Modern English writers of the Conservative school, always eager to asperse Ireland, never capable of frankly avowing the English causation of Irish backwardness, think it a sufficient exculpation of their ancestors' crimes to say that Irishmen have not taken up the old industries since they have been free to do so. Thus the late Mr. H.D. Traill meets Irish comment on Strafford's treatment of the Irish woollen trade by saying that the complainants "in these days prefer other and less worthy industries to those which they have now been free to practise, if they chose, for generations" (Strafford, 1889, p. 137). This is a fair sample of the fashion in which racial and political prejudices prompt men otherwise honourable to devices worthy of baseness. It should be unnecessary to point out, in reply, that when the Irish industries had been so long extirpated as to be lost arts, it was simply impossible that they could be successfully restored in competition with the highly developed machine industry of England. Other countries set up new industries under high protective duties. This Ireland could not do. But the most obvious considerations are missed by malice.
The beginnings of modern parliamentary government thus coincide with the recommencement, in the worst spirit, of the principal national crime thus far committed by England; and this not by the choice of, but in despite of, the king, at the hands of the Parliament. In the next reign the same sin lies at the same door, the monarch doing nothing. The fact should serve better than any monarchic special pleading to show us that the advance towards freedom is a warfare not merely with despots and despotic institutions, but with the spirit of despotism in the average man; a warfare in which, after a time, the opposing forces are seldom positive right and wrong, but as a rule only comparative right and wrong, evil being slowly eliminated by the alternate play of self-regarding instinct. Gross and wilful political evil, we say, was wrought in the first stages of the new progress towards political justice. But that is only another way of saying that even while gross political evil was being wrought, men were on the way towards political justice. A clear perception of the whole process, when men attain to it, will mean that justice is about to be attained.
§ 5
Even while the spirit of religion and the spirit of separateness were working such wrong in Ireland, the spirit of separateness was fortunately defeated in Scotland, where it had yet burned strongly enough to make perpetual division seem the destiny of the two kingdoms. We learn how much political institutions count for when we realise that in Scotland, just before the parliamentary union with England, there was as furious an aversion to all things English as there has ever been shown in France of late years to things German. The leading Scots patriots were not only bitterly averse to union, but hotly bent on securing that the line of succession in Scotland after Anne should not be the same as that in England; this because they held that Scottish liberties could never be secure under an English king. The stern Fletcher of Saltoun, a Republican at heart, had to play in part the game of the Jacobites, much as he abominated their cause. But both alike were defeated, with better results than could possibly have followed on any separation of the crowns; and the vehement opposition of the great mass of the Scots people to the Parliamentary Union was likewise defeated, in a manner hard to understand. The heat of the popular passion in Scotland is shown by the infamously unjust execution of the English Captain Green and two of his men[1200] on a charge of killing a missing Scotch captain and crew who were not even proved to be dead, and were afterwards found to be alive. The fanatical remnant of the Covenanters was as bitter against union as the Jacobites. Yet in the teeth of all this violence of feeling the Union was carried, and this not wholly by bribery,[1201] as was then alleged, and as might be suspected from the analogy of the later case of Ireland, but through the pressure of common-sense instinct among the less noisy. There was indeed an element of bribery in the English allowance of liberal compensation to the shareholders of the African Company (better known as the Darien Company), who thus had good cash in exchange for shares worth next to nothing; and in a certain sense the reluctant English concession to Scotland of freedom of trade was a bribe. But it is by such concessions that treaties are secured; and it needed a very clear self-interest to bring round a Scotch majority to union in the teeth of a popular hostility much more fierce than is shown in our own day in the not altogether disparate case of Ulster, as regards Home Rule. Burton and Macaulay agreed[1202] that the intense wish and need of the Scottish trading class to participate in the trade of England (as they had done to much advantage under Cromwell, but had been hindered from doing after the Restoration) was what brought about the passing of the Act of Union in the Scots Parliament. No doubt the moderate Presbyterians saw that their best security lay in union;[1203] but that recognition could never have overridden the stiff-necked forces of fanaticism and race hatred[1204] were it not for the call of plain pecuniary advantage. A transformation had begun in Scotland. The country which for a hundred and fifty years had been distracted by fanatical strifes, losing its best elements of culture under the spell of Judaic bibliolatry, had at length, under the obscure influence of English example, begun to move out of the worst toils of the secondary barbarism, not indeed into a path of pure civilisation—the harm had gone too deep for that—but towards a life of secular industry which at least prepared a soil for a better life in the centuries to come; and even for a time, under the stimulus of the new thought of France, developed a brilliant and various scientific literature. The Darien scheme may be taken as a turning-point in Scottish history; an act of commercial enterprise then arousing an amount of energy and sensation that had for centuries been seen only in connection with strokes of State and sect. It is not agreeable to idealising prejudice to accept Emerson's saying[1205] that the greatest ameliorator in human affairs has been "selfish, huckstering trade"; but, barring the strict force of the superlative, the claim is valid. It is the blackest count in the indictment against England for her[1206] treatment of Ireland that she deliberately closed to the sister nation the door which the Scotch, by refusing union on other terms when union was highly expedient in the view of English statesmen, forced her to open to them.
FOOTNOTES:
[1145] Armand Carrel (Histoire de la Contre-Révolution en Angleterre, ed. Bruxelles, 1836, p. 8) notes the "apathetic indifference" to which Cromwell's imperialist rule had reduced the middle classes.
[1146] It is to be noted in this connection that at first the secret was very well kept. There can be no reasonable doubt that Shaftesbury and Lauderdale were kept in the dark as to the Treaty of Dover, in which Charles agreed with Louis to introduce Catholicism in England. Macaulay's suggestion to the contrary comes of his determination to hear nothing in Shaftesbury's defence.
[1147] This is accepted by Armand Carrel, who calls him (Histoire de la Contre-Révolution en Angleterre, p. 6) "homme d'une immoralité profonde."
[1148] It is to be regretted that Green, while admitting that Mr. Christie was "in some respects" successful in his vindication of Shaftesbury, should have left his own account of Shaftesbury's character glaringly unfair. Verbally following Burnet, he pronounces Ashley "at best a Deist" in his religion, and adds that his life was "that of a debauchee," going on to couple the terms "Deist and debauchee" in a very clerical fashion. And yet in the previous paragraph he admits that "the debauchery of Ashley was simply a mask. He was, in fact, temperate by nature and habit, and his ill-health rendered any great excess impossible." The non-correction of the flat contradiction must apparently be set down to Green's ill-health. As a matter of fact, the charge of debauchery is baseless. Long before Mr. Christie, one of the annotators of Burnet's History (ed. 1838, p. 64, note) defended Shaftesbury generally, and pointed out that "in private life we have no testimony that he was depraved." Cp. Christie, Life of Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1871, i, 316.
[1149] History of His Own Time, ed. 1838, p. 290.