Though the policy of abstention from Parliament came to be known as “the Hungarian Policy” it was a policy that had been advocated, and to a certain extent practised, in Ireland long before the Hungarian Deputies adopted it. In 1844, the “Parliamentary Committee of the Loyal National Repeal Association on the Attendance of Irish Members in Parliament” presented a report which contained the following: “The people of Ireland, having in vain attempted to obtain from the Imperial Parliament detailed measures of justice, and with equal failure sought the restoration of their domestic Senate or even inquiry into the wisdom of that restoration, have at length sought to obtain those rights by agitation out of Parliament. They have to this end arrayed themselves into a Loyal and National Association to obtain the Repeal of the Union. They try to obtain strength by the reality and display of union and organization. They seek converts by their speeches, their writings, and their peaceful virtues. They are endeavouring to increase their knowledge and their power by reading, thinking and discussing. And to carry out their projects of organization, conversion and self-improvement, they subscribe large funds to a common treasury. Their efforts in the Imperial Parliament having then been so fruitless, and their undertaking at home being so vast, they, the people of Ireland, have consented that such of their members as seek with them domestic legislation, should secede from the Imperial Parliament and control the agitation, instruction and organization of the people at home.” This report is signed by Thomas Davis. A correspondence between Thomas Davis and the Earl of Wicklow, to whom certain resolutions of the Repeal Association had been sent, debates the rival merits of the policies of parliamentarianism and abstention. The Earl, who had no intention of leaving Parliament, wrote: “I now believe that there exists amongst the British people an anxious desire to do justice to our country and to atone in every way in their power for the evils of former mismanagement.” Lord Wicklow had formed this conviction before 1844. The “Hungarian Policy” of 1902 was framed for the same situation and in face of the same conviction.
It is difficult to understand why the credit of the policy was not claimed for Thomas Davis the Irishman instead of for the Hungarian Franz Deák: unless it be that the policy had in the case of Ireland never been put into actual effective practice and had remained fruitless of result, while in Hungary it had seemed to have achieved its object. Be that as it may, Mr. Arthur Griffith proceeded to contribute to the United Irishman a series of articles on “The Resurrection of Hungary,” reprinted in book form the same year and widely circulated. The preface represented the policy as an alternative to that of armed resistance: the body of the book gave a historical account of the struggle of the Hungarians under Deák for the restoration of the constitution of 1848 and its success, due (it was claimed) entirely to Deák’s policy of abstention from the Austrian Imperial Parliament: the concluding chapter drew the parallel between Hungary and Ireland, claiming that by abstaining from sending members to Westminster Ireland could secure the restoration of the constitution of 1782. The book was interesting and able: the narrative was presented with vigour and spirit: but the accuracy of some of its statements and conclusions was open to question and as a piece of popular propaganda it was a failure. While many people read it, it produced no immediate or widespread response. Exception was taken to the view that Ireland ought to aim at the restoration of the constitution of 1782: exception was taken to the substitution of a peaceful for a forcible policy. “If the Irish members” (wrote a representative of the latter body of critics) “of the English Parliament withdrew from Westminster to-morrow the government of the country would be carried on just as it is to-day; and so it will and must be as long as the people forget they are Irishmen with a country to free from a foreign yoke. The protest would end in smoke unless armed men were prepared to back it.”
Mr. Griffith, nothing daunted, continued his fight against on the one hand the traditional parliamentarianism and on the other hand the advocates of physical force and revolution and the members of the Republican Party. His claim to independence for Ireland was to be based not upon force but upon law and the constitution of 1782: his claim was not a Republic but a national constitution under an Irish Crown. He tried to show in a series of articles on “The Working of the Policy”—which from now on begins to be referred to as the Sinn Fein Policy—how his ideas might be put into practice. But to carry on such a policy as he had outlined, some political organization other than the Cumann na nGaedhael or the ’98 Clubs was required. This was inaugurated at a meeting held in Dublin on November 28th, 1905, under the chairmanship of Mr. Edward Martyn. The policy of the new body, the National Council, was defined as “National self-development through the recognition of the rights and duties of citizenship on the part of the individual and by the aid and support of all movements originating from within Ireland, instinct with national tradition and not looking outside Ireland for the accomplishment of their aims.” A public meeting held afterwards in the Rotunda passed the following resolution: “That the people of Ireland are a free people and that no law made without their authority and consent is or can ever be binding on their conscience. That the General Council of County Councils presents the nucleus of a national authority, and we urge upon it to extend the scope of its deliberation and action: to take within its purview every question of national interest and to formulate lines of procedure for the nation.” Mr. Griffith, who was the main-spring and driving force of the movement, speaking in favour of the resolution, proposed the formation of a council of 300 to sit in Dublin and form a de facto Irish Parliament, with whom might be associated all those members of Parliament who refused to attend at Westminster; its recommendations should be binding upon all County Councils and Boards of Guardians, whose duty it would be to carry them into effect as far as their powers extended.
With this meeting ends the preliminary stage, and Sinn Fein formally takes its place as a duly constituted political party with its own policy and aims. The United Irishman, the organ of its infancy, ceased to exist, and its place was taken by Sinn Fein.
THE EARLY YEARS OF SINN FEIN.
