The Framework of Home Rule

by Erskine Childers

Nor can the coming Bill for Ireland make any preparation, technically, for a general Federation. Morally, as I shall show, it might have an important effect in stimulating local sentiment, not only in England, Scotland, and Wales, but in Ireland, towards a general Federation in the future, but in its mechanical structure it must be not merely non-Federal, but anti-Federal. One often hears it carelessly propounded that Irish Home Rule, so devised as to be applicable in later years, if they so desire, to Scotland, Wales, and England, will give us by smooth mechanical means a General Federation. This is a fallacy. At one stage or another, the earliest or the latest, we should have to create a totally new central Parliament, still elected by the whole people, but exclusively devoted to Imperial affairs, and wholly exempt from local business, before we possessed anything in the nature of a Federation. But, whatever the future has in store, it would be a scandal if Irish Home Rule were to be hampered or delayed by the existence of Scotch or Welsh claims, and it is earnestly to be hoped that no action of that kind will be taken. The case of Ireland is centuries old, and more urgent than ever. It differs radically from any case that can possibly be made for Scotland and Wales.

The Bill, I repeat, must be anti-Federal, centrifugal. In the case of Ireland we have first to dissolve an unnatural union, and then to revive an old right to autonomy, before we can reach a healthy Federal Union. Such, exactly, was the history of Canada. If, in that case, the dissolution of the Legislative Union and the construction of the Federal Union were consummated simultaneously in the British North America Act of 1867, they were nevertheless two distinct phases, and of these two phases the first, implying the revival of the old separate autonomies, was the indispensable precursor of Federal Union. This antecedent recognition of autonomy was not peculiar to Canada. Every Federation in the world arose in the same way, by the voluntary act of States under one Crown or suzerainty, but independent of one another, and it is of the essence of Federalism that this psychological condition should exist. Compulsory Federation would not last a year. It would indeed be practicable to federalize the United Kingdom by one Legislative Act, but the prior right to and fitness for complete Home Rule on the part of each of the component parts would have to be implicitly recognized.

It needs only a moment's consideration of Anglo-Irish history to see the special applicability of the psychological rule to Ireland. The evils of the Canadian Union, during the twenty-seven years of its duration, are infinitesimal beside the mischief, moral and material, which have been caused to both partners by the forcible amalgamation of Great Britain and Ireland; the waste of indigenous talent, industrial and political; the dispersion all over the globe of Irishmen; the conversion of friends into enemies, of peaceable citizens into plotters of treason, of farmers into criminals, of poets and statesmen into gaolbirds; the check to the production of wealth and Anglo-Irish commerce; the dislocation and demoralization of Parliamentary life; and, saddest results of all, the reactionary effect upon British statesmanship, domestic and Imperial, and the deterioration of Irish character within Ireland. The voluntary principle—at any rate, among the English-speaking races—is as essential to a true Union, like that of the South African Colonies or that of Scotland and England, as to a Federation. It is a sheer impossibility to create a perfect, mechanical Union on a basis of hatred and coercion; witness the strangely anomalous colonial features surviving in Irish Government—the Lord-Lieutenancy, the separate administration, and the standing army of police.

Persons inclined to reckon the advantages, whether of Federation or of Union, in pounds, shillings, and pence, may regard the psychological requirement as fanciful. It is not fanciful; on the contrary, it is related in the clearest way to the concrete facts of the situation. Before there is any question of Federation Ireland needs to find herself, to test her own potentialities, to prove independence of character, thought, and action, and to discover what she can do by her own unaided will with her own resources. As I endeavoured to show in the last chapter, these are the true reasons for Home Rule.

Home Rule is neither a luxury nor a plaything, but a tremendously exacting duty which must be undertaken by every country conscious of repression and valuing its self-respect, and which Ireland is praying to be allowed to undertake. When a people has learnt to understand the extent of its own powers and limitations, then it can safely and honourably co-operate on a Federal basis with other peoples, and, in the interests of efficiency and economy, can delegate to a central Government, partly of its own choice, functions hitherto locally exercised. Once more, that is the origin of all true Federations, British and foreign, in all parts of the world.

If, then, the Home Rule Bill cannot in legal form be a federating or unifying measure, it must be one of a precisely opposite character, and a measure of devolution. It is a proof of the need for a scientific nomenclature that the word "devolution" has to Irish ears come to mean something similar in kind to "Federal" Home Rule, but less in degree, and something different in kind from "Colonial" Home Rule, and infinitely less in degree. What a tangle of truth and fallacy from the misuse of a single word! It is associated rightly with the ill-starred Irish Council Bill of 1907, and it has been universally but wrongly used to indicate a small measure of local government in contradistinction to the Home Rule Bills of Mr. Gladstone and, a fortiori, to any more liberal schemes.

Nevertheless, the problem before us is one of devolution pure and simple, and the question is, how far is devolution to go? It may go to the full length of Colonial Home Rule, that is, Ireland may be vested with the full freedom now enjoyed by a self-governing Colony (for the grants of Colonial Home Rule were measures of devolution), or it might at the other extreme take the form of a petty municipal government. By hypothesis, however, we are precluded from considering any scheme which does not admit of responsible government in Ireland. That condition commits us to something in the nature of "Colonial" Home Rule, now enjoyed by States widely varying in size, wealth, and population, from the Dominion of Canada, with over seven million inhabitants, to Newfoundland, with under a quarter of a million inhabitants and very slender resources. It is worth notice also (to shift our analogy for the moment) that little Newfoundland, which, owing to divergency of interest, has declined both federation with the Dominion and union with any of the constituent parts of the Dominion, subsists happily and peacefully by the side of her powerful neighbour; and that New Zealand, for the same reason, prefers to occupy the same independent position by the side of Australia.

III.

THE EXCLUSION OR RETENTION OF IRISH MEMBERS AT WESTMINSTER.[78]

We have discarded the "Federal" solution as wholly impracticable, and have arrived at the "Colonial" solution. And at this point I feel it necessary to plead for the reader's patient, if reluctant, attention to what follows. The solution I suggest is unpopular, mainly, I believe, because prejudice has so beclouded the issue in the past, and because for the eighteen years since the last Home Rule Bill, while prejudice has diminished, the subject of Irish Home Rule has ceased to be studied with scientific care.