A National University would not be founded in Ireland under the second project. Trinity College would remain completely intact; it would retain its present governing body, its privileges, and its power of conferring degrees. The Queen’s Colleges—that of Galway being probably suppressed, and its funds transferred to the College of Belfast—and the Royal University would continue unchanged; the students of the Queen’s Colleges would probably seek degrees from the Royal University as they do at present. But the Catholic University should be established and endowed, and placed on the same level as Trinity College, as far as this could be effected by law; the charge of the endowment would not be great—it would be perhaps £100,000 for buildings, and perhaps £40,000 a year for other purposes; but the students, and those of other colleges to be connected with it, would not be numerous, at least for years; it should, of course, have the power of conferring honours and degrees. In return for these advantages, the State should have a right to insist that its governing body should be in part laymen—the Irish Catholic bishops have already agreed to this; and the State ought, also, to have a right to require that the secular education it should afford should be good, a security which could fully, if indirectly, be obtained. The advantages of this scheme, it is obvious, are that it would get rid of the difficulties inseparable from a National University in Ireland; it would preserve Trinity College exactly as it is, an enormous gain for that great place of learning; it would interfere as little as possible with things as they are; and it would do all that Catholic Ireland could reasonably demand. It is understood that a scheme of this description has the approval of the authorities of Trinity College, and of their distinguished representative, Mr. Lecky; their opinions are of the very greatest weight. The only real objection made to this plan is one made by characteristic prejudice: the education, in the Catholic University, it is said, would be bad, and its degrees would be of no value. In the face of the success of Catholic University students at the Royal University examinations, the first assertion has been proved to be false; and besides, this is the affair of the students and their parents alone. As to the inferiority of the Catholic University degrees, there is no reason to believe that this would exist; these degrees, moreover, would have to compete with those of the Royal University and of Trinity College; if they were really inferior, this would soon be found out, and the Catholic University would have to increase their value. This is the true security the State and the public would possess.
A few ‘Present Irish Questions’ remain, on which I may offer passing remarks. Ireland is essentially a poor country; her middle class is comparatively very weak; her trade and manufactures are small; the greater part of the community is a Celtic race. It has long been contended by well-informed Irishmen that many undertakings, which, in Great Britain, have properly been left to private enterprise, ought, in Ireland, to be carried out by the State, as for centuries has been the case in France, a Celtic land, as was largely the case in Ireland under her extinct Parliament. This observation especially applies to the Irish railway system. As long ago as 1836, Thomas Drummond, the Under Secretary of well-known renown, strongly recommended that Irish railways should be laid out, managed, and controlled by the Government; but this was inconsistent with English ideas; the Irish railways were abandoned to private companies. The results have been very far from fortunate; many of the lines have been badly designed; the Irish railway fares are a great deal too high; too numerous boards of directors are a heavy charge; railway communication, in a word, in Ireland is of an inferior kind, and much too costly in a backward and poor country. Not indeed that the State has not made large advances to Irish railway companies, some of these on terms very unjust to ratepayers; but the system is faulty and ill-developed; a reform in this direction is greatly wanted.[193] As Drummond insisted, the State, even now, ought to buy up and direct the Irish railways; but this is only a part of what it ought to do in this province. The material condition of Ireland is not prosperous; her main river basins require drainage; her whole arterial drainage is in a bad state, and has suffered much from the legislation of 1881, and from the policy of so-called ‘land purchase,’ for ordinary Irish tenants will not keep it up, and their landlords cannot now be expected to do so; these works must be undertaken by the State, or assuredly they will not be undertaken at all. Mr. Arthur Balfour has done something in this direction by the encouragement of light railways in remote parts of Ireland, and by the foundation of the ‘Congested Districts Board,’ an institution that has had excellent results. But this is only the fringe of the subject; an enormous amount of work remains to be done; and this, in the circumstances of Ireland, can only be done by the Government.
