It may be worth while to remark that the notion of an unsociable "state of nature" prior to a "social contract" was effectively criticised by Sir William Temple in his Essay upon the Origin and Nature of Government (1672). With a really scientific discrimination he points to food conditions as mainly determining gregation or segregation among animals, observing: "Nor do I know, if men are like sheep, why they need any government, or, if they are like wolves, how they can suffer it" (Works, ed. 1814, i, 9, 10). In the next generation, again, the ultra-Hobbesian view was keenly attacked and confuted by Shaftesbury within a few years of Locke's death (Characteristics, early edd. i, 109-11; ii, 310-21). As I have elsewhere pointed out (Buckle and his Critics, p. 395), the "contract" theory lent itself equally to Whiggism and to High Toryism.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century we find the Radical Bentham (Fragment on Government, 1776) deriding it as held by the Tory Blackstone. But Rousseau himself (preface to the Discours sur l'inégalité) avowedly handled the "State of Nature" as an ideal, not as a historical truth; and Blackstone did the same. It is therefore only a new species of abstract fallacy, and one for which there is no practical excuse, to argue as does the school of Maine (cp. Pollock, as cited, pp. 63, 75, 79, etc.) that the theories in question are responsible for the French Revolution in general, or the Reign of Terror in particular. Revolutions occur for reasons embodied in states of life: they avail themselves of the theories that lie to hand. The doctrine that "all are born equal" or "free" comes from the Institutes of Justinian, and is laid down in so many words by Bishop Sherborne of Chichester in 1536, and by the orthodox Spanish Jesuit Suarez early in the seventeenth century (Tractatus de Legibus, l. ii, c. ii, § 3). The first-mentioned passage is cited by Stubbs, iii, 623-24, and the second by Hallam, Literature of Europe, iii, 160.
The derivation was bound to warp the theory; but such as it is, it represents the beginning of a new art, and therefore of a new science, of representative government. A variety of forces combined to prevent anarchy on the one hand, and on the other the fatal consolidation of the monarch's power which took place in France.[1184] The new English king was a Protestant, and therefore religiously acceptable to the people; but he was a Dutchman, and therefore racially obnoxious; for fierce commercial jealousy had long smouldered between the two peoples, and war had fanned it into flames that had burned wide. Further, he was a "latitudinarian" in religious matters, and zealous to appoint latitudinarian bishops; and the retirement from London forced on him by his asthma deepened tenfold the effect of his normal coldness of manner towards all and sundry. In the very Church whose cause he had saved, he was unpopular not only with the out-and-out zealots of political divine right, but with the zealous Churchmen as such, inasmuch as he favoured the Dissenters as far as he dared. So hampered and frustrated was he that it seems as if nothing but his rare genius for fighting a losing battle could have saved him, despite the many reasons the nation had for adhering to him.
One of these reasons, which counted for much, was the political effect of a National Debt in attaching creditors as determined supporters to the Government. The highest sagacity, perhaps, could not have framed a better device than this for establishing a new dynasty; albeit the device was itself made a ground of hostile criticism, and was, of course, resorted to as a financial necessity, or at least as a resource pointed to by Dutch example, not as a stroke of statecraft. What prudence and conciliation could do, William sought to do. And yet, with all his sanity and enlightenment, he failed utterly to apply his tolerant principles to that part of his administration which most sorely needed them—the government of Ireland. Even in England he could not carry tolerance nearly as far as he wished;[1185] but in Ireland he was forced to acquiesce in Protestant tyranny of the worst description. The bigotry of his High Church subjects was too strong for him. On the surrender of the last adherents of James at Limerick he concluded a treaty which gave the Irish Catholics the religious freedom they had had under Charles II when the Cromwellian oppression was removed; but the English Parliament refused to sanction it, save on the condition that nobody should sit in the Irish Parliament without first repudiating the Catholic doctrines. This was not the first virtual breach of faith by England towards Ireland; and it alone might have sufficed to poison union between the two countries; but it was only the first step in a renewal of the atrocious policy of the past.[1186]
At the Restoration the ex-Cromwellian diplomatists had contrived to arrange matters so that the monstrous confiscations made under the Commonwealth should be substantially maintained; though the settlement of 1653 had been made in entire disregard of the Act of Oblivion by Charles I in 1648; and though Charles II avowed in the House of Lords in 1660 that they had "showed much affection to him abroad." So base were the tactics of the Protestants that many Irish were charged with having forfeited their lands by signing under compulsion the engagement to renounce the House of Stuart; while those who had compelled them to the act now held the lands as royalists. But the decisive evil was the base indolence of the King. As Halifax said of him, he "would slide from an asking face";[1187] and what Clarendon called "that imbecillitas frontis which kept him from denying"[1188] made him solve the intolerable strife of suitors by leaving possession in the main to those who had it. The adventurers and soldiers finally relinquished only one-third of their estates;[1189] and only a few hundreds of favoured Irish were restored to their old lands, under burden of compensation to the dispossessed holders.[1190]
When the resort of James II to Ireland gave power to the oppressed population, it was a matter of course that reprisals should be attempted. The English historian glibly decides that they should not have been permitted; that the King "ought to have determined that the existing settlement of landed property should be inviolable"; and that "whether, in the great transfer of estates, injustice had or had not been committed, was immaterial. That transfer, just or unjust, had taken place so long ago that to reverse it would be to unfix the foundations of society."[1191] Thus does the race which claims to be civilised prescribe a course of action for that which it declares to be uncivilised.[1192] It is further suggested that the English interest in the Irish Parliament would have "willingly" granted James a "very considerable sum" to indemnify the despoiled natives for whom during a quarter of a century it had never moved a finger. There is not the least reason to believe in any such willingness; and it was in the ordinary way of things that the wronged race should not exhibit a moderation and magnanimity of which the wrongers had never for a moment shown themselves capable. The Irish Parliament of 1689, indeed, took care to indemnify all purchasers and mortgagees, while dispossessing original holders under the Cromwellian Settlement;[1193] but it passed an Act of Attainder in the fashion of the age; and when the Protestant cause triumphed, the revenge taken was a hundredfold greater than the provocation.
