Ireland since the union; sketches of Irish history from 1798 to 1886

Preface

Home Rule is the question of the hour. Every one is talkmg of it, thinking about it, writing upon it. The newspapers daily devote leading articles to the consideration of every phase of the subject, couched in the most contrasting terms of approval and disapproval. Most of them allot a portion of their columns to the reception of outside opinion of the most varied kind upon the problem. Statesmen of every school seem eager to express their views, on the platform and in print, upon the question whether Ireland is entitled to any form of self-government or not. Mr. Morley, Mr. Labouchere, Mr. Stead, and others write and speak upon the subject with the same cool, keen good sense, and the same steadfast adhesion to Radical principles, which make them the true representatives of a Radical Party in and outside the House of Commons. The so-called ' Unionist,' on the other hand, fumes and flares. He is consumed by fiery indignation. He is all for an appeal to the god of battles. The good old principle of might meaning right animates and sustains him, and his attitude towards the Irish people appears to be the old-fashioned ' Squelch them, by God ! ' one.

It is a relief to turn from letters and from speeches which, if uttered to express the other side of the case, and printed in the Freeman's Journal or United Ireland, or spoken on National League platforms by any prominent Nationalist, would have been denounced for their shameless attempt to viii PREFACE

sow dissension between the two races. It is pleasant to turn from such utterances to the letter from Mr. Eusldn which appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette on Tuesday, January 5, 1886. I am glad to be able here to express my gratitude to a great man, to a great Englishman, for having cared to remember just now, first, that the Irish ' are an artistic people, and can design beautiful things, and execute them with indefatigable industry ; ' secondly, that * they are a witty people, and can by no means be governed by witless ones ; ' and, thirdly, that ' they are an affectionate people, and can by no means be governed on scientific principles by heartless persons.' If English statesmen had more often cared to recognise or to remember the truths which Mr. Euskin so opportunely enforces, the question which is called Home Rule would not have so long and so profoundly troubled the minds of politicians and the time of Ministries.

At last, after a period of infinite pain and infinite patience, that proud patience which the gods are said to love, the Irish people have found their reward. The question of Home Rule has been at last admitted into the charmed circle— as unstable in its circumscription as the enchanted tent of the Eastern Pari Banou — the region of practical politics. It is some years since the words Home Rule became the watchwords of a political party ; it is some years since they became the recognised war-cry of a devoted and determined minority in the House of Commons. Those years have been years of more than Egyptian trial to the Irish people. During their first days, in the age of what our opponents are now pleased to call the moderate Home Rulers, the Enghsh Press and the members of all English parties were well-nigh unanimous in their assurances that the question of Home Rule was inadmissible and undebatable, and that if we pleaded till the crack of doom no English statesmen would ever condescend to enter-

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tain any scheme whatever for the restoration of an Irish ParHament. Hearing, indeed, was not refused to us — occasionally. In that Sa.turnian epoch of amiable inactivity when Butt and Shaw swayed the destinies of an almost absolutely unimportant section of the House of Commons, the Government was wont, every session, to allow the Home Bulers a field-night for the exposition of their hateful but harmless doctrines : hateful because they were the expression of any discontent with the perfection of existing rule in Ireland ; hai^mless because they were but the birth of a midsummer madness working on the brains of a few idle or eloquent politicians, and were about as serious a contribution to statesmanship as the desire of the moth for the star and the night for the morrow. So these field-nights came and went, and Mr. Butt made his speech and Mr. P. J. Smyth gave a wellprepared entertainment, in which the ideas of 1848 and the peroratioiis of Henry Grattan formed an ingenious and not unattractive medley, and Mr. Butt's other followers said their permitted say, and were decorously listened to. Then the leaders of the Treasury Bench would make elaborate replies, in which the Irish demands were quietly puffed out of sight in a cloud of compliments to the sincerity and the ability of Mr. Butt, or Mr. Shaw, or Mr. P. J. Smyth. At this rate of progress any recognition of the Irish claim would have been accorded at the time when, according to Rabelais, the Coqcigrues come home — that is to say, never.

But towards the end of the last Parliament which Lord Beaconsfield presided over, the Home Rule party in the Plouse of Commons began to display signs of unusual animation, of commotion, of agitation. Their languid ranks had been recruited by some new men, and the new men carried on the fight after new methods. This heralds the opening of the second period of Home Rule, the period of Parnell.

