The Framework of Home Rule

by Erskine Childers

IRELAND TO-DAY

Why does present-day Ireland need Home Rule? I put the question in that way because I am not going to question the fact that she wants Home Rule. She has always said she wanted it: she says so still, and that is enough. There is a powerful minority in Ireland against Home Rule. There always have been minorities more or less powerful against Home Rule in all ages and places. That does not alter the national character of the claim. If once we go behind the voice of a people, constitutionally expressed, we court endless risks. National leaders have always been called "agitators," which, of course, they are, and non-representative agitators, which they are not. To deny the genuineness of a claim which is feared is an invariable feature of oppositions to measures of Home Rule. The denial is generally irreconcilable with the case made for the dangers of Home Rule, and that contradiction in its most glaring shape characterizes the present opposition to the Irish claims. But Unionists should elect to stand on one ground or the other, and for my part I shall assume that the large majority of Irishmen, as shown by successive electoral votes, want Home Rule. Precisely what form of Home Rule they want is another and by no means so clear a matter, on which I shall presently have a word to say. But they want, in the general sense, to manage their own local affairs. Her best friends would despair of Ireland if that was not her desire.

What, in the Colonies, Ireland, and everywhere else, is the deep spiritual impulse behind the desire for Home Rule? A craving for self-expression, self-reliance. Home Rule is synonymous with the growth of independent character. That is why Ireland instinctively and passionately wants it, that is why she needs it, and that is why Great Britain, for her own sake, and Ireland's, should give it. If that is not the reason, it is idle to talk about Home Rule; but it is the reason.

Character is the very foundation of national prosperity and happiness, and we are blind to the facts of history if we cannot discern the profound effect of political institutions upon human character. Self-government in the community corresponds to free will in the individual. I am far from saying that self-government is everything. But I do say that it is the master-key. It is fundamental. Give responsibility and you will create responsibility. Through political responsibility only can a society brace itself to organized effort, find out its own opinions on its own needs, test its own capabilities, and elicit the will, the brains, and the hands to solve its own problems.

These are such commonplaces in every other part of the Empire, which has an individual life of its own, that men smile if you suggest the contrary. But ordinary reasoning is rarely applied to Ireland. There "good government" has been held to be "a substitute for self-government" and a régime of benevolent paternalism to be a full and sufficient compensation for cruel coercion and crueller neglect. In this paternal régime it is impossible to include those great measures of land reform passed in 1870, 1881, and 1887, which revolutionized the agrarian system, and converted the cottier tenant into a judicial tenant.[42] Although these measures, which fall into an altogether different category from the subsequent policy of State-aided Land Purchase,[43] were inspired by an earnest desire to mitigate frightful social evils, they cannot be regarded as voluntary. They were extorted, shocking as the reflection is, by crime and violence, by the spectacle of a whole social order visibly collapsing, and by the desperate efforts of a handful of Irishmen, determined at any cost, by whatever means, to save the bodies and souls of their countrymen. The methods of these men were destructive. They were constructive only in this, the highest sense of all, that while battling against concrete economic evils, they sought to obtain for Ireland the right to control her own affairs and cure her own economic evils. It is often said that Parnell gave a tremendous impetus to the Home Rule movement by harnessing it to the land question. True; but what a strange way of expressing a truth! Anywhere outside Ireland men would say that self-government was the best road to the reform of a bad land system.

With the tranquillity which was slowly restored by the alterations in agrarian tenure and the immense economic relief derived from the lowering of rents, a change came over the spirit of British statesmanship. With the exception of the short Liberal Government of 1892-1895, which failed for the second time to carry Home Rule, Conservatives were responsible for Ireland from 1886 to 1905. They felt that opposition to Home Rule could be justified only by a strenuous policy of amelioration in Ireland, and the efforts of three Chief Secretaries, Mr. Arthur Balfour, Mr. Gerald Balfour, and Mr. George Wyndham—efforts often made in the teeth of bitter opposition from Irish Unionists—to carry out this policy, were sincere and earnest. The Act of 1891, with its grants for light railways, its additional facilities for Land Purchase, and its establishment of the Congested Districts Board to deal with the terrible poverty of certain districts in the west, may be said to mark the beginning of the new era. The Land Act of 1896 was another step, and the establishment of a complete system of Irish Local Government in 1898 another. In the following year came the Act setting up the Department of Agriculture, and in 1903 Mr. Wyndham's great Land Purchase Act. Then came the strange "devolutionist" episode, arising from the appointment of Sir Antony (now Lord) MacDonnell to the post of Under-Secretary at Dublin Castle, the Government who selected him being fully aware that he was in favour of some change in the government of Ireland. He entered into relations with a group of prominent Irishmen, headed by Lord Dunraven, who were thinking out a scheme for a mild measure of devolution. When the fact became known, there was an explosion of anger among Irish Unionists. Mr. Wyndham, who had been a popular Chief Secretary, resigned office, and was succeeded by Mr. Walter Long; perhaps the most dramatic and significant example in modern times of the policy of governing Ireland in deliberate and direct defiance of the wishes and sentiments of the vast majority of Irishmen.

