What would be the political constitution of an independent Ireland? How would its form be settled? The political training of the people generally since they came out of political thraldom has been agitation against government and law; their only notion of rule has been personal. Nor is a hierarchy friendly to political liberty. To set up a stable democracy in Ireland, if that is the aim of the revolutionary party, would surely be an arduous undertaking.
All who look coolly into the matter apart from faction and its necessities have pronounced that the choice lies between separation and legislative union. Two Parliaments, two nations; so all wisdom says and so experience before the Union proved. The forces which under Grattan’s constitution held the two Parliaments together in strained and precarious fellowship, the nomination boroughs, the pension list, the sinecures, the peerages, the bishoprics, would no longer exist. What is even more important, there would no longer be an oligarchical and exclusionist Parliament in Ireland dependent on British support for its ascendency, perhaps even for the security of its lands. Antagonism would almost inevitably ensue; the more surely as the partners would set out with the embitterment of a divorce. Nothing apparently could avert collision; the result of which would be repression, making the latter end worse than the first.
The proposal of federation is surely preposterous. It would be necessary first to cut the United Kingdom in two and create an Irish government in order that negotiations for a federal union might be set on foot. But how could there be a federation of two states, one of them enormously superior in power to the other? What sort of deliberative assembly would the federal council be?
Another plan is to form a federation of the four nationalities, as they are assumed to be, England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales; wrenching apart the members of a great nation which have long been united and cancelling the highest work of British statesmanship. Here again federation could not work. England being so much the predominant partner, the result would almost certainly be a perpetual league of the three minor powers against her domination. The federal system is applicable only to a group of tolerably equal States. The restoration of the Heptarchy with the addition of Scotland, divided into Highland and Lowland, and the four provinces of Ireland erected into States, would be a comparatively practicable system. The present condition of the Federal system in the United States does not encourage experiments of that kind.
The mildest proposal of all is devolution; in other words, the concession to Ireland of a larger measure of local self-government. This probably would be readily granted to any extent compatible with supremacy of law and security of life and property, which no government without abdicating its plainest duty can forgo. Gradual extension of local self-government would not entail any acute crisis or bring on any party conflict. The Lord-lieutenancy, Parliament has already shown itself ready to abolish. It was in deference to the wish of Ireland that it has been retained. The only thing in the way of undue centralization of which, so far as the writer remembers, his Irish friends complained, was the necessity of carrying Irish causes to Westminster as the final court of appeal. Whether concession on this point would be feasible it is for legal authorities to say.
However, it can hardly be doubted that in the course of this struggle a sentiment has been cultivated among the people of Ireland for which it is wise as well as kind in some way to provide satisfaction. The Irishman being of lively sensibility and impressible through sight has never seen the power which really governs him. A session or two of the Imperial Parliament held at Dublin for the settlement of Irish questions would probably have had a very good effect, but it was thought to entail too much inconvenience. Would there be any objection to empowering the Irish members of both Houses to sit annually at Dublin as a preparatory House of Irish legislation framing bills to be commended to Parliament? There would then be something in College Green. The experiment would involve none of the difficulties or perils of a statutory division of the powers of Parliament. It would be at first on the footing of an experiment, nor would it preclude further concessions if further concessions should be found needful.
With the question of national character, social or industrial, and its special requirements, I do not pretend to deal. It has been treated systematically, perhaps for the first time, by an excellent authority, Sir Horace Curzon Plunkett, in his “Ireland in the New Century.” Of Irish character a part may be aboriginal and fundamental. A part probably is the result of historical accident more or less ingrained, and probably capable of modification. I am told that Irish character has been even acquiring a more serious cast since I watched the Tipperary steeplechases or stood on the fair-ground of Ballinasloe. Not a little, so far as the masses are concerned, is probably the work of a priesthood strongly and inherently reactionary, which has exercised the same influence on the ideal of life, character, mind, and industry here as in other Catholic countries. Ireland is perhaps happy in having been cut off from the prodigious development of luxury and dissipation which, as social writers tell us, has been taking place on the other side of the Channel as well as from the domination of the stock-exchange. She may in this way become a saving element in the social character of the United Kingdom.
Is it vain to hope that for the settlement of a question so vital party may for one short hour suspend its war? What far-off object of aggrandizement can be half so important as a contented and loyal Ireland.