Now, there may be persons in this room, I should be surprised if there were not, who doubt whether it is worth their while even to hope for substantial justice, as this address says, from a Parliament sitting in London. If there be such a man in this room let him understand that I am not the man to condemn him or to express surprise at the opinion at which he has arrived. But I would ask him in return for that, that he would give me at least for a few minutes a patient hearing, and he will find that, whether justice may come from the north or the south, or the east or the west, I, at any rate, stand as a friend of the most complete justice to the people of this island. When discussing the question of Parliamentary Reform, I have often heard it asserted that the people of Ireland, and I am not speaking of those who are hopeless of good from a Parliament in London, but that the people of Ireland generally imagine that the question of Parliamentary Reform has very little importance for them. Now I undertake to say, and I think I can make it clear to this meeting, that whatever be the importance of that question to any man in England or Scotland, if the two islands are to continue under Imperial Parliamentary Government, it is of more importance to every Irishman. You know that the Parliament of which I am a Member contains 658 Members, of whom 105 cross the Channel from Ireland, and when they go to London they meet—supposing all the Members of the House of Commons are gathered together—553 Members who are returned for Great Britain. Now, suppose that all your 105 Members were absolutely good and honourable representatives of the people of Ireland—I will not say Tories, or Whigs, or Radicals, or Repealers, but anything you like,—let every man imagine that all these Members were exactly the sort of men he would wish to go from Ireland,—when the 105 arrive in London they meet with the 553 who are returned from Great Britain. Now, suppose that the system of Parliamentary representation in Great Britain is very bad, that it represents very few persons in that great island, and that those who appear to be represented are distributed in the small boroughs over different parts of the country, and in the counties under the thumb and finger of the landlords, it is clear that the whole Parliament, although your 105 Members may be very good men, must still be a very bad Parliament. Therefore, if any man imagines—and I should think no man can imagine—that the representation of the people in Ireland is in a very good state—still, if he fancies it is in a good state—unless the representation of Great Britain were at least equally good, you might have a hundred excellent Irish Members in Parliament at Westminster; but the whole 658 Members might be a very bad Parliament for the United Kingdom.
The Member for a borough or a county in Ireland, when he goes to London, votes for measures for the whole kingdom; and a Member for Lancashire or for Warwickshire, or for any other county or borough in Great Britain, votes for measures not only for Great Britain but also for Ireland, and therefore, all parts of the United Kingdom—every county, every borough, every parish, every family, every man—has a clear and distinct and undoubted interest in a Parliament that shall fairly and justly represent the whole nation. Now, look for a moment at two or three facts with regard to Ireland alone. I have stated some facts with regard to England and Scotland at recent meetings held across the Channel.
Now for two or three facts with regard to Ireland. In Ireland you have five boroughs returning each one Member, the average number of electors in each of these boroughs being only 172. You have 13 boroughs, the average number being 316. You have 9 other boroughs with an average number of electors of 497. You have, therefore, 27 boroughs whose whole number of electors, if they were all put together, is only 9,453, or an average of 350 electors for each Member. I must tell you further that you have a single county with nearly twice as many voters as the whole of those 27 boroughs. Your 27 boroughs have only 9,453 electors, and the county of Cork has 16,107 electors, and returns but two Members. But that is not the worst of the case. It happens both in Great Britain and Ireland, wherever the borough constituencies are so small, that it is almost impossible that they should be independent; a very acute lawyer, for example, in one of those boroughs—a very influential clergyman, whether of your Church or ours—when I say ours, I do not mean mine, but the Church of England—half-a-dozen men combining together, or a little corruption from candidates going with a well-filled purse,—these are the influences brought to bear upon those small boroughs both in England and Ireland. A great many of them return their Members by means of corruption, more or less, and a free and real representation of the people is hardly ever possible in a borough of that small size.
But if I were to compare your boroughs with your counties, see how it stands. You have thirty-nine borough Members, with 30,000 electors, and you have sixty-four county Members, with 172,000 electors. Therefore you see that the Members are so distributed that the great populations have not one quarter of the influence in Parliament which those small populations in the small boroughs have. We come next to another question which is of great consequence. Not only are those small boroughs altogether too email for independence, but if we come to your large county constituencies, we find that from the peculiar circumstances and the relations which exist between the voter and the owner of the land, there is scarcely any freedom of election. Even in your counties I should suppose that if there was no compulsion from the landowners or their agents, that in at least three-fourths of this island the vote of the county electors would be by a vast majority in favour of the Liberal candidates. I am not speaking merely of men who profess a sort of liberality which just enables them to go with their party, but I speak of men who would be thoroughly in earnest in sustaining, as far as they were able, in Parliament, the opinions which they were sent to represent by the large constituencies who elected them.
