Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century

by James Richard Joy

LIFE OF VISCOUNT PALMERSTON. Lord Dolling and Bulwer.
VISCOUNT PALMERSTON. L. C. Sanders.
HENRY HAVELOCK. (English Men of Action Series.)
THE INDIAN MUTINY. G. B. Malleson.
THE WAR IN THE CRIMEA. Gen. Sir Edward Hamley.

X

GLADSTONE AND THE IRISH QUESTION

[WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE, born, Liverpool, December 29, 1809; died, Hawarden, Flintshire, Wales, May 19, 1898; educated at Eton and Christ Church College, Oxford University (double first- class, 1831); Member of Parliament for Newark as a Tory, 1832 46; wrote, 1838, "The State in its Relations with the Church"; held minor financial offices in Peel administration; 1843-45, President of Board of Trade; 1847-65, Member of Parliament for Oxford University; 1852, Chancellor of the Exchequer under Lord Aberdeen; 1858, Commissioner to the Ionian Islands; 1859, Chancellor of the Exchequer under Lord Palmerston; 1865, defeated as candidate for Oxford but returned for South Lancashire as a Liberal; leader of House of Commons; proposes radical Reform Bill; 1868, Member of Parliament for Greenwich; 1868-74, Premier (I.); Disestablishes Irish Church; carries National Educational Law, Ballot Law, Irish Land Act; abolishes purchase in the army; resigns Liberal leadership in 1875, and publishes works on ecclesiastical controversy; 1876, attacks Disraeli's Eastern policy in letters on Bulgarian atrocities; 1880, Member of Parliament for Midlothian; 1880-85, Premier (II.); Irish Coercion Acts; new Land Acts; Arrears of Rent Act; Franchise and Redistribution Acts; 1886, Premier (III.); First Home Rule Bill Fails; 1892-94, Premier (IV.); 1893, Second Home Rule Bill carried through the Commons, thrown out by the Lords; retires from public life March, 1894; buried in Westminster Abbey.]

From the first day of the nineteenth century to the last the statesmen of England have had one standing problem to face. It might come up under various forms and disguises, and it might seem to demand various remedies, but in some shape or other the woes of Ireland have always furnished the test of practical statesmanship, and have often been the rock on which proud administrations have met with disaster.

By nature Ireland would seem formed for peace and plenty. Happily located with the protecting bulwark of Great Britain between their emerald isle and foreign foes, blessed with a mild and equable climate, and inhabiting an island of singular fertility, the Irish would seem to have been marked for fortune's favors. Yet such has been the misgovernment of the English that the Irish have seen their paternal acres pass into the hands of aliens and absentees, their religion made a brand of shame and outlawry, their Parliament corrupted and done away, their industries crippled and bound down, and themselves reduced to wretched poverty.

At the outset of the century the Act of Union went into effect, abolishing the Irish Parliament and admitting Irish (Protestant) Lords and Commons to the Parliament at Westminster. Pitt believed that the change would strengthen the empire and help Ireland as well, but it was brought to pass by means of lavish bribery, and sorely against the wish of the Irish patriots. Furthermore, the determination of Pitt to commend the act to Ireland by removing the political disabilities which barred Catholics from membership in Parliament was thwarted by the stiff-necked George III., who had got it into his head that such a concession would do violence to the Protestantism of his coronation oath. Pitt resigned in disgust, and Catholic emancipation had to await until England had finished Napoleon's European business and could turn her hand to the troubles nearer home. It was finally carried, in 1829, by Wellington and Peel, the reform being fairly forced upon them by the tremendous agitation in its behalf by the eloquent Daniel O'Connell and his comrades of the Catholic Association. To save the nation from civil war the government yielded with scant grace, and O'Connell and his "tail" of Irish Catholics came into Parliament to form a new and perplexing element in all subsequent political calculations.

From his vantage-ground as a member of Parliament O'Connell led a fresh agitation for the "Repeal," meaning the repeal of the Act of Union which had destroyed the Dublin Parliament. His oratory, which in its power over vast multitudes of his emotional countrymen has never been surpassed, made him the idol of his party. To boisterous congregations of tens of thousands he declaimed his bitter harangues on Saxon injustice to the Celt. But when the people had been brought to fever heat the agitation failed because the orator proved to be a voice and nothing more. He yielded meekly to the proclamation of the government forbidding further meetings, and his followers forsook him when they saw that he would not cross the Rubicon and take arms after words had failed. The society called "Young Ireland," formed about 1840, took up the agitation for Irish nationality, and carried it to greater lengths than O'Connell had dared. Its fiery young leaders, Smith O'Brien, Meagher, and Mitchel, preached sedition with voice and newspaper press, and in 1848, only by the vigorous exertion of physical force was open rebellion averted. The principal men of the Young Ireland party were seized and condemned to death for high treason, though they ultimately got off with transportation to Australia, whence most of them eventually found their way to America, whither thousands of their countrymen had emigrated since the famine year of 1846.

The famine marks a turning-point in the history of the relations of England and Ireland. As has been narrated in another place, it was the dearth of food in Ireland which forced the government of Sir Robert Peel to do what the Cobdenites had been demanding for ten years, and repeal the Corn Laws. Probably the distressful plight of the Irish peasant had never been brought so strongly to the attention of Englishmen as by the reports which now reached England from the agents of the relief committees who visited every part of the island ascertaining conditions and distributing food. From this time a considerable number among the English Liberals carried the sad state of Ireland upon their heart and conscience. Another result of the famine which was to exercise enduring influence upon Irish politics was the emigration to America. The hundreds of thousands who came to the free republic at this time soon made it the asylum of Irish patriots, the hot-bed of anti-English conspiracies, and the source of a swelling stream of revenue for the Irish nationalist treasury.

It was in America that the next alarm was sounded after two unquiet decades. A widely ramified secret society, the Fenian Brotherhood, sprang up among the Irish exiles and emigrants in the United States about 1857, its members swearing "to free and regenerate Ireland from the yoke of England." The movement spread to Ireland, and Fenian lodges were organized even on British soil. The close of the American Civil War set loose many Irish veterans who eagerly enlisted in the cause of "the Irish Republic." The reports of vast enlistments and contributions in America alarmed the British government. In February, 1866, the Habeas Corpus Act was suspended in Ireland, and scores of suspects were thrown into jail. In May an armed band of Irish- American Fenians crossed the Niagara River to invade Canada. The attempt failed miserably, as did the plans for a general rising in Ireland. But a succession of surprises, jail deliveries, gunpowder plots, and the like, kept the English government in a flutter for several years, and gave the name of Fenian a place in the somber side of the century's history. The most notable result of the Fenian outbreak, beyond its obvious one of embittering the feeling between the governing nation and the subject race, was that it aroused one man—and he the greatest statesman of his time—to the need of providing some far- reaching and sufficient remedy for the disease which showed such virulence. "We know," says McCarthy, the historian of the epoch, "that even the worst excesses of the movement impressed the mind of Mr. Gladstone with a conviction that the hour was appropriate for doing something to remove the causes of the discontent that made Ireland restless…..While many public instructors lost themselves in vain shriekings over the wickedness of Fenianism, and the incurable perversity of the Irish people, one statesman was already convinced that the very shock of the Fenian agitation would arouse public attention to the recognition of substantial grievance, and to the admission that the business of statesmanship was to seek out the remedy and provide redress."