CHAPTER II
THE QUESTION OF HOME RULE
The question of Home Rule not extinct—The reasons—Butt’s scheme of Home Rule—It is denounced and ridiculed by Mr. Gladstone, and defeated in the House of Commons—Death of Butt—The Home Rule movement becomes allied with a foreign conspiracy—Davitt and Parnell—The Land League—Mr. Gladstone’s surrender to it—The movement makes no progress in the Parliament of 1880-85—The General Election of 1885—Mr. Gladstone suddenly adopts the policy of Home Rule—The probable reasons—The Home Rule Bill of 1886—Its nature and tendencies—Decisive objections to the measure—It is rejected at the General Election of 1886, having been previously rejected in the House of Commons—Policy and conduct of Mr. Gladstone—The Home Rule movement makes some progress in England, and why—The Home Rule Bill of 1893—It is much worse than that of 1886—The reasons—It is rejected by the House of Lords—Home Rule under different forms—The Union must be maintained—Proposal that Parliament should occasionally sit in Dublin—The over-representation of Ireland should be redressed.
Home Rule, it is very generally assumed, has vanished into the domain of extinct politics. Unlike what had been the case from 1886 to 1895, when this was the main of our domestic questions, Home Rule was scarcely referred to at the late election; it will receive little countenance at the hands of the present House of Commons, however Irish Nationalists may persist in urging their demand. It would, nevertheless, be imprudent to believe that this policy, as has been said, ‘is as dead as Queen Anne,’ as impossible as a return to Protection or to an unreformed Parliament. Isaac Butt’s scheme of Home Rule was treated with scorn and ridicule by Mr. Gladstone during many years; Mr. Gladstone was the author of the Bills of 1886 and 1893, embodying Home Rule in forms few will now approve of; and he left nothing undone to convert them into law. At the General Election of 1880, Home Rule was regarded as a mere Irish craze, and hardly a candidate could be found, in England and Scotland, to consent to an inquiry upon the subject; within six years Home Rule was a Ministerial measure; and though the House of Commons pronounced against it, and its decision was emphatically ratified at the General Election of 1886, still, on this occasion, the votes in favour of Home Rule were not much less numerous than those cast against it.[19] In 1892 England condemned Home Rule, if not as decisively as six years before; but Ireland, Scotland, and Wales declared for it; and a Home Rule Bill received the sanction of the House of Commons, which, but for the resistance made by the House of Lords, would now be a fundamental law of these realms. It deserves notice, too, that not one of the Liberal leaders, although, as a rule, they avoided the subject, repudiated this policy at the late election; two or three, indeed, gave it a qualified support; and it is evident that they keep the question in reserve, in the hope of turning it to account at a more convenient season. Nor can it be denied, as long as Ireland can send more than eighty Nationalists into the House of Commons, pledged to insist on Home Rule as their country’s right, that the subject must command more or less attention; for many reasons it is impossible to ignore the claims of a representation so large in numbers. It must be added that, under our system of party government, especially as this has existed of late years, a considerable group of politicians, with a fixed purpose, can effect much by throwing its weight indifferently into the Ministerial or the Opposition scale, and giving its support to either side, in order to compass its own ends; it has, sometimes with successful results, swayed majorities by these means, and not in vain. This is the hope of the Irish Nationalist leaders; ‘let parties in the House of Commons,’ they cynically argue, ‘be equally divided, as must at some time happen,’ and ‘we shall gain Home Rule from either Tories or Whigs, if we assist either by our votes to keep them in office.’ It cannot be said, if we look back at some political events within the last twenty years, that this expectation is wholly groundless; and though I am convinced it will not be realised, its existence alone suffices to prove that Home Rule cannot yet be dismissed as outside the sphere of practical politics.