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When the Liberal Government entered into office in the early spring of 1880, Mr. Parnell was the chosen leader of the Irish Parliamentary party. That party, in obedience to the wishes of the Irish people, sat in opposition to the new Government, and announced their intention of sitting in' opposition to any Government that refused to recognise the right of Ireland to regulate her own local affairs after her own fashion. That resolve, apparently a slight thing in itself, had a deeper significance in it than many politicians at that time were keen enough to perceive. Up to that hour every Irish party in Parliament had been made the victim of a spurious tradition which forced them into an alliance with the Whigs, and dragged them helpless and hopeless at the tail of every successive Whig Administration or Whig Opposition. The recent elections, which have for the first time severed the connection between the Whigs and the Eadicals by creating the amazing Wliig-Tory alliance, were the fitting sequel to and the fitting justification of the attitude of the followers of Mr. Parnell in 1880. A few fossil members of the old sham Home Eule school persisted for some time in sitting below the gangway on the Government side of the House, but these have all vanished from the field of Irish politics, and their place knows them no more.

I am not going to tell over again here the history of the past six years as it affected Ireland in and out of Parliament. The Liberal Government, face to face with a small but solid group of Irishmen, who boldly avowed that they placed their own country's interest before the temporary interests of either of the two great parties, lost for a time its temper and its head. In defiance of the principles which are most dear to the Liberal mind, the Government determiiied at once to grapple with this defiant minority and crush them out of existence. Then be^an one of the most

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marvellous constitutional struggles which the world has ever witnessed. On the one hand was the most powerful Ministry of modern times, numbering in its ranks all the talent of its party, supported by a swollen and certain majority ; on the other, a band of men, all unknown, almost all young, led by a young man who had only been a short time in the House of Commons, but to whom Ascendency already paid the compliments of a cordial dislike. The Irish nation at home, in England, in America, and in Australia, watched the contest with burning eyes and throbbing hearts. They saw their representatives expelled again and again, for fighting against coercive measures of new and miraculous strictness. They saw their country bound by successive Coercion Acts which recalled, by their ingenious ferocity, the pleasant days of the Penal Laws. They saw their leaders imprisoned for failing to admit that the administration of Mr. Forster was the greatest blessing that heaven could offer them. They saw the degradation of Dublin defended by what it seemed not unfair to term executive conspiracy. They saw themselves reproached for crimes and outrages which were the direct fruit of the administrative folly of Mr. Forster. They saw, day by day, how the most influential voices of the English Press kept taunting the party which followed Mr. Parnell with repre* senting in no sense either the Irish people or their wishes, and assuring them that, come what might, they should never,, never have Home Eule.

Well, they saw all this, but they saw other sights which made their spirits more of comfort. They saw their leaders come out of prison as determined to carry on the struggle as when they went into prison. They saw victim after victim of the coercive laws sent as delegate of the Irish people to take a place by Mr. Parnell, and help him to fight for the cause in the House of Commons. They saw the fall of Mr. Forster.

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They witnessed the resignation of Mr. Trevelyan. They saw the defeat of the great Ministry. They rejoiced at last in the adoption by Enghind's greatest statesman of the principles for which they had so long struggled.

The bitter taunt which has been so often levelled at the Irish Parliamentary party, that they do not represent the Irish people, has been satisfactorily answered once for all. The principles which Mr. Parnell advocates have swept Ireland from the centre to the sea, and he returns to Parliament the unquestioned leader of a following of nearly ninety men, of whom no inconsiderable portion are recruited from that province of Ulster which was for so long the hope, the prop, and the garrison of ' Ascendency ' in Ireland. With Derry and the west division of Belfast represented by Irish Nationalists, arguments based on the hostility of Ulster to Home Rule do not count for much. Lord Hartington finds some cheer in still repeating the old parrot cry. When once Lord Hartington gets an idea into his head, it is not very easy to dislodge it, and accordingly Lord Hartington still finds a strange delight in declanng that Ireland cordially detests Mr. Parnell and all his works and pomps, and is only coerced by the terrible National League into returning his lieutenants by enormous majorities. Horror of coercion in the mind of the upholder and the approver of coercive laws for Ireland seems to me as incongruous as the name of honour in the mouth of Joseph Surface seemed to Lady Teazle, or as the name of God seemed on the lips of Margaret to the dying Valentine. If, however. Lord Hartington can really delude himself into the belief that Ireland sends eighty-five men to support Mr. Parnell in Parliament because Ireland distrusts and detests Mr. Parnell, I can only express my sympathy for those who see in Lord Hartington the future leader of the Liberal party.