It was the legislature, not the crown, that did the work. Under the tolerant and statesmanlike King, the Irish Protestant Parliament proceeded to pass law after law making the life of Catholics one of cruel humiliation and intolerable wrong. There is nothing in civilised history to compare with the process by which religious and racial hatred in combination once more set the miserable Irish nation on the rack. The extreme political insanity of the course taken is doubtless to be attributed to the propagandist madness of James, who had just before sought to give all Ireland over to Catholicism. Fanaticism bred fanaticism. But the fact remains that the Protestant fanatics began in the reign of William a labour of hate which, carried on in succeeding reigns, at length made Ireland the darkest problem in our politics.
Hassencamp (pp. 117, 125) insists that the penal laws "were not dictated by any considerations of religion, but were merely the offspring of the spirit of domination," citing for this view Burke, Letter to a Peer (Works, Bohn ed. iii, 296), and Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe (Id. ib. p. 321). But this is an attempt to dissociate religion from persecution in the interests of religious credit, and will not bear criticism. Burke, in fact, contradicts himself, assigning the religious motive in an earlier page (292) of the Letter to a Peer, and again in the Letter to Langrishe (p. 301). When the Protestants went on heaping injuries on the Catholics in the knowledge that the people remained fixed in Catholicism, they were only acting as religious persecutors have always done. On Burke's and Hassencamp's view, persecution could never take place from religious motives at all. No doubt the race feeling was fundamental, but the two barbaric instincts were really combined. Cp. Macaulay's History, ch. vi (2-vol. ed. 1877, i, 390-93).
As regards Irish trade, commercial malice had already effected all that religious malice could wish. Even in the reign of Henry VIII a law was passed forbidding the importation of Irish wool into England; and in the next century Strafford sought further to crush the Irish woollen trade altogether in the English interest, throwing the Irish back on their linen trade and agriculture, which he encouraged.[1194] Strafford's avowed object was the keeping Ireland thoroughly subject to the English crown by making the people dependent on England for their chief clothing; and to the same end he proposed to hold for the crown a monopoly of all Irish trade in salt.[1195] Cromwell, on his part, was sane enough to leave Irish shipping on the same footing as English under his Navigation Act; but in 1663 the Restoration Parliament put Ireland on the footing of a foreign State, thus destroying her shipping trade once for all,[1196] and arresting her natural intercourse with the American colonies. In the same year, a check was placed on the English importation of Irish fat cattle: two years later, the embargo was laid on lean cattle and dead meat; still later, it was laid on sheep, swine, pork, bacon, mutton, and cheese. In William's reign, new repressions were effected. The veto on wool export having led to woollen manufactures, which were chiefly in the hands of Dissenters and Catholics,[1197] the Irish Parliament, consisting of Episcopalian landlords, was induced in 1698 to put heavy export duties on Irish woollens; and this failing of its full purpose, in the following year the English Parliament absolutely prohibited all export of manufactured wool from Ireland.[1198]
To this policy of systematic iniquity the first offset was a measure of protection to the Irish linen trade in 1703; and this benefaction went almost solely into the hands of the Scotch settlers in Ulster.[1199] Even thereafter the linen trade of Ireland was so maimed and restricted by English hindrances that it was revived only by continual bounties from 1743 to 1773. And this twice restored and subsidised industry, thus expressly struck out of native and put in Protestant and alien hands, has been in our own age repeatedly pointed to as a proof of the superiority of the Protestant and non-Celtic inhabitants over the others in energy and enterprise. As a matter of fact, many of the Scots who benefited by the bounties of 1703 in Ulster had recently immigrated because of the poverty and over-population of their own country, where their energy and enterprise could do nothing. Irish energy and enterprise, on the other hand, had been chronically strangled, during two hundred years, by English and Protestant hands, with a persevering malice to which there is no parallel in human history; and the process is seen at its worst after the "glorious Revolution" of 1688.