Home Rule, therefore, is a ‘Present Irish Question,’ and if not at this moment urgent, it remains the most important of Irish questions, for it directly affects the fortunes of the Three Kingdoms. It is necessary, accordingly, to examine it, in its principles at least; and an inquiry is opportune, at this juncture, for the subject can be fairly discussed in its different bearings, apart from the obscuring influences of national and party prejudice, and especially of political passion. Isaac Butt was the true author of the conception of Home Rule; for though a movement in favour of a Repeal of the Union had become dangerously active in 1843-44, and had been feebly intermittent since that period, this peculiar modification of the arrangements made at the Union, in fixing the relations between Great Britain and Ireland, was wholly an idea of that distinguished lawyer. The occasion, on which this scheme was put forward, was not a little remarkable for various reasons. Mr. Gladstone had just disestablished the Anglican Church in Ireland, and had disendowed it, to a considerable extent; this policy was angrily resented by a party of Irish Protestants; for the maintenance of the Established Irish Church had been made an essential condition of the Treaty of Union. These men, who were not without energy and parts, declared that a great international compact had been broken; and they gradually obtained the support of leaders of the ‘Young Ireland’ following, of survivors of the ‘Tail’ of O’Connell, and even of adherents of the Fenian cause, all, in different degrees, opposed to the Union. Butt became the head and spokesman of this curiously assorted band, composed of essentially discordant elements; but he endeavoured to combine it into a strong Parliamentary force, by propounding a plan of Home Rule for Ireland, which he had thought out with patience and care, his hope being that this would unite his followers, and that his project would at least be entertained in Parliament, and would not be as hopeless as an attempt to repeal the Union. His views are set forth in his ‘Irish Federalism,’ a long-forgotten work, but which, even now, may be read with profit. Butt professed, and I have no doubt sincerely, that he did not seek to disturb the Union, and that the Imperial Parliament was to remain as it was; but he proposed to give Ireland a Parliament of her own, with full powers of legislation on Irish affairs, and an Executive practically appointed by this, which would have the government of Ireland in its hands. Having thus called into existence an Irish State, possessing State rights of supreme importance, he sought to connect Ireland with Great Britain by a Federal tie; representatives from Ireland were to repair to the Imperial Parliament, and to vote in that assembly on Imperial questions, but not, as I believe Butt meant, on those which belonged to England and Scotland.[20]
The cry of Home Rule was welcomed in Ireland by her Catholic masses; at the General Election of 1874, sixty men were returned to the House of Commons to support this policy, a party formidable in numbers, if not in essential strength. Butt brought forward his plan, in outline, on three or four occasions; but the question was not discussed with the fulness of knowledge and the breadth of view it certainly required; on the whole, it was superficially treated. Neither Butt nor his opponents thoroughly perceived that his proposals virtually repealed the Union, for if the Imperial Parliament was, nominally, to be left intact, a real Parliament was to be placed in its stead, in Ireland, which would practically annul its effective authority, from the Giant’s Causeway to Cape Clear; and they seem not to have understood that ‘Irish Federalism’ implied Federalism for Great Britain to a great extent, and introduced into the Constitution the Federal principle with its far-reaching and dangerous effects. Butt’s scheme, however, was powerfully attacked in its details; by no one so powerfully as by Mr. Gladstone, who had lately announced, to an approving multitude, that Home Rule was sheer folly or worse, and had exultingly asked, ‘Can any sensible man, can any rational man, suppose that, at this time of day, in this condition of the world, we are going to disintegrate the great capital institutions of the country for the purpose of making ourselves ridiculous in the sight of all mankind, and crippling any power we possess for bestowing benefits, through legislation, on the country to which we belong?’[21] Little knowing what the future was to bring forth, Mr. Gladstone declared that Home Rule was not to be even thought of, until it could be proved that the Irish affairs, to which the Irish Parliament was to be confined, could be separated from Imperial and British affairs, a partition he evidently deemed impossible; and he insisted that the introduction of Irish members into the Imperial Parliament, which, according to this plan, was to have nothing to do with Ireland, was not only essentially unjust, but involved the absurdity that these men ‘were to judge as they might think fit of the general affairs of the Empire, and also of exclusively English and Scotch questions,’ an interpretation not, I believe, correct. Home Rule was rejected by overwhelming majorities in the Parliament of 1874-80; and at the General Election of the last-named year, it found no countenance, I have said, in England or Scotland. The subject was scarcely referred to by Mr. Gladstone, wholly preoccupied by his Midlothian campaign, and by his persistent efforts to deprive Lord Beaconsfield of power.