The question that is before the English public just now is

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simply this : * Are you prepared to listen at all to the voice of Ireland, speaking as it does in strict accordance with constitutional tradition and usage through the mouths of a vast preponderance of Irish members, duly and constitutionally elected, and supported as it is by so large a proportion of the English people ? or are you determined to deny to Ireland that expression of a national desire and that freedom of national government of which you are so proud to have been the champions in almost every other comitry in Europe ? '

What, after all, is the meaning of this demand for Home Rule, of which in one way or another we have heard so much for the last decade ? What is the demand which for so many years the leaders of the two great English parties have agreed in ignoring, and which now the real leader of the Tory party would be willing to satisfy, if by so doing he could deprive the leader of the Liberal party of the honour of carrying out the great work he has begun ?

The opponents of Home Rule are, roughly speaking, of two kinds : those who refuse even to consider the question at all ; and those who temporise with it, who do their best to dyke it back for the time being, for the hour, even for the minute, and who feel a curious gratification in the most temporary postponement of a puzzling problem. The first of these two classes of opponents of Home Rule has at least the merit of simplicity in its arguments. It boldly asseverates that Home Rule means dismemberment of the Empire, and it stubbornly refuses to listen to any argument which would interfere with that assumption. * Dismemberment of the Empire ' is its catchword, its counter sign ; it has even become its war-cry. It repeats it, as the credulous might repeat some wizard's spell, in the hope of dissipating the danger which it believes to menace it.

In certain of his speeches, most notably that ever-memorxiy PREFACE

able utterance at Newport, Lord Salisbury invoked Home Rule. When the invocation was answered, he seems to have shrunk from the consequences of his own temerity, and to be now nursing a baffled indignation because a stronger statesman than he has stepped boldly forward and prepared to deal righteously with the spirit of Irish discontent.

Mr. Gladstone lost a great opportunity when, after his visit to Ireland some years back, he failed to perceive the strength of the national demand, the keenness of the national desire for some form of home government. He lost some precious years in the effort to suppress the Irish party in Parliament, and in shutting his senses to the fact that they were strong because they spoke with the voice and acted with the strength of a people. But Mr. Gladstone was too great a statesman to let one lost opportunity prove the precedent for another, or to excuse loss of time in the past by losing more time in the present. The result of the two recent elections proves the strength of Irish Nationalism. That pohtical map of Ireland which the :Pall Mall Gazette published the other day, with its vast surface of white representing the constituencies which have returned Mr. Parnell's followers, and its pitiful patch of black in the far north to distinguish all that is left of Ireland which is not national, is the eloquent symbol of a more remarkable change than has ever been represented in any atlas of maps of Europe by treaty. If the voice of a nation is ever to count for anything, tlie voice of a nation has spoken in Ireland, and Mr. Gladstone has been too ardent an advocate of the rights of nationahties abroad to deny their existence at home.

If, however, any explanation of what Home Rule means is really needed — and I am compelled, to my surprise, to beheve lliat it is, from hearing the question still so often asked, iu ail honesty, ' What do you Home Rulers really want ?'

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— I can explain wliat I mean by Home Rule easily enougli. I should like to see, I hope soon to see, Ireland placed in much the same relationship to the Imperial Parliament as that in which a State of the American Union stands to the central governing body at Washington. That I consider to be, roughly speaking, the length and breadth of the Home Rule demand. It may perhaps, however, be well further to set down a few of the things that Home Rule does not mean.

It does not mean dismemberment of the Empire, or disintegration of the Empire, or any injury whatever to the Empire. It does not mean separation or anything like separation. It does not include any control of an army or a navy, or any power of levying what may be called Imperial taxation, or of negotiation with foreign Powers. It does not propose to abrogate in any way the Imperial functions of the English Parliament. It no more proposes to do any of these things than the State of Massachusetts proposes to do them.

What is there, then, so alarming in the suggestion of Home Rule for Ireland ? Englishmen see with composure some form of Home Rule or other existing in all the dependencies of the Crown, from the great Antipodean colonies to the little . Isle of Man, within almost a stone's throw of these shores, j If Canadians and Australasians and Manx have Home Rule, and having it are happy and contented, and the solidarity of the Empire is in no way injured, but rather greatly strengthened thereby, why should it be denied to Ireland ?

