Handbook of Home Rule: Being Articles on the Irish Question

by Unknown

The bearing of this condition of American opinion on the Irish question will be plainer if I remind English readers that the Irish in the United States numbered in 1880 nearly 2,000,000, and that the number of persons of Irish parentage is probably between 4,000,000 and 5,000,000. In short there are, as well as one can judge, more Irish nationalists in the United States than in Ireland. The Irish-Americans are to-day the only large and prosperous Irish community in the world. The children of the Irish born in the United States or brought there in their infancy are just as Irish in

their politics as those who have grown up at home. Patrick Ford, for instance, the editor of the Irish World, who is such a shape of dread to some Englishmen, came to America in childhood, and has no personal knowledge nor recollection of Irish wrongs. Of the part this large Irish community plays in stimulating agitation—both agrarian and political—at home I need not speak; Englishmen are very familiar with it, and are very indignant over it. The Irish-Americans not only send over a great deal of American money to their friends at home, but they send over American ideas, and foremost among them American hostility to large landowners, and American belief in Home Rule. Now, to me, one of the most curious things in the English state of mind about the Irish problem is the apparent expectation that this Irish-American interference is transient, and will probably soon die out. It is quite true, as Englishmen are constantly told, that "the best Americans," that is, the literary people and the commercial magnates, whom travelling Englishmen see on the Atlantic coast, dislike the Irish anti-English agitation. But it is also true that the disapproval of the "best Americans" is not of the smallest practical consequence, particularly as it is largely due to complete indifference to, and ignorance of, the whole subject. There are probably not a dozen of them who would venture to express their disapproval publicly. The mass of the population, particularly in the West, sympathize, though half laughingly, with the efforts of the transplanted Irish to "twist the British lion's tail," and all the politicians either sympathize with them, or pretend to do so. I am not now expressing any opinion as to whether this state of things is good or bad. What I wish to point out is that this Irish-American influence on Irish affairs is very powerful, and may, for all practical purposes, be considered permanent, and must be taken into account as a constant element in the Irish problem. I will indeed venture on the assertion

that it is the appearance of the Irish-Americans on the scene which has given the Irish question its present seriousness. The attempts of the Irish at physical resistance to English authority have been steadily diminishing in gravity during the present century—witness the descent from the rebellion of 1798 to Smith O'Brien's rebellion and the Fenian rising of 1867. On the other hand the power of the Irish to act as a disturbing agency in English politics has greatly increased, and the reason is that the stream of Irish discontent is fed by thousands of rills from the United States. Every emigrant's letter, every Irish-American newspaper, every returned emigrant with money in his pocket and a good coat on his back, helps to swell it, and there is not the slightest sign, that I can see, of its drying up.

Where Mr. Dicey is most formidable to the Home Rulers, as it seems to me, is in his chapter on "Home Rule as Federalism," which is the form in which the Irish ask for it. He attacks this in two ways. One is by maintaining that the necessary conditions for a federal union between Great Britain and Ireland do not exist. This disposes at one blow of all the experience derived from the working of the foreign federations, on which the advocates of Home Rule have relied a good deal. The other is what I may call predictions that the federation even if set up would not work. Either the state of facts on which all other federations have been built does not exist in Ireland, or if it now exists, will not, owing to the peculiarities of Irish character, continue to exist. In other words, the federation will either fail at the outset, or fail in the long run. No one can admire more than I do the force and ingenuity and wealth of illustration with which Mr. Dicey supports this thesis. But unfortunately the arguments by which he assails Irish federalism might be, or might have been, used against all federations whatever. They might have been

used, as I shall try to show, against the most successful of them all, the Government of the United States. I was reminded, while reading Mr. Dicey's account of the impossibility of an Anglo-Irish federation, of Mr. Madison's rehearsal in the Federalist (No. 38) of the objections made to the Federal Constitution after the Convention had submitted it to the States. These objections covered every feature in it but one; and that, the mode of electing the President, curiously enough, is the only one which can be said to have utterly failed. A more impressive example of the danger of à priori attacks on any political arrangement, history does not contain. Mr. Madison says: "This one tells me that the proposed Constitution ought to be rejected, because it is not a confederation of the states, but a government over individuals. Another admits that it ought to be a government over individuals to a certain extent, but by no means to the extent proposed. A third does not object to the government over individuals, or to the extent proposed, but to the want of a bill of rights. A fourth concurs in the absolute necessity of a bill of rights, but contends that it ought to be declaratory not of the personal rights of individuals, but of the rights reserved to the states in their political capacity. A fifth is of opinion that a bill of rights of any sort would be superfluous and misplaced, and that the plan would be unexceptionable but for the fatal power of regulating the times and places of election. An objector in a large state exclaims loudly against the unreasonable equality of representation in the Senate. An objector in a small state is equally loud against the dangerous inequality in the House of Representatives. From one quarter we are alarmed with the amazing expense, from the number of persons who are to administer the new government. From another quarter, and sometimes from the same quarter, on another occasion the cry is that the Congress will be but the shadow of a representation, and