The Liberal Government of 1906, coming into office under a pledge to refrain from a full Home Rule measure, confined itself to the introduction of the Irish Council Bill of 1907, which, rightly, in my opinion, was repudiated by the Irish people, and accordingly dropped. But the Government was in general sympathy with Nationalist Ireland, so that a number of useful measures were added to the statute books; for example, the Labourers (Ireland) Act of 1906, empowering Rural Councils, with the aid of State credit, to acquire land for labourers' plots and cottages; the Town Tenants Act, extending the principle of compensation for improvements at the termination of a lease to the urban tenant; the very important Irish Universities Act of 1908, which gave to Roman Catholics facilities for higher education which they had lacked for centuries, and, lastly, Mr. Birrell's Land Act of 1909, which was designed partly to meet the imminent collapse of Land Purchase, owing to the failure of the financial arrangements made under the Wyndham Act of 1903, and partly to extend the powers of the Congested Districts Board.

To these measures must be added another which was not confined to Ireland, but which has exercised a most potent influence, and by no means a wholly beneficial influence, on Irish life and Irish finance, the Old Age Pensions Act of 1908, under which the enormous sum of two and three-quarter millions is now allocated to Ireland.[44]

The best that can be said of the legislation since 1881 is that it has laid the foundations of a new social order. Agrarian crime has disappeared and material prosperity has greatly increased. Government in the interests of a small favoured class has almost vanished. It survives to this extent, that civil administration and patronage, which are still, be it remembered, removed from popular control, remain, in fact, in Protestant and Unionist hands to an extent altogether disproportionate to the distribution of creeds, classes, and opinions. And, of course, in the major matter of Home Rule, the power of the Unionist minority, as represented in the Commons by seventeen out of the thirty-three Ulster representatives, and in the House of Lords by an overwhelming preponderance of Unionist peers, is still enormous. But within Ireland itself, central administration apart, the exceptional privileges and exceptional political power of Protestants and landlords, which lasted almost intact until forty years ago, is now non-existent. The Disestablishment Act of 1869, while immensely enhancing the moral power and religious zeal of the Church of Ireland, and even strengthening its financial position, took away its political monopoly, and through the final abolition of tithes, its baneful and irritating interference with economic life. The successive measures of land legislation, culminating in the transfer of half the land of Ireland from landlord to peasant proprietorship, and the Local Government Act of 1898, surrendering at a stroke the whole local administration of the country into popular control, destroyed the exceptional political privileges of the landlord class.

Ascendancy, then, in the old sense, is a thing of the past. What has taken its place? What is the ruling power within Ireland? Is it a public opinion derived from the vital contact of ideas and interests, and taking shape in a healthy and normal distribution of parties? Is thought free? Has merit its reward? Is there any unity of national purpose, transcending party divisions? If it were necessary to give a categorical "Yes" or "No" to these questions, the answer would be "No." Sane energizing politics, and the sovereign ascendancy of a sane public opinion, are absolutely unattainable in Ireland or anywhere else without Home Rule. It is all the more to the credit of Irishmen that, in the face of stupendous difficulties, and in a marvellously short space of time since the attainment, barely twenty years ago, of the elementary conditions of social peace, they have gone so far as they have gone towards the creation of a self-reliant, independently thinking, united Ireland. The whole weight of Imperial authority has been thrown into the scale against them. Whatever the mood and policy of British upholders of the Union, whether sympathetic or hostile, wise or foolish, their constant message to both parties in Ireland has been, "Look to us. Trust in us. You are divided. We are umpires," and the reader will no doubt remember that the theory of "umpirage" was used in exactly the same way in the Colonies, notably in Upper Canada,[45] to thwart the tendency towards a reconciliation of creeds, races, and classes. Fortunately, there have been Irishmen who have laboured to counteract the effects of this enervating policy, and to reconstruct, by native effort from within, a new Ireland on the ruins of the old. Whether or not they have consciously aimed at Home Rule matters not a particle. Some have, some have not; but the result of these efforts has been the same, to pull Irishmen together and to begin the creation of a genuinely national atmosphere.