In a book which has attracted some attention—‘Ireland, 1798-1898’—I wrote these words nearly four years ago: ‘An Irishman, Wolseley, an Irishman, Roberts, are the foremost of living British soldiers; but there are no Irish Guards, and few Irishmen in our artillery; we see here a want of tact and of sympathy.’ Time, in this respect, has suddenly brought its changes; has again illustrated the genius of the Irishman in war, and, in some measure, has removed a reproach from England. It is true that the conspiracy, which still exists in Ireland, did all that it could to prevent Irishmen from taking part in the contest in South Africa, and that even a petty Irish contingent appeared in the ranks of the Boers. But Lord Wolseley had at least a great share in fitting out the largest expedition which has ever left our shores to fight an enemy at a distance of six thousand miles—no other power could do anything of the kind; and without disparaging our other generals, the presence of a superior mind was at once seen when Lord Roberts was given the supreme command in our army. And the Irish soldiery who fought in the campaigns of 1899-1900 were true to the noble traditions of their race; they were in the forefront of many a bloody conflict; and now that a regiment of Irish Guards has been at last embodied—a tardy acknowledgment of Irish military worth—England may rest assured that these men will rival the famous Irish Brigade of another age, ‘ever and everywhere true’ to the Bourbon lilies, and conspicuous in the service of France on many a field of renown. I may add a word on another subject, in which Ireland perhaps has a just claim on England. The descendants of the chiefs, who, in Scotland, clung to the cause of the Stuarts, have, for the most part, regained their forfeited lands and honours; no such reparation has been made to the descendants of Irish nobles and princes, who supported the Stuarts in the nobler cause of their country. The representative of the last of the Celtic kings of Ireland—a man of large possessions and of unquestionable parts—has no place on the roll of the peerage; the sons of ennobled Cromwellian troopers and tradesmen have precedence at Court over the sons of the most illustrious Milesian Houses. This is not a mere trifle as may carelessly be said; it tends to revive memories that it were better to forget. Can nothing be done to make a graceful concession, which would touch many an Irish heart, and would go some way to promote a spirit of loyalty and hope in Ireland, which it should be a great object of statesmanship to create and foster?
If the picture I have drawn of Ireland is correct in outline, there is much of evil omen in her present condition. The ancient divisions of race and faith, the most distinctive feature in her social structure, are at least as deeply marked as they have been for a century; bad legislation has made them deeper and wider. Catholic Ireland remains disaffected to British rule, despite efforts of conciliation and concessions that cannot be justified; no class in the community is completely satisfied; discontent rankles in the hearts of the landed gentry. The Union, indeed, has been successfully maintained; the frightful agrarian disorder of 1881-89 no longer exists. But the Union is not permanently assured as long as the Liberal party and eighty Irish members demand Home Rule, and the over-representation of Ireland continues; the conspiracy of the Land and the National Leagues has revived in that of the United Irish League; and this seeks to compass the ends of its prototypes by obstruction in Parliament and detestable socialistic tyranny. And the frame of Irish society has been well-nigh shattered; ruins have been made, nothing solid has been put in their place. An aristocracy, long waning, has been practically destroyed, and can no longer be a support of the State; the bureaucracy of the Castle reigns in its stead; but this is essentially a weak Government; it can maintain order, but has no hold on the people; the Irish democracy, to which power has been transferred, regards it with a dislike and a contempt it does not try to conceal. The country has made hardly any progress of late years; if some improvement in the state of the middle classes appears, agriculture, its leading industry, has perceptibly declined. In by far the most important of Irish social relations, those connected with the land, a revolution has taken place; a huge if a veiled confiscation has gone on; the landed gentry have been shamefully wronged; the occupiers of the soil have been most unduly favoured; yet both classes declare they have been ill-treated, notably the last. And the Irish land system has been turned upside down, with consequences disastrous and far-reaching; the landlord has been cut off from his estate; the tenant has been encouraged in thriftlessness and waste by law; the land has been bound in a ruinous mortmain, like that which existed under the penal code, and subjected to demoralising litigation, breeding a war of class; capital and fruitful enterprise turn away from it. And, at the same time, in order to lessen these evils, recourse has been had to remedies that are perhaps worse; the system of so-called ‘land purchase’ has been devised; the result has been to create a class of peasant owners reproducing the nearly extinct middleman, and, above all, to arouse a cry for the ‘compulsory purchase’ of the rented lands of Ireland, an act of wholesale spoliation unjust and disastrous alike. In the position of affairs we now see in Ireland, the stability of society has been rudely shaken; the sense of the security of property has well-nigh disappeared; the sanctity of contracts has no respect; the pillars on which order and prosperity rest have been injured; violent revolution has been arrested, indeed, but revolutionary and socialistic ideas spread far and wide. And will any impartial inquirer deny that these untoward results may be largely ascribed to the faulty legislation of late years, and to a system of administration shifty and feeble? And what judgment is to be passed on the thoughtless optimism too common in opinion with respect to Ireland? Meanwhile, reforms imperatively required are not even attempted; they are passed over or postponed to some more convenient season. The time surely has come to look things in Ireland straight in the face; to see if statesmanship cannot do something really effective for her good. This end assuredly will not be attained by breaking up the Three Kingdoms under the guise of Home Rule, or by promoting a confiscation the worst Ireland has ever seen; still less will it be attained by the quackery in legislation and administration too apparent of late years; nor can trifling and foolish optimism blind the eyes of intelligent thinkers to facts. Ireland can only expect to make progress by ruling the community on the just and sound principles to which long experience has given its sanction; and this consummation can only be the slow result of time.
APPENDIX
THE IRISH GOVERNMENT BILL, 1886.
ARRANGEMENT OF CLAUSES.
Part I.