Well might Sir Spencer Walpole have written: “The treatment of Ireland made representative Government in Ireland a fraud. It is absurd to say that a country enjoys representative institutions if its delegates are uniformly out-voted by men of another race.”
While the Irish representation in the Imperial Parliament was a fraud, the English Administration of Ireland was an outrage on national sentiment. After Catholic Emancipation, as before, it was, in the main, based on Protestant Ascendency principles, which meant not Ireland for the Irish, but Ireland for [pg 331] an English faction. As a rule no man in touch with popular feeling was allowed to have a voice in the government of the country. Catholics as Catholics were habitually excluded from office. Since Catholic Emancipation there has not been a Catholic Lord-Lieutenant, nor a Catholic Chief Secretary. There have been 3 Catholic Under-Secretaries. There have been 3 Lord Chancellors. In the High Court of Justice there are 17 Judges; 3 of them are Catholics. There are 21 County Court Judges and Recorders; 8 of them are Catholics. There are 37 County Inspectors of Police; 5 of them are Catholics. There are 202 District Inspectors of Police; 62 of them are Catholics. There are 5,518 ordinary Justices of the Peace; 1,805 of them are believed to be Catholics. There are 68 Privy Councillors; 8 of them are Catholics. And in other offices, through the whole gamut of the administration, the same principle of exclusiveness was observed. Nor was this all. Catholics who were appointed to office, feeling that they were “suspect” as Catholics, only too often, in order to show that their loyalty was above suspicion, became more Protestant than the Protestants, and more English than the English. “We have now captured the Castle,” I heard an Irish Catholic official say, in reference to a Catholic appointment which had recently been made. The retort was obvious. “No, but the Castle has captured you.” In truth, no matter what was the religion of the official, he appeared before the people as the instrument of a foreign government, not as the servant of the Irish nation. Let us remember that it was in the year 1885, not in “ancient times,” that Mr. Chamberlain said in memorable language:
“I do not believe that the great majority of Englishmen have the slightest conception of the system under which this free nation attempts to rule the sister country. It is a system which is founded [pg 332] on the bayonets of 30,000 soldiers encamped permanently as in a hostile country. It is a system as completely centralised and bureaucratic as that with which Russia governs Poland, or as that which prevailed in Venice under the Austrian rule. An Irishman at the moment cannot move a step—he cannot lift a finger in any parochial, municipal, or educational work, without being confronted with, interfered with, controlled by an English official, appointed by a foreign Government, and without a shade or shadow of representative authority.”
It was not until 1898 that popular control in local affairs was established by the County Councils' Act.
Englishmen often say to me: “What an illogical and unreasonable people you Irish are. At the very time when we were showing our determination to do justice to Ireland, when we had disestablished the State Church in 1869, and passed the Land Act of 1870 at that very time, in the very year 1870, you started the Home Rule movement.” Englishmen say many foolish things about Ireland, because they know nothing about Irish history, and indeed give very little serious thought to Irish affairs. The fact that the English State Church was not disestablished for sixty-nine years after the Union, and that an Act for the protection of the tenants and for securing the proper cultivation of the soil was not passed until seventy years after the Union; and that it took constant agitation and incessant outbursts of lawlessness and crime and finally a revolutionary convulsion to accomplish these things, was a sufficient justification for the establishment of the Home Rule movement in 1870. Had the government of Ireland in the nineteenth century been as good as it was bad, still I hope that the Irish people would not have relinquished their national claims—would not have sold their birthright for any mess of porridge; but they did not get the porridge; rather vinegar and gall had been the offering of England to the “sister” [pg 333] isle during sixty-nine years of “Union.” I have said that the seed sown by O'Connell and Young Ireland took root, so did the seed sown by England. Extremes meet. The agitator—the rebel—and the English Government combined to keep the spirit of nationality alive, and to make the demand for Home Rule inevitable and irresistible.
It was on May 19th, 1870, that the Home Rule Association was founded. It was no wonder after seventy years of the Union that failed that the following resolution should have been passed:
“That it is the opinion of this meeting that the true remedy for the evils of Ireland is the establishment of an Irish Parliament with full control over our domestic affairs.”
The objects of the Association were then set forth.
“To obtain for our country the right and privilege of managing our own affairs by a Parliament assembled in Ireland, composed of Her Majesty, the Sovereign, and her successors, and the Lords and Commons of Ireland.
“To secure for that Parliament, under a federal arrangement, the right of legislating for, and regulating all matters relating to the internal affairs of Ireland, and control over Irish resources and expenditure, subject to the obligation of contributing our just proportion of the Imperial expenditure; [leaving to] an Imperial Parliament the power of dealing with all questions affecting the Imperial Crown and Government, legislation regarding the Colonies and other dependencies of the Crown, the relations of the United Empire with foreign States, and all matters appertaining to the defence and stability of the Empire at large....”