In the year 1906 Sinn Fein emerged from the region of ideals and abstractions, of academical discussion and preliminary propaganda, into the arena of Irish party politics with a fully formulated practical policy. Taking constitutional ground with the dictum that “the constitution of 1782 is still the constitution of Ireland,” it proposed to show how the people of Ireland, keeping within the letter of a law which they could not otherwise break, might render nugatory the effort to hold the country in dependence upon England in pursuance of the Act of Union. It proposed to arrest the anglicization of Ireland by recovering for the Irish people the management of those departments of public administration in which the anglicizing process was working most markedly to the detriment of Irish interests and which might be remodelled without any actual breach of the existing law. In the first place it seemed necessary to take education in hand, and by the introduction of a system more in accordance with Irish needs and capabilities and characteristics, endeavour to train up a generation of young Irish men and women, imbued with a national spirit and national pride, capable of taking their part in the agricultural, industrial and administrative life of the country. County Councils might do much in this direction through their intimate connection with the administration and policy of the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction; a wise use of the means placed by the Department at their disposal might in a few years revolutionize to the advantage of Ireland the entire education of the country. The young men and women thus trained might form the nucleus of an Irish Civil Service, if the County Councils could be induced to abandon their “patronage” in the positions at their disposal and throw them open to competitive examination; others of these trained Irishmen might be employed in an unofficial Irish Consular Service to the great advantage of Irish commerce, handicapped in foreign markets by English consuls in the interests of the English commercial houses. Pressure could be brought to bear upon the Irish banks to adopt a policy more in sympathy with Irish trade and industry. There was deposited in Irish banks a sum of £50,000,000, the savings of the people of Ireland; yet these banks invested this money in English securities (the Bank of Ireland during the South African War even lent money to the English Government without interest) while Irish industries were starving for lack of the capital which the banks refused to lend. The Stock Exchange, controlled by the Government, neglected to quote shares in Irish companies that might be formed for the furtherance of particular industries in particular districts, discouraging investors who were thus left unable to dispose of their shares in the ordinary way. It was hoped that public bodies as well as private persons could be induced to bring pressure to bear on the banks by withdrawing or withholding accounts until they should adopt a more patriotic policy, though it was more difficult to see how the Stock Exchange could be dealt with. The difficulties put by railways and their heavy freights on the exchange of commodities could be obviated by a development of the Irish waterways under the control of popularly elected bodies: the County Councils should see to this and to questions such as afforestation and the encouragement of home manufactures by specifying their use in the giving of contracts for institutions under their control. The Poor Law system should be remodelled in accordance with Irish sentiment and the money expended upon it spent in Ireland upon Irish goods. To ensure the advantage of foreign markets without English interference an Irish Mercantile Marine should be established, what could be done even by a poor country in this way being shown by the example of Norway, where nearly everyone was at least part owner of a ship.
But to stimulate and foster native industry and native manufacture was to Mr. Griffith (whose writings on economic matters formed a kind of gospel for Sinn Fein) an urgent and supreme duty. He was convinced that until Ireland became an industrial as well as an agricultural country her economic position was insecure. Thinking always in terms of national independence, which he interpreted to mean national ability to dispense with outside assistance, he looked forward to a time when Ireland should be able not merely to feed her population from her own resources, but to supply them with nearly all the other necessaries of modern life. Irish coal and iron existed in abundance to supply the necessary fuel and raw material; there was plenty of native marble and other stones for building; Irish wool and hides were once famous over Europe for their abundance and excellence. All that was required to make Ireland once more a prosperous manufacturing country was at her disposal within her own boundaries, and only waited for the policy that would call out her latent powers. In an independent State the encouragement required would be forthcoming in protective legislation, pursued until the protected industry became established and able to compete on favourable terms with similar industries in other countries, the work of protection being limited strictly to the task of building up a temporary screen to shelter a budding national industry from the wind of competition until its strength was established. The Irish Parliament in the days of its independence had adopted this policy, which had enabled it during its short life to secure to Irish manufactures an unprecedented prosperity. But Ireland, deprived of legislative powers, might fall back upon a less secure but still efficacious method of protection. Irish consumers might refuse to purchase English goods while Irish goods of the same quality were to be had, and be content to pay in an enhanced price their share of what under other circumstances the State might have expended in bounties to the industry; public bodies might insist upon the use of goods of Irish manufacture; port authorities should arrange port dues so that they should fall most heavily on manufactured goods brought into the country, and should publish periodical returns of the imports of manufactured goods at every port in Ireland; Irish capital should be invited and encouraged to undertake the development of the country on industrial and commercial lines, being assured, in the support of industrial and corporate public feeling, of encouragement and success in its enterprise.
In expounding this theory of protection and of the vital necessity to a country of developing its industrial life Mr. Griffith was confessedly following the economic doctrines of the German economist Friedrich List, “the man whom England caused to be persecuted by the Government of his native country, and whom she hated and feared more than any man since Napoleon—the man who saved Germany from falling a prey to English economics, and whose brain conceived the great industrial and economic Germany of to-day.” A man with credentials like these might well be listened to with profit. The commercial policy that made the New Germany could not fail to make a New Ireland, and List made seductive promises. He foretold an increase in population by a combination of agricultural and industrial enterprise greater in proportion than by the development of either industry or agriculture by itself: he denied the possibility of intellectual progress to a country relying solely or mainly upon agriculture: culture marched behind the mill and the factory. But the chief merit of the policy undoubtedly was that it promised a self-contained and independent economic existence, serving as the basis of a distinctive national culture.