CHAPTER VII.
HOME RULE IN HISTORY[ToC]
What is the fact of Irish history vital to our present cause? Surely it is this, that up to the year 1800—the year of the Act of Union—Ireland had possessed for practically five centuries a Home Rule Government in some shape or form. In other words, self-government had been the rule and not the exception throughout the centuries preceding 1800. This is a complete and sufficient answer to those who argue that the supporters of Irish Home Rule are making a proposal of a completely novel and revolutionary kind, without precedent in the history of the Western world.
As a matter of plain fact, it was the framers of the Act of Union who were the revolutionaries, and it is the supporters of Home Rule who are returning to the ancient paths. The Home Rulers have five centuries behind them, as against the one century behind the Unionists. From the days of Simon de Montfort[56] the Irish Parliament developed side by side with the English, growing with the growth of English rule in Ireland, and varying with its limitations. Its powers, indeed, were placed under a grave and serious limitation by Poynings' Law, passed in the reign of Henry VII.,[57] and strengthened in the reign of Mary Tudor.[58] They were for a brief time entirely taken away by Oliver Cromwell, who was, strangely enough, the first great Unionist ruler of Ireland. Restored by Charles II., the Irish Parliament was again limited in power by the Government of George I.[59] But in 1782 it broke through all these limitations, and became for a short brilliant period a fully self-governing Parliament.
We have thus the illuminating fact that, with one single exception—and that an example eminent in English affairs, but certainly not to be followed in Irish—every great English ruler and monarch governed Ireland under a distinct Irish Home Rule Parliament up to the year 1800. If Home Rule is so certain to be ruinous to Empire, how, we may well ask, did these rulers build up the British Empire? How did Marlborough and Clive, Chatham and Walpole, do their great world-work with an Irish Parliament behind them? The answer is, of course, that they did it better, and not worse, because Ireland was so far satisfied with her fortunes as to be willing to put her full force into the struggle for Empire.
For as long as Ireland possessed a Parliament she always possessed hope.