This mistake of viewing Mr. Butt and Home Rule just as they view Sir Wilfrid Lawson and prohibition is just where the English show their unpardonable and fatuous want of intelligence. Indeed, others besides English commentators fall into this error. They imagine the Home-Rulers contemplate working Home Rule through the House of Commons by bringing in a “Bill” and having an annual “vote” upon it, as if it were the Permissive bill, or the Woman’s Suffrage, or the Game Law Bill. The Home-Rulers laugh heartily over all this sort of criticism. They dream of nothing of the kind. There is another way of looking at the Home-Rule party and the Home-Rule question in the House of Commons.
Six hundred men can indeed very easily vote down sixty, and make short work of their opposition; always supposing these latter to be units from places wide apart, representing scattered interests or speculative opinions. The House of Commons deals every year, session after session, with several such sixties and seventies and eighties and nineties. But it would be a woful apology for “statesmanship” to regard the Home-Rule sixty in this light. In their case the government have to do, not with sixty of their own general body of British members, but with the Irish representation. The question is not with sixty members of the House, but with Ireland. In any crisis of the empire, as the English Chancellor of the Exchequer said recently about the British representatives on the Suez Canal Board,
“their votes would be weighed, not counted.”
The purpose of the Home-Rulers, for the present at all events, is much less with the House of Commons than with the country; they operate on the country through that house. They want to get Ireland into their hands; and even already they have very substantially done so. They want to convince and conciliate and enlist the English democracy; and they have very largely succeeded. With this key to their movements, the supreme ability and wisdom which they have displayed will be better recognized. They have taken the whole of the public affairs of Ireland into their charge. They have taken every public interest in the country under their protection. Whoever wants anything done or attended to, whether he be Catholic, Protestant, or dissenter, now looks to the Home-Rulers, and to them alone. Not the humblest peasant in the land but feels that, if a petty village tyrant has wronged him, the Irish party in the House of Commons will “know the reason why.” They have seized upon every subject deeply affecting the people as a whole, or important classes among them, and showered bills dealing with these subjects on the table of the House of Commons. The distracted premier knows what is beneath all this; he detects the master-hand of Isaac Butt in this deep strategy. These are not sham bills, merely to take up time. They are genuine bills, ably and carefully drawn, and every one of them dealing with a really important and pressing matter for Ireland. Every one of them hits a blot; they are nearly all such bills as our Irish Parliament would pass. Some of the subjects (such as the “Fisheries Bill”) are popular
with very nearly all classes in Ireland; then there are the University Education Bill, the Land-Tenure Bill, the Grand Jury Bill, the Municipal Privileges Bill, the Franchise Hill, the Registration Bill, besides a host of others. Suppose the government give way, and accept one; there is a shout of triumph in Ireland: “The Home-Rulers have forced their hand!” and a cry of dismay and rage from the irreconcilable Orangemen: “The government have succumbed to the Jesuits!” Suppose they resist and vote down the bill; matters are worse. The Irish people are inflamed, and even ministerialists sulk and say: “This is bad policy; ‘tis playing the Home-Rule game.” Suppose, again, Mr. Disraeli adopts a middle course and says: “This is an excellent bill in many respects, but really we have not time to consider it this year.” A louder shout than ever greets such a statement: “There is no room for Irish business. Then let us transact it here at home.”
It is a matter of notoriety that there is growing up among Englishmen, within and without the House of Commons, a feeling that, even apart from all political considerations, something must be done to lighten the work, and remit to other assemblies a large portion of the legislative business now attempted there. The house is breaking down under the load laid upon or undertaken by it. So would Congress, if, in addition to its own functions, it attempted to do the work of the State legislatures besides. There are hundreds, it may be said thousands, of influential English politicians who, seeing this, regard as simply inevitable something in the direction of the Home-Rule scheme, only, of course “not so extreme,” as they call it.
Nothing but the bugbear of “dismembering the empire” prevents an English cry for lightening the ship. The Home-Rulers watch all this, and take very good care that the load which the house prefers to retain shall press heavily on it. Not that they pursue or contemplate a policy of mere obstruction, which many persons, friends and foes, thought they would. Mr. Butt has again and again repudiated this. He knows that such a course would only put the house on its mettle, and would defeat his scheme of silently sapping the convictions of the more fairly disposed Englishmen. He knows that the present system cannot last many years. He knows that the English people, once their convictions are affected, soon give way before public exigency. To affect those convictions and to create that exigency is the Home-Rule policy. It is all very well, while the skies are clear and tranquil, for English ministers, past and present, to bluster greatly about the impossibility of entertaining the Irish demand. It is all very well, while the present Tory majority is so strong, for both parties to protest their hostility to Home-Rule. Opinions change wondrously in these cases. When the Disraelian majority has in the course of nature dropped down to forty, thirty, twenty, and ten; when the Liberal leaders find they can attain to office with the Home-Rule vote, and cannot retain office without it, they will—offer Home Rule? No. Offer palliatives—good places for Home-Rulers, and “good measures” for Ireland? Probably. But when these offers are found to be vain; are found to strengthen the power and intensify the resolution of the Home-Rule party, the transformation
which England went through on so many great questions—Catholic Emancipation, Church Disestablishment, etc. (each in its day just as solemnly sworn to be “impossible”)—will begin to set in; and—all the more loudly if such a moment should happen to synchronize with deadlock in the legislature, peril abroad, and popular resentment at home—from England itself will arise the cry that “Ireland must be fairly dealt with.” At such a moment a British minister will easily be found to “discover,” as it were most fortunately, that “the question has hitherto been misunderstood,” and that it is England’s interest not less than Ireland’s to have it satisfactorily adjusted.
For it is not with Ireland alone British ministers will have to settle. Although no reference has previously been made here to the fact, the strongest arm of the Home-Rule party is in England itself. Within the past thirty years there has grown up there, silently and unnoticed, a new political power—hundreds of thousands of Irishmen who, having settled in the large labor marts, have grown to citizenship, power, and influence. From Bristol to Dundee there is not a large city that has not now on its electoral roll Irish voters whose action can decide the fate of candidates. Coincidently with the establishment of the “Home Government Association” in Ireland there arose in England, as a co-operative but independent organization, the “Home-Rule Confederation of Great Britain.” This body has organized the Irish vote all over England and Scotland, and holds virtually in its hands all the vast centres of political thought and action. Reflecting their sentiments and their influence, Dundee, Newcastle, Durham, Tynemouth,
Cardiff, and more than a dozen other important English and Scotch constituencies returned English friends of Home Rule to Parliament. It was not the mere matter of so many votes that lent such value to this fact; it was the incentive which it gave to the growing feeling (amongst the English working-classes especially) that the Irish question was one to be sympathized with. An event which occurred in England barely a few weeks ago was, however, beyond all precedent in the sensation which it created. This was the recent Manchester election. A week previously in Burnley it was found impossible to return any but a Home-Rule Liberal, and such a man accordingly headed the poll. In Manchester Mr. Jacob Bright (son of Mr. John Bright) was the Liberal, and a Mr. Powell the Conservative, candidate. It became clear that the Irish vote would decide the issue. One morning the news was flashed through England that both candidates, Liberal and Conservative, had undertaken to vote for Mr. Butt’s motion on Home Rule! What! Manchester, the political capital of England, gone for Home Rule? It was even so, and Mr. Bright, being preferred of the two, was triumphantly returned by the Irish Home-Rule vote.