that the government would be far less objectionable if the number and the expense were doubled. A patriot in a state that does not import or export discerns insuperable objections against the power of direct taxation. The patriotic adversary in a state of great exports and imports is not less dissatisfied that the whole burden of taxes may be thrown on consumption. This politician discovers in the constitution a direct and irresistible tendency to monarchy. That is equally sure it will end in aristocracy. Another is puzzled to say which of these shapes it will ultimately assume, but sees clearly it must be one or other of them. Whilst a fourth is not wanting, who with no less confidence affirms that the Constitution is so far from having a bias towards either of these dangers, that the weight on that side will not be sufficient to keep it upright and firm against the opposite propensities. With another class of adversaries to the Constitution, the language is, that the legislative, executive, and judiciary departments are intermixed in such a manner as to contradict all the ideas of regular government and all the requisite precautions in favour of liberty. Whilst this objection circulates in vague and general expressions, there are not a few who lend their sanction to it. Let each one come forward with his particular explanation, and scarcely any two are exactly agreed on the subject. In the eyes of one the junction of the Senate with the President in the responsible function of appointing to offices, instead of vesting this power in the executive alone, is the vicious part of the organization. To another the exclusion of the House of Representatives, whose numbers alone could be a due security against corruption and partiality in the exercise of such a power, is equally obnoxious. With a third the admission of the President into any share of a power which must ever be a dangerous engine in the hands of the executive magistrate is an unpardonable violation of the maxims of republican

jealousy. No part of the arrangement, according to some, is more inadmissible than the trial of impeachments by the Senate, which is alternately a member both of the legislative and executive departments, when this power so evidently belonged to the judiciary department. We concur fully, reply others, in the objection to this part of the plan, but we can never agree that a reference of impeachments to the judiciary authority would be an amendment of the error; our principal dislike to the organization arises from the extensive powers already lodged in that department. Even among the zealous patrons of a council of state, the most irreconcilable variance is discovered concerning the mode in which it ought to be constituted."

Mr. Madison's challenge to the opponents of the American Constitution to agree on some plan of their own, and his humorous suggestion that if the American people had to wait for some such agreement to be reached they would go for a long time without a government, are curiously applicable to the opponents of Irish Home Rule. They are very fertile in reasons for thinking that neither the Gladstone plan nor any other plan can succeed, but no two of them, so far as I know, have yet hit upon any other mode of pacifying Ireland, except the use of force for a certain period to maintain order, and oddly enough, even when they agree on this remedy, they are apt to disagree about the length of time during which it should be tried.

Mr. Dicey, in conceding the success of the American Constitution, seems to me unmindful, if I may use the expression, of the judgments he would probably have passed on it had it been submitted to him at the outset were he in the frame of mind to which a prolonged study of the Irish problem has now brought him. The Supreme Court, for instance, which he now recognizes as an essential feature of the Federal Constitution, and the absence of which in the Gladstonian arrangement he treats as a fatal

defect, would have undoubtedly appeared to him a preposterous contrivance. It would have seemed to him impossible that a legislature like Congress, with the traditions of parliamentary omnipotence still strong in the minds of the members, would ever submit to have its acts nullified by a board composed of half a dozen elderly lawyers. Nor would he have treated as any more reasonable the expectation that the State tribunals, which had existed in each colony from its foundation, and had earned the respect and confidence of the people, would quietly submit to have their jurisdiction curtailed, their decisions overruled, causes torn from their calendar, and prisoners taken out of their custody by new courts of semi-foreign origin, which the State neither paid nor controlled. He would, too, very probably have been most incredulous about the prospect of the growth of loyalty on the part of New-Yorkers and Massachusetts men to a new-fangled government, which was to make itself only slightly felt in their daily lives, and was to sit a fortnight away in an improvised village in the midst of a Virginian forest.