The question of the ballot is, in my opinion, of the greatest importance in Great Britain and Ireland, but is of more importance in the counties than it is in the large boroughs. For example: in Great Britain, in such boroughs as Edinburgh and Glasgow, and Manchester and Birmingham, and the metropolitan boroughs, where the number of electors runs from 10,000 to 25,000, bribery is of no avail, because you could not bribe thousands of men. To bribe 100 or 200 would not alter the return at an election with so large a constituency. But what you want with the ballot is, that in the counties where the tenant-farmers vote, and where they live upon their land without the security of a lease, or without the security of any law to give them compensation for any improvements they may have made upon the land, the tenant-farmer feels himself always liable to injury, and sometimes to ruin, if he gets into a dispute with the agent or the landowner with regard to the manner in which he has exercised his franchise. And what will be very important also, if you have the ballot, your elections will be tranquil, without disorder and without riot. Last week, or the week before, there was an election in one of your great counties. Well, making every allowance that can be made for the exaggerations circulated by the writers of the two parties, it is quite clear to everybody that the circumstances of that election, though not absolutely uncommon in Ireland, were still such as to be utterly discreditable to a real representative system. And you must bear in mind that there is no other people in the world that considers that it has a fair representative system unless it has the ballot. The ballot is universal almost in the United States. It is almost universal in the colonies, at any rate in the Australian colonies; it is almost universal on the continent of Europe, and in the new Parliament of North Germany, which is about soon to be assembled, every man of twenty-five years of age is to be allowed to vote, and to vote by ballot.
Now, I hold, without any fear of contradiction, that the intelligence and the virtues of the people of Ireland are not represented in the Parliament. You have your wrongs to complain of—wrongs centuries old, and wrongs that long ago the people of Ireland, and, I venture to say, the people of Great Britain united with Ireland——My friend up there will not listen to the end of my sentence. I say that the people of Great Britain, acting with the people of Ireland, in a fair representation of the whole, would long ago have remedied every just grievance of which you could complain.
I will take two questions which I treated upon the other evening. I will ask about one question—that is, the question of the supremacy of the Church in Ireland. Half the people in England are Nonconformists. They are not in favour of an Established Church anywhere, and it is utterly impossible that they could be in favour of an Established Church in an island like this—an Established Church formed of a mere handful of the population, in opposition to the wishes of the nation. Now take the Principality of Wales. I suppose that four out of five of the population there are Dissenters, and they are not in favour of maintaining a religious Protestant Establishment in Ireland. The people of Scotland have also seceded in such large numbers from their Established Church, although of a democratic character, that I suppose those who have seceded are a considerable majority of the whole people—they are not in favour of maintaining an ecclesiastical Establishment in Ireland in opposition to the views of the great majority of your people. Take the other question—that of land. There is nobody in Great Britain of the great town population, or of the middle class, or of the still more numerous working class, who has any sympathy with that condition of the law and of the administration of the law which has worked such mischiefs in your country. But these Nonconformists, whether in England, Wales, or Scotland, these great middle classes, and still greater working classes, are in the position that you are. Only sixteen of every hundred have a vote, and those sixteen are so arranged that when their representatives get to Parliament they turn out for the most part to be no real representatives of the people.
I will tell you fairly that you, as the less populous and less powerful part of this great nation—you of all the men in the United Kingdom, have by far the strongest interest in a thorough reform of the Imperial Parliament, and I believe that you yourselves could not do yourselves such complete justice by yourselves as you can do, by fairly acting with the generous millions of my countrymen in whose name I stand here. You have on this platform two members of the Reform League from London. I received yesterday, or the day before, a telegram from the Scottish Reform League, from Glasgow. I am not sure whether there is a copy of it in any of the newspapers, but it was sent to me, and I presume it was sent to me that I might read it, if I had the opportunity of meeting any of the unenfranchised men of this city. It says:—'The Scottish Reform League request you to convey to the Reformers in Ireland their deep sympathy. They sincerely hope that soon in Ireland, as in Scotland and England, Reform Leagues may be formed in every town to secure to the people their political rights. Urge upon our friends in Ireland their duty to promote this great movement, and to secure at home those benefits which thousands of their fellow-countrymen are forced to seek in other lands—where land and State Church grievances are unknown. We also seek cooperation, knowing that our freedom, though secure tomorrow, would not be safe so long as one portion of the United Kingdom were less free than the other portions.' There is the outspoken voice of the representatives of that great multitude that only a fortnight since I saw passing through the streets of Glasgow. For three hours the procession passed, with all the emblems and symbols of their various trades, and the streets for two or three miles were enlivened by banners, and the air was filled with the sounds of music from their bands. Those men but spoke the same language that was heard in the West Riding, in Manchester, in Birmingham, and in London; and you men of Dublin, and of Ireland, you never made a mistake more grievous in your lives than when you come to the conclusion that there are not millions of men in Great Britain willing to do you full justice.
I am very sorry that my voice is not what it was, and when I think of the work that is to be done sometimes I feel it is a pity we grow old so fast. But years ago, when I have thought of the condition of Ireland, of its sorrows and wrongs, of the discredit that its condition has brought upon the English, the Irish, and the British name, I have thought, if I could be in all other things the same, but by birth an Irishman, there is not a town in this island I would not visit for the purpose of discussing the great Irish question, and of rousing my countrymen to some great and united action.
I do not believe in the necessity of wide-spread and perpetual misery. I do not believe that we are placed on this island, and on this earth, that one man may be great and wealthy, and revel in every profuse indulgence, and five, six, nine, or ten men shall suffer the abject misery which we see so commonly in the world. With your soil, your climate, and your active and spirited race, I know not what you might not do. There have been reasons to my mind why soil and climate, and the labour of your population, have not produced general comfort and competence for all.