at the other extreme the ardent but inadequate figure of Wolfe Tone, affirming in words which expressed the literal truth of the case that "to subvert the tyranny of our execrable Government, to break the connection with England, the never-failing source of all our political evils, and to assert the independence of my country—these were my objects." Midway stands Grattan, the defeated and disillusioned "Girondin," as Mr. Fisher aptly calls him,[17] blind until it was too late to the errors which plunged his country into anarchy, and retiring in despair when he saw that anarchy coming. And on the other side of the water, Pitt, dispassionately prescribing for Ireland in 1784, while there was yet time, the radical remedy, Reform, patiently turning, when that was refused, to palliatives like mutual free trade in 1785 and the Catholic franchise in 1793; and meanwhile, with an undercurrent of cool scepticism, preparing the ground for the only alternative to Reform, short of a revolutionary separation of the two countries, legislative Union, and remorselessly pushing that Union through by the only available means, bribery.
In this wretched story we seek in vain for individual scapegoats. Tracing events to their source, we strike against two obstructions, proximity and ignorance, and we may as well make them our scapegoats. If proximity had implied knowledge and forbearance, all would have been well, but it implied just the reverse, and prohibited the kind of solution which, after very much the same sort of crisis, and in the teeth of ignorance and error, was afterwards reached in the case of Canada and South Africa.
The immediate cause is clear. The failure of Reform is the key to the Rebellion and the Union. In a patriotic anxiety to idealize Grattan's Parliament, with a view to justifying later claims for autonomy, Irishmen have generally shut their eyes to this cardinal fact, and have preferred to dwell with exaggerated emphasis on the little good that Parliament did rather than on the enormous evils which it not only left untouched, but scarcely observed. We must remember that it was not only a Protestant body, but a close body of landlords, with an infusion of lawyers and others devoted to the interest of landlords. In that capacity it was incapable of diagnosing, much less of remedying, the gravest material ills of Ireland. In the very narrow domain where the landlord interest was not concerned, as in industrial and commercial matters, Parliament seems to have acted on the whole with wisdom. It endeavoured to encourage industries, while refusing to squander its newly won commercial powers in waging tariff wars with Great Britain, where prohibitive duties against Irish goods still continued to be imposed. But Ireland was no longer an industrial country. All the encouragement in the world could not replace lost aptitudes or bring back the exiled craftsmen who, during a century past, had left Ireland to enrich European countries with their skill. The favoured linen industry alone survived to reach its present flourishing condition. The revival in other manufactures, even in that of wool, which was remarkably rapid and strong, seems to have been artificial and transient. No wonder; for, while Ireland had been stagnant for a century, her great competitor, England, had been steadily building up that capacity for organized industry which, under the inventive genius of Arkwright, Hargreaves, and Watt, and the economic genius of Adam Smith, made the last twenty years of the eighteenth century such a marvellous period of industrial expansion, and eventually converted England from an agricultural into a manufacturing nation. Ireland was hopelessly late in the race. On the other hand, the fertile land of Ireland remained as the indestructible source of wealth and the prime means of subsistence for the great bulk of the four and a half million souls who inhabited the country. Parliament seems to have been almost indifferent to the miseries of the agricultural population, wholly indifferent, certainly, to their source, the vicious agrarian system which it was the interest of its own members to sustain. Foster's famous Corn Law without doubt increased tillage, and, in conjunction with the inflated prices for produce caused by the French War, gave a powerful though a somewhat unhealthy impulse to the trade in corn. But it enriched only the landlords, and left untouched the real abuses, absenteeism, middlemanism, insecurity of tenure, rack-rents, and tithes. The Whiteboy risings of the sixties and seventies recurred, and were met with Coercion Acts as stupid and cruel as those of the nineteenth century. The tithe grievance, which festered and grew into civil war in the nineteenth century, was never touched. While tenants in North-East Ulster were painfully and forcibly establishing their custom of tenant right in the teeth of the law, the inhuman system of cottier tenancy, which was to last until 1881, became more and more firmly rooted in other parts of Ireland.
None but a democratic Assembly could possibly have grappled with these evils; nor is there any reason to suppose that in the existing condition of Ireland a Protestant democratic Assembly, even if temporarily it retained its sectarian character, would have grappled with them less boldly and drastically than an Assembly composed of Catholics and Protestants. The material interests of nineteen-twentieths of the people were the same, while the education and intelligence belonged mainly to the Protestants. Ulster tenants had as much need of good land laws as other tenants. Tithes were as much disliked in the north as in the south. The Established Church was the Church of a very small minority, and its clergy, numbers of whom were absentees, were as unpopular as the absentee landlords and the absentee office-holders and pensioners.