But if Home Rule for Ireland, some of our opponents argue, why not Home Rule for Scotland ? why not Home Rule for Wales ? To which I answer, question for question, 'Why not, indeed?' If Scotland and Wales desire Home Rule, I can conceive no just or even sane reason for denying it. If the Scotch people were to demand Home Rule to-morrow, with anything likj the imanimity of the Irish pejplj, xvi PREFACE

we all know perfectly -well that it would be conceded to tliem immediately, and almost without discussion. The reason why Scotland does not demand Home Rule as yet is because, up to this time, she has practically enjoyed the bulk of its benefits. Scotland has had her own way all along. She has worshipped in freedom at her own shrines ; she has lived beneath the shelter of her own laws. When she wishes for greater freedom than she now enjoys, all she has to do is to ask for it and she will get it immediately. But because Scotland and Wales do not ask for Home Rule, and presumably do not want it, is no reason why Ireland, who does ask for it, and does want it, should be denied her petition.

Some writers and speakers have expressed a fear that, in the event of any system of self-government being granted to Ireland, the Protestant minority would suffer, in one way or another, from oppression at the hands of the Catholic majority. Such an apprehension is curiously unfounded. It is scarcely likely that a people, many, indeed most, of whose best beloved heroes were Protestants, and whose present leader is himself a Protestant, would be likely to prove in any sense or degree hostile to their Protestant fellow-countrymen. I may remind my readers that while Protestants have been returned, again and again, as representatives of Catholic constituencies in Ireland, that while Irish Catholics have, again and again, entrusted the representation of "their grievances to Protestant delegates, it was until within the last few months practically impossible for any Catholic to find a seat in any English constituency. The present Parliament, upon its new and extended franchise, does contain a few Catholic representatives of Enghsh constituencies, but in the Parliament of 1880-1885 there was, I think, only one, and he was regarded as remarkable for having gained that rare and almost unattainable distinction. It is not long ago since the English

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Press and English public opinion generally seemsd innniraous in agreeing that the career of Lord Ripon as a statesman and politician was closed in England because he had become converted to the Catholic faith. On the other hand, I have heard that Catholic voters in Ireland have expressed regret that some Nationalist candidate was not a Protestant, in order that they might show their tolerance of a creed which was not their own, and in the present Nationalist party several Protestants are enrolled among its most prominent members. It is a matter of statistics, too, that a vast number of Protestant Azotes were recorded for the Nationalist and Catholic candidates at the just-passed general elections, a fact which serves to show that a very great number of the Irish Protestants do not share the apprehensions expressed for their safety by some writers and thinkers on this side of the Channel. The tolerance which English Protestantism has not always extended to Catholics, the Irish Catholics have always extended, and always will extend, towards their Protestant fellow - countrymen .

In the following pages I propose to sketch briefly the more salient features of Irish history since the Union, including, of course, certain of the events which heralded the Union. I do not propose in this volume to give a minute and exhaustive presentment of the history of eighty-six troubled years. Some parts will be dwelt upon at greater length than others. My aim is to present a sketch, not a complete picture ; a sketch, however, that may be of service to the student of the Home Rule question.

I hope and believe that the time of Home Rule for Ireland has arrived. I am convinced that it will bring peace and welfare and content to my country. Her manufactures will again rise and flourish ; commerce will once more visit the grass-grown wharves of her sea-cities, and fill the vacant

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spaces of those deserted buildings which now stand in ruined desolation, more melancholy than Karnak or Corinth. A people trained at last to patience and self-reliance will take a just pride in the fulfilment of those duties as citizens of which they have been so long deprived. The Church that has for so long guided the nation through darkness and the valley of the shadow of death will exercise its loftiest duty as the guide and guardian of a regenerated race. The Irish nation has been taking shape under our eyes ; her children need now only the privileges of freedom to exercise those privileges worthily. The activity of the country will be directed into its proper channels. National occupation, and the responsibilities of administration, will bring with them those virtues of statesmanship which the Irish race have always shown in lands more happily ruled than their own. That national strength which now is spent, and rightly spent, in agitation for a great end, will be then employed in the fulfilment of those civic duties which the new conditions of political existence will create and establish.

Not to Ireland alone, however, will the advantages be limited. All that is to be gained from friendship instead of enmity, from trust instead of distrust, from loving fellowship and the heart's alliance instead of suspicion and the heirloom hate, all these may yet be England's if England choose. In God's name, is it not better to have, across that strip of stormy water, a nation of free men who are friends, fellow-workers for the Empire's welfare, firm allies in danger, than to be the most unhappy masters of an island of unconquered and insurgent bondsmen ?

Justin Huntlt McGabtht.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGB

I. The Penal Laws ••••.••• 1

II. The Parliament . • 14