Butt had sincere reverence for the Constitution and the Law; the Home Rule movement, as long as he was at its head, was a constitutional and a lawful movement. But this eminent man had been supplanted, by degrees, by a politician of a very different nature; and when he had passed away in the spring of 1879, Parnell, and what was called the ‘active Irish party,’ which had baffled and incensed the House of Commons, became the directors of the Home Rule policy. The character of the movement was almost wholly changed; it became associated with a conspiracy hatched in the Far West, which aimed at the separation of Ireland from Great Britain; Butt’s moderate followers fell away from it, especially the band of Protestants who had first set it on foot. Meanwhile, American Fenianism, which had in vain attempted open rebellion in Ireland in 1865-67, had, at the instigation perhaps of Michael Davitt, made another effort to compass its ends; the ‘New Departure’ in treason was made; the Land League was formed with the avowed purpose of overthrowing ‘Irish Landlordism,’ as it was called, as being the mainstay of British power in Ireland, and then of wresting Ireland by force from her British rulers. But Davitt was not well fitted for his work; Parnell became the leader of the Home Rule and the Land League movements; and during a short visit to the United States, he openly professed that his ultimate aim was ‘to break the last link between Great Britain and Ireland,’ though he was still the chief of an apparently constitutional cause. Ere long the Land League, availing itself of a season of distress, and subsidised by Fenians across the Atlantic, had taken root in different parts of Ireland; and gradually a reign of terror, marked by detestable crime, and essentially of the Jacobin type, had acquired a frightful ascendency in ten or eleven counties. By this time, Mr. Gladstone had become Minister: how he denounced the League in passionate language; endeavoured, for a few months, to hold it in check; succumbed to it, when he made the ‘Kilmainham Treaty;’ and, finally, how, after declaring that Parnell and his adherents were ‘aiming at dismemberment through rapine,’ he became the author of the Land Act of 1881, and threw the Irish landed gentry as a sop to Cerberus,—is sufficiently known, but I shall recur to the subject. During these years, Parnell, artfully playing the double game, which this born conspirator especially made his boast, and linking what he called ‘a constitutional with an illegal movement,’ had more than once spoken on behalf of Home Rule in the House of Commons, his moderate and even statesmanlike language being in marked contrast with his treasonable harangues in Ireland. But Parliament had been otherwise engaged with Irish affairs; it had become more averse to Home Rule than ever; it had learned what the movement had begun to involve, veiled, if not open, rebellion against the State, and it voted down the question by immense majorities. Statesmen of all parties, Tory, Whig, and Radical, without exception, concurred in this view; Lord Salisbury, Lord Spencer, and John Bright alike condemned the very idea of Home Rule. Mr. Gladstone indeed asserted afterwards that he had a policy of this kind in his thoughts; but if he had, he kept it to himself; it cannot be gathered from his speeches of the time; he never breathed to his colleagues a word about it; he allowed them to pronounce against Home Rule with his full apparent sanction.[22]
Mr. Gladstone’s Ministry fell in 1885; Majuba, Gordon, and his Irish policy had set the best sense of the country against him. Lord Salisbury’s Government came in his place; for a short time the tendency, too often seen in British parties, to temporise with sedition and even crime in Ireland was exhibited with untoward results; the negotiations between Parnell and Lord Carnarvon have not yet been explained. At the General Election of 1885, Parnell openly took the Conservative side, denounced the Liberals in the bitterest language, and perhaps, through the influence of the Irish vote, deprived them of a few seats in England. His principal object certainly was to increase his own power and that of his band by weakening the strongest of British parties; but this association with the Conservatives probably lessened the antipathy of their opponents to Home Rule, and was not without effect on the events that followed. Ireland, however, was by no means a prominent question in this electoral contest; the Tory, Whig, and Radical leaders dealt, for the most part, with different topics; and though Mr. Gladstone dropped ambiguous phrases, which, he ere long contended, indicated his conversion to Home Rule, his lieutenants continued to declare against this policy, their chief remaining openly in accord with them; indeed, all that could be collected, from what he wrote and said, was that he called upon the country to give him such decisive support as would make him independent of all Irish factions. The result of this General Election, taken as a whole, was to gain for the Liberals a majority of some eighty seats in Great Britain; but in Ireland it effected a notable change in politics. By a recent, and, for Ireland, a most unwise statute, the electoral franchise had been assimilated in the Three Kingdoms; political ascendency had, for the first time, been secured for the masses of Catholic Ireland, largely an ignorant and superstitious multitude; property and intelligence were overwhelmed at the polls; and Parnell and his satellites, now called Nationalists, won more than eighty seats out of a total of one hundred and three. The Liberal majority, therefore, would be effaced should the Irish leader and his men give the Conservatives their votes; a weak Government would be the inevitable result; Mr. Gladstone, now in his seventy-sixth year, could hardly expect to return to office. In these circumstances, it became gradually known that Mr. Gladstone had accepted Home Rule in principle, and was even prepared to legislate upon the subject. It would be unfair to assert that personal motives alone determined this sudden resolve; though obviously should the Liberal chief retain the allegiance of his party, and draw Parnell and the Nationalists to his side, by inaugurating Home Rule as a practical measure, he would inevitably be restored to power with a great majority. Mr. Gladstone, ever ready to yield to a popular cry, may have believed that five-sixths of Ireland were passionately eager for Home Rule; he may have been convinced himself that, as affairs now stood, Parliament would well-nigh be reduced to a deadlock should nothing be done to redress the balanced state of parties, and that Home Rule was the condition of a stable Government; he may have thought that since the Conservative dalliance with Parnell, it had become impossible permanently to resist this policy; yet these considerations form no apology for the conduct of the aged, but most impulsive, statesman. Only a few years before large parts of Ireland had been in a state of frightful anarchy; a rebellious and socialistic movement against British rule and Irish landed property had acquired great force; even at the present time, the National League, replacing the Land League, kept disorder prevalent in many counties. Was this the moment to effect a revolution in Ireland, to tamper with, and to impair, the Union, to hand over the loyalty, the property, and the worth of the island to the classes and the men against whom but, as yesterday, it had been necessary to put the severest coercion in force?