But with no redress, and, what is more important, no prospect of redress for the primary ills of Ireland, the centrifugal forces of religion and race had full scope for their baneful influence. And it was at the very moment when tolerance was steadily gaining ground among all classes that these spectres of ancient wrong were summoned up to destroy the good work.
How did this come about? Let us remember once more that everything hinged on Reform. Reform gained a little, but suffered far more, by its association with the question of Catholic franchise, which was useless without Reform, while it was the corollary of Reform. Nothing is more remarkable than the growth of academic tolerance during this period, doubtful and suspect as the motives sometimes were. It is true that the great Relief Act of 1793, giving Catholics the vote and removing a quantity of other disqualifications, would scarcely have been sanctioned by the Parliamentary managers without the stern dictation of Pitt, whose mind was strongly influenced by the violent anti-Catholic turn just taken by the French Revolution; but, once sanctioned, it passed rapidly, and was received with universal satisfaction in the country at large. Without "Emancipation," that is, the permission to elect Catholics to sit in Parliament and hold office, the franchise was illusory and even harmful. In the counties the forty-shilling "freehold" vote ("freehold" was an ironical misnomer) encouraged Protestant landlords for another generation, before and after the Union, still further to subdivide already excessively small holdings, while the benefits to be derived from the admission to power of propertied Catholics, with all their intensely Conservative instincts, were thrown away. Emancipation apart, the franchise without Reform was a complete farce, for the boroughs, which controlled the Parliamentary balance, were the personal property of Protestant landlords, and the 110 Parliamentary placemen were indirectly their tools. As usual, the men of light and leading contributed unconsciously to the strength of a system which, in their hearts, as honest men, they condemned. Each of them had some fatal defect of understanding. Grattan became a strong Emancipator, but remained an academic and ineffectual reformer striving in vain to reconcile Reform with a passionate abhorrence of democracy and a determination to keep power in the hands of landed property. In England, which was Protestant in the Established sense, he would have done no more harm than Burke, who for the same reason fought Reform as strongly as Pitt and his father Chatham had advocated it. But in Ireland, which was Catholic and Nonconformist, landed property signified Episcopalian landed property, that is, the narrowest form of ascendancy. Charlemont was an even stranger paradox. He was an academic Reformer before Grattan, but not an Emancipator, arriving at the same sterility as Grattan through a religious bias which Grattan ceased to feel, a bias inspired, not by a fanatical fear of democracy in itself, but by a fear of Catholic revenge for past wrongs. These men and their like, admirable and lovable as in many respects they were, were useless to Ireland in those terrible times. Whether Emancipation, unaccompanied by Reform, had any real chance of passing Parliament in 1795, when the Whig Viceroy Fitzwilliam, the one Viceroy in the eighteenth century who ever conceived the idea of governing Ireland according to Irish ideas, came over from England with the avowed intention of proposing it, is a matter of conjecture. Fitzwilliam was snuffed out by Pitt, and recalled under circumstances which still remain a matter of controversy. All we can say with certainty is that the opinion of Ireland at large was absolutely ignored, and that English party intrigues and English claims on Irish patronage had much to do with the result. On the whole, however, I agree with Mr. Fisher that too much importance has been given to this episode, especially by Mr. Lecky, who devotes nearly a volume to it.
The anti-national Irish Parliament was past praying for. Long before 1795 the Irish aristocracy had lost whatever power for good it ever possessed, and most of the resolute reformers of Wolfe Tone's middle-class Protestant school had turned, under the enthralling fascination of the French Revolution, into revolutionaries. Reform had been refused in 1782; again, and without coercion from the Volunteers, in 1783. It was refused again in 1784, against the advice of Pitt and at the instigation of Pitt's own Viceroy, Rutland, whom Pitt had urged—what a grim irony it seems!—to give "unanswerable proofs that the cases of Ireland and England are different," and who answered with truth that the ascendancy of a minority could only be maintained "by force or corruption." Every succeeding year showed the same results. Wolfe Tone was more than justified, he was compelled, to convert his Society of United Irishmen, founded in 1791, into a revolutionary organization and to seek by forcible means to overthrow the Executive which controlled Parliament and, through it, Ireland. Since the symbol of the Irish Executive was the British Crown, he, of course, abjured the Crown, though he had no more quarrel with the Crown as such than had the American or Canadian patriots. He simply loved his country, and from the first saw with clear eyes the only way to save her. Tolerance to him was not an isolated virtue, but an integral part of democracy. He took little interest in the Parliamentary side of Catholic relief, realizing its hollow unreality, and, in the case of the Bill of 1793, actually ridiculing the absurd spectacle of the Catholic cottiers being herded to the poll by their Protestant landlords. Nor was he even an extreme Democrat, for he advocated a ten-pound, instead of a forty shilling franchise. His original pamphlet of 1791 contains nothing but the most sober political common sense.